Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,
I had better years than this last one. I got married again, to Teddy someone, I can’t remember his last name, because we were only married one day when he died, my seventh husband, I think. The way he died was after we got married we went to this baseball game at Tiger Stadium, front row in the second deck, and we got a pretty good buzz on with beer and some joints Teddy had. Then someone named Jason something hits a home run, and Teddy gets to cheering so hard he fell out of the stands into what they call the bullpen. The fall killed him. I just got out of there. I’d only known him a day or two, I don’t know why we got married, we just did, so it wasn’t like I was all broken up, we never even did it married. I landed in Ypsilanti, with the rest of Teddy’s stash, and I got busted. In all those years I never called Arthur, not once, that was the deal, but that time I did, I thought it was all over, I was at the end of my rope, what with my husband dying one day and me getting busted the next, and Arthur said he’d take care of it. He got hold of the guy called Max, Max was a lawyer, he said, and Max must’ve done something, because I was let go without bond, and then the charges were dropped, and that’s when I moved to Pontiac. So what do you think of your old mother now?
From Maury Ahearne:
On September 14, 1979, during a game between the Tigers and the Cleveland Indians at Tiger Stadium in Detroit, a fan fell out of the upper deck into the visitors’ bullpen after a grand slam home run by Tiger first baseman Jason Thompson. The fan, subsequently identified as Eduardo Burke, address unknown, suffered massive internal injuries and was pronounced dead on arrival at Immaculate Conception Hospital. Toxicological tests administered during Eduardo Burke’s autopsy indicated that the levels of alcohol in his system exceeded the legal definition of drunkenness, and there were also indications of extensive use of cannabis. The body of Eduardo Burke went unclaimed, even though there was a wedding license in his pocket, listing his intended wife as Melba Mae Tyler. A check of the Wayne County Hall of Records showed that Eduardo Burke and Melba Mae Tyler were married by a city magistrate on the day of his fatal accident. It was the seventh marriage recorded for Mrs. Burke. The Detroit Police Department had an outstanding bench warrant calling for the arrest of Eduardo Burke because of his failure to appear in superior court on the charge of selling illegal controlled substances.
Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,
Arthur told me once that Jacob’s death was a kind of peace offering. A ritual sacrifice, he said. I don’t know what that means either. It was Jimmy’s way of telling Lilo, Arthur said, it’s over, let’s get on with the peace. I never told Jacob about me and Meta. I would have, I suppose, but then he was this ritual sacrifice thing.
Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,
To think I have a daughter 30 yrs old today. It makes me feel a hundred. I’ve been clean for two weeks now. Not bad for a 50 yr old broad. Or an old 50 yr broad. I think your father was Jacob, but it could’ve been Arthur. I never saw you, if I saw you I could say which one you favored, Jacob was so beautiful. I hope it was Jacob. Of all the men I knew at that time of my life, he was the only one didn’t treat me like some kind of prize puppy, I was real to him. I mean, I know he liked me because I was a movie star, everyone did except Meta, but he really liked me because I was me. Lilo said I would’ve dumped him sooner or later, it was the way of the world. Lilo was such a shit. You know something Jacob did? This was when we first began going out. He seemed to know he wasn’t going to live long, even then before the bad shit happened, and he bought himself a plot at the Westwood mortuary. That was where he wanted to be buried, with all the movie stars and stuff. I thought it was creepy, buying a plot in a graveyard, that and the way he said he wanted a big marble gravestone, from Italy, he said. Arthur said the trouble with Jake was he wanted to be one of the goyim, and I said Arthur, there’s no goyim in the Industry, and Arthur said, the Industry invented the goyim. I think about that a lot.
Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,
It may be your birthday, but I got a nice present today. I went to the bank this morning, and the ass’t manager, he said my semimonthly deposit check had been upped from $500 to $750, and what was I going to do with all that money, put it in a T-bill, he called it, and I said it was none of his fucking business. I wanted to call my benefactor, but I am not supposed to know who he is, but if you are interested, his father’s real name is Moses.
Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,
This year’s been kind of a blank.
Happy birthday, wherever you are now,
God, I hate being 60. It’s ten years worse than being 50.
Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,
I didn’t even know that Rita’d died until I read Lilo’s obituary. “Once the consort of Rita Lewis, Mob bag lady,” is what the obit said. I wish Lilo’d been alive to read that. It would’ve given him a heart attack. The thing is, I got to like Rita in the end. Her and Chuckie. Outcasts of the islands is what Chuckie called us. What islands, I said. I watched her testify on TV. Some old fart senator was giving her a hard time, and she was just laughing at him. I was with this guy, he was an A.D. for Henry Hathaway, and we were watching Rita and doing it, and watching and doing it, and he called me Miss Tyler all the way through it, a first for me. The guys I have known. There was this movie star, I can’t say his name, he’s still alive, he got the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award a couple of years ago, and when he was with me, all he could do was jerk off. He had this little bitty thing, about the size of a lipstick, he didn’t have much to play with. Your old mom shouldn’t be telling you this stuff, but all I do about sex these days is think about it. You ever think about me? I think about you all the time. I wonder if you’re famous, like I was. I look at magazines all the time, looking for someone looks like me or Jacob, or maybe me and Arthur, although the thing about Arthur was, he was so careful, he always wore something, even when I said it was all right, I was wearing my diaphragm. If I got knocked up, it wasn’t that he was worried about marrying me, it was that I would miss a start date, and the whole Cosmo schedule would be postponed, it was always the studio first with Arthur. I knew I was taking a chance with Jacob, but it was a chance I wanted to take. I used to think if I had to tell you who your father was, I would say it was Arthur, even if he wasn’t, because not everyone would want Jacob King as a father. I said to him once have you ever killed anyone, and he nodded, and I said more than one, and he nodded, and I said more than thirty, and he shook his head, and I said more than twenty, and he shook his head, and I said more than ten, and he didn’t move, so I guess it was somewhere between ten and twenty people, if you can believe him. Arthur said Jacob once put out someone’s eye with a blowtorch, but Jacob said he had never done that. The truth is, I think Arthur liked to hear about all those people Jacob did, because I think Arthur might have liked to do it once, just to see what it was like, and I think the one he wanted to do it to was Moe.
Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,
You’d be 42 this year, twice as old as I was when I had you, and if you’ve learned one thing by now you’ve learned that all men are snakes …
I wondered why she had not taken the letters with her. I can only think now it was because she left her trailer in such a hurry after Maury Ahearne broke into it, and had forgotten that she had hidden them behind the medicine cabinet.
I never found out the answer.
V
I think we should all think this through and try to see where it’s taking us,” Sydney Allen said.
“What Sydney means is he’s not sold on Blue having a kid,” Marty Magnin said.
“I’m not convinced a child’s a viable asset,” Sydney Allen said. Set up on easels around his office at Columbia in Culver City were production sketches of a picture he seemed to be preparing, and the sketches did not look as if they belonged to my as-yet-untitled script of the Blue Tyler story, the one he had assur
ed me would be his next film. “Every film has its own ecology, and for Blue to have a child would destroy the ecological balance of the love story, as it were. It would put us in two different time frames, and that’s always difficult, cinematically speaking.”
“Its ecosystem would be upset,” I said. “The symmetry of its food chain.”
“Exactly,” Sydney Allen said. I think he thought I was agreeing with him.
“Sydney thinks she’s an unnecessary complication,” Marty Magnin said.
I had never seen Marty deferential, especially to a director, but then his last four pictures had been flops, the blame for which he had artfully deposited in other laps, but not so artfully that he could afford to be the bully he so naturally was, especially with success. I peered at the sketches, trying to guess the story line from them. There was what seemed to be a grain elevator, with wheat pouring into it, and there seemed to be a railroad-engine switching yard. No. Jacob King did not fit as Casey Jones.
“She destroys the arc,” Sydney Allen said. The arc is what directors talk about when they are stalling. “I see a picture as a suspension bridge with two spans …”
“A suspension bridge doesn’t have an arc,” I said. “An arc is a precise geometrical configuration.”
“You know what Sydney means,” Marty Magnin said irritably. He had been reduced to interpreting Sydney Allen to a recalcitrant me, and it did not make him content.
“No, I don’t.”
“Jack, you don’t like me much, do you?” Sydney Allen said.
“That’s a reasonable assumption, Sydney. But actually I rarely give you a thought. It’s the arc, the ecological balance of film, the suspension bridge and all that horseshit I mind. All you have to say is that you have another picture, you have a start date, and you want to put this one back, and you want me to be happy about it.”
“Actually I don’t care if you’re happy or not.”
“Then we understand each other.”
Marty Magnin tried to soothe. “We just think it’s time we went in another direction.” He paused. “With another writer.”
“On what?”
“The script,” Marty Magnin said.
“Marty, you’re forgetting something,” I said. “I told you I’d work up a script. On spec. I never released the rights.”
“Not that it matters,” Sydney Allen said. “Her story is public domain.”
“But my notes aren’t.” I rose and pointed to the grain-elevator sketch. “What’s this picture called?”
No one spoke for a moment.
“Empire,” Marty Magnin finally said. He and I had been through too much together for him to ignore the question. “The Kansas wheat wars. Action. Night riders. Cruise and Kidman. They met Sydney over the weekend at Mike Ovitz’s in Aspen, and signed on this morning.”
The actors were of no interest to me. “And this is a grain elevator?”
“Nice to see you, Jack,” Sydney Allen said. He seemed taller, and as he tried to steer me out of his office, I saw he was wearing cowboy boots. “As always.”
“And somebody is going to fall into the grain elevator, and a load of wheat’s going to fall on him, and he’s going to suffocate and die, right?”
“Sydney’s idea,” Marty Magnin said. “When we were all schmoozing with Michael.” Marty considered the sketch. “How’d you know that anyway?”
“I read The Octopus,” I said. “Sydney only steals from the better sources.”
Marty looked from Sydney Allen to me. He had obviously never heard of either The Octopus or Frank Norris. Not that stealing anything from a classic would ever cause him to lose any sleep.
“Bottom line, Hollywood pictures don’t make it,” Marty Magnin said. “You’re rich, finance it yourself, you and the fageleh snitch.”
VI
Why did you have to find her, Jack? Arthur French said.
Arthur was recuperating at Willingham. With all the riding he had done, and all the spills he had taken, his knees finally wore out and had to be replaced, and so he had come to Los Angeles to get the operations done by the chief of orthopedic surgery at Cedars. I had talked to him in Arizona a number of times on the telephone but had never mentioned the letters. I wanted to show them to him in person, to see how he reacted, and his immobility after the two knee surgeries made him a captive audience, one in a certain amount of pain, unable to ride off into the sunset as he had so often done in Nogales, unable to deflect a question with an evasion as easily as when he was in his prime. I always tended to forget that Arthur was twenty-odd years older than I, because he had so vigorously taken to the outdoor life, but as I watched him reading the letters in his wheelchair at Willingham, wearing pajamas and a bathrobe, his legs resting on an ottoman, I realized that he was old, as were both Blue and Chuckie, the only other survivors of this random chain of events forty years earlier.
Why did you have to find her, Jack?
So there was a daughter?
She wouldn’t abort, Arthur said. There were screaming fights with J.F. and Lilo and me, but she still insisted on having it. That was the real reason Broadway Babe was postponed, not because of the score. She went to this place in Connecticut. It was like a safe house. She could have the child there, and not in a hospital, and nobody would talk, because silence was truly golden. It cost an arm and a leg.
How’d you explain her absence?
We just said she was making a career change, she was a grown woman now, she’d bought a ranch in Colorado, she loved the solitude and the fresh air, and then she was going to Europe before she started shooting Broadway Babe. Her first real vacation in ten years. The usual crap, but people believed studios those days.
If she was only going to give it up for adoption, then why have the kid?
She wanted to make a point, Jack. And she thought she could put it someplace where she could watch it grow up, without having any real responsibility for it. With a little weep when it went off to kindergarten. Standing outside the schoolyard, like a rich Stella Dallas. Life was always a movie to Blue, movies were her only frame of reference. It was Lilo who was finally able to talk some sense to her. Or maybe it was just that she was sick every morning and she was getting fat and the romance of having a baby and being a mother was wearing off. Like a rough cut that went on too long.
Jimmy Riordan took care of the adoption?
He had it placed even before Blue arrived at the place in Connecticut.
Why?
He felt guilty, I guess. About Jake. A kind of … what do you Catholics call it?
Penance, I said. Do the penance and you’re granted absolution. (I had never thought I would be discussing the fine points of confession with Arthur French.) Whatever happened to Jimmy Riordan anyway?
He bought himself a good name, Arthur said.
How?
Morris died less than a year after Jake was killed. Natural causes, in his own bed. As he always wanted. He went to sleep one night and didn’t wake up. His death was Jimmy’s ticket to respectability, and he’d been preparing for it, needless to say, since long before Morris died. He knew where all the bodies were buried—literally and figuratively—all the deals and all the payoffs, and a lot of people wanted to make sure that information never got out. So Jimmy negotiated a lawyer’s deal. Anything happened to him—food poisoning, an automobile accident, a fall in the shower, anything—then everything he had, and he had everything, was shipped to the feds. It was his insurance policy, and the premium he paid was his silence. So he spent the rest of his life doing good works. He died in 1970, 1971, around there, a stroke.
Any family?
There was a wife, but she left him early on. J.F. used to say Morris was more than she was willing to handle. Then she died, of cancer, I think.
Children?
None.
Where is Blue’s daughter now? I asked.
I don’t know.
You don’t know or you won’t tell?
I don’t know.
I don’t believe you, Arthur.
A flash of the old Arthur: I’d be surprised if you did.
And disappointed …
A weary smile. Yes.
And all those years, you were sending Blue money?
I guess there’s no point in denying it now.
No, I said.
He sighed. It began after she came back to New York from Italy. I’d been keeping tabs on her over there, and sometimes if I knew she was short, I’d see that a little something got sent her way. Jimmy did, too. It was Jimmy who suggested we give her a regular … stipend, I guess you’d call it. I said I’d take care of it, she was my responsibility, not his, I just wanted him to work out the details. Jimmy’s people, I mean his legitimate people, got in touch with her, and they gave her an ID number and a telephone number she could call collect, and they told her she should get a bank account, and there would be something deposited twice a month.
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