Playland

by John Gregory Dunne

  You tell him Wanda Nash called, Melba Mae Toolate said, you tell him it’s important, and she gave the maid the number of a pay phone in Cortez, Colorado, where she could be reached at six o’clock that afternoon, local time.

  I’m at the end of my rope, Arthur, Blue Tyler said when she picked up the pay telephone on the first ring. Everyplace I go, people look at me. It’s like when I was a star. People say you look just like … and I just say my name is Wanda Nash, a lot of people say I look like her. I need a place to hide, Arthur, it’s like my life’s been taken away from me, maybe I’ve been alone too long, I didn’t think it’d be like this …

  Here’s what I want you to do, Arthur French said.

  I was surprised when Arthur called me, since I knew that he blamed me for all that had happened since the story broke. My error was finding Blue; in Arthur’s scheme this was a willful act, one that negated the possibility of Blue living out her days, more or less contentedly, as Melba Mae Toolate, with Arthur as her faraway provider and guardian angel, a role that was, of course, his me absolvo. To find her, in this interpretation, was to take advantage of her. Needless to say, it was self-serving for him to think this, as everyone, not excluding Arthur or myself, had in some way been taking advantage of Blue Tyler from the time she was four years old. But if Arthur was to help Blue, I was the one person he could call, because he was a sick, reclusive old man and I was his only friend, however strained that friendship had become, as well as his only contact with Melba Mae Toolate. He had also requested that I bring Chuckie along with me to Willingham, a considerable concession, because he knew Chuckie detested him, but Chuckie had known Blue Tyler as well as anyone ever had, he had been the keeper of her secrets, and there was no one else still alive who shared that kind of intimacy with her.

  Arthur told us about the call.

  “Where the hell is Cortez?” Chuckie said.

  “Colorado,” Arthur said. He was still confined to his wheelchair and seemed to be in some pain. “On the way to Monument Valley.”

  “Monument Valley?” Chuckie said incredulously, and when Arthur nodded, Chuckie turned to me and said, “Jack Ford country, Jack must’ve shot half dozen pictures there.”

  “That’s why she wanted to see it,” Arthur said. “Remember Fort Apache? Well, she’s convinced herself Jack wanted her to play Philadelphia …”

  “… the part Shirley Temple played,” Chuckie explained to me. I had never seen him so in his element. It was as if he was in preproduction, attending to casting. “Blue could never stand Shirley. She called her Lollipop, and she used to swear Shirley was a midget.”

  Arthur smiled. “In drag.” He tried to readjust his legs on the ottoman, and the effort made him suddenly wince. “Now she says that after she got into her trouble, it was the studio that forced Jack to give the part to Shirley. She thinks if she had played Philadelphia, things would’ve turned out better for her.”

  “And that’s what brought her to Cortez?” Chuckie said, shaking his head. “Jack Ford never would’ve let her play that part.” It had been years since he had been on a set, but he still understood the chemistry of film. “She’s living in a dream world.” He hesitated. “Is she …” He could not finish the sentence, but we knew that he meant was she crazy.

  “She occasionally”—I sought the most mitigating phrase—“wanders from reality.”

  Arthur nodded. The weeks of recuperation had cost him his range tan, and his skin looked gray and slack.

  “I’d like you to go get her, Jack,” Arthur said.

  “All right,” I said, surprised. “But how does she feel about it?”

  “Okay. You made an impression. Mainly by not saying anything to anybody.” Speaking was an effort for Arthur, and he paused to catch his breath every few sentences. “You fly to Denver. I’ve chartered a plane that’ll take you from there to Cortez, it’s a tiny little airport, no jet traffic. Pick her up and bring her to Nogales.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Chuckie said.

  “No,” Arthur said. “You and I’ll go down to Nogales together, Chuckie. We knew her in the old days. Jack’s the only one who knows her as Melba. I think we should keep the two lives separate for a while.

  “I booked her into a Days Inn as Wanda Nash,” Arthur said to me after a moment. “Prepaid. I told her not to move until you get there. Get her down to the ranch quick. It’s only an hour’s flight. They’re expecting Mr. Broderick and a guest.”

  I rose and shook Arthur’s hand. It was strange seeing him and Chuckie together, each well over seventy-five, embarking on a new adventure, the director and the head of the studio, Arthur being commanding, Chuckie being subversive, as it was in the old days.

  “Jack,” Arthur said, a smile crinkling the corners of his mouth. “When we get this behind us, we should get back to work on our transplant picture. What were we going to call it?”

  “To an Athlete Dying Young, Arthur,” I said.

  There was no answer in Wanda Nash’s room.

  “You know who she looks like?” the woman at the Days Inn desk said. Her plastic nametag identified her as Patia, and there was a rash of tiny, angry pimples on her chin.

  “Blue Tyler,” I said, cocking a forefinger and pointing it at her. “Everyone says that. Especially since all this stuff started happening. I think she’s getting a little sick of it, you want the truth.”

  “Live your own life, that’s what I always say,” Patia said, nodding vigorously in agreement.

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  I waited for an hour. The sun was beginning to go down, and the small airfield did not have night lights.

  “You know Wanda?” Patia said, picking at her chin sores.

  “She was a friend of my dad’s.” As indeed she might have been in her prior incarnation.

  “Is that right?”

  “Listen, I just want to make sure she’s okay. Is there any way you can let me take a look at her room. She’s not as young as she used to be, and I want to make sure she’s okay.”

  “We’re not supposed to.”

  “You can come with me.”

  “Maybe she went shopping.”

  “Any place to shop here?”

  “Not really.” Patia tapped her pencil on the counter. “She into Indians? There’s a lot of reservations around here, Utes, Navajos. Maybe she went on a tour.”

  “No, I don’t think so. She knew I was coming …”

  “Well …”

  “I’d really appreciate it …”

  “You the police?”

  “If I was a cop, I’d’ve been in there by now, wouldn’t I?”

  “You’re the media, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  Patia slapped the counter. “I knew she was that Blue Tyler, I just knew it.” She took a key from a box and I cursed myself for being so easy to read. “That could be a lot of money coming my way, and I saw her first, I’m not going to split it with you.”

  We raced down the corridor. I knocked on Number 47. No answer. Patia elbowed me aside and unlocked the door. The room was empty. The bed had not been slept in. There was nothing in the drawers, nothing in the closet, nothing in the medicine cabinet. The paper covering on one of the bathroom glasses had been removed, a toilet seat cover was crumbled in a wastebasket, and the triangular fold in the toilet paper had been removed, but those were the only indications that anyone had ever been in the room.

  We went back to the desk. A couple in shorts and backpacks were impatiently banging the bell at the desk. For a moment, Patia hesitated, unsure whether to register the new guests or to follow me. “We’re full up,” she said.

  “The sign outside said Rooms Available,” the woman backpacker said.

  “Been so busy, haven’t had time to change it,” Patia said, following me out the door.

  “You got a car?” she said outside.

  I had rented one at the airport. The sun was down, there was no way I was going to get out on the plane that night, and
I had to shed this virago. “Will you give me a lift?”

  I got the answer I expected. “Not in your lifetime, buddy.”

  I watched Patia as she roared out of the parking lot. I had no idea where she was going. Nor, I expect, did she. Greed with no destination. I went back to the pay phone in the lobby and dialed the general aviation hangar at the airport. My pilot was a short, bowlegged man named Neal whose only answer to anything I asked was “Okay by me.” The copilot was his son, Neal, Jr., who was so taciturn he hadn’t said a word since I picked up the plane in Denver. “We’re not going to get out tonight, Neal, so I’ll get us a couple of rooms here in town, we’ll have some dinner, a couple of drinks, and I’ll figure what I’m going to do next.”

  “Okay by me, Mr. Broderick, it’s your tab.”

  “I’ll come out, pick you up. There’s a Ramada we can stay at, and a steak place I noticed on the way in.”

  “Okay by me,” Neal said. “You’re going to run into a real traffic jam, though.”

  “Why?”

  “That accident.”

  “What accident?”

  “You didn’t hear the sirens?” He pronounced it “sireens.”

  “What accident?” I repeated.

  “Some old lady, out on 160, on the way to Kayenta, over in Arizona. There’s a stoplight there at the airport turnoff …”

  I had seen it coming into town. I could feel a chill in the pit of my stomach.

  “… after that it’s bye-bye, baby, nothing but open road all the way to Kayenta.”

  “What happened?”

  “This old lady, waiting there at the light, well, she just ups and puts herself and her suitcase under the rear right wheels of this eighteen-wheeler refrigerator rig stopped at the light, the light goes green, and the driver takes off, he feels this bump, and pulls over to the side, to see what’s wrong, and there’s this old lady, my boy, Neal, Jr., saw her, she’s flatter’n a goddamn pancake …”

  I felt as if the breath had been sucked out of my lungs. A good visual, Melba Mae Toolate had said to me in Hamtramck when I had read her the story about the elderly woman in Chicago who had placed herself under the wheels of a transcontinental moving van on Michigan Avenue. I began to hyperventilate.

  “You okay, Mr. Broderick?”

  “Fine, Neal, fine.” I did not know what else to say. “I have some things I have to do, so why don’t you and your boy grab a ride into the Ramada, we’ll meet up later, okay?”

  “Okay by me, Mr. Broderick, it’s your tab.”

  I identified the body. She was a mess. A good visual. Sweet Jesus. Every blood vessel in her head seemed to have ruptured, and it was as if she was wearing a purple fright mask. I tried to comprehend why she had run from the Days Inn when the safe haven Arthur had offered was so close at hand. I could only think it was because she had been running for forty years, and running had become a habit too ingrained to break. Chuckie had once said that Blue Tyler movies always had happy endings, but Blue Tyler could never escape Melba Mae Toolate, and Melba’s life was never destined to end with a walk into the sunset, slow fade to black. I console myself that she had finally become totally unbalanced, but I also know that I wanted to abjure responsibility for reading her the item about the woman on Michigan Boulevard. As she considered her options out there at the airport turnoff, I can only suppose that seeing the refrigerator truck stopped at the traffic light caused some flickering brain cell in her memory bank to flash suddenly, and thought was translated into demented action. If it were not that, I wanted to believe, it would have been something else.

  We always want so much to believe the unbelievable.

  After I left the medical examiner’s office, I called Arthur in Los Angeles. He listened without a word, then asked if I could call him back in five minutes. It was Arthur’s way; he would not ever let me hear him cry. When I called back, he was perfectly composed. He would charter a jet in Denver, and he wanted me to fly to Los Angeles with Blue’s body. We were the only family she ever knew, he had told me a short time before, and now the sole surviving member of that family was bringing her home.

  The press arrived the next morning. I was no stranger to celebrity death. I could say “No comment” in every possible way, and not take offense at any offensive question. Why had she picked so grotesque a way to die? I was asked; I said I had no idea. As suicide is a criminal offense, Blue’s suitcase would have to remain in the property room of the Montezuma County sheriff’s office until it was released by the county attorney. I was surprised at how little was in it. A few of the Meta Dierdorf photographs, a framed snapshot of an almost boyish Arthur in black tie, laughing. Clothes. Sensible shoes. An uncashed money order for seven hundred fifty dollars. An annotated copy of Raul Flaherty’s Messenger of Death, the annotations mainly “B.S.” in large block letters. A few pieces of jewelry, one or two of which were perhaps valuable. Three cans of Chicken of the Sea tuna fish. Her tapes. Her tiny special Oscar. And a will leaving all her possessions to Arthur French.

  When the paperwork attendant to Blue Tyler’s death was completed, a hearse took her casket to the airport, and the two Neals and I flew her to Denver, where we picked up the chartered G-3 to Los Angeles. To avoid the press, the plane landed at Ontario, and the casket was transported to the Heyer & Sobol Funeral Home & Mortuary in Studio City.

  There was no service, only a laying to rest of Blue’s ashes. It was Arthur’s idea to put them in the crypt with Jacob’s. Arthur, who always tried, and sometimes failed, to do the right thing. Years before, Jimmy Riordan had seen to it that the name on the crypt was changed from Yakov Kinovsky to Jacob King, and that Jacob’s name, his dates, and the inscription were all in brass letters. Arthur, Chuckie, and I were the only mourners. Somewhere in his Cosmopolitan Pictures memorabilia, Arthur had dug out an old Tiffany calling card with the name Blue Tyler printed on it, and under her name he had written “1927–1991.” Arthur’s instructions were that Blue’s name and dates would have the same brass lettering as Jacob’s, and as the inscription, “But westward, look, the land is bright.”

  I read about Arthur’s death in the international Herald Tribune a year later. I was in Spain scouting locations with that season’s new genius director, and saw the headline on the obituary page: MOGUL’S SON, 78. Poor Arthur. Dead of a heart attack at the ranch in Nogales, but at seventy-eight still identified as J.F.’s son. Chuckie flew down for the funeral. It was so butch, he said when I called him from Madrid, everyone was on horseback. He and Arthur had become close that last year as a result of everything that happened. Friends, Chuckie said. Arthur and Aunty Charlton, can you believe it? But when you reach our age, Jack, you take your friends where you find them.

  In his will, Arthur left me the unfinished portrait of Jacob King, the one his body came to rest against the night he was killed. The accompanying letter said that Blue had taken the portrait after Jacob died, and that he had bought it from her when she went to Italy to evade her subpoena from the Kefauver Committee. The painting was basically worthless, but it was a way of giving her money.

  I’m sorry I had so many secrets, Jack, Arthur wrote in his letter, but thanks for everything. He signed it, An Athlete Dying Old.

  The picture was exactly as I had heard, Jacob in jodhpurs, laced boots, beige shirt, and a polka-dot ascot, a fantasy aristocrat in an imaginary land, an America of privilege that in some odd way could have been imagined only by people like J. F. French, and desired by people like Jacob King. Reality was the small dark blotch at the lower right-hand corner of the picture, where Jacob’s blood had leaked against the canvas.

  I put the picture in storage. I imagine that someday when my effects are itemized, someone will find it and wonder who the subject was.

  Chuckie died.

  The bugler at his graveside blew the Marine Corps hymn, slow tempo, then taps.

  I cried.

  III

  I think of Blue often. Think of the life she led, and try to understand why she turned
out the way she did. Sometimes I comfort myself with the idea that Blue Tyler had a better life, even with all its turmoil, than she would have had if she had remained Melba Mae Toolate, but such speculation is idle, academic, perhaps even dishonest. When she was a newborn infant, her mother, the lady who dropped her the way an animal does, as she said in the tape she had sent Arthur, sold her to a stranger for a bus ticket. Her father she never knew; if there was a stepfather, he never appeared. Her life until the age of four, when she went to the open dance call at Cosmopolitan Pictures, was a blank. She remembered always being on the move with Irma. She remembered Needles, and San Bernardino rang a bell, but she remembered little else. Where she learned to dance she could not recall. How Irma learned about the open dance call at Cosmo she did not know. Why Irma thought she had talent remained a mystery, but she did, and her life was forever changed. Melba Mae Toolate became Blue Tyler, named after the allegedly favorite color of Chloe Quarles, J. F. French’s lesbian wife, and after John Tyler, allegedly J.F.’s favorite president, whose birthday he claimed to share, but did not.

  We were the only family she ever knew, a mixed blessing, at best. Irma was pensioned off, Chloe was discouraged from being alone with her, her education was entrusted to studio spies and to governesses named Madame. She not only could not name the forty-eight states, she very probably did not even know that there were forty-eight states. By the time she was seven, she was making six thousand dollars a week. When she was fourteen, she should have died in a plane crash, but she did not because she was on her knees fellating her benefactor in a Las Vegas hotel suite. The lesson she absorbed from that encounter was never ever to let anyone take advantage of her again, and if her formal education and her vocabulary seemed inadequate to the demands of the world beyond the one she knew, her cunning was infinite. Her only yearning was to meet someone, anyone, who wanted nothing from her. Jacob King wanted nothing from her, and she fell in love with him; that he had been a murderer, without remorse, many times over was for Blue Tyler only incidental information. Meta Dierdorf also wanted nothing from her, except the secrets they shared, and Blue fell in love with her as well; that Meta was murdered by a person or persons unknown only increased Blue’s suspicion of the world at large. Beyond Meta and Jacob, there was never anyone who did not want something from her.