Hollywood Gothic

by Thomas Gifford

  “You mean Kay looked at sex the same way as the men she was screwing? Sure, I get the idea.”

  “Terry when she was fourteen, Tony Ashton at fifteen, Cedric Darwin at sixteen, Paul Irving at seventeen, Lydia Duncan—yes, a woman, a great star, Lydia Duncan—at eighteen, and Lydia’s husband, Sylvester, too, he was a cameraman … Kay was rapacious, but she was so beautiful, so angelic, so fetching—and I didn’t know what she was up to then. No, no, it all came to my attention later on, what sort of creature she was. But in 1941 she was still Maximus’ top star and I believed our own publicity on her … blame me if you wish, I was as innocent as poor Aaron, I didn’t know there were women like Kay Flanders—was I naive? Hell yes. Oh, yes, I knew there were such women, yes, but not in my family—that’s the way I looked at Maximus … my family. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for that family, everybody knows that, but I felt I could trust them all. I did trust them all. And when Aaron graduated from Yale in 1939 and came home, he met Kay … and it came on slowly, slowly, but it seemed like such a sweet thing to me. My son and Kay Flanders, falling in love … it was a wonderful movie, Toby, it really was. They were married in 1941. There were a thousand people at the reception, everybody in our world who mattered, who made the industry a great force in the world … they were celebrating the marriage of my son and America’s sweetheart. The happiest day of my life? I think so. Maybe the last time I knew such happiness.” He shivered like a man discovering leeches sucking at his belly. “How many of my guests knew the truth? How many were drinking my Veuve Clicquot and Mumm’s and looking at me and Aaron and snickering? How many, Toby? How many were saying Aaron Roth had just married the easiest fuck in the business? Terry, Tony, Cedric, the Duncans—hell, they were all there at the reception. And I was smiling and Aaron was adoring her and we danced with the bride … well, that’s when it all began, Toby—1941, about six weeks before Pearl Harbor.”

  “How did you ever find out the truth about her?”

  “Aaron came to me, admitted it … but by then I knew they were not happy. I knew there was something wrong and Aaron had to tell me about the drugs and the drinking first, had to because I was continually seeing evidence with my own eyes. I’m not a fool, whatever else may be said about me—naive, innocent, unobservant, trusting. But not a stupid man.” The crocodile’s grin was still there, masking the old man’s feelings. “Aaron went into the service, the Navy, first in the Pacific, then in Washington as a liaison with Hollywood, and in 1942 while he was on a battleship, Goldie was born. America was happy for us. Daddy fighting the war, Mommy still making movies and having time to bear a beautiful blond daughter—Goldie was on the cover of Life, but you know that of course. Little Goldie, eight weeks old, smiling up at her mother. The picture went all over the world. … The pride I felt! They had an interview with Aaron and a picture of him taken somewhere with Admiral Halsey. … God, what days they were!”

  “So when did it all begin to go wrong?”

  “Aaron came back to us in 1945 and Kay made two more big musicals in 1946 and 1948 and was spending time being a mother. But there was something wrong with Aaron—he was thirty, he’d come out of the war in fine shape, he was taking hold nicely at the studio, he had a beautiful daughter, his wife was a great star … you’d think, here’s a man who has it all.”

  “That’s what I’d think, all right,” Toby said.

  “But Aaron was a badly troubled man. He wouldn’t talk to me about his problems, he was distant, terribly nervous, he wouldn’t seek help or comfort from anyone. Well, it was years before I knew what was going on … but it was all to do with Kay. She’d begun to drink heavily, at home, on the sly. She didn’t make a picture for … what, five years … 1953. And it was a comedy she seemed to walk through, no spirit, no verve, and the rumors began. Tantrums on the set, firing secretaries and hairdressers and stand-ins, but everybody at Maximus was trying to shield me, they knew how I worshiped her and Goldie, who was eleven by then. No one wanted me to know the truth, but when the 1953 picture came out it was such a flop, well, things began to come to a head. Aaron finally told me what was going on. And it was a nightmare story—drugs, drinking, abuse of Aaron and Goldie … and he told me how she’d disappear for days at a time, and he hired private detectives to find her … the head of publicity at Maximus had his hands full half of the time keeping it all quiet. And he kept it quiet, all right—I didn’t even know, and I was involved in everything at the studio in those days. Everything.

  “We did all we could to get Kay back on the track. It was distasteful to me, but what could I do? Throw her to the wolves? She’d have been ripped to pieces … and I believed there was still hope for her. My God, Toby, she was only thirty-three, thirty-four years old. We put her in a very private clinic in Switzerland, got the dope and the liquor out of her system, but …” The old man swallowed hard, as if the memories and the effort of talking such a long time were working on him. “But she’d had hard usage, Toby. She was getting old long before her time, she had the shakes, and there was nothing she could do about them. She was terrified of a thousand little things … people, crowds, being seen, having to talk, any kind of noise, even Goldie—she didn’t want to see her own daughter, or be seen by her. She lost a lot of hair, got gray, lost weight, couldn’t remember things, she’d wander around the grounds of the sanatorium in Switzerland quite naked, like some pathetic survivor of a death camp. It was tragic. But at least no one knew about it, we kept it all in the family. Aaron was a monk, worked like a madman, was always flying to Paris and then going to see her incognito … a couple of times a year they’d go out, to a premiere in London or to Cannes or visiting dear friends at Cap Ferrat or in New York. The world would see her and she’d look fine. But it was all camouflage. Then back to Switzerland. Slowly she seemed to improve. Seven years went by, and in 1960 she was determined to make a comeback … but not a picture. She wanted to do a concert. She worked hard, her voice was different now, ragged and strange, but she worked hard, she saw to every part of the show, and she did it at the Olympia in Paris. Well, it made history, as you know. She was utterly different from America’s sweetheart, she wasn’t yet forty, but she looked fifty, frail, used, and the French went crazy. She played two weeks and she didn’t come apart, she held up. Aaron was so happy. Arrangements were made for her to play the Palace in New York, Aaron set the whole thing up—he was a man possessed. And the show at the Palace was a triumph … people still buy the recording today. But it was then that Aaron discovered how she was holding herself together—more drugs, new drugs, and an endless succession of men. Preying on her. … At one time I feared for Aaron’s sanity. I thought he might kill himself. But he’s strong. What was he to do? Commit her to another sanatorium? Send her back to Switzerland? She was famous again, maybe bigger than she’d ever been before … there was no tasteful way to get her out of the spotlight, not anymore. So he let it go on, tried to keep up appearances, covered for her in every way he could … and in 1967 you married Goldie, so you know what she was like at the end. Barely human, barely alive, totally dependent on drugs. You saw her, Toby, you saw what was left of Kay Roth by the time you met her in 1966, 1967. And then, when she went back to Paris to play the Olympia again, she died … she killed herself, of course, one way or another. Too much pills and liquor, the wrong man, and that was it. The French loved it, a grand finale.” Solomon Roth got another cigarette into his holder after several tries: his hands wouldn’t work quite right. He did the match thing, flung the match into the hot tub.

  It wasn’t quite the story Challis had expected, but Solomon surely knew the truth. To Challis, Kay had seemed frail, unwell, but composed, friendly, little seen.

  “I still don’t get it,” Toby said. “What has it got to do with Goldie ten years later?”

  “Oh,” Solomon Roth said. “The diary … Kay had kept a diary. Meticulously detailed. No matter how terrible her condition, she kept a diary. Everything was in the diary, all the men, all the drugs s
he tried, all the sewer stuff scraped out of her diseased mind. You see, nobody knew she’d kept this detailed record, nobody at all … until Goldie …

  “When Kay died in Paris, she had trunks of stuff with her. It was eventually all shipped back here, and we just stored it, no one ever opened the trunks, until Goldie did a year, eighteen months ago, and she didn’t even tell anybody she was going to do it. But she’d become very interested in Kay’s life in recent years—maybe it had struck her that she was just about the age when her mother went round the bend. I don’t know. What matters is that she got into the trunks and found the diary … diaries, I suppose, to be accurate. And it was all there, the whole story.” He puffed smoke before him, pushed his hand slowly through it.

  “Jesus,” Challis said. “I was right, then. Blackmail.”

  “Goldie hated her father that much,” Roth said sadly, each word pulled forth at the cost of considerable psychic agony. “She had met Jack Donovan, and in her mind she made the connection, Donovan and the diaries. He had a magazine, he knew the publishing business. I doubt if she even thought of the kind of killing she could make through the book rights, the paperback rights, world rights. What she wanted was to get back at her father, at all of us I suppose, but mainly at Aaron. She knew she finally had him.” His old face sagged like his body somewhere deep inside the robe, but the grin remained.

  “My God,” Challis breathed softly. “Aaron had a hell of a motive for—”

  “Don’t even think it, Toby. In the first place, killing Goldie wouldn’t have done any good. Donovan was already in on it … and he’s alive, don’t you see? No, Goldie had no interest in blackmail, none whatsoever. She wanted the diaries published. She wanted Donovan to run them in his magazine. In installments. She saw it as a circulation builder for Donovan and revenge on Aaron for herself.

  “It was Jack Donovan who saw the blackmail potential. He came to us and told us that Goldie had offered the diaries to him, free and clear, for the purpose of running them in his magazine. Mr. Donovan just let that hang there between him and Aaron … then he told Aaron what was in the diaries. Aaron was suddenly faced with the whole cesspool, just dumped in his lap. Well, he had no choice but to come to me for guidance. What to do? By coming to us, Donovan had signaled that there was a way out of our dilemma. After all, he hadn’t just gone off to the printer and let us simply read it all in the magazine. He came to us … and Aaron. And let Aaron know that he needed a million dollars to prop up the magazine, to get it where he wanted it. He wasn’t asking for a gift. He was asking for an investment of one million dollars. Aaron couldn’t do that by himself, he had to come to me. It didn’t take me long to say yes. The man had us by the short hairs … he told us he had the diaries, we gave him the money on his assurance that he could control Goldie. It was indescribably sloppy on our part, we were panic-stricken, we had to stop publication.”

  “And the diaries?” Challis asked.

  “I leave that to Aaron—”

  “You mean to tell me you don’t know?”

  “I don’t know. I’m an old man, I’ve tried not to think about it.” Towser looked up, sniffed the wet night air. “It was pay up or Kay’s filth would go out to the world … can you imagine that? Kay Roth?” He shuddered. “So I don’t think Aaron did anything to Goldie, and I don’t think her death was involved in any way with all this—”

  “Solomon, you’re crazy.”

  “And why is that?”

  “What if Donovan didn’t have the diaries? What if he’d only read them? And he finds a couple of quaking imbeciles who’ll fork over a million bucks for nothing but his assurances. But then Goldie gets fed up with Donovan’s stalling around and not publishing them, she gets pissed off and says she’s going to someone else. But Donovan’s got the million she doesn’t know about, and he keeps seeing Tully Hacker pulling his head off and spitting in the hole—you get the picture? And Aaron and you might be angry over a million dollars just thrown away … Goldie won’t listen to reason. So Jack beats her to death just before I wander in looking for my dinner! Christ, and you sit here telling me there was no point in bringing it up at the trial?”

  “Now, now, Toby. Bringing it up at the trial would have wasted our million, too. And Goldie would have had her revenge. From the grave. No, we couldn’t allow that, I’m afraid.”

  “Sol, I don’t know what to say. I guess good night will have to do.” Challis stood up, watched Towser prick his ears and growl.

  “Good night, Toby.” Challis was walking away. “Come see me tomorrow, Toby. We’ll get you out of this.” His voice faded away in the fog.

  18

  HALFWAY UP THE LONG, SLOW rising terraces, a yellow light blurred through the fog, soft light, like something growing on a milky culture. Challis walked toward the edge of the jungle growth which Manuel and Pepe spent their waking hours day after day, year after year, trimming back, holding at bay. He reached the barrier of huge, thick leaves and creeping, winding vines and stood with his hands in his pockets, smelling the jungle. In the halo of light they stood watching him. Illuminated from below, the shadows giving them an unusually expressive look, were the two dinosaurs. Raindrops dripped from their tiny heads. They watched him as if they were shy, ready only to keep their distance and wait for him to go. Tons of concrete, their huge abbreviated legs sunk in the black jungle floor, they watched. A long time ago Solomon Roth had wished for them, snapped his magic fingers, and they had appeared. Elves from the studio had come in the night, and by morning Solomon Roth had had his dinosaurs, the first dinosaurs in Bel Air in millions of years.

  Daffodil Roth was pacing the hallways. She was smoking a cigarette, and when she turned to see Challis, she batted both arms at the blue clouds. “My God, I wish I knew what’s going on around here.” Her small blue eyes darted from Challis to the door to the sound of a log crackling in the other room. Her feet pattered on the parquetry. “Sol goes wandering off into the night, he won’t take the goddamn cable car, and he’s going to slip on the wet grass some night and break his neck, and nobody’s going to hear him … Toby, please, what’s going on?”

  “You’re asking me? I’m the one who just escaped from jail.”

  “Well, I’m going crazy, Aaron tearing around here like a madman—doesn’t anybody ever go to sleep in this house? Now, where are you going? You haven’t told me anything.”

  “Daffy, you’ve got to calm down …”

  She jerked away from him and headed back down the hallway. “You’re no help, you never were. For Christ’s sake, Toby, stay and have a drink with me. Please?”

  “I’ve got things to do …” A longing flared in his throat, a desire.

  “He’s right, Mrs. Roth.” Hacker stepped out of the shadows in the foyer. He didn’t make much noise, not for so large a man.

  “Someday!” Daffodil Roth shook a tiny fist at Tully Hacker. “Soon. God …” She marched off toward the kitchen. Hacker watched her go, his arms folded, his hat square on his big head.

  “She resents me,” he said matter-of-factly. “I guess I don’t blame her. But if she had any sense, she’d come to terms with having me around.” He shook his head at the silliness of it. “Weed is bringing your car, Toby. You’d better make tracks, get done whatever you’ve got to do.” He sighed, walked beside Challis toward the front door. They went outside. “She’s right. Nobody ever seems to go to bed around here.”

  “Where’s your room, Hack?”

  “Upstairs. I’m wired to the closed-circuit TV system, about a dozen different alarm systems, room like an armory. Pity the poor bugger who picks this place to break in. He’ll just go out with the garbage in the morning.” He laughed abruptly. Weed arrived with the cancerous Mustang and melted away, nodding. Challis got in, and Tully closed the door for him. “Listen, Toby, I got a couple of messages for you. Aaron says I’m supposed to run you out of town. Or shoot you if you turn up here again. But he’s nervous, and I have to guess what he really means, you know how he is
. Menopause, maybe. But Solomon says he’s got a passport man … you can be gone in twelve hours and nobody’ll ever find you. All you’ve got to do is give us the word. It’s not a bad offer, you gotta admit that. You do what you think best, but the old man, he’s real fond of you, Toby … he means what he says, you know that. Okay, amigo?” He stepped back from the car. “Take care of yourself, you hear?” He smiled and went back into the house. Challis didn’t envy him. Not with Daffy to deal with.

  By the time he’d reached the Bel Air gate, the leak in the roof had begun again like a metronome and the windshield had fogged up. Hunched over the steering wheel, he maneuvered onto Sunset, where the traffic was thin and cautious, hooked around to the left, and headed into the darkness of Beverly Glen Canyon. A muddy film was running downhill, but the mudslide and fallen trees had been cleared away, and ten minutes later he’d crested Mulholland and slid down the other side into the valley. It was midnight, and Ventura Boulevard was a wet, uninspiring sight. He pulled to the curb in front of the Murder, He Says, Bookshop.

  From the street the main room where the party had been located was dark, but behind it there was a light shining in the hallway and a shadow moved. Maybe she was still there. He stood under the eaves, out of the rain, and knocked several times. A police car passed slowly, the driver staring at him. The shadow appeared in the hallway and came hesitantly across the darkened room. The door opened on a chain lock.