Only the Dead Know Burbank

by Bradford Tatum

  “We couldn’t be anywhere else, my dear,” I whispered back.

  Taxis were waiting and the girls piled into these, no longer strangers to one another. Or slid into the beds of beaten pickups owned by aunts and uncles as shabby as the folks they had left half a country behind. There was a flurry of greeting and hefting and leaving. But of course there was no one waiting to meet us.

  CHAPTER 21

  Universal Pictures was a smallish spread of white stucco buildings, vaguely crenellated, a lower set of gigantic dentures left in a pasture. If I had known anything about fake Spanish architecture, I would have recognized it as such. Later I would compare it in my mind to the taco stand/carwash soon to be erected on a corner of La Brea and Sunset. But then I merely gawked at the folly of leaving such massive dentition among the cow shit and creosote.

  I don’t remember a sign of any kind. The only way I was sure it was the studio was by the fleet of Duesenbergs and Durant Stars parked on the circular gravel driveway. We crunched up to the front entrance. And holding open the screen door, Mutter let me inside.

  It was dark. On benches of tiger oak sat roughly thirty girls, all wearing an equal number of conflicting scents that fought for atmospheric supremacy like caged cocks in some miasmal ring. There was talc and tuberose and honeysuckle, starched linen, lye and lavender. Not to mention the soft marine stink of lip rouge from sixty heavily lacquered lips. There was little conversation. A polite compliment upon a particularly unspectacular pair of pumps or a question about how one had achieved such shine over her finger waves. But for the most part they were silent, shifting only in careful jerks like wagons loaded with nitro.

  Girls went in. Girls came out.

  There was no place for us to sit, so Mutter stood and I crouched in the corner. After a few moments a sour-looking secretary slunk out of some inner office, a clipboard pressed to her chest, and asked our names. I mentioned we were there to see the boss.

  “Mr. Laemmle?” she asked. But I would have been just as effective in my answer if had I suddenly launched into “Deutschland über Alles.” She jotted something down on her clipboard and motioned us back to our places on the floor.

  I don’t remember losing consciousness, that room-heated slipping down that passed for sleep in me during extreme moments of boredom. Mutter was slumped to his side, breathing in great even waves. Slack in his thick fingers was a half-eaten chocolate bar, the remains of a cartoon rabbit staring up from the mangled wrapper. I had no idea where he had gotten it. The afternoon had grown long. The girls were gone. There was only one other change in our surroundings. On the main office door was a sign: Will resume at 9:00 tomorrow. Good luck! We had missed it. Slept through our one chance to be seen, possibly heard. I stood up and crossed to the sign. I fingered through my primer, to the translating dictionary. Perhaps the word resume did not have as final a connotation as I had thought. I noticed the door was open. At the receptionist’s desk, a nail file lay by the cradled telephone, the seat empty but still warm with the suggestion of rose water. I peeked through the main door and noticed another door marked Private. That’s where he was. Whomever he was. The granter of wishes. The dasher of hopes. The door was closed but through it I could hear noise, a shifting of linen, the soft complaints of bodies in sleep. The halls were just beginning to fill with the smell of late-afternoon coffee. I put my hand to the private knob. And looked back at Mutter. He nodded his head. What the hell . . . we’d come this far. Let’s see if my ambition had grown legs. And perhaps something between them. My eyes cooled to grim as I pushed the door open.

  A man and a girl.

  On her knees she was my height, and as her face turned toward me I could see crumb-colored ingots of sleep still in the ducts of her eyes. The man leaped back as if stung from the girl’s now-shut mouth and screamed something, his face flushing. But all I could see was the look on the girl’s face. She was my age, at least in actual years, and in that brief moment of recognition I wanted to hold her, welcome her as a kind of cousin by telling her that I too had paid for my tutoring with a similar coin. But all she saw was a bleak child. A ghost of a left sister or distant niece whose standing and seeing could mean only the worst about her. She had settled for the lies of the last chances and never again could her act be a gift to some far-off husband, never could it shoulder surprise or inspire love. She had given it away for nothing. And probably without lunch. She must either now totally succeed and file this act as dues or be dashed into an oblivion of drink or drugs or homecoming.

  Lifetimes from now, such an act would be inconsequential. By the end of business she would have a deal and be well on her way to her own fragrance line. But we still believed we were decent in those years after the first Great War. We still needed to believe our atrocities were self-defense, not self-serving, and so her act was monstrous.

  Her arms rounded in the air, a shoulder arcing to accommodate her dress strap. The flat pink of her breast was packed into her best calico. She stood then and head down, so far down, she scurried from the room.

  “Just what the fuck do you two think you’re doing bargin’ in here?” the man bellowed. I noticed then Mutter had sneaked up behind me. Mutter tensed.

  “Pull up your pants,” I said evenly, placing a calming hand on the giant. Where I got the balls to say that to a man in his position, I’ll never know. I must have heard my mother say it.

  The man looked down and I realized then how young he was. Younger even than Mutter. His fingers dribbled over the buttons of his pants and he raked his fingers through his hair and fluffed the lapel of his suit coat.

  “I’m givin’ ya two minutes to make your play,” he said, trying to pump the authority back into his voice. “Just to show you the kind of guy I am.”

  “You will give me all the time I require, Mr. Laemmle,” I said quietly. I didn’t wait for him to ask me to sit. Confidence gripped me like a sudden seizure. Mother would have been proud. “My name is Maddy Ulm. And this is my associate, Mutter.” Associate? I was spit balling like crazy. But somehow I knew the only way to keep the man’s attention was to act like I belonged there. “We have recently come from Germany, UFA, where our picture, known to you, I believe, under the name of The Toymaker, was recently acquired by your company for foreign distribution.”

  “The what?” he asked, reaching for a cigar.

  “The Toymaker,” I repeated, my confidence beginning to show its seams.

  “Wait,” he said, lighting his Upmann. “You don’t mean Der Spielzeugmacher?” His accent was impeccable. Why wouldn’t it be? His father, who owned the company, was from the same part of the country as we were.

  “Precisely.”

  “Well, guten Tag, Schatzi!” he said, puffing through his smile. “Hell yes. Terrific picture. You were the little girl, right? Jesus. We’ve got it out in limited release, but with any luck we’ll be hitting the majors. Why didn’t you write you were coming?”

  “I didn’t realize it was necessary.” Was this really happening? Was Volker right after all?

  “Terrific. I’ll tell the kids over in juvenile to start a buildup. Maddy Ulm, is it?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, smiling at Mutter. “But, please, what precisely is this buildup?”

  “Just for publicity. Get you on the roster.”

  “Roster, please?”

  “Christ, you’re green as grass, aren’t you? That’s no dig. It’s refreshing. Half these mice come in here and try to tell me my own business.”

  “This is an acting roster, then? For to act?”

  “What else?”

  If I’d had a beating heart it would have been racing. Sinking.

  “I fear a mistake has happened,” I said.

  “What?” His eyes cooled reptilian. “What’d you mean? That wasn’t you?”

  “It was, but my interest is not in acting. I wish to direkten Filme.”

  “Direct pictures? Jesus Christ. Already? What is with you kids? You think we hand out megaphones with the fre
e coffee?”

  “But I have directed, Mr. Laemmle. Two pictures in Germany.”

  “Two? What two?” he snapped, puffing.

  “The one you have seen and—”

  “Hold on. I don’t remember seeing your name above the title, sister.”

  “True, but I was the one who—”

  “Okay. Show’s over, all right?” He put his cigar in its tray and sat down at his desk, moving papers around his desk with empty authority. “I don’t know how they do things in ol’ Deutschland but here in the good ol’ USA we don’t toss the helm of five-figure pictures to scabby-kneed little girls.” Knees must have been much on his mind. He stopped moving his papers and looked up. “Look. I’m sorry. That wasn’t . . .” I couldn’t help but shiver in front of him. We had seen the rawness and the worst of him. The impression he had made upon us had escaped his control and he could have none of that. He bent over his desk and scratched something on a sheet of company paper and handed it to me.

  “You can use this in the commissary,” he said. “Get a hot meal. Put some roses back in those cheeks, huh? No hard feelings? Think about what I said, about acting. Nobody wants to direct. Who wants to work that hard?”

  My God, how Hollywood fears burning a bridge, even where one does not yet exist.

  “Try the roast beef,” he shouted to our backs. “It’s fresh every day.”

  So I had failed. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps my best course of action was to lather myself in cheap paint and ratchet my way through a series of discount emotions, just like my mother. The thought sickened me. But at least Mutter could eat. And what were my raging dreams compared to his empty stomach?

  The studio streets were filled with sheiks and cowboys and the weird stagnant heat of the California sun. The sidewalks we walked on were not real. The trees that lined them seemed preoccupied. They held our attention but not our trust. Men in stained coveralls with old-world mustaches pushed pieces of the sky on silent rubber casters. Professional pratfallers with their barroom noses and crippled gaits, ingenues under white powder and parasols. All moved with purpose, quick to ten thousand different schedules, factory workers slipping from the cracks of time, unconscious of their tiny tributes to the impossible and the dead. Here, despite appearances, everything had been birthed within the decade, some things within that very day. And appearances were all that mattered. I knew I might survive here.

  CHAPTER 22

  The commissary was not hard to find. Mutter smelled it before he saw it, loped like a barn-soured colt through the beef- and cabbage- and coffee-smelling doors. It reminded me of one Sunday’s biergarten, when the Trout had been feeling prosperous, but the scale was off. There was simply too much of it. It yammered on, table after table, cup after cup, steaming carcass after steaming carcass like a fugue composed by an idiot. It had a large wooden bar that served beer and even hard liquor for the asking, and its rounded edge was banked two-deep by lipsticked men and women with faces that reminded me of sheets too often laundered. Fleets of waiters in ankle-length aprons served food on thick buffalo china with pale blue company globes crested on the rims. Roman centurions elbowed over the rainbows shimmering off the slabs of their roast beef, Property of Universal costume winking from the seams of their leather baldrics. It was a madhouse subsidized by the inmates. A stale and drunken house party that had severely outlived its weekend.

  We were served coffee without asking. Then, moments later, two plates heaped with steaming food. Mutter didn’t bother with the formality of asking for mine. I sipped from my cup only for comfort, feeling the warmth borrowed then dissipate as the liquid slowly trickled from the corners of my mouth. We were being watched.

  He was average. Average of face, of build. He wore the clothes of any studio workman, a plaid shirt, cuffed to the elbows, a flat cap, laced boots. In his lap was a large white pad, and in his fingers he held a slender tube of charcoal, gingerly, as if it might burn. His strokes were fluid and precise, made without looking, much like my artist had done all those years ago. It was only when his hand stopped moving that he looked to his work. I assumed he worked in some designing capacity—sets, costumes—but he lacked the pronounced effete quality typical of those practitioners. He might have been a grip, simply easing half an hour before returning to the heat of the stage. But his gaze was not casual. It burrowed. Even when he stuffed a cigarette between his lips, his eyes never left us. When he caught my eye, his face was sullen, unapologetic. To sketch us was his right. He removed his cap, then placed it back on his slicked head. I nodded, thinking this was his crude greeting, but his eyes flashed impatience. He removed his hat again, holding it above his head impatiently. Then I understood. He was not drawing me. He was drawing Mutter, and he wanted Mutter to remove his cap. I shook my head slowly, careful not to further spark his intensity. He threw his pad and charcoal to his seat and arrived at our table in a few angry strides.

  “Wasn’t I clear?” he began. His voice was deeply etched from cartons of cigarettes and strong coffee. “The light is perfect and I’m due back in editing in ten minutes.”

  Mutter chewed in animal bliss, unaware of our interchange.

  “My friend is very sensitive about his condition,” I said quietly. “He never removes his cap to strangers.”

  “Isn’t he afraid of appearing rude?”

  “We can barely pay for this food, let alone worry about manners,” I said. “Anyway, how do you know there is even anything of interest under there?” I pointed to Mutter’s cap, which twitched with the motion of his jaws.

  “Instinct,” he said.

  His face hardened under his silence and I noticed two deep cuts, wrinkles perhaps, that shot down the length of both cheeks, humorless creek beds that pulled at the corners of his mouth. It was a face made from heavy blows, a testament to rough weather.

  “The war?” he finally said, his eyes narrowing at the promise under Mutter’s cap. “I must see it.”

  “Never to strangers,” I said with a slight nod of my head.

  “Lon,” he said, thrusting out a rough hand. “Now we’re friends, right?”

  “Lon?” I said looking at Mutter chewing. “Is that short for something? Should I know it?”

  “Leonidas.”

  “I prefer that.”

  “Well, the brass prefers Lon, and I prefer working. Friends?”

  I said nothing. Just mouthed another swallow of tepid tea and offered the cup’s stolen warmth for him to shake.

  “Listen,” he said, flashing a rare but brilliant smile. “I don’t expect him to parade around in here. Let me see if we can use Mary’s dressing room.”

  I didn’t know what this man with a laborer’s face really wanted. I just knew he offered a change of scenery, a dark corner perhaps, away from all this loud flesh, and there was something clean and honed and earnest in his manner. I was beyond harm. Mutter could take care of himself.

  I began with “Liebling,” whispering to Mutter in German, explaining why we needed to follow this gentleman.

  “English,” Mutter said, wiping the grease off his second plate with a heel of bread.

  “This man wants to draw you. Without the cap, Mutter. Do you understand?”

  Mutter understood. He stuck out his tongue and made a farting sound with his warm mouth.

  “Listen, buddy,” Lon began. “You like chocolate?”

  How he knew this to be Mutter’s weakness was pure animal instinct.

  Mutter nodded, and Lon said, “I have bricks of the stuff back at my place.”

  Mutter’s eyes glazed.

  “I just want to draw you. No one will see. You’ll be safe with me. Okay?”

  Mutter stood up without a single look back.

  We stopped in front of what seemed to be a charming cottage made of pale blue clapboard with yellow flower boxes that rose up between two buildings of tan stucco. Posies unfurled in cherry red stasis in the fake loam of the boxes, the petals stiff as cow hooves. They were molded from sheets of c
olored Bakelite, scentless, impervious to weather, a thin layer of grime dulling their natural shine. He knocked on the Dutch door and entered without being prompted.

  The inside was in marked formal contrast to the folksy exterior. It was the size of a bowling alley, complete with an attached powder room, bedroom, and a spacious sitting room whose walls were lined in quilted salmon-pink shantung. Regency sconces glowed mutely under weak filaments and curvaceous cabriole legs and Aubusson needlepoint writhed and sprawled on every surface. There was the smell of freshly washed children from a silver bowl of flowers on the mantel, and in the corner sat an old woman in Quaker black, her gray head tilted to a small jigsaw puzzle on her lap, a smote of coal in a smooth pink throat.

  “You got that near done, Mother Philbin?” Lon asked the old woman, looking down at her half-finished puzzle. She smiled and pushed another fault line in place, nodding slowly in the private rhythm of her consent.

  “This is Mary’s mother,” he said, still smiling at the old woman. “I didn’t get your names.”

  “Maddy Ulm,” I said. “And this is Mutter.”

  “That’s simple enough. This is Maddy and Mutter, Mother.”

  The old woman lifted her head and bowed slightly at the neck. I curtsied back, Mutter blinked, and Lon smiled, pleased at the simple ceremony.

  “What’s wrong with her?” the old woman asked. “What’s wrong with you, child?”

  “Don’t mind us, Mother,” Lon demurred. I didn’t know then Lon’s own taste for the dusk, how surefooted he was among the rust and bone of the charnel house. I was just another shade of familiar gray locked in the grease sticks of his miraculous paint box. “I’m just going to be doing a little sketching and we’ll get out of your hair.”

  There was a faint sound, a dry gasp as another piece of her puzzle slipped into place.

  “I owe you some chocolate, don’t I, buddy?” Lon strode to a pearwood taboret stacked with heart-shaped boxes. “What’s your pleasure? Soft centers? Cherries? Nougat?”