Only the Dead Know Burbank

by Bradford Tatum

  So in the twilight of a daydream, in what would seem no more than a few moments of blissful despondence, I passed out of consciousness.

  I awoke, if one could call it waking, to the sound of a knock on my front door. It was a sound I remembered hearing, many times, a shout through closed lips. But something in this knock was different. More plaintive? More seductive? I can’t say. My time away was over.

  I was covered by an inch of dust, as if I had sprouted downy feathers, and the hollows of my mouth and ears writhed with the wet-white bodies of baby termites and ants. I shook them loose like change from a deep pocket and tried to stand. My joints snapped, bones dumb to their function, and I fell once. Then a second time. How long had I been in my trance? Finally I pulled myself by the elbows to the front door. I pressed myself to my feet, unsteady, feeling strangely hollow. My neck and spine sang like splintering wood as I opened the front door.

  “Telegram.” A young man in a Western Union suit lifted his eyes to my face in tandem with his pen. His eyes caught, as if snagged from behind their sockets and I heard a faint intake of breath. I must have looked a fright. “Sign here,” he finally managed to say, his wide eyes never leaving my face. I scribbled my name, took the thin yellow envelope offered me. His hand shot reflexively to the brim of his hat, but his action was aborted there. It was still stalled at the brim of his hat when he mounted his motorcycle and puttered away.

  I tore the telegram open. It was from Billy:

  Dearest girl, stop. Where have you been? stop. Phone on the fritz? stop. Call me at once. stop. Billy.

  There was only the dense compression of my breath on the mesh of the receiver when I lifted it to check. My kitchen taps groaned but no water flowed. My light switches were impotent. I found my car keys, lifting them from a cocoon of dust, leaving a clean shadow of their shape on the floor. Outside my front lawn looked like a forgotten graveyard, weeds as high as me. My truck turned over only after several tries, the cabin cold, reeking of stale gas. As I drove to the small market at the foot of my block I noticed the changes. Ivy I remembered as tawdry sprigs now covered my entire garage door. And when did that sycamore grow so shady? There were cracks in the pristine sidewalk. A new Ford in the driveway of a home that I remembered being for sale.

  I dropped the coins in the pay phone. Billy answered at once

  “Billy?”

  “Maddy, dear girl. There you are. Where have you been? On holiday?”

  “Hadn’t we just spoken?” Through the glass of the phone booth I saw a woman in shabby calico leave the market with a box of milk and a newspaper. I couldn’t see the date but recognized Roosevelt’s dark circles on the front page.

  “Just spoken? Dear heart. It’s been three years.”

  I tried to get my bearings, to find my sea legs. Time was like a listing ship.

  “Three years? Of course.”

  “I thought perhaps you went back to Germany to see your family what with all the dreadful changes going on over there.”

  “No.”

  “Have I caught you at a bad time?”

  “No. Billy? Is that really you?”

  “Yes, darling. Maddy, listen, I really would love to see you, catch up and all that. I have loads to tell you and I’m afraid I’m going to solicit your help.”

  “My help? In what?”

  “I think it would be easier if we met. Tea?”

  His address was in Laurel Canyon on a parcel of land that overlooked Sunset. It was surrounded by gardens. Hollyhocks and foxgloves. Heraldic rosebushes that came from clippings descended from the time of Henry IV. It was a Tudor home of blond and russet brick with doors and shutters carved with patterns of folded linen. He had obviously prospered in the time we had spent apart. A butler greeted me in hunter-green livery and said Mr. Karloff was in the back garden and was expecting me to join him out there. I followed the servant through wide but tasteful rooms until two French doors opened on a shirtless man in shorts and a top hat.

  “Maddy! Dear child,” Billy said, taking a dressing gown from his butler and slipping it on. “Look at you. I was expecting a young lady. You haven’t aged a day.”

  Before I could answer, I was ambushed by a piebald sow that immediately began to nibble my cold fingers.

  “Violet!” Billy snapped. “Stop that at once!”

  Pigs are carrion eaters and her bites were not affectionate.

  “Stop it this instant, you dreadful creature!” Billy shouted, and he pulled at the pig’s hindquarters while I dipped my free hand into her mouth to extract the middle digit she had managed to detach. In a movement that I hoped looked like slipping on a ring, I reattached the finger.

  “I hope she didn’t hurt you, dear. I’ve never seen her act like that before. Jeffery, see Violet back to her room and no dried corn this supper. She’s been beastly. Tea?”

  And we sat in front of a silver service on chintz-covered wrought iron overlooking a garden right out of a summer in Surrey.

  “Shall I pour out?” Billy asked rhetorically.

  “Nice to see you’ve done so well,” I said.

  “Yes. Our little friend, the creature, has been quite good to me. I owe him everything.”

  This was just like Billy, to share the credit of his success with a two-dimensional fictional construct that only captured the public’s love due to his humanizing effort.

  “I’m surprised Whale let you take any credit at all.”

  “Jimmy’s mellowed quite a bit. Success has had the opposite effect on him. Instead of making him insufferable, it’s made him rather paranoid, I’m afraid. He’s constantly trying to outdo himself. Of course nothing has matched Frankenstein. That’s why we’re making a sequel.”

  “A sequel? But you died in the mill fire.”

  “Apparently not. Box office has amazing regenerative powers and it seems I slipped into a subterranean well and lived. Horribly scarred, of course, but alive nonetheless. And I speak. I suppose the shock of a near death, or rather re-death experience, scared the verbiage into me.”

  “You can’t speak. The whole soul of the creature is his animal-like vulnerability.”

  “My argument, precisely. But Jimmy was very persuasive.”

  “I can’t believe he has changed that much.”

  “Then perhaps it’s me who has mellowed. Biscuit?”

  “You’re going to do it? You’re going to play the creature again?”

  “That hideous galoot has been rather good to me.”

  “What do you want me for, then?”

  Perhaps I was too blunt. Billy was delicate, and I saw his eyebrows raise and then narrow in a kind of benevolent indulgence.

  “You were good luck for me that first time.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Simply that I’d like to have you on set.”

  “As what? A kind of mascot?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that coarsely. A friend. A muse.”

  “A muse. So no real function.”

  “Being a muse has a tremendous function.”

  I had forgotten the tedium that led to my slipping away for three years. I should have been leaping at the chance to just breathe the sound stage air again.

  “I mean, I’d have no other purpose than to be there for you,” I said, trying to gain my composure.

  “Yes. I’m afraid you’re right in that. Think about it. Mull it over. We don’t shoot until next month.”

  “I don’t need to think about it. Of course I’ll do it. I’d do whatever you ask of me, Billy.”

  “I’m so pleased.”

  “What about Whale? Won’t he object?”

  “I think he’ll be amenable.”

  Then it was clear. Billy had already spoken to Whale about me. He was fulfilling his promise to me in the only way he could. Whale had agreed to my presence but only under one condition, that I be there in a purely observational capacity. But I didn’t care. I’d be back in the warmth of the arc-light-heated air, back on the killing fl
oor. All of this went unspoken, just like the questions he had about me, about my not aging, not changing, went unspoken. What did he think? That I had some glandular condition? A midget with an excellent skin care regime? I left him his illusions, and he left me mine.

  CHAPTER 41

  The feeling on the set of The Bride of Frankenstein could not have been more different than its predecessor. No longer were we the upstart innovators grinding by on a shoestring. (And I tax we with the word’s broadest inclusionary meaning imaginable.) Now we were the precedent, the pinnacle. What no one knew was that we were coming to the end. Never again in the Universal horror cycle would a film match our humor, our horror, our quality, our humanity, or our originality. We were the last of an often-to-be-imitated breed. For me to leave no real thumbprint on such an undertaking was disheartening in the extreme but still exciting. It smelled like history. It felt like history. The press had a constant presence on the set. Pierce was always ready with an eyebrow pencil to pose for the cameras, and Billy posed with teacups and pinkies for more publications than Roosevelt.

  Whale had free reign and he hired his friends, people who could keep up with him in conversation, who shared his tastes and prejudices. I suppose when he hired me on the first picture he had hoped I’d be one of these. The only exception was Billy, whom he still treated like a truck driver. But Billy didn’t seem to mind. He said once, “If ever I require authentic warmth, that’s what real family is for.” I kept to the sound stage as much as I could, even “slept” there when sweeping up was done for the night. I was afraid of seeing old faces. Too many questions if they saw me. I couldn’t count on everyone being as proper as Billy. But Mutter was on my mind quite a bit. I wondered how he was getting on, how much his boy had grown, if he was happy.

  And so one evening I scurried up a piece of laboratory apparatus and crept out of the transom to the street. The studio was not doing well. The streets were shabby, the backlot in dire need of paint. It was as if a hard destructive wind had blown through the lot. The castle keeps showed their ribs of two-by-fours. The casino at Monte Carlo had been scavenged for parts. Notre Dame looked like an abandoned car wash. The old European street seemed to be the only set still living. It was lit that night, flagged arcs throwing slanted shadows on the forced age of the buildings. An eerie shorthand of illumination I had helped write. Foggers sighed their sinuous breath to the knees of vague dress extras in funereal black. You want to know what real horror is? It was being tethered to the shadows that night, lashed to the decayed peripheries along with the withered sagebrush and cigarette butts. It took everything I had to not barrel down there like a half-pint banshee and scream, “Curb that spill on cobbles there! Let that smoke settle! You got that backlight as hot as it will go? Now let’s really push their faces in the shit, this time. Let’s make them feel it!” I shouldn’t have wandered. I receded back into the shadows. Perhaps seeing Mutter again would buffer my spirits.

  The Indian camp was gone.

  I retraced my steps in my mind, checked my trajectory, but I had made no error. The teepees, the fire pits, the lean-to shacks, all were gone. Only the car bodies, rusted old jalopies, tireless, windowless, fit sadly as dens for the coyotes, were left.

  This wasn’t natural history. One could not kneel and sift through the silt and find an arrowhead, a beer top, a child’s tin whistle. There was nothing, no trace of Mutter and his friends ever having existed there at all. It was an hour before dawn, in the lonely cool that had once held so much promise for me, had once shadowed me through nights when I roamed the lot as if I owned the place. Now I needed to talk to someone. I needed to know what had happened, and I willed the sun to hurry.

  The sheen off the women who peopled Junior’s waiting room had tarnished since my first years at the studio. These were hard creatures with no illusions about quick stardom and industry charity. They knew they were going to start on their knees and seemed ready for the work. Buttons had been bitten from blouses. Few wore stockings. Eyebrows were painted on as thin as cheap noodles. They were all eyes, lips, and tits, pure bundles of joyless accommodation and the hate between them was palpable. They barely seemed to notice me. They must have thought I was a secretary’s daughter, a script girl’s niece, a nothing. Only when my name was called and they realized I sought the same audience as they, did they suck their teeth and mumble.

  Junior looked awful, bloated, hair thinning, ravaged by creditors and unsavory appetites.

  “You the same Maddy Ulm who used to work here?” he asked, not looking up at me.

  “The same.”

  “You ain’t her sister?”

  “I have no siblings.”

  He looked up at me and his eyes seemed to glaze.

  “What’s wrong with you? You look exactly the same.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I don’t mean it like a compliment. It’s not right. Gives me the jimmies.”

  “I want to know what happened to Mutter.”

  “Who?”

  “My brother.”

  “I thought you just said you didn’t have any siblings.”

  “You know who I mean, Mr. Laemmle. What happened to him, please?”

  “You expect me to know what happens to every mug who can take a flop off a horse?”

  “You promised me he’d have employment here for life. Or are your promises as thin as your hair these days?” He reached for a cigar. His box was empty. “Then why did you agree to see me?” I asked.

  “Professional courtesy.”

  “But that courtesy doesn’t extend to actually answering my question?”

  “I got a studio to run. Leave your address. I’ll see if we can’t get you back on the lot.”

  “I’m already on your precious lot, Mr. Laemmle,” I said, rising, not waiting for an answer. “How long do you think you will be?” In the waiting room I was stopped by a female voice.

  “Wait, please,” she said.

  I recognized her from my first day in Junior’s waiting room. She hadn’t aged well, had chosen the shabby jowls of three squares a day instead of a place where a smile could softly land. She led me outside.

  “Look, it’s been tough around here lately. Layoffs like you can’t believe. Junior doesn’t act it but he’s scared. The studio’s one bad picture away from receivership and all he knows is the family business.”

  “You’re breaking my heart.”

  “Same old yarn, I know. But he didn’t want to do it. But he had to. It killed him, really broke his heart.”

  “What broke the bastard’s heart?”

  “Closing that camp with all those Indians. He had to break up families, people his father had hired when they were just kids.”

  “Do you know what happened to them?”

  “Some went back to the reservation, I guess. Or got as far as a bottle and a flop on Franklin Avenue.”

  “Mutter?”

  “He feels bad. That’s why he doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  “Do you know where Mutter is?”

  “He had nothing to offer, not really. But he did promise.”

  “Where is he, please?”

  “He’s here. On the lot. Lives in a shack behind Stage Twenty-eight that used to be a recording booth. Night janitor. Works for two meals a day and a cot. Not a bad deal if you think about it.”

  “Thank you.”

  My plan was to leave the lot and never come back. Simply get in my truck and drive to the top of Mulholland and find a nice dung heap and call it home. My studio days were over. I was little more than an actor’s lapdog. A ghost too stupid or stubborn to shut up and actually haunt. But with this final humiliation, I needed to face a hard reality. Junior had promised employment for life. He never stipulated what kind of life. But my feet wouldn’t pass the gates. Before I knew it, I was creeping around the Phantom stage to that dilapidated shack behind it.

  The door was little more than a few nailed boards fastened with a hook and eye. Being locked from the out
side, I felt it safe to assume Mutter was not at home. I lifted the latch and stepped inside. The walls were papered with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit chocolate bar wrappers, his three fingers and vacant grin in frightful duplicate from ceiling to floor. Mutter had a small cot, made with a patched Beacon blanket in an Indian pattern. A single photo tacked to the wall: Mutter and his wife, a tree with its arms around its resident squirrel, and a bright-faced boy with dark hair and his father’s eyes. Under the bed, a tin plate and a fork were stacked near a chipped commissary mug. And over the bed was a huge stolen one sheet, a lithograph of Billy in full monster makeup, menacing and underlit, the words Warning! The Monster Is Loose! blazoned beneath. And that’s when the idea came to me. Maybe it was seeing that European street all lit up for business that fueled me, the hot shame of the shadows, like my seat in the opera house, a taste, a tease, my mocking, useless vantage point. I had an eternity to reconcile with my ambition, but Mutter wasn’t so cursed. He deserved more than a flop and a cold lunch exile, sealed up like a dirty studio secret in some shabby closet. And I would make sure he got it.

  I waited for hours, more than hours. Half a day perhaps until I finally heard the rasp of the hinges as the door creaked open. Mutter filled the doorway, but I could tell, even from his silhouette, that he was thinner, bleaker, less. It was getting dark and he carried a lamp with him, which he lit and placed on the floor near the bed. Then he saw me.

  “Maddy? Home?” he said.

  His voice cracked. But that could have been a trick of the duration of his day.

  “Hello, dear heart,” I said in German.

  “English?”

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  CHAPTER 42

  My plan was simple. The clothes would not be hard to come by, an old castoff suit, a pair of heavy boots. Mutter’s height and bulk, even in his diminished state, would not require him to go to the studio’s extremes. Unknown to the staff on the lot, the studio was already in receivership by then, just months away from a total takeover from the Standard Capital Corporation. The theater chains had been sold. A bum Western had cost Junior his credibility with his usual investors. His grandstanding during our last meeting had been his last indignant salute to a passing parade.