Playland (16 page)

She paused for breath.

Listen, I saw you look in my medicine cabinet, you wonder what I’m doing with a box of rubbers, you nosy bastard. Jesus, sex. Arthur told me once, this was before I left L.A. and went to Italy, that was Arthur’s idea, by the way, and I was fucking a lot of people, even for me, and that’s saying something. It was the bad time, I was tapped out, and I was getting worried, and he said to me, Arthur, they’re only going with you because they want to say they slept with Blue Tyler, if I stayed around any longer I’d end up as a call girl. He had a kind of pig sense, Arthur. You know, I never could get him to say the word fuck, even when we were doing it.

I suppose you really need that tape recorder. It’s funny. There’s so many things around now that weren’t around when I was at Cosmo, and I always had the best when I was at Cosmo, the newest, the latest, every kind of gizmo, but nothing like they have nowadays. Answering machines. Computers. TV sets. Fax machines. VCRs. Tape recorders. I had one once, a tape recorder. What I wanted to do was tape my memoirs. Then I was going to edit them. And get a big fucking best-seller. And go on the TV. With that blonde on
Prime Time
. The one that looks like Mae West. She’s my favorite. Diane Something. Sawyer. I liked Mae. She was funny. Took a high colonic every day. That’s French for enema. Her big beauty secret. You think Diane takes a high colonic? You think she even remembers me? No one’s heard of me anymore. There’s this impressionist, Rich Little, he used to do me in his act, I heard it one night on Carson, he wasn’t bad. And then I thought what kind of fucking secondhand life in show business is that, doing impressions
of people better than you are, and I said fuck that. Do I have the tapes? Yes, they’re around someplace, I think. I think I hocked the tape recorder for vodka money. You know the funny thing? I suppose my voice would’ve got this way even if I had my uvula, because of all the booze.

What happened? Baby, I just fell off the planet earth. I said that, didn’t I? I tend to repeat myself. When I was five, I really couldn’t read my scripts, so Mr. French had someone read them to me, and I would memorize them that way, repeating them over and over, I always knew the good lines, and “Baby, I fell off the planet earth” is one of them, you ever know Sammy Cahn, is he still around? Give that to Sammy or the Bergmans, they could run with that title, a perfect season, a perfect reason for making whoopee. Drink is what happened. Booze, skag, scumbag men. Flophouses, a nickel a night. Just someplace to collapse. Anyplace. Even jail. Finally a gas station crapper with a spike behind my knee, the only place I could find a vein, I was dead, not dying, D-E-A-D, they put the sheet over my face, I was going to buy the fucking farm in Ypsilanti, Michigan. And then this intern. A young squirt. One of those eastern niggers. Indian. Paki, maybe. One of them, anyway. Keep ’em alive till eight-oh-five. The motto of the emergency room. Squirt didn’t want me to check out on his watch, all that extra paperwork he’d have to do, and his not speaking English all that good. That’s why he gave me that last jolt with the resuscitator. What I’d like to have, what I would really like to have, is that sheet, the one they pulled over my face when they thought I was dead. That’d be a memento, sell it at Sotheby’s, when they auction off my personal effects after I die. Like Judy’s shoes. Me Dorothy, you Toto. You think some fag would like that sheet?

A sudden squall.

Fuck you. I know why you’re looking at me that way. I’ll cry tomorrow, Lillian Roth. Whatever happened to Baby Jane? You know what I think? You think I’m your meal ticket. You bought
yourself a little piece of Hollywood history. You’re not the first asshole who found me, thought he could cash in on me. Don’t you ever forget that, and fuck you again.

I did not take offense. It was the way her brain worked, rerouting itself past burned-out connections. There was still a lot of power in that system. She knew what would hurt. But she had been born with that. A tropistic instinct. The only way to survive.

Handle with care.

Do not rise to the bait.

Wait her out.

She took a cigarette from the pack of unfiltered Pall Malls on the Formica table, the pack opened the way women open cigarettes, with the foil and the tax stamp ripped away and all the cigarettes exposed. She tapped the cigarette on her thumbnail, firming up the loose strands of tobacco, and then held it between her fingers and waited for him to light it. He found a wooden safety match on the hot plate in the kitchenette and when he returned to the Formica table he flicked it lit with his thumbnail, a piece of business he had learned on the set of a period cop movie he had once written for Burt Lancaster. The way he lit the match seemed to strike a responsive chord, a softening of the harsh lines around her mouth and the hawser veins in her neck. It was the sort of flourish specific to the pictures she had starred in. She drew deeply on the Pall Mall, but did not inhale. After a moment she let the smoke billow out, then inhaled it back in again, through her nose, finally exhaling through her mouth. A small smile, a lightening of her mood, as if she had done a close-up in one take. With a thumb and a finger she removed a bit of tobacco from her tongue. The whole procedure dated her, he thought. Smokers don’t tap filter cigarettes against their fingernails anymore, and rarely French inhale, a good visual but from another time.

Perfect, Chuckie O’Hara said when I told him of this first meeting, you have a good eye for a writer. A remark intended as a compliment, and I had been around the business too long to take offense. Like all directors, good and bad, Chuckie fed on the details, in the details, he would say, is the character. His hands framed a shot, moving in close, perhaps in his mind focusing on the bit of tobacco she had lifted from her tongue, or the smoke curling from the face in profile, then with a reverse from the other side.

What did you call her? Blue?

No. If I had to call her by name, I’d call her Mrs. Toolate. Most of the time, though, I didn’t call her anything.

But what, Chuckie O’Hara wanted to know, did she look like?

She was sixty-three, and she looked every minute of it. It had been forty years since she had left Hollywood, and more than thirty since she abandoned public life and the cosmetic ministrations available to even the most minor of celebrities, the nip, the tuck, the dyes, the clamps. Her face was never really beautiful, just arresting, discomforting in its pre- and post-pubescent availability, and now it was not so much worn by her travails as lived-in, less a face than an open book, dog-eared and much sampled, an encyclopedia of living. She had a racking cough that periodically contorted and reddened her face, her breath coming in short spurts until the attack eased. Her movements were extremely precise, not a motion wasted. Her eyebrows had always been incongruously thick; in her days of fortune, she was too young to have her eyebrows plucked and penciled in the style of the time, and incongruously lush they still were, drawing you, however much against your will, into her gaze. Her hair was dark, shot here and there with gray, and short as it had always been, but long enough to be drawn together with a rubber band into a tiny ponytail, and over her left brow a shock of pure white, like a skunk’s back, through which she would constantly thrust the hand not holding the omnipresent Pall Mall.
Only her hands betrayed her years and then some, knotted with veins and mottled by liver spots. Her nose, disturbingly sensual when she was young, was now more generous, and still sensual. Tall and tomboyish as a child, she had sprouted accordingly, and as a young woman she grew only to medium height, neither mannish nor voluptuous. Though the weather had gone chill, she still wore a shapeless summer sundress, and appeared to carry neither undue weight or bloat or distention or the more disfiguring components of age and gender. Sticking from the pocket of the sundress, as if she had forgotten to remove them when the gardening season ended, were a pair of pruning scissors and a dirt-encrusted trowel; over her shoulders she wore a gray cardigan buttoned only at the neck. No stockings, and on her feet an oversized pair of fleecy mules.