Playland (26 page)

“Who are these grown-up women she keeps talking about?” J. F. French said.

No one spoke for a moment. “Blue means bad girls, Moe,” Lilo Kusack finally said.

The color began to rise in J. F. French’s face. “What bad girls,” he shouted.

“Blue means bad girls in general, J.F.,” Lilo Kusack said. He was an expert in mood changes, and he knew that at that moment familiarity would not be politic. Had he not known him so well he might even have said “Mr. French,” a lawyer’s trick. “She means that maybe, in her next project, she gets a shot at a bad … at a more adult role.”

J. F. French rose from his seat. “We let Shelley Winters play the bad girls. We let America’s favorite teenager play Red River Rosie.” He headed for the door of the screening room. “You,” he said to Blue. “Stage Nine. You already cost this studio half a day’s shooting. If you weren’t America’s favorite teenager, I would deduct it from your salary.”

Blue waited until he opened the door. “Moe, who is Jacob King?”

J. F. French stopped. He turned and stared at Arthur. “You take your fiancée to New York, and that’s who you let her meet?”

Arthur looked thoroughly miserable. “It’s all right, J.F. Nobody took any pictures.”

“He’s a good dancer,” Blue said.

“She wanted to go dancing, I should’ve sent her to New York with George Raft,” J. F. French said to his son, almost shouting.

“So who is he?” Blue asked again.

“One of Morris Lefkowitz’s guys,” Lilo Kusack said after a moment.

“Who is Morris Lefkowitz?”

You have to remember, Chuckie O’Hara said years later, that for all her tough mouth and tough business sense she was a true innocent. She had been brought up in the Industry and so sheltered by it that she knew virtually nothing of the world outside it.

“You don’t want to know,” J. F. French said. And then he said the wrong thing. “And something else you don’t want to know. You definitely don’t want to know Jacob King.”

That the Frenches, first Arthur in New York and then J.F. at the studio, had both told her to stay away from Jacob King only stimulated that anarchic spirit that in her was like an erogenous zone. “I was only thinking a dinner date?”

“Dinner date?” Lilo Kusack said. “A lot of people had their last supper with your dinner date.”

“Last supper, like in that picture about Jesus and them that Mr. DeMille did?” Blue said.

J. F. French’s gaze suddenly took in Frick and Frack and Flack. This was a conversation that had unexpectedly gone into areas not covered by their pay grade. “Out,” he shouted. “What are you doing here anyway? Who asked you? You. You’re fired. You. You’re fired. You—”

“I don’t work here, Mr. French.”

“You’re fired anyway. You don’t come on this lot again. Ever.”

“Arthur,” J. F. French said when the room had cleared. Then he saw Chuckie O’Hara, who supposed he had been included in the dismissal order, but who because of his leg had difficulty scurrying out. “O’Hara. You’re a war hero. War heroes can stay. Arthur,” he repeated.

“Sir.”

“I think after
Red River Rosie
we let your fiancée grow up. I think we start setting the date for you and Blue to get married. We do it on a stage. White confetti. Bluebirds of happiness. Cosmo Newsreel.” He moved over and put his arms around Blue. “I will give the bride away.”

F
or five days Melba Mae Toolate had talked.

Nonstop. She swore. Cried. Laughed. Hit me twice.

Nearly killed herself once. Not deliberately. Although in these arias I had on tape (and on the tapes of her own that she finally retrieved, reluctantly, on that fifth day, several of which she let me listen to) she always seemed to be courting violence and danger so assiduously that I thought she might be something of a death lover, albeit one who thought the actual dying, in the event the outcome of the courtship could not be forestalled, would be done by a stunt woman, with the star available for the close-up. She divided random violent death into two categories, those that would make a good visual and those that would not. She was particularly taken by a wire-service report I read to her from
USA Today
about an elderly woman in Chicago, wearing a mink coat and carrying a Chanel bag containing only a single hundred-dollar bill and no identification, who had placed herself snugly against the right rear wheels of an eighteen-wheeler transcontinental Allied moving van stopped at a traffic light on Michigan Avenue, and when the light turned green, the truck moved forward and the four huge wheels flattened her, the driver in the cab noticing only a slight bump he
attributed, in the press report, to a pothole. A good visual, Melba Mae had said.

She always did want to direct, Chuckie O’Hara said when I told him about the woman in Chicago, he like Blue contemplating the master and the coverage, I on the other hand wondering what made the unidentified woman do what she had done, and whether it was spontaneous or planned.

This is the way Melba nearly killed herself. I was listening to her tapes, straining to hear because of their bad quality (she often re-recorded over an existing tape, and she usually seemed to be drunk when she did), which made her monologues difficult to follow, and she had fallen asleep on the king-sized bed with the Indian blanket. It was cold in the trailer and she had turned the Sears electric heater at the foot of the bed up so high that when the blanket rubbed against its grill it caught fire. I was in the middle section of the trailer and it was a moment before I noticed the smell. I took my jacket and smothered the flame, then pulled the seared and smoking blanket off her and ran it outside onto her tiny patch of brown lawn, where I could finally stamp the embers completely out. When I came back inside, she was awake and lighting a cigarette, as if nothing had happened. You’re going to burn yourself to death, I told her, get so deep fried they’ll only be able to identify you with your dental charts. A crispy critter. She thought “crispy critter” was a cute phrase.
Cute
was her word. I told her it was what a napalm victim was called in Vietnam when I was a reporter there. It turned out she did not know what napalm was, and Vietnam, she said, that was that war we were in, right? In any case, she was never really interested in my back story. Are we talking about me or you? she would say irritably. This was a woman, after all, who I doubt had ever spent eight consecutive seconds not thinking about herself.

Selectively.

Chuckie O’Hara knew enough of her history to fill in some of the blanks. He knew she had fucked Chocolate Walker Franklin. Resulting in the first of the two abortions Lou Lerner, M.D.,
the studio doctor, had performed on her.
The first when I was fourteen, and is that a story
, she had said elliptically, a tease in Hamtramck.
Not now. Maybe not ever. Too many skeletons I don’t want to rattle in too many closets
. Not knowing that Chuckie would give the bones a good shake. Walker was one of the all-time great swordsmen, Chuckie said, he’d fuck a jar of Skippy’s peanut butter if there was nothing else around. Moe French said he’d run Walker Franklin out of the Industry when he finally found out about him and Blue. It was Lilo who told him. Lilo was the keeper of the secrets, he doled them out like communion wafers whenever it served his purposes. I never knew what his particular purpose was in telling Moe about Blue and Walker, but he did, five or six years after it was over, right after Jake was killed and I got my subpoena. Moe was true to his word. Walker never worked in pictures again. And Moe made sure he couldn’t grab a job in nightclubs or on Broadway either, so Walker went to Paris, the only French he knew was “sit on my face,”
asseyez-vous sur mon visage
, I think it was. Jean Gabin taught him that, they were fuck buddies when Gabin was at Fox, but after he got to France he danced at the Follies and the Crazy Horse and he had a good run as a fancy man until he was killed in a car crash on his way to Deauville to meet some vicomtesse he was boning—a colorful Afro-American phrase, they always have the best words for it, don’t they, and a natural sense of rhythm—Brigitte de Freycinet, remember her, Jack, wasn’t she one of your father’s girls, too? The Maserati he totaled belonged to a Monegasque princess he was also boning, Léonie Grimaldi, a minor scandal at the time.

So said Chuckie O’Hara.

A couple of things Chuckie didn’t know. One way Melba supported herself was via phone sex. She had a listing with a service she had found in the Personals of a local fuck sheet and guys would call her up and she would talk them off. His cock, her cunt, how wet she was getting, bingo. A couple of her regulars checked in when I was there. She wasn’t embarrassed by it. Her telephone name was Mona. Just a minute, hon, let
me take off my panties, she would say, and cover the phone and ask me to fix her a cup of instant coffee with Preem, and then back on the phone, You want to smell Mona’s finger, I just put it up there, lick it. This was a woman after all who as a child had been sent fan mail caked with come; for her, dirty talk on the telephone was just a natural way for the older woman to make ends meet. How did you get the job, I had asked. I sent them a tape. A demo. It was the voice. I don’t think they’d’ve hired me if they’d known how old I was.

She also had a tattoo. A pair of eyes just above her pubic line, looking down at her bush. The tattooed eyes had mascara and eye shadow, and the eyebrows were thick, modeled on hers. She wasn’t sure when she got the tattoo. Or where. It was when she was out of it, she knew that. When she fell off the planet earth. Baby, I just fell off the planet earth, she said for the fourth or fifth or ninth time. It took me a while to realize that she wanted some variant of “Baby, I just fell off the planet earth” as the title of the autobiography she thought I was going to ghost for her. She really liked that tattoo. It’s like the eyes are checking out how good you’re doing, she had said. The tattooed eyes were disconcerting, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

On the sixth day she was gone.

The door to the recreational vehicle in Slot 123, Forsythia Lane, was unlocked, and the inside stripped of the more valuable appliances, the thirty-inch television set and the VCRs and the microwave oven and the Cuisinart, even the pack of ribbed Trojan-Enz condoms. The Sub-Zero freezer was open and had defrosted, leaving pools of water on the floor, and the frozen food thawing. The manager of the Autumn Breeze trailer park and recreational vehicle encampment, Mr. August Johnson, said that Mrs. Toolate had rented her mobile home furnished, was paid up until the end of the month, and had left no forwarding address. She had asked August Johnson if anyone had tried to gain entrance to her RV, her things had seemed disturbed, and August Johnson had told her that a detective from the Detroit police department had been asking questions about her, it was a
police matter. She had become abusive, August Johnson said. Did he have a warrant, she wanted to know, he had to have a warrant, she knew that from watching
Hill Street Blues
, and August Johnson had told her not to call him the dirty words she was calling him, and that the Autumn Breeze would have to ask her to vacate her vehicle at the end of the month, the management did not wish any trouble with the Detroit police department, this was a camp of law-abiding citizens.

The randy old fart with the prostate cancer in Slot 122 said a minivan cab had come to pick her up in the middle of the night, and she had loaded all her things in it, the GD&WC Cab Company was its name, for Greater Detroit & Wayne County, and he had tried to help her, and she had called him a randy old fart, and he did not think that was neighborly, he had the prostate cancer after all. The old prune with the Alzheimer’s in Slot 124 said a Negro had been living in Slot 123, a Mr. Roosevelt by name, there had never been a Mrs. Toolate there, and if Mr. Roosevelt was gone, then Autumn Breeze would be a safer place that night, she had never gone out because she was afraid of Negroes, you read the paper, you know why. Father Vaclav Paciorek, the pastor at St. Anton the Magyar Roman Catholic Church, said Mrs. Toolate had left her dog in the church, she knew I liked dogs and she must’ve known I’d take care of it. Father Paciorek said he had never been entirely convinced that Mrs. Toolate was even a Catholic, but so few people came to church these days, he was not going to pry too closely, most came because they just enjoyed the companionship, and that was why he had named her chairperson of the Shut-in Committee, it would give her someone to talk to. She had once been an actress, he had been told, although he had never heard of Melba Mae Toolate, and he liked to see all the Broadway musicals when they traveled through Detroit on tour.