Playland (36 page)

As it were.

I
coached her on the Pledge of Allegiance, Chuckie O’Hara said. Gave her line readings, told her where to breathe and where to pause. I used to do it with her on every picture. You shouldn’t forget, she couldn’t read when she became a star, she was only four, remember, and her scripts had to be read to her, that’s how she learned them, and she never really stopped doing it, she’d come to me for line readings even for the pictures I didn’t direct. And so I said to her, I pledge allegiance—pause—to the flag—pause, breathe—of the United States of America—pause, breathe—and to the republic for which it stands—pause. Chuckie, she said, why not a pause after “to the republic,” and I said, Because the clause shouldn’t be broken up, and she said, What’s a clause? Apparently they never got around to clauses in the English grammar course at the studio school. If they even taught grammar. The Little Red Schoolhouse. It was on Stage 11. I think the only geography she ever learned there was the map of movie star homes. The funny thing was, when she was called to testify before the Committee, she was asked if it was called the Little Red Schoolhouse because it was teaching Communist propaganda. It’s true. You can look it up. Needless to say, Moe French closed it down right after
that. Red is for apples, not Communists, he liked to say. None of us had any idea what he meant, but we would all sit around in the executive dining room at the commissary, everyone agreeing right and left, That’s right, J.F., red is for apples, not Bolsheviks. Then all of a sudden Blue said, Why aren’t you going to the dinner, Chuckie? You’re not one of those Communists Moe is always talking about, are you? My dear, the chill that ran up my spine. I wondered what she had heard, and I even considered going to the dinner. I had bought a table anyway to keep on the good side of Moe, but told him I couldn’t go because I was shooting. Moe didn’t seem to care if I went or not, he thought I was solid, I’d shot this short for him against Upton Sinclair in the 1934 election for governor, all the studios shot them and then showed them in their theater chains and pretended they were newsreels. It was the first time I ever used a hand-held camera, so it would have a grainy, man-in-the-street look. Mine had Walker Franklin’s cousin Esmeralda something, Nixson, she was a part-time actress and full-time maid, telling the camera she was voting for Sinclair because he would show California how well Russia really worked, and that he was going to build low-income housing for the colored in Beverly Hills. I have to admit it’s not a picture I include in my filmography. My God, I voted for Landon in 1936, and I have never told anyone this, you must never repeat it to a soul, for Hoover in 1932. I could not stand that cripple, waving that cigarette holder of his. Think of Jack Barrymore sober, with braces on his legs, and you’ve got him. A ham actor is all he ever was. So why did I join the Party then? Love’s mission. I was enamored of someone, so I joined as proof of my undying ardor. I loved it. All those fervent young revolutionaries, ready to try anything, even me.

I have a copy of Blue Tyler’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. She was never asked if Cosmopolitan Pictures’ Little Red Schoolhouse was so named because it taught Communist propaganda.

It was Mr. French who wanted me to be at that dinner, Melba Mae Toolate said. I had an early call the next morning, and he said he would get Chuckie to rearrange my schedule, it was important that the biggest stars in the Industry be there, and I was Cosmo’s biggest star, I would introduce the main speaker, some congressman who was investigating Reds in the Industry, and afterwards I’d say this pledge. The real reason I didn’t want to go was because that rabbi guy, Barry Tyger, was always trying to feel me up, he’d put his arm around my waist and then let his thumb knock up against my boob, copping a cheap feel is what he was doing. At least the Catholic guy, the what do you call what he was …

The cardinal.

That’s right, I knew it had a bird name, at least the cardinal kept his hands to himself, but he must’ve been at least a hundred years old, I don’t think pussy was on his mind. Anyway he was wearing this swell outfit, kind of an orangey-red with buttons all the way down the front, neck to ankle, and a yarmulke, did you know Catholics wore yarmulkes? I thought it was just a Jew thing.

It’s called a biretta.

It looked like a red yarmulke, you ask me. I think if Mr. French knew that Jacob was going to show up that night, he would’ve said go home, you got an early call, we don’t want to get behind schedule on
Red River Rosie
. Mr. French was always telling me not to let Arthur get fresh if I had an early call, he meant I shouldn’t let Arthur fuck me.

How did Jacob know enough to show up?

Well, there were these big billboards on Sunset and all over, with my picture about fifty feet high, and the lettering saying “I Am an American Day” in red, white, and blue type, Jacob couldn’t have missed seeing it if he tried. I guess he just wanted to see me again, I don’t know, I really hadn’t thought of him much, except I kept hearing Rita was fucking him, and Chuckie said he heard he had a dick that belonged in a circus, it was the eighth wonder of the world. It was all right, I suppose …

Arthur French had a copy of the invitation squirreled away in the scrapbooks of his Hollywood years that he never liked to admit he still kept and, I suspect, browsed over in the small hours when sleep was difficult and bad memories and minor treasons laid siege and assaulted:

Arthur also had the clips, and the accompanying Cosmopolitan publicity photographs of his father embracing Theodore Wilder and introducing him to Irving Berlin and Sam Wood and Victor Fleming and Blue Tyler, and photos of Blue with the congressman’s wife, LuAnne Wilder, and with Shelley Flynn and Clark Gable and Walt Disney and Adolphe Menjou and Ginger Rogers and Barry Tyger, and with the cardinal, in his full ecclesiastical robes. It was Barry Tyger who in fact had suggested it might be better if the cardinal delivered the invocation rather than he because one of the congressman’s aides had inquired if there would a large Hebrew element attending the dinner.

There were no photographs in Arthur’s scrapbooks of Jacob King at the “I Am an American Dinner,” but he did have a copy of Congressman Wilder’s address:

A headline in the next day’s
Los Angeles Mirror:
J. F. FRENCH TO FILM INDUSTRY AT EXTRAVAGANZA
: “
BACK ANTI-COMMIE CRUSADE
.”

Another headline, in the same day’s
Herald:
BLUE TO LOUELLA
: “
I’VE BEEN AN ANTI-COMMUNIST SINCE I WAS FOUR
.”

“My first exclusive,” Louella Parsons wrote. “Blue Tyler, who has thrilled movie audiences since she was four years old and has grown into a beautiful young woman, told me at the ‘I Am an American’ dinner last night that she has been an anti-Communist since her very first picture, the delightful
Sunny Face
. ‘In Russia, Louella,’ Blue told me, ‘they tell you what to do, but in America anyone can become a star like I have.’ Wise words, Blue. Blue also said that she wanted to talk to high school students about the importance of home life and good citizenship. And to think this True Blue American is still two years short of casting her first ballot, for an anti-Communist, this pillar is sure.”

Arthur remembered the Bob Crosby orchestra playing a syncopated dinner-music version of “America the Beautiful.” He and Blue were at the head table with his father and Chloe Quarles, from whom J. F. French was more or less separated, but who he thought a more appropriate dinner companion than his current attachment, a French Filly younger than Blue Tyler. Chloe was
living in Montecito in sapphic bliss with a former Filly, a situation J.F. had not anticipated when he invented the Fillies, and the stable became in effect his own private brothel, but she was always available to be with J.F. on public occasions. The Wilders were also at the table, as well as Lilo Kusack and Rita Lewis, her breasts generously displayed in a Mainbocher dress, and Benny Draper (at Lilo’s invitation, his reasoning being that it could not hurt to have Benny and Moe breaking bread at the same table), Benny the only man in the ballroom not wearing a tuxedo, apparently his idea (this from Arthur in his droll mode) of solidarity with the workers. Blue was seated on Congressman’s Wilder’s right, pretending to be interested in what he had to say. What he had to say, according to Arthur, seemed to be about the Jews.