Playland (40 page)

“Are you lucky?” Blue said later. She could see the full moon shining through the open French doors in the bedroom.

“So far. Why?”

“Arthur said if you didn’t watch out, you were going to get killed.”

Jacob did not reply.

“That’s why you should stay with me,” Blue said. “Because I’m lucky.”

“How lucky?”

“Very lucky. During the war, I was fourteen, I was on this war-bond tour with Carole Lombard. She was great, Carole. We talked all the time. Usually about men. I mean, she treated me like a grown-up. I told her some things I never told anyone, and she told me she really loved Clark, but that Ted Fio Rito, you know the bandleader …”

Jacob nodded.

“… she said he was the best she ever had.” She rolled over and brushed her lips over Jacob’s cock. “Like you with me.” It was a line she would have insisted on saying if the Hays Office allowed fuck scenes. He lifted her up into the crook of his arm. “Anyway. The tour was a big success, we sold over two million dollars in bonds, I said I would kiss any man who’d buy ten thousand dollars’ worth of bonds, and Carole said she’d kiss anyone who’d buy fifty thousand dollars’ worth, and if you bought a million dollars’ worth, well, you just think about what she’d do for that. It always got such a laugh. I said, Carole, what if someone buys a million, and she said, someone’s going to get the fuck of his life. But finally we just wanted to get back home, we’d been away so long, the whole trip we’d been on a train, and so we decided to fly instead. TWA. A DC-3. It made a stop in Las Vegas. A gas stop. I got off, I didn’t think it was going to leave so quickly, and it took off without me. And crashed into a mountain. Everyone on board was killed. Including Carole.”

Jacob King took a deep breath. “That’s lucky.” He ran a finger down her stomach. “I guess I’ll stick close to you. Try and buy a piece of your luck.”

She rolled over and looked at him, as if debating whether to say something more. “Actually …”

“Actually what?” Jacob said.

She rose from the bed without answering and went to the doors leading to the balcony. Tears were welling in her eyes and she did not want him to see them. She did not like to think
about the crash, because the crash made her think about why she had missed the plane, the reason she had never told anyone, not even Arthur, and with Arthur she shared her worst secrets, even those that hurt him most. It was a reason that saved her life, but there were moments, rare, it should be said, when she wondered if she might have been better off had she been on the plane when it smashed into Potosi Mountain, and rescue crews were dispatched to bring down the bodies, and then she wondered if she would have had a bigger funeral than Carole. She knew everyone would have cried. Even Moe. She tried not to cry now and, as always when she did not want to yield to emotion, searched for an appropriate line of dialogue from a favorite movie. That was the thing about movies. There was never a situation that had not been anticipated in some picture. High in the night sky she could see the stars.

“Oh, Jerry,” she said, turning to face Jacob. “Don’t let’s ask for the moon, we have the stars.”

He looked at her quizzically, then got up from the bed and joined her at the window. He had an erection. She had never known any man, not even Walker Franklin, who got so many erections. “My name isn’t Jerry,” he said, and she thought perhaps he might be a little angry.

“It’s a line from a movie.
Now Voyager
.” A pause. “Jacob.” The “Jacob” was offered with a slight emphasis, so that he would not miss the point.

“I never saw it.”

“With Bette and that German guy, Paul, that was in
Casablanca
. He played Jerry.”

“I didn’t see it.”

“Well, you didn’t see anything, did you?”

“I had things to do,” Jacob King said, enveloping her in his arms. After a moment, he said, “You know, the first time I ever saw the stars I was ten years old.”

“What?” she said. Carole and the plane crash and her imagined funeral were forgotten. “What do you mean, ten years old? Were you blind or something?”

“You don’t see the stars in Brooklyn. I got sent to this juvenile
farm, it was upstate, in the mountains. I stole a car, and I couldn’t even drive. I just hot-wired it. I hit three cars in the block, then this old fart, he was crossing the street, how was I supposed to see him, I couldn’t even see over the wheel. I’d already been laid, but I’d never seen the stars. And there they were, at this juvey farm.”

It was a story outside her realm of experience, but it freed her to talk about herself, the subject with which she was most comfortable. “When I was five I went to the premiere of
Angels on Parade
 …”

“What’s that got to do with the stars?”

“Wait. Let me tell you. And after they ran it, Mr. French took me onstage and introduced me and said Let me present someone who is going to be Cosmopolitan Pictures’s brightest star. And I started to cry. Because the stars were in heaven. And when he said I was going to be a star, I thought he meant I was going to heaven. You know, like dying?” She burrowed into him. “I’m not even afraid of dying anymore. You know what I’m afraid of instead?”

He tightened his hold on her. “You’re afraid of walking into someplace and nobody gives a shit, nobody knows who you are, you’re a nobody.”

Blue twisted out of his arms and looked at him. This was not the way she would have put it, but it was more or less what she meant. “How do you know that?”

“Because we’re alike, you and me.”

“No, we’re not,” she said with a hint of petulance. He was not an actor, nor a director, nor a producer, nor did he own a studio, like Moe, nor was he a son, like Arthur. These were the only categories of people she really knew, and he fit into none of them. And a writer would certainly never live in a house like this. She did not know where production managers and makeup men and hairdressers and wardrobe mistresses lived, although she tried to remember them by their first names, and gave them all Christmas presents that the studio paid for and charged to the production number of whatever picture they had worked on with her. “Because I’m famous.”

He smiled, and it occurred to her that he must be famous, too. In his way. Whatever that way was. Famous enough so that his presence made people nervous, people like Mr. French and Lilo and that awful Benny Draper, men whose business was making other people not just nervous but fearful. “Well, anyway,” she amended, “I’ve been famous longer than you.”

A shrug, still smiling. “Yes, we are alike,” he said gently. “We’re in different lines of work, you and me, but we’re out there in the spotlight, because that’s where we want to be.”

That was it. That was it exactly. How did he know that? “What kind of work are you in, Jacob?”

“I’m a sportsman,” Jacob King said.

T
here is very little in this narrative that Blue Tyler, Arthur French, and Chuckie O’Hara, each with a personal and totally self-absorbed perspective, could agree on, but they all agreed that the downfall of Benny Draper, leading to his violent demise, began the day he ordered a wildcat strike that pulled the gaffers off Cosmo’s Stage 7, the largest on the lot, where Chuckie, in the last week of shooting on
Red River Rosie
, two days behind schedule and hearing about it from J. F. French, who was threatening to replace him with Victor Higgins, Metro’s equally homosexual director of big-budget musicals (an idle threat, because J.F. would never pay a loan-out fee to L. B. Mayer, who he wished would choke on a fishbone), was preparing the production-number finale. Of course I looked up the trade papers for that day. The page-one headline in
Daily Variety
read,
ALAN SHAY IDENTIFIED AS RED
, while the
Reporter’
s front page was bannered with
DIRECTOR SHAY TAKES FIFTH
47
TIMES
; in both papers, the story of the ongoing negotiations with Benny Draper’s OMPCE was buried on page five:
PROGRESS REPORTED IN LABOR TALKS
, reported
Variety
,
LABOR SETTLEMENT REPORTED NEAR
, said the
Reporter
.

It was our Manhattan Towers number, Chuckie O’Hara said. Rosie’s run away from the Red River Valley and come to New York, and she’s all the rage, of course, so down and dirty, a fifteen-year-old Texas Guinan, but the sophisticated New Yorkers just love her, and she has this society fiancé, who doesn’t know how old she really is, Billy Teasdale played the part, oh, how I loved that boy, but he was a monogamous fag, if you can believe it, he and Victor Higgins were together for years, Victor was always out on the town, playing the field, but Billy was just Miss Stay-at-Home, gardening and cooking, nothing says lovin’ like something in the oven. Anyway. Enough of unrequited amour. Blue was supposed to dance down the floating staircase of this penthouse apartment, one hundred and two steps, my dear, the bannister swathed in chiffon, Blue singing “Anything Goes,” ba ba bababa bum, “In olden days, a glimpse of stocking … was looked upon as something shocking …” It takes four and a half hours to light the master, Walter Sklar was the slowest cameraman on the lot, but he was Moe French’s nephew, and I always got stuck with him, I think his main job was to tell Moe if I was prancing around with anyone below the line. So it’s eleven-thirty and we haven’t had the first setup yet, and Blue’s acting cunty with wardrobe and makeup, she wants to show cleavage, she wants her knockers squished together, and I say to her, Blue, you’re playing fifteen, I know you’re nineteen, we’ll compromise, I’ll show just a tiny little hint of cleavage and see if I can prevail on Moe to run an ad campaign that says, “Blue’s Got Tits and Billy’s Got ’Em.” Anything to get a laugh out of my star. And she says, Billy wouldn’t know what to do with them.
Quelle vrai
. You have the rag on, dear, I say, or a little preggers, are we? You see, I had met this new gentleman friend, and I’d heard that Arthur was on hold, and that Arthur was being such a good sport about it, Arthur was born being a good sport, and he’ll die being one, it’s like he came over on the fucking
Mayflower
, he’s such a good sport. Fuck you, Chuckie, she said in that winning way of
hers, but by that time the shot was finally ready, and the A.D. said, Places everybody, and the chorus boys and those loathsome French Fillies took their places, and Blue rode to the top of the staircase on a boom, and the A.D. said, Music ready, and I said, Rolling … and … action …

I hated to lip-sync, Melba Mae Toolate said, and so in all my musical numbers I’d do the songs to a live mike, and then in postproduction I’d rerecord. I hated that picture. I never minded Chuckie being a fairy, but I never had to do love scenes with him, not that I had any love scenes with Billy Teasdale, because I was only supposed to be fifteen, and he didn’t know that, or his character didn’t, and so the thing was, was he going to kiss me or not, the jerk-off factor, Chuckie called it, the jerk-off factor was what made me a star. Billy was nice, I suppose, but I was always asking him if Victor was the husband and he was the wife, or vice versa, and he would tell me I had bad breath. Fuck him. I didn’t go to his funeral. He had a stroke or a hemorrhage or something bad in his head, he was on location, and they couldn’t get him to a hospital in time, Victor threw himself on Billy’s casket at the funeral, that’s the only reason I wish I’d gone, to see that, it made Clark Gable furious, he said Victor should be barred from the Industry. He was such an asshole at times, Clark. One time he told me that my being with Jacob set a bad example for the Industry, and I said, What about all those old bags you married for their money and shit before Carole, Carole told me she thought you were cherry when she married you, she didn’t say that, but that got to him. Fuck him, too.

Give me a little grapefruit juice, and while you’re up, throw a little vodka into it, put the juice in first, then the ice, then the vodka, and don’t stir it, that way the juice is like a chaser. Anyway, I’m up on this staircase waiting for Chuckie to say Action, and I look down and see Billy Teasdale picking his nose and looking at it, it really got me in the mood. I’m pissed off at Arthur, too, he’s being so fucking noble, he says this is just a
phase I’m going through, I say, What’s just a phase, getting it twice a night regular, which I shouldn’t have said, then I get to look at Billy snacking on a little piece of snot, no wonder he had a fucking hemorrhage, the boogers clogged up his arteries, then Chuckie says, Action. The music starts, I start coming down the staircase, “In olden days, a glimpse of stocking …” Left foot over right foot, right food over left foot. “… was looked upon as something shocking …” I’m halfway down the stairs, when the whole stage goes dark, pitch-black, and I’m screaming, Will someone get me off these fucking stairs. I was making over twelve thousand dollars a week, I was the most valuable piece of property on the lot, and none of those people whose job depended on me knew how to get me off those fucking stairs. I thought I was going to die, and I thought it would’ve been a better ending going into that mountain with Carole …