The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (40 page)

The pièce de résistance had been the glass shard being pulled from my leg. Captured by an unprepared camera, the shot was jittery and off-kilter; moviegoers stroked to complacency by smooth dolly shots cried out in unison. I did not budge when
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
began. The plot followed an unfairly condemned man pursued
across the years, but it was my face I saw lingering upon that screen.

I exited the theater in a fog. Moviegoer chatter centered not on actor Paul Muni's gutsy performance but rather on that curious fellow from the newsreel. Was that business with the shard real or Hollywood effects? They did not know, but agreed it deserved a second look.

The Excelsior ticked like a tapped foot. From my coat I removed it and registered a time of 4:45—fifteen minutes late. If I ran, I might still make the bus that Church was no doubt holding. Taxi after taxi passed the theater; I did not hail a one. The lure of plodding alongside the indignant injured in Washington was no lure at all when compared to the red sparkle of the marquee above, the yellow dazzle of the lobby beyond.

I felt low about abandoning Church like that. I did.

But from my trouser pocket I fished another thirty cents.

II.

O
N JUNE 27, 1932, I
received by post an invitation to a Fourth of July dinner. It was printed in gold foil upon creamy stock the likes of which I hadn't felt since being handed Dr. Leather's business card three decades prior. I read it over and over, struggling to swallow a single delectable crumb.

I had been invited, or so read the absurd text, to Pickfair, which I knew from Church's celebrity magazines to be the sprawling Beverly Hills home of the first couple of the silver screen: America's Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, and the King of Hollywood, Douglas Fairbanks. The letter, penned by a third party in their employ, claimed that Mr. Fairbanks had viewed my newsreel and was keen to add me to a guest list that, historically, was second only to the White House in its litany of luminaries.

A valedictory paragraph indicated that a reservation had been made in my name for an American Airways flight scheduled to depart from Floyd Bennett Field on July 2. I had to sit down. Zebulon Finch in an airship, dashing among the clouds? For the millionth time since my death, I wished I could have a drink—very stiff, if you please.

When the glow had subsided some six or eight hours later, I confronted a predicament. There had been no word from Church since I'd jilted him at the bus station, even as the papers reported each travail of the beleaguered Bonus Army. After erecting a Hooverville
along the Anacostia River with which to shame President Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur's U.S. Army—the irony, it scathes!—set upon the squatters with bayonets and tear gas. One would think that these were Germans saboteurs being dispelled, not American heroes.

Two men had been killed in the fracas and cameras had caught it all. Of late I huddled by the telephone like an Army wife, waiting for Church's cry for help that would, at the same time, indicate his forgiveness. But the bell did not ring. I toggled the rotary dial and drew patterns in the handset dust. Perhaps, thought I, the Bonus Army's strife had trawled memories of the Cotton Club. If so, he might prefer his apartment empty when he returned. In fact, his prolonged absence might be his quiet Midwestern way of holding the door open for my exit.

The notion might have inspired me to jump into the Hudson River were it not for the invitation card's caressable embossment. Wasn't it possible, even probable, that I might better help Church from afar? I'd earned fifty dollars, an astronomic sum, for a half-day's work in Ed Mann's picture. Perhaps in Hollywood, the one town in America unaffected by the Depression, I might work a full day, a full week, a full year, many times over, and mail every penny of it back to my friend until I had purchased his lung operation as well as his forgiveness.

I'd intended to help John Quincy's family and failed.

This time, swore I, Zebulon Finch would come through.

So it was with an anvil heart that on July 2 I put on my last surviving suit and hat, stomped a mouse on my way out of the apartment, locked the door, and slid beneath it my key. It was only then that I agonized that Church, upon his return, might worry. I scrounged the
lobby for a handbill and found a chip of coal with which to write. The paper I slipped beneath the door offered two words in a caveman scrawl:

GONE, HOLLYWOOD

My plane was a Ford Tri-Motor—“the Tin Goose,” the pilot called it—and in this goose's belly were ten wicker rattan chairs and little else. Take-off was a thing of white-knuckle terror and I might have kicked out a window and dove for land had there not been two delighted children right behind me. Once aloft, the ride was not unlike that of a boat, except for the noise, which was deafening, and the vibration, which was numbing, and the quick drops in altitude, which were pants-pissingly scary—well, it was nothing like a boat. The view? I cannot say. It was bright white panic for twenty-five-hundred straight miles.

We landed in a town called Burbank and I emerged from the flying coffin into a seventy-two-degree heaven of palm trees and blue skies. A taxi took me to Hollywood, where I asked a sunglassed bloke in a straw boater for the nearest hotel. He fast-talked directions but all of the stucco buildings looked the same, and I wound up cutting through an alley. I turned a blind corner and came upon a man squatting amid debris.

“Say, friend,” said I, “I wonder if I might bother you for . . .”

I left the request dangling. The man was having himself a shit on the concrete. His mucky clothing betrayed his derelict nature and the twitch of his face conveyed mental derangement. He glanced my way, not much perturbed, and boosted the volume on the song that he was singing: “Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” from the Walt
Disney cartoon, which, by that year, had become a sarcastic anthem of the Great Depression.

“Tra la la la la,” sang he.

He reached for a copy of
Variety
with which to wipe his ass.

Perhaps Hollywood was not so unlike the rest of America.

Independence Day was as beautiful as the two days before it, and in the late afternoon I engaged a cab to carry me to the appointed Beverly Hills address. Through the San Ysidro Canyon we wound until arriving at the kelly green lawns and Tudor stylings of Pickfair. I was let out in a parking lot shining with Bentleys and Cadillacs and Packards. Jumpy as a virgin, I killed a half hour fondling the hood ornaments—griffins, swans, angels, mermaids—before forcing myself up the long paved path, beneath the overhang of a great gabled roof, and into a crowd where I did not belong.

Forty people of paralyzing beauty filled the back veranda with the finest of leisure suits and summer gowns. Men accepted cocktails from servants and slapped the backs of comrades while women giggled at private jokes or looked elegantly bored. Two dashing dans with waxed hair and pencil mustaches saluted my arrival with their drinks but, receiving nothing from me but apparent retardation, resumed their debate.

An infernal force pushed me into deeper waters, one dog-paddle after another. Why, there was Charlie Chaplin—
the
Charlie Chaplin—making as if to club an opponent with a croquet mallet. And wasn't that Lillian Gish, star of
The Birth of a Nation
, outfitted in gloves, matching hat, and an ermine collar despite the weather? And fielding questions by the bookcase, that looked like honored aviatrix Amelia Earhart! And who was that on his knees scratching the chin of a mongrel dog? It couldn't be Albert Einstein. Could it?

This was no throw-your-stockings-into-the-air blowout of the Twenties; here existed codes of conduct no two-bit criminal from Chicago could hope to understand. I shuffled past a grand piano (a Steinway, natch) and beelined for an Edwardian four-panel screen behind which I might cower. A blonde woman in a pale-gold satin dress and a commendable bust clocked me with a swinging hip as I passed. I goggled at her, astonished.

“Relax, kid.” She had a Brooklyn squawk. “They's humans. Most of ‘em, anyhow.”

With a thick-lidded wink, she sashayed into the miller-abouters, pendulating her well-packaged buttocks with enough verve to clear a path six feet wide. I watched her collar two men at once, pulling them from their respective females. In seconds she had herself encircled and I could see no more.

“You there. Young man.”

Ye gods! What indignity now cometh? I turned toward a settee festooned with deer antlers but found it vacant. Behind it, however, all but hidden within a forest of ferns, a woman lazed against gold drapery. Though she stood, she had about her the look of a lounging tigress eyeing a warren-load of unwitting bunnies. Any red-blooded (or, for that matter, no-blooded) American male would know her on sight.

Bridey Valentine was no less than the foremost sex symbol of the screen. I had seen her in countless pictures:
The Votes Are In
, in which she played the unstable (and insatiable) eldest daughter of a desperate senator;
The Struggle Buggy
, in which she portrayed a humble switchboard operator determined to burn down a burlesque hall;
Judy Plays the Game
, in which she starred as a card shark who falls for the detective on her trail; and, of course,
All Who Are Wearied and Burdened
, the controversial smash hit about
a mute nun forced to break her every holy vow in order to rescue a group of orphans from gangsters.

Willst thou, Dearest Reader, lend me a single paragraph within which I might roll like a pig in the muck of physical desire? Bridey Valentine's hair was a black abyss, forever billowed into chaos begging to be soothed. Her eyebrows, sly as the slots of a violin, butterflied in tandem with lashes growing ever longer from inside to out. So many actresses had large, limpid eyes; Bridey's, though, were small, the better to keep secrets, and smelted by amber irises. Her lips were sculpted so as to smile and frown as one: love, hate, love, hate. Her body, of course, was maddening, and given to onscreen contortions that shoved
this
hip into vulgar altitude even as it sloughed
that
breast against sheer fabric. She breathed in a way other actresses did not, her belly and bosom in constant pulsation, her thighs rocking—tensed, relaxed, then tensed again, so that you, poor boy, were squeezed of all breath of your own.

I, junked piece of human garbage, approached her.

Her golden eyes flicked toward the crowd.

“You were talking to Miss West. How do you know her?”

“Miss West?”

“You didn't know that was Mae West?”

No, damn it all, but I should have guessed. That crackly old Radiola of Church's had kept us abreast (so to speak) of the bawdy performer's exploits upon the New York stage as well as her arrest because of a play called
Sex
, which had exploited the irresistible slogan, “Enjoy
SEX
with Mae West!” I hastened to curtain my spectacle of ignorance.

“Yes, Mae West,” said I. “We do not know each other all that well.”

Bridey popped a cigarette between her lips and raised an eye
brow. My kingdom for a lighter! She rolled her eyes at my transparent alarm, shook a flint-wheeled gadget from her purse, lit up, and expelled a dragon of smoke in Miss West's direction.

“I have it on good authority she's making eight grand a week. For her first picture. You know what I made on my first picture? Sixty-five.”

“That seems quite respectable.”

“Sixty-five
dollars
. A
week
. This bitch moans like a cat in heat and they give up the whole bank. They'll regret it when it comes time for close-ups. There's not enough filters in the world for that face. Meanwhile the censors gather like alley cats. Hays is putting watchdogs right on her set, did you hear? There are ways to push the envelope—believe me, I know—but what she's doing is bad for all of us.”

“Hays?”

“Will Hays. The Hays Code. For moral decency in pictures. The three-second-kiss rule?”

“But of course,” said I. “Will Hays.”

Smoke snaked from the corner of her lips. At last she gave me her undivided attention. I fidgeted before the inspection.

“You're not in pictures, that's for sure,” said she. “Who are you?”

“I'm nobody. I'm sorry.”

“Don't be sorry, I'm sick of somebodies. Your name.”

“Zebulon.”

Her laugh was a taunt.

“Now there's a name the studios would change. Too many syllables for Mary Moviegoer. Tell me, Z, do I need to introduce myself?”

Hundreds of hours had Church spent regaling me with vapid “exclusives” and silly “scoops” from his gossip rags, and until that moment I'd considered them wasted time. Now those pages provided
crisp kindling for a furnace of industry insight. Something at last upon which I could discourse! I cracked my dry knuckles for effect.

“Bridey Valentine got her break in
An Orchid Unknown
, 1925, opposite Norma Talmadge, after which she went on to become one of the screen's pre-eminent tragediennes, starring in a series of dramatic roles that presented her as the opposite of girl-next-door Mary Pickford.”

“Today's hostess, so go easy,” said Bridey. “But do continue.”

“Miss Valentine's career was shaped by a childhood accident in which she damaged the tear ducts of her left eye, limiting how directors could photograph crying scenes. Eventually producers began choosing roles for her that did not include crying at all.”

“Hearsay at best. But I remain impressed. Resume.”

“Ergo, Miss Valentine became known for tough characters and an even tougher off-screen persona. Among the rumors are that she spends her weekends entirely in the nude, dabbles in witchcraft, wears a locket filled with blood, and puts cigarettes out on the soles of her feet. Her stock-in-trade is the shock.”

“Nice turn of phrase. But who would stub cigarettes on her feet?”

“Miss Valentine is best known, of course, for her combustible sex appeal, and has been linked to some of the most visible men in the business. There was
l'affaire
Errol Flynn,
l'affaire
James Cagney,
l'affaire
Victor Fleming—”

“Well, Fleming's a rite of passage. He hardly counts.”

“—all of which have given Miss Valentine the reputation of one who goes in and out of relationships quickly.”

“Yes, in and out, in and out. Isn't that how you do it?”

“When asked about these romances, Miss Valentine repeats her catchphrase: ‘Always a Bridey, never a bride.'”

“I rue the day I said that. Who the hell wants to be a bride?” She removed her cigarette. “Here, give me your foot so I can put this out.”

But she smirked when she said it, so goddamn radiant that I beamed. How grand it was to feel the return of the old strut and swagger! I gambled on a grandstanding gambit.

“However, it is my opinion, having known Miss Valentine for such a long while now, that she is not so brambly as all that. In fact, she seems quite likable.”