The Man Who Died Laughing (16 page)

Hoag:
Your relationship with Gabe deteriorated?

Day:
We didn’t talk. It bothered both of us, but we couldn’t seem to live any other way. Then he met Vicki, his second wife. Suddenly, he don’t want to work so hard. We
did
fight about that. The staff and the crew took Gabe’s side, even though I was the one putting food in their mouths while he was off making records. This happened—let’s see—this was the third season. I was seriously crazed by then. Drinking a bottle a night. Taking pills to sleep, to wake up. Eating like a horse. I was totally excessive. In everything. It finally broke me in the fourth season. I collapsed right on the air. People laughed. They thought it was a gag. I was dying. Had to be taken to the hospital. I was in bed for a month with double pneumonia. Gabe went on every week with a pinch-hit costar-Jimmy Durante did one, Red Skelton. When I came back, I swore I’d take better care of myself, but right away I was back to my old habits. And me and Gabe, we’d had it with the grind. We just couldn’t keep it up anymore. That was the only thing we could agree on. So we went out with our heads high. Moved back to California.

Hoag:
According to Connie, that’s when your life …

Day:
My life turned to shit.

(end tape)

W
ANDA SAID SHE WAS
up for having some fun. I said that would be fine with me as long as I didn’t have to wear roller skates.

We started out at that years favored celebrity eatery, Spago. The chef was a fellow named Puck, and you had to know him, or know someone who knew him, to get a table. Ours was right by the windows, which looked down on the traffic and billboards on Sunset Boulevard, and on the city beyond. The sun was setting soft and pink in the smoggy sky. It made everything out there look fuzzy, as if the whole city were made of Necco Wafers.

We ordered champagne—our drink. Brooke Hayward and Peter Duchin stopped by for a hug and a hello while we waited for it to arrive. So did a former wife of Richard Harris, who was with a guy with nineteen-inch hips who spoke only German and couldn’t take his eyes off his own reflection in the window.

Lee Radziwill was eating there that night, too. So was a former U.S. senator, who was not with his wife. None of those people stopped by.

Wanda wore skintight black leather pants, high heels, and a little red silk camisole that could very well have qualified as underwear in many parts of the country. Her face was made up and she was acting very up, very gay. A little too gay. I wore a starched tuxedo shirt with a bib front, mallard suspenders, and gray pleated flannels. I also had a little something greasy in my hair. It was fun to be out again.

The waiter popped our cork and poured.

“To exes,” Wanda said, raising her glass.

“To exes,” I agreed.

She drained hers and leaned over the table toward me, showing me most of what was there under her camisole. “I think I should warn you,” she said, her voice husky and intimate. “I’m not as tough as I look.”

She was off and rolling again, playacting her ass off.

I refilled our glasses and charged right in. “I don’t think you look very tough at all.”

“You see right through me, don’t you?”

“It’s easy. Your despair is showing.”

She looked hurt. “You go right for the bone, man.”

“Nothing personal. I’m in the same place, remember?”

“There’s very little I’m sure about,” she said, “but that’s one of the things—
nobody
is in the same place I am.”

We ate a pizza that was covered with some sort of rare, aromatic fungus that only grows in a tiny region of the Alps, following it with grilled tuna and a second bottle of champagne. Wanda only picked at the food. She was much more interested in the champagne. When the waiter took our plates away, I ordered a third bottle and lit her cigarette for her.

“About you and Merilee,” she said. “What happened?”

“Not much. I lost interest.”

“Someone else?”

“No one else.”

She took one of my hands in hers. Her fingers were smooth and cold. “Tell me about it, Hoagy.”

“I’m rather hung up on myself and on my work. That doesn’t leave enough for other people. At least that’s Sonny’s theory.”

She dropped my hand. “Sonny’s hardly one to talk.”

“How come you and he don’t get along?”

“I don’t want to talk about him. I want to talk about you and me. Why won’t you fuck me? You promised me you’d tell me. Are you involved? Are you gay?”

“When I say I lost interest, I mean …”

“You lost the urge.”

“That’s right. I suppose I just have to—”

“Meet the right woman?” She raised an eyebrow. I felt the toe of her shoe toying with the cuff of my trousers under the table. “How do you know I’m not her?”

“I don’t.”

“How long has it been?”

“Four years.”

“Whew. I wouldn’t want to
be
her.”

“No?”

“At least, not on the first night. Or the second. Or the … christ, you really know how to issue a sexual challenge, don’t you?”

“I didn’t intend to.”

“Too worried about what
Sonny
would think.” She shook her head. “You’ve been taken in by him, haven’t you?”

“I’m doing a job. I don’t want to mess up the relationship he and I have going right now. It’s important to the book, and it’s shaky.”

“So what are we doing here tonight?”

“Having dinner. Being friends. I like you. I want to get to know you better.”

“So you can use me?” Her voice rose.

“Absolutely not.”

“So you can find out who
I’ve fucked and
put it in your
fucking
book?!”

Heads began to turn.

“Maybe you’d better say it a little louder,” I said. “I don’t think everyone heard you.”

“You
cocksucker!
All you care about is that book! All you want is some juicy dirt! I won’t tell you a thing, you motherfucker! Not a thing!” She jumped to her feet.
“Motherfucker!”

She liked scenes and she got one. Everyone in the place was staring at her now in stunned silence, avid for her next move.

Wanda turned on her heel and marched for the door. But she wasn’t done. When she got to the bar she stopped and screamed at me again,
“Motherfucker! Motherfucker!”

Not wanting to let her down, I chipped in with what I thought was a marvelous ad-lib. “Does this mean we’re not going dancing?”

In response she grabbed a platter of duck ravioli from a passing waiter and hurled it across the restaurant at me. It didn’t come anywhere near me. Lee Radziwill took most of it, if you want to know.

Then Wanda ran out the door and slammed it behind her. Sonny was right. They should have named her Stormy.

I’ll grant her one thing—she didn’t drive off and leave me stranded there. She was waiting for me in her Alfa after I paid the check and strolled leisurely out to the parking lot, toting our half-full bottle of champagne. She had on a soft doeskin jacket and racing gloves. The top was down, and she was revving the engine and flaring her nostrils. I took a swig and hopped in. She took off with a screech before my butt hit the seat.

She headed up into the Hollywood hills, her foot to the floor. Wanda drove exactly the way you’d expect Wanda to drive—like a nut. She shifted gears with fury, skidding around the hairpin curves, the little car barely holding on to the road. Actually, it did leave the pavement completely when we cleared a hump at the top of the hill and started flying down. That was when we really picked up speed. Houses and parked cars flew by. We tore down the narrow canyon road, Wanda accelerating blindly into the curves. If anybody happened to be coming up the canyon, we’d all be raspberry jam.

I held on and enjoyed the ride. I knew what she wanted me to do. She wanted me to tell her no, tell her bad girl. She would have a long wait.

When we got back down to Sunset she pulled over and wept in my arms. I gave her a linen handkerchief and she blew her nose in it. Then she took several breaths in and out and ran her fingers through her hair. I passed her the champagne bottle and she drank deeply from it. Then she lit a cigarette. I finished what was left of the bubbly.

“Get all of that out of your system?” I asked.

“Yes. Where to?”

We had to make seven stops before we found an ice cream parlor that sold licorice. It was a place down in Ocean Park on Main Street, and it was good licorice, though she thought it tasted “icky.” I suggested she was too old to keep using a word such as “icky.” She told me to get fucked.

We walked for a while, eating our ice cream, looking in the windows of the antique shops and galleries. It had turned chilly and foggy. No one else was out walking.

Suddenly she stopped and stared at me long and hard with narrowed eyes.

“What is it?” I said.

She just kept staring. Then she turned and strode away.

“Where are you going?” I called.

“I want to take you somewhere,” she called back over her shoulder.

She took me to Malibu, to the beach.
Their
beach, where she and Sonny had gone for those morning walks when she was a little girl. We walked a long time in the damp mist, not talking, the waves pounding. She was a lot smaller in her bare feet. And when she started talking, her voice was higher and more girlish than I’d ever heard it before. She wasn’t playing a role anymore.

“We used to come down here every morning when he was in town,” she said. “He’d hold my hand and he’d point out the prettiest shells for me. He always knew exactly where to find them. I don’t know how, he just did.”

I cleared my throat, but I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t have the heart to tell her.

“I—I couldn’t cope, Hoagy. I never could.”

“With what?”

“What was going on around me. Any of it. I’m like him—I’ve got thin skin. Only, he grew up in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is real. I grew up in Hollywood. It’s not. It’s all make-believe here. Make-believe is real. Sly Stallone isn’t acting. He actually thinks he
is
Rocky. He really does. People here become whatever they want to be, and as long as they stay hot enough, nobody turns the lights off on them. Would you like to hear the benefits of my twenty-eight years in therapy?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Okay, here goes: In the absence of a rational, ordered reality, people sometimes create one of their own, one that has the values and standards they require to survive. I grew up in a household that didn’t make sense to me. Daddy was either crazed or bombed or trying to be Mister Macho—fucking around, beating up on people. And Mommy never tried to change him. He was Sonny Day. The One. She gave in to him. He treated her like total shit and she just came back for more. I couldn’t deal with that. I just couldn’t. It was wrong. So, when I was little, I started my own world. My make-believe place. My … my movie. And sometimes I still live in it. Partly for fun. Partly because I need to. See, I never outgrew it.”

“I never outgrew wanting to play shortstop for the New York Yankees.”

“Most of the time, I’m okay. I’m aware that it’s make-believe. But sometimes … sometimes I’m not. I kind of lose touch with the so-called real world, and I… I’m what they call a borderline schizo.”

“What’s it about, your movie?”

“Me. What’s going on around me. Only things make sense. They turn out the way I want them to.”

“You seem okay right now.”

“I always am when I’m down here.”

She flopped down on the sand. I flopped down next to her. She snuggled into me. She smelled good against the sharp salt spray.

“I’m telling you all of this,” she said, gazing out at the water, “because I think I’m falling in love with you.”

I put an arm around her and she pressed her head against my chest. I was seeing her now for who she really was—a sweet, sad, vulnerable, and messed-up little girl who happened to be thirty-nine years old and all mine, if I wanted her. If I could handle her.

“And what about Hoagy’s Little Condition?” I asked.

“I don’t care about that. The real problem for me is this book. It’s like a barrier. I keep wanting to trust you. Wanting to open up to you. But I’m afraid.”

“I’m glad you trusted me.”

“Are you really?”

“Yes.”

“How is it going?”

“You really want to talk about it?”

“Yes, I do.”

“It’s hard work. He’s a complex man. And it’s his own memory of his life. Memory is really another form of make-believe. But I’m getting there. I’m starting to feel like I comprehend him and what’s gone on. I spoke to your mom. She helped a lot.”

“Did she tell you … ?”

“Tell me what?”

She placed her hand behind my head and brought my face down toward hers. I thought she was going to give me a kiss, but she had something else to give, a far greater token of her love.

She put her mouth to my ear, and in an urgent whisper Wanda told me why Sonny Day and Gabe Knight got in that fistfight in Chasen’s.

(Tape #7 with Sonny Day. Recorded in his study, February 28.)

H
OAG
: OKAY, SO YOU
quit your TV series and moved back here.

Day:
Right away, I feel different. Like something has gone out of me. Nowadays, they call it burnout. All I knew was I felt like I was just going through the motions. With Gabe. With Connie. I was very unsatisfied by my life all of a sudden. I was down. Gabe and I started a picture,
Alpine Lodge.
It was the same damned picture as
BMOC,
only with snow. Nobody seemed to notice. Or care. We did a couple of specials for NBC that season that were stale as hell—top-rated shows of the season. We did our six, eight weeks in Vegas. Again, stale. Again, sold out. It was fucking depressing.

Hoag:
Did Gabe feel the same way you did?

Day:
He did.

Hoag:
Did you talk about it?

Day:
Nah. We were like two people with a marriage that didn’t work anymore. Bringing out the worst in each other. But the love was still there. And so was the dough. We flat out couldn’t afford to break up, and we knew it, and it made us resent each other even more. I drank more and more. Took pills. Then my old lady died, and I don’t know, I felt like nobody was looking over my shoulder no more. I started kicking up my heels. But I was still low. Show you how low, Francis calls me up one day and says, “We’re doing a caper picture in Vegas together—Dean, Sam, Peter, Joey, everybody. Who do you and Gabe want to play?” And I said, “I don’t know. I’ll get back to you.” I never did. It didn’t sound like fun to me. We never did appear in
Ocean’s Eleven.