Playland

  Copyright © 1994 by John Gregory Dunne

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Walter Scott’s Personality Parade is a registered trademark of Parade Publications, Inc.

  Used with permission.

  A signed first edition of the work has been privately printed by The Franklin Library.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dunne, John Gregory

  Playland: a novel/by John Gregory Dunne.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81741-9

  I. Title.

  PS3554.U493P57 1994

  813′.54—dc20 94-4344

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Jack

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  Blue

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  1947

  I

  II

  III

  Maury

  I

  II

  Part Two

  Novel & Screenplay

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  Part Three

  Meta & the Hound of Heaven

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  Part Four

  Retrospective

  I

  II

  III

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  With witness I speak this. But where I say

  Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament

  Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent

  To dearest him that lives alas! away.

  —Gerard Manley Hopkins

  SETTING THE SCENE I

  First things first:

  She was born Melba Mae Toolate (or maybe not, but certainly, or so I think, close enough, although Myrna Marie Toolate still has a core of adherents, the way Los Angeles with a hard also has its core vote) in San Bernardino, California, April 28, 1928. That is, if she was not born in Yuma, Arizona, on the same date a year earlier (in other words, April 28, 1927), or then again in Shoshone, California, October 29, 1929, but that was the day the stock market crashed, and a few years later, after Melba Mae Toolate became Baby Blue Tyler, Hollywood’s number-one cinemoppet and biggest box office star, studio publicists, always looking for an item, would claim that her birth was America’s only bright spot that day, which did not exactly lend the date, as Blue Tyler’s birthday, verisimilitude.

  Her father died shortly before her birth, or shortly thereafter, or perhaps he was in prison in Ohio when she was born, or then again maybe it was in Pennsylvania, Nebraska or Montana. The prison stories surfaced only after her disgrace; Blue Tyler was a woman, a child really, to whom disgrace attached itself with a certain regularity, but the disgrace here in question was her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, when she was either nineteen, twenty or twenty-one years old. The prison reports came up again after her disappearance from what Collier’s magazine called “the baleful glare of the public eye,” in any event when those same studio publicists who had been so quick to claim, for Jimmy Fidler’s deadline, that Blue Tyler was born the day the market went belly-up were no longer available to keep the legend, such as it was (and even more so such as it became), free from taint.

  Anyway. Melba’s father (if indeed he was). Among other names, he was known as Herman Toolate or Herbert Tulahti (“Too-late” and “Too-lah-tee” being the two conflicting pronunciations of the name she abandoned when she became, or was reborn as, Blue Tyler), or (this from those French cinéastes who kept Blue Tyler’s torch from being extinguished in those decades when she was, as it were, in the desert) Henri Tulaté. Mr. Toolate (or if you will Mr. Tulahti or M. Tulaté) was in some accounts a pharmacist, in others a would-be trombonist or a failed Tin Pan Alley songwriter (sample unpublished song titles: “Mimi from Miami” and “Yolanda from Yuma,” the latter giving an uncertain advantage to those who favored Arizona as Melba Mae’s birthplace, and the added possibility that Yolanda was in fact her real name, a father’s hymn to his daughter), even a ballroom dancer who had murdered his partner during a dance marathon in 1931 (this scenario, in a French monograph on Blue Tyler’s career, stolen without apology from Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?).

  The former Melba Mae Toolate’s musical talent, such as it was, was said to come from this man cast as her father (in his trombonist, songwriter, or marathon dancer incarnations), unless it came via her mother (Irma in most cases, although Erna, Ursula, and heaven knows how many other Christian names were also candidates), a God-fearing (in later revisionist versions, as theological fashions changed and theories about the death of God were abroad in the land, God-hating) woman who taught piano, or the harp, or (this from a piece in Film Comment entitled “The Geometry of Dance in the Classic Hollywood Musicals”) mathematics. Irma (or Erna or Ursula) Too-late’s emergence as the more dominant influence on Melba Mae was a feminist theory that came into currency after the brief reappearance of Blue Tyler as a middle-aged woman in Hamtramck, Michigan, when for a moment she became, to her surprise (although I cannot say amusement, because when one spends an entire professional life cosseted by the apparatus of a motion picture studio, one does not easily learn to be amused at one’s own expense), a heroine of the women’s movement, a victim, in that liturgy, of the system and the male oppressors who would extinguish any spark of female spirit or independence.

  You begin to see the difficulty.

  SETTING THE SCENE II

  Chuckie O’Hara died yesterday. The obituary in the Times said he was seventy-seven, but I knew he was older than that, to the very end vain about his age in that poofter way of his, eighty-two or eighty-three more likely, because when he lost his leg on Peleliu he had already received an Oscar nomination, for directing Lily of the Valley. Most of the obits carried the picture, the famous photograph, of Chuckie testifying before the Un-American Activities Committee, the day he took off his wooden leg when the chairman asked if he was now or ever had been a Communist. It was quite a sight on those grainy old Movietone newsreels I tracked down and ran when I was trying to find out anything at all about Blue Tyler, who as it happened was the star of Lily of the Valley, her performance earning her a third Academy nomination, all before she was twelve.

  In the stock footage, Chuckie began pulling up his pant leg just as he started to answer the chairman’s question. Every eye in the hearing room was on him as he unbuckled that old-fashioned prosthetic device with all the straps, laid it on the witness table, and then said, clear as a bell, “Yes, Mr. Chairman, I was a Communist,” not taking the First, as the Ten had done, and not the Fifth either, and he listed the dates, from October 1938 to July 1941, and, no, he would respectfully decline to name names, all the time massaging that raw stump of the
leg he lost on Orange Beach. It was a real director’s touch, a perfect piece of business. Chuckie always knew exactly how to stage a scene, and he knew that no one at the hearing was listening to what he had to say, they were just looking at that stump, all pulpy and white with red crosshatching where the stitches had been. “Darling,” he told me when I asked him about that day in front of the Committee, “it was divine.” Sydney Allen stole the hearing scene and used it in one of his pictures when it was safe to do safe pictures about the blacklist. The Times tried to get a quote from Sydney for Chuckie’s obit, but Mr. Allen’s spokesman said that Mr. Allen was in the cutting room and was not available for comment. Sydney never disappoints, as always a thoroughbred shit-heel.

  In a movie, Chuckie’s performance would have taken the steam out of the hearings, which naturally it did in Sydney Allen’s piece of crap, but in real life, of course, it didn’t. Only time accomplished that. Still the scene had good value. Chuckie was certainly a Red, he admitted that, but I doubt if it had anything to do with politics. Blue told me it was because he was really stuck on Reilly Holt, the writer at Paramount, and a high-muckety-muck in the Party, and from things Chuckie told me later I suspect she was getting close to the truth. In his defense, it should also be said that no one on that Committee had ever hit a beach, let alone had a leg blown off on one.

  The Marine Corps must have had some idea about Chuckie’s politics, it had to be why he was never given a commission, when they were making A.D.s from Poverty Row captains and majors. Chuckie said he preferred being an enlisted man anyway. The farm boys in the barracks were more susceptible to my roguish charms than officers in a BOQ might have been, he said, the roughest of rough trade, my dear, it comes from being so louche with all those sheep on cold winter nights. And the farm boys were more than compensation enough for having to salute Jack Ford and Willie Wyler, even, sweet mother of God, D.Z.

  But if the Corps did not think Chuckie was officer material, it did realize that Corporal, later Sergeant, Charlton O’Hara, USMCR, was a pretty country fair director, just the man to shoot invasions, and so they gave him a film crew and put him on the beach with the first wave when the Fifth Marines hit Cape Gloucester the day after Christmas 1943 (“Not the way one would ordinarily choose to spend Boxing Day, dear,” he said once), and then again nine months later with the first wave at Peleliu, a pointless and bloody fiasco, again with the Fifth Marines. All the Marine brass really wanted was film of jarheads hitting the beach to show Congress when it was time for the next year’s appropriations. To the Corps, Chuckie’s politics (and the sexual orientation the brass must have suspected) did not matter as much as the footage he was getting, when the chances were he was going to end up in a body bag anyway, a dead Commie nance, longevity not generally accruing to people who landed often enough with the first wave. Meaning Chuckie was probably lucky to lose only his right leg from the knee down on D-Plus-Two at Peleliu, Orange Beach, from an unexploded mortar round buried in the sand that he accidentally kicked while he was moving his crew around the beach looking for a better angle. Force of habit, the old Cosmopolitan Pictures training, directors at Cosmo always overcovered so that any mistakes could be fixed in the editing room.

  Chuckie was blacklisted after he testified, no studio would hire him, no independent would back his projects. He could have gone to England but he hated the cold and he hated the dark wet English winters. Anyway the blacklist was not an economic hardship for Chuckie, as it was for so many others in the same boat, because he was rich, his family owned most of the highway billboards in the state of California. Not old money, darling, he told me, but money, and pots of it. He left his tiny perfect house in the Hollywood Hills and moved up to his family’s place in the Carmel Highlands, where he was in no danger of being constantly reminded of the Industry from which he had been banished. The old O’Hara house on the Carmel bluffs looked as if it had grown out of the rock formations that fell into the Pacific hundreds of feet below, and there on the sea he spent his period of exile with his trick of the moment and with his dotty old mother, Vera O’Hara, who even when I met Chuckie several decades later was always asking him when he was going to get married. That was when I was taping his memories of Blue Tyler, and he was at the same time pumping me about her. During the hours and days we spent together, I kept trying to imagine his life in those years when he was a professional nonperson. All over the Carmel house there were photographs of Chuckie from that period, all in silver Tiffany frames; as much as any of the actors he directed, Chuckie loved having his picture taken, and in fact favored catamites who were photographers, although he never photographed them in turn. In the comfort of this Elba, he seemed to want for nothing, the man of principle as the man of leisure.

  So I can understand the surprise of those who had canonized him when one day Chuckie flew to Washington on his own, and in executive session with the Committee’s investigators purged himself. Because of his earlier appearance—a public relations disaster the Committee did not wish to repeat—he was treated with kid gloves, and his testimony never made public. There was only an announcement that he had appeared voluntarily and that his testimony would be most helpful in allowing the Committee to prepare its final report. That was it. Chuckie never said who he had named—less than I could have, more than I should have, was all he would tell me—and he went back to work as untroubled by his decision as he was by most of the events in his life. Why did you do it? I asked. Not very complicated, he answered. What it boiled down to was that he missed working. He missed the costume tests and the looping and the mixing sessions and the big mugs of coffee the script girl would hand him during the shoot and the crossword puzzles he would work with his thick black Mont Blanc pen while the D.P. was lighting the next scene. I could never feature myself as this queen hero of the revolution, he said during one of our tapings, it was in the most revolting taste.

  For a while after his recantation he worked steadily if without particular distinction, accepted again in the commissaries and the private studio dining rooms, at the same time denounced as a pariah and stool pigeon by those of his peers who had been so quick to acclaim him a hero on that earlier occasion before the Committee when he had removed his prosthetic leg. The younger historians of this period, ideologically correct, dismiss him as absent character and kidney, but they were never able to appreciate the social weave of Hollywood, what it was like to live and work there, to understand that the priority was always making pictures, the black sheep accepted back in the fold always a reliable story line. After a time, he more or less slipped into professional oblivion, doing an occasional Hallmark Hall of Fame special, but never segment television, Chuckie was too much a snob for that, he had after all directed Crawford and Davis and Kate and Claudette and Blue Tyler.

  Ah, yes. Blue Tyler. Or Melba Mae Toolate, as she had become once again when I sought her out in Hamtramck, Michigan, her real name the perfect disguise. Chuckie knew so many of Blue’s early secrets, as I knew so many of her later ones, although she was such an elaborate fantast (a fastidious construct, liar being more to the point) that no one could ever really pin down the truth, such as it was, about her. Melba Mae covered her tracks.

  Chuckie’s stories were wonderful. Not always believable, but wonderful. He tended to look at life as if he was setting up a shot, his hands joined at the thumbs, framing what he wanted the camera to see. A story was only meant to advance the action, and sooner than I should have I found myself going along with him, adding some set decoration of my own. You get in the mood. See the possibilities. Did it really matter if what happened did not actually happen that way? Who was to know? Everything is subjective. We were just advancing the action. Story-conferencing the truth. A shading here, a shading there, in the interest, always we would tell ourselves, of clarification. Facts are unforgiving, so fuck facts, make the scenes work.

  Anyway, Chuckie’s stories, as such they were. About Blue, of course. And her passion for Jacob King. People in Hollywood have a
lways had this romantic idea about gangsters, and Jacob, with his slick hair and perfect teeth and his dark brooding looks and his volcanic furies, satisfied every fantasy. Even his sexual appendage was given demonic proportions, the schlong on him, the schwanss, the schmekelah, Chuckie said, and he a student of such instruments, with a student’s capacity for priapic exaggeration, a foot and a half, I saw it in the shower at Hillcrest. The venue explained Chuckie’s lapse into Yiddish, the anti-Semitism that came so easily to him no reason not to play gin at the Industry’s top Jewish country club, to take a little steam and case a few cocks in the locker room. This blissful reverie of an aged pederast allowed me to contemplate how many psychic miles Jacob King had traveled from the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, where he was born, to the shower room at Hillcrest, where Chuckie could swoon over his swinging dick. And Jacob the only man in that shower of whom it could be claimed that he had made his bones at the age of twelve. Or was it ten? Or had he just been brought along as a decoy, on that hit when he was ten, because his youth made the professional cannons doing the dirty less suspicious-looking?

  Jacob King admitted nothing.

  And denied nothing.