Playland Page 10

  Why Pittsburgh Pat Muldoon had been marked for assassination has never been satisfactorily explained, although it has been said (so often that it has assumed the weight of fact) that Jacob King took the contract as a way of cementing his bona fides with the man who later became his mentor and protector (at least while it suited him), Morris “The Furrier” Lefkowitz, who was indeed a furrier, a student of mink and fox and sable and ermine and Persian lamb, as well as the lesser pelts, those he called with some scorn the unimportant furs, the raccoon, the seal, the beaver, and the coypu. “I am only a simple furrier,” Morris Lefkowitz would invariably say on those occasions when the authorities asked him to comment on some civic perfidy or municipal outrage with which they thought he might have been associated or about which he might have the kind of knowledge that any public-spirited citizen might wish to share, and it is a fact that in a life of crime that spanned sixty-one years, Morris Lefkowitz was such a solid citizen that he never spent a single night in jail.

  It is also said that Morris Lefkowitz had no particular quarrel with Pittsburgh Pat Muldoon, a minor hit man who had practiced his murderous art for him on a number of occasions, his only crime (in the eyes of Morris Lefkowitz, if not in the eyes of a dozen federal, state, and municipal law enforcement agencies) being that Morris Lefkowitz had grown used to him, uncomfortable with him, the way a man with sap still rising in his system begins to grow uncomfortable with a wife who has begun to snore in her sleep with her mouth open, a wife whose stomach muscles have grown slack like a rubber band that has lost its snap. Jacob King was new and brash, contumacious, it is true, but smart (an adjective that had never been applied to Pittsburgh Pat Muldoon, example enough his being a Jew who took an Irish nom de guerre, the harps to Morris Lefkowitz being the fattest of the world’s fatheads), and Morris Lefkowitz liked the cut of his jib, liked both Jacob King’s head for figures and his capacity for violence, the two rarely, in Morris Lefkowitz’s experience, going hand in hand, wondered in fact if Jacob King should be placed in his organization’s line of succession.

  This was the kind of thought one began to consider after fifty-plus years in the criminal trade, a trade where luck such as that experienced by Morris Lefkowitz did not generally last for so many decades, and when the prospect of dying in one’s bed, even, in one’s decline, of being fed watery Cream of Wheat by relays of nurses with big tits, held a certain appeal. Jacob King’s mettle was all that was in question (not his willingness to kill, of course, but only his willingness to kill on someone else’s command), and that question he more than answered when he shot, at least in the popular imagination, his unfortunate landsman Hyman Krakower of Staten Island through the left ventricle.

  VII

  Blue Tyler was never interrogated under the full glare of tabloid publicity about the murder of Jacob King. The questioning, such as it was, was conducted by two detectives from the Robbery-Homicide division of the Los Angeles Police Department, acting upon instructions of law enforcement authorities in Las Vegas, and took place not in an official setting but in J. F. French’s library on Angelo Drive in Beverly Hills, with Lilo Kusack present in his capacity as family friend and legal adviser to all the parties concerned, that is to say, Blue Tyler, J. F. French, and Cosmopolitan Pictures. Under the terms Lilo Kusack had negotiated with the LAPD, the proceeding was informal, and the presence of either a police stenographer or tape-recording equipment was prohibited. The detectives were allowed to take handwritten notes, and later an abstract of these notes was typed up and placed in the case file, where I found it forty-odd years later as I burrowed through the detritus of Blue Tyler’s life; the report said that Miss Tyler had been helpful but had no knowledge either of the reason Jacob King might have been killed or of who the perpetrators might have been.

  Coincidentally the detective who wrote this report was the same Lieutenant Thomas Spellacy who had earlier investigated the murder of Meta Dierdorf, and who on that occasion as well had informally interviewed Blue Tyler. During the thirty-minute interview, Lieutenant Spellacy and his partner, a detective named Crotty, were served iced tea, cucumber sandwiches, and sponge cake by J. F. French’s household staff, while (according to later newspaper reports) Cosmopolitan Picture’s most valuable asset, wearing a simple cotton sundress and no makeup, her hair fastened in the back by a rubber band, sat perfectly composed, answering every question put to her in a calm and controlled manner, and indicating to Detectives Spellacy and Crotty that her relationship with Mr. King was of a professional nature only, that as her occasional escort to motion picture industry events he was never anything but a perfect gentleman, and that it was a shock to her to learn of those aspects of his private and business life that were the source of so much current speculation in the press. Immediately upon the conclusion of the meeting on Angelo Drive, a press release paraphrasing her remarks (which in fact had been prepared prior to the unannounced interview with the police) was given to reporters, who had been summoned to a press conference at the Cosmopolitan studio commissary. Quoting from the release for the benefit of local and network radio newscasters, a studio spokesman said, “Miss Tyler had engaged Mr. King as a production and business-affairs adviser under the terms of her new contract with J. F. French and Cosmopolitan Pictures. Although their association was only of a short duration, Mr. King was a trusted and valued employee.”

  On the night of Jacob King’s funeral, Blue Tyler had hobo steak at Chasen’s, the first banquette on the left inside the door, in the company of J. F. French, Arthur French, and Lilo Kusack, and afterward they all went to Ciro’s, the object of the evening, of course, that Blue be seen, a star on display in her native habitat, happy and guileless, without a care in the world, certainly not the murder of a trusted and valued employee. The second of the three photographs I have pinned to my bulletin board is the one that went out over the wires that night, of Blue on the Ciro’s dance floor with Arthur French. Arthur had a copy of the picture made and gave it to me when I went to Arizona to see him about Blue shortly after I left Detroit. As I said earlier, conversation with him was always a duel. Thrust, parry. Hint and pull back. See how forthcoming he would be. And how evasive. He had lived on a ranch outside Nogales (he claimed contentedly) for almost thirty years, a widower for a second time after two more or less uxorious marriages, dabbling in the movie business but too rich and too bored and too out of touch to be involved in any substantial way. When I was a postulant in the picture business, I had written a treatment for him from an idea he had, a piece of shit about a tycoon who has an Olympic athlete murdered so that the athlete’s sturdy heart can be transplanted to replace the tycoon’s own diseased organ. With raised eyebrow, Arthur said perhaps we could call it “To an Athlete Dying Young.” It was his way of letting me know that he had areas of knowledge of which perhaps I was not aware, and it was at that moment, when he was so obliquely defensive, that I knew I was going to like him. Nothing ever came of the story (I suspect Arthur was no more interested in it than I, the idea just an opportunity for him to bring someone new to Nogales who he thought might amuse him), but every holiday season brought a Christmas card from Arizona, with a sardonic comment about getting the transplant picture on track again. In all our conversations, which only rarely had anything to do with the picture I was supposed to be writing, he never once mentioned Blue Tyler, although he talked about everything and everyone else, usually in the most indiscreet way, with that ironic assumption of entitlement I have always found came so easily to the assimilated second generation of Hollywood’s founder class, an elegant compensation, I suppose, for the brutishness of their fathers and for the fires that in the offspring had been banked, or perhaps never lit. It was not until I met Melba Mae Toolate in Hamtramck that I was even aware that Arthur had played so important a part in the Blue Tyler phase of her life. You never asked, he said when I called after Blue disappeared once again, why don’t you come on down, I have some new ideas about our transplant epic. It was the invitation of a lonely old man,
and it struck me that in his affluence Arthur was as lonely as Melba in her poverty, an idea he of course would have ridiculed as sentimental nonsense.

  The night I arrived at his ranch outside Nogales, Arthur gave me the photograph of him dancing with Blue at Ciro’s, and told me to examine it. It’s all there, he said. If you get it, no explanation is necessary, if you don’t, no explanation will suffice. Arthur’s method of conversing was always to make one feel like a particularly backward student taking an exam he was expected to fail, and in his late seventies this ability had not deserted him, nor had its capacity to annoy me. So I studied the photograph with a certain amount of irritation. First the dress. Something J.F. (Arthur always referred to his father as “J.F.,” never “Moe,” Moe the diminutive for Moses, last name Frankel—Moe, Moses, and Frankel all too déclassé for Arthur) had Edith run up, Arthur said. His was always a world of familiar first names, and to ask who Edith might be he would consider a lapse in taste. Edith Head, I assumed (correctly), who had personally designed Blue Tyler’s wardrobe in all the pictures she made for Cosmo. A black wool jersey with puff sleeves, its Empire waist gathered below the bosom with a velvet cord. Edith ran it up that day, Arthur said, from scratch, no excuses, forget the cost, J.F.’s orders. It’s only a dress, I said. You don’t get it, he said. Then two strands of natural pearls around the neck. Black gloves, over which she wore, on her left wrist, a diamond bracelet, and on her right a diamond watch. Dark hair in a bun, and a small hat with a point d’esprit veil. Rather elaborate, I said. Even the underwear was new, he said. Even the girdle. Who would know? I said. That was the point, he said. What point? I said. He did not answer.

  Her head was thrown back, her long swan neck smooth as marble, and she was laughing, mouth open, eyes sparkling, her right hand barely touching Arthur French’s left shoulder. Arthur was smiling, listening, the ever-attentive escort, the dauphin, I understood now, the perfect first husband. She was nineteen, he thirty-two, and she educated by life in ways Hollywood’s laws of primogeniture had not prepared him for. That at least I did intuit. There seemed to be no one else on the Ciro’s dance floor. In the background, what appeared to be apparitions were on closer inspection two other diners watching from a ringside table. Arthur identified them: J. F. French and Lilo, both toasting the young couple with champagne flutes.

  Sitting shiva, I said.

  For a way of life, Arthur said.

  There was a sadness about Arthur that made me hesitate to ask him further about Blue, or Melba, as I could only think of her as, and of some of the things she had told me. I thought I would wait for another time, as if time, for Arthur, was an infinite resource.

  Blue Tyler never made another picture for Cosmopolitan.

  She never made another picture in Hollywood.

  She went to Europe.

  She was forgotten.

  She came home.

  She vanished.

  VIII

  Now imagine the voice. The vaginal voice:

  That goddamn voice. I don’t have an uvula, that’s why I sound the way I do. An uvula. Not a vulva. I had one of them, all right. Still do. And I don’t mean are you interested. Or then again, maybe I do. All right, all right, take a joke, will you? Lighten up. Uvula. The thing that hangs down in the back of your throat. Like a nipple in heat. I lost mine. A fucked-up tonsillectomy. Studio doctor. Lou Lerner, M.D. Kept his job on the lot because he supplied morphine to all the heavy hitters. Plus he did all the abortions. Two of mine. The first when I was fourteen, and is that a story. Not now. Maybe not ever. Too many skeletons I don’t want to rattle in too many closets. Anyway. He crapped up my tonsillectomy. So I couldn’t hold pitch or any of that musical bullshit. I just had to invent a sound. Vibrato was what they called it. Sounded okay to me, so I went along with it. I hadn’t even had my first period yet, shit, I was only six years old, for Christ’s sake, and already I was sounding like some boozed-up diesel dyke with fifty years of bad liquor and cheap cigars.

  Got me in a whole lot of trouble, this voice, Melba Mae Toolate said. I didn’t even have pussy hair, and still everyone thought I was a dyke. Not my style. I tried once or twice. Hell, I suppose I’d still give it a whirl, the opportunity ever arises, but just to keep warm at night. I like dykes, they’re fun. You ever heard of Frenchy Ray? She was in the line at the Latin Quarter that time I was in New York, when was that, after I came back from Italy, I think, I’ll get to Italy later, what I remember of it. She named herself after some ballplayer nobody ever heard of, Frenchy. The most beautiful woman in New York. Everyone was fucking her. And giving her cars and apartments and furs and jewels. Men kept women in those days. The thing was, Frenchy fucked more showgirls than all those studs who were fucking her put together. She liked boys when she was sober and girls when she was drunk. Or maybe it was the other way around. I never heard anyone put the knock on her, though, man or woman, so she must’ve been pretty good in the hay. Not that I ever had any personal experience. She had her eye on me, I was still famous, ha, ha, but I just said, I’m easy, Frenchy, but not that easy, and anyway I lost my curiosity about that a long time ago, it’s nice, but not that nice, and she just laughed and said if she had been the first I wouldn’t think that way.

  She finally went out a window, Frenchy. On West End Avenue. Sat in it for a couple of hours, both legs hanging out over the sill, skirt caught up beneath her ass, you could see her garter belt even, except they airbrushed it out of the pictures. The cops tried to talk her back in, they even called me to talk to her, like I was her fucking hair pie girlfriend, and all the times the cops were talking, they were setting up this suicide net on the street, you know, like they do in the circus for the trapeze artists, in case they fall. Then one of the cops, he makes a grab for her, and she dives, or she falls, who knows what the fuck happened, into the net. But the net was stretched too tight, like a trampoline, and when she hits it, she bounces like a basketball, out of the net onto the sidewalk, and breaks her neck. They don’t even run Frenchy’s picture in the Mirror, they run mine, a still from Little Sister Susan, COMMIE CINEMOPPET BLUE TYLER FAILS TO SAVE CHORINE GAL PAL is what the headline says, dyke’s best friend is what they really mean, you read between the lines, just the kind of publicity I needed. You think Winchell didn’t run with that, the miserable fuck, he’s dead, I hear, I hope, cancer of the bowels, I hope, something that really hurt, I hope, made him scream, I hope.

  She paused for breath.

  Listen, I saw you look in my medicine cabinet, you wonder what I’m doing with a box of rubbers, you nosy bastard. Jesus, sex. Arthur told me once, this was before I left L.A. and went to Italy, that was Arthur’s idea, by the way, and I was fucking a lot of people, even for me, and that’s saying something. It was the bad time, I was tapped out, and I was getting worried, and he said to me, Arthur, they’re only going with you because they want to say they slept with Blue Tyler, if I stayed around any longer I’d end up as a call girl. He had a kind of pig sense, Arthur. You know, I never could get him to say the word fuck, even when we were doing it.

  I suppose you really need that tape recorder. It’s funny. There’s so many things around now that weren’t around when I was at Cosmo, and I always had the best when I was at Cosmo, the newest, the latest, every kind of gizmo, but nothing like they have nowadays. Answering machines. Computers. TV sets. Fax machines. VCRs. Tape recorders. I had one once, a tape recorder. What I wanted to do was tape my memoirs. Then I was going to edit them. And get a big fucking best-seller. And go on the TV. With that blonde on Prime Time. The one that looks like Mae West. She’s my favorite. Diane Something. Sawyer. I liked Mae. She was funny. Took a high colonic every day. That’s French for enema. Her big beauty secret. You think Diane takes a high colonic? You think she even remembers me? No one’s heard of me anymore. There’s this impressionist, Rich Little, he used to do me in his act, I heard it one night on Carson, he wasn’t bad. And then I thought what kind of fucking secondhand life in show business is that, doing impre
ssions of people better than you are, and I said fuck that. Do I have the tapes? Yes, they’re around someplace, I think. I think I hocked the tape recorder for vodka money. You know the funny thing? I suppose my voice would’ve got this way even if I had my uvula, because of all the booze.

  What happened? Baby, I just fell off the planet earth. I said that, didn’t I? I tend to repeat myself. When I was five, I really couldn’t read my scripts, so Mr. French had someone read them to me, and I would memorize them that way, repeating them over and over, I always knew the good lines, and “Baby, I fell off the planet earth” is one of them, you ever know Sammy Cahn, is he still around? Give that to Sammy or the Bergmans, they could run with that title, a perfect season, a perfect reason for making whoopee. Drink is what happened. Booze, skag, scumbag men. Flophouses, a nickel a night. Just someplace to collapse. Anyplace. Even jail. Finally a gas station crapper with a spike behind my knee, the only place I could find a vein, I was dead, not dying, D-E-A-D, they put the sheet over my face, I was going to buy the fucking farm in Ypsilanti, Michigan. And then this intern. A young squirt. One of those eastern niggers. Indian. Paki, maybe. One of them, anyway. Keep ’em alive till eight-oh-five. The motto of the emergency room. Squirt didn’t want me to check out on his watch, all that extra paperwork he’d have to do, and his not speaking English all that good. That’s why he gave me that last jolt with the resuscitator. What I’d like to have, what I would really like to have, is that sheet, the one they pulled over my face when they thought I was dead. That’d be a memento, sell it at Sotheby’s, when they auction off my personal effects after I die. Like Judy’s shoes. Me Dorothy, you Toto. You think some fag would like that sheet?