Playland Page 8

  All this is by way of saying, however defensively, that the cult of Blue Tyler was one of which I was only vaguely aware, and I paid no more attention to it, and to the cinéastes who worshiped at its altar, than I did to the cult of Jerry Lewis that the French in all their perversity have perpetuated. For me, Blue Tyler was only an occasional presence lingering on my TV screen for a second or so in those many predawn hours when I scrolled through the channels with my remote, searching for a sedative movie to relieve my chronic insomnia, something talky without too much movement or fancy cutting that might delay sleep. If asked before I met her, before (God help me) I studied her pictures in an editing room (I can tell you now that in her famous—sweet Jesus Christ, even I am succumbing to the fatuous vocabulary of the cinéaste—Haitian fire dance with Shelley Flynn and Chocolate Walker Franklin in Carioca Carnival, there were 177 separate setups), if asked, I repeat, what she looked like, I would have been hard put to give an answer. Shirley Temple I could describe: moon face, a ringlet of curls, the pouty lower lip when she cried, the nauseating smile she directed at Bill “Bojangles” Robinson as she tapped, tapped, tapped. Margaret O’Brien: the eyes. Natalie Wood: harder, because one remembers her better as a grown-up in pictures in which the screenplay actually called for her to get poked, little Marjorie Morgenstern with a bagel in the oven.

  Of Blue Tyler, all I remembered, the first thing anyone remembered, was the voice, the voice that even when she was six and eight and ten and a stranger to the indulgence she later never tried to resist was a voice that carried the hint of too many cigarettes and too much booze and too many late nights and too many dark erotic liaisons. A vaginal voice. Husky, inviting, a midget Dietrich, a dwarf Tallulah. “Butch Blue,” Bob Hope called her the first time she appeared on his radio show when she was five, and Butch Blue she remained through all her subsequent appearances on the show, Butch Blue Tyler playing the Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart parts in Hope’s parodies of their movies, once on a holiday broadcast even singing bass to Bing Crosby’s baritone in a “White Christmas” duet. Hers was an aberrant attraction, I realize now, a pedophile’s nocturnal emission. She was Eve not just before the apple, but before puberty, a siren at six, the child who would come to no good, erotic catnip to those who would despoil her: to all of us.

  Consider now the photographs. The hundreds I saw of the thousands that I suppose were taken—studio candids mostly—on the set, in the schoolroom, at leisure, a documentation of a child growing up that was so total and so false, evoking not so much truth as the generic truth of the celebrity machine. Publicity was the oil of the star system, the way by which an ordinary little girl could be lent, even in her ablutions, even feeding the Labrador puppy it turned out she never actually had (called Chocolate in the caption, after Chocolate Walker Franklin), a quality of transcendence that touched even the ordinary with the shimmer of possibilities, of what might be. There were entire (and in many cases entirely manufactured) social and political histories in these photographs and in the press releases scotch-taped to the back of each one. By demonological scrutiny one could discern shifting alliances, hidden agendas, secret vanities, new hierarchies. Take for example Melba Mae Toolate at age four, with Shelley Flynn and Chocolate Walker Franklin, democracy in action the subtext of that simple time. And in this less simple time a different subtext: the realization that those blacks who crossed over in show business during the 1930s all seemed to have names like Chocolate or Bojangles or Butterfly, subservient names, nigger names, to put an uglier (and truer) handle on it, that defined their relationship to the whites with whom they performed, and who, at least in the publicity handouts, named their house pets after them. Melba Mae in that photograph (stamped on the back PROPERTY OF COSMOPOLITAN PICTURES), selected at an open dance call on Cosmo’s Stage 17 by J. F. French himself, according to the text on the back of the photo, mogul of moguls, founder of Cosmopolitan, 1934’s Humanitarian of the Year (again according to the caption), Entertainment Industry Division, National Conference of Christians and Jews. It was J. F. French, the release said, who came up with the name Blue Tyler, after his wife’s favorite color (his wife, or to be more accurate, his then-current wife, the former silent screen vamp Chloe Quarles), and after the tenth president of the United States, John Tyler, with whom J. F. French said he felt a special bond as they shared the same August 4 birthday (although later, when I checked, I discovered that John Tyler’s birthday was actually March 29). Blue Tyler. Or Baby Blue Tyler, as many tried to call her. A name she hated. Fuck you, she would say to fan magazine reporters who called her Baby Blue. Fuck you in the eyeball. She was then six.

  A Little-Known Fact: Did you know that John Tyler had fifteen children? I asked Melba Mae Toolate.

  Stupid fuck, she had answered. And then: Who’s John Tyler?

  PROPERTY OF COSMOPOLITAN PICTURES: a perfect description, because that is exactly what Blue Tyler was. Her mother in effect was pensioned off by the studio, given a position in something called Special Projects that kept her, as a press release said, “on the go,” although where she was on the go to was never specified. If she appeared in the photographs at all, it was only as a shadowy figure in the background, sometimes identified, more often not, and easily cropped out. On official studio occasions, Chloe Quarles assumed the maternal role, or the senior character actress in whatever picture Blue was then starring in. Her upbringing was entrusted to governesses hired by and loyal to Cosmopolitan Pictures. Did your mother live with you? I asked. More than once. A series of questions over the days we were together. She answered or she did not answer, depending on her mood. Sometimes she was evasive, sometimes truculent, sometimes she offered a story to some other point, with the answer I was seeking buried deep within it, often an untruth. The questions, the answers, the evasions, the lies became in time a seamless piece. And so again, a second, a ninth, a forty-fourth time: Did your mother live with you? Of course. Another time, another answer: She lived in the guest house. Question: Where did Chloe Quarles fit in? (A leading question, of course, from intonations I had picked up.) Answer: She was a dyke, Mr. French did not like her around me too much. (Confirming the intonations.) I had the sense of a household out of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, run by machines and service personnel. There was a maid, Esmeralda, a would-be actress and cousin of Chocolate Walker Franklin (democracy in action again), and Madame. Who was Madame? All the governesses, it seemed, were called Madame. For fear of kidnappers, her house was never photographed; the rooms that appeared in magazine layouts were always dressed sets on a soundstage. Sometimes the Pacific was the featured backdrop, sometimes the Santa Monica Mountains, sometimes a ranch in the San Fernando Valley, the exteriors blue-screen process shots superimposed on the windows, the magic of motion pictures. Her mother’s absence from these photo spreads was covered by the assertion that Irma Tyler (her contract with the studio stipulated that she too abandon the name Toolate) did not wish to “capitalize” on her daughter’s fame, that being the mother of such a loving and talented child was reward enough. Question: What happened to Irma Tyler? And again: What ever happened to your mother? Blue was vague. Answer: She cut out.

  When?

  I was fifteen, I think.

  Did you ever see her again?

  She died.

  How?

  In a car crash.

  Who told you she died?

  I don’t know.

  Who?

  I can’t remember.

  Who?

  Mr. French. The publicity department.

  In fact, her mother was not her mother at all.

  Or might not have been.

  Or in all likelihood wasn’t.

  Or so Blue claimed. Indirectly. Her voice on a tape. The tapes she said she made when she decided it was time to do her autobiography. (“To do” is the operative infinitive in this kind of enterprise, never “to write.”) The autobiography is an inclination that all has-been movie stars have. Another grab at the brass ring. Youth recaptured
and old scores settled on talk shows and in newspaper Style sections.

  Arthur French gave me the tape and let me dupe it. The son of J. F. French. Son as in the son also rises. Old Hollywood joke. The man Hedda Hopper had said Blue was “dating.” The man Louella Parsons said was her “intended.” A “woosome twosome,” Winchell said. “The Son and the Star,” the fan magazines said. “Setting the date,” Jimmy Fidler said. Arthur and I went back a long time. By the time Arthur gave me the tape, I had already talked to him about Blue several times at his ranch in Arizona, trips undertaken when I had more knowledge than I cared to impart but needed him to fill in some of the blanks, although I knew how difficult a task debriefing him would be. He had not mentioned the tape during those visits. He mentioned it only later, when I was talking to him at Willingham, his father’s preposterously named and preposterously huge estate on lower Angelo Drive in Beverly Hills. The tape, he said, had turned up in his mail one day. No note. No identification. No return address. Just the voice on the tape. That unmistakable voice.

  This is what was on the tape, beginning to end:

  “That was the night Jack Rabbitt called me a son of a bitch. I told him I couldn’t be a son of a bitch because I was a daughter. Smart talk like that. If he wanted to call me a name, then call me a daughter of a bitch. And I want to tell you one thing and not two things. I was the daughter of a bitch. The lady who gave birth to me was fifteen when I was born. I say ‘the lady who gave birth to me’ because I never saw her. She dropped me like an animal does, then she sold me to Irma for a bus ticket out of town. Irma said the bus ticket was to Chicago, but I think she was just trying to get me off the scent in case I ever wanted to go look for the lady who gave birth to me. Fat chance is what I said to that idea. Irma was my mother, if you call being a mother raising you. That’s what Irma did. Irma was a waitress out there in that pisshole in the desert, and I guess with tips and all she could scare up the cost of a bus ticket to Chicago. Or Cleveland or Milwaukee or Atlanta or wherever it was that lady who gave birth to me took off to. She wanted a kid, Irma, without having to fuck to get it.

  “Now to Jack Rabbitt. Of course Rabbitt wasn’t his real name. I’m not even sure that Jack was. He just said he was Jack, and that whole summer he wouldn’t tell me his last name, so I just called him Jack Rabbitt, with two t’s, like it was a real name, and not just a carrot eater.

  “That Jack, he was a pistol. At least I didn’t marry him. Or I don’t think I did.”

  It just appeared, this tape? I asked Arthur French. We were walking through the orchid house at Willingham. J. F. French had been dead for years, but Arthur still maintained Willingham despite the rarity of his trips to Los Angeles from Arizona, where he had lived for as long as I had known him. It was a mansion built at a time when mansions were mansions, with a nine-hole golf course and ponds that had been dug and aerated, with swans swimming in them, and entire English gardens imported from the Wiltshire countryside to bake and wither in the subtropical sun, only to be replaced again the next season. Arthur kept a skeleton staff of housekeepers and gardeners on duty, down from the nearly two dozen servants his father had terrorized when he was alive, and when Arthur showed up, always on short notice, there were fresh flowers in all the vases and phalaenopsis plants in the master bedroom and the linen was starched and the crystal and the china and the silver sparkled. There was no reason for Arthur to keep the place. He could have sold it or given it to a school and saved the prodigious upkeep and the equally prodigious taxes, but I think he just liked the pointless extravagance of it, and the way this pointless extravagance seemed to irritate people.

  It was a pattern, Arthur French said. Through the years. She was always sending me things.

  What sort of things?

  Things. Newspaper clippings. Walker Franklin’s obituary. Chloe’s retrospective at the Biarritz Film Festival. Shelley Flynn getting married again. Things like that.

  And you always knew they were from her? Even with no return address?

  Of course. Who else would be interested in clippings about people nobody else knew. Or remembered. Or cared about. She knew I’d remember.

  (He was equivocating. You had to wait Arthur out. Approach him from a different direction. Come back at a later time. And at a time after that, and after that time, too. Wait until he was ready to tell you, until he knew what he was going to find out in return. And as he was keeping things from me, I of course was keeping things from him. Darker things. Things Melba Mae Toolate had intimated in Hamtramck, other things she had said straight out, perhaps true, perhaps not, perhaps true only in part. The problem was how to find out what to believe and what not to believe. Arthur knew I was equivocating, as I knew he was. Our discourse was like poker. Lose one hand, play the next. The trick was not to show your hole card. Arthur enjoyed the game more than I did, but then for Arthur, life was a game for which he seemed to have the only copy of the rulebook.)

  Who is Jack Rabbitt? I said.

  He shrugged. Never heard of him.

  Never?

  Maybe he was somebody she fucked. That wasn’t all that unusual with her. She didn’t even know his name. That wasn’t unusual either.

  Is it true, the tape?

  After a fashion. It jibes with things we knew.

  Like what?

  Irma wasn’t her mother, we knew that.

  How?

  The studio was not without resources, Jack. (With that high irony Arthur often affected. Meaning, or at least implying, that the studio owned, or, more precisely, rented, if not the police department then individual officers in it, who, with at least the tacit approval of superiors who would share in the payoff, could bring the intimidating powers of their organization to bear.) There was no birth certificate. One day Irma didn’t have a child, the next day she did. We found that out. We couldn’t send her packing. So J.F. just put her under contract. In return for which she had to answer certain questions about where Blue came from. And agree to certain stipulations.

  How did Irma really die?

  An auto accident.

  Really?

  She drove off a cliff. In the hills up behind San Diego.

  Was it really an accident?

  We didn’t kill her, Jack, if that’s what you’re getting at. (This was Arthur in his ironic mode, when certain words and certain phrases in every sentence appeared to be italicized.) The studio might try to cover up a murder, but we never ordered one. We did have certain standards.

  Then it wasn’t an accident?

  It was made to appear that way.

  The studio not being without resources.

  If you have resources, you use them. That’s why they’re called resources.

  Thank you, Arthur. For explaining that to me. Anyway. The hills behind San Diego …

  The mother of a child star is not supposed to commit suicide. It looks bad. Especially when the child star has a picture ready for release.

  Why did she do it?

  I suppose her contract was not going to be renewed. Her usefulness was more or less at an end. Or maybe she had just had it. It happens. Anyway, finding a surrogate guardian was never any problem.

  Because Cosmopolitan Pictures was her real mother and father?

  Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Jack. But yes, the studio was her family. I bet Blue would agree with that even today.

  Who was Toolate?

  Irma’s ex-husband, as near as we could figure. Long gone by the time Melba Mae appeared on the scene.

  Gone where?

  I’m sure I don’t know.

  In prison?

  A possibility.

  Did he ever show up?

  (Carefully): Over the years a number of people showed up claiming to have some kinship with Blue. The legal department handled all the claims.

  You’re a cool customer, Arthur.

  Yes.

  Blue usually claimed that she had lost the tapes. Or then again that she was keeping them in a safe place. Mad money, she w
ould say. My little annuity.

  A nice way to say extortion money.

  That she still thought there were people around that she might be able to blackmail is evidence, I suppose, of how far off life’s radar screen she had wandered.

  V

  Her every public move was recorded on camera (and many of her private ones, too, as a star of her magnitude was always expected to be on public display, a condition written into the boilerplate of her contract). Here a photo of Baby Blue Tyler at age six being taught by a studio stunt coordinator how to climb trees at Cosmopolitan’s ranch in the San Fernando Valley. There a photo of Blue at age ten receiving from Clark Gable that special Oscar at the 1939 Academy Awards. Another of Blue giving Eleanor Roosevelt a contribution to the March of Dimes on behalf of the Motion Picture Producers Association. Blue with Bronx Bomber Joe DiMaggio and Brown Bomber Joe Louis. Blue with the French Fillies, the chorus line that appeared in all of Cosmopolitan’s musicals, each Filly personally selected by J. F. French himself (the better the head the Filly candidate gave Mr. French in her job interview, Chuckie O’Hara would tell me later, the better her chances for selection). Blue with Congressman Martin Dies, chairman of the Un-American Activities Committee, and Blue with Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. With Harold Arlen and Irving Berlin, “both penning Tyler songfests,” according to the caption. Blue being comforted by Norma Shearer outside the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, where she was “the youngest mourner at the funeral of Beloved Industry Legend Irving Thalberg.” Blue in January 1942, weeping at the news that Carole Lombard’s plane had crashed in Table Rock, Nevada, outside Las Vegas, killing everyone on board. “Blue Misses Fatal Flight,” read the caption headline. “Teen Tot had been on bond-selling tour with late star and good friend Carole Lombard. Strep throat canceled homecoming flight, saved life.” And Blue, now fourteen, at Cosmo’s Little Red Schoolhouse with fellow student Meta Dierdorf, described in the caption as a “non-pro,” and “further proof that Cosmo wants its most priceless asset to meet with people from all segments of society, and not just those associated with the Motion Picture Industry.” Blue reading Little Women with Meta Dierdorf, and at the blackboard with her, solving algebra problems. Blue and Meta Dierdorf serving doughnuts and coffee to soldiers and sailors at Hollywood’s Stage Door Canteen. Meta Dierdorf then disappears from Blue Tyler’s pictorial and print biography until three weeks before the end of the war: