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  BLUE’S TRAGEDY

  NON-PRO CLASSMATE FOUND STRANGLED IN TUB

  NO CLUES

  The murder was never solved. According to the newspapers, Meta Dierdorf was an “oil heiress.” Her mother had died of puerperal fever after a second child was stillborn, and her father was said to be an “independent oil operator” who had been in Bahrain on a field exploration when his daughter was suffocated in her bathtub by someone who had crammed four inches of what the newspapers said was a Turkish towel down her throat. The day of her murder, Meta Dierdorf had attended, in her capacity as a hostess at the Stage Door Canteen, a publicity luncheon given by Chloe Quarles at Willingham for a contingent of U.S. Marines billeted at the Naval Auxiliary Shore Station in San Pedro. The marines had been assigned as extras to a military musical comedy Cosmopolitan Pictures and J. F. French were preparing called Ready, Aim, Fire. The Cosmopolitan publicity department said that J. F. French had not been present at the luncheon, that the event was part of his former wife’s continuing and valuable contribution to the war effort, that he had never met any of the lovely young hostesses, and that he had been in script conferences all that day so that his personal production of Ready, Aim, Fire, starring Shelley Flynn, Chocolate Walker Franklin, and the French Fillies, would be the great success that everyone at Cosmopolitan knew it would be. It was further added that a percentage of the studio’s profits would be given to the Army-Navy Relief Fund, that J. F. French himself and all the studio’s employees mourned Miss Dierdorf, and that in her name Cosmopolitan would make a cash donation to the Stage Door Canteen.

  The largesse of Cosmopolitan Pictures was forgotten the next day when the Express reported that shortly before she was strangled Meta Dierdorf had “engaged in an act of intimacy.” It was the kind of delicate construction indulged in by newspapers of the period, one inviting all kinds of prurient speculation, especially in the studio commissaries, with fellatio leading the morning line. According to Chuckie O’Hara, now medically discharged from the Marines and newly back at the studio with his prosthetic leg, the story in the Cosmo executive dining room, via the studio police, was that homicide investigators had discovered several used rubbers in a bedroom wastebasket and that the medical examiner had also found evidence of semen both in the victim’s mouth and on the tile floor next to the toilet.

  In an effort to protect the image of his number-one star, J. F. French refused to let Blue attend Meta Dierdorf’s funeral, at the same time killing a release from Cosmo’s publicity department saying that America’s number-four box office attraction (and top-ranked actress) was too grief-stricken to make an appearance, and then fired the studio’s publicity director for allowing the item to appear in some early editions. Chuckie O’Hara said that J.F. did not want Blue’s name associated in any way with the crime, nor even to have it further reported that she and Meta Dierdorf had gone to school together, let alone that the studio had picked Meta Dierdorf to be Blue’s best friend, it being bad enough in his view that Chloe Quarles had invited the little cunt to the luncheon at Willingham. If the mother of a cinemoppet is not supposed to have committed suicide, neither is that cinemoppet supposed to have a best friend naked in a bathtub with come in her mouth and a towel shoved down her throat. It was to change the focus that J. F. French called upon his long friendship with Hugh Cardinal Danaher, ordinary of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles, with whom he was associated in a number of anti-Communist crusades, and arranged for Blue to represent Cosmopolitan Pictures at an armed forces mass at St. Basil’s Cathedral the day Meta Dierdorf was buried, a mass celebrated by the cardinal himself. In the next morning’s newspapers, there were front-page photographs of Blue and His Eminence on the steps of St. Basil’s, she in a white linen dress and a widebrimmed blue straw hat, carrying a white missal (the missal from the Cosmo property department, Chuckie said, as she had never been baptized in any denomination). But of course Life magazine’s picture researchers remembered the published studio photographs of Blue with Meta Dierdorf, and after that the publicity department’s effort became an exercise in damage control.

  Blue Tyler was not questioned officially, although in the presence of her lawyer, Lilo Kusack, she did have an informal conversation with a homicide detective named Spellacy (“Subject was forthcoming but could add nothing pertinent to the investigation”) that went unreported in the local press, and that I only discovered years later when I had an opportunity to examine the Dierdorf case file. As I grew to anticipate, and to appreciate, the better I came to know him, Chuckie O’Hara had the raciest footnote to the Dierdorf affair, as he was present at a studio meeting between Lilo Kusack and J. F. French about the matter. (The reason he happened to be in J.F.’s office, Chuckie said, was to go over a list of pictures he might direct now that his discharge was final, and to discuss whether his having only one leg would preclude his doing a certain kind of outdoor film that he did not wish to do anyway, the soundstage being where he was most in his element). Why he was not asked to leave when Lilo was ushered into the office he never bothered to explain (nor in truth did I ask), but whether accurate in every detail or not, his story did have the virtue of verisimilitude (at least insofar as it pertained to my own experience in the Industry, and my knowledge, however secondhand, of the behavior of the principals), and it also indicated the milieu in which Blue had grown up, and whose values she had taken as her own.

  “We can’t have our little girl friendly with someone who gives blow jobs on the crapper,” J. F. French said in the O’Hara version.

  “Moe,” Lilo Kusack said, “Moe” being the name that only his closest associates were allowed to call J. F. French, “Blue is famous for, uh …”

  “Never on the crapper,” J. F. French shouted. “I swear on my mother’s grave, Blue has never sucked anyone off on the crapper.”

  There was one last headline about the Meta Dierdorf murder, an example of damage control Cosmopolitan Pictures-style, as it applied to Blue Tyler:

  BLUE OFFERS REWARD

  IN SLAYING OF BEST SCHOOLFRIEND

  COSMOPOLITAN PICTURES WILL MATCH OFFER

  As it happened, the banner headline across the front page that day was:

  B-29 DROPS SUPERBOMB ON JAP CITY IN PEARL HARBOR PAYBACK NIPS TALK SURRENDER

  To J. F. French and Cosmopolitan Pictures, the dawn of the atomic age had the entirely satisfying side effect of driving the murder of Meta Dierdorf and her putative friendship with Blue Tyler out of the newspapers.

  With the war over, there were more headlines, better publicity. BLUE INKS RECORD MULTI-PIC PACT MAKING HER HIGHEST-PAID STAR IN COSMO GALAXY, and with the story a photograph of Blue on Soundstage 27 with J. F. French and (in captionese) “Blue’s steady flame, Producer Arthur French,” as she “prepares for new song-and-dance role in Red River Rosie, with former Marine war hero Charlton (‘Chuckie’) O’Hara, who has megged three Tyler hits for Cosmo, behind the camera.” And a photo of Blue standing under the American flag in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel delivering the Pledge of Allegiance at 1947’s “I Am an American Day” dinner, “where Hollywood pledged to stand four-square against the forces of Communism.” A photo of Blue in a box at Santa Anita with “Millionaire Sportsman Jacob King.” And at the Grauman’s Chinese opening of Red River Rosie, again with “Millionaire Sportsman and Man About Town Jacob King.” Then the high point: the cover and an eight-page layout in Life, the story leading off with a bleed double truck of Blue, almost twenty, sitting at the huge oval teak table in the conference room at the William Morris Agency, surrounded by her retainers—the lawyers and agents and publicists and accountants and managers and financial planners dedicated to her professional care and feeding. BLUE PLOTS CROSSOVER CAREER MOVES, read the headline. And the subheads: FORMER MOPPET SEEKS ADULT ROLES. THE WORLD HER OYSTER.

  A tainted oyster, it turned out.

  I still have a copy of that conference-room photograph pinned to the bulletin board in my office. It was one of the three I kept, of a
ll the hundreds I looked at, as if in those three photographs I would find the secret of Blue Tyler that for so long eluded me.

  It was as if she was not meant to grow up.

  “Naughty, naughty, Blue Tyler’s hips were hiccuping at the Mocambo with J. F. French’s lad Arthur … they’re that way, they say, but ukiddinme? We hear she’s only fit for a king.” Winchell, of course, antennae quivering.

  Fit for a king.

  Specifically Jacob King. Born Yakov Kinovsky, Red Hook (Brooklyn), 1907. Playboy. Man About Town. Millionaire Sportsman. Hotel Investor. Polo. Tennis. Yachtsman. A man who collected headlines. DENIES MOB LINKS … ACQUITTED … NOT CHARGED … NOT UNDER INVESTIGATION … PLANS NEVADA HOTEL EMPIRE … WILL PRODUCE TYLER WESTERN, OTHER PIX … DENIES HOTEL OPENING POSTPONED … “JUST FRIENDS,” BLUE SAYS … “ONLY BUSINESS ASSOCIATES,” KING SAYS.

  Then:

  KING SLAIN

  MOBSTER GUNNED DOWN IN NEVADA SHOWPLACE

  MANY THEORIES, NO CLUES

  VI

  There have been two indifferent cut-and-paste biographies of Jacob King written over the years, the tone of each reflecting the national infatuation with the underworld and its more marketable citizens. Both books are a collage of the same old clips and the same old police files and booking sheets and court transcripts, the same unsubstantiated accusations, the same slipping memories and inductive leaps and fanciful conjectures. The films about Jacob King, in which his character appeared either pseudonymously or under his own name (or to be more precise the Americanization of his own name), were no less inventive. Usually he was portrayed in one of two conflicting ways, the low-budget version being Jacob as a murdering, sexually impotent hood, impotence that all-purpose motivation in bad movies, cut-rate filmmakers (and upmarket ones as well) never having understood that motivation is a terrible explanation of character. Then there is the big-budget version, with Jacob as tragic romantic hero trying to go straight and grab a legitimate slice of the American dream, but unable, or perhaps unwilling, to cut the umbilical cord tying him to his violent past. Whatever the medium, whatever the perverse alchemy of fact, factoid, and fantasy, Jacob King was always perceived as larger than life, a criminal of many parts.

  It is instructive here to examine the criminal passport of Jacob King, preserved in the archives of the New York Police Department, and on microfilm as well at the United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, D.C. 20537, the result of a 1949 federal investigation into the circumstances of his death, and of the 1951 Kefauver hearings on the world of organized crime. In the dull abbreviations of police bureaucrats, Jacob King’s yellow sheet, as it is more familiarly called, shows the stopovers he made as he traveled the world of crime, absent the romantic filter through which his actions were later viewed. I quote at random:

  PD, NY, NY Yakov Kinovsky 6/18/24 PC 1897 #1 Fel assault #2 PL dangerous weapon 9/12/23 Complaint withdrawn and dismissed.

  PD, NY, NY Yakov Kinovsky aka Jacob King 7/27/25 poss bookmaking records, usury 12/12/26 Case dism.

  Two entries, of interest primarily in that sometime between the ages of sixteen and eighteen Yakov Kinovsky decided that his personality and his success in the criminal calling warranted his Americanizing his name to Jacob King. K-I-N-G. Four letters that would fit neatly into the tabloid headlines he would later court so assiduously. K-I-N-G. Even in his teens Yakov Kinovsky already considered himself the stuff of criminal royalty.

  PD, NY, NY Jacob King (Yakov Kinovsky) 11/12/30 aslt 2d degree; poss of loaded revolver 3/18/31 Complaint withdrawn.

  PD, NY, NY Jacob King 8/19/31 Aslt WITC Murder 1st, Kidnapping, Extortion 3/2/36 Case dism. (insuff. evidence).

  There were a number of other arrests for assault with intent to commit murder in the first degree, and in every instance the result was “Case dism. (insuff. evidence),” Jacob King’s reputation over the years inducing a passion for discretion among those in a position to testify against him. Only once did he ever go to trial in a capital case, on the charge of “Mrdr 1st,” and the disposition (1/6/47) was “not glty. by jury,” a verdict Jacob King owed largely to the fact that while he was in custody at the Tombs, remanded there without bond throughout the investigation and trial (the only time he was ever incarcerated for a sustained period), the state’s two leading witnesses were murdered, the first blown apart by a bomb delivered in a Christmas poinsettia, the second shot to death as he was evacuating his bowels in a men’s room stall at Sunnyside Arena in Queens during a preliminary four-rounder the night Lulu Constantino won his twenty-ninth consecutive featherweight fight against Lefty Lew Mann in the main event.

  As a record of mayhem, Jacob King’s rap sheet was not all that more evocative than those of more run-of-the-mill thugs. What made him distinctive was the spur-of-the-moment inventiveness with which his forays into criminal violence were said, if only on the basis of hearsay, to have been conducted. In the case of Jacob King, “aslt w/dang. wpn” could mean severing the victim’s fingers from his left hand with a hammer and chisel (“complaint w/drwn, case dism., 6/26/39”), or wrapping another victim in duct tape until he suffocated and died (“case dism., insuff evidence, 5/25/42”). Such was his fame as time wore on that all the more esoteric crimes of violence throughout the five boroughs began to be ascribed to him, alibis notwithstanding, even when Walter Winchell would vouch that Jacob King was at Hialeah the day Vincente Crociata was thrown off the Williamsburg Bridge, even when Damon Runyon would attest that Jacob King was sitting in the press box at Briggs Stadium in Detroit (Yanks over the Tigers, 6–5, two homers by Hank Greenberg) the day Leo Spain’s tongue was cut out in the laundry room of a whorehouse on Fort Washington Avenue in upper Manhattan. It did not matter. In the city rooms and the police shacks, he had become a man to whom stories attached, like lint to a cheap suit, and in the world in which he had chosen to travel, being known as a man of spontaneous violent invention only enhanced his criminal pedigree.

  Murder, the skill at which Jacob King was said to be most proficient, has an almost sexual appeal, and sexual undertones ripple through the descriptions of the more heinous of his alleged homicides. Here, in Jake—A Gangster’s Story, is how the murder of a small-time hoodlum named Pittsburgh Pat Muldoon is described:

  Pittsburgh Pat Muldoon never knew what hit him. That’s what a gunsel’s dum dum does. One shot, and one shot only, is all it takes. Jake’s shot hit Pat Muldoon just above and to the right of his left nipple. Moving like a jet fighter, the projectile tore through flesh and lungs and cartilage, destroying tissue and shattering bones and ribs. So close was Jake to Pittsburgh Pat when he fired that flakes of unburned gunpowder were forced through Muldoon’s expensive maroon silk jacket, charring the skin and making a tattoo pattern around the edges of the entrance wound.

  Pat Muldoon had less than a minute to live. Jake’s slug crunched through the sternum, bored through both lobes of the left lung, veered down through the left ventricle of Pittsburgh Pat’s ticker, and then tore out his back, fracturing his seventh rib. The path of the bullet created a wound channel, and for a fraction of a second, the walls of the wound channel were stretched like a rubber band, displacing the heart muscles, the valves and chambers, forming a cavity the size of an orange in Pat Muldoon’s heart. The heart continued to pump, squirting blood from the bullet holes in the heart wall, filling the pericardium and pouring into the chest cavity itself, at a rate of about five quarts a minute.

  There was, however, no pressure to carry blood through the aorta and the network of arteries to Pat Muldoon’s brain. No blood, no oxygen. No oxygen, no working body cells. The veins collapsed. Electricity and neuromuscular activity stopped.

  Pittsburgh Pat Muldoon died.

  It was Jake King’s seventh hit.

  Or his ninth. Or his fourteenth. That Jacob King was never charged with the murder of the unfortunate Pittsburgh Pat Muldoon (who was born Hyman Krakower on Staten Island and who had, to the best of anyone’s memory, never been to P
ittsburgh) and that there were no witnesses to the crime were quibbles easily overridden by city editors with deadlines to meet and headlines to write. There was speculation, and there was an autopsy report whose dry medicalese lent bogus authenticity to the speculation. Even this was not enough. “This is for being a rat and a fink,” Jacob King is reported to have said when he shot Pittsburgh Pat Muldoon that dark December night in Brighton Beach, in the borough of Brooklyn, in the city of New York, although Pat Muldoon was not available to testify as to the accuracy of the last words he is supposed to have heard, his corpse having been dropped into New York Harbor lashed to a pinball machine to weigh it down, and punctured with an ice pick to let its air and body gases dissipate, further discouraging flotation, with the result that it did not surface until the spring solstice, and then with its face and all other identifying features having been worn away by its season in the roiling winter waters of Sheepshead Bay. Even his pecker had fallen off, a source of great good humor in the press shack, his shriveled dingdong, it was said, a tasty hors d’oeuvre for a bluefish with delicate taste buds, another footnote in the continuing legend of Jacob King.