Dreams Bigger Than the Night (28 page)

Sitting on the ground in front of their tents, they wheezed from the aridity in Needles. Ma miraculously produced a bunch of bananas and offered them some. As they reached for the fruit, out of the darkness came cacophonous sirens, the wailing sound of police cars. A minute later, four state troopers appeared, angrily questioning their intentions in California. The family explained how they had left Oklahoma in the hope of gaining employment as harvesters in the fruit orchards and cotton fields.

“There ain’t no work,” said one trooper.

“You Okies are just shiftless bums,” said a second.

A third brandished a flashlight that he seemed to enjoy shining in their eyes; and a fourth stood to one side watching amusedly while sucking on a toothpick.

When Tom, Ma’s oldest son, defended their right to enter the state, the third man repeatedly shoved his flashlight into Tom’s chest and snarled, “You tellin’ me what I can and can’t tell worthless drifters like you?” The trooper shone the light right in Tom’s eyes and waited for an answer.

The reply came swiftly, but not as the bully expected. Tom grabbed the light and with one swift blow crowned the guy, who dropped like a limp john. In the darkness, his three companions reached for their pistols. Immediately, Tom wrestled one of them to the ground as T and Casy jumped the other two. Curses, blows, and grunts sounded. With all four troopers on the ground, Ma’s other kids weighed in, as did Jay. Somehow, the four police pistols ended up in Jay’s possession. Racing to the river, he hid in the reeds and buried the guns in the mud, keeping his own. In the confusion, Tom and Casy and T also took refuge in the thick tangle of reeds. For several minutes, an eerie silence prevailed, and then they heard gunfire. The troopers had returned to their patrol cars for shotguns, which they trained on the river. When the fusillade ended and the cop cars drove off, Tom and Casy moved further downstream. T, who had hidden next to Jay, still lay face down. Jay tried to rouse him. But T did not respond to his touch. Turning him over, Jay saw blood oozing at the site of the injuries he’d suffered in Cape May and Amarillo. Had a shotgun pellet found its mark and worsened the wounds? Peeking out of T’s hip pocket was the unfinished bottle of Energy Elixir. Jay trickled some into T’s mouth and prayed that it would awaken him; then he pressed his ear to T’s chest, but he failed to detect a heartbeat. Choking with sadness and guilt, he cradled T’s body in his arms and cried unabashedly. Had he not asked T to accompany him to California, his friend would still be alive. Innumerable memories crowded his mind: the deli and the checkers and the Bible debates with Leonora and the drive across country and the places that turned them away and those that invited them in and the Kansas City Monarchs and of course Janice, whom he would have to call to tell about the death of her uncle and to whom Jay would forward T’s belongings. Later that night, by which time Tom and Casy had returned, they buried him in a marshy spot at a bend in the river, and the preacher said a few words over the makeshift grave.

“Death ought to be reserved for the legions of selfish and mean people in charge of this world. Kindly men, like T, deserve to live on, not just in memory but in life, so as we can enjoy their many gifts. Why good people die young remains a mystery. Black or white, the just will stand before the Lord, one color, in His radiant light. And if’n I make it to heaven, the first question I intend askin’ the Lord is ‘How come you don’t rid the world of the bad uns and keep alive the beautiful?’”

On a late afternoon in July, after enduring the dreary expanse of southeastern California, Jay reached a valley of endless fruit and nut groves: apricot, orange, lemon, avocado, and walnut. Los Angeles, indeed, seemed like the City of Angels.

8

The Franklin Arms, a small residential hotel just off Wilshire Boulevard, provided Jay with a splendid view of manicured grass lawns and swaying palm trees. But for the depressing sight of homeless people, he would have thought that he had arrived in Eden. The lush smell of gardenias competed with orange blossoms, suggesting southern corruption and the possibility of all manner of romance. From the mountaintops to the sandy beaches stretched Los Angeles and environs, a fecund land waiting to be ravished. It was said that in this city the impossible could happen.

And indeed, serendipity struck when outside a hardware store, Jay ran into John “Jinx” Cooper, an Englishman who used to buy from Honest Ike and now owned Sierra Powder Puffs on Adams Boulevard. Out of friendship for Jay’s father, Mr. Cooper willingly hired him as a pattern cutter, enabling him to support himself.

The hotel staff, most of them would-be thespians, kept Jay current on the Hollywood gossip and, when word got around that he tipped generously, delivered his groceries. They also arranged for him to have a private telephone so that he could regularly call his mother to ask about the family business, which was entering bankruptcy. At least once a week, he received a call, not from his mother but from someone else. He would be called to the hall telephone, and the feminine voice on the other end would ask, “Jay?” He would reply “Yes,” and the person would hang up. From the accent, he inferred the calls were placed by Francesca Bronzina; and from time to time, he would see in the hotel parking lot a yellow Studebaker, which Longie, during their last conversation, said she’d recently bought to fit in.

Evenings he walked along Wilshire to enjoy the cool night air and the scents of the city. His perambulations led him past the glamorous Ambassador Hotel housing the Coconut Grove, currently hosting Tommy Dorsey’s band and featuring Glenn Miller. They also gave him a chance to reflect on how one goes about finding two people among half a million. His first few weeks in Los Angeles he tried several ploys. He ran an advertisement in three of the local papers asking for help locating two lost friends. He stopped by several government hiring agencies to learn if the Maglioccos had signed on with them. He called the movie studios and asked the same question. He read the newspapers to see if they had run an ad, like so many others, seeking work. He even interviewed a private eye on how to proceed with his search, a fruitless endeavor that cost him a fiver.

Seven weeks passed, and he was still working as a cutter. Then, an opportunity to get back into journalism presented itself at the end of July, when all the local papers were headlining what promised to be a juicy story, the actress Mary Astor’s custody case. Astor’s complaint stated that at the time of her divorce from Dr. Franklyn Thorpe (April 12, 1935), Thorpe had threatened to ruin her screen career unless she agreed to a judgment awarding him their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn. Now, fifteen months later, she was suing for custody and seeking to change the divorce decree to an annulment, claiming that at the time of her marriage to Dr. Thorpe, he had a common-law wife, Lillian Lawton Miles, a comely blonde widow with a saccharine southern accent, named as a codefendant. All the hotel staff buzzed about the case. Within a few days, people were lining up, lunch satchels and knitting bags in hand, to witness the court proceedings. Jay tried to attend one of the sessions to see the lissome Titian-haired beauty in person. He recalled Arietta saying that her mother, Kristina, had once met Miss Astor’s parents in New York and hoped that the link would lure Arietta to the courtroom. Alas, thrill seekers queued the night before to see the trial, and Jay had no hope of gaining entrance unless he wanted to sleep on the sidewalk and wait for the bailiff to open the doors in the morning.

A few days later, however, when the Los Angeles newspapers hinted that Dr. Thorpe’s attorneys might introduce into the trial, as evidence of Astor’s immoral conduct and maternal unfitness, her two-volume diary—reputed to be an illuminating record of her love life before, during, and after her marriage to Dr. Thorpe—it occurred to Jay to call the
Newark Evening News
to ask if they would secure him a press pass and pay him a salary. His editor said the newspaper could get full coverage from the Associated Press, United Press, or International News Service, all of which the
Evening News
had used before. Although Jay knew that star reporters, people like Roger Dakin of the
New York Daily News
and Sheila Graham for the North American Newspaper Association, would be covering the proceedings, he pleaded that he could fashion the story to fit the
Evening News
readership.

The conversation would have ended with a “No” had Jay not mentioned his old friendship with Jean Harlow and his plan to reconnect and induce her to comment on her friend Mary Astor and on what one paper called “the worst case of dynamite ever to reach Hollywood.” The editor agreed and told Jay to include not only Jean’s comments and all the salacious details but also descriptions of Mary’s dresses “for the ladies back home.” For safety’s sake, Jay requested that his name not be used.

Forty-eight hours later, Western Union delivered a money order and credentials. Now he could leave Sierra Powder Puffs and join the other members of the fourth estate behind the heavy oaken courtroom doors and, unlike the milling mob attempting to find seats, take his in the jury box, reserved for the press, ready to streak for a telephone should mention of a name or a situation mean a news flash.

To celebrate Jay’s good fortune, Jinx Cooper took him to the Brown Derby Restaurant for lunch. How Jinx managed to obtain a reservation was a mystery, because a table at the Brown Derby was the hottest seat in town. Jay wore his one summer suit and straw hat. They had a good view of the other diners but not the front door. As they started eating, Jay felt a hand brush his back. Before he could turn, the person swept past him. It was a woman. Her companion followed a few steps behind. When they arrived at their table, she pointed him to a seat that made it impossible for Jay to see his face. But Jay saw hers. It was Francesca Bronzina. During the course of the meal, the man entered the lavatory. On his exit, Jay recognized Rolf Hahne.

So Francesca had finally decided to beard the Nazi. Jay wondered how she had found him. A number of pro-Nazi groups in Los Angeles advertised their meetings. Perhaps they had run into each other at one, where she had passed herself off as a believer in the cause and capitalized on her good looks and acting ability. All Jay could think of was the cobra and the mongoose. Would she be able to stay out of his reach? Or would Jay shortly be reading about a woman’s body found with her throat slit?

On leaving the restaurant, Jay made it a point not to be seen by Cauliflower, dissolving into the crowd waiting at the front to be seated.

Jay’s first day in court, he looked around and saw James Cagney, George Raft, Paulette Goddard, Franchot Tone, Edward G. Robinson, and the bandleader Horace Heidt. Everyone stood when Superior Judge Goodwin “Goody” J. Knight entered. A youthful thin-lipped man with a splayed nose that looked as if he had taken one on the nozzle, he was presiding without benefit of jury, a request agreed to by both parties. Whether or not the judge knew it, all of Hollywood was counting on him to preserve filmland’s reputation.

On Monday, August 3, for the first time, Miss Astor entered the courtroom. Although Jay had seen her in New York City, he couldn’t get over her stunning good looks. A soulful, dark-eyed, ethereal wisp of a woman weighing barely one hundred pounds, she was even more beautiful than he had remembered. Film cameras failed to capture her essence: her gorgeously chiseled, slightly uneven but lovely, cameo-like features, her throaty sensuous voice, her full lips and Titian hair. Whether flanked at a table by her two lawyers (only one of whom spoke), or on the stand, she became the fixed star of the courtroom.

Behind Jay sat the peanut gallery, a vast sea of staring eyes and listening ears, composed mostly of middle-aged and elderly women, who perched in their chairs, wearing their proper hats and holding their paper bags. Their mood decidedly favored Miss Astor, despite Dr. Thorpe’s good looks. Jay gathered they were willing to forgive her indiscretions because of her readiness to risk her career for the custody of her daughter.

The strategy on both sides was the same: to prove the other party morally unfit to care for the child. Marylyn’s nurse, a plain looking bespectacled woman in an ugly frock, approvingly pointed out that Mary kept the child in virtual isolation every summer to protect her from polio. Her view of Dr. Thorpe was less kind. She testified that beautiful women often came to the house to spend the night, and even took breakfast in bed with him the next morning. Miss Astor’s attorney, a roly-poly, round-faced fellow with an unruly shock of curly hair, went so far as to suggest—to the gasps of the courtroom—that Dr. Thorpe entertained more than one woman in bed at the same time.

Dr. Thorpe defended himself against these charges by using his patrician bearing to good effect. A handsome, curly headed, debonair, well-spoken gynecologist and surgeon to the movie stars and other rich women, Thorpe responded through set teeth:

“Untrue . . . all of it untrue. I feel very sorry for Miss Astor that she would allow her hired help and attorney to resort to such slanders. But by doing so, she leaves me no alternative . . .”

The doctor broke off without finishing the sentence, an interruption that left everyone wondering: Did he mean to publish her diary? Not until Miss Astor took the witness stand did the courtroom learn that the two large ledgers, bound in black cloth with bright red edges, resembling a grocer’s account books, had indeed been entered into the trial as Exhibit A. The public and press, though, did not get to see all the pages, covered with Miss Astor’s distinctly feminine handwriting in deep purple ink, but only those that Dr. Thorpe’s attorney, a bald ex–narcotic agent, chose to release. Although she acknowledged that she’d mentioned many men in her diary, she claimed that much of what Dr. Thorpe’s lawyer released was a forgery. Listening to her tearful testimony, Jay was inclined to believe what she entered into the record as her “real diary”:

“Nothing could have been more sincere than my love for Franklyn a short while ago and yet—we are now simply worlds apart. I am not myself with him. Sometimes it’s pretty bad—we don’t think alike; and we’re not interested in any of the same things. All we have to talk about is the doings of the day: some patient of his who won’t pay a bill, the servants, the gardener, the baby, her discipline and cute ways, money matters, the trouble with my family—and that’s all. Franklyn has no sense of humor whatsoever. I like laughter and people and he sits around with them like a bump on a log. He doesn’t know what to discuss, except politics and medicine.”

After meeting the playwright George S. Kaufman, whom she adored immediately, she tried in her diary to make sense of her feelings.

“Does this happen over and over again? Am I going to keep on forever thinking this is it? What the hell is it? And what do I want? First of all I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason for my constant restlessness and dissatisfaction with life in general is because I don’t like to be alone. I’m scared to death of independence, and the result is I’m always tying myself up imagining myself deeply in love with someone I’ve no right to be tied up with.”

All of the people following the trial had the same question in mind: Did she author the racy parts? Perhaps Jean Harlow would know. Jay had promised his editor that he would include Miss Harlow in his reports. Now was the time to call her.

“Do you remember me?”

“Of course Jean remembers you. We played poker together and Jean predicted that one day you’d visit her in Hollywood—and she was right. Come on over. Here’s how you can find her house.”

Directions followed. Jay drove to the leafy Bel Air and Beverly Hills area and eventually located her estate. Jean answered the door wearing a sheer silver shift that offered no more than a nod to the convention of dress. She might just as well have come to the door naked, which he understood she sometimes did. Leading him through the house to the pool, she excused herself. He sat in a padded deck chair and admired the view of the city. Returning a few minutes later with a tray of drinks and noshes, she put it on a white-enameled table, shaded by a green awning, and stretched her gorgeous body on a chaise longue. They drank and reminisced until suddenly she stood up, wriggled out of her shift, and dove into the blue water.

“I don’t have a bathing suit,” Jay said stupidly.

“Neither does Jean.”

Feeling terribly self-conscious, he stripped and cannonballed into the pool trying to cover his nakedness. They swam and splashed each other playfully, until she pulled him up against her body and kissed him with tongue and lips. What he feared most happened: he sprouted an erection. Jean laughed and said:

“There seems to be an eel in the pool.”

Torn between wanting to ravish her and fearing that some mobster would kill him, he exited the pool, took an enormous bath towel from a trolley piled high with them, and wrapped himself up like a mummy.

She returned to the chaise longue and lay undressed, letting the water evaporate off her body in the warm light that had not yet shaded toward evening. He had an urge to lick the drops off her, running his tongue across her perfect alabaster skin and into hidden places. Thank goodness for the bath towel. Once again he was rampant. Forcing himself to focus on her face and not her body, he said that he had been attending the Astor-Thorpe trial and wanted to know what she thought about the discrepancy between the ruminative and the rutting Mary.

She surprised him by responding, “You can ask her yourself. Jean will call her now,” and went into the house, standing naked just inside the open French doors talking on the telephone. He could hear her say, “Fine, we’ll drive over about nine, after we’ve gone out to dinner.”

“Jean will just throw something on and be back in a jiff.” At the door she turned and smiled. “Jean told you that someday we’d dine together. Jean knows these things.”