Dreams Bigger Than the Night (29 page)

They ate at a small restaurant on Sunset Boulevard—salmon and a salad. When Jean mentioned Longie, Jay asked her not to tell him they had dined together. His request seemed to flatter her. She wanted to pay for the meal, but he wouldn’t hear of it. They drove in Jean’s red Cadillac to Miss Astor’s Toluca Lake mansion, where she retreated each night after court. A tired, wan Mary greeted them in the living room, with the lake glistening beyond huge windows. There they sat among the great thick rugs and luxuriant pillows, soft lights, and profusion of indoor plants, including an ornamental monkey-puzzle tree that reached to her cathedral ceiling, comforted by the knowledge that the great iron gate and the solemn night watchman would combine to restrain the reporters camped outside her house.

“I love this place,” she said. “It’s everything that the Quincy and Chicago apartments were not, the holes where I grew up. Did you know,” she said aimlessly, “I once placed second in a beauty contest to Clara Bow. The ‘It’ girl had more to show physically, and I more mentally.”

At first Jay thought her comment strangely self-serving, but soon realized that she had a first-rate mind, even if she was emotionally immature. Jean and Mary, like two teenagers, giggled and joked, sometimes at Mary’s expense. When the subject migrated to the diary, she rued Dr. Thorpe’s confiscating it and the descriptions of men easily identified. Otherwise, she felt perfectly satisfied that her diary had served her well as a faithful confidante.

Jay specifically asked her about George S. Kaufman, who held center stage in the “thrill omnibus.” With admirable candor or foolish indiscretion, Mary told them a part of the story surrounding their affair, beginning with the breakdown of her marriage.

“The fact that I was in love with George had nothing to do with my wanting a divorce, but of course Franklyn thought it did. The real reason was I didn’t love Franklyn anymore. I was unhappy and bored with him, and I didn’t think one should live with a person feeling that way.”

Jay could feel the pain of this troubled woman; her loneliness and need for love palpably filled the room. To break the tension, he pointed to the monkey-puzzle tree. “That’s some tree. I’ve seen only one other like it. Did you grow it yourself?”

“No, my current gardener installed it. He’s very good.”

She returned to her memories of George. “We had rapturous moments, delicious, sublime. We’d sing at the piano and talk about books and shows. The great bane of modern life, boredom, never assailed me when I was with him.”

Jean, who had been unusually quiet, said rather too crassly, “Love ’em and leave
’em. That’s Jean’s motto.” She shifted the gum in her mouth and added, “Well, it’s all over now.”

Mary replied heatedly, “Not until I have Marylyn
and
the diary!”

Jay could understand her desire to have her daughter legally assigned to her, but it seemed a little late to worry about the diary. “Just words,” said Jean, with a wave of her hand.

“Franklyn has his own reasons for taking the diary,” Mary said cryptically.

On the way back to Jean’s house, Jay started to wonder. The doctor had a wide practice among Hollywood stars, not as a psychiatrist or therapist, but as a surgeon and gynecologist. According to rumor, Jean’s numerous affairs, as well as those of other actresses, had led to several abortions. Had Mary used a code to identify these people? If Thorpe had performed illegal operations, Jay could understand why the doctor would want the diary.

Certainly he couldn’t ask Jean. When they returned to her place, she reminded him that at Longie’s party he had agreed to play poker with her in Los Angeles and insisted that he honor his word. In an upstairs sitting room she had a table laid out with cards and chips, as if, like Miss Havisham, she was waiting for the suitor’s return. They played well into the night, and Jay had the feeling that he might have been able to share more than her card table if he had stayed on; but he wanted to return to the courtroom before other reporters grabbed the best seats in the jury box and he was forced to sit at a distance.

He kissed Jean goodnight and promised to return in a few days to take her to dinner and then to the Trocadero. She said wistfully:

“Longie and Jean used to go there.”

Outside Jean’s house, the silver moonlight had miraculously turned the lawns blue, and the sky, vibrant with stars, seemed just one dream away from descending and, like the arms of Arietta, embracing him with astral brilliance.

On two hours of sleep, he attended the next day’s court session. Miss Astor gave him a radiant smile and sat down next to her attorney. Garbed attractively in a dazzling white ensemble of sharkskin silk, she also wore a sheer brown blouse, a tan felt hat adorned with an orange-tinted feather, white sandals, tan stockings, and brown gloves. A jeweled brooch shone at her throat.

Some of the quotations from Mary’s diary that had appeared in the physician’s affidavit charging her with “continuous gross, immoral conduct,” the ones she deemed forgeries, now surfaced.

“Once George lays down his glasses, he is
quite
a different man. His powers of recuperation are amazing, and we made love all night long. . . . It all worked perfectly, and we shared our fourth climax at dawn. . . .

“We saw every show in town, had grand fun together and went frequently to Seventy-Third Street where he fucked the living daylights out of me. . . .

“Was any woman ever happier? It seems that George is just hard all the time. . . . I don’t see how he does it, he is perfect.”

When Kaufman came to Los Angeles, she saw him at his hotel.

“Monday I went to the Beverly Wilshire . . . he tore out of his pajamas and I never was undressed by anyone so fast in all my life. Later we went to Vendome for lunch, to a stationer’s shop . . . then back to the hotel. It was raining and lovely. It was wonderful to fuck the entire sweet afternoon away . . . I left about six o’clock.”

Shortly thereafter, Kaufman and Moss Hart went to Palm Springs. Miss Astor followed.

“Ah, desert nights—with George’s body plunging into mine, naked under the stars . . .”

Judge Knight issued a subpoena for George S. Kaufman.

At the conclusion of that day’s testimony, Jay migrated to a diner a few blocks away and sat over an egg bagel—the owner claimed never to have heard of a water bagel—and a bad facsimile of coffee. During the courtroom proceedings, when the questions and answers had begun to beat a repetitive tattoo and Jay’s mind wandered, the word “current” kept surfacing in his head, until it lodged there like a splinter demanding attention. As he dunked his bagel in the virtually tasteless liquid, he suddenly remembered the context: Miss Astor saying, “My current gardener.” Her use of the word “current” had to mean that the gardener now caring for her grounds had replaced someone else. How recently? He could hardly wait for the next day.

As Miss Astor passed down the aisle to take a seat next to her attorney, she again threw him a smile. Dressed in a simply tailored navy blue taffeta tunic dress, accented by a single diamond brooch, and a broad-brimmed matching hat, she lent a touch of relief to the severity of her outfit with white gloves and purse. Her shoes were of black suede and her sheer silken stockings of sunburn tan. Jay smiled back and, before the judge arrived, leaned out of his first-row seat in the jury box and asked an attendant to hand Miss Astor a note. It read: “What is the name of your current gardener and when does he come to your house?” She took a small gold fountain pen from her purse, unscrewed the cap, scribbled on the paper, and handed it back to the attendant. She had written: “Piero Magliocco, every day.”

Called to the stand and asked about the trip to New York when she first met Kaufman, Mary prefaced her answer with some comments about her marriage having begun at that period to fail. She dabbed her eyes with a lacy handkerchief and explained:

“I felt as though I had been in a foreign country and had suddenly found people who spoke my language. I met Edna Ferber and Moss Hart and Alec Woollcott and Oscar Levant. I went to a small gathering where people hung around the piano and listened to a new score that George Gershwin was playing for them; it was a new concept of opera and was to be known as
Porgy and Bess
. I felt that I was accepted easily and without question; I liked their ideas and opinions and points of view.”

For nine days, the spectators hung avidly and silently on every detail that dealt with life as most of the spectators had never lived it—a Bohemian world of orchidaceous ladies and artistic gentlemen. Rumors circulated that, behind the scenes, pressure was building for Judge Knight to conclude the proceedings. Apparently, Will Hays and the Legion of Decency had appealed to studio executives to immediately stop further hearings of the case, with its “spicy testimony and scandalous mention of big film names.” On the last day, Judge Knight summoned the lawyers to his chambers, where they deliberated on a settlement. When the judge and the lawyers emerged, their smiles betokened an agreement.

“Baby Marylyn Thorpe,” the judge declared, “will remain with Miss Astor during the school months of the year, except for weekends, and with Dr. Franklyn Thorpe during the summer and vacation periods, except for Christmas and Easter, which she will share with both parents. The child’s teachers, nurses, and governesses will be selected by mutual consent, and the cost of the child’s upkeep will be shared as the court may direct. As for the diary, its final disposition will rest with the court, for the nonce to be placed in a vault assigned to County Treasurer Roger Byrum. By stipulation, it will be made available again only if the custody case is reopened at some future date.”

Mary retreated at once to her Toluca Lake mansion, where numerous friends, including Jean Harlow and Jay, celebrated her self-declared victory. He had hoped to catch a glimpse of Mr. Magliocco, gardener, at Mary’s house, but they arrived too late. At some point during the celebration, Jay asked her if he might stroll through her garden. She told him to feel free to “perambulate” wherever he wished. As he wandered toward the garden shed, he wondered where—in which safe-deposit box, in which hands, in which bonfire of the vanities—the million-dollar diary would end up.

The shed revealed nothing unusual, except a stack of torn papers in one corner that he assumed Mr. M. used for repotting and planting. All of them treated the same subject: the recent polio cases in the city. Her faithful gardener had collected information on recent advances in the treatment of the disease and on prevention; perhaps his training as a priest had left him with pastoral sympathies. At the house, Jay inquired discreetly of the maid which kind of vehicle Mr. M. drove.

“A ratty old truck.”

Trying to appear indifferent, he laughed and said, “I suppose Miss Astor has him park it in the garage lest he offend the neighbors.”

“Oh, no,” she replied, “he leaves it on the street. Miss Astor’s garage is always full up with cars.”

Friday, around midafternoon, August 14, the day that he had decided to trail Mr. M. to his house, Jay left his hotel, leisurely drove west on Wilshire Boulevard, turned north on La Brea, passed Hollywood High School, and turned west on Sunset. The ritzy women with large brimmed beribboned straw hats mixed with vagrants scrounging through trash bins and picking up cigarette butts from the street: two separate worlds, living side by side, utterly oblivious to the other. Across the street from Schwab’s Drugstore, he turned north into Laurel Canyon, the heat immediately abating as he drove under the canopy of sycamores and through the wooded retreat of the rich, whose homes, snuggled into the hillsides and twisted streets, looked like outcroppings of brilliant ore. The view of the San Fernando Valley from the top of the canyon had attracted a few painters sitting at easels. Across the valley floor, the fruit groves stretched north to the San Bernardino Mountains and as far east as the eye could see. He saw irrigation ditches and farmhouses, and at the foot of the canyon that ribbon of activity, Ventura Boulevard.

As he came down the north side of the canyon, he had to stop at one point for several deer crossing the road. The creek near the bottom, shielded by oak trees and heavy brush, still trickled water, even though the heat had sent thousands to the beaches. As he approached Ventura Boulevard, he noticed that on both sides of the canyon road large homes were being built, catering to the tastes of those in the movie colony who eschewed Beverly Hills and Bel Air for the sylvan and bucolic San Fernando Valley.

He took Laurel Canyon north to Riverside Drive and turned east to Toluca Lake. Mr. M.’s Ford truck stood outside Mary’s house. Parking down the street, he glanced at his watch: four o’clock. He waited for over an hour before Mr. M. appeared, wearing overalls and a straw hat. Throwing some shrubs onto the flat bed, Piero drove off in a cloud of blue smoke that issued from his exhaust pipe, suggesting that the vehicle badly needed a ring job. Jay followed him north to Magnolia Boulevard and then west. Keeping another car between them, Jay more than once had to run a stop signal to keep him in sight. At the corner of Laurel and Magnolia, Mr. M. went into a pharmacy and disappeared for a few minutes, returning to drive south on Laurel just a few blocks to Hesby, then turning east for two blocks, and, halfway down the street, parking alongside another car in the driveway of a one-story, Spanish-looking house with red ceramic roof tiles. Jay gathered that most of the houses on the north side of Hesby had gardens that ran right through to the next street, Otsego. Continuing around the corner, he stopped at the boundary of the garden. Father and daughter had found themselves a nice place, and the garden, which Jay assumed Piero tended, had been planted with walnut and orange and lemon trees. Rows of yellow and pink rosebushes, gardenias, camellias, and a trellis of wisteria snaked across the landscape. A fountain with water continually seeping from a raised font proved an irresistible lure for birds, flapping their wings and happily chattering.

Coming back around the block, Jay discovered that the car had departed, leaving only Mr. M.’s Ford truck. All his instincts told him to see Arietta when Mr. M. was gone from the house; he therefore chose to wait through the weekend, until her father had returned to work on the Monday. In the meantime, he could entertain himself with Jean Harlow, who had suggested that he ring her on Sunday about noon. A voice, older than and different from Jean’s, answered the phone. Her mother, as he quickly discovered, had come to the house to nurse her daughter, who had complained of a fever. Had Jay not lingered for a moment to ask if he could lend some assistance, Jean wouldn’t have picked up the extension phone and recognized his voice.