Hollywood Ending (6 page)

She put her pen down and adjusted her glasses. ‘Hilda, I find your fascination with murder a little disconcerting. This is a very sad and horrific crime.'

‘But you said it was gang-related.'

‘So?'

‘So then he probably had it coming.'

‘Life isn't as black-and-white as that, Hilda. It's not fair for you to judge other people when you have no idea what they've been through, the social and economic circumstances they were born into—'

‘All right, you don't have to give me a sermon. I'm not the jury.'

‘Thank God for that.'

‘Anyway, you're the one obsessed with murder, not me. You made a career out of it.'

‘I'm not obsessed with murder, Hilda. I'm helping people.'

‘Come on, just one look—'

I tried to slide one of the case folders away with my finger but Lynette snatched it back.

‘No, Hilda. Trust me when I say you are better off not seeing this.'

I had never viewed any of Lynette's case files. She kept them under lock and key, never once made the mistake of accidentally leaving one out. Did she have any idea what I had access to on the internet?

‘You're probably right,' I said. ‘Wouldn't want to warp me now, would we?'

I was halfway out of the room when Lynette spoke again. ‘You know, we could feed a third-world country with the amount of dinners I've made for you and you've never eaten. It's very wasteful.'

‘I'm not hungry.'

‘And I suppose you got everything you needed at the Connors' house?'

‘No, I'm just not hungry,' I lied, my stomach still full of chocolate chip cookies.

‘Well, I hope you're more grateful to Mrs Connor than you are to me. I'd be very embarrassed if you weren't.'

I went back over to where Lynette was sitting and gave her a kiss on the forehead. ‘Sorry.'

‘Next time call.'

‘Okay!' I yelled over my shoulder as I left the room, taking the milk carton with me.

SIX

John Belushi once said that happiness is not a state you want to be in all the time. I knew what he meant. He was talking about the uncontrollable urge to fuck it all up, the desire to put a knife in the toaster of existence just to see what would happen. To put a bomb under your blessings and watch them blow sky-high, swan-dive off the precipice and give in to the free fall.

Belushi had it all: money, fame, a wife, a home. But he didn't want to live in the safety of these creature comforts. He wanted to exist on the knife's edge, the sharpest point of the blade where you could fall either way, the only guarantee that you will inevitably get cut. He rolled the dice, tossed the coin, shook his tail-feather in the face of death until the reaper lost his sense of humour. The punch line was a big fat speedball to the heart; a massive dose of heroin and coke that left him dead in an expensive hotel room in Los Angeles, bloated and bleeding on freshly laundered linen and thousands of miles from his home.

I sat down at my desk and watched footage on the internet: the old CBS newsreel from the day Belushi died—all grainy and washed-out— posted on a fan's website. A swarm of photographers milled outside Belushi's bungalow at the Chateau Marmont; the coroner, grim-faced, wheeled his body out on a gurney. That famous toga was now a death shroud: a thin, white sheet pulled up over his head in an attempt to give dignity to the unmistakeable girth beneath. For some people this unpleasant image would have been enough, but I wanted more. I wanted to see autopsy photos: the incisions made by the coroner's blade, the thick, careless stitches that left the deceased looking like Frankenstein's monster. But what I wanted to see most was an image from the inner sanctum: the photographs of Belushi lying dead in his hotel bed, his naked body seeping gas and fluid onto the sheets. This was the money shot, the point of impact where life abruptly ended. To see how a celebrity looked at the very moment of passing, that mysterious instant where life just stopped. This was what I lived for.

I checked in at The Celebrity Autopsy Room. The website was run by an anonymous webmaster who called himself
The Coroner
. He had set up a Frequently Asked Questions section to try and impede the flow of disgust levelled his way.
Yes
, he posted,
I can live
with myself. No, I don't know what it's like to lose a loved one, but I'm
sure it's terrible. No, I am not being disrespectful to the dead, if anything
I am preserving their legacy by showing the truth of their final days.
No, I will not post a photograph of myself on the website, as it will only
assist those of you with vigilante justice in mind to track me down and
beat me with a baseball bat, as you have threatened to do so many
times before. Yes, if you have any photos of dead celebrities please send
them to me. No fakes please—after so long in the business, I
can
tell the
difference.

I logged onto the chat room and posted a question asking whether anyone had seen a photograph of John Belushi dead. There were some high profile celebrities who were fortunate enough never to have photographs of their bloated, distended corpses find their way onto the internet. Phil Hartman was one, which I attributed to the fact he was so well liked and no one had the stomach to publish photos of such a likeable guy with his head blown off. Another was Kurt Cobain. Sure, there was that famous shot taken through the window of the greenhouse where Kurt's dead, lifeless leg can clearly be seen, a Converse sneaker on his foot. But actual photographs of his full dead body had never surfaced. I'd read that the impact of the shotgun blew half his head off. I guess it would be difficult to prove that the exploded head was actually Kurt's and not some other unfortunate individual's.

I checked the message board. A couple of people claimed they had seen photographs of Belushi's autopsy on the internet, but when I clicked the links to take me to the photos I was redirected to porn sites. Most people pointed me in the direction of photos of Chris Farley's death, which had been readily available on the internet for years. Chris Farley was a
Saturday Night Live
comedian who wanted to emulate his idol Belushi in any way possible, even if it meant dying like him. Farley died of a drug overdose at the age of thirty-three, exactly the same age Belushi was when he took the speedball that ended his life.

The photos of Chris Farley showed him lying on the floor of his Chicago apartment, his face purple and bloated, a large white bubble coming out of his mouth. The bubble was so solid it looked like a mouth gag, so people often mistook his death for an S & M ritual gone horribly wrong. In reality the white stuff was his stomach coming out of his mouth, pushed up by the toxicity of the drugs. The Coroner's office referred to this as a ‘foam cone'. The photos were good and graphic, but still a distant second to the footage of Belushi's body being wheeled from the Chateau. Belushi was an original that Farley had failed to measure up to, no matter how hard he had tried. Both of their deaths had been sad and pointless.

My room depressed me. Lynette wouldn't let me stick posters up because she didn't want the wallpaper ruined. As a compromise she bought me a corkboard which hung like a lonely blank canvas in the middle of the room. To show I wouldn't be placated I'd never stuck anything on it. Occasionally I'd find a note from Lynette pinned to it, about remembering to do my homework, or wishing me a good day at school, but I always took them down. The only thing she pinned up there that I hadn't thrown away was a recent article about the Manson Family parole hearings she'd cut from a newspaper. I kept that in my drawer, another slice of LA's morbid history.

My own little collection of artefacts wasn't as carefully laid out as Benji's, or as well presented, and I didn't have down lights or even a cabinet, just a single shelf on my wall that once housed Lynette's case files. I picked up my treasures one by one. A jar of dirt from underneath the Hollywood sign, a T-shirt that a guy at a flea-market told me belonged to Karen Carpenter. I carefully handled a single long-stemmed rose that was now all dried and flaky. I'd taken it from Marilyn Monroe's grave. There were hundreds of them there, and it wasn't as if she could enjoy them anyway. I'd grabbed it and run, while the other tourists tutted behind me, some angry lady telling me to stop. But I kept running. It wasn't like they really cared about Marilyn, not the way I did. I figured Marilyn would understand why I did it, and that was all that mattered to me. Everyone else was just a hypocrite.

I picked up a bracelet of tacky plastic beads, all different colours, and put it on. Once it was way too large, and would have hung off my wrist like a hula-hoop, but now it nearly fitted. Mom didn't care that they were cheap and gaudy beads, she just loved the colours: the blues and reds and oranges that danced on her wrist. She didn't care what anyone else thought about her. As long as she was enjoying herself and could live with herself, everything was fine. I wanted to be just the same way. I was never going to let anyone tell me how to live, what I could and couldn't do, what was
acceptable
. I took the bracelet off, placed it gently back on the shelf, and went to bed.

SEVEN

The next morning we once again made our way towards Hollywood. The heat was stifling, the sun blazing like the apocalypse. I wound down the window and breathed in the city air, a familiar mix of smoke and gasoline. Brushfires in the north left a brown haze across the horizon and smoke drifted dreamily over the surrounding hills. We didn't give it a second's thought. Something was always burning in Los Angeles.

I leafed through Benji's copy of
Hollywood Hell
, the pages yellow and well thumbed. It was a pocketbook guide to LA's seedier attractions, offering tourists an alternative to the corporate tourist traps like Disneyland and Universal Studios. Listed in its pages was information on Hollywood's sordid, secret past, with detailed maps to guide the way. There was no listing for Graumann's Chinese Theatre, no directions to Knott's Berry Farm. Instead you could find the location of the Beverly Hills house where Lana Turner's daughter allegedly killed her mother's boyfriend, the infamous standover man Johnny Stompanato. The apartment where the actor from
Seaquest
hung himself. The street where Robert Blake's wife was shot.

We drove to Leimert Park where The Black Dahlia's body was found in 1947. The Black Dahlia was a young actress struggling to make it in Hollywood. She was a transient floating from one lonely part of Los Angeles to the next, hanging out with sailors and letting strange men buy her meals. Her naked body was found in a vacant lot close to the side of the road, severed at the waist and drained of blood. Cigarette burns scarred her breasts, a piece of flesh was carved from her side, and a grin had been slashed into her mouth with a sharp object, most probably a straight razor.

Benji and I got out of the car and stood next to the spot where her body was found. The vacant lot had been replaced by a neat row of family homes; the exact spot where her body had lain was now a driveway. A kid's bike lay on its side on the front lawn, its back wheel spinning slowly in the air. Benji and I stood side by side, entranced. Benji was infatuated with The Black Dahlia. Many were. With her ravishing black hair and full pouting lips, she was the epitome of the untouched innocent destroyed by the evils of Hollywood. Her mysterious death was an obsession Los Angeles couldn't quite shake off.

Benji stared at the spot where her body had been discarded. An old man walked his dog across the road, watching us with suspicion, and the tiny dog started yapping in our direction. He was old enough to know what had happened here, and why two teenagers dressed in black were standing at the side of the road staring at the sidewalk. He could see right through us. The little dog kept yapping and I felt the urge to flee, ashamed that we had roused awful memories on this glorious sunny day. I didn't blame him for being angry. Wherever we went we stirred up memories people had been trying to forget, brought darkness back to what were now nice neighbourhoods. Benji pulled out his camera and took a picture of the sidewalk.

‘Time to go,' I said, the old man and his dog still watching us. Benji took one more photo then reluctantly got back in the car.

‘Did you hear about that new book?' Benji asked as we drove away. ‘Apparently John Huston was involved in The Black Dahlia's murder.'

‘John Huston?'

‘Yeah.'

‘The director of
The Maltese Falcon
?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Father of Angelica and the perpetually underrated Danny?'

‘What's your point?'

‘My point is, every day there is a new book about who killed The Black Dahlia. One day it's an evil abortionist, the next it's some vagrant who burned to death in a hotel room.'

‘But Huston could have done it. You could see it in his eyes. When he was in
Chinatown
he totally freaked me out. That guy is one evil dude.'

‘Benji, he was playing a role in a movie! Do you think Anthony Hopkins really bites people's faces off?'

Benji found a spot of dirt on the dashboard and wiped it off with a wetted finger. ‘All I'm saying is, to play a role like that in
Chinatown
, a guy so evil, and to do it so well, you've gotta have something going on inside. He had it in him. He could have done it.'

‘Yeah, and Christopher Reeve was faster than a speeding bullet in that wheelchair.'

Many of the sites listed in the guidebook were gone, or had been altered forever. Hotels were now car parks. Schwab's Drug Store, where a young composer scribbled ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow' on a napkin while Lana Turner sipped malts in the back booth, was now a strip mall. The last place that James Dean ever lived, a large house in Sherman Oaks, had been renovated until it was unrecognisable.