Playland (51 page)

Quelle
melodrama, Chuckie O’Hara said,
quelle dramaturge
. There were all these people milling around, pretending nothing happened. Thank God for Rita. Okay, everyone, the show’s over, she said, like she was a traffic cop, ordering everyone around, go home, get laid, get a drink, tell everyone all about it, it’s an event, like Pearl Harbor, you can tell people you were here that day. Arthur, you drive Lilo to the emergency room at Mount Sinai, she said, and to Jake, Where do you think you are, back at the social club in Red Hook? Even Blue didn’t get off free. She was up in the house and kept on asking, What could Lilo have said that made him do that? And finally Rita was just fed up to here, and said, You wouldn’t understand, Blue, it wasn’t in the script. And with that, Blue bounces out the door, gets in her car, sideswipes Jake’s Continental, and nearly cracks up on her way out the driveway. And in the middle of all this, Jake had just disappeared. We looked all over the house, and he wasn’t there, and nobody had seen him leave. So Rita pours herself a drink, and she says, You know something, Chuckie, I wished you fucked women, because you’re my type of guy. I would’ve loved being on that island with you. Like I loved being here this afternoon. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

Of course, her day had a postscript.

It was three in the morning when Rita Lewis spotted Jacob King’s smashed Continental on a deserted stretch of Mulholland Drive. Jacob was smoking a cigarette at the edge of the cliff, looking down at the lights of the San Fernando Valley twinkling below. Rita parked and got out of her car.

“What did you tell Lilo?” Jacob said. He was unshaven, his shirt streaked with sweat and dust, and he looked exhausted.

“I didn’t have to tell him anything. Lilo’s not used to getting beat up at a croquet game. So he takes two Seconal, two shots of Scotch to calm him down, and he’s out until morning. If I’m lucky, he doesn’t wake up, and he remembers me in his will.”

Jacob laughed. The laugh he had when he was on top of the world, Rita Lewis thought.

“What you don’t understand about Blue and Lilo, Jake, is they’re going to go to each other’s funerals,” Rita said. “This is a community here. All these people today, they all belong to it. Everybody there, except for you and me. Their kids marry each other. One of them dies, they all show up to sit shiva. Except it’s with drinks, and Virginia ham, and everybody doing a little business, and Barry Tyger talking about the stuff dreams are made of. You don’t understand that.”

Jacob did not reply for a moment. “I need a favor, Rita.”

“How much do you want?”

“How do you know it’s money.”

“You’re not the first guy to ask me for money, Jake. Someone calls me at three o’clock in the morning, says to meet him out here, this godforsaken place, and then says he needs a favor, I can figure it out. How much?”

“Seventy-five grand.”

A low whistle escaped from Rita Lewis’s lips. “Why?”

“Nobody’s been paid at Playland. I thought we’d be finished by now, everything would be all right.” He took a deep breath. “The suppliers said no more deliveries effective Monday morning. Jackie says the crews wouldn’t report for work.”

“And that’s what the fight with Lilo was about?”

“Among other things,” Jacob said. He did not elaborate and knew Rita would not ask what the other things were. In any event, Lilo would probably tell her what he had said about him and what he had said about Blue. Lilo always had the last word. “So I wrote out a personal check this afternoon, rented a plane, and flew it over. I wasn’t on the ground more than ten minutes. I don’t have the money, Rita. I need you to cover it until I can talk to Morris. If it bounces, then it’s all over.”

Rita leaned against the car and wondered if she could count the lights below, wondered in how many of those houses people were fucking at that very second. “Why not?” she said after a moment. “It’s my retirement money, Jake. For that time in my life when I have to buy myself a beachboy.”

“I’m good for it, Rita.”

“One thing. Your girlfriend. She turn you down?”

“I didn’t ask her.”

“Why?”

Jacob hesitated. Rita knew the answer even before he spoke. As far as he had traveled, as far as he wanted to go, it was only with people like her and Eddie Binhoff that he would ever feel really at home.

“I don’t know her long enough, Rita,” Jacob King said.

T
hat was Saturday.

By Sunday morning, Lilo Kusack already had his lines out.

Jacob was supposed to have lunch at Hillcrest with Shelley Flynn, and he arrived on the dot at twelve-thirty, having decided it was best to pretend nothing had happened yesterday, it was an altercation that would be quickly forgotten and no score kept. At the desk, he was told that Mr. Flynn had just called and said he would be unavailable for lunch, and no, there was no further message, and so Jacob went into the bar and ordered a Tanqueray Gibson straight up. There were only a few people present, but no one looked up, and no one said hello. Barry, he greeted Rabbi Baruch Tyger, but Barry Tyger looked through him as if he was not there, Barry Tyger to whom in a gin game four days earlier he had fed cards that made him a seven-thousand-dollar winner. He had just taken a handful of salted peanuts when a waiter said that the resident manager wished to see Mr. King, could he come with him to the resident manager’s office. Jacob signaled for a chit to sign, but the bartender shook his head, and busied himself washing glasses, while the waiter hovered close to his elbow until he finished his drink. It reminded
Jacob of the way cops tried to box you in when they came to arrest you.

The resident manager’s name was Nathan Krakower, and for a moment Jacob wondered if he was perhaps kin to Hyman Krakower, alias Pittsburgh Pat Muldoon, who came to such an untimely end in Sheepshead Bay the winter of 1933. Probably not. Nathan Krakower did not favor Pat Muldoon, and he was so nervous his voice threatened to break. The membership committee, Nathan Krakower informed Jacob King, had recently rewritten the articles in the club by-laws relevant to guest memberships. They were no longer open-ended, and so Mr. King would have to surrender his guest card, and while he would of course be welcome if he came to the club with an accredited member, he unfortunately had exceeded the number of guest visits allowable under the new rules, which were retroactive and included the period of his guest membership. As he handed over his guest card, Jacob said he understood the difficulty of Mr. Krakower’s position, and that he had handled the matter with the tact and delicacy he had come to expect from the members and staff at Hillcrest.

There was one further item, Mr. Krakower said, and by now he was visibly perspiring. Some members, and he was not at liberty to name them, had asked for assurances that no harm would come either to the membership, the staff, or the club facilities as a result of this action.

It was then that Jacob King laughed.

Lilo also contacted Hedda Hopper. On Monday, her column in the
Times
began: “This editorial is dedicated to all those Hollywood stars who try to play with fire, particularly Blue Tyler. Blue, you first won America’s heart as a four-year-old cinemoppet, and all your dreams should have come true by now …”

As it happened, Chuckie O’Hara was shooting wardrobe and makeup tests for
Broadway Babe
with Blue that Monday morning, even though the rewrite on the script was still not finished
and the score only half written. Her eyes were all puffy, as if she had been crying all weekend, but when Chuckie asked if she had seen Jacob she told him to mind his own fucking fairy business. Everyone on the set had seen Hedda’s column, and as Blue slumped at the makeup table, her hairdresser was reading it to her.

“ ‘… dreams should have come true by now. You have youth and beauty …’ ”

“C.C.,” Blue said to her makeup man, “I have a zit on my nose, fix it.”

“As soon as I finish with the bags under your eyes, sweet,” C.C. said.

“ ‘… and fame and jewels,’ ” Gavin, her hairdresser, continued. “ ‘You have an army of adoring fans. You have studio scion Arthur French begging you to set the date. But let’s talk frankly, Blue. Some Hollywood insiders are saying …’ ”

“Gavin, did you talk to that cunt?” Blue said irritably.

“Hedda doesn’t talk to us little people, you know that, Blue,” Gavin said. He continued to read. “ ‘… insiders are saying your current flame is out, out, out. Blue, your fans beg you, don’t persist on a romance that only means trouble, with a capital
T
. You’re more royal than any king.’ Well, does she have a nerve. ‘More royal than any king.’ C.C., is that what they call a veiled reference?” Gavin put down the paper and examined Blue in the mirror, appraising the makeup. “You need … something.”

“What I need is a good fuck, and you and C.C. don’t fill the bill,” Blue said.

I saw him first, Chuckie said. It was supposed to be a closed set, and I’d heard that J.F. had barred him from the lot. I don’t know how he got on, maybe the studio police were afraid they’d get shot, but then they’d worked with him when he broke Benny Draper, and they liked him. Anyway, there he was, stepping over the cables and the stacked lumber until he got to the edge of the set. Blue was doing left profile, right profile, hitting
her marks, it was uncanny, she never missed a mark in all the pictures I did with her. He didn’t say a word. I think it was the first time Jake realized she had a working life that no matter what happened would always exclude him. Then she saw him. Mr. Trouble with a capital
T
. Chuckie, she said, will you please ask that gentleman to move, he’s in my eyeline.

The cunt of the eon, but a star. All right everyone, I said, take five.