Playland (62 page)
There was a chatty quality about the letters, as if she had just finished talking to her correspondent on the telephone and wanted to add a few things she had forgotten to say, so there was no need for any sort of preamble or identification of the players. I tried to sort them chronologically, but since the year was not included in the date, it was often difficult. If the order seems haphazard, so too was her life.
Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,
You’re 21 today, the same age as I was when you were born, and you might be wondering why I never got in touch with you before this, but that was because it was part of the deal, I couldn’t try to contact you, or write you or anything. But now you’re 21, the age of consent (and is that a laugh, my age of consent was 13), and you can come looking for me if you want. You’ll have to get it out of Arthur, but he won’t tell you, and the guy called Max won’t either. So let me give you a little background. I was a big movie star one time, the biggest in the Industry, and then I got pregnant and wanted to have you. It wasn’t done in those days, look at what happened to Ingrid when she got knocked up by that wop, a word I’m not supposed to say today, but that’s what he was, an Italian guy. I got
pregnant the first time when I was 14 (I hope that doesn’t make you think I’m some kind of slut or something, I was just mad at some guy, I don’t want to say who or why, and it was by this other guy, the first guy would’ve killed me if he found out), and the second time when I was 17, that was an accident. I was doing tea with an actor who was a pretty big star at the studio (not as BIG as me), I was in a couple of pictures with him, and he was always billed after me, below the title, I was always above, it was in my contract, and I wasn’t careful, and, well, you know. Lou Lerner took care of me both times. Lilo fixed it, he had something on Lou, now he had something on me. With you it was different, I just knew I wasn’t going to let Lou Lerner near me. It caused a real big stink, this was after Chuckie and all that stuff in Washington. I mean, I had to agree to give you up, I was a star, and like I said, look what happened to Ingrid. I never even saw you, it was done by what they call a C-section, and I was out with the anesthesia, and when I woke up, you were gone, I never knew who you went to, Arthur said Jimmy took care of that, he said he didn’t even know who you went to, but you never know when Arthur is telling the truth or not. I’ll finish this tomorrow.
She did not finish the next day.
Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,
It’s no big deal, not having a mother, I never did either, you get right down to it. I had a bunch of governesses and shit, and Irma, who bought me for a bus ticket (get Arthur to tell you that story, it’s a doozie), she was OK, Irma, Mr. French just didn’t like to have her around, she made him nervous, and then there was Chloe who was a dyke. What I’m trying to say is this, I didn’t have a mother either, and
I turned out OK, Clark Gable gave me an Oscar one year, I never liked Clark, I told him once you could bunk in his ears, they were so big, and he didn’t like it much. It was Carole Lombard I liked.
The letter ended there.
Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,
The thing about being a movie star is that you never really had any friends, because people my own age weren’t as famous as I was or as rich, and so I couldn’t hang around with them, Mr. French didn’t like it. So there I was like seven years old, pretending Bob Hope was my best friend. Meta at the studio school was different. She was like me, not as famous, but alone a lot of the time, living by herself with maids and stuff, and by her wits, Arthur said, the state should step in and take care of her, put her up for adoption like you were. He was such a pill sometimes. Arthur said her father was a confidence man, I didn’t know what that was at the time, but I do now. Arthur wanted to get rid of her at the studio school, he said her father was the type who would cause trouble one day, but by that time Moe had latched on to her, and Moe liked her to come up to his office, and Arthur was in the service (big war hero making movies, and living at home at Willingham, it wasn’t like Chuckie in the USMC getting shot at), so he wasn’t around to make that much of a stink. That was how me and Meta became such friends, we had this secret about Moe we shared together. She was funny about Moe. He had this secret entrance to his office so no one’d know he was seeing someone, and he’d be dressed up in boots and riding breeches when she went up there. Me and Meta tried it a couple of times, but she wasn’t that way, and I guess I wasn’t either, we just liked each other. She let me use her place to meet people, that was another secret
we had together. I took a picture of her nude when she was 15 or 16 yrs old, real arty, and she was going to take one of me, but she never got around to it, and then she got bumped off. Moe wouldn’t let me go to her funeral, I had to go to some Catholic church instead. To tell the truth, I thought Moe might have done it, but he was at a preview of
January, February
in Santa Barbara that night, and everyone stayed over at the Biltmore. The picture was a real piece of shit, Alan Shay directed it, and Moe said that was when he knew Alan was a Commie. I think of Meta a lot. She used to call me Vide, and I’d call her Plein (figure that out, you’re my daughter, so you can’t be some dumbbell) or Doc, after her initials. When I left L.A., I found the picture of her, and I had a lot of copies made, I didn’t want to lose any, because she was my best friend, after Arthur.
Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,
I had better years than this last one. I got married again, to Teddy someone, I can’t remember his last name, because we were only married one day when he died, my seventh husband, I think. The way he died was after we got married we went to this baseball game at Tiger Stadium, front row in the second deck, and we got a pretty good buzz on with beer and some joints Teddy had. Then someone named Jason something hits a home run, and Teddy gets to cheering so hard he fell out of the stands into what they call the bullpen. The fall killed him. I just got out of there. I’d only known him a day or two, I don’t know why we got married, we just did, so it wasn’t like I was all broken up, we never even did it married. I landed in Ypsilanti, with the rest of Teddy’s stash, and I got busted. In all those years I never called Arthur, not once, that was the deal, but that time I did, I thought it was all over, I was at the end of my rope, what with my husband dying one day and me getting busted the next, and Arthur said he’d take
care of it. He got hold of the guy called Max, Max was a lawyer, he said, and Max must’ve done something, because I was let go without bond, and then the charges were dropped, and that’s when I moved to Pontiac. So what do you think of your old mother now?
From Maury Ahearne:
On September 14, 1979, during a game between the Tigers and the Cleveland Indians at Tiger Stadium in Detroit, a fan fell out of the upper deck into the visitors’ bullpen after a grand slam home run by Tiger first baseman Jason Thompson. The fan, subsequently identified as Eduardo Burke, address unknown, suffered massive internal injuries and was pronounced dead on arrival at Immaculate Conception Hospital. Toxicological tests administered during Eduardo Burke’s autopsy indicated that the levels of alcohol in his system exceeded the legal definition of drunkenness, and there were also indications of extensive use of cannabis. The body of Eduardo Burke went unclaimed, even though there was a wedding license in his pocket, listing his intended wife as Melba Mae Tyler. A check of the Wayne County Hall of Records showed that Eduardo Burke and Melba Mae Tyler were married by a city magistrate on the day of his fatal accident. It was the seventh marriage recorded for Mrs. Burke. The Detroit Police Department had an outstanding bench warrant calling for the arrest of Eduardo Burke because of his failure to appear in superior court on the charge of selling illegal controlled substances.
Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,
Arthur told me once that Jacob’s death was a kind of peace offering. A ritual sacrifice, he said. I don’t know what that means either. It was Jimmy’s way of telling Lilo, Arthur said, it’s over, let’s get on with the peace. I never told Jacob about me and Meta. I would have, I suppose, but then he was this ritual sacrifice thing.
Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,
To think I have a daughter 30 yrs old today. It makes me feel a hundred. I’ve been clean for two weeks now. Not bad for a 50 yr old broad. Or an old 50 yr broad. I think your father was Jacob, but it could’ve been Arthur. I never saw you, if I saw you I could say which one you favored, Jacob was so beautiful. I hope it was Jacob. Of all the men I knew at that time of my life, he was the only one didn’t treat me like some kind of prize puppy, I was real to him. I mean, I know he liked me because I was a movie star, everyone did except Meta, but he really liked me because I was me. Lilo said I would’ve dumped him sooner or later, it was the way of the world. Lilo was such a shit. You know something Jacob did? This was when we first began going out. He seemed to know he wasn’t going to live long, even then before the bad shit happened, and he bought himself a plot at the Westwood mortuary. That was where he wanted to be buried, with all the movie stars and stuff. I thought it was creepy, buying a plot in a graveyard, that and the way he said he wanted a big marble gravestone, from Italy, he said. Arthur said the trouble with Jake was he wanted to be one of the goyim, and I said Arthur, there’s no goyim in the Industry, and Arthur said, the Industry invented the goyim. I think about that a lot.
Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,
It may be your birthday, but I got a nice present today. I went to the bank this morning, and the ass’t manager, he said my semimonthly deposit check had been upped from $500 to $750, and what was I going to do with all that money, put it in a T-bill, he called it, and I said it was none of his fucking business. I wanted to call my benefactor, but I am not supposed to know who he is, but if you are interested, his father’s real name is Moses.
Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,
This year’s been kind of a blank.
Happy birthday, wherever you are now,
God, I hate being 60. It’s ten years worse than being 50.
Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,
I didn’t even know that Rita’d died until I read Lilo’s obituary. “Once the consort of Rita Lewis, Mob bag lady,” is what the obit said. I wish Lilo’d been alive to read that. It would’ve given him a heart attack. The thing is, I got to like Rita in the end. Her and Chuckie. Outcasts of the islands is what Chuckie called us. What islands, I said. I watched her testify on TV. Some old fart senator was giving her a hard time, and she was just laughing at him. I was with this guy, he was an A.D. for Henry Hathaway, and we were watching Rita and doing it, and watching and doing it, and he called me Miss Tyler all the way through it, a first for me. The guys I have known. There was this movie star, I can’t say his name, he’s still alive, he got the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award a couple of years ago, and when he was with me, all he could do was jerk off. He had this little bitty thing, about the size of a lipstick, he didn’t have much to play with. Your old mom shouldn’t be telling you this stuff, but all I do about sex these days is think about it. You ever think about me? I think about you all the time. I wonder if you’re famous, like I was. I look at magazines all the time, looking for someone looks like me or Jacob, or maybe me and Arthur, although the thing about Arthur was, he was so careful, he always wore something, even when I said it was all right, I was wearing my diaphragm. If I got knocked up, it wasn’t that he was worried about marrying me, it was that I would miss a start date, and the
whole Cosmo schedule would be postponed, it was always the studio first with Arthur. I knew I was taking a chance with Jacob, but it was a chance I wanted to take. I used to think if I had to tell you who your father was, I would say it was Arthur, even if he wasn’t, because not everyone would want Jacob King as a father. I said to him once have you ever killed anyone, and he nodded, and I said more than one, and he nodded, and I said more than thirty, and he shook his head, and I said more than twenty, and he shook his head, and I said more than ten, and he didn’t move, so I guess it was somewhere between ten and twenty people, if you can believe him. Arthur said Jacob once put out someone’s eye with a blowtorch, but Jacob said he had never done that. The truth is, I think Arthur liked to hear about all those people Jacob did, because I think Arthur might have liked to do it once, just to see what it was like, and I think the one he wanted to do it to was Moe.
Happy birthday, baby, wherever you are now,
You’d be 42 this year, twice as old as I was when I had you, and if you’ve learned one thing by now you’ve learned that all men are snakes …
I wondered why she had not taken the letters with her. I can only think now it was because she left her trailer in such a hurry after Maury Ahearne broke into it, and had forgotten that she had hidden them behind the medicine cabinet.