West of Paradise (2 page)

“Fletcher!” said a short, round man with dreadlocks that appeared to be extensions woven into his hair. He wore Armani glasses, sun lenses attached to their tops and flipped up at the moment to reveal albino eyes, a gray that was eerily translucent. His smile was wide and pointy-toothed, a light film around the enamel and gum line, as if he had not bothered to brush. It seemed to Kate a contemptuousness past confidence, as though he didn't concern himself with other people's sensibilities. He held out his manicured hand to the attorney, the half moons of his nails glowing pale pink, the only part of him that looked really clean.

McCallum ignored the offered hand and pointedly looked away. “Is that any way to treat a client?” the short man said.

“There's a letter in the mail to you, Arthur. The firm will no longer be representing you or your publishing company.”

“For what reason?”

“It's all in the letter.”

“Oh, come on. You can be straight with me.”

“If you insist.” McCallum drew a breath, and the massive jaw seemed to grow. There was a pugnaciousness to it that seemed almost prosthetic, as if he had implanted in his chin a wedge that said, Don't mess with me. Leading with his jaw, McCallum spoke. “Because you're a fraud.”

“That's
slander!
” Even as he said it, Arthur Finster looked exultant at having gotten under such important skin.

“Worse than that, you do it knowing you're a fraud.”

“I think I'll sue.”

“Go ahead.”

“Okay. Will you represent me?” Finster grinned darkly, a troll with luminous eyes, and slipped into a seat a few rows away.

The minister, a former child star now with the liver freckling of age, stepped to the microphone at the podium. Kate had read a facetious article about his getting the call one day on the set of an MGM movie, when the studio still had sets and “more Stars than there are in Heaven.” All that, the piece went on to say, had vanished under the reins and reigns of various incompetents, the prideful motto disappearing along with sections of real estate sold off to the Japanese. Now, the article added, there were few MGM stars who weren't in Heaven, except Katharine Hepburn, and, arguably, those grounded in Forest Lawn.

Even that kind of great Hollywood tradition, the old-time funeral, was apparently over. No one these days would drive, even in limousines, as far as they had for Clark Gable, buried next to Carole Lombard, a gravestone's throw from a private movie theater, one of the prior perks.

There had been no question of Larry Drayco's being interred at Forest Lawn. It was all the head of Marathon Studios had been able to do to cull a respectable crowd for a place this convenient, and then only by promising a lunch afterwards at the new Wolfgang Puck's.

“Friends,” intoned the minister, “we are gathered here this darkly sunlit morning…” The talking subsided. “Friends,” he began again, “we are gathered to honor a most unusual man—”

There was a loud clattering of high heels. Everyone turned. Darkly radiant in black, Helen Manning swept noisily by, like a preened, exotic bird, feathers jutting from a boa drawn around her honey-skinned shoulders. Her phoenix eyes, so labeled by the writer-painter Bunyan Reis in his birthday piece on her in
Life
magazine, glowed amber, a shade darker than her hair. They slanted at angles to the sides of her head, flaring like rebirth from the ashes, as her career, like her many loves, had done. The dress she wore ended just below her knees and looked painted on her body, her remarkable breasts and thighs distinguishable beneath the satiny cling.

The ensemble by Vera Wang, recently featured on the cover of W, was sleekly suitable for daytime, though the glossy raven feathers looked out of place. But whose place was it, this side of Marilyn Monroe? Kate wondered. Who was there, alive, besides Helen Manning, who had that kind of glamour, the ancient Scottish word that meant to “cast a spell”?

“Oh.” Helen seemed surprised at having caused such a stir, chagrined at interrupting the proceedings. Her black gloved hand moved to her darkly outlined cupid's bow mouth, from which issued her little-girl voice. “I'm so sorry.”

She moved down the aisle, head bowed as if in remorse. Silky blond hair drawn back into a knot at the base of her perfectly shaped skull, she made her way to the front of the chapel, ignoring those who signaled vacant places in the rows she passed.

“To honor a man,” the minister went on, looking at Helen as though awaiting license to continue, “who has meant so much to the motion picture industry.”

What Larry Drayco had meant, as most of those present knew, was major scandal in a business where no one thought another, saltier scandal possible. In the argot of gossip—the official language of Hollywood—he had fucked the town's most impressive women, and fucked over most of its men. But he'd always failed up, as the expression went, moving on to more exalted positions in bed and in the boardroom. Even when he'd actually broken the law, he'd gotten off scot-free, becoming the head of a better studio than the one he'd embezzled from. It was as though the town, like the judge who'd suspended his sentence, couldn't do enough to make him feel better about getting caught.

“Larry Drayco has given us…” Here the minister began listing his many credits. Behind him, an auburn-haired harpist who'd been Drayco's sponsor in Narcotics Anonymous, to which the judge had remanded him for his cocaine habit, played the themes from his movies. There were snatches of familiar melody, strung together on the strings. As the harpist strummed the most moving strain from the song that had won the Academy Award the year Drayco couldn't, having been ruled out by his confreres because of his behavior, Helen Manning rose and started to sing. The lyrics were curiously apt, dealing with a love that was stronger than death. The sound of her childishly clear soprano struck such an honest note that the minister was silenced without seeming offended.

Others started to sing, and then, the minister himself. He had a deep voice, a bass baritone, that made the song into a hymn. As music could transform, the scene changed to one of reverential solemnity, where several people seemed genuinely moved. Some wept openly. Was the sadness for Larry Drayco, Kate wondered, a black sheep transfigured by death to scapegoat? Or were the tears they shed for themselves? As little experience as she'd had in her young life with funerals, she knew people usually grieved for a number of things: what they had lost, that they were left behind, that they would not be left behind forever. Their own mortality, really.

One who seemed determined to live forever sat just in front of Kate: Charley Best, the biggest star of the fifties. His face was still oddly cherubic, his skin miraculously unsallowed in spite of years of admitted alcohol and drug abuse. But the scars behind his ears were ill-concealed by his curly brown toupee. The platinum blonde with him wore an outfit that looked like Frederick's of Hollywood, a store that specialized in ready-to-wear for Heidi Fleiss–type professionals. It was a rubber dress, ebony for the occasion, pumping up her breasts like expectations. She started to sing along with Helen, her voice a
Playboy
magazine squeal. It was an out-of-date, out-of-style bimbo kind of sound, like her look. She seemed unconscious at a level that superseded stupidity, totally unaware, as though no one had told her Hugh Hefner had gotten out of his pajamas, married, sired a new set of children, and put toy fire engines in his front hall. Charley Best looked delighted at the awful impression she was obviously making.

“The coffin's closed,” Charley turned and whispered to Wilton. “How can we be sure he's dead?”

“The same way we know you are,” Wilton answered.

“To be insulting…” murmured a painfully thin woman with a modified Mohawk, brown hair barely more than fuzz along the sides of her head, with heavily moussed high scarlet spikes down the center. The width and size and steel blue of her eyes would have been exquisite in a softer face. As it was, they looked trapped in the wrong person, trying to figure out a way to escape. “… is not the same as being clever.”

“Your editor should have told that to you,” Wilton said.

The chapel, like the service, was nondenominational, no crosses, Jewish stars, or obtrusive stained glass. It was a simple, tasteful structure with polished wooden benches, a model of understatement except for the lavish floral displays and the people who were getting up to make speeches. Speaking, like reading, was a skill that was not much practiced in the town, except at black-tie dinners honoring the accomplished and occasions like these where accomplishments were at an end. Reading had become a low-echelon occupation, with young people doing “coverage” for studio heads and producers, a few sentences summarizing what writers had taken years and thousands of words to express. But there was no one to do that for speeches, with the exception of Army Archerd, who could be counted on to sympathetically synthesize the tributes in
Daily Variety
the next day, the only columnist in town who was nice to everybody.

All this Kate knew, although she knew no one, being an assiduous researcher who'd had plenty of alone time to dissect a society. And a society it was, without question: not one that might have engaged fully the mental capacities of a Jane Austen but one that might easily have seduced her had she been alive to be celebrated by it. To be feted as the winners always were. Not a society based on breeding or education or land—although the real estate holdings of the heirs and stockholders of Disney were enviable—but a society where Success was the key. Success here meant grosses, which meant money, which meant people wanted you, and that, in her spinster longings, Jane Austen would have surely understood. Just as Kate, for all her wit and wish for detachment and objectivity, understood. Understood to the marrow of her bones as she read every week—for the purposes of her studies, she assured herself—the glossy giveaway paper called
Beverly Hills 213,
all the while trying to convince herself she wouldn't have wanted to be at all those parties. Her bibliography also included the trade papers printed on slick paper,
Daily Variety
and
The Hollywood Reporter,
and an even slicker magazine,
Buzz,
that acidly scoffed at the industry while, like Kate, longing to be embraced by it. Every day she read the
Los Angeles Times,
torn to shreds monthly by
Buzz,
which seemed to have an unnamed insider within the
Times
organization as potent as the one who had spied on the Clinton campaign, and become “Anonymous.”

The chapel was silent now except for the sultry voice of a television actress who had been one of Drayco's few avowedly loyal friends. She addressed the coffin in wry tones, chiding him for dying as though he'd been a sitcom that had been canceled.

“It used to be that she knew where the bodies were buried,” Wilton whispered about the actress to Kate. “Now the word is that she finds them.”

It had been in that morning's
Times
that a woman friend, the one who stood now acerbically raging, had gone to Drayco's house when he failed to answer his phone, and discovered his lifeless body. They had attended the same party two evenings before, where she had noted that he seemed depressed. Though the coroner was to rule out both the rumored drug overdose and suicide, there was still a patina of sensationalism over the proceedings. Few seemed to believe that Larry had simply died. The actress recounted funny tales of him, making him seem warmer than the vision the general public had. She spoke of his generosity of spirit, which, according to Wilton's whispers, no one was aware of but her.

“She is unfailingly loyal to friends,” he murmured, “and fabulous in intensive care wards. They're starting to call her the angel of death.”

“Have you no shame?” said Sarah, fingering her Mohawk.

“You're rich on the blood of others,” said Wilton. “Why don't you buy me some?”

“Who is that woman?” Kate whispered to Wilton, of the person with the dinosaur back on her head.

“Sarah Nash.”

“That's Sarah Nash?” Kate felt a flood of excitement. She had read Sarah's bestselling book about Hollywood, and heard, beneath the barbs, the voice of a genuine writer. Fettered by her own innocence and affection for the naivete that had been Fitzgerald's, Kate attributed a questing spirit and vulnerability to anyone who could put words together. “I thought she'd be older.”

“She
is
older. She sold her soul to the devil. Mike Ovitz was still an agent at the time and made the deal.”

Sarah Nash was one of the few California writers whom the New York literary establishment took seriously, and was well reviewed, welcome at Elaine's, probably accepted by Gay Talese. At the same time she struck fear and loathing into the movie industry, the kind of panic that prevailed when people had both the capacity to wound and make money.

The press, with the exception of Army, a writer from
The Hollywood Reporter,
Larry King, and Samantha Chatsworth, the studiedly chic West Coast editor of the high-line New York magazine
East,
were kept outside the chapel. Even now they were being held off by security men. They stood behind a temporary barrier wheeled in for celebrity funerals, next to a permanent barbed wire fence put in place after the third time someone had scaled the wall after midnight in an attempt to steal Marilyn's brass nameplate.

People still came through the open gates by daylight and took flowers from notable graves. Kate had witnessed such thefts on her way to the chapel. In Natalie Wood's case flowers had been replaced by potted plants, chained and bolted to the metal covering her portion of earth, bearing the legend left by R.J., “More than love.” It saddened Kate, beyond the too-early, long-ago death, that a surviving lover could not even give a gift of flowers in this souvenir-crazed city without suffering additional loss.