Where the Truth Lies (3 page)

Vince was neither of these commodities. While he was no longer the box-office champ he’d once been, his name alone could carry a movie to the break-even mark, and coupled with a popular actress and a script that suited his intentionally offhand style, he could still rake in a few shekels. The fourth entry in the series of films featuring his soldier-of-fortune character Colt Carrera had actually been well received by the critics, at least for the kind of mindless escapist fare that it was.Death Is Cold with Angel Tompkins and Victor Buono had not netted as much asDeath Is Warm orDeath Is Green, but no one had yet voiced the notion that Vince was slipping. His most recent film,Casa Grande, was still in production. It was a Warners project, and while Vince was shooting interiors and a few street scenes on the western sets nearby, the company had given him the suite of offices as a home away from the well-appointed Winnebago that awaited him on any outdoor shoot.

I parked my Caprice and walked up a flight of concrete steps to the second level. Midway along was a door bearing the discreet letteringPAUS &ANTER . I had researched my prey well enough to know that this was the name of Vince’s production company, and not a badly spelled invitation. The company was really named after his three children, Paul, Sandi, and Terri. The ampersand was just Vince’s little joke. He had another production company created solely to keep a few pennies out of the hands of his ex-wife. That company was called “FTC Productions.” When someone asked what the letters stood for, Vince said the T was forThat.

I paused and entered. There was a compact woman in her thirties behind a desk talking down to someone on the phone. She looked up and through me. “Yes?”

“I’m here to see Vince Collins. My name’s O’Connor.”

She got up from her desk and took me back onto the walkway outside the office. She pointed toward the buttressed backs of some standing street sets. “He should be on Maple Street. See that curving street with the old-fashioned houses? He should be at the end of it. Walk on over, he’s expecting you.”

I’d been in L.A. for a while now and I’d forgotten about walking. I passed a firehouse that was a town hall on its north face and a bank on its south face. I was curious enough to saunter around to its fourth side. A movie theater. I turned onto a gracefully curving street that had to be Maple. It could have been a background cel forLady and the Tramp. Every house was painted white, and trees were plentiful along the street, although some of them had clearly been rented rather than rooted, and nary a one of them was actually a maple.

I was relieved to see there was no movie crew. In point of fact, there was no one on the street at all. Narration by Rod Serling would have been appropriate. It was as if I had turned a corner and found the way back to my childhood, an immaculate, shaded street in a small midwestern town, orderly and respectable and caringly maintained. Only that hadn’t been my childhood, not in the slightest.

I heard a pleasant, lightponk and saw Vince. He was on the front lawn of the last house on the street, its thick grass mowed low and even, stroking a neat row of golf balls into what apparently was a hole in the ground—yes, it was a perfect putting green. He was wearing a cardigan the shade of Gulden’s mustard over a smooth white turtleneck, with nice trim pants in a herringbone pattern. His socks were tan and his loafers were brown and tasseled.

“Hi again,” he said without taking his eye off the ball. He stroked a slow, assured putt into the cup. “Thanks for walking over. Nice street, huh?”

“Very Thornton Wilder,” I murmured. Remembering that Vince hadn’t finished high school, I added, “He wrote a play calledOur Town. ”

He was focused on another ball. “That’s right, andThe Matchmaker andThe Skin of Our Teeth. ” He looked up at me for the first time with a strange smile on his face. “What, you think I’ve never heard of Thornton Wilder? Gee, you must really take me for a greaseball.” He gave a little shiver, which looked odd on a warm day. “Jesus.”

I tendered my apology. “I’m sorry if at our first meeting I forgot to mention that I’m frequently a total idiot.” I was pleased to see him smile back, so I tried to change the subject with the incisive observation: “It’s so quiet here.”

Vince lined himself up behind a golf ball. “Well, this is areal back lot, you know, not like that fireman’s carnival over at Universal. You’re only supposed to be here if you’re making a movie or preparing the set for one. Just so happens no one’s making a movie right now.”

“No TV?”

“The Waltons,but their house is way over by the lagoon.”

“They shootThe Waltons here?”

“That’s Walton’s Mountain behind you.”

I turned back and tried to mentally crop out the high-tension wires on the brown scrubby hillside rising directly behind the lot. “My God. Thatis Walton’s Mountain. I always assumed they shot that on location.”

“They did. This is the location.”

I shook my head. “I’ve driven by that hill a thousand times. Forest Lawn is off to the right, isn’t it? My God, Walton’s Mountain. Burbank.”

Vince collected up the golf balls and dropped them into a wooden box, which he set down on the front porch of the house. “If you like this part of Burbank,” he said, taking off his cardigan and draping it over his arm, “let me show you somewhere even better.”

I was apparently to get the tour. We hooked around the end of Maple and headed up a western street. It was the end of the afternoon on a Friday, a day viewed by most of the L.A. workforce as purely optional. With the studio successfully evacuated until Monday, we were completely alone, strolling the streets of a ghost town.

There were perhaps better times to reflect that some people in my trade believed Vince Collins might once have been involved in the murder of a young woman. Personally, I found this impossible to believe, not only because Vince was so attractive but also because he had made so many successful movies since then. (I realize there’s an underlying flaw in this line of reasoning, but wouldn’t our world be so much better if we all tried harder to put our trust in people who dress really well and purchase superior colognes? Or do you find me a tad shallow?)

A saloon bore the painted signPARIS ,TEXAS , apparently one of the locales of his latest Western, a genre that was gradually exceeding musicals, comedies, and adventure films in his repertoire. I asked him idly what accounted for his recent emphasis on sagebrush and saddles.

“Italian Westerns are big right now.” He smiled. “Who’s more Italian, me or Clint Eastwood? My next film isThe Dago Red River Valley. ”

We rounded a turn into another long western boulevard, this one slightly uphill and coated with a black siltlike powder.

“You see this dirt?” he asked, kicking up a smoky cloud of dust. “So, this is Laramie Street—they use it mainly for the more civilized western towns after the Civil War. Dodge City, Tombstone, Laredo. But it can also double for 1890s San Francisco. And if you want to use it for a 1920s or ‘30s setting, all you have to do is put in some old electric streetlamps, make the saloons into general stores and emporiums, and you have yourself your perfect midwestern Depression town. But the dirt road is a dead giveaway. It should be a paved street, and sure they could pave it, but then they wouldn’t be able to use it as a western set the next day. So what they do is …”

He bent down, picked up some of the inky dirt of the street.

“… they spray-paint the dirt black.”

I squinted at the well-rutted street, and sure enough, the jet-black dirtwould read as paving, certainly in long shot. “They’re probably doing this for aWaltons episode. You know,‘John Boy goes into town to buy compost and cornpone’ ?” Vince stood up, smacking the dirt off his hands. “The first time I saw them doing this, I thought, ‘Yup, that’s what Hollywood is. A place where they give dirt a paint job.’” He smiled disarmingly. “Did you bring that letter?”

“Yes, I’ve got it here.” He watched me as I reached into my bag and produced the letter from Lanny’s attorney. It had been with me on Wednesday at Le Carillon, but I hadn’t wanted to show it to Vince until I was sure I wasn’t committing some kind of legal or ethical breach. “It’s a letter to you,” I’d been told by Bernard Besser, senior attorney for Neuman and Newberry. “From a junior partner in a law firm. He doesn’t characterize anything as being privileged information. You can show it to anyone you like.” I was liking Vince, so I showed it to him.

He read it as we crossed the street. I looked both ways, which was absurd since there wasn’t a car on the lot. He folded it up and handed it back. “I guess if Lanny is going to talk about things, I can too, huh?”

We were now flanked by two rows of venerable New York brownstones. I asked casually, “So, have you and Lanny talked since the split-up?”

“Never,” he said quickly.

“Why?”

He took my arm so gently that it was impossible to take offense. “Off the record? Lanny can be a bit of a monster. A cruel one.” He waved away the thought by gesturing at the brownstones. “This is my favorite street because it looks exactly like my old neighborhood. If we had a broomstick and a Spaldeen—that’s what we called those pink rubber balls that Spalding used to make—you and I could have ourselves a nice game of highsie-lowsie.”

I looked at a street sign. “Euclid Avenue.”

“That’s whatthey call it. For me, it’s Forbes Avenue and Hooper.”

“We had a Euclid Avenue where I grew up.”

Vince conceded, “Yeah, I’ve never understood this ‘Euclid’ thing. Most every town I’ve ever played has a Euclid Avenue. How do you figure that? I understand a Maple Street, Oak, Elm, Washington or Jefferson, Broadway or Main. But …Euclid? When did a Greek mathematician become beloved to the people of this nation? Does every town have an Archimedes Avenue? A Pythagoras Plaza?”

He was much smarter than I’d anticipated. There was also something strangely familiar about his riff. It wasn’t until later that I realized he was to some degree aping the delivery of Lanny Morris. Maybe when you work so long with somebody, you don’t even notice you’re doing it.

As I laughed, I leaned against a brownstone wall and a piece of its plaster broke off behind me. He reached out to steady me and ushered me to where Euclid Avenue made a T-shaped intersection with French Street.

“And, uhhh, ‘you must remember this,’” Vince murmured, gesturing to a lovely brownish-gray boulevard that revealed itself as we turned the corner. It was a location fromCasablanca, one that had been etched into my retinas years ago. The current moniker of “the Burbank Studios” had made me forget that this was stillthat Warner Bros., and this corner was where Rick and Ilsa had first been in love, in flashback, within a few steps of the Arc de Triomphe.

“I’m in the same French street where Bogart and Bergman were,” I murmured.

“It’s just plaster of Paris.” He smiled. Oh, what a clever lad was he, who had displayed in several of his films the same gruff masculine hurt that Bogart had patented a generation earlier. It made me remember that Vince was a movie star. When I was nine, I’d seen this same man embrace Lizabeth Scott and Martha Hyer on corners exactly like this. I’d stared at the screen, twenty-five-cent bag of popcorn in my hands, my eyes and palms growing damp.

I looked now at Vince, his shoulders wide beneath his turtleneck, his breath so charming, his hair so nicely tousled. What were we up to? I wondered.

I was not yet acclimated to dusk on the West Coast. The sun hung around much longer, shining at unusual low angles that I wasn’t used to seeing. The clouds were a livid violet wall, assembled in the south end of the sky like an Apache nation preparing to descend upon the cavalry.

Now Vince led me past a cosmopolitan row of buildings verging on what could have passed for Central Park South and Fifth Avenue and up a hillock through a Bohemian village designed in early Gepetto. Paris had yielded to Germany as easily as Alsace-Lorraine had to Hitler. There was a rounded doorway set in brick between a cobbler’s shop and a tobacconist’s. Vince swung open the door, revealing the beginning of a long flight of slate steps down an overgrown hillside. I don’t mean ten or twenty steps. I mean Cinderella Running from the Palace at Ten Seconds to Midnight steps, down and down the side of a ravine.

“Okay, so what you have to do is not look back until I say so,” instructed Vince. “Just look straight down at your feet and the steps and don’t turn around until I tell you.”

I said okay, and he led the way, walking sideways like a crab. Vince was literally leading me down the garden path, for I perceived vegetation on either side of me, thick moss and ivy, and beds of tall plum-colored flowers matching the damson sky.

“Okay,” he said at last. “Turn around.”

I did. Delirium. Rising high above me, as if pressed into the side of a soaring cliff, were the almost Gothic towers and turrets of an immense Asian castle. Mad spires and ominous gates were cloaked in writhing tendrils of overgrowth. Every now and then the cliff was broken up into little plateaus, with a stone bench here, an incense burner there, and flat rocks that might have been altars for strange rituals.

Dumbstruck, I looked to Vince for elucidation.

“Shangri-La,” he explained. “The main exterior for thatLost Horizon musical. With those great crooners Peter Finch and Liv Ullmann. A big bomb.”

“The set alone must have broken their budget,” I said.

He straightened a small statue of a dragon. “They’ve amortized their losses a little by using it on the TV seriesKung Fu. They never show the entire set, but they do tight two-shots and it reads as Asia.”

Burbank again. Who knew.

“You want to have a drink?” he asked.

“When?”

“Now.”

“Where?”

“There.” He indicated a Winnebago resting on concrete blocks at the foot of the hillside. “Warners keeps this for me when I’m filming here.” The trailer was long and wide, no doubt long enough for a well-stocked bar, certainly wide enough for a queen-sized bed.

Ah. Aha. So we had gone through the Lollipop Woods, around the Rainbow Trail and up the Gumdrop Pass, evaded the Molasses Swamp, and now we had finally arrived by an exact throw of the dice at Candyland, where I was to be the bonbon bonanza with the creamy filling, the fornicated fondant, the all-day sucker to cap off Vince’s afternoon of stroking golf balls into a vacant receptacle on his personal putting green. This was why I’d been taken on my VIP backstage Burbank tour, at the culmination of which our guests are respectfully reminded that it is traditional for the tour guide to receive gratuitous sex if you were pleased with his services. And I’d been gawking and geeking my hayseed way through the whole thing like a breathless heroine in a Harlequin novel. I wouldn’t have been surprised if there were a painting in Vince’s trailer of his most recent ex-wife, guarded by the compact woman from his office, whose name would turn out to be Danvers.“This was the previousMrs. Collins. They found her shattered body at the foot of the castle’s highest turret.”