Hollywood and Levine (11 page)

The actor stepped to the lectern and removed a sheet of paper from a black leather slipcase. It was a Wordsworth poem, “At The Grave of Burns,” which he read with considerable feeling, particularly its closing stanzas:

For he is safe, a quiet bed

Hath early found among the dead,

Harboured where none can be misled,

Wronged, or distrest;

And surely here it may be said

That such are blest.

And oh for Thee, by pitying grace

Checked oft-times in a devious race

May He, who halloweth the place

Where Man is laid

Receive thy Spirit in the embrace
For which it prayed!

Sighing I turned away; but ere

Night fell I heard, or seemed to hear,

Music that sorry comes not near,

A ritual hymn,

Chanted in love that casts out fear

By Seraphim.

Carpenter stepped from the lectern. Rabbi Winkler then introduced Milton Wohl and Henry Perillo, who delivered two very personal, and very revealing eulogies.

The writer went first, speaking in a voice that started at a quaver and then evened out into a mournful and resonant sing-song. “What about us, the survivors of yet another loss,” said Wohl. “How do we learn from the tragic circumstances of our good friend Walter's death? How do we, workers in an industry whose products attempt to profess the humanistic values of decency, freedom of thought, and brotherhood, learn to apply those values to ourselves and the way we live? How do we come to love, trust, and help each other more?” I heard some coughing and scanned the room. Edward G. Robinson sat with his head bowed and his arms folded across his chest, Jack Warner was gazing up at the ceiling, Johnny Parker was checking the time.

“Walter,” Wohl continued, “you were a hell of a writer, and a fighter for the betterment of the common lot of mankind. We've all been asking ourselves why your life had to end so abruptly, with so many triumphs still before you. Well, maybe it was a warning to us all, Walter, a warning to get our houses in order. To stop suspecting our neighbors and friends, to devote ourselves to a kinder and saner world, where our work will be a reflection of the best in us, a world in which future Walter Adrians will be free to write as honestly and bravely as the limits of their creativity will allow. I think that's what you would have wanted your friends and co-workers to think today. I know you would not have wanted us to be angry, because anger was not in you. You were a rare one, Walter, and it was a joy to spend part of the journey with you.” Wohl's voice broke on his last words and he left the lectern wiping his eyes with a blue handkerchief.

Perillo followed, wearing a black woolen suit that looked as if it had been suspended in a bag full of mothballs for the past ten years. He marched to the lectern, took some pages from a slipcase, placed the case on the floor by his feet, and donned a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles. Without looking up, he cleared his throat and began reading from his paper.

“This is a day rich with meaning for the industry in which many of us are employed. A tragedy has befallen one of us, and all of us. I convey my deepest sympathies to the Adrian family, especially to Helen, and assure them that these sympathies are felt by my brothers in the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. And more than sympathy. Anger.” He looked up, his eyes burning behind the specs. “Deep anger at the events and the climate in this industry that led to the passing of our dear Walter Adrian.

“We are coming to a crossroads. Much has been whispered about in the privacy of our homes. Rumors fly, accusations are passed from ear to ear. Let us voice this openly now, let us bring our concern into focus. Is the death of Walter Adrian just the first casualty in a war between the progressive-minded men and women of the movie industry and reactionary lackeys who seek to turn the clock back to the Stone Age?” Perillo thumped his hand on the lectern and people began to stir. I saw Bogart turn to Garfield and raise his eyebrows. Parker sat staring at his feet.

“Is Walter Adrian,” Perillo continued, gaining in speed and volume, “the first sacrifice to a clique of reactionary congressmen who hope to fatten themselves off a fearful movie industry, one that thrives on popular acceptance, one whose economic well-being hangs on a slender thread of respectability and imagined 100 percent Americanism? Are the progressive-minded workers of the industry going to hide in their houses and surrender their cherished beliefs in the freedom and dignity of all men, regardless of race or color? I say no! I say Walter Adrian did not die, so that his friends might succumb to an orgy of fear and sterile self-criticism! Let us never imagine that we can compromise on the issues over which we have fought so long and so well. There is no compromise, only capitulation!

“No, Walter's death will not be wasted on his friends. Ever more vigilant of our freedoms and the safeguards of our treasured Constitution, we shall burn the candles late into the night. We shall watch over our rights and principles like a mother over a feverish infant. That is what Walter Adrian would have wanted from his friends and that is what Walter Adrian will get from his friends!”

Perillo turned and walked away, stuffing his speech into his pocket and removing his spectacles. There followed an absolutely tubercular explosion of coughing, a violent clearing of a hundred congested throats. Rabbi Winkler, looking as comfortable as an asthmatic deep-sea diver, returned to the lectern and led a closing invocation. As he did, I saw Parker whisper into Jack Warner's ear and start edging out into the aisle, nodding at acquaintances as the invocation ended and Walter's coffin was borne out a side door. I watched it go, watched Helen follow the casket with a bowed head, and then flew out the back door and into the parking lot.

The limousines were lining up for the trip to the cemetery. Helen and Walter's sister and brother-in-law headed for the lead limo, the Wohls, the Arthurs, and Goldmark were climbing into the second one, while Carpenter, Perillo, and Friedland entered the third. Other luminaries stood waiting, but Johnny Parker was already backing his Rolls out of a space between two Cadillacs. I raced for the Chrysler and climbed inside as Parker started out of the lot. The engine took a maddening while to turn over, during which time the Rolls was making its somber and dignified way onto Wilshire Boulevard. Fate ran Parker into a red light and I was able to find a cozy little niche about four cars in back of him. There was very little chance of losing the executive in traffic; his Rolls was as conspicuous as a white whale.

We stayed on Wilshire for miles and miles. Occasionally I'd get beaten through a light, but there was never a cause for panic. Parker had given no indication of spotting me; in fact, he was driving with the caution of a man who didn't want to attract attention. He went on and on, at a steady forty miles per hour, out of Beverly Hills and past Hancock Park, more miles east, still traveling at a measured pace, taking the bend around Hoover Street, past the hospital and into the shabby downtown area. I remained three cars behind and tailed Parker around Pershing Square, a rundown playground for derelicts and hustlers.

Parker took a left on Hill, a right on Fourth, crossed San Pedro, and finally hooked a short left onto an unpromising dead end with the Turkish monicker of Omar Avenue. He pulled up to the curb in front of something called the Pill Building, a shabby, gutted five-story mousetrap that yearned for a wrecker's ball. Parker got out of the Rolls. He looked at the building and then at the car, in a worrisome, agitated manner, as if concerned for its safety or, perhaps, visibility. Omar Avenue was a very dead end with a boarded-up diner and shuttered pharmacy and a dingy beauty parlor with yellowing photographs of prehistoric hairstyles in the window, the kind of parlor that serviced old ladies or maybe people who placed bets on horse races. Omar Avenue was not used to Rolls-Royces, but there wasn't a goddamn thing Parker could do about it, so he locked up and disappeared inside the Pill Building.

I had pulled up in back of a parked Hudson on Fourth Street and was getting out, when a blue Pontiac raced past me and took the turn on Omar very sharply, stopping abruptly in front of the Pill Building. I ducked behind my car and observed two men emerge from the Pontiac. They were both in their early thirties. One was wearing sunglasses, a natty blue sports jacket, and wheatcolored slacks. His hair was clipped very short. The other guy needed a shave and was attired in a suit of such a peculiar cut that it looked to have the wooden hangers and paper stuffing still inside. He had a curiously baby face behind the growth of beard, with an infant's fatty jowls and the thick eyebrows of an adolescent who had been carpeted with body hair overnight. Most prominent on his pale face was a nose that went down and then abruptly out, like a Rockaway shoot-the-chute. He stood jiggling on the balls of his feet, punching one hand lightly into the other.

The natty man with the small mouth leaned in through the window of the blue Pontiac and spoke to the driver, a heavy-set type with a gray fedora pulled way down on his forehead. The fedora nodded, then drove down the street and out of view. The two men stood on the sidewalk and gazed at the yellow building for an uncertain moment; then the one with the crewcut nudged the one with the eyebrows and they walked inside.

I straightened up and got out from behind the Chrysler, heading down Fourth and across Omar. I walked carefully up to the Pill Building and peered through a fly-stained pane of glass wedged loosely in a splintery door. The door said “Fuck You” in lipstick. Through the smeared glass, I saw the two men waiting, silhouetted against a window at the end of the narrow, unlit lobby. Their faces were dimly illuminated by the opening of elevator doors. They got aboard, the doors closed, and I cautiously entered the building.

The lobby of the Pill Building couldn't have passed inspection in Calcutta. Part of the fake marble wall was decayed away, leaving in its wake a dangling vine of exposed electrical wiring. A phone booth next to a stairwell was gutted and urinous, the receiver swinging ghost-like in the draft caused by the opening and closing of the front door. The lobby floor was filthier than the men's room of a nuthouse: cigarette butts and candy wrappers had been stamped flat and black. Scattered beneath the stairs were newspapers and ancient, discarded condoms, aged as brittle as stemware. They lay unattended, coffins of the unborn, wreathed by garlands of dust.

Across from the elevator was a ruined directory. Letters and numbers were missing in profusion, leaving a pathetic, gap-toothed shorthand: “Abramtz, Dentit,” “Nelson & elo, eal Esta.” There were a couple of novelty firms, Royal Publishing Co., and a sprinkling of chiropractors, appraisers, and lawyers who chased the lawyers who chased the ambulances.

The elevator had stopped at four.

I raced silently up the stairs, taking them two at a time. I stopped on the landing below the fourth floor and heard a door closing at the end of the hall, then continued on up. The hall was very long, wide and high-ceilinged, like that of a municipal hospital. As in the lobby, there was only the natural light of an open window; the electrical fixtures had all burned out, bulb by bulb, like the tenants of the Pill Building.

A light went on behind a closed door. I tiptoed down the hall and flattened myself next to the occupied office. The frosted glass on the door read “S. Haller, Antiques and Jewelry Appraised.” I heard voices.

“Johnny, good to see you,” a voice said. “Hope this isn't an inconvenience.”

“Certainly not. Anyway I can help.” Parker sounded strained.

“Have you ever met the congressman?”

“No, I haven't, Davis, but I've heard marvelous things about him.”

“Well, let's get on with it,” jollied the first voice. “Johnny Parker, meet Congressman Dick Nixon.”

“I've enjoyed your movies greatly,” said a third voice, pitched deep but thin. This was obviously the congressman.

“Delighted to meet you, Dick,” said Parker.

There followed the silence of shaking hands.

“Let's go inside,” said the first voice, Davis. By its assurance, I took a guess and matched it up with the mug in the sunglasses. I heard a door close inside the office; low sounds followed, but they were not distinguishable as words. I would have to get closer.

Next to the appraiser's office was a darkened door that read “P. Elwood, Dentist. We Use Gas.” I extracted a penknife from my jacket, and with the enthusiasm of a Boy Scout, had Elwood's door opened in a matter of seconds.

The door squeaked slightly, opening into a small reception area, bare except for a half-dozen folding chairs and a low metal table covered with magazines. I pushed the door closed, but kept the lights off. There was noise coming from the appraiser's office, but still no conversation. I followed the battered linoleum down a short hallway to Dr. Elwood's dental chambers. The door was open. It was a small glum office, the final resting place for a dental career that probably began with a correspondence course. The shelves were lined with old instruments, many of which looked unused, some in their original boxes. Moldings of bridgework smiled at me like the glee club of a graveyard.

I seated myself in the motorized chair reserved for patients; the sink next to it was so deeply stained that I figured Elwood crapped in it during office hours. He was either the least successful dentist in Los Angeles or the office was some kind of a front. But it had one towering thing going for it: through a common wall you could hear every word uttered in the adjacent office.

“I think we're all agreed,” Davis was saying, “on the need for utmost confidentiality on this. Whatever we say here, stays here. That should be our guiding principle: say here, stays here.”

“Absolutely,” said Parker. “But I'd like to emphasize that I can only speak for myself here; you realize that I can't speak for the entire industry.”

“Of course,” replied Davis. “Congressman, you have a few comments?”