Playland (11 page)

God, she was on.

A motor driven by an energy that had been bottled up, capped like an oil fire, for decades. Did you ever bang your finger in a car door? The blood wells up under the nail, the pain is excruciating, throbbing, then the doctor drills a hole in the nail, the pressure is relieved, it’s like coming, you feel so good, the blood spurts like a geyser.

She was that geyser.

Old Faithful.

Or Old Unfaithful.

As the case may be.

Imagine again, this time the interior of that recreational vehicle in Slot 123, Forsythia Lane, Hamtramck, Michigan 48212:

One large space cut into three sections by two accordion room dividers. A king-sized bed, covered with an Indian blanket, so completely filled the rear third of the trailer that there was no room to maneuver on either side of it without risking a
barked shin. Next to the bedroom a small bathroom with a shower, a chemical toilet, and in the medicine cabinet, along with the over-the-counter pills and the Medicare prescriptions for calcium deficiency and for bloat (yes, I looked, of course I looked), an unopened package of twelve ribbed Trojan-Enz condoms. The living space was in the center section. An ancient Sylvania television set, vintage 1950, with a circular screen. An artifact, it turned out.
Un objet trouvé
, she said in her best French-governess French, but where it was found she did not offer. Two VCRs, Mitsubishis with twin digital autotracking, and a 30-inch Panasonic color TV set with wraparound sound, cable ready, 156 channels. A couch with bad springs from Goodwill. Four wooden kitchen chairs, none of which matched. A portable Royal typewriter with the question mark and the dollar sign missing. Oilcloth curtains, once pink, now faded by the sun. Worn and patched diamond-pattern linoleum floors.

The final section contained the kitchen, with its Mr. Coffee coffeemaker, a six-slice toaster, a gelato maker, a Cuisinart, a microwave oven, a two-burner stove, and a Sub-Zero freezer crammed full of packaged food, junk food, but that’s another story, it’ll have to wait, in due time, don’t worry, it explains the top-of-the-line appliances, those two VCRs, the giant TV, the Cuisinart, and the gelato machine as well. Empty half-pint bottles of supermarket-brand vodka were lined up along the baseboards like so many ducks in a shooting gallery. The glasses had all once been jam or peanut butter jars. Stuck to the freezer with a miniature magnetized naked woman was a mimeoed list of weekly events at St. Anton the Magyar Roman Catholic Church in Hamtramck—a get-together for new converts, prayer sessions for divorced parishioners, a meeting of the Shut-in Committee, Mrs. M. M. Toolate, chairperson. There was a two-shelf bookcase, its only volumes movie star biographies—Marilyn Monroe and Carole Landis and Lana Turner and Joan Crawford and Hedy Lamarr and Elizabeth Taylor and Marlene Dietrich. No men, two suicides, and a million and a half fucks and blow jobs. Her description of her library, not mine. On top of the bookcase
a quilted tea cozy, and under the cozy not a teapot but the pint-sized special Oscar given her in 1939 by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences for being the Industry’s top box office draw three years running, all before she was ten years old.

And everything neat as a pin.

Baby, she said, I just fell off the planet earth.

W
ho was she?

What was she?

That, I think, the more difficult question.

Genius. Whore. Individualist. Iconoclast. Liar. Free spirit. Bag lady. Madwoman. Spoiled. Willful. Pathological. Self-indulgent. Self-destructive. An eternal child. A fantast willing to sacrifice everything—fame, career, and fortune—to satisfy her need to flout convention. A case of severely arrested development whose first priority was always the maintenance of her own interests. A moral force more honest and uncompromising than her contemporaries. Everyone living or dead seemed to have an opinion about Blue Tyler, whether they knew her or not. Even Maury Ahearne, who claimed not to care about her, weighed in with “crazy cunt.”

So.

Take your pick.

All the above would be my choice. Including the verdict of Maury Ahearne.

Her filmography, which I diligently gathered over time via computer modem from newspaper morgues (
The New York Times
and the
Los Angeles Times
, in particular, although the tabloids
and the penny press in both cities, most of them no longer publishing, contributed their own particularly raffish take, too); from an assiduous search-and-save of Winchell and Hedda and Louella and Kilgallen and Jimmy Fidler and Jack O’Brian, all gone to their eternal reward now (skewed views, but dramatically interesting, adding primary colors, the softer tones in the historical palette not coming naturally to gossip columnists); from interviews with those who it turned out knew her less well than they claimed, and with others (more interesting) unwilling (in some instances with good reason) to share easily their considerable fund of memories; from delving into the archives of mainstream motion picture libraries and the dusty files of college film societies as well—all these many sources yielded few clues, and the ones they did yield were conflicting, contradictory, and in some cases shamelessly fabricated, the irony being (as I was to learn) that the fabrications did not do justice to the real story; or the real story as I (another fabricator: an added spin) began to imagine it, with inductive leaps (mine) and addenda (these much later) from long-forgotten rap sheets and criminal-investigation files still open after nearly fifty years because the capital crimes reported therein remain unsolved. Meaning murder, P.C. 187 in the California penal code, on which the statute of limitations never runs out.

Ah, yes. Murder is part of the mix. Something I had not anticipated. My mistake.

Caveats:

I admit a certain impatience with Hollywood and all its orthodoxies. I hear that film is truth at twenty-four frames a second, Godard’s formulation, and I want to grab an AK-47 and spray the room. Try it this way: truth at sixty words a minute. I like writing movies. I am good at it, quick and always in demand. Movies provide me a good living that I don’t actually need, with more laughs than in most businesses; the heartbreaks, such as they are, are generally carnal. I don’t get all twisted out of shape by the law of nature (Hollywood division)
that says a director who gets paid twice as much as I do is therefore twice as smart as I am. I like the Marty Magnin types I work for, and am willing to entertain the idea that I like them in part because they give me something to which I can feel superior. I have no particular enthusiasm for the masters who used to be called directors and are now called filmmakers, Hitchcock, for example, and Ford, and only occasionally do I warm to Chaplin. Nor am I won over by the argument that black-and-white is the real cinema (that shit word; they shot in black-and-white because color was clumsy and expensive and washed out, it was certainly not for any artistic reason) and that movies (a far better word) took a turn for the worse when sound came in. I do not haunt the rerun houses to see Garbo in
Queen Christina
, I have never gone to the Cinémathèque Française in Paris to see
Pandora’s Box
at four in the morning (have never gone to the Cinémathèque at all, in fact), and I have no position on the importance of Gregg Toland’s lighting to the films of William Wyler, or William Cameron Menzies’s sets on the success of
Gone With the Wind
.

All this is by way of saying, however defensively, that the cult of Blue Tyler was one of which I was only vaguely aware, and I paid no more attention to it, and to the cinéastes who worshiped at its altar, than I did to the cult of Jerry Lewis that the French in all their perversity have perpetuated. For me, Blue Tyler was only an occasional presence lingering on my TV screen for a second or so in those many predawn hours when I scrolled through the channels with my remote, searching for a sedative movie to relieve my chronic insomnia, something talky without too much movement or fancy cutting that might delay sleep. If asked before I met her, before (God help me) I studied her pictures in an editing room (I can tell you now that in her famous—sweet Jesus Christ, even I am succumbing to the fatuous vocabulary of the cinéaste—Haitian fire dance with Shelley Flynn and Chocolate Walker Franklin in
Carioca Carnival
, there were 177 separate setups), if asked, I repeat, what she looked like, I would have been hard put to give an answer.
Shirley Temple I could describe: moon face, a ringlet of curls, the pouty lower lip when she cried, the nauseating smile she directed at Bill “Bojangles” Robinson as she tapped, tapped, tapped. Margaret O’Brien: the eyes. Natalie Wood: harder, because one remembers her better as a grown-up in pictures in which the screenplay actually called for her to get poked, little Marjorie Morgenstern with a bagel in the oven.

Of Blue Tyler, all I remembered, the first thing anyone remembered, was the voice, the voice that even when she was six and eight and ten and a stranger to the indulgence she later never tried to resist was a voice that carried the hint of too many cigarettes and too much booze and too many late nights and too many dark erotic liaisons. A vaginal voice. Husky, inviting, a midget Dietrich, a dwarf Tallulah. “Butch Blue,” Bob Hope called her the first time she appeared on his radio show when she was five, and Butch Blue she remained through all her subsequent appearances on the show, Butch Blue Tyler playing the Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart parts in Hope’s parodies of their movies, once on a holiday broadcast even singing bass to Bing Crosby’s baritone in a “White Christmas” duet. Hers was an aberrant attraction, I realize now, a pedophile’s nocturnal emission. She was Eve not just before the apple, but before puberty, a siren at six, the child who would come to no good, erotic catnip to those who would despoil her: to all of us.