Playland (12 page)

Consider now the photographs. The hundreds I saw of the thousands that I suppose were taken—studio candids mostly—on the set, in the schoolroom, at leisure, a documentation of a child growing up that was so total and so false, evoking not so much truth as the generic truth of the celebrity machine. Publicity was the oil of the star system, the way by which an ordinary little girl could be lent, even in her ablutions, even feeding the Labrador puppy it turned out she never actually had (called Chocolate in the caption, after Chocolate Walker Franklin), a quality of transcendence that touched even the ordinary with the shimmer of possibilities, of what might be. There were entire (and in many cases entirely manufactured) social and political
histories in these photographs and in the press releases scotch-taped to the back of each one. By demonological scrutiny one could discern shifting alliances, hidden agendas, secret vanities, new hierarchies. Take for example Melba Mae Toolate at age four, with Shelley Flynn and Chocolate Walker Franklin, democracy in action the subtext of that simple time. And in this less simple time a different subtext: the realization that those blacks who crossed over in show business during the 1930s all seemed to have names like Chocolate or Bojangles or Butterfly, subservient names, nigger names, to put an uglier (and truer) handle on it, that defined their relationship to the whites with whom they performed, and who, at least in the publicity handouts, named their house pets after them. Melba Mae in that photograph (stamped on the back
PROPERTY OF COSMOPOLITAN PICTURES
), selected at an open dance call on Cosmo’s Stage 17 by J. F. French himself, according to the text on the back of the photo, mogul of moguls, founder of Cosmopolitan, 1934’s Humanitarian of the Year (again according to the caption), Entertainment Industry Division, National Conference of Christians and Jews. It was J. F. French, the release said, who came up with the name Blue Tyler, after his wife’s favorite color (his wife, or to be more accurate, his then-current wife, the former silent screen vamp Chloe Quarles), and after the tenth president of the United States, John Tyler, with whom J. F. French said he felt a special bond as they shared the same August 4 birthday (although later, when I checked, I discovered that John Tyler’s birthday was actually March 29). Blue Tyler. Or Baby Blue Tyler, as many tried to call her. A name she hated. Fuck you, she would say to fan magazine reporters who called her Baby Blue. Fuck you in the eyeball. She was then six.

A Little-Known Fact: Did you know that John Tyler had fifteen children? I asked Melba Mae Toolate.

Stupid fuck, she had answered. And then: Who’s John Tyler?

PROPERTY OF COSMOPOLITAN PICTURES
: a perfect description, because that is exactly what Blue Tyler was. Her mother in effect was pensioned off by the studio, given a position in something
called Special Projects that kept her, as a press release said, “on the go,” although where she was on the go to was never specified. If she appeared in the photographs at all, it was only as a shadowy figure in the background, sometimes identified, more often not, and easily cropped out. On official studio occasions, Chloe Quarles assumed the maternal role, or the senior character actress in whatever picture Blue was then starring in. Her upbringing was entrusted to governesses hired by and loyal to Cosmopolitan Pictures. Did your mother live with you? I asked. More than once. A series of questions over the days we were together. She answered or she did not answer, depending on her mood. Sometimes she was evasive, sometimes truculent, sometimes she offered a story to some other point, with the answer I was seeking buried deep within it, often an untruth. The questions, the answers, the evasions, the lies became in time a seamless piece. And so again, a second, a ninth, a forty-fourth time: Did your mother live with you? Of course. Another time, another answer: She lived in the guest house. Question: Where did Chloe Quarles fit in? (A leading question, of course, from intonations I had picked up.) Answer: She was a dyke, Mr. French did not like her around me too much. (Confirming the intonations.) I had the sense of a household out of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, run by machines and service personnel. There was a maid, Esmeralda, a would-be actress and cousin of Chocolate Walker Franklin (democracy in action again), and Madame. Who was Madame? All the governesses, it seemed, were called Madame. For fear of kidnappers, her house was never photographed; the rooms that appeared in magazine layouts were always dressed sets on a soundstage. Sometimes the Pacific was the featured backdrop, sometimes the Santa Monica Mountains, sometimes a ranch in the San Fernando Valley, the exteriors blue-screen process shots superimposed on the windows, the magic of motion pictures. Her mother’s absence from these photo spreads was covered by the assertion that Irma Tyler (her contract with the studio stipulated that she too abandon the name Toolate) did not wish to “capitalize” on her
daughter’s fame, that being the mother of such a loving and talented child was reward enough. Question: What happened to Irma Tyler? And again: What ever happened to your mother? Blue was vague. Answer: She cut out.

When?

I was fifteen, I think.

Did you ever see her again?

She died.

How?

In a car crash.

Who told you she died?

I don’t know.

Who?

I can’t remember.

Who?

Mr. French. The publicity department.

In fact, her mother was not her mother at all.

Or might not have been.

Or in all likelihood wasn’t.

Or so Blue claimed. Indirectly. Her voice on a tape. The tapes she said she made when she decided it was time to do her autobiography. (“To do” is the operative infinitive in this kind of enterprise, never “to write.”) The autobiography is an inclination that all has-been movie stars have. Another grab at the brass ring. Youth recaptured and old scores settled on talk shows and in newspaper Style sections.

Arthur French gave me the tape and let me dupe it. The son of J. F. French. Son as in the son also rises. Old Hollywood joke. The man Hedda Hopper had said Blue was “dating.” The man Louella Parsons said was her “intended.” A “woosome twosome,” Winchell said. “The Son and the Star,” the fan magazines said. “Setting the date,” Jimmy Fidler said. Arthur and I went back a long time. By the time Arthur gave me the tape, I had already talked to him about Blue several times at his ranch in Arizona, trips undertaken when I had more knowledge than I
cared to impart but needed him to fill in some of the blanks, although I knew how difficult a task debriefing him would be. He had not mentioned the tape during those visits. He mentioned it only later, when I was talking to him at Willingham, his father’s preposterously named and preposterously huge estate on lower Angelo Drive in Beverly Hills. The tape, he said, had turned up in his mail one day. No note. No identification. No return address. Just the voice on the tape. That unmistakable voice.

This is what was on the tape, beginning to end:

It just appeared, this tape? I asked Arthur French. We were walking through the orchid house at Willingham. J. F. French had been dead for years, but Arthur still maintained Willingham despite the rarity of his trips to Los Angeles from Arizona, where he had lived for as long as I had known him. It was a mansion built at a time when mansions were mansions, with a nine-hole golf course and ponds that had been dug and aerated, with swans swimming in them, and entire English gardens imported from the Wiltshire countryside to bake and wither in the subtropical sun, only to be replaced again the next season. Arthur kept a skeleton staff of housekeepers and gardeners on duty, down from the nearly two dozen servants his father had terrorized when he was alive, and when Arthur showed up, always on short notice, there were fresh flowers in all the vases and phalaenopsis plants in the master bedroom and the linen was starched and the crystal and the china and the silver sparkled. There was no reason for Arthur to keep the place. He could have sold it or given it to a school and saved the prodigious upkeep and the equally prodigious taxes, but I think he just liked the pointless extravagance of it, and the way this pointless extravagance seemed to irritate people.

It was a pattern, Arthur French said. Through the years. She was always sending me things.

What sort of things?

Things. Newspaper clippings. Walker Franklin’s obituary. Chloe’s retrospective at the Biarritz Film Festival. Shelley Flynn getting married again. Things like that.

And you always knew they were from her? Even with no return address?

Of course. Who else would be interested in clippings about people nobody else knew. Or remembered. Or cared about. She knew I’d remember.

(He was equivocating. You had to wait Arthur out. Approach him from a different direction. Come back at a later time. And at a time after that, and after that time, too. Wait until he was ready to tell you, until he knew what he was going to find out in return. And as he was keeping things from me, I of course was
keeping things from him. Darker things. Things Melba Mae Toolate had intimated in Hamtramck, other things she had said straight out, perhaps true, perhaps not, perhaps true only in part. The problem was how to find out what to believe and what not to believe. Arthur knew I was equivocating, as I knew he was. Our discourse was like poker. Lose one hand, play the next. The trick was not to show your hole card. Arthur enjoyed the game more than I did, but then for Arthur, life was a game for which he seemed to have the only copy of the rulebook.)

Who is Jack Rabbitt? I said.

He shrugged. Never heard of him.

Never?

Maybe he was somebody she fucked. That wasn’t all that unusual with her. She didn’t even know his name. That wasn’t unusual either.

Is it true, the tape?

After a fashion. It jibes with things we knew.

Like what?

Irma wasn’t her mother, we knew that.

How?

The studio was not without resources, Jack. (With that high irony Arthur often affected. Meaning, or at least implying, that the studio owned, or, more precisely, rented, if not the police department then individual officers in it, who, with at least the tacit approval of superiors who would share in the payoff, could bring the intimidating powers of their organization to bear.) There was no birth certificate. One day Irma didn’t have a child, the next day she did. We found that out. We couldn’t send her packing. So J.F. just put her under contract. In return for which she had to answer certain questions about where Blue came from. And agree to certain stipulations.

How did Irma really die?

An auto accident.