Playland (13 page)

Really?

She drove off a cliff. In the hills up behind San Diego.

Was it really an accident?

We didn’t
kill
her, Jack, if that’s what you’re
getting
at. (This
was Arthur in his ironic mode, when certain words and certain phrases in every sentence appeared to be italicized.) The studio might try to cover up a murder, but we never
ordered
one. We did have
certain
standards.

Then it wasn’t an accident?

It was made to appear that way.

The studio not being without resources.

If you have resources, you use them. That’s why they’re called resources.

Thank you, Arthur. For explaining that to me. Anyway. The hills behind San Diego …

The mother of a child star is not supposed to commit suicide. It looks bad. Especially when the child star has a picture ready for release.

Why did she do it?

I suppose her contract was not going to be renewed. Her usefulness was more or less at an end. Or maybe she had just had it. It happens. Anyway, finding a surrogate guardian was never any problem.

Because Cosmopolitan Pictures was her real mother and father?

Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Jack. But yes, the studio was her family. I bet Blue would agree with that even today.

Who was Toolate?

Irma’s ex-husband, as near as we could figure. Long gone by the time Melba Mae appeared on the scene.

Gone where?

I’m sure I don’t know.

In prison?

A possibility.

Did he ever show up?

(Carefully): Over the years a number of people showed up claiming to have some kinship with Blue. The legal department handled all the claims.

You’re a cool customer, Arthur.

Yes.

Blue usually claimed that she had lost the tapes. Or then again that she was keeping them in a safe place. Mad money, she would say. My little annuity.

A nice way to say extortion money.

That she still thought there were people around that she might be able to blackmail is evidence, I suppose, of how far off life’s radar screen she had wandered.

H
er every public move was recorded on camera (and many of her private ones, too, as a star of her magnitude was always expected to be on public display, a condition written into the boilerplate of her contract). Here a photo of Baby Blue Tyler at age six being taught by a studio stunt coordinator how to climb trees at Cosmopolitan’s ranch in the San Fernando Valley. There a photo of Blue at age ten receiving from Clark Gable that special Oscar at the 1939 Academy Awards. Another of Blue giving Eleanor Roosevelt a contribution to the March of Dimes on behalf of the Motion Picture Producers Association. Blue with Bronx Bomber Joe DiMaggio and Brown Bomber Joe Louis. Blue with the French Fillies, the chorus line that appeared in all of Cosmopolitan’s musicals, each Filly personally selected by J. F. French himself (the better the head the Filly candidate gave Mr. French in her job interview, Chuckie O’Hara would tell me later, the better her chances for selection). Blue with Congressman Martin Dies, chairman of the Un-American Activities Committee, and Blue with Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. With Harold Arlen and Irving Berlin, “both penning Tyler songfests,” according to the caption. Blue being comforted by Norma Shearer outside the Wilshire Boulevard
Temple, where she was “the youngest mourner at the funeral of Beloved Industry Legend Irving Thalberg.” Blue in January 1942, weeping at the news that Carole Lombard’s plane had crashed in Table Rock, Nevada, outside Las Vegas, killing everyone on board. “Blue Misses Fatal Flight,” read the caption headline. “Teen Tot had been on bond-selling tour with late star and good friend Carole Lombard. Strep throat canceled homecoming flight, saved life.” And Blue, now fourteen, at Cosmo’s Little Red Schoolhouse with fellow student Meta Dierdorf, described in the caption as a “non-pro,” and “further proof that Cosmo wants its most priceless asset to meet with people from all segments of society, and not just those associated with the Motion Picture Industry.” Blue reading
Little Women
with Meta Dierdorf, and at the blackboard with her, solving algebra problems. Blue and Meta Dierdorf serving doughnuts and coffee to soldiers and sailors at Hollywood’s Stage Door Canteen. Meta Dierdorf then disappears from Blue Tyler’s pictorial and print biography until three weeks before the end of the war:

The murder was never solved. According to the newspapers, Meta Dierdorf was an “oil heiress.” Her mother had died of puerperal fever after a second child was stillborn, and her father was said to be an “independent oil operator” who had been in Bahrain on a field exploration when his daughter was suffocated in her bathtub by someone who had crammed four inches of what the newspapers said was a Turkish towel down her throat. The day of her murder, Meta Dierdorf had attended, in her capacity as a hostess at the Stage Door Canteen, a publicity luncheon given by Chloe Quarles at Willingham for a contingent of U.S. Marines billeted at the Naval Auxiliary Shore Station in San Pedro. The marines had been assigned as extras to a
military musical comedy Cosmopolitan Pictures and J. F. French were preparing called
Ready, Aim, Fire
. The Cosmopolitan publicity department said that J. F. French had not been present at the luncheon, that the event was part of his former wife’s continuing and valuable contribution to the war effort, that he had never met any of the lovely young hostesses, and that he had been in script conferences all that day so that his personal production of
Ready, Aim, Fire
, starring Shelley Flynn, Chocolate Walker Franklin, and the French Fillies, would be the great success that everyone at Cosmopolitan knew it would be. It was further added that a percentage of the studio’s profits would be given to the Army-Navy Relief Fund, that J. F. French himself and all the studio’s employees mourned Miss Dierdorf, and that in her name Cosmopolitan would make a cash donation to the Stage Door Canteen.

The largesse of Cosmopolitan Pictures was forgotten the next day when the
Express
reported that shortly before she was strangled Meta Dierdorf had “engaged in an act of intimacy.” It was the kind of delicate construction indulged in by newspapers of the period, one inviting all kinds of prurient speculation, especially in the studio commissaries, with fellatio leading the morning line. According to Chuckie O’Hara, now medically discharged from the Marines and newly back at the studio with his prosthetic leg, the story in the Cosmo executive dining room, via the studio police, was that homicide investigators had discovered several used rubbers in a bedroom wastebasket and that the medical examiner had also found evidence of semen both in the victim’s mouth and on the tile floor next to the toilet.

In an effort to protect the image of his number-one star, J. F. French refused to let Blue attend Meta Dierdorf’s funeral, at the same time killing a release from Cosmo’s publicity department saying that America’s number-four box office attraction (and top-ranked actress) was too grief-stricken to make an appearance, and then fired the studio’s publicity director for allowing the item to appear in some early editions. Chuckie
O’Hara said that J.F. did not want Blue’s name associated in any way with the crime, nor even to have it further reported that she and Meta Dierdorf had gone to school together, let alone that the studio had picked Meta Dierdorf to be Blue’s best friend, it being bad enough in his view that Chloe Quarles had invited the little cunt to the luncheon at Willingham. If the mother of a cinemoppet is not supposed to have committed suicide, neither is that cinemoppet supposed to have a best friend naked in a bathtub with come in her mouth and a towel shoved down her throat. It was to change the focus that J. F. French called upon his long friendship with Hugh Cardinal Danaher, ordinary of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles, with whom he was associated in a number of anti-Communist crusades, and arranged for Blue to represent Cosmopolitan Pictures at an armed forces mass at St. Basil’s Cathedral the day Meta Dierdorf was buried, a mass celebrated by the cardinal himself. In the next morning’s newspapers, there were front-page photographs of Blue and His Eminence on the steps of St. Basil’s, she in a white linen dress and a widebrimmed blue straw hat, carrying a white missal (the missal from the Cosmo property department, Chuckie said, as she had never been baptized in any denomination). But of course
Life
magazine’s picture researchers remembered the published studio photographs of Blue with Meta Dierdorf, and after that the publicity department’s effort became an exercise in damage control.

Blue Tyler was not questioned officially, although in the presence of her lawyer, Lilo Kusack, she did have an informal conversation with a homicide detective named Spellacy (“Subject was forthcoming but could add nothing pertinent to the investigation”) that went unreported in the local press, and that I only discovered years later when I had an opportunity to examine the Dierdorf case file. As I grew to anticipate, and to appreciate, the better I came to know him, Chuckie O’Hara had the raciest footnote to the Dierdorf affair, as he was present at a studio meeting between Lilo Kusack and J. F. French about the matter.
(The reason he happened to be in J.F.’s office, Chuckie said, was to go over a list of pictures he might direct now that his discharge was final, and to discuss whether his having only one leg would preclude his doing a certain kind of outdoor film that he did not wish to do anyway, the soundstage being where he was most in his element). Why he was not asked to leave when Lilo was ushered into the office he never bothered to explain (nor in truth did I ask), but whether accurate in every detail or not, his story did have the virtue of verisimilitude (at least insofar as it pertained to my own experience in the Industry, and my knowledge, however secondhand, of the behavior of the principals), and it also indicated the milieu in which Blue had grown up, and whose values she had taken as her own.

“We can’t have our little girl friendly with someone who gives blow jobs on the crapper,” J. F. French said in the O’Hara version.

“Moe,” Lilo Kusack said, “Moe” being the name that only his closest associates were allowed to call J. F. French, “Blue is famous for, uh …”

“Never on the crapper,” J. F. French shouted. “I swear on my mother’s grave, Blue has never sucked anyone off on the crapper.”

There was one last headline about the Meta Dierdorf murder, an example of damage control Cosmopolitan Pictures-style, as it applied to Blue Tyler:

As it happened, the banner headline across the front page that day was:

To J. F. French and Cosmopolitan Pictures, the dawn of the atomic age had the entirely satisfying side effect of driving the murder of Meta Dierdorf and her putative friendship with Blue Tyler out of the newspapers.

With the war over, there were more headlines, better publicity.
BLUE INKS RECORD MULTI-PIC PACT MAKING HER HIGHEST-PAID STAR IN COSMO GALAXY
, and with the story a photograph of Blue on Soundstage 27 with J. F. French and (in captionese) “Blue’s steady flame, Producer Arthur French,” as she “prepares for new song-and-dance role in
Red River Rosie
, with former Marine war hero Charlton (‘Chuckie’) O’Hara, who has megged three Tyler hits for Cosmo, behind the camera.” And a photo of Blue standing under the American flag in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel delivering the Pledge of Allegiance at 1947’s “I Am an American Day” dinner, “where Hollywood pledged to stand four-square against the forces of Communism.” A photo of Blue in a box at Santa Anita with “Millionaire Sportsman Jacob King.” And at the Grauman’s Chinese opening of
Red River Rosie
, again with “Millionaire Sportsman and Man About Town Jacob King.” Then the high point: the cover and an eight-page layout in
Life
, the story leading off with a bleed double truck of Blue, almost twenty, sitting at the huge oval teak table in the conference room at the William Morris Agency, surrounded by her retainers—the lawyers and agents and publicists and accountants and managers and financial planners dedicated to her professional care and feeding.
BLUE PLOTS CROSSOVER CAREER MOVES
, read the headline. And the subheads:
FORMER MOPPET SEEKS ADULT ROLES. THE WORLD HER OYSTER
.