Playland (2 page)

But if the Corps did not think Chuckie was officer material, it did realize that Corporal, later Sergeant, Charlton O’Hara, USMCR, was a pretty country fair director, just the man to shoot invasions, and so they gave him a film crew and put him on the beach with the first wave when the Fifth Marines hit Cape Gloucester the day after Christmas 1943 (“Not the way one would ordinarily choose to spend Boxing Day, dear,” he said once), and then again nine months later with the first wave at Peleliu, a pointless and bloody fiasco, again with the Fifth Marines. All the Marine brass really wanted was film of jarheads hitting the beach to show Congress when it was time for the next year’s appropriations. To the Corps, Chuckie’s politics (and the sexual orientation the brass must have suspected) did not matter as much as the footage he was getting, when the chances were he was going to end up in a body bag anyway, a dead Commie nance, longevity not generally accruing to people who landed often enough with the first wave. Meaning Chuckie was probably lucky to lose only his right leg from the knee down on D-Plus-Two at Peleliu, Orange Beach, from an unexploded mortar round buried in the sand that he accidentally kicked while he was moving his crew around the beach looking for a better angle. Force of habit, the old Cosmopolitan Pictures training, directors at Cosmo always overcovered so that any mistakes could be fixed in the editing room.

Chuckie was blacklisted after he testified, no studio would hire him, no independent would back his projects. He could have gone to England but he hated the cold and he hated the dark wet English winters. Anyway the blacklist was not an economic hardship for Chuckie, as it was for so many others in the same boat, because he was rich, his family owned most of the highway billboards in the state of California. Not old money, darling, he told me, but money, and pots of it. He left his tiny perfect house in the Hollywood Hills and moved up to his family’s place in the Carmel Highlands, where he was in no danger
of being constantly reminded of the Industry from which he had been banished. The old O’Hara house on the Carmel bluffs looked as if it had grown out of the rock formations that fell into the Pacific hundreds of feet below, and there on the sea he spent his period of exile with his trick of the moment and with his dotty old mother, Vera O’Hara, who even when I met Chuckie several decades later was always asking him when he was going to get married. That was when I was taping his memories of Blue Tyler, and he was at the same time pumping me about her. During the hours and days we spent together, I kept trying to imagine his life in those years when he was a professional nonperson. All over the Carmel house there were photographs of Chuckie from that period, all in silver Tiffany frames; as much as any of the actors he directed, Chuckie loved having his picture taken, and in fact favored catamites who were photographers, although he never photographed them in turn. In the comfort of this Elba, he seemed to want for nothing, the man of principle as the man of leisure.

So I can understand the surprise of those who had canonized him when one day Chuckie flew to Washington on his own, and in executive session with the Committee’s investigators purged himself. Because of his earlier appearance—a public relations disaster the Committee did not wish to repeat—he was treated with kid gloves, and his testimony never made public. There was only an announcement that he had appeared voluntarily and that his testimony would be most helpful in allowing the Committee to prepare its final report. That was it. Chuckie never said who he had named—less than I could have, more than I should have, was all he would tell me—and he went back to work as untroubled by his decision as he was by most of the events in his life. Why did you do it? I asked. Not very complicated, he answered. What it boiled down to was that he missed working. He missed the costume tests and the looping and the mixing sessions and the big mugs of coffee the script girl would hand him during the shoot and the crossword puzzles he would work with his thick black Mont Blanc pen while the D.P. was lighting
the next scene. I could never feature myself as this queen hero of the revolution, he said during one of our tapings, it was in the most revolting taste.

For a while after his recantation he worked steadily if without particular distinction, accepted again in the commissaries and the private studio dining rooms, at the same time denounced as a pariah and stool pigeon by those of his peers who had been so quick to acclaim him a hero on that earlier occasion before the Committee when he had removed his prosthetic leg. The younger historians of this period, ideologically correct, dismiss him as absent character and kidney, but they were never able to appreciate the social weave of Hollywood, what it was like to live and work there, to understand that the priority was always making pictures, the black sheep accepted back in the fold always a reliable story line. After a time, he more or less slipped into professional oblivion, doing an occasional
Hallmark Hall of Fame
special, but never segment television, Chuckie was too much a snob for that, he had after all directed Crawford and Davis and Kate and Claudette and Blue Tyler.

Ah, yes. Blue Tyler. Or Melba Mae Toolate, as she had become once again when I sought her out in Hamtramck, Michigan, her real name the perfect disguise. Chuckie knew so many of Blue’s early secrets, as I knew so many of her later ones, although she was such an elaborate fantast (a fastidious construct, liar being more to the point) that no one could ever really pin down the truth, such as it was, about her. Melba Mae covered her tracks.

Chuckie’s stories were wonderful. Not always believable, but wonderful. He tended to look at life as if he was setting up a shot, his hands joined at the thumbs, framing what he wanted the camera to see. A story was only meant to advance the action, and sooner than I should have I found myself going along with him, adding some set decoration of my own. You get in the mood. See the possibilities. Did it really matter if what happened did not actually happen that way? Who was to know? Everything is subjective. We were just advancing the action.
Story-conferencing the truth. A shading here, a shading there, in the interest, always we would tell ourselves, of clarification. Facts are unforgiving, so fuck facts, make the scenes work.

Anyway, Chuckie’s stories, as such they were. About Blue, of course. And her passion for Jacob King. People in Hollywood have always had this romantic idea about gangsters, and Jacob, with his slick hair and perfect teeth and his dark brooding looks and his volcanic furies, satisfied every fantasy. Even his sexual appendage was given demonic proportions, the
schlong
on him, the
schwanss
, the
schmekelah
, Chuckie said, and he a student of such instruments, with a student’s capacity for priapic exaggeration, a foot and a half, I saw it in the shower at Hillcrest. The venue explained Chuckie’s lapse into Yiddish, the anti-Semitism that came so easily to him no reason not to play gin at the Industry’s top Jewish country club, to take a little steam and case a few cocks in the locker room. This blissful reverie of an aged pederast allowed me to contemplate how many psychic miles Jacob King had traveled from the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, where he was born, to the shower room at Hillcrest, where Chuckie could swoon over his swinging dick. And Jacob the only man in that shower of whom it could be claimed that he had made his bones at the age of twelve. Or was it ten? Or had he just been brought along as a decoy, on that hit when he was ten, because his youth made the professional cannons doing the dirty less suspicious-looking?

Jacob King admitted nothing.

And denied nothing.

Twenty or thirty times he had whacked someone out.

Or so people said.

Did I know, Chuckie said, that Jake once killed somebody by wrapping his face in duct tape so he couldn’t breathe? A murder meant to make a statement.

Or so the story was.

Chuckie saw the duct-tape caper as a high-angle crane shot, with a slow pan down, then a 120-frame hold on the mummified victim before the cut.

When Jacob King was killed, his left eye was blown out of its
socket and landed on the unfinished portrait he was having painted of himself. Like a piece of snot, Chuckie said about the eyeball. Jacob was wearing jodhpurs in the portrait and laced boots and a beige silk shirt and a polka-dot ascot. Yet another indication of the mileage from Red Hook he had put on his psychic pedometer.

Or perhaps he was only traveling in place. On a treadmill with a fancier wardrobe.

It was said that Blue bought the portrait after Jacob King was killed. In any event, it disappeared.

Chuckie said that Jacob always carried a silver Tiffany locket in which he kept two of Blue’s pubic hairs. Why just two? I said. Why not one? Or one short-and-curly for every time he fucked her? They couldn’t have taken up all that much room. It wasn’t like it was a load of hay.

These were the sorts of questions I always asked. Chuckie would never answer, but would just go off on another tangent about someone else. About Blue’s lawyer, Lilo Kusack, and Lilo’s girlfriend, Rita Lewis. About J. F. French. The Mogul. Founder of Cosmopolitan Pictures. J. F. French claimed to have personally discovered Blue Tyler when she was only four years old. Arthur French figured in Chuckie’s reminiscences, too. Arthur was J.F.’s son and Blue’s designated fiancé when she was under contract to Cosmopolitan. Chuckie saw the whole story as a movie, when his mind stopped wandering. It will be my comeback picture, he said. And then he would say, Doesn’t it bother you the way these vile children directors say
film
? We made
pictures
. Adding after a moment, “I sound like some faggot female impersonator doing Norma Desmond.”

I was surprised at how many people turned out for Chuckie’s funeral. All the oldtimers who were still around, and for whom a funeral was an outing, many of them with canes and walkers and private nurses. In the end he was one of them, whatever his transgressions; membership in the closed society of the motion picture industry is almost never revoked for moral failings.

Of course Chuckie had scripted the service, down to the music
cues. He wanted a bugler to blow the Marine Corps hymn at his graveside, slow tempo, “From the halls of Montezuma, To the shores of Tripoli,” and then a segue into taps. Even from beyond the grave the
fageleh
son of a bitch was manipulating me, and I cried, as I knew I was meant to. And through the tears I remembered the day the story began.

The day Lizzie died.

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