Playland (46 page)

LILO KUSACK
takes a leather notepad from his suit pocket, and with a gold pencil jots down Blue’s instructions.

SHELLEY FLYNN
wipes the sweat from his brow.

ANOTHER ANGLE
The earthmoving equipment moves toward the site, rolling over the red ribbon, and then carving out great hunks of sand from the desert.

ANGLE ON THE GROUP
all turning away except for

JACOB KING
who lingers, gazing at the site.

ANGLE ON JIMMY RIORDAN & LILO KUSACK
who look back at Jacob King. They look at each other wordlessly, then get into their chauffeur-driven car for the ride back to Los Angeles.

HOLD ON JACOB KING
as he removes the architect’s rendering of Playland from the easel.

DISSOLVE TO
:

M
ontage:

It was Chuckie O’Hara who dubbed Jacob King The Great Gatzberg, and the name stuck, to Chuckie’s initial dismay and horror, for it was accepted as sacred writ in the film community that Jacob did not suffer perceived slights with equanimity. In the past, it was whispered, bones had been broken for less, but because battery was not considered a viable social option for a guest member at Hillcrest, a member of the congregation at Barry Tyger’s Temple Beth Israel, it was now said that husbands who uttered any public slur about Jacob King, his origins or his reputed profession, would be quietly cuckolded, their wives fucked up the ass as punishment. Although Rita Lewis and Lilo Kusack were not joined in matrimony, theirs was the example most commonly given, albeit sotto voce, since Lilo’s documented capacity for retaliation—if only economic career-ending retaliation—was said to equal Jacob King’s. Jacob, however, took Chuckie’s remark as a compliment, a comment on the style and stylishness he was trying to affect, although I find it difficult to believe he had ever read or even heard of
Gatsby
, or seen the movie. Someone however must have told him about the book, probably Blue. She was an
avid, if primitive, reader, sliding her forefinger slowly along each line of type, her lips moving as she read, two habits that the teachers at Cosmo’s Little Red Schoolhouse could never break her of, habits she still had when I met her as Melba Mae Toolate. She was less an autodidact than a seeker after romance, or, to be precise, romantic parts she thought she could play, Jane Eyre or Elizabeth Bennet, say, or best of all Joan of Arc, especially (according to Arthur French) if the Maid of Orleans could have a couple of love scenes. In her reading of
Gatsby
, Blue identified with Jordan Baker; in her opinion (and this too was via Arthur, and so open to question), Daisy Buchanan was “a cunt.”

They were gorgeous together, Chuckie O’Hara said. He was always buying her things. Emerald earrings. A diamond necklace. I remember the premiere of
Red River Rosie
at Grauman’s. Real Hollywood stuff. The searchlights crisscrossing the sky, a big crowd in the bleachers. Blue being the star of the picture, her limo was the last to arrive. Moe had wanted to ride in the same car, but she said only Jake or she wasn’t coming, and if Moe insisted on riding in her car, she’d tell Jimmy Fidler, who was doing the live radio feed, that she had cramps, and she would’ve done it, too, Moe knew that. Jake got out of the car first, and he was wearing tails. Nobody wore tails to an opening, but he could bring it off. He helped her out of the car, and they walked up the red carpet into the theater, Blue blowing kisses, the flashbulbs exploding. You remember what Nick Carraway said about Gatsby, that there was a romantic readiness about him that he had never found in anyone else? Well, that’s what Jake had. Usually the stars slipped out of the theater after the houselights went down, but Blue always stayed, she just loved looking at herself on screen. There was a party afterward at Moe’s, everyone was there, Elsa Maxwell and Cole Porter, Noel Coward, my date was Hedy Lamarr, if you can believe it, Moe didn’t like guys to come with guys, except Noel, and I always thought Elsa was in drag. I liked Hedy, she was fun, she said,
Chuckie, I’m having my period, we can’t do it. That huge fucking house of Moe’s, three bands rotating so the music never stopped. Jake and Blue never seemed to leave the dance floor. It was as if they were alone out there, and everyone was watching them, but what I remember best was Lilo. His face was almost totally shrouded by cigar smoke, and he never took his eyes off them. It was scary.

Chuckie again:

Jake and Blue would have these croquet luncheon parties every Saturday at the house on St. Pierre Road. For all the sports he tried to learn, croquet was the only one he was any good at, he used to love to slam your ball out of the way, as if he was trying to knock it into Ventura County or was paying back someone who’d done him wrong. There was a violence about it, about croquet, for God’s sake, you got a sense that he was only truly master of his own fate in the world of violence. He’d play in these high-stakes games with Howard Hawks and Louis Jourdan and Mike Romanoff, Reggie Gardiner, people like that, all decked out in his white flannel slacks, and he seemed to be surrounded by this aura of mystery that they didn’t have, a distance. It was as if he knew everyone was talking about him, and they were a little afraid of him. He liked that. He was a celebrity in the kingdom of celebrity, and nobody is more fascinated by a celebrity than another celebrity.

Still Chuckie:

Jake and I always got along. I never knew exactly why. He didn’t like fairies, we made him nervous. I don’t mean in any sexual sense, that sexually ambivalent psychocrap that’s always dropped on studs. He just didn’t understand men who liked to fuck other men. Maybe in the joint, he said, if it’s a long stretch, but even then I think I pass. So I suppose our getting along had something to do with my losing my leg, it wasn’t a fag thing to do. He asked me if it hurt, and I said no, I was in shock, I didn’t even know the leg was gone until I woke up on the hospital
ship, and then he asked if I thought I was going to die, and I said yes, and he said did that make you scared, and I said I couldn’t remember, but probably, yes, I was scared the whole time I was on Peleliu. Both days. So why’d you do it then, he said, you could’ve gotten out of it. As if I was stupid not to. He meant because I was queer, not because I’d been a Communist. God, I didn’t tell anybody that. That was around the time Alan Shay committed suicide after testifying, and all us old Commies were scared to death. Anyway I didn’t have an answer. It was as if he was trying to find out how his victims must have felt, those twenty or thirty people he was supposed to have murdered. Or maybe he thought it was going to happen to him one day, and he wanted to know how to behave, or how he should behave, he certainly would like to behave as well as this fairy movie director.

Meta liked to say—

Meta?

This girlfriend I had at the studio school, Melba Mae Toolate said. She wasn’t in the business.

And she said what?

Meta said that dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire, you ever hear that?

I heard that.

Well, Jacob was the best dancer I ever knew, outside of Walker Franklin, he made dancing like balling, you danced with him you couldn’t wait to ball after. You’d think someone who was such a good dancer would be athletic, but he wasn’t. Arthur could hardly do the two-step, but he was a good athlete, and this drove Jacob crazy. He thought if he bought all the right clothes, that was all he needed. Arthur rode, so he had to ride too. He had jodhpurs made and a hacking jacket, and he bought a polo helmet and some mallets, and he even had this artist guy painting a portrait of him in the jodhpurs and laced-up knee boots, he was going to give it to me as a present, but I saw it, and I laughed, big mistake, Jacob didn’t like people laughing at him.

What’d he do?

He fired the painter, said he didn’t know how to paint worth a shit.

What happened to the portrait?

It ended up over at Playland.

Unfinished?

Yeah.

What happened to it after …

Listen, I don’t know. Jesus, you ask a lot of fucking questions, it’s none of your fucking business.

Okay.

How about topping off my drink?

You sure?

What’re you, my fucking keeper?

(I opened another half pint of vodka and splashed some into her glass. She took a swallow, then a second. In the freezer, I found a frozen macaroni-and-cheese dinner, popped it into the microwave, and set the timer. By then her mood had lightened.)

The first time he got up on a horse, the horse threw him, and he took out his gun, I thought he was going to shoot it.

Really?

(A cryptic smile. In other words, it was a better story with the gun. Even in Hamtramck, she hadn’t lost the knack of juicing a scene.) He tried tennis, too, right?

All he could do was hit the ball hard, when he didn’t miss it. But I could beat him, and that was too much for him. I’d say to him, Jacob, you’ve got to set your feet like this, and you’ve got to be ready to move toward the add court or toward the let court, and he’d say, okay, okay, let’s do it, and I’d slam one by him. One day he flung his racket away, and he says you know what kind of game tennis is, and I said what kind of game is it. And he said it’s the kind of game Arthur plays, I bet he’s really good at it. And I said Arthur played in college. And he turns me around right there on the court, puts his hand up under my shirt over my boob, and he says, well, tell me something, did Arthur play this in college, was he as good at this as I am? So he took lessons every day, not from some club pro at Hillcrest, but
from Lanny Todd, he was in the semifinals at Wimbledon in 1936, on our own court, because he didn’t want anyone to see how bad he was. He’d practice and he’d practice, he willed himself into being a tennis player good enough to beat me. He liked beating me, it was as if his life depended on it. Finally I said to him you play like a fucking gangster, and he said no, I played like a gangster when you were beating me. And then he said if I’m a gangster, what does that make you. And I said a gangster’s moll.