Playland (56 page)

In perhaps the most manic moment of Blue’s appearance, she was asked if she was now or ever had been a Communist. “Mr. Tavenner,” she replied to the Committee’s chief counsel, “I won’t be old enough to vote until next year’s election.”

You quit
Broadway Babe
because of Chuckie? I asked.

And because of Jacob, Melba Mae Toolate said. Because of a lot of things.

What things?

Just let me alone, will you? Everything.

Cosmopolitan Pictures invoked the moral-turpitude clause in her contract, an action that left the studio’s highest-paid star functionally unemployable in the Hollywood community. No one seriously believed that she was a Communist, but the clause covered a multitude of sins, most of which in fact she had committed. Her earnings since the age of four had gone into trust accounts so that her financial position was not as precarious as that of others who had been blacklisted. But then neither were her funds infinite, and Cosmopolitan brought her to the brink of financial ruin through a series of legal maneuvers holding her accountable for production costs on pictures it had developed for her. She formed an independent production company and announced pictures, none of which of course were made. Then in 1951 she was subpoenaed to appear before the Kefauver Crime Committee to answer questions about the murder of Jacob King and whether it was the result of labor racketeering in the motion picture industry. Rather than testify she left the
country for Italy via Mexico. Her passport was immediately revoked.

She was broke.

She was twenty-three years old.

Moral turpitude, Arthur?

Well, there was Jake, and there was Chuckie, who was not just queer, he was a Commie on top of it, Arthur French said. And don’t forget Walker Franklin. Any one of those was grounds for the moral-turpitude clause. He hesitated. Then: Plus we didn’t know if she would work out as a grown-up.

Was that the real reason?

It went into the mix. Those were tough days, Jack. Television changed the whole equation. That, and making us get rid of the theater chains.

You people were all heart, Arthur.

I went along with the decision, Jack.

But she was a proven player.

It was a new ballgame.

She made a number of pictures in Italy, none of which were released in the United States. Occasionally exposé magazines featured lurid accounts of her past and present. She was a lesbian, a bag lady for the Mob, a madam, she had fingered Jacob King, she had borne his love child, she had borne Arthur French’s illegitimate daughter, she had aborted both, she had secretly married Jacob, she had secretly married Arthur, she had even secretly married Chuckie O’Hara, she was the beneficiary of hush money from Jacob’s former associates, she was a call girl in Rome, she was a courier for the Italian Communist party. Her putative lovers ranged from Doris Duke to the Duke of Edinburgh, Lucky Luciano was said to be smitten, as was Senator John Kennedy, his father, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, and my father, Hugh Broderick. In rapid succession she married and divorced a gaffer on one of her pictures; a grandnephew of Benito Mussolini; and one of King Farouk’s lesser pimps. Between
marriages she briefly took up again with Walker Franklin, but when she could not support him in the style to which he had grown accustomed, he abandoned her for a Venetian principessa. In the late fifties, more or less forgotten, she came back to New York. There was little fanfare, except for a brief flurry when a chorus girl she knew jumped out a window on West End Avenue, the story she had told me in Hamtramck. Blue Tyler’s chorine gal pal, as the tabloid headlines put it. Nobody really cared except Walter Winchell, and he, like her, was a relic of another age. For two years she sang in a nightclub on Sixth Avenue, married and divorced twice more—two horn players, who also happened to be brothers—and then in the early 1960s, she simply disappeared.

She was broke.

She was unknown.

She was a drunk.

She was thirty-three years old.

As Blue Tyler, she ceased to exist.

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

A
ctually she did tell me, Arthur French said. After a fashion. In her own way.

On the flight to Tucson and then on the drive from Tucson to Nogales, I had debated whether I should finally mention to Arthur that Melba Mae Toolate, during our last taping session in Hamtramck, had reported matter-of-factly that when she was fourteen years old she was giving his father a blow job at the Fremont Hotel in Las Vegas that sixteenth of January, 1942, at about the time that Carole Lombard’s TWA flight, with Blue Tyler supposedly a passenger on board, crashed into Potosi Mountain in Table Rock, Nevada, with no survivors. Trying to sort out Blue’s life, and Melba Mae’s problematic take on it, I had come to the ranch twice since my return, and talked to Arthur at length on the telephone, and again that one time in his father’s orchid house at Willingham when he had come up to Los Angeles, but the topic was not one with an easy transition into it (“Oh, by the way, Arthur …” did not seem to fill the bill), and so I kept putting it off until I could find an opportune moment. We rode every day, I think because Arthur liked to see my discomfiture in the saddle. I don’t like horses and
hated to ride, and he sat a horse better than one might have expected from the son of Moses Frankel, immigrant turned haberdasher turned mogul. And also if we were riding I could not tape, and I had the sense that Arthur wanted few records kept of any discussions we might have about Blue Tyler. It was not until my last night at the ranch, as we sat on the veranda before dinner, with the sun disappearing behind the foothills and a third or perhaps even a fourth drink stiffening my resolve, that the old cop-shop reporter I had once been took charge, the one who in days past could ask the relatives of murder victims to comment on the brutal slaying of their son or daughter or husband or wife or brother or sister, and ask it without hesitation. Still it was with a certain trepidation, earned over the years of our friendship, that I finally told him what Melba Mae Toolate claimed was the reason Blue Tyler had missed Carole Lombard’s plane that night. And as so often with Arthur, I was not prepared for the equanimity of his response.