Playland (69 page)

Why did you have to find her, Jack?

I have pondered Arthur’s question many times while lying awake in the middle of the night, and the best answer is, Why does the sun come up, Arthur? Wherever he is, I am not sure he would understand, or let me off that easily.

It happened.

Finding Blue gave purpose back to a life that had gone off the rails after Lizzie was killed. Finding her brought me back to the land of the living.

Consider the ifs.

If the Fiat Spider had not spun out of control and killed Lizzie. If I had not hit Shaamel Boudreau with $331 worth of Bergdorf-Goodman sheets. If Maury Ahearne had not told me to fuck off. If I had not gone to the Socially Responsible Singles meeting. If Fern had not cried in the night. If Lily White had not told me to go, please go. If. If. If.

A compendium of ifs. Eliminate any one, and Melba Mae Toolate might still be alive, planning the triumphant comeback of Blue Tyler.

Still.

There was a cost.

Blue was never the most reliable witness to her own life, less a real person than the product of her own considerable imagination, constantly reinventing herself as the occasion and her own psychic need dictated. It was her intention, once contact was made (however fortuitously) and identity established, that I be the agent, or perhaps the director, of her latest reinvention, the of course uncredited collaborator in the continuing fabrication of the Blue Tyler myth, in all its many, and to her fascinating, chapters. Via me, she hoped to define a clearer image of the Blue Tyler she never tired of trying to perfect. That I might perhaps not be willing to go along with this collaboration never crossed her mind. In the end she was just another diversion for a public with an insatiable appetite for diversion, and I was the agent of that diversion, a co-conspirator in her death.

Non me absolvo
.

Lily named her baby Charles. She is married again and living in Cleveland. He didn’t have a return ticket, she scrawled on the wedding announcement.

I also made up with Marty Magnin. Why not? He made me laugh. One night last summer we were having dinner at Morton’s when he suddenly began blowing kisses to a party at an adjoining table. It’s the people at Cosmo, he said, they’ve
bought the rights to that chick’s story, you know, the big wheel in victims’ rights.

I turned around, and recognized her immediately. Dark like Jacob King in his portrait, oddly beautiful in the way Blue Tyler was, with the same shock of white hair over her left brow that Melba, in her later years, had. She caught my eye and held it, unwaveringly, to the point where I wondered if she recognized me in turn, and knew that we shared the same secret. I was sure she did.

“Teresa Kean,” I said to Marty.

“You know her?”

“Only from seeing her on TV.”

“That whole victims’ rights area. You should’ve thought of it, Jack. It’s a great story. She’s a great story.”

“Yes.”

“You want to meet her?”

“I don’t think so, Marty. Thanks, anyway.” I knew how much he wanted to go over and sit down with them. “I’m going to make this an early night.”

With almost palpable relief, Marty joined the Cosmo table and I went out into the cool of the evening. As I handed my claim check to the valet parking attendant, I suddenly had a powerful urge to return and introduce myself to Teresa Kean. I knew your mother, I wanted to say. Tell me about her, I was sure she would say.

No.

No more ifs added to the compendium.

It had to stop here.

I lived in Los Angeles for twenty-four years, and both knew and worked with a number of people who were active in the motion picture business during the late 1940s, when much of this book takes place (a time when I was still a high school student in New England). Their children were my contemporaries, and many became friends. It is from the memories and photo albums of parents and children that I was able to absorb and retain so much of the atmosphere of that period. My brother Dominick Dunne was instrumental in my meeting so many of the people to whom I listened, and it is safe to say that without his easing my entrée into the community this book probably would not have been written. Of those who have died, I can only say I think of them still as living. In no special order, I would like to thank Constance Wald, Collier Young, Evarts Ziegler, Philip Dunne, Lillian Hellman, Peter Davis, Johanna Mankiewicz Davis, Irving Paul Lazar, Brooke Hayward, Jean Stein, Billy Wilder, Barbara Warner, George Stevens, Jr., Daniel Selznick, George Cukor, Daniel and Lilith James, Ivan Moffat, Jean Howard, Natalie Wood, R. J. Wagner, Christopher Isherwood, Gavin Lambert, Otto Preminger, Rupert Allan, Diana Lynn, Mickey and Paul Ziffren, Richard Roth, Steve Roth, David Brown, Michael Levee, Kenneth Tynan, Richard Zanuck, and so many, many others; the failure to include them is mine.

Philip Dunne’s memoir,
Take Two
, is essential to any understanding of the period; Phil (to whom, unfortunately, I was not related) was both a gentleman and a gentle man, more charitable and forgiving toward those who named names than many of his colleagues. A. Scott Berg’s
Goldwyn
and Otto Friedrich’s
City of Nets
are necessary books, offering a sense of the time, as does Neil Gabler’s
An Empire of Their Own
, the best book about Hollywood I have ever read; my Congressman Wilder’s address about the Communist menace is a free translation of an actual speech in the
Congressional Record
by Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi, as quoted by Mr. Gabler. Jean Howard’s photo memoir,
Hollywood
, absolutely captures the look and the spirit of the place.

My gratitude also to Robert Scheer for his profile of Edgar Magnin in
the
Los Angeles Times
, to Paul Dean, also of the
Times
, for his piece on the anatomy of a bullet wound, to Art Harris of
The Washington Post
for his piece on coupon shopping, and to Linda Yglesias for her profile, in the New York
Sunday News
, of Anita O’Day, who fell off the planet; from each of them I drew fact and texture. Sharon Lieberman and José Otavio Raymundo made life infinitely easier. Finally a special mention to Bernie Brillstein, who planted the seed, and as always what I owe to Joan Didion is incalculable. I thank them all, and absolve them of any flaws in
Playland
; those are mine, and mine alone.

BY JOHN GREGORY DUNNE

Crooning
Harp
The Red White and Blue
Dutch Shea, Jr.
Quintana and Friends
True Confessions
Vegas
The Studio
Delano

John Gregory Dunne is the author of, among other books,
True Confessions, Dutch Shea, Jr., The Red White and Blue
, and
Harp
. He lives in New York with his wife, the writer Joan Didion.