The Fame Thief (3 page)

“Good point.”

“That was a question.”

Context is everything, and we’d been talking about Dolores La Marr. “An actress.”

“I could learn to like you,” Dressler said, “maybe. First the Shakespeare, then the common sense. They shouldn’t call it common sense, you know? Nobody’s got it any more.”

I didn’t think there had ever been a period in human history when common sense had been thick on the ground, but it didn’t seem like an observation that would interest Dressler. So I said something he’d undoubtedly heard a lot of. I said, “You’re right.”

“Everything, the girl lost everything. She was getting good parts in bad movies, working up to bad parts in good movies, and then Lew was going to give her a good part in a good movie. Her whole life, she wanted one thing, just one thing, and she worked like a bugger to get it. And then somebody took it all away from her.
He that filches from me my good name
,” Dressler declaimed, “
Robs me of that which not enriches him—
”

“
And makes me poor indeed
,” I said in unison with him. We both gave it a little extra, since the wine had kicked in, and Tuffy, coming in with a plate in his hands, stopped as though
he’d found the two of us sitting shoulder to shoulder at the piano, playing “Chopsticks.”

“I couldn’t do it,” he said, looking worried. “I brought the olives and the toothpicks, but the olives are just rolling around on the dish ’cause I couldn’t get them on the toothpicks. I ate the ones I touched. I figure the genius here can figure it out.”

“In my sleep,” I said.

“Just put it down,” Dressler said. “Where’s Babe?”

“He’s, uh, he’s taking a nap.”

“What
is
this? Juana’s got a headache, Babe’s asleep, and you can’t put olives on a toothpick. I’ve gotten old, I’ve gotten old. Nobody’s afraid of me any more.”

“I am,” I said.

“You don’t count. Wake Babe up. He can sleep tonight.”

“Yes, Mr. Dressler.” Tuffy was backing up.

“Aahhh, let him sleep,” Dressler said. “They got a baby at home. Probably up all night.”

“Yes, sir.” Tuffy licked his lips and fidgeted.

“Just fucking say it,” Dressler said.

“Kid’s teething,” Tuffy said.

Dressler lifted a hand and let it drop. “Achh, I remember. My sister, two of my nieces and nephews. Misery, it’s misery. Okay, let him sleep.”

Tuffy left the room rather quickly, and Dressler said to me, “Give me an olive.”

“I don’t know how to do it, either,” I said. “How to get them on the toothpicks without touching them.”

He pulled his head back, a snake preparing to strike. “Yeah? And suppose you’d been Tuffy just now, and I gave you an order you didn’t know how to carry out. What would you have done?”

“I’d have been all over the olives with my fingers.”

“And then lied about it?”

“Absolutely. That’s why God gave us lies. So we could get out of things.”

“The hell with the toothpicks,” Dressler said. “Just give me a goddamn olive.”

Forty minutes later
, there was a second bottle of wine on the table and Dressler and I were discussing techniques for soothing a teething baby, and Tuffy was in the kitchen, singing Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana” and heating some chicken noodle soup. Outside, a long summer afternoon had done its slow fade, and the windows had gone a glassy black. Dressler’s house was completely surrounded by hedges and fences, with gates front and back, so there were no lights to blemish the darkness. Tuffy had gotten to the verse about feathers and long hair, and he was giving it quite a bit. He had a lot of vibrato.

“Is Tuffy married?” I asked.

“No, and it’s not in the cards,” Dressler said. “Not until they change the law.” He harpooned an olive. “But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t whip you thin enough to spread on matzoh.”

He’d said it cheerfully enough, so I thought I’d give it another try. “You really think I should do this Dolores La Marr thing.”

“I not only
think
you’re going to do it,” he said. “I know you will. I like you, Junior, although it’s probably mostly the wine, but you’re going to do this for me. If you don’t, you’re going to have to find a new place to hide, and wait there until I’m dead.”

Dressler, as near as I could figure, was ninety-two. That wouldn’t be so long to wait, and I already had the perfect hiding place, in the Wedgwood Apartments in Koreatown. It was the most successful secret of my life. So I listened a bit smugly.

“And you should do it even if I didn’t want you to do it,” he said. “She’s your neighbor, Dolly is. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” he said. “Jesus said that, right?”

“I guess so.” I thought about the block in Tarzana where Rina lived with my ex-wife, Kathy, and then I ticked off the names of the people who lived in the nearby houses. “Dolores La Marr lives in Tarzana?”

“No, stupid,” Dressler said, quite a bit less cheerfully. “In the Wedgwood, same as you. In Koreatown.”

The “China” apartment houses—so-called not because they’re Hollywood-Chinesey in design but because their names (The Wedgwood, The Royal Doulton, and The Lenox) all denote makers of fine china—were built in the late 1920s on what was then the western edge of the city of Los Angeles, near the appropriately named (at the time) Western Boulevard. They’re masterpieces of twenties California architecture, art deco in three dimensions, and were designed to allow members of the upper middle classes to live in close proximity to each other, well above the peons on the sidewalks, and under conditions of comfort and even grandeur.

Twelve-foot ceilings, mahogany paneling, oak floors, wrought-iron fixtures, hand-built deco windows, no two alike. Only four apartments to a floor, their front doors opening into a cathedral-ceilinged, vaulted hallway high and wide enough for four men on horseback, side by side. The cowboy actor Hoot Gibson famously did ride his movie horse, Goldie, down the fourth-floor hallway one gin-fueled evening in 1929.

The China apartment houses were close enough to the film industry—then budding in dusty Hollywood—to house an historic assemblage of actors, actresses, writers, the occasional
director, and a great many mistresses. The studio moguls lived at first atop the hills of Los Feliz, near the newly expanded Griffith Park. As the city spread west, toward the sea, the moguls and the stars migrated to Beverly Hills and Bel Air, and the neighborhood the Chinese apartments graced had slid imperceptibly downhill. The second-tier actors and actresses and directors moved away, the mistresses were relocated farther west for ease of access, and the writers stayed, as writers usually do, to the party’s bitter end.

By the 1960s, the party was no longer even a memory. The blocks north of Pico and Olympic, and east of Western, had become working-class, many of the grand duchesses among the apartment houses broken up into smaller units and offered at low rents. In the 1970s and ’80s, the Koreans moved in, recognizing good value when they saw it and building—over the course of decades—a Koreatown that has the highest population density in LA and more Koreans, during business hours, than any other city outside of Korea. The men, and the occasional woman, who govern Los Angeles looked on with mixed emotions. On the one hand, here was an inspiring local immigration success story that had the additional benefit of displacing some of the city’s more lethal gangs and bringing down the crime rate sharply. On the other hand, as all-Korean shopping malls the size of small cities began to spring up, accompanied by literally hundreds of all-Korean strip malls, restaurants, and night clubs, the city rulers’ palms began to itch.

Where were the rake-offs? Where were the taxes on all that investment money? Where were the corporate profits? There they were, the leaders of Los Angeles, good twentieth-century political hacks, looking greedily through a smoked-glass window at a thriving private economy of cash, favors, handshakes, and barter.

That figurative smoked glass made the extremely peculiar
renovation of the China apartment houses possible, and with almost no profit to the city. Operating on the ancient Asian principle that ostentatious living should be confined to interiors, surrounded by drab exteriors designed not to arouse envy, the Koreans who renovated the China apartment houses left the grass long and the sidewalks cracked and the paint peeling, left the window shutters hanging crooked, left the neon signs missing the letters that turned The Lenox into the toxic-sounding
The nox
and the The Royal Doulton into
The Royal Doult
. They even left the elevators and the hallways threadbare and shabby. In some cases, they distressed them further, installing non-conducting electrical wires and letting them dangle from the ceiling and doing the occasional Mexican-restaurant trick of punching holes in the plaster to expose the bricks behind it.

But the apartments, behind their triple-locked doors, were brought back to the sheen and grace of the 1920s, fitted out with the finest appliances, invisibly heated and cooled by the best systems money could buy. And then, bribing a great many building inspectors to allow them to do so, the Korean owners’ syndicate created a single enormous garage that stretched beneath all three buildings, separated only by thin but deceptively solid walls, each with a locked door, the numbered keys to which were distributed among the tenants. As a result, a tenant could take the driveway beneath the Nox when he or she was actually going to the Wedgwood, or walk into the Wedgwood and walk out of the Royal Doult. The landlords knew who their customers would be: people with something to hide. And they’d attracted a fine group of the rich and shifty, people who needed to conceal their incomes, their identities, and themselves. At a million to three million a pop, depending on the size of the apartment and which floor it was on. Most of the tenants, though not all, were Korean.

Traffic on the major boulevards surrounding Bel Air was brutal by the time Tuffy and Babe drove me back to the street in Hollywood where they’d snatched me. They were in a lighter mood, since Dressler and I had apparently gotten along so well. The death threat hadn’t carried into the kitchen, where Babe had been sleeping in a breakfast nook with his head back and his mouth open and Tuffy had been working on his dance moves.

So they were fairly pleasant on the drive, including me in a conversation about who would buy the Dodgers now that that prick Frank McCourt was on the way out, and was Matt Kemp really worth $160 million bucks. On the latter topic, Tuffy and I disagreed, he saying you could get a whole team for that much and I saying that in the last half of the last season, Kemp had pretty much
been
the whole team, and we’d have made it to the World Series if he’d been allowed to bat nine times in a row instead of bringing the other guys to the plate.

“Designated runners,” I said, wise on Dressler’s wine. “That’s what you need. Three pitchers, three designated runners so you’ve got one for each base, and Matt Kemp. World Series guaranteed.”

“Yeah?” Tuffy said. “Then who’s on first?”

I said, “Yes.”

“No, I mean, who’s playing first?”

“Who.”

“You had too much wine, huh?”

“Nobody remembers Abbott and Costello,” I said. “It’s a poorer world.”

Babe said slowly—Babe said everything slowly—“I always liked Martin and Rossi. Every time that little fat guy said
Hello Dere
, I cracked up.”

“Hello Dere,”
Tuffy said, and laughed.

“Hello Dere,”
Babe said, and laughed.

Given the option, I would choose a really ripe case of cholera over fifteen minutes of Martin and Rossi. I said, “You can drop me up here.”

“Hello Dere,”
Tuffy said, and laughed, and then he wiped the tears of mirth from his eyes and said, “Got a couple of blocks to go.”

“No problem,” I said, all but clawing at the door handle. “I could use the walk.”

“Goodbye Dere,”
Babe said, pulling to the curb, and the two of them laughed so hard they fell over sideways and banged shoulders. I got out while the car was still moving. In fact, it kept moving until it banged into the bumper of the parked car in front of it. That set Babe and Tuffy off again, and I could still hear their laughter, spiced with the occasional
Hello Dere
, when I was half a block away.

My anonymous white Toyota Corolla had, as always, been ignored by car thieves and cops alike, and I climbed in and pointed myself South and East, toward Koreatown and the most beautiful woman in the world.