The Man Who Lived by Night (2 page)

“Routine security, sir,” he replied. “Nothing personal.”

The accent was American. So was the suit. Sears—the Arnie Palmer collection. He patted me down for hidden weapons, then said I could get back in. The other guard slammed the trunk shut. The gates swung slowly open. And into the realm—the secure realm—of Tristam Scarr we drove.

The road was crushed gravel and lined with beeches. It took us past meadows, past woods, past terraced gardens, past a lake. Then it cut through a clustering of little stone buildings—houses for staff and security people, stables, garages, a chapel. Almost a village unto itself. It was hard to imagine driving for so long without ever leaving your own property. Hard to imagine, but nice. A covered bridge took us over a stream and then there was Gadpole. It was an eighteenth-century brick manor house, three stories high with a glassed dome at its center. I doubt there were more than sixty rooms.

“Rock pays,” I said.

“It does indeed, sir,” agreed the chauffeur. “Handsomely.”

Two more guards were on the front door. There were fourteen of them altogether, I was to learn. All of them retired FBI agents.

The housekeeper wore a sweater and pleated skirt of matching bottle green cashmere and knobby brown oxfords. She was in her sixties, plump, pink-cheeked and silver-haired. She smiled and fluttered a hand at me as I got out.

“Yes, yes, Mister Hoag,” she called out cheerily. “Please do come in. He’ll not be awake for hours, but he’s asked me to make you comfortable. I am Pamela.”

“It’s Hoagy,” I said as we went inside. “And this is Lulu.”

“Why hello, Miss Lulu.”

Lulu promptly rolled over on the polished marble floor of the entrance hall, four paws up, to be petted. She has a knack for buttering up anyone who might be in a position to slip her tasty morsels.

Delighted, Pamela knelt with a refined grunt and patted Lulu’s belly. To Lulu she said, “What a sweet little thing you are.” To me she said, “My, her breath is rather …”

“She has funny eating habits,” I informed her. “As I’m sure you’ll find out.”

Gadpole wasn’t an understated house. The entrance hall was two stories high and encrusted with ornate molding. A curving marble staircase wide enough to accommodate a Range Rover led up to the second floor. A tall doorway framed by columns and an angular pediment opened into the immense living room, where there was plenty more wedding-cake plasterwork, and a ceiling painted with nymphs and swans. The furniture was lacquered Louis XV. The tables were gilded with leaf patterns, the chairs intricately carved and upholstered in red silk. It was all exceedingly rococo and, seemingly, genuine. On the walls were a lot of formal portraits of a lot of dead English people. On the floor were richly colored Persian rugs. It wasn’t at all the sort of place I’d expected from a man who once dropped his black leather pants in front of eighteen thousand screaming fans at Madison Square Garden and dared the police to arrest him. (They did.) It was more the kind of place I imagined Truman Capote would have lived in if he’d been born a peer. And who’s to say he wasn’t.

Lulu sneezed. She was shivering. So was her master.

The house was as warm and snug as a meat locker.

“I’ve had the west wing guest suite made up per your instructions,” said Pamela. “I do hope you’ll be comfortable.”

“If there’s heat there we’ll be fine.”

She chuckled. “You American visitors are always cold.”

“And Mr. Scarr?”

She frowned, bit her lower lip fretfully. “I’m afraid Mr. Scarr feels very little.”

The west wing guest suite was on the second floor, and so far down the long, carpeted hallway that it was in a different century. This one. The sitting room was masculine and clubby, right down to the hunting scene prints on the walls and the nicely worn leather sofa and armchairs grouped around the fireplace, which was, mercifully, lit. The typewriter I’d asked for was set up on a massive walnut desk in front of the tall windows that overlooked Gadpole’s maze. Clearly, whoever had positioned it there had never tried to write a second novel. Pamela opened a wardrobe cupboard to reveal a television, videocassette recorder, stereo system and small refrigerator. There were bookcases full of interesting-looking books and a sideboard full of interesting-looking bottles.

In the bedroom there was a huge four-poster bed and another wardrobe, this one for clothes. Someone had already brought up my bags.

“I’ll be in the kitchen if you want breakfast,” said Pamela.

“Thank you. Lulu will lead me to it.”

Actually, Lulu had claimed the leather chair closest to the fire and showed no signs of ever wanting to move. Possibly she preferred this to our dingy little fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-Third Street. Possibly she wasn’t the only one.

“Your rooms will be made up daily,” Pamela went on gaily. “Anything you need cleaned or laundered please leave by the door, and I’ll have it taken care of. I do hope you’ll be happy here, Hoagy.”

“I think I can manage for the next twenty or thirty years.”

There was a Macallan single malt on the sideboard that was almost as old as I am. It was certainly a lot smoother. As I sampled it I unpacked the Fair Isle sweater vest I’d had knitted for Lulu when she had bronchitis one winter. I didn’t want her developing breathing problems again. She snores when she has them. I know this because she likes to sleep on my head. She wriggled gratefully into it. I put her bowls down in the bathroom. Also the cases of the only canned food she’ll eat—Nine Lives mackerel for cats and very strange dogs. Then I hung up my clothes and decided to explore.

There wasn’t much else in the west wing besides closed doors. The east wing was closed off entirely. The stairs up to the third floor and the dome terminated at a small landing, where there was a set of heavy double doors. Closed. Here sat another guard, reading a copy of
USA Today.
He looked up at me. He didn’t smile.

“Mr. Scarr’s room?” I asked, glancing at the doors.

“And recording studio. And kitchen. The works. He’s got it all over Hef. You’ll be Hoag.”

I nodded.

“He’s asleep now. Or doesn’t want to be bothered. Later.”

Downstairs I found a library, a formal dining room, a paneled billiards room and a grand ballroom that dwarfed the living room. A Knicks game could go unnoticed in there. Lulu was the one who found the kitchen, where Pamela was rinsing berries in the sink and humming. It was a modern kitchen, and not small. There were three refrigerators and a commercial-size hooded range.

“Have you eaten?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then pour yourself some coffee and sit,” she commanded, indicating a cluttered country pine table. “He’ll not be stirring for hours and hours. He only lives by night, you see.”

“Like Count Dracula?”

“You’ve seen him then?”

“We’ve never met.”

But I knew him. Just about everyone in America had since 1964, when he first appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
his scowling, pockmarked face thrust brazenly forward at the camera, nostrils flared with impudence, voice a raspy primal scream. That night he sang Us’s hit version of the Little Richard song, “Great Gosh Almighty.” There would be so many more hits through the years—“Come On Over, Baby,” “More for Me,” “This Must Be Love,” “New Age,” “Miss Eloise,” “We’re Double Trouble,” “For Johnny Baughan.” Sure I knew him. He was T. S., full of talent and anger and himself. Strutting. Preening. Pointing at the audience. Condemning it. Alongside him there on the Sullivan stage stood Rory Law, his blond hair an uncombed mop, his snaggled teeth working on his lower lip as he fired off the brutal guitar chops that gave Us its distinctive sound. T. S. and Rory. Boyhood friends. Co-founders of Us. Popularly known as Double Trouble. Behind them, Puppy Johnson attacked the drums, sweating, grinning. Puppy Johnson, the man who, by way of Monroe, Louisiana, became Britain’s first black rock star. The man who the British press labeled “the wild man of Borneo” for his drumming style and his lifestyle. Thumping away next to him on bass was Derek Gregg, the tall handsome one with the choirboy face and the angelic voice.

They were nasty and rude. They were rebels. Together, the four of them rode the second wave that washed ashore in America after the Beatles hit. That was the one that brought the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Animals. Us would last as long as anyone. They would outlast rhythm and blues, rockabilly, acid rock, reggae, heavy metal and disco. Their sound was their own, and no one did anything better. But that wasn’t the only reason they got as much attention as they did. They were the bad boys. They took too many drugs, threw too many punches, used up too many women. They fought with the world and with each other. Always, it seemed, there was feuding and controversy. Violence. Scandal. Death. Only a year after that first Sullivan appearance Puppy Johnson was jailed in Little Rock, Arkansas for the statutory rape of a fifteen-year-old white girl. The group was banished from America. Two years later Puppy was dead from a drug overdose. The band went on. Triumphed. Broke up. Reformed. Triumphed again until that ghastly night in Atlanta’s Omni auditorium, summer of ’76, when Rory Law was gunned down on stage by a former disciple of Charles Manson. T. S. went on alone from there. Tried performing solo after the release of his album
Shadow Man.
But when someone threw a lit firecracker up on stage one night, and it exploded next to him, he walked off and never came back. He bought Gadpole and went into seclusion. After John Lennon’s assassination he hired a full-time force of security guards to protect him. He seldom came out now. In fact, he had not been seen in public in over ten years.

Sure I knew him. Long ago, Tris Scarr had been my idol—the one after Mantle and before Mailer. Tris Scarr had provided the soundtrack for my coming of age.

Only, I didn’t know him. No one did. He was, as Jay Weintraub had said, a complex man, a man of different faces, of contradictions, of anger. A man whose personal turmoil
was
rock ’n’ roll. He had gleefully cultivated high-class friends and sophisticated tastes, yet at the same time blasted those who had money and privilege. He had partied and drugged and wrecked hotel rooms, yet was considered a sensitive poet and a serious intellectual. His stormy love life had consumed some of the most famous beauties of the past three decades, most notably Tulip, the London supermodel—The Mod Bod—whom he eventually married. He was T. S. He had seen it all and done it all—to himself and to others. He was a man who had stories to tell, and he’d agreed to tell them. The feuds. The women. The drugs. It all.

“Bacon and eggs do, Mr. Hoag?” asked Pamela.

“Always have. And it’s Hoagy. Please.”

“As in Carmichael?”

“As in the cheese steak.”

She frowned. “I see.” She went into the pantry and returned with eggs and a slab of bacon. “How do you like your eggs, Hoagy?”

“The same way I like everything else,” I replied, stirring my coffee. “Soft-boiled.”

I
T WAS MY FAULT
we got lost in the maze.

Lulu hadn’t wanted to go in there. She was having too much fun barking at the herd of deer nibbling on the grass at the edge of the woods. She even made a few of them bound off in terror. It was the happiest I’d seen her since she treed a baby squirrel in Riverside Park. But I insisted, and I’m bigger. Grudgingly, she waddled along next to me through the carefully pruned geometric corridors of ten-foot-high box hedges. First right, then left. Then left, then right. I had never been in a maze before. I liked it in there, and the notion we wouldn’t be able to find our way out never occurred to me—I assumed Lulu would know how to, being a dog. I assumed wrong. To give her credit, she tried. But all she found was one dead end after another. Ultimately, all paths led to the gazebo in the maze’s center, where there was a cast iron table and chairs and a metal strongbox. On the box was printed the words OPEN ME. I did. Inside it was a flare gun and a note: FIRE ME. Twenty minutes later the chauffeur arrived.

“I’m quite embarrassed,” I said, apologetically.

“Don’t be, sir. Happens to all of our guests.”

“Even when they have a dog with them?”

“That is a new one, actually”

The chauffeur cheated. He had a map. We came out on the other side, where T. S.’s car collection was stored in converted stables. He liked Alfas. He owned two—a ’31 1750 Zagato Grand Sport and a ’59 Giulietta Sprint Coupe Racer. He liked Ferraris. He had a mouthwatering red ’59 Pininfarina and a ’67 275 GTB four-cam. He liked nice cars, period. There was a ’52 Aston Martin Lagonda cabriolet, a ’55 Mercedes 300SL gullwing, a ’39 Packard Dutch Darrin convertible, a ’64 Studebaker Gran Turismo Hawk, a ’72 Maserati Ghibli spyder, a ’52 Bentley R-Type Continental, a ’56 T-Bird, a ’57 Corvette. There were others. He even had a Delorean.

“Nice collection,” I observed to the chauffeur, who had gone back to rubbing the Silver Cloud with a chamois. “If you like this sort of thing.”

“Mr. Scarr does, sir,” he replied pleasantly. “He does indeed.”

I stuck out my hand. “It’s Hoagy.

His hand was meaty and strong. “Jack, sir. Pleased to meet you.”

“Been with him long?”

“A number of years. Yessir. Relatively quiet, this. Not like before. The girls used to paint lipstick kisses all over his car. Throw themselves in its path in the hope of meeting him. Plenty of goings on.”

“You must have quite a few stories. I’d like to hear them sometime for his book.”

“I’m only a chauffeur, sir. You flatter me.”

“It won’t hurt a bit—scout’s honor.”

He shrugged his heavy shoulders noncommittally. And said, “May I be so bold as to offer you a suggestion, sir?”

“Fire away.”

He stepped toward me until his face was very close to mine. His breath smelled of beer and pickled onions and either very strong cheese or very old socks. “Don’t look into the past.”

“That’s my job—looking into the past.”

“Then I wouldn’t look too closely”

There was a hint of menace in his voice now. At my heels, Lulu growled softly.

“Any particular reason?” I asked.