The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  “Tra la la la la,” sang he.

  He reached for a copy of Variety with which to wipe his ass.

  Perhaps Hollywood was not so unlike the rest of America.

  Independence Day was as beautiful as the two days before it, and in the late afternoon I engaged a cab to carry me to the appointed Beverly Hills address. Through the San Ysidro Canyon we wound until arriving at the kelly green lawns and Tudor stylings of Pickfair. I was let out in a parking lot shining with Bentleys and Cadillacs and Packards. Jumpy as a virgin, I killed a half hour fondling the hood ornaments—griffins, swans, angels, mermaids—before forcing myself up the long paved path, beneath the overhang of a great gabled roof, and into a crowd where I did not belong.

  Forty people of paralyzing beauty filled the back veranda with the finest of leisure suits and summer gowns. Men accepted cocktails from servants and slapped the backs of comrades while women giggled at private jokes or looked elegantly bored. Two dashing dans with waxed hair and pencil mustaches saluted my arrival with their drinks but, receiving nothing from me but apparent retardation, resumed their debate.

  An infernal force pushed me into deeper waters, one dog-paddle after another. Why, there was Charlie Chaplin—the Charlie Chaplin—making as if to club an opponent with a croquet mallet. And wasn’t that Lillian Gish, star of The Birth of a Nation, outfitted in gloves, matching hat, and an ermine collar despite the weather? And fielding questions by the bookcase, that looked like honored aviatrix Amelia Earhart! And who was that on his knees scratching the chin of a mongrel dog? It couldn’t be Albert Einstein. Could it?

  This was no throw-your-stockings-into-the-air blowout of the Twenties; here existed codes of conduct no two-bit criminal from Chicago could hope to understand. I shuffled past a grand piano (a Steinway, natch) and beelined for an Edwardian four-panel screen behind which I might cower. A blonde woman in a pale-gold satin dress and a commendable bust clocked me with a swinging hip as I passed. I goggled at her, astonished.

  “Relax, kid.” She had a Brooklyn squawk. “They’s humans. Most of ‘em, anyhow.”

  With a thick-lidded wink, she sashayed into the miller-abouters, pendulating her well-packaged buttocks with enough verve to clear a path six feet wide. I watched her collar two men at once, pulling them from their respective females. In seconds she had herself encircled and I could see no more.

  “You there. Young man.”

  Ye gods! What indignity now cometh? I turned toward a settee festooned with deer antlers but found it vacant. Behind it, however, all but hidden within a forest of ferns, a woman lazed against gold drapery. Though she stood, she had about her the look of a lounging tigress eyeing a warren-load of unwitting bunnies. Any red-blooded (or, for that matter, no-blooded) American male would know her on sight.

  Bridey Valentine was no less than the foremost sex symbol of the screen. I had seen her in countless pictures: The Votes Are In, in which she played the unstable (and insatiable) eldest daughter of a desperate senator; The Struggle Buggy, in which she portrayed a humble switchboard operator determined to burn down a burlesque hall; Judy Plays the Game, in which she starred as a card shark who falls for the detective on her trail; and, of course, All Who Are Wearied and Burdened, the controversial smash hit about a mute nun forced to break her every holy vow in order to rescue a group of orphans from gangsters.

  Willst thou, Dearest Reader, lend me a single paragraph within which I might roll like a pig in the muck of physical desire? Bridey Valentine’s hair was a black abyss, forever billowed into chaos begging to be soothed. Her eyebrows, sly as the slots of a violin, butterflied in tandem with lashes growing ever longer from inside to out. So many actresses had large, limpid eyes; Bridey’s, though, were small, the better to keep secrets, and smelted by amber irises. Her lips were sculpted so as to smile and frown as one: love, hate, love, hate. Her body, of course, was maddening, and given to onscreen contortions that shoved this hip into vulgar altitude even as it sloughed that breast against sheer fabric. She breathed in a way other actresses did not, her belly and bosom in constant pulsation, her thighs rocking—tensed, relaxed, then tensed again, so that you, poor boy, were squeezed of all breath of your own.

  I, junked piece of human garbage, approached her.

  Her golden eyes flicked toward the crowd.

  “You were talking to Miss West. How do you know her?”

  “Miss West?”

  “You didn’t know that was Mae West?”

  No, damn it all, but I should have guessed. That crackly old Radiola of Church’s had kept us abreast (so to speak) of the bawdy performer’s exploits upon the New York stage as well as her arrest because of a play called Sex, which had exploited the irresistible slogan, “Enjoy SEX with Mae West!” I hastened to curtain my spectacle of ignorance.

  “Yes, Mae West,” said I. “We do not know each other all that well.”

  Bridey popped a cigarette between her lips and raised an eyebrow. My kingdom for a lighter! She rolled her eyes at my transparent alarm, shook a flint-wheeled gadget from her purse, lit up, and expelled a dragon of smoke in Miss West’s direction.

  “I have it on good authority she’s making eight grand a week. For her first picture. You know what I made on my first picture? Sixty-five.”

  “That seems quite respectable.”

  “Sixty-five dollars. A week. This bitch moans like a cat in heat and they give up the whole bank. They’ll regret it when it comes time for close-ups. There’s not enough filters in the world for that face. Meanwhile the censors gather like alley cats. Hays is putting watchdogs right on her set, did you hear? There are ways to push the envelope—believe me, I know—but what she’s doing is bad for all of us.”

  “Hays?”

  “Will Hays. The Hays Code. For moral decency in pictures. The three-second-kiss rule?”

  “But of course,” said I. “Will Hays.”

  Smoke snaked from the corner of her lips. At last she gave me her undivided attention. I fidgeted before the inspection.

  “You’re not in pictures, that’s for sure,” said she. “Who are you?”

  “I’m nobody. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, I’m sick of somebodies. Your name.”

  “Zebulon.”

  Her laugh was a taunt.

  “Now there’s a name the studios would change. Too many syllables for Mary Moviegoer. Tell me, Z, do I need to introduce myself?”

  Hundreds of hours had Church spent regaling me with vapid “exclusives” and silly “scoops” from his gossip rags, and until that moment I’d considered them wasted time. Now those pages provided crisp kindling for a furnace of industry insight. Something at last upon which I could discourse! I cracked my dry knuckles for effect.

  “Bridey Valentine got her break in An Orchid Unknown, 1925, opposite Norma Talmadge, after which she went on to become one of the screen’s pre-eminent tragediennes, starring in a series of dramatic roles that presented her as the opposite of girl-next-door Mary Pickford.”

  “Today’s hostess, so go easy,” said Bridey. “But do continue.”

  “Miss Valentine’s career was shaped by a childhood accident in which she damaged the tear ducts of her left eye, limiting how directors could photograph crying scenes. Eventually producers began choosing roles for her that did not include crying at all.”

  “Hearsay at best. But I remain impressed. Resume.”

  “Ergo, Miss Valentine became known for tough characters and an even tougher off-screen persona. Among the rumors are that she spends her weekends entirely in the nude, dabbles in witchcraft, wears a locket filled with blood, and puts cigarettes out on the soles of her feet. Her stock-in-trade is the shock.”

  “Nice turn of phrase. But who would stub cigarettes on her feet?”

  “Miss Valentine is best known, of course, for her combustible sex appeal, and has been linked to some
of the most visible men in the business. There was l’affaire Errol Flynn, l’affaire James Cagney, l’affaire Victor Fleming—”

  “Well, Fleming’s a rite of passage. He hardly counts.”

  “—all of which have given Miss Valentine the reputation of one who goes in and out of relationships quickly.”

  “Yes, in and out, in and out. Isn’t that how you do it?”

  “When asked about these romances, Miss Valentine repeats her catchphrase: ‘Always a Bridey, never a bride.’”

  “I rue the day I said that. Who the hell wants to be a bride?” She removed her cigarette. “Here, give me your foot so I can put this out.”

  But she smirked when she said it, so goddamn radiant that I beamed. How grand it was to feel the return of the old strut and swagger! I gambled on a grandstanding gambit.

  “However, it is my opinion, having known Miss Valentine for such a long while now, that she is not so brambly as all that. In fact, she seems quite likable.”

  “My word, Z. I’ll bet your sweet nothings have unzipped a lot of dresses. But I’m afraid you’ve much to learn about Hollywood. Truth and reality are intertwined in these here hills. I am what they say I am—and there is nothing I can say about it.”

  “Such a knot of words.” I gestured at the settee. “Please let me assist in the disentanglement. Mind the antlers.”

  “Sit? In this dress?”

  A long, luscious leg that had no business being attached to a woman in her mid-thirties stretched outward to display the gown to best advantage—a snug velvet encasement with metallic leaves embroidered about the collar and down the steep neckline. The dress had no back to speak of, and I longed to warm my cold palm upon the kiln of accessible skin.

  “This is my standing dress,” lectured she. “There is another version for sitting.”

  “Your sense of humor goes vastly under-reported.”

  “I’m quite serious. Ask Mary. She recommended the designer.”

  Mary Pickford? I’d forgotten the swarm of buzzing dignitaries! Now I inhaled their stratospheric air and felt no correlating queasiness. What volumes of confidence could be won from the most casual of attachments to a woman like Bridey Valentine.

  “I should like to meet Miss Pickford,” said I. “And Mr. Fairbanks, as it was he who extended my invite. Swell people, I should think—the swellest!”

  “I think they’ll like you, provided you keep your enthusiasm to a low boil. Just don’t ask Mary about her next picture because there is no next picture. She’s through with acting thanks to that horrible facelift. She can’t even smile anymore, poor dear.”

  “Facelift?”

  “Oh, Z. You’re a charmer. Yes, you shall meet them. And George Bernard Shaw, if you can find him beneath his beard. And Dietrich too, although don’t get too excited about it; she is, as you will see, a raging lesbian. It’s all here for you, so go, go, take advantage of it—it’s the Hollywood way. I do suggest staying clear from that one. The fat fellow staring daggers.”

  “Fatty Arbuckle! The hefty humorist! Is he still making films?”

  “He’s mounting a comeback.” But she said it through bared teeth. “You recall the rape trial? How he squashed that starlet to death?”

  “Oh.” This did damper the mood. “Yes.”

  “They say that the poor girl’s girl parts were in a box on their way to the incineration room when the coroner rushed in and stopped it, and that’s when they discovered that her bladder had been ruptured by the weight. He almost got away with it.”

  “But he did get away with it.”

  Bridey shrugged.

  “Fans don’t forgive as easily as juries.”

  “So why invite him? If he is as hated as you say?”

  She reached out, stroked the hair above my ears, and spoke softly.

  “There are many reasons one might be invited to Pickfair. Some of them admirable. Some of them not. Fatty Arbuckle—oh, how do I say it with any class? He is a star burning out before our very eyes. We have to watch it up close if we are to understand our own demises, which will come, and quickly, because time out here moves double-speed. Make sense?”

  No number of printed puff pieces could have prepared me for this introspection. Nor could Bridey have guessed the effect her words would have upon me. As the world’s bearer of la silenziosità, I knew how one could dangle the secrets of death before any man or woman, and how, regardless of the danger, they would snatch at it.

  Her hand slid from my hair (was this a fantasy picture?), down my cheek (hellcat, pray continue!), and to my chin, where it drew to a teasing pinch. She let go; my dead skin took its time expanding. Her lashes fluttered and she blew me the smallest of kisses.

  “Be careful out there and you might live to see me again.”

  And then, Reader, Bridey Valentine took her leave, the shush of her hemline across carpet ten times more effective than Mae West’s honking. Everyone turned to kiss-kiss her cheeks. I became jealous, of course I did, for I’d been the hunter to capture her as she’d prowled the greenery. But it struck me that she might be teaching me a lesson: not all women could be captured.

  Halfway through a sigh worthy of a silver-screen romance, my allotment of daylight was blotted out by a figure sidling up next to me. There was a yellow suit, acres of it, and squirting from its collar was a perspiring, ham-pink face split by an alligator grin and buttoned with blue eyes that blinked, blinked, blinked like a bird.

  “Watch out for Valentine,” giggled Fatty Arbuckle. “She’ll screw your prick off.”

  III.

  WHAT IS ONE MONTH IN Southern California? Or two, or four, or six? The sun shined until it became a stupor, a daydream of life undelineated by the usual indicators of rain or snow. Los Angelenos lived as if in constant emergence from a dark theater, convinced of their mastery over the smaller, dimmer worlds played out across the rest of the country.

  For a time I was their best barnacle. My debut at Pickfair earned me a string of auxiliary invites, from home banquets complete with ice sculptures and balalaika quartets, to lunch parties aboard houseboats and schooners, to private rooms behind velvet ropes in happening clubs like Hawaiian Paradise and the Famous Door. No one in the flea-ridden flophouse where I resided received such summonses, and from that I drew an energy both prideful and, after a time, pitiful.

  It took talent to make a splash and I was but a gimmick, sat ever nearer the washed-up end of the table and called upon once per evening to entertain.

  “Why, you’re that young magician Doug was so keen on,” one would remark.

  “You do look ghoulish,” a second would say. “Is that make-up? Max Factor is doing fabulous things these days.”

  “Do your bit!” a third would add. “Jolly good fun—Madge, wait until you see.”

  And thus my night would rise to a climax befitting the Pageant of Health, with me borrowing a pin from an adjacent lady and, after a halfhearted spiel, jabbing it into the back of my hand and displaying it as if it were a ring. The sophisticates gasped and clapped, and, oh, how I slurped it up in my thirst to belong to their society, if only for a minute. The flavor was always bittersweet; each time I would spy a starlet so put off by my demonstration that she could not eat.

  Bridey had warned me.

  There are many reasons one might be invited. Some of them admirable. Some of them not.

  My trick became tired. Invites petered and I was friendless. Poorer than I’d been in New York, I hustled work as a movie extra. My bony, ashen face made me an ideal “Mad Villager” or “Freak Number Four” on a half-dozen Universal Studios horror pictures, and I mailed almost everything I earned to Church’s Chinatown address. There came no reply, though, and chasing fake monsters like Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff off soundstage cliffs did nothing for my self-esteem. I was the monster, the real one, and I waited for the other mad villagers, or
freaks, to realize and redirect their pitchforks.

  I was studying up on active volcanoes into which I might hurl myself when I saw a note being slid beneath my door. In it, the harried handwriting of the proprietor relayed a telephoned invitation to a last-second shindig celebrating the fresh repeal of Prohibition thirteen years after its harebrained ratification. For most, this was cause for a celebration of the guzzlingest kind. I, however, pressed the heels of my hands to my sockets, hoping to suppress the images of John Quincy, Mother Mash, and the alcoholic mud foaming beneath their dangling feet.

  I’d half-crumpled the note before noticing the party’s location: the San Simeon home of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. Shared with his almost-wife, actress Marion Davies, it was rumored to be nothing short of a medieval hilltop acropolis. Only the hasty organization of the event explained my invite. I set the note upon my lap and smoothed the wrinkles. Yes, I’d attend one last bash as a toast to John Quincy, who never lived to see the liquor laws fall.

  Perched high above a portentous fog, Hearst Castle was a thing to behold, one hundred and sixty-five rooms situated upon acres of craggy bluffs that looked as if shipped over from Scottish moorland—and given Hearst’s fortune, it was possible. I passed beneath the hand-carved eaves and cathedral arches as did everyone else, hushed by the semblant fairy tale and waiting for the royal wedding (or underbridge trolls) to conclude it.

  A butler scowled at my weathered suit and in a self-righteous huff I stormed the so-called Assembly Room, a hall of etched ceilings, ancient tapestries, marble nudes, bronze busts, and a thirty-foot Christmas tree. Sixty-some people mingled in the caramel light, drinking suddenly legal liquors by the steinful. Ignoramuses to a man! Not a one of these ales or lagers could possibly rival the love-punch of Dog Bowl Debbie.

  Renaissance-era choir stalls were built into the walls and I claimed a corner one in order to embark upon what I hoped to be a sulk of legend, crossing my arms so that my naked, bony elbows peeked from matching holes. I was the bum in the alley, these people were the big bad wolves, and it was with their grand successes that I wiped my vile filth: Tra la la la la.