As usual some cottages and cabins turned them away because of T’s skin color, so they pulled into a tent camp. Without sleeping or cooking gear of their own, they rented some from the manager. But having no food, they were reduced to asking other campers if they might sell them a can of beans and some bread with a few bacon strips. No luck. Jay told T that they could stand to go without a meal; they were still better off than some of the other campers. A rain of locusts suddenly blew in from the south, causing them to beat a hasty retreat to their tent. As they stomped on the bugs, a middle-aged woman with pale blue eyes, leathery skin, gray hair, and discolored teeth pushed her head through the door flap and asked if they would like to share a meal with her family. Hungrily accepting her offer, they followed her to her campsite. Three tents housed thirteen people: the woman, called Ma, her husband, her parents, her brother, six children, a son-in-law, and a preacher man by the name of Casy. Even though her group clearly had more members than any other, she insisted it would be no trouble to feed two extra mouths.
Using a small kerosene stove and pan, she brought a wad of bacon grease to a sizzle, added dough and taters and then some greens and onions. They ate with bent silverware on chipped plates. Jay suspected that his parents would have gagged at the greasy-smelling concoction, but he thought it tasted like manna from heaven.
After the meal, Ma said, “Since no one said grace before the eatin’, Preacher, how’s about you shoutin’ up a thanks to the Lord for sendin’ us a full stomach.”
What Ma called a full stomach, Jay regarded as a scant mouthful. Other members of the family must have felt the same, as they took crusts of bread and sopped up the last bits of grease in the pan.
Casy explained for the sake of the two guests that he had given up preaching but in appreciation for the meal would say a few words. “We thank those responsible for the growin’ of the fruits of the earth and the pasturin’ of animals for what we’ve just et. Their hard labors, and that of others, keep us goin’, even though the rich foxes try to spoil the vineyards. Someday, though, when we harvest the grapes, the people, I pray, will rise up in wrath against the spoilers. Amen.”
The family chimed in and fell to telling stories. Jay gathered from some of them that the oldest child, Tom, had done time in Oklahoma for killing a man in self-defense. Ma’s son-in-law, married to Rose, babbled stupidly about the money to be made once they arrived in California. His lack of sense made him think that enrolling in a night-school class and learning how to repair radios would enable him to afford a home with electrical appliances in Hollywood. Similarly, Ma’s second son, Al, resolved to find a job in a garage fixing cars and to spend his money on lovely long-legged aspiring actresses. From his talk, Jay concluded that Al knew a great deal about engines and was the person responsible for keeping the family truck running, an old Hudson that looked as if any moment it might quit.
Ma, who provided the moral strength of the family, urged T, who had briefly played baseball in Los Angeles, to tell what they could expect to find there.
“The city fathers call it the City of Angels, but I think of it as the city of dreams. Even then, back in the twenties, all the failed and frustrated folks from around the country had started to move to the coast, ’specially hopeful actors. What I remember was the weather, the sameness of it, and the orchards and the movie studios abuildin’ out toward the beach. Them hills overlookin’ the city on one side and the valley on the other sure were pretty. The best town of all, though, was up the coast a bit, Santa Barbara. Now that place, if you had enough money, would be my idea of landin’ in paradise. From the city, you can see up on the hillside a mission datin’ back to the Spaniards. Hikin’ up to that church, I got to speak to the padre. One of my sweetest memories is of that man in his brown robes and rope belt.”
Back in their tent, Jay asked what the padre had said. “That God was color blind.”
In the morning, as they loaded the car, Jay could see Ma and her family packing up their Hudson truck. She waved. Jay folded a fiver in his palm and asked T to join him in saying goodbye to these kind folks. When they shook hands with the old lady, Jay transferred the money and closed his hand around hers, whispering, “Promise you won’t look until we’ve left the camp.” She reluctantly agreed. They thanked the family for their hospitality, shook hands all around, and once again took to the road. The Texas panhandle lay ahead.
They stopped at a campground outside of Amarillo, and T set up his checker board, as he had done many times before, to earn a handful of change. As usual, Jay hustled players, going from one tent and cooking pit to another announcing the start of the game. On this particular evening, they attracted about twenty players, each good, Jay figured, for at least a dime. What he didn’t count on were the cops showing up with lights flashing and night sticks waving. Hauled off to jail for breaking Texas gambling laws, T and Jay were questioned about their age, place of birth, residence, last job, education, name of father, maiden name of mother, length of stay in Amarillo, destination. Jay wondered what all these questions had to do with gambling. Eventually, they were turned over to the turnkey, who told them to follow him. They found themselves in a cell measuring about ten-by-fifteen feet. Five men were already in the cage when they entered, and by midnight the number had increased to ten. Everyone lay on the cement floor in all sorts of positions. Jay was doubled like a jackknife; T was trying to sleep sitting up; and a hobo felt no reluctance to use Jay’s stomach as a footrest. The last two men who entered the cell arrived drunk and, for want of space, were forced to sleep with their heads against the toilet bowl.
Well past midnight, Jay felt someone trying to take his watch, one of the two drunks. When he shoved him aside, the man grew truculent and struck Jay with his boot. A second later, T had him in a neck lock. His companion tried to help him, but T kicked the man in the groin, ending the night’s adventure and attracting the turnkey, who proved susceptible to a bribe. The bull led them out the back door of the jailhouse into a darkened street but not before hitting T with a nightstick on the back of his head, a lacerating blow that exacerbated the ones administered by Rolf Hahne and caused T no little blood and pain.
As they approached their car, they saw a drummer and his tart, whose giggle sounded strange in the perfect deadness of the hour, and a family sleeping in a doorway, their two young children hunched over with their faces hidden in the mother’s skirts. What dreams obsessed the parents? Probably dreams that swallowed up the night. Reaching the car, they drove west toward New Mexico with its beautiful mesas and dry desert stretches. Slowed by the sea of souls in every conceivable conveyance making their way down 66, they gave up any idea of making good time. Vehicles lined the road for miles. It looked as if all of America was resettling from east to west. Reaching Albuquerque two days later in the late afternoon, they slept on the outskirts of town. A blistering sun greeted them in the morning. Before setting out, T bought some curios and an Indian blanket for Janice and Melanie. The desperately tedious drive through New Mexico and Arizona ended with their arrival at the Colorado River and an agricultural station checking for plants. By the time they rolled into Needles, California, where they luckily found lodging in a tent camp, T had just about consumed his second and last bottle of Energy Elixir. Perhaps the stuff partially worked: T hadn’t become a white man, but Jay’s faithful friend had manhandled two thieving drunks and kept him from harm. Unloading their gear from the car, they heard familiar accents: Ma and her family. Although they had left Oklahoma before Ma, the endless queue of cars and their arrest had put the two men only a short ways behind.
Sitting on the ground in front of their tents, they wheezed from the aridity in Needles. Ma miraculously produced a bunch of bananas and offered them some. As they reached for the fruit, out of the darkness came cacophonous sirens, the wailing sound of police cars. A minute later, four state troopers appeared, angrily questioning their intentions in California. The family explained how they had
left Oklahoma in the hope of gaining employment as harvesters in the fruit orchards and cotton fields.
“There ain’t no work,” said one trooper.
“You Okies are just shiftless bums,” said a second.
A third brandished a flashlight that he seemed to enjoy shining in their eyes; and a fourth stood to one side watching amusedly while sucking on a toothpick.
When Tom, Ma’s oldest son, defended their right to enter the state, the third man repeatedly shoved his flashlight into Tom’s chest and snarled, “You tellin’ me what I can and can’t tell worthless drifters like you?” The trooper shone the light right in Tom’s eyes and waited for an answer.
The reply came swiftly, but not as the bully expected. Tom grabbed the light and with one swift blow crowned the guy, who dropped like a limp john. In the darkness, his three companions reached for their pistols. Immediately, Tom wrestled one of them to the ground as T and Casy jumped the other two. Curses, blows, and grunts sounded. With all four troopers on the ground, Ma’s other kids weighed in, as did Jay. Somehow, the four police pistols ended up in Jay’s possession. Racing to the river, he hid in the reeds and buried the guns in the mud, keeping his own. In the confusion, Tom and Casy and T also took refuge in the thick tangle of reeds. For several minutes, an eerie silence prevailed, and then they heard gunfire. The troopers had returned to their patrol cars for shotguns, which they trained on the river. When the fusillade ended and the cop cars drove off, Tom and Casy moved further downstream. T, who had hidden next to Jay, still lay face down. Jay tried to rouse him. But T did not respond to his touch. Turning him over, Jay saw blood oozing at the site of the injuries he’d suffered in Cape May and Amarillo. Had a shotgun pellet found its mark and worsened the wounds? Peeking out of T’s hip pocket was the unfinished bottle of Energy Elixir. Jay trickled some into T’s mouth and prayed that it would awaken him; then he pressed his ear to T’s chest, but he failed to detect a heartbeat. Choking with sadness and guilt, he cradled T’s body in his arms and cried unabashedly. Had he not asked T to accompany him to California, his friend would still be alive. Innumerable memories crowded his mind: the deli and the checkers and the Bible debates with Leonora and the drive across country and the places that turned them away and those that invited them in and the Kansas City Monarchs and of course Janice, whom he would have to call to tell about the death of her uncle and to whom Jay would forward T’s belongings. Later that night, by which time Tom and Casy had returned, they buried him in a marshy spot at a bend in the river, and the preacher said a few words over the makeshift grave.
“Death ought to be reserved for the legions of selfish and mean people in charge of this world. Kindly men, like T, deserve to live on, not just in memory but in life, so as we can enjoy their many gifts. Why good people die young remains a mystery. Black or white, the just will stand before the Lord, one color, in His radiant light. And if’n I make it to heaven, the first question I intend askin’ the Lord is ‘How come you don’t rid the world of the bad uns and keep alive the beautiful?’”
On a late afternoon in July, after enduring the dreary expanse of southeastern California, Jay reached a valley of endless fruit and nut groves: apricot, orange, lemon, avocado, and walnut. Los Angeles, indeed, seemed like the City of Angels.
8
The Franklin Arms, a small residential hotel just off Wilshire Boulevard, provided Jay with a splendid view of manicured grass lawns and swaying palm trees. But for the depressing sight of homeless people, he would have thought that he had arrived in Eden. The lush smell of gardenias competed with orange blossoms, suggesting southern corruption and the possibility of all manner of romance. From the mountaintops to the sandy beaches stretched Los Angeles and environs, a fecund land waiting to be ravished. It was said that in this city the impossible could happen.
And indeed, serendipity struck when outside a hardware store, Jay ran into John “Jinx” Cooper, an Englishman who used to buy from Honest Ike and now owned Sierra Powder Puffs on Adams Boulevard. Out of friendship for Jay’s father, Mr. Cooper willingly hired him as a pattern cutter, enabling him to support himself.
The hotel staff, most of them would-be thespians, kept Jay current on the Hollywood gossip and, when word got around that he tipped generously, delivered his groceries. They also arranged for him to have a private telephone so that he could regularly call his mother to ask about the family business, which was entering bankruptcy. At least once a week, he received a call, not from his mother but from someone else. He would be called to the hall telephone, and the feminine voice on the other end would ask, “Jay?” He would reply “Yes,” and the person would hang up. From the accent, he inferred the calls were placed by Francesca Bronzina; and from time to time, he would see in the hotel parking lot a yellow Studebaker, which Longie, during their last conversation, said she’d recently bought to fit in.
Evenings he walked along Wilshire to enjoy the cool night air and the scents of the city. His perambulations led him past the glamorous Ambassador Hotel housing the Coconut Grove, currently hosting Tommy Dorsey’s band and featuring Glenn Miller. They also gave him a chance to reflect on how one goes about finding two people among half a million. His first few weeks in Los Angeles he tried several ploys. He ran an advertisement in three of the local papers asking for help locating two lost friends. He stopped by several government hiring agencies to learn if the Maglioccos had signed on with them. He called the movie studios and asked the same question. He read the newspapers to see if they had run an ad, like so many others, seeking work. He even interviewed a private eye on how to proceed with his search, a fruitless endeavor that cost him a fiver.
Seven weeks passed, and he was still working as a cutter. Then, an opportunity to get back into journalism presented itself at the end of July, when all the local papers were headlining what promised to be a juicy story, the actress Mary Astor’s custody case. Astor’s complaint stated that at the time of her divorce from Dr. Franklyn Thorpe (April 12, 1935), Thorpe had threatened to ruin her screen career unless she agreed to a judgment awarding him their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn. Now, fifteen months later, she was suing for custody and seeking to change the divorce decree to an annulment, claiming that at the time of her marriage to Dr. Thorpe, he had a common-law wife, Lillian Lawton Miles, a comely blonde widow with a saccharine southern accent, named as a codefendant. All the hotel staff buzzed about the case. Within a few days, people were lining up, lunch satchels and knitting bags in hand, to witness the court proceedings. Jay tried to attend one of the sessions to see the lissome Titian-haired beauty in person. He recalled Arietta saying that her mother, Kristina, had once met Miss Astor’s parents in New York and hoped that the link would lure Arietta to the courtroom. Alas, thrill seekers queued the night before to see the trial, and Jay had no hope of gaining entrance unless he wanted to sleep on the sidewalk and wait for the bailiff to open the doors in the morning.
A few days later, however, when the Los Angeles newspapers hinted that Dr. Thorpe’s attorneys might introduce into the trial, as evidence of Astor’s immoral conduct and maternal unfitness, her two-volume diary—reputed to be an illuminating record of her love life before, during, and after her marriage to Dr. Thorpe—it occurred to Jay to call the Newark Evening News to ask if they would secure him a press pass and pay him a salary. His editor said the newspaper could get full coverage from the Associated Press, United Press, or International News Service, all of which the Evening News had used before. Although Jay knew that star reporters, people like Roger Dakin of the New York Daily News and Sheila Graham for the North American Newspaper Association, would be covering the proceedings, he pleaded that he could fashion the story to fit the Evening News readership.
The conversation would have ended with a “No” had Jay not mentioned his old friendship with Jean Harlow and his plan to reconnect and induce her to comment on her friend Mary Astor and on what one paper called “the worst case of d
ynamite ever to reach Hollywood.” The editor agreed and told Jay to include not only Jean’s comments and all the salacious details but also descriptions of Mary’s dresses “for the ladies back home.” For safety’s sake, Jay requested that his name not be used.
Forty-eight hours later, Western Union delivered a money order and credentials. Now he could leave Sierra Powder Puffs and join the other members of the fourth estate behind the heavy oaken courtroom doors and, unlike the milling mob attempting to find seats, take his in the jury box, reserved for the press, ready to streak for a telephone should mention of a name or a situation mean a news flash.
To celebrate Jay’s good fortune, Jinx Cooper took him to the Brown Derby Restaurant for lunch. How Jinx managed to obtain a reservation was a mystery, because a table at the Brown Derby was the hottest seat in town. Jay wore his one summer suit and straw hat. They had a good view of the other diners but not the front door. As they started eating, Jay felt a hand brush his back. Before he could turn, the person swept past him. It was a woman. Her companion followed a few steps behind. When they arrived at their table, she pointed him to a seat that made it impossible for Jay to see his face. But Jay saw hers. It was Francesca Bronzina. During the course of the meal, the man entered the lavatory. On his exit, Jay recognized Rolf Hahne.
So Francesca had finally decided to beard the Nazi. Jay wondered how she had found him. A number of pro-Nazi groups in Los Angeles advertised their meetings. Perhaps they had run into each other at one, where she had passed herself off as a believer in the cause and capitalized on her good looks and acting ability. All Jay could think of was the cobra and the mongoose. Would she be able to stay out of his reach? Or would Jay shortly be reading about a woman’s body found with her throat slit?
Dreams Bigger Than the Night Page 24
