Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

  Flattered as I was to be grandfathered into the ranks of men who’d actually borne arms against the enemy, my own opinion was that Southern California had been at war with nature for so long that the war against Japan had probably been anticlimactic. Conjured out of desert by magician entrepreneurs, Los Angeles always seemed to me just a few days of water deprivation away from returning to hardscrabble and horned toads. For the past few hours, since stepping off the Super Chief train from Chicago, I’d been imagining the fault lines grinding against each other below my feet, the pressure building, the cracks about to open into jagged chasms that would break apart and send this paradise out to sea like a new Atlantis.

  But as usual, my anxiety was Jack’s anticipation. One reason he loved it here was exactly this sense of imminence, the feeling that something might happen. He’d been coming to Hollywood since he was a kid when the Old Man was making a killing producing cheap cowboy movies while living in a rented cottage over on Gower Street and banging not only Gloria Swanson but also Constance Bennett, Marlene Dietrich and several other stars, including Ginger Rogers, who finally had to claim that she had syphilis to get away from him, and Miriam Hopkins, who said to me one tipsy night years later at the Stork Club, “Joe Kennedy was charming in an oppressive sort of way, I suppose, but he had the worst breath of any man I ever fucked.”

  As a result of his past visits, Jack knew Hollywood like a native. He’d already been out here for a week or so, now on general assignment for the Hearst papers after several weeks in San Francisco as their special correspondent covering the United Nations founding convention. But the only information gathering I’d seen since meeting him early that morning had been his feverish effort at a succession of phone booths to get us into the big Warner Brothers fortieth anniversary party later that afternoon.

  Having finally secured the invite, Jack said “Let’s kill time before it kills us” and gave me a little cook’s tour. The first stop was the La Brea Tar Pits, where he sat on a bench reading the newspaper while I stood at the barricade watching the heavy bubbles break on the surface of the thick oily ooze and imaging the panicked cries of Cervidae falling into the suffocating muck in their rush to escape sabertoothed predators.

  We got sandwiches and took them to the Hollywood Bowl, deserted at noon. Jack insisted that I get up on stage and do my rich darky imitation of Paul Robeson’s “Old Man River” while he sat in the front row clapping derisively. Next was a stop at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre so I could match my hands and feet with the prints left by Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney and other favorites of mine.

  Then we crawled down postwar, pre-prosperity Hollywood Boulevard for almost half an hour, before finally turning onto Cahuenga and heading up toward a first draft of the Hollywood Freeway.

  I was still pinching myself about being back with Jack after the winds of war had blown us apart, I thought forever. Almost exactly four years earlier, his older brother Joe Jr. had ordered us to meet him at Delmonico’s for lunch and “a council of war.” When we arrived, Young Joe, as he was known inside the family, was already at a table in the corner, Black Irish handsome in that slightly menacing way of his, nonchalantly weaving a silver dollar between his fingers from thumb to pinkie and back again—the first person I ever saw perform that trick.

  He ordered us to sit on either side of him, pulled out a fountain pen and, ignoring scandalized looks from the maître d’, began defacing the tablecloth with inky designs of likely troop movements and military engagements around the world while Fortress America looked on from a distance.

  “Son of a bitch!” He drew arrows that pulled the U.S. toward the Continent. “War’s coming and we’ve got to get in it. I’m sick and tired of these commie Brits and Roosevelt’s Jews ripping Dad for being soft on Hitler when he was ambassador to the UK! We’ve got to restore his good name!”

  “Right!” Jack said as Joe Jr. punched him hard on the shoulder.

  “Right!” I echoed as he punched mine even harder.

  When we went to enlist the next morning, Young Joe waltzed right into the Army Air Corps, but the recruiters, still choosy with Pearl Harbor three months yet in the future, flunked me because of my poor eyesight and Jack because of his bad back, which of course was actually only a presenting symptom of his other, more ominous malady.

  Jack went down to Palm Beach for a health regimen of sit-ups and milkshakes before trying again, and for a while the only Kennedy I saw was Kick, then living in Washington, about an hour from my mother’s house in Baltimore. I still had a slim hope that I might make the transition from “big brother” to something more, but she too wanted to get into the action and found a job with the Red Cross in London. I was the only family member there to see her off when the Queen Mary sailed for Southampton, waving until she was a microdot on the upper deck.

  After several weeks in limbo, I volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Field Service and was sent to North Africa. Jack finally wangled his way into the Navy with his father’s reluctant help. He spent a few months as a desk jockey in D.C. and then headed to the Solomon Islands.

  His first dispatch from there, which took six weeks to reach me, laconically described his early combat engagements in PT-109 and signed off with the usual jibe: “Incidentally, there are some of your fellow Princeton graduates stationed over here. It is said that they are doing very well under white officers.”

  A month or so later, another note from the war zone informed me that Kick, no less anxious than her brothers to extend the Kennedy writ, had met and married the very Anglican Billy Cavendish, who, as future Duke of Devonshire, would someday be one of England’s richest and most powerful nobles.

  I wrote an answer in one word, underlined: “Devastated!”

  “She must have gotten tired of waiting for your balls to drop,” Jack scrawled on my letter before sending it back to me. “Buck up, old man.”

  Not long after he rammed his boat into a Jap destroyer, a fiasco the Old Man’s press assets miraculously transformed into a modern equivalent of the Crossing of the Delaware, Jack became ill again and was sent home early in 1944. A few months later, I too was released and was about to go down to Palm Beach to meet him when word came that Joe Jr. had been blown up over the English Channel while piloting a B-25 in a “suicide mission” against a V-2 missile site on the French coast.

  It was the event that brought death into the Kennedys’ world. Soon after came news that Kick’s noble husband Billy, a major in the Cold-stream Guards, had been killed by a German sniper in Belgium shortly after D-Day. At that point, Jack vanished into parts unknown—for a time unknown even to his father, who made it his business to know everything about his children.

  It was a long time before a mutual friend told me that Jack had been sighted at a dude ranch in Arizona, of all places, apparently trying to exorcise his ghosts by riding horses down mountains at such breakneck speed that admiring ranch hands gave him the nickname “Apache John.”

  By V-E Day, the Old Man had lured him back into the fold by getting his pal W. R. Hearst to take him on as a reporter. For Jack it was a way to placate his father while testing a profession that had always vaguely interested him; for Big Joe it was a way of getting the name of the son he had always held in reserve in front of America. I had seen his byline on a series of stories about the architecting of the United Nations in San Francisco, but my letters to him went unanswered. Assuming that he had gone his way, I figured I’d better go mine. I got a job at an ad agency, moved out of my mother’s house for good, and started thinking of life without him.

  Then, out of the blue, an unsigned telegram arrived at my office. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” it read. “In Hollywood now getting the lay of the land in the land of the lay. Join for Playtime?”

  I quit my job on the spot, packed a bag and headed to Grand Central Station, joining furloughed men in uniform waiting for a ticket to Chicago. Once there, I boarded the Super Chief with the feeling that I too was fi
nally going home.

  After three days cutting through the inert plane of the American heartland, then falling down into the Mojave Desert from the heights of the Rockies, the Super Chief pulled into LA’s Union Station at eight in the morning. As the warpainted engine emitted a final heavy sigh of steam, I jumped down into a series of tableaux vivants of soldiers clutching sobbing wives and mothers—images I knew even then would last until the end of our generation’s time.

  At the stop in Denver the previous day I’d telegraphed Jack with the arrival time. Knowing how allergic he was to getting up early, I found a spot on the terra-cotta floor of the station’s Art Deco lobby, picked up a discarded Los Angeles Times, and settled down on my duffel bag for a long wait.

  I happened to look up after a few minutes and saw him near the entrance of the lobby, looking around for me. He was wearing aviator’s dark glasses, a white T-shirt and a leather flight jacket with the collar turned up, and was backlit just as he had been the day we first met.

  I jumped up and ran toward him, but he stuck out his hand like a spear to prevent the possibility of a hug.

  “How are you?” I held the handshake as long as possible, fighting back tears.

  “Fit as a butcher’s dog,” he replied briskly.

  “You look older,” I stammered.

  He stepped back to give me a blasé once-over, with one raised eyebrow: “You look the same as always, except more so.”

  THREE

  The Santa Ana winds I’d heard so much about bent the sparse vegetation clinging to the hills above us and made the Zephyr shudder. Everything was so sere and shriveled at the end of summer that it was easy to imagine a cigarette carelessly tossed out of a car window touching off a domestic Dresden.

  I tried to make small talk about the family, our family as I was allowing myself to think of it again, which was spread out all over the country—all over the world, if you counted Kick, now living as a young widow in London. Jack kept his eyes on the road; his terse answers to my questions made it feel like I was playing tennis against a wall.

  Finally I started pressing him about what the Old Man was up to.

  “Same old thing,” he said. “Looking for ways to turn coincidence into destiny.”

  “Is he going to get back into politics?”

  “Not as a candidate. That dream is dead.”

  “Because of the appeasement stuff?”

  Here he tilted his chin down to give me a wry look over his dark glasses: “In the time you’ve been on your own, you appear to have forgotten that Joseph P. Kennedy wasn’t an appeaser; he just looked like one because he was set up by the warmongering sheenies around FDR.”

  “He never forgave the President for ditching him.”

  “Right, even though it was Roosevelt who raised him up in the first place. But you know Dad: no grudge not worth bearing. The day of FDR’s funeral, some newspaperman asked him if now he couldn’t at last say something good about the President, and Dad’s answer was, ‘Yeah, he’s dead.’”

  “So no more politics.”

  He was silent for a moment, eyes on the road. “Yeah, there’ll be politics.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been chosen,” he said fatalistically.

  “Chosen?”

  “Jim Curley’s leaving his congressional seat in Boston and Dad can hardly wait for Johnny-boy to give him the okay to begin parlaying a bad back and wrecked PT boat into political gold.”

  “You don’t want it?”

  “I’d just be shadowboxing with Joe,” he said morosely. “It was supposed to be him. He would have been good at it.”

  In fact, Jack knew better than anyone that Young Joe wouldn’t have been good at politics. He was shallow and inflexible; too much like his father and too circumscribed by the role he had enthusiastically accepted as prosthetic for the Old Man’s thwarted ambition. He might have climbed a rung or two on the strength of the Kennedy money and connections, but he would never have made it anywhere near the top.

  Jack had always been the one with the esprit and intellectual curiosity necessary to succeed in politics. And he knew it. But because of the double bind he faced—knowing he’d never be able to make it as his father’s pawn, but knowing too that he’d have to be his father’s pawn even to try—he had decided just to look for other possibilities.

  “So what’s your plan then?”

  “Not sure,” he said. “Maybe keep being a writer. Maybe not. Time will tell. But this much I know. When Dad realizes that I’m not going to be his Charlie McCarthy, there’s going to be absolute hell to pay.”

  “Does he know you’re out here?”

  “No,” he shot me a dire look, “and let’s keep it that way.”

  He retracted into silence again as we exited onto Barham Boulevard and joined the line of cars going up over the hill to various destinations in the Valley. We were headed for Burbank.

  Jack was still skinny though more substantial than before the war. He retained vestiges of his youthful ardor, but had finally come down to earth after all those years as the high-flying, doomy young man who had learned to bend the little time he thought he still had into such intense and appealing shapes that people wanted to be there with him. He had a specific gravity now and seemed ready to take the next step.

  We were passing over the concreted-in Los Angeles River with its trickle of mossy water when he suddenly hit the brakes and muttered, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” his grandfather Honey Fitz’s favorite oath.

  Up ahead, the area around the Warner Brothers’ entry was a war zone. Thick black smoke was blossoming over a burned-out panel truck flipped on its back like a beetle at the edge of the sidewalk. Strikers carrying battery cables, baseball bats, broken bottles and other weapons were using it as a command center while staging feints against a handful of security men clustered around a heavy chain held taut to keep them off Warners property. Burbank city cops stood on the sidelines near their squad cars, nervously smacking their nightsticks into their palms. Jack turned into the churning mob and tried to force an opening through the studio’s famous portal.

  Placards pounded the roof of the Zephyr, fists drummed on the hood, and lurid faces loomed in the side windows. The car began rocking from side to side. When Jack looked over at me, his eyes, normally narrowed with irony, were wide with apprehension and his lips were as compressed as a ventriloquist’s. Then a flying squad of Warners guards rammed into the bodies surrounding the car, gaining enough space for us to shoot into the studio’s main street before the chain went up again.

  Jack stopped in a small parking zone and yanked on the emergency brake. As we gathered ourselves, I saw several executives in light-colored suits a few yards away sullenly studying the chaos in the street. They all wore starched white shirts and ties knotted in perfect Windsors despite the wilting afternoon heat.

  We got out of the car and Jack walked up to one of them, a man of medium height with a choleric flush on his face and a pencil mustache that looked plagiarized from Errol Flynn. He was rotating his neck as if to relieve vertebral pressure and compulsively flattening his thinning hair with both hands while he paced rapidly back and forth.

  Jack held out a hand and said, “Jack Kennedy.”

  A look of recognition passed over the scowling face. “Jack Warner,” he replied, offering a brief shake. “I’m surprised you got through. It’s like fucking Iwo Jima out there. Why didn’t you go to the back entrance over on Olive Avenue? We told the people coming to the party to go there to avoid this shit.”

  He nodded grudgingly at a slightly older man with a long, melancholy bookkeeper’s face and the grayish skin of coronary insufficiency standing next to him: “My brother Harry.”

  At another time we might have seen evidence of the celebrated feud between the two men, the last of the original four brothers left standing after Sam died early and Albert retired young. Eventually a fight to the finish, this conflict between them was so serious that when Warners ha
d introduced talkies with The Jazz Singer several years earlier and the company’s stock shot up from 8 to 65 overnight, they ate at the same table in the studio commissary every day for months without ever saying a word to each other about their good fortune. The silence was finally broken one day when Harry chased Jack down a hall holding a sharpened pencil aloft and yelling, “I’ll get you, you son of a bitch!”

  Now, the chaos in the street had produced not only a truce but a distant camaraderie.

  “Commie bastards!” Harry spit the words in the strikers’ direction as we all jumped back to avoid the exploding shrapnel of glass from a volley of pop bottles.

  “This business is getting ridiculouser every day,” his brother said. “As we speak, the makeup artists represented by the IBTA and the hairstylists in the ASE union are at war with each other at Paramount over who is authorized to install falsies. I kid you not! Falsies!”

  Just then the mob separated to allow a thewy man wearing a white T-shirt and dungarees and carrying a step ladder to approach the entry we’d just come through. He was blond and weathered-looking, with Pop-eye forearms and a big grin. When they saw him, the rank and file began to gather round and clap in a slow cadence.

  Jack Warner considered himself a suave phrasemaker, having once famously introduced a mistress as “a girl with a heart of gold and a snatch to match,” but now he was so enraged that words deserted him. “Commie fuck!” he yelled. “Bastard starts this shit on our fortieth birthday! Can you believe it?”

  Harry elaborated: “Clive Selkirk. Came over here from Australia to destroy our world. We didn’t pay attention when he organized the painters. But then he takes over the cartoonists and makes Disney eat it. Then the electricians and carpenters. And then the set dressers, no less! He got all of them to join his half-assed Association of Studio Employees. Now it’s tomorrow-the-world time! He’s trying to kick off the apocalypse right here on our property!”

  “The prick!” Jack Warner sent the union leader a death stare. “Red as Superman’s cape. Where the hell does he think he is anyway, at the Winter Palace? Worst goddamn thing I ever saw.”