“She’s in the movies,” I said weakly.
“Tell me something I don’t already know.”
“She’s Italian and she got caught up in the war.”
He shot me a withering look.
“She’s a very nice person.” I was babbling now.
“I’m sure I’ll love her to death.” He was disgusted. “But I’m not sure I’ll love her criminal father.”
“Jack says he’s a war hero.”
“For a minute or two, maybe,” the Old Man snorted. “But now he’s back to who he was in the first place and will always be—a piece-of-shit mobster. Lesson Number One: Step on people like that and you’ll get them on your shoes and track them all over your life.”
Like the Kennedy kids themselves, I was reduced to speechlessness in his presence.
“Do not encourage Jack in this,” he ordered. “He has things to accomplish. It’s not the time for him to get sidetracked in some infantile romantic pash. This thing won’t last.”
He delivered this last sentence as a fact, not a prediction, then glanced at his watch. “I’ve got an early lunch. Tell Jack I’m at the Biltmore and need to hear from him soonest.”
He nodded brusquely at Molly: “Come on, let’s get busy.”
Watching them trudge up the sandy driveway to their waiting cab, I was weighed down by the heavy sense of portent the Old Man always left behind as his calling card.
When Jack returned a couple of hours later and I told him that his father had paid a visit, he gave a look of incredulity that quickly deteriorated into resignation.
“How the hell did he find me? The guy is unbelievable. He ought to work for the Missing Persons Bureau.”
Psyching himself up to call his father took half an hour. The conversation was one-sided and brief, and he hung up looking like he’d been beaten in the kidneys with a hoe handle.
“He give you the business?” I asked.
“And how.”
“What did he say?”
“Among other things, for me to get my ass over there right away. You drive so I can put my thoughts in order and maybe hold him off for a minute or two when he starts in on me.”
The Biltmore was a grand hotel, even by eastern standards, and while Jack was upstairs taking his medicine, a short middle-aged bellboy who looked like he’d just stepped out of a Philip Morris ad saw me gawking and offered a little guided tour.
We started at the impressive vaulted reception area with a fret-worked trompe l’oeil plaster ceiling that looked like wood, and then passed through spacious sitting rooms with frescoed ceilings and wall murals, some painted with 24 carat gold accents, including a large scene of the Roman goddess Ceres greeting the Spanish conquistador Vasco de Balboa as he first set foot in the New World.
We stopped at a banquet room that had been a speakeasy during Prohibition, the bellhop said. He opened a secret doorway leading to a low tunnel that exited onto the parking lot: “Here’s your getaway when the cops stage a raid.”
Then we walked through the Music Room, which the Kennedy campaign would use as its headquarters during the 1960 Democratic convention, and through the exquisite ballrooms, to the Palm Room. I was looking at one of the small “Biltmore angels” carved on the ornate pilasters, her furled wings setting off pert breasts as she knelt invitingly with her naked nether parts disappearing provocatively into a reptilian tail, when Jack caught up with us. He was clearly rattled.
I waited until we were back in the Zephyr to debrief him: “So what did he say?”
“That I was spitting in the face of my destiny.”
“He used those exact words?”
“Yeah. He must have asked Molly for an elegant way of saying that he’s sick and tired of having his grand plan for me to be his political stooge constantly fucked up.”
“Did he rip you about Val?”
“Of course. He’s got a file on her already. He said foreign women are trouble. Foreign Jewesses doubly so. I have no idea where he dug up that detail. He wants me to be a big boy and write her a Dear Jane letter.”
“What did you say?”
“No dice.”
“Those words?”
“Yeah.”
“And what did he say?”
“‘We’ll see about that.’” He paused to submit to a forceful yawn before continuing: “There may be a little bit of silver lining. He’s got one of his sinister intrigues going on with the studios and their labor problems and that could take the heat off me for a while.”
But we both knew that our time in Hollywood had just been divided in half: before Joseph P. Kennedy and after.
FOURTEEN
Two days later I still felt trapped in the Old Man’s forcefield. After catching myself standing at the kitchen sink for several minutes vacantly watching the morning sun climb up the side of the beach house next door, I decided to get out and about.
Jack had the car, so I walked out to the highway to thumb a ride into Santa Monica. Wartime camaraderie was over, and it was fifteen minutes before an old pickup that looked like it had been traded in by the Joads stopped for me. The long-faced driver didn’t speak a word until he dropped me near the arched blue neon sign of the Santa Monica Yacht Harbor.
Then he said, “My brother didn’t even make it onto Omaha Beach, he died in the water,” and drove off.
I went out on the pier and watched the daytime fishermen staring at their bobbers for a while before going into the arcade to play some of the games—the gripper machine, the mutoscope punching bag, the alley-cat shooting gallery. I spent ten minutes feeding coins into the Love Meter, but no matter how hard I squeezed the handle, I couldn’t do any better than Naughty But Nice. The machine’s message seemed to be confirmed when the guy waiting behind me took over and immediately hit Hot Stuff.
I stopped in a sandwich shop that had Game 2 of the World Series on the radio and ordered a tuna melt. Virgil Trucks, my favorite because of his nickname “Fire,” was on the hill for the Tigers, down 10 to the Cubs in the fifth. I thought it might be another heartbreaker for him, but in the bottom of the inning his teammate Hank Greenberg came up with two men on. Just home from four years of active duty, the “Hammering Hebrew,” as the announcer called him, hit a three-run homer. That was all Fire Trucks needed, and he closed out the game.
It was late in the afternoon when I got back to the bungalow. Still excited for the Tigers and a little woozy from the noise and lights of the arcade, I saw that our front door was slightly ajar. I entered cautiously and heard sounds coming from Jack’s bedroom. I grabbed a paring knife off the drain board as I passed through the kitchen.
The bedroom doorway smelled like it had been doused with gin. I yelled, “Come out of there!”
After a moment, Beaufort emerged, the adverse claims of his face trying to cooperate in an ingratiating smile.
“Emile, Emile Beaufort,” he grabbed at my hand.
I drew it back. “I know who you are.”
“Mr. Kennedy said it would be okay for me to look around.”
“This isn’t Mr. Kennedy’s house.”
“He wanted me to check and make sure that his son’s security is not being compromised.”
“We both know that’s horseshit.”
Beaufort shrugged as if to say that he’d given it the old college try before drawling, “Well, you probably know better than I that Mr. Kennedy worries about his children and wants what’s best for them.”
Worry wasn’t the right word. From the time they were teenagers, the Old Man had conducted surveillance on his kids, steaming open their letters, suborning their friends to find out about their current doings, and sometimes having them followed—all part of his eternal quest to turn knowledge into power.
“So what?”
“Well …” He seemed to want me to finish his thought. “Are you spying on us? Are there microphones and hidden cameras in this house?”
“I do not spy.” His good eye looked away when he said this. “My
work involves nothing more than the acquisition of information.”
“Just like the guy who takes pictures of people in flagrante over the transom with his Graflex Speed Graphic.”
“Very tacky,” Beaufort said with hauteur, “and primitive too. Something I would never do.”
“If you want to acquire information about people you should have stayed with the FBI.”
He was affronted: “I remained at the bureau all during the war for patriotic reasons. But now it’s peacetime and there’s no longer any need to sacrifice for the good of the country. Mr. Kennedy offered me an opportunity to enter private enterprise. Mr. Hoover said he was sorry to see me go but he told me he certainly understood the desire for a nest egg.”
He was warming to the subject. “I am quite proud of what I achieved. I began my government work countering Nazi agents and ended it countering Soviet agents. I’m the one who proved that the spy Elizabeth Zarubina had infiltrated our atomic bomb project through a cell she set up at Los Alamos.”
“Congratulations. Never heard of her.”
“Trust me. It was big. Very big.”
Seeing that I didn’t care, he frowned. “You don’t want to live under Communist domination, do you?”
“Right now, I mainly don’t want to live under your snooping.”
He shook his head sadly, gave me a smile that was tailored for the simple-minded, and ambled toward the front door, bizarrely whispering “Farewell” over his shoulder as he evaporated into the afternoon light.
I was still fuming when Jack and Val arrived an hour later. I pulled him aside as soon as she was occupied and told him about the encounter with Beaufort.
He shrugged stoically: “So what’s new? At the beginning of the war when I was having a thing with that Danish girl, Inga, Dad bugged my phone constantly, maybe with this guy’s help, who knows? I only found out about it because the recording system went haywire and one day I picked up my phone and heard the replay of a conversation I’d had the previous evening.”
Val waited until there was a lull in our conversation to come over and put a hand on my sleeve: “Today is October 4.”
When I gave a blank look, she was slightly affronted: “Our one-month anniversary, don’t you know? A very big moment and tonight we celebrate.”
“Yeah, we’ve got a table for three at Ciro’s,” Jack added. “We need to leave in forty-five minutes. That gives you time to spruce yourself up so people won’t think we’re tripling with Lon Chaney Jr.”
I tried to beg off, pleading a headache, but Val seized my hand and held it to her cheek: “We are a triangle, Billings. If we will lose one of our sides we will collapse.”
We drove to Sunset Strip, which still felt like something of an open city, the identity it had acquired in the late Twenties when it was the place to go for bootleg liquor and other forbidden things, and when local criminals were so blatant in their activities that a group of concerned citizens once put up a billboard reading “Keep Chicago out of Los Angeles!”
Now it was more subdued, but still a place apart—an unincorporated area outside the LA city limits, under the jurisdiction of the county sheriffs rather than the heavier hand of the LAPD—where the rules still knew how to bend. Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen and their crews still treated it like their clubhouse, while Zanuck, Sam Goldwyn and other moguls won or lost a few thousand dollars in their standing poker game every Thursday night upstairs at the Melody Room. Girls a step down from Temple Rose’s worked the sex industry with the hicks who showed up on the weekends hoping to take a little walk on the wild side.
Ciro’s was at the center of things on the Strip, having inherited pride of place from the Trocadero, which had reigned supreme during the Thirties before closing its doors. When we arrived at half past seven there was already a long line. Jack flashed his ID at a security guard, who checked his list and let us cut in front of the plebs who had no chance of getting in before midnight.
The interior was spiffy as a foxtrot, with a red ceiling, plush gathered curtains on the walls, and statuettes of chubby putti smugly cupping baskets of flowers in their hands. I was able to make out the signatures of Mary Pickford and Cary Grant among the dozens on Ciro’s Scroll of Fame in the lobby before Jack yanked on my sleeve. The maître d’ charted a serpentine route to our table, passing within a few feet of Xavier Cugat, who was standing in front of the bandstand holding his beloved chihuahua in one arm and languidly waving his baton with his free hand as his musicians went through a rote version of his signature song, “Perfidia.”
We ordered the house specialties—Caesar salad, half turtle and half cream of pea soup with sherry and whipped cream on top, and a cha teaubriand for three—and then searched the crowd for celebrities whose names would appear in the columns of Luella Parsons and Hedda Hopper the next morning.
“There’s Rita Hayworth,” Jack inclined his head so he wouldn’t appear to be staring at the star along with everyone else in the restaurant. “The ‘Love Goddess.’”
“Born Margarita Carmen Cansino, as Temple Rose would probably tell you if she were here,” I said to Val.
“Such beautiful red hair,” she examined Hayworth closely, “but she appears to be here alone. And she pretends she doesn’t know that everyone looks at her.”
“If we come back here this time next year after the movie’s out, people will be looking at you,” I told her.
“They already are,” Jack said proudly.
“Don’t be foolish, Gianni,” she tucked in her chin and gave him a saucy sideways Lauren Bacall look. “Mr. Talbert’s film will disappear like a ship that has been struck by an exploding mine, and by next year it will require a large expedition of deep-sea divers to bring my career up from the bottom of the ocean.”
Our food had just arrived when the maître d’ suddenly reappeared, fastidiously directing two busboys carrying extra chairs and place settings. Then we saw the Old Man pulling Gloria Swanson toward us. He sat her between Jack and me and squeezed his own chair in next to Val, relishing the awkwardness.
Swanson gave us a haughty look, bearing herself like the Screen Queen she had been twenty years earlier in what was now already being seen as Old Hollywood, when her sultry kohl-eyed portrayal of Sadie Thompson helped make the case for censorship in the film industry. She had been left behind by the transition to talkies and her own middle age, but while she had virtually disappeared from the screen over the past decade, she still knew how to make news—most recently by accusing her fifth husband at their divorce trial of having had black-market butter on his crêpes Suzette every morning throughout the war—and how to retain her mystique.
Especially with the Old Man. Even though their rut was long since over, she would always be his greatest trophy—his Marilyn—acquired during his rapid and improbable climb as a Hollywood producer. He had eventually grown as brazen in the possession of her as he had been groveling in the pursuit—fucking her over at the same time he was actually fucking her as producer of the catastrophic Queen Kelly, her last big silent, which according to lip readers featured filthy denunciations of Big Joe as a stand-in for dialogue. Yet she unaccountably still had a soft spot for him, and whenever he was in Hollywood she let him flash her around town like an antique diamond stickpin.
She was tiny, not quite five feet tall, with size four shoes, thin penciled arches for eyebrows and a turned-down mouth conveying a grim pessimism about the human condition. Her makeup was so thick that her facial features seemed mortared in place. She was wearing her trademark beret and a fox wrap with glass eyes glaring out of the snarling head on one shoulder and claws sharp as switchblades on the other.
She unfolded her napkin and perfected the symmetry of her silverware, saturating these mundane gestures with the deep theatricality that Norma Desmond would employ in Sunset Boulevard, Swanson’s great curtain call of a role, a few years later.
After the Old Man had ordered for both of them without asking her what she wanted, Swanson stared envio
usly at Val and asked, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“I was once almost as beautiful as you are.”
Val gave a genuine blush and Swanson presented us with her profile.
“The fleeting grandeur of their youth makes so little impression on the young,” she spoke imperiously to the room. “They have no appreciation of the transitory nature of their life course.”
After letting this pronouncement settle, she turned to Jack: “I suppose you don’t remember my visit to your family in 1929?”
“How could I forget?” He gave her a buttery look. “You landed at Hyannis in a seaplane and Dad went out to get you in our speedboat. It was the grandest entrance ever.”
“Oh, there were others even grander, I assure you.” She hoisted the corners of her mouth in a mysterious little smile before continuing: “I autographed the wall of your sister Kathleen’s playhouse.”
“I remember,” Jack chuckled. “Dad had it bulldozed a couple of years later so we’d have more room for football, but at the last minute Mother ran out and saved the board that had your signature.”
Swanson’s eyes narrowed at the mention of Rose, the rival she had vanquished so easily.
“Does she still have it?”
“On the mantle in her bedroom.”
“Her bedroom,” Swanson scoffed as she inserted a cigarette into an ivory holder. She pointed it at the Old Man for him to light, then swung it upright and smoked grandiosely.
While Jack and I were watching her act, the Old Man was moving in on Val. Smiling so broadly that you could see his molars, he scraped his chair ever closer to hers. At first she was welcoming, trying to make a good impression as he analyzed the angles of her face and gave advice on how to tilt it to take advantage of studio lighting, how to hold her upper body when sitting on a sofa, how to steal scenes without being accused of trying.
“He’s swarming her,” Jack whispered. “If I’d known he was going to show up I would have warned her what to expect.”
That’s what he had done with the debs he invited to Hyannis for house parties during his college years. At the end of those evenings, when everyone was retiring, Jack always cautioned the girls to lock their doors because, as he said euphemistically, “Dad tends to get a little frisky at night.”
Things in Glocca Morra Page 14
