Hollywood and Levine

by Andrew Bergman

  She shook her head. “That’s out of the question.”

  She did not want to hear differently and I couldn’t blame her. Personal fear wasn’t the motive, it was something simple, ancient and biblical: revenge. And you can’t argue against revenge.

  “There’s something else, Jack,” she continued. “Walter’s associates in his work …”

  “You mean his political associates, the crowd that was here last night?”

  She hesitated. “I’m not sure we’re talking about the same thing.”

  “Mrs. Adrian, I am aware of the fact that Walter was a Communist, and that the people who gathered here last night are also. Am I correct?”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “What about you?”

  She cocked her head, as if thinking about the question and then as if thinking about something else, pre-Walter, pre-Hollywood. Helen Adrian floated from the room at that moment, sailing out of 1947 and into an earlier, easier time and place. She was so beautiful then, so serene, that it almost scared me. Me, a tough guy.

  Helen Adrian finally said that no, she had never joined up. “I was sympathetic, but I’m no joiner.”

  “Did you feel pressure to join?”

  “A little.”

  “From Walter?”

  “No, Walter never pressured me to join, never. In fact, I think he was actually getting tired of the Party, not the politics, I think, so much as the meetings and the backbiting and suspicions, particularly recently.”

  “Who did pressure you?”

  She sifted through the blue haze that screened her face, as if trying to spell out an answer in smoke.

  “I didn’t mean pressure like anyone giving me ultimatums, Jack. It was more in the nature of suggestion.”

  “By whom?”

  She smiled.

  “You’re a persistent s.o.b.”

  “I’m not doing it for abstract reasons, Mrs. Adrian, believe me.”

  “Call me Helen, please.”

  “Fine, Helen. I’m asking about these people because I’m undertaking the investigation of a first-degree murder that everyone thinks was a suicide and I’m undertaking it almost completely without information or leads, three thousand miles from my home base. That is to say, three thousand miles from any cops or reporters that I know, or any hatcheck girl or hotel dick or barber who I can depend on to tell me things on the level and on time. Out here, I can only trust you and the palm trees. So I’ve got to press you, Helen. Even if my questions seem pointless, give me an answer if you’ve got one or part of one.”

  Mrs. Adrian sat up in her chair and stared down at the tablecloth, pushing some crumbs around.

  “You’re a hundred percent right, Jack. Forgive the coy remarks. Pressure.” She thought it over and furrowed her brow into soft wrinkles. “The Wohls, Milton and Rachel. Henry, Henry Perillo. He’s the most organization-minded of the group, the most disciplined. He felt it compromised a member’s effectiveness not to have his spouse in with him. We had arguments about it, friendly ones. He’s not a bad egg.”

  “Did Walter talk openly about his tiring of the Party?”

  “No, at least not to me. But I could see it in his face, in his expression after a meeting, in little remarks he made.”

  “Did he ever talk to the others about leaving?”

  “In the group? I’d be surprised if he had. It would have been out of character for him to be that open about it. Besides which, Party discipline really discourages that kind of faltering and egoism.” Her smile was that of the disinterested observer. “They’re all in such a bind. They sit in their offices writing bilge for the big screen, bilge indistinguishable from that written by the right-wingers across the hall, except that once in a while they work into the speech of some minor character a pitch for democracy or brotherhood or working-class rights—and then they think they’ve really advanced the cause. And they’re making these incredible amounts of money, but when they meet as progressives, they see themselves merely as ants in the anthill of Party unity, workers just like the men who bring their lunch pails to the factory everyday and make eighty cents an hour. Kind of contemptible, when you think about it. I tried not to. None of them saw the irony.”

  “Did Walter?”

  “No. He sometimes pretended that he did, but in his gut he didn’t. He wanted his status and parking space and hundred-fifty grand like everyone else. I never knew anyone who worried about money as much as Walter did.”

  Her eyes got a little wet and then the maid came in to clear the dishes. We got up and started for the living room, but Mrs. Adrian suddenly turned and told me to follow her. We went up the stairs.

  The master bedroom was across from the top of the stairs. Mrs. Adrian walked past it and down a hallway that went back to the front of the house. We came to a study, a small, cozy room containing a couch, desk, typewriter and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Above the desk were framed, glossy photographs inscribed to Walter: from Mervyn LeRoy, the director, from Edward G. Robinson (“To Walter, a great writer. With affection, Eddie”), from Claudette Colbert, Humphrey Bogart, Joan Blondell, and John Garfield, dressed as a boxer. (“To Walter, a real fighter. Your dear pal, Julie.”)

  “I want you to stay here with me,” Mrs. Adrian said very softly.

  I turned to face her. Her cheeks were slightly flushed.

  “In this room, I meant, Jack.” She pointed to the couch. “That folds out. It’s really more comfortable than the bed in the guest room. Walter slept here sometimes, when he had to work late and didn’t want to disturb me coming into the bedroom. In the morning I’d find him curled on the couch in his underwear, his clothes piled up on the typewriter.” She smiled, really glowed, I thought, for the first time in discussing her husband. It was as if her fondest memory of Walter was of his sleeping in another room, down a long hallway from her.

  “Why do you want me to stay here?” I asked.

  “It’s cheaper than the hotel and mainly I’m too frightened right now to stay here alone. You’re a detective, you know your way around guns, you’re familiar with danger. That’s true, isn’t it? It’s not just from the radio. You have faced danger, I assume?”

  “Once in a while. Not daily, but enough. Too much.”

  She was satisfied.

  “Good, then. You’ll stay.”

  We looked at each other for a long moment. I could hear the leaves hissing in the full trees outside.

  “You’ll stay,” Helen Adrian said, “until we learn what really happened to Walter.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I suppose you will return to New York and I will figure out what to do with the rest of my life.” She nodded abruptly and started acting the busy housekeeper, the decision made. “But first things first. I’ll put fresh linen on the bed here and you can go back to the Real and get your belongings. You know how to get there from here? Want me to go with you?”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll find it.”

  “Fine.”

  I stood there looking more than a little ridiculous. This was not the kind of thing I handled well. Helen Adrian knew it. She smiled mischievously.

  “Jack, no one will talk. They know you’re a detective. If they do talk, the hell with them. Now get your stuff. Mrs. Billy will stay till you come back.”

  I stood a bit more, searching for excuses not to stay, excuses motivated by guilt at having the hots for my dead friend’s wife and fear that we were both in serious danger and sitting ducks in this big rich house. Then Mrs. Adrian stepped forward and kissed me, an ambiguous peck that landed at a point equidistant to my sensual wet lips and my scratchy cheek. Then she walked out and headed for a hall closet, probably the linen closet, calling “See you later” over her shoulder.

  I retrieved my gear from the Real and returned to the Adrian house about eleven. Mrs. Billy opened up and informed me that Mrs. Adrian had retired for the night.

  I went upstairs and checked into the study. The bed had been made. Th
ere was a note on the pillow reading “Jack—You’ll never know how much I appreciate this. You’re a wonderful man. H. A.” I folded the note and put it into my suitcase, beneath the shirts. Don’t say I’m not sentimental. Then I undressed and got into bed, pulling a bound script of Walter’s from one of the shelves. It was Boy From Brooklyn. After a few pages, I got tired and doused the light, then lay there listening for the telltale squeak of a hall floorboard. A part of me, a ridiculous part, said that Helen Adrian was going to rap softly on my door and float in, a dim figure in a sheer negligee, her body’s shadows a mystery of the night. An imperceptible hitch of her shoulders and the gown would billow to the floor. Naked, oiled, perfumed, she would slip into bed to straddle me and drive us both through a midnight of slow pleasures.

  I stood sentinel by my hopes for an hour or two, wondering all the time if I should be the aggressor and go creeping into her tent. Perhaps she was keeping watch also.

  My waking grew choppy, with blind spots of time that must have been sleep. I yielded and turned over, bothered by something I had to do tomorrow but could not locate. Finally I found it.

  At ten o’clock I had to be at Walter’s funeral.

  7

  It was an interesting funeral. Five hundred mourners filled Temple B’nai Sholom in Beverly Hills, a ritzy edifice to a sun-tanned God who knew how to look the other way. I say “mourners” in a purely descriptive sense, for there was very little weeping or wailing. The dominant emotion was uneasiness.

  From my seat in the last row I could barely see Helen. Her features were veiled and indecipherable. Walter’s sister and brother-in-law had come in from Chicago and sat looking pale, rumpled, and out of place amid the expensively tailored Californians, craning their necks to spot celebrities. Walter’s mother had decided to remain in New York and was spending the day bent over double in a storefront synagogue in Brooklyn. And that was where Walter’s funeral was really taking place today, in the back row of a freezing shul.

  The God who presided over Beverly Hills—Our Father Who Art in Technicolor—couldn’t be bothered with old ladies. This God mingled with the great and blessed their tennis courts and kidney-shaped pools. Among his worshippers today were John Garfield, Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, Karen Morley, Edward G. Robinson, and Lloyd Nolan. Jack Warner was there, wearing a red skullcap, seated next to Johnny Parker, whose eyes darted continuously about the room, alighting always on his watch. When Parker stood, he swayed from foot to foot. He was nervous, he wanted out, and I guessed he had an appointment. Parker’s discomfiture intrigued me, and having nothing better to do, I decided to follow him after the services. I would tail him, and tail him good, until I was satisfied that he either was or wasn’t a major player in this case.

  The funeral proceeded apace. A young rabbi named Zalman Winkler presided and spoke of Walter as a “heroic Jewish artist, of imagination and conscience,” one who “brought his imagination to the celluloid universe of film.” He managed to get in a plug for Walter’s last picture, Alias Pete Costa, saying that it was “due for release at that sacred time when we celebrate another release, that of the Jews from Egypt, that is to say, Pesach.” Jack Warner nodded solemnly at the rabbi’s words. After working in a few more parallels between the picture business and the flight of the Hebrews, all of which led to the inescapable conclusion that Moses had shepherded his people directly to the Brown Derby, Rabbi Winkler mercifully stopped and introduced Dale Carpenter.

  The actor stepped to the lectern and removed a sheet of paper from a black leather slipcase. It was a Wordsworth poem, “At The Grave of Burns,” which he read with considerable feeling, particularly its closing stanzas:

  For he is safe, a quiet bed

  Hath early found among the dead,

  Harboured where none can be misled,

  Wronged, or distrest;

  And surely here it may be said

  That such are blest.

  And oh for Thee, by pitying grace

  Checked oft-times in a devious race

  May He, who halloweth the place

  Where Man is laid

  Receive thy Spirit in the embrace

  For which it prayed!

  Sighing I turned away; but ere

  Night fell I heard, or seemed to hear,

  Music that sorry comes not near,

  A ritual hymn,

  Chanted in love that casts out fear

  By Seraphim.

  Carpenter stepped from the lectern. Rabbi Winkler then introduced Milton Wohl and Henry Perillo, who delivered two very personal, and very revealing eulogies.

  The writer went first, speaking in a voice that started at a quaver and then evened out into a mournful and resonant sing-song. “What about us, the survivors of yet another loss,” said Wohl. “How do we learn from the tragic circumstances of our good friend Walter’s death? How do we, workers in an industry whose products attempt to profess the humanistic values of decency, freedom of thought, and brotherhood, learn to apply those values to ourselves and the way we live? How do we come to love, trust, and help each other more?” I heard some coughing and scanned the room. Edward G. Robinson sat with his head bowed and his arms folded across his chest, Jack Warner was gazing up at the ceiling, Johnny Parker was checking the time.

  “Walter,” Wohl continued, “you were a hell of a writer, and a fighter for the betterment of the common lot of mankind. We’ve all been asking ourselves why your life had to end so abruptly, with so many triumphs still before you. Well, maybe it was a warning to us all, Walter, a warning to get our houses in order. To stop suspecting our neighbors and friends, to devote ourselves to a kinder and saner world, where our work will be a reflection of the best in us, a world in which future Walter Adrians will be free to write as honestly and bravely as the limits of their creativity will allow. I think that’s what you would have wanted your friends and co-workers to think today. I know you would not have wanted us to be angry, because anger was not in you. You were a rare one, Walter, and it was a joy to spend part of the journey with you.” Wohl’s voice broke on his last words and he left the lectern wiping his eyes with a blue handkerchief.

  Perillo followed, wearing a black woolen suit that looked as if it had been suspended in a bag full of mothballs for the past ten years. He marched to the lectern, took some pages from a slipcase, placed the case on the floor by his feet, and donned a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles. Without looking up, he cleared his throat and began reading from his paper.

  “This is a day rich with meaning for the industry in which many of us are employed. A tragedy has befallen one of us, and all of us. I convey my deepest sympathies to the Adrian family, especially to Helen, and assure them that these sympathies are felt by my brothers in the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. And more than sympathy. Anger.” He looked up, his eyes burning behind the specs. “Deep anger at the events and the climate in this industry that led to the passing of our dear Walter Adrian.

  “We are coming to a crossroads. Much has been whispered about in the privacy of our homes. Rumors fly, accusations are passed from ear to ear. Let us voice this openly now, let us bring our concern into focus. Is the death of Walter Adrian just the first casualty in a war between the progressive-minded men and women of the movie industry and reactionary lackeys who seek to turn the clock back to the Stone Age?” Perillo thumped his hand on the lectern and people began to stir. I saw Bogart turn to Garfield and raise his eyebrows. Parker sat staring at his feet.

  “Is Walter Adrian,” Perillo continued, gaining in speed and volume, “the first sacrifice to a clique of reactionary congressmen who hope to fatten themselves off a fearful movie industry, one that thrives on popular acceptance, one whose economic well-being hangs on a slender thread of respectability and imagined 100 percent Americanism? Are the progressive-minded workers of the industry going to hide in their houses and surrender their cherished beliefs in the freedom and dignity of all men, regardless of race or color? I say no! I say Wal
ter Adrian did not die, so that his friends might succumb to an orgy of fear and sterile self-criticism! Let us never imagine that we can compromise on the issues over which we have fought so long and so well. There is no compromise, only capitulation!

  “No, Walter’s death will not be wasted on his friends. Ever more vigilant of our freedoms and the safeguards of our treasured Constitution, we shall burn the candles late into the night. We shall watch over our rights and principles like a mother over a feverish infant. That is what Walter Adrian would have wanted from his friends and that is what Walter Adrian will get from his friends!”

  Perillo turned and walked away, stuffing his speech into his pocket and removing his spectacles. There followed an absolutely tubercular explosion of coughing, a violent clearing of a hundred congested throats. Rabbi Winkler, looking as comfortable as an asthmatic deep-sea diver, returned to the lectern and led a closing invocation. As he did, I saw Parker whisper into Jack Warner’s ear and start edging out into the aisle, nodding at acquaintances as the invocation ended and Walter’s coffin was borne out a side door. I watched it go, watched Helen follow the casket with a bowed head, and then flew out the back door and into the parking lot.

  The limousines were lining up for the trip to the cemetery. Helen and Walter’s sister and brother-in-law headed for the lead limo, the Wohls, the Arthurs, and Goldmark were climbing into the second one, while Carpenter, Perillo, and Friedland entered the third. Other luminaries stood waiting, but Johnny Parker was already backing his Rolls out of a space between two Cadillacs. I raced for the Chrysler and climbed inside as Parker started out of the lot. The engine took a maddening while to turn over, during which time the Rolls was making its somber and dignified way onto Wilshire Boulevard. Fate ran Parker into a red light and I was able to find a cozy little niche about four cars in back of him. There was very little chance of losing the executive in traffic; his Rolls was as conspicuous as a white whale.