by Jerry Ludwig
He taps on my window. Gestures for me to roll it down. He’s barrel-chested, with a lifetime of arrogance etched on his florid face. “Can I help you, sir,” he challenges.
“Just about to leave.”
“Yeah, been watching you from back there. Got business in this neighborhood?”
“A trip down memory lane, officer. Used to know a girl who lived in that house. Wanted to take a look at it again.”
“Can I see your driver’s license and registration, sir.”
“Car’s a rental,” I say. As I reach slowly into my jacket pocket, he shifts his hand onto the butt of his .38. So I’m very careful as I bring out a gray folder. He takes it, scans it, then says, “What the hell is this?”
“International driver’s license.”
Squinting at it—“Issued where?”
“Paris.”
“Well, well, never seen one of these. You a long way from home, Frenchy.”
“I’m not French, I’m an American.” He’s starting to piss me off.
“But you been livin’ in Gay Paree, huh? You a draft dodger?”
“Look, is there a problem, officer?”
“You tell me—we been havin’ a rash of burglaries in this area the last couple months.” The way he says it, I know it’s bullshit.
“Sorry to hear that, but I just arrived in town a couple of days ago.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Matter of fact, I can.”
Still moving slowly, I produce my passport and point out the arrival date stamped by the custom’s officer in New York. He finds the passport even more interesting than the international driver’s license.
“Born in New York City. Religion: Jewish.” He hands the passport back to me. “Got a local address?”
“Chateau Marmont. In Hollywood.”
“Oo-la-la, a shat-tow! I shoulda guessed. Step out of the car, sir.”
“What?” He’s definitely pissing me off.
“You heard me.” Drawing his gun. Moving a pace away.
I climb out. He kicks the door shut. “Face the vehicle, hands on the roof.” I do it. “Spread your legs.” Then he roughly kicks them back so I’m off-balance, leaning against the car. Powerless. At least that’s what he thinks.
He frisks me with ham-handed abrasiveness. The black rage is boiling in me. At the bored, inefficient assholes at the airport, at pushy, smug Agent McKenna, at myself for not calling out to Jana, at the world generally—and it’s all focusing on this clown.
The frisk is over, he found nothing, and that frustrates him. He jabs me viciously in the back with his gun. The demon within me is rattling the bars of its cage. I struggle to keep it under control. “Here’s my advice to you,” he says. “Turn your cute little rented car around and scoot on back to your shat-tow and tell all the other fancy New York clipped-dick Jew boys to stay out of my neighborhood, or—”
Fuck control!
I push off from the car and half-whirl around, smash an elbow in his abdomen knocking the wind out of him, while simultaneously slamming a lock onto his gun arm, twisting hard. Ranger-taught technique. I could easily snap his arm in this position. But I don’t. His gun goes flying and he falls back onto his butt, like Humpty Dumpty tumbling off the wall. He’s gasping for air and I automatically move into position to finish him off with a kick in the head. But at the final instant I catch myself. Restore control. Kositchek, the shrink I’ve been going to in Rome, taught me that. Anger control, he calls it. More difficult for me to master than any Ranger technique. I pick up the revolver and his eyes bug. I let him taste terror for an instant.
“You dropped this, officer.”
Then I flip the chamber open and let the cartridges spill on the pavement. I toss the gun in his lap.
“Don’t bother writing this up. It’ll only make you sound like a schmuck—that’s a Jewish word for idiot. Then I’d have to write up my version of what happened—and anyone who knows you more than five minutes will believe me. Have a nice night.”
I get in my car and make a U-turn and drive off. As I get back on Sunset, the adrenaline rush is diminishing. I’ve got the cage door shut again. Been fighting this compulsion to lash out at assholes since the bad days in Mexico.
When I reach the Chateau I’m not hungry or sleepy, so I stretch out on a lounge chair in the near darkness surrounding the pool. Music is wafting from an open window on a rear bungalow, and I can hear Bobby Darin singing “Beyond The Sea.” I wonder if Jana likes that as much as I do. We used to have the same taste in music. The underwater lights in the Chateau pool are on and the aquamarine water glows.
In the summer of 1937, when we first came out here, we were only three years old, and Jana and I learned how to swim in this pool. So is that what I’m harkening back to—long ago memories that Jana may have stopped recalling? Has she been married? Nah, I would have heard. Yeah, how? Once we were as close as twins, but that was then. Does she ever think of me? Even if she does, what do I have to offer her? She stayed, I left. Everything that once was ended then.
Yet here I am.
So I ask myself for the zillionth time, why am I really here? I force myself to put it into words:
I want Jana. And I want everything they took away from Teddy. Plus—if, as the adage goes, revenge is a dish best served cold, then I’d like to order a big serving of that icy item on the menu. Is that too much to ask?
CHAPTER
3
JANA VARDIAN
“I don’t know if I’m going to the funeral,” I say to my tennis partner Wendy Travers.
She and I play early morning sets several times a week, sometimes with our hosts, Harry and Valerie Rains, on the private court behind their Tara-like mansion in the exclusive Beverly Hills flatlands. We’re sitting on the bench toweling off after a fierce workout. Wendy, lithe, raven-haired and gorgeous, is twenty years older than I am, but she’s my best friend.
Neither of us have been invited to Teddy Weaver’s funeral. But we both saw the two-inch ad in Variety announcing the time and place with no contact information.
“I’m kinda scared,” I admit to Wendy. “Don’t know if I can handle it. Of course, I want to go—for Teddy.”
“Just for Teddy?” Wendy nails me. That’s the thing about a friend who knows you that well.
“Okay,” I concede, “I’m particularly nervous about seeing David.”
“Well, it scares the hell out of me, too,” she says, “the idea of confronting all those old judgmental faces. But I’m going. Valerie and Harry offered me a ride. Want to come along? Safety in numbers.”
David Weaver and I have known Wendy since we were three. She came to the big pool party welcoming our families to Hollywood. She taught us how to swim that day. That was easy for her. She was a water ballet dancer in the Esther Williams “aqua-musicals,” those Technicolor romances where all plot complications climaxed in a splashy extravaganza. Since then, Wendy has carved out a career as one of Hollywood’s top romantic comedy writers. Twice nominated for the Oscar, her sunny movies have grossed millions for MGM. Harry—who used to be her lawyer, as well as Teddy and Leo’s—recently lured her to work at Panorama, where he’s head of production now. That’s where I work, too, back in the stacks of the research department.
Wendy and I have grown very close these last few years. She’s not a mother substitute. Ellie, David’s mom, was virtually my mom. Wendy loved her as I did. When I lost Ellie, Wendy never tried to take her place. But we’re more than best friends. We share a tangled past.
My father and Wendy were both cooperative witnesses before HUAC. And they each named the other.
My father did it first during the 1951 hearings. Wendy named him a few months later, along with four others. Neither of them named Teddy Weaver. A few months later, I witnessed a shouting confrontation between Wendy and my father outside a Malibu restaurant. It ended in tearful reconciliation. “Friendly” witnesses often could do that with each other. The commonality was that th
ey had succumbed to the same pressures. Those who had been named and Blacklisted were not so forgiving. Reconciliation did not seem possible.
I’ve never really been able to talk with my father about those days. Whenever the subject came up, he would just rant, and I knew he was trying to assuage his pain. So I stopped bringing it up. But with Wendy I could explore what had happened and try to figure out why. It’s been a powerful bond between us. A way for me to understand my damaged dad. And also a safe place for Wendy to share her own pain. As only a pair of outcasts can.
“For three years after I testified,” she told me once, “I couldn’t bring myself to walk into the studio commissary. I’d get right up to the entrance, but I’d feel so nauseous I couldn’t get through the door.”
I’ve experienced those same feelings.
After my father testified, he was ostracized by almost everyone he knew—and so was I. Of course, he made his decision without consulting me, but it totally altered my life. I was a student at Beverly Hills High School and all my friends dropped me; many were literally forbidden by their Liberal parents to have anything to do with me. The other kids, wanting to be cool, almost all joined in. “Your dad is a rat fink,” some of them would chant at me in the school yard. I went from being one of the top ten popular girls to being an untouchable piece of shit.
I cried a lot, but my dad’s advice when he finally noticed was the bold challenge he’d been issuing to the whole town since he came back from Washington. “Fuck ’em all! You’ve gotta get over it.” But I guess he was stronger than I was. I handled it by getting massively depressed, that’s how our family doctor described it, and he prescribed antidepression and antianxiety meds. They didn’t work.
The only thing that provided relief was eating. I simply could not stop. My doctor asked why I did it, and I told him as honestly as I could that I was hungry. I felt like I was starving, a great gnawing void within me that seemed bottomless. Looking in the mirror was like having a front row seat at a special-effects horror movie. I seemed to be ballooning before my eyes.
Leo said that was why no one had asked me to the senior prom. Then someone did. Sam Kantin was supersmart but a bit goofy-looking at that age. The other girls always mocked him as “The Class Shnook,” but when he nervously extended an invitation, I accepted gratefully. Dad had a beautiful dress designed for me that concealed my extra girth, and I waited with unexpected anticipation for my date to show up on prom night. He never did. He stood me up. His father, a warmly regarded Beverly Hills rabbi, wouldn’t let him come. As a consolation prize, my father bought me a fire-engine-red Corvette. When I drove around in it, I felt like the whole world was staring at me. A winged chariot ain’t so great if there’s no one else to ride in it.
I was accepted at USC but begged my father to let me go away to somewhere nobody knew me. Our doctor was my ally—he said I was verging on a nervous breakdown. That’s how I got to Northwestern. The distance between Beverly Hills and Chicago helped a lot. I could breathe again. People there had hardly even heard of the Hollywood Ten, and my father’s name meant nothing to them. I made a few friends, concentrated on studying—I was a Theater Arts major, to Leo’s approval—and slowly lost the weight I’d gained.
Life was looking better. I made the dean’s list, lost my virginity to the male lead in a student production of Our Town (I played Emily), and was scheduled to direct the next campus show when my father was diagnosed with lung cancer. His wife, the Park Avenue socialite, had divorced him and moved back East. So for the first time in my life he needed me. He pleaded with me to come home. How could I say no?
His chemo treatments were terribly rough—he wasted away and I thought so many times I was about to lose him. He was so vulnerable and, except for Harry Rains, no one came to see him at the Stone Canyon house. It was as if we were the sole occupants of a luxurious leper colony. When he went into remission and his strength returned, his vulnerability also dissolved. His old rages returned, now reinforced by his professional successes. But I knew how much he still needed me, so I stayed on. Where else did I have to go? I finished my course work at USC while tending to the day-to-day details of Leo’s life.
Harry and Leo arranged for a job for me at the studio where both of them were. At first I was viewed by my coworkers as what I was—a classic case of nepotism. Driving a spiffy Jaguar onto the lot to perform my menial duties. But I was diligent and discovered I loved doing research, particularly getting lost in the past. I was good at it and was assigned more and more responsibilities. I made some new friends around the lot, had a few inconsequential romances, my confidence gradually rebuilt, but I still felt essentially alone. The memories of the David and Jana times were never far away.
Wendy Travers was my mainstay through those times. But our friendship hasn’t been a gloom parade. We go shopping together, play as a doubles team in pro-am tennis tournaments, and go to see old movie revivals at the Nuart Theater. She’s had affairs with various guys over the years, none very serious, she claims. For a while now, she’s been seeing someone, but she keeps the details private and refers to him as “Mr. Wonderful.” It seems like he’s nice to her, which I’m glad about.
Of course, I had told her about the Paris meeting between Teddy and Leo and how awkward it was between David and me and how cold he was. I admitted that I was just plain terrified and froze. David had been an inseparable part of me, but times had changed. Perhaps he had become one of them—the school-yard chanters. “Your father’s a rat fink.” And that’s all he could see of me.
“So what do you think, Jana? Are you going to the funeral?”
I think about it for a long moment.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know how I’m going to feel tomorrow.”
CHAPTER
4
BRIAN MCKENNA
I’m the guest of honor at a bank robbery. Watching a reenactment of my glory days from behind the huge Mitchell camera on a movie set.
Three heavily armed gunmen wearing ski masks storm into the bank. They club the security guard and force the customers facedown onto the marble floor. The smallest of the robbers runs swiftly at the row of teller windows. The tellers are sheltered behind a bulletproof shield that almost reaches the ceiling. There’s a narrow space left above them. The runner springs off a nearby desk. Like a human cannonball he vaults high, angles his body, clears the barrier, and drops down behind the tellers. He levels his pistol at them as the director calls “Cut!”
I’m sitting in my canvas-backed folding chair with FBI AGENT MCKENNA stenciled on it as the director turns to me questioningly. “How was it for you?”
“Just the way the real robbers did it back in my Detroit days,” I say.
“Then that’s a print,” the director announces.
It’s the morning of the day after my visit with David Weaver. We’re on a jumbo-airplane-hangar-size soundstage at Warner Bros. studio in Burbank. A replica of the bank where I once foiled a daring robbery has been constructed for The FBI Files television series. As part of my Bureau duties, I’m the technical advisor on the series and this episode’s my baby. I gave them the story. One of the few real ones they’ve depicted this season. Mostly the producer and the writers make up any old bullshit, and I find some vaguely connected real case, and we slap that file number on the screen to boost the illusion that this is the real stuff. It’s just Hollywood hokum.
Besides monitoring the TV series for the Bureau, I also operate out of the Federal Building downtown as liaison with the Hollywood community when they want FBI cooperation on a film or TV project. It all adds up to a cushy, boring, PR backwater job.
J. Edgar Hoover first sent me to Los Angeles thirteen years ago in 1946 to run the Commie-chasing squad. It was a hard-hitting, headline-grabbing mission. A jubilant experience for me. I went after unfriendly witnesses for the House Un-American Activities Committee. We were taking action to curb the spread of International Communism, the same way the Bureau rooted out Nazi sp
ies in America during World War II. At least that’s what I told myself at the time.
My powder-puff position now is titled “Special Assignments.” It was intended as a reward for a job well done in support of HUAC, but it feels like I’ve been put out to pasture. I’m forty-seven and worried I will spend the rest of my career with the Bureau stagnating in this velvet trap.
As usual, however, I follow orders. I’m a team player. Even on those occasions when the game gets a little tacky.
Like a few years ago in 1956 when Hoover became obsessively interested in the reported romance between Negro superstar entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. and platinum blond screen bombshell Kim Novak. He’d be on the phone every day pushing me to put aside Commie chasing for the moment and focus all my energies on digging up the latest dirt about this black-white relationship.
Hoover intimated he was doing a favor for Harry Cohn, who ran Columbia Pictures, where Novak was under contract. A bi-racial love affair could damage her value for Columbia at the box office. Hoover put me on the case. I felt like a garbage picker sifting through trash Dumpsters. Then we hit a development that made it official FBI business.
Gangleader Johnny Roselli reportedly kidnapped Sammy Davis. That’s a federal offense, so I pounced—jammed my way into the LAPD’s investigation, wound up tangling tails in an ugly fracas with their lead investigator, Ray Alcalay. I hung in there to Hoover’s delight. Then, abruptly, it was all over.
Sammy Davis was only missing a matter of hours and when he reappeared he denied being kidnapped. Johnny Roselli was the face of innocence when we questioned him. Word on the street was that during the snatch Sammy Davis had been threatened with death unless he stopped seeing Kim Novak. He dropped her and married a gorgeous Negro dancer very soon after.
Hoover felt the Bureau’s presence had been partially responsible for resolving what he called “a clear case of miscegenation,” still a crime in several Southern states, but not a federal crime. The experience left me feeling filthy, but sometimes the work went that way. Behind my back some of the other agents then began calling me “Hoover’s Hitman.”
