Blacklist

by Jerry Ludwig

  Teddy pushing me down again, seeking safety where there is none. My hands go flat on the floorboard. I feel dozens of pinpricks. Glass all over. Piercing the palms of my hands. I lift my head again.

  We’re like a duck in a shooting gallery. On a conveyer belt. Moving through the gauntlet of catcalling, invisible rock-throwers. And we can’t escape. From the curses—“White Niggers!” “Gonna string Robeson up!” “Nigger-Loving Commies!” “Howdoyalikethis?!” The hailstorm goes on and on.

  A huge rock crashes onto our hood. I shrink down. But then, can’t stop myself. Have to peek up again. Police aren’t doing anything to stop the guys on the hillsides. They’re protecting them! Teddy continuously tugging me down. I wriggle and resist. If only I can see the face of one of those bastards. But all I see is the occasional contorted face of a state trooper. I stare at each one. Usually in this dream they’re strangers. Made familiar by all the times I’ve relived these moments. But tonight, there are special cameo appearances: One of the cops waving us on is Alcalay. A trooper looms briefly out of the darkness and it’s McKenna, and when I peer hard into the inky hills I glimpse Markie Gunderson aiming a rock at my head, and as he throws it, I shriek and—

  —and sit bolt upright in my bed. At the Chateau. Jana beside me. Her hand on my arm. Looking as terrified as I feel.

  “Sweetie, it’s okay. It’s okay. You’re all right.” I look at her, still dazed. She sits up beside me. “What were you dreaming about?” she asks.

  “Peekskill,” I say.

  * * *

  I was there. That was my experience. Years later, after Korea—and after a night-sweat repeat of the dream in our Paris apartment—I went to the offices of the Herald-Tribune and checked their back files to fill in the background details:

  On September 4, l949, there was an all-star concert in a rented meadow three miles outside of Peekskill, New York. Its year-round residents were mostly blue-collar people and their families. But the population exploded during the hot summer months with nearly 30,000 second-home owners and vacation renters from New York City. Many Jewish, most left-leaning, some Communists. For the prior three years, the annual concert had been held without incident.

  Once again, Paul Robeson was the featured performer. He was the most famous Negro in America. Twice named an All-American football star at Rutgers, he followed with a career on the concert stages of the world, on phonograph records, and sang “Ol’ Man River” in the Hollywood version of Show Boat. But it was his international role as a social activist pressing for equality in civil rights that during the Cold War made him controversial to the point of being incendiary.

  Attendance at the Peekskill concert was later officially estimated at about 20,000 concert-goers inside the grounds and 8,000 protesters outside. Platoons of police on hand, including 900 state troopers, plus a helicopter overhead and four ambulances on call. But despite jeering at the arrivals—“You’ll get in, but you won’t get out!”—the concert went off smoothly. Many attributed the peaceful afternoon to 1,500 volunteers, drawn from the ranks of the Fur and Leather Workers’ Union, the Teachers’ Union, the United Electrical Workers, and some New York Longshoremen. They linked arms to protect the perimeter of the meadow. During the concert there were no speeches, only music. When Robeson finally appeared he was surrounded by fifteen volunteers to shield him from possible sniper bullets. Several protesters with rifles already had been removed from the neighboring hillside.

  Trouble erupted after the concert. Police funneled all the cars through one exit that fed into a traffic jam on the dark one-lane mountain road. As the caravan crept along they had to run a crossfire of rock throwers. Cars and buses were overturned. 215 concert-goers, including women and children, were injured, 145 hospitalized, some with serious eye damage.

  New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey ordered an investigation. A grand jury exonerated the state troopers. Dewey described those attending the concert as “followers of Red totalitarianism” and the victims were blamed for the violence.

  * * *

  Jana turns on the nightstand lamp. “I didn’t know you were still dreaming about it.” She first heard me talk about Peekskill after our family came home to California. She knew it had haunted me long afterwards.

  “Comes and goes.” I lean back against the headboard, breathing as if I’ve run the hundred yard dash. “Hasn’t happened in a while. I know it’s a stress symptom. Had it in Mexico after Mom died. Joe McCarthy was in it then. Throwing rocks. When I was in Korea, and the Chinese had us nearly surrounded, General MacArthur was directing Peekskill traffic.”

  We both know why I’m having this dream again tonight. With guest appearances by McKenna and Markie and Alcalay.

  * * *

  Earlier, when I had first burst into my room at the Chateau, Jana hadn’t heard about the ruckus over Okie. She thought my excitement was about the meeting with Markie, but I minimized: “Markie says the script needs work.” Tell her about that later—instead I brought her up to speed about The Singing Fool. Then I proclaimed the discovery I’d made during my interrogation by Alcalay. “It made me laugh out loud—with relief.”

  His clumsy questions had tipped me to the sign left on Okie’s car. “Maybe I’m sketchy about what I did last night because I was too drunk, but I’m cold sober today. And I sure as hell know I didn’t leave a sign for Okie!”

  She picked up on it instantly. “So someone else must have done the Shannon sign, not you! And his murder! David! You can stop suspecting yourself.”

  “Yeah! My rage demon didn’t get out of the cage while I wasn’t looking.”

  I kissed her and whirled her around the room. We were caught up in this thankful news until I mentioned that I almost told McKenna about my discovery during our chat in the parking lot. “But then I thought, he’ll never believe me—all he’d hear was that I’ve been suspecting myself. Probably take it as a half-assed confession. But I almost told him—”

  At the mention of McKenna’s name, the color drained from her face. “God, how I hate that man! He makes me feel crawly and ashamed! After your family went to Mexico, they’d come over to the house to work on Leo every night. McKenna and Harry Rains. They’d close the door to his study. I’d crouch on the landing above to eavesdrop. I couldn’t hear much of what they said. But their tones—McKenna so silky, Leo screaming curses at him, calling McKenna every vile word you ever heard, Harry smoothing and calming, then McKenna persuading again, Leo screaming some more. Night after night. I was so proud of my father for standing up to them. Refusing what they wanted him to do. And then—Leo went to Washington and named names. McKenna had finally broken him!”

  I was not about to defend McKenna. But I thought Jana was blaming the wrong guy. McKenna and Harry Rains pressured him, but Leo did what he did for his own reasons.

  * * *

  Now, in the middle of the night, we’re facing new realities.

  “Okay,” Jana says, “of course you’re not the one who killed Shannon—but who’s doing all this and making it look like you are? And why? Why you? Who wants to hurt you? What’s in it for them?”

  My heart is still pounding. I can’t think. “It’s like Peekskill. Same feeling. As if I’m being ambushed. Can’t go back, can’t go forward, can’t stand still. And there’s a steamroller about to run over me.”

  She wraps her arms around me and kisses my cheek. “You forgot one thing. You’re not alone. Not anymore. There are two of us.” She kisses me again, on the lips. Then, with that chairman of the board authority she’s always had, Jana says, “We’re going to do something about this.”

  “Like what? Where do you even begin?”

  “We’ll think of something,” she says.

  I’m not so sure, but we curl our bodies like a pair of spoons. I can’t fall asleep again, but in a few minutes I think she has, until she says in the darkness:

  “How about the phone call?”

  “Hm-m-m?”

  “The one you told me about. McKen
na on the Western street today. And that stuff you heard Okie telling him after?”

  “Axel Atherton. The Birthday Boy.”

  “Yeah,” she says, “that’s something. Let’s start there.”

  “Alcalay is much more interested in me.”

  “So—if they’re ignoring a lead, all the more reason we check it out.” She tries teasing me. “C’mon, David. Got anything better to do?”

  She seems so upbeat. So I mumble, “Okay, let’s do it. But how?”

  “Leave that to me,” she says. We cuddle even closer and somehow fall asleep again.

  CHAPTER

  35

  JANA

  I get into work extra early the next morning. Anxious not to lose any time trying to track down the one slim lead David and I have.

  Most of what we do in the Research Department is in preproduction—from gathering background material for writers to checking out accuracy in completed scripts. I’ve had many dealings with the Pentagon and the other armed services, so I know who to reach out to now.

  “Axel Atherton,” I tell Commander Hal Heffernan, my contact at the Navy Department in D.C.

  “Why do you want to find him?”

  “We’re working on a WWII aircraft carrier story. The name popped up in the research.” Who knows? Atherton might have been a sailor on a carrier.

  Heffernan gets dozens of similar requests every week from accredited journalists and film studios. “Here I thought you were calling this morning to make me famous,” he teases, then says he’ll get back to me. He sounds like a Hollywood agent.

  While we’re waiting, trouble seems to pile on. Rowan mentions to me one afternoon that Alcalay was asking about a police report that David was involved in a brawl at a Hollywood Hills party. Rowan painted David as a hero, but Alcalay was only interested in the level of violence. Then a couple of mornings later, Ken, the friendly studio cop at the front gate, popped out of his booth to confide to me McKenna was nosing around about David’s hassle here on the morning Leo barred David from the lot. “Gathering more proof that I’m a short-fuse psycho,” David glooms when I tell him.

  * * *

  I’ve started treatment with psychotherapist Sarah Mandelker. Her office is in a brick-fronted medical building north of Wilshire on Camden Drive, the Freudian-Jungian plush gulch in Beverly Hills. I hope she can help. I resent paying someone to listen to me, but I don’t know what else to do.

  My first day, I arrive forty minutes late for my fifty-minute appointment. Spouting excuses amid tears. All the traffic lights were against me, forgot to take the address, went to the wrong building, had to find a phone book in the gas station, no parking on the street, couldn’t find the entrance to the underground parking lot, I’m scared of elevators so I had to walk up all three flights and—

  “Sounds like you were a little ambivalent about coming here.” She offers me a Kleenex.

  Dr. Mandelker is a short, plump woman in her early fifties with a kindly face. Chest rounded like a pouter pigeon, helmet of close-cut graying brown hair, legs skinny as a bird’s. She’s wearing a stylish Anne Klein pantsuit. What did I expect? Hospital greens like a brain surgeon? She tells me she has an open slot in an hour, suggests I get some air, maybe a cup of tea, and come back. But she’ll have to charge me for both sessions.

  “Part of the treatment?” Sarcasm feels like a useful dodge until I get my bearings in this scary new environment.

  “You don’t pay, you don’t get well,” she jokes.

  But when I come back for my session, I concentrate on that. The money. Panorama’s medical plan will pay most of the cost, but if I come here several times a week that still leaves me with a deductible that will add an extra hundred dollars a week to my expenses, which I’m determined to cover on my own now. Not taking any more extras from my father. I stop babbling, confess that I don’t really know how or where to start.

  “I think you just did,” she says.

  Of course, I expected to be talking about my father, and at first I do. I tell her who he is but she’s not impressed. Doesn’t recognize the name. Thinks she may have seen one or two of his movies. “I prefer reading,” she says. I like that.

  Then I realize I’ve really come here to talk about myself. I have finally looked at who Leo is, now I’m left wondering, who am I?

  “Good question,” she says, “let’s try to find out together.”

  After a few sessions, I feel Sarah’s office is a sanctuary. Quiet, warm, tasteful, with no distracting decorations. Comfortable chairs for both of us. Facing each other across a coffee table with a box of tissues on it. Which I use a lot. Guess that’s part of the treatment, too.

  But I’m constantly torn three ways. Trying to come to terms in my mind with Leo, figuring out how and why I’m the way I am, and most of all the aching worry about David. We still haven’t heard back from the Navy Department.

  Sarah and I meet five days a week, same time each day. Late one afternoon she challenges me to do a verbal portrait of myself.

  “In twenty-five words or less?” She shrugs. So I give it a shot. “I see—a pampered, isolated young woman with no real friends. I still haven’t gotten over losing Wendy. So there’s just Carol and a few other people on the lot.”

  “And David,” she reminds me.

  “Of course, David.” I grope for a Kleenex. “But I feel like the princess in the tower—someday my prince will come. Now at last he’s here—and I’m scared the cops will take him away.”

  She thinks I’m being an alarmist. She says that’s understandable under the circumstances. But that still leaves me so afraid for him.

  The sessions are painfully hard, but I’m astonished at the progress I make in just a handful of meetings. Dredging up the pain of the high school civics class when the teacher discussed Communism and the kids whispered and snickered about me while the teacher pretended not to notice. Or was that just an excuse for me to cut myself off from everyone? Punishing myself. To prove my loyalty to Leo. It’s all been bottled up so long. Now it’s coming out. I could be finished here in no time. Then Sarah mentions that she’s pleased, too, but she expects the hardest stuff is yet to come.

  * * *

  David never asks what we talk about and I don’t volunteer much. He’s been in treatment so he respects my privacy.

  I’ve settled into Carol’s house in Silver Lake. It’s a total change after spacious Stone Canyon. Small, casual, and comfy. It’s built on stilts overlooking a wide brush-filled canyon. Like floating on a cloud. Soon I’ll be looking for a place like this for me—and David, too. We talk about that, when we’re not worrying about the mess he’s in.

  At the studio, we spend as much time as possible together, but peeking around corners to avoid colliding with my father. So far so good. I haven’t seen him since I moved out nearly two weeks ago. That pleases me and guilts me. I feel like a righteous person and a bad daughter.

  This afternoon, when I get back from a trip to the museum collecting research on ancient Mesopotamia for a tits-and-sand epic, Rowan shouts down the hallway, “Jana, telex for you.”

  It’s from the Navy Department. A one sentence telex. At first glance I’m disappointed. Or am I? Have to find David.

  I take the shortest route toward the Western street. Going past the row of editing rooms, but that seems safe. I checked by phone and Leo is in his jungle. Rounding the corner I see Keeler’s faded Buick parked with the trunk lid open. Several cartons in the trunk and Keeler coming down the metal steps with two more.

  “Hey, Keeler, moving to bigger quarters? Too much film for one room, huh?”

  But he’s in no mood for joking.

  “You just missed your father. He roared through here like a nuclear blast and fired me!”

  “Oh, he’ll change his mind, you know that.”

  “Not this time. I’ve got fifteen minutes to get off the lot or he’s sending the security guards to drag me away.”

  I’m staggered. “Why? What happened?�
� This is one of my father’s longest professional relationships.

  “Seems I’m a betraying sonuvabitch who’s out to butcher his movie! That’s what he keeps screaming at me.” Keeler stacks the boxes in the trunk, then turns to me. “Jana, I had no choice.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Barney Ott and his arm-twister Heritage stormed into my room and ordered me to show them some footage. Ott said he’d fire me on the spot if I refused.”

  “So—?”

  “So I work for them. Just like Leo does. It’s their studio. So I let them see what they asked for. The edited version of the ending of the movie. They hated it. Now the studio’s demanding Leo rewrite and reshoot or they’ll pull the plug. I tried to tell him there’s a way to recut what we have that will satisfy ’em, but there’s no talking to him. He’s like a maniac!”

  “Didn’t you explain to him why you—”

  “He said I should have let them fire me. I owe him that much.” Keeler scoffs, “Just like he was willing to fall on his sword to protect me. He gave the Committee my name. But that was only my life at stake, this is something important—his fuckin’ movie!”

  “I—I’m so sorry to have it end this way between the two of you.” I hug him, he pats my back, apologizes for giving me such an earful. Then he slams the lid of the trunk.

  “I’m actually glad it’s finished between us. I’m so tired of being reminded how he saved me—after he screwed me over. It’s like the national debt, you never pay it off.”

  He gets into his car and leans out the window. “Classic Hollywood! What have you done for me lately? You know I lied to the cops for him, Jana, backed up his bullshit story that we were here together working late the night that creep Shannon died. This is my thanks.”

  Keeler’s car roars off. I’m left there with another of my father’s lies. It could be the worst one. I’d just about convinced myself Leo was innocent of the Shannon thing. Now I’m flooded with fear again. Could my father be a murderer? He had reason to despise Shannon and he has no alibi. Then another thought. Neither apparently does Keeler.