"That's great," she said; then turned to me. "Eddie, we know a woman. She was in silent movies and her husband is one of the biggest movie moguls in town. She wants to meet you tomorrow morning."
"She's got some work for you," Al said. "Emily, Geffy can take him after he drops us off." Geffy was Al's driver, investigator and bodyguard. In the '30s Geffy had been a top ranked welterweight.
Emily told me: "Be here tomorrow about nine."
"I'll be here."
"What are you going to do tonight?"
"I'm going to see an old girlfriend."
Al grinned. "You can't have any old girlfriends. Emily, did you pay him for his work today?"
"Not yet."
"Here." He extracted a $20 bill from his wallet and gave it to me. At that time the minimum wage was 50 cents an hour. I was very happy with it.
As I went out, I thought about Mrs Wallis. I was no reader of movie credits, but I did recognize the name of Hal Wallis. I'd seen it too many times not to recognize it, and especially so because it was on the movies I liked best, black-and-whites from Warner Brothers about gangsters and hard times, mainly starring Bogart, Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and George Raft. They were not just actors to me; their characters were my role models.
Al Matthews owned a sea-green Cadillac convertible. It was the first year with the trademark tail fins. It was beautiful, and the first Cadillac in which I'd ridden. Cadillac's only competition was Packard. Mercedes was still a pile of bombed-out ruins, Mitsubishi was the Japanese junk plane that our Corsairs shot down by the bushel. In 1950 the United States made 80 percent of all the cars in the world, and Cadillac reigned supreme.
The Hollywood Freeway was still a long ditch with exposed steel rods and concrete being poured. The route to the San Fernando Valley was either along Riverside Drive around Griffith Park, or through Hollywood's Cahuenga Pass. Geffy took the latter route. The city already had memories for me. We passed a movie theater where I used to sneak in and sleep while a fugitive from reform school living on the streets. The men's room was behind the screen next to the emergency exit into an alley. When Joe Gambos and I knocked on the door in the alley, one of the winos that frequented the theater would let us in. One night, however, I knocked, the door opened and a policeman charged out swinging his nightstick. Joe was standing behind me, so when I turned to run, I bumped into him. The cop caught me across the backbone with the nightstick. The blow knocked me down and the bolt of pain made me scream. I was writhing on the ground and the cop kicked me a few times before telling me to get going. I went. The next morning my entire back was black and blue. It was numb for weeks. I've never hated cops, but I knew then that they were frequently not what Norman Rockwell painted for Saturday Evening Post covers.
Geffy turned up Cahuenga Boulevard, passing the Hollywood Howl. Across from the Bowl was an outdoor theater where the Life of Christ was put on every summer. My father had worked there for several years.
The San Fernando Valley's orange groves were falling quickly 10 the developers' bulldozers. Tract homes were rising to house the greatest immigration in human history, which was then in full swing. Never before had so many people moved to one place in so short a time.
Geffy knew very little about Mrs Wallis except that she had been a silent film comic in Mack Sennett's Keystone comedies.
Her name was Louise Fazenda. I remember her when I was a kid. She wore pigtails like a trademark. She was funny. I haven't heard anything about her for . . . twenty years, I guess."
We turned off Riverside Drive onto Woodman. The area was still all orange groves and alfalfa. Half a mile north of Riverside, at Magnolia, there was a ten-foot wall, whitewashed to resemble adobe. It was a long wall. Geffy turned into a short driveway and slopped at a solid green gate. The address was 5100 Woodman.
Geffy pressed a button and the intercom in the gate crackled. "Who is it?"
"We're from Al Matthews's office."
The gate swung open, controlled from the house. We drove in and the gate closed behind us. Flowers bordered the road, agapanthus and trellised roses on the right and a huge lawn on the left. The lawn sloped from the Monterey Colonial house, with trees dose around it, to a swimming pool and bathhouse. Behind the bathhouse was a tennis court. The house itself was smaller than the mansions on Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena, hut the grounds were far better maintained. They radiated the serenity of a cloister.
The road kept going toward the rear, but a circular drive around a fountain ended at the front door. It opened as we arrived. Mrs Hal Wallis was in her fifties and clad entirely in white. She hurried to greet us. She had very blond hair and a big mouth with a huge smile. She was one of those persons that you warm to the moment you meet them. She told us to come in, but Geffy said he had to get back and take Al to court in Pomona that afternoon.
"Give him and Emily my love," she said, and turned to me. "Come on. Follow me." She took my hand and led me inside.
The hallway was dim after the bright sunlight. She led me past a very formal living room, then through another room with blue chintz upholstered chairs, and down a hallway with Chippendale and polished brassware into the kitchen, which was sunny. There she introduced me to a snowy-haired woman named Minnie, who had been with the Wallises for a long time.
Mrs Wallis looked me up and down. I was too dressy to do the work she had in mind. She asked Minnie if Brent had any old jeans that I could use. Minnie wiped her hands and went to look. While Minnie was gone Mrs Wallis explained that her property included a back street where there was an old house that nobody lived in. A mound of trash had accumulated over the years. She wanted it moved and dumped in a large pit. Did I know how to drive a truck, she asked.
"Depends on how big it is."
Minnie returned with a pair of Levi's and a T-shirt. Mrs Wallis held the jeans to my waist. "He's a little heftier than you, but they'll probably fit."
The fit was adequate for the situation, although I wouldn't have worn them in public. My vanity was substantially greater at sixteen than it is at sixty. Indeed, the whole society put greater premium on appearance in 1950.
"Follow me," she said, leading me out the back door toward the rear of her property. Under a weather shed was an old stagecoach. Nearby was a row of horse stalls, although there were no horses. There were a couple of small cottages, one used by her gardener who came around the corner, saw us and quickly ducked out of sight. "Who was that?" I asked.
"He doesn't know you. He's the gardener, poor man. He was in a car accident and his wife and daughter were killed. He went out of his mind. He was in Camarillo. He needed a special environment . . . privacy . . . seclusion. I was glad I could give him a job."
We came upon an area that looked like the storage yard of a farm. I'd noticed a large field behind the cottages. Mrs Wallis said it had been a walnut orchard until a few years before. As I recall, some kind of flood had killed the trees. The property was still called Wallis Farms, which was printed on the many checks she would give me over time.
In a building that resembled a cross between a barn and an open-faced garage was an old stake bed truck. It was bigger than anything I'd ever driven, which was actually limited to a few stolen cars. "Can you handle it?" she asked.
"Sure." Why not? It wasn't as if I was driving it to Oklahoma City on Route 66.
We both got in and I got the motor running. She was going to show me the route. We started off, bouncing along a dirt road toward a paved street. It was Magnolia, which ran at right angles to Woodman.
"Turn here," she said. She meant the street. I thought she meant the space between rows of orange trees. The truck turned, but the bounce got worse, and the sides of the truck bed began snapping tree limbs.
"Oh my God!" she said; then dissolved into laughter as the truck hit a tree and stopped.
"Nobody's perfect," I said.
"My attitude precisely. Back up and try again."
I reached Magnolia and went around the block. The Wallises owned
all the property in between, including several newer garden apartment buddings.
We turned into a driveway beside a house quite old by Southern California standards. In the overgrown back yard was a mound of the standard effluvia of a wealthy society: a mattress and bed springs, boxes of trash and a refrigerator with the door torn off, boxes of discarded clothes and scraps of lumber.
Mrs Wallis told me where to dump what I loaded. "I'll walk hack," she said, cutting straight across her property instead of going out to the street and walking around the block.
I began throwing things on the truck. It was late morning and the marine layer of clouds common to Southern California was rapidly burning away under the bright sun. The hard labor common to reform school and the county farm had instilled resentment in me. It was hot, dirty work. Sweat was running into my eyes. Then I got a sliver of wood under a fingernail. By the time I'd finished with filling the truck the first time, I was telling myself that I wasn't coming back tomorrow. Many men take pride in hard labor, swinging a pick or wrestling a jackhammer. That attitude is planted in adolescence by family and culture and has myriad names: Protestant work ethic, the macho manhood of Hispanic societies, the competition of Japanese bushido transformed to the mercantile world. I still recalled Whittier when I had to do hard labor and I hated it. I was not alone in that view. It was a group attitude, perhaps akin to what slaves feel. Repartee expressed the subcultural view: "Manual labor sounds like some kind of Mexican to me." "Work is for fools and mules, and you don't see long ears on me."
I drove the truck to the dump and pushed the trash off in a cloud of dust. On the way back for another load, I found Minnie waiting on the road. "Mrs Wallis says to come in to lunch. Take the truck back to the garage."
In the kitchen, a place mat, silverware and a napkin in a ring awaited me. Minnie had corn chowder and a ham and cheese sandwich with lots of mayonnaise waiting for me. It's strange how clearly I remember such details after so many decades.
As I finished, Mrs Wallis entered. By now the San Fernando Valley, which would have been a desert if not for the Northern California water (what a wonderful story of chicanery that is) was a full midday blast furnace. "It's too hot to work," she said. "Why don't you take a swim? There's lots of bathing trunks in the pool house."
"That's a great idea," I said.
"I thought you'd agree. One thing, though. If some men in collars show up, don't pay any attention to them. I let the brothers from Notre Dame High School swim in our pool. They almost never come until late afternoon, but . . . just don't be surprised."
"Okay."
I went out the kitchen door and around the back of the house, en route passing a large rose garden in full spring bloom. Mrs Wallis would tell me later that Hal had a special affection for roses.
As I crossed the vast lawn dotted with shady maples and an occasional tall pine, birds sang. No wonder the Catholic brothers came here. It was as bucolic and peaceful as a seminary garden. Off to the side a whirling sprinkler cast sparkling drops through the sunlight. I went around the swimming pool to the bathhouse and found some swimming trunks that fit.
I walked out and dove into the pool. It was the first rime I'd been in a private swimming pool, or in any pool by myself and it was great. I dove and swam until I was tired, and then lay on the hot cement and let the sun dry me. Lying on the warm cement beside a swimming pool is one of the most pleasurable sensations I've ever experienced.
Soon I saw Mrs Wallis coming across the lawn. She'd changed clothes, but it was still all white. She always wore white; I never discovered why. She strutted in a parody of a zoot suiter, leaning backward, exaggerating her arm swing, a haughty expression on her face. She carried a tray with two ice-filled glasses and a pitcher. "Lemonade?" she asked.
"Sounds good."
She put the glasses on a wrought-iron table and poured the lemonade. As she handed me one, she said: "You've got a pretty good tan ... at least from the waist up. I thought everybody in jail was pale . . . unless they're colored or Chicano."
"They let us take off our shirts to work out at Wayside."
"I used to be on the county parole board."
"I didn't even know the county had a parole board."
"They do ... or at least they did .. . once upon a time."
She was a most likeable woman, radiating a good-natured garrulousness. She was also curious about me and asked me a lot of questions. My replies were more wary than candid. Why should she be concerned about me? It was obvious that she had wealth surpassing the dreams of the average person. What did she want from me? She could sure do better than me for a gigolo. Nonetheless, I found myself grinning and laughing. She was warm and funny.
A young woman in shorts and an immense straw hat, with two children ambling around her, appeared coming across the lawn. While they were still some distance away, Mrs Wallis said that she was a neighbor, "who used to be my son's girlfriend even though she's four years older .... Is that strange?" Over time I would learn that she often asked questions like that, in a deliberately conspiratorial manner of speech. It was not malicious. It was her way to draw you closer to her. "Her husband's directing a movie at Warner Brothers. If they knew she was coming here . . . oi vay they'd be displeased."
They! What they was she talking about?
The children blew by and hit the water like two small bombs, and the young woman extended her hand as Mrs Wallis made the introductions. I can't even remember her name, or who she was, except that she was about twenty-five and quite pretty, with a full mouth of teeth showing as she smiled during the introduction. The best part was that it saved me from the velvet interrogation. When she was seated and they started to talk, I went into the water to play with the children, a boy and a girl — older than six, younger than ten. I was (and continue to be) poor at determining the ages of children, except for my own child, who hasn't gotten that far yet. We threw a big, light rubber ball around the water. They swam like seals. Why not? They were Southern California children of the upper middle class. Swimming was in their genes.
Minnie came out to tell Mrs Wallis that "Miss Wallis" was on the phone. "Miss" Wallis was Hal's sister, Minna Wallis of Famous Artists and agent to Clark Gable and others. Over time I would learn that she was a sucker for poker and a merciless bitch at negotiation.
After Louise Wallis was gone for some minutes, I decided it was time to leave. The white sun of midday was tinged with orange as it shone at a lower angle through the many trees, which were starting to move to the music of the rising evening breeze. The young woman called her children. "It's getting chilly," she said. I gave her a wave as I climbed from the pool at the far edge. It was closest to the bathhouse.
When I finished toweling myself and getting dressed, the young woman was gone. To reach the house I would have to go around the swimming pool. As I walked along the short side of its rectangular shape, I failed to see the step from the deck down into the water. I took a step and my foot came down first on air and then in a foot of water, pitching me sideways into the swimming pool. Chaplin could not have taken a better pratfall.
I arrived at the back door dripping water and thoroughly mortified. Minnie called Mrs Wallis, who thought it was hilarious.
Wearing one of Hal's monogrammed terrycloth robes, my clothes a soaked pile on the rear stoop, I followed Mrs Wallis upstairs to her son's bedroom. He was attending one of the Claremont colleges and came home on the weekend. The room had a wall of books and the various photographs, pennants and athletic equipment one would associate with a youth in America at the time. The acoustic guitar there was a little ahead of its time. The rage of the age was the saxophone. Mrs Wallis went through drawers and closet, plucking out Levi's (what we call 501 was all they made in 1950), a knit polo shirt and a short windbreaker of pig suede. While she was at it, she said he had more than he needed and made me a "care package." She found a bag in which to carry them.
"Now we have to get your money," she said, leading me to her bedroo
m, which was actually a suite, with separate dressing room and bathroom. The room was at the corner of the house, with windows on two sides, facing north and west, the slanting sun softened by the trees along the outside. Shadows danced in the breeze and sunlight. The room was large. Half was the actual bedroom; a sofa and a screen created another space, with a fancy antique desk and file cabinets. One wall was a huge bookcase. 1 glanced at some titles. Many were psychology, a couple were religion. It was the first time I saw the name Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It was so mellifluous that I remembered this moment the next time I saw it. One title I noticed was The Neurotic Personality in Our Time, by Karen Horney.
Mrs Wallis's checkbook was huge, six perforated checks to each page. She wrote a check for $23. Twenty was for the work, the three for transportation. "You can walk a block north. The red car stops at Chandler and Woodman. It'll take you all the way to the subway terminal."
"That's where I want to go."
"Can you drive a car better than a truck?" She was laughing.
I was blushing. "Oh yeah. I mean . . . that was just ..."
"It was my fault. I told you to turn. Tomorrow I want you to drive me on my errands. I've got arthritis in my hands." She held them up. Her joints had the telltale swelling. "Can you be here by ten?"
"I'll be here." Driving a rich woman around town was a different matter than laboring in the sun, and $20 was twice what a worker got on the line at General Motors.
I walked out to the gate where a button on the inside let me open it for myself. Trudging along Woodman the long two blocks to the Pacific Electric tracks on Chandler Boulevard, I saw a tract of California ranch-styles being erected. Some were still skeletons of wood frame, others were covered with plaster skin, and from somewhere came the rhythmic banging of a hammer, the sound carrying in the afternoon breeze.
Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade Page 11
