One of Pacific Electric's big red streetcars, actually two of them attached to each other, soon appeared and came to a stop. It ran along a wide right of way in the middle of the divided road. It took me through North Hollywood and the edge of Glendale, past the temple built by Aimee Semple McPherson, and Echo Park with its electric boats, into a mile-long tunnel at the end of Glendale Boulevard. The tracks ended far beneath the subway terminal building half a block north of 5th Street on Hill.
I rented a furnished room near MacArthur Park. It was $7 for the week. The bathroom was down the hall, but it did have a sink. I felt good about it. There was a carpet on the floor and it was comfortable. It was mine. I locked the door and took a nap. When I came awake it was time to go out into the Los Angeles night. The world knows that Southern California is warm in winter. It is less well known that night in the City of Angels is its best time. If the day was scorching, the moment the sun descends the world cools to the perfect comfort zone. I walked downtown, about two miles from the room, and went to see Yellow Sky, still an excellent, character-driven western, with Gregory Peck and Anne Baxter.
In the morning we began the routine that would continue several days a week for the next few months. I would arrive after nine. Sometimes Mrs Wallis was ready at 9.30, sometimes not until eleven. While I waited, Minnie cooked me a great breakfast.
Sooner or later we left on her "errands." We went in on Riverside if we were going to Paramount in Hollywood. She always got first-class treatment, for if her star days were long gone, "I'm still Lady Wallis," she would say, and wink like a conspirator. No doubt Hal Wallis was a movie mogul by anyone's criteria. I thought it strange that he was never at the studio when we visited. Was it something ulterior? Did she want me to kill him? Maybe that was why she seemed too interested in finding out about me and what I thought.
She loved to talk — and I have always been a listener. In bits and pieces I began to learn her story. She had been born poor, not impoverished, but working-class poor. She had lived at 6th and Kohler in the first decade after the turn of the century. She had worked at the Bishop Candy Co., at 7th and Central. She got fired because she was too sick to work (years later she confided that it was because she'd had an abortion). So she was looking for another job. A woman named Bertha Griffith, I believe that was her name, gave her a ride, found that she needed a job and took her out to where Mack Sennett was making Keystone comedies. She got a job as an actress in Sennett's company because she could drive an automobile, a skill rare among women in the first decade of the century. Wearing trademark pigtails, she became a star of silent movies: ". . . not real big," she said, "but I had a long run." Indeed, she still worked occasionally after the arrival of sound, although by then she was the wife of Hal B. Wallis and had no financial need to act in a movie. When I once spotted an Oscar for Best Picture for Casablanca, Louise told me the tale. At one time Hal had run the Warner Brothers studio and the Brothers Warner "loved him like a son," so Mrs Wallis said. A decade and some thereafter, the Brothers Warner and Hal Wallis divorced with bile and acrimony. At the Academy Awards of 1942 or '43, when "Best Picture" was announced, minions of Harry Warner blocked Hal from getting out of his seat to come on stage. They ran up and collected the Oscar. "They claimed it was the studio's ... or something like that."
"So what happened?" I asked.
"Oh, you see where it is, don't you?"
"I don't even know why I asked."
"They hate him. Don't mention Hal Wallis at Warners'. The last few years there, he'd been signing the talent to personal rather than studio contracts — actors, cinematographers, directors, several big ones. When he left and set up an independent production company at Paramount, Harry Warner nearly had a seizure". Cross my heart it's true." It was very entertaining to hear the inside Hollywood gossip. It made me feel like an insider, too.
Often our route from her house was over the hills into Beverly Hills. She knew many famous people. Jack Dempsey was a friend from her heyday in the Roaring '20s when, she said, "I tried everything there is, and what I liked I did twice." Having heard that I had the idea of being a prizefighter, she took me to Dempsey's real estate office, I think it was on Santa Monica Boulevard. He had me throw a jab and held up a huge hand. The jab felt awfully weak, and I felt slightly embarrassed. He was at least sixty and looked as if he could knock a mule down. Another time she took me to visit Ayn Rand, whom she knew because Hal had produced the movie of her book, The Fountainhead, which I had not then read. Ditto for Aldous Huxley, a tall, gaunt man. All I remember was that the house smelt of bread freshly baked by his wife.
The most memorable visit was on a trip over Benedict Canyon. It descended into Beverly Hills via many tight curves and switchbacks. Houses were few, and they were all flashes of red tiled roofs behind walls draped in bougainvillea.
"Do you know who William Randolph Hearst is?" she asked.
I'd heard my father curse the Hearst newspapers as "goddamned Fascist propaganda." And somewhere I'd heard that the movie, Citizen Kane, was based on Hearst.
"Is he still alive?"
"Oh yes . . . barely."
"The movie said he was dead."
"Oh no, W.R.'s still alive. He might be better off if he wasn't. He's had a couple of strokes. He hasn't been out of Marion's house for three years. That's where we're going." A little while later, she added, almost to herself, "God, how Marion hated that movie. Him, too, but she . . . she would have killed him . . . and Marion is really kind and gentle . . . and funny. Everyone thinks it was just W.R.'s money that made her a star, but she was a good light comedian." Mrs Wallis paused in reflection. "We had fun," she said. "It was almost shameful in the Depression. W.R. would run a small private train from Glendale to San Luis Obispo, the Hollywood Train they called it. Then everyone would pile into a string of limousines to "the Ranch." That's what W.R. called it. Imagine calling San Simeon "the Ranch?" Everybody wanted an invitation. Chaplin went all the time. He was a good tennis player. Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, I can see them all now, swimming in the outdoor pool in the moonlight." She named other names that must have blazed across the firmament of fame once upon a time, but failed to resonate in my memory. I did recognize Ken Murray, for my father had worked backstage at Ken Murray's Blackouts, a review that ran in Hollywood for years. Someday she'd show me San Simeon, she said.
As I recall, the Davies house was up Beverly Drive, north of Sunset Boulevard, where Beverly turns into Franklin Canyon, although someone told me that the house where they lived was in Whitley Heights above the older part of downtown Hollywood. I am writing from memory, not research, and where I'm wrong my memory is flawed. I never expected to write of it, not when it happened.
Marion Davies opened the door. She was in her fifties, although in the shadowed light of the entryway she looked younger. It was still easy to see why Hearst, in his fifties, had been attracted to the twenty-two-year-old chorus girl. She embraced Louise and then turned to me. "Is this Brent? I haven't seen him since—" She extended her hand out about the height of her waist to indicate The size of a little boy.
"No, no, this is Eddie. He's my weekday son. Brent comes home on weekends."
Marion smiled warmly and extended a hand. "You've got a great weekday mother. She's been my buddy for a long, long time."
Marion Davies led us into a sitting room where they talked about ZaZu Pitts, a mutual friend who had just undergone cancer surgery. Marion said that ZaZu was okay. All her cancer had been removed.
While they were talking, I excused myself to use the bathroom. Marion led me to the hall and gave me further instructions. When I came out, they were gone. A French door was open and I saw a flash of white, and went that way onto the terrace. Its bricks were mottled with sunlight coming through a giant elm, and stained with crushed red berries from a bush that had overgrown a masonry railing. A pair of squirrels were wild and noisy in a tree. There was lots of wild greenery on the slope beyond the wide terrace.
The flash of wh
ite had been the uniform of a nurse. She was carrying a tray through another door into the house. Behind her, sitting in the single square of warming sunlight, was a man in a wheelchair. I moved closer, meaning to ask if he'd seen Marion and Louise Wallis, but when I got closer, I decided against it. The face had familiarity. I must have seen it in newsreels or a Life magazine, or somewhere — or maybe I imagined recognition. My knowledge was straight out of Orson Welles and my father's attitude, but for some reason I felt this man represented wealth and power beyond my conception of such things. What I saw was a big jaw, a huge round skull with a few wisps of gray hair. He turned his torso to look at me with rheumy eyes. I'd felt awe because this was a man who had spoken to all of America whenever he desired. Presidents consulted him, Churchill visited him at Marion's beach house in Santa Monica, according to Louise Fazenda Wallis. But as he turned and screwed his mouth to speak, I saw the frailty of decrepit old age and disease. I think that viscerally I understood for the first time that all men are mortal. He said something that sounded like "mom," with spittle on the corner of his mouth. "What?" I asked, leaning forward.
"Marion," he said, or so it seemed.
"I'll find her," I said, turning at once. The nurse was coming toward me. "Do you know where Miss Davies and Mrs Wallis are?"
"They were going into the kitchen."
I found them coming out of the kitchen. When I told Marion Davies, her face got red, but she made no comment. We were in die entryway. Mrs Wallis said we had to go, and told Marion she would keep in touch. It was very friendly, but Miss Davies was manifestly distracted as she showed us out.
Driving back to the valley through the part of the Hollywood Hills called Beverly Hills Post Office, it was hard to keep the image of William Randolph Hearst out of my mind, and to think of Citizen Kane. I cannot separate what I knew then from what I've learned since, but I'd assumed without reflection that giants never got old and helpless. It was truly my introduction to the ultimate equality of human frailty and mortality. I never wanted to get so old that I was that helpless. But, God, what a life he had lived until then.
Sometimes Mrs Wallis's errands were really just that, trips to the market or flower nursery, or to friends without particular wealth. Some she'd known since her movie days, like the woman who did her hair and dyed it not quite platinum — and never got it exactly the same twice in a row. She was fun to be with. Once I accidentally ran a stop light on Riverside Drive. She said, "Trucha . . la jura!" It was pure barrio slang for "Cool it, the heat," and seemed very funny to me considering who she was. Another time she forgot the key that turned under the speaker phone and opened the gate. It was about 11 p.m. Instead of waking the servants, she took off her shoes, threw them over, had me web my fingers together and boost her until she could stand on my shoulders and climb over the gate. It seemed so unaffected and unpretentious that it sent a wave of affection through me. By then I doubted that she wanted either a gigolo or a hit man; all she seemed to want was to help me, but I couldn't imagine why. Nor could Al and Emily Matthews when I asked them. "She just helps people," they said. "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth."
It was several years later that she told me the story of her philanthropy, which was always personal and individual rather than as part of an organization. She never appeared in the photos of the women's committee of this or that charity. She did her good works alone and quietly, although her obituary was headed: "Angel of Hollywood."
Through the "Roaring '20s" she did the Charleston and the Black Bottom and knew Al Capone and the "boys in Chicago . . ." She once had a prizefighter boyfriend who left a suitcase with her. Soon thereafter the drug agents came for the suitcase full of morphine. She told the ribald tales with gusto, although she also became serious, and it was the serious demeanor she showed when she told me why she devoted herself to helping people.
"I wanted a baby and I couldn't get pregnant. The doctors speculated that the abortion had done something to me. Anyway, I went on a trip to France on the Normandie. I met some Hollywood people and one day we went to Lourdes. You know about Lourdes?"
"I saw the movie with Jennifer Jones."
"Right. Naturally we'd been drinking since lunch and it was dark when we actually went to see. It was really moving, hundreds of people with candles in a line that snaked back and forth up the hillside to the grotto where she saw the Virgin. On impulse I got in line and when I got to the grotto, I promised that if I could have a baby I would spend the rest of my life helping people.
"Three months later I was pregnant."
In the eighteen years since then, she fulfilled her vow. During World War II she brought two children from the London Blitz to live in her home. She had helped several girls who had gotten pregnant. It was still a major stigma then to have a baby out of marriage, and abortions were illegal. After she took in one young girl, provided for her, paid for the delivery and arranged for the baby to be adopted by a film director (she said "well known" without giving a name), word got around the movie business and other girls were referred to her. Once she had arranged for a Tijuana abortion, "but I won't do that again," she said. One of her special works was the McKinley Home for Boys. It had occupied forty acres at Riverside Drive and Woodman since the time of William McKinley and took in about a hundred boys from five to seventeen, mostly from broken homes, many with parental alcoholism. Some came from the Juvenile Court. She was McKinley's foremost benefactor. She paid to send one youth who had grown up there to the University of Chicago. He was destined to become the Superintendent of McKinley.
She also helped Notre Dame High School. Over the years she tried to help Edward G. Robinson Jr., a handsome but tormented youth with an affinity for trouble, who would die too young from too much wealth and insufficient responsibility. She told me, too, that thinking about someone else's troubles was a balm to her own. At the time I wondered what troubles she could possibly have. A week or so later, I read a newspaper feature story about "starmaker" Hal Wallis and his latest protegee, the husky-voiced Lizabeth Scott and recalled some hints and innuendoes. Later on, I told Louise Wallis that I'd heard Lizabeth Scott was a lesbian. "I heard that too," she said. "I don't know what that makes Hal."
As with virtually all reform school graduates, I had some haphazard India ink tattoos. I had a diamond in the loose strip of flesh between thumb and forefinger where most others wore a Pachuco cross. It indicated my loyalty to "La Diamond," the only inter-racial street gang of the era. I had WSS and PSI on my upper arm, the middle "S" serving for both - read one across and one up and down. Whittier State School, Preston School of Industry.
In my night world, after I left Mrs Wallis for the mean streets, having been in reform school was no stigma. Indeed, it had a certain cachet. On one visit to Al Matthews's office, Emily called me aside and said that Mrs Wallis wanted to pay to have my tattoos removed. That was fine with me - and thank God my defacement was so minor. Many of my comrades were highly illustrated men.
A week later, a Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon removed the tattoos on my body. What was tattooed into my brain was a different matter.
My nights and weekends were spent in the underworld. I now had a furnished room in a residential hotel near MacArthur Park, half a mile west of downtown Los Angeles. Although just sixteen and not looking older than my years, I hung out in Robin's Club, on 8th Street. It was literally a den of thieves, mostly artists of the "short con"; the match, the strap and laying the note (a form of short change) were standard games. The days of "long con" were over. In a short con, one simply takes what the sucker has on him. Long con is what the name implies, and a good example of a "long con" is the fake bookie parlor in The Sting. There were also "till tappers" and a few burglars. These were thieves who looked down on armed robbers and violence.
One night, Sully the bartender at Robin's who was also the patch (he took the payoff and gave it to the bunco squad), told the con men that LA was closed down. Con men couldn't work the sheds, the train and bus depot wh
ere 90 percent of short con games originate. People who are going somewhere usually have a good amount of money on them. When they were on "juice," the bunco squad let them take off anyone who was traveling and wouldn't be around to make noise. Suddenly all the con men were closed down. They couldn't go into the sheds because the bunco squad detectives knew them by sight. Still, they had to make money. Most of them were junkies, the older ones on morphine, the younger on heroin.
Charley Baker and Piz the Whiz, whom I'd met in the county jail, asked me if I knew how to play the match or the strap. Although I'd had them explained to me, and even performed for me, I had never played con, which is quite comparable to an actor memorizing a script and then performing. Indeed, the game is in the spiel, the script. I shook my head.
"Never mind. You don't need to play. All we want you to do is steer." They wanted me to go into the shed, find the suckers, qualify them with a spiel they would teach me (it was easy), and bring them out onto the downtown sidewalks where the con would go down. Usually the steer played the inside, but they would take over, one at a time, when I brought the sucker out. They would cut me in for a third. Was I interested?
I was very interested. I wanted to see these con games because it seemed awfully weak. I wanted to see someone go for it.
Besides, it was a new adventure, and I was always prepared for new adventures.
I looked through the crowd for young men with short haircuts and ill-fitting clothes in the downtown Greyhound bus terminal. Anyone with this description had a high likelihood of being a serviceman on transfer from base to base, which meant he was carrying a few hundred dollars in cash, and a few hundred in 1950 was equal to a few thousand half a century later. "Hi, good buddy, where you stationed?" If the response was cold or hostile, I veered away like a shark looking for easier fish. If they said St Louis or Oklahoma City or wherever, I'd say, "You goin' on that bus?" Whatever bus he said, it was then, "Me, too! That bus don't leave for an hour ..." (Or whatever time the bus schedule said.) Next I'd tell him about some waitresses I met. "They got bodies . . . Mmmm, mmmm, mmm. C'mon, let's go check 'em out. I'll buy you a drink."
Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade Page 12
