Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade

by Edward Bunker

  When we came around the corner, we saw the Olympic-sized swimming pool and a swimming meet was in progress. A white- haired man of sixty separated himself from a group of adults near the pool and came to greet us. He was Mr Swartzcoff the superintendent. It was he who had offered me a job to satisfy the requirements of release on parole. Although it was much easier for an ex-con back then, jobs in general being more plentiful, there was still a stigma, so I was trying to read Mr S., as he was called by the boys and the staff alike, for I wanted to know if the offer had been made willingly or because Mrs Hal Wallis was the McKinley Home's foremost benefactor. Actually hiring me cost them nothing. Mrs Wallis wrote them a check for the amount of my salary, and immediately deducted it from her taxes as a charitable contribution. Had she paid it after taxes it would have cost her several times the amount.

  Mr S. was affable enough, but it was the effusive Mrs S., his wife, who made me feel comfortable and she showed me around the home. I wasn't starting work until the next Monday. My room above the kitchen was quite large and had a balcony overlooking the driveway and the walkway to the mess hall. I could stay here during the week and at my apartment on the weekend. We unloaded the many packages and shopping bags marked Desmond's, Bullock's, Silverwood's, and piled them on the floor next to the bed. I was given the key and I laughed as I inserted it and turned. It was the first door I could remember locking. It seemed funny — but many things that have seemed funny to me seem un-funny to most others.

  It was time for a late lunch and the gate to Wallis Farms was around the comer and down Woodman about half a mile. I asked her why it was called a "farm," and she told me it was so they could pay the cook, maid, chauffeur and gardener as farm employees, not servants.

  We turned off Woodman and curtsied for the solid green gate that was already swinging open. It was familiar, yet entirely new. It was certainly more vivid after five years of San Quentin had polished my lenses of perception. The roses were a riot of color and a wisp of breeze blew the sweet scent to me. God, it was good to be free.

  During lunch, Louise told me about Mr and Mrs S., how fond she was of them and what good work they did at McKinley.

  After lunch, Bertha departed. Louise snapped her fingers in sudden recall. "You need a couple other things. Come on."

  She led me upstairs to Hal's suite, where she purloined gold and sapphire cufflinks from a posh yacht club in the Bahamas and a tie tack with a half-carat diamond. She started to take' one of the three watches, but put it back. "No, I'm going to buy you one," she said. I took the gifts, but I had vague misgiving?. I didn't expect material things. She'd always indicated that she wanted to help me help myself, and that was what I expected and wanted. The clothes and the apartment, they were generous and I appreciated them - but what I hoped for was that she would make introductions and open doors.

  On the way out she stopped at his closet, which was twenty feet long behind sliding mirror panels. The shelf above the hangar was stacked with sweaters in plastic bags. She pulled down several. "You like cashmere? Here."

  It was a simple V-neck in navy, but the label said Bergdorf- Goodman, and the feel was the incomparable softness of cashmere.

  She was singing as we went back downstairs. In the blue room she took a cigarette from a box and a wooden kitchen match from another. Instead of using the striker, she pulled the match along the wall. It ignited, but left a long streak on the wall. "What the hell, it belongs to the Board of Education," she said.

  It took a few seconds for me to get the joke and laugh, although her humor and my laugh were tinged with sadness, for this Monterey Colonial with its shaded grounds and lush lawns had the serene beauty of a cloister. Because she had always been a clown and comic, it would take repeated bizarre incidents over several months before I realized that something was wrong.

  Standard procedure for the parolee is to visit the parole officer - now known as the parole agent — the day after release, where he is given the rest of his "gate money." I was shopping with Louise the day after release; then came the weekend, so it wasn't until Monday that I met my parole officer, a small man with a "flat top" haircut and a petite mustache. Even then it was not at the parole office. It was at Wallis Farms, in the blue room, where I was seated next to Louise Fazenda Wallis, on the wide armrest of her overstuffed chair, with my arm extended along the top of the chair back. She played gracious lady as well as Katharine Cornell. Would he and his wife like to see the studio? "Not on one of those tours. I'll take you behind the scenes. You have a wife and children?"

  Ah yes, she played him beautifully. It wasn't manipulation with ulterior motive. It was to make him forget about me. He had more than a hundred parolees under his supervision and could keep track of very few. I wanted to be ignored, and that seemed to be the message he was giving me when I walked him out to his car. He stopped and looked back and up at the house and around at the property. "Well," he said laconically, "I'm pretty sure I won't pick up the paper and read about you in a shootout with the LAPD."

  "What about a car? Can I drive?"

  "If you have a license."

  We shook hands and as he drove around the circle and down the road toward the front gate I felt great. A car. I was going to have a car — as soon as I had a driver's license. I was bobbing and weaving and shadow boxing as I went back inside the house. Louise saw me and laughed. "Feel good, huh?"

  "Couldn't feel better. He said I could drive ... if I had a license."

  "I've been thinking about that. Can you pass a driver's license exam?"

  I was dubious and it showed. I'd gone on joy rides in stolen cars and on a couple of high speed chases that ended in wrecks, but beyond knowing what red and green meant on a traffic light, I was totally ignorant of the traffic laws.

  "No matter," she said. "I thought about it. We'll get you some lessons. When you get a license you'll need a car. Nothing new or fancy, but I put some money aside from the house. I had to re-invest nearly all of it or give it to the government. Taxes, you know. We can get richer and richer — in fact we have to get richer and richer or the government will take it."

  "It looks to me like you're doing okay."

  She laughed in a way that felt like an affectionate hug.

  The following week I started work at the McKinley Home for Boys. Although there was no real slot for me to fill, with 120 boys there was plenty to do. My duties sort of evolved. At first I filled in at different places. At the swimming pool my job was closer to scarecrow than lifeguard. Every boy could swim, and everyone ten or older could swim better than me. I was charged with maintaining order, keeping horseplay to a minimum and stopping the running around the pool side. When a busload of boys went somewhere, say the Times charity game between the LA Rams and the Washington Redskins, I was the second man, the one who kept them from yelling out the windows and made sure nobody was separated from the group. When the fall school semester started, I tutored in study hall three evenings a week. After I got a driver's license and a four-year-old Ford convertible, my main job was taking boys to appointments with doctors, dentists and psychologists. Within a month I would have won a popularity contest as the staff member best liked by the boys. That was partly because my position didn't require me to enforce much authority, but the primary reason was because I had been raised in places like McKinley, although none so good. I knew what it was to be a chdd raised by strangers, to be without a family to turn to. I could not fill that emptiness, but I was friend and advisor and I never judged. I wanted to help them find their footing in life. Some were hard to like, the whiners and crybabies, and I was ashamed for not liking them, for they had the greatest need for attention and understanding. Among the 120 was a handful who were beyond help: the warp was already too great. A pair of these broke into a hi-fi store in Van Nuys and stashed the loot in my car. I yelled "Oh God! Oh shit!" when they told me. It could be a trip back to San Quentin as a parole violator. The Adult Authority would treat me like a twentieth-century Fagin. Yet I could n
ot countenance turning them in. Although I had no intention of ever committing another crime, I still had an unquestioning acceptance of the criminal's number one rule: thou shall not snitch, not even on a snitch. "Get that shit outta there," I told them. "Right now."

  Naturally they were caught the moment they went to school and started flashing their booty. I held my breath, but my name was never mentioned. They'd been in trouble before, and this time Mr S. sent them to juvenile hall and the juvenile justice system. It saddened me because it was so much like my own childhood, one thing leading to another and eventually to prison. A decade later I ran into one of them in the penitentiary.

  Nobody at McKinley except Mr and Mrs S. knew I was an ex-convict, nor did they know of my special relationship with Mrs Wallis. She lived so close that it was easy for me to visit. When she wanted me to meet someone, she sent for me.

  Hal was gone, and somehow I got the impression that he was on location with Gunfight at the OK Corral. Their son, Brent, was a lieutenant in the Army or Air Force, stationed in Northern California. He came home on the weekends, and that's where I finally met him on a blistering San Fernando Valley afternoon. He had a moderately powerful physique. He had worked out with weights since his early teens. From the books lining the walls of his room he was obviously well educated, well read and interested in ideas. Many of his books were in Spanish. Louise said she had lost him when he was about twelve years old. She had taken him with her as she followed Hal to trysts with mistresses that he maintained quite flagrandy. Brent's reaction, according to her, was to dislike his father and turn cold to her. "He's got armor thick as a battleship's," she said to me. He had a Ph.D. in psychology, and she thought his choice of professions was because of his childhood. He intensely disliked the movie industry, she said.

  When I met him, I wondered what she'd told him about me. Of course he knew I had been in prison while he had been at one of the prestigious Claremont colleges. I had no idea which one. Did he see me as an interloper?

  I found him as inscrutable as the proverbial Asian. He was so well mannered that I was unable to read him. His courtliness I would have expected from the English aristocracy rather than from the scion of Hollywood nottveau riches. Louise thought it was because he was raised by European governesses. He had the best manners of any man I'd met so far. He introduced me to the first imported beer I'd ever seen, Heineken. It was markedly better than Lucky Lager or Brew 102, which teenagers in the poorer sections of LA drank to get drunk. What other reason was there to drink beer?

  When he drove me back to McKinley in a Mercedes 190SL roadster, it was the first time I'd ridden in a sports car. The feel on curves and corners was almost erotic, a sensation totally different than I felt in other cars. It was fun. I wanted one. I wanted a lot of things.

  Although he had been gracious and friendly, I had no idea what he thought or how he really felt. I didn't want him thinking that I was exploiting his mother. I would never take advantage of her, although there would come a time when I wished I had done so. I wanted her to do what she had said from the beginning: help me to help myself. That began to change. She began to give me money far beyond what I expected or wanted, and when I tried to tell her, she waved me away. "Never mind. We've got more than we ever dreamed of having. I just made two million." Indeed, they had purchased the estate of a millionaire in Chatsworth. It had a sprawling house, a bunk house, stables and a timing track for the racehorses he bred, and was zoned for agriculture. Louise planned to raise alfalfa and write off the losses against other income. Two months after they completed escrow on the property, the zoning was changed so it could be subdivided into tract homes. Its value doubled from two million to four million. When you're rich, she said, you keep getting richer with very littleeffort, as long as you don't intentionally throw your money away. How could I protest when she gave me a few hundred dollars? Once I gave her back $1,000; the next day it arrived at McKinley in the US Mad. Not knowing what else to do, for certainly I wasn't going to hurl it into the street, I deposited it in my checking account. I could use it; there was no doubt of that.

  Near the end of summer I met Hal Wallis for the first time. I'd gotten a flat tire about a quarter-mile from the gate to Wallis Farms. I called Louise and she told me to come over and call the Auto Club on her membership card. That way I wouldn't have to pay for towing. I'd made the call, she had given me her card, and I was getting ready to walk back to the car to meet the tow truck when we heard the front door open, and the sound of male voices.

  Hal came in, followed by Brent and another youth who, I believe, managed the agriculture of Wallis Farms, which actually grew something somewhere. They'd been at a preview screening of Gunfight at the OK Corral and carried stacks of audience reaction cards.

  "How are they?" Louise asked.

  "I think the best I've ever seen," Hal said. "And I've seen plenty over the years."

  Gunfight starred Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, both of whom Hal had discovered. Louise once told me that he was poorly educated and poorly mannered when she first met him. He was working in the publicity department of National Studios, which became Warner Brothers. One day on a set she saw him from the rear, thought he was someone else and grabbed him from behind. They got married and three years later he was Executive Producer in Charge of Production at Warner Brothers, the same job Irving Thalberg had at MGM. His training - typing and shorthand at a Chicago business school. He had two natural talents. He saved many thousands of dollars by an unerring sense of what should be cut from a script instead of having to wait until it was on film. He also had a perfect feel for who the public would love. His mediocre autobiography, Starmaker, which he would write twenty-five years later, scarcely did more than list his films. He was certainly a mogul from Hollywood's Golden Age who deserves a good biography, as does Louise Fazenda Wallis.

  That night Mr Wallis didn't notice me. I studied him, though. When young he was handsome, Louise had said, but now his hair was thinning and he combed it straight back, which gave his face a sharpness. He was average looking, at best, although his clothes glowed with the expensive good taste of an Esquire spread. He was cordial, but for a moment I saw his eyes unveiled. He saw life in terms of manipulation and combat, so how else would a twenty-two-year-old ex-convict appear to him? I could understand his attitude. Ah well, but it would have been great to have his favor. He could open doors in this the capital of nepotism, oligarchy and connections. Being a success in Hollywood took skills, but even more than skills, except in the technical end, it took connections. The easiest way to be a movie star is to have parents who are stars, or directors or producers. As the son or daughter grows up, they see up close how the game is played, and they know the players — the fathers of their own friends. There is just enough new blood to keep it percolating.

  "You'd better go," Louise said. "Or you'll miss the Auto Club truck."

  I walked down the driveway to the electric gate, and then along the side of Woodman toward Chandler Boulevard, named, I assumed, for the founding family of the Los Angeles Times. Once upon a time they'd had estates with orange groves, and children rode their horses along the roadside, which had neither curbs nor sidewalks. Now the orange groves were few, although I could smell their blossoms and jasmine in the night. Everything was the American Dream of the moment: three bedrooms, two baths in a ranch-style tract home. A popular song proclaimed the joy of making the San Fernando Valley one's home. As I walked along the roadside, footsteps crunching, occasional headlights flashing over me, crickets sounding in the night, I knew that Hal Wallis was nothing like his wife. She'd told me that he was a cold and ruthless man (married to Hollywood's angel), and anyone cold and ruthless had to be very suspicious. They went together like mustard on a hot dog. While I wanted to be a writer, and proclaimed it loudly, back then I specifically wanted to write screenplays, which I kept quiet about. If I had Hal Wallis as an ally ... I had tried to pull him, but there was the obstacle of hostile suspicion.

 
As I neared the car, the Auto Club tow truck pulled up. Its driver could hardly believe that I was unable to change a flat tire. It wasn't part of reform school curriculum, and I'd had no chance to change a tire in San Quentin, so where could I learn? It was an explanation I kept to myself.

  Hal departed California and Brent went back to the base. Hal's sister, Minna Wallis, was in town, but she saw little of Louise. Minna had never married and some in Hollywood, according to Louise, spoke of her possessive incestuous feelings toward her brother. She had gotten her brother his first job at the studio. "She was even jealous of me back then," Louise said. It was also said that she'd forced an English actor, a poor man's facsimile of Ronald Colman, into being her lover in return for Hal renewing his contract. Because she saw Louise infrequently, I was the one who saw Louise deteriorate, but not having been around her very much until now, and because she was, after all, a professional clown, I attributed much of her bizarre behavior to her nature.

  One afternoon I went to visit and found her whacking a house wall with a sledgehammer. All I could do was grin and shake my head. On another occasion, we spent a futile two hours telephoning around the world in search of a priest to whom she wished to speak. It was 3.30 a.m. in Austria where his Order had their headquarters. He was somewhere in the Holy Land, but they had no way to contact him. The mina birds were flying around her room, and there were littlespots where bird shit couldn't be totally washed away. "I just wish the sons of bitches would say something," Louise said.

  One afternoon, I got a message at McKinley to call Mrs Wallis. She was excited; she wanted me to come to dinner. Tennessee Williams would be there. Hal was negotiating for film rights to Orpheus Descending, a play that Tennessee Williams had written specifically for Anna Magnani (sic). Hal Wallis had a several-picture deal with her.