Suspects

by David Thomson

sighing against the house, I let my

  unsteady heart beat in its paper

  prison… .

  JAKE GITTES

  Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, 1974,

  directed by Roman Polanski

  In November 1901, at the Tulip Tree, a whorehouse on Stockton Street in San Francisco, where she worked, the nineteen-year-old Opal Chong gave birth to Jacob. She was a Eurasian who named her child after Jacob Schwartz, an agreeable policeman whose patrol included that stretch of Stockton. The infant was allowed to live on the premises, and Opal (a star of the house—she was alluded to occasionally, with awe, in the social column of the San Francisco Chronicle, written by Herbert Kane) was permitted a second room of her own by the proprietress, Adeline “Lady” Ray. The other girls spoiled Jacob whenever they could, but Opal went from carefree to strict. She was not as imaginative a whore after his birth.

  Jacob was acquiring Chinese and pocket money from errands for the house laundry when the Tulip Tree was leveled in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Opal perished in that disaster, but only after she and her son had been trapped seven hours in the debris. Later in life, Jake told the story that his mother protected him from the full weight of a collapsed beam, and instructed him in the pleasuring of a woman before she expired. He never made this story plausible, but listeners took it as a sign of his romantic inclination.

  The boy’s education and welfare were assumed as duties by Mrs. Ray and the policeman Schwartz. They put him in an orphanage in Sacramento and had his name changed to Gittes, apparently after a lawyer who had been disbarred a few years earlier. “Jake” Gittes had few visitors in his years in Sacramento, and he left the orphanage in 1918 with a reputation as a dark schemer, a promising middleweight and the chronic teller of tall stories.

  Moving to Los Angeles, and fighting as “Chink” Gittes, he had a three-year ring career that included a bloody but honorable draw with Harry Greb. He gave up the game when he was obliged to “lose” two fights in a row for gambling coups. It was in one of those thrown contests that he suffered a broken nose, leaving him with a somewhat nasal intonation and recurrent respiratory problems, so that he was sometimes known as “Snort.”

  Jake retired from the ring in 1922 and was then a worker with—soon to be manager of—a swimming-pool construction company that employed mostly Chinese labor. It appears likely that Gittes was personally responsible for some fanciful novelty designs—for instance, the Cobra Pool at Rudolph Valentino’s Falcon Lair home. Apparently thriving, the company was driven into liquidation when one of its pools was shown to have a defective chlorination system, as a result of which a Silverlake child had died of cholera. Jake always believed that the “accident” was linked to his refusal to take out insurance with the local police.

  Thus, in 1925, having learned fatalism, Jake Gittes joined the Los Angeles Police Department. He was promoted and in 1928 he was assigned to Chinatown as a detective. A distinguished career might have been his but for the Iris Ling case. Another Eurasian, and the owner of a small, prestigious brothel, she and Gittes became lovers. But Ling was under pressure from a Tong gang, and Jake rashly promised police protection—it was LAPD practice to stay aloof from native disputes in Chinatown. Iris was found, wandering and incoherent, in the Santa Monica mountains, blinded and abused. No arrests were ever made, and Jake resigned from the force in helpless disgust.

  He next set up the J. J. Gittes Detective Agency, specializing in divorce work. He was experiencing a modest if rather flashy prosperity when, in 1937, he was drawn into the affairs of Evelyn and Hollis Mulwray. This led Jake to investigate the part played by Noah Cross, Evelyn’s father, in the manipulation of water in southern California. In love with Evelyn—by then a widow—Jake was there in Chinatown when police shot and killed her after she had wounded her father in an obscure family altercation. In the investigation, Judge Robert Evans said Jake had acted with “disastrous good intentions … and culpable naiveté, especially when you recall the clever pug he was.”

  For a year he did not leave his Los Feliz apartment—a victim of hepatitis and melancholy. He drifted thereafter, but found work farther north in 1942 at an internment camp for the Japanese. He married Aioshi Ichikawa, an internee, and there were allegations after the war that Jake had run a ring of prostitutes in the camp for munitions workers in the area.

  By then, however, he was in Japan. In 1946, he and Aioshi went to Tokyo, where Jake returned to the swimming-pool trade with a partner, Alex Dawson. A daughter was born in 1949—Iris—and Jake became rich enough to travel in the East. Rumors spread from Macao to Manila that he was an operative of the CIA, and it is known that in 1960 he was in Saigon supervising the installation of an exotic indoor pool for Madame Nhu.

  In 1972, Aioshi (still resident in Tokyo) said she had not seen Jake for four years; she was then in personal charge of the swimming-pool/golf-course design company. Iris, a photographers’ model in Hong Kong, said she had met her father in Saigon in 1971, and reported that he was in poor health, suffering from jaundice, but working for a gaming club known as the Red Sash.

  Dead or alive, present whereabouts unknown. There can be a lurking poetry in reference-book style: official statements with a hint of suspiciousness, as if one were hard of hearing between the lines. I will never let Jake die.

  All those movies, hundreds a year for fifty years, with only seven or so story structures in all of them. I can see through the window the street lamp on the corner saying Bedford Falls is safe and civilized. And there is the light in my window that anyone passing by might call tranquil home life, or anxiety’s tireless friction.

  I write by night.

  NOAH CROSS

  John Huston in Chinatown, 1974,

  directed by Roman Polanski

  What follows can be no more than notes waiting for the publication of Gore Vidal’s biography of Cross, so often announced and postponed, yet still promised as Noah’s Flood: The Wealth of America.

  Noah Cross was born in 1870 in a prodigious rainstorm that prompted his name. He was the son of Julian Cross (1828–99), a leading Virginian and tobacco farmer, and Minna Russell (1851–91), granddaughter of Lord John Russell, British Prime Minister from 1846 to 1852. That couple met in London in the early 1860s (when the lady was only a child) during a secret mission undertaken by Cross on behalf of the Confederacy. Married in 1868, Minna went with her husband to live in Charlottesville. Her life there was made wretched and abbreviated by an asthma played upon by the rich, humid air, by her husband and by the fatal onset of lung cancer, which she ascribed to “living, willy-nilly, in America’s fuming humidor.” Her son was her single consolation, and local lore had it that he would sleep in her bed on thundery nights, up to the age of twelve.

  Noah studied history at the University of Virginia and graduated in 1892. A noted horseman, he entered the cavalry and, as a colonel, he took part in the 1898 skirmishing in Cuba, where he was wounded in the right thigh. In the aftermath of these hostilities, Cross purchased land in Cuba very cheaply—“for what I had in my pocket”—and this became the basis of the Cross Fruit Company.

  With both parents dead, Cross inherited lands in Virginia and Derbyshire, England, as well as the family tobacco interests. Leaving these under wise management, he went west and spent a year riding in the Sierras. In 1901 he built a house for himself near Los Angeles, and in 1902 he married Hester Doheny, the daughter of the oil magnate Edward Doheny. Their daughter, Evelyn, was born in 1905, but Hester died of influenza in 1919. In four generations, no Cross woman lived past forty.

  The first decade of this century was a period of vast business expansion for Cross. By the time of America’s entry into the First World War, The Wall Street Journal estimated, he was growing 8 percent of the cigarettes smoked in the U.S., canning 12 percent of its fruit, and “effectively licensing” the water flushed away by Los Angeles. This last accomplishment was the result of a collaboration between Cross and William Mulholland of the Los Angeles Depart
ment of Water and Power that took possession of water from the Owens River Valley for use by the city. Officially an urban policy, it only proceeded after Cross had purchased key acreages, the value of which kept rising in direct proportion to the population of Los Angeles. This enterprise provoked angry controversy (Upton Sinclair called Cross “The Great Rapist”), but Cross repudiated every charge by quoting Mulholland’s first estimate of the water in the Owens Valley: “There it is—take it.”

  What The Wall Street Journal of 1917 could not know was that Cross was also a silent partner in the Hughes Tool Company. In 1909, he had gone to the aid of Howard Robard Hughes and Walter Sharp when they needed capital. Cross remained a shareholder in that company until it came under the control of Howard Hughes, Jr., a man Cross could not endure and about whom he said, “In the old days a tycoon was a man who, tastefully I daresay, threatened other people. This gray-suit cowboy is perpetually alarmed about his own health. No good will come of it.”

  Also in Los Angeles, it was Noah Cross who had prevailed upon a young “photoplay artist,” Cecil B. De Mille, to make his film The Squaw Man, in the village of Hollywood. Thus Cross deserves much credit for bringing motion pictures to Los Angeles: he had, in 1910, helped arrange the co-opting of Hollywood into the city of Los Angeles in return for its water supply. Cross and De Mille became fast friends, and it was through that contact, in 1921, that Cross joined the board of Paramount. He is alleged to have told its chairman, Adolph Zukor, on that day, “My life—make that,” little guessing that soon after his death the same company would treat parts of his career in Chinatown. It was De Mille, also, who introduced Cross to the actress Norma Desmond—their affair resulted in his setting her up in a mansion on Sunset Boulevard which she retained in the fierce suit that followed his boredom with her. Some felt his admission of it drove her mad. (Actresses sit on a narrow ledge, and they are preserved by our response, our loving them.)

  When Edward Doheny was implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal (1922–24) it was his son-in-law, Noah Cross, who went out of his way to pay off witnesses and journalists. For those services, Cross gained entry into the oil industry, links that would prove instrumental in the eventual sale of Paramount to Gulf & Western, at which point Cross is reputed to have told his colleague Zukor, “What you have never had to find out, my dear Adolph, is that under compelling conditions a board may do anything.”

  It was in 1921 that Cross’s daughter, the sixteen-year-old Evelyn, married Hollis Mulwray, the diligent head of the Department of Water and Power, when she became pregnant with her father’s child. This child was named Katherine. In his nineties, Cross would talk privately about the matter: “Evelyn should not have been so much around that summer,” he said. “My wife had died and … it was a provocation.” By then, however, Cross’s longevity had transcended morality: it is the survivors who present history, and for Noah Cross life was always larger than its crimes.

  The Depression brought scarcely a pause in Cross’s progress. By 1935, he was reckoned to have a personal fortune worth over $500 million. It was in 1937 that his son-in-law, Hollis (salaried at $32,500 a year), began to threaten Cross. As the matter grew uglier and more confused, a private investigator, J. J. Gittes, was involved—both professionally and romantically. Hated by Evelyn, attacked by Hollis and hounded by Gittes, Cross found fresh impetus in his old zest to survive. Evelyn was killed by the police after wounding her father. Katherine went to live with her grandfather. But Katherine Mulwray killed herself when she was eighteen: she was found drowned in the Hollywood Reservoir. Cross had her cremated, without autopsy. He could get things done.

  In his last decades, Cross retreated—to Galway, in Ireland, where he bred, rode and talked to horses; and, until 1959, to Cuba. No waning in his faculties was observed, apart from a little arthritis from his several old wounds. His empire swelled still, always under his scrutiny. He dabbled with a volume of memoirs, Deep Waters Run Still, never finished. We must wait for Mr. Vidal to find confirmation of whether or not he was a patron of, and advisor to, Gregory Arkadin, Eva Perón or Warren Beatty.

  He died, early on the morning of June 18, 1972, in Ireland, of a massive heart attack, while on the phone to Washington, D.C.

  I will never quite escape the sway of Noah Cross or the urge to imitate him. It would amaze anyone who knows me, but I could have been like him, could still put on a Stetson and drawl away. He was as grand and convincing as an actor. But I am real and splintered. I have hundreds—well, seven or so—to please.

  ILSA LUND

  Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, 1942,

  directed by Michael Curtiz

  Although only a hundred miles from Stockholm, Askersund, the country estate where Ilsa Lund was born in 1918, was an idyllic enclave made claustrophobic by the dire feud that prevailed between her parents. The girl could do nothing except hope to outlast its withering effect. We know how valiant her spirit was because, until the moment of her unexpected death, she never backed away from the sincere hope that lives could be improved. But in her last photographs, we see the grave marks of disappointment.

  Her father was a count whose small fortune was wiped out by the Kreuger speculations exposed in 1932. Her mother was a determined feminist at war with her husband and horrified to discover her own pregnancy. The country people had a notion that Ilsa was “simple,” but that was only the servants’ gossipy view of a child who never took sides and was invariably frustrated in her attempts to love two people who hated the sight of each other. The mother died when Ilsa was only eleven, of an illness that seems to have been just the breaking out of unmanageable rage. The girl was left alone with a morose father whose one need for his wife had been as an enemy.

  So it was that Ilsa became infatuated with one of the young men servants in the household. They had a clumsy, furtive affair and he told her they would elope. But when the moment came, his nerve failed; Ilsa faced humiliation and misery if she stayed. On her own, and with very little money, she made her way to Germany in the summer of 1937.

  In that terrible country, she was like a refugee from another century. But in Munich, and then later in Berlin, she was employed at a school for languages, first in a menial capacity, and then, when her German was more secure, as a teacher of Swedish. It was a bare existence in which her peace of mind was further eroded by the daily persecution of Jews. She intervened once or twice in street brawls and was once detained by the police. It was this incident that made her German pupils persuade her to leave Berlin. The language school had premises in Paris, and she went there late in 1938.

  In Paris, she met an American expatriate, Richard Blaine. Not only were they lovers in that time of phony war; Blaine also served as the mentor she had never had. A former labor organizer in America, who also claimed to have fought in the Spanish Civil War, he introduced her to the works of Marx, Trotsky, Victor Serge and John Reed. Their relationship was stormy: he was a heavy drinker and she challenged his brutally despairing attitudes too much for his comfort.

  Blaine quit Paris on the eve of the German occupation, but Ilsa remained behind. As a national of a neutral country, she was able to live in Paris teaching languages to German officers. Late in 1940, she was approached by “Octave,” a leader in the Resistance, who wanted to exploit her contacts in the enemy high command. She undertook several assignments for Octave—a hungry, lazy, rootless man—and had “Elena” as her code name.

  Early in 1941, she was sent through Lyon to the vicinity of the Swiss border to rendezvous with Victor Laszlo, a Hungarian partisan who had escaped from a concentration camp. Together they traveled by way of Biarritz and Lisbon to Casablanca. Unbeknown to Ilsa, Blaine was then established in that city as a café proprietor.

  It was widely assumed that Ilsa and Laszlo were married, but that was only a cover which inhibited Ilsa’s reawakened feelings for Blaine. In truth, she never warmed to Laszlo and had early misgivings about his genuineness. But thanks to Blaine’s assistance, she and Laszlo were able t
o obtain the scarce letters of credit that permitted departure from Casablanca. And so they made their circuitous way to America.

  In New York by the fall of 1941, they were hailed as heroes of the struggle against fascism. But security agencies were not satisfied that Laszlo had indeed been in a concentration camp. Some wondered if he was a Nazi plant; others felt that he was a quixotic opportunist bizarrely touched by good fortune. In the words of the official report, “… it was so contrived an escape from German authority that it seems to have required the personal attention of Germany’s ace, Major Heinrich Strasser.” Later on, it was impossible to measure the balance of truth and masquerade in either Laszlo’s boisterous identification with Communism in the years after 1942, or his tearful coming clean to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1949. In all of this, Ilsa was an unhappy bystander, estranged from Laszlo but under suspicion by association. It was an undoubted relief for her when Laszlo died, of emphysema, in 1952—he had kept up a vulgar society trick of smoking two cigarettes at the same time.

  Ilsa’s American period was as unsettled as the rest of her life. She again taught languages, being proficient by now in five. She did some work subtitling the early films of Ingmar Bergman, and she was for a while the intimate of writer Delmore Schwartz. He refers to her in his collection Vaudeville for a Princess:

  And we shall never be as once we were,

  This life will never be what once it was!

  There is no prospect for tomorrow’s thrills,

  Now and Tuesday, I must remember Ilsa.

  More recently, research by Gail Levin has suggested that Ilsa may be the tall blonde woman, naked but for a blue sleeveless wrap and red high-heeled shoes, standing in the doorway in the Edward Hopper painting of 1949 High Noon. There are other mysteriously austere sexual icons in Hopper’s later work that might be Ilsa Lund.