Suspects

by David Thomson

  Al hoped not to be noticed. Real hired killers must not look dangerous. They need a kind of meekness, a gray availability that no one remembers. There were no marks and no identification: in taking other lives safely, Als must surrender much of their own. They live in boardinghouses, moving on, their lack of Social Security, credit rating, tax base and driver’s license excused by the propriety of their lives and the steady call for killings.

  From my world of law-abiding wallets full of identity, I wonder how one contacts Al and buys the assurance of his unobtrusive craft? I have a job and I do not think I can do it myself. So I am on the lookout for him, patiently examining shamefaced men.

  JOE GILLIS

  William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, 1950,

  directed by Billy Wilder

  Like many who made long journeys to Los Angeles, Joe Gillis had once meant to be a movie star. He never owned up to it; he sneered at actors and their emptiness. When he met them, he was reassured to find his superiority justified. None of this altered how as a youth in Ohio he had longed to be on the screen. It was not exactly that he wanted to be a picture actor. He wanted his life to take place on a screen, with all the enhancements of close-ups, dissolves and hushed music.

  But one day in the house off Sunset Boulevard Joe Gillis looked at the empty pool and thought what a hole it was, where a drunken slip could smash a face. He thought of those movie moments when tuxedo pomp walks backward into the water, and hilarity soars on the splash. Feeling blue, and trying to organize good times, he told Max to have it filled with water. Should it be cleaned first? Max had wondered. What did Joe know about pools? He said he guessed not. Wouldn’t the water clean it? A few days later, he toppled gracefully into that pool—it was his best moment, his starry fall—and, drowning and dying, he swallowed water and spewed out his story.

  He had been born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1918. His father had a drugstore. Joe served ice cream and floats in summer and put out the magazines. He admired their pictures, and he had a collection in his room above the drugstore of Photoplay and the other picture papers. He sensed that the stories were less accurate than the pictures. The stories were so torrid, so sweet, so full of mood, like advertisements or letters of persuasion. When he grew older, Joe recognized that these stories about the stars’ lovers and their pets had the same drama and atmosphere as the stars’ movies. He could not be sure whether this was a trick, something no one else had noticed, or whether in Hollywood people did live out motion picture stories. He could believe the latter, for when he went to the movies himself he always wanted to be up there, moving, turning, waiting, watching, smiling on the screen. He practiced those faces in the mirror and he lived with the blessed momentariness of someone always being just noticed.

  It hurt his face. He had been a good-looking boy, but in adolescence his features took on the folds and ghostly inside-outness of one of those paper toys that children fold. There were so many instants in Joe Gillis’s face it was all he could do to hold the thing together. When he smiled, you felt the parts were going to come apart. So he had to settle for a grin, and that turned mean and sour. By the time he was twenty, he looked and felt unreliable. He could never do a thing without imagining he was being written. Joe did not like writing or reading, but he had announced that as his calling because he could not get the inward scrutiny out of his rattled, dishonest head.

  He studied English at the University of Dayton, and he wrote a story in 1939, about a kid who helped the Wright brothers in their first attempt to fly. It was fiction, but it was carefully researched, and it soared on Joe’s own wish to mingle with the famous. Paramount read the story—it was sent to them by Joe’s professor—and they bought it for five hundred dollars. The studio told him it had been “an invaluable, background contribution” to the 1941 picture I Wanted Wings. Joe …vie three times, but he never found a trace of his story beyond the common theme of flight and the general emotional yearning for transformation.

  He went into the army, determined to use all the idle time he had heard about to write more stories. But within a week of landing in Europe, he had been captured. No shots were fired. His detachment simply walked down a road and found itself among Germans. No one struggled or argued; it was like a journey reaching its appointed end. So Joe Gillis was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, and there his face became gaunt but his fingers grew calluses as he wrote story after story in lead pencil on the gray paper that he managed to save. There was not one war story. They were all about happiness and success.

  When he was released, Joe went back to Ohio, got his stories typed up, and sent them to Paramount with a letter of explanation that was already like a magazine article on how this young writer became a movie scenarist in a harsh, unfriendly stalag. A few days later he followed the registered package on the train, confident he would never see Dayton again.

  From 1946 to 1950, Joe Gillis worked on seventeen pictures. He was on staff at Paramount for two years; he got a credit for the shared original story on My Wife the Mailman (which claimed to be set in Dayton) and another for a script on a quickie Western, Canyon Fire. Other scripts were bought and shelved, or passed on to other writers. He was paid for treatments. He lived well enough, but the insecurity and the lack of glamor sapped him. Studios got to know him, they anticipated his jaded face and anxious calls, and his reputation became that of a has-been. He hated stories now. He regarded the elements of fiction as the cards in a pack. They were always all there. There was no surprise; solitaire always came out if you cheated. He was a hack, and he hit the typewriter with the violence of self-loathing. Back in Dayton his condition would have been recognized as a mental breakdown. But this is harder to discern in Los Angeles.

  Then one hot day he tried to get his car out of reach of the repossession men, and he drove it into that unexplained driveway off Sunset Boulevard. It could have been the beginning of a lane up into the hills, or the mouth of oblivion. It beckoned, just as if art directors and gardeners had plotted all morning over its open, sleepy abandon. The mansion was something out of a fairy tale, Joe told himself, and then Norma Desmond called to him from the balcony, the voice like a fingernail dragged across glass.

  She took him in; she would not let him go. For she had never lost her love of stories, and she regarded him as a pilgrim, a pen and a fan sent by providence. She lavished clothes, love and her script upon him. He wore the clothes all the time—when they went out, when they stayed at home; he was her male model, with the whisper “gigolo” in his ear and sticking out in exactly the way an ivory-colored silk handkerchief protruded from his top pocket. He suffered her love—he let her clamber all over him, her fearful, sinewy heat and her precipitate orgasms, she was always so in love with love. And he took her pages and folders of script and hacked them down into a polished, lifeless work.

  She shot him. He fell into the pool. The script had not sold. He had wanted to leave. And she had never told him that in all those love-stews he had put a child in her. It was as if she regarded the conception as hers alone. But if he had known, he might have shot himself. Joe Gillis was a coward who was horrified easily. And he had ordered the pool filled so that the Chinese tiles on its floor shone and smiled.

  MAX VON MAYERLING

  Erich von Stroheim in Sunset Boulevard, 1950,

  directed by Billy Wilder

  Born in 1894 in Vienna, Max Meck; died in 1964 in Pasadena, Max von Mayerling. A man of many parts—military spy, fraud, illegal immigrant, military costume advisor to motion pictures, director, husband, failure, the humiliated one, guardian of unlocked doors, chauffeur and magician. If every previous generation of the Meck family had felt itself advancing with seriousness, then Max is the augury of modern times, forever stepping into greater implausibility but never losing his balance. As we drag our history forward, we seem able only to find more unbelievable lives. Yet Max never gave up the ghost. He dressed impeccably, and his pained eyes spoke of duty, honor and expectation. Just by glancing at chaos, he could c
onvince his stepson, Julian, that there was still a notion of order, and a gulf between it and reality, a loss, the prevailing message of Max von Mayerling’s eyes.

  The Meck family was very poor. What did you expect? The father worked in a bottle-making factory in Vienna; the mother had seven children, all in three rooms on the third floor with only one window that admitted daylight. The others were trapped by wells, backs and the gloomy overlay of the bottling factory. All those nineteenth-century cities, filled with children and the memory of others who died in infancy; kids hungry and thin, with eyes burning in their scrappy faces; their heavy shoes clattering on the stone steps, their pale legs striving to carry the leadlike shoes; an era that seemed like a dingy, overcrowded tenement building where there was always someone ill, or dying, or being born.

  The most natural mood of the tenement is a jittery, cheerful anxiety—like someone who expects bad luck. But at the age of twenty, Max Meck was already possessed of the grace that could have lived on a country estate. He alone knew how he had acquired it: he may have worked as a valet or groom; he may have read novels and visited the theater. But at twenty he knew accoutrements. He spoke like an aristocrat, and behaved toward women with that curt Britishness that was in fashion with gentlemen. As the war came along, so Max was the picture of a young Prussian officer, thoroughly versed in the history of battles, sentimentally drawn to the cavalry but up to date on artillery statistics.

  When he joined the Austrian army, his superiors noticed this authority and extricated him from the ranks. They had his birth certificate, and they could measure how far his presence belied it. Some wise adjutant realized he had an actor on his hands, and so Max was drafted into espionage. He posed as a German flier, was shot down over France and imprisoned, but was taken into the confidence of his French brother-officers. When he had had his fill of their information, he escaped and hiked back to Germany. Of course, the information was trivial. But it delighted the Germans and the Austrians to hug such a trick to their hearts. Max could have been shot in the process, for those tricked must respond severely if they ever detect the trick. He took extravagant risks so his superiors could enjoy a sense of advantage. Espionage is a state of mind, like unfaithfulness; it is more a treasure to the imagination than a concrete advantage.

  As the war ended, Max Meck took a ship to Mexico from Lisbon, hired as the ship’s doctor. Thus, he came over the border to the south of San Diego, a sturdy, resolute man, dressed in rags he had purchased as adornment to the tan and the scars he had won to make up his peon look. Six weeks later, Max von Mayerling was working as an extra in pictures, and as a military costume expert on films showing the wickedness of the Hun. He watched the making of these movies and saw nothing he could not understand. The realization of plots was second nature to a spy.

  He was a director by 1921—Speckled Hens and Cockerels, a sardonic portrait of the marriage-market in Granada, about which the legend endures of pornographic scenes shot for the delectation of a studio boss. In 1925, a mangled version of his Death Valley Days was all that Hollywood could divulge of an extravagant masterpiece. The Honeymoon was withheld; its symbolism was deemed too flagrant. And Princess of the Micks, with Norma Desmond, was so immediate a commercial failure that Miss Desmond, its spent owner, withdrew the picture and herself from public gaze.

  Max was by then her husband, so she did not prevent his following her to Europe. She had forgotten how they came to be married. But her aberration was his tragedy, for he loved her. She teased him and said he had fallen in love with her only to inspire masochistic ecstasy, a pressing strain in all his films. He replied that love was always absurd; the choice of whom one loved should be perverse. She hired him as her butler when she had divorced him. He could get no more work in pictures, so she kept him on an allowance. Max watched two other husbands come and go. The first was too proud to speak to a predecessor, but the second recognized tradition and liked to chat with Max.

  Years passed. Back in America, living on Sunset Boulevard, Norma became more erratic. She tried to kill herself in 1940, and Max removed the locks from the doors so she could not isolate herself from rescue. And so he lived, with a beloved who did not consider him, and who sometimes beat on his chest with wrath. He did not sleep from imagining a suicidal leap in her. He was caught in a trap of frustration. Max wept for an hour every day until his black eyes had the luster of velvet.

  Then Joe Gillis came along, offering the phantoms of a comeback and another lover to Norma. Max did all he could for Gillis; being polite to this jerk was a refined self-abuse. And at the time of the shooting, it was Max, a director still, who coaxed Norma downstairs and into the loony bin by conjuring up a camera to track back in front of her languid advance. It was as lovely as an Arab dance, he thought.

  He visited Norma, and never mentioned the pregnancy that the star and killer ignored. She had no anesthetics in labor, but screamed at the mysterious pain. The son was born and Norma went back to eight years of asylum hours.

  Max petitioned the state of California to be appointed the boy’s guardian. He was accepted. He had the boy named: Julian Kay, he told the registrar, the first name that came into his head; he was an effortless inventor.

  He took the boy to two rooms in Inglewood. Max worked as a chauffeur and as a magician who hired out for children’s parties. He cared for the child in a doting and grim way. He looked after him physically so that he grew up soft and babylike. But he allowed his mind no innocence, and he taught the boy the proper spartan caress that a man must bring to women. So Julian grew up with an odd, unemotional expertise, as appealing and perverse as a mustache.

  Max died in 1964. He was returning from a party where he had made pigeons fly in and out of reality. He had a heart attack at the wheel, and his car collided with a truck carrying beer. He was killed instantly, as he had always hoped he would be.

  GUY HAINES

  Farley Granger in Strangers on a Train, 1951,

  directed by Alfred Hitchcock

  Perhaps it is all those gleaming whites stooping to the cunning of lobs and drop shots, not to mention the paranoia of disputed line calls, with smudged chalk, elderly judges set in cherry-colored silence, and the horror of a bad call marring the purity of the game. Still, tennis players are not easily trusted. Their elegant lines of movement succumb to forced errors or double faults. Tennis is a game for flawed saints. Its arrangement of white and green is like a cucumber sandwich in which, somehow, a virulent mustard has been smeared. “Anyone for tennis?” they are supposed to sing out in polite, middle-class theater; it seems an innocent game, a prelude to marriage, what with mixed doubles and the hints of love in the scoring. But it is often the tennis player who is the killer in that land of Agatha Christie.

  Guy Haines was never quite in the front rank of players. He looked a little frail next to Savitt, Sedgeman and Schroeder. His backhand was unsound, not so much weak as snatched and evasive—a smile hoping to conceal a cavity. He had never spent a summer driving three hundred backhands every afternoon against an unbeatable wall; he never took his weakness and pounded it flat. Perhaps he admired his own little kink, and so his backhand was a wicked shot—sliced, cut, spun, dropping over the net and twisting back into the netting—but something that broke under pressure. At Wimbledon in 1949, Budge Patty so repeatedly attacked his backhand that Haines lived in the shaded corners of the court, a suspect under interrogation.

  But Guy Haines was welcome on the court and in the clubhouse. He was the best-looking tennis player on the circuit. He had a gracious way of losing and a shy acceptance of victory that won sentimental support. He smiled a lot; he was courteous to umpires and pally with ballboys.

  He was born in 1926 in Manchester, New Hampshire, with the real name George Hank, of German descent. The father had a laboring job in one of the mills in a town losing its eminence in that industry. Young George had no special talent, except for nimbleness at ball games. His schoolwork was always interrupted by practice. But he was slig
ht and hurt easily. He liked the notion of being safe on his side of the net—no matter that he was one of those who perfected the winner’s easy hurdling of the net to land in the loser’s lap with consolation and bravos.

  During the war, Guy worked summers on Long Island as a ballboy, helping the pros and making himself available as a partner at country clubs. He was not drafted because of flat feet—marching would have crippled him. But he kept the lightest tread on the court, where he was known as a retriever.

  He won some worthwhile competitions in New England in 1945 and 1946. Tennis was still an amateur game, accessible only to players of some means. Guy Haines (his nom de raquet) was eager to play in Europe, but he needed a patron. In Huntington, Long Island, he found and married Miriam Chitty, who had inherited money from her parents. She was willing to put these funds toward Guy’s expenses, and she did understand that it would impede his plans if she accompanied him on the tour. So she kept a scrapbook at home, rejoicing when he won the Italian Open in 1948, and made the Wimbledon semifinals in ’forty-nine.

  The marriage drifted. Absences grew into separation. Guy met Ann Morton, the daughter of Senator Morton of Pennsylvania. He was moving in society circles, telling the Mortons that Miriam was a spoilsport, one of the sluts of Long Island, waiting to be bought off with a good divorce settlement. “I could kill her,” hissed Ann Morton one day, though never having met her. “Me too,” said Guy, always eager to agree.

  Their marriage conjured up a strange genie: Bruno Anthony, a tennis fan, who set out to meet Guy on the train from New York to Washington. This was achieved with the full effect of chance and surprise, and Bruno introduced the motif of “crisscross”—lines of force that meet and feel the knot of intersection. “Why sure,” said Guy, almost to himself, “your father and my wife.” “Exactly,” said Bruno. Or something like that. Who can ever remember conversations on trains, with all the rattling of the machinery? Guy was a skilled player, and Bruno an overemotional fan, quick to jump to conclusions, and so touchingly ready to do something, to be as active as a tennis player.