“There you are, kid,” he said. “We’ve been looking all over for you. Whatcha doin’ under there anyway?”
“Aw, for Chrissakes, Lon, leave the kid alone. We all need our dark places.”
The last voice was new to me, a lazy Kentucky drawl barely discernible under a gloss of standard Hollywood affectation that made one think of some small English-speaking country that was not the United Kingdom and definitely not the sticks. The voice’s owner crouched to his knees and I saw the director for the first time. He wore an ivory tennis sweater two sizes too small for him, a collar and tie, and above this a broad head with an aggressively receding hairline and a violent bristle of mustache that looked remarkably like a nail brush pressed to his upper lip. I sensed no eyes, no shape to his nose or jaw; he was merely follicles shouting hair. I was not impressed. He was beside me in the damp sand before I could respond to his mumbled introduction. He crossed his arms over his chest and chuckled the way the living do when they are brave or drunk enough to mock death. And then he turned to me.
“You know,” he began in a whisper, his breath sharp with whiskey, “this reminds me of when I was a kid. I used to play the living corpse in a traveling spook show down south. They used to stick a straw in my mouth and bury me for up to eight hours a go in a cardboard box. You believe that? They’d dig me up and pull me out, dust me off, and folks would ooh and aah and that was entertainment back then. But I kinda liked it. Being deep in the dark. Made me feel safe and kinda whole. You know what I mean?”
And his eyes lit with a flicker of recognition. He knew that I did.
“Listen, let’s get outta here,” he said, taking my hand and pulling me into the sky and stars and light of the boardwalk. “We don’t want to miss them jockeys.”
On the boardwalk, the nighttime pier teemed with day-lit life. On one side, pragmatic barns with vaguely Moorish battlements housed the amusements. Cars were parked along the white railing, the windshields swiveled to let in the damp breezes. Music throbbed from the heated yellow glow of portable Bakelite radios. Sloppy couples drank from scoured ketchup bottles, from one another, as men stripped to their undershirts fondled the breasts of their dates. Seabees up from Point Mugu strutted in their dress whites, tattoos bluing under battleship tans, while hatcheck girls argued with pomaded rent boys, vying for the eyes of passing trade. The director took it in, his eyes nearly watering from delight at the low ebb of life all around him. Some he paused to speak to, offering squares of gum or cigarettes, desperate for a few words from those authentic lips. But Chaney remained aloof, a bishop of the average, his face so common and still so known as to be almost invisible.
We passed the briny stink of the bait shops, a dance school that promised proficiency in something called the Charleston, boat rentals, pretzel stalls. We came to the end of the pier and there, life was most potent. And music, a lazy jelly roll trot flowed inward on tin drums and muted brass, swaying, shirking, shivering on a limping vortex of golden light, sweat, and tobacco smoke. We had arrived at the La Monica Ballroom.
The jockeys the director had referred to were people, couples really, who shuffled about the filthy dance floor of the ballroom like after-hour brooms. All were in various states of exhaustion, leaning into the dregs of formal embraces just to stay upright. It was commerce, a dance marathon, popular then when the prize was a thousand bucks just to spend a week on one’s feet. Nine hundred and twenty hours of dancing had already lapsed. Twenty couples remained and each told their story in the fallen debris around their combined ankles. Chicken bones and soda bottles, cigarette packages, empty tubes of lipstick, cracker crumbs. Some still wore the bibs of stained napkins tucked into their shirt or dress fronts, evidence of meals consumed hours ago while exhausted on the hoof. They slept in shifts, sometimes violently rousing the other when the allotted time for rest had passed. If they both collapsed, they were roused and led from the floor. If rousing was ineffective, stretchers were employed.
On the upper galleries, the spectators, fresher than the competitors, jeered and hollered at favorite couples, some holding up patterned bedsheets with ATTA BOY ROSCOE or SHOW ’EM YOUR STUFF, PEARL painted on them. It was up there, where the smoke and peanut shells collected, that the director led us, his red feminine mouth pursed with excitement.
“I got twelve grand on number fifteen. Can you believe that? It was touch and go during the fox trot, but that bitch he got with him there got legs like a howitzer. Ain’t no way them kids is goin’ down.”
I noticed his sordid glee brought out his native drawl, and sweat glistened on his broad brow as he nipped from the neck of a small flask.
“May I say, Mr. Browning, I’m quite a fan of your work,” I began. I had been instructed by Chaney to say this. I was of course lying. I had seen none of his pictures. But Browning did not want to talk shop. Number 15 had just hit a patch of rough weather. Try as she might, the amazon with the thick legs could barely hold him up.
“Come on, you gorilla-assed bitch! Hold that cocksucker to rights!” Browning shouted. “Keep it movin’! Keep it movin’, ya iron-plated half a whore!”
But the deadweight of her partner beckoned with the entropy of the ever-after, and she went down, proud and hard as the Bismarck. Browning imploded and two stretcher men scrambled to the wreckage. She could not be roused, and there was an awful panic as members of the orchestra were enlisted to try to hoist her bulk to safety. In the end she was rolled off the killing floor, her dress and sweat-soaked arms gathering dust and cigarette butts like some demonic Christmas loaf.
“Well, there goes the goddamned night!” Browning shouted. “Twelve grand, you bum! Twelve goddamned grand!”
It was a cursory meeting, a test run to see if perhaps I could work with the director on a property he and Chaney had been developing, a property that had already enjoyed one infamous German incarnation as a motion picture and countless retellings in other mediums. But Chaney knew he could put a very special stamp on Dracula. It could be the part he was remembered for. Browning was publicly reticent, but privately he needed to prove to a studio he was worth the risk again. I didn’t tell them none of this was news to me. Just like I didn’t tell them of the afternoon meetings I’d been having with Junior.
In the years that followed, pictures found their voice and the bottom fell out of the banks.
CHAPTER 28
The consensus in those years was that talking pictures were a clever but somewhat vulgar fad that would hopefully wear out and leave us all blissfully back in the strong silent dark. No one realized synchronized sound would completely change not only the experience of the cinema but also the types of players who would then be drawn to them. Much has been made of regional dialects and foreign accents completely destroying budding careers. The truth was, speaking gutted the magic for many. Few can remember hearing their dreams. Sound made the medium more totalitarian, more common, more like daily life. And few players had gotten into the game to approximate a quotidian experience. Silence was international. Sound was regional. Once actors were exotic messengers from a muted world, agents of a kind of divine but temporary madness whose voices echoed like angels behind our flickering optic nerves. Sound sobered everything, made us dull. Made us sane.
The Laemmles embraced the new technology, as did all the captain pimps of Hollywood. Soon the boulevards were filled with promises of talk. Dracula would be the first talking picture of its kind. Uncle Carl hated the idea of some greasy supernatural ghoul draining pert little blondes by their jugulars, while his son, Junior, hoped it would be pure rube currency, sex and death as palatable as bacon and eggs. They made a compromise. If Junior could get the rights, he would front-burner his father’s World War I message picture and Pop would clear the way for things that go bump in the night. That was where I came in.
“But I have no influence with Mr. Chaney,” I said.
“He likes you and listens to you. That’s platinum in this town,” Junior said.
“Mr. Laemmle. L
on’s and my relationship is based on professional respect and I hardly think it fitting to appropriate it for some front office intrigue.”
“Front office intrigue? Jesus Christ, where do you think you are, kid? Do you know who the lowest creature on this lot is? It ain’t the copy girls or even the poor schmucks who mop up in the men’s room. It’s the clever bastards in the editing department who play with pictures all day. You want something better? Okay. But first you gotta get outta the dark. You gotta get me Chaney.”
“I thought Metro or Paramount Lasky had the rights.”
“Where’d you hear that? No one’s got the rights. Not yet. But it’s a cinch. Schulberg’s too much of a snob to allow stage blood on his profit sheet and Mayer’s terrified of the production code.”
“But Metro has Chaney,” I said.
“But Metro doesn’t have you.”
“I don’t understand. If your plan is to procure the rights to Dracula yourself, wouldn’t that be all the incentive Chaney would need?”
“Why do I feel I’m always talking to my rabbi with you? Listen, say Universal doesn’t have as deep of pockets as some of the other studios and the rights don’t come so easy. Chaney’s my insurance.”
“If you’re not happy with my work here Mr.—”
“Son of a bitch! You’re a tough little nut. You look outside the window lately, sister? Those people ain’t standing in line to get a good table at the Derby. Those are breadlines.” He reached for a cigar. Talk of the economy always forced his hand to a three-dollar cigar. “Half the town would crawl on its belly for a walk-on and you’re making me spell it out. I mean, you gotta eat, don’tcha?”
Silence.
“Well don’tcha?”
“You know what I want from this studio and it’s not the blue-plate special.”
Junior grinned. “Again with the directing,” he said, shaking his head. “Why are you such a glutton for punishment, kid?”
“I very much enjoy my work here on the lot, Mr. Laemmle. But I respect that it is your prerogative as head of production to relieve me of my contract anytime you may see fit.” I didn’t tell him my real fear, that the real earth and real trees off the lot were filled with the siren song of the everlasting, that to leave this plywood empire would leave me as vulnerable as a dead branch in a breeze. I didn’t tell him that in my stalled heart, lungs, and brain was imbedded the very grail of spiritual practice, that I was the flat-chested apotheosis of prana. That I needed the falsity of Hollywood like a drunk needed a drink.
“All right, all right. So you don’t need to eat. But I bet that hulking friend of your does.” He smiled when he saw this new tack hit its mark. “He’s happy here, right?” he continued, leaning back in his chair. “But if this town teaches us anything, it’s that we could always be happier. You put a bug in Chaney’s ear about this, your pal will have a job here for life.”
“What about directing?”
“Jesus! Get me Chaney and I’ll think about it.”
Mutter was soon after employed in front of the camera for the first time, following his Indian brothers into mock battles only he had actually lived through. He was hired as an action extra in All Quiet on the Western Front because production needed tall bodies to stand in the foreground to force the perspective of the outdoor scenes. At least that’s what they told him.
He didn’t know about my tacit agreement with Junior to enroll Chaney, so I just smiled and nodded when he told me the news. It is a testament to the innate hokum of Hollywood that Mutter never mistook these battle sequences as the real thing. I had heard of shell shock, traumatic repression, latent what-do-you-call-it, but these proved merely academic terms. Mutter was as happy as a puppy in the surf diving into muddy hand-dug shell craters. It was as if the explosions, the flying earth and bodies, held no memory for him, no monsters under his bed. It was simply play—noisy, wet, filthy, exhilarating play.
I was collecting checks, trying my best to maintain contact with Chaney, feeling my own pressure to win him over, but my duties had very little to do with actual production. I was binning dailies for bread-and-butter comedies, delivering script changes at all hours of the night. I even cast a few extras for the six-day horse operas we shot in the wilds of what is now Encino. There was a rumor in the commissary that Mutter’s girl was pregnant, and I imagined him, briefly, poised above her small dark body actually fulfilling what he had been dared to do to my mother all those years ago. There was a surprising distance in the thought, but still I was doubly content with my bargain with Junior. I could never confirm his impending parentage as he never took his meals in the commissary. He ate in the open, out of steaming pots and smoking grills, animal grease on his fingers, smiling, I imagined, at the camping trip that had become his life. At least he had found someone. I had no idea I was about to do the same.
The system was simple. I’d get a call at about five thirty in the morning requesting basic Western types: twenty cowhands, a few baddies for the posse scenes, a bartender, nonspeaking, with attendant barflies, and I’d load myself into my modified Packard flatbed and head over to Gower Gulch. That Packard was a marvel. With its blocked clutch and brakes, my shorter legs could reach the pedals. It had a hand throttle that allowed me to modulate speed with my fingertips. A straight four, it was bored out for hard duty, and with its two-ton struts could carry or climb nearly anything. I got it cheap from one of the studio’s transportation managers. Spent a weekend in the wilds of Sherman Oaks teaching myself how to drive it. Best automobile I ever owned.
At that hour of the morning, the Cahuenga Pass was full of birdsong. I’d buzz the empty road in the still-cool sunshine over to Sunset, where George Washington Smith was building the first of his West Coast palazzos, and continue east to Gower Gulch. There’s a mini mall there now, trussed up with fake Western fronts and a paved parking lot, but then it was just a big dirt parcel surrounded by a split rail fence. This was Paramount’s backyard but also the only place in town to pick up a few Western day players. They’d come still in their gear, batwing chaps and roughed-out boots, hooks buckled to their belts, on horseback or foot. Texas shitkickers and Montana bulldoggers, New Mexican Apaches with frowning jaws and eyes as pretty as their ponies. Boys and men, ropers, punchers, cooks, and fence menders, all as lean as piston rods and twice as functional. They’d muster as soon as they heard the first trucks pull up and then we’d walk the line.
I knew all the scouts from the other studios, but we never said as much as hello. We respected one another’s type and left it at that. Metro wanted cowboys who could sing. Paramount wanted only those who looked like John Gilbert. But Universal wasn’t so picky. We just needed hands who could take a twenty-mile-an-hour fall from horseback for two bits an hour and not gripe. That usually left the majority for me, and the ’pokes knew it. So as soon as I pulled up it was hats off and shy white smiles and “Morning, Miss Maddy” this and “Howdy, Missy Maddy” that. I was the queen of this rodeo. And I loved it. You must understand I was at the foothills of my sexual peak, at least chronologically, and these lean and lanky specimens were fodder for the rare nights in my box when my dreams did not fail.
CHAPTER 29
He was young, about my age in years. As tall and straight as a young sequoia with shoulders so lustful they whispered sinfully under the yoke of his snap-front shirt. He had sky-blue eyes and a shock of brown hair with a pure-white streak just left of his widow’s peak. He’d survived a strike of lightning as a boy and was thus marked. His name was Lucy Kinnon, but he’d been known as Lucky ever since his flirtatious brush with atmospheric discharge. A spray of pale copper freckles dappled the bridge of his nose and these, along his with tangled teeth, never fully allowed him to be the man who lived in the roughness of his hands and hard, lean muscles.
I lusted for him on the spot. He carried a battered guitar with him wrapped in a worn sheet of Christmas paper. The Metro scout was the first to notice him and asked if he could actually play that thing, to which
Lucky mumbled he reckoned he could.
“Anytime, son,” the Metro scout snapped, and off came the wrapping paper, as gently as a newborn’s diaper, and he slung it with a length of twine over his broad shoulder and out came norteño, as sweet and ancient as anything I might have heard from a roving orange picker. And when he finished, the scout sniffed and asked if he knew any white men’s songs, to which Lucky addressed the dust once more, saying, “I suppose I do but don’t rightly feel like playin’ ’em.”
This was too much for the Metro scout but just enough for me. I packed him shotgun and left the rest of that morning’s haul in the back, gripping the slats of the flatbed, and listened to him strum all the way down Hollywood Boulevard to Highland.
That first day, I put in a good word with that day’s director (John Ford, perhaps?) and got him a few lines. He was happy with the bump, and we had lunch together, where I pretended to eat a piece of cherry pie while he wolfed down three burgers. He told me of his father’s place in Perris, not France, he said. A small cattle spread where he’d worked since he could stand. The day laborers hired for castrating and branding season were the ones who taught him how to play and gee, if I wasn’t the spittin’ image of his baby sister. Something sunk in me at that, but I rallied and gave him my plate of shredded pie and asked him if he wanted to see the studio.
I led him through Little Europe, past the colonnades of the casino at Monte Carlo to the steps of Notre Dame. And his face, his shiny, open face, was like a new penny. Well, tie me to a tree or dip me in spit. Rural references took on the luster of Keats as he quipped over everything he saw. How the heck they figure that? I’ll be dog danged if that don’t look like real stone. The sun was going down. The arcs were being set for the night’s shooting and I felt the day begin to lose its luster. I knew the hard physics of this world, knew he had no contract in his sights, knew these moments would be our last together. But I simply wanted to drink him in, see the way his limp thumb flicked the cowlick from his eyes, the way his lips shuddered shy of those crooked teeth before he smiled. And in my mind, I could give him warmth, a heartbeat, a future. I could age the playfulness in his eyes to full passion and lift his callused hand to my stunted breast and he would feel something that could torture him there.
Only the Dead Know Burbank Page 16
