Hollywood Gothic (23 page)

Aaron Roth kept his mouth tightly shut while Toby told Solomon Roth the story of the past few days, beginning with the plane crash. His eyes flickered behind his spectacles. He was thinking. His fingertips tapped on the edge of the tub.

Solomon Roth sat staring at Toby when the story was over. Finally he shook his head, stroked Towser’s jowls. “Never heard such a story, never! What a picture it would make. Thank God you’re alive, thank him for what a man must never expect—a second chance. But now, what is your plan? Indeed, do you have a plan?” He pulled the robe closer around his neck, where a tuft of gray hair showed on his chest.

“Just what I said, Sol. I want to find out what Goldie was doing at the end … with Donovan. I just can’t see heading off into the bush without ever knowing what was going on. And don’t tell me I’m being stupid, don’t ask me who cares, what difference does any of it make—”

“You know me better than that, Toby. You know I am the man who will understand your situation.” He fit another cigarette into the holder and did the match trick again. “Who knows you’re alive and well?” Toby told him, and Roth’s eyebrows pulled together, the long eyes narrowing. “That seems like a lot of people … the more people who know—well, you see my point. What about the clown people, Aaron? Do they know?”

“Certainly not,” Aaron said without looking at his father. “Do you think I just introduced them all?”

“Aaron, if those crazy people are invited here again, I’ll have Mr. Hacker and Towser here run them out of town. Do you understand me?”

“Isn’t that a little harsh, Father? All they preach is happiness.”

“There is no room for charlatan’s fakery and japery and what-not here. They give our community and our work a bad name.”

“I won’t ask them here again, Father. It was my mistake—”

“You should develop a hobby, Aaron.” The old man had developed a tendency to cling to an idea, to keep refining it until it had been reduced to a nameless silt and everybody else was climbing the walls. “You should develop a hobby like my Stainforths … the paintings of horses are more expensive than maintaining a stable, perhaps, but the upkeep is so much less—Toby, there you are! Forgive me, late at night my mind sometimes wanders, I forget what I should be attending to—now, why is it you’re here? What exactly is going on?” Towser unexpectedly let out a yelp and Aaron threw the shark at him. Towser gave him a hurt look and pulled the shark’s head off, spit it out.

“I came here to pick on Aaron … about Donovan and Laggiardi. I was doing a pretty damned good job of it, too.” Toby smiled at the old man. The mist was lowering upon them. Los Angeles was only a faint yellow blur of light behind the fog. There were no sounds anymore. It was always strange, listening to Sol flicker in and out of a conversation.

“You know, I’ve never thought you killed my granddaughter,” Sol said. “You’re aware of that …” For a moment he was conducting a conversation all his own.

Toby went on. “I asked Aaron what the hell Goldie was doing to him. I ran into a stone wall … your son won’t be candid with me, Sol. So what can I do?”

“I’ve never thought you were guilty. It was a circumstantial case … I got you the very best lawyers I could find. You must believe that.”

“I know that, Sol, and I appreciate it. But it didn’t do me any good in the end, so here I am. I’ve got to dig it all out myself, and the digging isn’t easy. My guess is that Goldie was blackmailing poor Aaron here … real hard-edged blackmail could drive anybody to the clowns.”

“For God’s sake, Toby,” Aaron said softly, almost imploring him, “shut it off, you’re on the wrong track entirely.”

“What do you say, Sol? Am I on the wrong track? Aaron says you’ve just taken to investing in magazines as a hardheaded business venture. With a little shared grief thrown in … and I say that particular piece of hamburger has been in the sun too long, smells like shit.”

Solomon Roth held up his big soft hand, his mouth set in the crocodile grin. It was an involuntary configuration, the way his mouth worked. It didn’t mean he saw anything funny in the situation. “Please, please,” he said. “Much too graphic, but as usual, you’re very close to the bone, very acute. You’re a sly one, clever. … Aaron, I think you owe our Tobias an apology. I think we’d better tell Tobias the truth.”

“No apology from me,” Aaron said. His shark was in ribbons.

Solomon Roth stared at Toby.

“What did she have on him, Sol? It comes down to that.” It crossed Challis’ mind at just that instant: have I gone too far? Do I really want to know? But the questions were gone as quickly as they’d come.

Aaron said, “You amaze me, Toby. You really amaze me.”

Solomon Roth said, “Be still! We’re talking to a member of the family now. We owe him the truth … then we can see what comes next.”

“I won’t be a party to this,” Aaron said. He hoisted himself up out of the steaming water, looking frail in the dim light, the black hair matted on his white body. He grabbed a robe and crawled quickly inside its folds. “Tell him whatever you like … I’m tempted to call the cops. No, no, I won’t.” He was polishing his glasses on the robe’s belt. “But you’re making a mistake. That’s my opinion, and I will stick to it. Good-bye, Toby. You’re on your own, as far as I’m concerned.” His voice was shaking. He clutched his robe, and struck off into the fog.

Challis said, “The truth …” A wave of tiredness swept across him. “I wouldn’t recognize the truth if I found it in my underpants.” He sighed.

Solomon Roth laughed, his lower jaw jutting out beyond the upper, and a big jagged incisor drooping over his lip.

“The truth is frequently a letdown, Toby. But it’s always better to stick to it. It keeps thing simple. You must be selfless to cope with it, though. Suppress the ego. Which is why truth is such a rare commodity in our business. Too much ego, and the truth can always be shaped to our ends.”

“So what is the truth, Sol? What did Goldie have on Aaron? How did Donovan get into it?”

“You amaze me with your reluctance to ask the one logical question—and you a writer!” His eyes were the narrowest of slits, as if he were peering out from inside a cage. “You should keep asking about the identity of the murderer. You’re trying to clear yourself, am I right? Then act the part, Toby, or people will think you already know.”

“Sometimes I think I do know,” Challis said softly.

“The killer?”

“Yes, I think I know it, the name, but then it’s not there. I feel like I actually saw him, saw it happen. … I don’t know how to explain it, but maybe it frightened me, maybe I don’t want to accept the identity of the murderer—maybe I’m just punchy, who knows?” He stared at the flat surface of turquoise water, glowing. “I heard a noise that night. I see Goldie lying there, and I hear a noise outside … someone watching me as I stand there holding the bloody Oscar. I get that far, and my memory gets wiped away—fear, I suppose, I remember I was dripping with cold sweat when the cops got there. I dream about it, and the same thing happens, I get just so far, knowing there’s somebody outside watching me, then I wake up shaking and wet.” He shrugged, turned back to Sol. “Who the hell was outside watching me? Maybe I actually saw him and can’t handle the knowledge. Anyway, I can’t seem to force it.” He shook his head, getting straight again. “So what’s the story about Goldie and Aaron?”

“It’s a cheap story,” Solomon Roth said. “You’ll see why it couldn’t come out at the trial. There was no way it could have affected the trial, anyway.” He rubbed his pulpy white foot along Towser’s spine, and the dog yawned. There was a piece of shark stuck between two long, sharp teeth. “It all comes down to the unhappy part women have played in Aaron’s life, first Kay, then Goldie. Digging into the psychopathology of their lives is hardly my place. Aaron is the one with the education in the family, but for all his education, he came into Maximus a complete innocent, fresh-faced idealist, eager to learn, willing to work his way up. But for all his willingness and determination, he had a terrible blind spot. Women … can you believe, little Aaron was a virgin when he left New Haven and came home to go to work! And here he was, Solomon Roth’s son, surrounded by some of the most beautiful, alluring women in the world, women who saw him not simply as a young man trying to make his way in an incredibly complex and sophisticated business, but as my son … a quick ticket to the top. Not exactly a new story … no, not exactly.”

“The last tycoon,” Challis muttered. “What has this got to do with—”

“Kay Flanders was a star at this point, twenty years old in 1941. She’d been a star for Maximus since she was, what? Fourteen? Her first big picture was that Civil War musical … 1935, it was. She too big too young. An unspoiled girl at fourteen when I saw the potential in her …” The old man drifted for a moment in a reverie of swaying magnolias and smiling black folks on the old plantation and cotton fields and dashing fellows with mustaches and gray uniforms with braid. And the little girl with long soft curls and puffy sleeves and the bell of a voice and the sloe eyes with the heavy dark fringe of lashes. “She grew up fast. She was sexually mature very early, and I’ll go to my grave believing that Terry Downes—sixty if he was a day—who directed her in that first big one, was her first man. I’m positive, but I could never prove it, it’s neither here nor there, I suppose. But she liked it … you know, Toby, the way some women really like it? It’s fun, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just fun?”

“You mean Kay looked at sex the same way as the men she was screwing? Sure, I get the idea.”

“Terry when she was fourteen, Tony Ashton at fifteen, Cedric Darwin at sixteen, Paul Irving at seventeen, Lydia Duncan—yes, a woman, a great star, Lydia Duncan—at eighteen, and Lydia’s husband, Sylvester, too, he was a cameraman … Kay was rapacious, but she was so beautiful, so angelic, so fetching—and I didn’t know what she was up to then. No, no, it all came to my attention later on, what sort of creature she was. But in 1941 she was still Maximus’ top star and I believed our own publicity on her … blame me if you wish, I was as innocent as poor Aaron, I didn’t know there were women like Kay Flanders—was I naive? Hell yes. Oh, yes, I knew there were such women, yes, but not in my family—that’s the way I looked at Maximus …
my family.
There was nothing I wouldn’t do for that family, everybody knows that, but I felt I could trust them all. I
did
trust them all. And when Aaron graduated from Yale in 1939 and came home, he met Kay … and it came on slowly, slowly, but it seemed like such a sweet thing to me. My son and Kay Flanders, falling in love … it was a wonderful movie, Toby, it really was. They were married in 1941. There were a thousand people at the reception, everybody in our world who mattered, who made the industry a great force in the world … they were celebrating the marriage of my son and America’s sweetheart. The happiest day of my life? I think so. Maybe the last time I knew such happiness.” He shivered like a man discovering leeches sucking at his belly. “How many of my guests knew the truth? How many were drinking my Veuve Clicquot and Mumm’s and looking at me and Aaron and snickering? How many, Toby? How many were saying Aaron Roth had just married the easiest fuck in the business? Terry, Tony, Cedric, the Duncans—hell, they were all there at the reception. And I was smiling and Aaron was adoring her and we danced with the bride … well, that’s when it all began, Toby—1941, about six weeks before Pearl Harbor.”

“How did you ever find out the truth about her?”

“Aaron came to me, admitted it … but by then I knew they were not happy. I knew there was something wrong and Aaron had to tell me about the drugs and the drinking first, had to because I was continually seeing evidence with my own eyes. I’m not a fool, whatever else may be said about me—naive, innocent, unobservant, trusting. But not a stupid man.” The crocodile’s grin was still there, masking the old man’s feelings. “Aaron went into the service, the Navy, first in the Pacific, then in Washington as a liaison with Hollywood, and in 1942 while he was on a battleship, Goldie was born. America was happy for us. Daddy fighting the war, Mommy still making movies and having time to bear a beautiful blond daughter—Goldie was on the cover of
Life,
but you know that of course. Little Goldie, eight weeks old, smiling up at her mother. The picture went all over the world. … The pride I felt! They had an interview with Aaron and a picture of him taken somewhere with Admiral Halsey. … God, what days they were!”

“So when did it all begin to go wrong?”

“Aaron came back to us in 1945 and Kay made two more big musicals in 1946 and 1948 and was spending time being a mother. But there was something wrong with Aaron—he was thirty, he’d come out of the war in fine shape, he was taking hold nicely at the studio, he had a beautiful daughter, his wife was a great star … you’d think, here’s a man who has it all.”

“That’s what I’d think, all right,” Toby said.

“But Aaron was a badly troubled man. He wouldn’t talk to me about his problems, he was distant, terribly nervous, he wouldn’t seek help or comfort from anyone. Well, it was years before I knew what was going on … but it was all to do with Kay. She’d begun to drink heavily, at home, on the sly. She didn’t make a picture for … what, five years … 1953. And it was a comedy she seemed to walk through, no spirit, no verve, and the rumors began. Tantrums on the set, firing secretaries and hairdressers and stand-ins, but everybody at Maximus was trying to shield me, they knew how I worshiped her and Goldie, who was eleven by then. No one wanted me to know the truth, but when the 1953 picture came out it was such a flop, well, things began to come to a head. Aaron finally told me what was going on. And it was a nightmare story—drugs, drinking, abuse of Aaron and Goldie … and he told me how she’d disappear for days at a time, and he hired private detectives to find her … the head of publicity at Maximus had his hands full half of the time keeping it all quiet. And he kept it quiet, all right—I didn’t even know, and I was involved in everything at the studio in those days. Everything.

“We did all we could to get Kay back on the track. It was distasteful to me, but what could I do? Throw her to the wolves? She’d have been ripped to pieces … and I believed there was still hope for her. My God, Toby, she was only thirty-three, thirty-four years old. We put her in a very private clinic in Switzerland, got the dope and the liquor out of her system, but …” The old man swallowed hard, as if the memories and the effort of talking such a long time were working on him. “But she’d had hard usage, Toby. She was getting old long before her time, she had the shakes, and there was nothing she could do about them. She was terrified of a thousand little things … people, crowds, being seen, having to talk, any kind of noise, even Goldie—she didn’t want to see her own daughter, or be seen by her. She lost a lot of hair, got gray, lost weight, couldn’t remember things, she’d wander around the grounds of the sanatorium in Switzerland quite naked, like some pathetic survivor of a death camp. It was tragic. But at least no one knew about it, we kept it all in the family. Aaron was a monk, worked like a madman, was always flying to Paris and then going to see her incognito … a couple of times a year they’d go out, to a premiere in London or to Cannes or visiting dear friends at Cap Ferrat or in New York. The world would see her and she’d look fine. But it was all camouflage. Then back to Switzerland. Slowly she seemed to improve. Seven years went by, and in 1960 she was determined to make a comeback … but not a picture. She wanted to do a concert. She worked hard, her voice was different now, ragged and strange, but she worked hard, she saw to every part of the show, and she did it at the Olympia in Paris. Well, it made history, as you know. She was utterly different from America’s sweetheart, she wasn’t yet forty, but she looked fifty, frail, used, and the French went crazy. She played two weeks and she didn’t come apart, she held up. Aaron was so happy. Arrangements were made for her to play the Palace in New York, Aaron set the whole thing up—he was a man possessed. And the show at the Palace was a triumph … people still buy the recording today. But it was then that Aaron discovered how she was holding herself together—more drugs, new drugs, and an endless succession of men. Preying on her. … At one time I feared for Aaron’s sanity. I thought he might kill himself. But he’s strong. What was he to do? Commit her to another sanatorium? Send her back to Switzerland? She was famous again, maybe bigger than she’d ever been before … there was no tasteful way to get her out of the spotlight, not anymore. So he let it go on, tried to keep up appearances, covered for her in every way he could … and in 1967 you married Goldie, so you know what she was like at the end. Barely human, barely alive, totally dependent on drugs. You saw her, Toby, you saw what was left of Kay Roth by the time you met her in 1966, 1967. And then, when she went back to Paris to play the Olympia again, she died … she killed herself, of course, one way or another. Too much pills and liquor, the wrong man, and that was it. The French loved it, a grand finale.” Solomon Roth got another cigarette into his holder after several tries: his hands wouldn’t work quite right. He did the match thing, flung the match into the hot tub.