Playland (63 page)

I never found out the answer.

I
think we should all think this through and try to see where it’s taking us,” Sydney Allen said.

“What Sydney means is he’s not sold on Blue having a kid,” Marty Magnin said.

“I’m not convinced a child’s a viable asset,” Sydney Allen said. Set up on easels around his office at Columbia in Culver City were production sketches of a picture he seemed to be preparing, and the sketches did not look as if they belonged to my as-yet-untitled script of the Blue Tyler story, the one he had assured me would be his next film. “Every film has its own ecology, and for Blue to have a child would destroy the ecological balance of the love story, as it were. It would put us in two different time frames, and that’s always difficult, cinematically speaking.”

“Its ecosystem would be upset,” I said. “The symmetry of its food chain.”

“Exactly,” Sydney Allen said. I think he thought I was agreeing with him.

“Sydney thinks she’s an unnecessary complication,” Marty Magnin said.

I had never seen Marty deferential, especially to a director,
but then his last four pictures had been flops, the blame for which he had artfully deposited in other laps, but not so artfully that he could afford to be the bully he so naturally was, especially with success. I peered at the sketches, trying to guess the story line from them. There was what seemed to be a grain elevator, with wheat pouring into it, and there seemed to be a railroad-engine switching yard. No. Jacob King did not fit as Casey Jones.

“She destroys the arc,” Sydney Allen said. The arc is what directors talk about when they are stalling. “I see a picture as a suspension bridge with two spans …”

“A suspension bridge doesn’t have an arc,” I said. “An arc is a precise geometrical configuration.”

“You know what Sydney means,” Marty Magnin said irritably. He had been reduced to interpreting Sydney Allen to a recalcitrant me, and it did not make him content.

“No, I don’t.”

“Jack, you don’t like me much, do you?” Sydney Allen said.

“That’s a reasonable assumption, Sydney. But actually I rarely give you a thought. It’s the arc, the ecological balance of film, the suspension bridge and all that horseshit I mind. All you have to say is that you have another picture, you have a start date, and you want to put this one back, and you want me to be happy about it.”

“Actually I don’t care if you’re happy or not.”

“Then we understand each other.”

Marty Magnin tried to soothe. “We just think it’s time we went in another direction.” He paused. “With another writer.”

“On what?”

“The script,” Marty Magnin said.

“Marty, you’re forgetting something,” I said. “I told you I’d work up a script. On spec. I never released the rights.”

“Not that it matters,” Sydney Allen said. “Her story is public domain.”

“But my notes aren’t.” I rose and pointed to the grain-elevator sketch. “What’s this picture called?”

No one spoke for a moment.

“Empire,”
Marty Magnin finally said. He and I had been through too much together for him to ignore the question. “The Kansas wheat wars. Action. Night riders. Cruise and Kidman. They met Sydney over the weekend at Mike Ovitz’s in Aspen, and signed on this morning.”

The actors were of no interest to me. “And this is a grain elevator?”

“Nice to see you, Jack,” Sydney Allen said. He seemed taller, and as he tried to steer me out of his office, I saw he was wearing cowboy boots. “As always.”

“And somebody is going to fall into the grain elevator, and a load of wheat’s going to fall on him, and he’s going to suffocate and die, right?”

“Sydney’s idea,” Marty Magnin said. “When we were all schmoozing with Michael.” Marty considered the sketch. “How’d you know that anyway?”

“I read
The Octopus
,” I said. “Sydney only steals from the better sources.”

Marty looked from Sydney Allen to me. He had obviously never heard of either
The Octopus
or Frank Norris. Not that stealing anything from a classic would ever cause him to lose any sleep.

“Bottom line, Hollywood pictures don’t make it,” Marty Magnin said. “You’re rich, finance it yourself, you and the
fageleh
snitch.”

W
hy did you have to find her, Jack? Arthur French said.

Arthur was recuperating at Willingham. With all the riding he had done, and all the spills he had taken, his knees finally wore out and had to be replaced, and so he had come to Los Angeles to get the operations done by the chief of orthopedic surgery at Cedars. I had talked to him in Arizona a number of times on the telephone but had never mentioned the letters. I wanted to show them to him in person, to see how he reacted, and his immobility after the two knee surgeries made him a captive audience, one in a certain amount of pain, unable to ride off into the sunset as he had so often done in Nogales, unable to deflect a question with an evasion as easily as when he was in his prime. I always tended to forget that Arthur was twenty-odd years older than I, because he had so vigorously taken to the outdoor life, but as I watched him reading the letters in his wheelchair at Willingham, wearing pajamas and a bathrobe, his legs resting on an ottoman, I realized that he was old, as were both Blue and Chuckie, the only other survivors of this random chain of events forty years earlier.

Why did you have to find her, Jack?

So there was a daughter?

She wouldn’t abort, Arthur said. There were screaming fights with J.F. and Lilo and me, but she still insisted on having it. That was the real reason
Broadway Babe
was postponed, not because of the score. She went to this place in Connecticut. It was like a safe house. She could have the child there, and not in a hospital, and nobody would talk, because silence was truly golden. It cost an arm and a leg.

How’d you explain her absence?

We just said she was making a career change, she was a grown woman now, she’d bought a ranch in Colorado, she loved the solitude and the fresh air, and then she was going to Europe before she started shooting
Broadway Babe
. Her first real vacation in ten years. The usual crap, but people believed studios those days.

If she was only going to give it up for adoption, then why have the kid?

She wanted to make a point, Jack. And she thought she could put it someplace where she could watch it grow up, without having any real responsibility for it. With a little weep when it went off to kindergarten. Standing outside the schoolyard, like a rich Stella Dallas. Life was always a movie to Blue, movies were her only frame of reference. It was Lilo who was finally able to talk some sense to her. Or maybe it was just that she was sick every morning and she was getting fat and the romance of having a baby and being a mother was wearing off. Like a rough cut that went on too long.

Jimmy Riordan took care of the adoption?

He had it placed even before Blue arrived at the place in Connecticut.

Why?

He felt guilty, I guess. About Jake. A kind of … what do you Catholics call it?

Penance, I said. Do the penance and you’re granted absolution. (I had never thought I would be discussing the fine points
of confession with Arthur French.) Whatever happened to Jimmy Riordan anyway?

He bought himself a good name, Arthur said.

How?

Morris died less than a year after Jake was killed. Natural causes, in his own bed. As he always wanted. He went to sleep one night and didn’t wake up. His death was Jimmy’s ticket to respectability, and he’d been preparing for it, needless to say, since long before Morris died. He knew where all the bodies were buried—literally and figuratively—all the deals and all the payoffs, and a lot of people wanted to make sure that information never got out. So Jimmy negotiated a lawyer’s deal. Anything happened to him—food poisoning, an automobile accident, a fall in the shower, anything—then everything he had, and he had everything, was shipped to the feds. It was his insurance policy, and the premium he paid was his silence. So he spent the rest of his life doing good works. He died in 1970, 1971, around there, a stroke.

Any family?

There was a wife, but she left him early on. J.F. used to say Morris was more than she was willing to handle. Then she died, of cancer, I think.

Children?

None.

Where is Blue’s daughter now? I asked.

I don’t know.

You don’t know or you won’t tell?

I don’t know.

I don’t believe you, Arthur.

A flash of the old Arthur: I’d be surprised if you did.

And disappointed …

A weary smile. Yes.

And all those years, you were sending Blue money?

I guess there’s no point in denying it now.

No, I said.

He sighed. It began after she came back to New York from
Italy. I’d been keeping tabs on her over there, and sometimes if I knew she was short, I’d see that a little something got sent her way. Jimmy did, too. It was Jimmy who suggested we give her a regular … stipend, I guess you’d call it. I said I’d take care of it, she was my responsibility, not his, I just wanted him to work out the details. Jimmy’s people, I mean his legitimate people, got in touch with her, and they gave her an ID number and a telephone number she could call collect, and they told her she should get a bank account, and there would be something deposited twice a month.

She knew it was from you?

I was the logical candidate, wasn’t I?

And you never saw her?

Not after she went to Mexico, no. That was in 1950, 1951.

All those years she never got in touch with you?

Directly just that once, when she got arrested in Michigan. But then she’d send me those things in the mail I mentioned, the tapes and the clippings and things. It was a way of keeping in touch.

Arthur closed his eyes. I thought he might be weeping, but perhaps he was just trying to preserve the memories. I changed direction. You knew the girl in that picture I showed you was Meta Dierdorf, didn’t you?

He opened his eyes and waited a beat. Yes.

Why did you lie to me then?

A pained expression crossed his face. She was somebody I simply hadn’t expected to come up. And I didn’t want to give anything away I didn’t have to. So I lied. I’d never seen the picture before. And I never knew they had this … episode together. Arthur stared at me sadly. I’ve always liked you, Jack. I just never thought of you as the hound of heaven.

I wasn’t sure that was intended as a compliment. Who is Max, Arthur?

A lawyer. Like Blue said.

He fixed the Ypsilanti beef?

He made it go away, yes.

So he knows what strings to pull?

Arthur was getting back into form: When you hire lawyers, you expect them to know what strings to pull.

Even in pain and as old as he was, Arthur was not entirely leveling with me. I think he was incapable of it. I did not know exactly what he was omitting, or why, but I knew I was not getting the whole story.

Does Max have a last name?

Yes.

I was trying to be patient: Then what is Max’s last name, Arthur?

Arthur hesitated, as if running over the possibilities.

Look, Arthur, I said. If a drug charge was settled in Ypsilanti in 1979, then the charge sheet and the name of counsel are a matter of public record. And by now you know that sooner or later I am going to track down that counsel’s name, and if counsel was a local Ypsilanti lawyer appearing for an out-of-state attorney, then I, or an intermediary, in this case a cop I know in Detroit named Maury Ahearne, an eight-hundred-pound gorilla, believe me, one of us, count on it, is going to drag the name of that out-of-state attorney from the local attorney. I have not come this far, Arthur, to let you jerk my chain.

Riordan, Arthur said. His name is Max Riordan.