Playland (64 page)

Denis Maxwell (“Max”) Riordan, Jimmy Riordan’s nephew and the junior United States senator from Florida, a Republican from Orlando, listened to what I had to say and then threatened suit if I implied that anything illicit had transpired between his uncle and Morris Lefkowitz. Uncle Jimmy was Mr. Lefkowitz’s attorney, no more, Max Riordan said, a right guaranteed under the Constitution of the United States of America, any citizen is entitled to representation, whatever public attitudes of revulsion may exist toward that citizen, the defense of Jimmy Hoffa by Edward Bennett Williams being in this great tradition. In any event, Max Riordan continued, my uncle and Morris Lefkowitz were never social friends or business partners, their relationship
was protected by the attorney-client privilege, Morris Lefkowitz was never arrested in seventy-seven years of robust good health, the James Francis Riordan Chair in Jurisprudence at the University of Florida Law School is one of the nation’s most prestigious endowed professorships, and the annual James Francis Riordan Lecture in Miami was eagerly anticipated in the legal community, F. Lee Bailey has been a Riordan Lecturer, and Edwin Meese as well, and to imply, as you seem to be implying, Mr. Broderick, that my uncle Jimmy was just trying retroactively, and out of a guilty conscience, to buy himself a good name, is criminal slander, et cetera and so forth, and to be frank, I expected more from the son of Hugh Broderick, who served this nation and so many of its presidents so well.

Max Riordan was an idiot, but then I have always had a low tolerance for politics and politicians. He was up for reelection, a difficult race, and the idea that he would sue me for unspecified allegations about Jimmy Riordan and Morris Lefkowitz was a bluff, not the sort of thing he would wish played out in the tabloids during a political campaign. He had his uncle’s name, but not the smarts I had come to appreciate so as I dug into the history of James Francis Riordan. In any event, I was more interested in something else.

Where is Blue Tyler’s daughter now?

I don’t know.

Of course you do, Senator. Jimmy Riordan never let anything go. He would have had her name and the name of her adopted parents in his papers.

That information would be privileged, Mr. Broderick.

Senator, Jimmy Riordan’s will was probated in New York. According to the terms of that will—and I had my lawyers look it up in Manhattan Surrogate Court before I came here—you were his sole noninstitutional beneficiary. There was also a single trust, set up in 1949, and the will stipulated that upon your uncle’s death, or if he were to become physically or mentally impaired, you would succeed him as its trustee. As you did in 1969, when James Francis Riordan suffered the cerebral incident
that ultimately caused his death. A portion of the income from that trust went to a couple named Moira and Brendan Kean for the care and upbringing of their adopted daughter, and of that daughter only, not of subsequent issue should there be any. The balance of the income went to increase the value of the trust. When the adoptive daughter came of age, or upon the death of her adoptive parents, whichever came first, she would become the beneficiary of the trust. If her adoptive parents were still alive, they would receive an allowance from the trust, unless the trustee, with cause, decided otherwise. Am I on the money so far?

Max Riordan, R-Fla., stared at me without replying.

Brendan Kean was a former assistant D.A. in Queens, I continued. Chief prosecutor in all the rougher homicide cases. A city kid. Grew up in Inwood, went to St. John’s and St. John’s Law School. Right?

Still no reply.

He went into private practice. Specializing in criminal law. He was one of the lawyers your uncle Jimmy hired to defend Jacob King in the Philly Wexler case.

Max Riordan stirred uncomfortably in his chair.

Brendan Kean and his wife had no kids. And if your uncle was going to place Jacob King’s child, he wasn’t going to place it with someone he didn’t know. Someone he wasn’t sure of. That was never Jimmy Riordan’s way.

What do you hope to gain from this, Mr. Broderick?

Nothing, Senator. I just want to close a book that never should have been opened in the first place.

I thought it would end after I saw Max Riordan. Brendan and Moira Twomey Kean were never told the name of their daughter’s natural parents, nor of Jimmy Riordan’s role in the adoption. Lack of evidence notwithstanding, however, I would have been surprised if Brendan Kean, given his background, had not made a few discreet inquiries, and perhaps even some discoveries. The Keans named the girl Teresa, and never had any other
children of their own. Teresa was by all accounts a loving child given only to the usual rebellions of adolescence—youthful experimentations with sex and controlled substances—a bright student as well, who earned a scholarship to Smith and married soon after graduation. The marriage did not last. A second marriage also ended in divorce. Having no children, she applied to Yale Law School and was accepted; on admission to the bar three years later, she reclaimed her maiden name and worked in her father’s Manhattan law office until his death in a small plane crash in 1977, on a flight to his summer house at Cape May, on the Jersey shore. After his death, she moved to Washington as an advocate for an organization lobbying on behalf of victims’ rights, a not-insubstantial irony, considering her natural father’s propensity for making victims. In time, she became the organization’s president and spokesperson. As it happened, I was aware of Teresa Kean’s name and had seen her briefly several times, arguing her case on the Sunday talk shows and the
MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour
. She seemed bright, articulate, and attractive, but otherwise she had made little impression on me, advocacy politics not being an area in which I had much interest. Her mother was still living, in a retirement community in California, and Teresa Kean visited her regularly. She knew she was adopted, had known since she was a little girl, but had never shown any inclination to discover the names or whereabouts of her natural parents.

I told Max Riordan I would not attempt to contact Teresa Kean, and that if in the natural course of events I did happen upon her, the secret of her birth was safe with me. I also told him that if my path did cross Melba Mae Toolate’s again, as was not unlikely if she were still alive, I would not reveal to her anything I had learned about her daughter.

There it should have ended.

But life is rarely so simple.

M
y father was invariably referred to as “Billionaire Hugh Broderick” in the press, to the point that a few years ago, when I was doing publicity on a picture I wrote (and the fact that the screenwriter was doing publicity is a comment in itself on the quality of the film, which the stars and the director were now pretending they had nothing to do with), the interviewer asked if it was not true, as he had heard, that once when I was a child I had asked my father why he was not called Bill instead of Hugh if his first name was Billionaire. If memory serves, I laughed heartily at this absurdity; the exchange occurred on a live morning television show, and however much one might like to call the host an asshole, it is the rare guest who, at 7:00
A.M
., can summon the kidney to do so. The laugh was taken to mean assent, and as so often happens, this assumed assent found its way into the texts about my father, with the result that the story has turned up in two books about him, and a television documentary as well, the story having achieved the status of holy writ, a means of humanizing a man who in truth was only rarely capable of being human.

My father favored me with the same indifference he showed toward the rest of mankind, the blood kinship between us offering
me no special discount. I actually rather liked the old bastard, especially the way he never backed down. He fucked my first wife—after we had divorced, it is true, but I do not think it would have made much difference if we had still been married; she was there for the taking, and he was a taker—and he made no apologies for it when some years later I confronted him with the fact. I could not emulate him in many ways—he was sui generis, an ignoble savage for whom convention was just another piece of china that deserved to be smashed, and I had been civilized, Lord Greystoke to his Tarzan, but we did share an arrogance, in my case watered down, although less so as I grow older, and perhaps more a product of his money, and my share of it, than of his genetic pool. Unlike most of my compatriots in the picture business, I had a listed telephone number, and my father was the reason. Until the day he died, his name was always in the directory, “BRODERICK, Hugh,” with both his office and home numbers listed. Often he would pick up the telephone himself, when it rang, beating secretary or butler to it, always answering without the amenity of “Hello,” just a simple “Yes,” or occasionally a disconcerting “What is it?” More often than not, “What is it?” would elicit a surprised, “Who’s this?” To which my father would reply, “Who you were calling,” and then hang up, advantage Hugh Broderick. It was this constant search for any edge, however small, that led him to list his telephone numbers in the first place; many of the people who called were those he had bested in some business venture or whose abilities he had publicly denigrated, and who in turn wanted satisfaction. A mistake. My father had the manners of a billy club and the tact of a fart; abuse was his natural dialect, his way of keeping trim. So I also listed my number, less to imitate him—a pale way, at best—than because I could imagine the waves of his contempt coming at me from beyond the grave if it were unlisted. You’re just like all those other Hollywood Hebrews, he would have said, a phrasing he often used when trying to get a rise out of me—he seldom failed to do so—because not to respond was to run the risk of being told that my
backbone had the tensile strength of a strand of linguini. Listing my phone number was really just a painless affect—who would call a screenwriter anyway?—leading to only a few unwanted calls, most of which could be brushed off.