Show Business Is Murder (4 page)

“Unless Mendy didn't realize the guy was an enemy.” Patrick's voice was thoughtful and he gazed into the distance. “There were people who testified in executive session, secretly naming names and never getting the rap as informers. Poor Larry Parks, the guy married to Betty Garrett, had to do that.”

“But Mendy didn't name names,” Birch objected. “He was a victim of the blacklist, so why would someone want to kill him?”

“You're supposing he told us the truth,” Scotty said. She reached for a cigarette and Birch wrinkled her nose. Smoking was one of the few things about Scotty she genuinely disliked.

“What if he lied to us?” Scotty blew smoke into the air and waved out her match. “What if he did name names and somebody he named killed him out of revenge?”

“We're back to the old problem,” Patrick said, irritation wrinkling his smooth forehead. “If Mendy ruined some guy's life by giving him up to the Committee, why would he accept a pill from the guy?”

“Who expects somebody to poison you, for God's sake?” Birch wasn't sure why she'd decided to become devil's advocate. “Maybe Mendy recognized the guy but thought bygones were bygones.”

“Not those people, honey.” Patrick shook his head and his long blond hair fell into his eyes. “Elia Kazan, to name just one, will never be forgiven for naming names. People who lived through the blacklist have long memories and there are no buried hatchets that I know about.”

“What if Mendy didn't recognize the guy? It was a long time ago, and frankly, one old guy kind of looks like the next to me.”

“Wow.” Patrick gave a long low whistle. “Imagine. Ruining somebody's life and then adding insult to injury by forgetting you'd ever done it. Heavy.”

“Heavy indeed,” said another, deeper, voice.

It was the man Scotty said had followed Mendy out of the theatre. Birch might never have recognized him out of context, but in Ratner's, while they were talking of Mendy, he was in context.

“Sit,” Scotty said, moving over in the booth. “Sit and explain.”

“You can't think he's going to confess?”

Patrick looked at the old man and his blue eyes widened. “Are you who I think you are?”

“Paul Dixon. The former Paul Dixon. The present Paul Damrosch, not that it matters. I can't keep a job under any name.”

“You blame Mendy for that?”

“He wrote the letter.” The little old man's breathy voice held a world of sadness. “My best friend, and he goes into executive testimony, talks just to the committee, no publicity, names names, and my name leads all the rest. Then he plants that phony story with Pegler, calls me a faggot. Makes sure I'll never work again. To this day, to this goddamn
day
I got FBI guys following me around.”

“How do you know it was Mendy?” Scotty's voice held a note of pleading. “Couldn't it have been somebody else?”

“You ever hear of the Freedom of Information Act?” Dixon looked around the group. Patrick nodded and Scotty started to speak, then closed her mouth.

“I got my files. I looked close, and even though they put black ink over all the names, I thought about where I was when, who I was with. Who took me to those so-called Communist meetings. I took out my old diaries I used to keep when I first got to Hollywood. Kept them so I could
write home to my mother, tell her all the glamorous people I was meeting.”

“And you figured out that Mendy ratted on you,” Scotty said. A long blue cloud of smoke emanated from her lips; she crushed the butt into an ashtray. “He destroyed your career—but is that a good enough reason to kill somebody?”

“My wife couldn't stand it. She was high-strung when we married, I knew that. But when we sold the house in the hills and moved to Compton, when I couldn't even hold a job in a bakery, when she started seeing guys in black cars everywhere she went, she lost control. One night she took too many pills and died in her sleep and I will never, so long as the sun sets in the West, forgive Mendelson for that. He killed her with his big mouth.”

“If you were married, how could anybody believe you were gay?” Birch thought it was a good question, but Patrick rolled his eyes and Dixon gave a short, mirthless laugh.

“Kid,” the old man replied, “Rock Hudson was married. Every faggot in Hollywood—” he gave a brief, apologetic nod in Patrick's direction—” pardon my French, makes damn sure to get married.”

When Birch blurted, “Rock Hudson is gay?” Patrick almost fell out of the booth laughing.

Scotty brought them back to the matter at hand. “Maybe he was just trying to save himself. Maybe he named you thinking the Committee already had your name.”

“That doesn't excuse the call to Pegler,” the old man replied. “Mendy was jealous—he wanted the breaks I was getting and he thought if I was out of the way, he'd be cast in the roles I was up for. Happiest day of my life was when Gene Kelly said yes to
Summer Stock,
because that meant Mendy was screwed.”

“We figured out that you offered Mendy a saccharin tablet and he took it,” Patrick said. “Do you mean to tell us he didn't recognize you?”

A slow, sweet smile crossed the wizened face. “Oh, he recognized me, all right. That's why I'm not afraid you'll tell the cops what I'm telling you. He recognized me and he knew he had two choices: take the pill and go quietly or let me tell my story. One thing about the old ham: he really liked putting on that ‘I was a victim of the blacklist' crap, and he didn't want anybody knowing him for the rat he was. I expected him to take the poison, the dirty coward. At least now I can go tell my Stella the bastard is dead.”

“Your wife?”

“Yeah. She's buried out in Woodlawn; I brought her home to be with her family. So I'll take her a bouquet tomorrow and tell her that Mendy's gone and she'll maybe forgive me for going to those stupid meetings and screwing up my life.”

THE COPS HAD
Mendy's death down as a suicide, and now it looked as if it really might have been one. There was nothing for us to do but drift home and make a date to see another double feature next week.

The newspapers reported the death of Paul Dixon, blacklisted “onetime movie hopeful,” about four months later. I figured he'd already been diagnosed with the emphysema that killed him; one more reason he wasn't afraid of jail.

There's a strange undercurrent of sadness in movie musicals. Judy's addictions, Mickey's pathetic eagerness to please, the frenetic tone of thirties musicals, the ones that packed as many chorus girls onto the screen as possible, perhaps just to keep them eating during the Depression. And what the blacklist did to a couple of young hoofers.

I once went to a church basement with an old friend and her deaf sister to see a silent movie. Before the film, a man
made a speech in sign language, which Beth kindly interpreted for me, saying that the great days of silent film were still alive in the church basements and libraries where, as he put it, “The lights are turned down, the projector is turned on, and the deaf watch.”

It was a strangely moving experience, seeing Lillian Gish and John Gilbert with people who saw their movies as whole, not soundless. I think of that when I recall the days and nights we spent at Theatre 80. The movie musicals were made for Main Street, for families and “kids of all ages.” Old people and gay people bought the tickets at Theatre 80. We were an audience not planned for, but perhaps especially sweet because unexpected. We kept the musical alive in those lean years between
Brigadoon
and
Saturday Night Fever
—not that even Patrick, with his huge crush on Travolta, ever accepted
Fever
as a true musical.

Patrick died a year ago today. He was our cruise director, our emcee, our encylopedia of all things Hollywood. Gay Hollywood was his specialty, and like so many of us, he took great pleasure in claiming the brightest, most incandescent stars for “our side.” As if straight America would come to tolerate us if they learned that some of their favorite stars were “that way.”

Oh, Patrick, I do miss you!

My life back then had more Patrick in it than I knew. I breathed him like air, and it never occurred to me that one day he would cease to exist, like the musical itself.

No, not AIDS; he hated clichés, except when they were lines from old movies. Plain, ordinary, vanilla cancer, the kind straight people get, too. And, yes, I brought a VCR to the hospital so he could watch all the musicals his heart desired and I think, I hope,
Footlight Parade
was the last one he saw.

So tonight Birch and I will gather together all the people
who loved him. We'll make buttered popcorn, toast him with champagne, and celebrate the life of a man who was completely and totally big time in his heart.

And perhaps we'll raise one of those glasses to the late, never-great Paul Dixon.

EDWARD D. HOCH

“
SO YOU'RE A
performance artist?” the Las Vegas reporter asked. Wanda figured he was about twenty-one, probably on his first assignment covering the more bizarre aspects of Vegas nightlife.

“That's what I am, Sonny,” she said, taking her costume out of the closet.

“Name is Rick Dodson,” he said softly.

“Yeah, Rick. You're a handsome young man. This is for the
Vegas Weekly?
”

“That's right.”

She peeled off her blouse and jeans. He wasn't the first man to see her in her underwear. “I have to dress while we talk. Hope you don't mind.”

He moistened his lips but kept a firm grip on his pencil. “No. Go ahead.”

“What was it you wanted to know?”

“Is Wanda Cirrus your real name?”

“It is now.” She held the costume up to the light, inspecting it for stains.

“Are you married?”

“Not now. Not for years.”

“As a performance artist, do you feel you're closer to the artistic world or to show business?”

“When I'm performing in a museum it's art, when I'm in an Off-Broadway theater it's show business. What more can I say.”

“What is it here in Vegas?”

She slipped into the snug red and black cat suit, zipping it up the front, and pulled up the hood to cover her hair. Then she slipped her feet into the shiny black boots and picked up the black gloves and blindfold for later. She pressed the button to arm the apartment's security system and replied, “I don't know. Why don't you come along tonight and decide for yourself?”

COVERING HER COSTUME
with a long cape, she talked about performance art as she led him downstairs. “It only dates back to the 1970s, really. It was an outgrowth of the so-called happenings during the sixties, when I was still a child. These usually were collaborative efforts involving a company of performers in a non-structured theater piece. Members of the audience were invited to take part, and there was often a good deal of nudity involved. In the mid-seventies some individuals or smaller groups began to appear on stage. A few became quite well-known in places like New York and San Francisco. I remember a woman who daubed herself with paint and rolled around nude on a canvas. She even sold some of the resulting paintings. I believe there's a man in New York today who sits on a ladder eating the Wall Street Journal. He's also been known to crawl through the Bowery wearing a business suit. There's usually an implied message of some sort in performance art.”

“What is the message in your piece?”

She gave a little shrug. “Chance. One writer viewed me as a personification of Lady Luck.”

At the car she suggested he follow along in his vehicle. “It's not far.”

Ten minutes later Wanda pulled into the parking garage at one of the older hotels, just over the city line. Rick followed along as she led the way through the lobby to a private meeting room that had been converted for use as a bar and casino. A tall man with a mustache was waiting for her at the door. “Hello, Wanda. How are you feeling tonight? Black or red?”

She laughed, handing him her cape. “I haven't decided yet.”

“Who's this?” he asked, indicating the reporter.

“Rick Dodson from the
Vegas Weekly
. Rick, meet Judd Franklyn. This is his operation.”

The two men shook hands. “Doing a little story about us?”

“Well, about Miss Cirrus.”

Franklyn slipped his arm around the young man's shoulders. “Sure, you can tell what she does. But call it a performance. Don't mention the betting aspect. I don't want the Gaming Commission after me.”

“All right,” Dodson agreed.

“Between ourselves, they know what goes on, but we can't be too blatant about it. We don't run ads. We depend on word-of-mouth.”

“I understand.”

Judd Franklyn looked Wanda up and down. “You're in great shape, girl. Go out and do your stuff.”

“Nobody's called me a girl in twenty years.” She slipped on the black gloves and followed him to the platform, still carrying the blindfold. The hood was in place over her hair and neck. The clinging cat suit was basic black, but with red lightning bolts that gave her the appearance of some sort of comic book superhero. Miss Roulette, perhaps.

The platform indeed was a huge roulette wheel, its diameter almost equal to a boxing ring. Close to a hundred players were crowded around it. Wanda stepped over the
numbered slots to a small turntable at the center of the wheel. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Judd Franklyn announced, “it is my honor to present the famed performance artist Miss Wanda Cirrus as the human roulette ball. She will blindfold herself, and while the wheel spins clockwise her little turntable will move in the opposite direction. She will roll off the turntable and reach her hands into one of the numbered slots. You have one minute to place your bets.”

Wanda smiled at them and pulled the padded blindfold over her eyes. Then she crouched down, linking her hands around her knees, and waited. Almost at once the turntable began to move. She knew the wheel itself would be spinning, too. After several seconds, when she started to grow dizzy, she pitched forward off the turntable. As she hit the padded wheel itself her two hands shot out blindly, clasped together, and found one of the numbered slots.

“Twenty-nine black!” Judd Franklyn called out.

As the wheel slowed its spin Wanda pulled the blindfold from her eyes. “It is fate,” she told them with a graceful bow. “I'll be back in fifteen minutes.”

Dodson was waiting for her in awed amazement. “How often do you perform?”

She gave him a smile as she pulled back the hood from her head. “Every fifteen minutes from nine till midnight, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights. The wheel action doesn't stop, of course. When I‘m not on they use a white volleyball.”

“That's unbelievable! Is this the wildest thing you ever did?”

Wanda shrugged. “Once at a performance art festival in Boston I stayed curled up in a birdcage the entire day. And I crawled naked down a tube filled with glop. It was supposed to depict my birth. When I turned forty I decided it was time I kept my clothes on.” Remembering when she changed into her costume, she amended, “At least some of
them.” She wondered why she was telling him these things that she'd never told anyone else.

“Is this sort of work profitable?”

Wanda shrugged. “I make a living. Off-Broadway I get a percentage of the gross. They work it a bit differently here, but it still depends on the business my performance brings in.”

He watched her for the next hour, every fifteen minutes, as she rolled in a ball off the revolving turntable and stretched out her hands to blindly find one of the slots. Seven red, one red, twenty-two black, eighteen red.

“Thanks for your help,” he told her as he left.

“I'll watch for your article. If you need anything else, give me a call.”

The rest of the night was routine. Thirty red, double zero, two black, seventeen black, another seven red, thirty-six red, eleven black, twenty-one red. Thirteen performances in all, nine to midnight. Five black, seven red, and the double-zero. Seven odd, five even. Only one repeat. She liked to keep track of the numbers and colors, seeking a pattern that didn't exist. The big betting always came at midnight, her final performance, when Franklyn raised the limit from five hundred to five thousand.

She performed again on Friday night, and this time after her ten o'clock appearance one of the bettors who was having a good night wanted to buy her a drink. “No thanks,” she told him. “I get dizzy enough doing this routine thirteen times a night.”

“How about after you knock off at midnight?”

She looked him over more closely. He was probably in his early forties, about her age, “Do I know you from somewhere?”

“Sam Dole. I'm here often. You maybe noticed me in the crowd.”

“Maybe,” she agreed, wondering what he wanted. Maybe he just liked the way the black and red cat suit fitted her body.

“So how about that drink?”

“Why not? It's Friday.”

“I'll meet you in the parking garage right after midnight.”

“What's wrong with the bar here?” she asked.

“They probably don't like you drinking with the customers.”

She thought about that and decided Judd Franklyn might find cause for complaint. “OK, the parking garage it is.”

The next number she hit was a zero.

BY TEN AFTER
twelve she was out of the hotel, walking toward her car in the garage. Her hood was down and her costume covered by the cloak. She wasn't looking for Sam Dole but she knew he'd be around.

“Wanda?” a voice spoke her name, quite close.

“Hi, Sam. I thought maybe you found something better to do.”

“Not a chance. Want to go in my car or follow me?”

“Where to?”

“I know a little bar outside of town.”

“I'll follow.”

He avoided the Strip, where the midnight traffic made it seem like high noon, and headed instead out the route 15 expressway to Enterprise, just south of the airport. The bar he chose was called the Landing Strip, a small place by Vegas standards with only a dozen slot machines along one wall. At this hour there were just a few customers at the bar and the tables were empty. Wanda had never been there before.
When the bartender brought their drinks Sam Dole came right to the point. “How'd you like to make some money?”

Wanda smiled at him. “I couldn't tell you how many times I've heard those words in my life. Look, Sam, I'm no call girl. If you're looking for one, you're in the right town but I'm not one of them. I'm a performance artist, period.”

He reached across the table to touch her hand. “I'm not talking about sex. Just listen to me, will you?”

Glancing around to make sure they were out of the bartender's line of vision, he took something from his pocket. “Put this on.”

It was a blindfold with an elastic band that went around the back of the head, just like the one she wore in her performance. “What's this all about?” she asked, but slipped on the blindfold as he requested. She realized at once that part of the inner padding had been cut away, leaving only a black gauze covering over her eyes. From the front she appeared blindfolded, but in actuality she could see quite clearly through the gauze. She took it off almost at once. “If you think I'm going to spot certain numbers for you, you're crazy. It wouldn't even work. When I land on that padding and stretch out my hands to a winning slot, there are only a few within reach.”

“Not a certain number, just a certain color. The colors alternate from black to red around the wheel, except for the zero and double zero spots. So no matter where you land and reach out your hands, you're never more than one—or two at most—away from a red number. With this blindfold you could pick red every time, or black.”

Wanda snorted. “And end up buried out in the desert somewhere. Judd Franklyn is no dope, you know.”

“I'm not talking about winning fifty grand a night or anything like that. Franklyn has a five hundred dollar limit anyway, except for your midnight appearance. But if you picked blacks or reds in a pre-arranged rotation for your thirteen spins, at even money that would mean winnings of
six thousand for the first twelve and five thousand for the last spin. That's eleven thousand for the night. We'd give you three thousand a night, nine thousand a week.”

“Who's we?”

“I can't win it all myself. I'd need a partner making some of the bets. If it works out we can keep at it.”

“In Vegas that's small change.”

“It adds up.”

Wanda shook her head. “Not me. Get someone else.”

“Someone else? There is no one else. It's your act!”

“Look, Sam, I don't know you. I never saw you before tonight. Why should I trust you and go along with this harebrained scheme?”

“Think of it as another performance. It would even top what you're doing now.”

“No.”

“Here's my phone number. At least think about it over the weekend and give me a call.”

FOR SOME REASON
she kept the card and did think about it. On Saturday night she went to see the Blue Man Group at one of the casinos on the strip. They were the best known of the performance artists and sometimes she envied them for their success. Maybe she needed some partners. Thinking about Sam Dole, she finally decided that what he'd said about another performance was right. It was still her creation, whether or not she could see through the blindfold. “Just one night,” she told him over the phone. “This Wednesday. I‘m nervous about it.”