The Empty Glass (18 page)

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 22

51.

I
t was Rock Hudson’s voice that I heard on the Sony tape in Otash’s office. I would have known it anywhere. I had seen most of his movies, had always thought of him as a man’s man. But I guess I’m going on the record now as saying that, if anything, Rock Hudson was a man’s woman. And not just one man’s. Almost every man’s.

On the tape his wife said, “You told Christine that you had found great happiness in your homosexuality.”

“I don’t know why I said that. Because I haven’t. You know there was Jack. [unintelligible] That was unhappy.”

“And then there was Randy.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Don’t you learn by your mistakes?”

“Yes. Everyone does, for God’s sake.”

“Then why do you continue to do it, over and over? I know everything. I know why I didn’t hear from you in Italy, and what you were doing before Italy, and since you got back.”

Otash stopped the reel-to-reel and smiled, his cigar extended between fat fingers studded with oversized rings.

I never understood why they call a face a
mug
until I met Fred Otash. His face was half jowls and half eyes. His eyes were black and they followed you even when his head did not, like Jesus in paintings. He wore paisley shirts open at his wide collar, his chest hair matching his white sideburns.

“So that’s how it’s done,” he said. “The wife hired me to tape him as part of the divorce. There are others. They hire me, and I get in’air. Sometimes I have to get in’air without the whole house knowing, so someone who works for me dresses up like a plumber or something and the truck that’s parked outside reads ‘Twenty-four-Hour TV Repair’ or ‘Roofing Company’ or ‘Furniture Company.’ My favorite is ‘Otash Plumbing: We Clean Cesspools.’”

“Boy, do you ever,” I said.

“A man’s gotta live.”

“Do you do electricity?”

“I don’t know what you mean?”

“Are you ever B. F. Fox?”

“Never heard of it,” he said, but I wasn’t so sure.

“Why?” you ask me now. “Did you think he bugged the Savoy?”

I nod. “I had seen him before, Doc.”

“Where?”

“In the Monroe house,” I say. “The night I broke in.”

His office was in West Hollywood between Sunset and Santa Monica. It wasn’t far from the Hollywood Hills. There had been fires in Cajon Pass the night before and I could smell the smoke through the window that overlooked the fire escape and the gray brick walls and shaded windows of the nearby building. I saw a pair of binoculars on the sill under the spotted window. The spots on the window were dead flies.

Otash hit
PLAY
again.

The Hudson tape continued, and I heard the star confess that, while in Italy filming
A Farewell to Arms
, he engaged in an affair with an “Italian member of the crew, Roberto or Francis or something, a most discreet man.” I heard the wife telling Rock that the doctor knew his problems by his “inkblots,” she said. “You told me you saw thousands of butterflies and also snakes. Butterflies mean femininity, and snakes represent the male penis. . . . There isn’t anything glandular about your homosexuality, it is only a freezing at an emotional state, and it’s up to the individual to grow out of it.”

But he didn’t. He had an affair with a married male friend, then went to the man’s house and had dinner with the man and his wife. He had an affair with his predatory agent, Henry Willson, a “bitch in heat” (the wife said) in Palm Springs. And “everyone knows you were picking up boys off the street shortly after we were married,” she said. “People don’t talk if you aren’t doing anything. You never hear these stories about Gary Cooper.”

Otash hit
STOP
. “So,” he said. “Now you know what I do. You going to tell me why you’re here?”

“Jo sent me.”

“I know that.”

“She said there was a tape.”

“What tape?”

“She said that you knew Marilyn.”

“Oh, Jesus, not this—”

“What’s ‘this’?”

“I guess you know,” he said, “if you know Jo.”

•   •   •

Y
ou’ve heard of Peter Lawford, Doc—the boozy English actor who had, through good graces and looks, insinuated himself into the Kennedy family by marrying the president’s sister, Pat, in 1954. Sinatra had famously dubbed him the Brother-in-Lawford, though people forget now that Kennedy himself was first known as the guy whose sister was married to the movie star. What you might not know is that the beach house Lawford bought, the old Louis B. Mayer mansion in Santa Monica, became a sort of White House West—the place where the president relaxed in Los Angeles. It was, as such, a presidential whorehouse.

“There were parties,” Otash said, chewing his cigar. “
Extreme
ones.”

When Pat was away, Peter stocked the house with starlets and would-be singers, waitresses and child acrobats, girls who did nothing but walk around in bikinis with thumbs in their mouths, girls who sat stoned and nude with legs spread on the edges of beds. There was music and booze, and when the orgies ended, often around dawn, the president would take one or two of his favorite “kids” back to his hotel.

That is why the house had bugs: “And I don’t mean cockroaches,” Otash said. “
Four
bugs were installed. In the bedroom, on the phones. Numerous tapes were made of Marilyn and Jack in the act of love.”

“Did you hear Bobby Kennedy on a tape, too?”

“Yes.”

“At the Lawford house?”

“The
Monroe
house.”

“There were bugs in the Brentwood hacienda?”

“Yes.”

“Did the tapes confirm that Bobby and Marilyn had an affair?”

“Of course . . . sure. Bobby and Marilyn were recorded many times.”

“Were tapes recorded at Marilyn’s house up until her death?”

“They were recorded on the day of her death . . . the
night
of her death.”

“A conversation with Kennedy?”

“
Bobby
Kennedy.”

“And what were they talking about?”

“It was a violent argument. She was saying, ‘I feel passed around! I feel used! I feel like a piece of meat!’”

“And you heard this tape?”

“One of them.”

“One.”

“There were two. One belonged to the Kennedys.”

“And the second?”

“It was Marilyn’s. They’ve torn that place upside down trying to find it. That’s why there was a delay before anyone was called.”

“They didn’t find it?”

“They wondered if I knew where it was. I didn’t. I would have told them. The only one who thinks she knows for sure is Jeanne Carmen.”

“And what does Jeanne Carmen say?”

“Marilyn hid it in a bus locker.”

“Well, that should tell you something.”

“You know how many bus lockers there are in this city, guy?”

52.

882
North Doheny Drive is a triplex on the corner of Cynthia Street. Sinatra’s accountant manages the place, which is why the singer’s secretary lives there. So does Jeanne Carmen, who had more than once been the willing if not eager recipient of the Chairman of the Board’s affections, which were as changeable as the weather in San Francisco, where both he and Tony Bennett had so glibly left their hearts. Marilyn herself had first lived at Doheny before she married DiMaggio. She moved back after divorcing the playwright. She stayed there, a kind of way station, on her way to the permanent digs—as permanent as her digs would ever be. She died only six months after moving to Brentwood.

But you know that already.

So do I.

What I didn’t know was what Jeanne Carmen knew, or had been led to believe, about the tape.

I went in through the lobby. The bell didn’t work, so I stood by the mailboxes smoking before someone emerged, a woman with her dog, and I climbed three flights to 3A, the alphanumeric I had found next to the initials
J.C.
on the mailbox.

I knocked.

A voice: “Hang on a second.”

A dog barked—one of those precious teacups that use noise to overcompensate for the fact that they can only shake and pee. Jeanne opened the door three fingers and peered out. She wore a bathrobe. Her blond hair was mussed. Roots peeked from the scalp, looking vaguely skunkish. She wore no makeup. I wondered if she’d been up all night. Maybe I had woken her.

“Who are you?”

I tipped my hat. “Ben Fitzgerald, ma’am. Friend of Jo Carnahan’s.”

“What are you doing here?”

“We met at Ciro’s. You said I looked like Don Taylor, ma’am. You said Shakespeare—”

“Get out of here.”

“You said Shakespeare said ‘more’s the pity.’”

“Shakespeare said a lot of things. It’s no concern of mine.”

She started to close the door. I put my foot in it. “If I could just have a minute of your time.”

“You already
had
a minute.”

“One more, then. One question, really.”

She opened the door slightly.

“You told Miss Carnahan about a tape.”

“I don’t remember.”

“You know Jo Carnahan.”

“Socially.”

“You said Marilyn had a tape.”

“Who said anything about a tape?”

“Jo, ma’am. She said—”

“That bitch.”

A voice from inside: “Jeanne?” A man. Was this one of her pill parties? Or was she entertaining one of her extracurriculars? “Who is it?” he asked.

“Wrong number,” she said, and closed the door.

Sure, a Big Story was out there somewhere in our sprawling, sports-starved metropolis just waiting for Benjamin Fitzgerald, deputy coroner, to break it. But a guy can get discouraged—especially when he hasn’t eaten in twenty-four hours.

So I ordered the ham and eggs at the first restaurant I could find, an evil place where I discovered mold on the bottom of the pie that I wanted just to tide me over before the eggs. The old woman behind the counter didn’t seem to have washed her hair. Her hairnet looked like a clogged drain. That should have tipped me off. I didn’t want the eggs anymore—they were probably filled with shells or blood—so I canceled my order.

She handed me the bill, but when I reached into my wallet I realized I had nothing left. “Look, I have to get money.”

“Oldest trick in the book.”

“I don’t have money, ma’am. But I can leave my hat.”

“It’s not much of a hat. Not worth the price of that pie.”

“That pie was garbage.”

“I
made
that pie.”

“There’s mold on the bottom.”

“That isn’t mold,” she said. “It’s tapioca.”

•   •   •

“
—overdrawn,” said the bank manager. “We’ve been trying to contact you. We’re quite troubled about checks made out for an inordinate amount of money, and have no choice but to close—”

“I didn’t
write
any checks.”

“Let’s not drift down this tiresome route, Mr. Fitzgerald. Trust me: I’ve traveled it often. It has been a trying day and I have all but exhausted my patience. We’ve been trying to contact you.”

“I’ve been on vacation.”

“That’s not what we heard.”

“Oh?”

“We tracked you down at work,” he said. “They said that you were fired.”

53.

Taking everything into account, what action, if any, do you think the U.S. should take at this time in regard to Cuba?

Bomb, invade . . . 10%

Trade embargo . . . 13%

Something short of war . . . 26%

Hands off . . . 22%

Other action . . . 4%

Don’t know . . . 23%

I
don’t know, either, Doc. No one does. I am reading the Gallup poll results in the
Times
as you try to make the Sony work. It has stopped again. When it finally kicks in, you stare at the turning tape, sweat beading on your forehead as you light another cigarette and say, “Put the paper down.”

I do.

“Now continue.”

“Where were we?” I manage a yawn.

“You went to pay for the pie. You didn’t have the money.”

“Worse,” I said. “I didn’t have a job.”

•   •   •

I
returned to the place where I had spent my adult working life, the rat’s labyrinth of dark halls and empty offices, and heard the giggling just before I saw the man with a brush. He was repainting the name on my office door. My name had been removed; it was now nothing but a splotch that lay, along with my postcard from the Pick-Carter in Cleveland, on the papers that covered the floor.

“’Scuse me.” I said.

The painter turned to me.

“This is my office,” I said.

“So why is Archie in there?”

I heard the giggling again. Through the half-opened door, I saw feet on a desk. They began to jiggle as the man named Archie whispered, then laughed again.

I stepped inside.

He was nuzzling the phone, his broad grin stretching over most of his face. His right hand was cupped over the receiver and mouth. I stood until he caught my eye, put his hand on the receiver, and said, “May I help you?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Just working.”

“Working.”

“The daily grind. All that. Another day, another three-fifty an hour. And all that.”

“I mean what are you doing
here
?”

“Oh, here.”

“My office.”

“Yours?” He looked around, surprised. “What’s your name?”

“Ben Fitzgerald.”

“Oh, hey, Ben. Tell me: How are your ‘other opportunities’ going?”

“What?”

“The ones you ‘left’ to ‘pursue.’”

“I don’t follow.”

“The memo said you left LACCO ‘to pursue other opportunities.’ In Cleveland.”

“Who said Cleveland?”

“Who else?” he said. “Curphey.”

•   •   •

I
found him on the sixth hole, a bunker cut within the putting surface of the Riviera Country Club, built over the sets that director Thomas Ince had constructed on the slopes of the Santa Ynez Canyon in 1912. Back then, it was known as Inceville, where the director made hundreds of movies that no one remembers now. You could walk through ersatz Japanese villages, Puritan settlements, and Swiss streets seven miles up the hills from the spot where Sunset ends at the Pacific Coast Highway. The place only lasted ten years. The first fire hit in 1916. By 1922 it was already a ghost town.

Now it’s the Pacific Palisades.

“Dr. Curphey?” I said.

He stopped, looked up, and turned. He was smoking his pipe. “Ben.”

“I want to speak with you.”

“Another time.”

“Was I fired?”

“I
said
another time.”

I grabbed the club from his hands. “I went on vacation like you told me to go on vacation and I forgot what you told me to forget but I came back to the office this morning to find that someone had taken my job.”

“Archie didn’t
take
your job,” Curphey said. “He
earned
it. He’s a hardworking,
moral
young man. That’s what we need in this office.”

“I perjured myself for you.”

“And you stole a diary from the Monroe house. And you stole Nembutals from the Monroe file. And you stole the key to the Evidence Room. Now we asked you to get help.”

“I was never offered help.”

“You turned it down.”

“I don’t have a job. What am I supposed to do?”

“I’m sure you’re familiar with the classifieds. I suggest you check them out. Now, please give me my club.”

“I have a son to support.”

“Oh? I hear he’s being supported by a gangster. Who happens to be fucking your wife.”

I swung the iron straight into Curphey’s crotch. The pipe popped from his mouth, ashes burning on the kikuyu grass. He staggered backward with an “oof,” clutching his groin even as I felt the hands grab me from behind: one guy on each side as they dragged me, kicking, down the fairway.

You can see the pictures, Doc. They show me struggling, maybe even “drunk.” Well, that’s the power of suggestion. But if someone handed you them and said, “He was drunk and disorderly,” wouldn’t you agree?

It sure looks that way.

Lots
of things do.

“And that was when it hit me,” I say.

“What?”

“Curphey said I’d stolen the key to the Evidence Room.”

“So?”

“It was true,” I say. “And I still had it.”