Where the Truth Lies (29 page)

“Who’s that?” I’d asked.

“Nobody. I just assume that no one on earth wants to talk with anyone named Otto Bloodwort. Push the button, say today’s password, which is ‘Hi, it’s me, I’m here,’ and I’ll buzz you in.”

The route conveyed to me by Vince was like one of those maze puzzles in a kid’s comic book that resemble the upper intestine. Now my “car” was finally coiling its way up the torturous Tortuoso and my instincts were telling me that Vince had by no means given me the most direct route from my apartment to his estate. In fact, I learned much later (and not from Vince) that years before he’d had mapped out for his use the most circuitous route to his home from all points of the compass, which he relayed to first-time visitors in the hope they’d be unable to retrace their path without written instructions or a road map, lowering the odds on uninvited return guests who might contemplate dropping by without warning.

“Yes?” asked the voice that emanated from the speaker grille below the name Otto Bloodwort on the gate’s intercom.

“Hi, it’s me, I’m here,” I said. I was standing by the intercom, as I’d been unable to reach the intercom button from where I’d stopped my hideous car.

There was no reply but simply a low buzz akin to what I’d imagined the hum of the electric chair might sound like, and after a dramatic pause, the metal gate swung slowly open. I ran back to my vile vehicle, fearful that there was a time limit on how long the gate stayed open. “Lady Journalist Crushed in Dreadful Convertible.”

There was still quite a bit more driveway ahead of me after the gate. I eventually pulled my unforgivable transport into a motor court the size of a playground. Vince was framed in his doorway at the far end of a walled courtyard. He wore a fisherman’s sweater, charcoal gabardines, socks that looked like cashmere, and Bass Weejuns.

“Any trouble with the directions I gave you?” he asked.

“Only with the parts where I had to turn. It doesn’t usually take me an hour and a half to travel fourteen miles as the crow flies.” My, what an ornery cuss I was for the moment.

Vince shrugged. “I’m sorry. The price of seclusion.”

“Have you considered Yucca Flats?” I responded, pushing my luck. “Actually, it’s my fault, not yours. My car turns on a dime store.”

We walked into his home, stepping through a foyer that might have been an art gallery and down five softly carpeted steps into the living room. It was as handsome as I knew it would be and as comfortable with its manliness as Vince was with himself. Hues in every shade in which coffee can be taken: black, and with varying amounts of heavy cream, and simply cream itself. I was surprised to see so many books, not a one of them about show business.

There was a De Chirico hanging on the left wall, not one I knew but the usual setting: a sunny, eerily deserted Italian town square, a self-important statue, the long shadows of two people talking in an archway of the piazza. As always, the painter’s work looked to me like a holiday photograph taken a few seconds before something dreadful happened. Its muted oranges and yellows went well with the room, which had as its main ornamentation a marvelously slung-out view of Los Angeles, as if from the verandah of a manor house that oversees the valley that is its domain. “Good for you, Vince,” I couldn’t help but murmur to myself.

Vince asked if I’d like the grand tour, but we had work to do and some of it would not benefit from my being Vince’s pal. I was, at the very best, morally positioned somewhere between a matador and a surgeon. “You know,” I said, slinging the bag that contained my cassette tape recorder and my writing tools onto a leather couch studded in dull brass, “we’re going to be doing this every day, and I’m sure I’ll have occasion to look around. We have so much terrain to cover—”

He nodded and went into the kitchen to get some coffee. I lavished praise on his taste in Italian modern art. He laughed. “What were you expecting, wide-eyed moppets? Or matadors, nude women, and clowns on black velvet?” Again, I had reflexively been patronizing him. As I set up the tape recorder, I asked him if he always fended for himself.

The thought of having live-in help was poisonous to him. “I’d have to talk with them, ask all about how their family was doing, hear what they thought about this and that, introduce them to guests and then tell the guests all about how their family was doing, so I’d seem to be a nice guy… . That’s a lot of work, considering that what I most cherish in life these days is to not have to be ‘Vince Collins.’” That was why Reuben had been (and remained) Lanny’s valet exclusively, whom Lanny always paid directly. “I like to read, to think, and have the freedom to get up and leave any time of day without having to tell anyone about it, or even having to say good-bye.”

That first day we started with his parents and his childhood. I knew he half-expected me to open with the topic of Maureen. But I wanted to make it easy at the beginning for Vince.

It wasn’t so much that I wanted him to trust me. I wanted him to trust himself, to feel like a trial witness given the kid-glove treatment from opposing counsel for the first hour of a cross-examination. After a while, he begins to feel, Hey, there’s not much to this. He starts to get more expansive. He follows up his own answers. He knows you’ll understand since he’s already explained to you how things were. Eventually, he’ll tell you everything. The truth is: everybody wants to confess.

Of course, I couldn’t wait too long to get to Topic A. I knew I had Greg Gavin all antsy in New York for hot copy and N&N’sMaster magazine ready to run stunning excerpts from our book in its premier issue. But it could wait three, even four days. I rationed myself that long to enjoy chatting with Vince Collins.

It was easy. He was self-effacing, funny, a nice mix of warm and tangy, like a perfect circle of lemon slice floating in a straight-up Manhattan. And when he talked about his childhood, I pictured how hard he’d worked to better his lot in life. Somewhere in his early teens, he must have looked in the mirror, messing with his hair and some Wildroot Cream Oil, appraised his looks, and thought, “I can work this. I can get myself somewhere with this face.”

His father’s American name was Domenico Collins. Vince had been told that Collins was really some customs official’s version of Colline Metallifere, which is the mountain range in southern Tuscany where his father’s family came from. His father’s Italian name was Domenico Vincenzo d’Ambrosio. He’d always wondered why the customs official didn’t dub his father Domenico Ambrose.

I asked him, “Making you Vince Ambrose?”

“Does sound a bit lavender, doesn’t it?” he acknowledged.

His father came to the New World in his late teens, either because he’d heard there were lots of good prospects for northern Italian chefs in this country or because he had murdered an ex-boyfriend of his wife’s. “Oh, Madon’, what a goddess my mother was!” Vince reflected. He said he would look through his mother’s face and see from the Renaissance all the way back to ancient Rome. She was the one who’d encouraged Vince to sing, although he’d inherited his voice from his father, who was known for singing (not just robustly but memorably) while he cooked.

By a quarter to six, I heard the slightest rasp in Vince’s voice and I suggested we pack it in.

“Would you like to get some dinner?” he asked. I hesitated and he added, “We wouldn’t have to talk about me.”

Recent experience should certainly have caused me to say no to Vince’s suggestion, but I knew that if I searched my mind, I could find a justification for saying yes.

My real reason for wanting to acquiesce should have been obvious enough for anyone to understand. If George Harrison of the Beatles meets you at a bar, takes you on a mini–Magical Mystery Tour, makes you feel that something special and unique is happening to you, has his way with you (which is exactly the way you’d have it), and then unceremoniously dumps you, what would be the one thing that could make you instantly feel better about losing George Harrison?

Correct, very good: John Lennon, of course. If I was Dorothy Lamour, then Lanny was definitely Bob Hope and Vince was Bing Crosby.

Not that Lanny was unattractive. But though his face could look fascinating and sensitive in the glow of a Plaza bedside table lamp, and though he had one of the three most adorabletuchus es it had ever been my privilege to grab, and though he was certainly (God fucking damn it) the best one-night stand I’d ever had, anyone but anyone would tell you that it was Vince who was the looker of the two, the man of the two, the more soulful of the two.

Aha. I’d thought of the rationale. Great. It hadn’t really taken very long. Being social and chummy with Vince would be a great way to, again, make him further drop his guard. Not to sleep with him yet, of course (of course), for, as a rule, when a man sleeps with a woman, this causes him to afterwardraise his guard.

He took us to a favorite restaurant of his, across the street from the Riot House (which is what we in the trade had taken to calling the Continental Hyatt House, because this, along with the Sunset Marquis, had become the lodging place for second-tier rock bands or the roadies for first-tier rock bands).

The restaurant’s address may have been 8426 Sunset Boulevard, but you certainly couldn’t find it if you were standing at that address on the sidewalk. At this point, the streets off the Sunset Strip nosedived downhill to Santa Monica Boulevard, as if you were in San Francisco. At number 8426 there was simply a metal gate and a flight of stone steps descending into what seemed like an empty lot alongside a tattoo parlor. Vince opened the gate and gestured that I should follow him.

Once again I was being led down a long flight of steps by Vince Collins to an unknown terminus. This time there were Japanese lanterns hanging above the wrought-iron balustrades and thick foliage on either side of me. The air was wonderfully sweet. After descending some forty steps, we emerged onto a patio enclosed by shrubbery and trees far below the boulevard, where very smart people were dining as if in the garden of someone’s house, which in fact it was. Gas sconces challenged nature, negating the hint of a chill in the night. Well behind and above me, I could hear the soft whisking of traffic along Sunset Boulevard like distant comets sweeping across the night sky.

A fair-haired young captain instantly spotted Vince and ushered us to a table tucked into a corner of the sunken patio. It was a lovely place to be.

I learned that the restaurant, called Butterfield’s (and who Butterfield was I have yet to glean), had at one time been the guest house of John Barrymore and was preserved as such. Its most illustrious guest was Barrymore’s drinking buddy Errol Flynn.

Without Vince uttering a word, a fair-haired young waiter had placed before us fried parsley on a silver salver. We picked at it strand by strand as we talked. It was hot, greaseless, and sophisticated, as if Cole Porter had reinvented the potato chip.

I had a cream of watercress soup that was pleasingly thin with a mysterious flavor something like smoky asparagus. Vince started with sand dabs, which were new to me, a flat fish like a thumb-length halibut. They’d been dredged in flour, then pan-fried in olive oil and served with a green tartar sauce that I suspected contained Japanese horseradish. Vince had me try one of the sand dabs, neatly ushering it onto my bread plate. It was wonderful. He was wonderful. We were having such a nice time, talking not one bit about show business or his career but simply what each of us thought about all sorts of matters.

Maybe it hadn’t been such a bad thing after all, I thought, that I’d agreed to make love with him when the book was finished. It was as if, having come to that agreement, the issue of sex was now off the table. Flirtation was unnecessary. Lecherous innuendo need not lurk at the end of every sentence. Some men I’d known would have made endless references to the promise, trying to make sure it hadn’t all been a joke on my part, reminding me of their intention to cash in the promissory note I’d issued, seeing if the redemption date could be advanced a little. Not Vince. Apparently when we were done with this project, he would get to deflower me of whatever was left of my petals, and that was that. So there was no need for either of us to toy around with each other. We could actually talk, as if we were people.

And that, undramatically, was how our evening went. No kiss, not even a “kiss-kiss,” no plaintive voicing of “God, if only we weren’t working together!” Just this sane, rational, very atypical for the time “See you tomorrow.”

For several days, it went just this way. We would progress through Vince’s life (by Day Three we were only up to his entry into the army, and there were still some points in his teens I needed to go back over) and then have a relaxed dinner, where we would make a graceful transition from narrator and inquisitor to two adults having a genuine conversation. We went to relatively low-profile places where Vince could dine as anonymously as was possible. By “anonymously,” I mean simply that people he didn’t know didn’t come over to our table and introduce themselves, asking for photographs to be taken or menus to be signed. Vince treasured certain restaurants where the majority of the patrons understood this code of behavior. Don’t think I’m saying that Vince could go anywhere without being recognized.

He did have a “don’t recognize me” face, which he sported on those rare occasions when he was momentarily out in public and vulnerable. He’d apologize, saying, “Sorry, I’ll be right back” and tilt his head downward, keeping his eyes up and wearing what I could best describe as a stupid, openmouthed grin. He’d also raise the key of his voice a fifth and adopt a flat, genial midwestern twang, pushing the words a little. “Well, thanks very much, sir,” he’d say to the parking attendant, “we’d just like to have it back in one piece,” and one would see this shy but good-natured rube standing where Vince had been a second earlier. As we got to know each other better, he stopped apologizing and simply whipped out the face when necessary, as one might whip out a hankie if about to sneeze.

Thursday night he’d suggested a place out in Malibu, the Sandpiper, whose management guaranteed that the sun would set into the Pacific Ocean each evening. Vince being Vince, we had the best table, providing us with a clear view of the slick, hollow stone that jutted far out into the water, ocean spray spuming up through its ventilated surface like a rock garden of geysers.