Playland (19 page)

It had grown cold in the parking lot. Eddies of snow were scudding across the blacktop. There were twelve bags in all. Blue did not help him load them into the trunk of the rental Ford Taurus. She stood apart, preoccupied, withdrawn into that middle-distance space he had so often seen actors occupy when they wished to appear oblivious to the attention focused on them.

“I always liked to shop.” It was a pronouncement. He was surprised that she had not used the royal “we.” As in We are not amused. As I am not now, he thought.

“When I was at Cosmo, and I’d go to New York to do publicity, I’d always go to Macy’s on Sunday mornings. Mr. French would talk to Mr. Macy or whoever it was he talked to, and they’d open the store just for me. I couldn’t go during the week, they were afraid I’d be injured by my fans …”

It was as if she was being recorded for some oral history program. Archives of Film 101—The Publicity Tour. Jack tried not to move too fast, to do anything that would interrupt the flow.

“… and so I’d show up at the store with a publicity man from the New York office and take the elevator to the top floor. The antique department. There was just the two of us. And someone from store security. And someone to take the orders. And a vice-president. Sometimes, after I got older, Arthur would come with me, but Arthur didn’t really like to shop, all he came to New York for was to see the shows. I always bought him a present, though. A tie. A pipe. Once I got him a toboggan. And had a rose painted on it, like the sled in
Citizen Kane
, because I knew how much Arthur and his father hated that picture, Arthur said it was un-American, but of course he picked that up from his father. Mr. French was such a good friend of
Mr. Hearst’s. We’d take his private car up to the ranch for the weekend, they’d just hitch it on to the Starlight, and when we woke up in the morning, we’d be at the ranch siding.”

She paused, as if wondering if she should explain that the ranch was San Simeon. No. Back to Macy’s, in that strange disembodied voice.

“I’d come down the escalator, floor to floor, picking out exactly what I wanted. It was so much fun. They even let me run up the down escalator. I always bought toilet paper at Macy’s. Hundreds and hundreds of rolls. It was extra soft, and didn’t scratch your pussy like the kind my household staff always bought in Los Angeles. And I never had to pay. The man from the store would add it up, and the publicity man from the New York office would take the bill, and he’d pay it, I think they just billed it to the publicity budget of whatever picture I was publicizing. I don’t think the studio even deducted it from my salary, although I don’t know, because everything I made went directly to my business manager. I had a maid and a secretary and a chauffeur the studio paid for. Mr. French fired the chauffeur because he thought I was fucking him. I think I only fucked him once. His name was Rod. Rob. Something like that. It was during the war. I loved the war. The war-bond tours. Visiting the troops. Mr. French wouldn’t let me go overseas with Bob and Bing. He thought my plane would crash and I would die, like Miss Lombard and Glenn Miller and that English fairy, what’s his name, that played Ashley in
Gone With the Wind
. I could always get cigarettes during the war. From Lilo Kusack, he knew people. I mean cartons. A gross of cartons. Chesterfield. Philip Morris. Mr. French would never let me smoke in public. And silk stockings. In my size. I read someplace that after the war the girls in Germany would fuck somebody for a pair of nylons. That was so cute. I was doing a little marijuana those days with Shelley Flynn, and I promised him some head if he got me a dozen pair. He did, and then so I didn’t have to blow him I told him I would tell Mr. French he was giving me Mary Jane.”

Suddenly she smiled. A dazzling close-up smile for the cameras
that were not there. “So Farmer Dell’s might not be Macy’s, but I guess you can say I’ve been shopping all my life.”

“Yes, I guess you can,” Jack said carefully.

“You know, it was after one of those shopping trips that I met Jacob.”

He held his breath. It was the first time she had mentioned his name. Maybe she was not that crazy after all. Just not entirely screwed in tight. She seemed to take for granted that he was intimately familiar with the Tyler hagiography in its entirety, the legend down to its most esoteric footnotes, and of course including the part that Jacob King had played in her life, and she in his. This was the real thing. The scenes with Herb and Tiara were acting.

“I was staying at the Plaza, that corner suite on the top floor overlooking the park, and when I came back there after Macy’s, I fucked Arthur, or at least I think I did, Arthur always liked to fuck in the afternoon, so it’s natural to think that’s what we did, and then we went out to dinner at 21, and then we ended up at the Copa. Jacob was there. He was the best-looking man I had ever seen in my life. He had just been acquitted of something, murder, I think, something like that. Arthur said he’d wrapped some guy who ratted on him all up in duct tape, that shit plumbers use, so he couldn’t breathe, he must’ve been really funny to look at, with all that tape all over him, like a mummy, I guess, but that’s just Arthur, he read that in the
Daily Mirror
, I bet, and that was another one anyway. He was celebrating, Jacob, with his lawyer, Jimmy something, and that old man, the furrier, Morris, I think his name was, but of course he had done it, he told me that later.”

She must mean the murder, Jack thought.

A gust of wind. She shivered and went silent, then stood by the right rear door of his gray Taurus, waiting for him to open it, a residual instinct, the star who took it for granted that a suitor or servitor would always be there to open doors for her, a car available, and a chauffeur or a studio teamster to see that she
was comfortable in the back seat, a lap robe available, if necessary, the chauffeur or teamster or suitor or servitor there but to be commanded, and to speak only when spoken to. “Would you drive me home now?” she said. As if home were still on Linden Drive in the Beverly Hills flats, or the larger place on Tower Road north of Sunset, around the corner from Bing and Dixie Crosby, where there were no writers or B-picture directors to taint the neighborhood, or perhaps that corner suite at the Plaza where Arthur French would mount her after her Macy’s shopping expedition late on a winter Sunday afternoon, with the reflections of the Christmas lights on Fifth Avenue twinkling in the bedroom mirror when she came, the kind of special effect Cosmopolitan Pictures was famous for.

I
n the fullness of time, I have tried to consider why certain gangsters become legend, and why others do not, why Jacob King was a legend and why Pittsburgh Pat Muldoon is remembered, if at all, only because he was, putatively, a legend’s victim. Jacob King had style and girls and the national racing wire Morris Lefkowitz had given him (a testing insisted upon by Morris’s attorney Jimmy Riordan, who thought Jacob King too headstrong for the demands of the business world), and run it well he did, turning the wire into a multimillion-dollar monopoly whose competitors decided to seek retirement in Florida and Arizona when the suggestion was tendered that their fingers, noses, and tongues might be imperiled if they continued in operation. He called Winchell Walter, and Walter called him Jake, as did bespoke tailors and headwaiters and the chorines he was said to enjoy two or three at a time. If Jacob King had not been photographed as often as Blue Tyler, neither was he a stranger to the pop of flashbulbs and the biography of headlines. In the newspaper morgues there were photographs of him cutting a wedding cake the day of his marriage to the former Lillian Aronow, and leaving the Temple Orach Chaim a year later with his wife and their infant son, Matthew, and a year after that a picture
taken by the house photographer at the Latin Quarter of Jacob smoking a cigar, a girl on each arm, neither of whom was the former Lillian Aronow, and then in 1943 a candid of Jacob and Lillian and Matthew and six-week-old Abigail King outside their new house overlooking the harbor in Bay Ridge, with Staten Island in the background and in the background as well the USS
New Jersey
steaming toward the Narrows and the war Jacob King’s Brooklyn draft board had declared him physically unfit to fight in because of his flat feet, and perhaps also because of the emoluments that Morris Lefkowitz, through layers of underlings, had the forethought to direct to the draft board’s members. There is a Weegee photograph of Jacob King entering a building in the garment district with two men who held their hats in front of their faces while he waved cheerfully to the photographer, and a Weegee photograph of Jacob King in a double-breasted dinner jacket dancing with a WAVE lieutenant junior grade at a war-bond rally at the Statler Hotel, and still another Weegee photograph of Jacob King in a camel’s-hair overcoat being fingerprinted at the Thirty-fourth Precinct in upper Manhattan. Then there were the headlines, a sampling of which sketch the outlines of a life lived dangerously:
JUDGE IMPLICATED IN MOB BRIBERY PROBE; DA ACCUSES KING WITNESS OF PERJURY; KING ACCUSED IN MOB SLAYING; KING: “JUST TAKING A LITTLE STEAM”; KING WITNESS KO’D; CHRISTMAS PACKAGE RIPS KING WITNESS
.

Legend, however, is more than just headlines and appearance, because Morris “The Furrier” Lefkowitz was also a legend, and he nearly an old man when he became one, a nearly old man with rimless glasses and a suit with a vest and what seemed to be, in the rare photographs of him that appeared in the press, only seven strands of hair taped to his liverish skull, a legend because his fingerprints were not on file with any law enforcement agency even after half a century as banker and secretary of state in the country of crime, a legend as well because he could become rapturous about the qualities that would make nutria the fur of the future, the fur for women who had never before owned a fur.

It was this capacity for looking into the future and seeing how it could work, seeing its potential for profit, both licit and illicit, that led Morris Lefkowitz, when the war was over and the victory processions ended, to send Jacob King to Los Angeles as his personal emissary to those who would make the desert of Nevada bloom, to show them how an entente cordiale between East Coast and West Coast and the criminal city states of the large empty in-between could only benefit them all. It was a delicate mission, because the men of the West wanted to keep Nevada for themselves, a mission calling for a certain flair, and flair Jacob King had in abundance. It was also a good time for Jacob King to leave New York for a spell, as the murder trial in which he had been found “not glty.” by jury had focused the kind of attention on Morris Lefkowitz that he had spent a lifetime trying to avoid, and with it speculation that he had ordered the bomb in the poinsettia and the hit in the crapper at Sunnyside Arena in Queens the night Lulu Constantino won a split decision over Lefty Lew Mann in the main event.

What Morris Lefkowitz had not factored into the equation was Blue Tyler.

On the afternoon of Twelfth Night, 1947, in the Criminal Courts Building at 100 Centre Street in lower Manhattan, a dozen good men and true, some perhaps fearful of their lives, and not entirely without reason, acquitted Jacob King of the murder of one Philly Wexler, a gambler who in the absence of good sense had tried to move in on the vending-machine business that was one of Morris Lefkowitz’s lesser enterprises, one to which he paid such scant attention that Philly Wexler apparently thought he could take it over with but a minor rebuke, if indeed any rebuke was in order, as it was Philly Wexler’s stated objective to revitalize the vending-machine franchise, to run it on a more cost-effective basis, and by rallying it from the inertia brought about by Morris’s inattention, increasing the tribute he claimed he was more than willing to pay into the Lefkowitz coffers. It is unnecessary to say that when this transgression was brought to Morris Lefkowitz’s attention, he did not appreciate
the favor Philly Wexler maintained he was doing for him. If Morris Lefkowitz encouraged the notion that he was a benign despot, a despot he still was, and not one willing to countenance the grab of even the most insignificant asset of his criminal conglomerate. Though they were at best minor profit centers, and sometimes even liabilities, these were ventures Morris Lefkowitz kept in reserve so that he might bestow them upon deserving subordinates for services rendered, a piece of the action, as it were, albeit a small one.