Playland (25 page)

I heard all of this fourth-hand forty-five years after the fact from Chuckie O’Hara, who never really tried to disguise his anti-Semitism (he was too fastidious and too aware of who employed him ever to use words like
kike
or
sheeny
, but in selected purlieus and with selected acquaintances he often talked about “the chosen” or “our chosen friends”), and Chuckie’s version came from Rita Lewis, who because of some unspecified sexual misdemeanor in the past was never enthusiastic about J. F. French, and as a writer I added some fine-tuning of my own. When I repeated the story to Arthur French, he only smiled and said it sounded more or less like his father except for the March of Dimes line, but even that had J.F.’s resonance, and his father would have added it had he thought of it, even though he hated Franklin Roosevelt.

J.F. would have put you under contract, Arthur said, comedy polishes on all the Cosmo scripts.

I never met J. F. French. When I arrived in Los Angeles he was already senile, living alone at Willingham, cared for by a staff of twenty-two, one of whom, it was said locally, was a professional woman who once a day tried to find heft in his phallus. J.F. finally died, peacefully, during an afternoon nap in the solarium at his house, his flaccid member, according to Industry
lore, cradled in the palm of the professional woman. Arthur was unable to attend the funeral because a horse had thrown him a week or so before his father’s death, the accident breaking both his legs, making it impossible for him to travel up from Nogales, and so out of friendship (I think as a matter of fact that I was as close a friend as Arthur ever had, in spite of the twenty-plus-year difference in our ages) I attended the nondenominational service at the Westwood Mortuary, a pricey little cemetery surrounded by high-rise buildings in the heart of Westwood.

Did anyone show up? Arthur asked when I called him in Nogales after the service.

Of course.

Anyone you recognized?

Not offhand, I said.

Were you the only one there?

It was a moment before I replied. How did you know?

He was ninety-four, Jack. If he died twenty years ago, as he should have, they would have had the service on a soundstage at Cosmo, and the whole town would have turned out. Like they did at Harry Cohn’s. On the lot at Columbia. SRO. Stage Seven. Chuckie O’Hara was at Harry’s funeral, and he said you give the people something they want to see, they’ll show up.

I’m sorry, Arthur.

It’s a kettle of very different fish, Arthur said.

What?

It’s something J.F. used to say. He used to mangle the language pretty good. He’d want to say a very different kettle of fish, and it would come out …

Arthur fell silent, and I knew he was trying to compose himself, that in the end when all was said and done and however loathsome a shit J. F. French most certainly was, his father was still his father.

Arthur, I said finally, the obituaries never said what the initials J.F. stood for.

Nothing.

Nothing?

Nothing. When he first got into the nickelodeon business, he was always looking for product to steal, and he saw this English play, it might’ve been by Freddy Lonsdale, or someone like that, and there was a character in it named J. F. Something-or-other, and so Moe just appropriated it.

It was the first time I had ever heard Arthur refer to his father as Moe.

He was too busy to think of names to go along with it, Arthur said. You asked him to come up with a name for a four-year-old Cosmo was considering putting under contract, and without even thinking he’d come up with Blue Tyler. It was only his own name he had trouble with.

Joseph Fennimore French, I said suddenly.

Now I know he would have put you under contract, Arthur French said the day of his father’s funeral, many years ago.

Lilo Kusack had as a matter of course told J. F. French that Jacob King was on his way to California as Morris Lefkowitz’s special economic negotiator, as he had also told Benny Draper, whose OMPCE pension fund was a heavy investor in La Casa Nevada, which Lilo and Cosmopolitan Pictures were fronting. Benny Draper said there was no fucking way that Morris Lefkowitz was going to muscle into Nevada and the best way to make that clear was to whack Jacob King on the Super Chief before he ever set foot in California, he knew people he could call right that fucking minute, would pick up the Chief in Albuquerque the next afternoon and get the job done before Phoenix, and nobody would fucking know, a meal for the fucking coyotes is what Jake’d be, they’d pick his fucking bones clean, hey, making their bones, I like that. It was the kind of talk that made Lilo Kusack uncomfortable, not out of any scrupulosity or respect for human life, particularly Jacob King’s, nor even because it would have put him legally at risk in the event that talk was translated into action. The main reason for his discomfort was that a move on Jacob King promised immediate retribution and
then at least a nominal examination on the part of the authorities, thus adding onto the cost of the Nevada operation the additional expense of payoffs, as well as construction delays until the heat died down, and so he told Benny Draper not to worry, he had already taken steps to neutralize Jacob King, and perhaps even co-opt him. I don’t know from co-opt, Benny Draper said, I just know the only fucking thing Jakey King understands is a big fucking hole behind his ear, you remember I told you that, Lilo, it’s the way of the world, you guys with manicures don’t like to think that, but that’s the way it is.

That’s the way it
was
, Lilo Kusack thought to himself, a thought he did not share with Benny Draper.

Of more immediate concern to J. F. French than the anticipated arrival of Jacob King onto the local scene was Blue Tyler, who in the first week of shooting on
Red River Rosie
was making trouble on the set. Chuckie O’Hara was directing the picture, in which once more she was playing a teenager of indeterminate years, but certainly no older than fifteen. Blue wanted to grow up, and she wanted to graduate into adult roles without observing the rite of passage that Hollywood traditionally demanded of its child stars. A child actress was supposed to marry at eighteen, as Elizabeth Taylor and Shirley Temple had, marry a slightly older contemporary associated at least in some tangential way with the Industry so that he could be vetted, his credentials checked to see that he was not just some kind of fortune hunter or troublemaker with a big cock; someone with whom she shared a passion for hamburgers or Frank Sinatra ballads, which the fan magazines said made their love inevitable, and from whom she could be easily divorced at nineteen, the divorce sanctifying her transition from child to adult, she now a woman who during her year of matrimony had engaged in sexual intercourse, perhaps even oral and anal intercourse, which finally allowed her to be the object of sexual intention on film, and perhaps even a collaborator in sexual license, so long as it did not go unpunished.

The meeting on
Red River Rosie
took place in J. F. French’s
private screening room on the Cosmopolitan lot. J. F. French was present, and Arthur and Chuckie O’Hara and Lilo Kusack and Blue’s agent and her press agent and her accountant and her business manager. Frick and Frack and Flack was how Chuckie O’Hara referred to Blue’s support team, and as their names meant nothing to me it is what I shall call them as well. Onscreen the dailies of
Red River Rosie
from the day before were being run. In the take, a close-up, Blue was wearing a gingham dress with puffed sleeves and a high-necked collar and she clutched a bouquet of roses to her bosom as she expressed dismay at the advances of an unseen suitor. The take ended, and onscreen a clapper appeared:

“Lights,” Blue Tyler suddenly said in the darkened screening room. “Turn it off.” The film wound down, the house lights came on, and Blue stood up. “You still want to know why I walked off this picture? Because this picture’s a piece of shit, that’s why I walked off this picture.”

J. F. French puffed on a cigar and said nothing.

“Well,” Blue said. “That’s all I get? Silence?”

Frack looked at J. F. French and, when no one spoke, cleared his throat. “What I think, Blue, is, and when I say ‘I,’ I mean all of us here, Arthur and Chuckie and Mr. Kusack and Mr. French, who has given up a great deal of his valuable time to be at this meeting when he has a studio to run, and an entire menu of pictures to cast, not to mention dealing with un-American subversion from that bunch of Communists in the Directors Guild, present company excepted, Chuckie, and then since you don’t seem to be aware of it, there is the possibility of a strike that could shut the entire Industry down, isn’t that right, J.F.?”

J. F. French sat like a sphinx, not acknowledging Frack’s question with even a flicker of the eye.

Frack plowed on. “I suppose what I’m saying, what
we’re
all saying, Freddy and Maurice and Sidney and Gary and all of us who have your best interests at heart, is that by walking off
Red River Rosie
, as you are threatening to do, perhaps, just perhaps, you don’t really comprehend the exigencies of the business …”

“J.F. doesn’t make these decisions cold, Blue,” Arthur French said after a moment’s silence. “We’ve done considerable testing …”

Lilo Kusack was conciliatory. “There’s no problem, Moe, about Blue finishing
Red River Rosie
, but—”

“Lilo, who’s paying you?” Blue Tyler interrupted. “Are you here as my lawyer or what?”

Lilo shrugged and lit a cigarette.

“Lilo’s talking business, Blue,” Arthur said, “and you don’t seem to understand business.”

Blue took a deep breath. “Listen, Arthur. And Moe.” She was the only Cosmopolitan contract actor who would dare call him Moe, which always seemed to amuse him. “And Lilo. And Chuckie. And Gary and Stan and whatever the fuck the rest of you people are called. I am the number-five box office attraction in America. I have been in this business since I was four years old. I make twelve thousand five hundred dollars a week, forty weeks a year, and my price bumps to fifteen when my next option gets picked up next month. So believe me, when you talk business, I know what you’re talking about.”

Chuckie O’Hara put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. He wondered if his missing leg would ever stop itching. Time and again he would reach to scratch and only hit the plastic prosthesis, but still it itched, as the doctors had told him it would. Chuckie knew he was present only as window dressing, and while he would agree with Blue’s opinion of the script, he was quite pleased with what he had shot. However the meeting turned out, he did not wish to antagonize his star by
saying anything that she could use to make his life difficult when she came back to work, as come back to work he knew she would.

“What the business seems to be saying, Blue,” Arthur said, “is that perhaps the present climate is not the best time for you to be making a crossover picture. Isn’t that right, J.F.?”

“Arthur, why do you always call your father J.F.?” Blue said. “His name is Moe.”

J. F. French permitted himself a small smile.

“Moe, the fact of the matter is I’m almost nineteen years old,” Blue said. “You can’t keep casting me as a fifteen-year-old cherry until my tits start banging off my belly button.”

J. F. French roused himself to speak for the first time. “Nice talk from America’s favorite teenager.”

“That’s exactly my point. I’m not a fifteen-year-old cherry anymore. You can’t keep me playing one.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Missy,” J. F. French said. “Fifteen-year-old cherries happens to be what Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea want to see you play.”

“Chuckie,” Blue said. “Tell Moe why you made me carry the bouquet in that shot. To cover my nips. They’re like fucking acorns.”

“Very effective, Chuckie,” J. F. French said.

“Thank you, J.F.,” Chuckie O’Hara said. There were times he would call J. F. French Moe, but this was not one of them.

“Arthur,” J. F. French said without turning, “are you responsible for those acorns when you know she’s got a five
A.M
. call?”

Arthur did not reply.

“You can’t sell me in this shit anymore, Moe. The public won’t buy me as little Miss Priss with her knees welded together. You’re always telling me how you can’t fool the public. Well, you’re trying to fool them when you give me a bouquet in every shot so my boobs don’t show. You’re the one that sent the memo to wardrobe. ‘Do something about Miss Tyler’s tits.’ ”

“Arthur, you showed that memo to her?”

Arthur sank farther down into his seat. Chuckie O’Hara bit his tongue and tried not to laugh. Blue’s tits were a problem, and her nipples looked as if she were nursing twins. Pad the nipples and it only made her breasts look larger, and there were only so many trees he could hide her behind.

“I’m almost nineteen—”

“You said that already—”

“—and I can have a valuable career at Cosmo until I’m thirty, maybe even thirty-five, if you start letting me play grown-up women.”