Stars Screaming (40 page)
Authors: John Kaye
But now he claimed that he’d developed new leads that linked Fuller’s manager with Jack Dragna, a notorious gangster who ran the gambling and prostitution rackets in Los Angeles during the fifties and sixties. According to Gene, Fuller’s manager was a high-stakes gambler who was into the mob for $50,000.
“They gave him sixty days to pay off,” Gene told Burk. “When he couldn’t come up with the cash, he sold half of Bobby’s contract. Bobby found out and threatened to go to the cops. Two weeks later he was dead.”
As Gene laid it out, the story was intriguing—a rock-and-roll mystery set in Southern California in the 1960s: Raymond Chandler meets the Beach Boys—and Burk loved his older brother, but he had a couple of his own ideas he wanted to develop.
“Then fuck you,” Gene said, his voice taking on a surprising edge when Burk turned him down. “Remember this conversation when I sell the rights for a million bucks.”
Near the intersection of Crescent Heights and Sunset, the road widened and Burk passed a large traffic island that used to be the site of Pandora’s Box, one of Hollywood’s first beatnik coffeehouses. Mort Sahl was a regular in the fifties, and so were poets Jack Hirschman and Charles Bukowski. And one night coming back from a Drifters concert in El Monte, Burk and Timmy Miller saw Marlon Brando sitting at a table in the cool darkness, playing chess with jazz bassist Charlie Haden.
A block west of Crescent Heights was The Way, a zen macrobiotic restaurant and the former location of The Xanadu, another Bohemian night spot where Burk and Timmy used to hang out in high school— until it became, mysteriously, the meeting place for the Grave Diggers, an outlaw motorcycle gang from Antelope Valley.
It was there in 1964 that actor Lee Marvin came in drunk and sucker-punched Billy Valentino, the lead singer of the Droogs, LA’s premier garage-punk band. Later that night Marvin was attacked
in the parking lot as he climbed inside his brand-new Corvette. The windshield was shattered and he was beaten so badly that filming on
Cat Ballou
had to be delayed for eight weeks.
Burk stopped at a red light at the end of the Sunset Strip. The last building, a high-rise at 9255 Sunset Boulevard, contained the offices of his former agents, Rheinis and Robins. Burk fired Maria Selene back in 1972, when he discovered that she had sought out Loretta Egan as a client behind his back. She even secretly negotiated Loretta’s deal to polish
Pledging My Love
and later took Loretta’s side when she petitioned the Writers Guild for shared credit.
The day Burk won the arbitration he had a dozen roses delivered to Jon Warren’s house on Alta Way, where Loretta was living. On the card he wrote a two-word message:
Nice try.
South of Sunset three blocks were the Shoreham Apartments. Actor Kenny Kendall lived at the Shoreham until 1974, when he was found shot to death outside the elevator on the ninth floor. The
LA Times
reported that Kendall had been arrested twice in his last year, both times for possession of cocaine. An obituary ran the following day in the
Hollywood Reporter
, listing several films in which he had appeared. Included was
Careless Love
, a gangster flick Max Rheingold produced in 1948. The obituary also mentioned a daughter, Patty, who was living in New Orleans.
Burk felt a tingling in his neck, then a hot burning sensation, as his mind was teased back to that sweet afternoon in the summer of 1959—an afternoon that was later converted into myth—when he and Timmy and Patty Kendall saw Gene fight Clay Tomlinson in the parking lot at Will Rogers State Beach. All it took was the fury of his quick fists—machinelike fury, executed with a bloody vengeance— and for months Gene’s name was on everyone’s lips. Everywhere he went people smiled at him or shook his hand.
Siblings. Burk and Gene. That summer of 1959 ended their childhood together. From then on they moved in different directions.
A photograph comes into Burk’s mind like a sudden flash: He and his brother are standing side by side. Burk is taller by two inches, though he is two years younger. They are in their backyard with the midafternoon sunlight slanting
through the treetops. A flawless day. But there is nothing peaceful in their faces, just stillness, the absent mother feasting silently on their insides with her malignant lips.
A woman walks away from her family, from the two boys who were formed in the cavern of her body. Why did she do that? Burk wonders, her face just a blur in his memory, a faint smudge rubbed into the mirror of his soul. Goddamn you, Mother.
Burk was on the freeway, just minutes from the airport. Off to his left was the Hillside Memorial Cemetery. Behind a cluster of trees, Sandra was lying underneath the soft earth, her very cells broken down into four or five pounds of bone and ash, the drama of her shattered life finally over.
“So long,” Burk whispered, and, as soon as he released Sandra’s face from his mind, he felt a panic come over him. On the screen in front of his eyes raced the events of his life. The fifties, sixties, seventies—gone in a flash. Years. Days. Months. Decades. All the ordinary and extraordinary moments. Gone.
“No!” Burk screamed, his body lurching toward the windshield in a spasm of terror, the thought of his own death locked around his throat like a necklace of iron spikes. “Not yet!”
And in that terrifying moment Burk dared to ask himself this question: What happens when the last person who has loved someone is gone? Who will remember them?
Who will remember Sandra
?
Who will remember Bonnie
?
Who will remember .
. . ?
“It doesn’t matter,” Burk said to himself almost defiantly, answering the voices that were still chanting inside his head. Outside the window of his airplane he saw a searchlight move slowly across the fathomless sky, a slender silver finger pointed toward the stars. “Because right now I am still alive, and I’m going home. I can remember them. I can remember them all.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing this novel was a long, slow journey, most of it trudged through canyons of deep darkness, where the cold wind of fear fanned my face and every other step was backward. Without the love and support of the following people—and God’s good grace—I would not have made it home.
These are my friends, and I want to thank them all: Jeremy Larner, Anne Lamott, Katherin Seitz, Michael St. John Smith, Sean Blackman, Michael Blodgett, George Stelzner, Rosie Shuster, Ned Wynn, Steven Isenberg, Margot Kidder, Judy Coppage, Michael Wolf, Lydia Cornell, Thorn Mount, Josh and Cathy Kramer, Priscilla Newton, Teresa Tudury, Penny Peyrot, and Iris Black.
This book could never have been started (or completed) without the encouragement and optimism of my good friend, Terry McDonell. Thanks, Terry.
I am also deeply grateful to my editor and publisher, Morgan Entrekin, whose patience and sage advice helped me to write the best book I could.
To my agent, Amanda Urban, I thank you for your honesty and invaluable insights, especially at the end when they counted the most.
Special thanks to Carla Lalli, Judy Hottensen, Elisabeth Schmitz, and everyone at Grove/Atlantic who made me feel so welcome.
Finally, I would like to thank my brother, Mike, who was there from the beginning. He knows the real story.