FREEDOM! MY FINGERS WERE ALL THUMBS and I was half-dizzy as I stripped off county jail denim and waited for my street clothes. The trusty came out of the racks of hanging clothes and pushed mine across the counter: deep-pleated and full-cut doeskin gabardine slacks and a jacket with big shoulder pads and a brown suede front. The look was stylish. When they brought me from Lancaster I was dressed in U.S. Army surplus khakis, but one morning when I returned from court the man ahead of me took off and hung up the doeskin slacks and suede-fronted jacket. I switched tags—and here they were. They fit as if tailored for me. Except for the high-topped jail brogans, I was going forth dressed in the fashion of 1950.
From the jail bathroom, where releases were dressed out, I was then sent up corkscrew steel stairs into a cage. It had a now-empty bench along one wall, while the other was like a barred cashier’s cage. At the end away from the stairway was an electrically controlled barred gate.
A deputy sheriff stepped up to the cashier’s window. “Who’re you?”
“Bunker.”
He looked through a pile of releases, found the right one with its attached documents, and motioned for me to step up. “What’s your mother’s maiden name?” he asked.
“Sarah Johnston.”
“Where was she born?”
“Vancouver, British Columbia.”
“Gimme your thumb.”
He took a thumbprint and, while I used a hanging rag to wipe off the ink, compared it with a thumbprint taken when they booked me. Satisfied, he yelled around the corner to the elevator operator, “One out!” and pressed a button and the gate buzzed. I pushed it open, stepped out, and let it crash shut behind me.
Around the corner an old elevator operator was holding the door. I stepped in, the doors slid closed, and we dropped ten floors swiftly. The doors opened into the teeming main corridor of the Hall of Justice. Lawyers, cops, witnesses, litigants, defendants, bail bondsmen, and trial spectators swarmed rapidly about. Ahead of me was a big glass door. Beyond that, Broadway. I pushed out.
On the sidewalk, I stopped. Now what? Pedestrians swirled around me. The morning was sunny and warm. A pretty young woman in a bright print dress went by on high heels. I smelled her for a moment. She had tanned legs and her hair bounced around her neck. She was headed south on Broadway, toward the taller buildings and the many movie marquees. Al Matthews’s office was in the old Law Building. It was south, too. I followed the young woman, looking at her legs and imagining them above the hemline. She moved with verve.
I continued to imagine as we crossed Temple Street. She turned into the first building, the old Hall of Records. Good-bye, pretty lady, good-bye. Could you be Laura, passing in the misty light? Oh well. The Law Building was across the street.
The Law Building was shabby but still striving for gentility. One or two of the better criminal defense lawyers were still there. Joe Frano had a fancy office, as did Gladys Towles Root, she who came to court with purple hair—or green or blue or whatever else matched her clothes. Her trademark hats made bystanders duck. Feathers flew and blew everywhere. In the conservative world of the courts, she was flamboyance personified. She was a pretty good trial lawyer when she wanted to be. Some thieves swore by her. Like many jaded defense lawyers, she took every case, whether she could give it proper attention or not. It was a common joke that she had her own tier of clients in Folsom.
The elevator creaked, and when I entered the Law Offices of Matthews & Bowler the carpet was threadbare. Still, the place had a certain somber respectability, with leather-bound law books in cases around the walls and heavy leather furniture in the outer office. A birdlike woman, quick and petite, Emily Matthews, Al’s wife, was behind the receptionist’s desk. She came around the desk, smiling broadly, shook my hand, and told me who she was. Al had mentioned her to me. “Al’s in court,” she said. “But let me introduce you around.”
A man was gold-lettering MANLEY BOWLER on a door. Bowler was Al’s new partner. Emily knocked, and we entered. He was a slender, patrician-appearing man who shook hands and eyed me critically. “You’re going to stay out of trouble this time?”
I replied with candor, “I sure hope so. But . . .” I ended with a shrug. I’d been in trouble as far back as I could remember, so how could I categorically declare I’d never get in trouble again? That would slap the face of probability.
“Well, let’s hope you make it.” He was friendly, but his eyes had a different look from Al’s. Bowler’s partnership with Al Matthews was short-lived, although their friendship continued. Manley had a prosecutor’s view, and he soon returned to that side of the table, where his career flourished.
The outer office phone rang. Emily hurried to answer it, and Manley excused himself; he had work to do. I went to the reception area and started to tell Emily that I would return tomorrow. Still on the phone, she shook her head and gestured for me to wait. When she hung up, she said, “Stick around. Al wants to see you. Go sit in his office. Read something. I’ve got to answer these phones.”
Al’s office was spacious, the wood old and dark. Glass-fronted bookcases were along the walls from floor to ceiling. Rows of numbered volumes, 51 Cal App Rpts, and 52, 53, 54, etc. Two fat blue volumes: Corpus Juris Secundum. A couple of worn smaller books: California Criminal Law, Fricke; California Criminal Evidence, Fricke. Fricke was the guy Sampsell and Chessman had been talking about. Black’s Law Dictionary. I think I believed that these books had incantations that were almost magical. If I knew them, I would be a wizard of law.
I went around the desk and sat in Al’s chair. The desk was clear except for a photo of Emily and a boy about twelve years old. Under the edge of the green desk blotter was tucked a hand-written note. It said: Eddie . . . Mrs. Wallis???? Did that refer to me? If it did, I would find out at the right time.
I began browsing. The first book I took down had a slip of paper serving as a page marker. Opening to the marker, I found a California Supreme Court opinion affirming a death penalty conviction. Emily came in. “You might as well go. Al isn’t coming in until late this afternoon.”
“What time?”
“It’s hard to know . . . whenever the trial judge calls it a day. Some of them go late.”
As I started to leave, she added, “The best time to catch him is in the morning . . . between nine and nine-thirty . . . before he goes to court.”
That was fine with me. I wanted to roam free. We went from the office to the reception room.
“Where are you going to stay?”
“I thought I’d rent a furnished room.” Back then, a furnished room cost nine or ten dollars a week. Called piss-in-the-sink rooms, they usually had a sink and faucet, with the bathroom down the hall.
“You got some money?”
I hesitated half a second before nodding. Actually, I had about forty dollars in ones and fives. A five was the largest denomination a prisoner was allowed in his possession. I’d been red-hot in a poker game during my last week.
The hesitation sent Emily to her purse. She extracted three twenty-dollar bills and tucked them in my breast pocket. “Nice outfit, by the way,” she said.
When I departed with $100, I felt good. That could be two weeks’ take-home for a factory worker. I was flush.
Back out on Broadway, I continued south. The sidewalks were filled with well-dressed shoppers. Yellow streetcars clanged up and down the middle of the street with barely room for a car to pass on the right. In the shadowed canyon of buildings, the movie marquees sparkled. I could see from Second to Ninth Street. Here, too, were Los Angeles’s big department stores—the Broadway, May Company, Eastern Columbia, J J Newberry, Thrifty Drug Stores—and the local stores, Victor Clothing being the most well-known.
I looked in the display windows of the men’s stores. The style of the hour was double-breasted suits with wide shoulders, wide lapels, pants with deep pleats, relaxed knees, and tapers to the cuff. It was a modified zoot suit, the first time the style of the underclass had been assumed by the fashionable people. The basic style had been in vogue since I began caring about clothes. I assumed, back then, that the same style would be sharp throughout my life.
The display window also reflected my image. I was moderately tall and slender and very average-looking, with lots of freckles. The years of mixing with precocious youths from East Los Angeles and Watts had molded my style. I walked like a hip Chicano from East Los Angeles.
Continuing my walk down Broadway, I thought of things I had to do. Fore-most among them was visiting my father in the home for old folks. He was in his early sixties, which was much older then than it is now. He’d already had one severe heart attack, and my Aunt Eva had written that he was showing some dementia—the word the doctor used, she said. Thinking of him gave me a hollow ache in my stomach. He’d done all he could for me, a son he never understood. True, what he could do had never included a home and he had put my beloved dog to sleep, but even if there was no home, he had sacrificed to pay for good boarding homes and expensive military schools for me. I felt responsible for his aging so fast. I hated that he was in a retirement home, but I lacked the power to do anything about it. Maybe if I made enough money . . .
I’d have to visit Aunt Eva, too, but I hoped that I wouldn’t have to ask her if I could stay. The last time had been tough on both of us. Maybe I would stop by this evening after she got off work, but that was hours away. What should I do right now? Maybe catch a #5 streetcar through Chinatown across the bridge to Lincoln Heights. Lorraine, my first girlfriend, lived there with her older brother and two younger sisters.
A car horn bleated. “Bunker!”
I looked around. An emerald-colored convertible with the top down was at the curb. The platinum blonde in the passenger seat was waving to me. I didn’t know her, but I went over to see what she wanted. Behind the wheel was J.M., the pimp who got the pot on visiting day.
The blonde opened the door and slid over. Cars were honking behind us. The blonde smiled and gave them the finger.
I got in and we pulled away.
“Hey, Bunker, good to see you. Meet Flip.”
“Hi, Flip.”
“This is the guy I told you about . . . the one that fucked up Billy Cook.”
Flip turned, her face close. “Congratulations. Let me shake your hand.” Her fingers were slender, her flesh smooth, and her eyes were green and catlike. With dye and makeup and stylish clothes, she was the most beautiful woman I’d seen outside a movie screen.
“Want to get high?” he asked.
“Does a bear shit in the woods?” I replied.
THE PARK WILSHIRE HOTEL was across the street from Mac Arthur Park. Financed by a union in the late twenties, the hotel was originally planned to be a first-class joint. Its architecture was striking, and the lobby had a grand staircase suitable for a Russian palace. Alas, the location was too far west of downtown Los Angeles to attract business travelers and too far east to get business from the movie studios. I was unaware of that as we waited for the elevator. To me it looked as palatial as the Waldorf-Astoria. Flip pushed the elevator button several times. Nobody is in a greater hurry than a junkie going to fix.
The elevator had an operator. As we were going up, he eyed me in a manner that asked my companions a silent question. “He’s okay,” was J.M.’s answer. “What’s up?”
“A friend of mine’s got a girl who wants to work,” said the elevator man.
“She ever worked before?”
“No. But she’s game.”
“Bring ’er over tomorrow morning.”
“Late tomorrow morning,” Flip added. “After eleven.”
“Yeah, late in the morning,” J.M. agreed. “But don’t be surprised if she changes her mind. A whole lotta young chicks think they wanna turn tricks. They can get big money for doing what comes naturally—layin’ down first and gettin’ up last—but when it gets right down to the reality of it with some potbellied old man who’s drunk and mean, they can’t handle it.”
“That’s why a lot of them turn into junkies. It covers their torment.”
“Yeah, it does take away all pain,” J.M. agreed. “Physical and mental.”
“What it doesn’t take away, it makes not to matter,” Flip finished.
“I get it. I’ll bring her by.”
As we walked down the hallway, I smelled Flip’s perfume. It was intense after the various odors of jail: sweat, piss, and disinfectant. She sure knew how to walk, long strides with her ass moving from side to side. She looked like a stripper strutting her stuff with her clothes on. J.M. put his arm possessively around her hip and said something I couldn’t hear, and they both laughed. What did he have that would make her sell her body and give him the money? It wasn’t his looks. He was dissipated, gaunt, and a little effete. I’d seen him naked in the shower at the county farm. He had blotchy skin pitted with acne scars. How could he have a chick who belonged on a calendar? Was he some kind of sexual genius? No. Somehow I knew his control had nothing to do with sex.
J.M. was unlocking the room door when another door opened farther down the hallway. A fat man in undershorts and over-the-calf stockings came out. His face was red, his body fish white. He kept one foot in the door so it couldn’t close and lock him out. It was both awkward and comedic. “Where is she? Where’d she go?”
“Where’d who go?” J.M. asked.
“That whore . . . Brandi?”
“We didn’t see anybody,” Flip said. “Did we?”
I shook my head.
“Bullshit! She just came out. I heard a door out here.” He was glaring at us. “You had to see her.”
“Take it easy, mister,” J.M. said, holding up his hands in a pacifying gesture.
Meanwhile, I stepped clear. If the fat man got too loud and threatening, I was going to sock him with a left hook to the stomach. It would quiet him. I was sure of that. Flip saw my move and used her eyes to tell me not to hit him.
Tears suddenly came to the man’s eyes. He knew how stupid he looked.
“What happened?” J.M. asked.
“She took my wallet . . . and my pants. I was in the John when I saw her go out. It was just—” He snapped his fingers to indicate how quick things had happened. “What am I going to tell my wife? I’m gonna call the police.”
I was half between a laugh and pity for him.
“Take it easy, mister,” J.M. said. He walked toward the man and pushed his door all the way open. “Go in and wait. I’ll see if I can help you.”
The man’s lips trembled; he looked at each of us, uncertainty on his face.
“Go on,” Flip said. “You can’t run around in your skivvies. It’s going to be all right.”
The trick squinted at us, then did as he was told. J.M. closed the door and came back to where we waited. As he turned the key in the door he was muttering curses.
Brandi, the missing whore, was waiting inside. She’d been listening through the door. “Look,” she said, holding up a fat sheaf of currency. “Eight bills and change.” She seemed nervous, and she had reason to be nervous. J.M. tried to backhand her. She ducked away and he kicked at her. She deflected some of it with her hand and took some of it on her thigh.
Flip quickly moved between them. “Take it easy. Don’t bruise her. She won’t be able to work.”
J.M. checked himself, then he snatched the money. “Where’s his wallet and his pants?”
“I threw them out.”
“Out where?”
“The air shaft.”
Flip looked down the air shaft in the building’s center. “I can see them.”
“Get your ass down there and get ’em,” J.M. said to Brandi.
“Do I have to?”
“Do I have to?” he mocked. “Goddamn right you have to. He still might scream copper and get us closed down.”
“You pay the patch, don’t you?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I thought he covered this kind of stuff.”
“Yeah, he does—but not if there’s a buncha complaints. I told all you silly bitches not to steal from a trick. Didn’t I?”
Brandi’s nod was grudging.
“I guess that’s why you’re a whore. . . . You’re fuckin’ dumb.” He turned and handed Flip the money. “Go back over there and cool him out.”
“You want me to give him the money back?”
“Yeah. And tell him we’re getting him his pants and wallet.”
Flip went out. J.M. reached for the telephone and told the front desk that he’d accidentally dropped his pants down the air shaft and a girl was coming down to search for them. Still on the phone, he gestured for Brandi to go. As she headed for the door, he hung up the phone and took one final kick at her rump with he side of his shoe. It lifted her on tiptoe for a moment. “Dumb bitch,” he muttered when the door closed. He shook his head and chuckled, obviously enjoying the display of his power, a power that was an enigma to me. Why would beautiful women take being so demeaned? Flip and Brandi could use their bodies to subjugate many men. “Siddown. Make yourself comfortable.” I sat down and he began searching through drawers, then went into the bathroom. Through the open door, I could see him feeling around under the sink. What was he looking for?
Flip returned. “It’s cool,” she said. “Where’s Brandi?”
“She went to get his pants back. Say, where’s the outfit?”
“Out in the hallway in the fire hose. I’ll get it.” She went out, leaving the door ajar, and returned within seconds carrying a dirty handkerchief bundled around a bent and blackened teaspoon and an eyedropper with a baby pacifier on the bulb end and a hypodermic needle on the other. A gasket of thread around the eyedropper end tightly fastened the needle. It was a junkie outfit, circa 1950. Junkies didn’t use syringes back then.
She put the unfolded handkerchief and its contents on top of a dresser. J.M. came out of the bathroom with a glass of water.
“We need some cotton,” Flip said.
“Got it.” J.M. sat on the bed, took off his shoe, and pinched a tiny ball of cotton from the bottom of the shoe tongue. He dropped it in Flip’s palm as he put his shoe on. She added it to the paraphernalia lined up on the dirty handkerchief. “Look out the window,” he said to me. “And see if she got those pants and wallet.”
I raised the window into the air shaft and looked down. Brandi was carrying the pants back to the window she’d used to reach the bottom of the air shaft. “She’s got ’em and just comin’ back in.”
“Fuck all that,” Flip said. “Let’s get fixed. That’s what I want.” She extended her hand toward J.M. and snapped her fingers.
He produced two #5 caps of white powder. They looked small to me. She pulled one of them apart and tapped the contents into the spoon. Drawing water from the glass into the eyedropper, she then let several drops fall into the spoon so it covered the powder, which immediately began to dissolve, although not entirely. She lit several book matches in a cluster and jiggled them under the spoon. The liquid turned clear. She quickly cooled the spoon bottom by touching it to the top of the water in the glass, rolled the tiny bit of cotton between thumb and forefinger, and dropped it into the liquid. She drew the liquid through the cotton and the needle into the eyedropper and then carefully measured a portion back into the spoon. My presence was forgotten.
J.M. rolled up his sleeve and wrapped an old necktie around his upper arm and pumped up a big vein.
Flip stood beside him and, bracing the eyedropper between thumb and index finger, tapped the needle into the vein.
A tendril of blood shot into the eyedropper. The needle was in the vein. She squeezed off a portion of the eyedropper’s content and stopped. He waited, then nodded. She squeezed off the rest.
While he cleared his throat and savored the flash of heroin going through him—no sensation in the world compares to it—she ran water through the needle and drew up another portion in the spoon. She sucked the cotton dry, then squirted back three small drops as she winked at me.
Carefully she put the outfit down and wrapped the necktie around her biceps, holding one end of the necktie in her teeth. At the inner aspect of her elbow were bluish scars and tiny scabs. They were covered with makeup but showed through. The scars traced the veins and were vaguely reminiscent of a bird’s tracks. And no wonder, for it took her several tries to register blood that meant she was in the vein.
“Chicks always have trouble,” J.M. said, “especially when they’re hooked real good. It makes their blood pressure drop or something.”
She pumped in the heroin. Her distended pupils turned into pinpoints. I’d never seen it before, but once I learned to recognize it I could tell if someone was high on heroin across a crowded room if I could see his or her eyes.
“Ahhhh . . . God’s medicine,” she said, humming.
She squeezed water through the needle to clean it, then sucked up the last few drops. “This is for you,” she said. Her voice had the gravelly slur that comes from opiates, as I would learn.
I was scared. Mixed with my fear was a hypnotic fascination. It wouldn’t kill me. What kind of sucker would I appear if I refused? And Charlie Parker liked it. What the hell. . . .
I rolled up my sleeve and took the necktie. “You fix me,” I said to Flip.
She drowsily scratched the tip of her nose and nodded, came close, and took the outfit. Our bodies brushed together. I could feel her warm breath and smell its sweetness. I almost missed the prick of the needle. The blood registered immediately.
“Good pressure,” she said, pausing momentarily to again scratch the tip of her nose. Then she squeezed the pacifier and the liquid disappeared into my body.
I waited for several heartbeats. Then came the indescribable warmth that spread through my entire being, erasing all pain. Good God! It was . . . wonderful. . . . Then, suddenly, came the nausea rising from my gullet to my throat.
I ran for the bathroom, hand over my mouth. The torrent splattered into the toilet. Thank God I hadn’t thrown up on the floor. Then I would have felt the fool.
I stayed bent over the toilet awhile until nothing came as I dry-heaved. My shirt was soaked with sweat, and it was running from my forehead into my eyes. I wiped my face with a towel and exited the bathroom. The paraphernalia was gone. Brandi had returned and was giving J.M. some money. She looked up as I entered.
“What happened?” I asked.
“She tricked him,” Flip said, then laughed. “A man with a hard dick is the biggest fool in the world.”
I took a couple of steps. My movement stirred up the nausea again. Flip saw it on my face.
“Lie down,” she said. “Don’t move and you’ll be cool.”
I followed her suggestion and found that she was right. As long as I was quiet, so was my stomach. The bliss washed over me, the absolute euphoria and utter insulation from every torment, mental and physical. I felt wonderful when I closed my eyes and savored the glow. I hadn’t known what to expect. It was different from the perception-distorting high of marijuana and the almost electric energetic charge of amphetamines. It made me drowsy yet did not dull my brain like Seconal or Nembutal. I simply felt good.
It seemed like only a few minutes had gone by, but when I looked at the window the sky was dark and the city’s lights glowed.
The hotel’s top floor was a whorehouse. J.M. had an arrangement with the night manager and with cabdrivers and bartenders. Pimps brought their whores there. One wanted a tiny piece of sponge; her period was nearly over, and the sponge absorbed the last traces of blood so she could work. Next came a black pimp who wanted to know if J.M. had any heroin. The black man’s old lady was sick from withdrawal and couldn’t work.
J.M. turned to Flip, who was at a mirror trying on earrings. “You’ve got the connection,” he said.
“You want me to go to Temple Street?” She said it in a challenging tone; the message was obvious. Temple Street was somewhere she should avoid. It was notorious at the time; a pool hall and Traveler’s Café on Temple Street were where drug dealers and thieves connected. Once on an escape from Whittier, I had slept for a week in the abandoned hulk of a ’37 Cord parked on Beaudry Street, which intersected Temple half a block from the pool hall.
“I’ll go with you, baby,” the black pimp said.
“You’re gonna throw us out a fix, right?” J.M. asked.
“Sure, man. Damn . . . you know that.”
Flip looked at me on the bed while putting on her coat. My head and shoulders were braced against the headboard so I could survey the comings and goings. “How do you feel?” she asked.
“Shit! I feel great!” My voice had an added rasp, and I did feel great. The only problem was that if I moved around, it jiggled my stomach and the nausea returned. What the hell, I didn’t have anywhere I had to go. This was great. I was seeing all kinds of things and people.
Everyone departed, Flip and the pimp on the errand, J.M. to pay the patch. The patch was a kind of bagman. All the street hustlers, pimps, confidence men, whores, gamblers, and boosters, who paid off the vice and bunco details, gave their payoff to a patch, and he dealt with the police bagman. The patch right now was a bartender in a cocktail lounge on West Eighth Street.
It didn’t matter that I’d been left alone. In the argot of the junkies, I was coasting on the nod.
The door opened. Brandi came in with a café-au-lait black girl. “Hey, baby,” Brandi said. “Where’s Flip?”
“She went to score.”
“Oh, shit! Say, we’ve got a hundred-dollar trick and we need a room.”
“So?”
“This is the only one. We’ll give you twenty.”
I swung my feet to the floor. “Forget it. Where do you want me to go?”
“Go right there. The closet.”
“The closet? What kinda shit is that?”
“Shhhh. He’s out in the hallway.”
I went into the closet. It was large, had an overhead light, and was empty except for some lingerie on a hook. Before I could say anything, Brandi turned off the light and closed the door.
Instantly I saw the light coming through the wall. It was a peephole. They had done this before. Voices came through the door. I accepted the invitation to play the voyeur and peeked through the hole. The hotel room was now bathed in green light, a catalyst I guess to erotic fantasy. It does smooth the wrinkles and make flab look firm. Brandi stood in the middle of the room in a garter belt, mesh stockings, and high heels. The black girl was in thigh-high rubber boots with long metal heels and an open-faced brassiere made of hard rubber. She had a twelve-inch ruler in one hand and was slapping it into the palm of her other hand. The sound was sharper than one might have imagined. Whooaaa . . . this I had to see. . . .
The whores played with the trick as if they were cats and he were a trapped mouse. It was a game the trapped mouse seemed to enjoy. He took off his expensive suit coat, unsnapped gold cuff links, and removed his shirt. As he stood there in his baggy shorts, with his flabby white legs and knobby knees, garters holding up his socks, he went from being a captain of industry to a trick with the speed of an erection. I expected to be aroused by the show, but instead I found myself biting my fist to keep from laughing, especially when he was on his knees cleaning the floor. The black girl stood over him, her pussy inches from his face, and gave him orders. He sneaked a look at her pussy. For punishment she swatted him on the butt with the ruler. “Ouch! Ohhh . . . that feels soooo good.”
I’d heard a lot of jailhouse tales of whores, pimps, and tricks but this was something else entirely. Later when I became friends with call girls I was told that many men who buy sex do so because they are both a little kinky and a little priggish, so they pay for fantasies with a hooker that they would be ashamed to ask their wives to participate in.
Brandi turned on the light and laughed at me. “How was that?”
“Weird.”
The café-au-lait hooker obviously felt bad. She sagged as she sat and sniffled. “Where the fuck is she?”
As if that were a signal, the door opened. Flip, J.M., and the black pimp came in.
“We be first, man,” the black pimp said. “She gotta get to work.”
“Sure. You paid for it.”
I stayed in the background, watching the scene. No wonder they were called dope fiends. There was a glazed eye fever as they waited for their turn. It was as if it were some kind of sacrament. They carefully counted drops and divided them between spoons. The black pimp tapped in the needle, and the eyedropper turned red with his blood. He squeezed off some and stopped. “Shit! It’s plugged.” He pulled it out, took the needle from the eyedropper, and put the remaining fluid back in the spoon. “Oh God! I forgot. I had hep—”
“You did!” J.M. said. “Whaddya think, Flip. This guy had hepatitis and he put some of his blood back in the spoon.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “I love hepatitis. Don’t you?”
“Oh yeah.” J.M. fitted the needle back on the eyedropper, drew up water, and squirted it through. It wasn’t plugged. He drew up the fluid in the spoon and handed it to Flip. As I watched, I thought they were all crazy. In Preston I’d known a boy who came down with acute hepatitis. When his skin turned yellow, so did the whites of his eyes, and his urine was like black coffee. He died a few days later.
Then I realized that they were sure the claim of hepatitis was a sham. The pimp virtually confessed when he shrugged. He’d hoped they would be afraid and he could have the rest.
“Gimme that hepatitis,” Flip said. “It makes the flash better.”
All the action slowed after 2:00 A.M. when the bars closed and the cabbies brought the last of the tricks. At 3:20, the Park Wilshire released five whores, three pimps, and a white boy delinquent. It had all been an adventure for me. For everyone else it was just another night of work. Now they were ready to eat. We piled into a taxi and J.M.’s car. I rode between J.M. and Flip, and the car motion jostled me against her. We headed downtown to The Pantry, a rough-and-ready steakhouse. It stayed open twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. The door was without a lock. It couldn’t close.
When we flamboyant whores and flashy pimps entered, heads turned, including those of two uniformed policemen at the counter. I felt immediate fear, for technically I was still under the curfew law. Had I not been in the forefront of the group, I would have turned and walked out. That, however, would have invited suspicion, so I kept walking behind the waiter. He took us to two big tables they had pulled together at the rear. I was just sitting down in the corner when a voice called, “Lookit Sambo with the white ho’!”
One of the black pimps turned and called out, “The dog that said that’s got a mama that sucks donkey dicks, and he gets fucked in the ass by big black dicks!”
“Ohh, shit,” J.M. muttered, reaching for the pimp’s sleeve. The pimp shook off the hand as a big redneck got up.
The policemen at the counter were also quick. The redneck’s back was to them; he had not been aware of them until one of them grabbed his arm. “Get outta here,” the cop said.
“I’m not finished with my coffee.”
“Yes, you are . . . unless you wanna take it to Lincoln Heights with you.”
“Yeah, okay.” The redneck sneered at the black pimp over the cop’s shoulder.
The black pimp started forward. The other cop blocked him with his nightstick. “Easy, boy!”
“Boy! I ain’t your boy, man.”
“Okay. I’m not your man, either. Just take it easy.”
Beside me, Flip muttered, “Stupid fuck.”
“Are you goin’?” the cop asked the redneck.
“Yeah.” He threw some change on the table and went out, muttering something about “nigger-loving motherfuckers.”
Both cops faced the black pimp. “C’mon now; don’t bite off more’n you can chew.”
The café-au-lait whore stood up and tugged her man’s arm. “C’mon, baby; sit on down. Don’t be parlayin’ nothin’ into somethin’.”
Grudgingly the black pimp sat down, muttering, “Fuck it,” as he did so.
The two policemen returned to the counter. The waiter came to take our order. Although a New York steak cost only seventy cents, nearly everyone ordered bacon and eggs. It took a few minutes for the tension to recede. Finally the pimp said, “That fool was lucky I didn’t kick his ass.” Everyone laughed.
We were eating when the front door opened. In came two more uniformed officers and two detectives. They went over to the officers at the counter, then looked toward our table at the rear.
I was next to the wall. “Here,” Flip said. “Ditch this.” From her purse on her lap she extracted a snub-nosed .38 wrapped in a handkerchief.
I took it, let my arm hang down, and curled my leg so when I dropped it my ankle broke its fall and eased the noise; plus I coughed loudly. Using my foot, I pushed it behind the table leg. By then the detectives and uniformed cops were filing down the aisle.
“On your feet . . . everybody.”
“What for?” asked a whore.
“’Cause I say so, Miss Coupe de Ville.”
Coupe de Ville! What a nickname.
“Outside . . . outside,” said a cop.
I quickly headed for the door, as far from the pistol as possible. One cop noticed me trying to slip behind the others using their bodies as shields. He crooked a finger. “How old are you?” he asked.
“Twenty-two.”
“You got any identification? A driver’s license?”
“No driver’s license. All I got is this.” I handed him two business cards stapled together, one from my probation officer with an appointment day and time written in, the other from Al Matthews.
“Matthews is your lawyer, huh?”
“Yessir.”
“Get outta here.”
“What?”
“Start walking. Put it on the road.”
Over his shoulder through the window I saw a uniformed cop at our table. He was bending over. I didn’t wait to see what he had picked up. “Thanks,” I said, pivoted, and walked away. About fifty feet from the door was an alley. As soon as I reached it and turned, my walk became an all-out sprint. I reached the next street and turned. What is now the Harbor Freeway was then a row of several old frame houses. I went partway down a driveway and ducked into the bushes. If the pistol had them looking for me, I would stand out walking around downtown at 4:00 A.M.
It was late spring and dawn came early. When the street lamps went out, cars began to appear and the first light of day peeked over Los Angeles’s low skyline of the time. I came out of the bushes and began to walk east and north. It was about a mile and a half to Al Matthews’s office. As I walked, I wondered if the police were looking for me. I doubted it. They had no way to prove the pistol belonged to me. The handkerchief had kept my fingerprints off it. While I walked and watched the stars fade, I wondered if something was wrong with my mind. Social scientists of the era thought crime was prima facie evidence of mental disorder. But wasn’t that just demon possession by another name? On the one hand, I sure as shit did things that might seem crazy. On the other hand, I’d never heard voices or seen anything that wasn’t there. Dr. Frym thought I had some paranoid traits. Why wouldn’t I have paranoid traits, living as I had lived? As my life went on, my miniparanoia would save my life more than once.
WHEN AL AND EMILY MATTHEWS ARRIVED at the office, I was waiting in the downstairs lobby. From their eyes more than their words I could tell that my appearance worried them. I wasn’t quite as neat as the day before. I wondered if my pupils were still pinpoints. I told them that I’d spent the night in the YMCA, which rented out rooms. Emily called Al aside. When she came back, she asked if I wanted a job for the day, painting a fence at their house. My reply was an enthused affirmative. I wanted the money enough to ignore my exhaustion.
My youth carried me through the morning while I splashed whitewash on a picket fence, but after lunch I sat down in the sunroom. I could hear music from the radio in the kitchen. I closed my eyes while listening to Billie Holiday singing “Crazy He Calls Me” and fell asleep. My next recollection was of Emily shaking me awake. It was twilight and we had to go back downtown to pick up Al at the office.
When we reached the office, Al wanted to see me alone. As soon as the door closed, he turned on me. “Why’d you lie?”
“About what?”
“About where you were last night?”
“I didn’t lie.”
“About four this morning you were with some pimps and whores. Sergeant O’Grady called me. There was a gun.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with a gun.”
“If Judge Ambrose heard about what happened, gun or not, you’d be in jail on a probation violation.”
I shrugged. My resentment of authority, and especially of any threat, was quickly ignited. Had the accusatory tone been from anyone else, I would have told him to kiss my ass . . . and fuck the judge in his ass. With Al, however, I checked myself, although he could see my attitude. He changed his: “Please stay out of trouble.” He opened the door and beckoned Emily. “Mrs. Wallis called,” he said. “She’s interested in meeting Eddie.”
“That’s great,” Emily said, then turned to me. “Eddie, we know a woman. She was in silent movies, and her husband is one of the biggest movie moguls in town. She wants to meet you tomorrow morning.”
“She’s got some work for you,” Al said. “Emily, Geffy can take him after he drops us off.” Geffy was Al’s driver, investigator, and bodyguard. In the thirties Geffy had been a top-ranked welterweight.
Emily told me, “Be here tomorrow about nine.”
“I’ll be here.”
“What are you going to do tonight?”
“I’m going to see an old girlfriend.”
Al grinned. “You can’t have any old girlfriends. Emily, did you pay him for his work today?”
“Not yet.”
“Here.” He extracted a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and gave it to me. At that time, minimum wage was fifty cents an hour. I was very happy with the twenty.
As I went out, I thought about Mrs. Wallis. I was no reader of movie credits, but I did know the name of Hal B. Wallis. I’d seen it too many times to not recognize it, and especially so because it was on the movies I liked best, black-and-whites from Warner Brothers about gangsters and hard times, mainly starring Bogart, Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and George Raft. They were not just actors to me; their characters were my role models.
AL MATTHEWS OWNED A SEA GREEN CADILLAC convertible. It was the first year with the trademark tail fins. This Cadillac was beautiful, and the first one in which I’d ridden. Cadillac’s only competition was Packard; Mercedes was still a pile of bombed-out ruins; Mitsubishi was the Japanese junk plane that our Corsairs shot down by the bushel. In 1950, the United States made 80 percent of all the cars in the world and Cadillac reigned supreme.
The Hollywood Freeway was still a long ditch with exposed steel rods and concrete being poured. The route to the San Fernando Valley was either along Riverside Drive around Griffith Park or through Hollywood’s Cahuenga Pass. Geffy took the latter route. The city already had memories for me. We passed a movie theater where I used to sneak in and sleep while a fugitive from reform school living on the streets. The men’s room was behind the screen next to the emergency exit into the alley. When Joe Gambos and I would knock on the door in the alley, one of the winos who frequented the theater would let us in. One night, however, I knocked, the door came open, and a policeman charged out swinging his nightstick. Joe was standing behind me, so when I turned to run I bumped into him. The cop caught me across the backbone with the nightstick. The blow knocked me down, and the bolt of pain made me scream. I was writhing on the ground and the cop kicked me a few times before telling me to get going. I went. The next morning my entire back was black-and-blue. It was numb for weeks. I’ve never hated cops, but I knew then that they were frequently not what Norman Rockwell painted for Saturday Evening Post covers.
Geffy turned up Cahuenga Boulevard, passing the Hollywood Bowl. Across from the Bowl was an outdoor theater where the life of Christ was put on every summer. My father had worked there for several years.
The San Fernando Valley’s orange groves were falling quickly to the developers’ bulldozers. Tract homes were rising to house the greatest immigration in human history, which was then in full swing. Never before had so many people moved to one place in so short a time.
Geffy knew very little about Mrs. Wallis except that she had been a silent film comedienne in Mack Sennett’s Keystone comedies. “Her name was Louise Fazenda. I remember her when I was a kid. She wore pigtails like a trademark. She was funny. I haven’t heard anything about her for . . . twenty years, I guess.”
We turned off Riverside Drive onto Woodman. The area was still all orange groves and alfalfa. Half a mile north of Riverside, at Magnolia, there was a ten-foot wall, whitewashed to resemble adobe. It was a long wall. Geffy turned into a short driveway with a solid green gate. There was an intercom with a button. The address was 5100 Woodman.
Geffy pressed a button and the intercom crackled. “Who is it?”
“We’re from Al Matthews’s office.”
The gate swung open, controlled from the house. We drove in and the gate closed behind us. Flowers bordered the road, agapanthus and trellised roses on the right and a huge lawn on the left. The lawn sloped from the Monterey Colonial house, with trees close around it, to a swimming pool and bathhouse. Behind the bathhouse was a tennis court. The house itself was smaller than the mansion on Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena, but the grounds were far better maintained. They radiated the serenity of a cloister.
The road kept going toward the rear, but a circular drive around a fountain ended at the front door. It opened as we arrived. Mrs. Hal Wallis was in her fifties and clad entirely in white. She hurried to greet us. She had very blond hair and a big mouth with a huge smile and was one of those persons that you warm to the moment you meet them. She told us to come in, but Geffy said he had to get back and take Al to court in Pomona that afternoon.
“Give him and Emily my love,” Mrs. Wallis said, and turned to me. “Come on. Follow me.” She took my hand and led me inside. The hallway was dim after the bright sunlight. She led me past a very formal living room, then through another room with blue chintz-upholstered chairs and down a hallway with Chippendale and polished brassware into the kitchen, which was sunny. There she introduced me to a snowy-haired woman named Minnie, who had been with the Wallises for a long time.
Mrs. Wallis looked me up and down. I was too dressed up to do the work she had in mind. She asked Minnie if Brent had any old jeans that I could use. Minnie wiped her hands and went to look. While Minnie was gone, Mrs. Wallis explained that her property went to a back street where there was an old house that nobody lived in. A mound of trash had accumulated over the years. She wanted it moved and dumped in a large pit. Did I know how to drive a truck, she asked.
“Depends on how big it is?”
Minnie returned with a pair of Levi’s and a T-shirt. Mrs. Wallis held the pair of jeans to my waist. “He’s a little heftier than you, but they’ll probably fit.”
The fit was adequate for the situation, although I wouldn’t have worn them in public. My vanity was substantially greater at sixteen than it is at sixty. Indeed, the whole society put a greater premium on appearance in 1950.
“Follow me,” she said, leading me out the back door toward the rear of her property. In a weathered shed was an old stagecoach. Nearby was a row of horse stalls, although there were no horses. There were a couple of small cottages, one used by her gardener, who came around the corner, saw us, and quickly ducked out of sight. “Who was that?” I asked.
“He doesn’t know you. He’s the gardener, poor man. He was in a car accident and his wife and daughter were killed. He went out of his mind. He was in Camarillo. He needed a special environment . . . privacy . . . seclusion. I was glad I could give him a job.”
We came upon an area that looked like the storage yard of a farm. I’d noticed a large field behind the cottages. Mrs. Wallis said it had been a walnut orchard until a few years before. As I recall, some kind of flood had killed the trees. The property was still called Wallis Farms, which was printed on the many checks she would give me over time.
In a building that resembled a cross between a barn and an open-faced garage was an old stake bed truck. It was bigger than anything I’d ever driven, which was actually limited to a few stolen cars. “Can you handle it?” she asked.
“Sure.” Why not? It wasn’t as if I were driving it to Oklahoma City on Route 66.
We both got in and I got the motor running. She was going to show me the route. We started off, bouncing along a dirt road toward a paved street. It was Magnolia, which ran at right angles to Woodman.
“Turn here,” she said. She meant the street. I thought she meant the space between rows of orange trees. The truck turned, but the bounce got worse, and the sides of the truck bed began snapping tree limbs.
“Oh my God!” she said, then dissolved into laugher as the truck hit a tree and stopped.
“My attitude precisely. Back up and try again.”
I reached Magnolia and went around the block. The Wallises owned all the property in between, including several newer garden apartment buildings.
We turned into a driveway beside a house quite old by Southern California standards. In the overgrown backyard was a mound of the standard effluvia of a wealthy society: a mattress and bedsprings, boxes of trash and a refrigerator with the door torn off, boxes of discarded clothes, and scraps of lumber.
Mrs. Wallis told me where to dump what I loaded. “I’ll walk back,” she said, cutting straight across her property instead of going out to the street and walking around the block.
I began throwing things on the truck. It was late morning and the marine layer of clouds common to Southern California was rapidly burning away under the bright sun. The hard labor common to reform school and the county farm had instilled resentment in me. It was hot, dirty work. Sweat was running into my eyes. Then I got a sliver under a fingernail. By the time I’d finished with filling the truck the first time, I was telling myself that I wasn’t coming back tomorrow. Many men take pride in hard labor, swinging a pick or wrestling a jackhammer. That attitude is planted in adolescence by family and culture and has myriad names: Protestant work ethic, the macho manhood of Hispanic societies, the competition of Japanese Bushido transformed to the mercantile world. I still recalled Whittier when I had to do hard labor and I hated it. I was not alone in that view. It was a group attitude, perhaps akin to what slaves feel. Repartee expressed the subcultural view: “ ‘Manual labor’ sounds like some kind of Mexican to me.” “Work is for fools and mules, and you don’t see long ears on me.”
I drove the truck to the dump and pushed the trash off in a cloud of dust. On the way back for another load, I found Minnie waiting on the road. “Mrs. Wallis says to come in to lunch. Take the truck back to the garage.”
In the kitchen, a place mat, silverware, and a napkin in a ring awaited me. Minnie had corn chowder and a ham-and-cheese sandwich with lots of mayonnaise waiting for me. It’s strange how clearly I remember such details after so many decades.
As I finished, Mrs. Wallis entered. By now the San Fernando Valley, which would have been a desert if not for the Northern California water (what a wonderful story of chicanery that is), was a full-midday blast furnace. “It’s too hot to work,” she said. “Why don’t you take a swim? There’s lots of bathing trunks in the pool house.”
“That’s a great idea,” I said.
“I thought you’d agree. One thing, though. If some men in collars show up, don’t pay any attention to them. I let the brothers from Notre Dame High School swim in our pool. They almost never come until late afternoon, but . . . just don’t be surprised.”
“Okay.”
I went out the kitchen door and around the back of the house, en route passing a large rose garden in full spring bloom. Mrs. Wallis would tell me later that Hal had a special affection for roses.
As I crossed the vast lawn dotted with shady maples and an occasional tall pine, birds sang. No wonder the Catholic brothers came here. It was as bucolic and peaceful as a seminary garden. Off to the side a whirling sprinkler cast sparkling drops through the sunlight. I went around the swimming pool to the bathhouse and found some swimming trunks that fit.
I walked out and dived into the pool. It was the first time I’d been in a private swimming pool or in any pool by myself, and it was great. I dived and swam until I was tired and then lay on the hot cement and let the sun dry me. I’ve always thought that lying on the warm cement beside a swimming pool is one of the most pleasurable sensations I’ve ever experienced.
Soon I saw Mrs. Wallis coming across the lawn. She’d changed clothes, but it was still all white. She always wore white, I never discovered why. She strutted in a parody of a zoot suiter, leaning backward, exaggerating her arm swing, a haughty expression on her face. She carried a tray with two ice-filled glasses and a pitcher. “Lemonade?” she asked.
“Sounds good.”
She put the glasses on a wrought-iron table and poured the lemonade. As she handed me one, she said, “You’ve got a pretty good tan . . . at least from the waist up. I thought everybody in jail was pale . . . unless they’re colored or Chicano.”
“They let us take off our shirts to work out at Wayside.”
“I used to be on the county parole board.”
“I didn’t even know the county had a parole board.”
“They do . . . or at least they did . . . once upon a time.”
She was a most likable woman, radiating a good-natured garrulousness. She was also curious about me and asked me a lot of questions. My replies were more wary than candid. Why should she be concerned about me? It was obvious that she had wealth surpassing the dreams of the average person. What did she want from me? She could sure do better than me for a gigolo. Although I was wary, I nonetheless found myself grinning and laughing. She was warm and funny.
A young woman in shorts and an immense straw hat, with two children ambling around her, appeared coming across the lawn. While they were still some distance away, Mrs. Wallis said that she was a neighbor, “. . . who used to be my son’s girlfriend even though she’s four years older. . . . Is that strange?” Over time I would learn that Mrs. Wallis often asked questions like that, in a deliberately conspiratorial manner of speech. It was not malicious. It was her way to draw you closer to her. “Her husband’s directing a movie at Warner Brothers. If they knew she was coming here . . . oi vey, they’d be displeased.”
They! What they was she talking about?
The children blew by and hit the water like two small bombs, and the young woman extended her hand as Mrs. Wallis made the introductions. I can’t even remember her name or who she was, except that she was about twenty-five and quite pretty, with a full mouth of teeth showing as she smiled during the introduction. The best part was that it saved me from the velvet interrogation. When she was seated and they started to talk, I went into the water to play with the children, a boy and a girl—older than six, younger than ten. I was (and continue to be) poor at determining the ages of children, except for my own, who hadn’t gotten that far yet. We threw a big light rubber ball around the water. They swam like seals. Why not? They were Southern California children of the upper middle class. Swimming was in their genes.
Minnie came out to tell Mrs. Wallis that “Miss Wallis” was on the phone. “Miss” Wallis was Hal’s sister, Minna Wallis of Famous Artists and agent to Clark Gable and others. Over time I would learn that she was a sucker for poker and a merciless bitch at negotiation.
After Louise Wallis was gone for some minutes, I decided it was time to leave. The white sun of midday was tinged with orange as it came at a lower angle through the many trees, which were starting to move to the music of the rising evening breeze. The young woman called her children. “It’s getting chilly,” she said. I gave her a wave as I climbed from the pool at the far edge. It was closest to the bathhouse.
When I finished toweling myself and getting dressed, the young woman was gone. Reaching the house from the bathhouse would necessitate going around the swimming pool. As I walked along the short side of its rectangular shape, I failed to see the step from the deck down into the water. I took a step and my foot came down first on air and then in a foot of water. However, it pitched me sideways into the swimming pool. Chaplin could not have taken a better pratfall.
I arrived at the back door dripping water and thoroughly mortified. Minnie called Mrs. Wallis, who thought it was hilarious.
Wearing one of Hal’s monogrammed tern cloth robes, my clothes a soaked pile on the rear stoop, I followed Mrs. Wallis upstairs to her son’s bedroom. He was attending one of the Claremont Colleges and came home on the weekend. The room had a wall of books and the various photographs, pennants, and athletic equipment one would associate with a youth in America at the time. The acoustic guitar there was a little ahead of its time. The rage of the age was the saxophone. Mrs. Wallis went through drawers and closet, plucking me Levi’s jeans (what we call 501s were all they made in ’50), a knit polo shirt, and a short windbreaker of pig suede. While she was at it, she said he had more than he needed and made me a CARE package. She found a bag in which to carry them.
“Now we have to get your money,” she said, leading me to her bedroom, which was actually a suite, with separate dressing room and bathroom. The room was at the corner of the house, with windows on two sides, facing north and west, the slanting sun softened by the trees along the outside. The shadows danced in the breeze and sunlight. The room was large. Half was the actual bedroom; a sofa and a screen created another space, with a fancy antique desk and file cabinets. One wall was a huge bookcase. I glanced at some titles. Many were psychology; a couple were religion. This was the first time I saw the name Pierre Tielhard de Chardin. It was so mellifluous that I remembered this moment the next time I saw it. One title was The Neurotic Personality in Our Time, by Karen Horney.
Mrs. Wallis’s checkbook was huge, six perforated checks to each page. She wrote a check for twenty-three dollars. Twenty was for the work, the three for transportation. “You can walk a block north. The red car stops at Chandler and Woodman. It’ll take you all the way to the subway terminal.”
“That’s where I want to go.”
“Can you drive a car better than a truck?” She was laughing.
I was blushing. “Oh, yeah, I mean . . . that was just—”
“It was my fault. I told you to turn. Tomorrow I want you to drive me on my errands. I’ve got arthritis in my hands.” She held them up. Her joints had the telltale swelling. “Can you be here by ten?”
“I’ll be here.” Driving a rich woman around town was a different matter from laboring in the sun, and twenty dollars was twice what a worker got on the line at General Motors.
I walked out to the gate, where a button on the inside let me open it for myself. Trudging along Woodman the long two blocks to the Pacific Electric tracks on Chandler Boulevard, I saw a tract of California ranch-style houses being erected. Some were still skeletons of wood frame, others were covered with plaster skin, and from somewhere came the rhythmic banging of a hammer, the sound carrying in the afternoon breeze.
One of Pacific Electric’s big red streetcars, actually two of them attached to each other, soon appeared and came to a stop. Running along a wide right-of-way in the middle of the divided road, it took me through North Hollywood and the edge of Glendale, past the temple built by Aimee Semple McPherson and Echo Park with its electric boats, into a mile-long tunnel at the end of Glendale Boulevard. The tracks ended far beneath the subway terminal building half a block north of Fifth Street on Hill.
I rented a furnished room near MacArthur Park. It cost seven dollars for the week. The bathroom was down the hall, but my room did have a sink. I felt good about it. There was a carpet on the floor, and it was comfortable. It was mine. I locked the door and took a nap. When I awoke it was time to go out into the Los Angeles night. The world knows that Southern California is warm in winter. It is less well known that night in the City of Angels is its best time. If the day was scorching, the moment the sun descends the world cools to the perfect comfort zone. I walked downtown, about two miles from the room, and went to see Yellow Sky, an excellent character-driven western, with Gregory Peck and Anne Baxter.
IN THE MORNING WE BEGAN the routine that would continue several days a week for the next few months. I would arrive after 9:00. Sometimes Mrs. Wallis was ready at 9:30, sometimes not until 11:00. While I waited, Minnie cooked me a great breakfast.
Sooner or later we left on Mrs. Wallis’s “errands.” We went in on Riverside if we were going to Paramount in Hollywood. She always got first-class treatment, for if her star days were long gone, “I’m still Lady Wallis,” she would say, and wink like a conspirator. No doubt Hal Wallis was a movie mogul by anyone’s criteria. I thought it strange that he was never at the studio when we visited. Was it something ulterior? Did she want me to kill him? Maybe that was why she seemed too interested in finding out about me and what I thought.
She loved to talk—and I have always been a listener. In bits and pieces I began to learn her story. She had been born poor, not impoverished but working-class poor. She had lived at Sixth and Kohler in the first decade after the turn of the century and had worked at the Bishop Candy Company, at Seventh and Central. She got fired (years later she confided that it was because she’d had an abortion) because she was too sick to work. She was looking for another job. A woman named Bertha Griffith, I believe that was her name, gave Louise a ride, found that she needed a job, and took her out to where Mack Sennett was making Keystone comedies. She got a job as an actress in Sennett’s company because she could drive an automobile, a skill rare among women in the first decade of the twentieth century. Wearing trademark pigtails, she became a star of silent movies. “Not real big,” she said, “but I had a long run.” Indeed, she still worked occasionally after the arrival of sound, although by then she was the wife of Hal B. Wallis and had no financial need to act in a movie. When I once spotted an Oscar for Best Picture for Casablanca, Louise told me the tale. At one time Hal had run the Warner Brothers studio and the brothers Warner “loved him like a son,” or so Mrs. Wallis said. A decade and some thereafter, the brothers Warner and Hal Wallis divorced with bile and acrimony. At the Academy Awards of 1942 or ’43, when “Best Picture” was announced minions of Harry Warner blocked Hal from getting out of his seat to come onstage. They ran up and collected the Oscar. “They claimed it was the studio’s . . . or something like that.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Oh, you see where it is, don’t you?”
“I don’t even know why I asked.”
“They hate him. Don’t mention Hal Wallis at Warners. The last few years there, he’d been signing the talent to personal rather than studio contracts—actors, cinematographers, directors, several big ones. When he left and set up an independent production company at Paramount, Harry Warner nearly had a seizure. Cross my heart it’s true.” It was very entertaining to hear inside Hollywood gossip. It made me feel like an insider, too.
Often our route from her house was over the hills into Beverly Hills. She knew many famous people. Jack Dempsey was a friend from her heyday in the Roaring Twenties, when, she said, “I tried everything there is, and what I liked I did twice.” Having heard that I had the idea of being a prizefighter, she took me to Dempsey’s real estate office, I think it was on Santa Monica Boulevard. He had me throw a jab and held up a huge hand. The jab felt awfully weak, and I was slightly embarrassed. He was at least sixty and looked as if he could knock a mule down. Another time she took me to visit Ayn Rand, whom she knew because Hal had produced the movie of Rand’s book The Fountainhead, which I had not then read. Ditto for Aldous Huxley, a tall, gaunt man. All I remember was that the house smelled of bread freshly baked by his wife.
The most memorable visit was on a trip over Benedict Canyon. It descended into Beverly Hills via many tight curves and switchbacks. Houses were few, and they were all flashes of red-tiled roofs behind walls draped in bougainvillea.
“Do you know who William Randolph Hearst is?” she asked.
I’d heard my father curse the Hearst newspapers as being “goddamned fascist propaganda.” And somewhere I’d heard that the movie Citizen Kane was based on Hearst.
“Is he still alive?”
“Oh, yes . . . barely.”
“The movie said he was dead.”
“Oh no, W.R.’s still alive. He might be better off if he wasn’t. He’s had a couple of strokes. He hasn’t been out of Marion’s house for three years. That’s where we’re going.” A little while later, she added, almost to herself, “God, how Marion hated that movie. Him, too, but she . . . she would have killed Welles . . . and Marion is really kind and gentle . . . and funny. Everyone thinks it was just W.R.’s money that made her a star, but she was a good light comedienne.” Mrs. Wallis paused in reflection. “We had fun,” she said. “It was almost shameful in the depression. W.R. would run a small private train from Glendale to San Luis Obispo; the Hollywood Train, they called it. Then everyone would pile into a string of limousines to the ranch. That’s what W.R. called it. Imagine calling San Simeon the ranch? Everybody wanted an invitation. Chaplin went all the time. He was a good tennis player. Greta Garbo, John Gilbert. I can see them all now, swimming in the outdoor pool in the moonlight.” She named other names that must have blazed across the firmament of fame once upon a time but failed to resonate in my memory. I did recognize Ken Murray, for my father had worked backstage at Ken Murray’s Blackouts, a review that ran in Hollywood for years. Someday she’d show me San Simeon, she said.
As I recall, the Davies house was up Beverly Drive, north of Sunset Boulevard, where Beverly turns into Franklin Canyon, although someone told me that the house where they lived was in Whitley Heights above the older part of downtown Hollywood.
Marion Davies opened the door. She was in her fifties, although in the shadowed light of the entryway she looked younger. It was still easy to see why Hearst, then in his fifties, had been attracted to the twenty-two-year-old chorus girl. She embraced Louise and then turned to me. “Is this Brent? I haven’t seen him since—” She extended her hand out about the height of her waist to indicate the size of a little boy.
“No, no, this is Eddie. He’s my weekday son. Brent comes home on weekends.”
Marion smiled warmly and extended a hand. “You’ve got a great weekday mother. She’s been my buddy for a long, long time.”
Marion Davies led us into a sitting room where they talked about Zasu Pitts, a mutual friend who had just undergone cancer surgery. Marion said that Zasu was okay. All her cancer had been removed.
While they were talking, I excused myself to use the bathroom. Marion led me to the hall and gave me further instructions. When I came out, they were gone. A French door was open onto a terrace, and I saw a flash of white and went that way onto the terrace. Its bricks were mottled with sunlight coming through a giant elm and stained with crushed red berries from a bush that had overgrown a masonry railing. A pair of squirrels were wild and noisy in a tree. There was lots of wild greeneiy on the slope beyond the wide terrace.
The flash of white had been a nurse’s uniform. She was carrying a tray through another door in the house. Behind her, sitting in the single square of warming sunlight, was a man in a wheelchair. I moved closer, meaning to ask if he’d seen Marion and Louise, but when I got closer I decided against it. The face had familiarity. I must have seen it in newsreels or a Life magazine or somewhere—or maybe I imagined recognition. My knowledge was straight out of Orson Welles and my father’s attitude, but for some reason I felt this man represented wealth and power beyond my conception of such things. What I saw was a big jaw and a huge, round skull with a few wisps of gray hair. He turned his torso to look at me with rheumy eyes. I’d felt awe because this was a man who had spoken to all of America whenever he desired. Presidents had consulted him and Churchill had visited him at Marion’s beach house in Santa Monica, according to Louise Fazenda Wallis. But as he turned and screwed his mouth to speak, I saw the frailty of decrepit old age and disease. I think I viscerally understood for the first time that all men are mortal. He said something that sounded like, “Mom,” with spittle on the corner of his mouth.
“What?” I asked, leaning forward.
“Marion,” he said, or so it seemed.
“I’ll find her,” I said, turning forthwith. The nurse was coming toward me. “Do you know where Miss Davies and Mrs. Wallis are?”
“They were going into the kitchen.”
I found them coming out of the kitchen. When I told Marion Davies about Mr. Hearst, her face got red, but she made no comment. We were in the entryway. Mrs. Wallis said we had to go and told Marion she would keep in touch. It was very friendly, but Miss Davies was manifestly distracted as she showed us out.
As I was driving back to the valley through the part of the Hollywood Hills called Beverly Hills Post Office, it was hard to keep the image of William Randolph Hearst out of my mind and to think of what I knew from Citizen Kane. I cannot separate what I knew then from what I’ve learned since, but I’d assumed without reflection that giants never got old and helpless. This was truly my introduction to the ultimate equality of human frailty and mortality. I never wanted to get so old that I was that helpless. But God, what a life he had lived until then.
Sometimes Mrs. Wallis’s errands were really just that, trips to the market or flower nursery or to friends without particular wealth. Some she’d known since her movie days, such as the woman who did her hair and dyed it not quite platinum—and never got it exactly the same twice in a row. She was fun to be with. Once I accidentally ran a stop light on Riverside Drive. Mrs. Wallis said, “Trucha . . . la jura!” It was pure barrio slang for “cool it, the heat,” and seemed very funny to me considering who she was. Another time she forgot the key that turned under the speakerphone and opened the gate. It was about 11:00 P.M. Instead of waking the servants, she took off her shoes, threw them over, and had me web my fingers together and boost her until she could stand on my shoulders and climb over the gate. It seemed so unaffected and unpretentious that it sent a wave of affection through me. By then I doubted that she wanted either a gigolo or a hit man; all she seemed to want was to help me, but I couldn’t imagine why. Nor could Al and Emily Matthews when I asked them. “She just helps people,” they said. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
It was several years later that Mrs. Wallis told me the story of her philanthropy, which was always personal and individual rather than as part of an organization. She never appeared in the photos of the women’s committee of this or that charity. She did her good works alone and quietly, although her obituary would be headed: “Angel of Hollywood.”
Through the Roaring Twenties she did the Charleston and the Black Bottom and knew Al Capone and the “boys in Chicago. . . .” She once had a prizefighter boyfriend who left a suitcase with her. Soon thereafter the drug agents came for the suitcase full of morphine. She told the ribald tales with gusto, although she also became serious, and it was the serious demeanor she showed when she told me why she devoted herself to helping people.
“I wanted a baby and I couldn’t get pregnant. The doctors speculated that the abortion had done something to me. Anyway, I went on a trip to France on the Normandie. I met some Hollywood people, and one day we went to Lourdes. You know about Lourdes?”
“I saw the movie with Jennifer Jones.”
“Right. Naturally we’d been drinking since lunch and it was dark when we actually went to see. It was really moving, hundreds of people with candles in a line that snaked back and forth up the hillside to the grotto where she saw the Virgin. On impulse I got in line, and when I got to the grotto I promised that if I could have a baby I would spend the rest of my life helping people.
“Three months later I was pregnant.”
In the eighteen years since then, she had fulfilled her vow. During World War II, she brought two children from the London Blitz to live in her home. She had helped several girls who had gotten pregnant. It was still a major stigma then to have a baby out of marriage, and abortions were illegal. After she took in one young girl, provided for her, paid for the delivery, and arranged for the baby to be adopted by a film director (she said “well-known” without giving a name), word got around the movie business and other girls were referred to her. Once she had arranged for a Tijuana abortion, “but I won’t do that again,” she said. One of her special works was the McKinley Home for Boys. It had occupied forty acres at Riverside Drive and Woodman since the time of William McKinley. It took in about a hundred boys from five to seventeen, mostly from broken homes, many with parental alcoholism. Some came from the Juvenile Court. She was McKinley’s foremost benefactor. She paid to send one youth who had grown up there to the University of Chicago. He was destined to become the superintendent of McKinley.
She also helped Notre Dame High School. Over the years she tried to help Edward G Robinson Jr., a handsome but tormented youth with an affinity for trouble, who would die too young from too much wealth and insufficient responsibility. She told me, too, that thinking about someone else’s troubles was a balm to her own. At the time I wondered what troubles she could possibly have. A week or so later, I read a newspaper feature story about “star maker” Hal Wallis and his latest protégée, the husky-voiced Lizabeth Scott, and recalled some hints and innuendos. Later on, I told Louise Wallis that I’d heard Lizabeth Scott was a lesbian. “I heard that, too,” she said. “I don’t know what that makes Hal.”
AS WITH VIRTUALLY ALL reform school graduates, I had some haphazard India ink tattoos. I had a diamond in the loose strip of flesh between thumb and forefinger where most others wore a pachuco cross. It indicated my loyalty to La Diamond, the only interracial street gang of the era. I had WSS and PSI on my upper arm, the middle S serving for both—read one across and one up and down. Whittier State School, Preston School of Industry.
In my night world, after I left Mrs. Wallis for the mean streets, having been in reform school was no stigma. Indeed, it had a certain cachet. On one visit to Al Matthews’s office, Emily called me aside and said that Mrs. Wallis wanted to pay to have my tattoos removed. That was fine with me—and thank God my defacement was so minor. Many of my comrades were highly illustrated men.
A week later, a Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon removed the tattoos on my body. What was tattooed into my brain was a different matter.
My nights and weekends were spent in the underworld. I now had a furnished room in a residential hotel near MacArthur Park, half a mile west of downtown Los Angeles. Although just sixteen and not looking older than my years, I hung out in Robin’s Club, on Eighth Street. It was literally a den of thieves, mostly artists of the “short con.” The Match, the Strap, and laying the note (a form of short change) were standard games. The days of “long con” were over. In a short con, one simply takes what the sucker has on him. Long con is what the name implies, and a good example of a “long con” is the fake bookie parlor in The Sting. There were also till tappers and a few burglars. These were thieves who looked down on armed robbers and violence.
One night Sully, the bartender at Robin’s who was also the patch (he took the payoff and gave it to the bunco squad), told the con men that Los Angeles was closed down. Con men couldn’t work the sheds, the train and bus depot, where 90 percent of short con games originate. People who are going somewhere usually have a good amount of money on them. When they were on “juice,” the bunco squad let them take off anyone who was traveling and wouldn’t be around to make noise. Suddenly all the con men were closed down. They couldn’t go into the sheds because the bunco squad detectives knew them by sight. Still, they had to make money. Most of them were junkies, the older ones on morphine, the younger on heroin.
Charley Baker and Piz the Whiz, whom I’d met in the county jail, asked me if I knew how to play the Match or the Strap. Although I’d had them explained to me and even performed for me, I had never played con, which is quite comparable to an actor memorizing a script and then performing. Indeed, the game is in the spiel, the script. I shook my head.
“Never mind. You don’t need to play. All we want you to do is steer.” They wanted me to go into the shed, find the suckers, and qualify them with a spiel. Charley and Piz would teach me from there. I was to bring the suckers out onto the downtown sidewalks where the con would go down. Usually the steer played the inside, but Charley and Piz would take over, one at a time, when I brought the sucker out. They would cut me in for a third. Was I interested?
I was very interested. I wanted to see these con games because it seemed awfully weak. I wanted to see someone go for it. Besides, it was a new adventure, and I was always prepared for new adventures.
I looked through the crowd for young men with short haircuts and ill-fitting clothes in the downtown Greyhound bus terminal. Anyone fitting this description had a high likelihood of being a serviceman on transfer from base to base, which meant he was carrying a few hundred dollars in cash, and a few hundred in 1950 was equal to a few thousand half a century later. “Hi, good buddy, where you stationed?” If the response was cold or hostile, I veered away like a shark looking for easier fish. If he said “Saint Louis” or “Oklahoma City” or wherever, I’d say, “You goin’ on that bus?” Whatever bus he said, it was then, “Me, too! That bus don’t leave for an hour” (or until whatever time the bus schedule said). Next I’d tell him about some waitresses I had met. “They got bodies . . . mmmm, mmmm, mmm. C’mon; let’s go check ’em out. I’ll buy you a drink.”
If he came along, out on the street we would go one way; then I would change my mind. “No, this way. C’mon.” The idea was to ensure dominance and leadership. After half a block, Charley Baker would appear. “Hey, man,” he would say to me. “I was lookin”’ for you. Those chicks are waitin’. C’mon.” So three of us would be walking along the pedestrian-crowded sidewalk. On the next block, Piz the Whiz would cut into us, usually using either an Irish brogue or an Australian or country boy accent. He would claim to be lost. Then he would confide in us that he was in Los Angeles to settle his brother-in-law’s estate for his sister: “Did pretty good for myself, too. Got an extra eight thousand she don’t know about.” He would give a long wink, and the inside man would whisper to the sucker, “That guy just beat his sister outta eight thousand dollars.”
The conversation that ensued was essentially scripted dialogue between the inside and outside man, with an occasional nudge or whisper to the mooch by the inside man. The outside man would be loud and gross and often pretend to be half-drunk. He would want to gamble.
“We’ll match coins. Odd man wins.”
To the mooch, the inside man whispers, “Let’s take this sonofabitch that stole from his sister. You take heads. I’ll take tails. One of us gotta win. We’ll split what we get.”
As the coin match gets ready, the inside man says, “This is for three hundred dollars.” They all flipped. “And I win!”
The outside man says, “Goddamn . . . you sure did.” He would pull out a fat bankroll, usually a Philadelphia bankroll of one-dollar bills with a twenty on the outside and sometimes even paper. “Here you go.” He would pay the inside man, who pulls out a wallet that has a zipper all the way around three sides. He unzips it and puts the money in. “C’mon; let’s go,” he tells the mooch. “We just made a hundred and a half apiece.”
When they had gone about twenty yards, Piz the Whiz would hurry after. “Hey, wait a minute. How do I know I woulda got paid if I’d won? You got three hundred?”
“Hell yes. You know I got it.”
“I don’t know that he’s got it.”
“You’ve got it, don’t you?”
The mooch nods.
“You say it, but I didn’t see you pay off. Are you guys in cahoots against me? Maybe I better call a cop.” And Piz starts looking around, as if for a police car.
“Show it to him,” says Charley, playing the inside, whispering, “Jeez, we don’t wanna see no cops.”
As the mooch gets out his money, Piz demands that he pay off. If the mooch has it in a wallet, he can only open the wallet to the money compartment by using two hands. As he does that, the inside man plucks it out. “How much is here?”
If the mooch says an amount less than the amount of the wager, the inside man says, “I owe him the difference,” and starts to hand it back.
Piz yells, “You guys are in cahoots! I want a cop!”
“No, no. We’re not in cahoots.”
“You’re givin’ him his money back.”
“No, I’m not.” He pulls out the zippered billfold, unzips it, and puts the money in. (He actually has two identical billfolds, one of which has a zipper that won’t unzip.) “C’mon; let’s go.” He starts leaving with the mooch. “Boy, we almost got in trouble with the cops. Don’t worry. I got your money. We still made a hundred and fifty apiece.”
Piz chases them again, now loudly proclaiming that he knows they are going off to split his money. “Stop! I want a policeman!”
Charley, the inside man, stirs the pot of fear in the mooch: “Jesus, if he gets a cop, we’re in trouble. Stop!” He turns on Piz. “Get away from us. We’re not together.”
“Then you go one way . . . and you go the other way.”
This last move is the split out. Ideally, it happens at a corner. The inside man whispers to the mooch, “I’ll see you at the bus depot.” He goes one way, the mooch goes the other, and Piz stands at the corner looking both ways. If the mooch is going off, he gives the standard signal that things are all right: he rubs his stomach. In fact, throughout the con game there are hand signals for when to make the next move in the script. Sometimes at this last moment the mooch bucks; he won’t let his money get out of sight. If he cannot be split out, Charley says, “Here, you take the money and meet me at the bus station.” He then gives the billfold with the fixed zipper to the mooch, who won’t be able to get it open. That, however, is a last resort. The con game unfolds in such a way that the victim never senses danger until the trap closes. Until then he has risked nothing and believes that he has made a hundred and a half dollars off a dirty son of a bitch who has stolen from his own sister.
The Strap is virtually the same con game, except the gimmick is not matched coins but rather an ability to stick a pencil in the center of a rolled-up belt. Laying the note is a short-change hustle where you buy something, hand over a bill, then decide to pay for it with another bill, and then the con is in the count. I know con men who try it with every cashier. It doesn’t work with wizened cashiers, but young girls behind cash registers are raw steak to a lion for con men.
I’d been told about all these games in the county jail and at the honor farm. Also the various signals that con men, boosters, and card mechanics use. Actually, most who play one game can play the others, too. Patting your stomach means “okay, everything is cool.” Tugging your ear means “get outta here.” Tugging your sleeve means “get me outta here.” Rubbing your nose means “come back in for the next step of the game.” Sitting down in a card game, a closed fist on the table, indicates that “I am a card mechanic and want to work.” A flat palm on the table in response tells the mechanic to go ahead; a closed fist means to freeze.
I absorbed everything indiscriminately. The lingo, too, the rhyming lingua franca passed down from seventeenth-century London. The rhyme was the key. A “bottle and stopper on the hammer and tack” means there’s a copper on your back. “Oscar hocks” are socks. “Roses and reds” is the bed; “plates of meat” are the feet. Mix the rhyme with carney talk: “Beazottle steazopper iazon the heazammer,” and the statement is plain as day in the thief underworld. Only those at home among thieves could handle it with any facility.
One night I was hanging out at the Traveler’s Café on Temple Street between Figueroa and Beaudry. An archway went from the café to the adjacent pool hall. Most of the habitués of both were Chicano or Filipino, with lots of dyed blond whores coming and going. They told me they liked Filipino tricks because they weren’t mules. They were quick and they liked head, which was the quickest and easiest for a whore. I liked watching the action, and I never knew what adventure would happen next.
Wedo, who would later be called Wedo Karate in prison, came in to the Traveler’s that night wide-eyed. He was already a junkie and sometime dealer. He was looking frantically for someone. Spotting me, he came down the counter. I expected him to hit on me for enough to buy a fix, but he had other business in mind. Outside, around the corner, he had two “wetbacks” from Mexico who had two gunnysacks full of pot. “Damn near a hundred pounds,” Wedo said. “They want a hundred dollars for both sacks. I only got thirty bucks, man. If you got the rest, we’ll go in partners on it.”
It was worth looking at, so I went outside and around the corner. Sure enough, waiting in Wedo’s battered car (the left back door was held shut with wire) were two non-English-speaking Mexicans in straw hats. On the floorboards at their feet were two big gunnysacks of jute that were stuffed like huge sausages. The smell was pot.
“Where can we go to check it out?” Wedo asked.
“Your place,” I said.
“No, no. I got an old lady and a baby. She’ll go ape shit. Let’s go to your room.”
That was where we went. We parked in the alley and went up the back stairs, the Mexicans lugging the big, fat sacks on their shoulders.
In my room, I stripped the sheets off my bed and spread them on the floor. The Mexicans dumped one of the sacks on the sheets. It was a big pile of marijuana. It wasn’t the high-potency seedless buds of fancy Humboldt County horticulture. It was “weed” in the truest sense, full of stems and seeds, but it was the marijuana of the era, what everyone bought for a dollar a joint, three joints for two dollars, or ten dollars a can (a Prince Albert can at that), and there was a lot of it. It had been crushed into bricks, but they were shedding seeds and falling apart. Maybe it was a hundred pounds, maybe it was only sixty or seventy, but it was at least a couple hundred ten-dollar cans. I couldn’t go wrong. Mrs. Wallis usually gave me twenty dollars a day, but on Friday she gave me sixty dollars for the weekend, and I had about ten more.
Wedo was half-Chicano and spoke Spanish. They wanted a hundred dollars U.S. He offered them eighty and promised them another twenty later. They took it. I was in the pot business. I drove Mrs. Wallis during weekdays and sold pot at night and on weekends. It was pretty good pot, too, at least for the time. In a few weeks I would be able to buy my fondest desire: a car. Wedo and I used to look at them in car lots with the yearning of the poor.
“I need to drive up the coast to San Francisco,” Mrs. Wallis said one day. “I’m going to look at some locations for Hal. Want to come, or should I get someone from McKinley?”
“Oh no. I’ll be glad to drive you. I’ve never seen San Francisco.”
“We’ll have a nice trip. We do have a good time together, don’t we?”
It was true. I enjoyed her company as much as if not more than that of any nubile sixteen-year-old female I knew. Some of them were high-breasted and had round asses; they could arouse desire almost blinding in its ferocity, but they were invariably ignorant of anything beyond their truncated world of the street. I cannot recall any who had ever read a book. They blossomed in the cracks of the mean streets, full-bosomed and empty-headed, and of course they simply reflected the world where they had grown up. I had never met the daughters of doctors and lawyers. Louise Fazenda Wallis had wit and wisdom and many interests. She had great stories to tell, of Capone sending emissaries to the train when she arrived in Chicago, of Hollywood in the heyday of silent films. Mabel Normand, Desmond Taylor, and Louise Brooks had been her close friends. She introduced me to a world I’d never imagined seeing firsthand. My image of success was to own a cocktail lounge, wear Hickey-Freeman suits, drive a Cadillac, and sport a blonde in a mink stole. Mrs. Wallis planted the seed in me of greater dreams.
There was no freeway to San Francisco back then. Ventura Boulevard was U.S. 101. Beyond Sepulveda Boulevard it was mostly desert with some citrus groves. The towns of Encino, Woodland Hills, and Tarzana were tiny hamlets. We passed children riding bareback and barefoot on the shoulder of the highway, which was just two lanes along the base of the Santa Monica Mountains. Somewhere between Tarzana (so-named because Tarzan’s creator lived there) and Thousand Oaks we stopped at a wild animal compound in a stand of eucalyptus. Here were lions and tigers and elephants rented out to the movies. She knew someone in Tarzana from the “old days.”
The big, heavy station wagon we drove ate up the road. When we came down from a pass through the half-mountains into a broad valley and Ventura County, the landscape was all lush farmland. The sun was hot and the fields were full of pickers bent low.
“Strawberries,” Mrs. Wallis said.
As if confirming her words, a truck stand beside the road had a sign: FRESH STRAWBERRIES. Farther on were vast alfalfa fields growing lush under the whirling sprinklers that threw glittering water through the air. Then there were ranks of trees I did not recognize. “What are those?”
“Walnuts.”
“Everything grows in California.”
“Yes, it does.”
Beyond the town of Ventura the highway followed the shoreline. The big station wagon seemed to race the rolling surf for miles. Traffic was light and I was going fast when I saw my first sports car, an XK 120 Jaguar roadster. It was silver and fast and it first appeared in the rearview mirror, then blew by me. “Buy me one of those,” I said.
It made her laugh. “You like that, huh?”
“Oh, yeah.” At the time I had no idea what kind of car it was, only what it looked like and how fast it was.
“I don’t know about buying it for you . . . but you could have that. . . . You could have anything you want if you want it bad enough.” She laughed. “I’m a believer in perseverance. It is the number-one ingredient to success.”
Following lunch in Santa Barbara, we drove to Pismo Beach, where Mrs. Wallis was met by a town official. He had been told what she sought and had a list of possibilities. Mrs. Wallis produced a camera and took pictures. It was midafternoon when we finished in Pismo Beach.
“We won’t make Monterey today,” she said when we were under way again. “Stop and let me make a phone call.”
At the Madonna Inn just south of tiny San Luis Obispo, I waited while she went inside to use the telephone. She was grinning when she came out. “I called Marion and we’re spending the night at San Simeon.” She was excited, but I had no frame of reference, so I didn’t react. She added, “In Citizen Kane, remember Xanadu . . . ‘the stately pleasure palace,’ or something like that.”
I did remember, vaguely about Xanadu, but I rejected that film fantasy as exaggeration. Nothing could be like that. I was wrong, of course.
Above San Luis Obispo we turned from U.S. 101 in California Highway 1. From Morro Bay north, the narrow highway hugged the cliffs, below which the Pacific slammed into jagged rocks. The trees were twisted by perpetual wind; their roots seemed to penetrate the rocks themselves. Seagulls soared and screeched. There was almost no traffic. On the rocks below, seals basked.
“The first time I came here,” she said, “most of this road wasn’t paved yet. Let’s see; Hal and I were in a car with Marie Dressier. Do you remember her?”
I shook my head.
“Ah, how transitory is fame,” Louise said. “She was a big star in the thirties.”
“I’ve probably seen her. I just don’t remember the name.”
“Everybody calls San Simeon the Hearst castle. He called it the ranch. Believe me, it’s more castle than ranch . . . although it’s two or three hundred thousand acres.”
“. . . hundred thousand?”
“Something like that. I guess most of it is pretty worthless. The big thing used to be long horseback rides on Saturday. He had giraffes and herds of zebras running wild. We’d be out in the middle of nowhere, come lunchtime, lo and behold, there were the servants with linen-covered tables under wild oaks with some wildebeests or something looking on. You’d think you were on the Serengeti.” She brayed her big laugh that always made people smile. She manifestly took great pleasure in telling me about W.R. bringing the ceilings from a tenth-century abbey and making a guest house fit under it. “There’s two swimming pools. The indoor pool cost two million dollars, and nobody ever used it except the servants. Imagine that.”
It was hard to imagine. Two million dollars for a swimming pool!
When we passed through the tiny hamlet of Cambria, she was excitedly telling me one anecdote after another. As we got close, proximity refreshed her memory. “I’ll never forget the girl Chaplin brought one time. She was . . . maybe sixteen . . . and that’s giving him the benefit of the doubt. Boy, he did like them young. She didn’t know if she was a temptress or entrapped by a child molester.
“The servants used to go through your luggage when you arrived and when you left.”
“You mean they searched your suitcases?”
“They didn’t do it in front of you. They did it when they took your bags to one of the guest houses . . . or to the cars on the way out.”
“Why would they search when you came in?”
“Booze. W.R. allowed one drink before dinner. It was a boozy time, and lots of Marion’s friends had hollow legs . . . except for a few who did dope. One time we were getting ready for dinner, waiting for W.R. and Marion to come down. Mabel Normand came in the door, mad as hell, and yelled, ‘Some sonofabitch stole my morphine!’ I think Marion got it back, but I don’t think Mabel ever visited again.
“Did I tell you that the way I set my table, with mustard and ketchup and all the condiments in their jars in the center of the table, is a copy of San Simeon’s table?”
A minute or so later she said, “Look, look, over there to the right . . . up . . . up . . .”
Miles away, crowning the hills several miles from the shore, was a flash of white towers. The view was suddenly blocked by a line of eucalyptus along the roadside.
“Watch for the entrance on the right.” She paused. “The last time I was here was in thirty-six. Good God, how time flies. I remember the big concern that weekend was the Spanish Civil War. W.R. was getting dispatches upstairs. We were asking each other where W.R. stood. All of us movie people were for the Republican side, but we didn’t want to make any gaffes if W.R. was for Franco.”
“How did he stand?”
“You know . . . I can’t remember.”
THE CASTLE WAS SEVERAL MILES from the highway. The private road zigzagged through the hills. The castle appeared and disappeared, growing larger each time we saw it. The twin spires reminded me of an old Mexican cathedral I’d seen in National Geographic. To me it looked more like a palace than a castle.
Down on the highway, the ocean had kept the air cool, but a mile or two away from the sea breeze, the air was heated from the sun pounding down on desert mountains. We finally reached some green landscaping. The main buildings were still some distance away.
“Keep going,” Louise said when we reached Casa Grande, as it was called. She had me go around it to some steps. They were few, but very wide. Looming above us, seeming bigger because it sat atop the Enchanted Hill, as Hearst called it, was Casa Grande. I looked up at the top, which caused me to crane my neck.
“Close your mouth,” she said. “You’ll catch a fly.”
It was true. I was standing with my mouth agape.
A housekeeper was descending the steps. Behind her were servants. I had already seen and experienced many things in my sixteen years, but not until Louise Wallis had I had a servant to do my bidding. I unlocked the rear of the station wagon, intending to pull out our two bags. Mrs. Wallis was talking to the housekeeper, but when she saw what I was doing she gestured for me to stop. “Leave those. They’ll take care of it.”
The housekeeper led us up the steps. I was looking around in awe, so I failed to notice Mrs. Wallis’s dissatisfaction until I heard her mutter, “Shit.” It was her favorite bad word, she once told me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“We can’t stay in the main house. Some of the family are here.”
I scanned the immense building; it seemed as large as Notre Dame. “They need the whole house?”
Mrs. Wallis laughed. “No . . . but we are here because of Marion . . . and the Hearsts hate Marion Davies. Mr. Hearst’s wife is still alive, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know. I didn’t know he was married.”
Instead of leading us into Casa Grande, the housekeeper led us along an immense veranda or terrace around the house. Flowers were everywhere, and amid them was a lass of alabaster marble crouched beside a goat. It was all like the fantasy set of a silent movie. Ornate. Fluted columns topped with round white spheres—lights for the nights.
The housekeeper led us toward an intricately carved door that may have graced a Venetian palace in the fifteenth century. She opened it and ushered us in.
A guest house? Bullshit! It was a museum of some kind. In time I would come to appreciate the art and artifacts collected around the world that graced this room, but back then it all merely seemed old to me. Wealth to me was glittery black-and-white art deco back then. Or maybe my reaction was governed by the stuffy heat of the room. The sun slanted on a low angle through a huge window overlooking the sea far below. The guest house had no air-conditioning. Indeed, that was what had miffed Mrs. Wallis, for the big house did have air-conditioning. Her dark attitude was temporary. Within a few minutes her humor was back. She appreciated all of life. She showed me around the guest house. The bedrooms were abundant, but there was no kitchen. “The kitchen’s in the big house. Come on; flop down on Cardinal Richelieu’s bed.”
“The guy in The Three Musketeers.”
“I think so.”
“I’m ready for a little nap in Richelieu’s bed.”
“Go ahead. I’ve got some letters to write.”
The bed had a huge dark headboard and was so high off the floor that I had to stand on a chair to reach it. Mrs. Wallis said that beds were so high off the floor to keep away from the rats that ran across even palaces’ floors. The bed was soft but lumpy. Being accustomed to jail bunks and concrete floors, I did manage to sleep for an hour. The sun was orange and just beginning to dip into the Pacific when I woke up. I was hungry.
Mrs. Wallis was reading a book when I came in. “Feel better?”
“I feel great. When do we eat?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t know which of the family is in residence . . . and I really don’t want to run into them in the dining room. But I want to show it to you. If it was round, you’d expect King Arthur and his knights to be there. Here’s what we’ll do. You take a swim while I go to the kitchen and see what’s up. Use the Neptune Pool, the one outdoors.”
She saw my hesitancy. “It’s okay,” she said. “Nobody’ll say anything and it’s something you’ll never forget.”
“I didn’t bring any trunks.”
“You’ve got an extra pair of Levi’s, don’t you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Use those.”
“Where is it?”
“Right around the stairs. You can’t miss it.”
Barefoot and shirtless and carrying a towel, I went outside. It was magic hour, that time when dusk smooths all the world’s wrinkles and blemishes. Everything seemed hushed and there was a feeling of enchantment. Gone were the weighted heat and the squinting glare. The softer light brought forth the luster of the marble. There was an evening breeze just beginning; roses, red and yellow, danced in it. Jasmine was already making perfume in the air. Ever since that day the scent of jasmine has called up my memory of San Simeon.
The steps to the Neptune Pool were two strides wide, so I descended slowly. Fountains of intricate beauty fell in stages to the pool. Decades later, in Rome, I remembered the fountains of San Simeon when I saw those of Bernini. All were marble, as was the pool itself.
I stopped in unabashed awe. It was truly an enchanted moment in an enchanted place. Across from the fountains where I descended were pillars holding up an arch with a statue of Neptune. The hillside beyond fell away to the distant sea, into which the giant orange-red sun was inexorably sliding. Its rays came through the pillars and bathed the world in a golden hue. It was so wondrous that I ached with inchoate longing as I looked at it. I turned to face Casa Grande above and behind me. The twin spires were superimposed against faintly pink clouds moving slowly across the sky. The rich reliefs and detailing blended into the towers.
The breeze moved the water, and the geometric designs at the bottom shimmered ever so slightly. I paused on the pool edge. Into memory came my moment with William Randolph Hearst, old and gaunt, sick near death. If he had done nothing else, this alone was a monument that would last as far into the future as I could imagine.
I plunged into the water. The cold shock changed my thoughts. I swam hard to warm up, finally floating on my back, which gave me a better view of Casa Grande. What Mrs. Wallis had once told me was true: this had been Mount Olympus for the twentieth century versions of gods and goddesses, the stars of the movie screen. She told me that Chaplin had loved this pool and that Greta Garbo and John Gilbert had made love in it. George Bernard Shaw had done a lap or two; Winston Churchill had floated here.
Through Neptune’s fluted pillars came orange twilight glare. I swam through molten gold toward the sunset fire. I was certainly in a world removed from the swarm. I remembered the Griffith Park public swimming pool where the children of the city were packed like a school of tuna. I much preferred this.
I heard Louise calling me: “Eddie! Eddie!” She was coming down the wide steps to the poolside. I swam across and grabbed the edge. Her face was somber. “Marion just called. Mr. Hearst died an hour after I talked to her. I think we’d better leave.”
I hoisted myself from the water, and we walked up to the esplanade. “She said the family took his body away that quick.” Louise snapped her fingers to illustrate. “They hate Marion, and without W.R. she doesn’t have any authority here. Maybe they wouldn’t say anything, but maybe they would. I don’t want to be embarrassed.”
I could understand, but it seemed weird, too. I thought she was too rich and powerful for such things.
Going down the long, winding road, I looked back. The canyons were deep purple and black, but atop the Enchanted Hill, Casa Grande gleamed in the last rays of the sun. The spires sparkled and flashed. The old man in the wheelchair had certainly left a great monument. What would I leave? Was there purpose? Could I make a purpose?
When we reached the highway, Louise said, “We were the last guests of the great lord and lady.”
We stopped in Big Sur for dinner. She called Hal, who was on location in Missouri. He called the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco for us and made reservations. When we arrived, they put us in the Presidential Suite. It had two bedrooms. The next morning, every newspaper had William Randolph Hearst’s image on the front page. The last mogul of the Age of Moguls had died.