IN THE SUMMER OF ’56, I was paroled from San Quentin. Louise Wallis arranged for me to pick up a ticket at the United Airlines office on Union Square in San Francisco. It was still the age of low-flying prop airliners, so as I hurtled through the afternoon light above the Salinas Valley, I could see the plane’s shadow racing across the geometric patterns of green and brown fields below me. There were white farmhouses, each one encircled by a stand of trees. Everything looked so neat and so empty of people. I thought of Steinbeck’s tales mined from this relatively empty land. If he could find The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and Of Mice and Men down there, my meager writing skills should have been able to find stories in the places I had been and from the people I had known. Reading taught me that prison had been the crucible that had formed several great writers. Cervantes wrote much of Don Quixote in a prison cell, and Dostoyevski was a mediocre writer until he was sentenced to death, commuted within a few hours of execution, and then sent to prison in Siberia. It was after these experiences that he became a great writer. There are two worlds where men are stripped of all facades so you can see their core. One is the battlefield; the other is prison. Beyond any doubt I had plenty of raw material; the question was my talent. Louise reported that friends of hers had read my manuscript and said it wasn’t publishable but showed promise. I’d felt great simply finishing it, but when I read it a year later it seemed pathetic, although I saw improvement between the first and the last chapter. I’d learned something in three hundred pages. Now I was almost a hundred pages into my second novel and hoped it would be a quantum improvement. I really wanted to be a writer, although I didn’t yet have all my hopes and dreams invested therein. Who knew what I would find in the world outside? Maybe I would feel different about everything. Erich Fromm had made me aware of one aspect of my nature: I had the hunger to transcend.
As I was sipping a bourbon and 7 UP and looking down at the plane’s shadow rushing over the terrain, many things went through my mind. I was free. I had gone into San Quentin at seventeen and now was out at twenty-two. I had grown to manhood behind high prison walls. As I mentally weighed my assets and liabilities it was obvious to me that I had more going for me than almost anyone else I knew. Mrs. Hal Willis signed her letters: “Love, Mom.” She would help me to help myself. What else did I need? I’d never heard of anyone being released without being issued a package of work clothes—except me. The field parole agent sent word that she would take care of my wardrobe. She had an apartment for me, too, although she hadn’t divulged the address because she didn’t want me to hand it out to my convict pals. That was okay, for although I had many friends, I would only keep in touch with one or two, and I could send them the address after I was free.
Even without Mrs. Hal Wallis, or anything else, I was confident of my abilities. In a test that compared anyone taking it to a graduating class of Harvard liberal arts majors, I was equal to the top 5 percent; plus I had skills they never dreamed about. I had knowledge about life that many people never learn and never have need to learn. But I knew I had gaping flaws, too, emotions and impulses without the internal controls that we learn from parents and society. Most people obey the law not from fear of the consequences but because they have accepted the beliefs as their own. My beliefs were based on what I had learned from the underworld and jail. I would never have followed Raskolnikov’s example and made a spontaneous confession to murder because of conscience. For years after reading Crime and Punishment I thought Dostoyevski was wrong in that regard—until I saw two men I knew quite well, men I had thought were hard-core convicts, turn themselves in on murders for which there was no evidence against them. That would never happen to me. For one thing, I wasn’t a killer, although there had been times in prison when I would have killed in self-defense. I wasn’t going to run. I wasn’t vengeful, nor did I feel remorse for most things I had done. I believed that yesterday could be learned from but never erased. If I had dwelled on my past there is a good chance I would have gone insane. I had done too much already, and too much had been done to me.
Still, all this was simply squirrel-caging, running around in a circle. Leon gave me the only advice that mattered. “You’re not normal, but you’re not crazy. It’s up to you if you commit another crime. Whether you do or not is all that matters.”
It was true. I was different. How could I be anything else after going to juvenile hall at ten, reform school at thirteen, and San Quentin at seventeen? I would never view the world or behave as a member of the bourgeoisie, nor did I so desire. I craved experience and wisdom, not the average life of quiet desperation. The best I could hope for was a marginal adjustment, but that was all I needed. It was up to me not to risk another prison term by committing another felony. As long as I didn’t do that, nothing else really mattered. I had brains, I had Louise—and as the plane came over the mountains and the LA basin was below, I had great expectations.
It was twilight when we landed. Instead of the raised tunnels that fit against the plane, in those days we still descended onto the tarmac and crossed the field toward a chain-link fence, behind which stood the people awaiting arrivals. I saw Louise from some distance—her white clothes and blond hair made her stand out; plus she was enthusiastically jumping up and down and waving. It made me grin and surge with affection. I was a lucky ex-convict; there was no way else to put it.
She met me at the gate and hugged me enthusiastically, then pushed me back and looked me up and down. “We’ll get rid of those clothes,” she said. “Tomorrow.”
“I have to see the parole officer tomorrow.”
“No, no. I took care of that. He’ll come by to see you in a few days. Let’s go.”
As we turned to push through the crowd, I noticed that she was accompanied by a youth of sixteen or so. She introduced us as we headed toward the parking lot. His name was Mickey, and he was her driver from the McKinley Home for Boys, which was giving me a job. “You’ll have a room at McKinley and the apartment where we’re going now. Here.” She gave me a key on a key ring with a religious medal of Saint Francis. “Blessed by the pope,” she said. “When we go to Europe, I’ll take you to meet him.”
The apartment was over a four-car garage behind a two-story Victorian-style house on the edge of Hancock Park. She had built the house before she met Hal. Her parents had lived in the apartment over the garage. It was different from most apartments, for the house was on a corner, the driveway entered from the street where the house faced, a wall ran alongside the house, the apartment’s door was up a stairway around the corner from the driveway, and it was difficult to see that it was a garage apartment.
Louise and Hal had just purchased the estate of Joan Bennett and Walter Wanger on Mapleton Drive in Holmby Hills. Walter Wanger was in deep financial trouble at the time. Ingrid Bergman’s Joan of Arc had collapsed at the box office, and Walter Wanger had spent a few months in the LA County Jail for shooting Jennings Lang (who would later become the head of Universal Studios) in the parking lot. It was all over Joan Bennett. The end result was the need to sell the house as quickly as possible. Louise said she got it for the value of the lot, $90,000. The house’s value back then was about $250,000. Thirty years later, when Hal Wallis died, the same house sold for $6,500,000.
At the time of my release, Louise was still residing at her Van Nuys estate. It had been condemned under eminent domain and was to be used for a school. She had gotten what was a fortune in ’54, but for a twenty-acre estate she got the price of an average house south of Ventura Boulevard today. She had written to me about it. She had a long time to move, a year or two at least.
She was excited when we went up the stairs and opened the apartment door. It was a one-bedroom apartment, perhaps eight hundred square feet, neatly designed. It was narrow, of course, for it was above four garages. The doorway at the top of the stairs opened into the living room. It had windows overlooking sycamores on the street and the front house on one side. The other view was the blank wall of a new apartment building. It provided absolute privacy. The living room was very comfortable and also tasteful. The sofa and overstuffed chair were in gray slipcovers; the walls were burnt orange or some color like that which I cannot name. On one wall were two small watercolors in ornate frames. I would learn that the artists were well known. What dominated the room from a corner was a huge ornate antique secretary. Its burled wood gleamed in deep, dark colors. “I had it and I didn’t know what to do with it,” she said. “So here it is.” She leaned closer, confidingly: “It’s worth forty thousand dollars.” She winked. I didn’t know why she winked but simply smiled as if I did. She showed me the rest.
The bathroom and the kitchen faced each other across a narrow hallway. It was a smart use of space. Beyond the bathroom, the hall opened onto the bedroom. It was adequate—much larger than any cell I’d lived in but perhaps smaller than a bullpen. It had classy windows, the kind with wooden frames and small panes and a latch that turned, along one side and the rear. The bedroom furniture was simple and expensive, she told me. It had come from the Wanger residence. The closet was a full-sized walk-in. “We’ll put some things in it tomorrow,” she said. “Get rid of those things.” she added, pointing at my clothes.
I started to protest. The gray flannel slacks and the navy blazer went everywhere then and now. They were good quality. The label read: HART, SHAEFFNER & MARX. It wasn’t Hickey-Freeman, but it was excellent. “They look good, don’t they?”
“Yes, but they came from prison.”
“So did I.”
“I know. I know. But for me, get rid of them.”
“Sure.”
She opened a French door into a breakfast nook at the end of the kitchen next to the rear stairs.
“Well, whaddya think?” she asked.
As her question was uttered, I spotted a new Royal portable typewriter on a bedroom writing desk next to a window overlooking the swimming pool. I was literally choked speechless, a response unheard of for me. Tears welled into my eyes. How could I fail? How could I let her down? She had made the dream real for me. She wasn’t going to give me the world on a platter, but she would help me to help myself. She would open doors, although I had no idea what those doors were.
“You’d better do some writing on that” she said.
“I will,” I said with all sincerity, although future months would expose the sincerity as hollow. I meant it, but the lure of bright lights, fast cars, and sweet-smelling young women with long legs was too much for me. It would be decades before I spent one night at home when not incarcerated. I would sleep when I was tired and eat when I was hungry—and every day outside prison was swollen to bursting with possibilities for adventure after the first few months of acclimating myself.
Late the following morning, she arrived with Bertha Griffith, whom I’d met before going to prison. Even then her husband was a wraithlike figure ravaged by paresis, twisted facial muscles, and distorted movements. He was a former silent film director who had caught syphilis from a young actress fifteen years before antibiotics could cure it. I wanted to ask her how he was but sensed it would be an impropriety and kept silent.
Using Louise’s long white Chrysler station wagon, we drove a few blocks down to the Miracle Mile. The facades of fancy shops and department stores faced Wilshire. The shopping area was planned with the automobile in mind, for it had large parking lots behind the stores. It was considerably more tasteful than the giant shopping malls of the future. At the time, this stretch of Wilshire was considered the most expensive real estate in Southern California.
Starting at the art-deco masterpiece of Bullocks-Wilshire, we worked west, shopping for my wardrobe as we went. She bought me everything. The rear of the station wagon was piled high with boxes from Bullocks and Desmond’s and Silverwood’s. In one department store, a dazzled salesclerk followed Louise with a chair. When she stopped and sat, he shoved the chair under her. She whispered to me, “I’m Lady Wallis. remember?” In her pristine white gabardine pants suit, it was impossible to forget. Playing Lady Wallis was one of her greater enjoyments in life. It was a scene out of many movies made real. I was awed and grateful. It was so munificent that I felt a guilty discomfort. Still and yet, beyond doubt I would take it all—and thank you.
In Beverly Hills, we went to Oviatt’s, the most elegant classic tailor in Southern California back then. Hal’s suits were made here. She had me fitted for two suits, one a worsted navy (“If you have nothing else, you have that,” she instructed), the other a lightweight white flannel. It was soft and smooth between my fingers. “They’ll think you’re Gatsby.” she said.
Gatsby was great, but most unlikely. Gatsby was too unreal. Although I thought Fitzgerald wrote as well as any American novelist in the twentieth century, Gatsby was as far from truth as Fu Manchu. He was too soft to be what he was storied to be. Gatsby might be a cat burglar, but Gatsby was definitely not a gangster. He lacked the force of will to compel tough men to his bidding simply by force of will. He failed another test; he was too weak for a broad.
“I was in several movies from his stories and books,” she said.
This was something I have never verified. And today I simply repeat what she said, which is how an honest memoir should be. At the time, I wondered how they could catch Fitzgerald’s character nuances in silent movies, or any other for that matter.
From the Beverly Hills of two-story buildings, courtyards and fountains, and many red-tile roofs, circa ’56, we crossed Beverly Glen into the San Fernando Valley. About a mile from the Wallis estate was the McKinley School for Boys. It had about a hundred and twenty boys, from age five through high school, and several boys who had grown past eighteen but were still not ready to leave who stayed on as employees. They had a building of their own. In ’56 the boys of McKinley were predominantly white, but there was a liberal collection of colored kids and Mexicans, the operative and acceptable terms then. Most came from homes of drunken abusers, some were sent by social agencies, and a few came from the Juvenile Court. Once upon a time they had tried to put me here. In the parking lot I had thrown a tantrum of such maniacal ferocity that whoever was looking out an administration building window decided not to accept me. I felt wonderful then. I would get to stay with my father in his furnished room, sleeping on the army cot in the corner, for at least a couple more weeks. My father’s face was scarlet; veins stood out in hard ridges. He was stifling rage. I had perfected getting thrown out of these homes and schools that I hated; now they wouldn’t even take me.
Not long thereafter, I went from being the concern of social service agencies to that of the juvenile justice system.
Louise turned off Riverside and passed through the tunnel of trees to a parking lot. It was full of cars, but the only person visible was an eight-year-old in a bathing suit starting along a sidewalk in front of the parking lot. As soon as his bare feet hit the hot cement, he danced and jumped off onto the lawn. He disappeared around a two-story masonry building. We went that way. Before we came around the building we heard splashing and excited voices cheering, “Go! Go! Go!”
When we came around the corner, we saw the Olympic-size swimming pool and a swimming meet was in progress. A white-haired man of sixty separated himself from a group of adults near the pool and came to greet us. He was Mr. Swartzcoff, the superintendent. It was he who had offered me a job to satisfy the requirements of release on parole. Although it was much easier for an excon back then, jobs in general being more plentiful, there was still a stigma, so I was trying to read Mr. S., as he was called by the boys and the staff alike, for I wanted to know if the offer had been made willingly or because Mrs. Hal Wallis was the McKinley Home’s foremost benefactor. Hiring me actually cost them nothing. Mrs. Wallis wrote them a check for the amount of my salary, and immediately deducted it from her taxes as a charitable contribution. Had she paid it after taxes it would have cost her several times the amount, for after-tax income was about 15% of before-tax income.
Mr. S. was affable enough, but it was the effusive Mrs. S, his wife, that made me feel comfortable and showed me around the home. I wasn’t starting work until the next Monday. Although there was no real slot for me to fill, with 120 boys there was plenty to do. Sometimes I would watch the pool, although every boy at McKinley could swim like a fish after the first month of summer. I would drive boys to appointments with doctors, dentists, and social workers.
My room was above the kitchen. It was quite large and had a balcony overlooking the driveway and the walkway to the mess hall. I could stay here during the week and at my apartment on the weekend.
We unloaded the many packages and shopping bags marked DESMOND’S, BULLOCKS, and SILVERWOOD’S and piled them on the floor next to the bed, not hiding them, but making them inconspicuous as a matter of course. I was given the key, and I laughed as I inserted it and turned. It was the first door I could remember locking. It seemed funny—but many things have seemed funny to me and un-funny to most others.
It was time for a late lunch, and the gate to Wallis Farms was around the corner and down Woodman about half a mile. I asked her why it was called a farm, and she told me so they could pay the cook, maid, chauffeur, and gardener as farm employees, not servants.
We turned off Woodman and curtsied for the solid green gate that was already swinging open. It was familiar, yet entirely new. It was certainly more vivid after five years of San Quentin polishing my lenses of perception. The roses were a riot of color, and as we walked from the car to the front door a wisp of breeze blew the sweet scent to me. God, it was good to be free.
During lunch, Louise told me about Mr. and Mrs. S. and how fond she was of them and what good work they did at McKinley.
After lunch. Bertha departed. Louise snapped her fingers in sudden recall. “You need a couple other things. Come on.”
She led me upstairs to Hal’s suite, where she purloined gold-and-sapphire cuff links from a posh yacht club in the Bahamas and a tie tack with a half-carat diamond. She started to take one of the three watches but put it back. “No, I’m going to buy you one,” she said. I took the gifts, but I had vague misgivings. I didn’t expect material things. She’d always indicated that she wanted to help me help myself, and that was what I expected and wanted. The clothes and the apartment, they were generous and I appreciated them—but what I hoped for was that she would make introductions and open doors.
On the way out she stopped at Hal’s closet, which was twenty feet long behind sliding mirror panels. The shelf above the hangers was stacked with sweaters in plastic bags. She pulled down several. “You like cashmere? Here.”
It was a simple V-neck in navy, but the label said: BERGDORF-GOODMAN, and the feel was the incomparable softness of cashmere.
She was singing as we went back downstairs. In the Blue Room she took a cigarette from a box and a wooden kitchen match from another. Instead of using the striker, she pulled the match along the wall. It ignited, but it also left a long streak on the wall. “What the hell, it belongs to the board of education.”
It took a few seconds for me to get the humor and laugh, although her humor and my laugh were tinged with sadness, for this Monterey Colonial with its shaded grounds and lush lawns had the serene beauty of a cloister. Because she had always been a clown and comic, it would take repeated bizarre incidents over several months before I realized that something was wrong.
STANDARD PROCEDURE FOR THE PAROLEE IS to visit the parole officer—now known as the parole agent—the day after release, where he is given the rest of his “gate money.” I was shopping with Louise the day after release; then came the weekend, so it wasn’t until Monday that I met my parole officer, a small man with a flat-top haircut and a tiny mustache. Even then it was not at the parole office. I was at Wallis Farms, in the Blue Room, with me seated next to Louise Fazenda Wallis—on the wide armrest of her overstuffed chair, my other arm extended along the top of the chair back. She played gracious lady as well as Katherine Cornell. Would he and his wife like to see the studio? “Not on one of those tours. I’ll take you behind the scenes. You have a wife and children?”
Ah yes, she played him beautifully. It wasn’t manipulation with ulterior motive. It was to make him forget about me. He had more than a hundred parolees under his supervision and could keep track of very few. I wanted to be ignored, and that seemed the message he gave me when I walked him out to his car. He stopped and looked back and up at the house and around at the property. “Well,” he said laconically, “I’m pretty sure I won’t pick up the paper and read about you in a shootout with the LAPD.”
“What about a car? Can I drive?”
“If you have a license.”
We shook hands and he drove around the circle and down the road toward the front gate. I felt great. A car. I was going to have a car—as soon as I had a driver’s license. I was bobbing and weaving and shadowboxing as I went back inside the house.
Louise saw me and laughed. “Feel good, huh?”
“Couldn’t feel better. He said I could drive . . . if I had a license.”
“I’ve been thinking about that. Can you pass a driver’s license exam?”
I was dubious and it showed. I’d gone on joy rides in stolen cars and on couple of high-speed chases that ended in wrecks, but beyond knowing what red and green meant on a traffic light, I was totally ignorant of the traffic laws.
“No matter,” she said. “I thought about it. We’ll get you some lessons. When you get a license you’ll need a car. Nothing new or fancy, but I put some money aside from the house. I had no reinvest nearly all of it or give it to the government. Taxes, you know. We can get richer and richer—in fact, we have to get richer and richer or the government will take it.”
“It looks to me like you’re doing okay.”
She laughed in a way that felt like an affectionate hug.
THE FOLLOWING WEEK I STARTED WORK at the McKinley Home for Boys. My duties sort of evolved. At first I filled in at different places. At the swimming pool my job was closer to scarecrow than lifeguard. Every boy could swim, and everyone ten or older could swim better than I could. I was charged with maintaining order, keeping horseplay to a minimum, and stopping the running around the poolside. When a busload of boys went somewhere, say the Times charity game between LA Rams and the Washington Redskins, I was the second man, the one who kept them from yelling out the windows and made sure nobody was separated from the group. When the fall school semester started, I tutored in study hall three evenings a week. After I got a driver’s license and a four-year-old Ford convertible, my main job was taking boys to appointments with doctors, dentists, and psychologists. Within a month I would have won a popularity contest as the staff member best liked by the boys. That was partly because my position didn’t require me to enforce much authority, but the primary reason was because I had been raised in places like McKinley, although none so good. I knew what it was to be a child raised by strangers, to be without a family to turn to. I could not fill that emptiness, but I was friend and adviser and I never judged. I wanted to help them find their footing in life. Some were hard to like, the whiners and crybabies, and I was ashamed for not liking them, for they had the greatest need for attention and understanding. Among the hundred and twenty were a handful who were beyond help. The warp was already too great. A pair of these broke into a hi-fi store in Van Nuys and stashed the loot in my car. I yelled, “Oh God! Oh shit!” when they told me. It could mean a trip back to San Quentin as a parole violator. The adult authorities would treat me like a twentieth-century Fagin. Yet I could not countenance turning them in. Although I had no intention of ever committing another crime, I still had an unquestioning acceptance of the criminal’s number-one rule: thou shall not snitch, not even on a snitch. “Get that shit outta there,” I told them. “Right now.”
Naturally they were caught the moment they went to school and started flashing their booty. I held my breath, but my name was never mentioned. They’d been in trouble before, and this time Mr. S. sent them to juvenile hall and the juvenile justice system. It saddened me because it was so much like my own childhood, one thing leading to another and eventually to prison. A decade later I ran into one of them in the penitentiary.
Nobody at McKinley except Mr. and Mrs. S. knew I was an ex-convict, nor did they know of my special relationship with Mrs. Wallis. She lived so close that it was easy for me to visit. When she wanted me to meet someone, she sent for me.
Hal was gone, and somehow I got the impression that he was on location with Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Their son, Brent, was a lieutenant in the army or air force, stationed in Northern California. He came home on the weekends, where I finally met him on a blistering San Fernando Valley afternoon. He had a moderately powerful physique. He had worked out with weights since his early teens. From the books lining the walls of his room he was obviously well educated, well read, and interested in ideas. Many of his books were in Spanish. Louise said she had lost him when he was about twelve years old. She had taken him with her as she followed Hal to trysts with mistresses that he maintained quite flagrantly. Brent’s reaction, according to her, was to dislike his father and turn cold to her. “He’s got armor thick as a battleship’s,” she said to me. He had a Ph.D. in psychology, and she thought his choice of professions was because of his childhood. He intensely disliked the movie industry, she said.
When I met him, I wondered what she’d said to him about me. Of course he knew I had been in prison while he had been at one of the prestigious Claremont Colleges. I had no idea which one. Did he see me as an interloper?
I found him as inscrutable as the proverbial Asian. Brent was so well mannered that I was unable to read him. His courtliness I would have expected among the English aristocracy rather than in the scion of Hollywood nouveau riche. Louise thought it was from his being raised by European governesses. He had the best manners of any man I’d met so far. He introduced me to the first imported beer I’d ever seen, Heineken. It was markedly better than Lucky Lager and Brew 102, which teenagers in the poorer sections of Los Angeles drank to get drunk. What other reason was there to drink beer?
When he drove me back to McKinley in a Mercedes 190 SL roadster, it was the first time I’d ridden in a sports car. The feel on curves and corners was an almost erotic sensation. It felt totally different from other cars. It was fun. I wanted one. I wanted a lot of things.
Although he had been gracious and friendly, I had no idea what he thought or how he really felt. I didn’t want him thinking that I was exploiting his mother. I would never take advantage of her, although there would come a time when I wished I had done so. I wanted her to do what she had said from the beginning: help me to help myself. That began to change. She began to give me money far beyond what I expected or wanted, and when I tried to tell her that, she waved me away: “Never mind. We’ve got more than we ever dreamed of having. I just made two million.” Indeed, they had purchased the estate of a millionaire in Chatsworth. It had a sprawling house, a bunkhouse, stables, and a timing track for the racehorses Hal had raised. As it was zoned for agriculture, Louise planned to raise alfalfa and write off the losses against other income. Two months after they completed escrow on the property, the zoning was changed so it could be subdivided into tract homes. Its value doubled from $2 million to $4 million. When you’re rich, she said, you keep getting richer with very little effort, as long as you don’t intentionally throw your money away. How could I protest when she gave me a few hundred dollars? Once I gave her back a thousand dollars; the next day it arrived at McKinley in the U.S. Mail. Not knowing what else to do, for certainly I wasn’t going to hurl it into the street, I deposited it in my checking account. I could use it; there was no doubt of that.
Near the end of summer I met Hal Wallis for the first time. I’d gotten a flat tire about a quarter mile from the gate to Wallis Farms. I called Louise and she told me to come over and call the Auto Club on her membership card. That way I wouldn’t have to pay for towing. I’d made the call, she had given me her card, and I was getting ready to walk back to the car to meet the tow truck when we heard the front door open, followed by male voices.
Hal came in, followed by Brent and another youth who I believe managed the actual agriculture of Wallis Farms, which actually grew something some-where. They’d been at a preview screening of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and carried stacks of audience reaction cards.
“How are they?” Louise asked.
“I think the best I’ve ever seen,” Hal said. “And I’ve seen plenty over the years.”
Gunfight starred Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, both of whom Hal had discovered. Louise once told me that he was poorly educated and poorly mannered when she first met him. He was working in the publicity department of National Studios, which became Warner Brothers. One day on a set she saw him from the rear and, thinking he was someone else, grabbed him from behind. They got married and three years later he was executive producer in charge of production at Warner Brothers, the same job Irving Thalberg had at MGM. Hal’s training: typing and shorthand at a Chicago business school. But he had two natural talents. He saved many thousands of dollars through an unerring sense of what should be cut from a script before having to wait until it was on film. He also had a perfect feel for whom the public would love. His very mediocre autobiography, Star Maker, which he would write twenty-five years later, scarcely did more than list his films. He was certainly a mogul from Hollywood’s Golden Age who deserves a good biography, as does Louise Fazenda Wallis.
That night Mr. Wallis didn’t notice me. I studied him, though. When young he had been handsome, she said, but now his hair was thinning, and he combed it straight back, which gave his face a sharpness. He was average-looking, at best, although his clothes glowed with the expensive good taste of an Esquire spread. He was cordial, but for a moment I saw his eyes unveiled. He saw life in terms of manipulation and combat, so how else would a twenty-two-year-old ex-con appear to him? I could understand his attitude. Ah well, but it would have been great to have his favor. He could open doors in this the capital of nepotism, oligarchy, and connections. Being a success in Hollywood took skills, but even more than skills, except in the technical end, it took connections. The easiest way to be a movie star is to have parents who were stars or directors or producers. As the children of movie people grow up, they see up close how the game is played, and they know the players, fathers of friends with whom they grew up. There is just enough new blood to keep it percolating.
“You’d better go,” Louise said. “Or you’ll miss the Auto Club truck.”
I walked down the driveway to the electric gate and then along the side of Woodman toward Chandler Boulevard, named, I assume, for the founding family of the Los Angeles Times. Once upon a time they’d had estates with orange groves and children rode their horses along the roadside, which had neither curbs nor sidewalks. Now the orange groves were few, although I could smell their blossoms and jasmine in the night. Everything was the American Dream of the moment: three bedrooms, two baths, in a ranch-style tract home. A popular song proclaimed the joy of making the San Fernando Valley one’s home.
As I walked along the roadside, footsteps crunching, occasional headlights flashing over me, crickets sounding in the night, I knew that Hal Wallis was nothing like his wife. She’d told me that he was a cold and ruthless man (married to Hollywood’s Angel), and anyone cold and ruthless had to be very suspicious. It went together like mustard with a hot dog. While I wanted to be a writer and proclaimed it loudly, back then I specifically wanted to write screenplays, which I kept quiet about. If I had Hal Wallis as an ally . . . I had tried to pull him toward me, but there was the obstacle of hostile suspicion.
As I neared the car, the Auto Club tow truck pulled up. Its driver could hardly believe that I was unable to change a flat tire. It wasn’t part of the reform school curriculum, and I’d had no chance to change a tire in San Quentin, so where would I learn? It was an explanation I kept to myself.
HAL DEPARTED CALIFORNIA FOR SOMEWHERE, and Brent went back to the base. Hal’s sister, Minna Wallis, was in town, but she saw little of Louise. Minna had never married and some in Hollywood, according to Louise, spoke of her possessive mental incest toward her brother. She had gotten her brother his first job at the studio. “She was even jealous of me back then,” Louise said. It was also said that Minna had forced an English actor, a poor man’s facsimile of Ronald Colman, into being her lover in return for Hal renewing his contract. She saw Louise infrequently in the normal routine of the day. I was the one who saw Louise deteriorate, but not having been around her very much until now and because she was, after all, a professional clown, I attributed much of her bizarre behavior to her nature.
One afternoon I went to visit and found her whacking a house wall with a sledgehammer. All I could do was grin and shake my head. On another occasion, we spent a futile two hours telephoning around the world in search of a priest to whom she wished to speak. It was 3:30 A.M. in Austria, where his order had their headquarters. He was somewhere in the Holy Land, but they had no way to contact him. The mynah birds were flying around her room, and there were little spots where bird shit hit something and couldn’t be totally washed away. Those spots could be immaculate otherwise, but a trace of stain remained. “I just wish the sons of bitches would say something,” she said.
One afternoon I got a message at McKinley to call Mrs. Wallis. She was excited; she wanted me to come to dinner. Tennessee Williams would be there. Hal was negotiating for film rights to Orpheus Descending, a play that he had written specifically for Anna Magnani. Hal Wallis had a several-picture deal with her.
I arrived in a navy blue shirt and a necktie. Tennessee Williams was in black-and-red-check Pendleton, half-drunk, unshaven, and with perceptible body odor. By the time we sat down, he was totally drunk. Halfway through the soup, he said he felt sick and excused himself.
Every Saturday evening the latest movies were screened in the Blue Room. A screen rose out of the floor, and across the room a painting came down from an opening for a projection booth. The projectionist was hired from the studio. When Hal was home, his friends came. When he was gone, which was much of the time, Louise’s friends were the guests. I liked languishing on an overstuffed chair while watching Elizabeth Taylor running through the jungle ahead of a herd of rampaging elephants or Jack Palance as a movie star who was simultaneously beloved by the multitude and under the thumb of the movie mogul. Having a private screening was a great way to start Saturday evening, and in the incomparable LA nights there were always adventures to be had until the sun rose on Saturday morning.
THE SUMMER OF ’56 came to an end. The only change was that afternoons in the Valley were 82° now instead of 102°. I stayed away from most ex-convicts and former friends, but my vow of rehabilitation never included that I would stop smoking pot. That necessitated keeping a connection with my childhood partner, Wedo. When I went to see him, I found that during my five years in San Quentin he had married his girlfriend, fathered two children, and turned into a junkie who peddled on a street level to maintain his habit. He was on probation for illegal possession and on bail for a second case. Within the month he was going to court for sentencing and it was a cinch he was going where I had just been.
Through Wedo, I met his brother-in-law, Jimmy D., who was married to Wedo’s wife’s sister. Jimmy gladly procured me pot if I gave him some of it and a few dollars. Although we were in the same age, my five years in San Quentin gave me status. Jimmy was lean, powerful, and handsome, but he was oblivious to his appearance or his clothes. I once gave him an expensive suit. He put it in the trunk of his car. Five months later I saw him open the car trunk. The suit was there, now mildewed and ruined. Jimmy was too lazy to work and had become too scared to steal. A couple of years later he drove the getaway car while I heisted a bookmaker. When I came out, the car was gone. I had to make my escape on foot, down alleys and over fences in an area I knew poorly. I got away and, when I confronted him, he said that a police car had circled the block so the officers could give him special scrutiny, so he had driven away. At the time I gave him the benefit of the doubt, but when he later folded up en route to a score (“I can’t do it, man; I just can’t do it”) I changed my judgment of the earlier episode. I used it as a basis for a sequence in the movie Straight Time two decades later.
I had no close family. I did have some second cousins, although I hadn’t seen any of them since my parents’ divorce, when they were adolescents and I was four. Bob H., then twenty-nine, ran one of several departments at Channel 4, the local NBC affiliate. He was a handsome man who sang well, but not quite well enough; he was an even better painter, but again not quite enough better. Or perhaps he could have been fulfilled in either endeavor but lacked enough tenacity to overcome. Either way, he wasn’t what he wanted to be. He had converted to Catholicism and wanted to be a priest. I don’t remember why that never reached fruition. At first I thought he was gay. His mannerisms appeared to me like those of a queen in the penitentiary. As a convict said, “I ain’ never seen no man act that way.” After a while, however, I reached a different opinion. I think Bob was asexual. Psychologically I believe he was far closer to being gay than being a male warrior, but the thought of male-to-male sex would have been physically repulsive.
Bob had a girlfriend, Patty Ann, although it was a weird romance. He had kissed her just once. She was sui generis as far as I was concerned. Twenty-six years old, slender, pretty, well-educated, vivacious, intelligent—she was a virgin. That was something I wouldn’t learn for some time. Although it was still the uptight fifties and she was a nice Catholic girl, it was hard for me to believe that any twenty-six-year-old outside a nunnery was a virgin. I met her on a Saturday afternoon at Channel 4, where I went to see Cousin Robert about a party he was giving that night.
Patty Ann and I had an immediate affinity. By the time the party ended it was long past midnight. We walked through Hollywood until dawn, talking about all kinds of things. She’d never even met anyone who had been in jail. That, too, was hard for me to believe.
Within a week we were seeing each other regularly, and whatever idea we might have had about romance at the outset, it quickly became obvious that we were too different for anything more than a great friendship. However, we did share a love of books and writing. She gave me encouragement and advice. Of all the people I’ve known in my life, I think she has the best attitude toward life. She is as happy as anyone can be without being psychotic. She was a benefit to my etiquette, and when I started to think or act in the manner taught by my background, she would pinch my cheek and say, “No, no, poochie. You can’t do that anymore. You’re a writer now.” She could always make me feel good.
Mrs. Wallis thought Patty Ann was wonderful and let us use a cabana at the Sand & Sea Club, the mansion that Hearst had built for Marion Davies on the beach at Santa Monica. The original colonial pillars, facing the ocean, were as big as those on the White House. The swimming pool, with a bridge across it, was of Carrara marble. Much of the original was gone, and a double deck of cabanas had been constructed. Each was a single room plus a bathroom and a shower, opening onto a wide terrace overlooking the sand and sea. Each cabana had furnishings appropriate for the beach: a sofa of bamboo and water-resistant cushions, a glass-topped table in an alcove, a cabinet with a bar and closet. It also had a card table. On occasion I would play the role of writer, moving a card table and portable typewriter onto the terrace and then posing with a tall drink while looking down at the unwashed masses running around below. For me it was a fancy way to go to the beach.
Meanwhile Louise’s behavior became more irrational, although I still didn’t see how irrational it was. Saying offhandedly that she had never really liked it, she gave Patty Ann a diamond-and-sapphire brooch. I had no idea of its value, nor that Louise had been dispensing her jewelry and other possessions almost willy-nilly. She changed toward me, too. Where she had once been generous but not excessive, and stressed helping me to help myself, now she began giving me more than I expected, wanted, or felt good about. I traded in the Ford convertible for a used XK 120 Jaguar, planning to make the payments myself. She said I was impatient and to slow down and how hard it was to ask someone to help me when I arrived in a Jaguar. Still, when I made a payment, the loan had been paid in full. It was great, but not what I wanted. When I pressed about those things, she waved me aside and said I didn’t need to worry. It was easy to do, but I knew it was transitory. It wasn’t a permanent lie I could hide behind. But it felt wrong.
Realization of the situation’s gravity came at a Saturday-night screening. Usually I ate dinner at the house if I was invited to a screening, but for some reason Patty Ann and I dined at the Sportsman’s Lodge on Ventura Boulevard, which was then fairly new and somewhat fashionable.
When we reached the house, dinner was finished there, too. Brent Wallis was on hand with a friend named Henry Fairbanks. Three or four Catholic teaching brothers from nearby Notre Dame High School were waiting for the movie, plus a young woman from the neighborhood with whom Brent had grown up and her husband, who worked for the Bank of America.
When we reached the Blue Room, Louise was drunk. The jacket of her white pants suit was unbuttoned down the back. Apparently a young woman had been protesting Louise’s excessive generosity in giving them the mortgage to their home, which she held. That conversation was winding down because of our arrival and because everyone started settling in to watch the movie. The painting over the projection booth opening came down, the screen rose from the floor across the room, and people began to find seats. Louise sat on the right-hand side of a sofa at the rear, under the projection booth. She motioned Patty Ann to sit next to her. “And you there,” she said to me, indicating the space on the other side of Patty Ann. My attention was caught by a conversation across the room, the content of which I no longer remember. Then Louise’s voice, shrill with alcohol, cut through: “. . . take this and marry him. He needs you. He said he wanted me to get him Anita Ekberg. He was joking, but. . . . He doesn’t want an actress. He just thinks he wants an actress. They never see anything outside the mirror. He needs a good girl. He’s going to be rich . . . gonna make him the richest man in the San Fernando Valley.” She noticed me paying attention and waved for me to turn away. “This is between us,” she said. In her hand was a ring with a diamond I would have thought was fake if it were not being waved about by Mrs. Hal B. Wallis. It was somewhere between three and five carats.
The intercom buzzed and the projectionist notified Louise that all was ready. She told him to start the movie.
The lights went down and the beam of dancing gray light cut through the cigarette smoke and threw images on the screen as, simultaneously, the music rose. I was glad for the anonymity it gave, for my face was fiery with embarrassment and Patty Ann was nearly in tears.
As the credits rolled, Louise continued on Patty, repeating the phrase: “Do this little thing for me. Please do it for me.” The movie sound was drowning Louise out. She pushed a button on the armrest, and the sound went off, although the movie continued to run, silent in the darkness. The only sound was Louise’s drunken voice pleading with Patty Ann to take the ring and marry me.
Brent and his friend got up and left the room. I followed them into the entry hall. I forget what I said, but it was some kind of combination apology and disclaimer of responsibility. Likewise, I cannot recall Brent’s reply, except that it was brief and gracious. They went out the front door.
I turned back toward the Blue Room. The sound was back on—thank God, I thought—and just then Patty Ann came out, shoulders shaking, arm over her face. When she raised her eyes to see where she was going (even mortified, she didn’t want to crash headlong into a wall) I could see two black streaks of runny mascara. She was distraught and I could feel empathy for her. Nevertheless, the streaks of mascara somehow went beyond anguish into soap opera parody. Neither death nor jail was at stake. There was not merely pain, but pain’s humor, and, despite myself, I started laughing.
After several seconds of increased tears, she suddenly stamped her foot on the floor. “Shame on you, Ed Bunker. You don’t know how to comfort a girl.” Then she, too, perceived the absurdity and began laughing while crying. I rubbed her back and debated returning to the Blue Room. Through the open door down the hall came the flashing gray light and sound track—but only for a moment. Then the movie stopped and the room’s lights came up. I could have handled the darkness, but the particular kind of chaos likely to transpire was not what my life had prepared me for. And Patty Ann certainly didn’t deserve further harassment, no matter what the motive or anything else.
“Come on; let’s go.” I guided her to the door.
My car was not far from the front door. As we got in, the Mercedes roadster with Brent and his friend went by. We were close behind as they went out the gate, but when they turned left, I turned right. I didn’t want them to think even momentarily that I might be following them.
I drove up winding Beverly Glen to Mulholland Drive, which ran along the top of the line of hills, or short mountains, from Cahuenga Pass in Hollywood to the Pacific Coast Highway beside the ocean. Mulholland was curves and switchbacks. Sometimes the San Fernando Valley was visible, clustered lights with darkness in between. Soon enough it would become a carpet to the next line of mountains. We spoke little. The scene in the Blue Room was still with us, perhaps more so with me. All of Louise’s earlier comedic behavior now had darker meanings. Something was wrong with her, and being drunk was only the catalyst exposing it.
ON MONDAY MORNING I CALLED PARAMOUNT and tried to contact Hal Wallis. He was out of town, and the woman wouldn’t give me his number without my giving details of what I wanted. I wasn’t ready to do that. I could have called Minna Wallis, but I didn’t know her. Finally I called the Hacker Clinic in Beverly Hills. I knew Louise had once undergone therapy from Dr. Hacker. He listened to my story, but his response was noncommittal. Several days later, Dr. Frym called to tell me that I’d done the right thing. Someone had told Hal, who had flown back to Los Angeles and also called Dr. Hacker. Their telling him that I’d already informed them might lessen his suspicion of me. Dr. Frym emphasized two things: “Don’t take any money from her, and don’t drink with her. When someone has as much money as she does and starts giving it away, they’ll take the right away from her.”
Several days later, without warning, she was admitted to Cedars. Over that weekend they moved everything from the house in the Valley to the larger mansion at 515 Mapleton Drive in Holmby Hills. Dr. Hacker thought that losing the house in the Valley, which had been her sanctuary for many years from Hal’s flagrant infidelity, was part of her problem. Over that weekend, I got a message at the McKinley Home to call Mr. Wallis. He wanted to see me. The move was in progress when I arrived at the house. He told me that she had given away a considerable amount of money and all her jewelry: “I know you didn’t get that much of the money, but what about the jewelry?” All I could account for was the brooch she had given to Patty Ann. I retrieved it and returned it to him at the Hillcrest Country Club. The conversation lasted but a few seconds, but it ended with his saying that maybe he could help me.
When Louise exited Cedars, it was to the new house in Holmby Hills. Minnie and her husband, who were loyal to Louise, were replaced by a couple hired by Hal’s sister. When I went to visit, I had the feeling that they were watching me. Always before I’d felt that Louise and I were together, in a kind of nonmalicious conspiracy. Now, however, she had manifestly experienced some kind of breakdown. Dr. Hacker still visited her every week. Under those circumstances it was impossible for me to talk with her as I once had. I couldn’t add stress to her situation.
I had given her the half-finished manuscript to my second novel, about a young drug addict who becomes an informer. It was missing after the move. This was not a family unfamiliar with scripts and manuscripts. Nobody would throw it out without at least knowing what it was. I had no doubt that its loss was due to some malice from someone, but there was nothing I could say or do about it. The novel was probably unworthy of publication, as my next four were found wanting, although the last of those will soon be published in England, and perhaps in America with some judicious pruning and polishing. It was a kind of a Jim Thompson noir story, unlike the realism of my other work.
I’D BEEN OUT OF SAN QUENTIN for about a year, and it was time for me to move on from the McKinley Home for Boys. Because of my voracious reading and aspiration to the literary life, it seemed reasonable to try for a job in the story department of one of the studios. Louise thought the same, but she also thought it inappropriate for her to call Mervyn LeRoy. Minna Wallis, being an agent, dealt with people at the studios and would make the calls, although it would be behind the scenes at Warner Brothers, where mention of Hal Wallis would send Jack Warner into apoplexy. A “story analyst,” or “reader,” would be given a book or article and write a very brief, no more than a page, comment on its viability as a movie and then a three- or four-page synopsis of the story. I was given The Nun’s Story, which Warner Brothers had already bought, and with Patty Ann’s help did the job, which Louise read and thought quite good.
I’d gone through four studios when the head of the story department at Paramount told me that while Minna had arranged for the meeting, she had also said that she and Hal preferred that he not hire me. “I don’t know what it’s about,” he said, “but don’t think that she’s your friend.
As I crossed the parking lot to my car, I was certain who had taken and destroyed my unfinished novel. I wasn’t even angry. This confirmed my belief in human nature. And so much for Hal Wallis’s throwaway line about helping me.
I had a first-class wardrobe and a Jaguar sports car, although it was evident to me that it was a lemon and the used-car lot had clipped me. It was constantly in need of frequently expensive repair. I had a $2,600 check that Louise had given me and I had never cashed. I knew how she handled such matters. A man she had put into business with a janitorial service that now serviced several downtown buildings was a bookkeeper. Once a month he came over and took care of her accounts. He would bring the unusual check to her attention, for in 1956 that would equal at least ten times as much as it does on the eve of the twenty-first century. Although not a king’s ransom by the standards of the time, it was certainly an amount to be queried about. She would simply make it disappear. That I knew.
The clutch went out on my Jaguar. I cashed the check and forgot about it. I had not gotten it by subterfuge or deceit. It had been given me. And there had been no question of her competence at the time, not that I knew about. I will admit a slight sense of unease before doing it but no sense of having done wrong.
A few weeks went by. Without warning, she went into Cedars and had an “extremely serious” liver operation, as Dr. Frym phrased it. “The liver is always serious surgery.”
I called Cedars, and they denied having any Louise Wallis or Mrs. Hal Wallis or any Wallis or Wallace or Fazenda. And by then the switchboard operator was abrupt and irritated.
I considered calling all the hospitals in Southern California, but the list was too long, the possibilities too many.
She was under another name, of course. The name of a character she’d played in some obscure movie.
She called me in about a week. It had been touch and go, or so I’d been told, but she sounded both strong and funny.
She stayed in the hospital another week, during which period the checks for the various personal accounts had come back. She told me immediately when I first visited her when she was convalescing at home on Mapleton Drive that Hal had gone through them. For a moment I felt as if I’d lost something—but I knew that I’d lost nothing. Hal Wallis was never going to help me unless he could profit from it, and that was unlikely, although he would have gotten a loyal friend without avaricious intent or duplicity for the deal. I would have wagered then, and now, that he could never have pointed to three men and sincerely proclaimed them his friends.
It was also obvious that I could no longer count on or conspire with Louise. She had given me so much that I fairly ached, near tears with gratitude for what she’d done, and only partially realized at the time that her main gift was letting me look from the outhouse into the mansion, and I was far too wise about too much to accept the future that the past wanted to mandate for me. Maybe she would help me sometime in the future, but for now I needed a plan for my current situation. Obviously I wasn’t getting into a studio story department. I might have been able to get an office boy job at the Herald Express, as the afternoon Hearst newspaper was then named. Vanity of vanities, I could not see myself as an office boy, thank you.
Yet I needed a job of some kind, both to pacify the parole officer and to make a living. I had clothes, a nice apartment without rent, and a Jaguar roadster, but no cash flow. I applied for an insurance salesman job. They were enthused by my manner and appearance, but I never heard from them again after they discovered my background.
When I realized how slickly the used-car salesmen who had sold me the Jag had taken me off, me who thought I was half-slick, I decided it was a game I should learn. I became a used-car salesman. My first job was with a Chevrolet dealership on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. They hired anyone who walked in the door. It was all commission, so what did they care? The idea was to sell to your mother and father, brother and sister, friends and lovers. Bring them in and turn them over to a closer. In about three days I understood that this was no way to anything.
Then I spent a couple of months at a dealership that sold Nashes and Ramblers. I don’t recall if it was then called American Motors or something else. It was now 1958, a terrible year for car sales, and what we sold was the opposite of the swept-wing yachts then in vogue. I made a little money, but not much. I did, however, learn the game.
I finally went to work for the English mechanic who worked on my Jag. His business was on Second and LaBrea. He fixed foreign cars, especially English, and sold used sports cars of all varieties. It was the age of the Austin-Healey, Jaguar, MG, and bathtub Porsche. He only had two salesmen. We worked hours that I liked. I would come in at noon and stay until 9:00 in the evening. The last three hours I was alone. The next day I would open up at 9:00 A.M. and work until noon, when the other salesman took over. Then I was off until noon the next day. I had unlimited free use of a telephone, and anyone could visit me about anything in the privacy of my small office with the loud little air conditioner in the window. I could dress in jacket and necktie, and no grime got under my fingernails. It was the conservative fifties, long before anyone even heard of grunge as a style choice. Even beatnik poets were neat and stylish, albeit with individualized flairs. Another fringe benefit was that every other evening when I locked up, I could use any of the two dozen or so foreign sports cars on the lot. A bathtub Porsche one night, an Austin-Healey, Jaguar, or Mercedes 190 SL the next. The owner did take in a gull-wing 300 SL Mercedes, which he asked me not to take. “I wasn’t thinking about it,” I told him.
“And why not?” he asked.
“It’s almost empty of gas.” For although Richfield premium was about twenty cents a gallon, I almost always took a car whose gas tank was full or nearly full.
In the argot of the underworld, a car salesman’s job proved to be a good front. . . .