11

I didn’t hang around to watch Lockard tee off. He was surely willing himself a long, straight drive, and I didn’t want to see it come to pass. I reclaimed the DeSoto and drove east to Beverly Hills where the originals of the little estates Lockard dreamt of building resided. My appetite hadn’t returned–if anything, it had wandered farther away–so I had to lie about lunch when I called Peggy to tell her where I’d be. On the same stop I bought a fresh pack of cigarettes, Old Golds instead of my usual Lucky Strikes. They were my ticket of admission for the visit I intended to make, not unlike the whiskey I’d used earlier with John Piers Whitehead.

I’d been thinking of stopping by to see Torrance Beaumont ever since Ella’s bout of déjà vu at the Club Satyr. The party she’d been remembering that night, the party at which we’d met, had promoted a Tory Beaumont picture that had ended up unfinished. It never would be finished now, not with Beaumont starring. The actor was terminally ill with cancer.

I’d been visiting Beaumont every couple of weeks or so for a year, as part of a rotation of his old friends and drinking buddies. During that year I’d watched him struggle back from eight hours on an operating table and then begin a long, steady slide. For one reason or another I hadn’t been by the estate on Summit Drive for a month, and I felt bad about that. But I wasn’t going now because my conscience bothered me. I was going because everything bothered me.

The wrought-iron gates on Summit were open, so I drove through them and parked on the curving drive, pausing to admire the Technicolor landscaping that Beaumont had paid for but probably couldn’t describe: the hibiscus, the oleander, the fuchsia. Then again, maybe Beaumont could name every gaudy plant and do it in Latin. Maybe he’d started them from seeds in his own little greenhouse. If he had, he’d never admit it.

Beaumont liked the tough guy image that Hollywood had given him, the most enduring of the several identities he’d assumed in the course of a long acting career. I’d always thought of him as a well-educated, sensitive man who wore his gangster persona for the same reasons he liked a beat-up old suit: because it was comfortable, because it helped him fit in. Since his illness, I’d come to see that I’d sold him short. Toughness was more than a pose for Beaumont.

His house was a Tudor revival whose previous owner had been a successful plastic surgeon. Beaumont called the place Nose Job Manor and liked to tell people that he got it as a settlement when his face lift didn’t take.

The heavy front door was answered by the English butler. Everyone called him Moody, but I was never sure whether that was his name or a brief description. After he’d greeted me, Moody managed to ask where the hell I’d been keeping myself without actually putting the question into words. Not trimming his eyebrows gave him certain advantages in the emoting department. He took me through the quiet, cool interior of the house. At the glass doors that overlooked the pool, he stopped long enough to ask if I required cigarettes. I tapped my pocket, and he led the way out.

The big, kidney-shaped pool was backed by a bathing pavilion that looked like a Chinese pagoda. Either the pavilion’s architect hadn’t noticed the pile of Tudor on the other side of the pool, or else he’d wanted to make some personal statement on the East-meets-West debate. As we crossed the lawn, I noted two fresh wheel tracks in the grass and looked around for the wheelchair Moody had used to take his employer out to the water. It was hidden away somewhere safe. The chair Beaumont now occupied was wheelless and straight-backed, and it had arms flat and broad enough to hold a glass.

The man in the chair was wearing an old yachting cap, an older windbreaker, and gray suit pants that had been pressed sometime in the last twenty minutes. He sat with his feet and knees together, the knees leaning a little to one side. The glass on the arm of his chair was empty.

As Beaumont and I shook hands, Moody brought a chair around for me, placing it upwind of his boss.

“What brings you here, soldier?” Beaumont asked. “I thought you’d forgotten my address. The usual Gibson for Mr. Elliott, Moody, and another scotch for me. Better make it a pitcher of Gibsons. He looks like he’s seen a ghost.”

That was a joke at Beaumont’s own expense. He’d spotted how shocked I was at the change in him. Luckily, my reaction amused him. Or maybe my attempt to hide it did.

“And you wanted to be an actor,” he said. “Take off that goddamn tie and relax.”

I loosened my tie, dug out the Old Golds, and lit one, blowing the smoke in Beaumont’s direction. He drank it in with half-closed eyes.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“Swell. This has been a good day. If I could just put some damn weight on, I’d turn the corner.”

He’d been on the wrong side of that corner for months. Never what you’d call a heavyweight, he now had a quality in common with the very old: the ability to inhabit his clothes without really wearing them, without filling them out or giving them shape. Without bringing them to life. The only things alive about Beaumont were his dark eyes. The eyes had grown huge in his dried-apple head, as though they were the center of the cancer that was eating him, and not his lungs.

“What have you been up to?” he asked.

“Today I got an alcoholic drunk so he’d spill the story of his life. After that I tried to threaten a gorilla with social pretensions over at Riviera.”

Beaumont repeated the name a little dreamily as the next wave of my smoke passed over him. “Riviera. I was there for the last round of the ’48 Open, sitting on the clubhouse verandah, drinking rusty nails.”

“Who won?”

“As I recall, it was the rusty nails. Who won today?”

“The gorilla. He called me a shady character.”

“Your job didn’t end up being about rescuing fair maidens from dragons or helping little old ladies across the street, did it, soldier?”

“No,” I said.

Moody returned, carrying a little tray with legs. It held Beaumont’s drink and a sweating shaker of Gibsons. Moody poured one into a stemmed glass and added a single onion, transferring it from a bowl of next of kin using tiny silver tongs.

“To old times,” Beaumont said. He took a sip of his drink and then set it down carefully. I did my bit with the Old Gold again.

“Is it your job that’s bothering you?” Beaumont asked when the last of the smoke had moved east.

“What makes you think anything’s bothering me?”

“You’re not the usual cheery visitor I’ve been getting lately. Seems like everyone who stops by to see me is so pumped full of sunshine they make Ed Wynn look like a wooden Indian. You’re a refreshing change of pace.”

“Thanks.” I ground the cigarette out in the ashtray the thoughtful Moody had provided.

“Light up another,” Beaumont said. “They don’t bother me.”

“Why the hell don’t you just smoke one yourself?”

“The doc says no. As long as I’m doing good, I’m going to let him call the shots.”

I wondered who was pumping who full of sunshine now. I took a drink and lit another cigarette.

“Is it your job in general that’s getting to you,” Beaumont asked, “or just working for Carson Drury?”

“How did you know I was working for him?”

My reaction brought out Beaumont’s old, wolfish grin. “I recommended you. Drury came by to see me. Smoked the same lousy cigar the whole time, the bum. He’d heard about the fracas we got into in ’47. Wanted to know all about it. All about you.”

That solved the mystery of Drury asking for me by name. “It’s not him,” I said. “In fact, I kind of like the guy. He’s one of the few people I’ve met lately who thinks that Hollywood has a future.”

My host chuckled. “The bad news being that Drury hasn’t been right about anything since he started shaving.”

“You think he’s wrong about Hollywood?”

“Dunno. I know that what you mean when you say Hollywood–namely, the town you left behind when you went off to play Sergeant York–that town is dying. A fellow with time on his hands could ride around on a white charger trying to save it, but he’d just be wasting his energy. Nobody can stop things from changing, usually for the worse. ‘Things fall apart,’ as Yeats said.” He hastened to add, “He was a poet, I think, or a bartender.

“The only thing certain is, when the studio system finally croaks, something else will come along to take its place. Whether it’ll be a Renaissance or the Dark Ages is anybody’s guess.”

We drank in silence for a while to give Beaumont a chance to catch his breath. Then I asked him if he remembered a guy named Vincent Mediate.

“I remember the gun he waved in my face,” Beaumont said.

“I’ve been thinking of him on and off today.”

“Because of Drury?” There was a similarity. Mediate had been a boy wonder in his own right, although he’d never enjoyed Drury’s level of success.

“No,” I said, “because of something Mediate told me once. He said the ex-serviceman’s dream of a wife and a little house in the sticks was going to seem like a trap someday. Funny how he could spot my end coming but couldn’t see his own.”

“That’s the way it usually works,” Beaumont said. “So you’re feeling trapped?”

“Not exactly. I’m feeling like a guy who spends his days rolling drunks. I meant to do more than that. I think I did do more than that, once.”

Beaumont drew himself up in his chair, the effort making us both wince. “You’re a prize sap, Elliott. You always have been. You told me once that every man’s life should fade to black after he’d done his one heroic thing. It was crap then and it’s crap now. If that’s all there was to heroism, who couldn’t win a medal? It’s living through the empty days that takes sand. And carrying your weight and a little extra.”

He left off there, pale and out of breath. Before he built up steam again, Moody rejoined us. “Telephone for Mr. Elliott,” he said.

I stood up. “I should be going anyway,” I said.

“Yeah,” Beaumont said. “You should. Go home and tell your wife she married a cream puff. And take those damn things with you.”

I picked up the pack of Old Golds I’d carelessly left on the silver tray. When Moody and I reached the house, I handed him the cigarettes for his reserve supply.

“What’s the latest word?” I asked.

“No hope,” he said.

He led me to the phone and then went back outside.

I said, “Elliott,” into the mouthpiece when I’d gotten my fill of the quiet.

“Scotty, this is Peg. Get out to the RKO lot in Culver City as fast as you can. Paddy’s on his way there now. There’s been some kind of accident. Carson Drury’s been hurt.”