Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (15 page)

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 shone 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. To reach the house I would have to go 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, pitching 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 terrycloth 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 out
Levi's (what we call 501 was all they made in 1950), 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. 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. 1 glanced at some
titles. Many were psychology, a couple were religion. It was the first time I
saw the name Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It was so mellifluous that I
remembered this moment the next time I saw it. One title I noticed 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 $23. 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 than laboring in the sun, and $20 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-styles 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. It ran
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 5
^th
Street on Hill.

I
rented a furnished room near MacArthur Park. It was $7 for the week. The
bathroom was down the hall, but it 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 came awake 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,
still 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
nine. Sometimes Mrs Wallis was ready at 9.30, sometimes not until eleven. While
I waited, Minnie cooked me a great breakfast.

Sooner or later we left on her "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 6
^th
and Kohler in the first decade after the
turn of the century. She had worked at the Bishop Candy Co., at 7
^th
and Central. She got fired because she was too sick to work (years later she
confided that it was because she'd had an abortion). So she was looking for
another job. A woman named Bertha Griffith, I believe that was her name, gave
her 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 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," 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 on stage. 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 the 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 '20s 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 felt 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 her book,
The Fountainhead,
which I had not then read. Ditto
for Aldous Huxley, a tall, gaunt man. All I remember was that the house smelt
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
"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 him . . . 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 comedian." 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. I am writing from memory, not research,
and where I'm wrong my memory is flawed. I never expected to write of it, not
when it happened.

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, 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 ZaZu Pitts, a mutual friend who had just undergone cancer surgery.
Marion said that ZaZu 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 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 greenery on the slope beyond the wide
terrace.

The flash of white had been the uniform of a nurse.
She was carrying a tray through another door into 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 Wallis, 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,
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 consulted him, Churchill 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 that viscerally I 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 at once.
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, her face got red, but she made no comment. We were in die 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.

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
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. It 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, like 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.
She 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 speaker phone and
opened the gate. It was about 11 p.m. Instead of waking the servants, she took
off her shoes, threw them over, 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 she 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 was headed: "Angel of Hollywood."

Through the "Roaring '20s" 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 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 and 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.