Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (28 page)

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 petite mustache. Even then it was not at the parole
office. It was at Wallis Farms, in the blue room, where I was seated next to
Louise Fazenda Wallis, on the wide armrest of her overstuffed chair, with my
arm extended along the top of the chair back. She played gracious lady as well
as Katharine 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 to be the
message he was giving 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 as 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 shadow boxing 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 a 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 to re-invest 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. Although there was
no real slot for me to fill, with 120 boys there was plenty to do. 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 me. I was charged with maintaining
order, keeping horseplay to a minimum and stopping the running around the pool
side. When a busload of boys went somewhere, say the Times charity game between
the 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 chdd raised by strangers, to be without a family to turn to. I could
not fill that emptiness, but I was friend and advisor 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 120 was 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 be a trip back to San Quentin as a
parole violator. The Adult Authority 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 OK Corral.
Their son, Brent, was a
lieutenant in the Army or Air Force, stationed in Northern California. He came
home on the weekends, and that's 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 flagrandy. 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 told 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. He was so well mannered that I was unable to read him.
His courtliness I would have expected from the English aristocracy rather than
from the scion of Hollywood
nottveau riches.
Louise thought it was because he was 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 or Brew 102, which teenagers in the poorer
sections of LA drank to get drunk. What other reason was there to drink beer?

When he drove me back to
McKinley in a Mercedes 190SL roadster, it was the first time I'd ridden in a
sports car. The feel on curves and corners was almost erotic, a sensation
totally different than I felt in 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, 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 bunk
house, stables and a timing track for the racehorses he bred, and 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 two million to four million. When you're rich, she said, you keep
getting richer with very littleeffort, 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 $1,000; the next day it arrived at McKinley in the US Mad. 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, and
the sound of male voices.

Hal came in, followed by Brent
and another youth who, I believe, managed the agriculture of Wallis Farms,
which actually grew something somewhere. They'd been at a preview screening of
Gunfight at the OK 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, thought he was someone else and 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. His training - typing and shorthand at a Chicago business
school. He had two natural talents. He saved many thousands of dollars by an
unerring sense of what should be cut from a script instead of having to wait
until it was on film. He also had a perfect feel for who the public would love.
His mediocre autobiography,
Starmaker,
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 was handsome, Louise had 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-convict 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 are stars, or directors or producers. As the son or daughter
grows up, they see up close how the game is played, and they know the players —
the fathers of their own friends. 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 assumed, 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. They went together like mustard on 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, 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 reform school curriculum, and I'd had no chance to change a tire
in San Quentin, so where could I learn? It was an explanation I kept to myself.