Where the Truth Lies (40 page)

I sighed. “Okay, I’ll be there.”

She told me “there” was a luncheon at the Hollywood Roosevelt. I was secretly pleased to have been considered an acceptable presenter by the organizers of the Event. I was certainly not known to the public by any means. I could only imagine that if you interview enough celebrities, some of their notoriety begins to rub off on you, at least within the trade.

The next call I had planned to make was the one I most dreaded, because it involved sustaining more complex fabrications than the ones I’d inflicted on Connie, which were largely lies of omission. Procrastination being the one thing I rarely put off until tomorrow, I called Beejay instead. I needed to hear a friendly voice. More important, I had not had an extended conversation with anyone in the last twenty-four hours to whom I hadn’t been lying: Vince, Adolfo, Tony the doorman, Kef Ludlow, Connie … I wondered what it would feel like to speak the truth.

Beejay didn’t give me much of a chance to find out. She had a romantic triangle on her hands that, at the moment, was a lot more functional than my non-ménage with Lanny and Vince. Beejay had been seeing the vice principal of her school, who was married, and also seeing a New York actor who was not married to anything other than his mirror. Last Friday, she’d done the dirty deed, as Beejay so sensually put it, with the principal of vice in his office, and then gone home and bathed the scent of sex from her body so that she was virginal for Mr. Method’s big entrance. The next afternoon she’d received a spectacular bouquet of flowers. But there was no card. She said the hippie delivery boy, whose blond pageboy haircut made him look like Illya Kuryakin onThe Man from U.N.C.L.E., hadn’t a clue as to who had placed the order, or anything else for that matter. “So what do I do?” she fretted to me. “I want to keep both of them for a while, but they’re both very jealous personalities. Do I thank them both for the flowers and see which one knows what I’m talking about?”

I told her that if she did and both of them said, “I’m glad you liked them,” she could be certain that one of the two was definitely a creep. Always the detective, I suggested she call each and fake sneezing at the very start of the conversation. “Then explain you’re highly allergic to flowers. The guy that sent you the flowers will immediately apologize.” She said she didn’t know if she could fake sneezing very believably. I told her that when we were roommates in college I’d heard her fake a lot more than sneezing while I stood waiting outside the bedroom we shared.

Finally we were allowed to get to my problems withmy two men who didn’t know about each other. I explained why I’d had her call me at Vince’s home and what I’d done since.

My supply of quarters had now been halved, and I had no idea how long my next phone call, the most long-distance of the three, would take. I reluctantly signed off with Beejay, took several deep breaths, rolled my eyes heavenward in order to invoke an alpha state of relaxation, and dialed Vince’s number.

He was home, and he said he’d answered the phone in the hope that it might be me. I was glad I hadn’t gotten his service or office. I needed him to hear the airport behind me. Air Florida cooperated tremendously by announcing“Last call for Flight 586 to Pensacola and Memphis at Gate 4” just after I told him where I was.

“Miami? I thought your brother was in New York.”

“He was. But the funeral ceremony was here.”

There was silence on the line for a moment, during which Eastern Airlines announced that their 7:00P .M. flight to Washington and Philadelphia would be delayed by a half hour.

“I’m very sorry,” Vince said at last.

“That’s all right. We weren’t all that close. He was my half brother.”

“Older or younger than you?”

“Older.”

“So your mother was married twice?”

I didn’t like that idea. My own mother was devoted to my father. “No, Clifford was my father’s son from a previous marriage.” That was better. “Actually, he was my father’s stepson.”

“So he wasn’t even really your half brother,” Vince observed.

“Mmm. As you say. But still, it felt— For example, he had a crush on me when I was a teenager, and there was nothing genetically stopping us from pursuing the relationship, yet I told him it just felt wrong.” This was getting much too richly hued for my comfort. I’d meant to simply distance myself from “Clifford,” to explain why I would resiliently be back to normal by tomorrow, but instead I was on the verge of scripting a Bergman film.

“The funeral was so soon,” noted Vince.

“It wasn’t a burial. It was a private ceremony. He had asked that he be cremated as soon as possible and that his ashes be scattered over the Everglades. He loved the Everglades. He grew up there.”

“But when he had a crush on you, he was up north? Or were you—”

“He visited my family, to see my dad, who was his”—what was he again?—“his stepfather, in the summer months. He was cremated this morning, and I accompanied the ashes down here. Tomorrow a private airplane will distribute them.” I was tired of saying “scatter.” “There was a ceremony today for his mother and my father. His biological father is no longer alive.”

“How did he die?” asked Vince.

“I have no idea, he passed away before I was born.”

“No, I— Not how Clifford’s biological father died. I meant Clifford.”

This part I’d planned in advance. “He worked for the government. The project he was involved with is a classified matter. I was given very few details, but it was clearly an accident and, thankfully, he didn’t suffer.” I changed my tone to apologetic. “Vince, my feelings need time to sort themselves out, and I think it would help if I didn’t talk about this for a while. Is that okay?”

“Sure, I understand,” said Vince in a very reassuring tone.

“I think the best remedy for me is to focus on the book and our work together. Will you help me with that?”

He said he would and we scheduled to meet the next afternoon, after the Scotty Awards luncheon. Now I had to make a larger request. I had to ask him not to involve Lanny in any of our meetings. To broach this, I began, “By the way, before I hang up, it’s been very much on my mind: can you tell me a little of what you felt seeing Lanny again, after so long? What was that like, Vince?”

“He didn’t show up. I never saw him.” He sounded disappointed, perhaps even hurt. “After all that buildup. So anticlimactic.”

He told me that Lanny had called him about five minutes after I’d left to tell him he was unbelievably behind schedule doing a Morris the Cat commercial out at the Sunset-Gower Studios and wouldn’t be done until early evening. Vince had told him about my brother and they’d both agreed to reschedule the meeting for another date.

I told Vince that, as per our contract, I was respectfully going to exercise my editorial jurisdiction over the project and stipulate that Lanny not be invited to any of our meetings again. He made some bewildered sounds and I explained: “Look, I’ve thought about it, and whenever I tell a story about something funny that happened to me and a friend, I always tell it differently when my friend is with me. She’ll interrupt, saying, ‘No, it was the other guy who wanted to dance,’ or ‘You left out why we went there in the first place.’ And sometimes she’s right, so I back up the story a bit, or I disagree with her and we get caught up in a mini-debate, or I adhere so strictly to the truth that it ruins the story. We end up with a flat, lame, compromised, confused rendition of what either one of us individually could recount in an extremely funny way. That’s what I’m afraid will happen if you and Lanny jointly answer any of my questions. Even if he doesn’t say a word, his presence alone would influence what you say. I don’t want that. You’re contractually obligated to answer my questions, but Lanny isn’t. He can pull a ‘no comment’ and get away with telling me only what he wants me to hear. You can’t. He can put something off the record, but for you and me, everything’s been on the record since I first met you. It would be like a tennis game where one player observes all the boundaries and regulations—”

He cut my explanation short and said he understood. He apologized for having invited Lanny in the first place and said he looked forward to seeing me directly after the Scotties ceremony.

I hung up the phone and, scooping up my remaining quarters, went back to the bar, where I purchased myself another greyhound. I had an hour to kill before my flight to Los Angeles. I paid for my drink, tipping the bartender a generous eight quarters, and took the remaining change over to the Pong machine. The bar was pretty empty now, as there were only a few evening flights left. No one was playing the game. It looked remarkably simple and easy to beat. I popped in a quarter and squared off against the computer, which knew all the boundaries and regulations of the game. It gulped down my quarters like a ravenous slot machine and gave me a sound thrashing, beeping and blipping as it boffed me over and over again.

TWENTY-SIX

I had interviewed Richard Harris a few years after the success of his hit record “MacArthur Park,” which was named after a real place in downtown Los Angeles and which, on the recording, Harris continually and mistakenly referred to as MacArthur’s Park. During the course of the interview, he told me that his favorite place to stay in Hollywood was the Roosevelt Hotel, and I’d been puzzled by that until he explained that when he stole the towels in his room, they were correctly monogrammed for him. Much as he, Rita Hayworth, and Rex Harrison might have adored the Roosevelt for this specific reason, the hotel had clearly once seen better days, and its view of those better days was growing dimmer as they receded into memory. Like MacArthur Park (around which a Central American community was building but no real estate developers were), it was not that anyone was doing anything awful to the Roosevelt. It was simply that, when something broke, no one fixed it.

The Roosevelt Hotel—its address was 7000 Hollywood Boulevard—had been built in 1927, around the same time Joe Young built his Hollywood-by-the-Sea in Florida. It made a lot of sense as the place to hold the fourth annual Scotty Awards. At the Roosevelt’s once-fashionable Cinegrill, F. Scott Fitzgerald used to be a social drinker who never stopped being social; he once went ten rounds with Ernest Hemingway (I’m not referring to boxing) and won on a technical blackout. I wondered if Lil Walker had any Cinegrill stories to share with me.

I stepped into the hotel’s still-handsome two-story Spanish Mediterranean lobby, its tile floors bouncing the sound of my footsteps up to the hand-painted ceiling and back to my ears in a pleasant, precise ricochet. I walked by the staircase where Bojangles Robinson had purportedly shown Shirley Temple how they might perform a dance routine inThe Little Colonel. Then on to the Daisy Room, where I found Nita Cowan, who was handling P.R. for Neuman and Newberry. I’d been told I would be able to spot her because she would have the darkest tan of anyone there, including Leslie Uggams. I went over to a woman with Caucasian features who was the same color as the balustrade I’d just held and introduced myself. She told me how thrilled she was that I could be part of the event. If she were about to be beheaded, she’d probably also have said this to the hooded man carrying the ax.

The room was smartly dressed, the tables in salmon-colored linen with a centerpiece of white flowers at each table. There was a dais, with a podium at center stage. Behind it was a transparent Lucite triangle upon which sat three clear shelves, the resting place for twenty-three Scotty awards, which were in the shape of Fitzgerald’s profile. I asked if the winners’ names were on them and was told no, that they would all be inscribed after the ceremony, if the recipient so wished it, for a very nominal fee. I asked if Rona Barrett was there yet (I had never met her, although like anyone who ever watched TV, I knew what she looked like). Nita said Rona had a taping conflict and that she would be arriving just before our particular presentation was to begin. I told Nita that my only concern was that I had a meeting with Vince Collins set for this afternoon, but she assured me the ceremony wasn’t going to go over two hours.

She suggested I head up to the podium and get the feel of the stage. She handed me a file card on which there were some quips I was supposed to exchange with Rona.

“Really?” I said upon hearing this information. “I’m a writer—can’t I just use my own words?”

She explained with not much patience that Rona would be working from the same script and that it would be unprofessional for me to depart from it, not to mention confusing for Rona. I walked up to the podium. The microphone was placed a little high, and when I bent its gooseneck down, it gave off the same sort of feedback that had made Jimi Hendrix the star of Woodstock.Everyone working in the room looked annoyed with me. I reeled off a sentence and retreated from the stage.

Nita looked displeased. “You better speak up when you do it for real. I couldn’t hear a word you said.”

I looked down at the card in my hand. “Nita, I see that Rona is supposed to say to me,‘Well, I’d say you really knocked one out of the park with your book. Has to be the first time anyone hit a home run on ball four.’ What does that mean?”

Nita examined the card with mild curiosity. As she read it, I added, “See, I’ve written for magazines and newspapers. My first book isn’t out yet.” She looked the notes over again and handed the card back to me.

“I don’t know, I guess it’s a joke. Itis sort of funny. Just go with it.”

I stared accusingly at Nita. “Someone else was originally supposed to do this with Rona other than me—that’s what this is, isn’t it? Look, I don’t mind, I’m not a celebrity or famous, I know that. But could Rona just talk to me as if I’m me? I don’t know how to reply to what you have her saying.”

Nita gave me a frosty smile. “Sure you do. You read what’s on the card. Rona already has hers, she said she’d look it over on the way here.” She looked at the card again. “I have no problem with this. Look, it’s not like this is on TV or anything. And you must have interviewed someone in sports in your life.”

She was obviously expecting me to answer. “The closest would be Paul Newman when he made a film about hockey.”