Playland

by John Gregory Dunne

Genres: Historical Fiction; Thrillers

Synopsis

A critically acclaimed best-seller set in the glamorous, gangster-dominated Hollywood of the 1940s tells the story of Blue Tyler, a child star who disappears from Hollywood and becomes a bag lady in New York City.

Release date: May 2, 2012

Publisher: Random House

Print pages: 512

Sample

SETTING THE SCENE I
 
First things first:
She was born Melba Mae Toolate (or maybe not, but certainly, or so I think, close enough, although Myrna Marie Toolate still has a core of adherents, the way Los Angeles with a hard  also has its core vote) in San Bernardino, California, April 28, 1928. That is, if she was not born in Yuma, Arizona, on the same date a year earlier (in other words, April 28, 1927), or then again in Shoshone, California, October 29, 1929, but that was the day the stock market crashed, and a few years later, after Melba Mae Toolate became Baby Blue Tyler, Hollywood’s number-one cinemoppet and biggest box office star, studio publicists, always looking for an item, would claim that her birth was America’s only bright spot that day, which did not exactly lend the date, as Blue Tyler’s birthday, verisimilitude.
 
Her father died shortly before her birth, or shortly thereafter, or perhaps he was in prison in Ohio when she was born, or then again maybe it was in Pennsylvania, Nebraska or Montana. The prison stories surfaced only after her disgrace; Blue Tyler was a woman, a child really, to whom disgrace attached itself with a certain regularity, but the disgrace here in question was her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, when she was either nineteen, twenty or twenty-one years old. The prison reports came up again after her disappearance from what Collier’s magazine called “the baleful glare of the public eye,” in any event when those same studio publicists who had been so quick to claim, for Jimmy Fidler’s deadline, that Blue Tyler was born the day the market went belly-up were no longer available to keep the legend, such as it was (and even more so such as it became), free from taint.
 
Anyway. Melba’s father (if indeed he was). Among other names, he was known as Herman Toolate or Herbert Tulahti (“Too-late” and “Too-lah-tee” being the two conflicting pronunciations of the name she abandoned when she became, or was reborn as, Blue Tyler), or (this from those French cinéastes who kept Blue Tyler’s torch from being extinguished in those decades when she was, as it were, in the desert) Henri Tulaté. Mr. Toolate (or if you will Mr. Tulahti or M. Tulaté) was in some accounts a pharmacist, in others a would-be trombonist or a failed Tin Pan Alley songwriter (sample unpublished song titles: “Mimi from Miami” and “Yolanda from Yuma,” the latter giving an uncertain advantage to those who favored Arizona as Melba Mae’s birthplace, and the added possibility that Yolanda was in fact her real name, a father’s hymn to his daughter), even a ballroom dancer who had murdered his partner during a dance marathon in 1931 (this scenario, in a French monograph on Blue Tyler’s career, stolen without apology from Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?).
 
The former Melba Mae Toolate’s musical talent, such as it was, was said to come from this man cast as her father (in his trombonist, songwriter, or marathon dancer incarnations), unless it came via her mother (Irma in most cases, although Erna, Ursula, and heaven knows how many other Christian names were also candidates), a God-fearing (in later revisionist versions, as theological fashions changed and theories about the death of God were abroad in the land, God-hating) woman who taught piano, or the harp, or (this from a piece in Film Comment entitled “The Geometry of Dance in the Classic Hollywood Musicals”) mathematics. Irma (or Erna or Ursula) Too-late’s emergence as the more dominant influence on Melba Mae was a feminist theory that came into currency after the brief reappearance of Blue Tyler as a middle-aged woman in Hamtramck, Michigan, when for a moment she became, to her surprise (although I cannot say amusement, because when one spends an entire professional life cosseted by the apparatus of a motion picture studio, one does not easily learn to be amused at one’s own expense), a heroine of the women’s movement, a victim, in that liturgy, of the system and the male oppressors who would extinguish any spark of female spirit or independence.
 
You begin to see the difficulty.
 
SETTING THE SCENE II
 
Chuckie O’Hara died yesterday. The obituary in the Times said he was seventy-seven, but I knew he was older than that, to the very end vain about his age in that poofter way of his, eighty-two or eighty-three more likely, because when he lost his leg on Peleliu he had already received an Oscar nomination, for directing Lily of the Valley. Most of the obits carried the picture, the famous photograph, of Chuckie testifying before the Un-American Activities Committee, the day he took off his wooden leg when the chairman asked if he was now or ever had been a Communist. It was quite a sight on those grainy old Movietone newsreels I tracked down and ran when I was trying to find out anything at all about Blue Tyler, who as it happened was the star of Lily of the Valley, her performance earning her a third Academy nomination, all before she was twelve.
 
In the stock footage, Chuckie began pulling up his pant leg just as he started to answer the chairman’s question. Every eye in the hearing room was on him as he unbuckled that old-fashioned prosthetic device with all the straps, laid it on the witness table, and then said, clear as a bell, “Yes, Mr. Chairman, I was a Communist,” not taking the First, as the Ten had done, and not the Fifth either, and he listed the dates, from October 1938 to July 1941, and, no, he would respectfully decline to name names, all the time massaging that raw stump of the leg he lost on Orange Beach. It was a real director’s touch, a perfect piece of business. Chuckie always knew exactly how to stage a scene, and he knew that no one at the hearing was listening to what he had to say, they were just looking at that stump, all pulpy and white with red crosshatching where the stitches had been. “Darling,” he told me when I asked him about that day in front of the Committee, “it was divine.” Sydney Allen stole the hearing scene and used it in one of his pictures when it was safe to do safe pictures about the blacklist. The Times tried to get a quote from Sydney for Chuckie’s obit, but Mr. Allen’s spokesman said that Mr. Allen was in the cutting room and was not available for comment. Sydney never disappoints, as always a thoroughbred shit-heel.
 
In a movie, Chuckie’s performance would have taken the steam out of the hearings, which naturally it did in Sydney Allen’s piece of crap, but in real life, of course, it didn’t. Only time accomplished that. Still the scene had good value. Chuckie was certainly a Red, he admitted that, but I doubt if it had anything to do with politics. Blue told me it was because he was really stuck on Reilly Holt, the writer at Paramount, and a high-muckety-muck in the Party, and from things Chuckie told me later I suspect she was getting close to the truth. In his defense, it should also be said that no one on that Committee had ever hit a beach, let alone had a leg blown off on one.
 
The Marine Corps must have had some idea about Chuckie’s politics, it had to be why he was never given a commission, when they were making A.D.s from Poverty Row captains and majors. Chuckie said he preferred being an enlisted man anyway. The farm boys in the barracks were more susceptible to my roguish charms than officers in a BOQ might have been, he said, the roughest of rough trade, my dear, it comes from being so louche with all those sheep on cold winter nights. And the farm boys were more than compensation enough for having to salute Jack Ford and Willie Wyler, even, sweet mother of God, D.Z.
 
But if the Corps did not think Chuckie was officer material, it did realize that Corporal, later Sergeant, Charlton O’Hara, USMCR, was a pretty country fair director, just the man to shoot invasions, and so they gave him a film crew and put him on the beach with the first wave when the Fifth Marines hit Cape Gloucester the day after Christmas 1943 (“Not the way one would ordinarily choose to spend Boxing Day, dear,” he said once), and then again nine months later with the first wave at Peleliu, a pointless and bloody fiasco, again with the Fifth Marines. All the Marine brass really wanted was film of jarheads hitting the beach to show Congress when it was time for the next year’s appropriations. To the Corps, Chuckie’s politics (and the sexual orientation the brass must have suspected) did not matter as much as the footage he was getting, when the chances were he was going to end up in a body bag anyway, a dead Commie nance, longevity not generally accruing to people who landed often enough with the first wave. Meaning Chuckie was probably lucky to lose only his right leg from the knee down on D-Plus-Two at Peleliu, Orange Beach, from an unexploded mortar round buried in the sand that he accidentally kicked while he was moving his crew around the beach looking for a better angle. Force of habit, the old Cosmopolitan Pictures training, directors at Cosmo always overcovered so that any mistakes could be fixed in the editing room.