20th Century Un-limited Page 13

  The house was not even in the area already known as the Malibu Colony, favored by movie stars of the time as “weekend vacation spots.” And, second surprise, it wasn’t anything like the all-glass walls on the ocean and blank wooden walls otherwise, built-up-on-stilts style of architecture that would dominate down here on the sands later on. But instead it was a big Cape Cod, with a half second floor of balconied open rooms above the living room and dining room, and was complete with dormer windows, shutters, the New England cockerel weather vane: the works!

  Nor was there a swimming pool tucked in between the house deck and sands. I mean, come on, people, you have the entire Pacific Ocean out there!

  There was a little, mostly fenced-in, wooden back deck level to the sand—and a white picket fence to match the architectural style. And as the house was locked up, that’s where I decided to wait.

  I’d brought a book, Faulkner’s totally over-the-top story of Temple Drake, a book I’d not read in forty-two years, not since a college course titled Faulkner and the Southern Novel. I’d also brought my MP3 player with its ear buds.

  And my new 1935 bathing suit, which, while not a Speedo, was a lot smaller than the ugly, oversized board trunks most men sported in 2010, and thus wouldn’t drag me down in the surf, although these days they wore their suits higher on the waist than I usually did. What’s wrong with showing a little navel anyway? Everyone has one.

  In fact, I’d been playing in the ocean almost until sunset—at 6:30 p.m., as it was now October and it was fairly warm, for the Pacific—and then I’d listened to an hour or so of a recording of a Jean-Baptiste Lully opera from a score not rediscovered until the turn of the twenty-first century. I’d also read pages and pages of Faulkner, whose descriptions of night were excellent, I thought.

  As it got cooler, I covered up with my shirt and then with some old beach towels, lying on the beach chaise on the back terrace, and I’d at last fallen asleep.

  Before that, however, I’d had a long enough time to just watch the sunset and think about what it was that I missed the most in being back in 1935, and what, if anything, compensated for it.

  Oddly, food had turned out to be my biggest problem. I’d ended up going to the farmers’ market for fresh fruit and produce several days a week. I’d also driven out to an almost brand-new shop in Venice Beach that had begun to specialize in “Health Food” in order to locate some of the food staples that I used to get regularly anywhere in 2010: yogurt, for example. Whole rolled oats, whole wheat in forms like bulgur and semolina and farina, not to mention brown rice. Nuts and seeds and beans like lentils and soya. Vitamins too. Various herbal teas. Forget tofu! I ultimately did end up finding some sold out of a giant can filled with tofu and water in colorful little Chinatown, across the corn field from downtown L.A. It looked freshly made, but how sanitary could it be? Fruit juices also were few and far between, except for the ubiquitous orange. Avocados, mangos, guavas, jicamas, and plantains were only found in a few rare Mexican food shops difficult to locate. As for dinners out, everyone who could afford to ordered steak. I ended up ordering fish and dictating exactly how many minutes and at exactly how high a temperature it ought to be cooked so I wouldn’t get a piece of white or pink cardboard served on my plate. Doubtless, I developed a reputation among restaurateurs as a “problem patron” and “picky eater.”

  I’d gotten an early and unreliable sterno stove for my room, and all the other four had their fun with it, calling me “Doctor Zarkoff”—from Flash Gordon, then in movie theaters as a ten-part serial with the divine Buster Crabbe. None of them but Hank would even taste whatever I cooked on that. Sid called it my “wrist-radio-Sterno stove”—Yes, Dick Tracy comics were all the rage. The diner owner, Anderson, was more understanding, and he sometimes let me whip up something in his diner’s kitchen, where Cookie had returned unchastened, and then had to humiliate himself by asking for my cornbread recipe, which breakfast patrons kept asking for.

  To say that I missed computers and television and the Internet was completely true. But I’d known that would happen coming here. One had to go out of one’s house and into a theater to watch a movie. If you missed it locally, you had to go find a place where it was playing. Usually out in Monrovia or Pomona. There were no DVDs. There was no streaming video. To do the kind of research I could have done in a few hours via Yahoo and Google, I had to take my chances in the reference section of the L.A. Central Library.

  Almost ditto with concert music or jazz. You would have to go to the Hollywood Bowl or the Wilshire-Ebell for classical and to the Wiltern Theatre or to the few jazz clubs that had started up on Central Avenue downtown for pop music, where it was live and cheap too. Big band stuff was popular, and all over town, but it was song-and-dance music and I had enough of that from work. Of course the radio—it was AM only, as Morgan had predicted—provided plenty of music, but again, you had to sit there to listen. I did enjoy Otto Klemperer conducting the L.A. Philharmonic and various guest conductors and soloists taking their shots with the Pasadena Civic Orchestra. Violinist Jascha Heifetz was at his height of fame, and pianist Artur Rubinstein too, and you could hear them playing. Also that anomaly Erwin Nyireghazi, once the European child prodigy who had apparently settled in L.A. somewhere, destined for a life of women, boozing, and being utterly forgotten—until he was in his eighties, when he was rediscovered briefly—and recorded, before dying. So I bought the best record player I could find, a German Braun, alas, sold in England and shipped to me with a His Master’s Voice label pasted over it, and I played all my newly bought 78 rpm vinyl records.

  Cars were beautiful, classically so, but mechanically…well, they didn’t have power steering, windows, brakes, or power anything! Only the most expensive ones had easy-to-use ignitions and anything like easy steering. Once Jonah went to work full-time for Frances Wannamaker, on his way to becoming a talent agent himself, he bought the Willis-Knight sedan off me entirely. He needed it all the time.

  My income ballooned considerably by movie number three, however, and I got myself a sporty new Ford Model B “Deuce” coupe, and then after a few months of being fatigued with all the manual handling required in driving that, I traded it in for an Auburn boattailed roadster, in cream and tan. That had a manual transmission too, but one that was as fluid as shaking a hand. It also had tight steering, powerful brakes, and a zero-to-sixty speed to take most other cars on the street. I’d had a radio installed too, a rarity except in limousines, with a big whiplash antenna. That was what I’d driven in out to the beach house, with the rag top down, listening to the Dorseys.

  In addition, I was sometimes at a complete loss for words when someone said something I didn’t understand and realized I should have known or understood. But rather than make a fuss about it, I would usually shrug it off, or make a joke about it, and then just move on. I’m sure some folks thought I was faking it.

  I never lost that sense of never quite being able to pick up people’s signals. “Do you mean…?” I would have to ask. “Whaddya think I meant?” people would ask back, and I’d say, “Let’s not go there.” “Go where?” “Wherever that question will lead us,” I’d have to respond. By which time they were pretty well confused. Talk in 1935 was for the most part grounded and specific, not metaphorically high flying, allusive and abstract as even the lightest chatter would become later. I sometimes longed for the latter and had set my cap on connecting with a few of the intellectuals of my time and place: Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Franz Werfel, and Arnold Schoenberg all lived in Los Angeles, and I knew I had to meet them.

  Where I ended up being the most improvisational was in trying to work within my sexuality without causing too much of a stir: a big deal for someone who’d been out from the age of twenty-two, which by 2010 was forty-three years. By contrast, Billy Haines’s career—and his wasn’t the only one—was a clear case of what could and what would happen if you didn’t publicly play the heterosexual game in 1935. But my life in that quarter alm
ost seemed set up from the beginning: Sue-Anne and Hank moved very slowly together and never in public unless I was there too. She seemed to need me as cover of her real intent as much as I was using her as a “beard.” People expected us to be together in public, anyway: I wondered if anyone actually saw Hank was there too. That was a dual role that the two of us could play for several more years, before anyone noticed the ubiquitous other guy.

  All that was fine, and having a few carefully selected (mostly older) people know I was interested in other men seemed to be fine too, since everyone in the movie business was very quiet about that. But at least among my growing set of I guess you’d have to call them older, successful men, there wasn’t that secret and closeted life that as a youth in the 1960s I had first entered into and then watched dissipate and then vanish in the harsh glare of us coming out with Gay Liberation. No, it seemed that level of closeted-ness would only come later on, after the Second World War, and probably partly as a result of gay servicemen fraternizing and needing instantaneous code words and euphemisms. After all, they would have so little time to get to know each other for a one- or two-night hook-up before they were shipped off to another theater of war and possibly death.

  With Randolph Scott, I openly flirted and he’d openly flirted back. Based on what I’d seen at the Haines/Shields party the one time I went—Rafferty never let me go again—that was pretty much how it was done, and nobody really seemed to notice or care. Pops had warned me not to be surprised at any gay action I came upon in the Alsop House showers and johns, but either it wasn’t there or I just missed it every time I stepped in the door. Did Hank rub up against me sensually in his sleep? Absolutely, and I let him. Were Ducky and Sid doing stuff together in their bed they didn’t talk about? I’m guessing yes, since neither of them took a single room when one came available. Did anyone care? Not that I was aware of.

  Women who easily had sex with men were sluts or rubber-heeled (falling backward easily) or at best called “divorcees.” With that kind of a double standard going on, they were hardly in a position to call a man a queer if he didn’t sleep with them. And no adult female would think of approaching a man of my apparent age of eighteen. They wouldn’t dream of it, no matter how available they were. This despite the rumors going around of at least one male “child star” who was known to passionately go after older women stars. Was there a male-on-male casting couch in Hollywood at this time? Sure. For example, everyone seemed to know about Howard Hughes’s residence hotels for good-looking younger actors on Fountain Avenue in West Hollywood; but so what? He was an eccentric millionaire! And didn’t he also have one on De Longpre for good-looking younger actresses?

  Only those busybodies who’d formulated the recent Code of Decency in Movies seemed to care, and they were easily blackmailable for other reasons.

  As for other changes coming back here? Morgan had said it would be quieter in ’35. It was. With only a few thousand cars and trucks plying the roads, the air was a lot fresher. I’d expected both of those. Smog wouldn’t arrive until after the Second World War, with increased automobile production and sales. In this era I’d found myself in, public transportation via streetcars ruled L.A., and it was predominantly clean-fuel electric.

  What I hadn’t really counted on was how much simpler people were. For every shark like Rafferty, there were thousands of people who would never even suspect the kind of games he played or who understood his internecine politics. At least in America. True, a bunch of Germans had left their own country and come to Southern California, writers, actors, theater people, musicians. But they tended to hang out with each other and it would be years before they allowed others to know exactly what they had left back there—partly out of shame, just pure shame!

  That bothered me. Sure, it would keep Americans out of World War II until more horrors had happened in Europe and Asia, but then it would mean more drastic measures would be needed to end both wars.

  So the simplicity was something I hadn’t quite counted on; how naïve pretty much everyone was about motives and scheming and how really bad other humans could be to each other and were actually being to each every day in faraway China and Germany.

  As for setting my guns on Randolph Scott, hell, as I said before, he’d been one of my early idols in the movies, along with another drop-dead handsome star of questionable sexuality—Alan Ladd.

  What I’d known of Scott as a fan and what I’d strongly suspected were closely related. He’d been a college football star and then his wealthy Carolinian father had made a connection to Howard Hughes and Hughes had brought Scott to L.A. in 1929, put him up in one of his residence hotels on Fountain Avenue, and groomed him for the pictures, getting him bits in various movies.

  If that wasn’t suspicious enough, the facts also said that Scott married Marion Dupont in 1936 when he was thirty-eight years old, but then she moved East and he and Grant lived together on the beach for over four years, until Dupont eventually divorced Scott. When Scott remarried after World War II, in 1944, it was to his agent/manager Patricia, and he was already forty-seven, long in the tooth for a Hollywood matinee idol, and to add to the ambiguity further, the couple adopted two boys but never had children of their own.

  One could easily read both of Scott’s unions as “lavender marriages,” typical of the time. The agent/manager would be “safe.” Scott wouldn’t even have to sleep with her. We knew the kids weren’t biologically his.

  But what had convinced me to go after Scott was what had happened to him in later life. He’d become a star in 1935 first with Roberta, and then with She, based on the H. Rider Haggard book, and originally intended as a vehicle for the shapely if stiff Helen Gahagen. In 1936, Scott had gone on to play the most gorgeous of all Deerslayers in The Last of the Mohicans. In 1938, alongside Shirley Temple he’d done Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. 1939 saw him in Jesse James; 1940, in another Western, Virginia City; and then in 1942, he had opposed John Wayne for Marlene Dietrich’s attentions in Pittsburgh.

  He’d had seven solid years of big box office, and while Scott was forty-five, and thus too old to enlist in the armed forces by the time Pearl Harbor came around, he did work with the U.S.O. and even worked with a few film units in the European Theater before returning home to make more Hollywood movies.

  After that, while his body still looked great, Scott’s face began to change: he was no longer the sunny, open, handsome Southerner, but instead he’d become gaunt and haggard-looking, distinctly older than his real age, almost a character actor. He had not seen action in the war, unlike, say, Tyrone Powers, who had been totally freaked out by it—so that couldn’t be the cause.

  No, more than likely, it was the choices that Scott had made in life—playing the hetero game, making the lavender marriages—that he realized too late also came with a price to pay at the end. He looked haunted and maybe he was: by his choices, now seen as mistakes that he could no longer go back and change.

  Everyone had noted it by 2010, fans, biographers, admirers, and critics alike. It was what made some of those later films where Scott played the role of a once-promising loser and now a bitter criminal so believable and so devastating: in Ride the High Country, for example. Jimmy Stewart and Bill Holden would have to work at being a villains later in their careers. Not Randolph Scott: he was instantly credible.

  Scott had also become a real estate speculator and was worth hundreds of millions of dollars by the time he died. He’d become conservative politically, one of the biggest and earliest donors to his sometime buddy Ronald Reagan’s bid for the governorship of California, and then, later on part of his core support group for the presidency.

  When he died at eighty-nine, it might have seemed to Scott that he’d had taken the worst possible road and made the worst possible choices in his life.

  And I felt that it was up to me, newly placed in 1935, to get him back on the right path. My duty and my right too.

  It was that sense of purpose and the fresh air and the cuddly beach
towels that got me to sleep.

  When I woke up, it was because Randolph Scott’s big face was leaning down into mine and saying, “C’mon, kid! Wake up.”

  I did and pretended I couldn’t.

  “You can’t stay out here all night,” he argued. “You’ll catch cold or something.”

  So I let him lift me up and take me indoors, and as he put me into a bed he began to put a blanket over me. But once there, I grabbed him. I’m guessing that at that moment I looked totally adorable, hair all tousled, salt-tinged skin, mostly unclothed, half-asleep.

  Meanwhile he looked like a big golden cat, and after all I was big game hunting.

  “I happen to know that despite your roles, you are completely legal,” Scott said, possibly asking me to deny the fact.

  I wanted to reply that I was old enough to be his father and I knew exactly what I was doing.

  By then I had his shirt opened and all that golden chest hair to play with. So instead I asked: “Are we going to talk all night? Or are we going to give this beach shack’s reputation something to live up to?”

  18

  Coffee had been served all around Louis B.’s office, and once the secretary had left the big room, everyone looked at the floor and then at Mayer. I knew several of the others were nervous and desperately wanted to smoke cigarettes. Their hands kept going to their pockets, then remembering that he wouldn’t allow it, they moved away again, fingers empty. Mayer kept a cigar going on his desk ashtray but he seldom puffed on it, and only out an open window.

  Finally Mayer asked, “Did everyone read the script?”

  The script in question being one I’d penned myself under the pseudonym Blaine Anthony that I’d been using, but the script was unlike anything that I or anyone else had ever done before, titled American Boys.