Chapter 20 - Where the Truth Lies

CERTAINLY WHAT REUBEN had shared with me had extinguished any little pilot light of hope I might have had for Lanny’s affection. No, I had been made an honorary member of Lanny’s club, placed at the end of a long line of women who’d been burned by the club’s founder and who now stood out in the cold, cooling their heels. Enough. Shaping a successful book about Vince Collins that revealed some injurious facts about Lanny Morris would have to be my consolation prize.

I’d had a chance to think through how events in New York would affect my immediate schedule. I’d pick up the revised typed pages from Cynthia this evening, airmail them to N&N first thing Monday morning, and with any luck they’d be there by Thursday. I would certainly then receive a self-important call from Gavin, saying that the stuff I’d sent was far too innocuous and that the entire project was in trouble. (Gavin’s type had a constant need for projects to be in trouble so that he could come in, all furrowed brow with much pipe sucking, telling everyone to remain calm, with the air of the Man Who Will Sort Things Out; never mind, of course, that the whole frenzy had been created by him.) It would be good if, during that phone call, I could tell him something juicy that would silence him for the remainder of my tenure.

Toward this end, I called Vince and told him that I wanted to take him up on his offer to work Sunday. Sounding regretful that he’d volunteered this, he asked if we could do it while he got in some golf, which he tried to make time for at least every other day. I advised him that I didn’t know the first thing about golf. He said that wouldn’t matter, I could just walk the course with him while he played. I considered that it might be the only chance I’d ever have to make the rounds of the Bel Air Country Club, short of becoming a caddy, and agreed to meet him there.

I had always found golf courses beautiful and frightening, looking a little too much like cemeteries minus the gravestones. They gave me the same uneasiness I felt looking at Vince’s de Chirico painting, where the marketplace and town square are inexplicably deserted at midday of all but two denizens, who cast long shadows even though the sun is high overhead, and who share whispered words about things that no one must know. It was in that sort of eerie, sun-filled midday that I found myself telling Vince we would wrap up his big-band years by tomorrow and, on Tuesday, jump ahead in chronology to discuss the Girl Found Dead in New Jersey.

He started to walk briskly away from me to where his last drive had landed. “Why do you need to jump ahead in the timeline?” he asked. I told him a variant on the truth: Neuman and Newberry’s Master magazine, which would be publishing an advance excerpt from our book in its first issue, needed the material much sooner than did N&N. I watched him carefully as I elaborated: “They have to work out what the placement on the cover and the wording might be—you know, ‘Vince Collins Comes Clean About a Dirty Secret’ or ‘We Ask Vince Collins the Hard One.’ They’re going to want a grabber—”

He kept walking but glared at me. “Boy, you’re really blunt, aren’t you?”

I had to take a little extra run-step, as he had half a foot on me. “Vince, I was very direct about this from the outset. I’m not going to play games with you. This is in large part why you’re being paid such a huge sum of money.” He looked at me questioningly and I snapped, “A million dollars is a huge sum of money, Vince. That’s more than the budget of your first Colt Carrera film, and not a whole lot less than the gross of your fourth one.” That was nasty of me and not altogether accurate. “Sorry, that was stupid.”

He kept moving. I had to take two run-steps this time. He said, “The Carrera series is played out, I know it.”

“You’ve spent days telling me what it was like to grow up poor in Pittsburgh, so it irks me if you don’t take seriously the amount I fought for you to get. You’d have to make two films to get this kind of money.” In this I was being generous, to compensate for my previous insult. I knew what Vince’s current going rate was, and while certainly that of a Hollywood star, it was not on a level commensurate with anyone over at First Artists, meaning McQueen, Newman, Streisand, or Poitier. Vince would have to make more than a pair of films to pull in a million dollars.

Vince putted cool, long, and straight into the cup. The dimpled sphere made the satisfying sound of a roulette ball settling down into the very number on which you’ve bet. Vince didn’t even watch.

“It’s your show,” he said flatly. “I thought all of my life was of some general interest, but if my brief encounter with a girl named Maureen O’Flaherty, who worked a room-service job in Miami and was found dead in a New Jersey hotel that I’d never set foot in before, is all you really want to hear about, then Tuesday it is. Now, do you want me to tell you about the boring stuff… like when the Elgart band played for Harry Truman’s inaugural ball and what I did at the request of his daughter Margaret while two Secret Service men stood guard outside the ladies’ lounge and why from that day on I always called her Peg? Or do you think that’s not going to be of much interest to the reading public?”

He moved on to the fourth hole, not brusquely, just more than anything a bit hurt. Or was he nervous? I felt guilty if it was the first, and a bit excited if it was the second. But either way, I knew that I still liked him, liked his reasonability even when he was angered. I felt certain (and I’m pretty good with these things) that whatever I might ultimately learn about the events in question, I would not think any less of him after that.

Vince played through the rest of the course quickly, as if there were points given for the shortest time. He took no pleasure in his game now, but worked the green more like a champion billiards player, efficiently lining up his shots and making them before he had a chance to second-guess the angles. I was out of breath the entire time, even though he was doing the talking, but some part of me didn’t want to ask him to slow down, perhaps because I felt I’d ruined the day for him. Under my breath I asked his caddie if this was Vince’s usual style of play, and he said he hadn’t seen him behave this way before. When Vince finished the course, he didn’t even tally his score, as if when each hole was finished, it no longer counted.

We didn’t have dinner together that night. We got a lot accomplished in the afternoon at his home, and when his stories were funny, which most of them were, we both laughed. But there was definitely a different feeling in the air. It was the atmosphere that emerges in a doctor’s examining room, when the doctor (myself) comes in and makes a few lighthearted jokes to the patient (Vince) prior to using sharp instruments to perform a surgical procedure that he knows will hurt a great deal.

For dinner that night I stopped at Barney’s Beanery. The waitress, who was dressed like a drugged-out groupie who’d made it with Sly and the entire Family Stone, took my order by sitting down across from me in my booth. I asked for a draft Coors and a bowl of chili, which the menu proclaimed to be the second best in the world. “Who makes the first-best chili?” I asked. She scowled and pointed at a flyer on one side of the table as she walked away. I picked it up. It read: “Don’t ask your waitress who makes the first-best chili. She doesn’t know.”

The next morning I was assembling my notes in the kitchen, in preparation for our day’s work, when there came a knock on my door. It was Vince, looking all chipper in a silk shirt the color of lemon sorbet and smart black jeans with a wide black leather belt. I didn’t like bell-bottoms (although men were wearing them as if America had turned into one gigantic naval academy), but these were flared so slightly that you didn’t notice them at all. He looked great, and to my relief he didn’t seem upset with me.

“Hi,” I said. “I didn’t know you knew where I live.” Which was perhaps not the warmest greeting but was certainly the first thought that popped into my head. He reminded me that my earliest letters proposing the book had all borne my home address.

I offered him some coffee, but he waved me off. “Look, here’s the thing: Tomorrow we get to the grim stuff, so you’re going to have to let me off easy today. You can ask me any questions you want on the drive down to Anaheim and back, but in between, you have to let me have my four hours of recreational therapy. I try to do it once a month to stay sane.”

I asked him what this therapy was. He looked embarrassed and sat down on a flower-patterned love seat by my window, which overlooked the fountain in the courtyard.

“Okay, let me explain. Every month or so, I have to clean out my brain, totally, of all the poisonous pressure of this god-awful town. It’s stupid but it’s therapeutic for me, so why should I apologize? Some people listen to Bach. Some people chant mantras. Carol Lynley does needlepoint while she’s being interviewed on talk shows. Lots of people go fishing. Others go to hypnotists. I go to Disneyland, Kerry. Please don’t laugh.”

I looked at him, not sure if he was ribbing me. I knew from my research that Vince enjoyed playing the occasional, well-constructed practical joke. But he seemed serious, if admittedly chagrined. “I’m not trying to be cutesy or adorable or anything. Honest, I just really like the place. I like its corniness and its technology. To me, hearing five hundred choruses of ‘It’s a Small World’ sung by nine-fucking-thousand figurines all smiling at each other while I glide along in my canal boat with a family from Topeka, Kansas, is better than a million transcendental ‘oooom’s. It’s Disneyland. Walt says, ‘I Am That I Am.’ ” He smiled. “It’s just that I like the place.”

I took my bag off the kitchen table. “Me too,” I said and started to walk out my door. “But if we squander some of the day’s work for the Magic Kingdom, I’ve a couple of stipulations: We either have to have lunch at the Blue Bayou or eat StarKist tuna sandwiches alongside Captain Hook’s ship under the Skull Rock waterfall. We go to the Enchanted Tiki Room, and when the audio-animatronic parrots cry out, ‘Oh applause, applause!’ at the end of each song and the audience doesn’t applaud because they know the parrots can’t hear them applauding, we have to applaud. And we have to laugh at all the jokes on the Jungle Boat ride, right up to the end when the Skipper says, ‘And now we reach the most dangerous part of our journey. That’s right, the return to civilization and those California freeways!’ ”

He looked at me as if he’d suddenly learned that his loyal secretary, whom he’d come to love and who had helped him through his years of amnesia, was in actuality his loyal wife. I checked my makeup in the antique Mucha-style mirror by the door. “And in the Haunted Mansion, coming out of the stretching-room elevator, we have to lag behind the crowd in the gallery until we’re alone.”

He nodded slowly. “You mean the room with the three-dimensional busts that turn whichever way you move?”

I adjusted the air-conditioning before leaving. “It’s the only place on one of the indoor dark rides where you can stay inside the environment for as long as you like. If we let everyone else in our group go ahead of us, we’ll have the gallery to ourselves for at least a minute, maybe two, before the next elevator unloads.”

Vince’s expression was of exquisite joy and profound gratitude, as if I’d just given him his first hand job. “Oh, this is wonderful, Kerry.”

The car parked outside was a 1957 Ford Skyliner, looking like the mating of a Thunderbird and a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air. Its prow was all optimism, and its tail fins scalloped out gracefully like inverted single quotation marks. It was a pert-busted girl with a tail that was just begging for it, a two-tone in “Starmist Blue” and “Colonial White,” Vince later informed me. He’d retracted its patented “Hideaway Hardtop,” and it was now in convertible mode. I had the sweet suspicion that this was the car Vince had longed for as a teenager. “I don’t take it out very often,” he said, and I was glad he didn’t call the car “her.”

We didn’t do much interviewing on the way down, which was fine because we had covered as much of “the Elgart Years” as any reader would find interesting. The bothered mood he’d been in yesterday had made us work efficiently and was now dissipated.

The L.A. sun was shining big, and the wind felt good. My name was as close to Peggy Sue as it was ever going to get.

Vince didn’t take the usual exit to the Disneyland parking lot.

(You may have gathered that I’d been there more than a few times. When I first came out to the West Coast, I’d been hired to trash the place for the L.A. Free Press before that paper became a sex rag. There’d been rumors—untrue—that the Disney company was thinking of reinstating the dress code of the sixties, which had barred men with long hair from attending the park. Not just from working there, but from actually going on the rides or walking around the place. This was supposedly to prevent another yippie invasion, which had closed down the park for a day in 1970. My assignment was to savage Disney’s simplistic, sanitized spin on America past and future, with the additional directive to search the fairy tales for latent pederasty and anal fixation. I spent a week at a cut-rate motel only a few blocks from the main gate and patrolled the park armed with pencils sharpened to a dartlike point… and came away by the end of the week completely smitten with the place.)

Instead of the regular exit, Vince turned off earlier onto a local street, made a left, and approached a gate marked WED ENTERPRISES—PLEASE SHOW PASS. There was a guard there, not an old fellow but more of an ex-marine. Vince greeted the guard by his first name and said in modest fashion that he believed there might be a pass waiting there from Mr. Byram’s office. The guard looked through a file box, found the desired memo, and opened a drawer, from which he pulled out two rectangles of blue plastic, each the size of a Master Charge card. They said WED GUEST and bore today’s date. On the back was a three-digit number and letter, which Vince later explained was a code that got changed every day so that the card could not be counterfeited.

We drove past many low buildings with small lawns around them, mostly warehouse-type structures but some two-story offices as well. Vince pulled up to a brick building with a broader front lawn and a sign marked ADMINISTRATION AND GUEST SERVICES. Past it, I could easily see the turrets of Sleeping Beauty’s castle and the Matterhorn’s peak. I could also see the backs of the Victorian buildings that commenced the park; Walt Disney, with his admirable attention to detail, had insisted that the rear of the mock buildings be as complete as the front, even though no paying guests would ever see them.

We parked and were greeted by a charming Disney brunette, a stewardess-type whose bright smile evoked “coffee, tea” but no “me.” Her name, on the oval I.D. pin that all Disney staff wore, was Pam. She apologized to Vince, saying that unfortunately she’d been unable to obtain any seating on Royal Street (whatever that meant) because it was closed for the installation of a new ventilation system. However, if we wished, we could have a table held for us at the Blue Bayou on the semiprivate part of the patio. Vince smiled and said, “But the strongest thing in the mint juleps will be the mint, right?” Pam said yes, the only spirits permitted there were those that wandered over from the Haunted Mansion. I tried to picture the manual Pam had studied containing all these answers to oft-asked questions.

She walked us down a long, blue-carpeted corridor where lots of people were typing and filing as if they were in any office in the world. At the end of the short hall was a narrow door, and by it stood a guard who was dressed as a policeman in an O. Henry story. He had a short handlebar mustache that was clearly his own. “Hello, Ken,” said Pam. “Will you show our guests in, please?” I’d thought we were in.

Ken rapped two short knocks on the door. After a pause, two knocks sounded from the other side. Ken said, “This way, please.” He opened the door just a crack and nodded at a man dressed in a straw hat, a shirt with blue vertical stripes, a white apron, and gray pin-striped pants. Getting a nod from this fellow, who looked like he had been plucked from a barbershop quartet, Ken opened the door wider and indicated that we should step through. We did and found ourselves outdoors. The door shut quickly behind us. The barbershop fellow beamed at us. He was standing behind a tall pushcart of plastic flowers that obscured our view of anything else. “Have a great day in the Magic Kingdom, Mr. Collins, ma’am,” he said. Vince led me around the flower stand, and I immediately saw that we were at the end of a narrow courtyard. I heard horse’s hooves clopping by, the bell of a trolley, and the oscillation of a thousand people. We stepped through the brick-paved area, past an artist in similar period costume seated at a small table. She was busy with black paper and scissors creating a silhouette cameo of a girl dressed in a Partridge Family T-shirt and Ditto jeans for kids. A double-decker bus puttered by and I realized that we were in Main Street USA, halfway along its length, equidistant from the train station by the entrance gates and the circular park out from which all the Disney “lands” radiated. Not since Blanche Sewell, who’d edited The Wizard of Oz, spliced from the last frame of Dorothy’s monochromatic house to the Technicolor door into Munchkinland had anyone experienced a more abrupt change of locales. Vince smiled at me and we headed up Main Street, past the Sunkist Citrus House on our left, whose tangy scent of a thousand freshly squeezed oranges seemed appropriate with the California sun high overhead. Vince had donned aviator sunglasses and a beat-up, broad-brimmed cowboy hat he’d brought with him. If you didn’t expect to see him (and who would expect this big swinger at Disneyland?), you’d never have known him.

We stopped in front of the Crystal Palace-styled Carnation Plaza Gardens. There you go. Lanny had taken me to the Szechuan Garden, where the flavors were strange and erotic and hot, so hot that they had at one point literally caused me pain. Vince had brought me somewhere safe, sunny, and soothing, as soothing as Carnation evaporated milk drawn from contented cows and poured over cornflakes. At that moment, I much preferred where I was to where I had been.

We stepped over to the Plaza Park, hub for all the Disney “lands.” Vince smiled at me. “So? Where first?”

“Ummm, Tomorrowland?”

Vince winced enough that I could see it even behind his sunglasses and hat brim. “No, we don’t like tomorrow,” he muttered. I had unintentionally reminded him of the topic we’d be covering the next day.

We decided to go straight to Adventureland, which was as appropriate a destination for me, I would grimly come to realize, as Tomorrowland was for him.