West of Sunset Read online

  THE GARDEN OF ALLAH

  As soon as he pulled in he realized he’d been there before, at a mad party, the last time he’d been out here. The place was a Moorish variation on an L.A. staple, the square block of courtyard apartments. The swimming pool behind the main house was shaped like the Black Sea, an homage to Yalta, birthplace of the former owner, a kohl-eyed co-star of Valentino, fallen now, reduced to playing a lodger in her own home. True to its name, the landscaping aspired to an oasis, with nodding date palms, spindly eucalyptus and rampant bougainvillea attracting hummingbirds and butterflies and hiding the Garden from the outside world. Grouped around the pool like tourist cabins were Mission-style villas, white stucco with terra-cotta roofs. He remembered Tallulah Bankhead standing naked and sleek as a hood ornament at the end of the diving board, finishing her martini and regally handing the glass to her second before executing a perfect gainer, so like Zelda that even as he clapped, he mourned her. He couldn’t recall if Benchley had been there, or Dottie. Possibly. There were years like phantoms, like fog. Often he wondered if certain memories of his had really taken place.

  Benchley, in a coat and tie, was lounging by the pool with Humphrey Bogart and a jet-haired woman in a white one-piece who turned out not to be his wife—Mayo Methot, an actress Scott had never heard of. In his swim trunks Bogart looked like a muscled puppet, his head too large for his body. He hopped up to shake Scott’s hand, taking it animatedly and turning his maniacal bad-guy smirk on him.

  “Well, well, Scott Fitzgerald. You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “Of course—The Petrified Forest,” Scott said, noting that, though it was still technically morning, his breath carried the medicinal perfume of juniper. On the table between their chaises sat two highball glasses, an ice bucket and a crystal ashtray heaped with cigarette butts.

  “The Cocoanut Grove?” Bogart prodded. “In the cloakroom?”

  Scott could see the palm trees and Gus Arnheim’s band playing on stage, the ceiling winking with false stars. Long ago they’d stayed at the Ambassador and danced there every night. This had been during Prohibition, and after a few weeks they’d been asked to leave. It had been Zelda’s idea to take all the furniture in their room and make a big pile in the middle, crowning it with the unpaid bill.

  “Sorry,” Scott said.

  “You gave me this.” He turned his head and pointed to a white scar at the corner of his mouth no larger than a grain of rice.

  “Supposedly,” Benchley said, “you were of the mind that someone had gone through your coat pockets.”

  “I apologize. I’m sure I wasn’t in my right mind.”

  “That’s all right, neither was I. As I recall, I got you pretty good too. Plus I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of the story. For a while it was my one claim to fame.”

  “It still is,” his girlfriend said broadly, obviously smashed. “I swear to God, he tells everybody we meet. ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald split my lip.’”

  “The thing is,” Bogart said, “before that I’d never read any of your stuff.”

  “Just tell him and get it over with,” she said. “He thinks you’re the greatest writer in the history of the world, blah-blah-blah.”

  “I didn’t say that!” he scolded her, then, theatrically, turned back to them, smiling again. “When Bench told me you were coming over, I just had to meet you and tell you how much I like your work, that’s all.”

  “Thank you,” Scott said. “I did enjoy you in The Petrified Forest.”

  “That’s kind of you to say, but really, I think The Great Gatsby is a masterpiece. ‘And so we all beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly back into the past.’ That’s the stuff, brother.”

  He’d confused a few words and mucked up the rhythm, but, more flattered than embarrassed, Scott didn’t correct him. Bogart offered him a drink, then when Benchley said they had to run, promised to buy him one sometime.

  “He’s between engagements,” Benchley explained on their way into the hills. He had an absurdly large Packard, bought with movie money, and was driving faster than Scott liked. The drop on his right was dizzying. On the horizon, across the hot plain of L.A., the sea was a dark blue line. He thought he could see Catalina. “She’s permanently between engagements. When they’re engaged with each other, it can get pretty loud. She has a gun. Sometimes we get to hear it. But good neighbors, salt of the earth.”

  “Where’s his wife?”

  “On Broadway. She’ll never leave New York. She’s older, met him when he was just breaking in. I don’t think she minds. They’re actually a very charming couple, which might be the problem.”

  “He likes a challenge.”

  “Don’t we all,” Benchley said.

  If the slip was inadvertent, he didn’t apologize, and in a larger sense it was true. What man wanted a woman without fire, and vice-versa?

  “By the way,” Benchley said. “Oppy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Never lend him money. He drops it on the nags.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “And don’t bounce anything off him. He’ll steal it. That’s how he’s hung around so long.”

  “Got it.”

  Ernest was staying with friends, was all Benchley would say, as if sworn to secrecy. It was typical, Scott thought, the needless intrigue. For years, to the delight of Condé Nast readers, Ernest had traveled the globe indulging his self-dramatizing streak, trying on swashbuckling costumes, while Scott stayed home, hoping to patch things together, a labor for which he discovered he had little talent. At one time they’d been equals, and happy to be, but the last few letters he’d received from Ernest had been dismissive, if not outright combative, and rather than reply in kind, he’d appealed to Max, thinking he might broker a peace between them. It hadn’t happened, and as Benchley’s pompous car climbed the curves, he felt a queasy mix of dread and self-righteousness, like a wronged party before a duel. If he was flattered by the invitation, he was also leery of an ambush.

  They reached the top of Laurel Canyon and wound west on Mulholland, following the ridgeline several miles until Benchley turned down an unmarked, dusty spur lined with boulders. It dropped sharply, shadowed by tall pines, their sweet fragrance reaching in the windows. As they went, the air grew cooler, tinged with a clammy hint of ocean. After a last blind curve the road leveled off. They rocked along, passing rutted drives that disappeared into the forest. There were no signs, no mailboxes, no gates. They might have been deep in the Smokies except for the distant line of sea winking through the trees.

  Knowing Ernest, he expected a gloomy stone hunting lodge decorated with heroic taxidermy, but the house below the end of the road was a glass box set into the hillside, overlooking the ocean. He imagined how much trouble bringing in everything to build it must have been, and pictured it at night, lit like an aquarium against the blackness. It was at once splendid and foolhardy, entirely incongruous, a home only someone in pictures would imagine. He and Benchley had to descend a flight of stairs steep as a slide to reach the door, and by then their host was waiting—Marlene Dietrich, in a plain white blouse and black skirt, like any hausfrau.

  He was so used to her face from the screen that he was shocked to see the lines about her mouth. In real life, her famous bedroom eyes drooped, giving her the look of someone drugged or on the verge of passing out. He knew it was unfair—his own oft-photographed profile had long ago softened, his skin ceded the bloom of youth—yet he was disillusioned, as if all this time she’d been fooling him.

  “I should warn you.” Vahn you. “He’s not well. The doctor says he needs rest. He says he doesn’t. So.”

  They each declined her offer of a drink, though instantly, in retrospect, the novelty of being served by her appealed to Scott. She led them to the equivalent of a living room with an endless view, where Ernest, in striped briefs and a ribbed undershirt, balance
d on a single crutch, his right shin swathed in a wasps’ nest of gray bandages. He was heavier than Scott remembered, and hadn’t shaved in a while, or washed his hair, it appeared, which was flat on one side as if he’d just woken up. She announced them brusquely and retreated to an unseen corner of the box.

  “Mi hermano,” Ernest said, throwing an arm wide, and Scott crossed to him. Instead of a handshake, Ernest embraced him, kissing one cheek and then the other. His breath was foul—not with drink, but rotten, as if he had an abscessed tooth. “You look well.”

  “I’d say the same but I’d be lying.”

  Ernest subsided into his chair, swinging his leg onto a hassock. “What did she tell you?”

  “You’re supposed to be resting.”

  “Lousy Krauts—all they do is give orders. It’s just a blood clot. They operated on it over there and didn’t get it all.”

  “Red badge of courage?” Benchley asked.

  “Our hotel was being shelled and I tried to hide under a desk. Bumped my head too.” He pulled back his greasy bangs to show a yellow-and-grape egg. “And that’s how I won the war.”

  “I hope you at least had room service,” Benchley said.

  “No food, no water and no ammunition. Otherwise things were ducky.”

  “Which is why you’re here,” Scott said.

  “I’d rather be there. The whole thing’s been bitched since New York. The cops shut us down in Boston. They didn’t even let us into Chicago. You’d think it wouldn’t be a hard sell, with the Krauts involved.”

  “The country’s not in the mood to buy a used war,” Benchley said. “Another one, I should say.”

  “First off,” Scott said, “they don’t have the money.”

  “They’re going to have to buy it sometime, and the price is just going up.”

  “I agree,” Scott said. “But they’re not going to buy it from the Reds.”

  “We will,” Benchley said. “New York and Hollywood.”

  “Might as well be the Reds to the rest of the country,” Scott said.

  “I know,” Ernest said. “And no one wants to back the wrong horse.”

  “Is it the wrong horse?”

  “It’s the right horse,” Ernest said. “Just the wrong time.”

  “I don’t see how being anti-Fascist can be premature,” Benchley said.

  “It’s tough,” Ernest said. “All we can do is hope we lose well enough so people will be ready the next time.”

  Scott looked to Benchley to see if he’d heard him correctly. Benchley sat with his arms crossed, biting his lip.

  “It’ll all be over by spring, no matter what we do. Then it’ll be someone else’s turn.”

  “Austria,” Scott said.

  “Very good,” Ernest said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Which is why I wanted to talk with you. I hear you’re going to be working on Three Comrades for Metro.”

  Scott didn’t know why, but how he’d heard so quickly frightened him. It wasn’t out of the question that Ernest knew Eddie Knopf, or that Eddie had run it by some of the other producers. Maybe all of Hollywood knew, via rumor, and naturally he, the unwitting subject, heard it last.

  “Nothing’s settled yet.”

  “If you do,” Ernest said, “do me a favor and remember Spain.”

  “I will.”

  “You know the first movie Hitler banned?”

  “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Scott said, making the connection plain.

  “They’ll do everything they can to stop this one, or gut it,” Ernest said. “There’s an attaché from the German consulate named Reinecke who screens everything before it goes to the foreign distributors. He’s basically their censor for Europe.”

  “Don’t the studios have final say?” Even as Scott said it, he realized how naive he sounded. Like any leaders who ruled through and solely for money, when threatened, the studio heads were geniuses at appeasement.

  “Thalberg had final cut on everything,” Benchley reminded him.

  “You know how to get things past an editor,” Ernest said. “That’s your strength, making heavy things seem light—not like me. I couldn’t write a Saturday Evening Post story to save my life.”

  You’ve never had to, Scott thought.

  “Just be aware,” Ernest said, “that certain people are going to be very interested in what you’re doing.”

  “That’s good to know,” he said, though, knowing how powerless he was, he felt he’d been given an impossible assignment.

  They ate on a terrace noisy with birdsong, commanding a broad view of the sea. Dietrich served them cold trout and salad and went back into the house, from time to time peering out of the kitchen window like a servant. Scott had ice water rather than the Mosel.

  “On the wagon—good for you,” Ernest said, toasting him. “I’ll be joining you in a few months if it’s any comfort.”

  “It’s not,” Scott said cheerily, toasting him back.

  As they were saying good-bye at the bottom of the stairs, while Benchley was gushing at Dietrich about the lunch, Ernest discreetly asked after Zelda.

  Scott shrugged. “No better, no worse.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you.” He didn’t ask after Hadley, or the new Mrs. Hemingway, just returned his embrace and said he’d see him tonight. Afraid of seeming familiar, he reached to take Dietrich’s hand. She drew him to her like an old friend. She smelled of lilacs, and the silk of her hair against his skin made him shiver. In the car he wanted to ask Benchley if that had happened to him, but didn’t.

  He was glad to have seen Ernest, because that night they barely had time to say hello. Fredric March’s place in Beverly Hills was a timbered mock Tudor mansion complete with formal gardens and classical statuary. There, nibbling hors d’oeuvres and sipping cocktails passed by Filipino servants, they honored the brave Spanish peasants by talking shop and writing checks. For Hollywood it was an oddly homely bunch. The only star he ran into besides their host was Gary Cooper, who stood a foot taller than anyone in the room. The rest were older—balding, bespectacled gnomes: writers and directors and composers, most of them Jews, recent émigrés from the continent. In a last-ditch act of self-interest, half a millennium after the Inquisition, the refugees were taking up a collection to save their persecutors.

  Ernest, sans Dietrich, was slicked-up in a buttercream linen suit that might have come from Metro’s wardrobe department. He limped over to the mantel and held forth on Franco and Catalonia and the defense of Madrid while a projectionist erected a screen. To his credit, he told the party the same tale of his war wound he’d told Scott and Benchley, including bumping his head.

  “I think we’re ready,” he said, and signaled someone in back to kill the lights.

  The film, as Dottie prophesized, was stultifying, all long shots and portentous voiceover. Ernest had written the script, and the repetition of key words, instead of being powerful, was lulling. Via an insistent montage, the Republic’s hopes were linked to the farmers’ harvest, so that in the end the rain darkening the dry soil and rushing muddy through the ditches was accompanied by heroic and, to his ears, vaguely Soviet crescendos. It was ridiculously simple, and even more frustrating after what Ernest had told them at lunch. Was the cause somehow nobler, being lost? Emotionally, yes, conceded the southerner in him; practically, reminded the northern boy, no. He hoped this wasn’t what Ernest expected him to do with Three Comrades, because he was incapable of it.

  “Wasn’t that something?” Dottie asked the gathering as the lights came up, and they applauded once more. As president of the Anti-Nazi League, it was her job to pitch them, and she did, nakedly, calling on them to do what was right. “I don’t have to tell you what’s at stake.”

  When it came time to pledge, he wrote a check for a hundred dollars—a
pittance compared to what others were giving, but more than he could afford, so that he felt at once righteous and extravagant and doubly guilty. It was a great weakness of his, being unable to resist even the least gesture.

  The evening was wrapping up, the waiters collecting the empty glasses. Already there were cars idling out front. He made to congratulate Ernest, but he was mobbed by admirers. Dottie and Alan were throwing a party for him back at the Garden. Scott figured he’d see him there.

  As a matter of courtesy, he sought out Fredric March to thank him.

  “Thank you, sir,” March said heartily, clearly unaware of who he was, a fact Scott dwelt upon, cruising the neon gauntlet of Sunset. L.A. had never been his city, and as the glowing late-night coffee shops and drive-ins slid by on both sides, he thought he understood why. For all its tropical beauty there was something charmless and hard about it, a vulgarity as decidedly American as the picture industry which thrived on the constant waves of transplants eager for work, offering them nothing more substantial than sunshine. It was a city of strangers, but, unlike New York, the dream L.A. sold, like any Shangri-La, was one not of surpassing achievement but unlimited ease, a state attainable by only the very rich and the dead. Half beach, half desert, the place was never meant to be habitable. The heat was unrelenting. On the streets there was a weariness that seemed even more pronounced at night, visible through the yellow windows of burger joints and drugstores about to close, leaving their few customers nowhere to go. Inconceivably, he was one of that rootless tribe now, doomed to wander the boulevards, and again he marveled at his own fall, and at his capacity for appreciating it.

  After dark, the Garden of Allah was the oasis it claimed to be, alive with racketing jazz and flickering with torchlight. A console radio blared from a balcony, and the patio had become a manic dance floor, the chaises tossed in a pile. Bogart and Mayo were in the shallow end of the Black Sea, sitting on carved armchairs that obviously belonged to someone’s villa.