Hollywood and Levine by Andrew Bergman Page B

pillow reading “Jack—You’ll never know how much I appreciate this. You’re a wonderful man. H. A.” I folded the note and put it into my suitcase, beneath the shirts. Don’t say I’m not sentimental. Then I undressed and got into bed, pulling a bound script of Walter’s from one of the shelves. It was Boy From Brooklyn . After a few pages, I got tired and doused the light, then lay there listening for the telltale squeak of a hall floorboard. A part of me, a ridiculous part, said that Helen Adrian was going to rap softly on my door and float in, a dim figure in a sheer negligee, her body’s shadows a mystery of the night. An imperceptible hitch of her shoulders and the gown would billow to the floor. Naked, oiled, perfumed, she would slip into bed to straddle me and drive us both through a midnight of slow pleasures.
    I stood sentinel by my hopes for an hour or two, wondering all the time if I should be the aggressor and go creeping into her tent. Perhaps she was keeping watch also.
    My waking grew choppy, with blind spots of time that must have been sleep. I yielded and turned over, bothered by something I had to do tomorrow but could not locate. Finally I found it.
    At ten o’clock I had to be at Walter’s funeral.

7
    I t was an interesting funeral. Five hundred mourners filled Temple B’nai Sholom in Beverly Hills, a ritzy edifice to a sun-tanned God who knew how to look the other way. I say “mourners” in a purely descriptive sense, for there was very little weeping or wailing. The dominant emotion was uneasiness.
    From my seat in the last row I could barely see Helen. Her features were veiled and indecipherable. Walter’s sister and brother-in-law had come in from Chicago and sat looking pale, rumpled, and out of place amid the expensively tailored Californians, craning their necks to spot celebrities. Walter’s mother had decided to remain in New York and was spending the day bent over double in a storefront synagogue in Brooklyn. And that was where Walter’s funeral was really taking place today, in the back row of a freezing shul.
    The God who presided over Beverly Hills—Our Father Who Art in Technicolor—couldn’t be bothered with old ladies. This God mingled with the great and blessed their tennis courts and kidney-shaped pools. Among his worshippers today were John Garfield, Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, Karen Morley, Edward G. Robinson, and Lloyd Nolan. Jack Warner was there, wearing a red skullcap, seated next to Johnny Parker, whose eyes darted continuously about the room, alighting always on his watch. When Parker stood, he swayed from foot to foot. He was nervous, he wanted out, and I guessed he had an appointment. Parker’s discomfiture intrigued me, and having nothing better to do, I decided to follow him after the services. I would tail him, and tail him good, until I was satisfied that he either was or wasn’t a major player in this case.
    The funeral proceeded apace. A young rabbi named Zalman Winkler presided and spoke of Walter as a “heroic Jewish artist, of imagination and conscience,” one who “brought his imagination to the celluloid universe of film.” He managed to get in a plug for Walter’s last picture, Alias Pete Costa , saying that it was “due for release at that sacred time when we celebrate another release, that of the Jews from Egypt, that is to say, Pesach.” Jack Warner nodded solemnly at the rabbi’s words. After working in a few more parallels between the picture business and the flight of the Hebrews, all of which led to the inescapable conclusion that Moses had shepherded his people directly to the Brown Derby, Rabbi Winkler mercifully stopped and introduced Dale Carpenter.
    The actor stepped to the lectern and removed a sheet of paper from a black leather slipcase. It was a Wordsworth poem, “At The Grave of Burns,” which he read with