Playland by John Gregory Dunne

answers, the evasions, the lies became in time a seamless piece. And so again, a second, a ninth, a forty-fourth time: Did your mother live with you? Of course. Another time, another answer: She lived in the guest house. Question: Where did Chloe Quarles fit in? (A leading question, of course, from intonations I had picked up.) Answer: She was a dyke, Mr. French did not like her around me too much. (Confirming the intonations.) I had the sense of a household out of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, run by machines and service personnel. There was a maid, Esmeralda, a would-be actress and cousin of Chocolate Walker Franklin (democracy in action again), and Madame. Who was Madame? All the governesses, it seemed, were called Madame. For fear of kidnappers, her house was never photographed; the rooms that appeared in magazine layouts were always dressed sets on a soundstage. Sometimes the Pacific was the featured backdrop, sometimes the Santa Monica Mountains, sometimes a ranch in the San Fernando Valley, the exteriors blue-screen process shots superimposed on the windows, the magic of motion pictures. Her mother’s absence from these photo spreads was covered by the assertion that Irma Tyler (her contract with the studio stipulated that she too abandon the name Toolate) did not wish to “capitalize” on herdaughter’s fame, that being the mother of such a loving and talented child was reward enough. Question: What happened to Irma Tyler? And again: What ever happened to your mother? Blue was vague. Answer: She cut out.
    When?
    I was fifteen, I think.
    Did you ever see her again?
    She died.
    How?
    In a car crash.
    Who told you she died?
    I don’t know.
    Who?
    I can’t remember.
    Who?
    Mr. French. The publicity department.

    In fact, her mother was not her mother at all.
    Or might not have been.
    Or in all likelihood wasn’t.
    Or so Blue claimed. Indirectly. Her voice on a tape. The tapes she said she made when she decided it was time to do her autobiography. (“To do” is the operative infinitive in this kind of enterprise, never “to write.”) The autobiography is an inclination that all has-been movie stars have. Another grab at the brass ring. Youth recaptured and old scores settled on talk shows and in newspaper Style sections.
    Arthur French gave me the tape and let me dupe it. The son of J. F. French. Son as in the son also rises. Old Hollywood joke. The man Hedda Hopper had said Blue was “dating.” The man Louella Parsons said was her “intended.” A “woosome twosome,” Winchell said. “The Son and the Star,” the fan magazines said. “Setting the date,” Jimmy Fidler said. Arthur and I went back a long time. By the time Arthur gave me the tape, I had already talked to him about Blue several times at his ranch in Arizona, trips undertaken when I had more knowledge than Icared to impart but needed him to fill in some of the blanks, although I knew how difficult a task debriefing him would be. He had not mentioned the tape during those visits. He mentioned it only later, when I was talking to him at Willingham, his father’s preposterously named and preposterously huge estate on lower Angelo Drive in Beverly Hills. The tape, he said, had turned up in his mail one day. No note. No identification. No return address. Just the voice on the tape. That unmistakable voice.
    This is what was on the tape, beginning to end:
    “That was the night Jack Rabbitt called me a son of a bitch. I told him I couldn’t be a son of a bitch because I was a daughter. Smart talk like that. If he wanted to call me a name, then call me a daughter of a bitch. And I want to tell you one thing and not two things. I was the daughter of a bitch. The lady who gave birth to me was fifteen when I was born. I say ‘the lady who gave birth to me’ because I never saw her. She dropped me like an animal does, then she sold me to Irma for a bus ticket out of town. Irma said the bus ticket was to Chicago, but I think she was just trying