Authors: John Kaye
Stars Screaming (11 page)
Bonnie didn’t laugh or even smile as she gazed past Rosellen’s shoulder with her head inclined to the side, listening, it seemed, to the small fan purring in the corner of the room. Presently, a fly buzzed through an open window and circled Rosellen’s large Afro twice before it landed on her framed MSW certificate that hung on the wall behind her head.
“I have to go,” Bonnie said, sliding back her chair and standing up.
“What’s your hurry?”
Bonnie pointed to the clock on Rosellen’s desk. “I’ve been here an hour.”
“At least.”
“Then my time is up, isn’t it?”
Rosellen shook her head no. “We got lots of time, sugar. Relax.”
“I’ll come back next Wednesday,” Bonnie said, and she took a step backward and reached for the doorknob. “We can talk more then.”
Rosellen checked her calendar and frowned. “I’m taking next Wednesday off,” she said. “I’ve got tickets to see the Red Sox play the Tigers. But I’m free the Wednesday after that.”
Bonnie shrugged.
“Wait! I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you come with me?”
“To a baseball game? Are you kidding?” Bonnie asked. Her tone was suspicious. “Can you do that?”
Rosellen smiled at her. “You can do anything you want if you’re tryin’ to help someone. At least that’s the way I see it.”
Bonnie stood, thinking, her hand still on the doorknob. The door clicked open and she said, “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“No maybes. Gotta put it on my schedule right now. Yes or no.”
“Okay,” Bonnie said, and for the first time that day she smiled. “Sure. Why not?”
The following Wednesday, at noon sharp, Bonnie Simpson met Rosellen Clark at the will-call window in the parking lot in front of Tiger Stadium. The temperature was already in the 90s and climbing, and by the time they reached their seats in the upper deck in left field, Rosellen’s tawny face shone with sweat and Bonnie’s white cotton blouse was clinging to her back.
After Denny McLain struck out the side in the first inning and the cheering around them stopped, Bonnie told Rosellen how she celebrated her thirteenth birthday on June 6, 1949, the day after she arrived in Los Angeles for the first time, from Buchanan, Michigan.
“I went to Chasen’s, this fancy restaurant. I was with my mom,” she said wistfully, closing her eyes for a moment as she stepped back slowly through her past. “I had a steak and a Caesar salad and a piece of chocolate cake for dessert. I think it was the best dinner I ever had. That summer I saw the ocean for the first time, and I took my one and only tennis lesson, and I got a crush on a man named Terry Tibbles. Terry’s middle name was Nicholas. So naturally everyone called him TNT, a nickname that just fit perfect with the job he had on the movie set in the mountains where we stayed for a while; he made things explode.
“‘I can make the stars cry,’ he told my mom one night outside our cabin by the lake. The porch light was off, but the brightness from the moon threw their shadows against my wall. Soon their faces came together and I heard their lips touch, and right then I knew what I wanted most was to have a man hold me in his arms at night. Someone to hold me tight.”
In the bottom of the seventh inning a bizarre incident took place down on the field. The bases were loaded with two out and Tiger manager Sparky Anderson sent up a pinch hitter for the weak-hitting right fielder, Earl Fulton. His name was Ricky Furlong, and he struck out on three blistering fastballs to end the rally and the inning.
But instead of turning and walking back to the dugout, Furlong remained at the plate with the bat cocked uselessly behind his ear, staring out at the now-vacant infield. Time was called and both managers and all four umpires convened at home plate. Several minutes
went by as they stood in a close circle around Ricky, scrutinizing him dumbly as they tried to talk him off the field. Eventually they gave up and Sparky motioned to his dugout, and two of Ricky’s teammates came out and lifted him up by his elbows, transporting him back to the clubhouse like a cracked marble statue.
“There’s something seriously wrong with that boy,” Rosellen told Bonnie after the game, while they were walking through the parking lot in the shimmering heat. “He’s going to need help. Lots of help.”
December 6
,
1969
The overcast morning light was an hour away, and a mild Santa Ana condition was blowing in vagrant breezes from the northeast when Bonnie Simpson’s bus pulled into Los Angeles on Thursday, one day behind schedule. After she bought a cup of coffee and a postcard at the Greyhound station on Vine Street, she strolled up to Sunset Boulevard and sat patiently on a bus bench while the night sky faded into a mixed hue of silver and gray clouds.
The traffic was sparse, but cars with single men driving would beep their horns lightly as they passed by her corner. They must think I’m a prostitute, Bonnie said to herself, as she watched a blue Cadillac circle the block twice before pulling to the curb in front of her. “Need a ride?” the driver, a fat man, asked her, but Bonnie turned her face away and directed her gaze in the opposite direction. “You sure?” he said. “I can make it worth your while.”
Bonnie remained silent and the fat man called her an ugly name under his breath. The stoplight blinked to green; and Bonnie heard the car window close up electronically as the Cadillac rolled slowly through the intersection.
When the light turned red again, a city bus stopped to discharge a potbellied man in his early thirties, with a big, doughy face and dirty red shoulder-length hair. He proceeded to the corner, where he unfolded a canvas chair and propped up a sign by the lamppost that read
MAPS TO THE MOVIE STARS’ HOMES.
He took a seat and glanced at Bonnie, and when he smiled she noticed that a large chunk of his lower jaw was missing.
Bonnie smiled back and said, “Good morning.”
The man inhaled. “Yes, it is,” he said, the side of his face collapsing as the air pushed the words out of his mouth. “It’s a wonderful morning.”
After she rented her apartment in the Argyle Manor, Bonnie took a shower and walked the three short blocks down to Hollywood Boulevard. She bought a street map and a copy of
Photoplay
at Nate’s News on Las Palmas; then she crossed the street and continued west until she reached the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.
The last time Bonnie was in Los Angeles, in 1949, she and her mother spent the better part of a Sunday afternoon wandering through the forecourt of Grauman’s, examining the celebrity footprints and handprints that were embedded in the concrete. Bonnie remembered seeing a pretty young woman sitting in a wheelchair in front of the box office, weeping like a child. Suddenly, the woman threw herself on the ground and began clawing at the cement, screaming, “He loves
me
, only
me
! I was the only one he loved!”
Bonnie’s mother said, “Don’t stare,” and she pulled her away from the circle of tourists who instantly gathered around the woman. Crossing the street, Bonnie overheard a man say, “Her name was Maria Casey. She played a dance hall girl in
Stampede.
She was having an affair with Rod Cameron. When he broke it off she threw herself off the roof of her apartment building.”
The warm wind swayed the tops of the palm trees on Melrose Avenue as Bonnie stood in front of the main entrance to Paramount Studios. From her pocketbook she took out the photo of her mother posed against the high walls.
“That’s my mom,” Bonnie said to the guard standing in the kiosk by the front gate. “She used to work here.”
The guard glanced at the photo while he waved through a black Cadillac convertible with a sleek-looking blonde behind the wheel.
Bonnie said, “That was—”
“Faye Dunaway,” interrupted a young man standing on the sidewalk a few paces away. He wore faded Levi’s, a blue T-shirt, and a Detroit Tigers baseball cap with the bill turned up. “I got her yesterday on her lunch break,” he said, holding up a leather autograph book
with a floral cover. “Today I got my eyes peeled for Marlon Brando. Wouldn’t that be something if I got
his
autograph, Gill?”
The guard exchanged a look with Bonnie. Then he winked at her. “Yes, that’s right, Ricky,” he said, talking through his smile. “It sure would.”
To Bonnie the young man said, “Last week Peter Fonda almost ran me down with his motorcycle. That’s why Gill makes me stand over here, out of the way. I got his father’s autograph here, too,” he said, and he held up a page with a signature scrawled in green ink. “
I
didn’t get him, my dad did. His name was Benny Furlong. He worked on a lot of his pictures.
Grapes of Wrath
,
The Long Night
,
Fort Apache
, lots of ’em. Was your mom an actress?” he said, looking over her shoulder at the photograph she was holding. Bonnie nodded. “What was her name? Maybe I have her autograph.”
“No,” Bonnie said. “You never heard of her.”
“My dad’s got tons of people in here you never heard of: Carla Baxter, Kenny Kendall, Lucy Alvarado. Nobody’s ever heard of them,” he said, and he pushed his face close to hers. “Come on, tell me.”
Bonnie shook her head. “I gotta go,” she said, backing up.
“Where?”
“I got things to do,” she said. “And don’t try to follow me.”
“Follow you? You’re no one. Why would I follow you?”
“Just don’t.”
When she returned to her apartment, Bonnie moved the armchair over to the window and sat staring down at the street until the twilight shadows fell across her patient face, darkening the room.
“I’m here,” she said out loud, right before she dozed off. “I’m finally here.”
It was after midnight when she awoke and heard the radio playing in the apartment beneath her. Radio Ray Moore was saying, “Let’s spend an hour talking about our fears, the things that make our hearts pound in the middle of the night. You’re on the air.”
A woman called in, a high school teacher, and said she was afraid of the noise in the cafeteria at her school. She said, “When I’m in charge during lunch, and I hear loud talking and the plates and trays banging, it puts the fear of God in me.”
“What are you afraid of?” Radio Ray asked her.
“I’m afraid something’s going to happen.”
“What?”
“Something. I don’t know. Don’t badger me, Ray, I just get afraid.”
“I’m afraid of dyin’,” a man named Leon said to Radio Ray. “That’s what I fear the most. That don’t make me special, does it, Ray?”
“No. Of course not. It’s something we all have to face sooner or later. How old are you, Leon?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“You’re a young man.”
The caller said, “What frightens
you
, Radio Ray?”
“Bowling alleys and flamingo tattoos.”
“That’s pretty weird.”
“And dominoes remind me of tombstones.”
In the apartment below, Bonnie heard a woman say, “Will you turn that off, please?”
“I’ll turn it down,” a man said.
“No!” the woman shouted. “Turn it off.”
“I’m afraid of fire,” the next caller said, a boy, and Bonnie sat up with her eyes open wide. “I’m afraid of the flames and the smoke. I’m afraid of getting burned. I’m afraid, but I set them anyway.”
Radio Ray said, “You set fires?”
“Yes.”
“You need help.”
“I know.”
“Tell someone. Your mom or someone at school. A teacher. They’ll get you help.”
“Miss Morris knows who I am.”
“Who?”
“Miss Morris. She called earlier. I recognized her voice. She knows about me. I want to burn down the school.”
“People would die.”
“I know.”
“You need to talk to someone.”
“I’m talking to you, Ray,” the boy said, and a moment later someone downstairs switched off the radio.
Six
Becoming a Writer and Losing a Wife
December 13, 1969
One week after Bonnie’s death and Sandra’s miscarriage, Burk was sitting in the living room of his house on Valley View Lane, surrounded by open boxes and wrapping paper and the wooden tracks for the Hot Wheels set he was trying to assemble for his five-year-old son. When the phone rang in the kitchen, Louie dropped the metal race car he was building and shouted, “Mommy!” and for a split second Burk, too, thought it was Sandra, but then he remembered that his wife was unable to speak over the phone, that her jaw was still wired shut.
“Happy Hanukah, Ray.” It was Timmy Miller, calling from Berkeley, where he’d been living since 1963, the year he graduated from Cal and opened a used book store on Telegraph Avenue. Burk and Timmy had spoken often on the phone, but the last time they saw each other was in June, when Timmy flew down for their tenth high school reunion, an event that Burk chose not to attend.
“I was thinking about you, Tim.”
“Yeah?”
“No shit.”
“Daddy.”
Burk put his hand over the mouthpiece. “I’ll be off in a couple of minutes, Louie.”
“Is that Mom?”
“No. It’s Uncle Tim. Mommy’s still in the hospital. She can’t talk on the phone yet, remember?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. But when her face stops hurting, she can. Right?”
“Right.”
“You didn’t mean to hurt her, did you?”
“No. I was trying to save her life.”
“Ray?”
“Sorry, Tim.”
“You want to call back?”
“No, that’s okay. Louie?”
“Yeah?”
“Why don’t you watch
Gumby
. When I’m through on the phone, I’ll finish putting together the Hot Wheels.”
“Okay.”
“Tim?”
“Yeah?”
“I was thinking about PK. We had some cool times, didn’t we?”
“Sure did.”
Louie turned away from the TV and stared at Burk. “Are you talking about Mom?”
“No.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“This girl I knew in high school. She and I and Uncle Tim were friends. We took a trip once.”
“Is she gonna live with us now?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Good.”
“Tim?”
“What?”
“I think I have a great idea for a movie.”
* * *
“Now what? The Wedge? Dana Point? San Diego?” Timmy asks Burk. They are sitting at a corner table in the Blue Pelican, a dilapidated diner that is built on weather-worn pilings overlooking the ocean near Capistrano Beach. On the jukebox the Shirelles are singing “I Met Him on a Sunday,” and outside the sun has fallen behind the thick dark clouds massed on the horizon, casting an eerie purplish light over the solitary surfer still riding the waves. “Or we could go to TJ, then drive down to Baja and surf Rosarita on Sunday.”
“Whatever you want,” says Burk, shrugging, his attention shifting to the sway of PK’s hips as she walks out of the ladies’ room and crosses back to their table.
“Or we could zoom.”
“Zoom?” Burk glances at Timmy, who is now grinning slyly. “What’s that?”
“This thing we do.”
“Who?”
“Me and PK. It’s kinda hard to describe. She’ll tell you,” Timmy says as PK sits down in the chair next to him and plucks a Pall Mall out of the pack lying in the center of the table.
“Tell him what?” she says, lighting up.
“About zooming.”
PK takes a long drag and exhales slowly, looking away as she lets the smoke come out a little at a time. “I met him on a Sunday and my heart stood still,” she sings, her voice off key as she tries to imitate the Shirelles’ lead singer.
Timmy says, “Come on, PK, show him.”
PK glances at Burk. Then, yawning, she says, “I don’t know.”
“You have to. He’s my best friend.”
PK, after a short silence, reaches into her purse and removes a harmless-looking nasal inhaler, a two-inch plastic cylinder with one end rounded off to fit snugly into a nostril. In 1959, this particular inhaler—brand name Rexall Nasalex—had been banned by the FDA and pulled off the shelves of every drugstore and supermarket in the state. But it took several weeks for the directive to reach some of the more
remote communities in Northern California, and there were still isolated pharmacies in Humboldt and Trinity counties where the Rexall Nasalex had not been replaced by Rexall Mist, a four-hour spray containing the benign active ingredient oleic acid, rather than the pure Benzedrine that PK’s father discovered one evening on a
Bonanza
location, when he and a couple of his actor buddies cracked open the Nasalex and squeezed the speed-saturated cotton filter into their coffee.
“So whattaya think?” Timmy says, catching Burk’s eye as he and PK roll the Nasalex back and forth across the Formica table. “You want to try it?”
The plastic cylinder stops in front of Burk. He picks it up and closes his hand around it. “What happens to you?”
Timmy and PK look at each other. “Everything.” PK laughs. “Everything that you ever wanted to happen.”
At 9
A.M.
the next morning, Burk drove his dented Chevy down to the neighborhood Thrifty Drugs. He bought ten 8-by-14-inch yellow legal tablets, an electric pencil sharpener, and four boxes (of one dozen) No. 2 Ticonderoga pencils. When he arrived home he made a second pot of coffee, drank a cup while he reread the sports section, and then walked into his den and wrote
Fade In
on the top left-hand corner of a blank yellow legal page.
Six weeks later, Burk completed the first draft of
Zoomin
’, a lightly fictionalized account of the drug and sex-soaked odyssey that he and Timmy and Patty Kendall took ten years earlier, in the winter of 1959.
“I bet it’s terrific,” Sandra said. “When can I read it?”
“I don’t know. I think I’ll wait till I hear from some agents.”
“If you don’t want to show it to me, that’s okay too.”
“No,” Burk said, “I do. I just want to wait.”
That night Burk and Sandra made love for the first time since she’d been released from the hospital. It was quick and tense, and the warm excitement he used to feel when she kissed and fondled him was gone. After she came in a series of quiet spasms, there was a sad silence in their bedroom, a silence that was more intense, it seemed to Burk, than if he were truly alone.
Finally Sandra said, “That wasn’t one of our best, was it? I bet right now you wish I’d disappear off the face of the earth.”
“That’s not what I’m feeling.”
“What are you feeling, Ray?”
“Scared.”
“Of what? Of being stuck with me for the rest of your life?”
“Sandra—”
“Stuck with a wife who has a miscarriage at the races and tries to stab herself to death. A normal wife doesn’t do that. And a normal mother misses her son when she’s away.”
“You love Louie, you know you do.”
“I don’t feel like I belong here anymore, Ray. I feel like I belong somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“
I
don’t know
,” Sandra cried out suddenly. “
I just don’t know.
”
The following day Burk mailed his script to five agents. Of the five, two—Ben Marino from Creative Management Associates and Ronny Gold at William Morris—he knew from CBS. Both were second-tier variety agents, assigned to hand-hold the singers and comics who appeared on the
Red Skelton Show
and the
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
, two of the shows that Burk covered when he was a censor.
Burk called them personally, and each promised to pass
Zoomin
’ along to their literary departments as soon as it arrived at their offices. As it turned out, they were the first two agencies to reject his screenplay.
“A few interesting scenes but, on the whole, this story is unbelievable,” wrote a junior agent at the Morris office. The following day the script came back from CMA with the word NO stamped across the title page in huge red letters.
By the end of the second week the rest of his scripts had been returned in the mail. Ziegler-Ross and the Sunset Plaza Group dismissed his efforts in identical language:
Sorry
,
this is not the kind of material we’re looking for
. The only encouragement came from Irving Kaplan of Premiere Artists. He wrote:
I enjoyed reading
Zoomin’
very much. For a first draft this is extremely well conceived. Good luck. Irv.
On Friday afternoon, Burk drove down to the post office and mailed off ten more copies of his screenplay. When he returned home, Sandra was sitting at the dining room table in the muted light, still in her bathrobe. By her elbow was a vodka Collins, and his script was open in front of her. She said, “I’m on page eighty-three. I think it’s really good.”
The tension in Burk’s face slowly disappeared, replaced by an expression of surprise. “You’re kidding?”
“No, Ray, I’m not.”
“It works?”
“So far it does.”
“It’s not getting slow or anything?”
“Ray?”
“Yeah?”
There was a pause. Then, looking up, Sandra said, “Did this stuff really happen?”
“Some of it did.”
“The motel is real?”
“Yeah.”
“And this girl PK, she fucked all those marines. That’s true?”
“We were high, Sandra.”
“Yeah, I guess. What about the boy who dies when Timmy takes him surfing in the middle of the night?”
“That’s made up. No one dies.”
“Did
you
fuck her too?”
“Who?”
“The girl, PK.”
“Finish the script.”
“I mean in real life. Did you fuck her, Ray?”
“Does it matter?”
“Just tell me.”
Burk nodded just perceptibly. “Yes,” he said. “I fucked her.”
Ten days later, Burk received a call from Maria Selene, an agent at Rheinis and Robins, a small but prestigious literary agency in West Hollywood. “I read
Zoomin’
over the weekend. I found it quite interesting,” she told Burk, in a voice that was cool but not unfriendly. “You may have some talent, Mr. Burk. I think we should set up a time to talk. How does three-thirty on Wednesday sound?”
“Three-thirty? That’s fine.”
“Do you know where we are?”
“I think so,” Burk said, scanning the submission list that he kept taped on the wall above his desk. Checking the address, he said, “You’re at 9255 Sunset, right?”
“The penthouse suite. I’ll see you Wednesday.”
After he put down the phone, Burk felt light-headed. A warmth spread throughout the center of his chest, and the phrase
you may have some talent
kept repeating itself inside his head as he wandered from room to room in a semidaze. On his third pass through the kitchen he saw Sandra pull her car into the driveway. Next to her on the seat was a basket of laundry. Before she turned off the engine she bent forward and her head fell out of sight, searching, Burk was certain, for the pint of Smirnoff that she kept under the seat.
Moments later, when he met her on the front porch, she slid past him quickly and silently, making no sign with her eyes that she even recognized him. In the bedroom where he followed her, he said, “What’s wrong? What’s going on?”
Saying nothing, Sandra put the laundry on the bed. Then, as if in a trance, she unzipped her skirt and walked into the bathroom. Turning away from the open door, Burk said, “I have some good news. I just got off the phone with an agent.”
There was no reply. When he heard the toilet flush he turned around. Sandra was standing in front of the mirror, staring at her reflection while she squeezed skin cream from a tube into the palm of her hand.
Burk said, “Did you hear what I said?”
Sandra nodded, almost smiling now as she pulled up her blouse and rubbed the viscous white liquid into the thick scars that crosshatched her stomach.
“She thinks I have talent. I’m going to meet with her on Wednesday.”
Sandra’s fingers slowly crept inside her underpants, and her knees buckled slightly as she started to stroke herself.
“You’re not gonna say anything. You’re just gonna stand there, staring at me while you jerk off. Is that what you’re gonna do?”
Sandra hunched her shoulders and a few ragged locks of hair fell over half her face. Then, closing her terrified eyes, she whispered, “Leave me alone, Ray. Just leave me alone.”