Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

FIVE

Jerry Brahms had been a child-actor in the late thirties, but his career hadn't lasted into puberty. He'd been at his "most picturesque," as he liked to put it, at the age of nine or ten, after which it had all been downhill. Todd had always thought of Brahms as being slightly ridiculous: with his overly-coiffed silver hair, his mock-English diction, and his unforgiving bitchiness about the profession to which he'd once aspired.

But Jerry knew his Hollywood, there was no doubt of that. He lived and breathed the place: its scandals, its triumphs. He was most informed about the Golden Age of Tinseltown, which coincided, naturally enough, with the years of his employment. In matters relating to this period his knowledge was encyclopedic, as he'd proved three years before, when Todd had been looking for a new house. Jerry had volunteered his services as a location scout, and after a week or two had taken Todd and Maxine on a grand tour of properties he thought might be suitable. Todd had not wanted to go; he found Jerry's chatter grating. But Maxine had insisted. "He'll be heartbroken if you don't go," she'd said. "You know how he idolizes you. Besides, he might have found something you like."

So Todd had gone along; and it had turned out to be quite a trip. Jerry had organized the tour as though he were entertaining royalty (which perhaps, as far as he was concerned, he was). He'd hired a stretch, supplied a champagne-and-caviar hamper from Greenblatt's in case they wanted to picnic along the way, and a map of the city, on which he'd meticulously marked their route. They went down to the Colony in Malibu, they wound their way through Bel Air and Beverly Hills; they looked at Hancock Park and Brentwood, their route plotted by Jerry so that he could show off his knowledge of where the luminaries of Hollywood had lived and died. They passed by Falcon Lair on Bella Drive, which Valentino had built at the height of his fame. They went to the Benedict Canyon Drive home where Harold Lloyd had spent much of his life, and past Jayne Mansfield's Pink Palace, which was as gaudy as ever, and the house where Marilyn and DiMaggio had briefly lived in wedded bliss. They visited homes occupied, at one time or another, by John Barrymore ("It still smells of liquor," Jerry had remarked), Ronald Colman, Hearst's love, Marion Davies, Clara Bow, Lucille Ball and Mae West. Not all the houses were for sale, nor open for inspection; in some cases Jerry's research had simply turned up a property close by, or one that resembled the house in which some luminary had lived. Other properties were located in areas that had become shadows of their glamorous selves, but Jerry didn't seem to care, or perhaps even notice. The fact that stars whose faces had become legendary—whose names evoked lives of elegance and luxury—had lived in these homes blinded him to the fact that there was often decay around them. They were like sacred sites, and he a pilgrim. Todd had found the tenderness with which he talked about these places, and about the people who'd once occupied them, curiously touching.

Four or five times during the trip Jerry had directed the driver to a certain spot, invited Maxine and Todd to get out of the limo in order to show them a certain view, then presented them with a photograph taken on precisely the same spot sixty or seventy years before, when many of the places they visited had been little more than an expanse of cactus and sand. It had been an education for Todd. He hadn't realized until then how recent Los Angeles was, nor how tenuous its existence was. The greenery was as artificial as the stucco walls and the colonial façades. The city was one enormous back-lot, fake and fragile. If the water ever ceased to pump, then this verdant world, with its palaces and its swooning falls of bougainvillea, would pass away.

As it turned out, Todd hadn't ended up buying any of the properties Jerry had shown them that day, which was probably for the best. He finally decided to stay in his house in Bel Air, but substantially remodel it. It didn't matter, Jerry had said, apparently reserving his opinion on whether Todd would join the pantheon of guests, nobody legendary had ever lived there.

Once Todd had said yes to the house in the hills, it took a day to get the move to the Hideaway properly organized; a day which Todd spent sitting at the window of the Malibu house, staring at the pale reflection of his bandaged face in the rain-spattered glass. Technically, the painkillers Burrows had given him should have left him without any discomfort whatsoever, but for some reason, even when supplemented by some of Bunny's specials, not a minute of that day passed without his being acutely aware of the pressure of the gauze and the bandages on his face. He morbidly wondered if perhaps he wouldn't be left with this residue of feeling for the rest of his life; he'd heard of people who'd had certain operations who were made much worse by the surgeon's knife, and indeed were never the same again. The thought terrified him: that he'd done something completely irreversible. But there was no use regretting it. All he could do now was hope to God that this unavoidable complication, as Burrows insisted it was, would be quickly cured, and he'd have his face back intact. He wasn't even hoping for improvement at this point. Just the old, familiar Todd Pickett face would do fine; creases, laugh-lines and all.

In the early evening Marco came to pick Todd up, having spent the morning moving some essentials over to the new house. Todd went with him in the sedan, Maxine and Jerry followed on.

"I got lost twice this morning," Marco said, "going back and forth from the old house to the new one. I don't know why the hell it happened, but twice I got all turned round and found myself back onto Sunset again."

"Weird," Todd said.

"There are no street signs up there."

"No?"

"There aren't many houses, either, which is what I like. No neighbors. No tour buses. No fans climbing over the walls."

"Dempsey used to get them!"

"Oh yes, old Dempsey was great. Remember that German? Huge guy? Climbs over the wall, gets Dempsey's teeth clamped in his ass and then—"

"Tries to sue you."

"—tries to sue me."

They chuckled at the incident for a moment, then rode in silence for a while.