Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

ONE

Although every medical expert who paraded by Tammy's bed in the next many weeks—bone-specialists and skull-specialists, gastroenterologists and just good old-fashioned nurses—invariably pronounced the opinion that she was a "very lucky woman to be alive" there were many painful days and nights in that time of slow, slow recovery when she did not feel remotely lucky.

Quite the reverse. There were times, especially at night, when she thought she was as far from unmended as she'd been when Todd had first pulled her out of the car. Why else did she hurt so much? They gave her painkillers of course, in mind-befuddling amounts, but even when she'd just taken the pills or been given the injection, and the first rush of immunity from pain was upon her, she could still feel the agony pacing up and down just beyond the perimeter of her nerves' inured state, waiting for a crack to appear in the wall so that it could get back in and hurt her again.

She was in the Intensive Care Unit at Cedars-Sinai for the first seventy-two hours, but as soon as she was deemed fit to be removed from the ICU, her insurance company demanded she be taken to the LA County Hospital, where she could be looked after at fifty percent of the price. She was in no state to defend herself, of course, and would undoubtedly have been transferred had Maxine not stepped in and made her presence felt. Maxine was close friends with several of the Hospital Board, and made it clear that she would unleash all manner of legal demons if anyone even thought of moving Mrs. Lauper when she was in such a delicate state. The hospital authorities responded quickly. Tammy kept her bed, complete with a private room, at Cedars-Sinai. Maxine made it her business to be sure that the room was filled with fresh orchids every day, and that fresh three-layer chocolate cake from Lady Jane's on Melrose was brought in at three every afternoon.

"I want you well," she instructed Tammy during one of her first visits after Tammy had been released from the ICU. "I have a list of dinner parties lined up for the two of us that will take every weekend for the next year, at least. Shirley MacLaine called me; claimed she'd had a vision of Todd passing over, wearing a powder-blue suit. I didn't like to spoil the poor old biddy's illusions so I told her that was exactly what he was wearing. Just as a matter of interest, what was he wearing?"

"Jeans and a hard-on," Tammy replied. "He'd torn up his T-shirt for bandages." Her voice was still weak, but some of its old music was starting to come back, day by day.

"Well, I'll leave you to tell her that. And then there's all these friends of Todd's who want to meet you—"

"Why?"

"Because I told them about what an extraordinary woman you are," Maxine said. "So you'd better start to get seriously well. As soon as you're ready to be moved I want you to come down and stay with me in Malibu."

"That'd be too much trouble for you."

"That's exactly what I need right now," Maxine replied, without irony. "Too much trouble. The moment I stop to think ... that's when things get out of hand."

Luckily, Tammy didn't have that problem. In addition to the heavy doses of painkillers she was still being given, she was getting some mild tranquilizers. Her thoughts were dreamy, most of the time; nothing seemed quite real.

"You're a very resilient woman," her doctor, an intense, prematurely-bald young fellow called Martin Zondel, observed one morning, while scanning Tammy's chart. "It usually takes people twice as long as it's taking you to bounce back from these kinds of injuries."

"Am I bouncing? I don't feel like I'm bouncing."

"Well perhaps bouncing is too strong a word, but you're doing just fine!"

It was a period of firsts. The first trip out of bed, as far as the window. The first trip out of bed, as far as the door. The first trip out of bed as far as the en suite bathroom. The first trip outside, even if it was just to look at the construction workers on the adjacent lot, putting up the new research block for the hospital. Maxine and Tammy ogled the men for a while.

"I should have married a blue-collar worker," Maxine said when they got back inside. "Hamburgers, beer and a good fuck on a Saturday night. I always overcomplicated things."

"Arnie's blue-collar. And he was a terrible lover."

"Oh yes, Arnie. It's time we talked about Arnie."

"What about him?"

"Well for one thing, he's a louse."

"Tell me something I don't know. What's he been up to?"

"Are you ready for this? He's been selling your life-story."

"Who to?"

"Everyone. You're hot news, right now. In fact I had a call from someone over at Fox wondering if I could sell you on the idea of having your life turned into a Movie of the Week."

"I hope you said no."

"No. I just said I'd talk to you about it. Honestly, Tammy, there's a little window of opportunity in here when you could make some serious money."

"Selling my life-story? I don't think so. I don't have one to sell!"

"That's not what these dodos think. Look at these."

Maxine went into her bag, brought out a sheaf of magazines and laid them on the bed. The usual suspects: The National Enquirer and The Star plus a couple of more up-market magazines, People and Us. Tammy was still too stiff to lean forward and pick them up, so Maxine went through them for her, flicking to the relevant articles. Some carried photographs of Todd at the height of his fame; the photographs often emblazoned with melodramatic questions: Was Fame Too Much for the World's Greatest Heart-throb? on one; and on another: His Secret Hideaway Became a Canyon of Death. But these lines were positively restrained in contrast with some of the stuff in the pages of The Globe, which had dedicated an entire "Pull-out Special your family will treasure for generations" to the subject of Haunted Hollywood; or, in their hyperbolic language: "The Spooks, the Ghosts, the Satan-worshippers and the Fiends Who Have Made Tinseltown the Devil's Fanciest Piece of Real Estate!"

There were pictures accompanying all the articles, of course: mostly of Todd, occasionally of Maxine and Gary Eppstadt, and even—in the case of The Enquirer and The Globe—pictures of Tammy herself. In fact she was the subject of one of the articles, which was led off by a very unflattering picture of her; the article claiming that "According to her husband, Arnold, obsessive fan Tammy Jayne Lauper probably knows more about the last hours of superstar Todd Pickett's life than anybody else alive—but she isn't telling! Why? Because Lauper (36) is the leader of a black magic cult, which involves thousands of the dead star's fans worldwide, who were attempting to psychically control their star, when their experiment went disastrously and tragically wrong."

"I was of two minds whether to show you all this," Maxine said. "At least yet. I realize it probably makes your blood boil."

"How can they write such things? They're just making it up . . ."

"There were worse, believe me. Not about you. But there's a piece about me I've got my lawyers onto, and two pieces about Burrows—"

"Oh, really?"

"One of them was a very long list of his . . . how shall I put this? His 'less than successful' clients."

"So Todd wasn't the first?"

"Apparently not. Burrows was just very good at buying people's silence. I guess nobody really wants to talk about their unsuccessful ass-lifts, now do they?"

Maxine gathered all the magazines up and put them into the drawer of the bedside table. "That's actually put some color back into your cheeks."

"It's indignation," Tammy said. "It's fine to read all that nonsense in the supermarket line. But when it's about you, it's different."

"So shall I not bring any more of them in?"

"No, you can bring 'em in. I want to see what people are saying about me. Where are the magazines getting my photographs from? That one of me looking like a three-hundred-pound beet—"

Maxine laughed out loud. "You're being a little harsh on yourself. But, you're right, it's not flattering. I guess the photographer himself gave them the picture. And you know who that was?"

"Yes. It was Arnie. It was taken last summer."

"He's probably gone through all your family photographs. But look, don't get stirred up. He's no better or worse than a thousand others. Believe me, I've seen this happen over and over. When there's a little money to be made—a few hundred bucks even—people come up with all these excuses to justify what they're doing with other people's privacy. America deserves to be told the truth, and all that bullshit."

"That's not what Arnie thought," Tammy said. "He just said to himself: I deserve to make some money for putting up with that fat bitch of a wife all these years."

There was no laughter now; just bitterness, deep and bleak.

"I'm sorry," Maxine said. "I really shouldn't have brought them in."

"Yes, you should. And please, don't apologize. I'm not really all that surprised. What are they saying about you ... if you don't mind me asking?"

Maxine exhaled a ragged sigh: "She was exploitative, manipulative, never did anything for Todd except for her own profit. That kind of stuff."

"Do you care?"

"It's funny. It used not to hurt. In fact, I used to positively wallow in being people's worst nightmare. But that was when Todd was still alive ..." She let the thought go unfinished. "What's the use?" she said at last, getting up from beside the bed. "We can't control any of this stuff. They'll write whatever they want to write, and people will believe what they want to believe." She leaned in and kissed Tammy on the cheek. "You take care of yourself. Doctor Zondel—is that it, Zondel?"

"I think so."

"Sounds like a cheap white wine. Well, anyway, he thinks you're remarkable. And I said to him: 'this we knew.'"

Tammy caught hold of her hand. "Thank you for everything."

"Nothing to thank me for," Maxine said. "We survivors have got to stick together. I'll see you tomorrow. And by the way, now that you're compos mentis—I warn you—there's a chance you're going to have nursing staff coming in to ask you questions. Then selling your answers. So say nothing. However nice people are to you, assume they're fakes."

Maxine came every day, often with more magazines to show. But on Wednesday—three weeks and a day after Tammy had returned to consciousness—she had something weightier to place on her bed.

"Remember our own Norman Mailer?"

"Detective Rooney?"

"Ex-Detective Martin Ray Rooney. The same. Behold, he did labor mightily and his gutter publishers saw that it was publishable and they did a mighty thing, and put it in print in less than three weeks."

"No!"

"Here it is. In all its shoddy glory."

It wasn't a big book—a mere two hundred and ninety-six pages—but what it lacked in length it made up for in sheer bravura. The copy described it as a story too horrific for Hollywood to tell. On the cover was a photograph of the house in Coldheart Canyon, with the image of a glowering demon superimposed on the clouds overhead.

"He says you, I and a woman called Katya Lupescu were in it together. Like the three witches in Macbeth."

"You mean you actually read it?"

"Well, I skimmed. It's not the worst thing I've read. He spells all our names right, most of the time, but the rest? Oh God in Heaven! I don't know where to begin. It's a big sticky mess of Hollywood myths and

Manson references and completely asinine pieces of detective work. Basically, he's convinced everyone is in on this massive conspiracy—"

"To do what?"

"Well. . . that's the thing. He's not really sure. He claims Todd found out about it, so he was murdered. Same with Joe. Same with Gary Eppstadt, though of course everybody in Hollywood had a reason to murder Gary Eppstadt."

"I didn't know books could be published so fast."

"Well it's just hack-work. It'll be off the shelves in a month. But Rooney got a quarter of a million dollars' advance for it. Can you believe that?"

Tammy picked up the book—which was called Hell's Canyon—and flicked through it.

"Did he interview Arnie?"

"Well I didn't read it that closely, but I didn't see his name."

"Oh, there's pictures," Tammy said, coming to the eight-page section in the middle of the book. To give him his due, Rooney—or somebody working on his behalf—had done a little research. He'd turned up two photographs from the archives of some silent-movie enthusiast. One was a picture of Katya Lupi, dressed in a gown so sheer it looked as though it had been painted on, the other a much more informal photograph which showed Katya, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Theda Bara, Ramon Navarro and a host of other luminaries at a picnic in the shadow of the dream palace in Coldheart Canyon. At the back of the crowd—separated from Katya by several rows of smiling, famous faces—was Willem Zeffer. Tammy closed the book.

"Don't want to see any more?"

"I don't think so. Not today."

"I've been thinking . . . Doctor Zinfandel"—Tammy laughed at Maxine's perfectly deliberate error—"has told me you'll be out of here in a week, ten days at the most. I don't want you going back to Rio Linda, at least not yet. I want you to come and stay with me at the house in Malibu, if it doesn't have too many distressing memories."

Tammy had been worrying about how she'd cope when she was released from the hospital; the offer made her burst with tears of relief.

"Oh Christ, I hadn't realized you hated the place that much!"

Laughter appeared through the tears. "No, no, I'd love to come."

"Good. Then I'm going to send Danielle—she's my new assistant—to Sacramento and have her pick up some of your things, if that's okay with you."

"That would be perfect."

Nine days later, Tammy moved out of Cedars-Sinai and Maxine ferried her down to the beach-house. It looked much smaller by day; and somehow more ordinary without the twinkle lights in the trees, and the cars driving up, full of the great and the good. Perhaps it was simply that she'd come to know Maxine so well in the past few weeks (and how strange was that—to have become so fond of this woman she'd despised for years, and to have her sentiments so sweetly returned?), that the house didn't seem at all alien to her. It was very far from her taste of course (or more correctly, far from her pocketbook) but it was modestly stylish, and the objects on the shelves were elegant and pretty. Sitting on the patio on the second or third evening, sipping a Virgin Mary, the wind warm off the Pacific, she asked Maxine if she'd decorated the place herself, or had it done professionally.

"Oh I'd love to say I chose every object in the house, but it was all done for me. Actually Jerry selected the paintings. He's got a good eye for art. It's a gay thing."

Tammy spluttered into her drink.

"He's flying back to California next weekend, to see a friend in the hospital. So I said he should call in. That's all right, yes? If you don't feel up to it, you don't have to see him."

"I'm fine, Maxine," Tammy said. "Believe me, I'm fine."