Stuart Kaminsky: Show Business is Murder

“You blame Mendy for that?”

“He wrote the letter.” The little old man’s breathy voice held a world of sadness. “My best friend, and he goes into executive testimony, talks just to the committee, no publicity, names names, and my name leads all the rest. Then he plants that phony story with Pegler, calls me a faggot. Makes sure I’ll never work again. To this day, to this goddamn day I got FBI guys following me around.”

“How do you know it was Mendy?” Scotty’s voice held a note of pleading. “Couldn’t it have been somebody else?”

“You ever hear of the Freedom of Information Act?” Dixon looked around the group. Patrick nodded and Scotty started to speak, then closed her mouth.

“I got my files. I looked close, and even though they put black ink over all the names, I thought about where I was when, who I was with. Who took me to those so-called Communist meetings. I took out my old diaries I used to keep when I first got to Hollywood. Kept them so I could write home to my mother, tell her all the glamorous people I was meeting.”

“And you figured out that Mendy ratted on you,” Scotty said. A long blue cloud of smoke emanated from her lips; she crushed the butt into an ashtray. “He destroyed your career-but is that a good enough reason to kill somebody?”

“My wife couldn’t stand it. She was high-strung when we married, I knew that. But when we sold the house in the hills and moved to Compton, when I couldn’t even hold a job in a bakery, when she started seeing guys in black cars everywhere she went, she lost control. One night she took too many pills and died in her sleep and I will never, so long as the sun sets in the West, forgive Mendelson for that. He killed her with his big mouth.”

“If you were married, how could anybody believe you were gay?” Birch thought it was a good question, but Patrick rolled his eyes and Dixon gave a short, mirthless laugh.

“Kid,” the old man replied, “Rock Hudson was married. Every faggot in Hollywood-” he gave a brief, apologetic nod in Patrick’s direction-” pardon my French, makes damn sure to get married.”

When Birch blurted, “Rock Hudson is gay?” Patrick almost fell out of the booth laughing.

Scotty brought them back to the matter at hand. “Maybe he was just trying to save himself. Maybe he named you thinking the Committee already had your name.”

“That doesn’t excuse the call to Pegler,” the old man replied. “Mendy was jealous-he wanted the breaks I was getting and he thought if I was out of the way, he’d be cast in the roles I was up for. Happiest day of my life was when Gene Kelly said yes to Summer Stock, because that meant Mendy was screwed.”

“We figured out that you offered Mendy a saccharin tablet and he took it,” Patrick said. “Do you mean to tell us he didn’t recognize you?”

A slow, sweet smile crossed the wizened face. “Oh, he recognized me, all right. That’s why I’m not afraid you’ll tell the cops what I’m telling you. He recognized me and he knew he had two choices: take the pill and go quietly or let me tell my story. One thing about the old ham: he really liked putting on that ‘I was a victim of the blacklist’ crap, and he didn’t want anybody knowing him for the rat he was. I expected him to take the poison, the dirty coward. At least now I can go tell my Stella the bastard is dead.”

“Your wife?”

“Yeah. She’s buried out in Woodlawn; I brought her home to be with her family. So I’ll take her a bouquet tomorrow and tell her that Mendy’s gone and she’ll maybe forgive me for going to those stupid meetings and screwing up my life.”

Scotty, present

THE COPS HADMendy’s death down as a suicide, and now it looked as if it really might have been one. There was nothing for us to do but drift home and make a date to see another double feature next week.

The newspapers reported the death of Paul Dixon, blacklisted “onetime movie hopeful,” about four months later. I figured he’d already been diagnosed with the emphysema that killed him; one more reason he wasn’t afraid of jail.

There’s a strange undercurrent of sadness in movie musicals. Judy’s addictions, Mickey’s pathetic eagerness to please, the frenetic tone of thirties musicals, the ones that packed as many chorus girls onto the screen as possible, perhaps just to keep them eating during the Depression. And what the blacklist did to a couple of young hoofers.

I once went to a church basement with an old friend and her deaf sister to see a silent movie. Before the film, a man made a speech in sign language, which Beth kindly interpreted for me, saying that the great days of silent film were still alive in the church basements and libraries where, as he put it, “The lights are turned down, the projector is turned on, and the deaf watch.”

It was a strangely moving experience, seeing Lillian Gish and John Gilbert with people who saw their movies as whole, not soundless. I think of that when I recall the days and nights we spent at Theatre 80. The movie musicals were made for Main Street, for families and “kids of all ages.” Old people and gay people bought the tickets at Theatre 80. We were an audience not planned for, but perhaps especially sweet because unexpected. We kept the musical alive in those lean years between Brigadoon and Saturday Night Fever -not that even Patrick, with his huge crush on Travolta, ever accepted Fever as a true musical.

Patrick died a year ago today. He was our cruise director, our emcee, our encylopedia of all things Hollywood. Gay Hollywood was his specialty, and like so many of us, he took great pleasure in claiming the brightest, most incandescent stars for “our side.” As if straight America would come to tolerate us if they learned that some of their favorite stars were “that way.”

Oh, Patrick, I do miss you!

My life back then had more Patrick in it than I knew. I breathed him like air, and it never occurred to me that one day he would cease to exist, like the musical itself.

No, not AIDS; he hated clichés, except when they were lines from old movies. Plain, ordinary, vanilla cancer, the kind straight people get, too. And, yes, I brought a VCR to the hospital so he could watch all the musicals his heart desired and I think, I hope, Footlight Parade was the last one he saw.

So tonight Birch and I will gather together all the people who loved him. We’ll make buttered popcorn, toast him with champagne, and celebrate the life of a man who was completely and totally big time in his heart.

And perhaps we’ll raise one of those glasses to the late, never-great Paul Dixon.

“ SO YOU’RE Aperformance artist?” the Las Vegas reporter asked. Wanda figured he was about twenty-one, probably on his first assignment covering the more bizarre aspects of Vegas nightlife.

“That’s what I am, Sonny,” she said, taking her costume out of the closet.

“Name is Rick Dodson,” he said softly.

“Yeah, Rick. You’re a handsome young man. This is for the Vegas Weekly? ”

“That’s right.”

She peeled off her blouse and jeans. He wasn’t the first man to see her in her underwear. “I have to dress while we talk. Hope you don’t mind.”

He moistened his lips but kept a firm grip on his pencil. “No. Go ahead.”

“What was it you wanted to know?”

“Is Wanda Cirrus your real name?”

“It is now.” She held the costume up to the light, inspecting it for stains.

“Are you married?”

“Not now. Not for years.”

“As a performance artist, do you feel you’re closer to the artistic world or to show business?”