Free Playland by John Gregory Dunne Page A

bottom, you’re the top,” slow fade to black.
    It was Chuckie’s contention that Blue had always known in some inchoate way, because she was a creature of the movies and because the films she made at Cosmopolitan Pictures, by edict of J. F. French, always had happy endings, that one day someone would rediscover her, and the more unlikely the locale the more dramatic, the more cinematic, that rediscovery would be. It was not a conscious move that had brought her to Detroit and the wrong side of the tracks, but with her innate story sense, that ability she never lost, even when she was at her most down-and-out, to project what was best for her character, Detroit and her menagerie of house pets and the multiple husbands, many of whose names she claimed not to remember, andthe endocarditis and the emphysema—all the factors real and fancied—provided the perfect contrast to the life that late she had led, the star that once she had been.
    Like most actors and actresses, Blue Tyler preferred anecdote to fact and mistook, as if by act of will, one for the other. Anecdotes are nothing but factoids of questionable provenance, burnished to a high gloss and purged of subtext in the interest of keeping the narrative flowing, for best effect usually set against gilded venues (or mean streets for contrary effect) and populated with the famous and the familiar as background atmosphere, as if the famous names and the gilded venues and mean streets certified authenticity. Whether biographical or autobiographical, all anecdote is essentially self-aggrandizing, allowing the anecdotalist to bask in his or her own created (or someone else’s reflected) glory, and to demonstrate whatever it is in the anecdotalist’s interest to demonstrate, either for his or her own good, or for someone else’s ill fortune (an equally winning hand under certain propitious conditions). As these anecdotes are usually provided by professional storytellers, the not-altogether-unbecoming result is that the stories show folk tell about themselves have the shorthand sense of being scenes from a screenplay, with dialogue, set decoration, and camera movements. In such circumstances, truth is an acceptable casualty, the narrative all.
    Fame once experienced is a narcotic. In the theater of her dreams Melba Mae Toolate was still the famous Blue Tyler, and like so many famous people, she accepted the kindness of strangers as natural acts of fealty, no more than what she was due. At Cosmopolitan’s Little Red Schoolhouse (so called because studio art directors had built it on a soundstage and dressed it to resemble a prairie school, which it often was, in Cosmo’s low-budget program Westerns), it had been drilled into her that the toughest audience of all was that soundstage dress circle of hardened grips, gaffers, best boys, makeup men, and wardrobe mistresses, those who even in her adversity she still regarded as “the little people.” As I was a writer, and thereforefore in her hierarchical scale a little person, I could never be immunized against her magic; in her mind her wish must always be my command. If she was to be rediscovered, if that was what the fates had ordained, then the denouement must be playable in a Blue Tyler vehicle. Little Sister Susan and Lily of the Valley transmogrified by the ravages of time into Apple Annie, a comeback vehicle she might consider if the billing and the money were right, and if the shitbirds in charge did not try to bring her to heel, harness her spirit, as they had always tried to do when she was on top. (Fuck them, she would say, suddenly, venomously, eyes aflame, like sulphur matches, the old memories like fishhooks caught in her gills, and fuck them again!) Admittedly a risky bet, a long shot, but if it worked, what a payoff.

II
    M aury Ahearne’s watch commander said he was in court testifying. I found him in the cafeteria during a recess. He did not seem surprised to see me. Nor curious about what might have