“Every one of them.”
“Why?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“It’s so bizarre,” she said. “Knowing someone who did that. Maybe I should write a book.”
Something new in her eyes. Now I understood why she’d agreed to meet with me.
“I’ve heard it’s tough,” I said.
“Writing?” She laughed. “I wouldn’t do it myself, I’d hire someone, put my name on it. There are some big best sellers who do that.”
“Guess so.”
“You don’t approve.”
I said, “So Amelia Dowd thought you had talent- ”
“Maybe I shouldn’t give you my story.”
“I have no interest in writing it up. In fact, if you do write a book, you can quote me.”
“Promise?”
“Swear.”
She laughed.
I said, “Amelia Dowd- ”
“She heard me play cello in the Essex Academy orchestra and thought I was some kind of Casals, which tells you about her ear. Immediately, she calls my mother, they knew each other from school affairs, teas at the Wilshire Country Club, acquaintances more than friends. Amelia tells Mother she’s putting together a band- a wholesome family thing, like the Partridge Family, the Cowsills, the Carpenters. My hair makes me perfect, I obviously have a gift, and bass is just another form of cello, right?”
“Your mother bought that?”
“My mother’s a conservative DAR lady but she’s always loved anything to do with showbiz. The ‘secret’ she tells everyone once she knows them long enough is that she dreamed of becoming an actress, looked exactly like Grace Kelly, but nice girls from San Marino didn’t do that even if nice girls from the Philadelphia Main Line did. She was always on me to join drama club but I refused. Ripe for Mrs. D’s picking. Plus, Mrs. D made it sound like a done deal- big record contract pending, interviews, TV appearances.”
“Did you believe it?”
“I thought it sounded idiotic. And lame. The Cowsills? My taste was Big Brother and the Holding Company. I went along with it on the off chance something would happen and I’d be able to miss school.”
“Did the Dowd kids have any musical experience?”
“Brad played a little guitar. Nothing fancy, a few chords. Billy held a guitar like a spaz, Amelia was always adjusting it. If he could carry a tune, I never heard it. Nora could but she couldn’t harmonize and she was always bored and spaced out. She’d never shown interest in anything other than drama club and clothes.”
“Fashion plate,” I said.
“Not really, she always dressed wrong. Way too fancy. Even at Essex things had gotten casual.”
“Was joining drama club her idea or her mother’s?”
“Hers, I always thought. She always pushed for the big parts, never got them because she couldn’t memorize lines very well. A lot of people thought she was semi-retarded. Everyone knew Billy was, I guess the assumption was it was hereditary.”
“What about Brad?”
“Smarter than those two. Anyone would be.”
“How’d he adjust socially?”
“Girls liked him,” she said. “He was cute. But he wasn’t what I’d call popular. Maybe because he wasn’t around much.”
“Why not?”
“One year he’d be there, the next year he’d be gone- at some out-of-state school- because of trouble he’d gotten into. But Mrs. D sure wanted him around the year she tried to start the band.”
“How far did you guys get?” I said.
“Halfway to nowhere. When I showed up at their house for the first rehearsal and saw what utter bullshit it was going to be, I went home and told Mother, ‘Forget it.’ She said, ‘We Ryans don’t have quitting in our blood,’ and notified me that if I wanted my own car I’d better buckle down.”
She slapped one palm against the table, then the other, sounded a slow, ponderous four-four beat. “That was Nora’s idea of playing drums. Billy was supposed to play rhythm guitar and he’d managed to learn two screechy chords- C and G, I think. But it sounded like a pig being strangled.” She screwed up her lips. “As if that wasn’t bad enough, we tried to sing. Pathetic. That didn’t stop Crazy Amelia.”
“From what?”
“Dragging us to have promo pictures taken. She found a discount photographer on Highland near Sunset, some old fart who slurred his words and had forty-year-old black-and-whites of people you’ve never heard of taped to the walls of his studio.” She wrinkled her nose. “The place smelled like cat pee. The costumes smelled like an old-age home. I’m talking boxes of stuff, all jumbled together. We had to pose as Indians, pilgrims, hippies, you name it. Everyone in a different color. ‘Varied garb and hue,’ as Mrs. D phrased it, was going to be our ‘signature.’ ”
“It worked for the Village People.”
“So where are they? Once the photos were done, it was agent-time, one blow-dried sleaze after another. Amelia flirted with every one of them. I’m talking hip rub, deep cleavage flash, calculated eyelash flutter, the works. She had this blond bombshell thing going on, played it to the hilt.”
“That doesn’t sound like someone a conservative DAR lady would trust,” I said.
“Funny about that, isn’t it? I guess showbiz trumps everything. You ask people in this city if they’d give up a vital organ for a walk-on in a movie, I guarantee you most would ask where’s the scalpel. Half the people in my business have had some connection to the industry. Come over to the office and you’ll see faces you vaguely recognize but can’t place. I’m talking the girl who served coffee to the banker lady on The Beverly Hillbillies during the second act of one episode. She’s still got that SAG card in her purse, works it into every conversation. The smart ones learn that even if they make it, it lasts as long as warm milk. The others are like Amelia Dowd.”
“Living in fantasyland.”
“Twenty-four seven. Anyway, that’s the history of the Kolor Krew.”
“The project never got anywhere.”
“We must’ve done two dozen auditions. None lasted longer than fifteen seconds because the moment the agents heard us sing they winced. We knew we were horrendous. But Amelia would be standing there, snapping her fingers, beaming. When I got home I’d light up a doobie, call my friends, get all hysterical-giggly.”
“How’d the Dowd kids handle it?”
“Billy was an obedient robot, might as well have come with wheels. Nora spaced out, just like always, did the whole Mona Lisa thing. Brad was always hiding a smirk. He’s the one who finally spoke up. Not disrespectfully, more like, ‘C’mon, we’re not getting anywhere.’ Amelia ignored him. I mean, literally, just pretended he wasn’t there and went on talking. Which was a switch.”
“In what way?”
“Generally she paid plenty of attention to Brad.”
“Abusive?”
“Not exactly.”
“Special attention?”
Elise Van Syoc tried to impale a lime wedge on her stirrer. “This could be the important part of my book.”
“She seduced him?”
“Or maybe it was the other way around. I can’t even say for sure something happened. But the way those two related wasn’t exactly mother-son. I never noticed until I started spending all that time with them. It took a while to notice Mrs. D being odder than usual.”
“What’d she do?”
“She was no great shakes as a mom. With Billy and Nora she was distant. But with Brad- maybe she figured, technically, because Brad was an adopted cousin and not her son…still, he was fourteen and she was a grown woman.”