His bad checks were as much of a hallmark around Hollywood as Liz Taylor’s bosom, Lee Marvin's squint, or Dean Martin’s bourbon. People rarely refused to cash a check for Winthrop. For one thing it was a mark of status just to hold one, to be a part of the celebrity circle stuck with a Winthrop Van Ardsdale check. For another, in the long run, somehow, Winthrop always managed to make his checks good. Even the stores and night clubs and hotels and restaurants cashed his checks and patiently held them. The business he brought in more than compensated for any loss they might have suffered.
With it all, Winthrop was genuinely well-liked. It was a fact that his personality attracted people. His zany capers—and many of them would truly have been considered horrendous had they been perpetrated by anyone else --were readily forgiven. There was a magic sort of golden-boy quality about him that was genuine.
It was evident later that ayem, when, flanked by Misty Milo and Happy Daze, I arrived at the party which Winthrop had arranged to welcome me back to Hollywood. He was standing with our hosts, a middle-aged couple rolling in new Midwest automotive money, obviously recent arrivals on the L.A. scene, just as obviously impressed with the famous people Winthrop had collected in their home in the middle of the night. Winthrop greeted me warmly and introduced them. They made welcoming noises deep in their throats and then receded to ogle the celebrities swilling their booze. I didn't quite catch their names. It didn't seem to matter.
“Squares,” Winthrop confided to me. “But sweet. Hungry for the high life. Friends of friends of friends, you know? Letters back and forth and I arranged for them to buy this house at a good price. Had it decorated for them too. What do you think?”
What did I think? I thought it was the perfect house for its location, which was the Pacific Palisades of Los Angeles. Which is to say that it suited L.A. more than the ocean it looked out over. It was all glitter, the house was, just like the city, all glitter and, as Saroyan put it, “no foundation all the way down the line.” It was a three-level villa hanging out over the side of a mountain, overlooking the sea, pointing toward Japan in styling as well as direction, a fragile, toothpick structure poised and waiting for the latest Tokyo earthquake. If the city of L.A. was all shiny new plastic breast-flesh quivering in the neon with the scars of the uplift operation not showing but ever-present, the house was a sequin-sparkling pastie trembling in the too-strong breeze and about to fly off into the black terror of the night. It was as insecure as the people who owned it, was the house. And it made me feel insecure to be wrapped in its goldfish-bowl plate-glass walls. How did I like the house? “I like it fine,” I told Winthrop.
“It really is good to see you, Steve.” He sounded like he meant it.
“It’s good to see you, too.” Was he Ex-Lax? Castor Oil? I couldn't help the suspicion.
“I collected as many of the old crowd as I could,” Winthrop told me. “And I filled in with the rest of these free-loaders.” His gesture took in the room.
There were perhaps thirty people there. I, recognized most of them, but only a half-dozen besides Winthrop, Misty and Happy were known to me personally. My eyes moved over the group as I picked them out.
There was Prince Juv Satir of Poversia talking to Voluptua. The boy prince had just turned fifteen the last time I’d seen him. That would make him about nineteen now, but he didn’t seem to have outgrown his adolescent preoccupation with mammaries. The heir apparent to the throne of the tiny Asian country was studying Voluptua’s bosom so avidly that his eyes were crossing. The blonde Voluptua was looking down at him from her six-foot-six height with amusement. With a 42-inch bust, she was used to being stared at, but her look seemed to say that even; royalty would have to grow up before being capable of coping with so much woman. Both the Prince and Voluptua were old acquaintances of mine.
So too were Donna Carper and Dwight Floyd Rank, standing across the room from Voluptua and the Prince. Donna was a legman (or leg-lady, if you prefer) for Ella Hooper, queen of the Hollywood gossip columnists. Behind her owl-like glasses, Donna was an unattractive girl, and her ample bosom was spongelike, soaking in confidences and squeezing out copy for the Hooper gossip-mill. Rank had imbibed just enough so that he was obviously considering taking her to bed despite her deficiency of beauty, but not so much that he’d forgotten that any pillow talk which ensued between them might turn up in boldface in the next day’s Hooper column. Rank was an architect, famous as an innovator, infamous for being on the wrong end of breach-of-promise suits. I’d made some wild scenes with him during my previous visit to Hollywood. He was skidding toward sixty now, but from the way he was eyeing Donna, the years hadn’t slowed him down any.
Rank’s eyes strayed for a moment from Donna. They fileted the clothes from the body of April Wilder, who was standing across the room from him and drinking a double martini through a straw. April was another one I knew from the semi-old days. Only it was really her father I’d known then. He’d been a second-rate actor, but a nice guy, who was on the road down then. Since my last visit he’d died, and now daughter April was on her way up. Four years ago she’d been a gangly teen-ager going to dramatic school. Now she was a sex kitten with a long-term contract, During the four years, according to the gossip columns, she’d not only learned how to drink, but also had sampled vices ranging from LSD to seduction as well. The latter vice seemed in evidence now as she backed a man I didn’t know against the wall by raking him first with the left and then the right-hand side of her bosom. I waved at her, and she winked back at me. The wink said she'd see me later, and that right now she was only keeping in practice.
The eye-signal was intercepted by Louis Ching, the Chinese photographer who specialized in shooting bosomy girls for cheesecake magazines, and who was another old acquaintance of mine. He returned the wink impartially, first to April, then to me. Louis was a chunky man about my age who’d been born and raised in China and had come to the U. S. as a refugee from the Reds.
Well, there they were—all of the closest of my old Hollywood friends. The chances were strong that one of them -- possibly two—was a top Commie agent. The question was who.
I considered them one by one. Was it Winthrop Van Ardsdale? He was frequently and vociferously anti-American, or at least anti many cherished American institutions. There seemed very little he wouldn't do for the proper reward. He was corrupt enough so that international power politics might be strictly a matter of personal advantage to him. Yes, Winthrop was a possibility.
So was Happy Daze. He’d signed a few highly suspect petitions during and after the Second World War. He’d lent his name to organizations which had eventually landed on the Attorney General’s list. Lately he’d been quiet and non-political, but it hadn’t been so many years since he’d leaned so far to the left that even his liberal friends had regarded him askance.
Or Voluptua, perhaps? Only a year ago she'd landed on the front pages because of her involvement with a Russian U. N. diplomat in New York. The Russki was married, and when his affair with Voluptua was discovered his government had shipped him home in disgrace. The incident had tarnished Voluptua’s reputation without really raising the question of any possible breach of patriotism. This was because of the outrage of the Russian government and their insinuations that Voluptua was a spy planted by our government to vamp their man and milk info from him. But maybe it was just the other way around. Maybe the whole incident was an elaborate construction designed to disguise the activities of Voluptua herself.
Maybe . . . And maybe April Wilder, the teeny-bopper sex-kitten, wasn’t the political innocent she seemed. Maybe her well-publicized involvement with the New Left -- her blocking a troop convoy by throwing her shapely body in front of it, her getting arrested for sitting in during a demonstration for the right to travel freely to Cuba, her speeches to college students in support of draft-card- burners—maybe all this wasn’t just another phase of her volatile personality. Maybe it wasn’t just honest conviction. Maybe, young as she was, April was a Red agent. I sighed at the thought. That was the trouble today. You couldn’t tell honest opposition from Commie kanoodling. Yet the distinction had to be understood, or the whole country would go smiling that toothful California smile as its most precious freedoms dribbled down the drain of blind anti-Communism.