Perkins Cobb Revisited

"He was an operator," she said. "He did lots of things. He was always doing things. You think all he did was My Sweet Dread--that's a joke. He'd do anything for money, power, knowledge. Anything that got him inside. God, he knew the real stuff! Freddie Katz--did you hear that one?"

"I don't believe I know a Katz."

"That was Perko's real name. He was never from Utah. He was raised in Ventura. He kept Utah for that splashy death scene."

I had noted, in fact, how oddly Perk's farewell had anticipated the last automobile vault into space in Thelma ? Louise.

"A movie's the only fit place for that kind of death," she said, and she looked at me forlornly, searching for a sign of intelligence. Then she clicked her gaunt fingers and Laura came up out of the pool, water tumbling from her lean sides.

"We can't stay here."

"But we've just started," I protested.

"Do you have a car?" she demanded.

I told her yes, but how was she without transport or luggage if she was staying in this house? As she hurried me off the premises I wondered if she had not simply walked in moments before I arrived.

The dog soaked the upholstery in my car, and Graziella smoked all the way to her next residence--the only person who has ever smoked in that Corolla. The Clark Plaza Suites, between Beverly and Wilshire, is a sedately gloomy place in a placid, residential area. When we entered, Graziella had to announce her name, leaning across me toward the speaker, before the gateway to the underground garage would grind open.

"Gray Opper," she said, her mouth inches from my ear. When I kept a very still head, she added, murmuring, "My real name. I abandoned it when I was hot. Made people think of rabbits."

Her suite at Clark Plaza was chaos. There were clothes, books, papers and tapes, pizza boxes and corn chip bags on every possible surface, and over everything there was Laura's fine blonde hair. There were file cabinets, leaning piles of old, stale newspapers, clippings, every sign of someone struggling to swim in the world's seething information. It reminded me rather of my own apartment, so she and I may have grown closer there because of the disorder. We made a kind of remote love (this was only proximity and narrative availability) and, when I woke, I found a cassette wedged between my toes.

What did she tell me about my hero, Perkins Cobb? That he was a scoundrel, a traitor and a fraud, and that she adored him still and could not accept that he was gone.

"Off a butte in Utah?" she asked me. "In a white Cadillac? What was the body like--do you know that?"

"Battered," I seemed to remember, "and burned a good deal, but--"

"Cobb Salad Crisp?"

"--but they were confident it was him."

"'They' would be. Cobb knew 'them' inside out."

I have to say, the possibility appealed. Perk was too playful just to quit.

I visited Graziella several times in the next few months, and the tirade never faltered. She told me Perk had done many other movies besides My Sweet Dread, or parts of movies, or parts of projects. He had been a "doctor," she said, whose presence let others know they were ill. I cannot name all the pictures involved--there are legal difficulties. But she showed me a videocassette in which no less than Laurence Olivier was shown reciting a verse for children by Maurice Sendak. "I told you once/I told you twice/all seasons/of the year/are nice/for eating/chicken soup/with rice!" Graziella told me this came from a children's book with a verse for every month. Perk had filmed the whole book. She had seen some of the months over the years--Cary Grant had done May and Louise Brooks (sitting up in bed, coughing) September--and she believed that the other contributors had included John Cazale, Paulette Goddard and Truman Capote.

"Where is the whole film?" I longed to know. "It must be a delight."

"Don't know," she said, staring at me askance. "But don't you get it?"

"What's to get?"

"Why would a man do that?"

"As play?" I surmised. "Or--for a kid?"

"Exactly," she pounced. "And no one knows where it might be--or who its mother was."

"Not you?" I enquired, as tenderly as I was able.

"Bless you for asking," was all she answered.

I gathered from Graziella--and I do not know how much to believe--that Perk had been an agent of certain police forces, in L.A. and perhaps farther afield. She maintained that the police had early on seen the wisdom of keeping files on potent figures in the entertainment world, so there had been opportunities for insiders with dope on the past and other guilty secrets. Perk had been a home-movie-maker at many parties--Graziella alluded to the homes of Warren Oates, Norman and Dana Chase, Barry Diller, and the Dunlap sisters--and no one knew what had become of the footage.

"This is mere speculation," I said, for I had begun to sniff Peter Lawfordism in the air.

"And don't think there weren't people who wondered what he'd seen, or recorded."

"It could be fascinating material," I admitted--I myself had long been on the trail of Hollywood home movies of the '30s. And now, in the video age, with astonishing low-light capabilities...

"But dangerous."

It was her conviction that Perk had somehow gone too far, that he had betrayed trusts, and that what I had taken for his own resolute quietism was something far more sinister.

Graziella was always jittery. She seldom slept for more than 20 minutes at a time. She had a terror of being doubted--and to treat her fears she had only cocaine, occasional carnality and the dreadful mirrors of her suite. She sat for hours repairing age but spying fresh eruptions. Her concentration wavered, and there were stories she gave up on in midstream. For instance, I never found out what "the Robert Towne tapes" might be.

There was so little hard evidence supporting her Perkins Cobb conspiracy theory, apart from the Olivier/Sendak material, and the five other pictures on the roll of film I had finished on her, apparently views of some desert ghost town--real or a set, who could say? Otherwise, there was only the mess in which Graziella was always searching, and the rising whine of her innuendo and dread.

And so gradually I withdrew as 1991 came to an end. There were calls I did not return, or lingered over answering. Then one day this January I was told at Clark Plaza that she was gone. I wondered what had become of all her papers and possessions. And what about that faithful Laura?

There was no mention of the dog in the report of the accident. I only noticed the small, inside story days later, how at Alden and Palm in the early hours of January 7th there had been what appeared to be a hit-and-run accident in which a woman, Grace Opper, had been killed. In the picture that accompanied the article, I saw the pattern of Graziella's flowered skirt. I went to check out the body--too late, it was cremated. But there was a morgue shot. Graziella looked peaceful.

The papers said nothing about the accident victim having been Graziella Ortiz. It was as if the wondrous face of the '70s had been a ghost all along, and actual death the final proof. I enquired, but I have had no answers. I went to Alden and Palm late one night. It seemed to me that for a vehicle to have hit her the way it appeared in the Times photograph, it would have to have been going the wrong way, or ... And how was there a picture in the first place? The police denied taking it.

Sometimes around seven on these early spring evenings, as twilight creeps in, I do wonder about the traffic in this L.A. of ours. Is it a mass of private purposes seeking their own routes, or is there a pattern, a single force for which every turn and tremor is known in advance? I have been happy in this city over the years, loved its light, its dusk and the movies that play with both. But now I begin to wonder whether there is not a fatal design. And if I pass this on, for whatever it may be worth, I do ask myself whether I am known and watched and waited on because of things I have learned, and because of what strangers wonder. I look at the pictures of that ghost town--did Cobb hide out there? Or is he down the street in that gray Cutlass, waiting for me to pause and dream at the curb?

____________

David Thomson is the author of Silver Light, Warren Beatty, and Desert Eyes and Suspects.

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