Hollywood Babble-On

By John Skow

The most perplexing beach read of the summer is a train wreck of a novel by John Gregory Dunne, a very good writer (True Confessions, Harp) whose fiction usually stays nicely on the rails. Trying to figure out what went wrong with Playland (Random House; 494 pages; $25) should keep writers' workshops twittering until Norman Mailer publishes his next thousand pager.

Hollywood in the '30s and '40s is the novel's principal setting, though the ramified and exceedingly tenuous plot spreads across the U.S. and into the '90s. Dunne invents a child star named Blue Tyler (born Melba Mae Toolate, or perhaps not, because her birth mother is supposed to have sold her as an infant to a Mrs. Toolate for the price of a bus ticket out of -- maybe -- Yuma, Arizona). Blue isn't cute like Shirley Temple (that "midget in drag," as one of Dunne's wise-guy industry types calls Blue's competition). Rather, she conveys adult sexuality to an unsettling degree, in part because a botched tonsillectomy (by the studio doctor who will one day perform her abortions) gives her Marlene Dietrich's voice.

As a young teenager, Blue is Cosmopolitan Pictures' biggest draw. She yearns to play adult roles, bad girls, and off the set has an affair with a gangster named Jacob King, who is murdered in his Las Vegas casino. Then she disappears and doesn't surface until 40 years later, when she is discovered, a few dollars from dead broke, living in a run-down trailer park in Hamtramck, Michigan.

There was a satisfying airport paperback, with pink cover and gold-embossed lettering for the title, to be written about Blue. Where is Judith Krantz, the reader muses, when we need her? And never mind that the Jacob King figure is an obvious sketch of the real-life mobster Bugsy Siegel and that since everyone knows that Siegel was murdered, there isn't a lot of suspense to be generated about whether King will live to collect Social Security. Blue is a good, tough, hard-edged character ("she only cries on cue," someone says of her), and a straight-ahead, page-turner approach might have worked.

Instead Dunne chose to spiral around the Blue Tyler myth in great, windy loops of speculation, reminiscence, industry gossip and dear-reader throat clearing, delivered by a self-absorbed and only fitfully interesting narrator named Jack Broderick. He's a middle-aged screenwriter whose wife has just died, so he's at loose ends. There is almost no action or dialogue in present time. What the author offers is Broderick, onstage alone, scratching his head and relating what he has learned from a phone call or an old police report. Blue had a husband named Teddy who got stoned and fell out of the second deck at Tiger Stadium on their wedding afternoon. Somebody else fell or was pushed from a hotel window, landing on a mounted policeman, killing the policeman and his horse. Good stuff but old stuff, not dramatized but simply retold.

Dunne and his wife, writer Joan Didion, have moved to Manhattan, but they lived in Southern California for years, wrote screenplays off and on and knew everyone in the movie business. The list of acknowledgments at the end of Playland names Otto Preminger, Natalie Wood, Billy Wilder and a cast of thousands. This explains part of the problem. What is supposed to be a novel is really the author's Hollywood valedictory, and he has included every good show-biz anecdote he ever heard. Unfortunately, the glut of marvelous gossip has stopped his story cold.