THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 25, 1994 TAG: 9409240155
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER
LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines
PLAYLAND
JOHN GREGORY DUNNE
Random House. 494 pp. $25.
John Gregory Dunne's Playland is a page-turner with panache, a Hollywood novel with style and sizzle.
The novel centers on the stunted life of Blue Tyler, a preening, pampered child movie star of the '40s. ``Condescension was second nature to Blue,'' Dunne writes, ``a perquisite of a box office deity, one adopted automatically for dealings with lesser mortals in the universe of film.''
With her precocious sex life and premature fame and fortune, Blue is wise beyond her years. Yet she still has to fight the studio to let her grow up. Even in her midteens, she is filmed carrying a bouquet of flowers to avoid showing her chest. ``The public won't buy me as little Miss Priss with her knees welded together,'' she complains to the executives. ``You're always telling me how you can't fool the public.''
Barely out of adolescence, she meets the suave New York gangster Jacob King. He can dance like an angel, but he also can kill like the devil, wrapping one of his victims with duct tape until he suffocated. Yet Blue is drawn into a passionate affair with him:
``Her only yearning was to meet someone, anyone, who wanted nothing from her. Jacob King wanted nothing from her, and she fell in love with him; that he had been a murderer, without remorse, many times over was for Blue Tyler only incidental information.''
Dunne skillfully interweaves several plots and time frames: the rise and fall of the love affair; the story behind Blue's subsequent disappearance from Hollywood (``I just fell off the planet earth,'' she says cryptically) and her rediscovery decades later; and a scriptwriter's attempts to sell the story of Blue's life as he pieces it together.
The prose is incisive and lightning-quick, like a good screenplay. Here is Dunne describing Blue's sultry voice: ``The first thing anyone remembered was the voice, the voice that even when she was six and eight and ten and a stranger to the indulgence she later never tried to resist was a voice that carried the hint of too many cigarettes and too much booze and too many late nights and too many dark erotic liaisons. A vaginal voice. Husky, inviting, a midget Dietrich, a dwarf Tallulah.''
And, naturally, the dialogue is first-rate. After Jacob roughs up a rival at a Hollywood club, Blue snaps at him: ``You don't hit people. They only do that in B-pictures.''
Along the way, Dunne sends up everyone from Ted Koppel to the old-time gossip columnist Walter Winchell. At a New York club, ``his eyes were constantly on the move, checking to see who got what table, who was coming, who was going. . . . `Whatta set of pipes on Miss Helen O'Connell,' he said to no one in particular, as if composing an item for his column. `Every note a treat. Swellegant. The stems aren't bad either.' ''
Blue also gets zinged for her shallowness and self-centeredness, but Dunne succeeds in arousing sympathy for her in having survived the hell of Hollywood as a child.
But there's a troubling whiff of moral relativism here. Dunne seems to be saying that despite all the bloodshed, the Mafia has more honor than the movie community. A King associate, having dinner with the Hollywood crowd, emotes: ``He was worth this whole goddamn table. He was worth this whole goddamn town.'' Remember: This is the same guy who killed with duct tape, who could shoot off a man's nose or cut off his fingers without a second thought.
But despite the faulty philosophizing - and a surfeit of seedy sex - this is a great read. Jackie Collins, take notes. MEMO: Philip Walzer is a staff writer. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket photo by DAVID LOEB/ANDREA HUBER
by CNB