And over in Glendale, in the big seething house, Bonnie stood cold and tearless and almost as devoid of life as her mother down in Hollywood being admired by thousands; while Clotilde, whose plump cheeks and Gallic nose seemed permanently puffed out from weeping, dressed her — unresisted — in soft and striking black, even though Bonnie had often said she detested public displays of grief and typical Hollywood funerals; dressed Bonnie without assistance from Bonnie, as if in truth she were dressing a corpse.
And in Beverly Hills Ty was cursing Louderback between gulps of brandy and refusing to shave and wanting to wear slacks and a blazer, just to show the damned vultures, and Alan Clark and a hastily recruited squad of husky friends finally held him down while Louder-back plied the electric razor and a doctor took the decanter away and forced Ty to swallow some luminal instead.
And then Ty and Bonnie met over the magnificent twin coffins at the mortuary, framed and bowered in gigantic banks of fresh-cut flowers until they and the corpses and the mortician’s assistants and the Bishop looked like figures on a float at the annual flower festival; and neither said a single word; and the Bishop read a magnificent service against the heady-sweet background, bristling with “dear Lords” and “dear departeds,” and Inspector Glücke almost wore his eyes out scanning the crowd on the fundamental theory that a murderer cannot resist visiting the funeral of his victims, and saw nothing, even though he stared very hard at Joe DiSangri Alessandro, who was present looking like a solemn little Italian banker in his morning coat and striped trousers; and Jeannine Carrel, the beautiful star with the operatic voice than whom no soprano in or out of the Metropolitan sang Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life more thrillingly, tearfully sang Nearer, My God, to Thee accompanied by the entire male chorus of Magna Studio’s forthcoming super-musical production, Swing That Thing; and Lew Bascom did not even stagger under his share of the weight of Blythe’s coffin, which was a testimonial to his stamina and capacity, since he had consumed five quarts of Scotch since Sunday night and his breath would have sent a buzzard reeling in dismay.
And among the other pallbearers present were Louis X. Selvin, executive president of Magna; an ex-Mayor; an ex-Governor; three outstanding stars (selected by Sam Vix on the basis of the latest popularity poll conducted by Paula Paris for the newspaper syndicate for which she worked); the president of the Motion Picture Academy; a Broadway producer in Hollywood making comical short subjects; Randy Round, the famous Broadway columnist, to whom no set in filmland was forbidden ground; an important official of the Hays office; and a special delegate from the Friars’ Club. There was a good deal of crowding.
And somehow, aeons later, the motored processional, rich with Isotta-Fraschinis, Rolls-Royces, Cofds, Lincolns, and special-bodied Duesenbergs managed to reach and penetrate the memorial park — Hol-lywoodese for “cemetery” — where a veritable ocean of mourners surged in eye-bursting waves, mourning, to await the interment ceremonies; and the Bishop, who seemed indefatigable, read another magnificent service while a choir of freshly scrubbed angel-faced boys in cute surplices sang magnificently, and thirty-one more women fainted, and ambulances came unobtrusively and plaintively to the scene, and one headstone was knocked over and two stone angels lost their left arms, and Jack and Blythe were lowered side by side into magnificent blue spruce-trimmed graves edged in giant fern and topped off with plaits of giant lilies; and Bonnie, disdaining the Boy Wonder’s arm, stood cold, lifeless, straight of back, and watched her mother make the last slow descent, magnificently dramatic, into the earth; and Ty stood alone in his own empty dimension, with incurving shoulders and a wonderfully bitter smile, watching his father’s clay make the same slow descent; and finally it was practically — not quite — over, and the only part of her costume Bonnie surrendered to posterity was her dry black lawn handkerchief, snatched from her hand by a sabled fat woman with maniacal eyes as Butcher led Bonnie back to his limousine; and Ty, observing, lost the last shred of his temper and shook his fist in the fat woman’s face, to be dragged off by Lew, Ellery, and Alan Clark; and stars and stars and stars wept and wept, and the sun shone blithely over Hollywood, and everybody had a lovely time, and Sam Vix said with emotion, wiping the dampness from under his black patch, that it had all been simply — there was no other word for it — magnificent.
But once safely away from the Argus-eyed mob, Bonnie gave vent to a wild sobbing in the Boy Wonder’s arms as the limousine dodged through traffic trying to escape the pursuing cars of the insatiable press.
“Oh, Butch, it was so awful. People are such pigs. It was like the Rose Bowl p-parade. It’s a wonder they didn’t ask me to sing over the r-radio!”
“It’s over now, darling. Forget it. It’s all over.”
“And grandfather didn’t come. Oh, I hate him! I phoned him myself this morning. He begged off. He said he was ill. He said he couldn’t stand funerals, and would I try to understand. His own daughter! Oh, Butch, I’m so miserable.”
“Forget the old buzzard, Bonnie. He’s not worth your misery.”
“I hope I never see him again!”
And when they got to the Glendale house Bonnie begged off and sent Butcher away and instructed Clotilde to bang the door in the face of any one, friend or foe, who so much as tapped on it. And she shut herself up in her bedroom, sniffing, and tried paradoxically to find comfort in the bulky bundles of mail Clotilde had left for her.
Ty, who had to traverse the width of Hollywood to get home to Beverly Hills, changed from open rebellion to a sulky, shut-in silence; and his escort wisely left him to Louderback’s stiff ministrations and departed. He had scarcely finished his third brandy when the telephone rang.
“I’m not in,” he snarled to Louderback. “To any one, d’ye hear? I’m through with this town. I’m through with every one in it. It’s a phony. It’s mad. It’s vicious. Everybody here is phony and mad and vicious. Tell whoever it is to go to hell.”