Customer Reviews

Playland

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Digging up the glittering myths of Hollywood to find long-buried truths is a task for a desperate man. The wealthy narrator, screenwriter Jack Broderick, is running from himself after the death of his wife, killed in a car accident while they were discussing divorce and he was driving.

By pure serendipity, Broderick runs into a child star who disappeared from Hollywood 45 years before at the pinnacle of her career. Blue Tyler now lives a rather hand-to-mouth existence in a trailer park and Broderick siezes the opportunity to immerse himself in her life - a possible movie or book.

Tyler, born Melba Mae Toolate to a woman who sold her for a bus ticket, became a star at age 4, grew up in the movies and was abandoned by Hollywood during the Red Scare of the '50s.

A product of adulation and attention but little love, she became both predator and prey. Broderick focuses on the circumstances that led to her disappearance - particularly her dangerous liason with Chicago gangster Jacob King and her relationships with studio head J.F. French who controlled her life and his son, Arthur, who she was intended to marry.

Piecing events together through interviews with Melba Mae (she reverted to the birth name she hated), Arthur French and Chuckie O'Hara, gay war hero and Blue Tyler's director, Dunne skillfully creates the schizo feel of life lived on two planes - the small percentage that is truly private and the greater part played for effect, exaggerated and glossed over. Blue, a used and protected child of the movies, never learned any other way to live. Broderick delves beneath the layers of self-deceit and polished scenes to find "truth."

Dunne's explorations of the magic of serendipity (and how lucky is it?), the effects of ego and the requirements of a "good story" on truth give the novel layers of wit and irony, but it's robbed of real depth by the focus on gangsterism and the rehashing of the Bugsy Seigel story. Blue Tyler is a character who arouses sympathy and impatience, but the heavy handed thugs at the center of the plot distract from her complex pathos.

Whether its due to his Celtic blood or wary eye, John Gregory Dunne brought an inimitable comic cynicism to his work. He did so again con mucho brio in Playland. With Hollywood, New York City and Detroit as backdrops Dunne spun a tale spiced with enough reality to make the reader believe and relish every word.

Jack Broderick, Playland's narrator, is a rich screenwriter who was the protagonist in Dunne's successful The Red, White and Blue. Through his observations the plot spins around Blue Tyler, an impossibly demanding and impossible to satisfy child star who disappeared amid scandal when she was twenty. Her next appearance is some 11 marriages and 45 years later - she is a bag lady whose shelter is a trailer park near Detroit.

After Broderick finds Blue again, he digs into a series of mysteries. Now, add a New York mobster who is building a spectacular gambling casino named "Playland," from which the book derives its title, a sly homocide detective, and Blue's childhood friend whose murder remains unsolved 50 years after the fact, and you have an unforgettable cast of characters.

As always with this author, humor abounds (albeit the humor is often dark). "Playland" is prime Dunne.

Dunne had writing talent dripping off his finger tips, but here he seems stuck. He seems not to be able to get on with telling an interesting story, as if doubting himself.

So: it's a long book, but has inadequate plot. He does not get me to care about a central character and that character does not accomplish anything significant. The long passages of interviews with Blue Tyler become tedious and feel pointless. Despite the stylish writing, which I continue to admire, I had trouble getting through it due to lack of story.