The shaggy stranger smiles and says, “Thank you kindly.”
As he turns to leave, he lifts his eyes again to the golden blonde in the doorway with the long legs, wearing a striped T-shirt that looks like she bought it in the little boys’ section of a department store. His hand rises in a wave gesture and he says, “Ma’am.”
Even though she finds this dark little intruder creepy, she nods at him and returns a slight smile. As the little man makes his way around the back of the property, Sharon’s eyes follow him until he disappears from view.
Rudi Altobelli has just stepped out of his shower when he hears his dog, Bandit, pitching a bitch at somebody by his open front door. He knows it’s a somebody rather than a something because, when it comes to intruders intruding on the property, the dog has three distinct barks. Cats get one bark, lizards, raccoons, and other varmints get another, and humans the dog doesn’t know get a third. Rudi throws a towel on top of his head, puts his naked, still-wet body in a terry-cloth bathrobe, and steps out of his bathroom, heading toward the front door to investigate.
Altobelli is a small-time Hollywood manager, who—once upon a time—represented (in some capacity) Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda. But these days his client list boasts Christopher Jones, Olivia Hussey, Sally Kellerman, and two out of the three members of the pop trio Dino, Desi & Billy (he repped the Juniors, Desi Arnaz and Dean Martin). The property was a pretty good investment; he lives in the guesthouse out back and rents out the big house to Hollywood highfliers. As he approaches the wide-open front door, which is really the side door, the television set plays a black-and-white rerun of the TV series Combat! The opening credits of the show flash across the screen, and the series’ military theme blares out of the speakers. The deep-voiced announcer announces:
“Combat! Starring Rick Jason. And Vic Morrow.”
His dog is excitedly barking at the small-in-stature shaggy figure on the other side of the screen door. As Rudi reaches the visitor, he shouts at Bandit to calm down, grabs him by his collar, and pulls him out of the way. The damp man in the bathrobe looks through the screen door and realizes he recognizes the man on his doorstep.
“Rudi?” Charlie asks.
“Yeah?” answering a one-word question with a one-word answer.
Charlie goes right into it: “Hey, Rudi, I don’t know if you remember me, I’m a friend of Terry Melcher’s and Dennis Wilson’s—”
“I know who you are, Charlie,” Rudi tells him without any warmth. “What do you want?”
This dude ain’t too friendly, Charlie thinks, but at least he knows I know Terry.
“Well, I came down to talk to Terry, and the dude at the house said Terry moved?”
“Yeah, they moved about a month ago,” Rudi confirms.
Charlie does a little frustrated dance, kicking at the grass in the ground, cursing, “Gosh dang it, dagnabit! Looks like I came all the way down here for nothing.” He then turns back to the man behind the screen door and asks with a big open face, “You know where he moved to or his number? I really got to get in touch with him. It’s kinda an emergency.” Which, from Charlie’s perspective, isn’t a lie.
But Rudi lies to Charlie when he tells him, “Yeah, sorry, Charlie, I can’t help you with that. I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s a drag,” Charlie says.
Changing his tone, Charlie asks the man behind the screen a question he already knows the answer to. “What do you do for a livin’, Rudi?”
“I’m a manager, Charlie,” adding, “you know that.”
As Vic Morrow, Rick Jason, and Jack Hogan blast Nazis in the background, Charlie goes right into his rap, before Rudi Altobelli can give him the brush-off.
“Well, the reason I gotta get in touch with Terry is, Terry was arranging an audition for me with Columbia Records and Tapes. But the truth of the matter is, I don’t have representation, so if all goes well with this audition and they want to sign me to a contract, I’m all by my lonesome. And you know that ain’t the best situation for an artist. Especially against some commercial giant like Columbia Records and Tapes.
“So maybe I could come back, play you some tapes of my songs. Maybe play for you a little on my guitar.
“You like what you hear, you sign me up and I start my relationship with Columbia Records and Tapes on the right foot.”
Charlie sees Rudi isn’t interested, so it’s time to bring out the catnip.
“I hang out with a bunch of girls. Maybe bring them around, they sing background. Everybody always has a good time with my girls. You ask Terry. You ask Terry—he’s had himself a goddamn good time with my girls.”
Rudi starts to open his mouth, but before anything can come out, Charlie shoots him a question. “Have you heard the new Beach Boys album, 20/20?”
“No.”
“Well, I got a song on it,” Charlie informs him. “I wrote the song,” he qualifies, “and Dennis Wilson tinkered with it, fucked it up, and the Beach Boys fucked it up even more.”
“Look—” Rudi tries to cut in, but Charlie doesn’t let him.
“In fact, they fucked it up so much I’d rather you not listen to it. I’d rather play my version of it. Maybe come back, play my tapes for you. Play a little on my guitar. You know, just make up some songs. I’m real good at that,” Charlie says sincerely.
Finally, Rudi gets out, “Well, I’d like to talk to you longer, Charlie, but I’m leaving for Europe tomorrow and I gotta pack.”
A big smile spreads across Charlie’s face, and he says with a giggle in his voice, “Well, I guess this is just my shit-luck day, ain’t it?”
Now it’s Rudi’s turn to change the subject. “How did you know to come back here?”
Charlie jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “Dude at the main house sent me back here.”
“Look,” Rudi Altobelli sternly instructs, “I don’t like my tenants to be disturbed. So from here on in, you don’t bother them again, you got it, Charlie?”
Charlie grins wide and waves his hand in compliance. “I get it, I got it, and I’m good,” Charlie assures him. “I don’t want to be no bother.” Trying to wrap up this whole exchange with a little dignity, Charlie says, “So I’m gonna go track down Terry—or he’ll track me down. And maybe at another time I can play you some of my songs?”
Finally! Rudi thinks.
“Yeah,” Rudi says, “sure thing, Charlie.”
Charlie gives the man behind the screen a big wave and an even bigger smile and says, “Happy trails!”
Up on top of Rick’s roof, Cliff has got Rick’s TV antenna back up again. He’s twisting some wire around the base with a pair of pliers to keep it in place when he spots the little hippie dude he saw drive up in the Twinkie truck leaving the Polanski residence, walking back down the driveway in the direction of the automobile. As Cliff continues to twist the pliers, he follows this sketchy dude with his eyes.
Charlie’s just about to climb aboard the Twinkie truck when he feels eyeballs on his shoulders. He pauses. Then turns around. He sees staring down at him from the roof of the house on the opposite side of the street a blond guy with his shirt off, working behind a TV antenna.
The men are too far away to get a good glimpse of each other.
Charlie smiles one of his big face-covering smiles and gives the shirtless blond bloke a big wave.
Cliff doesn’t smile or wave back. He just stares holes through the dark little hippie while he twists the wire around the antenna with a pair of pliers.
The smile disappears from Charlie’s face.
Then suddenly Charlie breaks into one of his “ooga-booga” dances, complete with yelled Manson gibberish. When Mr. Manson finishes his spastic dance performance for Cliff, he flips off the asshole on the roof. “Fuck you, Jack!”
Mr. Manson climbs back in the Twinkie truck, starts it up, shoves the broom-like stick shift into gear, and pops and coughs down the hill of Cielo Drive.
Cliff watches him leave.
Th
en says to himself, out loud, “What the fuck was that?”
Chapter Twelve
“You Can Call Me Mirabella”
The door of the makeup trailer on the set of Lancer flies open, and out steps Rick Dalton. Except he doesn’t look much like Rick Dalton anymore. Sonya put a brown Indian wig on his head, which she cut into shoulder-length locks, and spirit-gummed a “big droopy Zapata-like mustache” around his mouth. And Rebekkah put him in a groovy brown rawhide jacket with a Custer-like fringe dangling off the arms that wouldn’t be out of place if Rick was performing onstage at Woodstock with Country Joe and the Fish. In other words, Caleb DeCoteau, à la Sam Wanamaker.
Sam, Sonya, and Rebekkah couldn’t be happier. Rick ain’t so convinced.
But Sam is so enthusiastic about both Rick as an actor and his conception of a counterculture Caleb that the actor thought it best not to rock the boat. So he decided the best plan of action was to be as good an actor as Sam thinks he is by acting as if he’s as enthusiastic as the other three about the development of Caleb’s look. In reality, Rick thinks, I look like a cross between a goddamn hippie faggot and the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. And he’s not quite sure which of the two he dislikes most.
Sonya pops her head out of the makeup trailer door and warns him, “Rick I know it’s lunch, but you need to wait at least an hour before you eat. Give that glue holding your mustache on your lip a chance to dry.”
Nice-guy Rick gives her a no sweat, baby, look, pulls a western paperback out of his back pocket, and waves it at her in demonstration. “No worries, honey, I got my book.”
Great, Rick thinks, I’m fucking starving and now I gotta miss lunch.
One of the things Rick likes about working on a set is they have to feed you. Rick thinks any meal not paid for or prepared by him is a good meal. A lot of actors he crosses paths with on a set are ingrate sons-a-bitches. What’s not to love? They pay you a lot of money for pretending, they feed you, they fly you places, they put you up, give you spending cash, and do their best to make you look good? And still some actors complain. Aww, what, chicken again today? Rick has never understood it.
So during his lunch half hour, when he can’t eat, he might as well get himself familiar with the saloon set, where the gang of rustlers his character leads hangs out. Rick, in his full Caleb DeCoteau regalia, walks the Twentieth Century Fox western back lot, which on this show is called Royo del Oro. When lunch is over, this place will be teeming with crew members, cowboys, filming equipment, and horses. But during lunch it turns into a ghost town. It’s not completely deserted—random crew members cut through the western set as a shortcut on their way to somewhere else. But by and large it’s deserted.
As the actor walks in his costume and his boots down the dirt main street, surrounded by Wild West–type businesses (livery stables, general stores, a coffin maker, a fancy hotel, a shitty hotel), he starts getting a feel for Caleb DeCoteau.
In the pilot, Caleb was the leader of a gang of bloodthirsty cattle rustlers—which the show referred to by the fancy moniker of “land pirates”—who’d moved into the Royo del Oro territory, poaching the cows of the biggest cattle rancher in the valley, Murdock Lancer, at will. And with no law in the town to speak of, the nearest federal marshal over a hundred and fifty miles away, and nothing but old man Lancer and a few Mexican ranch hands to shoo them off, that situation didn’t look like it was going to change anytime in the near future. However, as if the unabated poaching of Murdock Lancer’s cows wasn’t bad enough, events had recently taken a turn for the lethal worst, with Caleb sending snipers at night to rain rifle fire upon the Lancer Ranch house (where Murdock’s precious eight-year-old daughter, Mirabella, slept) and the bunkhouse (where the ranch hands slept), resulting in the murder of George Gomez, the Lancer Ranch ramrod and Murdock’s oldest friend, and scaring off a quarter of Murdock’s men.
Murdock Lancer was desperate. And desperate times called for desperate measures. It would appear Murdock’s only alternative would be to hire a bunch of cutthroats of his own and engage in a bloody ranch war, which would leave many men dead (not to mention put his daughter in harm’s way). Not only did Murdock feel his money was not meant to finance murder (even scum like the men of DeCoteau), ultimately old man Lancer felt the murder of men wasn’t worth the price of bovine.
So instead of doing the obvious, Murdock Lancer took a turn toward the unique.
The old man had two sons by two different mothers (shades of Bonanza), who he hadn’t seen since they were children. And if their reputations could be trusted, both men seemed more than capable when it came to handling firearms.
The oldest of the two, Scott Lancer, was the most impressive in the old man’s eyes, educated inside the hallowed halls of Harvard and raised in wealth, culture, and honor by the Fosters, his mother’s distinguished Boston family.
Currently, in Murdock’s opinion, he was pissing away that pedigree by living the life of a riverboat gambler. There were also rumors of him killing the son of a United States senator in a pistol duel over the compromising of the honor of a beautiful Southern belle.
However, the young man had a distinguished military career, riding with the British Cavalry in India. When he left Calcutta and set sail for home, he returned with two medals for bravery in the face of the enemy and a limp in his right leg.
John Lancer, Murdock’s youngest boy, was another case entirely. The last time Murdock saw him was when the boy was ten years old. After his mother, Marta Conchita Louisa Galvadon Lancer, had sex with one of her husband’s ranch hands, she took their young son and fled into the night. Marta was a tramp the way other people are drunks. It was what she was but not necessarily what she wanted to be. But like a true honest-to-goodness drunk on the wagon, she might lay off her prowess at seduction and her susceptibility to same for a week or two, or a month or two, or a year or two, but her eventual fall was inevitable. In Marta’s case, as Murdock Lancer’s wife and John Lancer’s mother, she laid off for ten years (after the birth of her son). But, eventually, the time came where she gave in to her true nature.
The first time Marta saw handsome Lazaro Lopez astride a saddle, roping steers, she knew her fall from grace, wealth, and position was simply a matter of time. Marta might not have loved her husband, but as Tina Turner was later to sing, “what’s love got to do with it?” Fifteen-year-old girls fall in love with stable boys, who don’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, when wealthy landowners would gladly trade twelve good horses for their hand in marriage. Love is for young girls with their brains in their ass. What Marta felt for Murdock was far more meaningful: respect.
When she humiliated him in his home, in the eyes of his men, she pulverized the thing that made his spine stand straight, his pride. She had played house for ten years, but now he saw her for what she was. A filthy whore who could not be trusted. When he confronted her with her treachery, she saw in his eyes that the life they had created together on the Lancer Ranch was destroyed. Even if he did forgive her, he’d never forget. But even more catastrophic was the respect in herself she’d lost and would never regain. Murdock Lancer had his problems, but he was a good man. And he didn’t deserve a tramp who’d toss away the life he gave her for no better reason than a roll in the hay with some cocksure bronco buster. So once her husband went to sleep, she took their ten-year-old son and the buggy Murdock had given her for her twenty-eighth birthday and ran off to Mexico.
In the border towns of Mexico, she could stop pretending to be something other than what she was born to be. Unbeknownst to their little boy, Murdock spent five years searching for his runaway wife and young son. All to a fruitless outcome. After a dissatisfied customer slit her throat two years later in the back room of an Ensenada cantina, Marta finally received the peace she’d craved since her transgression. Her self-degradation could come to an end, her husband’s pride could finally find restitution, and her son could finally be rid of the weight tied to his ankle that dragged hi
m down to the lower depths of humanity. Since Jesus Christ was the only one who knew how badly she felt about what she had done, maybe he’d forgive her like he always promised he would. Then she could finally leave behind the shacks, cantina back rooms, and whorehouses. A paradise, where her sins would be washed away, was what lay before her (if this whole Jesus business was to be believed).
In some ways, Marta Lancer was the more fortunate one, because Murdock never found peace with his sons lost to him. The old man felt terrible bitterness toward his first wife, Diane Foster Lancer, for her weakness and lack of fortitude. Making vows in the eyes of God at their wedding ceremony she hadn’t the strength of character to keep. To keep a promise was a test of one’s self. A test that these women he brought into his life failed and failed horribly. But at least in Scott’s case the old man knew he was safe, secure, and well fed. He might grow up a dude as opposed to a cattleman and the heir to a self-made empire, but at least he would be well looked after by his China-plate Beacon Hill relatives.
But poor John—God only knew what he’d lived through. After five years of searching, one of Lancer’s Pinkerton detectives finally located Marta Galvadon Lancer’s final resting place in a boot-hill graveyard in Ensenada, Mexico. It was obvious that the wooden cross and her name carved on the board was carved by her surviving twelve-year-old son. The old man journeyed to Ensenada. The last record of his son was his appearance at the murder trial of her killer, a Mexico City citizen of wealth and prestige. The affluent Mexican was acquitted under prejudicial circumstances by the biased jury, who seemed to have it in for Marta. The throat-slitting parasite could have set Marta on fire and that jury wouldn’t have found him guilty. And though Murdock continued to search for the boy, all his efforts were in vain. When Murdock Lancer signed his last check to the Pinkerton detective agency, it was with the bitter resolve that his son was dead. And that, apparently, was that.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Page 15
