Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

by Quentin Tarantino

  He saw him across the set earlier. But set protocol dictates that when an established actor—especially one who used to have his own hit television series—is guest-starring on your show, it’s the lead of the series’ obligation to approach the visiting actor and thank him for appearing on the show.

  Just like Rick did when Darren McGavin guested on Bounty Law, and Edward G. Robinson, and Howard Duff, and Rory Calhoun, and Louis Hayward, and even Douglas Fairbanks Jr. It had been Rick’s place to welcome them aboard and thank them for their contribution. But as of two o’clock in the afternoon, Jim Stacy has yet to introduce himself and welcome Rick. Van Williams did on The Green Hornet. Ron Ely did on Tarzan. Gary Conway did on Land of the Giants. Efrem Zimbalist Jr. did on The FBI. But that little cocksucker Scott Brown on Bingo Martin didn’t. If you’re somebody and the series lead hasn’t introduced himself to you before you’re standing in front of the camera, you’ve just been told, in front of the whole crew, Fuck you!

  Both men have been on the set long enough that Jim should have introduced himself by now. But Dalton is prepared to cut Stacy a little slack. This is the first day of his first series. He could be legitimately nervous. But if he doesn’t get his shit together soon, he’s going to have an enemy for life.

  Well, Rick wouldn’t have long to wait. As he reads his paperback, he spots over the top of the pages CBS’s new swingin’ dick, in his red ruffled shirt and black jeans with the silver studs down the pant leg, making his way across the dusty Twentieth Century Fox western back lot, heading in his direction.

  Well, it’s about fucking time, Rick thinks. The actor acts like he doesn’t see Jim approaching and continues reading his book.

  When the devilishly handsome series lead reaches Rick’s chair, he says his name with a question mark at the end.

  “Rick Dalton?”

  Rick’s eyes rise from the paperback western, and he lowers the book into his lap. “You bet,” is his answer.

  Jim Stacy sticks out his hand and says, “Jim Stacy. This is my show; welcome aboard.”

  Rick smiles and shakes the swingin’ dick’s hand.

  Stacy says, “We’re real glad to have a pro like you playin’ the heavy on the pilot. I just want you to know I was a big fan of Bounty Law. That was a damn good show, and you should be really proud of it.”

  “Well, thank ya, Jim,” was Rick’s reply to Stacy. “Yes it was and yes I am.”

  “And gotta tell you,” Jim Stacy continues, “I came damn close to joining you in The Fourteen Fists of McCluskey.”

  “No kidding?” Rick says.

  “Yeah,” Stacy tells him. “I was up for the Kaz Garas part. I mean, I didn’t stand a chance against him. He’d already starred in a Henry Hathaway movie by that time, but I wanted it real bad.”

  Good-natured Dalton counters with, “Well, let me tell ya, I just got my part by sheer luck. Up until two weeks before shootin’, Fabian was in my role. Then he breaks his shoulder doin’ a Virginian—that’s how I got it. The director, Paul Wendkos, worked with me in the early days and he did a few Bounty Laws, so he suggested me to Columbia.”

  Jim Stacy sits down in the empty director’s chair next to Rick that Sam formerly occupied, leans toward the Bounty Law star, and asks in a confidential manner, “Rick, I gotta ask you somethin’ I heard about. Was it true you almost got the McQueen role in The Great Escape?”

  Oh boy, Rick thinks, here we go again. The same stupid swingin’ dick, askin’ the same stupid passive-aggressive question.

  Rick remembers sitting on the set of The Green Hornet, when series lead Van Williams, dressed in his full Green Hornet regalia, asked him about that same rumor. Or Ron Ely, practically naked, in his skimpy Tarzan loincloth. And in neither case were they good enough actors to hide the pity they held in the corner of their eyes.

  Rick gives Jim Stacy the short-version answer to the question Marvin Schwarz asked him yesterday.

  “Never had an audition, never had a meeting, never met John Sturges. Don’t think you can say I almost got the part—”

  Rick stops short, but an implied “but” hangs in the air and Stacy says it. “. . . But?”

  Rick reluctantly continues, “But . . . the story goes . . . for a brief moment, McQueen almost passed on the movie. And during that brief moment, I—apparently—was on a list of four.”

  Stacy’s eyebrows rise and he leans in even closer. “You and who?”

  “Me and the three Georges: Peppard, Maharis, and Chakiris.”

  Stacy winces in pain and instinctively hits Rick on his shoulder and says, “Oh man, that’s gotta hurt. Against those three faggots, you would’ve definitely got it. I mean Paul Newman—maybe not—but the fuckin’ Georges?”

  A fed-up Rick answers quickly back, “Well, I didn’t get it. McQueen did it. And frankly . . . I never stood a chance.”

  Stacy laughs and nods his head, but then says, “Still . . .” and pantomimes sticking a knife in his heart and twisting the blade.

  Rick looks at the grinning prick sitting next to him for a beat or two, then asks him:

  “Hey, Jim, I was wonderin’ . . . whaddaya think of my mustache?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Medal of Valor

  When Cliff was discharged from the military after World War Two, he had money and two Medals of Valor in his pocket. He also had to decide what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Which, frankly, for the last few years wasn’t a decision he ever really thought he’d have to make. While Cliff was in Sicily during the war, he thought it was very likely he would die over there. However, once he was transferred to the Philippines to fight alongside the Filipino guerrillas against the occupying Japanese military, he was fucking positive he was never going to see home again. And then, once he was captured by the Japanese and put in their makeshift POW camp in the Filipino jungle, Cliff Booth considered himself a walking dead man. If, in his mind, Cliff hadn’t already kissed his life goodbye, he never would have attempted the daring escape from the camp that allowed him to lead the Filipino prisoners to overthrow their captors and execute all the camp personnel, escape into the jungle, and rejoin their brother resistance fighters.

  Their escape was so daring and exciting that Columbia Pictures made a nifty little wartime action flick about it directed by Paul Wendkos, titled Battle of the Coral Sea. The Wendkos film was a highly entertaining but hugely fictionalized account of the escape. In the movie, it wasn’t Cliff and a bunch of Filipinos that pulled off the successful escape from the prison camp. It was an American submarine crew, led by their captain, played by Cliff Robertson, who performed the heroic adventure. And in a strange coincidence, way before Cliff Booth knew him, Rick Dalton played one of Robertson’s men.

  The movie dispensed with a lot of the real-life details. It left out Cliff Booth, it left out the Filipinos, and the Japanese in the movie didn’t make a practice of cutting off most of the cast’s heads, the way they did in real life. Nor did it show the surviving prisoners decapitating the heads of the Japanese camp personnel once the tables were turned. Neither was the brutish Japanese commander of the camp as sophisticated, debonair, intellectual, and honorable as the one portrayed in the movie.

  Shit, Cliff thought when he saw the movie, if that sadistic rock-headed bastard was that cool, I woulda stayed put till the war was over. In fact, Cliff Booth thought Cliff Robertson was the prick in the movie. He later admitted to Rick (who loved the movie), “The goddamn movie practically had me rootin’ fer the fuckin’ Japs.”

  Nevertheless, the details of the escape itself were more or less accurate. However, since Cliff was damn near positive he was never gonna leave the jungle alive, now that he had, his survival proved to be a mite inconvenient. When it came to what he was going to do with the rest of his life, Cliff knew fuck all.

  First things first, he wasn’t in any hurry to return to the United States. So once he was discharged, he thought he’d visit Paris. And it was from hanging around Paris a few months, e
ating cheese and baguettes and drinking red wine like it was Coca-Cola, that he was first introduced to a profession that before the war he was completely ignorant of: “gentleman of leisure.”

  A profession more commonly referred to as “pimp.” Like a lot of American men of Cliff’s era, the whole concept of pimping was completely foreign to them. They understood the concept of a madam who ran a brothel. But in Paris, Cliff met these French fellas called le maquereau, or Maqs for short (pronounced in English as “macs”). These French fellas dressed sharp, hung around in bars all day, and put women on the street to sell their pussy for money, who then gave the money to the maq. To an American male at the time, the idea of a woman selling her pussy, then giving the money to a man, was a mind-blower. But these French fellas had it all worked out to a science. Due to Cliff’s good looks, he’d been manipulating women to do things against their best interests his whole life. Getting them to offer up the pink, that was easy. But to get them to sell the pink, and then give him the cash? Man, that was manipulation on a whole other level. If he could figure out how these French fellas were doing it, this was something he could do when he got back home. So Cliff got to know a couple of these cats.

  “What does the girl get out of the arrangement?” Cliff asked. The French fella explained it to Cliff like this:

  “The women pay you to take care of them. And you do take care of them. You protect them. From customers, cops, hoodlums, and other women. You take them out and you show them off. Yeah, they give you money, but you spend a lot of the money on them. You could just give them a cut of what they make, but that’s not romantic. And eventually they’ll wise up, and when they wise up, they resent it. But if you take the money they make and spend a lot of it on them, buying them stuff they like, dresses, perfume, jewelry, wigs, pantyhose, magazines, chocolate, and take them to places they like to go, restaurants, bars, cinemas, dancing, they forget it’s their money. As long as they do what Daddy says, Daddy takes care of them.”

  “There’s gotta be more to it than that?” Cliff asked.

  “Do not underestimate the desire for a woman to have a daddy take care of them,” the French maq said.

  “Nevertheless, you’re right,” the maq admitted. “There is more to it than that. There’s one thing more important than anything else. For instance, finding the right type of girl is important. But even as important as that is, there’s one thing more important.

  “There are a lotta guys out there who can turn a woman out, but to keep them turned out? That’s the mark of a true maq. And then turn out multiple women, and keep them turned out? That’s a real motherfucking maq. And to do that, it requires you to do one thing above everything else.”

  “What’s the secret?” Cliff asked.

  “Simple,” said the maq. “Fuck ’em good. Fuck ’em real good. And fuck ’em real good real often.”

  Cliff smiled, but the French fella assured him, “Hey, that’s harder than it sounds. You can’t fuck ’em like you fuck your girlfriend. You can’t fuck ’em like you fuck your best friend’s girlfriend. You can’t fuck ’em like you fuck your father’s mistress. That’s fucking for fun. This is work. For work, they fuck customers for money. For work, you fuck them for money. And trust me, they’re harder to please. If you want to keep ’em in line, you better fuck ’em good, and you better fuck ’em a lot. Which means you’re gonna hafta fuck ’em when you don’t wanna fuck ’em. But even when you don’t wanna fuck ’em, you hafta fuck ’em, and you hafta fuck ’em good. And the more bitches you have, the more fuckin’ you’re gonna do. More bitches means more fuckin’. No sleepin’ on the job. You get lazy even four goddamn days, that bitch is gonna wake the fuck up. The spell will be broken. And when the spell’s broken, it’s not like, Okay, I guess that was that; see ya later. When the spell’s broken, that bitch fuckin’ hates you. And that bitch doesn’t just hate you, that bitch wants to see you dead. And maybe she tries to kill you. And maybe she tries to steal your shit. And maybe she calls her father, maybe she calls her brother, or maybe calls the boyfriend she had when she was a little girl and asks him to save her. And now it’s him coming after you with a knife, or her brother coming at you with a pistol, or her father coming at you with a fuckin’ shotgun.

  “Or she takes the pussy you taught her how to use, to recruit some joker to kill your ass.

  “In other words, a maq ain’t got no days off. There ain’t no fuck-free holiday for a true maq.

  “You fuck her, and you keep fuckin’ her, you can never stop fuckin’ her, and you can never stop fuckin’ her good.

  “You can’t be bored, you can’t resent it, nobody gives a shit if you’re in the mood. You’re her man and you take her there every fuckin’ time.

  “And the key: different positions. You don’t hafta fuck her better than any other man, you hafta fuck her different than any other man.

  “You wanna know what she gets out of it? That’s what she gets out of it. And you know what, it’s a good fuckin’ deal. She takes care of you, and you better fuckin’ take care of her. Yeah, she gives you money, but, mon ami, you’re gonna fuckin’ earn it.”

  Cliff understood. He understood really well. He also understood he didn’t want to work that hard. He’d rather drive a car into a brick wall at sixty miles an hour (like he was later paid to do) than fuck a bitch he didn’t want to fuck. It’s like that old expression, the only people who don’t like riding horses are cowboys.

  So once Cliff realized he wasn’t cut out for being a pimp, he returned to the States and bummed around America for a few years, eventually finding his way to Cleveland, Ohio. While there, he looked up an old chum from high school, Abigail Pendergast. Abigail was a peroxide beauty who was one of the mistresses of the Mafia-connected hoodlum Rudolfo “Patsyface” Genovese.

  Cliff Booth and Miss Pendergast were sitting in a Gay Nineties pizza joint, with sawdust on the floor, checkered tablecloths on the tables, music coming from a piano roll inside a player piano, and a 16mm Charlie Chaplin movie projected on the wall.

  As Miss Pendergast bit into a pizza slice and gooey mozzarella dribbled down her chin, she twisted around in her chair to ask the waiter for a napkin. That’s when she spotted them: Pat Cardella and Mike Zitto, sitting at the bar, sipping beers, and making faces at her table.

  Oh shit, the platinum-blond bombshell thought.

  She turned to her date, who, since he didn’t eat the crust, had polished off his pizza slice in two and a half bites.

  She leaned to Cliff across the table, “We’re not alone.”

  With a mouthful of gooey pizza pie, Cliff asked, “What?”

  Her eyeballs shifted to the bar. “Those two guys at the bar.”

  He started to twist in his seat to look at the bar, when her hand reached out and grabbed his wrist and she whispered, “Don’t look.”

  His eyebrows rose in a question mark.

  She whispered, “That’s Pat and Mike. They work for Rudy.”

  Then, despite her protest, he twisted around to get a good look at the two rough-looking customers sitting on barstools, sipping beer. They gave the former soldier a clear fuck-you look.

  He turned back around and disconnected another slice of pizza, as she told him, “At some point they’re going to come over here and chase you away.”

  He raised his eyes from the pizza slice in his hand to the pale-skinned bottle blonde across the table. “Oh, they are, are they?”

  Abigail made a guilty face and apologized. “I’m sorry, Cliff, I didn’t think Rudy would react this way. I mean, it’s not like I’m his fuckin’ wife or he doesn’t have eight other girlfriends.”

  “Yeah,” Cliff said, “but you’re probably his favorite. I can see that.”

  That made Abby blush.

  Then he told her to excuse herself and go to the little girls’ room. She started to protest, and he repeated his order to her: “Excuse yourself and go to the little girls’ room. Lock the door and don’t open it till I tell you it’s o
kay.”

  She didn’t understand.

  “Do it,” he commanded.

  She followed orders, standing up, excusing herself, going into the ladies’ room, and locking the door.

  Once Miss Pendergast had exited the dining room, the two Italian hoodlums made their way over to Cliff’s table.

  Mike Zitto sat in Abigail’s vacant chair, and Pat Cardella took a chair from an unoccupied table and slid it over.

  Cliff looked away from Charlie Chaplin on the wall and up at the two linebacker-like fellows joining him at his table, as he took another bite of his pizza.

  Pat placed his glass of beer on the table and said to Cliff, “Okay, fruitcake, here’s what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna get up from the table, you’re gonna take your ass out that door”—jerking his thumb behind him, pointing at the door—“and if either me or him”—moving his thumb between Mike and himself—“sees you hangin’ ’round Miss Abigail again, you’re gonna visit the hospital for a long time.”

  Cliff continued chewing his slice of pizza.

  “You understand, pizza-face?” Mike asked.

  Cliff swallowed his food and took the pizza in his hand and placed it back on his plate. He grabbed a napkin, and as he wiped the grease from his fingers, he asked the two fellows, “You two gentlemen wouldn’t by chance be of Italian descent, would you?”

  The two dark-haired men instinctively gave each other a look, then looked back to the blond guy. “Yeah,” Pat said.

  Cliff pointed his outstretched finger back and forth between them. “Both of you?”

  Mike puffed up his chest and said, “Yeah, we’re both Italian, what of it?”