Hide not your Talents, they for Use were made.
What’s a Sun-Dial in the Shade!
—Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard Improved, 1750
10 Bob Greenway meets Charlie at the gate in Los Angeles. Charlie hasn’t been in California since a social science convention in 1996. Of course, in 1969 LAX is nothing like it was in 1996. It’s kind of poky, with lots of towering palm trees. Pleasant. There is a band of saffron-robed, shaved-head types with their “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare” on the sidewalk coming out of baggage claim. Charlie smiles; he knows more about reincarnation than they ever will.
They walk through the shimmering July heat to Bob’s new red Buick. “I’m betting the farm on this,” Bob says as he starts it with a throaty growl. “You’re my ticket back in.” Just as Charlie starts sweating, the cool breeze from the vents in the dashboard rescues him.
Bob leans over and speaks with whiskey-rich, baritone authority. “Can’t live in California without air-conditioning.” Bob apparently sees himself as Charlie’s Virgil, guiding the young man through the Hollywood inferno. Hey, let this old guy have his fun, Charlie thinks. He has lived more years than Bob anyway. He turns away to look at Century Boulevard whizzing by. Not quite as bland as it will be in the 1990s. Refreshingly tacky. He chuckles.
“What?” says Bob.
“I expected more steel and glass.”
“You’ll get ’em—downtown. But first, gotta look cool.”
Greenway takes him to a Ford dealership right away. They buy him a dark-green Mustang, the new 1969 model, more powerful looking than the 1966 style, more of a muscle car. “Hip, but American,” says Greenway. Bob arranges for the cash transfer.
Charlie’s mustache makes him look much older. His long hair hides the trim lines of his smooth face. Under the sheets of sleek hair, behind the mustache, he could be any age, maybe even thirty.
Charlie drives the Mustang with a certain swagger, settling into his new role of hip young moviemaker.
Greenway’s Buick leads Charlie to the apartment booked for him. It’s absurdly expensive for something in a shabby two-story stucco rectangle on a narrow side street just down from Hollywood Boulevard. The landlord smells of cheap red wine. He tells Charlie that the complex dates to the 1920s. “Raymond Chandler times, y’know.” Charlie knows that Chandler was an oil executive in the 1920s who read Black Mask magazine and never lived in a dump like this. “Ah.” The musty apartment looks onto a shared courtyard with a yawning empty pool and long-dead fountains of concrete, sculpted metaphors. Charlie thinks of hapless William Holden floating facedown in Sunset Boulevard but dismisses the comparison. I’ve come to take this town, he thinks, not end up shot in somebody’s swimming pool. Especially not an empty one.
“I have something special planned for this evening,” Greenways says. “Get a shower and put on a jacket. See you at eight.”
* * *
When Charlie reaches the curb at eight o’clock the night has already cooled, its dry breath stinging with car fumes. Why didn’t I move to California last life? he asks himself. The answer squirms into his mind like a fat python. Because I bought into all that tweedy, uptight shit. I wanted to be a “significant thinker.” He laughs at himself. I’ll make up for it this time.
Charlie feels awkward in a jacket, his long hair rolling over his shoulders, and his mustache a bit prickly still. After Chicago, the streets of Hollywood are a summer flesh festival. A blond girl in a bikini top and jeans strolls by, her hair parted in the middle, a smooth, deep suntan screaming of basal cell carcinoma.
And then she flickers. Charlie starts. His blond vision has become doubled. He looks away, at the buildings and parked cars. No double vision there. Back to the girl. Now there are two of her walking down the street, clearly separated.
Charlie’s stomach feels hollow. Both girls turn toward him with a puzzled look. More flickering. There are now multiples of them, overlapping one another. He hears echoing voices, high pitched, but can’t make out words.
He closes his eyes, his head hurting. His body shudders. He waits it out.
The throbbing stops. He opens his eyes to look down at his shoes. They are okay.
Bob squeals up and honks, bumping Charlie out of his reverie.
“Come on, kid. Your future awaits!”
The familiar voice helps to bring Charlie back to self-possession. For a published novelist, Charlie thinks, Bob has a taste for clichés.
Bob pulls up in front of a restaurant and hands off the car to a uniformed attendant. “Valet parking,” he explains proudly. Recovered enough to take in more of his surroundings, Charlie notices the name of the restaurant: Chasen’s. Despite himself, he’s impressed.
Greenway addresses the maître d’ as Tommy, an ancient ruin with the gray skin of a vampire victim. His eyes dimly recognize Bob when he palms the twenty-dollar bill, giving him a nod, but it could have been a reflection of the lighting. As they are led to their table, he sees Peter Sellers. Then the young Anthony Hopkins.
“Is that really Anthony Hopkins?” he asks Bob.
“Who the fuck is Anthony Hopkins?”
Charlie reminds himself that in 1969 Anthony Hopkins is still an unknown in Hollywood, despite his turn as Richard the Lionheart in The Lion in Winter. Few would have noticed him then, next to Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn.
Their booth is cozy, the menus produced promptly. The light is dim, to flatter elderly actors. Charlie watches Bob’s older eyes struggle to make out the items.
“Uh, do they still have that peppercorn steak?”
“Yes, they do, Bob.”
“I’ll get that. Rare enough to smell Texas.” Bob waves for a martini. Though their waiters shuffle about with the spirit and grace of funeral home directors, dinner proceeds efficiently enough. The food, even Chasen’s chili, is heavy and fatty to Charlie’s palate from 2000. But the visceral comfort of it helps him get over the flickering. George Burns stumbles by at one point, squinting, hunched. Bob sees him too and leans forward, whispering, “All washed up.”
Charlie does not predict to Bob that George Burns will know more success in his eighties and nineties than he ever saw before, and will even play God.
“Over there,” Bob says, a little louder. “No, farther over. See him—the short, older guy with the thick glasses? Billy Wilder.”
Wow, Charlie thinks.
Bob looks around furtively. “Washed up.”
Charlie bites his tongue. Sure, the guy who made Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot. We’ll never be that good.
The flickering has left Charlie edgy. “How do you know so much about Hollywood, Bob?”
Bob puts his steak knife down and chews thoughtfully. He gulps some water to force the steak down, then displays his yellow incisors with pride. “I was here, you know.”
“Here, when?”
“The last days of the studio system. The fifties. Worked at Warner Brothers. Boy, was Jack Warner a bastard. He ran that place like a drill sergeant. I was one of their writers. Slavery.”
Charlie knows that Bob has returned just in time for the last convulsions of the moribund studios. Variety bannered a portent just last week, BIG PICS DRAIN STUDIOS. As this sunstruck Rome totters, plenty of Huns are waiting to storm the ramparts. But his key to this is Bob, a relic already, so he has to pretend interest. “Really. What screen credits did you get?”
“Nothing you’ve heard of.”
“Try me.”
“They don’t even show them on the TV, kid. Way before your time.”
“Try me, Bob.”
“Okay. Only the Damned. Kinda film noir, about a guy—wants to kill his wife.”
“Saw it! With Dagmar Kruger and Frank Randman.”
Bob leans back against the overripe upholstery, his face slack with disbelief. “Wow, kid, you are good. No wonder you can spin out all those treatments.”
Charlie grins, says nothing. He has made his point,
thanks to lonely nights of classic movies in the 1990s. Bob will show him more respect in the future. They chew their mediocre food in meditative silence. The martinis help Charlie fully recover his composure.
A smooth-looking thirtysomething man appears in an off-white jacket and paisley cravat. His hair sprouts at random angles, and Charlie can tell that he has spent some time in front of a mirror trying to make it look longer than it really is.
“Hi, Bob.” A hand shoots out of a jacket sleeve and meets Bob’s. Bob rises slightly and smiles broadly with heartfelt unctuousness.
“Great to see you, Merrill.”
Bob waves his hand in Charlie’s general direction, his eyes shifting back and forth between the two younger men. “Merrill, this is Charlie. Your studio’s new acquisition”—big hand wave—“and may I say a very promising young writer indeed.”
Charlie slides out of the booth and stands up to shake hands. He isn’t going to let this studio slimeball tower over him, even if the guy does have a clipped Yale accent. Hollywood is full of C students from the Ivy League. Charlie makes a point of inviting Merrill to sit with them, taking some of the wind out of Bob. Merrill accepts, saying he has already eaten at another restaurant, but maybe he can have dessert, fresh fruit perhaps. He turns on the polished kilowatt smile. “How is LA treating you, Charlie?”
“Fine, thank you, Merrill.” Charlie makes the further point of being polite. Even though he has a trendy look, he doesn’t want to be treated as the flavor du jour. He has come to Hollywood to make a serious career, some serious money. He has his family in Chicago to look after, and his legacy of middle-aged frustration to overcome. And he has his secret knowledge, which sets him apart from this world.
Merrill pointedly ignores Charlie’s tone, goes down-market. “Like the pussy here, Charlie?”
“Just got into town, Merrill.”
“The girls here say that there’s no such thing as an ugly director.”
Charlie doesn’t crack a smile.
“Or producer. Maybe even screenwriter, Charlie.”
“I’ll take my chances. You know the one about the blonde from Kansas who was so dumb she slept with the writer.”
They nod. It’s a classic.
Bob breaks in, “Boys, boys! Let’s talk about the movie, okay? You can go out looking for girls later.”
“Sure thing, Bob,” replies Charlie, looking steadily at Merrill.
“Merrill,” says Bob in an insider whisper, “I hear maybe the studio is getting William Holden for the part.”
Merrill has become a bit somber. “Not really. He’s sort of washed up. Who would want to see him as president, anyway? He’s way older than Nixon, even. We were thinking of Jason Robards.”
Charlie warms up a bit. “He would be great.”
“Yeah, but he was kind of stiff in The Night They Raided Minsky’s. There wasn’t any real box office. He may be kaput.”
Charlie bites his tongue again.
“What about using an unknown, making the concept the star?” offers Bob.
“I don’t know,” Merrill says, no life in his eyes.
The man is utterly hollow, decides Charlie. He must have graduated from Yale and gone to work for his uncle in Hollywood. These guys will fall when the cushy studio system topples.
Charlie tries to rescue Bob from Merrill’s indifference. He realizes that Bob has been hurt by studios and even now is sensitive to their power. “You could take Bob’s idea and cast someone who has a Nixon feel to him, the president himself being a kind of Republican, the impostor being a kind of Kennedy Democrat. That way we could highlight two of the stronger presidential figures of the 1960s.”
Merrill’s cool gray eyes show more light. “Not bad. Wouldn’t cost as much. The trailer could make the guy look like a real leader, so that makes Nixon look good. Angled right, we might even get a White House showing. My dad contributed a lot in sixty-eight.”
11 “How’s my boy doing? Dating any movie stars?”
“Not really, Dad. I was at the dry cleaner’s the other day, reading the signed actor photos on the wall. That’s about as close as I’ve come.”
A mellow laugh. “Are you sure you can afford the long distance, son?”
“The studio has me on a retainer. And I get paid for every treatment I write.”
“What’s a treatment?”
“A synopsis of a film. It has to get a green light before they’ll spend money on a script. They have me working on two screenplays now—the revisions for Dick and a big summer action picture.”
“Sounds exciting.”
“Not as much as you might think. But I still enjoy the writing.”
“Listen, Charlie, you’re seventeen years old, you have all this success. Have a little fun, too.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Bye, son.”
“Best to Mom. She there?”
“She’s off at her sister’s.”
Charlie hears the tenor strain in his father’s voice. More trouble, somehow. He doesn’t want to think about that. “Uh, too bad. Bye.”
Charlie wonders what is going on in Chicago. His mother doesn’t usually speak to him when he calls, unless she answers. Then she is distant, motherly but oddly reserved. Plenty of short sentences, and then she calls his father.
* * *
Sunlight and balmy air call to him. Charlie’s body cries out for the rich delights of this gaudy world. But Charlie finds himself holding back. The freeways intimidate him, so he walks around his neighborhood in the evenings, finding a menagerie of hair, bangs, bouffants, manes, beehives. These ride above decal eyes, stretch pants, French thrust bras, brush-on eyebrows, elf boots, ballerina slippers, leather jeans, eyelashes like black butterfly wings. Yet he worries about what happened his first evening in Hollywood, the jittering images.
The Sunset Strip has lost its Old Hollywood connections and now pops with rock counterculture. For the price of a few drinks, he hears Led Zeppelin, the Doors, the Byrds, Frank Zappa, and others playing the Whiskey a Go Go, the Troubadour, the Experience.
In the Whiskey he is listening to a shaky rock group rummaging through chords when a lyric penetrates the smoke-layered air: “I’m reincarnated, brother, don’t give me no other, / I live again and again, hopin’ to find a friend, / Oh, Lord, will this ever end?”
He waits in the side alley afterward for the sad-looking rhythm guitarist who sang. When the lean, stringy-haired kid stumbles out of the stage door, glaring angrily back at someone, Charlie says, “Loved that set! That song about living again, where’d you get that from?”
“Huh, man, what?”
“Living again. Were you in a past life?”
Bleary eyes search the blank sky above the alley. “I maybe was.”
“When was it? Are you living through your life again?”
“I was . . . I was a disciple, man.”
“Of who? When?”
“Well, Jesus, man, that was my life before. I knew Judas was going to rat him out.”
Charlie steps back. “Uh, so you’re in the Bible?”
“I was, man. They writ me out, is what happened.”
“You woke up on a birthday or something, you were back in your—”
“Hey, you tryin’ to work some magic shit on me!” The scrawny figure walks away with jerky strides, guitar case banging the jeans-clad legs.
Charlie doesn’t know what to think. Was the guy delusional, or just like himself? Didn’t seem like a disciple touched by the holy. He feels a bit of a dolt. He will have to keep that from happening again, he decides.
* * *
Dick is not going well in development. Merrill has tried out several directors, some old list, some young Turks. The studio also approached several male leads, but none are interested.
Charlie labors at the script himself, a card from a buddy named Rotsler tacked above the humming typewriter with the mottoes he’s trying to follow:
Funny is better than serious.
Short is better than long.
Short and funny is where you stop.
Easier said than done. His fingers want to dance and sing, but that makes for long scenes and slack tension, alas.
Charlie has been summoned to Bob Greenway’s office on the lot, just off Santa Monica Boulevard. Bob has used his connections. Action Pictures has converted an old factory complex, equipping it mostly with stuff cannibalized from the Twentieth Century Fox sell-off, after the studio got into trouble earlier in the sixties. An office at the studio is the official sign that Bob is a senior writer, though it isn’t much of an office. The cramped window boasts an air conditioner sticking out like a rude humming tongue. The carpet has a sour smell of better days.
Still, Charlie envies Bob his rumbling, wheezing air conditioner. Charlie doesn’t like his apartment’s stifling heat in the afternoons, especially on the dry “red wind” days. He flees to the beach on hot days, letting his apartment cool down. Sometimes he takes his Mustang up to Mulholland Drive to catch the breeze from the top of the Hollywood Hills, looking down over the dim San Fernando Valley, seeing the choking smog more than the suburban housing. Today he gets to enjoy Bob’s frigid air, even though stale cigarettes stink it up. Charlie coughs, watching Bob read his revisions for the act 1 scenes.
Bob throws the pages at his desk, one typed sheet floating too far, landing on the floor in front of Charlie.
“Damn it, Charlie! Good, but . . . that scene was perfectly good the last rewrite. They’re just spinning their wheels waiting for a director.”
“Or maybe a decent lead.”
“They don’t need a name. You were right. A Nixon type would get the box office going. Nobody can figure out the bastard! One day tough with Vietnam, the next day talking about wage and price controls. Where does he come from?”
“And where is he going to end up?”
“Reelected, I’m sure.”
“And after that?” Charlie is thinking about Nixon’s second term, then Ford, then Bush. Republicans without end. But yes, the domestic side of Richard Nixon’s White House, from policy to politics, was kind of malevolent screwball comedy.
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