From close up, Tobey Hatch was maybe sixty-eight or sixty-nine. He was also clearly sick or quite exhausted, and over the weekend he would tire easily, leaving the others alone. But at least the smallness of the dogs made total sense now. Against Andy they were like specks of color and motion. Sitting next to and licking various unclothed parts of Tobey’s well-put-together little body, they were appropriately-sized pets.
The three had to be indoors most of the time because of the strong sun’s effects on the chemo Tobey was still taking. Victor would never learn where the cancer had begun in him nor when. He was such a cheerful guy that Andy Grant’s wild-sounding prediction came true. That whole weekend they had fun. Had fun indoors and out. Had fun driving around town in the oversized Olds 98, Tobey sitting on a specially upholstered seat, “So I can see over the dashboard and not mow anyone down—at least not accidentally!” he added with mischief in his green eyes.
That first night, when Tobey retired before the others, he said, “You’re staying in Miss Roger’s suite, right?”
“I don’t have to,” Victor said. “I could sleep out here,” meaning one of the long living room sofas.
“No. She’d want it,” Tobey declared with authority.
The following day, when they were alone, Tobey confided, “The first time I spent any time with Miss Rogers, I inadvertently walked away with one of her little pink stationery pads. It read ‘From the Desk of . . . .’ well, you know Who.”
“Were you mortified?” Victor asked.
“For about a Baptist minute,” Tobey giggled. “For the next six months I left messages all around the city, using her stationery.”
Later that night, Victor commented to Andy about Tobey’s using “Miss” so much about the actress.
“Well, he’s completely inaccurate. She married three times, you know. Although the truth is she was slurping on Howard Hughes’s pole long enough, hoping to become Mrs. Hughes. But after that first adolescent marriage and divorce, clever Howard played the field forever after, and never got hitched again.”
“You know this how? A tell-all biography?”
“There are a few of those. No, I know his nephew. The one Howard turned queer when the boy was sixteen? Just like Hughes’s gay movie director uncle turned him onto fellatio when young Howard was fourteen. Don’t shake your head. It’s a known fact that Hughes didn’t have vaginal intercourse until he was forty.”
“I’ll believe all that when I hear the nephew tell it to me in person.”
“It’ll happen. I’ll throw you two together some time. He’s eighty-four or so. He lives up in one of those very old posh nabes in the Ess-Eff Valley.” (San Fernando)
While Andy was at last cleaning the pool, Tobey drew Victor inside the very deliberately “cottage-y” kitchen with its cleverly cross-hatched-everything when not ceramic-everything-else. “Look at these Polaroids I found.”
They were from about the year 1960 or so, and they showed a forty years younger and not much physically different Tobey Hatch wearing an “arty” too-big beret, tight, striped sailor’s shirt, and body-hugging toreador pants with big Keds sneakers.
“Wasn’t I a sight?”
“Are you kidding? Look how cute you were! I would have gone after you!”
“Gotten me too. I was so horny!”
He pulled out a dozen more, all from the same period, all showing himself among young men and a few young women.
“That’s when I met Miss Rogers. I was a film chorine then. A dance gypsy. We all were. Well that lasted about a Protestant second for me. They just kept wanting to cast me in what they called ‘novelty roles.’ Because of my height. Or rather my lack thereof.”
“Prejudiced bastards.”
“Well, it is Show Biz,” Tobey said in a tone of religious finality. “So while that lifelong dream was slowly strangling on the vine, I’d begun to fix some of the girls’ hair in the companies. Some of those dizzy broads couldn’t comb-out a shampoo or make a French Bun that didn’t look like a dog’s turd. But I could. Easy. Frosting hair was big then. Cut Italian-boy short in back. Gina Lollabridgida bangs in front. With blonde frosting. I learned how to do that in a cinch, and even the dance boys started to coming to me for what they called ‘The Surfer Look.’ Right. Surfing Selma Avenue for twenty bucks a suck! Well, after a while, I decided to charge money and they all paid, without even blinking. Then one film, where I had like about fifteen seconds onscreen, the hair lady left and all the gypsies said to the producer ‘Hire Tobey. He redoes our hair after she does anyway.’ So they did hire me.”
“Wow!”
“Funny, huh? So there’s Miss Rogers on the studio lot, two buildings down, and she sees all these frosted kids and she’s perpetually worried about her hair. I mean, to look at it you’d think it’s perfect, but take it from me, her hair was like another entire personality altogether. Yes, that much trouble! Not to mention that she’s now En-El-Why.”
“No Longer Young,” Victor parsed it.
“Eggs-act-ly! So she has me come see her in make-up and she doesn’t want ‘frosting.’ What she wants is ‘touching up’ because that perfect yellow helmet is beginning to go dark on her and not just at the roots. Uh-huh! I am telling you! And Miss Rogers is freaked about it as she believes her yellow hair is now her fortune. At least that’s what she thinks.
“Well, I am so very nervous I almost spill my entire color tray all over her head the first time. But I take a good look at her hair and it’s like ten different types of blonde. So, of course, it’s going to darken in time, naturally.
“But not if Miss Rogers has any say-so in the matter. And she does. So I begin, quote, touching-her-up and the film-stock for whatever film she’s in is some kind of new Mescal-Color. When the film premieres, everyone else’s hair comes out yellow-green and yellow-red, except Miss Rogers, who is as blonde in 1960 as she was in The Barkleys of Broadway.
“The next day, I get out of bed and go to get my newspaper and what do I see but a shiny new cream and aqua Nash Metropolitan automobile parked on the curb in front, with a big satin bow on it and a card containing keys and from, you guessed who, Miss Rogers.
“It was the absolute perfect size for me. And the colors were my faves too,” Tobey said.
Victor had to laugh, he could picture it so well.
“So, when The Movies got tired of her, and she began to go on the road in live shows, well, she hired me.”
“To ‘touch-up’?”
“And that’s what I did, until several years ago. Traveled all over the country, all over the world, as part of her Hello Dolly stage company. I even did her mother’s hair. Because you know that stage mother was around, I swear, almost to the very end. She simply would not up and die!”
Tobey giggled. They both giggled.
Then Tobey mused: “I guess it was . . . some sort of a life. Even though I never did become the new Fred Astaire like I wanted.”
“It sounds like a perfectly fabulous life to me,” Victor said in all sincerity. “People would kill to have had that life, and you very well know it, Tobey Hatch! Now we’ve only got fifteen minutes till dinner and I want to know who was she dating then? Year by year.”
“Well, by then she’d gone through Hollywood—the last husband was Jacques Bergerac. Remember him? Utterly dreamy! But I swear, half her age! So she’d turned to foreign money! And I mean foreign. Cuban. Venezuelan. There was this Brazilian millionaire . . . “ Tobey began. “Hung like a donkey.
“When she dumped him, he came after me! Can you believe it? A total bisexual! I can tell you that was one extremely carefully backdoor affair he and I had. But, what is it Greer Garson used to say? ‘The only good thing about playing the “other woman” is that you always get to wear the best jewelry’!
“Of course some hustler boy got away with most of those baubles ten years later. Fucked me good, robbed me, and took off with my jewelry case. He probably pawned it all for gas money, thi
nking it was costume crap!”
Tobey Hatch almost fell over laughing at the memory.
CHAPTER THIRTY-one
“Today will be a ‘Meet and Greet’ at Warner Brothers,” Dmitrios Juenger said when Victor met him at the glassy front lobby of 9000 Sunset. “And of course, you’re dressed properly, casual yet businesslike. I can’t tell you how bad these actor-children of mine are. I’ve got to literally go through their wardrobes and pick out what they can and cannot wear at auditions and meetings. But you’re a Man of the World, so I knew you would instinctively know.”
He nattered on as they dropped down to the underground parking, where Dmitrios’s pale green current model year Mercedes Benz CLK-320 Coupe was waiting. When he’d first seen the expensive car—it cost what? five times the price of Victor’s “Rice-Rocket”?—and whistled the younger man had stopped, made a mock serious face, and said, “When the Parking Valet brings it up, no matter what bullshit line I’ve just given them, I’m, like, totally vindicated.”
“Them” meaning the various people Dmitrios had met one way or another, over the past year or more, with some connection to feature film or television, mostly encountered socially, or because one of his boys had auditioned well for them. Earlier this week, he’d put together a tentative list of several such people. All of them were “in a position to offer or buy,” and they would be visiting them over the next several weeks in hopes of getting someone interested in the film or television rights to Victor’s hit novel, Never Can Say Goodbye.
That there were so many was, according to his new Entertainment Rights Manager, a testament to the power of Victor’s name as an author. Victor however was certain that few of them actually knew who he was or had read any of his books. It was more like they vaguely recalled his name from years of perusing airport paperback racks, where they would invariably see one of his and buy someone else’s.
In some cases, Dmitrios admitted, they in all likelihood didn’t even know that, but were instead open to anyone with his track record for turning out books and getting them published.
The younger man was certainly unstinting in his activity on Victor’s behalf. In return, he’d asked Victor to do some work beforehand “on spec” (that is, without pay) on the book, making it easier for him to “pre-sell” or at least present it. This meant that for every fat copy of the trade paperback they would leave with someone, with its first four pages of fabulous quotes and its bright gold stripe across the top declaring it the winner of a literary prize Victor was sure they’d never heard of, they would also receive one of several new précis he’d prepared. One was as short as three pages of widely spaced text for the least lexic among them; the others ranged up to as many as ten more ordinarily spaced pages condensing the book’s material. All of these spelled out the setting, time, and major characters, as well as a selling log-line or instant description they could then present to their own superiors. No matter the length, each précis was laid out in three “acts,” saving the prospective buyer from even doing this not-that-onerous task.
It was assumed, of course, that none of those meeting the duo would have actually read Victor’s book, but would instead have farmed it out to an unemployed writer, a great enough number of which abounded in the city, some of whom made side-livings or even primary-livings out of doing such reports. But just in case even this short-cut was too much effort, Dmitrios had gotten a trade-off from a hopeful screen writer he’d done favors for, who had produced a perfectly professional “Reader’s Report” on the novel. This, Dmitrios would quickly claim to any new contact “just came in” from some other, never named, source. “I couldn’t possibly reveal who,” Dmitrios would assure them, making sure they knew someone else was interested in the book. Because, after all, why else would anyone even think to buy it?
The several layers of inanity involved in playing this particular game did not too much bother Victor. As he’d told his editor, he didn’t really have anything to do with himself these days and could easily enough waste the time while waiting for a new book to gel somewhere in his unconsciousness: a psychological area he seldom peered too closely into, fearing what might lurk in its depths; and worse, at other times, fearing nothing resembling depth lurked there at all.
In some ways, he was having fun doing all this—fun of an admittedly somewhat attenuated and unnatural kind—and Juenger had made enough contacts along the way and was enthusiastic enough so that it even at times seemed like they might actually be getting somewhere.
Seemed . . .
The Warner Brothers lot on the edge of Toluca Lake consisted of a half dozen giant buildings, each side of which boasted Herculean adverts of current television shows or upcoming films. But they weren’t going into any of those buildings. Instead, they took a back route to a parking lot bigger than many Midwestern towns. There, cell phone conversations confirmed that they were indeed expected at the gate—an edifice which approximated what Victor thought surely must guard Area 51 where all the downed U.F.O. bodies were kept.
Parking took five minutes since they wanted to be within a half mile of their destination by foot. That destination ended up being amidst a row of tiny, shabby wooden shacks huddling below the grand sound stages, where Dmitrios assured Victor the best and brightest producers currently with the fabled studio resided by day and worked.
They found the number, but the door was locked. They knocked and the shack seemed to shiver with the impact. Maybe three minutes later, several locks opened and they were able to step in.
The décor inside was what you would expect of an unheated windowless wooden hut. One interior door was left open, another shut. The outer office held two fold-up canvas beach chairs and a tipped over orange crate splashed with movie magazines, pretending to be a coffee table. A spindly Ficus fought for dear life in an icy, under-illuminated corner. The only sign of the work done here was seven giant posters that literally covered the walls, in all likelihood put up for some heat-retention, all theater cards for films which Victor knew had premiered from five to twenty years ago.
“Sandy”—no last name was offered—was anorexic, or at least bird-thin, and she shivered here. Once they went into her office through one conspicuously open door, she all but perched atop a tiny electric heater.
She was, she told Victor, the producer’s assistant, and said that she guarded his privacy and his time. She then admitted that she pretty much also took all of his meetings, as he was “a little Aspberger-ish, and the studio prefers that he not meet anyone directly.”
“You mean Aspberger-ish as in Autistic?” Victor had the bad grace to ask.
She then went on to explain her boss, the actual film producer’s, problems. The more he heard about them, the more Victor had to conclude that they added up to a bit more than that the man wasn’t particularly social. He was downright weird around others, most likely sociopathic, and probably dangerous. “Still,” Sandy concluded, “he can be a genius!” She gestured to get them to look up at the ten theater cards that wallpapered her office.
She was a pretty if exceptionally fidgety young woman. She spent most of the twenty-five minutes while Victor and Dmitrios pitched the book as a film filing her nails, and after that rummaging through a leather purse half the size of the room, in fact so large it often blocked her from their view.
Victor assumed Sandy was in search of some much needed prescription to calm the severe attention deficit disorder so evidently at the root of her personality. But what emerged at long last from that Saharan expanse of a pocket book was an eentsy packet of her personal professional cards, over-wrapped in red rubber bands. Upon them standing to leave, she distributed them with a face so serious they might have easily been vintage Liberty gold dollars.
Sandy said that she would look over what they left. Victor had chosen a smallish packet, but even so, he felt he was literally throwing away a perfectly good copy of his book since neither Sandy nor her producer appeared to be calm enough to read a prescrip
tion, never mind four hundred printed pages.
“Is it major or minor Bertolucci?” Dmitrios whispered loudly in the crowded and just beginning to quiet screening room, then half answered himself, “Actually even minor Bertolucci is worth seeing.”
“Major, major Bertolucci. Up there with The Conformist and Last Emperor of China!” Victor whispered back. He could see from Dmitrios’ eyes that he’d never even heard of the first film, but had heard, if not seen, the second. “This is the longest print ever available in the U.S. for Nineteen Hundred. It was badly cut for its American premiere and never shown in full before. I guess this screening came about because of the release of the VHS version.”
Four hours later, a conspicuously pleased group loudly applauded the ending and sat through about a minute of the credits. The crew mostly being Italians, they were no one anyone on Santa Monica Boulevard and 26th Street would be expected to know or have worked with.
“I forgot how amazing Dominique Sanda is,” Victor said aloud. “He certainly took a step down to Maria Schneider. Don’t you think?”
His younger companion was clearly flummoxed. He had no idea who either actress was. Victor was about to explain, when from behind them a very distinctive voice said: “Maria Schneider was Marlon Brando’s punching bag lover in Last Tango in Paris. And I’d recognize your voice anywhere, Mister Victor Regina, world famous novelist.”
As Victor and Dmitrios turned to see who had spoken in the row behind them, the speaker added, “Whatcha doing back in El Lay, Hon? Slummin’?”
“I live here now,” Victor said.
They all stood as people threaded around them and sure enough it was Joel Edison. Despite the perpetual and probably applied tan, and what must have been many, many spa treatments, he showed his age rather precisely. Of course he’d gained weight; they all had. On him it looked—well, affluent was the only word Victor could come up with.
Justify My Sins Page 26
