The Oscars were Monday, a week off. Victor figured Carol had called him so they would discuss details about the parties and cars and whatever. Instead she talked about everything else.
A long-retired musical actress her age had just had her memoir published and it had been recently reviewed. Lots of discreet scandal in the book, including that humpy Jeff Chandler—one of the primo shirtless “Indian-chiefs” of the 1950s and ’60s movies of Victor’s lost-in-a-movie-theater youth—had allegedly gotten himself up in drag.
“What a load of bull!” was Carol’s assessment of that factoid.
“He didn’t get into dresses?” Victor asked.
“He got into my dress,” Carol said and laughed. “And hers. And plenty of the other half-wits too. But he wasn’t into travesty or anything like that. Problem is, she’s hit the diving board a few too many times, so who knows what got knocked into or outta her head.”
“So some of these guys were real studs, huh?” he asked, all innocence.
“Some of them wouldn’t leave you alone. When I first came out to El Lay, Johnnie Weismuller had stopped making films. He was living off his residuals from worldwide serials and from real estate, as he’d bought up a good section of the valley. But he’d make sure he came by and introduced himself. And if he liked you—he liked me—he’d invite you over to his place for a dip in the pool. Great house and what would you expect? Jungle-like pool, with lianas and elephant ears and all that shit. Of course, you’d feel safe with Weismuller in the pool. Guy was like a porpoise. Really in his element . . . Only underwater rapist I’ve ever met.” She laughed. “Smooth as glass. You scarcely knew what was happening until he had that thing in you, and it was pretty noticeable too.”
“Underwater? Wow!”
“I asked around—carefully, of course. He did it to everyone. Sort of ‘Welcome to Hollywood,’ where you’re screwed before you know what’s happening.”
They toasted each other with their delicatessen soft drinks.
“So, about next week?” Victor began. “I’m taking you, yes?”
“No chance, squirt. Bobby always squires me around. How about, wait a minute, Loretta Young said she was peeking her head outta her shell this year. She’s not exactly one of the group, and I talk far too blue for her exalted company, but how’d you like to take her around?”
Loretta Young! With the huge blue eyes and porcelain face and long page-boy! God, he sure remembered her! His Mom used to watch her TV show all the time. That would be something to write about in his journals, no?
“That would be great.”
“Course, you’ll be done in an hour or so. With one of the rest of us, it could be all night. But that’s your look-out.”
“I’m at your command.
“I’m not putting her down, you understand,” Carol said. “She’s a nice enough woman. Only, you know, some of us had brains. We stood up for ourselves. And some of us didn’t.”
“Women, you mean?”
“Women. Queers. Coloreds. Anyone, really. The men with the cigars ran the show from their office, and the guys around them ran us. Or tried to. A few of us rebelled. Bette Davis is the big example. Burt Lancaster also went out on his own early. And Cary Grant later in life. As for me, I came here from New York, and it was after the Big War, hoop de doo! After ten years of Abbott and Costello movies I wanted to do something different.”
“They said no?”
She had opened up the egg salad sandwich as soon as it arrived, and she picked at it with her fork and spoon, cutting up the bread into little triangles and eating them last. Her potato salad and pickles landed on Vic’s plate, where he gobbled them up as he listened.
“They pretended they never heard. Then some lawyer arrives and tells me I’m under contact, and I can’t work for any other studio, and Lah-di-dah. So I left.”
“No kidding?”
“They shit a brick! I went back to Broadway and did a few things there. Made a name for myself. They’d never been smart enough to include a theater clause in their contract, so I did theatre. Then I did some television. No TV in their contract, either. They never thought that was important. Shows you how much brains they all had. More Broadway, and by then I was the Mother, not the Girl, so I was scrambling. I had a daughter and no husband. I’ll explain later. And TV moved out here and I moved back and I did—“
“WKRP in Cincinnati! I loved that show!”
“Where big-boobed Loni was the Girl, and so I was free to be the Rich Old Lady, which was fine by me by then because I needed the work and that’s what I’d become anyway. Except for the rich part.”
“It’s a classic show.” Victor said. “You’re TV history.”
“Hoop-di-doo. I’m not going to eat this half. How’s yours?”
“Try some,” he offered.
She dipped a fork into it, made a face.
“I didn’t mean to go on about that.”
“Someone else would have told me, anyway,” Victor said. “At least I got the story right.”
After a while, he said: “So! Jeff Chandler and Weismuller. Anyone else?”
“Fernando Lamas. Always stepping out on his sweet wife. She let it just go over her head. I would’a killed him. What am I talking about. I was no better.”
“You mean the daughter and no husband? The daughter’s father?”
“I married someone for a while so she’d have a last name. But no, it was Gene Krupa’s kid. Krupa was my guy. Only, stupid me, I hung in there, year after year, believing him when he said he’d divorce his wife . . . He never divorced his wife.”
“You’re kidding! The great drummer?”
“One of those guys told me you lost someone recently.”
“The love of my life,” Victor said.
“Then you understand. I mean, it wasn’t at all rational on my part. At first it was because the sex was so good. But then . . . and of course I had to know . . . And then he never acknowledged her and all that, and so she’s all screwed up, naturally, and of course it’s ‘all my fault!’ Except I don’t know how I would do it any different.”
“Right.”
She looked away at the corner or at some lower heaven where the great drummer must be, and her eyes were young again, briefly.
“Okay, enough of all that horse crap. You call Bobby and he’ll tell you what has to be done for next Monday.”
“Monday. I’ll even vacuum my car.”
“Get the tux Saturday, so that you’re sure—”
“I own one, remember?”
“Best. And we meet at 4:00 p.m. Sounds too early, I know. He’ll give the details because I don’t remember.”
As they were leaving he said, “You know, Carol, you should write your memoirs.”
“They’d need asbestos to print it on,” she assured him. And laughed.
Dmitrios had okayed two more not-quite-official-meetings re: Never Can Say Goodbye. However, he would not be attending as they were completely Victor’s contacts, not his.
The first one took place in the commissary on Disney’s “campus” in Burbank, through which a particularly stream-like portion of the Los Angeles River ran—thus the Riverside Boulevard address—and even more surprisingly, horse trails, upon which riders from various local stables passed anywhere you looked, providing a disconcertingly rural aspect.
This informal lunch had been arranged by the lover of a friend of Geoff Bax, Victor’s new book editor. They’d all met each other at some shindig or other and spoken briefly. Geoff had done the leg-work. Victor expected little or nothing to come of it. Still, he was tickled to be in the midst of the famous movie studio with its bizarre architecture of Witch Hats and Dumbo-like winged roofs in what was otherwise laid out like a suburban high school with a large and quite fun cafeteria.
There wasn’t really much chance that the family-oriented, if gay-friendly, studio chiefs would sanction anything resembling his book into a movie, but he
’d mentioned it at the shindig anyway. Via Geoff, he’d mailed out a book and requisite packet with the shortest possible version of the précis: virtually a paint-by-numbers in three pages with lots of white space. This had been read, and, according to Zeb, the guy he had lunch with in the whimsical cafeteria, it had been passed from his unlikely source (The Department of Merchandising: Paper Products) to someone in Film Development.
Victor walked away from the campus an hour later with a full tummy on Zeb’s dime and his own unique Disney memento: a black and blue rubber loose-leaf telephone book. It’s only sign of origin was the subtle, virtually abstract black-rubber mouse head on the front cover.
For a minute, he actually thought it was this Zeb character calling him back two days later when he took the call. It turned out to be Sam Haddad’s assistant, a person of not-aurally-determinable-gender named Leonie, who said. “Oh good, you’re there! Hold for Mr. Haddad.”
Interference from what sounded like the asteroid belt ensued, followed by the very hollow-sounding if jovial voice of Sam Haddad. “We’re having lunch and your name came up. It’s close to where you live. Why not join us?”
It was such a surprise that Victor first thought, He’s going to say yes to the film. Then he realized it was less of a request than a demand.
“Okay, sure. Where are you?”
“Orso! Do you know it? It’s on Third between Robertson and San Vicente. We’ll only order appetizers. What do you drink? White wine?”
“Fine.”
“Don’t dress. Come as you are. It’ll be fifteen minutes.”
It was seventeen minutes because while he did change he also stopped and called Joel Edison’s line. Joel was out and Vlacheslav semi-explained, “He kennnt be gontackted nauw.”
The directions had seemed familiar to Victor. All the more of a surprise when he pulled up and left his Rice Rocket in the hands of a fourteen-year-old parking valet and peered across the street.
Yes! That very doorway to some medical offices connected to the octopus of Cedars-Sinai Hospital had, for a decade or so, been the entrance to the Club 8709, once the hottest bathhouse in the Continental U.S. So, this must be . . . ?! There were the red brick interior walls, intact, although the rest of the building had been gutted and redecorated to within an inch of its life, including the addition of a big cheery outside dining patio surrounded by obscuring ficus trees and other potted “walls” of foliage. Orso had been Joe Allens! Where twenty-two years ago he had allowed himself to be quote entertained unquote by Joe Whats-his-face, the Schlong Ranger himself.
There was no possible way that Sam Haddad had known about that. He would never have told Sam that story, would he? No, never. Nor Frank either.
Victor had wondered while driving who the “we” that Sam referred to having lunch actually were. He and Joel perhaps? He and the screen writers?
He found them outside on the patio, already having gone through one bottle of Valpolcella and enjoying their calamari fritti and fritti misti. “They” were his colleagues, Jamie Drexler and Colin Renfrew. With them was a very pretty red-haired young woman, who, from the way she stared on first meeting Victor, he guessed had to be an actress.
So it was a “family” situation. Fine with Victor. Less hassle than if it were all business. Sam was seated between the two women and so Victor took the other side of the table next to Colin, who couldn’t have been jollier and more friendly.
“I know this place is very old-fashioned ‘The Biz,’” Sam defended himself. “But we were tired of the usual joints. And Tina,” obviously the actress, “is new to it all so she doesn’t mind. Do you, hon?”
“I love it!” she declared in an unexpectedly smoky alto voice.
Ah! So that’s how she’d be in the running for Justify My Sins: because of that seductive phone voice!
“Me too,” Victor admitted. “In fact, way before any of your time, I used to come here. When it was Joe Allen’s.”
“This was Joe Allen’s?” Sam asked. “I always wondered. Frank spoke of it.”
“It was Joe Allen’s and it was perfectly disgraceful. Except for the cheeseburgers and onion rings, which were sublime.”
This led to a general conversation about who made the best contemporary burgers in El Lay, with votes going to In-’n-Out, Fat-Burger, The Silver Spoon, and Hamburger Hamlet—with a preference to the one on Sunset off Doheny. At least among “places where all of us could go,” according to Colin, who evidently knew some seedier ones.
He was looking exceptionally good. His hair was naturally feathered beyond his temples and tucked behind his ears, and in this strong early Spring sunlight, it looked ten shades of blond, all of them good. His face was as tan as a week before and his eyes somehow brighter. Whenever the talk moved away from their side, he began telling Victor about his project, a film based on the life of two elderly British women who, according to him, had lived together alone for decades as proto-feminists and equal-sexers and probably dykes too, in the 1900s in Wales. He went on at great length about them and their biography, which he’d obtained film rights to, and discussed how he could turn it into a film someday. “With some real writing talent,” he added. “Not teenagers whose idea of literature is a Green Arrow comic strip!”
Several people came by the table and Colin or Jamie or Sam or sometimes all three would stand to meet them, and then Victor and Tina would be introduced, too. The lively eye contact all around during these moments suggested that some of the meet-ers would rush right back to their offices and get on the phone where they night hawked as paid sources to Variety or The Hollywood Reporter. (Why else would Jamie spell names?)
As Victor’s Pappardelle alla Coniglio arrived and was being eaten, he reconfigured the meeting as an informal-very-early-publicity-on-the-run kind of affair combined with a casual meet-and-greet of a potential actress: a type of lunch highly unlikely anywhere else in the known universe.
While he remained as clued-in as possible to what Sam was saying and to what Colin, closer to him, was saying, even so he missed the significance of the arrival—or perhaps semi-arrival, as he didn’t stay—of another fellow. He barely came up to them but stood for a while at the next table over to get attention. First Jamie, then Sam, then at last Colin looked, and the last got up and went over to him. Victor could see through a scrim of yellow hibiscus the two of them greeting with European cheek kisses. The older fellow was very European-looking, bull-chested, solid, with the sneering lips, prow nose, porcine eyes, and thoroughly sculpted head of one of the more dissolute post-Antonine emperors.
“That’s Rudolf!” Sam said, seeing Victor looking, and dropped back to his veal piccata.
“We’re not very fond of Rudolf!” Jamie added, taking a sip of wine.
“That’s not so,” Sam corrected. “We’re not very fond of how Rudolf treats our beloved colleague, Colin.”
“We’re not at all fond of that,” she added, giving it even more darkness of tone.
“We think Rudolf is . . . Well, I hesitate to use the word evil unless it’s immediately followed by a film agent’s name or one of several actors’ names,” Sam said. “But he’s not at all a good influence upon our beloved colleague’s personal life.”
“He cheats?” Tina asked.
“If it were only that simple.” Jamie was theatrical.
He makes him do what? Victor wondered. Be beaten till he’s bloody? Eat the flesh of Gentile children? Spit on the Cross? Kite bad checks?
“We, on the other hand,” Sam said, “very much like and very much appreciate one Victor Regina!”
“Who is only months away from official Beatification,” Victor joked. “No idea why the Lateran Council hasn’t called back.”
Colin came back to his seat somewhat downcast but cheered up quickly to their laughter.
As they were waiting for their cars to arrive from the hands of one of the Olympic-sprinter valets in front of the restaurant, Sam took Victor by the arm and
walked him away from the others.
“Colin is a very busy man,” he said. “I keep them all busy. And he’s got his own projects. But he’s a hundred and twenty percent behind Justify My Sins. He’ll be the point man in the general meeting. And I heard you two talking about the Ladies of Wherever-it-is project?”
“Llangowen, yes. It would be interesting.”
“It really needs a writer’s hand in it. Your hand, maybe. What do you think? Could you work with him closely?”
Oy, these straight men! Could he be any more transparent?
“I don’t know, Sam. He’s so good looking. I’d be tempted to—”
“Let yourself be tempted,” Sam interrupted in a stage-whisper. “Wasn’t it you who told me what Oscar Wilde said about temptation?”
“It’s a sin to resist temptation!” they said together.
Sam hugged and kissed his cheek and took off in his sparkling chrome and sky-blue classic BMW 702 two-seater convertible.
Driving back home, Victor found himself thinking: Sam isn’t even Jewish. He’s like, the opposite. What? Jordanian? Egyptian? And look at him, trying to make a shiddoch!
CHAPTER FORTY-one
He could hear music from the party long before he got near Tobey’s house. Then when he did get near, there was no parking anywhere. Cars, most of which he’d never seen before, several of which he recognized, were parked all about the house with no regard to how hot it had been earlier. Among them he spotted the Bentley, signifying that Es and El were there; also several beige Crown Victorias, meaning the Religious were putting in a forceful appearance.
“Hold onto your hairpieces, Girls, it’s going to be a stormy night,” Victor announced as he opened the gate and entered.
Two tall, nearly naked men clad in what looked like the remnants of silvery togas fled backward in front of him, totally oblivious of him, and then flew up together in the air, where one caught what looked like a sequin-studded Frisbee. The other caught the guy with the Frisbee and they fell in a heap on the lawn just as Portia and Cassius joined them underfoot.
Many were the barks and the giggles that ensued.
Justify My Sins Page 34
