The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  I was about to say, “What’s the matter?” when Jim spoke up, his voice so low I had to strain to hear him.

  “It’s all such shit,” he said. “I get so tired sometimes.” He went on in this vein for a while and I sat and listened to him, not having much to say myself, but nodding now and then to let Jim know I could hear him. Life was painful, life was boring, getting up in the morning was like crawling out from under a pile of rubble, etc&etc., until he suddenly jumped up and said, “I want to show you something,” and he went over to a door that was partway open and opened it and went in. I followed him.

  It was a closet, but not like any closet I had ever seen before, not just rows and rows of clothes on hangers, but rows and rows of rows and rows, and if that wasn’t enough to hold all the dresses and gowns, above the rows of clothing were more, a whole second story of rows of clothes; and on the other side, all in this beautiful unfinished cedar, were these cubbyholes and shelves and cabinets, all full of stacks of sweaters, blouses, underwear of every description, and below that stacks of rows of shoes, so that all Bianca diMorro had to do in the morning was come into the closet and she could find anything she wanted. The one thing that got to me was the cashmere sweaters. I have always liked cashmere sweaters. She had so many of them stacked in their little cedar cubbyholes that they were color-graded, starting out with the whitest of white sweaters and going through the just plain white ones to the first hint of a shade of blue through dark blue, and then pink so soft it seemed almost white, getting pinker and pinker until finally, a couple of cubbyholes away you get at last to the red sweaters, and then the sweaters so dark red they seemed almost black, and so on until you get to a whole cubbyhole of nothing but black sweaters, all in all I would guess she had maybe two hundred and fifty cashmere sweaters.

  Meanwhile, Jim was handling the underwear, which was as plentiful if not more so than the cashmeres, Jim running his hand over silk slips, brassieres, panties, the whole works, sometimes dropping an item of underwear on the floor of the closet, a nice thick beige rug, and then going on, looking around like a kid in a zoo. “Jesus, an underwear freak would have to die to get to a place like this,” I said. Jim didn’t say anything back, just kept looking around this closet, muttering to himself and making expressions of amazed disgust.

  “You know what?” he said after a while. “You don’t see any coats or jackets or furs, so she must have an entirely different closet for that crap.”

  It was true. I made a comment about what you could do with money if you really tried, and Jim snorted. “Shit. We could run this show for about a month, with our combined incomes.”

  “Don’t be bitter,” I said.

  “I’m not bitter, I’m just dumbfounded and bored and sick of the whole shithouse mess.”

  We were out of the closet now, and Jim was putting on his clothes. A maid stuck her head in the door and then unstuck it. I waited for Jim to get dressed, and we went downstairs and made our goodbyes. While I was shaking hands with George diMorro, the Chinese butler stood about three feet from us waiting—I thought he was going to convoy us to the door, but he wanted to tell me that there was someone who wanted to talk to me. It turned out to be a tall skinny fellow in a chauffeur’s uniform, with his hat in his hand. He was to be our driver. The studio had sent him.

  We got all the stuff out of Jim’s rental car and stuffed it into the back of the limousine and then got inside. The chauffeur said he would take care of getting the rental back to Hertz. He was to drive us to the airport if we could make the 12:30 Redeye Special, but if we couldn’t he was to drive us to Los Angeles.

  We had missed the Redeye by about an hour, so we slept in the back of the limousine, all the way to Hollywood.

  “JESUS,” SAID Jim, and turned on the lights.

  My suite was filled with flowers and baskets of fruit, and somebody on the hotel staff had closed the windows, and somebody else on the staff had turned on the steam heat, so that it was about one-hundred degrees and the fruit had begun to stick to its cellophane.

  I grabbed the nearest casement window and tussled with it until it sprung open with a rusty lurch and almost pulled me out eight stories over Los Angeles. I commented on this while Jim burned his fingers on the handle to the steam heat. The hotel telephone, not my private line but the one that goes through the switchboard, rang one long, very long, ring. I was naked and had all the windows open and Jim had managed to shut off all six steam outlets before I answered the phone, and it had rung that long ring the whole time. It was the desk, I was getting messages and they wanted to know if I was in or out. I told her I was out and to send up the messages, but I knew what they were before I saw them. Every year, the same thing, every subagent at the agency would send us a letter by messenger congratulating us on our movie, just a couple of typewritten lines in the middle of a sheet of the heavy crackly paper they use, a signature and the typist’s initials below. One year I got sixty of them in two days, all from men I had never met and never would meet. This year it was only forty-six, but the agency business has gone all to hell, I hear.

  I went around the room looking at the flowers and cartons and baskets of fruit. I happen not to like cut flowers, but none of the people who send this kind of crap ever seem to get the message. Jim and I put all the stuff out in the hall by the elevator, and after a while, after I had showered and brushed my teeth and combed my hair, the apartment began to be cool and fresh again. Jim had gone into the spare bedroom, and I left him alone.

  The apartment has two terraces, one looking out over flat smoky L.A. and the other one at the back, overlooking the hillside covered with trees and people’s houses. I stood looking down at a tiny man in a white jacket and dark pants watering a driveway back of the hotel. A mockingbird slowly and carefully went through his repertoire, and from somewhere in a copse of dark pines an owl gave a last contented sleepy hoot. It must have been about nine in the morning, and I felt pretty good. I dressed and walked down the street to Schwab’s and sat at the counter for some coffee.

  In Schwab’s, the place to eat is the room with the booths, which opens at eight. The counter is reserved for people who don’t have enough friends to fill a booth or for some reason want to be alone. Nearly everybody respects this; if you are at the counter you want to be alone. If you are sitting in a booth, particularly if you are sitting alone in a booth, looking nervously at the entryway every time somebody shows up, you want company. Lots of comedians and comic actors at Schwab’s. People with series, coming in literally in sunglasses with literal entourages. To these people one must wave and smile, after all, they sat there a dozen years waiting for the chance to come in like this, who are you not to wave?

  Guys who haven’t worked in years. No more shades, no more laughing gang of hangers-on. There’s always a big bunch of them at the table just to the right of the entrance of the booth section, and one by one they come over to me at the counter, this particular morning, say hello, the hand touching me lightly on the back, and I grin and shake hands, half-standing, and we exchange little jokes, and they go back to their booth, everybody’s on a first-name basis at Schwab’s. Dotty and Dorothy, Eddy, Bob, Jim, Jack, Jackie, Jackie and Jackie.

  Two cups of coffee, a copy of the L.A. Times, a slow stroll back to the hotel past the former site of the Garden of Allah, small silent prayer for the ghost debauchers Bob, Scott, Dash, Des . . . up the slight hill to the hotel, out onto the shady morning terrace in the back to read my paper and get back into the civilized world. I had slept enough, but Jim was still in the spare room making up for the days he had lost, and the studio’s happiness that Jim was at last here in place where he belonged would begin to fade under the realization that now we were here, we had to be worked, and that there would be a lot of executive unhappiness to be gotten through before everyone could heave a last sigh and start counting the profits.

  BY TEN I had smoked a joint, taken my car up Sunset to the big carwash and run it through, gone to the Ralph’s Market fur
ther up Sunset and done a big staples shop, come back to the hotel and put everything away and was in the middle of making breakfast—three eggs fried in butter, four strips of butcher’s bacon, an English muffin split, buttered and broiled almost black, fresh orange juice and coffee—when I heard a tapping at the door to the suite. It wouldn’t be the maid, she wouldn’t knock, she’d ring and come on in, so I opened the door only a crack.

  There was Karl Meador, our producer, standing out in the hall with his hands in his pockets:

  “Hi, can I come in?”

  It seemed he had spent the night in the hotel with a lady friend. I got back to the kitchen just in time to toss the eggs, with Karl behind me. I offered him coffee, juice, eggs, but he turned everything down.

  “Trying to keep it off,” he said, and sighed. Karl had gone through a fat period, and I didn’t blame him not wanting to eat. Now of course he was slim and trim, wearing a silk shirt open to the third button, and you could see a couple of thin gold chains hanging in amongst his black chest hairs, Levi’s that looked as though they had been tailored and washed out for him by the studio costumers and a pair of Puma running shoes. Karl was nothing if not fashionable. During his fat period he had also gone through his dopesmoking hippie period, and he had worn coveralls and plaid shirts to the office. Before that he had been in his Ivy League period, wearing all that three-piece-British boots drag.

  Now he sat in my sunny dining room and watched me eat.

  We talked about one thing and another, mostly girls. Karl was into fucking famous women and had fucked a whole string of them and was always getting into the papers this way, never failing to plug his latest picture. Karl makes a lot of movies, three or four a year sometimes, if things break right, but he is always the executive producer of our pictures since the first one ten years ago (Ivy League Period). He was very enthusiastic about the girl in suite 609, who had come to Hollywood from Texas via New York. The way Karl went on and on about her, she was probably going to get her big break in our movie.

  While I was sopping up the last of the egg yolk with the last of the muffin, Karl said, “Listen, where’s Jim? I called the lot and he’s not there.”

  Jim keeps a bungalow on the lot.

  “I haven’t seen him today,” I said.

  Just then a toilet flushed in the back of the apartment, and Karl looked at me with that hatchetman look he can get sometimes, wiping it off his face as soon as he realized it was there, and said politely with a smile, “Who’s in back?”

  “That could be Jim,” I admitted.

  My private telephone rang and I went into the living room and answered it. It was my lawyer, who wanted to set up a series of meetings at my convenience, and as we talked I watched Karl getting nervous. It must have driven him crazy to have somebody else on the telephone in his presence and him with no telephone. After sitting straight and staring out the window and tapping his foot, he jumped up and went into the kitchen. I heard the bottled water belch as he drew himself a drink, and then saw him through the French windows walk over to the edge of the front terrace and peer out over the side, and then come back in and grab the house phone, and pretty soon he was having a low conversation of his own, probably with his service, because he kept saying, “No, keep that one” and “Give me that one again” and making little notes in a notebook with a tiny gold pencil.

  All the time I had known Karl, ten years, he had been making notes in that same notebook with that same little gold pencil, or else he had a stash of them somewhere, thousands of them maybe, all alike, and got out a new one every morning, who knows? Karl is very secretive about some parts of his life.

  Jim came into the living room naked and said, “I’m hungry as a bastard.” He did a take when he saw Karl and glared at me.

  “What the fuck is this?”

  He strode out of the room and we heard him yell, “Get that asshole out of here, pronto!”

  Karl hung up his telephone quickly and looked at me with big round eyes. “What’s the matter?” he asked. I went on with my own call, and pretty soon Jim came out dressed and gave Karl another nasty glare:

  “You still here?”

  Karl stood up. Jim gave him a dazzling smile and hugged him. “Karl, you old bastard, how’s your dad?”

  Karl grinned, but I could tell he was really pissed off at Jim.

  I hung up my telephone. Jim said, “I’m hungry enough to eat the ass out of a dead mule. Let’s go somewhere and have a nice big lunch.”

  “I have a reservation at the Polo Lounge,” Karl said.

  “Fuck the Polo Lounge,” Jim said.

  “We could go to Schwab’s . . .” I said. “Schwab’s?” Karl asked. There was no enthusiasm in his voice.

  “What’s the matter with Schwab’s?” I asked him.

  “Nothing, it’s just I’ve never been there,” Karl said.

  “Well, suck my nuts,” Jim said. “We’ll just have to take you to Schwab’s!”

  As far as I knew, Jim had never been there either.

  “What about the girl?” I said to Karl.

  “She already ate,” he said.

  “What girl?” Jim asked.

  “What, the coffee and toast they bring you here?” I said. The hotel didn’t have a regular kitchen, but you could get anything you wanted if you were willing to pay for it.

  “I think she had juice, too,” Karl said. “I was in the shower.”

  “What girl?” Jim said again. He went into the kitchen.

  “Get me a beer, will you?” I called out to him, and picked up the house phone, dialing 609.

  After a couple of rings she answered, a nice low voice with most of the Texas rubbed off.

  “This is David Ogilvie,” I said. “We’re all going over to Schwab’s for something to eat . . .”

  “Here, let me talk to her,” Karl said. He came over toward me holding out his hand for the telephone, but I backed away.

  “You want a beer, Karl?” Jim called from the kitchen.

  “No, thank you,” Karl said.

  “. . . Me and Karl and Jim Larson,” I said into the phone.

  I heard the pops from the kitchen as Jim opened the beer, and felt a sudden wave of anxiety right down through my socks. “We’ll pick you up,” I said to the girl, and hung up.

  Jim came out and handed me my beer. He smiled at Karl.

  “Got a little piece of pussy stashed away here at the hotel, huh?”

  “Little bit of the old Texas poontang,” I said. “What the hell’s her name?”

  “Sonny Baer,” Karl said. He spelled it out while Jim and I looked at him blankly. “It’s her real name,” he said. “You know those Texas people and their names. Rip Torn. Sissy Spacek. Candy Clark.”

  “And now Sonny Baer,” Jim said. “She must be a real asshole.”

  “Karl probably wants to put her in our picture,” I told Jim.

  “Hell, I’m for it, if it gets Karl laid,” Jim said.

  “Maybe we ought to call Schwab’s for a reservation,” Karl said.

  “Hey, it’s a drugstore, man, you don’t call for reservations,” Jim said.

  After we finished our beers I went into the bathroom and got a couple of joints out of my shaving kit and we drifted down to the sixth floor.

  Sonny Baer was dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans. She had bushels of honeycolored hair, big deep blue eyes and a grin that cut the stunning effect of the rest of her and made it clear that Sonny Baer, whatever else, was no asshole. She grinned at me and shook my hand and said, “I see all of vour movies at least twice.”

  “What?” I said.

  Those eyes had never left mine, not even once, to look at Jim or Karl. “I love your movies. They’re funny.”

  “What about my movies?” Jim asked.

  Sonny said, “Oh, are you in the movies?” and won my heart forever. Jim laughed and shook her hand.

  “Boy, you got great tits,” he said, grinning and glinting.

  “Give me a couple of mi
nutes, okay?” she said, and went into the bathroom. Karl reached for the telephone and took it into Sonny’s breakfast nook, and Jim turned on the television set. Jim and I watched a rerun while Karl talked in a low voice and made notes. Finally he came back in to where we were, looked from one of us to the other as if he wanted to say something, gave up and sat down and watched about thirty seconds of a commercial, then got up and went into the back of the apartment, then came out again, sat with us for another thirty seconds at least, and then went out onto Sonny’s balcony, which overlooked the front of the hotel and Sunset, the same view as from my front terrace.

  We were well into another rerun when Sonny came out, looking about the same, and we all jammed up at the door trying to open it for her.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. We all stopped and looked at her.

  “Does anybody have a number? I’d really liked to get stoned.”

  I pulled out a joint and lit it, and Jim shut the door. It only took a minute for the three of us to smoke up the joint—Karl didn’t smoke anything anymore, because, he said, it made him lose his feeling of control. Now he just waited patiently. Karl up in my apartment was one thing, he could never handle us somehow, but he didn’t get where he was by being a jerk, and now, with an audience, it was more like the public Karl, smooth, darkly handsome, cool as ice. Karl was a real snooker player, and I should have known there was more to this whole Mickey Mouse morning than getting a part for his girlfriend.

  “This is great dope,” Sonny said. “What is it?” I could hear that Texas burr coming on a bit stronger now.