The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  Frankly, none of the choices was particularly appealing.

  He was helping her out of the pool when I climbed out by the ladder on the other side, but when I took a towel from the pile and sat down next to Max, Sonny came over and sat on my other side, her hand reaching out and touching mine. We looked at each other.

  “Oh, relax,” she said.

  Karl came over, ever the gent in front of an audience, and asked her if she wanted anything. Coffee, fruit, a glass of champagne? She looked at me.

  “Yeah,” I said, “some champagne would be nice,” and she turned back to Karl and said, “Yes, me, too,” and Karl went over to the house phone by his father and gave the orders. Max and Karl had not exchanged a word, and I wondered if they were in the middle of one of their feuds. On Max’s side of it, his son would have had a hard time getting a job in a gas station if it were not for the influence and guidance, however reluctant, of his father. From Karl’s viewpoint, his father had never extended him any respect because no matter how good Karl got, no matter how much he learned, changed, advanced in the business, Max was always out there a hundred miles ahead of him and everybody else in the goddamn world. Any proper son of Max’s would have had to outreach his father, possibly even destroy him, who knows, in order to get any respect.

  But after all these years they still lived in the same house, even though Karl was a millionaire several times over on his own hook (“He doesn’t have a hook to call his own!” I could hear Max saying with contempt), and if there was the suspicion that Karl was only the instrument to Max’s wisdom, it was a suspicion held by people who had never seen Karl work, or who simply didn’t understand the serpentine ways of moviemaking.

  “Tell me what you think of the champagne,” Max said to me, after a small man in a white jacket had poured for us and stuck the bottle back into its ice-bucket.

  “No fair,” I said, “I can’t see the label.”

  “You drink a lot of champagne,” he said. “Be a man and taste it.”

  I sat and watched the bubbles for a moment. “I had some in San Francisco a couple of days ago that was the best I ever tasted,” I said. “So that’s what this stuff is up against.”

  I asked Jim if he remembered the champagne, and he looked at me blankly. “From where?”

  “The diMorros’,” I said, faintly conscious of having dropped a name.

  “I was out of my bird,” was all Jim would say. He kept looking at Sonny, but I didn’t mind. She was worth looking at. It was only when Karl looked at her . . . I sipped the champagne, rolled it around in my mouth and spit it into the grass.

  “Tastes like shit,” I said to Max. “You own the vineyard?”

  Actually it was nice and cold, and champagne, which is enough for me.

  “I’m sending you a case,” Max said. “To your house up in the North Woods.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “The oil diMorros?” Karl asked me. “George?”

  “God, I’d love to fuck you,” Jim said.

  I didn’t have to turn around to guess who he was talking to.

  IT WAS old Max Meador who rescued our careers back years ago by putting us in a movie. Everybody thinks it was Karl, but it was Max. Karl was executive in charge of television production at the studio at the time, and our management had brought us to him in a last desperate hope for a series. We had had series before, but they had blown out after the first season, and so after a couple of dry years where I lived in a motel room in Santa Monica and did bits and commercials and Jim went out on the road as a night club single, usually limping back with a lot of half-funny stories about small-town club owners, the agency called and asked if we would meet to discuss a low-budget film.

  Jim and I hadn’t been seeing much of each other. He was married and living in the Valley with the wife who had come to him at the peak of our success as entertainers, before we stupidly thought we could ease out of the hard life of clubs and into the insouciant luxury of video, and who now had to live with him during the economy years of only one car and no maid. It didn’t bother Jim, he was raised on a tight budget, but Kitty made it pretty plain that she for one couldn’t wait until we were all in the bigtime again. Meanwhile she gave parties for anybody she could get, and so Jim was pumped full of the gossip of the lower end of the business, where you are on a first-name basis with anybody you have ever seen, even at a considerable distance, and everybody has at least one major project in the works.

  Just then a movie about some rats going crazy and running amok had scored big on a very small budget, so all the talk among dressers, grips, actors and secretaries was about crazy animal movies, cats going crazy, snakes going crazy, killer mongooses, elephants on rampages, whales coming ashore and running amok, etc&etc., and so when we met at the Beverly Hills Hotel, in the Polo Lounge, neither Jim nor I expected much. Kitty had come along, never one to miss a meal at the Polo Lounge, wearing tight pants that showed off her best feature, a perfect little blooming ass that invited you to grasp it and press it to your body, and Joe, the guy from the agency who is now out of the business, all of us trying not to peer around at the really important people in the room, sitting in our booth just opposite the entrance.

  “There’s Jimmy Stewart,” Kitty said.

  “That’s not Jimmy Stewart,” Jim said. “That’s his stunt double, the biggest faggot in Hollywood, what’s his name?”

  “Michael Hunt,” I said.

  Kitty gave me a dirty look and said, “I haven’t seen Jimmy since that benefit.”

  But we all knew we weren’t in it, we were just sitting in it, like half the people there, trying to put together any small deal that would get us the big flashy smile from the greeter and the tablehops from the stars. You could see other tables like ours, with agents in dark blue suits and talent in sweaters and jeans, or even buckskins and beads, things were starting to loosen up in Hollywood, although not as much as later when even the agents started showing up for work in hippie costumes, and only one thing on God’s green earth was certain, and that was that the agents would be picking up the checks.

  “What is it?” Jim said to Joe. “Swarms of luminous green scorpions inundate Scottsdale, Arizona, causing the world market in fake turquoise to collapse?”

  Joe laughed nervously and looked at his hands.

  “A gigantic creature made entirely of petroleum products emerges from the La Brea tarpits and purchases the L.A. County Museum?” I asked.

  “A couple of broken-down television comedians synthesize urine?” Jim asked.

  Somebody in the next booth glared at us through the foliage.

  “A couple of wacky guys dress up like women and fool half the police department, causing a scandal that reaches clear to Frederick’s of Hollywood . . .”

  “No,” Joe said. “Close but no cigar.”

  Karl Meador came into the room, darksuited, goldrimmed glasses and the beginnings of the potbelly that would continue to grow for the next few years while marijuana sapped his will power. He did not say hello to anybody in the room or tablehop, but came straight toward us, frowning slightly as he was introduced to Kitty Larson. Joe was obviously worried that either Jim or I would blow the interview, but he didn’t know us very well, he was just one of the dozens of guys at the agency who worked the not-so-hot clients before they were handed over to the mailboys, and I don’t suppose he even expected to get us the job, but was polishing his handle on Karl Meador. However, the lunch went well, Kitty was fascinated by meeting the son of a mogul, and Karl seemed to know what he wanted, which was to get the hell out of television and into features and begin at long last that endless upward battle against his father, and Jim and I for once kept our mouths occupied with food—the food at the Beverly Hills is really delicious if you’ve been eating your own motel cooking for a couple of years. And so around the end of the meal, Karl said, “There’s someone I want you two to meet,” and then he looked at Joe and said, “You, too, of course,” in a way that meant Joe was
not invited to the next meeting, and we made the date, not wanting to ask with whom this second meeting would be. For all we knew it could have been the director, the writer, or anybody.

  It was Max.

  Jim picked me up in Santa Monica in the Rolls-Royce he had bought when we signed our first television contract and before our business manager got into the act and impoverished us with investments. Jim had paid cash for the car, but now the bank owned it and Jim drove. We got to the studio, which was on Olive off Sunset in those days before the move to Burbank, and the woman in Karl Meador’s office made coffee for us and petted us and stroked us, gave us the trades to read, and then finally came out and said that Karl would not be coming in that day, and she knew it was a horrible inconvenience to us, but would we mind going out to the house? We would get there in time for lunch, she said, and we would be driven out in a studio limousine. As the limo passed my little motel I leaned forward and told the driver, “That’s where I live,” and he laughed and said, “Yes, sir.”

  I don’t know why Karl didn’t simply tell us we would meet at his home. We would not have guessed we were being brought to the old man, because everybody in the business thought the old man was crippled, crazy and retired.

  Karl met us at the door and took us into a big greenhouse full of tropical plants, but the old man wasn’t there. Karl got on a house telephone, looking hot and irritated in his dark suit, while Jim and I looked around at the various plants and tried not to do anything stupid. Eventually Karl found out what he wanted to know, and saying to us, “Sorry, come on,” left the greenhouse with us trailing. We ended up at a paneled door, and Karl stopped and knocked.

  “Come in,” said a rough guttural voice, and Karl opened the door and stepped back so that we could enter first.

  The old man was sitting in a wheelchair, all right, but he was at a small, busy-looking desk and he was wearing a suit and tie. There were papers and books and scripts all over the desk and behind the old man’s chair a window overlooking the cliffs and the ocean beyond.

  “This is my father,” Karl said from behind me. He pronounced our names and Max nodded and said, “Sit down, gentlemen.”

  I had been nervous before, but now I was in shock. I glanced sideways at Jim but he seemed perfectly calm, in fact, he seemed delighted at meeting Max, where I had been trying to keep a straight face. Karl sat on a small leather couch a bit back from the desk, where he could see all three faces, pulled a pipe out of his pocket and started to fuss with it. Without looking at him the old man said, “Don’t light that thing in here,” and Karl put the pipe away, crossed his legs, recrossed them, clasped his knees and then folded his arms, uncrossing his legs, and the old man said, “Stop moving around,” and Karl sat still. The old man smiled at me, his blue eyes twinkling; he looked like a man who would have a high piping voice, but his was deep and strong. He was darkly tanned even then and looked fit and sane.

  “Mister Ogilvie, Mister Larson, would you like something to drink? Some coffee? Beer? Tea? Didn’t my son even offer you tea? Karl, go bring us all a nice pot of tea.”

  Karl didn’t move and I don’t think the old man expected him to, but pushed a button on his desk and yelled “Tea and coffee!” so surprisingly loud that I must have jumped a little, because Max said to me, “Don’t worry, I wasn’t yelling at you, I was yelling at a deaf old man in the kitchen.”

  Jim said, “He always thinks people are yelling at him.”

  I wished Jim hadn’t said that. I looked over at Karl for the first time since the humiliations had begun, and he threw me back such complete understanding and sympathy that I have had a hard time hating him ever since, although he doesn’t often give anybody reason to like him.

  “Gentlemen,” Max said, “do I address you singly or as a team? Who makes the decisions?” Without waiting for an answer, Max went on: “I’ve seen you on television and I’m surprised you were making a living at it, although God knows I don’t understand why anybody makes a living at that business. I’m not trying to take you apart or hurt your feelings, but I want to make clear right away that I’m not interested in talking to the fellows I saw on television, but to a couple of young men who are willing to admit that up to now their careers have not set anybody on fire, much less the public. We start clean or don’t start is the way I feel about this.”

  “What’s the matter with our act?” I said.

  “It depends on what you mean by that question. If you mean to defend, then I must tell you that what is basically wrong with your act is nobody wants to see it; if you are asking me, man-to-man, what’s the matter with our act so we can get better, maybe I have something to tell you and maybe we can do business. Which is it?”

  Jim and I looked at each other but had nothing to say.

  Max said, “Well, you’re listening, that’s a good sign.”

  The coffee and tea came and we all fooled around getting what we wanted and settling back in our seats with the air full of hostility and cold fear. I had the feeling that we had been brought out here to entertain a bored old millionaire, and I was starting to get hot, but this was not the time to explode, so I paid a lot of attention to my coffee. The old man spent a lot of time squeezing his teabag and getting the right amount of lemon, etc., and then started talking:

  “I see it a million times and it is always the same, young fellows with talent work hard out in the sticks and then get called to the attention of the people in this business, who drag them in out of the sticks and promise to make them rich and famous, only the young fellows must not continue doing their act, they must change, because the Hollywood people know what the people in the sticks want to see; so you think, they must be right, they are driving Cadillacs and sending their children to private schools, and you change your act around to suit every Tom, Dick and Harry who comes down the street. You are made to feel ignorant and stupid, they know what music to play, what jokes to tell, what clothes to wear, what guest stars to have on the show, and then comes the big night and you are out there on television alone, dripping crap all over the audience and wondering what happened to the geniuses who thought this all up, because it is not them the audience is throwing vegetables at. Am I right?”

  “You are right,” I said.

  Max gave me a sharp look. “What you think right now isn’t that important,” he said. “Please accept my apology for pointing this out.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He laughed and sipped his tea. “It takes a man to make a mistake,” he said. “Good for you.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  “You, Mister Larson,” he said to Jim, “I have some of your records here and I listened to them. You have a nice voice, it bounces right along, and you are probably wondering why the teenage girls are not breaking doors to get at you and why the gold records go to the other fellows.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind,” Jim said. His eyes were actually twinkling.

  “Look,” said Max, “you fool around, you sing this kind of song, that kind of song, but mostly you sing, ‘Hello, I love you, let’s get married,’ and the records stack up in the warehouses, you know why? Because girls don’t want to marry a fellow like you, that’s the last thing in the world they want, a husband like a grasshopper: what they want from you is, ‘Hello, let’s fuck, and I’ll see you later.’ You start singing that song to them and they will kill to get at you.”

  Max turned his attention to me: “And you, my sarcastic friend. Has it ever occurred to you that being sarcastic works in kindergarten and almost no place else?”

  “It works for Bob Hope,” I said.

  “If you want to spend the rest of your life doing Bob Hope’s act, more power to you, but do not expect anybody to be listening because who needs you when they can get the original Mister Hope and his six-hundred gag writers any time they want?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to crack wise.”

  “Cracking wise, yes, you better forget it, b
ecause frankly it makes people sick, people don’t like to be told how wrong they are or how bad things are, even though God knows things couldn’t be worse. No. You are the fellow the girls want to marry, that’s the real you, kind of slow but not dumb, more like Mortimer Snerd than Charlie McCarthy but not stupid, just the kind of guy to bring home the paycheck and raise a little family of hayseeds. Am I making myself clear?”

  But nobody wanted to speak. Karl looked from one of us to the other and we looked at Max, and he sipped his tea.

  There was something about this meeting that was bothering me, not just Max’s way of conducting a meeting, something else. . . . I tried to think of what it was and couldn’t. Then, in the silence, it came to me: No telephone calls had been coming in. It is hard to tell you just what effect this had on me when I realized it, but I will try: normally anybody in Hollywood who is of any importance has hundreds of phone calls a day, and by the end of the day has a whole log of unanswered calls. In a normal meeting, that is to say, a meeting where nothing is going to happen, the Big Guy, the guy behind the desk, will take anywhere from one to ten calls while you are sitting there with your agent. Often, in fact, as soon as the Big Guy takes a call, your agent will pick up one of the instruments in the room and make a couple of calls himself, and then everyone apologizes for the interruptions and you get in about five minutes more of worthless meeting and the Big Guy’s secretary apologetically interrupts again, because this is an important call: “Hello, Sidney!” And the Big Guy waves his cigar at you as if to say, “Got to talk to Sidney!” And the meeting goes on.

  Of course the higher you are in the order of things, the less your meetings are interrupted, the theory being, I suppose, that the only calls that can interrupt your meeting are from people more important than either you or the Big Guy.