The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  After a while the music stopped and a man dressed in black whom Jody had never seen in her life came out and started talking about Rosalind. Jody did not like his skinny pinched face, and she did not like what he was saying about her sister. According to him, Lindy had been a sweet little girl, loved by all who knew her, full of spirits and the love of God. The speech was obviously a standard one used for girls of a certain age, padded out with the few fragments of Lindy’s real life that were clean and decent enough for inclusion.

  On he droned about her sister, and Jody, who thought she had her emotions under control, suddenly found that her head was bursting and that she could not stand to listen to another word of this.

  “What a bunch of shit!” she said in a voice that could be heard all over the room, and stood up and walked out the back door. The preacher didn’t miss a beat. Jody walked down a long corridor lined with ferns on white wicker stands and out into the lobby, where a member of the staff dressed in a black suit stood with his hands together over his crotch looking bored. He pretended not to notice Jody as she walked past him and out into the delicious air.

  PART TWO

  FOURTEEN

  WHEN SHE was thirty-five Jody McKeegan lived with an out-of-work actor in a large one-room house behind a row of old wooden garages in Hollywood, a couple of blocks north of the Boulevard. The actor’s name was Glenn Duveen, and he spent most of his time lying on their queen-sized bed smoking marijuana and listening to tapes from his collection of old radio shows. Duveen had been around Hollywood long enough to know that there is nothing an actor can do after a certain point except wait for the telephone to ring. It was through Glenn Duveen that Jody met the producer who was finally after all these years to put her into a movie.

  One winter evening they went to a small party at the house of a record producer, well up into the hills above Laurel Canyon. The place was noisy with people, mostly in their twenties or thirties and dressed in expensive-looking eccentric clothes. Lots of cocaine was being passed around, and after Jody had gotten a noseful she drifted outside to the garden, which was separated from the house by a high privet hedge with an iron gate in its middle. Jody went through the gate to a narrow lawn surrounded on three sides by trees and shrubbery. At the far end there was a white wrought-iron love seat, placed so that when Jody sat down she could see the lights of Los Angeles below, between two cuts of canyon. She felt rich and powerful, as she nearly always did when she had some cocaine in her. This was a nice place to sit. She could only barely hear the music from the house, and there weren’t any rock superstars or groupies or any of the other scum who hung around musicians. The house was full of them, and Jody was eternally tired of their company, so that when a man came out of the shadows and asked her for a match she thought he was one of them, and said coldly, “I don’t smoke.”

  The man looked out at the view for a moment, seeming to ignore Jody, and she glanced up at him. He was older than most of them, and better dressed. Perhaps forty, with lightish hair and thick dark eyebrows. He seemed to be a nice enough person, so she relented and gave him her cigarette lighter, taking out her package of Salems and letting him light her cigarette.

  “Thank you,” he said to her, and the two of them puffed on their cigarettes silently and looked out at the view. It was one of those clear cold nights, when the wind from the east had cleared the smog and mist away, and the lights of the city shone brightly, even more brightly for Jody, full of cocaine and marijuana. After a few minutes the man went away. Some time later Jody went back into the house and found a pillow to sit on in the living room, while people eddied around and talked. A couple of young men tried to hit on her, but she simply turned away from them. When somebody passed her a half-gallon of red wine she kept it, and over the next hour or two drank most of it before falling asleep on the couch. She did not see the man from the garden again, although he saw her, when Duveen woke her up and tried to get her to stand on her feet. Jody did not feel like standing up. Harry told her later, “I was walking through to get my coat when I heard you yell, ‘Pigfucker! Get your goddamn hands off me!’ I laughed to myself and went on out. I remember thinking how serene and deep in thought you had looked out in the yard, and then to see you with your eyes all bugged out and your mouth twisted up in rage, well . . .”

  To Jody it did not matter whether she got drunk and made a fool of herself or not. These were not movie people, and so they did not matter. Jody only had to keep a tight control over herself if there was a chance for her to get into the movies. She did not know at the time that Harry Lexington was a producer, or she would definitely have given him a light the first time he asked, and she would have made room for him on the iron love seat, and she would have turned her eyes on him in a concentrated effort to get him to need her. She had learned years ago that many men are utterly helpless when reasonably beautiful women actively try to seduce them.

  As it was, Glenn Duveen finally got her up off the couch and half-carried her out and down the path to where his car was parked with the other cars, hugging the clifflike roadway. Jody lay across the hood while he unlocked the car, and then slipped to the ground, giggling, while he cursed and tried to get her into the passenger door.

  “I have to pee-pee,” she said. “Can’t I just get behind the car and take a little pee-pee?” While she was laughing at him he managed to stuff her into the car, and they drove home in silence.

  The next time Harry Lexington and Jody saw each other was at the Hamburger Hamlet in Westwood. Jody and Duveen had been to the movies, and were sitting with their backs to the windows, having hot apple pie with ice cream on it. They were both very stoned and eating quietly when Harry Lexington came in with a fairly well-known actress named Susanne Hardardt and set the room to murmuring. Jody looked up and recognized Harry as they walked past and were seated in the middle of the room, where Jody could still see their heads and shoulders.

  “Who’s that?” she asked.

  “Susanne Hardardt,” Glenn Duveen said. “You’ve seen her before.”

  “I mean him.”

  “I don’t know. Boyfriend? Agent? Pimp?”

  “He was at that party we went to.”

  “Which party?”

  “At the you-know, record business.”

  But it turned out that Glenn Duveen did not know the man at all, and so Jody gave up. She was interested in the man now. He had spoken to her, and now she was seeing him with a well-known actress. That meant to Jody that he was possibly in the movie business, possibly important, and possibly approachable. In a few minutes she said, “Give me the roach,” and went into the women’s room, being sure to walk past Harry’s table. Jody knew how to walk. She did not wave her ass around like an amateur but walked with her head high, as if nobody in the room existed except herself. On her way back she was careful not to look in Harry’s direction as she passed his table, but profiled him instead, making sure that if he was looking, he was seeing her at her best. Then, back at the table finishing her coffee, she waited for Harry to turn and make eye-contact. It took only a few minutes, and when their eyes met, she looked at him expressionlessly for a long moment and then turned and whispered something to Glenn Duveen. That was enough. She knew by now not to go further.

  Then, one afternoon a few weeks later, Jody was sitting alone in one of the semicircular booths in the back room at the Cock ’n Bull, drinking a glass of white wine and waiting for Glenn Duveen. He was across the street in the highrise building that housed the International Famous Agency, where he was a sort of client, left over from the old Ashley-Famous days. Duveen had gotten up that morning in short temper and begun grousing about the way Jody kept house, although she was a good housekeeper and when she had moved in with him a few months before, he had been living in chaos and grime; then he had gone down to the Boulevard as usual for morning coffee, the L.A. Times and Daily Variety. When he came back he was furious. According to the papers, men of his approximate age, size and style were being cast in pictures
and television shows, and he was not. He had been patient long enough, and it was time to raise hell with his agent, or maybe even change agencies. The rest of the morning went badly, and then when the mail came there was nothing, not a residual, not a bill, nothing.

  “I don’t even exist!” Duveen yelled, and spent the next hour bathing and dressing for his showdown with IFA. The only thing he said to Jody was, “Listen, do I need a haircut?”

  “You look all right to me,” she said.

  Jody did not wait for him in the IFA waiting room because she was through with agents. None of the good ones would represent her because she was too old and had no picture experience, and the crummy ones only wanted to fuck her.

  Jody liked the atmosphere of the back room of the Cock ’n Bull in contrast to the noisy darkness of the bar, and on this particular afternoon no one else was in the room except a waitress who was putting setups on the tables in preparation for the dinner crowd, until Harry Lexington came in with two men who looked like agents, and took the big round corner booth. When he saw Jody he smiled at her and she smiled back, and after the waitress had taken the drink orders for the three men, Harry came over to Jody and said, “I don’t know your name, but we seem to keep running into each other. I’m Harry Lexington.” He held out his hand for Jody to shake, and she introduced herself. “I’d ask you to join us,” Harry said, “except I’m sure you’re waiting for somebody, and we’re talking business, at least for a few minutes.” He stood waiting for her to say something, and when she only smiled up at him patiently, he grinned, gave a mock salute and went back to his table. After their drinks came, he got up again and came back to her. “Listen,” he asked, “are you an actress, by any chance?”

  “Yes,” Jody said.

  When Duveen dragged in another hour later, Harry and his party were gone and the room was full of loudly talking prosperous and successful movie people, but she had Harry’s business card in her pocket, the card which identified him as a genuine producer. Business cards are a dime a dozen, but Harry’s telephone number was the same as Meador Studios, 464-0056. He might still be a phony but at least he was a legitimate phony, and he had asked Jody to call him next week during business hours. She did not mention any of this to Duveen, who was sullen and quiet for hours, and then, at home, full of dope and self-pity, began crying and told her that he had barely managed to stay on IFA’s client list.

  FIFTEEN

  HARRY LEXINGTON did not expect anything to come of Jody’s visit to his office, although he was certain that she would show up, and she did. That year he was officed on the third floor of the old Writers Building, just inside the Olive Street gate to the lot, and at this stage of his current production he wanted to save as much money as possible, so he did not have a secretary, just a suite of three rooms, with the entrance through the middle room and his office on the left. Later on, if the project went, a director would probably occupy the other office, and by then of course they would have a secretary.

  At this point, Harry’s project consisted of a screen treatment, an okay from the production head of the studio to go ahead to screenplay, and tentative approval to start preliminary casting and budgeting, with the assistance of the production department. The treatment was twelve pages of vague and overdramatic prose, describing an almost routine cops-and-robbers thriller, just barely a cut above movie-for-television material, but what the treatment said and what Harry intended his production unit to shoot were not necessarily the same thing. Harry was forty-six years old and had been in and around the movies all his adult life. He knew that getting financing required one approach, and making successful films another.

  The writer of the screenplay, Wilbur Garton, was sitting at home in Marina del Rey, assembling a screenplay that Harry believed would put them all into the big money, if only they were terribly lucky and worked terribly hard. Wilbur was an excellent film writer, but one who had a tendency to write hard in first drafts and then chicken out later, softening characters, eliminating scenes that might cause controversy and toning down the language. This was a highly successful formula used by many film writers, and Harry did not mind at all. He intended to film Wilbur’s first draft, with certain inflexions of his own.

  There actually was a part in the film for a woman of about Jody’s age and description and Harry actually was having a difficult time casting the part in his mind. The character was that of a waitress in a small roadside restaurant. The three principals have already robbed a bank and, after various adventures, think they are safely away from harm. They are sitting in Jody’s restaurant breathing easy and having lunch when two cops come in for coffee, become suspicious and get the drop on the gang. All would have been lost if Jody hadn’t taken a shotgun from under the counter and held it on the cops. Then she joins the gang and is with them until the end. The woman has to be tough, hard, beautiful, but capable of playing the fact that she is stuck in this out-of-the-way gas station, and capable of playing the sudden change of character that leads her to reach under the counter for the shotgun, without blowing credulity. The studio thought this was a weak place in the story, and so did Wilbur, but Harry secretly felt that it was one of the bustout moments which made the picture worth shooting. He certainly wished he could find somebody good enough to play the part but cheap enough to cast. To bring in a name actress for this role would be to give away his game-plan.

  As for Jody, she certainly had the look. She was beautiful all right, but you got the feeling that her beauty was assumed rather than real, almost an act of will; and underlying it was an animality, a fierceness, an independence, that Harry wished he could get onto the screen. But he was too experienced to hope. People who were marvels of charisma off screen often turned out to be dull and nervous once the cameras started to roll. So Harry’s mind was divided: first, he wanted, hoped that this girl could carry off the role. On the other hand he knew she wouldn’t be able to act (or she would have some credits, a woman her age) and so what he wanted was to fuck her. He assumed that she knew this, and if she showed it was both to read for the part and to allow him to make a pass at her.

  But Harry had never done anything like this before. He had always been strictly professional in his relationships with actors, not out of any special rectitude but because the people he knew who did use their professional status to get laid irritated and annoyed him. It was contemptible, really, to take advantage of the fact that there are hundreds of pretty girls in Hollywood for every acting job and that many of these girls have no money and very little intelligence and next to no talent. It took a special kind of arrogance to seduce these young people with no intention of offering them work.

  So Harry did not like himself very much when, at ten o’clock on Monday morning, there was Jody McKeegan in his office, all dressed and beautiful and shiny with expectation. Oddly, he felt even worse when she did not look around his office with surprise and say, “Just us? Where are the casting people? Where is the director?”—which is what she might have said if she had had any real experience. But instead she sat opposite his desk and smiled at him with a heartbreakingly wise and wonderful grin and said, “I hope I’m not too late.” He would have felt much better if she had gushed over his last picture and touched his hand and pretended to be shy.

  “I only have a few pages of what you might call first draft screenplay,” he said to her. He shuffled through his papers looking for the right scene. “Ah, here it is,” he said. He described the character of Helen the waitress to her and Jody laughed.

  “I’ve been a waitress, God knows, but I never took a shotgun to anybody, at least not yet.” She slowly read the two pages he finally handed to her, and then looked up at him and said, “Do you want me to just read her lines?”

  “I’ll help you,” he said. He wished the whole interview was over. This was the most unprofessional thing he had ever done in his life. He felt like a shit. “All right,” he said, “just take it easy and read the lines just for the sound, don’t worry about th
e sense.”

  Jody put the pages on the desk where she could see them and then put her hands on her lap, seeming to steady herself, and then what happened next Harry was never able to figure out. As he remembered it, she seemed first to get a little larger, just sitting there in the chair, and when she spoke the hairs on the back of his neck stiffened, not that the quality or tone of the voice was so different, but that it seemed to be the voice of a different person coming out of her. Harry was used to actors’ ability to mimic other people’s voices but this wasn’t the same, yet he did not know why it was not the same. He kept telling himself furiously as Jody read and reread the scene that if she could act as well as she seemed to be acting, he would have known about her before.

  “That will be fine, thank you,” he said at last. His face felt flushed and he was very nervous. He did not know what to tell her. She had changed from one person to another right in front of him and he did not know whether it was acting ability or his own overreacting imagination, guiltily imputing great talent to her because he did not have the guts to grab her and throw her onto the couch.

  “Thank you very much for the reading,” Jody said and stood up. She held her hand out for him to shake.

  He stood up and took her hand and said, “Don’t you have any film?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I think you ought to have a screen test,” he said. “You seem pretty good.”

  “Thank you very much,” she said.

  “Have dinner with me,” he blurted, and blushed.

  SIXTEEN

  THE CHATEAU Bercy was only a few blocks from Glenn Duveen’s house, but remote and isolated from the shabby neighborhood it dominated. When she had been living with Duveen, Jody often passed the hotel’s glass-and-wrought-iron entrance on her way to the big all-night Hughes Market on Highland. The hotel was built in the twenties in the type of architecture known then as Mizener Spanish: red tile roofs, moorish arches and creamy stucco walls. Jody had several times peeked in through the wrought-iron windows to the big living room, filled with massive wooden furniture, Persian rugs and a big dark grand piano over in one corner, hoping to see movie people, because this hotel was famous for the New York and British talent who used it as their home while they worked on pictures. It was not exactly the place she would have chosen for herself—the Beverly Hills Hotel was more to her liking—but when Harry Lexington asked her to visit him in his permanent suite on the eighth floor, she decided that if things progressed to the point where he asked her to live with him she would accept.