The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  Lunch was pleasant. Jack was not much older than Harry, and both men had been in the business most of their lives. They knew many people in common and more importantly, at least from Harry’s viewpoint, they shared an attitude toward the industry, an attitude which Harry once summed up by saying, “Hollywood keeps changing but Hollywood remains the same.” The remark had been made to a young woman who had been excited by the sudden outbreak of long hair and paisley fashions among studio executives some years ago. Over their hamburgers, Harry and Jack talked and laughed over the men who had come and gone the past few years—corporate geniuses sent from the East by conglomerates, boy-wonders who sprang from the agencies to take control, descendants of moguls, like Karl Meador, who had happened to suggest Jack Meltzer for this particular job.

  Jack was a stocky man with a tanned lumpy face and small sharp blue eyes. He had a pronounced overbite which he knew how to use to make himself look stupid, but Harry was not fooled and neither was anybody else who had ever worked with Jack. Now he sat across from Harry in the tiny crowded restaurant holding his bottle of beer and smiling slightly so that his two front teeth showed their tips.

  “I read the script last night,” he told Harry. “It’s not bad. Who do you have in mind, anybody?”

  Harry very carefully kept the surprise off his face, and kept himself from asking Jack whether he meant the whole script or just the treatment. As far as Harry knew, the whole script had not yet been turned in. But it might have been, even over the weekend. It might have been turned in to Fats, which meant that something funny was going on. “I thought we’d wait for the director to cast,” Harry said. “Nobody’s tied to the project yet at all.”

  As they discussed the screenplay and possible actor choices Harry could tell that Jack had read the full version, and so he guessed that the first draft had indeed been turned in to Fats, probably over the weekend or perhaps even on Friday. It was even possible that Fats had gone down to Marina del Rey and gotten it from the writer. Harry wondered if Jack Meltzer knew that he had not himself yet read the full first draft, but there was no telling from anything Jack said. He was too careful for that.

  And Karl Meador’s selection of Jack. Was this all part of a plan to hand control of the picture over to Fats Dunnigan, was it a vote of approval for Harry or was it a simple downgrading of the project by Karl Meador after Meador himself read the script? Harry did not know. He knew only that Jack was not a first-class director and therefore had none of the problems attaching to a first-class director—staying up nights rewriting the script on location, hiring his own pet crew, etc.—and so either the picture was heading down or up. Harry smiled to himself.

  “Did Karl talk any casting to you?” he asked Jack.

  “I haven’t talked to him. Fats brought out the script yesterday afternoon, all in a sweat over it. I guess he’d been out to Karl’s place that morning. I don’t really know.” Jack looked at Harry steadily for a moment, drank a sip of beer and said, “Have you read it yet?”

  “Nope,” Harry said.

  Harry shook hands with Jack and promised to get back to him, and walked onto the lot by himself, and just as he was passing the blue-uniformed gate guard, throwing him a mock salute, he thought of yet a fourth possibility—what if Karl Meador had decided to hire a big star for the picture? That would explain Fats’s behavior, Jack’s presence, and maybe a couple of other things. Harry turned abruptly away from the old Writer’s Building and headed for the Executive Building.

  He waited in the office of the secretary to Karl Meador for only twenty minutes when Karl came in from lunch, his face ruddy with health and his hair wet after a shower. “Ah,” he said to Harry, shaking his hand, “just the man I wanted to see.”

  Inside Karl’s office they talked about tennis for a while, and then Karl said, “How do you like my idea?”

  “What idea?” Harry said. He was sitting down, but he wished he was standing in front of Meador’s desk, his hands behind his back, in the parade rest position. It would be more honest.

  “Jack Meltzer,” he said. “You people were having director troubles, so I assumed you might have use for a trouble director.” He laughed. “A trouble-free director.”

  Harry laughed. “I like Jack,” he said. “I’ve known him slightly for years. We just had lunch.”

  “Fine,” Karl said. “Then I can leave the rest of it up to you and Fats?”

  Harry hesitated, wanting to ask some questions; but this was not the time. “Of course,” he said. Then, because he had to know, “How did you like the script?”

  “I never read scripts,” Karl said. He seemed no longer interested in the interview. Harry got out of there.

  When he got back to his office he found a Xerox copy of the screenplay on top of his desk. Alice Wanderove told him Fats had brought it in and left it.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  JUST BEFORE he left on the location survey that would take him to several southeastern states, hoping to find a place that did not look like California, Harry had a long talk with Jody about casting. It had been a perfect evening so far, with dressing up and dinner at Matteo’s, a late swim in the hotel’s deserted pool and then a session of lovemaking that left both of them calm and clear-headed.

  They were in bed, the only light coming dimly from the hallway leading to the living room. It was warm and slightly humid, so they were on top of the sheets, both still naked, when Harry began:

  “Look this is not going to be an easy thing to talk about,” he said.

  “What isn’t?”

  “Well, let me get into it. Please just listen to me. Casting.”

  “I thought so,” she said, and sat up so that her face was in shadow. “You listen,” she said, in her sweetest calmest voice. “You don’t have to cast me in your picture. You know that. I love you. Sure, I started going out with you because I was fascinated, you know. But now we love each other. It’s all different. I know. Now you have to cast and you don’t know how to tell me. Okay. I understand. I love you.”

  She kissed him deeply and then sat back, her face once again in shadow. She was sitting with her feet tucked under her legs, and he put a hand on her thigh.

  “No,” he said. “You got half of it. I knew we should have talked about this before. No, I’m going to do with you what I would do with anybody else. The reason I first got interested in you is that you look like this character Helen. I’ve been thinking of the character as looking like you. See, to me this character is the keystone to the whole plot—well, that’s not something to talk about now—anyhow, you are the character. I don’t mean that she acts like you—she is you, in a different life. Does that make any sense?”

  “Sure,” Jody said. “You want somebody like me.”

  “Almost. I want an actress like you. You don’t know. You don’t understand the pressures I’m under and I won’t go into it now or I’ll start crying, but the thing you have to understand is that even you, even the person I love most in the whole world, even you, I can’t just stick in the picture. I can’t walk up to Fats Dunnigan and say, ‘Listen, Fats, I want to cast my girlfriend as Helen.’ He’d laugh me out of his office. He’d think I just wanted somebody to screw on location, or that you had me pussywhipped into casting you. But I’d never get away with it.”

  Harry sighed, and Jody bent forward to kiss him on the end of his nose. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I told you. It’s all different now.”

  “It is and it isn’t,” he said. “I still don’t know if you can act or not. I don’t think you know either. I’ve purposely kept from fucking around with this thing because I knew it was coming up and I wanted to do it right, so what we have to do, see, is put you in front of the director as a candidate for the part. Do you understand me? You’ll be one of several girls selected for the part. You’ll read for the director, along with the rest of the girls . . .”

  “Cattle call?” Jody asked. “I won’t go on any goddamn cattle call.”

  “No, for Chri
st’s sake. You’ll read for the part.”

  “It still sounds like a cattle call.”

  “Well, you can’t expect to be hired without auditioning, can you?”

  “Frankly, I don’t expect to be hired at all. If you have to go through this rigamarole just to let me off the hook, go ahead. But you don’t have to for my sake. You aren’t going to hurt my feelings. Shit. You can’t hurt my feelings. You don’t know much about me, but I can tell you this right now, you can’t hurt my feelings. That’s all over with in my life.”

  “Oh baby,” he said, and began kissing her. After a while, though, he could sense that she wanted to make love less and to talk more, so he pulled back, wanting to look into her eyes. But her face was in shadow again. “I know you’ve been hurt in your life, and I don’t want to hurt you again. It’s just that this is a terrible situation. Producers should never date actresses.”

  “I thought I wasn’t an actress,” she said.

  So it was settled that when he came back from the location survey, she would have her audition in front of the director. Meanwhile, she was alone in his apartment on the eighth floor of the Chateau Bercy for two weeks.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  IT WAS not an easy time for her. All her life Jody had floated from job to job, man to man, not because she was a drifter but because she couldn’t seem to keep things going without blowing the lid off. She knew that all she would have to do would be to sit still, maybe read, go to the movies, watch television and lay back, and he would return and she would have her audition. She would be competing with other women for the role, and if she was the best, she would get it. It wouldn’t be up to Harry, she was now certain. The director, a man she had never heard of, would make the decision.

  There would be no drugs, because Harry had said that he didn’t want anymore for himself and hoped she wouldn’t have any around the apartment. “Maybe after the movie,” he had said to her. “But not now. They fuck up your brains and judgment.” So she wanted to stay clean too, if only for Harry. But she knew from experience with herself that sometimes the pressure just got too great and she would have to explode some way; maybe get drunk or do some running around. It was just that the boredom got so intense.

  The first day was fine. She got up early, unable to sleep, and on impulse walked down to the Boulevard and had her morning coffee in a little hole-in-the-wall where the only other customer was the fry cook, sitting on the end stool in fresh whites, a thick sloppy-looking man with rolls of fat under his tight tee shirt and black greasy hair hanging out from under his white cap. He was bent over his morning newspaper and breakfast and gave her only a glance. Jody had her coffee and chatted with the tired-looking waitress, and then left a fifty-cent tip on a twenty-cent check. Jody had been a waitress for a while and she always left big tips when she could. She could certainly remember the depressed irritated feeling you got from giving customers good service and getting nothing for your trouble but a bent dime and a dirty wink. She remembered men who would pinch her on the ass in lieu of tip and others who thought that if they tipped ten percent they were entitled to get your address and telephone number. She had never worked in a place like this though. Jody’s waitress jobs had always included costumes, panty hose and high heels.

  After her coffee she walked along Hollywood to Vine, and then on impulse down Vine to the ABC Studios where she hoped they would be shooting a game show and she could get in and watch, but the building was quiet so she walked back up toward the Boulevard, already getting a little hot. She passed the Hollywood Public Library, stopped and decided maybe she should get some books on acting and refresh her memory. Then she laughed, thinking that the Hollywood branch library’s copy of My Life in Art was probably pretty dog-eared by now.

  After looking at some blouses in the Broadway Hale store on the corner and having the clerk, a little man with a mustache and long sideburns, offer to meet her that night, Jody lolled down the shady side of the Boulevard among the morning drunks, the sailors, the peroxided, the red-faced beefy Hell’s Angel rejects and the rest of the Times Square-style riffraff, stopping for an orange juice, thinking about a morning movie and rejecting the idea because she did not want to come blinking out into the mid-afternoon heat, spending an hour in a record store dreaming of buying phonograph equipment and a dozen records, then thinking about Glenn Duveen, whose record collection she missed almost as much as she missed Glenn (and she had to admit that once in a while she missed him) and then on impulse crossing the street and heading up toward his house. His telephone had been disconnected last time she had tried to call him. Maybe he was sitting home on his bed, stoned, waiting for somebody to come and give him a job. But when she got there the man who owned the garages out in front of Glenn’s house told her, leaning on his rake, that Glenn was in Hawaii, working on a television show.

  Disappointed and now really wanting some marijuana to help the time pass, Jody trudged back to the hotel through the heat wondering whom she could telephone. She had impulsively thrown away the number of the only local dealer she knew. There were not that many other people she knew out here. In the apartment she took off all her clothes and drew the white drapes, letting the sunlight flood the couch, where she sat with the telephone wondering if she could call somebody in New York who would tell her the names of some people out here who could get her some dope, or at least might be interesting to talk to. But the maid buzzed the door and without waiting for an answer came in. Irritated, Jody ran to the bedroom and put on her bathing suit and went down by the pool.

  The morning regulars were there, and they waved or nodded to Jody as she made herself comfortable on one of the rusty old garden chairs in the shade of the big avocado tree. The regulars were actors, mostly from New York, in town trying to get work. There was Phil, a man in his fifties, thin, brown and balding, whom Jody had seen in a hundred movies, although he never seemed to have more than one or two lines per movie. Phil was an old swish and a nice man, and he had been the first around the pool to speak to Jody when she moved into Harry’s apartment. And there was Alonzo, whom Jody suspected of being on reds; at least he seemed pleasantly drunk most of the day, but she never saw him taking a drink. Alonzo had had one role thus far in his five-year career, and a lot of commercials. He was tall and handsome and full-lipped and cold-eyed, and he wore a tiny black bikini from which his thick nest of pubic hair bulged, leading to the masses of fine black curly hair on his chest. Alonzo was a very hairy man, very muscular in a lithe way, and must have really knocked them dead back home, wherever he came from. He was not knocking them dead in Hollywood.

  Alonzo made his play for Jody only when one day they happened to be alone by the pool. He had come over to where she was sitting with her feet still in the water, sat beside her and dangled his own feet into the pool and said, “You’re with Lexington up on eight, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Jody said. She looked into his dead cold eyes and smiled.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I noticed you.”

  “Really?” Jody said with her smile in place.

  “You got a good body, do you know that? Do you act?”

  “A little,” Jody said. He was close enough for her to smell his breath, but she couldn’t, although he seemed almost woozy.

  “How about coming up to my room later? We could have a couple of beers.”

  “No, thank you,” Jody said, and Alonzo had looked relieved. Now, he sat across the pool from Jody, stretched out next to Phil, who was talking animatedly to a woman Jody had never seen before, young and quite beautiful in a white one-piece bathing suit, the kind people used to wear in the Forties. Phil had a copy of Daily Variety open across his stomach which he didn’t seem to be into, so Jody walked over to him, said hello to everybody and asked Phil if he would mind if she read the paper.

  “Oh, take it, take it,” he said. “Nothing but gossip anyway.” He looked from woman to woman and said, “Do you two know each other? Jody, love, I forgot your last name, this is Jan Kosky;
both of you are aspiring actresses, I’m sure you have much in common.” And while the two women were smiling at each other, Phil picked up his Variety and started reading again. Jan Kosky laughed and said, “I think I’ll get into the water. It’s so hot!” She was blonde, ten years younger than Jody, but there was something tough and nice about her. Jody went into the pool too, and they swam for a while and then got out on the opposite side from Phil and Alonzo. By now there were a couple of other regulars out by the pool, and the faded battered telephone in its little white wooden birdhouse by the gate was buzzing every five or ten minutes. Jan and Jody were stretched out on their towels on the hot concrete, but every time the telephone would buzz Jan would start and sit up, blinking under her sunglasses.

  “I keep thinkin it’s for me,” she said with a grin. “Honest to Christ, you’d think I was Sally Kellerman or somebody.”

  “I would certainly like to smoke a jay right about now,” Jody said. The hell with finesse.

  “Oh, hey listen,” Jan Kosky said, getting up on one elbow and looking down at Jody very seriously. “I’ve got about ten cents’ worth of street weed up in my room if you want to split it with me.” She smiled hopefully. “Or do you maybe have some yourself?”