The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  Maggie Magnuson was middle-sized and almost stocky. She had seen him in a few things and liked him. He grinned at her and shook her hand and said, “It’s my first screen test, too, baby. We gotta help each other.”

  “No kidding?” Jack said. “You’ve never tested before?”

  “I’m not testing now,” Maggie said, “but you know what I mean.” To Jody he said, “You know your lines?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Then you know all there is to know about acting. Let’s do it!”

  “Do you mind if we sort of settle the lighting first?” Jack said with a puckish smile, and they spent the next hour under the lights, standing on their marks while the cameraman and electricians fiddled around. Harry was off in the gloom, sitting in an old easy chair, his hands formed into a steeple under his nose. While they stood around, Maggie Magnuson told Jody a string of filthy stories which he swore his twelve-year-old daughter had brought home from her private school in Switzerland. He was being kind to her, Jody knew, and keeping her entertained so that she would not be nervous. But she had not been nervous at all, not since Harry had come for her. But she liked Maggie for what he was trying to do. She knew he was a big-time actor and did not have to hang out while they fixed the lights. He was doing it so that she would get used to him and could play to him more naturally.

  But something funny happened to Maggie while they were rehearsing the scene. It was such a short little scene, and so little happened in it that Jody wondered why they were making such an effort. It was the same scene she had read in the office. They come in, Maggie sort of propositions her, she goes for it, and they start to make love. Nothing to it, a compressed slice of life. But Maggie seemed to change, right after the first walk-through.

  Jack came into the lighted area. “That was pretty nice,” he said. “Maggie, would you sort of loosen up? You seemed to get a little tight there when you said, ‘Come to bed, Helen,’ like you really didn’t want to take her to bed.”

  “Sorry,” Maggie said. “I was thinking about something.”

  Then it was time for the take, and the man held the clapper and clapped it and Jack said very quietly, “All right, go ahead, action.”

  This time there seemed to be something the matter with Maggie all through the scene. His mouth seemed tight. If it had been real life, Jody would have suspected a little impotence problem; he hustles her into bed and then can’t get it up. But if that was what Maggie was playing, he didn’t say so when Jack asked him what was the matter. “I don’t fucking know,” was all he would say, and on the next take he was too enthusiastic, too macho, and he overwelmed her. Jody was beginning to sweat in the heat of the lights, and to lose her temper a little at Maggie, who was supposed to be such a great guy and who was fucking up her screen test.

  On the fifth take, as they stood behind the door waiting for Jack to say action, Jody whispered to Maggie, “Watch out!” and when they came into the room, she threw her things onto one of the beds, and when he said, “We’ll bunk here,” she snorted at him and said, “You? And me?”—overplaying hard. Maggie caught it and threw it back to her, raising the level of his own performance, so that by the end of the scene they were practically shouting at each other.

  “Cut, oh fudge, “ Jack said. “Now we’ve all got it out of our systems, let’s get a take and wrap.” The next take was a good one, and they did one more for fun and it was good too, and Jody went into her trailer to be alone for a few minutes.

  When she came out, Maggie was waiting for her. She could see Harry and Jack talking to the cameraman and the production manager.

  “I want to apologize,” Maggie said.

  “You didn’t do anything,” she said. Jody was standing on the step of the trailer, looking down at Maggie. He had his hands in his back pockets, and now he grinned in the gloom.

  “Who was that you were doing?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s somebody, isn’t it? That character you did.”

  “Oh, that’s my sister,” Jody said.

  “I’d like to meet her. I think,” Maggie said. Jody just smiled down at him and he shifted his weight from one leg to the other and said, “Listen, you’re really good. I want you to have good luck on this picture.” When she still did not say anything, he added, “I’m quitting. I’m getting off the picture.” He reached out and shook her hand and walked away.

  THIRTY-ONE

  MONDAY AFTERNOON after Harry got the official word from Maggie’s agent he cursed for almost five minutes and then got into his car and drove out to Maggie’s house in Brentwood.

  “You have to tell me why you’re quitting,” he said. They were out in the back, near the pool. Maggie had a towel around his middle and sat on a white cast-iron chair under a striped umbrella. Harry stood.

  “What’d my agent say?” Maggie asked cheerfully.

  “He said a commitment from the past, something you really didn’t think would come through, came through. Some spaghetti western or something.”

  “That’s what we worked out,” Maggie said. “Do you really want to go into it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re worried. I don’t blame you, but don’t worry. I mean, really, don’t worry.”

  “But I am worried. You have to tell me.”

  Maggie tilted his head and began slapping it, to get the water out of his ear. Harry decided it was just an actor’s trick to gain time, so he said, “Schtik,” and Maggie stopped and told him what had been the matter.

  When Harry got home Jody wanted to know, and what he told her was that Maggie had been enthusiastic about doing the test for them because he had figured it would be a good way to get in solid with the producer—help him through his old lady’s screen test. He had figured it would be like a lot of those scenes, the chick was making Harry’s life miserable and so they had to go through the farce of giving her an expensive screen test, and then the director could play the villain and not cast her. Everybody would be off the hook and Maggie would look good—cooperative, humble, willing to work.

  But when they got under the lights Jody had stunned him with her performance. Oh, no, it wasn’t that good, but good enough to stun him. He had not expected acting. He had expected almost anything else, but not acting. After all, he told Harry, who was this chick anyway? Nobody had ever heard of her, how come she was so good? Anyhow, he had probably screwed up her screen test, and he knew he felt antagonistic and jealous toward her, and there really was this other job where he could spend three months in Spain making an Italian western, where he would be the star, where his name would appear over the title, and so what with one thing and another, Maggie felt it was right for him to drop out.

  Harry explained to Jody that he had told Maggie that he was being foolish. After a few days together, he and Jody would work together fine, everything would be all right, and besides, they really wanted him in the picture and were willing to raise his salary to where it would be at least competitive with the Italian starring job, if you take into account all the cost of travel, etc., and Maggie laughed and agreed and apologized for being temperamental.

  What Harry did not tell her was what Maggie had really said. Oh, he had said all the other things, but afterward Harry told him it was all bullshit and wanted to know the real reason.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. What did you see?”

  “You’re right, I saw something. I sure did. Listen, man, I’m a trained mimic. I can do anything. You show me a little piece of business and I can do it. I can do a fifty-year-old man with a goiter on his neck drinking a lemon phosphate through two straws. I can do anything. Because I’m an observer. I walk down the street looking at the people. I really look at them, and sometimes it gets me into trouble, but when I look at them I see into them. Maybe it started out as self-protection when I was just a little kid, but I have it and I can do it. I watch a guy sitting at a bus stop and I can get into his mind, not know what he’s
thinking, but how he feels about himself, his life, all that shit. It’s a lot in the way people hold themselves or dress themselves, and a lot of it’s in the eyes.”

  “Okay,” Harry said, “you’re good.”

  “Listen, man, that chick is a loser. I don’t care how well she can act. She’s a stone loser. It’s written all over her. It just spooked me, I just didn’t want to be around for it, you know? I didn’t want to work six, eight weeks on a picture waiting for that fucking timebomb to go off. She made me want to cry, man.”

  Harry knew what he meant. That afternoon in a tiny screening room in a remote corner of the lot he and Fats Dunnigan and Jack Meltzer had sat watching all the takes, less than ten minutes of film in all. It was Harry’s job to watch everything—the direction, the camera work, the lighting—but he could not keep his eyes off Jody. Of course he was in love with her and it distorted his perceptions, but he had also been watching performances for better than twenty years, and Jody’s performance was incredible for an untrained and unknown actress. In each of the takes she was a person, with twists and turns of character Harry had never dreamed of in her. She was vibrant, vital, alive, and yet she did not seem out of place as a waitress; in fact she would have seemed out of place as anything else.

  Harry did not dare look over at Jack, who was sitting next to him in the back row of seats, with the fold-down table and telephone in front of him. Jack was scribbling in his notebook as usual, Harry could hear, but he kept himself from craning over to look at what Jack was writing. When they were at the end, Jack leaned forward and flipped the switch and said to the projectionist, “Thank you, would you run it again please?” and they sat through all the takes once more. By now Fats, alone in the row ahead of them, had gotten onto the telephone and was murmuring to somebody. Harry had to go to the toilet very badly, but he refused to leave the others alone until they had all discussed it. So far, Fats Dunnigan did not know Jody’s relationship to Harry, and Harry dreaded having to tell him. Dreaded especially because now Harry was determined that Jody have the part. She was far and away the best actress they had looked at for the role.

  “Thank you very much,” Jack said into the intercom, “would you run the sixth take again for us?”

  Harry thought the sixth take was the best one too, but wasn’t Jack being more than thorough? Hadn’t he seen enough to know whether he liked the performance or not? It took less than a minute to screen, and when it was over, Jack flipped on the houselights, thanked the projectionist, shut his notebook and put his pen into his shirt pocket.

  “Well, boys,” he said.

  Fats hung up the telephone and turned to face them. He looked tired and harassed; he was executive for three projects in one stage or another, and it seemed to be telling on him.

  “That the girl you want?” he asked.

  “That’s my Helen,” Jack said flatly.

  “Concur,” Harry said.

  “Jesus,” Fats said. He got to his feet with a grunt. “Why’nt you pick somebody I heard of? I never heard of this person. What’er you paying her?”

  “Scale,” Harry said.

  “Well,” Fats said. “Looks like we got a movie.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  JODY FLEW first class from Los Angeles to Atlanta sitting next to a man who said he was an electronics expert and who tried to teach her to play chess with a tiny magnetized board. He was in his fifties and dressed in a dark-blue suit and had a flat Texas accent. Three times he gave Jody his business card and once he turned the card over and wrote a telephone number she was to call if ever she was in Houston. He drank throughout the trip and slept for the last half-hour or so, a light snore coming from his babyish open mouth. Jody did not drink anything except a glass of red wine with her lunch.

  She had a two-hour wait in the Atlanta airport, and after twenty minutes of hanging around the book and magazine counters she accepted a man’s offer to help her pass the time by going upstairs to the lounge, but when the man tried to buy her one of the outrageously expensive drinks she smiled and said she just wanted a cup of coffee. The man was tall and thin and had carroty red hair and a scarred angry complexion. He seemed to be about forty and wore a white shirt, bow-tie and tweed suit. He was a professor of economics, he told her, a married man albeit an unhappy one, although he suspected that Jody heard that a lot from this man or that man. Jody smiled and said she supposed that most people who were married were unhappy in one way or another, and he agreed eagerly and told her that his wife was a fine woman but she had never been what you might call attractive and now with the children in high school she had just let herself run down and they had frankly not been engaging in any sexual activities at all for a considerable length of time. He had two drinks and continually ate handfuls of peanuts from the glass peanut dispenser on their table, and when he finally got up enough nerve to ask Jody to have dinner with him next time she was in Detroit and scribbled his name and a telephone number on the back of somebody else’s business card he had in his pocket, he was so late for his plane that he had to make a rushed goodbye and lope out of the bar without waiting for her, leaving a twenty-dollar bill on the table to pay for everything.

  Jody sat alone for ten minutes and then an Air Force lieutenant colonel sat down beside her and after only a minute smiled at her and asked if, like two ships passing in the night, they might have a drink together. He too was a married man, but out of sight, out of mind, he joked, and offered to buy Jody a drink, which she refused with a smile. He did not write down anything on a card for her, but he wondered if she wouldn’t think him forward if he asked her to sleep with him that afternoon and catch a later plane to wherever she was going. He was not a man to mince words. He thought the two of them could have a hell of a good time in the sack. He considered himself to be an expert on lovemaking. He had made love to women of all ages in more than twenty countries. When Jody turned him down he told her she did not know what she was missing and for that matter he would pay her some money to go to bed with him, and by God if she didn’t give the money back to him afterward and maybe add a few dollars of her own he was sadly mistaken. Jody laughed and said that she appreciated the offer, but no thank you, and he lost his temper and said between his teeth in a low voice, “You bitch, you have to. I need you. I have to do it at least twice a day, and my regular Atlanta girl didn’t show up, damn her,” and Jody signaled for the black cocktail waitress to come over, and said to her, “This man is drunk and offending me,” got up, picked up the twenty dollars and left the colonel with the bill.

  There was no first class in the little airplane that flew her from Atlanta to Montgomery, Alabama, and Jody sat between a fat black Army sergeant and a middle-aged woman who spent the entire time looking out the little window at the ground and working her lips.

  At Montgomery Jody stepped out of the airplane directly into a wet oven blast of southern heat. It was almost dark and heavy clouds piled in the sky made it darker. There was a long covered walkway from the landing area to the terminal, with scattered handfuls of people greeting passengers or just lounging around, but Jody did not see anybody she knew. While she was waiting for her luggage at the other end of the terminal a plump young man rushed up to her out of breath and asked her if she was Jody McKeegan.

  “Yes,” she said. “Where’s Harry?”

  “Mister Lexington sent me. Ah’m Bobby, your driveh.” They sped through the Alabama night north and west with Bobby behind the wheel and Jody alone in the back seat. Bobby asked her if she minded if he played the radio and she said no, and those were the last words they exchanged until they crossed a bridge some fifty miles from the airport and Bobby turned around and said, “This’s the Alabama River, ma’m.” On the other side of the river was the town of Selma and then they were out into the night again, speeding past acres of corn and cotton, the distant lights of an occasional farmhouse making Jody wonder who on earth could live here in the middle of nowhere. Then, at last, they crossed the Grissom County line and in anoth
er ten minutes arrived at the Sugartown Motel, on the eastern edge of Sugartown, Alabama. Bobby took the car through the motel drive entryway and up to a two-story row of units in back, stopped the car and turned to Jody.

  “Now, ma’m, do you want to go to your room and maybe freshen up? They’re shooting on the other side of town and Mr. Lexington asked me to ask you if you weren’t too tired if maybe you might like to come out to the set. I’ll wait for you here.”

  Jody sighed. She was exhausted from the trip, but she was too keyed up to go to bed and wait to see Harry when he came back from wherever he was.

  “Let me just pop into the shower,” she said to Bobby.

  He had her key with him, and carried her luggage into the room. She looked around. A nice calm motel room, not classy but not crappy, and obviously all hers. She thought about asking Bobby where Harry’s room was, but thought better of it. The poor kid probably didn’t know they were living together. After he left she stripped off her clothes and stepped into the shower. One blessing: the shower threw a hard tight stream. She stood under it, letting the hot water hit the back of her neck for a long long time, getting the trip out of her nervous system, and then came out to lie on the bed for a few minutes.

  When she awakened, Harry was looking down at her, one hand on his hip, one on his chin, his expression unreadable. “Hi,” she said.

  “Are you all right?” Harry asked her. His voice seemed high and strained and he did not sit down, take her in his arms, offer to kiss her or anything, just stood there.

  “What did I do wrong?” Jody asked. She sat up.

  “Nothing, only I’ve been waiting for you for a couple of hours is all,” Harry said like a child.

  “Oh baby,” she said. “I just laid out for a minute and I must have fallen asleep.” She smiled her best even though she was still sleepy and did not understand what was the matter with Harry, and held out her arms for him. Abruptly he turned and went to one of the two easy chairs beside the air conditioner and sat down stiffly. Jody sighed and went into the bathroom and threw some cold water on her face. “Christ, I have to unpack,” she said to herself and came out into the room.