The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  But for Alexander it was his first nonerection in years. Since he had been last married, in fact.

  Food for thought, there. What had Teresa done to him? Or was it a coincidence? Was he going to have to endure one of those nonerectile phases? What would happen when Teresa came west, to Tahoe? With all those tall trees for inspiration? He laughed to himself. At least I still have a sense of humor about it. Pardon me, darling, but what we need here is a good stunt-fucker to stand in for me. Stand in is good. Plague of Drooping Peter Strikes Film Capital. Maybe it was happening to everybody at once, and everybody was keeping it as secret as Alexander himself. Good picture. Although you could hardly.

  Well, there were dick doctors. “Sir, you need more Vitamin E.”

  “It’s simple, just say the word manumission under your breath for fifteen minutes every morning.”

  “Well, old fellow, a tongue-depressor and a couple of Band-Aids should do the trick.”

  Gasoline flames leaped skyward on the screen in front of him. The picture was coming to its climax. There went the hero’s car through the flames and into the waters of the dismal swamp. So what? Would this picture make any money? Would it inspire imitations? Hardly, he thought, it was an imitation of an imitation already. But there was certainly no accounting for public taste. And the star was popular.

  Alexander pressed the button putting him in touch with the projectionist: “What do you think of this, Harry?” he asked. Back came the tinny-sounding voice:

  “Piece a shit, Boss.”

  But Harry always said that.

  ALEXANDER LOOKED at himself with horror. He had just stepped out of the shower and was toweling off when he happened to catch sight of his buttocks. And couldn’t believe what he saw. He finished drying himself numbly, avoiding the full-length mirror as long as possible. But then there was no avoiding it. His tanned and once muscular buttocks were turning into two drooping bulbs of fat!

  Old age was attacking him from the rear.

  But it couldn’t be old age, he wasn’t old yet. He was a man in his fifties. His middle fifties. And he was turning into a fatass. Alexander drew himself up, filled his chest and flexed into tightness every muscle he could control. He still looked good, his muscles rippling under his tanned skin, his chest wide, his stomach narrow . . . he turned slowly, his buttocks flexed as tight as he could get them. But there it was, the sagging fatty ass, looking even sillier with the rest of his body in flexion. He relaxed and his buttocks quivered. Good God! There were stretch marks on his ass!

  Stretch marks. He reached back and ran his fingertips over the soft flesh. Rippled, scarry. Ugly ass.

  He looked anxiously at his face, and saw his anxious face peering back at him. The face was heating up and getting red. He looked away, embarrassed. He had never thought of himself as abnormally vain, and he had not spent much of his life in front of mirrors. But, he thought, that was because he knew what a handsome roughneck he was. Well, it was all crumbling, now. First his ass, then his belly, then rolls of fat would appear under his jawline and he would have jowls. Or he could go on a crash diet regimen, jogging around the lot in a grey sweatsuit and a white towel around his neck, desperately trying to keep ahead of the fat globules, knowing that he was really racing against time, and nobody won that one.

  Might as well heave a sigh and get fat. He probably already waddled, and nobody would say anything to him, but they were laughing behind his back.

  Had all this happened since he had last seen Teresa? What would she think of the new Alexander? Women don’t care much about how men look, do they? Bullshit. Alexander was disgusted at himself for trying to make excuses. There was just no question about it. He would have to go back to lapping the pool every morning, eating his breakfast, cut down on the drinking and do more afternoon exercise. Daily tennis again. Cut out the nap. Push away sugar foods. Take vitamins. That was all there was to it. His own father had remained vigorous and lean into his eighties, and then fell over dead without a moment’s illness. If he could do it, so could Alexander.

  He dressed quickly in a three-piece Italian suit, a suit that made him look particularly dashing, and surveyed himself in the mirror. He turned sideways. Didn’t the back panel of his jacket stick out a bit? As if the suit were just a tiny bit small? And, now that he thought of it, didn’t that collar feel kind of tight? He buttoned the jacket. It did not want to button. Alexander had worn the same size suit for years. Would he have to go to his tailor and have everything remeasured? What good would that do if he was going to lose the weight anyway?

  Vanity. Vanity.

  He left the house and drove to work. At the gate, he said to his old friend Charlie Devereaux, “I’m turning into a fatass, Charlie.”

  Charlie, as usual, offered his paper coffee cup, but Alexander waved it away.

  “How do you stay so slim, Charlie?” he asked.

  Devereaux snorted. “You must be kidding, Alexander. I’m on my goddamn dogs all day in this fucking booth, is how I keep slim.”

  “Ha ha,” said Alexander and drove on into the lot.

  The first thing waiting for him on his desk was a memo from his production assistant, Dick Katzman, that there were “obligations but no availability” between Paul Newman and John Travolta. In other words, the studio had calls on the services of both actors, but there was no time within the next year when both were simultaneously available. So there went Untitled Love Musical, the Richard Heidelberg project. He wondered how much Heidelberg had into it, how much farther he would press the issue. Of course they could try to find a match for whichever of the actors they couldn’t get, or they could go for two entirely new performers. But bankable actors were rare, and availability was even rarer. He had liked the idea of Newman and Travolta. In his mind he had already nicknamed the picture The Battle of the Peepers. And NEWMAN SINGS! would make good copy. Hell, shit.

  “Let me talk to Dick Katzman,” he said over the intercom.

  “Yes, sir. Richard Heidelberg on two, do you want me to put him on hold?”

  “No, tell him I’ll call him back.”

  When Katzman came on the phone, Alexander said, “Dick, is there any way we can buy Newman and Travolta?”

  “There’s no time interface,” Dick said. Neither man could be broken out of his present commitments this year. “Next year is another ball game,” he said.

  “See what you can come up with for alternate casting,” Alexander said. At least somebody would be working on it. He would get lists for days now, as Dick tried to make magical combinations of names for their picture premise.

  “Do both of them have to be bankable?” Dick asked.

  “Within reason,” said Alexander, and hung up.

  “Get me Richard Heidelberg,” he said into the intercom. “Good morning, my young friend.”

  “Hello, Boss. How’re we doing?”

  “You must have second sight. We just pulled the plug on Newman and Travolta. Not available. Aren’t you glad you don’t have to pungle up three million dollars?”

  “I’d be willing. Look, that casting was just a way of clarifying the project, I never really expected . . .

  “Well, I did, and I’m sorely pissed off. And to quote my assistant, the viability parameter of this project is rapidly shrinking.”

  “The old shrinking parametric,” came Heidelberg’s amused voice. He did not seem bothered by this setback.

  “Well,” said Alexander, “let’s have a meeting and see what we can come up with. Can you be at my office at about five-thirty? We’ll drink company liquor and cast our crumbling project.”

  The next problem he had to face was also negative. Travis Morgan was balking on the set, to the tune of sixty thousand dollars a day. They were on location in Utah, making a Western that was already six million dollars over budget because the director, Sandor Kielmann, had been sitting up nights with a whiskey bottle, rewriting the script, and his buddy the cameraman was taking hours for every setup. It would be a disastrous situati
on except that Kielmann usually ended up with what the public wanted.

  But this was different. Somebody on the location had gotten to Travis Morgan about the plight of the Indians, the threat to the ecology and assorted matters, and Morgan was making a lot of demands for script changes and attitude changes that were, to put it mildly, uninformed. Now, Morgan had flown home to Brentwood, the director had followed, and the first assistant director was shooting a lot of second unit stuff under the scornful eye of the cameraman. At least they hadn’t had to shut down production. Yet.

  Kielmann arrived first for their three-way meeting. He was a plump, sour-looking man with great rings under his eyes. He was dressed in dirty cords and a tee shirt advertising THE LIQUOR LOCKER. He had not shaved that morning. Alexander liked him.

  “Well, my dear,” he said to the director, who was slumped on the couch opposite Alexander’s desk. “How are we going to trim this cowboy’s sails?”

  “He’s probably at home, waiting for Brando to call,” Kielmann said in a gravelly voice. He brightened. “Maybe I could pull it off. I do a pretty good Brando.”

  He did his Brando impression, and Alexander laughed. “We could try it.”

  “How’s this: I pick up the phone and tell him, ‘Hey, lissen, you punk, yer crabbin’ my act . . .’”

  The intercom buzzed. “Travis Morgan and David Novotny,” she said.

  Alexander got up and went to the door. Novotny, slender and handsome as ever, perhaps the best-articulated human body Alexander had ever seen, a tennis machine, a swimming champion, a delightful but always victorious poker and chess player and perhaps the best agent in Hollywood. The hilarious part was that David Novotny didn’t have to work, his San Francisco-based family had been multimillionaires for generations, the family fortune coming from the mining camps of ’49 and swollen by real estate dealings, oil property and Heaven knew what else. David worked because he loved the challenge of deal-making, he loved show people and he loved coming out on top.

  Travis Morgan, Novotny’s client, stood a bit behind his agent and grinned shyly, the same grin that had landed him in the top ten for six years running. He was dressed like a cowboy, boots, jeans and flannel shirt, while his agent looked as dapper as Alexander.

  Novotny grinned and grasped Alexander’s hand. “I thought I’d join you if you don’t mind,” he said smoothly. Alexander was delighted, but tried to keep it off his face. Novotny was at least a realist, and Alexander would not have to make his argument with this hambone’s new conscience.

  “Come into my office, gentlemen,” Alexander said graciously. After they were all seated, orders for coffee delivered and morning pleasantries made, Alexander said, “Okay, now, why are you guys in Hollywood instead of freezing your asses off in the mountains?”

  Novotny smiled politely and said, “I think this thing can be cleared up pretty fast. I advised my client to come home for a while.”

  “He’s in breach,” Alexander said politely.

  “Come on, we’re making a picture, not a deal.” Novotny continued to control the meeting, and Alexander let him, knowing their interests were similar, if not identical. As he spoke, a picture emerged of what had been going on in the Utah mountains. Everybody was under terrific strain because of the cameraman’s insistence on perfect light. Alexander had seen most of the dailies, and the stuff was utterly beautiful, but at enormous cost. There were Indians around, several of them had parts in the picture, and many of the cast and crew were bending over backward to let the Indians know they were appreciated, and that they had gotten a bad deal from the U.S. government. But this was normal and happened on nearly every set over something or other. What came out from under David Novotny’s careful circumlocutions was that the cameraman, an old-line Commie, had openly ridiculed Travis Morgan, and had even called him “a dumb asshole” in front of half the crew.

  Travis Morgan, then, overreacted by showing off his power, his power to alter the script, delay things and generally bully people around. Of course David didn’t put it that way. He said, “They’ve all been working their asses off, they’re all tired and on edge, and I thought Travis might feel better after a couple of days’ rest. That’s all. Blame me for the delay, although I hear you’re getting some nice second unit stuff meanwhile, so no one’s really hurt.”

  “Except your client’s salary continues to run, and days are being put on the production board,” Alexander said.

  “I don’t like being made a fool of,” Travis said with great sincerity. He almost dug the toe of his boot into the rug.

  “I don’t see you as the villain of the piece,” Alexander said. “I think that fucking Communist ought to go back to shooting commercials. Fire him.”

  “You can’t fire him,” Kielmann said stubbornly.

  “We can buy out his contract. He’d love that. He loves money almost as much as he loves himself.” That’s it, Alexander said to himself, jump on the guy who isn’t here.

  “But it’s personal,” said Kielmann stubbornly.

  “Then you should be the one to tell him,” Alexander said gently, and the substantive part of the meeting was over. The dailies wouldn’t be as good, but the picture would get done. That was what mattered.

  Although Alexander strangely enough did not think any of it really mattered.

  But you shouldn’t call the star a dumb asshole.

  LUNCH WAS in his private dining room, all business, putting together the final elements in a project that had stars, script, a start date, budget, location and crew, and needed only the final mesh of details to get rolling. There were ten men in the room, and they ate and worked in their shirtsleeves. This was the last chance for anybody to say his department wasn’t ready, but nobody said it, and at the end of the two-hour meal, the producer of the picture gravely shook hands with Alexander.

  “Looks like we have a picture.” he said.

  Alexander replied with equal gravity, slipped on his jacket and left the room first. I wonder if anybody noticed my ass, he found himself thinking.

  “The Boss is packing quite a rumbleseat,” nobody at all said behind his back.

  Time for a wee snooze. If he did not shut the blinds and stretch out on the couch for an hour, he might fall asleep during dailies, and that would be bad. Alexander liked to keep track of not just everything on the lot, but location dailies and anything that could be stolen or borrowed from other film production units. It would have taken a fifty-hour day just in the screening room to accomplish this, so much of what went on had to be scrutinized in summary. Only the most important things passed through his screening room, and it would be bad news to fall asleep.

  On this particular day there was nothing of any real interest to watch, just snips of film. He was slightly surprised to find at the end of the afternoon that he had drunk five Coca-Colas. He felt pretty good, though.

  “Thank you,” he said to Harry, and went back to his office. Rick Heidelberg was in the secretaries’ office talking to Willi Gottlieb, his executive secretary, an attractive levelheaded woman whose father had been a driver captain over at Universal for years.

  “Please don’t bother the help,” he said to Rick. He held his door open for Rick to enter. After Rick said hello and went past him, he said to Willi, “We’ll be casting,” which meant, don’t interrupt us for anything, unless, of course . . .

  Willi silently handed him his call log, and he glanced over his unanswered calls. There were three or four he knew he should really answer, and it would put Rick in his place if he had to sit there and listen, but no. Alexander did not feel like it. He wanted to relax and have a drink, right now. He handed the call log back to Willi and went into his office, closing the door.

  “Let’s open the blinds,” he said. While he was doing this the intercom buzzed. Instead of answering it, he walked to the door and pulled it open. Willi was standing there next to David Novotny, who looked exhausted, but managed a smile.

  “I talked her into it,” he said. “I knew Ri
ck was here, and I hoped I could get a free drink out of you.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Come in and get off your feet.”

  Rick did not look surprised to see his agent, but got up from the couch and shook hands. Alexander went to the small bar and opened it. “Gentlemen?” he asked.

  They sat quietly around the coffee table, Alexander on the couch next to Rick and David in a low armchair, listening to the ice crack in their drinks. The afternoon light made the battlements outside the window look romantic and remote. Alexander lifted his glass, and the others followed suit.

  “Here’s to the picture,” he said. He took a healthy swig and so did Rick. But David merely sipped his.

  David smiled tiredly. “I have to go out tonight,” he said.

  They talked business for a while. Naturally, since David was Rick’s agent, he knew everything about the project and was not above putting in the names of other clients as director or stars. Some of his ideas were good, and some of the people he named were on Alexander’s mental list, but Rick seemed restive and instead of just absorbing Novotny’s ideas as Alexander did, he argued or looked negative.

  “What’s troubling you?” Alexander finally asked him.

  “I want this picture to go,” Rick said.

  “We all do,” David said dryly.

  “But this isn’t the way to cast it. Casting’s the most important part of a movie like this. People will only want to go see it if they are promised a good time . . .”

  “You’re right,” Alexander agreed, “it isn’t exactly Hamlet we’re doing here . . .”

  “Thank God for small favors,” David said.

  “Okay,” Rick said, with more animation. “A young guy falls in love with the young mistress of a rich and powerful middle-aged charmer, a guy who’s got it made, had it made for years, and knows how to keep what he’s got. The kid is funny, goofy and irresistible. The girl is attracted to him, the old guy stands to lose her. This is when we find out he really loves her. But he does nothing, and the girl falls deeper and deeper for the kid. They do crazy wonderful things together . . .”