The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  Another failure. Add it to the pile. There comes a point in every man’s life. Nausea. The real thing.

  Cuddling his nausea, Alexander gradually drifted off to sleep.

  The next time he wakened it wasn’t so bad. He sat up and felt only a slight pain in his head. Rick had been wonderful. It had been in the doorway of the club, as they were leaving. Alexander had fallen down, and wildly grabbed at some people to keep from falling, and somebody had yelled and somebody else had cursed, and there was Rick at the center of it, protecting him, cooling off the man whose wife Alexander had pawed accidentally, helping Alexander to his feet, telling the manager, “This is a non-event, okay?”

  Non-event. What a way to put it.

  Alexander felt pretty good, now that he thought about it. The sunlight was brightening the drapes, so it must have been past eight o’clock. Did he have to be at the office today?

  No. It was Saturday. Thank God.

  Rick had been so enthusiastic, once he got rolling. He had other projects, other plans, the thing was all coming together, they would work together, Rick had the pulse of the young and Alexander had the power to make things happen the way they should happen. However, Alexander couldn’t remember much about Rick’s plans. He got out of bed and wobbled into the bathroom. He had to laugh. The kid probably thought he got Alexander doped and drunk and then pitched himself into a commanding position, but no. Alexander had gotten himself drunk and was not a high school boy who could be seduced by drugs.

  And of course nothing was on paper. But he liked that kid.

  Outside, he walked naked and a little dizzy toward his pool, fell into the water and had done a number of laps before he pulled over to the side, out of breath, and saw Elektra on the lawn, playing with his rabbits.

  “Hello,” he said. She was sitting in the sun, in only her underpants. The rabbits were having a bit of clover.

  “Hello,” she said.

  Alexander remembered begging them to spend the night. And then suddenly he remembered getting Orfeo out of bed, taking Carla out to the cars, and having Orfeo drive the girl home. They had kissed in front of Orfeo.

  “What do you call them?”

  “The rabbits? Just rabbits. They don’t have names.”

  Elektra stroked Mama Rabbit, who nibbled at the grass and clover contentedly. Papa Rabbit came over by Alexander who scratched him between the ears, those magnificent sensitive ears that could express so much, and then for no reason that Alexander could fathom, Papa Rabbit tore around the lawn in quick hops and sharp turns, ending with a jump straight into the air. And then went back to grazing as if none of it had happened. Alexander and Elektra laughed happily.

  “I can see I’m gonna have to get some rabbits,” Elektra said.

  “Where’s Rick?”

  “Oh, he’s snoozing. You boys really tied one on last night.” Elektra did not seem concerned about it.

  “I don’t do that often,” Alexander said.

  “So you said, quite a few times,” the beautiful girl said. She got to her feet and without any self-consciousness at all, slipped down her panties and came over to the pool. For an extraordinary moment, Alexander thought she was coming toward him, but it was only the swimming pool. She dived in, a smooth bubbling dive, and he could see her like a black-and-golden fish under water streaking to the other end and back. When she broke for air she pulled her long dark hair out of her eyes and grinned at Alexander like a child. “This is a great pool,” she said. “Most pools aren’t long enough to give you any workout.” Then she started lapping in long slow strokes, and after only a moment, Alexander joined her.

  Then they were out of the pool, sunning. Elektra was drying her hair with one of the white towels that had mysteriously appeared on the furniture.

  “Am I nuts or were the towels here all the time?”

  Alexander was pleased. “My staff likes to do things right,” he said.

  “Well,” she said, “what do I call you? I don’t want to call you Alec or Lex because I know you can’t stand those names, but do I call you Mister Hellstrom or what? I can’t call you Boss, because you aren’t my boss.”

  “That’s what most people call me,” he said.

  “I guess I’ll just call you Alexander,” she said. To Mama Rabbit she said, “And I’m going to call you Melissa, and your husband is Freddy.”

  Rick came out squinting into the sunlight, wearing pants and no shirt. “Hello, gang,” he said.

  “Look at the rabbits,” Elektra said.

  “Rabbits? Oh, yeah. I thought they were cats, the color, you know.”

  “Well, they are rabbits, and I want about six of them.”

  “Ha ha,” said Rick. “Well, Boss, did we make a couple of assholes out of ourselves, or did we make a couple of assholes out of ourselves?”

  “We did,” said Alexander, “but I’m holding you to everything you said. If I could just remember what it was.”

  Rick actually looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry I pitched you. You must get tired of that.”

  “Do you men want me to get breakfast?” Elektra asked.

  “Just pick up that telephone,” Alexander said proudly. “Ask for the kitchen. We can eat out here.”

  “What a treat!” she said.

  Rick went over and kissed her.

  Alexander felt like an old man watching some natural wonder like a beautiful sunset for the ten thousandth time. The two broke their kiss and made a loving intimate eye contact, their foreheads touching.

  “What do you want for breakfast?” he asked her eyes.

  “Pig meat and poi,” she said.

  Alexander thought wildly of sending Orfeo down to Trader Vic’s in Beverly Hills, make ’em open the kitchen early and bring them piping hot orders of pig meat and poi. But no. That was just the kind of Hollywood jive he scorned.

  “Would you settle for bacon and Cream of Wheat?” he joked.

  But the lovers did not even hear him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  JERRY REXFORD was busy these days, and gradually the pattern he had allowed himself to fall into when he moved to Los Angeles changed; but he did not know if he was happier or just busier. She was at the bottom of it. Naturally. That was a joke, for she was a very natural woman, and tried, was trying and would continue to try, to make Jerry into a natural man. Gone was the morning hour at the donut shop; these days he only had time to jump in, grab a big plastic-topped paper cup of coffee to take up to the office, barely time to say hello to Helen, whose wine-dark eyes followed his every move while he was in the shop. Then bustle up to the office and knock out those editorials and articles, edit the crap, lay out the pages, paste up the art, lunch at his desk, prepared by Barbara, with cute little notes like, “Chew your food, you’ll look good in the nude,” pencilled on the bag. Nuts and vegetables, hard cheese, the kind of lunch to make you glad you were working anyway. But he loved her, and had to make allowances.

  More and more he spent the nights at her place. She was a fine cook, in spite of her faddist ideas, and somehow he had convinced her that a man likes his red meat. He even quoted Kipling: “A man can’t work on fruit!” So dinners would be spectacular feasts of steak or chicken, fillets of sole sautéed lightly in garlic and butter, with tiny new potatoes, and of course plenty of green and yellow vegetables, sliced tomatoes and sliced cucumbers in vinaigrette, desserts of extraordinary carrot cake or cheesecake, which passed the ban on sugar because, to quote Barbara, “Honey doesn’t have any sugar in it.”

  Jerry had learned to keep his mouth shut about “quackery” and “faddism” and “pseudoscientific claptrap.”

  Also, they managed to get pretty drunk every night, for while she prepared the food, Jerry would sit in the kitchen with her, talking about the day’s trivialities and sipping white wine. It was a lot of fun, and after dinner, as likely as not, they would climb into her big cool fresh-smelling bed and make love. Then, television, brandy and blotto.

  There were only a couple of s
mall flies in the soup. One was that she would drag him out of bed in the morning and make him go running with her, after guzzling a nauseating pint of “tiger’s milk.” There they would be, at six a.m., trotting down Ventura Boulevard. That was one fly; but not so bad, because Jerry’s skin was tightening nicely, and the truth was, he felt lots better.

  The other fly was that Barbara had a problem with sex. Magnificent as she was physically, there was something in her makeup that made it hard for her to have orgasms. Not impossible, just difficult, so that it generally became a race to see which of them would make it. Jerry’s problem was that if he concentrated too much on lengthening the experience so that she would have an opportunity to climax, he would begin to suffer what he called privately “novocaine dick,” a state of local numbness that made it possible for him to fuck on and on, but without pleasure. He began sweating when this happened. Sometimes they just had to give up.

  She was a virtuoso of the penultimate cry, he thought bitterly one night, as they lay back to back after a particularly promising but eventually disappointing time. Queen of the unresolved chord. But it was not her fault, he reasoned, and to keep her from being too disappointed, he learned how to fake his own orgasms, which allowed him to give a great shout, lie there for a few moments, and then withdraw peacefully.

  Then he learned to counterfeit simultaneous orgasm. This turned her on as nothing had before, and with her eyes gleaming in the semidarkness she told him it was because of his new diet. “Our bodies were out of synch,” she said tenderly.

  For a while he despaired of a return to natural open sex. Without any faking or lying. But then he learned another great secret. After faking an orgasm, he still had the power to make love again. Gradually, as her delight at his new “power” became more and more obvious, he became the most theatrical of lovers, episode after episode, bringing her to at least one and sometimes, miracle of miracles, two or three.

  The more he faked it, the easier it was for her to come. But Jerry had acquired so great a control over himself that it became more and more difficult for him to come.

  Of this Barbara was unaware. She only knew that she had taken a plump white-fleshed so-so lover and turned him into a suntanned, slim, damned good-looking macho man.

  As for Jerry, he masturbated. But he was proud of the way he could make her feel. Sometimes it didn’t even bother him that his love life was a sham.

  There wasn’t much time for writing. At first Jerry had weakly insisted that he should return to Fountain and his typewriter, at least a few nights a week, but she had gone through this with her brother Richard, and knew all the symptoms. “You’ll get over it,” she told him.

  But they both agreed that he should keep his own place. A man has to have some place to get away, and Barbara didn’t mind if Jerry had the hobby of trying to write screenplays. In Hollywood, nearly everybody does. Although she never said so, it was obvious that she didn’t think he had a ghost of a chance. One night, drunkenly, he had left her house and driven over to Hollywood and gotten his first finished screenplay, a story about a couple of slum kids who rob a bank, make an enormous haul, far more than they had hoped for or expected, and then take the money to Vegas, where the professional hustlers take them for every cent and leave them for the cops. Jerry saw it as a tough hard uncompromising look at the world, but Barbara could hardly keep the boredom from her eyes as they sat in her living room sipping brandy and Jerry read to her in a flat nervous voice.

  “You don’t like it,” he said at last. There were twenty pages to go.

  “It’s not that I don’t like it,” she said. And never finished the sentence. Jerry never read her anything again. For weeks he didn’t write, and then one night, as he dropped by his apartment to get some laundry he wanted to run through the machines at Barbara’s apartment, he sat down and sternly read the script again. It wasn’t that bad. In fact, it was pretty good. Later in the week he stole a couple of big manila envelopes from the office and mailed his script, plus a politely worded note, to the office of Adams, Ray & Rosenberg, supposedly the best writers’ agency in town.

  Ten days later he had it back again, with an equally polite note explaining that the AR&R Agency was topheavy with clients. Not a word about the script itself. But by this time Jerry had begun to outline another script, and he was not so concerned. He just took the first one and put it into another envelope and sent it to the David Novotny Agency. Five days later, surely a record, he got it back with the same note—agent too busy, sorry. Off to Evarts Ziegler.

  The second screenplay, written in dribs and drabs, was a hard-boiled story about a group of blacks in prison, revolving around an innocent youth who is finally set up and killed by the authorities because, in his innocence, he had become the focal point of a riot. It was a tough hard story and it came out fast. Jerry was amazed by its power. He cried with pity and rage every time he read it. Into the mail. Script #1 was back from Ziggie and off to Wm. Morris. Script #2 began to follow the same trail, and Jerry spent almost no time at home.

  Then he got a phone call from the David Novotny Agency. Not from Novotny himself, of course, but from a subagent named Harriet Hardardt. Could Jerry please come and get his script, Harriet wanted to have a chat with him. Tomorrow would be fine.

  Jerry was pretty excited, but he said nothing to anyone about the appointment. After all, she had said, “pick up your script.” Maybe she just wanted to tell him to give up. Maybe she had taken pity on him and wanted to stop him before he wasted any more of anybody’s time.

  But no. When Jerry arrived at the luxurious offices on the twelfth floor of 9255 Sunset, dressed in his best dark blue suit even though it was eighty-five degrees out, he was quickly led by a beautiful secretary into a small office filled with books, where a handsome woman of fifty, red-haired and strong-chinned, reached across her desk and shook hands with him. Jerry’s script was right there on top of her desk. It looked much thumbed.

  “I’m Harriet Hardardt,” she said, “and I’m very pleased to meet you. I’m always pleased to meet somebody who can really write.”

  Jerry sat, numbed by this greeting. “Thank you,” he said, and numbly waited.

  “Look,” she said. “Let me get right down to business.” But her phone buzzed, and with a wave to Jerry she answered it, talking in a low tone for at least ten minutes to somebody who seemed to be threatening to kill himself, or threatening to come to the office, Jerry couldn’t tell which. She was soothing and firm, and finally got off the phone.

  “You don’t have what we consider a salable script here,” she went on with Jerry, as if the telephone call had never happened. “But as I said, you write extremely well, and I just thought it would be a shame to let you go on submitting scripts that can’t be filmed.”

  There was another interruption. This time, she sat there toying with a pencil and going, “Uh-huh.” At last it was over.

  “Tell me a little bit about yourself,” she said. Jerry gave her a capsule biography. She nodded with approval when she heard he was gainfully employed, and as a writer and editor.

  “That editorial experience,” she said. “I knew it. Your work shows the fine Italian hand of a good editor.”

  “Thank you,” Jerry said. “What’s the matter with my stuff?”

  “What’s the matter is, to be blunt, you are writing expensive stories for small, discerning audiences. A movie has to earn an enormous return to make back the cost of filming, two and a half times as much as it cost to make. So one of the criteria for evaluating an original screenplay is, what will the picture cost, and who will go see it?”

  Jerry’s heart sank.

  “Don’t look sad,” she said with a nice smile. “Just learn to incorporate that kind of thinking into your decision to write a particular script . . .”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what makes an audience come into a theater,” he said. “I just have to write what I think I can do best.”

  “Oh, phooey,” she said. “Come off
that. What do you really know about bank robbers and black prisoners?”

  So she had read the first script, too. Jerry fought his depression. There were things to be learned here.

  “Nothing,” he said. “You’re right, I’m acting like a jerk.”

  Her buzzer buzzed again, and Jerry waited without listening. At last she said, “I have an appointment now, but I want you to keep writing. Just try a little harder to evaluate what an audience, a very large audience, would pay to see.”

  He came out of the building, his script in his hands, his mind racing. This had been his first real brush with the real Hollywood, and he hadn’t come off so badly, not so badly at all. He found a pink parking ticket tucked under the windshield of his Porsche, but it did not bother him. Cheap enough at the price.

  HARRIET HARDARDT’S advice was good. There was no reason for Jerry to go on writing scripts that wouldn’t get made, no matter how “good” or “interesting” they were. That word interesting. It used to be one of his favorite words. Now it made him think of people leaning forward slightly in their theater seats. These people were not wide-eyed or laughing or holding hands, they weren’t even scared. They were watching an “interesting” movie.

  “How did you like the picture?”

  “Uh, it was very interesting . . .”

  Jerry thrashed around for a project. While he thrashed, he stayed pretty much at Barbara’s. There was no point in sitting at the typewriter when he didn’t even have a project. And besides, their love life was improving. Maybe Jerry was just getting better used to her timing; whatever the reason, they were more in synch, and there was less reason for him to fake. This took much of the pressure off him, and he began enjoying himself more. It got so that during the day, at odd moments, he found himself staring off into space, thinking about Barbara sexually. He had never had erotic daydreams about somebody he had been going with. Always before they had been about hopelessly unobtainable women, whose images stared at him from the pages of magazines or shone down on him from theater screens. Now he was fancying, in his mind, catching her in an elevator, a full elevator, and crowding her over into a corner and actually fucking her, while she looks over his shoulder, her face reddening as she knows she is going to cry out . . .