The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  He would go down to his office, leaving the door open, and in a moment Roberta, his wide-mouthed, big-breasted secretary, would come with the trades and fresh coffee.

  “Thank you, Roberta,” he would say, and she would leave the office, gently shutting the door behind her.

  Jerry would read about what the other folks in show business were doing (mentally discounting all figures by at least seventy-five percent) and then, his coffee percolating sweetly into his bloodstream, would turn to his typewriter and begin work on the day’s pages.

  Then lunch at the commissary or wherever Rick decided to take them that day. For that first week, anyway, Rick and Jerry had lunch together every day, and talked about the script. Rick knew how to compliment while criticizing, he knew how to get the most out of a negative situation, turn it positive; how to flatter without being destructive, and Jerry never learned so much about writing for the screen as he did during those five lunches. Technical matters. How to keep an eye out for the camera without pimping for it. To remember that lines are written to be spoken by actors. To refrain from attempting to direct the picture from his desk, and to forget employing camera terms he hardly understood, in favor of more diplomatic language. For Jerry it was a great relief not to have to fake camera language or directorial attitudes, and scene after scene was chopped and channelled into workmanlike shape, the script getting shorter and shorter all the time, until it had gone from 167 pages to 97.

  “Isn’t it too short now?”

  “Naw,” said Rick. They were at El Coyote, scooping in Mexican food. “It’s still literary. Jesus, your first draft timed out at about four hours.”

  Jerry now knew that “literary” was not a snide insult, but a practical description of a kind of script with too much action per eighth of a page.

  Often the two men spent the afternoon together in Rick’s office, playing with the script, with Rick on the telephone most of the time and Jerry, happy on the couch, eavesdropping on the high-powered conversations.

  And the screenings. At four each afternoon, they would walk down to Screening Room Twelve and watch hard-boiled private eye movies. It had become a tradition, in one week, that they take a six pack of Coors along, and each would drink three cans. Jerry could not help wondering if Rick had been just as cozy with the previous tenant of Jerry’s office, a mysterious Mexican director whom nobody around the office wanted to talk about. But that was the way it was, old projects seemed deadly taboo.

  So in one wonderful week they had gone clear through the script, and had something worth showing to the big bosses. Jerry could hardly wait for his next meeting with Rick.

  Jerry hardly recognized his apartment, coming in Friday evening after that first week of intense work with Richard Heidelberg. Every night he had come home, slugged himself to sleep with whiskey, and awakened only in time to shower and dress for the next big important day. Now here he was with two days to fill, nowhere to go, no one to be with, nothing to do. All week, in fact, he had expected Rick to invite him to the beach, so that they could go on working. But it didn’t happen, and here he was in the middle of this dirty, messy, smelly, dark little apartment with nothing but whiskey and television to keep him from going crazy.

  Later that evening he learned a great truth—whiskey and television cannot do the trick. Au contraire. Sometimes television is a wonderful thing. You turn the switch and out comes great science, great art, wonderful comedy, exciting news. Etc., etc. Other times it is boring and stupid. Still other times, tonight for example, it is insistently, nauseatingly, rottenly, boorishly offensive. And whiskey, you know how sometimes the first sniff of the stuff makes you giddy and pleased, and how other times you can’t get drunk on a carload? Well, there are other times, too, times like tonight, when no matter how much of the goddamn stuff you slop over your lip, it makes you sicker and wishing even more to get drunk and blot out reality. And yet you know that only the whiskey is keeping you awake.

  But it cut the old-socks smell of his apartment, especially with the door open, and that was a sufficiency to keep the door in the open position. It was certainly unrealistic to expect him to stop drinking, now that he had aired the place out. But he cringed at the thought of having company in his place. He would have to move, just as soon as he got his hands on a good-sized check.

  Now would be a swell time for a swim, before he got to thinking what he didn’t want to think about, namely, his loneliness, the gigantic empty raw spot inside him where Barbara had been, the smaller but just as raw spot where Rick had bored his way into Jerry’s heart. The dullness of his own life. He stripped but could not find his bathing suit. So what? Peeping out his windows he had often seen late-night nude bathers in the pool, so fuckum, he would do it too.

  The dew-damp lawn felt great against his feet as he crossed toward the pool. He giggled, and somebody said,

  “Who’s that?”

  “It’s Jerry,” he said, and stopped. Peering ahead, he saw a couple on the far side of the pool, on some towels. If they were not fucking, they should have been.

  “Oh, excuse me all to hell,” Jerry said. “I just wanted to go for a little swim.”

  “Well, go ahead, Jerry,” the girl part of the tangle of humanity said.

  With a giggle, Jerry half-jumped, half-fell into the warm sweet water of the pool. It felt wonderful to be naked in the water! He swam up and down, up and down, not getting tired, feeling his mind clear up, his depression, his emptiness vanish. He could barely pull himself up out of the water, and he sat on the concrete, running water and breathing deeply for quite a while before he even thought to open his eyes.

  The couple was going at it, a mile a minute. Jerry dropped into the water and moved darkly to the other end, where he could sit on the underwater steps with only his head out. There were dim stars past the black branches of the trees in the patio. Another person came by, opened a screen door, slap! and flipped on an intimate amber light within.

  And then the couple, still naked, jumped into the water and began to play with each other, giggles and splashes, while Jerry padded into his place and got a nice double shot of whiskey. This time it hit the spot and made him feel really quite goddamn delightful. Back out to the pool, naked as an opossum.

  Jerry helped the girl out of the pool, watching the water run off her glinting breasts, and then, oddly, not wanting to intrude on her privacy, her right to be naked, averted his eyes from her sexual parts and looked at her attractive wet face. She lived next door to him.

  “I’m Jerry,” he said.

  “I’m Brenda,” she said, and introduced her naked companion as Jack.

  “You’re the one with the black Super 90, right?” asked Jack, a Porsche enthusiast. They talked eagerly about Porsches for a while, sitting around naked, and then the conversation drifted into the picture business (there were few civilians on Fountain) and Jerry was led to an opportunity to point out that he was working on a picture right then. To Brenda and Jack’s excellent attention he told them all about it.

  Jerry thought he saw a note of admiration creep into their eyes as he talked, and that made him shut up. Enough was enough. And so it was, the couple drifted into Brenda’s apartment and Jerry into his, where in only a few minutes he could hear them through the wall, banging away on each other. Brenda murmured, “Please . . . please . . . oh, please . . .” and Jerry fell back into his desperately lonely funk.

  The next day should have been terrible, what with Jerry’s guilty hangover and the endless prospects of nothing to do. But it happened to be F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthday, or so at least they said, and it was a good excuse for a party. Everybody was invited.

  IT BEGAN as a loose-knit group sitting in the sun by the pool, curing their hangovers from a couple of big pitchers of fresh orange juice and a gigantic bottle of vodka. It was a warm morning, with a gentle breeze and the sky robin’s-egg blue above. Somebody went out and came back with several white sacks of bakery goods and somebody else passed around a joint of w
hat was described as “Thai-stick shake,” and there was a small argument as to whether it should be spelled “tie-stick,” since the stuff was literally tied to a stick. Others held that since it was supposed to be from Thailand . . .

  Jerry stepped out his door in jeans, tee shirt (unmarked) and huaraches, on his way to get a cup of coffee and the Sunday L.A. Times. Somebody from the pool group called to him and he waved and kept going toward the garage.

  “Hey, Jerry,” called Jack. He waved for Jerry to come over, and Jerry, head hanging, could not refuse.

  “You all know Jerry,” Jack said. He was tanned and grinning, with powdered sugar in his moustache. “The Phantom Writer.” Everyone laughed easily, and Jerry realized he was an old character around here. He recognized most of the faces, from the garage, the walkway, the patio. People he nodded to. Now they all looked friendly and relaxed, and he laughed at the joke of being called The Phantom Writer. He kind of liked the title.

  “How about one of these orange killer mamas?” Jack asked him.

  “What’s the occasion?” Jerry asked. He accepted his drink, and after the first tantalizing sip he tossed it off.

  A dark man with a roll of fat peeping through his open Hawaiian shirt said, “The occasion, my friend, is that it’s F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthday. We are all going to get bloody smashed.”

  Jerry accepted his second drink from Jack. A girl in an emerald one-piece bathing suit offered him a slice of apple strudel.

  “No, thank you,” Jerry said. His hangover was going away. He found a place to sit, and pretty soon he was no longer the center of attention. The conversation was full of names he did not know, but the activities being talked about were familiar enough. Who was getting together with whom, and how was it working out. Who was splitting up and who didn’t care. It was a comfortable conversation. By his third drink Jerry was bloody smashed, and it was only just a little after noon. More people had been showing up all the time, and the patio was crowded and buzzing with conversation.

  Jerry made a lot of friends when a newcomer, a short angry-looking man with a girl much too young for him, asked belligerently, “Who the hell’s F. Scott Fitzgerald?” and Jerry just as belligerently said, “Why, man, he was the greatest silent film director the world has ever seen!” Jerry raised his glass, and so did nearly everybody else.

  “Here’s to . . . Effey!”

  “Effey!”

  It was not a wild party, it was just an empty Saturday onto which a party had been superimposed. No one really thought they were going to stay, and nearly everybody had afternoon plans. But the party took hold and it was fun to be there. People went out for more booze, and the girl with the fruit juicer kept grinding out the fresh orange juice. For Jerry what made it a party was the large number of good-looking girls, friendly girls, many of whom lived either here or nearby. He spent a lot of time talking to the girls, who were secretaries, actresses, waitresses, production workers, girl friends, unemployeds, and all fascinated by the fact that Jerry was working on a picture, and knew Richard Heidelberg personally.

  “Rick and me are very tight,” Jerry said at least a dozen times that day. When he thought back to the party he was embarrassed by the number of times he had said that, but another memory covered his embarrassment and made this particular Saturday one of the landmarks of his life. He played it over and over in his mind, unable ever to get it exactly right, or in sufficient detail, but playing it over anyway, because it make him feel so good.

  The first one had followed him into his apartment when he had gone in to piss. He turned around and saw her standing in the middle of his messy apartment.

  “I’m going to the toilet,” he said.

  “I’ll wait here,” she said, Short girl, lived down the street. Dressed in jeans and a shirt tied up under her breasts. Eyes drunk, mouth saucy. When Jerry came out of the toilet he said, “Your turn”—still not getting it— and she threw her arms around him and planted a big wet kiss on his mouth.

  “Mmm, you’re cute,” she said.

  Jerry took her into the bedroom, mess that it was, and within seconds the two of them were undressed and on the bed.

  As they left Jerry’s apartment he caught Brenda’s eye, and she winked at him. He reddened, but did not care. Midge, the girl he had just fucked, disappeared into the crowd around the grill, where something was cooking, and Jerry loafed over to the grassy strip in front of the big banana tree and sat. Funny, making love had heightened his desires instead of satisfying them, and he looked around wolfishly at the female flesh everywhere to be seen.

  Soon he was deep in conversation with a girl who worked at the studio as an assistant editor, and they gossiped happily about the stuff that was supposed to be going on at the studio, and then Jerry found himself asking her if she wouldn’t like to go with him while he picked up some more booze. “Can’t take a free ride all day,” he said. “Come in while I change my duds,” he said, and she followed him into his apartment. Jerry just didn’t give a fuck, so he turned around and grabbed her and felt her slide into his arms with eagerness. And, so, little pink lights exploding in his mind, Jerry dragged her into the bedroom.

  They came out of his apartment just as Brenda was passing by. Brenda’s expression this time had a tinge of respect in it, and instead of winking, she merely raised her eyebrows.

  When Jerry and the girl got back from their booze run, having traded phone numbers, kisses and promises of lunch at the commissary, Jerry got rid of her and found Brenda.

  “Let’s go,” he whispered huskily.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” she murmured, and they slipped into Jerry’s boudoir, where the smell of sex was thick.

  “Where’s Jack?” he asked, but did not care.

  “I dunno, prob’ly fucking somebody in the bushes,” Brenda said.

  The party went on into the night, and Jerry made a couple of good friends among the residents. But there was no more sex. Jerry felt he had done his part. More than his part. When he finally went to bed he went alone, and the mingled odors wafted him into delicious sleep.

  PART FOUR: WESTWOOD

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  RICK’S GLOOMY mood was not improved by the front of the theater, even though already there were lines of young people stretching around the short Westwood block and out of sight, and a mob of “studio personnel” crowding their way in through a special velvet-roped open door. Above them the center of the marquee read not BRUIN! but RUIN! in blue neon script, and Rick was far from strong enough emotionally these days to see anything but an ominous omen.

  RUIN! RUIN! RUIN! the blue neon blinked. Or maybe it was Rick blinking. He got out of the hired limousine after slipping a fifty to the driver (“Buy yourself a drink!”) and scooted into the lobby. Studio personnel crowded back to avoid his touch. Boss Hellstrom, standing by the candy counter in a beautiful grey suit, turned away from him. Elektra trailed six feet behind him, like a Japanese bride of twenty-five years ago.

  Rick was hot.

  He stooped over the drinking fountain and let the icy water chill his swollen lips. He barely felt like swallowing. But swallow he must, or strangle on his own anxiety. Somehow he had gotten it into his mind that tonight’s reaction from this audience, mixed UCLA students, studio people and their guests, and the Brass, would determine the fate of The Lady in the Lake.

  Rick looked around, half-expecting to see Donald Marrow.

  At first, months ago, Marrow had been enthusiastic and full of ideas, actually moving west, taking up a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, occupying the big executive office across the hall from Rick’s and generally bounding around like a jackrabbit. He was no longer dressing Main Street, so Teresa di Veccio must have gotten to him in more ways than one. She was his business partner and was putting up a lion’s share of the bucks (Rick was not exactly certain how much) so that tonight’s audience was being treated to

  MARROW–DI VECCIO–RABALLO PRESENT

  A RICHARD HEIDELBERG PRO
DUCTION

  KERRY DARDENELLE’S

  THE LADY IN THE LAKE

  Raymond Chandler had somehow managed to elude this company of names, although way down in the billing he split a card with Jerry Rexford. Rick had decided at the last minute not to get in on the source card but stick to PRODUCED BY RICHARD HEIDELBERG. Perhaps it was the beginnings of a rudimentary modesty, although he doubted it. More likely preparation to lay the whole thing off onto Rexford if it was a disaster.

  A disaster now would wreck Rick. He had long since worn out his welcome at the studio. The Boss must have hated him, although no one could have been more impeccable in his behavior than Hellstrom, who, once he found himself sandbagged, doubly sandbagged—not only overruled on the picture but finding the woman he had told Rick he loved in the delicate hands of a creep like Donald Marrow; nonetheless breaking his ass to make sure the picture had every advantage he could supply, from a miracle budget, utterly without padding, to a daily scrutiny to keep the little problems little, and waste at a minimum. And he got them the best below-the-line crew anybody had seen for years.

  Rick had to admit that the production was first class because the Boss had made it so. Rick himself would have committed dozens of costly errors, and many times only the Boss’s intervention had kept him from folly. And the Boss had been polite and never let anybody see the dislike he must have felt. Only Rick could feel the chill, and regretted the death of what might have been a lifelong friendship.

  The Boss had even done his best to keep Marrow from forcing his idiotic notions down Rick’s throat, once the production had started to roll. Jerry, whom Rick could see now across the lobby, grimmer around the eyes and firmer in the mouth than when he had come to Rick as a callow first-time writer some months ago, and now acknowledging Rick’s wink with a flutter—no more—of his fingers and then pretending to be interested in a nearby tapestry, had feared Marrow more than any of them. Marrow would burst into Jerry’s tiny cubicle with script changes and ideas that must have been baffling to Jerry—worse than baffling, surrealistic—because Jerry had not been to the screenings of new product from the other studios that Marrow had been to, and so did not know that he was being offered the Big Moments from these other pictures, the Moments where the screening room or theater or living room full of executives and their mates burst into laughter or applause.