The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  Marrow was not one to stand back from a little judicious theft if it would improve the product, and he seemed to have no memory for yesterday’s suggestions. Rick finally had to teach Jerry to nod and smile and make notes until Marrow ran down. Sometimes this worked and sometimes Jerry would get an awful tongue-lashing from Marrow and would have to sit and clench his knees while his face turned redder and redder and Marrow explained how he wanted things.

  “This is a perfect chance for Jody McKeegan to sing, while she’s working in Bakersfield in this country-western hole in the wall, see? I asked you to run that scene up before . . .”

  Miserable Jerry would look at Rick and then at Marrow, squeeze his knees and say in a strained voice, “But I thought we agreed against any musical numbers . . .”

  “Jody McKeegan can sing, the audience expects it of her,” Marrow snapped.

  McKeegan was playing Muriel Chess and had the biggest salary on the picture, although she was billed below Eric Tennyson.

  Rick had actually fought casting McKeegan, on the grounds that she was too old, too expensive and too damn much trouble to work with, but the Boss had cut through all that by saying bluntly, “She’s the best actor we can get for the money, and believe me, this part calls for an actor. The audience has to be fooled by Mrs. Fallbrook as much as Marlowe is.”

  The real stroke of genius had been Eric Tennyson for Philip Marlowe, if Rick said so himself, and he certainly did.

  Rick looked around the crowded lobby. There wasn’t a Tennyson in sight. He broke out into a light sweat.

  “You better go to the toilet or something,” Elektra said to him.

  IT HADN’T exactly been Rick’s idea to cast Eric Tennyson. Everybody wanted Peter Wellman, and Peter Wellman wanted to play Philip Marlowe very badly. The studio had a three-picture commitment from Wellman, and now that his Texas movie was finished, except for an afternoon’s looping, Wellman was getting impatient for work. Rick had come down to his place in the Malibu Colony for lunch, with David Novotny and William Galaxy (Wellman’s producing partner) and they had all had a fine time, ate a wonderful lunch, drank white wine and played some doubles. Rick was not a very good player, and let Novotny do it all, even unto throwing the match, because, as he said to Rick later, “You don’t beat an actor on his own court, especially not with a terrible partner like yourself.”

  So Peter Wellman was hot to trot, and the item was leaked to Army Archard, on the instructions of Donald Marrow. Everyone, even Rick, groaned at this incompetence, and cringed while they waited.

  They didn’t have to wait long. Wellman’s people marched in with their demands less than a week after People magazine copied Archard’s item. Demand Number One: William Galaxy would not only produce the picture, under Rick’s executive but not too active producership, but would enter into immediate conferences with Jerry Rexford (“Rexford’s from a very fine old Los Angeles family, I don’t know if you knew that . . .”) and Heidelberg about the script and the changes that would have to be made to accommodate an actor of his stature, because among other things, Peter was very enthusiastic about playing the same role as Bogart and Mitchum and God knows who else, but it was felt that the old-fashioned notion of the private eye loner was passé, and most probably Marlowe ought to have a girl friend, maybe even a live-in girl friend.

  So before Peter read the script and the studio was committed to paying him two million dollars, it would be very wise to have the script “Wellmanized,” as Galaxy so ironically put it.

  “Wellmanized my ass!” shouted Donald Marrow, the cause of all the trouble. “That man’s off the picture! I never want to hear his name again! Get his people off the goddamned lot!” Marrow rushed into his bathroom to gobble Valium and Rick exchanged glances with Boss Hellstrom.

  “Did he forget about the three-picture deal?”

  “I’ll remind him later,” Hellstrom said. “Maybe while he’s eating. Because he’s sure going to have to either eat his words or eat the contract.”

  But that was the end of Wellman’s involvement with The Lady in the Lake, and for a couple of days, Rick had that old feeling. The project, which had been so hot, was now cooling rapidly.

  He sat in his air-conditioned office and sweated like a hog, his hands folded on the desk top. Joyce came in, and sensing his emotion, went back out again. Once more he reflected on what a fine secretary she was.

  “Get me Elektra, will you, Joyce?”

  “Elektra on one.”

  “Honey, I’m coming out to the beach. Is that all right?”

  They had been having problems, nothing really out of line, but Rick’s busyness and the pressure he was under conspired to leave him sexless and irritable. Lately he had been staying in Errol Flynn’s apartment and Elektra had been living at the beach. But she sounded glad to hear from him, and cheerfully gave him a list of stuff to pick up at the Trancas Market.

  It was lovely weather and the sun hung sweetly over the beach. Rick, in old jeans, barefoot, came down the steps to the dry piled sand, crossed it with sinking steps to the wet sand, wonderfully cool against his feet after the hot crossing—a thing he noticed every time, a part of his life that never changed, never deserted him. Maybe he should write a haiku about it. Only Rick did not know how to write haiku. He was not even sure if it was five seven five or seven five seven. One of those was a jet plane, another a poetry form. Never mind, wet feet, wet feet, feels sweet, how neet, bleet bleet, that’s better than any goddamn haiku.

  Rick laughed at himself, at his tense neck muscles.

  When he got back to the house, exhausted from impulsively running halfway up the steps, Elektra told him he had had a phone call from Joanne Clay. He did not stop to think of the effect on Elektra but picked up the nearest telephone and dialed the number of the Tennyson ranch. Joanne was not there, and nobody there seemed to know her telephone number. But Elektra had it, and silently pushed the piece of paper with the message on it over to Rick and went into the kitchen.

  “Joanne, this is Rick,” he said in a strained voice.

  “I’m glad you caught me, I was just heading for the market. Listen, I’m sorry about Peter and all that. I hear your picture’s in trouble.”

  “Greatly exaggerated,” Rick said.

  “Why don’t you come and have supper with me? I’d like to talk over a couple of ideas.”

  Rick got the address and the directions. Up Laurel Canyon, left on Kirkwood, up Weepah Way to the end.

  “I’m sorry, honey bear, but I got to go out.”

  She looked up from her vegetable chopping. “You fucker,” she said. The vegetable knife was huge in her tiny hand.

  “It’s pure business,” he said lamely.

  “You rotten fucker,” she said.

  THE HOUSE was almost invisible under a huge tree, and there was a small Datsun pickup truck and an old Buick convertible parked crookedly up against the trunk of the tree, so either she wasn’t alone or these were her cars. Rick parked on a slant in the remaining dirt and gravel under the tree and got out cautiously. Dogs, you know. Most people up here protected themselves with dogs. But there was no barking, except in the distance, and Rick brushed his way through the drooping leafy branches to the front door, set in a white stucco arch, and, after finding the doorbell button rusted rigid, knocked on the door. Who would open the door? If it was Joanne, how would she be dressed? What was going on? Rick did not know. He had driven thirty miles after a day of exhausting anxiety and craziness, to have dinner with a woman who could easily twist him around anything she wanted to twist him around.

  While he waited for his knock to be answered, Rick made up his mind that no matter what, he was going to be “impeccable” with Joanne Clay, and at once the great weight lifted from his chest. Aha! That was the trick! No skulking around trying to brush up against her. No bedroom eyes. No bargaining, with lust a butcher’s thumb on the deal. He rapped again, this time with more authority, and the door opened so fast he almost lost his balance.

>   “Whoops!” he said.

  “My God, you’re not drunk, are you?” she asked with a smile.

  “Just off balance,” he said.

  “Well, stumble on in here, and I’ll get you drunk,” she said, and held the door open wide.

  The place was warm, amber lit, filled with the kind of possessions that are bought one at a time, carefully, with just so much money to spend, although Rick knew she had been well-off all her life. There were books and records and pictures, photographs and skeins of yarn and little statuettes, including unobtrusively in little niches her two Academy Awards; there was a tea cart covered with drinking equipment and bottles, a wine rack half-full of dark down-pointing bottles. Altogether it was a comfortable little house, much smaller than Rick had expected, much better lived-in, and overpoweringly Joanne’s. She took him to the couch, just touching the tips of his fingers, and bade him sit. She sat next to him, drawing her knees up and facing him, dressed in a man’s shirt and jeans, the most relaxed and comfortable and wonderfully used thing in the room.

  Rick without thinking made namasti and thanked God he had left his seduction plans outside.

  “We could smoke a joint,” she said. “If you brought one with you.”

  “Don’t you Tennysons ever buy your own dope?” he asked, withdrawing one of his beautiful almost tailor-made joints from his shirt pocket. Joanne took it from his fingers and licked it so that it wouldn’t burn crookedly, and then lit it with a wooden match, struck on the side of the old-fashioned match holder that said Cinzano in red and blue.

  “Mmmm,” Joanne said, “you beach people got boss dope.”

  Rick laughed, and suddenly smelled dinner, a rich odor he finally separated out into meat loaf and scalloped potatoes.

  “Let’s get business out of the way,” Joanne said, after they had finished the joint and she had brought them each a glass of white wine—amber it was, in the subdued amber light.

  “You got it,” Rick said.

  “As I said on the phone, I heard your picture is just short of turnaround. I suppose it’s true.”

  Rick had several choices. Give in to the marijuana and babble for fifteen minutes about all the troubles he was having. Lie. Divert. Answer with a question (“Who told you that?”).

  “Yes, “ he said.

  “My uncle wants that part,” she said.

  Rick’s heart sank. The evening stretched out like the Sahara before him. There was, of course, no chance of hiring Eric Tennyson for the role, even though he qualified barely as an “older leading man.” Eric Tennyson’s vogue had been twenty years ago and he had been out of the business most of that time, except for the two years he did the Ford commercials and a couple of swings through the dinner-theater circuit.

  “How would I get the studio to buy it?” he asked her quite honestly, and she nodded her head as if knowing that would be Rick’s first question.

  “That’s the stumbler, all right. But Eric’s willing to make a test for the part, and stand by the results. If that means anything to you.”

  “It means your uncle’s got guts,” Rick admitted. He could see Eric Tennyson on the screen in a Philip Marlowe hat and tie, with the dead staring faces of Boss Hellstrom and Donald Marrow in the flickering light, hard faces, unyielding faces, faces without romance or sentimentality or compassion. His own tough little face beside them. He remembered Eric as a natural actor who never seemed to be performing at all.

  “I have a bonus to offer,” Joanne said, and again Rick was glad he had left his heart on the porch.

  “What?” he asked without looking at her.

  “Grandpa will consent to play the old sheriff, what’s his name?”

  “Patton,” Rick said. So she’s done her homework pretty good! “Sheriff Patton’s fat,” he said stupidly.

  Joanne laughed. “Grandpa’ll make him skinny . . . and he’s not volunteering to do this out of sentiment—Eric doesn’t even know about it. Grandpa likes the role—that’s a great scene he’s got there at the end . . .”

  A couple of Tennysons . . . in exchange for what?

  Joanne seemed to understand. “Eric’s tired of being out of the limelight.”

  The meat loaf got a little dry during their talk, but the scalloped potatoes took the opportunity to get even darker and crustier, and consequently more delicious. The steamed asparagus was perfect. They both ate like starving cats, and there was little conversation at the table. Rick did not even ask her where her husband was, or if he was still her husband. Rich people, he had noticed in the last couple of years, were likely to be worlds apart most of the time. After dinner Rick telephoned Elektra, in front of Joanne, and told her he would be home in an hour or so, whatever it took. She was cold on the phone, but he knew he could jolly her out of it. He felt wonderful. He had an instinct that this was all going to work out. Maybe it was that image in his mind, Eric in that Marlowe hat, that did it. It made Marlowe a little older, but that could add to the poignancy rather than take away from it. They would have to make the picture tasteful on every level, only the best character actors, loving detail on sets and costumes . . .

  Donald Marrow’s face intruded on his fantasy, and he had to say to Joanne, “Look, I’ll do my best. If the studio buys him, I like him. And I’ll try to get around that screen test idea, hell, Eric Tennyson shouldn’t have to . . .”

  “But they’ll want him to,” she said wisely.

  They kissed goodnight, but it didn’t mean a thing and she was right, they wanted that screen test, if only as a way of being polite to Eric Tennyson. And they were really hot for old Clay as Sheriff Patton, the quick-draw artist from the past.

  Eric Tennyson was no fool. He knew he had only about a five percent chance of getting the part, but as he told Rick nervously, on the set for his screen test, “I’m tired of horse shit.” He gave a fine restrained performance.

  But Rick sincerely believed that if Donald Marrow had stuck around, things would have gone differently.

  NO ONE really knew why Donald Marrow, after weeks of the closest interest, decided to disappear, or even why he had chosen to appear in the first place, except possibly his romance with Teresa di Veccio. Rick remembered with a rueful smile their little group at The Four Seasons, where Teresa was treated like royalty and the rest of them looked as if they would be more comfortable eating in the kitchen; how conscious he was of his own cheap-looking suit and Marrow’s dull but somehow loud green suit; Marrow’s lustful stares at both women, as if by the force of his eyeballs he could fuck them right there on the spot. It was hard to get Marrow to talk business. He kept saying things like “We’ll have to go to Studio Fifty-four, I know everybody there, you’ll love the place!” to Teresa’s barely concealed boredom with the idea, to Elektra’s simple placid acceptance of everything around her. Rick half-suspected that Elektra had been into his Quaaludes.

  This is what gave him his wonderful idea, and while Marrow was making a telephone call and nobody else but Teresa seemed to be watching, Rick quickly spooned a tiny glittering pile of cocaine from his little bottle into Marrow’s drink, winking at Teresa at the same time.

  “I wish I had some,” she said wistfully, and Rick passed her the bottle under the table.

  “Coming, dear?” she asked Elektra, and off they went.

  When Marrow came back, his swagger and smirk making it obvious that even in this place he was a famous fellow, Rick’s last misgiving faded as Marrow sat down with a rude flourish and said, “Well, I’m free now; let’s make a night of it!”

  “I want to talk about this picture,” Rick said. Marrow took a swig of his drink and soon was chatting like a jaybird. His enthusiasm rose to a crescendo under Rick’s carefully tailored presentation, and within thirty minutes Marrow’s hand was out shaking Rick’s with wonderful vigor. The two women, who had been an enthusiastic claque for Rick and would have been even without the visit to the women’s room, added their champagne glasses to the toast, as Marrow rose to his feet, almost continui
ng, Rick thought with amusement: the himmelfahr of Donald Marrow:

  “To The Lady in the Lake!”

  “People are looking at us,” Teresa suggested.

  “Let ’em look!” Marrow said. “We’re the circus tonight!”

  They went to Teresa’s apartment high in the sky, an apartment so tasteful and European that it made Rick slightly queasy, and Rick got out the cocaine openly, only to get a Dutch-uncle lecture from Marrow on the uses of drugs and the terrible Draconian laws of the State of New York. He was thoroughly drunk by now, and pawing verbally at both women, winking at Rick as a co-conspirator and spilling champagne on the oriental rugs.

  Rick was delighted to get out of there with Elektra in tow, and leave Teresa to get rid of him by herself.

  But Teresa did not get rid of him. They were seen everywhere together for the next few days, and Rick’s business talks with Marrow, conducted in his office in midtown, were uncluttered by high jinks or bad behavior. Marrow was a very intelligent man about some things, a tyrant, possibly even a tyrant-genius, and it was hard not to be impressed. Teresa herself told Rick that the man fascinated her. “He’s a brilliant oaf,” she said. “What used to be called a diamond in the rough.”

  “Is that anything like a chicken in the basket?” Rick wanted to know, and Teresa laughed. She probably thought he was a “rough diamond” too.