The Woman Who Fell From Grace

by David Handler

  “What’s Schlom’s stake in this?”

  “He’s Panorama’s single largest shareholder. He personally stands to pull down $350 million on the deal in stock. Plus get a megacontract to keep on running the studio. He’ll swing the biggest dick in town, no question. So will the guy who’s brokering the deal. And guess who that is? Guess who is serving as the go-between?”

  “Abel Zorch?”

  “Doink—Penny’s lawyer. Who happens to be very tight with Schlom. And also happens to speak fluent Japanese. See how all the pieces fit together now?”

  “Neatly.”

  “So you can appreciate the position we’re in.”

  “I can—you’re fucked.”

  He puffed out his cheeks again. “It’s true. We are. Unless …”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless Matthew and Pennyroyal somehow get back together.” He looked across the table at me pleadingly. “They have to patch things up, Hoagy. They just have to.”

  “You’re not asking me to write his book for him. You’re asking me to save his marriage.”

  “And his studio,” he admitted. “And all of the people who depend on it.” He sighed and ran a chubby hand over his face. “Maybe I’m asking too much.”

  “You can drop the maybe.”

  “It’s just that … there are no secrets in the film business. Everyone in town knows exactly what’s happening to us. No one’s bringing us any new projects—their agents are advising them not to. And the banks won’t finance any of our go projects. Not until this thing is settled. Matthew’s new movie is the only thing we’ve got going, and that’s coming out of his own pocket. All I can do is sit around, waiting for the ax to fall. I feel so totally helpless.” His eyes welled up. Again with the waterworks. He swiped at them with his napkin. “Maybe … maybe it is too late for us. Maybe we’re history. Whatever happens, it’s not your problem. I didn’t mean to lay it on you. I’m sorry. Really, I am. You write books. Good books. Write Matthew one. That’s all I ask.” He wadded up the napkin and laid it in the ashtray. “Will you do it? Please?”

  I got to my feet, rousing Lulu. “Anything else I should know?”

  His whole face lit up. He looked like Benjamin when it did. “Yeah. It was a hundred and seven in L.A. yesterday. The Santa Ana winds are blowing.”

  “How nice of them.” I picked up my trench coat and hat and started inside.

  “One other thing, Hoagy,” Shelley said nervously.

  I stopped. There was always one other thing. I waited.

  “Do you know how to duck?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  “Because you may get caught in the cross fire.”

  “Oh, that.” I put on my hat and grinned at him. “Not to worry. I can see them just fine, but they can’t see me at all. I’m a ghost, remember?”

  Not that I ever thought I would be.

  Then again, I don’t suppose anyone purposely sets out to become an invisible man. Let’s face it—on the human dignity scale, ghosting ranks somewhere between mud wrestling and writing speeches for Dan Quayle. But it does finance my fiction, which is how I get my true, unbridaled jollies. And I am ideally suited for it. In fact, I happen to be the best. Three bestselling celebrity memoirs to my noncredit, as well as someone else’s bestselling novel. Not that the three memoirs weren’t what you’d call fiction, too. A memoir, after all, is an exercise in self-deception and self-glorification. People remember things the way they want to remember them. And celebrities are by nature fictitious creations. “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,” the great star once acknowledged. “I want to be Cary Grant.” My background as a world-class novelist comes in real handy. So does my own former celebrity. I know how to handle stars. The lunch pail ghosts don’t. They treat them like rational, intelligent human beings. I know better.

  There is, however, a pitfall to my second career. Pretty big one, too. As a novelist, the greatest hazard I face is being called a no-talent bozo in the New York Times Book Review. Ghosting is a good deal scarier. Memoirs are about secrets, past and present. My job is to dig them up. The problem is there’s usually someone around who wants those dirty little secrets to stay buried, and will go to great lengths to see that they do. As a consequence, I’ve been shot at a number of times, punched, kicked, drugged, and suffocated—almost. And I can’t even begin to tell you what’s happened to Lulu. I haven’t been killed yet, but a lot of people around me have. This part of the job I’m not suited for. But I can’t seem to avoid it. Trouble has this way of following me around. I think it’s my personality. I figured I should warn you about it in case you’re an aging film star who is thinking of hiring me. Think again. Or in case you’re a young, ambitious writer who figures ghosting might be an easy way to make a shitload of money. It isn’t. Not even maybe.

  I also don’t need the competition. So back off. I mean it.

  Chapter 2

  I FLEW OUT TWO DAYS LATER ON BEDFORD FALLS’ own Boeing 727 jet. Most studios have their own. Part of the image. The most important thing to remember about the movie business, an old-time director once told me, is that superficiality is everything. The family Selden wasn’t with me. Mr. Shelley still had more business in New York. But I was not alone. Several others had booked seats on the flight. The usual collection you get on a studio jet. A couple of record company executives. A VJ from MTV, who had just gotten her own sitcom, and who wore very little clothing. Peter Weller, the actor. Ed Bradley from 60 Minutes. The agent who represents three-fifths of the Lakers’ starting lineup, and who spent four-fifths of the flight on the phone. I seemed to be the only one on board who wasn’t wearing cowboy boots, and that included our stewardess, Jennifer. I had on my white-and-brown spectator balmorals with my unlined suit of blue-and-cream cotton seersucker and my white straw boater. Lulu stuck with her shades.

  Jennifer was very friendly and helpful, and she made an enemy of me for life before we’d even taken off. Just as soon as she got done fussing over Lulu. “Are you her trainer?” she asked me.

  I stiffened. “Her what?”

  “Isn’t she a movie dog? What did I see her in?”

  “I’m afraid you’re mistaken.”

  Nonetheless, Lulu snuffled with glee and was a giant pain in the ass from that moment on. Even more so than usual. She has this problem with her head, you see. It swells even more easily than mine does.

  Lunch was a salad of assorted field greens topped with grilled chicken. Free-range, of course. I had pineapple for dessert, and a Bass ale. Lulu had the fresh linguine with red clam sauce, minus the fresh linguine. There was an extensive library of videocassettes aboard. Lulu spent much of the flight watching Turner and Hooch with Tom Hanks for the eighth time. It’s one of her favorites, though she’s always thought Beasley was a little over the top with that saliva thing. I spent my time plowing through the fat manila envelope the Bedford Falls publicity people had sent me. In it were the major magazine articles that had been written about Matthew Wax through the years. Profiles in Rolling Stone, Esquire, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, American Film. If you could call them profiles. They were really about his movies, not him. What he did on the screen. Not who he was. An enigma, several writers called him. What else could you call a director who didn’t grant interviews, didn’t promote his films, didn’t appear in public, period. About the only time he had was during the Film Colorization hearings in Washington, D.C., when he testified before a Senate committee in a halting, emotional voice that colorization was “like spray painting graffiti on the Liberty Bell.”

  The biographical details were sketchy. Matthew Wax had grown up in the middle-class Sepulveda section of Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. He started writing and directing his own 8mm films when he was still in high school, and went on from there to USC film school. His first 16mm student short, Bugged, was the story of an unpopular teenager who awakens one morning to find himself transformed into a large, distasteful insect. It so impressed Norbert Schlom, then vice
president of television production at Panorama Studios, that he immediately hired the nineteen-year-old to direct Rick Brant, Adventurer, a new CBS Saturday morning serial in the tradition of the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift. Within weeks of its premiere, Rick Brant was the most popular kids’ show in a decade. Matthew Wax never looked back. At age twenty-one he wrote and directed his first feature film, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, a low-budget Hitchcockian thriller about a lonely little boy who happens to witness the friendly couple next door committing a murder. The Boy Who Cried Wolf was a viscerally terrifying film right out of a kid’s worst nightmares. It made a vivid impression on filmgoers. So did its seven-year-old star, a wide-eyed little Canadian boy named Jean Forget. It also made $20 million. His second, I Was Invisible, a giddy spoof about an invisible teenager, became the sleeper box office hit of 1976. America’s most influential film critic, Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, breathlessly stamped young Matthew Wax with greatness when she wrote: “An adroit, look-ma-no-hands screwball farce by a young master who already knows more than Howard Hawks ever learned.”

  That was the end of low-budget filmmaking for Matthew Wax. From then on he cranked out an unprecedented string of blockbusters, transforming his own childhood fears, fantasies, and fascinations into spirited special-effects extravaganzas that everyone simply had to see. It was uncanny how he kept topping himself. Even more uncanny was his impact. Because if there was one man who was responsible for the infantilization of American mass entertainment, it was Matthew Wax. It was due to his astonishing success that Hollywood virtually gave itself over to the making and marketing of huge, dumb, kid-oriented blockbusters. It was because of him that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg found film careers, stepping forward to direct comic book megasuccesses of their own, one after another after another.

  But there was only one Matthew Wax.

  The young master’s first blockbuster was To the Moon, his lavish 1978 homage to those schlocky space flight movies of the 1950s. The story of a moon launch set off course by a meteorite storm, it broke box office records nationwide for fourteen straight weeks. And made an international star of Trace Washburn, the lean, rugged former USC quarterback and movie stuntman who played Rip O’Keefe, the fearless astronaut who single-handedly battles a race of demented, slavering Martian mutants. Its sequel, Back to the Moon, in which Rip discovers the moon to be populated by demented, slavering Nazi scientists, became the first movie in the history of Hollywood to gross more than Gone with the Wind. That particular record would not stand for long. Lucas would break it with Star Wars, Spielberg with E.T. Wax would go on to break it himself three more times. He broke it in 1982 with Yeti, his $40 million monster epic based on The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, a 1957 B-movie starring Peter Cushing and Forrest Tucker. Filmed on location in the Himalayas, Yeti featured both the greatest avalanche in movie history and Lord Laurence Olivier as the Dalai Lama. Trace Washburn returned to action in the role of Duke Jardine, fearless adventurer. Pro football’s John Matuszak shot to stardom, briefly, as the hairy behemoth with the heart of gold and the fatal weakness for Baby Ruths. Yeti would spawn Yeti II, which featured a surprisingly scary Glenn Close as the snowman’s revenge-crazed mate. The sequel did even better.

  But the biggest was yet to come. Exhausted by two years of rigorous location filming, Wax turned next to a heartwarming animated fable about a young brontosaurus named Dennis who becomes separated from his family and encounters all sorts of strange, magical creatures as he tries to find his way back to them. Jean Forget, the child star of Matthew’s first film, provided the voice of Dennis. A roster of notable actors joined him, including Meryl Streep as Dennis’s mother. Dennis the Dinosaur was an unabashed homage to Bambi and Dumbo and the other Disney classics of Matthew Wax’s own childhood. And it was a phenomenon. Audiences of all ages went back to see it again and again. Within four months of its 1985 summer release it had become the top grossing film of all time. (It still is—to date, it has grossed $367 million.) Before long, there was a top-rated Dennis prime-time TV show, a Dennis Ice Capades show, a series of children’s books featuring all-new Dennis adventures. There were Dennis dolls, Dennis shower curtains, beach towels, sheets, pillowcases, pajamas, calendars, notebooks, puzzles, hats, sneakers, shoelaces, lunch boxes. There was no escaping Dennis. Dennis was everywhere. Dennis was loved.

  And so was Matthew Wax. His movies were a tonic. “High priest of the New Optimism” was what Time called him when they put him on their cover at the height of the Dennis craze. Looking back, they could just as easily have labeled him the unofficial voice of the Reagan years. Just like the President, he reminded people of the good old days before Vietnam and Watergate. He put smiles on their faces. He made them believe again in that America of spunk and determination, that America where Good triumphed over Evil, and Love triumphed over all. That America we all wanted to believe in—the America of happy endings.

  He did stumble. Even a master can stub his toe. And Matthew Wax did with The Three Stooges in Orbit, the unfortunate 1986 remake starring Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and Steve Martin as Larry, Curly, and Moe. “A thirty-million dollar wind-up gadget that lurches from one dim-witted idea to the next,” sniffed Kael in The New Yorker. “Staggeringly unfunny,” agreed Siskel and Ebert, who gave it two thumbs down. So did Wax himself. He clashed repeatedly with the stars and with the studio. He disavowed the final cut that Panorama released into the theaters, where it barely broke even. Through his spokesman, Sheldon Selden, he announced he would never make another film for Panorama City. Or anyone else for that matter. He took his toys and went home.

  Home to Bedford Falls, formerly Lucerne Studios, which he bought with the vast fortune he’d earned from Dennis. Here, as lord of his own realm, he immediately made Badger Hayes, All-American Boy, his most nostalgic and evocative work. Badger was a misty-eyed look back at growing up in a small American town called Homewood in the fifties. Homewood was the America that never was, except perhaps in a Norman Rockwell painting. It was ham radios, soap box derbies, and malt shops. It was sturdy, fresh-scrubbed boys and neat, pretty girls. There was no such thing as orthodonture or acne in Homewood. There was no teen pregnancy, no drug abuse, no divorce, rape, suicide, poverty, or racial injustice. Homewood was everyone’s fantasy hometown. It was Carvel, where Andy Hardy was from. And Badger Hayes was another Andy Hardy—eager, irrepressible, good-natured, and utterly confused. Little Jean Forget, who was now eighteen and going by the Americanized Johnny Forget, soared to teen stardom as Badger. Pennyroyal Brim, the complete unknown who played Badger’s girl-next-door, Debbie Dale, captivated audiences, too. She was so fantastically cute. Trace Washburn returned from a rather long screen absence in the role of Badger’s dad. Teri Garr played his mom. The movie was immensely popular. Wax made a sequel, Badger Hayes and His Chemistry Set, which scored again. He also married Pennyroyal Brim. His world was complete now. It was time to live happily ever after.

  Only he hadn’t. His latest movie, Badger Goes to College, had been a colossal flop. His first. It was a typical Wax job, a warm-hearted bit of nostalgic fluff about Badger and Debbie’s ups and downs at Homewood U in the midsixties. Only this time, audiences stayed away. And the critics sneered. Laughed at its portrayal of a sixties college campus totally devoid of long-hairs and blacks and even the slightest awareness of Vietnam. They called it a pathetic joke. They didn’t just attack it—they went after the director himself. “What Matthew Wax doesn’t seem to realize,” wrote David Denby in New York Magazine, “is that he isn’t nine years old anymore, and neither are we.”

  Times had changed. Reagan had ridden off into the sunset. The stock market had crashed. Donald Trump was broke. Mike Milken was in jail. The eighties were over and out, and Matthew Wax was over and out with them. The public turns fast when you’re on top. They had turned on Matthew Wax. Suddenly they saw something inherently false about his dogged determination to make everything over into a feel-good experience. Suddenly his movies weren’t sweet anymore. T
hey were saccharine. A sham. If anyone needed proof, all they had to do was pick up a newspaper. Johnny Forget, all-American boy, got himself busted in Los Angeles for coke possession one week after the movie opened. A few weeks later he was arrested for attempting to murder his manager, who also happened to be his mother. And now there was this business, the House of Wax. Matthew’s storybook marriage to Pretty Penny had gone boom. And it looked like Bedford Falls would be next to have a great fall. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men …

  I sat back in my plush club chair, stared out the window at the clouds covering the Midwest, and thought about my own storybook marriage. My sunshine days, I called them. When I was that tall, dashing, fabulously successful author of that fabulously successful first novel. When Merilee was Joe Papp’s newest, loveliest darling. New York was ours then. The red 1958 Jaguar XK-150 was ours. Lulu was ours. We had it all. God, we were something. Until I lost it. Lost my voice, my juices, my touch. Lost Merilee. She got the Tony for the Mamet play, the Oscar for the Woody Allen movie. I got Lulu, my drafty fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-third Street, and my ego, which requires its own room and bath, with kitchen privileges.