Hollywood and Levine

by Andrew Bergman

  “Like what?”

  “Like what I need you for. When you asked what the problem was, I said the first thing that sounded plausible. Being followed sprang to mind. I used it in Murder Street.” He smiled. “Fooled you.”

  “That’s not so hard.”

  The waiter returned and wouldn’t leave until we ordered. Walter and I both opted for the brisket. The waiter tore the menus from our hands and departed.

  “Okay, Walter, for real this time: what’s the problem?”

  The writer finished off his manhattan and coughed a bit, his cheeks flushing red. Then he folded his hands before him.

  “It’s kind of a long story,” he began. “The background, that is.”

  “There aren’t any short stories in my business.”

  “So you’ll be patient?”

  “I’m even patient with strangers, Walter.”

  He was moved by the remark. His eyes went a little wet and he nodded.

  “I know, Jack. That’s why I’m talking to you.” Adrian rubbed the corners of his eyes. “Okay. The short of it is that my career is on the rocks.”

  “What’s the long of it?”

  “The long of it is that I don’t know why.”

  “All right, let me try and get a handle on this,” I said. “‘On the rocks’ means you’re not getting work?”

  “It is very complicated, Jack. It’s hints, rumors, feelings that I get. Plus actual tangible trouble that I’m having with Warners.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Contract trouble.” Adrian put one of those foreign butts in his mouth and lit up. I offered him a Lucky.

  “For the love of God, Walter, those things smell like yak shit. Take a good old American Lucky.”

  Adrian smiled and crushed out his cigarette, accepting one of mine. I lit us both up.

  “This contract trouble,” the writer continued, plumes of smoke curling from his nostrils, “is very unusual, Jack. I’ve been on the Warners payroll since 1938 and it’s the first time we’ve run into any problem.”

  “They don’t want to renew?”

  He shook his head abruptly, either to shut off my line of questioning or to mute the conversation until the waiter, who was setting down our two bowls of barley soup, had departed. When he was out of earshot, Adrian leaned forward and whispered.

  “They are giving us money problems.”

  “And ‘us’ means you and who else?”

  “My agent, Larry Goldmark.” Adrian spooned some soup into his mouth, managing to drool a bit on his chin. “The bare facts are this: my current contract runs out on April 6 and we’ve been renegotiating since December. I was getting twenty-five hundred a week and we asked thirty-five.” He looked down into the floating barley, suddenly embarrassed by the gross amounts of money he was talking about.

  “Seems fair enough to me,” I said. “The way prices are shooting up, how do they expect a fella to live on twenty-five hundred a week?”

  Adrian did not find my remark amusing. T had not expected him to.

  “Don’t bust my nuts, Jack,” he said coldly. The writer’s moods were as wildly unpredictable as an infant’s. “You can’t possibly understand the role of money out there.”

  “I understand the role of money everywhere, Walter. It buys things: slacks, automobiles, legs of lamb, sex, fillets of fish, people.”

  “No, Jack,” he continued, determined to beat his point through my head. “In the movie industry, money is a symbolic gauge of your standing. It measures you and determines your social and professional standing. Exactly and to the dime. Listen, I know the numbers are obscene, wildly out of line. In a world where people live and die in the streets, where children in the capitals of Europe go hungry, where Southern sharecroppers work from dawn to dusk for miserable, grotesque wages, that people should earn a quarter of a million dollars a year to write romance and trash is disgusting. In a decent society, in a society of equals, this wouldn’t happen. I know all that, Jack.”

  Adrian had raised his voice and was punctuating his words by beating his spoon on the table. A platinum blond at the next table and her companion, a fat man with a green cigar in his face, peered at us while pretending to look down at their menus.

  “You took the words out of my mouth, Walter,” I told him. “Now why don’t you slow down and tell me precisely what the problem is. I’ll try and keep my bon mots at a minimum.”

  The writer slumped back in his seat and idly ran his spoon through his soup, making little waves in the bowl.

  “You see, Jack,” he said in an educational tone, “the studios use dollar amounts to pin labels on people: Big Star, Declining Star, Featured Player. Major Writer, Slipping Writer, Hack. It is very conscious and very, very cruel.”

  “And you think you’re slipping?”

  “That’s what the negotiations tell me. And I’m baffled, hurt, amazed. I’ve done great work for Warners in the past couple of years. Berlin Commando grossed three million bucks, Boy From Brooklyn did two-seven. That’s serious dough.”

  “You don’t have to sell me, Walter.”

  “First, they compromised at three,” Adrian went on, picking up speed. “Not what we asked for but good, very good. You never get what you ask for, that’s why you ask for it. So they say yes to three and we’re about to sign when they come back at us with twenty-five.”

  Our steaming briskets arrived and the soup bowls were cleared. The waiter wanted to make some bad jokes at our expense by starting a “There’s a hundred things on the menu and both these guys order brisket. Where you from, Cleveland?” spiel. We completely ignored him and he departed in poor humor.

  “Same fucking waiters,” I muttered.

  Walter picked up where he had left off, as if he had been holding his breath. “We were unhappy enough about the twenty-five, but the next day it was down to twenty-two. Like a goddamn stock market crash! I was about to leave for New York and got half-crazy, as you can well imagine. How come I suddenly had the plague? My agent told Warners they could shove the twenty-two. They told him to get wise and accept.”

  “They give any reasons for this?”

  “Reasons?” he bellowed. The platinum lady and the gentleman with the green cigar turned around. Walter blushed and lowered his voice. “Reasons? A collection of excuses, lame excuses, the kind they give when they want you to know they’re only lame excuses. They’re worried about television, they have to tighten ship, all a lot of crap.”

  “Walter, this doesn’t make too much sense. You’re a top screenwriter, a moneymaker. If Warner Brothers is trying to force you down, go somewhere else. You’ll find a studio that’ll pay you what you want, no?”

  Adrian picked at his brisket uneasily.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “This isn’t the time. My agent made some calls: Paramount, Metro, Fox, Selznick. But he couldn’t say out front that Warners was trying to cut me out. It was a fishing expedition: he talked vaguely about Walter Adrian wanting to get more freedom. All he got were compliments and the stall.”

  We ate in silence for a while, Adrian depressed and Le-Vine hungry. The brisket was lean and aromatic. When we finished, we ordered strawberry cheesecake and coffee, to complete a most excellent glut.

  “So where does it stand right now, Walter, as we speak?”

  “As we speak?” The writer played with his lip, kneading it between his fingers. “As we speak, it hardly stands at all. The agent told me to sit tight, that if we held out Warners would ultimately give us what we wanted. So I flew East with at least a little peace of mind. Last night I called the Coast.” He stared bleakly ahead. “The market has plunged again: they’ve gone down to seventeen-fifty. And that’s just an insult, nothing else.”

  “If you say so.”

  Adrian’s jaw muscles worked silently and fiercely. “Jack, will you please understand,” he said angrily and precisely, “that the dollar amounts are symbolic. The numbers mean they want me out.”

  “Okay. Now t
he question is why?”

  “I don’t have the vaguest.”

  Our cheesecake was brought forth; gloom and despair briefly vanished. We ate our strawberry-topped wedges with the solemn ecstasy of religious fanatics letting communion wafers dissolve in their mouths. When the last bites began their greased plunges to our respective stomachs, we settled back and called for more coffee. Walter was kind enough to offer me a Havana and I was smart enough to accept. We lit up and sat puffing like a pair of exiled princes. A Negro busboy cleared the dishes.

  “Tough job, eh?” Walter asked the busboy in a tone of bogus comradeship.

  “Yessir,” he replied softly, not looking up from his tray.

  “You think seventeen hundred fish per week is a bum salary, kid?” I asked cheerily.

  Now he looked up. He was light-skinned and just a boy, eighteen at the most.

  “Seventeen hundred?” he asked with a shy smile. “Every week?” He laughed. “No, that’s all right with me. You got a job like that?”

  “No, but this guy here’s got one he wants to give up.” I pointed at a fuming Walter.

  “Then he’s crazy.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell him.”

  The busboy laughed and walked away with his tray full of filthy dishes. Walter was livid, as I knew he would be.

  “What the hell was that all about?” he demanded. “I didn’t know you enjoyed humiliating your friends.”

  “I’ll tell you what it is, Walter. I hammer at weak spots. By now it’s an instinct. See, the thing is, I don’t think you’re leveling with me. You came into my office to feel me out and told me someone was tailing you. That was the bunk, but I can understand why you did it. But now you allegedly feel comfortable with me and you’re still not leveling. That’s what I don’t like.”

  “I am leveling, Jack.”

  “You aren’t. I can’t believe that you don’t have a single clue as to why Warner Brothers is out to get you. What is it, Walter, a morals rap? They catch you sashaying around in one of Virginia Mayo’s outfits? You shtup someone you’re not supposed to, like Warner’s daughter or Minnie Mouse or The Three Stooges? What is it? A clue, a hint is all I want. Even if you’re not sure, give me your suspicions.”

  Walter shook his head in helplessness, not so much at my questions, but at his situation.

  “It is not morals, Jack. I’m absolutely sure about that.”

  “And it’s obviously not incompetence, not if your pictures have been making dough.”

  “A high percentage have been profitable, Jack. You can look it up in Variety.”

  “Oh, I believe it, Walter,” I told him. “Doesn’t leave much, except studio politics, personal animus.”

  The writer nodded vaguely. “I have some enemies there,” he said slowly, as if diagraming his thoughts, “but don’t we all? Hollywood has cliques like any place else, probably more because it’s such an insular community. There are the old-timers, the old money, the progressive element….” His voice trailed off, his eyes got distant and unfocused.

  “It is politics, then,” I said quietly.

  Adrian looked at me and I could tell for sure that he was trying to decide how far he could go with me.

  “In a general sense you might be right, Jack.” He weighed the words out, gram by gram. The calibrations were minute. “There are rumors that it might be a bad time for people like us.”

  “Who’s ‘us,’ Jews?”

  “People with progressive ideas. People who care a little about the world, about the sufferings of humanity, about the direction of government.” The writer’s eyes caught fire. “Christ, Jack, don’t you remember back in ’27, at City, when the Sacco-Vanzetti case blew up, the anguish of our generation? It was all we could think about, it was a watershed, a dividing line. What did Dos Passos write? ‘All right we are two nations.’ It was such a revelation.” Adrian leaned across the table, his face inches from mine. “We had such ideas about the way the world was going to be, Jack! God, did we ever dream! We were fools in college, of course; our ideas were unformed, undisciplined, but our instincts were right. I still make mistakes, I spread myself too thin, but I keep trying.” He shook his head thoughtfully. “Trouble is, there’s so much to learn about and the world changes so quickly you can’t truly keep abreast of things. But that can’t stop us from caring deeply or thinking deeply about the forces that make governments tick. Particularly with these terrible weapons of war we have now. One wrong move and it’s all up in smoke. And the United States won’t share the secret. That’s why, now more than ever, the people who want a better world can’t be scared off.”

  Adrian’s eyes had grown bright and intense, thrilled by his own oratory. I cleared my throat.

  “Stop me if I’m wrong,” I began, “but are you telling me that you spoke out too often and you’re getting roasted for it?”

  “I wish to God I knew.”

  “Okay. Anything else to tell me?”

  “There’s nothing else to tell.”

  “You ever do any work for Uncle Joe Stalin? Used to be very, very popular, Walter. Lot of smart people did.”

  Adrian leaned so far forward in his chair that he was practically out of it.

  “I’ve only worked for the people of the world,” he said. “Believe me, Jack.”

  Which was all I needed to hear. The part of my brain that I like the best told me to get Adrian out of my life pronto. He was hazy, evasive, and trouble all around. But he was so obviously scared and such a pigeon for anybody with an angle that I knew I had to climb in the boat with him, leaky as it might be. I had the feeling he was going to need a lot of help, the kind of help he wouldn’t get from his agents and managers. Besides, I told myself, it had been a dull few months: follow this guy, follow that broad, hang around that lobby. What for, to make a buck? Any shoe salesman can make a buck. LeVine rationalizes.

  “Are you asking me to go to the Coast, Walter?”

  He nodded. “Exactly. I want you to find out the precise reasons and motives behind all this trouble. I don’t know much, Jack, but I know this is serious.”

  “And you’re not being cute with me—you really don’t know why you’re being pushed around?”

  He covered my hand with his.

  “Trust me, shamus.”

  So I trusted him and if that doesn’t keep LeVine out of the private dicks’ hall of fame, nothing ever will. Adrian agreed to fly me out to the Coast and pay me three hundred dollars plus expenses for a ten-day investigation, to begin the following Wednesday, one week hence. He wrote a check covering the air fare.

  “I’ll get you a room at the Camino Real and have a car waiting for you there. Take a cab from the airport.”

  “Fine.” I folded the check and put it in my wallet.

  Adrian nodded and sat a little awkwardly, his hands bunched in his lap.

  “I’ve never hired a detective before.” He flashed his best boyish smile.

  “You’ll get used to it,” I told him. “It’s like hiring any menial help.”

  He nodded some more and then, having nothing further to say to each other, we got up and paid the tab.

  Out on the street, crowds of people streamed toward their eight-thirty curtains. Adrian and I stood with our hands in our pockets.

  “You’re going home now, Jack?”

  “Yeah. I walk down to Times Square and catch the Flushing train.”

  “Trains run pretty regularly?”

  “The Flushing is pretty good.”

  Adrian removed his hand from his pocket and extended it for a final shake. I shook it.

  “Then I’ll see you a week from tonight in California. We’ll treat you like a king.” Adrian was attempting to infuse the mission with a little gaiety, but he was too burdened by fears and doubts to come very close.

  “I’ll be there, Walter.”

  “Wonderful. I’ll be flying out tomorrow.” He tightened his grip on my hand. “And thanks for helping me out, Jack. I think you kn
ow how much it means to me.”

  “Don’t thank me, I’m being well paid for this job.”

  “I know you’re not doing it for the money.”

  I wasn’t sure if he was right, so I kept my silence. We stood uneasily on the street, reluctant to part company but uncomfortable in each other’s presence. I finally made the move.

  “Take it easy, Walter. I’m sure we’ll work this out for the best.”

  He slapped me on the shoulder and I headed south on Broadway. One block later, I stopped at a light and turned around. Walter Adrian was still in front of Lindy’s, tall and well dressed and alone.

  2

  I don’t like airplanes, being a person apt to worry even when both my Florsheims are planted firmly on the earth, so you can imagine what the thirteen-hour flight to Los Angeles did for my disposition. The DC-6 was jammed to capacity and there wasn’t enough room between the seats to cross a pair of adult male legs, so I spent a good deal of the trip pacing the aisles like an expectant father. My attempts at flirtation with the stewardesses were brushed off with professional ease, and a blond I had a casual eye on spent the last half of the trip straddling the armrest of a boisterous and wavy-haired Boston advertising man. She giggled and mussed his hair; he whispered in her ear and she took on the moist and serene look of someone whose glands have just said yes. The spectacle made me very unhappy, less for romantic reasons than for the fact that fantasizing about the blond had been a way of passing time. That fantasy shut off, I was condemned to spend the rest of the journey reading newspapers and worrying about Walter Adrian.

  After stops in Washington and Dallas, we set down for good at a quarter past five in the afternoon. I exited the plane on legs of stone and crossed the damp and breezy airstrip at an arthritic pace. The baggage pickup was a quarter-mile away, a trek across wooden walkways that bisected construction sites of mud and timber. The L.A. airport was a jerry-built affair of squat buildings in varying states of renovation and disembowelment. Palm trees swayed in the warm wet air and it was no trick to imagine one’s arrival in a banana republic whose aerodrome was being rebuilt as a monument to some national hero with a thin mustache and a Swiss bank account.