It had taken Arlene several weeks to confirm who held the copyright for Ursula Goes Underground, but when she had, it was exactly what he’d wanted to hear.
Cosmopolitan Productions had held the rights to Marcus’s story Subway People for seven years, but when Hearst got into a shouting match with Mayer and stomped off to Warners, Subway People/Ursula Goes Underground had stayed at MGM. But only for the term of the copyright, which ended in 1942.
“You own the rights to Subway People, and MGM are sitting ducks,” Arlene had written. “To quote my esteemed boss, Mr. Geoffrey Tanner, Esquire: GO GET ’EM!”
Tanner had referred Marcus to a local entertainment lawyer. Salvatore Sabbatini was big on gold tiepins and diamond pinkie rings, and seemed to have learned English from watching Ricardo Montalban movies. But he understood Marcus’s problem and promised “a pleasing outcome for all.”
He had sent a sternly worded grievance to MGM Italia and Fratelli di Conti for copyright infringement, which had resulted in a hastily organized meeting in the offices of MGM’s Italian lawyer.
“I’ll have my guy with me,” Marcus assured Hoppy now. The doorway smelled of vinegar gone sour. He pulled at Hoppy’s sleeve so that they could escape the stink, but the guy resisted.
“Sabbatini, right?”
Marcus nodded. “A bit overly polished for my tastes, but—”
“He and the guy who heads up MGM Italia are second cousins.”
Marcus slumped against the glass window. “But Arlene’s boss recommended him.”
“Tanner’s a million miles away; he wouldn’t know the family connection. I only discovered it by accident myself. It’s a long story and this is one meeting you shouldn’t be late for.” Hoppy consulted his watch. “You need to walk into that room assuming that everyone there is colluding to ensure you get the minimum deal.”
“Eight thousand miles away, and they can still grind you into dust.”
“Remember: Metropolitana is deep in pre-production. You’ve got them on the hook, and they know it.”
Even as the head of MGM’s writing department, Marcus had been made to feel like he always had his back foot at the cliff’s edge, one vicious uppercut away from being slugged into the abyss.
But not today. There’s a big, fat barrel and for once, I’m not the sucker bent over it.
Hoppy poked at Marcus’s chest. “Don’t trust anyone in that room. Melody told me that those Conti brothers can get real dramatic, real fast. And if it looks like they’re not getting their way, they become confrontational, explosive, and intimidating. So whatever happens, you’re Mister Cool.”
“Got it.”
But anxiety still creased Hoppy’s face. “She also said the Conti brothers are bullies. Napoleon Conti will have extra bodies on his side of the table—the more bodies, the more intimidating.”
“Seriously?” Marcus almost wanted to laugh. “His name is Napoleon?”
“I had a script meeting with him the other day. Stand your ground, keep your head, and don’t get suckered into their theatrics.”
“Don’t worry,” Marcus told him. “I’ve waited a long time to be the one holding the cards.”
* * *
Salvatore Sabbatini stood in front of the offices of MGM Italia holding a shiny briefcase the color of dark cherry wood. It matched his shoes and necktie, and the silk band around his Panama hat. The diamond in his pinkie ring glinted as he offered his hand for Marcus to shake. They climbed the steps and walked into the white marble foyer.
“This meeting will be short,” Sabbatini said. “They have done the wrong and breaked the law. So they will present you with an offer most fair and an apology most sincere.” They arrived at a pebbled glass door. “Remember: I do the talking.”
The offices reminded Marcus of the executive floor on the Irving Thalberg Building: the jangling of telephones fighting for attention with the din of typewriters amid a maze of glassed-in offices stretching in all directions.
Marcus and Sabbatini were led into a conference room. Like its MGM counterpart, it had huge windows running down one side, and on the opposite wall hung framed posters of recent Roman Empire epics.
Fratelli di Conti had packed their side of the conference table with twelve men. It wasn’t hard to tell who was who. The lawyers were dressed in conservative suits and the film people had teamed their stylish skinny neckties with modern-cut suits and wide lapels.
In the middle of the table sat a stern-faced thug with short-cropped hair and an aquiline nose that would have been more at home jutting out from under a centurion helmet. The guy had Napoleon written all over him.
At the left-hand end, Marcus saw a familiar face.
He had only seen Emilio Conti once—the day Melody caught him sneaking photographs of Ingrid Bergman. But once was enough to see that he was a disagreeable little shit with a chip on his shoulder the size of St. Peter’s Basilica. And now he could see why. Emilio was a pallid imitation of his older brother.
Whereas Napoleon radiated the authority of a Roman general, Emilio was the squirrelly little nutcase who cowered alone in the corner at a party.
Napoleon’s handshake was every bit as genuine as the unctuous smile that parted his lips. He took a seat, opened the folder in front of him, and pulled out a single sheet of paper. Spreading his fingers across it, he said, “Our offer is straightforward and will correct the unfortunate—” He rattled out a question to the associate on his right. When the assistant replied, he turned to Marcus again, slipping his glassy smile back into place. “Oversight.”
He pushed the paper across the conference table.
So much for the apology most sincere.
Marcus skimmed the words until he came to the amount. “Three hundred?”
“We feel it is fair.”
“Three hundred what?” Marcus kept his voice cordial.
“American dollars.”
Marcus shook his head very, very slowly at Napoleon. What a ridiculous name, even if it does suit you. “No.”
A flutter of discomfort rolled through all twelve men on the other side of the table.
“What do you mean, no?” Napoleon snapped.
“Not even close to the figure I had in mind.”
Sabbatini’s hand gripped his forearm. “Signore Adler,” the lawyer whispered, “this offer is more than—”
Marcus wrenched his arm away. “The answer is still ‘no.’”
Napoleon jutted out his lantern jaw. “What is your amount?”
Marcus wished Kathryn and Gwendolyn were here to witness this. And Doris, too. And Arlene and Bertie and Quentin and Domenico. What the hell, let’s throw in L.B. Mayer, Clifford Wardell, Ramon, and Hugo. He glanced up at the posters for Queen of Judea, Titus Flavius, and Rome Burns, and realized they were Melody Hope films. It made him feel like at least she was with him.
“Ten thousand.”
Sabbatini made a strangled wheezing sound. Someone else in the room dropped a pen. Nobody moved.
Napoleon Conti looked like a Michelangelo statue—minus the warmth. His jaw quivered as he sucked his lips inside his mouth.
“And,” Marcus placed his fingertip on the allegedly fair offer and pushed it away, “ten percent of the gross box office.”
Napoleon flew to his feet in a blur, planted both palms on the table like an alpha gorilla. He unleashed a Vesuvian eruption of Italian that sounded like a single super-long incomprehensible word.
Marcus had sat through meetings with Hollywood studio heads, script conferences with spoiled movie stars and egotistical directors, and he’d endured a cross-examination at the hands of the House Un-American Activities Committee in front of the national media. And each time, he felt like he was being hauled through the wringer. Squashed and squeezed. Pummeled and beaten. Gwendolyn had once told him that his soul was too sensitive for a dog-eat-dog town like Hollywood, and on occasion he suspected maybe she was right.
But not anymore.
The realization exploded with
a dizzying rush. I truly do not give a rat’s ass what this man is saying. I could leave this room right now and not look back. Not even to give him my best stink-eye.
Napoleon Conti was still spewing his tirade like a lava-vomiting Titan when Marcus stood.
“Those are my terms, so if you don’t like them . . .” He gave an exaggerated shrug like an old Jewish yenta. Sabbatini looked like his voice box had been clean slapped out of him. “I’ll see myself out.”
Marcus’s hand was pressed against the polished wood of the conference room door when the defeated General Conti moaned, “Yes.”
Marcus paused for a heartbeat and turned to face twelve furious Italians. Thirteen if he counted Sabbatini. “Ten thousand plus ten percent of the gross.”
Conti nodded stiffly.
“If you can get that contract retyped immediately, we can leave this room with a signed agreement tied up in a pretty pink bow.”
Napoleon Conti handed the old contract to the nearest flunky with instructions to locate the fastest typist in the office. The room festered with resentment. Marcus passed the time by playing a mental game—assigning names as though they were characters in a screenplay and giving them backstories. He wasn’t halfway to Emilio when the flunky slapped three sheets of paper in front of him—the new contract and two copies.
$10,000 American, plus 10% of the gross box office revenues.
“Anybody got a pen?” Marcus asked the room. Emilio Conti skimmed one across the table. “When can I expect payment?”
“By the end of the year.”
It was now the first week of December; Marcus longed to see the red-and-green Christmas decorations lit up along Hollywood Boulevard.
“By Christmas would be better.” Salvatore Sabbatini gave a low grunt: Don’t push your luck, Yankee Doodle Dandy.
Marcus signed the three copies, thanked Conti in a voice dripping with smarminess, and left the building. He hurried down the steps and found a patch of lukewarm sunlight among the shade trees. He pulled out his copy of the agreement. “Look at you,” he told it, “helping me to bend General Conti over his own barrel and force him to take one for the team.”
“GREEDY BASTARDO!” Emilio Conti was shorter than Marcus remembered—barely five foot four to Marcus’s five nine, and scrawny in a Wile E. Coyote sort of way. “You will regret crossing the Conti brothers. I guarantee it!”
“Let me guess: you’re a fan of James Cagney.” And about as tall, too.
“Nobody takes advantage of Fratelli di Conti. NOBODY!”
Marcus could see he wasn’t about to convince this furious little gnome of anything so he changed tack. “We have something in common.”
Emilio looked him up and down. “We have nothing the same.”
“You’re the scattino, right?”
“Si.”
“Me too.”
Another down-up-down. “You? An americano? Ridiculous.”
“Remember that scattino photograph of Sophia Loren on the set of Quo Vadis?”
Emilio nodded warily. Marcus jacked a thumb toward his chest.
“Impossibile!”
“I first came here to work on the Quo Vadis screenplay, and later documented the production with my camera.” Marcus let the words sink in. “And then there’s Ingrid Bergman.”
Marcus’s surreptitious snaps had come out extraordinarily well. He’d sent them to Epoca magazine, who’d bought them for a generous fee and featured six in a double-page spread. Marcus’s favorite caught Bergman laughing at her magazine. It wasn’t the most flattering photo, but she came across natural and unposed. Two weeks later it had landed on the cover of Look under the caption: LOOK AT INGRID LOOKING AT LOOK!
Emilio curled his lip into a snarl. “Loren and Bergman? I don’t believe you.”
Marcus rattled the contract in his hand. “Ciao.”
* * *
A half-hour later, Marcus met Hoppy and Domenico in a café across the Tiber from the Castel Sant’Angelo where old men argued about football and chewed over battles they’d fought during the war.
He ordered an espresso, then laid the agreement in front of them.
When Domenico read the part about the lump sum, he slapped his cheeks. “Gesù Cristo!”
“All that and ten percent of the gross?” Hoppy told Marcus. “Gesù Cristo indeed!”
When Marcus told him Emilio was there too, Domenico’s eyebrows hit the ceiling.
“Ah, poor Emilio,” Domenico tsked. “If he wasn’t so obnoxious, I almost feel sorry for him. Their mother could not make the babies. She saw every specialist in Italy but they told her it is God’s will. She went to Lourdes and prayed; three months later she learned she was having triplets. She told everybody about her visit to Lourdes and the Virgin Mary blessed her.” Domenico started juggling invisible balls. “The newspapers made a big deal of it, calling them the ‘Conti Miracle Babies.’”
“And what about Emilio?” Marcus asked.
Domenico shook his head mournfully. “Twenty years later, Signora Conti was pregnant again. But the new baby wasn’t a miracle like his brothers; he was a nuisance. He has been angry since the day he rushed out of his mother.”
Hoppy asked, “Did you read the whole contract?”
“Sure.”
“Do you know what ‘locked funds’ are?”
“It’s when the Italians declared that Hollywood’s pre-war profits could only be spent on projects aimed at reviving the Italian film industry. It’s how Quo Vadis and Three Coins were financed.”
“They’re paying you out of locked funds.”
“Is that illegal?”
“No, but you can’t stuff ten thousand dollars’ worth of lira into your pockets as you board the Ile de France.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you can’t take it out of the country.”
Marcus snatched the paper from Hoppy’s hand but he was too panicked to read the fine print. “So what does that mean?”
“You ain’t going no place till we figure out how to get your money back to the States.”
“I’m still stuck here?”
The insipid December sun fought hard to warm Marcus’s face as a cool wind blew across the Tiber.
CHAPTER 12
Kathryn flipped through the albums next to her record player.
Dinah Shore Sings the Blues? Too depressing.
By the Light of the Silvery Moon with Doris Day? Too sweet.
She skimmed through Anita O’Day, Fred Astaire, Kay Starr, and Bing Crosby, but nothing seemed right. Eddie Fisher Sings felt too earnest, and she wasn’t even sure how Christmas Day in the Morning with Burl Ives had got there.
She came to Sinatra Sings His Greatest Hits. What would Ava do if she walked in and heard her husband’s music? Would she think it a cute gesture? Or would she let loose with a string of cuss words and leave?
Three sharp knocks rang out. Ava Gardner opened the door and strode in like she owned the place. “I love how people around here still keep their doors unlocked.” With the barest brush of mascara and a hint of lipstick, she still managed to fill Kathryn’s living room with a radiance that few women enjoyed.
“Come on in!” Kathryn blew her a welcome kiss.
Ava bunched her hands together, threading and unthreading her fingers like shoelaces. She was usually so laid back that she gave Tallulah Bankhead a run for her money. Every slink of her hips and smirk on her lips seemed to say, “Cast me in your movie or don’t; renew my contract or don’t; stay the night or get out of bed. It’s all the same to me.”
But there was no “Go on, baby, give it your best shot” in the way Ava let her handbag slip onto the coffee table.
Kathryn lifted up two albums. “Kay or Jo?”
Ava pointed to Jo Stafford, so Kathryn placed Portrait of New Orleans onto her record player and let a jazzy trumpet meander through the villa. As she crossed to her liquor cabinet, Kathryn watched how Ava knotted together her fingers again and wondered if ask
ing for a favor might not be such a great idea. But the days had blurred into weeks.
“I was so glad to get your call.” Nostalgia tinged Ava’s voice. “There are times I wish I still lived here. Life seemed so easy, didn’t it?”
Kathryn twisted off the top of a bottle of Bristol Cream Sherry and pulled out a matching pair of lead crystal glasses. “But you were with Artie Shaw back then. As I recall, that marriage wasn’t any walk in the park.”
“More like a walk off the gangplank.”
Ava accepted Kathryn’s sherry and they clinked glasses. “Good to see you, ol’ neighbor of mine.”
Kathryn led her to the sofa, where she made a point of slipping out of her shoes, hoping her guest would do the same. She wanted Ava to feel relaxed and at home when she asked for the favor she had in mind.
But instead of following Kathryn’s lead, Ava crossed her legs and fidgeted with the hem of her skirt as her eyes skipped about the room like nervous crickets. She sipped the cream sherry and let out a long breath. “I gotta say that when you invited me to lunch, I wasn’t expecting a home-cooked meal from one of America’s most beloved housewives.”
As far as Kathryn knew, the Sunbeam – Betty Crocker – Westinghouse advertising ménage à trois was still under closed-door negotiations. “Where’d you hear that?”
Ava shrugged slyly. “Around.”
“Around what? Stonehenge? You’ve been in England shooting Knights of the Round Table all summer.”
“You of all people should know that branches of the grapevine extend past the eastern seaboard.” She flicked her wrist, sending the tiny music charms on her bracelet tinkling against each other. “I think it’s funny—you’re about as useful in the kitchen as I am. But if mum’s the word, my lips are sealed.”
“Thank you,” Kathryn said, “but it’ll be a minor miracle if this idea even clears the starting gate.”
Although she came off sounding like she couldn’t care less, Kathryn was desperate for Leo’s idea to gain traction. Now that her show was off the air and she was back to being just another columnist among dozens, her income had plummeted. Leo had promised her “tons of filthy lucre” if this deal went through, and she would need all the lucre she could lay her hands on to pay Dudley Hartman.
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