Famous

by Stan Charnofsky

  “This Bruce Thurston is a sinister and shrewd fellow, not to mention patently unforgiving, and—pardon the non-professional diagnosis—a real sick puppy.

  “Our only recourse, as we saw it, was to get some kind of angle on him, a way to threaten him back and perhaps create a détente. So that’s why we have been so forceful about—what did you call it?—grilling you and Juliet. Any inside information, some obscure clue, might give us the counter-ammunition we need.”

  “How can he hold you captive over an accusation that isn’t true? How can he prove it? Why can’t you shoot him down in court?” Harry was off-balance, his parents’ meaty tale unsettling, not because of the threat to them—they were perfectly capable of defending themselves—but for the sheer injustice of the situation; he had been admonished often as a growing child, to respect the law, to honor the truth.

  “Well,” his mother said, “depraved people, especially when they are lawyers, are meticulous about how they craft their frame-ups. He has a clever, if patently fraudulent, case amassed against your father.”

  “Here’s a little more background,” Louis added. “This woman came to our offices and asked us to represent her in a case involving a common-law relationship, where her partner of four years had just died and left his assets—not millions, but a tidy sum of over two-hundred thousand—all to her. Well, it turned out he had never been properly divorced, and his wife wasn’t about to let all that wealth go to an outsider. The woman who came to us asked us to do something shady—lie about the living arrangement with her and the deceased. You see, they had kept separate residences, had not actually lived together all those years, which drastically alters the notion of a common-law connection. And besides all that, she hadn’t even known that her man was still married.

  “We abjectly refused to represent her with such an intentionally deceitful agenda, which caused her to upbraid us in the nastiest language imaginable, and threaten to report us to the state bar for malpractice. I invited her, in a polite way, to vacate our offices. I did not have any physical contact with her.

  “It wasn’t long before she moved on to Bruce Thurston’s office and, with imagination and hindsight, we can see how exhilarated he must have felt to land this woman who had a grievance against my firm and me. His deposition claims that we dropped the woman because of our attempt to lie about her situation—the obstructing justice part—and for good measure he tacked on that when she was in my office, I assaulted her verbally and physically. We have witnesses to her hysterical behavior, but they are all our employees, and hardly amount to a solid defense.”

  “Though I’m not a lawyer,” Miriam said, “I can see how desperate a situation this is for your father. He took the high road with this disturbed woman, and is being brutally attacked. For what? For his integrity? Bruce Thurston is—though I dislike the label—evil in his spitefulness. It is a clear attempt to punish me for walking out on him over twenty years ago.”

  Harry was by now fully tuned in to the seriousness of his parents’ issue. His feelings fluctuated between resentment that his mother had seen fit never to tell him of her past romantic adventures, and compassion for her and his father’s plight. In a way, the latter gave him a sense of power—they needed something from him for the first time he could remember—and he reveled in that awareness. His eyes took in the trees and the grass, and the sunlight caressing the winter flowers skirting his apartment building, bathing them in a carnival of color. He was struck by contrasts, by the glory of nature persisting right through ugly human enterprises. He turned his gaze back into the car, toward his mother, looked into her eyes and saw, also for the first time he could recall, that they were hazel in color, flecked, and terribly sad.

  “Crappy situation,” he said. “I don’t know what I can do to help you. Galen did speak to me once, about his career issues, heavy stuff dealing with his lack of talent and what direction he wanted his life to take. He’s a man with a lot of insecurities and he makes up for them with an overbearing manner with attractive women. He didn’t talk much about his family, so I don’t know anything, except that I heard through Juliet that his father laid out a goodly portion of the seven million for the movie they are shooting, and stands to be a big loser if it doesn’t go through.”

  “I wonder,” his father said, “if there is something shady about that investment. Wouldn’t be surprised if Thurston’s propensity for dirty tactics is endemic, part of his standard operating procedure.”

  “How would we find out?” Miriam asked. “Apparently the boy didn’t tell Juliet much, perhaps doesn’t even know the details himself.”

  Harry nodded. After all, the powerful adult figures in his life kept him outside the ring when it came to their business ventures; likely that Galen’s father did the same thing. He wracked his brain to see if he could recover any snippet of information Galen may have let slip that might help his parents. Never before had he felt the slightest sense of camaraderie with them. This current problem of theirs was breaking new ground, curiously stirring in him a sense of affection, a palpable, if as yet slim, kind of bonding that he found himself relishing.

  A flash of memory caused him to blurt out, “I do remember Galen saying that his father was squeezing someone, the writer of the screenplay or the novel, I think, so that he had leverage to get Galen his part.”

  “Ah,” his mother said softly, “blackmail of some kind.”

  “Could be,” Louis said. “Fry is the name of the novelist this little screen gem is based on. I had my staff do a search on him, Wilfred Fry. Had one other novel published, but it didn’t do well. This one—I believe it was called, Over The Top—got some recognition but was not a best seller. It would pay us to dig up more about this Fry character to see if we can shine a light on the influence Thurston has over him.”

  “There,” Miriam said, her words sounding detached and generic, “just having this little talk may have gotten us a possible lead. Thank you, son, for your contribution.”

  There was something about the timbre of these words that felt like a regression, as Harry perceived it, a return once again to the old, familiar, austere and remote style.

  He had to work hard to hold back tears.

  FIFTEEN

  “So, what did you expect? Over twenty years of me Mommy, you child, doesn’t change because of a need for your help. They both don’t suddenly become Nobel Prize-winning parents.” Katy said this without humor, her patience with Harry growing thin.

  “It was the breakthrough. I saw their vulnerability, their…pain. I felt close to them for the first time, then, at least with my mother, I could see her wall go up and a complete reversal in her manner. She instantly took on the same, standard role of authority, the woman in charge, and it made me feel small.”

  “Of course. For a moment there, you were an equal, an adult friend offering assistance. Crash! Little boy again.”

  They were at Will Wright’s, the soft, creamy chocolate ice cream with the roasted almonds slowly being consumed, Harry’s family drama capturing their energies. Harry was aware that though he could do two things at once, one seemed always to get short-changed; he hardly tasted the ice cream.

  “Juliet did a pretty good job of handling their questions. At one point she must have decided she’d had enough and challenged them to explain what it was all about. I don’t think she knew much about Galen’s father anyway. My guess is that my father will figure a way out of this. He’s a pretty shrewd lawyer himself, though I don’t think he’d do something openly dishonest the way this Thurston guy is doing.”

  “Part of the SOP for attorneys is to arm-twist, find the creases, and if it means stretching the truth to get what they want, so what!”

  “How could I have been so unaware of the crude underbelly of my father’s work all those years? I never paid attention to either of their professions. Of course, they never let me in on them either. They charted my course for me and kept me ignorant of the real world.”

  “All the
more joy now that you’re exploding into awareness. You’re a good guy, Harry, a good guy with a lot of talent, and the sordid side of life has been hidden from you by heavy parental maneuvering. Doesn’t it feel good? Don’t you sense that you are now tuning into the bigger scheme of things, the valiant and the venal?”

  He laughed. “You have such a curious way of putting it. I love…” he searched for the right words, “the spin you put on things.”

  She wished he had finished that sentence differently.

  “I love,” she replied, “how you and I can talk things out.”

  “Yes,” Harry said, “but I can see that it always seems to be about me and my issues. You don’t get a chance to unburden yourself to me.”

  “I have issues. Everybody has, but mine are less urgent right now.”

  “Oh? Like what? Tell me.”

  Katy let slip a catch of her breath, as if startled by something, smoothed down her sweater—a soft powder-blue pullover, her favorite, that she wore regularly in the cooler California months—and shrugged herself back on balance. “Well,” she detoured, “I have a little decision to make, myself.”

  “Come on, tell me.”

  “Our esteemed professor, Garth Benjamin—well, he was my professor last semester—has alerted me to an audition at the Ahmanson Theater Group. He said he thought I’d have a chance to play Laura Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. It is a super role, and the run would be for over two months.”

  “Katy! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I just did.”

  “That’s wonderful. When? When is the reading?”

  “Next Tuesday. I’m not wildly optimistic. They made a movie of it way back in the fifties. A woman named Jane Wyman had the role of Laura—she was married for a while to Ronald Reagan—and Kirk Douglas was also in it. I’m sure there’ll be twenty actors reading for the part.”

  “But, Garth recommended you. They know him. That should count.”

  “Yes, normally an inside contact helps. But the Ahmanson is our prime theater in Los Angeles. They have the pick of the crop.”

  “As I remember, Laura is the shy crippled daughter the mother is trying to find a husband for. I saw the later production; I think it was 1987, produced by Paul Newman. His wife, Joanne Woodward, played Laura.”

  “There was also a TV version in 1973, played by Hepburn, and the original play, way back in 1945, featured a remarkable star, a Laurette Taylor, who never became famous, but is revered by other actors as a genius. This was the play that got Williams noticed.”

  He grabbed her hand. “And maybe it will be the play that gets you noticed.”

  “In my dreams.”

  “Once I had to read a line that Jim, Laura’s gentleman caller, says, that describes not only Laura, but you:

  ‘You know what I judge to be the trouble with you? Inferiority complex! Know what that is? That’s what they call it when someone low-rates himself.’

  “There, does it fit?”

  “Oh, Harry, it’s probably true. I’m afraid I’m somewhat superstitious. I never told you, but before every part I’ve ever played, I tape onto my upper thigh a saying I once got in a Chinese fortune cookie: ‘You are ready for success.’ Anyway, you don’t have to call me on it.”

  “Yes, I do. Because you’re my best friend.”

  “That’s nice,” she said, “very nice.” She hugged him to hide the tears that formed as she stared at the glowing, scrolled Will Wright’s sign over his shoulder.

  He hugged back, aware for the first time, and confused by the awareness—so many new insights!—of feeling the bulge of her breasts under the powder-blue sweater.

  SIXTEEN

  T wo events tumbled over each other, both affecting Harry’s life indirectly yet significantly.

  Katy read for the part of Laura and was told she was a bit young for the role. They liked her, though, and hired her as the number one understudy for the actor who got the part, Amanda Detmer, who had been in several movies, was just over thirty, and had a sweet, though un-glamorous look about her. She was, the director told Katy, a wholesome-appearing woman who could win the audience without distracting them with dazzling beauty. Katy, on the other hand, was attractive in a youthful way, and clearly skilled as an actor. It meant salary for the run of the show, and required accessibility during each performance, “in case” Amanda took ill or could not perform.

  In the second event, Wilfred Fry was exposed, through careful research, to be a steady if not spectacular writer, a local man who had taken a literary pseudonym, his birth name: William Fryberg.

  Mr. Fryberg, AKA Fry, had a notorious former life, as an addicted gambler and sometime swindler, who had managed to avoid arrest and incarceration, but was ripe for blackmail. Louis Schiff’s firm had the same resources as Bruce Thurston’s, and uncovering Fry’s shady past was a simple matter. Getting something on Thurston in the affair would be a trickier task, but one that Louis was eager to engage; this treachery built upon blackmail had to be thwarted.

  After a week of digging without clear results, Louis decided to face this Fry fellow off personally. The preliminary hearing on the law suit was only a few days away, and he reasoned that, if Fry were being squeezed, he would be unlikely to tell Thurston about Louis’ interview, which would be laid out in the best possible light: a rival firm, interested in fair play, wanting to help you get out of the mess you are in. If, on the other hand, Fry did choose to tell Thurston, it would not be a disaster, since Louis and his firm had found no other specifics about the blackmail—nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  Wilfred Fry, comfortable from the royalties of his novel, and more than comfortable with the advance given him by the film investors, lived in an up-scale apartment on Wilshire, on the west side, a trendy area populated largely by Industry people and the retired wealthy. It was in walking distance to UCLA and Westwood Village, which had elegant restaurants, four movie theaters, a successful playhouse, and ample shopping opportunities. He did not drive a car—like the science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury—explaining that he preferred walking for his health, yet eschewing the more obvious reason that his license had been confiscated for three DUIs. Was he an alcoholic? He would deny that, but his pattern happened to fit the universal definition rather well: did drink in the morning; had at least one drink each day; would binge on weekends. His counter, if challenged, was that it was all his choice, the great equalizer of all addicted people, and that he did not really need to drink.

  “As I mentioned on the phone, Mr. Fry, I am an attorney, but I want to set your mind at ease right from the start. My purpose is in no way to be a threat to you. I don’t operate that way, and besides, I have nothing to threaten you about. I need a bit of information and was hoping you would be a productive source.”

  Fry, who had a rumpled look about him, almost as if he had purposely set out to take on the physical persona of “writer”—in casual clothing, jacket with patches on the elbows, hair not quite as wild as Einstein’s but close—was, at the moment, sober as a statue. His alarms went off when he heard “attorney” over the phone, and his personal history had informed him to be clear-headed when dealing with that sort of animal.

  The two men sat in the pleasant lobby of his apartment building, much like a hotel lobby, with a half-dozen soft chairs angled strategically on a richly patterned Egyptian carpet. It was eerily quiet, the building so well constructed that even the incessant traffic noise on Wilshire was kept from penetrating.

  “Well, I get antsy when lawyers are within a hundred yards of me. What’s this meeting for?”

  Louis found himself bemused by this caricature of a man, and instantly calculated that a sordid past, cashed in for a promising new life, would bring with it an attitude of show. The man clearly wanted to be represented as an aesthete, part of the literary establishment scene.

  “I have dealings with the Thurston firm, and frankly know that Bruce Thurston, one of your story’s backers, pressure
d you to select his son, Galen as a lead player in the screenplay of your novel. No, I’m not resisting that. My purpose isn’t to block the son from having a part. You may find this curious, but what I want to know—and please be assured that nothing negative will come to you from this information—is what exactly does Thurston have on you? What angle did he pitch to you to pressure you to agree about his son?”

  Louis could see the sudden recoil by Fry, though he also picked up that the man looked, all at once, a lot more crafty than he had moments earlier. It was as if the challenge had brought out all the survival instincts that had been lying dormant when things were humming along smoothly. This man was, after all, a fairly successful writer, hardly stupid, clever in at least that one arena.

  “Listen, Mr. Schiff, I don’t know what games you lawyers play with each other. I don’t know you. For all I know, Thurston set this up. Why should I tell you anything?”

  Louis raised his hand. “Of course. I understand the reluctance. Let me tell you a bit more. I confess that I don’t particularly like Thurston—I would imagine you feel somewhat the same way, but have to tolerate him because of his financial backing. You see, there’s a possible legal conflict between his firm and mine. I need to deflect their accusations, which are phony as hot ice cream, and to be perfectly blunt, I need a wedge, an angle of my own.”

  “I get it,” Fry said with a sardonic smile, “you want my help to skewer the other lawyer. Now, the fact is, I have no great love for Thurston either, but if you manage to shoot him down, with whatever artillery you come up with, the movie we’re making of my book will disappear. Why would I do that? Shoot myself in the foot?”

  “I’m not asking you to do that. We aren’t trying to criminalize Thurston. We want to get him out of our hair, and to do that we need at least as powerful a counter threat as he is throwing up at us.”

  Fry took on an unconvinced demeanor, shook his head, stared at Louis with an, ‘I don’t quite buy your argument’ look, but said nothing.