Somebody's Darling

by Somebody's Darling (retail) (epub)

  She stopped talking and looked at me.

  “So far as I’m concerned, you can hang Henley Bowditch and Joe Percy on the same clothesline,” I said. “And seven or eight others to boot. None of them were ever any good.”

  Her face turned red. “You’re telling me about filmmaking?” she said. “You were selling tractors three years ago, as I remember. How’d you learn it all so quick?”

  “I don’t know it all,” I said. “I just know a hack when I see one.

  She got redder. “Henley Bowditch is not a hack,” she said. “You owe me an apology.”

  She got out of bed and picked up her party dress and party shoes. She held them in front of her, waiting. I didn’t say a word. She knew my views on apologies. When she saw I wasn’t going to say anything, she yanked off her nightgown, yanked on her party dress, stuffed the nightgown in her purse, and looked around the apartment like she might have been thinking of gathering up all her belongings, but of course she didn’t. She started for the door, not looking at me at all.

  “Don’t forget your Oscar,” I said. “It’s too bad you can’t fuck it.”

  She grabbed it off the bureau and threw it at me, an awkward throw. Oscar hit the wall about three yards from the bed. Jill was too mad to talk. She went on out, her blue nightgown hanging out of her purse.

  I guess I have a bad mouth. I always go too far. I just never feel like stopping where most people would stop.

  It was kind of a surprise that Jill and Pete Sweet won the writing Oscar. Toole Peters, the most hot-shit screenwriter in town, was really pissed, because he had actually done a partial rewrite for them, out of friendship for Pete. That had been years ago, when he wasn’t so hot-shit, so he got no credit and not much money. His adaptation of Momma Sang Bass was nominated in the other writing category, but it didn’t win either, which was fine with me. Toole was one of the worst little pricks in Hollywood, him and his fucking suede jacket. He thought he knew everything, and he was fucking a girl named Raven Dexter who was just as snotty as he was. She had worked for the New Yorker once, so she knew everything, too. She came to the Oscars dressed in squaw clothes, because she and Toole were trying to help Marlon Brando drum up some interest in the plight of the American Indian. Raven drummed and drummed but the only thing she could get anybody interested in was fucking her.

  I got up and walked over to the window in time to see Jill come out of my apartment building and start walking up Sunset. Her gown looked like it was going to fall out of her purse. While I was watching her the phone rang. Naturally it was Lulu.

  “Any progress?” she asked. “Or have I called at a bad time? Eek. I bet she’s still there.”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Nope, she’s not here, and nope, there’s been no progress.”

  “You’re a slow sonofabitch,” she said. “I want to know why the fuck you haven’t pushed it. When do you mean to put in a word for me?”

  I told her once that maybe I’d talk Jill into using her, but I hadn’t bothered. I didn’t bother to answer either.

  “Listen, Owen, you’re not any fucking’ Irving Thalberg yet,” she said. “Just because your girl friend made a small winner don’t mean you own Hollywood. I can get her a nice deal right now, with maybe a job in it for you, but if you fuck around much longer, I dunno. These things are liquid, you know. They can evaporate.”

  I let her rant for a while. When she finally hung up I put the phone on the hook and it rang before I could get my hand off it. This time it was old Mondschiem.

  “Good morning, Mr. Mondschiem,” I said. “I bet you’re feeling good today.”

  “I got a liver that’s not so good,” he said in that growl of his. He sounded like a sick bulldog.

  “I dunno, I think a rat bit it,” he said. “Fucking liver. May I have a word with my sweethoit?”

  “Mr. Mondschiem, she just left,” I said. “You just missed her. She just went out the door.”

  “Sonny, it ain’t my ear the rat bit,” he said. “Do I need a message three times? She’s gone, she’s gone! Where’s a nice girl like my sweethoit at this time of the morning?”

  “She runs,” I said. “Jogs. Likes to keep in shape.” The old fucker always made me nervous.

  “Jogs?” he said. The bulldog sounded sicker. “My sweethoit? With no security men? And what the hell do you do, lay on your ass? She could meet a rapist, you know. I know it ain’t bad here like New Yoik, but that don’t mean it’s a good rural place, if you know what I mean.”

  He grumbled for a while and I was nice as pie. “I thought you was some kind of foimer,” he said. “Texas or someplace. I thought foimers get up early.”

  When he got through grumbling I went in to shave and Bo Brimmer called. “Ah’m just calling’ to express my congratulations,” he said. “Ah was hoping for a word with Miss Jill.”

  “She took off a few minutes ago,” I said. “Anything I can do for you?”

  “You can come to lunch if you’re free,” he said.

  That surprised me. “Just me?” I asked.

  “Just you. I’ll catch up with Miss Jill later.”

  “I’m free.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Come about one. We’ll slip off somewhere an’ gnaw a bone.”

  Maybe he heard that I was going to be working with Jill for a while, or maybe he was scared of her or something and wanted to get me to help him with her, like Lulu did. I told the answering service to take the rest of the calls. Every agent in town would be calling up to tout their scripts, and all Jill’s washed-out friends would be wanting to rattle off their latest story ideas. Let the service deal with it.

  I got dressed and strolled off to Schwab’s to have some pineapple and read the trades. I know it was old-fashioned, but it was handy, and the pineapple was good. When I sold my stock in the tractor company and left Lubbock I had about forty thousand dollars, and I had been in Hollywood two years and still had thirty thousand of them. The ten had gone for options on two screenplays. One of them still might pan out, if I could get Jill to work on it a little, Mostly I lived off poker, which is easy to do in a town full of people who think they’re hot-shit gamblers. I didn’t have an office or a secretary, but I had the classiest Mercedes in town, ’59 coupé, butter-colored, also thanks to poker.

  While I was eating my pineapple a girl came in and sat down a few stools away. When I glanced at her, her face was turned away from me and all I could see was her hair. Her hair was done like Farrah Fawcett-Majors’, but I knew right away she wasn’t Farrah. Too big. I could tell from the way her back looked, under her T-shirt. Also her hair was a little too orange. Then she turned to speak to the waitress and I saw that her nose was as crooked as a corkscrew. It’s amazing the number of gorgeous backs that walk around Hollywood, attached to crooked noses and ugly chins. You can stand on Hollywood Boulevard any day of the week, and if you just watch the asses and the legs, you’ll think you’re in ass heaven. The mistake is ever looking at the faces.

  Even with the crooks in her nose the girl at the counter wasn’t so bad. She was big, at least, and sort of steaming with health. It comes off these big California girls like vapor. This one glugged down three glasses of orange juice, which meant she wasn’t too worried about money. They don’t give away orange juice out here in the land of the orange. I guess she felt me looking at her, because she turned and gave me a pretty direct once-over. Maybe, if I’d tried, I could have worked out a little sex-brunch, but I let it slide. I knew a lot of women like her: fresh, full of health food and vitamins. She probably spent half her time backpacking, and she probably did a hundred push-ups a day. Those big California girls had an athletic attitude toward everything, particularly fucking. No quickies for them. If they weren’t going to jog three or four miles, or surf for hours, or bicycle out to Malibu and back, then they wanted to work it all off in the sack. It was like fucking lady gym teachers. If you don’t do enough push-ups to suit them you’re i
n trouble.

  That was fine. Those big rangy girls were one reason for living in California, but this time I had other things to do. I had to get my suit pressed, for one thing, but I still kept looking at all that body. I also liked the remote, dumb look in the girl’s eyes. Jill was too skinny and too smart, and she had been horny too long. She fell in love with me before I could stop her. It was all too personal, with her. I would have appreciated a little stupidity, or a little boredom or something, but I never got it. She was too keyed in—I couldn’t fart without her wanting to know what the fart meant. After six months of that, fucking a big brainless beach baby would be relaxing.

  When I stepped behind the big orange-haired girl she was leaning over the counter, whispering something to the waitress. Her T-shirt had pulled out of her jeans, exposing some nice bumpy vertebrae. I could see right down her jeans to the hollow of her ass. Hollywood is ass heaven. Asses like volleyballs, with just the right bounce. Up in the Midwest women have asses like feedsacks. Probably why I never could stand the Midwest.

  I went home and got my gray suit and took it to the corner laundry and stood around while they pressed it. It wouldn’t do to have a meeting with Bo Brimmer in a wrinkled suit. Even so, I didn’t put the girl at the lunch counter out of my mind. Maybe she’d show up someday when I didn’t have a meeting. It was pleasant to give that possibility some thought. There’s no better time to think about fucking than when you’ve got a chance to make a little money, and I guess Bo Brimmer meant to offer me a chance to make a little money. Otherwise he would just have left a message for Jill and hung up the phone.

  2

  STUDIO GATE MEN ARE USUALLY EITHER TOOTHPICKS OR sides of beef. The one at Universal was a side of beef. He was friendly and respectful—they always are—and he soon found my name on his list and let me in, but I would have enjoyed running over his fat ass, to tell the truth. It’s easy to develop a hate thing for gate men if you deal with them every day. They have minds like prison guards, and in their eyes the very fact that you want to enter the fucking studio grounds makes you guilty until some secretary or some asshole executive proves you innocent. They look at you like you were probably a fucking terrorist. The studio is theirs, not yours, and they never let you forget it.

  If I had a studio, I’d hire ex-cons to be gate men—give them a chance to get their own back.

  It was a nice day in the Valley. For once the smog had gone somewhere else. I got past a couple of receptionists and made it to checkpoint three, which was Bo’s secretary, a big Georgia girl named Carly something. There were a lot of stories about her being black belt in karate and all that. If some thug went after little Bo, Carly would chop him into hamburger. She was also smooth as cream. She gave me one glance and sent me right on in.

  “He’s expecting you, Mr. Oarson,” she said. She had the build of a Bourbon Street stripper—her tits probably outweighed her boss.

  “I hope I’m not early,” I said politely. No stud numbers today.

  Bo Brimmer was on the phone when I went in. His eyes were bright as buttons and his desk was so big he could have taken a nap in any one of its drawers. He reached up a tiny hand, shook mine, and pointed to the bar. I got some Scotch. The office was full of contemporary California art, most of which was creepo junk. There was a realistic mud puddle, evidently some kind of sculpture, right in the middle of the floor. That was bad enough, but there was also a big woolly wall hanging, some bread sculpture, and a strange scaly aluminum thing sort of stacked in one corner. I preferred to look out of the big plate-glass windows. Some helicopters were buzzing around the tops of the mountains. Probably cops chasing down a freak of some kind.

  “Sorry ’bout that, Owen,” Bo said, when he finally hung up. “Little problem over in Rome. Elephant went berserk and smashed up a cinemobile.”

  “An elephant?”

  “Yep,” Bo said. “The I-talian army’s after him. He’s been smashing up monuments left and right.”

  He picked up a pencil and thoughtfully chewed the eraser off it. Evidently it was his relaxation, because his desk top was littered with pencils he had done it to. He even had a little china bowl where he spit the erasers.

  “You know Tony Maury, don’t you?” he asked. “I wish the fucking’ elephant had trampled him. I don’t know who the fuck is gonna want to see a movie called The Doom of Rome, anyway. It’s gonna be the doom of Universal if we don’t do something quick. They started this one while ah was still at Metro—ah nevah did think it had a chance.”

  “I’ll go see it,” I said. “I like that kind of stuff.”

  “Universal is grateful for your support,” he said, flipping a dead pencil into a wastebasket. He pressed a button and spoke into a box.

  “Carly, deah, get us a car,” he said. Then he picked a red pencil out of a glass of pencils and nipped the eraser off it. He gathered up the eraserless pencils and dumped them in the wastebasket.

  “Ah don’t care, honey,” he said into the box. “Just a car. One of them things that runs down the street.”

  Then he looked at me, selected another pencil, and drummed it on the edge of his desk. “Chewing’ up pencils, what have ah come to?” he said.

  “Well, you do a good Southern accent,” I said, thinking that might be what he wanted to hear.

  “Sure do,” he said, with no accent. “Of course, I wanted to be an actor, you know. If I had just kept on growing, I would have been an actor, but it was not my ambition to be the Mickey Rooney of my generation.”

  The phone jingled. Instead of just ringing, it started playing the theme from Burning Deck. Bo grabbed it like it was hot, said “Yup,” and slammed it down again.

  “Not my idea,” he said, meaning the theme. “Let’s go eat.”

  The car that was waiting for us was a green Plymouth, and the driver was old and bald-headed. He looked like a Slav.

  “Claude-Edmonde’s,” Bo said to the baldhead.

  “I apologize for not taking the Rolls,” he said. “When I do that the young execs follow me. Then they pretend they just happened to show up at the same place. I can’t enjoy my vittles with a lot of ass-lickers around.”

  The bald-headed driver, who had not said a word, drove straight out of the gate without slowing down. Evidently he hated gate men too. Bo nearly swallowed a pencil he was so surprised.

  “Did you see that?” he said. “He didn’t stop at the gate.”

  “Too much stop signs,” the driver said. He didn’t sound like he was apologizing.

  Claude-Edmonde’s turned out to be a yellow French restaurant on Ventura Boulevard. The napkins were the color of mustard. A lot of TV people were there, all of them wearing three-piece suits. They all looked nervous—probably some big job shuffle was in progress. If I had been running a network I would have farmed them all out in a minute to places like Biloxi and Utica.

  Bo had reserved a semi-private room for our little talk. The table was laid for five. Before I had my knees under it good, Lulu Dickey sauntered in, with Toole Peters and Swan Bunting tagging along behind her. The maître d’ bobbed along in their wake, like a fucking penguin. Lulu had a kind of horsey sense of fashion—she was wearing some puffed-up peasant stuff. Toole and Swan were in the usual celebrity sloppy. Toole had on his suede jacket and Swan wore a Wonder Wart Hog T-shirt and dirty jeans.

  “Man, why are we eating here?” Swan said as soon as he got in earshot of Bo. “I told you about this place. The escargot sucks, believe me. Sherry didn’t like them at all. I think they contributed to her stomach problems.”

  Bo was unimpressed. “For youah informashun, Swan, we own this restaurant,” Bo said. “That’s how come it’s sitting heah on Venturah Boulevard instead of being’ in Ly-on, where it belongs. We bought it so we’d have some place to feed those of ouah guests who have an appreciashun of fine cuisine. If you don’t like it you can haul youah sloppy ass off to the taco stand of youah choice.”

  “Fuck, don’t be Southern with me,” Swan said. He took a
chair and flicked his napkin open expertly. He didn’t give me so much as a glance.

  “You boys, you boys,” Lulu said. “You have to be nice. I can’t eat a bite if there’s animosity around me. I get so worried my throat contracts an’ nothing’ll go through.”

  “You’ll be lucky not to starve to death, then,” Bo said.

  “I didn’t know we were eating here,” Toole said. “I could have brought Raven. Raven loves French food.” He took off his sunglasses and put them in his coat. His eyes were the color of soapy water.

  “This gentleman is Owen Oarson,” Bo said. “Swan Bunting, Toole Peters. Lulu you know.”

  Toole unfolded his napkin so carefully that he might have been doing a fucking ballet. He knew me from some poker games, so he nodded. Swan didn’t bother.

  “They better have watercress,” Swan said. “If they don’t have watercress, I’m kicking some ass.”

  “Your refinement astonishes us all,” Bo said. “I do wish I’d got to go to the fucking Sorbonne.”

  “Listen, Bo, you better watch it,” Swan said. “Sherry’s never going through the Universal gate again unless you shut that up.”

  “Oh, you boys,” Lulu said. “Swan just got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. He’s just a little down.”

  “Fucking the top cunt must be tiring,” I said. My evil mouth got the best of me. Swan—who hadn’t given me a second glance—gave me a second glance.

  “What kind of punk remark is that?” he asked.

  Bo Brimmer grinned over his bow tie. Maybe my remark had surprised him pleasantly. Maybe he would give me a job. It was high time somebody did. I had been showing up at big-deal events and eating shit for about as long as I meant to. Bumping into Jill when I did had been my first piece of luck, but that had been nearly six months ago. It was time for something else to happen. If insulting Swan Bunting was the way to make it happen, that was fine with me. There was nobody in town I’d rather insult.