When we got to the Hilton it looked like the Texans had taken over. A couple of saddles were stacked inside the door, and a cowboy with a big belt buckle was standing guard over them. Some kind of touring rodeo was in town, which didn’t really surprise me. There’s no getting away from cowboys, no place I’ve ever been.
“What are they gonna ride?” I said. “Wild Hondas?”
The cowboy heard it and looked like he might have liked to pop me one. He was probably getting restive around so much civilization.
We were given a room that looked out over the top of some skinny cedar trees. Jill took a bath and contemplated the city for a while, and I went to find the production manager.
“You be respectful to Tony Maury if you bump into him,” Jill said.
“Far be it from me to be rude to a Hollywood legend,” I said.
Buckle and Gohagen were the Mutt and Jeff of screenwriters, you could say. Buckle was a long tall drink of water with shoulder-length yellow hair and a face that looked like it had absorbed a smallpox epidemic all by itself, with seventeen or eighteen years of hard drinking as a chaser. Gohagen was fatter than he was tall and no one had ever seen him without a can of beer in his hand. In fact he was waving around a bottle of German brew when I found the bunch of them in Tony Maury’s suite.
“Hell, it’s ol’ Owen Oarson, rhymes with whoreson and Orson and fucking’ what-all,” Elmo said when he opened the door.
“Shit on the Pope, then,” Winfield said. “He’s the sonofabitch that’s been sent to straighten out our ass, an’ just when I was getting’ a taste for this miserable German brew. How you, Owen?”
I let them good-old-boy me for a little. I can be as good an old boy as the next asshole, when it’s convenient.
Tony Maury was in another room, on the phone, so we went up to the Buckle and Gohagen suite for a while. It was on the top floor of the Hilton, with a sort of cinerama view of the Eternal City, but the suite itself was pretty much like their living room in Tujunga Canyon. Two or three silent, totally obedient, stringy-haired girls were sitting around smoking pot and looking spacy. Their only chore, so far as I could observe, was to keep rotating Willie Nelson records on the stereo. Now and then they threw in Waylon Jennings, for variety. Gohagen had an icebox full of beer. He amused himself by drinking beer and eating potato chips while he played footsy with one of his zombies. Elmo and I had a drink. Elmo at least had good taste in whisky.
“Shit, my buddy, this picture is shaping up disastrous,” Elmo said. He was wearing a sheepskin jacket, although it wasn’t cold.
“Why?”
“Because nobody can do anything with that old fucker,” Winfield said.
“Oh, boy,” Elmo said. “Even if Winfield and I could sober up, which we ain’t done for some years, it wouldn’t make a hell of a lot of difference. Have you ever worked with old T.M.?”
“Not until tomorrow,” I said.
“He’s got a will of high-grade steel,” Elmo said. “Once in a while I make an effort to talk about the script with him—I mean I am a professional, an’ so’s old Winfield, though what he’s a professional of is his big secret.”
“Professional booger-picker,” Winfield said, picking one.
“Well, however,” Elmo said. “I had a go at T.M. just yesterday. I said,” Tony, how the hell are we gonna work out this Brutus business? Fuck, we got to do something with Brutus. We can’t just let the motherfucker stand there with a knife in his hand and anguish in his eyes for very long.’ ”
“Might be a good way to end the picture,” I said.
“That was my very idea,” Winfield said. “Have the little fucker stab himself out of remorse, you know.”
“Anyway, that ain’t the point,” Elmo said. “All Tony said was,” I don’t see why I can’t have another elephant.’ That’s all he’s said for the last four days.”
After a while the phone rang and we were informed that Tony Maury was off the phone. We went back down to his suite only to find that he had gone to the bathroom, which seemed to depress Buckle and Gohagen.
“Takes T.M. the better part of the day to piss,” Winfield said. “I hope that miserable fate don’t befall me when I get old.”
“Winfield, I’ll see to it that the goddamn Lone Star beer company installs you a silver kidney, for when you get old,” Elmo said. “They owe you that. A two-hundred-horsepower kidney, for your retirement. Shit, it’ll squirt that recycled beer out of you like your cock was a damn firehose.”
While we were waiting, the production manager came in. He was a large, worried man named Roscoe.
“I don’t know, Owen,” he said. “I just wish we could have done it on the back lot. We could buy a country for what this is costing us.”
Finally Tony Maury shuffled out, looking like some sweet, harmless old shoe clerk from someplace like Boston. He was a delicate little man, and he wore very clean khakis and a neat little blue scarf tied around his neck.
“My dear Owen,” he said when we shook hands. “Have we met? I think we’ve met. Did you bring me an elephant?”
“Mr. Maury, I did better than that,” I said. “I brought you Jill Peel.”
“You did?” he said. His cold little gray eyes didn’t flicker.
“My darling Jill,” he said. “But she must be tired from her trip. I was tired from my trip. We won’t wake her. I don’t think we should.”
He never stopped smiling his little pointless smile. I guess he had smiled it continuously for forty years. No one could remember a time when Tony Maury hadn’t been smiling his smile.
“My dear Owen,” he said. “So you didn’t bring me an elephant?”
Then he shuffled off and stood in front of his picture window, looking out vaguely at Rome. I tried to talk to him, but all he would say was “My dear Owen,” or, “My darling Jill.” Then, once in a while, with a little well-bred pout, he would say, “All I want is one more elephant. I’ve tried to make that clear to our dear Bo.”
Then he stared. I thought I was good at staring, but I was bush league compared to Tony Maury. He stared at nothing, smiling. He could do it for hours. Once in a great while he would mumble gently about an elephant. His little gray eyes were so empty it was hypnotic. He was like a snake who had found a new way to get his frog: he would bore it to death, stare at it until it fell asleep or just died of boredom. He made Buckle and Gohagen so nervous they drank like fish. Big Jim Roscoe was popping tranquilizers. All Tony Maury did was shuffle around a little, stare out the window, and mumble now and then.
Of course it was no surprise. Everyone in the industry knew that was how he managed to get his way. He just stood around and stared until whoever had to deal with him went mad and gave him everything he wanted. He was a shrewd old fart.
“Our dear Bo,” he said, sighing. “The poor boy’s a little paranoid about that elephant I want.”
That night Buckle and Gohagen and a couple of their wenches—as they called them—took Jill and me to a restaurant filled with pictures of movie stars. Buckle and Gohagen were so popular there that they even got the waiters to sing “The Eyes of Texas.”
“These Italians got the hoedown spirit, all right,” Winfield said.
Naturally the two of them got the hots for Jill on the spot—or were reminded that they had had the hots for her for years. Of course, their own ladies hardly had the energy to wiggle their fucking toes. I had to listen to a lot of courtly compliments, which put me in a foul mood.
“You lead people on, you know,” I said, when we were in bed.
“Not really,” she said. “Those two just like to flirt. I’ve known them for years and neither one of them has ever tried anything.”
Women always try to talk you out of jealousy, even though they know it’s the one thing that always turns them on. The whole thing is a vicious circle. The more jealousy you work off fucking a woman, the more guys want her, because up to a point a lot of fucking just makes a woman more desirable. I was pumping beauty into Jill, no doubt of that. I
wasn’t so sure what she was doing for me. She held my arm for a long time, stroking the muscle.
“There are times when I almost think you like me,” she said. “The fact that I make you nervous is my only clue.”
“Is that some kind of asshole psychological comment?” I said. “Don’t talk to me about the color of buildings and don’t talk to me about psychology. Nobody knows why people do things.”
The longer I thought about it, the more it irritated me. “I don’t travel with women I don’t like,” I said. “Why do you want to come out with some kind of back-ass put-down?”
“It wasn’t a put-down, Owen. I was just being fond. You have to allow me to express my feelings now and then.
“After all, I do love you,” she added.
I let that one float out of the room, off the balcony, out over Rome. She had some need to say it, I don’t know why. I never meant to make her love me. Every time I hear somebody say they love me I think of a tag line people used to quote about old Mondschiem: All he wants is all you’ve got. A woman in love is like that—a mogul of the emotions.
After a while Jill sat up in bed and looked out the window, running her hand up and down my belly.
“You don’t have to clam up just because I said I loved you,” she said. “You think I’m going to cost you something, but I’m not. You don’t understand what a bonus this is for me. I was practically past relationships when I met you. I didn’t have any feelings at all, except for a few old friends and for my work. It’s so good to feel all the things you feel at the beginning of something, and it’s so rare, for a person my age. You’re younger—you don’t know that yet. At my age you’re too damn smart, too mature, too all-seeing. Even when you meet somebody new and you let a little something happen you see those old limitations, bright as day, and you sort of direct how things will go and settle for little experiences in order to avoid big disasters. It’s a bad thing. You plan how things are going to die before you even let them be born.”
I started to doze off, but she shook my arm. “Listen to me for two minutes,” she said. “I’m the only person in Hollywood who even thinks you’re a human being. You may think you’re just using me to get some kind of start, but you’re not. Everybody else thinks that too, but they’re wrong. It’s not just what I can do for you that you need—it’s what I am, and you need it as much as I need what you are. That makes it real, even if it doesn’t last another two weeks. It’s not as absolutely businesslike as you pretend.”
“Turn me loose, I’m sleepy,” I said. She did, but she was grinning. I guess she thought she’d made her point. When I woke up in the night she wasn’t in bed, but I saw her silhouette outside on the balcony. She was standing out there looking: moonlight, Eternal City, all that. I went right back to sleep.
5
THE NEXT MORNING I FOUND A NOTE:
Going early with Jim Roscoe to look at the sets.
Come when you’re rested.
JILL
Since Jim Roscoe left about dawn, she probably didn’t even sleep. I never knew anyone to sleep less. I think she resisted it, for some reason, as if she thought she’d lose something if she shut her eyes.
I got downstairs a couple of hours later, just in time to ride with Buckle and Gohagen, who were slumped in the back of their limo looking like dead men. Elmo was huddled in his peeling sheepskin jacket and Winfield had on Levis and a rodeo shirt. He had a can of beer in his hand, even though his eyes were shut.
“Ho, boy,” Winfield said when the limo started.
“I thought I saw a rodeo hand here yesterday,” I said. “Where did he go?”
“Ol’ Casey Tibbs is in town,” Elmo said, waking up a little. “That cocksucker was one of his hands.”
“Not good to shovel shit,” Winfield said.
“That means we don’t like him even well enough to shovel shit with him,” Elmo said. “Fuckin’ Winfield has to have an interpreter in the morning, till about the fifth beer. He’s too fucking’ stoned an’ hung over even to enunciate.”
“Motherfucking’ prick bastard and turd-plop,” Winfield said, loud and clear.
Elmo didn’t seem to think the remark referred to him. We rode out of town, over some dry hills. Except for the scrawny trees, the landscape didn’t look too much different from Southern California. Also, the air was kind of oily.
“As it happens, that very cowboy made off with Winfield’s top wench,” Elmo said. “Old prissy Linda, that I’d been warning him about for the last six weeks.”
“What he means is he’s been fucking’ her himself,” Winfield said, opening his eyes. “Elmo thinks that’s a warnin’, even though he did go to some lengths to conceal the whole squalid affair. I don’t consider that a warnin’, and I don’t consider it very fucking’ neighborly either. I wish I was back in Austin so I could fuck his ex-wife.”
“There’s other wenches, Winfield,” Elmo said. Evidently his conscience wasn’t too clear. Why it should bother him I don’t know. They had been fucking one another’s women ever since I’d known them.
“Linda was not just a wench,” Winfield said. He threw a beer can out the window and squinted at Italy as if he’d like to get a big eraser and erase it.
“Linda had done graduated from that category,” he added. “She was the fucking’ love of my life, or of this month, anyway. I wish that goddamn Casey Tibbs would learn to stay home. Why should cowboys get to be fucking’ international celebrities like us?”
“I just got one word of advice for you, my buddy,” Elmo said. “Don’t you go dwelling on this emotional tragedy.”
“Why not?—the love of my life,” Winfield said.
“Because if you dwell on it, you’re apt to get drunk and go challenge that bullrider, and then you’ll be a dead motherfucker and I’ll have to find a new partner, that’s why.”
They weren’t any too amusing, in the morning, and they looked like warmed-over pizza. Winfield got carsick twice before we got where we were going, which was a sort of fragment of a town near some kind of monster garden.
“T.M.’s a nut,” Elmo said as we eased our way through all the support vehicles that go with a movie production. There were several limos with Italian drivers snoring in them, and the usual sound trucks and vans full of props and stuff. The cinemobile that the elephant had kicked over was still lying on its side. Six or eight Italian kids in authentic rags were climbing around on it.
“This here’s Bomarzo,” Elmo went on. “A sickly little humpbacked Renaissance prince had some sculptor stick some monster statues back in the brush. Sort of his own little Disneyland, you could say. Now T.M.’s decided Nero did it, in spite of all the evidence.”
“T.M. is not loath to wrench the facts of history,” Winfield said.
It was obvious from one glance that Bo Brimmer had every reason to be worried. A fully equipped Roman army stood off in a little valley, doing nothing but drawing pay. There were extras everywhere, some of them stretched out on the ground with their capes over their heads, taking naps. It was the kind of big-budget, big-cast spectacle that hadn’t been made since Cleopatra—a ten-million-dollar lollipop they were giving old Tony because he had helped them cash in on the disaster craze with a picture called Crack, in which three California coastal towns slid into the sea.
Probably The Doom of Rome had been around for ten or fifteen years, being blocked by studio head after studio head. Then the persistent old bastard had taken advantage of a temporary lapse of leadership to slip the project through.
I got out and wandered around in the confusion. Some tourists who had come to see the monsters were arguing with the security people, who didn’t want them to. I passed a limo with Rosanna Podesta in it—she was playing Nero’s mother. Tony Maury was standing on a bumpy hill, smiling his little smile. He had his arm linked in Jill’s. She was frowning and talking rapidly to him. That was what we had come for, I guess: so she could put her touch with the old types to good use.
Of course, no m
atter how good she was, it wouldn’t save the picture. The picture was some kind of afterthought of Tony Maury’s that happened to be costing Universal a lot of money. All Jill could do would be to shorten everybody’s agony.
I left it to her and spent the morning wandering around. The two kids from U.C.L.A. who were going to shoot the documentary weren’t arriving until that afternoon, so I really had nothing to do but gawk at it all. We had decided to call our little documentary Outtake. The set was such a circus that I began to feel good about my part of the project for the first time. It might be a better picture than the picture, and all the film students in the world would probably flock to see it. I might even make a little money.
When I got tired of gawking I hung around with the guys with the walkie-talkies until a car came out that was going back to Rome. The car was taking in a little actor named Ellis Malki, who had let a camel step on his foot. Ellis was in intense pain. He was an aging fag who played some slimy functionary or other. He spent the whole drive sucking in his breath and suppressing screams of agony. As an act of consideration, Tony Maury had sent his personal driver to rush Ellis to the hospital.
“They bite too,” the driver said, referring to camels. “My cousin had his ear bit off while he was at Warners.”
The fact that Ellis Malki was in pain made no impression on the Roman traffic. We poked along like a black battleship, surrounded by Hondas and Fiats. Ellis got greener and greener, and I got tired of hearing him suck in his breath.
Later, while I was having a drink, Bo Brimmer called. It must have been about three A.M. where he was, but he sounded fresh as a daisy.
“What’s your first impression?” he asked.
“That this is a stupid project,” I said.
“That it undoubtedly is,” he said. “Of course, stupid and unprofitable are not synonyms. What’s Tony doing?”
“Standing on a hill grumbling because he wants another elephant,” I said.
“Make me a good documentary, then,” he said. “The more vulgar the better—mondo bizzarro, if you know what I mean. Shots of Winfield Gohagen taking a leak, and such as that. Let Jill help you and the kids if she wants to.”
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