“No chance,” I said. “She doesn’t even think we ought to be doing the documentary.”
“I know,” he said. “Thinks we’re out to mock old Tony, which of course we are. In this case mockery may be our only hope.
“Although,” he added, “she may be right. It may not be in our long-term interest to show this trade for the sleazy business that it is. I do like the ring of that title, though. Outtake. One of my better ideas.”
The kids he sent me—my interns, they were called—arrived while I was drinking: two bushy-haired movie brats who had evidently done nothing their whole lives except play with cameras. They were so excited you would have thought they had just arrived in heaven.
The next day I packed them out to Bomarzo and turned them loose. I didn’t even have to point. For the next three weeks they were active as prairie dogs. Jill worked herself into a stupor on a picture she officially had nothing to do with, and came in so tired she hardly even yapped at me. With so little to distract us, Buckle and Gohagen and myself played a lot of poker. They knew some Riviera types who weren’t too good, and I was soon averaging three, four thousand dollars a week, on the side. If the air hadn’t been so oily, it wouldn’t have been a bad life.
6
TONY MAURY CHOKED TO DEATH AT THE WRAP PARTY FOR The Doom of Rome. He choked on a piece of fried squid, probably because he was trying to eat it and smile his little smile. Everybody was either drunk, stoned, or too tired to notice; he sat down behind a bush on the Hilton patio and turned black in the face. Elmo Buckle found him and yelled so loud that a little Italian policeman, thinking there was a robbery, accidently shot the bell captain in the leg.
Jill went into shock. She had worked at the old fart’s side for four weeks, just because she can’t resist working. Naturally she had convinced herself that he was someone to be admired. After he was carted off, still black in the face, I walked her around for an hour or two and then put her to bed.
“I know you think it’s an awful movie, but there are some good things,” she kept saying. “He knew how to shoot action—he really did. After all, he won those four Oscars.”
I let her babble. Personally, I had no fondness for the old fucker. He was hard as nails and as selfish as a baby. Having him out of the way would just make his picture—and mine—easier to sell.
My two kids had got some wonderful footage of him shuffling around with his khakis and his little scarf on, looking at his new elephant. Our little documentary could even be considered an elegy to a Hollywood legend. Most of the footage was mondo bizzarro, all right. I had shots of Buckle and Gohagen and their wenches that were so revolting that an army of feminists would probably march on Tujunga Canyon and castrate them both as soon as the picture came out.
In the middle of the night it dawned on Jill that I wasn’t particularly grief-stricken.
“You’re not sad,” she said. “He didn’t even get to see his picture come out, and you don’t care. I don’t want to be with you.”
She got out of bed and began grabbing clothes, which irritated me. She had a habit of running off, and I was tired of it. She had no intention of staying gone, of course. It was just her way of making trouble for a few days, maybe get herself a little extra attention.
“Look,” I said, “I barely knew him. He was an old man, and he died working. I think that’s lucky. You’re the one who’s always moaning about all the old directors who can’t get hired. They sit on their asses in their mansions, if they haven’t blown all their money and lost their mansions. Tony Maury got to work right up to the last day of his life, and he was too dumb to realize that people didn’t care about his movies any more.”
“I cared about them,” Jill said. “He was just a little old-fashioned, that’s all.”
“Have it your way, but get back in bed. Where do you think you’re running off to, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She was actually packing a suitcase.
Enough is enough. I got up and threw the suitcase back in the closet, clothes flying everywhere. Then I wrestled her back to bed.
“I’ve had enough of your childishness,” I said. “You don’t need to run away because a man is dead. Lie down and try to get some sleep.”
“I’m not upset about the death any more,” she said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe Tony was lucky. What I’m upset about is you.”
“I’m no different than I was yesterday,” I said.
“That’s right,” she said. The minute I turned her loose she scooted away from me. “You’re no different than you were the night I first laid eyes on you. You don’t love this business, and you don’t love me.
“I can forgive you for not loving me,” she added. “I’m not particularly lovable, even if you were a loving man, which of course you aren’t.”
She looked at me, shook her head, and got up again. She began to gather up the clothes.
“I see,” I said. “It’s all right if I don’t love you, but I’m supposed to love the fucking’ movie industry?”
“That’s right,” she said. “Or get out of it. There are too many cynics in it already. Maybe there always have been, maybe there always will be, but I don’t think I want to be sleeping with one of them.”
“Tony Maury was a joke!” I said. “Maybe he wasn’t as much of a joke as your dear friend Joe Percy, or your chum Henley Bowditch, the half-witted cameraman, but he was still a joke. All he really had was a good head for business. Is all this because you think I’m crapping on some kind of artist?”
She sighed. “I don’t guess he was an artist,” she said. “Just a craftsman. But he was devoted to it, and he loved what he was doing. That’s what’s sad about you. You call yourself a producer but you have no craft. You can’t even do the things those kids do, like focus a camera.”
“Oh,” I said. “Now it’s a crime to be uncreative?”
“No,” she said. “Maybe your craft was football and maybe you lost it because you got hurt, in which case all this is unfair. But be that as it may, it’s still a shame not to respect craftsmen, and it’s a worse shame to be like you are, gifted and cynical.”
“I’m not gifted,” I said. “That’s the phoniest word in the language.”
She had an armful of clothes, but I leaned out of bed and swatted them every which way. Jill shrugged and went to the bathroom. When she came back she had her robe on. She shook her head, a gesture I was getting to hate.
“I was just wrong about you,” she said. “When I met you in New York I thought I had never met a person who wanted so much. That’s what attracted me to you—how much you seemed to want everything—including me, I guess. All that yearning was very appealing.”
“Only now the appeal’s worn off,” I said.
“Yeah, because you only want the easy things,” she said. “The cheap things. It’s fine to want to be a producer if you’re going to try to be a great producer, like Mr. Mond. I wouldn’t care if you wanted to be a great anything—tractor salesman, poker player, anything. You’re just like too many other people: you want the quick winner, no matter how tacky.”
She walked past me and opened the door.
“Mostly I want to get started,” I said. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get started in this business if all you’ve ever done is play football? I come from Plainview, Texas.”
“Fine,” she said, crying a little. “I come from Santa Maria, California. My dad sells lawn furniture. It’s not where you come from. It’s what you want. You just don’t want enough. It hurts to love someone like you—it makes me feel that if you want me I must be cheap, too. That’s why I’m leaving.”
She started down the hotel corridor in her nightgown and bathrobe. It infuriated me. I ran into the hall after her and shoved her as hard as I could, which is hard. She went spinning off the wall and fell in the corridor.
“Where do you think you’re going?” I yelled. “You don’t even have a credit card.”
She took her time getting
up, holding one shoulder.
“Upstairs,” she said. “Elmo and Winfield will take me in.”
“Those slobs?” I said. “You’d go to those slobs?”
“In an hour of need, yes,” she said. “They’re human, unlike yourself. They’ll lend me a couch.”
She hobbled off, still holding her shoulder.
THE DUST FROM THAT one didn’t settle for a while. I thought she’d be back the next morning, but she wasn’t. One of Elmo’s girl friends came down and got some of her clothes. Around noon I went down to the hotel restaurant. Elmo and Winfield were there, Elmo staring at an omelette and Winfield staring at a beer.
“Morning,” I said. “Seen my roommate?”
“Your ex-roommate,” Winfield said. “Inasmuch as we’re leavin’, we’ve ceded her our suite.”
“Oh, well,” I said. “Maybe I’ll move in, too. It wasn’t that bad a fight.”
“If you give that lady any more trouble, you’re going to have to whip about eighty Italians,” Elmo said.
“And a couple of bad-ass Texans,” Winfield added.
I had started to sit down with them, but I caught myself and took a table across the room. Naturally everyone on the crew would be on her side. Half of them probably fancied themselves in love with her. That had been a source of irritation ever since we arrived in Italy.
The more I thought about it, the madder I got. Elmo and Winfield had their gall, dragging around their doped-up little groupies and idealizing Jill. I hated the way she went around being nice to everyone on the crew: it was her copout, as far as I was concerned. As long as she had about fifty good old boys to flirt with, she didn’t have to lay much on the line with me. There would always be another movie crew somewhere for her to charm. Since she had most of them too buffaloed even to make a pass, it was all free affection too. Maybe it was all she really needed.
I hated the whole business because all day it wasn’t settled and all day I couldn’t think. I just sat around feeling nervous and sort of blocked. That’s exactly what’s wrong with love: it doesn’t leave you yourself. You have to be on balance with somebody in order to think clearly.
Jill stayed gone and I stayed edgy, but I wasn’t going looking for her. Eventually she’d come back and apologize. She’d decide that she’d been too hard on me, that I wasn’t really as bad as all that. Also she’d come back because, good or bad, I was what she had going. It might be a shitty relationship but at least she was getting fucked. It might not be perfect, but it had some kick in it. She would show up, eventually.
The next day I spent the afternoon around the pool, watching a fat little French producer try to pick up teenagers. He was a ridiculous little turd, with his big cigar and his blue beret. I had sent my two interns to the airport to get some footage of old Tony’s coffin being put on the plane. Also I wanted them to hang around and get some shots of the whole shabby gang straggling onto their jets to go home.
When I got back to the room Jill was there, talking on the phone. She had circles under her eyes. It didn’t take much of a squabble to make her look her age. She finished her call just as I finished changing.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “You don’t want to be seen hanging around with a cheap bastard like me. Why don’t you go marry James Joyce or somebody?”
“I would rather you didn’t get nasty,” she said. “I came to apologize, but if you get nasty, I may decide it’s not worth it.”
“It probably isn’t,” I said. “I don’t appreciate you running off to spend the night with those two slobs, just because you got mad. You could stay and fight things out, for once. For all you know I might even change, if you stayed around long enough.”
She sighed. “I know,” she said. “It’s just that we get so ugly to one another that I feel it’s going to destroy everything. I run away because I don’t want that to happen.”
“I don’t like your habits,” I said. “I’m not some liberated creep. You don’t see me rushing out to spend the night with other women just because I get my feelings hurt.”
“Do you get your feelings hurt?” she asked, coming closer.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You never show anything but anger. I guess I don’t think of you as being too vulnerable.”
“That’s another word I hate,” I said. “Vulnerable. It’s a phony word, like gifted. I don’t want to be gifted and I sure as hell don’t intend to be vulnerable to very much. Who was that on the phone?”
“That was Bo,” she said. “He asked me if I’d handle postproduction on Tony’s picture.”
“And what’d you say?”
“I said I would.”
I went in and turned on the shower. She followed me. “Is something wrong?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t bother to wait and ask my advice, would you?” I said. “Maybe I had other plans for us for the next six months. Maybe I hadn’t planned to sit around while you help put this worthless picture together. You could at least have told him you’d think about it.”
“But somebody had to do it,” she said. “I was the logical choice.”
Suddenly there were too many factors to consider. My brain was jerking around without a good hold on anything. Sometimes you have a sense of almost having things together, and then all the pieces start to slide around like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
This time it was Jill’s fault. She wouldn’t wait—she just did things on her own, as if I didn’t count. As if I had no plans. I felt tight, bursting. I was either going to hit her or leave. It was too confusing, that she had talked to Bo without my being there. I didn’t like her talking to the little fucker anyway.
“Owen,” she said, “stop looking like that. It’s just six weeks’ work, maybe two months’. It’ll be all right.”
I was a second from busting her, but she got inside and hugged me.
“Come on,” she said. “Come on. God, you’re more high-strung than me.”
Maybe she sensed how close I was to throwing her at the wall. I don’t know. She got a hand inside my bathing suit and before I could decide anything my cock was as tight as a cow’s teat. I had about stopped caring whether I fucked her or not, but this time I let it go that way. Why not? We kept at it until we were both like dishrags, worn out. It was a way of postponing something, but why not? I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and neither did she. I thought I might as well keep on. Maybe eventually the pieces would stop sliding and start to fit together again.
7
ACTUALLY, HAVING JILL HELP WITH THE POST-PRODUCTION work on old Tony’s picture was the best thing that could have happened. I would have suggested it myself if I’d had time to think about it. For one thing, it kept her busy, and of course it got me free access to the cutting room. I carted off all kinds of discarded footage, some of which could be spliced into my own little film.
Bo had found a sharp kid for me to work with, a cutter named Jimmy Boyd. He went to work with the outtakes and the location documentary, putting them together in crazy sequences. He was a pale little mole who hardly ever came out into the light, but he knew what he was doing. The longer he worked with it, the funnier it all got, until it was the kind of documentary the Marx brothers might have made, if they had made documentaries. I just let Jimmy Boyd go to it. I believe in professionals, and he was very professional. I was the coach, he was the quarterback, and Bo Brimmer was the team owner, who checked in every few days. I was happy to have him snoop. I figured we’d have a very salable product by the time Jimmy got through.
While Jill put the finishing touches on Tony Maury’s awful picture I had about a month’s worth of affair with Lulu Dickey—a nice relief after seven or eight months of nobody but Jill.
One thing that made it nicer was that Lulu wasn’t in love with me. She had one of the funniest bodies I’d ever grappled with: legs about twice as long as a normal woman’s, no tits, frizzy hair, and a cunt the color of a plum. It looked like a plum wit
h a short black wig.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked, referring to her cunt, the first time I had a chance to contemplate it. We were in her palatial mansion on a big pink bed, with a telephone with at least forty buttons on it right beside us. The buttons were constantly blinking, but Lulu let them blink. Up until a few minutes earlier her cunt had been blinking more rapidly than the telephone buttons.
“Lebanon,” she said, swabbing herself with a Kleenex.
The nice thing about her was that she took nothing seriously except money. Her bedroom was full of huge blown-up pictures of her bombed-out boyfriend, Digby Buttons. “Where’s old Digby?” I asked.
“In the dope hospital,” she said. “Don’t talk about him. I have a soft spot for him, even though he couldn’t fuck if his life depended on it.”
“Nobody’s life depends on it,” I said.
“Yeah, but it’s not to be despised,” she said.
She had cool, bright little black eyes and a sparrow face. Emotionally she was dry as a palm tree, which I liked.
“Impotence fascinates me,” she said. “It’s on the increase, you know. Over the last two years I must have tried to get it on with at least twenty guys who couldn’t. Do you think it’s because women are making more money now, or what?”
“Who cares?” I said. “I can’t even get laid any more without having to discuss the role of women. Who cares about the role of women?”
“Yeah, but if you were impotent, you wouldn’t be so smug,” she said. “Look at it. It’s already sticking up again. So why should you worry? But maybe it’s all connected to women’s salaries.”
“I only have to worry about one cock,” I said, “and it doesn’t give a shit about women’s salaries. What’s your number-one client doing these days?”
“Sherry? She’s into meditation. She has a swami, and she doesn’t talk to her cunt any more. She and Swan got bored with all that.”
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