“Well, it’s no joke, a stroke . . . if you’ll forgive the rhyme,” he said. At least he still had his voice, the sexiest old voice around, a baritone of which he was justly proud.
“But you don’t want to hear about being sick,” he said. “Everybody’s illnesses are the same. They’re only unique to the person they’re happening to.”
“Oh, I’m sure you managed to have a unique stroke,” I said.
He was an altered man—frightened. For a time I didn’t know what to do, because I had never seen him that way and hadn’t expected to. He had always been cavalier—in fact had told me once that since his wife’s death he had nourished a sort of mild death wish. I guess the stroke had changed that.
In a while we got a little more used to one another, and I stayed and made him dinner. Missing almost a year of a person is odd: even persons you know well don’t stay exactly the same. When you come back together again a lot of fine adjustments have to be made. My old friend was clearly no longer a man who went around fucking everything young and rich. Until I walked into the room and saw him I had not realized how rapidly people can fade. A man whose sexiness has always been a fat sexiness can look awfully pathetic when he suddenly becomes thin. The spirit had changed, too, with the flesh. His old banter, when he tried it, sounded like a parody of its former self. I put up with the parody for a while, and then I began to find it distasteful.
“Listen, stop it,” I said. “You don’t really feel like joking. Why would think I’d want you to put on an act for me?”
“Why, because I always have,” he said. “I’ve fooled you all these years. It wasn’t me you loved, it was the clown I pretended to be.”
I ignored that.
“All right, tell me about the man from Texas,” he said.
“He was not just a man from Texas,” I said. “He had a name.”
I spoke more sharply than I had meant to. No one would call Owen by his name any more, or even mention him, around me. All my shoved-down feelings weren’t shoved down very far—they were always ready to rise up. In my mind I was always defending him, against unspoken accusations. What did anyone know? What did I know, any more?
“Then tell me about your picture,” he said.
“Oh, why?” I said. “It would be like talking about your illness. It’s unique to me, but to anyone who’s ever made one it would be an old story, except that this one cost Wynkyn Weil his life.”
Our conversation, which for years had been a rapid, natural flow, impossible to check, seemed now to be full of stops. Not much more was said that evening. We sat on Joe’s couch, looking out over Hollywood, and he held my hand. We had hugged a lot in the past, but he had never exactly held my hand, and when he took it I guess I looked up in surprise.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I can no longer ejaculate.”
“What?” I said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He looked very embarrassed. Maybe he had chosen that means of calling attention to the area where he most wanted sympathy.
“It’s a fact,” he said.
“For god’s sakes,” I said. “You just had the stroke a month ago. I think you might give the old appetites a bit more time to recover, don’t you? The debutantes of this world may not have seen the last of you yet.”
A few minutes later I discovered that he was asleep, sitting at my side. He didn’t have a fat neck any more; his chin had fallen onto his chest. I got him awake enough to walk him to his bed, and he showed me a little red bottle on his bedside table.
“Seconal,” he said. “In case I feel another stroke coming on. I had to pay a lot for it, but if I feel one coming and I have time, I’m going to take it. I don’t want to lie around staring at the ceiling for years. You’d have to deal with me, because no one else would bother.”
“Oh, Joe,” I said; but it was clear that having the Seconal gave him great security. He went right back to sleep.
I went home and unpacked, so that maybe all my clothes would stop smelling like the inside of a suitcase. Then I went and looked at my cups, to see if any of them had broken. I have a passion for nice cups. When the last earthquake hit I realized it the moment I heard my cups breaking. But my new cups were all still there, as perfect within their terms as anything could be.
While I was admiring them, the phone rang. I was as frightened for a moment as if it were an earthquake. Who would call me, my first night home? Of course my greatest fear was that it was Owen. If it was, what would I say? More likely it was probably just Gauldin, which would be bad enough, but handleable.
“The hunter home from the hill,” Bo Brimmer said, when I snatched the receiver up.
“No, from the plain,” I said. “How did you know I was here?”
“Only God has better intelligence than Universal,” he said.
I was very glad it was him. He had such a crisp mind—it reminded me of cereal before you pour the milk in. For several months all the minds available to me had been like cereal about two hours after you pour the milk in. Not very flattering to my crew, but that was how it felt.
“I wish we were married,” he said. “We’d both be less lonely.”
He almost invariably proposed to me. I guess it was ritual, although if I’d said okay, let’s try it, he probably would have.
“I won’t say it couldn’t happen,” I said.
It could happen the day I got ready to marry a mind, but that I didn’t say. It was a game we both got a little bit of a lift from playing. He was not to make his proposal too heavy, and I was not to make my rejection too absolute.
“I’m finally over Jackie,” he said.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said. “I believe in irrational passions, even if they mostly bring pain. They’re more honorable than the common arrangements we all make.
“Excuse me,” I added. “That most of us make.”
“I wasn’t always this above it,” he said. “I had a pretty common arrangement with my wife. Since she lives in Little Rock, people forget that I actually had one. In fact I’m much more the married type than yourself. The purpose of marriage is order, and I respect order. I’ve even achieved it in my life, if at somewhat too great a cost.”
We rattled on for more than an hour, to no real point, but quickly, rapidly. A talk with Bo was like verbal Ping-Pong: the ball came right back. It was refreshing.
To my surprise, he told me that Tony Maury’s movie was making money. I had almost forgotten it, thanks to working so hard.
“It’s logical,” he said. “It’s a summer movie. We’ve got it in every drive-in in America. People like to watch other people whack at one another with swords, in the summertime.”
“How about Owen’s movie?” I asked.
“We closed it,” he said, and didn’t elaborate.
I felt torn, a little. Poor thing. All he wanted was to make it to what he considered the Big Time. The concept was a little old-fashioned, but so was he. He didn’t even need the substance, if he could just have the show: limousines, hotel suites, a few slaves, his name in the paper. It was the kind of thing thousands of people had, but not Owen. He kept falling off the curb. The limos kept driving away without him, or if he was on the inside, it was only by the grace of some woman—me, Sherry, or whoever took pity on him next.
“Well,” Bo said, “the only reason I sent him to Rome in the first place was because I thought either Buckle or Gohagen would bash in his head. I needed you free. You’re the only woman out here who understands me.”
“I don’t understand anybody,” I said. “I certainly don’t understand you.”
The kick I got out of talking to him wore off a little once he forced me to consider how calculating he was. He was more feminine than any of us—or at least his brain was. Poor Owen liked to think he was calculating, but his calculations had the consistency of pudding, compared to Bo’s.
“The town is rife with rumors about One Tree,” he said. “Sherry is said to be very concerned. I think you’
ll be lucky to get much say about the cut.”
“I’m not sure the cut matters,” I said. “I wasn’t really up to that job. You were quite right to reject that picture.”
“I was certainly right,” he said.
“Bo,” I said, “if you care for me, why didn’t you try to talk me out of it?” I couldn’t quite say “if you love me”— we had always avoided the word. A mark of good taste on both our parts.
“I wanted you to fail,” he said, with no hesitation. “You can’t be changed by abstract advice. My judgments are useless to you: you have to come to your own understandings. You have to sweat the sweat, bleed the blood, fuck the fuckers, and lose the money before you can agree with what I can figure out in my head in five seconds. I don’t need experience, but you can’t proceed without it. Now maybe you understand that you’re not a director.”
“I’m not?” I said—though I was more or less in agreement.
“No,” he said. “You can do some of the things directors do, but you’re not a director.”
“Can you tell me what I am?” I asked. “If your head is so fucking good, why aren’t you happy?”
He chuckled. “That’s two questions,” he said. “I’ll take them in reverse order. I’m not happy because I can’t attract the women I care about most. That’s sad, but it’s not a tragic or a particularly uncommon problem.”
“Answer the first question,” I said. Actually I was attracted to his voice. Somehow the sight of him sort of threw me off.
“Producer,” he said. “You could be the best in Hollywood. You’d just be a whiz at it. I’d give you a picture to produce tomorrow, if you’d come over here. You’d be excellent, and we’d make a tremendous team.”
I had fantasized about the same thing, a time or two. I probably would be a good producer, and we probably would be a good team, if he could stay out of love with me, or if I could get in love with him. Neither seemed likely.
Then I got worried about the line being tied up so long. Joe might have awakened and be trying to call. I made an excuse and hung up, and of course no one called. I opened my windows and listened to the distant traffic, to the airplanes that occasionally came over, to car doors shutting down the hill as people came home from parties. I had not slept in my own bed alone for a while, and it felt strange.
I woke up to a warm dawn, not a bit of mist in the hills. I put on some pants and a shirt and went right up to Joe’s. Not only was he alive, he was sitting on his front steps, in his pajamas and disreputable old bathrobe, reading the paper.
“I’ve lost my touch with the horses too,” he said, by way of greeting. In the morning light he didn’t look quite so bad, although I was not yet used to seeing him gaunt.
“I’m already tired of your self-pity,” I said.
He took my hand again, as soon as I sat down beside him on the porch. It seemed to be a new need. I think he had just been sitting there waiting for me to come.
But when I made him breakfast, he ate it. He had an appetite, and he was going back to work in a week. I began to feel better about him. After we ate I hustled down the hill, to go find out about the movie I was probably not going to be allowed to edit.
5
THE PEOPLE WHO ARE THE HARDEST TO DEAL WITH IN Hollywood are I guess what you’d call middle management. Or maybe you’d call them upper management: junior executives, vice presidents in charge of some segment of production, or in some cases, vice presidents in charge of nothing whatever. Such people may have nothing of substance to do, but they are still liable for punishment if they do it—or don’t do it—badly. It’s at their level that insecurity bites the deepest. The top men generally have protection. If they get sacked, they’re usually spared absolute humiliation. They retain some options, stock or otherwise; at the very worst, they can usually salvage a deal that makes it sound like they are becoming independent producers by choice. Sometimes it even is by choice.
The people one and two steps down the ladder don’t have that cushion. They can be fired anytime anyone above them needs a scapegoat, which is often. They can be fired even if no scapegoat is required, just because the wind changes, or the tide turns, or whatever.
I knew something was fishy when I got to the studio and found that the only person I could persuade to talk to me was B. G. E. Filson. It’s not accurate to say that I could persuade him to talk to me, either; it would be more accurate to say that I was unable to dissuade him from talking to me. Obviously—very obviously—Abe had assigned him to me, to divert me, get me out of the way, seduce me, anything.
It was a task for which Barry Filson was really ill-equipped, whichever way it went. He was one of the few people in Hollywood with three initials before his name—I believe he was from an old Connecticut family—and I did remember that the first initial stood for Barrett. Naturally everyone in Hollywood called him Barry, as a way of putting him down. I don’t think he was a bad guy—he was just stiff and had too many manners and was a little weak—but he probably led a terrible life. Abe and the various other executives had no trouble rolling right over him. What he was doing in the movie business was a puzzle to everyone, I think including himself.
My problem with him wasn’t that I disliked him—I scarcely knew him. I just didn’t like the role he had been sent to play. I tried to sort of sidle around him and go directly to Mr. Mond, but that didn’t work because Mr. Mond was sick. That was a surprise. So far as I knew, he had never been sick before.
“I think it’s bronchial,” B.G.E. said. He was wearing a beautiful gray suit, and it fit him and didn’t look out of place on him the way fine suits do on a lot of junior executives out here.
“Well, if I can’t talk to Mr. Mond, I guess I’ll go talk to Sammy,” I said. “I hear there are some problems with the cutting.”
Barry—since we weren’t in Connecticut, I called him that, too—looked very uncomfortable. He would never make a hatchet-man.
“I don’t think Sammy’s cutting it,” he said.
“What are you talking about? He just left Texas three days ago. He was cutting it then.”
“An emergency came up with that picture we’re shooting down in Durango,” he said. “I think Abe sent him down there.”
We were in his office, which had a couple of Matisse lithographs on the wall—real Matisse lithographs. Every time I saw them I realized how limited I was. There was something mature and joyful about the drawings that I envied so much I couldn’t stand to look at them. At the same time, I couldn’t keep my eyes off them. Barrett Gordon Evarts Filson couldn’t really hold my attention, with those drawings on the wall behind him, even when what he was saying seemed to be rather sinister.
“Barry, if Sherry is making trouble, why don’t you say it?” I said. “I know she hates me. All I want is a straight answer.”
“I think you’ll have to talk to Abe,” he said.
He had fine features, beautiful features, really, but the weakness was there. He wouldn’t meet my eye. And he wasn’t even on the make, particularly. I can forgive a man lying and cheating if he’s driven by ambition, but Barry wasn’t. I guess he was just a gentleman who liked to live where it was sunny, but was still a little too active for Palm Springs or Bermuda or the Bahamas, or wherever his peers lived.
I felt very tired of the failures of men. They were always failing in the most basic ways, like looking down or away at the moment when they should be gutsy enough to meet your eye.
“Why are you doing this?” I said—a terrible question to ask him. What could be worse than asking a man to account for his motives? In fact, I got very angry with him and said awful things, not vulgarly awful but subtly and cuttingly awful: things he would remember later, maybe months later.
He wouldn’t fight back, though. He stuck with his manners, offered to see what he could find out, and suggested we have lunch. His embarrassed good manners just made me more irritable; I felt bound to counter with absolute bad manners, so I marched out and went to see Abe’s se
cretary.
Her name was Wanda, and for my money she was the smartest person in the whole studio. She was a grizzled old girl who had lived her whole life in California—she had been through everything, and I think she liked me because she sensed that, at the rate I was going, I too would have been through everything in not too many years. She smoked constantly, drank all night, slept with God knows what kind of men, and dyed her hair a different color every few months. At the moment, she was living with a girl friend who was every bit as grizzled as she was; the girl friend was an executive secretary at Metro. They went on a cruise together once a year, to get away from it all.
I felt I could count on Wanda for a little bit of truth. She was really Mr. Mond’s employee, not Abe’s. Mr. Mond kept her on to see that Abe didn’t do anything too wild. I think Abe hated her, but he didn’t have the guts to fire her.
When I came in she was sitting in a cloud of smoke, typing. The page emerged perfectly typed from the typewriter, despite the little cloud that hung between Wanda and the machine.
“What have they done with Sammy?” I asked.
Wanda shrugged. “Did you look in the commissary?” she said.
“B.G.E. says they shipped him to Durango.”
“Barry’s beautiful, but he wouldn’t know a turd from a fig,” Wanda said. “It’s just that you’re about to get fired.”
“Would Mr. Mond really let them fire me?” I asked. “Have you talked to him?”
“Not for a week,” she said. “Usually it’s every ten minutes. I think I’m about to get fired, too. I think the old man’s given up.
“You know Hiram died,” she added. “I think that did it.”
Hiram was a friend of Mr. Mond’s youth—the last such friend, I guess. He was an aged banker who had lived in Miami for thirty years or so. Besides being a friend from New York days, he had financed Mr. Mond in his early years at the studio. The two of them talked on the phone for hours, every day.
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