Somebody's Darling

by Somebody's Darling (retail) (epub)

  Now the beautiful high place was the same and Mr. Mond was different. It was horrible to see the pallor of death so rapidly eat away the tan of a man who had done nothing but burn himself brown for fifteen years. The tan hadn’t entirely left his skin, but the pallor spread underneath it, leaving him a shadowy color, with black splotches here and there on his arms. He took my hand absently and held it, almost as Joe did, and the flesh that was left on his fingers was soft, over the bone. Now that the flesh was sinking off his face, his skull was almost visible, and that enormous jawbone, that Joe was always claiming had actually knocked down a small actor once, was sunk down against his chest, his neck no longer powerful enough to move it, much less swing it. It lay there, propped on his chest, pulling his head to one side so that I had to tilt mine to really look him in the eye. Amazing. It reminded me of the jawbone of a horse I found in a field in Mendocino one time.

  When Mr. Mond talked, it was slowly and tonelessly, I guess because the effort to really open his mouth was great. A number of attendants were around, at a respectful distance, but there was no sign of Abe, and no teenagers with bouncing breasts. The telephones with their panels of buttons were not ringing, not blinking, and the whole beautiful garden had a mortuary feel.

  Yet, deep in his black eyes, Mr. Mond was still there. His eyes fastened on me more tightly than the hand that held mine, in a grip as toneless as his voice. The color was fading from the rest of him, as his life was fading, but there was still a mean glint in his eyes.

  “Steal it,” he said, and then wheezed for a while, rasped, tried to clear the bubble and froth of mucus from his voice.

  “Steal da picture,” he said, when he could.

  “What do you mean?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Some mischief,” he said. “I got nothin’ to live for but some mischief. It’s all been mischief, everything I done with you. I got away with it, ya see, because I kept my options. I’d a made too much trouble, so da board put up with me. And I’m da smartest anyway, so I made them money, ya see? I don’t know how much, hundred million a year, even when I was ninety, ninety-one. None of them others done that, not no fuckin’ Goldwyn, Harry Cohn, nobody.”

  He lifted his jaw a little, stirred by pride, and then let it fall back on his chest.

  “But they’re glad I’m sick,” he said. “They been waitin’ ten, twelve years for me to die. It’s all right. Way of da woild. I’m old, I’ll die. But I want ya to steal da picture foist.”

  “How can I do that, Mr. Mond?”

  “Ya disappoint me, my da’lin’,” he said. “How do I know how? Hire a burglar. Steal the keys to da lab. Get da negative. You can walk around, you figure it out. But steal it. Get everything you can find. Otherwise that whore that thinks she’s such a big star is going to ruin it.”

  “To be honest, I’m not sure there’s that much to ruin,” I said.

  “Not da point,” he said. “Didn’t I say mischief? We don’t let ’em get their way, ya see? We don’t let the big star get away with it. Why should they get their way? We done it, you an’ me! So we see that they don’t get their way!”

  He was an amazing old man. He stared at me passionately—how many forms it takes. He wanted me to be his weapon, help him strike one last blow. I hadn’t realized how resentful the old must get of the people underneath them—the younger people. Now he had accepted the inevitable, but he wanted one last shot, one final act of pride, the victims of which would be the men who would get to live once he was dead.

  Only it wouldn’t be my final act, just his. What was I supposed to do after stealing the film?

  “You’re famous,” he said, when I asked him. “You’re da woman director. So ya steal your own film and what can they do? If they put you in jail the public won’t stand for it. Abe don’t care about the picture. He’d just as soon boin it. They’d get the insurance money and not have the problem of no release. Steal it. Make ’em pay a ransom. Make ’em give you da cut. You’ll get publicity like nobody’s ever seen, like if Garbo come back or somethin’. Da publicity will make da picture.”

  I didn’t know what to say. It was a sickroom fantasy to end all sickroom fantasies.

  “I’m not much of a criminal,” I said.

  “What criminal?” he said. “Listen, ya got moral rights. Ya made the picture.”

  Then his strength played out and he stopped talking. The life seemed to fade from his body. He was so weak he could barely mumble a goodbye, when they wheeled him in. Even his eyes faded, but they faded last, burning there in his ashen old face long after he had stopped talking.

  I didn’t know what to make of it. Even dying, he was capable of some deviousness. I thought he liked me, and had always thought so, but then, who knows what old men really feel about young women? Years before, ten years maybe, well before I had ever worked for him, he had exposed himself to me once. I was just visiting the house with a friend who was doing a script for him, and as I was coming out of the ladies’ room he came out of a bedroom with his pants down, fumbling with a shirttail. I don’t think it was accidental, either. I think he was lying in wait. What reminded me of it was his eyes, watching to see how I’d react when he suggested I steal the film. Later, when I thought about it, it was his eyes I remembered, not his cock, which looked like a piece of old cork.

  THE NEXT DAY I almost had an encounter with Abe. He was walking down a corridor with Jilly Legendre, who was just back from shooting a picture in Turkey. Abe flinched at the sight of me and made some hasty excuse before I got in earshot. He turned and hurried back down the corridor.

  Jilly, immense, dressed in white pants and some kind of red Greek shirt, watched Abe go with surprise.

  “What have you got?” he said. “Swine flu? I’ve never seen Abe move that fast, and I grew up with the little prick.”

  Perhaps in a way that was Jilly’s secret. He was a native of movies. He had grown up among movie people, in Hollywood, Paris, New York, and he knew the industry and its ways as a farmer knows his fields. He stood out in Hollywood because he loved it all: the deals, the indulgence, the confusion. To Jilly it was all just like walking around home.

  It was a bright day, and since I had inadvertently blown his appointment, we decided to go to the beach and catch up on one another. Jilly had a new Rolls—he liked all the appurtenances—and when we got to Malibu he sent his driver off for food and wine and we settled ourselves on his beach. We were an odd sight: a very fat man and a very skinny woman.

  Yet for all his self-indulgence and sophistication, Jilly was not world-weary, which was why I liked him. He looked at it fresh. When I told him about Wynkyn he shook his head.

  “Hollywood oughtn’t to try and propagate itself,” he said. “It ought to die out at the end of every generation. Experience never gets passed on here anyway.”

  We had a pleasant day, good for me. Somehow I could always be at ease with Jilly—I guess we trusted one another not to get nonsensical. The notion of anyone so fat and anyone so skinny joined in the sexual act affronted our common sense of esthetics.

  Besides, though Jilly shared Abe’s taste for Latin teenagers, he had a great love, an aging French actress, very imperious, who had skillfully kept him on the string for years and might keep him there forever. It left us free to indulge our mutually insatiable curiosity about one another’s life and work.

  I told him about Mr. Mond’s strange suggestion—he agreed it would get the picture unbelievable publicity—and then he told me about an affair he had had with Sherry years before.

  “You have to remember how concentrated she is,” he said. “Sherry has only one thing: herself. She needs nothing else, believes in nothing else, knows nothing else. But she absolutely has to be pleased with herself: nothing can be wrong, and in order for nothing to be wrong the whole world has to assume a certain shape. Everything she knows and relates to in any way has to help keep the world tilted so that it reflects Sherry in just the way she needs it to.


  “She’s good at shoving the world around,” he added. “She puts the camera where she wants it, and society and friendship and love are like the camera. She puts everything where she wants it, and as long as she can do that she’s fine.”

  “But she can’t do that now,” I said. “Wynkyn is dead.”

  “No,” he said. “Death is not a camera.”

  The ocean rolled in, and rolled in, hypnotically. The sun was not too bad, so I took a little nap, lying on my stomach on the warm sand. When I woke up, Jilly was still drinking wine. Black hairs curled into his navel, from the vortex of that great belly.

  “It wasn’t much of a love affair,” he said, as if the conversation hadn’t lapsed. “A man isn’t really a camera, either. They don’t hold their focus that well.”

  The water turned steel color, before we left.

  7

  THE NEXT MORNING ABE CALLED. HE WAS CHARACTERISTICALLY direct.

  “Hey,” he said. “It’s okay. It’s okay. Come and cut the picture.”

  “Really? What happened?”

  “We don’t know and we don’t care. Sherry’s lost interest in making trouble. She’s gone to Italy. So let’s don’t waste no more time.

  “Did you hear what happened at Universal?” he asked, once the business was settled.

  “No.”

  “It just happened,” he said. “It’s on television. A driver went berserk and killed eight people. Ran over them with a limo. The S.W.A.T. team’s after him. Think what a movie! It would have to happen at fuckin’ Universal.”

  By the time I turned on the television it was all over, and various policemen and survivors were describing it to the television reporters. The man who went berserk had been a former stunt driver, a Central European who, according to the news, had been around Hollywood for thirty years. He was one of those people Joe would know all about. Everyone agreed he was a man of formidable driving skills, because he had smashed his limo into a studio gatehouse, killing two attendants, then wove around the studio until he got six more people, all of them unaware that anything was happening. Even after the police got there he had somehow rolled his car over an apparently impregnable police barricade and set off, only to lose control a few minutes later, screaming through Laurel Canyon with twenty police cars in pursuit. He smashed into the hill and was dead when the police got to him.

  Bo was on the newscast briefly, expressing his shock and horror.

  It was the kind of happening that conspires to make L.A. seem crazier than it really is. For the next few days the news stations ran clips of some of the man’s great stunt drives, and unearthed a lot of old stills and such. What was haunting to me was not the man, or even his victims, but his fat, bewildered wife, also Central European. She was asked again and again for an explanation of the tragedy, only to grow more and more bewildered.

  “Gregor was man . . . men have these moods . . . when he was angry nobody better stop him . . . I am sorry,” she said, but then you could see it all become too much, and she faced the cameras silently, not sobbing, just retreating as deeply as she could into silence and stolidity.

  WE WERE HALFWAY THROUGH the cutting when Mr. Mond died. It was something of a shock, because reports were that he was getting well. The Academy had even decided to stage a tribute on his ninety-second birthday—they went ahead and arranged a spectacular gala, and then he died. Some people thought it had been his last trick, getting the industry to plan a party and then popping off, so as to leave them holding the bag. The gala had to be hastily converted into a memorial tribute—awkward, because now that he was finally dead almost everyone in the industry was happy to forget him. Having to say nice things about a man they hated, with him not even there to hear them, stuck in a lot of craws.

  I went with Bo. There was to be an immense party at Jilly’s, later on—his French actress was in town. Bo was very cheerful. The black humor of the gala appealed to him, made him even wittier than usual.

  Everyone was there—including Owen. It had never occurred to me that he would be there. I don’t know why it hadn’t, since it was well known that he hadn’t gone to Europe with Sherry. Her distraught, sick face was in the papers almost every day. Usually she was at a night club with her new love, a Spanish millionaire. Somehow I just never expected Owen to be anywhere that I was again. It threw me off, even though we got no closer to one another than about fifty yards. He was with Raven Dexter, Toole Peters’ old girl friend, a tall, vague New Yorker who had been in Hollywood seven or eight years and was still working on her first screenplay.

  I caught glimpses of him throughout the evening, amid the swirl of conversation, the speeches, the film clips, the jokes, and Abe’s predictable collapse into tears. Owen was never smiling, that was all I registered. Raven Dexter talked to Clint Eastwood all night. I had the funny sense—Joe Percy was always talking about it, but I had never felt it before—of being in a movie rather than a life. Of course, literally, I was in a movie: there were TV cameras everywhere. Emotionally, I was in a very trite role: jilted woman, going out with man she doesn’t care about, suddenly sees man she does care about, with another woman. The sense that I was in a movie was almost comforting, because maybe if it felt that way, it would turn out like it turns out in movies, with me getting him back if, upon consideration, I really wanted him back.

  To make it all more complicated, Truffaut was at the next table, with Jacqueline Bisset. The sight of her drove Bo to a fever of brilliance. He even revealed a rich command of the French language, which up to that moment none of us knew he had.

  Then at Jilly’s party I got high—not on much, a little marijuana, but I was in a state to get high if I took anything at all into my system. Jilly had a pained, reserved look on his face all evening: his lady was very difficult. It was a good thing he had a beard. Large men with beards automatically take on dignity when they’re unhappy. As for Bo, he could not have been higher, brighter, or more voluble—he was not for a moment going to let it into his consciousness that François Truffaut might have something he didn’t.

  While I was high I saw an amazing thing. Jilly had an immense and beautiful Dalmatian that wandered around the party looking as grave as his master. There was dancing around the pool, which had a kind of island made of mattresses in the center of it—of course everybody thought it was for fucking, but I think Jilly just lay on it and read scripts. Four or five beautiful young people were skinny-dipping, showing off their beauty, probably unaware that the sight of them in their healthy young glory was creating sinking feelings in all of us not-so-young and not-so-beautiful spectators.

  The Dalmatian was just as beautiful as the skinny-dippers, but no one noticed him except me. Then a Mexican servant brought out a really huge block of caviar—two pounds maybe, probably the best you can get—and set it on a low table by the pool. No one noticed that either, except the Dalmatian and myself. The Dalmatian walked over gravely, sniffed it once, and then, within ten seconds, ate every bit of it. He didn’t exactly wolf it—it just disappeared, as if it had been sucked into him. I was the only one who noticed. The Dalmatian walked away with about $800 worth of caviar in his belly, and no one even laughed. They were too busy wishing they were young enough and beautiful enough, not to mention uninhibited enough, to skinny-dip.

  Later I sometimes wondered if seeing the Dalmatian eat the caviar had anything to do with the fact that Bo and I ended up having a one-night stand that night. The sight of Owen, plus getting high, plus who knows what else—maybe all those body-proud young men at Jilly’s, lingering on the diving board so everyone would be sure and see what nice young cocks they had—I guess it combined to detach me from my normal self. And probably the sight of his true love and permanent fantasy had stirred Bo up. Going home late—the mist was in the hills—I thought anyway I’d kiss him because I’ve always liked his mouth and it might be the only time ever that we’d both be out of our patterns enough for it to happen. But he kissed me first and sent his driver right on home when we go
t to my house. Of course those persistent Hollywood rumors about him being freakish or perverse or a breast-biter or just too little to do anything were all nonsense. He was an insistent lover, even a little desperate. Maybe that was because his sex drive was fueled by the thought of an impossible love, I don’t know.

  When I woke up the next morning Bo was dressed, drinking a cup of coffee. He was also on the phone to his house, telling them what clothes to bring him for the day. When his driver came and I followed him out on the sidewalk, he got me to step off the steps before he did. Then he kissed me.

  “You’re a darling,” he said as he turned to leave.

  I did like his mouth, but that was the last I got of it. For some reason, that night ruined our relationship. Bo never came back to pester me, like normal old Gauldin. A bit of an affair with me would have done his reputation a lot of good, but it didn’t happen, and I don’t believe he ever mentioned that I’d been a conquest. I don’t understand why that one night distanced us so completely, but it did. After that, when we met at parties, we didn’t chat. I did not go to Universal to become a producer. Bo didn’t ask me to accompany him to the Oscar ceremonies, as he had for a number of years, and when he left Hollywood, scarcely more than a year later, to assume command of a national television network—probably the most powerful media position in the country—he didn’t call to say goodbye.

  And I didn’t miss him, although he was one of the brightest men I knew, and gave the most intelligent advice. The little roads that lead people up to and then away from one another are the most mazelike roads of all. My road to Bo, Bo’s road to me, who knows? Friends for years, lovers for a few hours, and then quits. Even a pseudo-sage like Joe Percy would have a hard time assigning causes in such a case.