Steven Bochco

by Death by Hollywood

  About now, you’re probably asking yourself why Bobby didn’t just smack this guy in the mouth. I can’t answer that one. Maybe he was afraid to alienate a guy everyone knows is gonna wind up running a studio within five years. Or maybe he was just so ashamed that he didn’t want anyone to know his wife was screwing around behind his back with a movie producer who wouldn’t even give him a lousy rewrite.

  Whatever the case, when Bobby gets home, the first thing Vee says, as casually as she can, is, “How was your meeting?”

  “The meeting was swell,” Bobby says. “I asked him does he like fucking you from behind so he can watch his dick go in and out, or does he prefer being on the bottom so he can watch your tits bounce up and down?”

  Vee hauls off and smacks Bobby in the face so hard it sounds like a gunshot. And from that point on, it’s all over but the shouting. Bobby calls her a cheating cunt. Vee calls Bobby a loser—an impotent boozer who can’t write his way out of a wineglass. He says he oughta throw her off the deck in back of the house (from where, by the way, you can see the HOLLYWOOD sign).

  “Did you ever stop to ask yourself whose fault it is I’m having an affair?” Vee yells. “Can you remember the last time we went out for a meal together without having a fight? Or the last time you kissed me, or made love to me without me having to beg? Can you even remember the last time you were sober? Because I can’t, and I finally couldn’t take it anymore, and I was so lonely I would’ve fucked the pool man if we had one!”

  “Well if you’re so goddamn miserable,” Bobby screams, “why don’t you just pack up your shit and get the fuck out of my house,” which is sort of like closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted, as she’s already throwing stuff in an overnight bag, saying she should’ve left him months ago.

  The sight of her actually packing suddenly breaks Bobby’s heart, and all the fight goes out of him. “Come on, Vee, don’t go, please,” he begs. He even promises to go to the shrink with her, but he’s a day late and a buck short. As afraid as she’d been, now that her secret’s out, she feels liberated. Her fear, catalyzed by anger, has now turned to courage, and her sense of euphoria billows her sails and carries her out the door, leaving their marriage and Bobby, miserable and remorseful, in her wake.

  I know all this because, coincidentally, I happened to call Bobby to ask him to meet me for drinks after work. I’d gotten an earful from Jared Axelrod about their meeting, and frankly, as much as I hated the idea, I realized I was going to have to fire Bobby as a client.

  CHAPTER 5

  Over drinks at the bar in the Four Seasons hotel, Bobby tells me the whole story from A to Z, starting with getting pulled over by the motorcycle cop and seeing Vee across the street grabbing some guy’s ass in front of the Peninsula Hotel to showing up for his meeting with Jared Axelrod and realizing he’s the guy his wife’s been banging.

  “It’s the worst meeting I ever took in my life,” Bobby says. “If I didn’t need the job so bad, I would’ve killed him on the spot.”

  Hindsight being twenty-twenty, I admit my timing could have been better, but then again, is the timing ever right for bad things to happen to you? Is there ever a right time to find out your wife’s cheating on you, or that someone you love has cancer, or that Sherry Lansing at Paramount hates your script? I wasn’t going to be doing Bobby—or for that matter myself—any favors by delaying the inevitable just because this happened to be the day his marriage broke up.

  Plus, for whatever it’s worth, no one has stuck by him longer than I have, to my own detriment, I might add, or defended him more loyally when everyone else was saying he’d lost his chops.

  So, cutting to the chase, I tell Bobby that notwithstanding the fact that this is a horribly difficult time for him, I have to let him go as a client. Julius Caesar couldn’t have looked any more stunned when Brutus stuck a knife in his kishkas.

  “Are you kidding me?” he asks. “Is this like one of those sick doctor jokes, I have bad news and I have good news? The bad news is, your biopsy came back positive, you’ve got three weeks to live, but the good news is, as soon as you leave my office, I’m going to fuck my nurse?”

  I try to explain to Bobby that this has been coming for months. I tell him I’ll always be his friend, but I can’t afford to have a guy like Jared Axelrod pissed off at me.

  “This prick is screwing my wife and you’re telling me you can’t afford to have him pissed off at you? Are you serious?”

  “I know you’re upset,” I say, “but try to see it from my point of view. I’m not saying he isn’t a prick, but if I lose credibility with this guy, he’ll start bad-mouthing me all over town. And then next thing you know, my calls aren’t being returned, my other clients are being penalized because of it, they get pissed off at me, and before you know it, I’m persona non grata and my clients are getting picked off like grapes during crushing season. I mean, do the math: losing my credibility equals losing my clients equals losing my job. Suddenly I can’t afford my kids’ school, I can’t make my mortgage payments, and my wife dumps me for Ron Perelman. I’m exaggerating for the sake of the point here, but credibility is the only thing I’ve got going for me in this business, and if I lose it, I may as well bend over, stick my head between my legs, and kiss my ass good-bye.”

  “What about integrity, fucko? What about friendship?”

  “Fucko?” I say. “You have the balls to call me fucko? I have lied for you, I have advanced you money, I’ve been a friend and a shoulder for you to cry on, the words thank you have never passed your lips once in all the years I’ve represented you, and for all that I get called fucko? Well, fuck you, you self-absorbed piece of shit,” I say, dropping a twenty on the bar and splitting before I really lose my temper.

  I want to go on record saying I’m not unaware that agents have a shitty reputation. People say horrible things about us behind our backs, clients call us names right to our faces, and comedy writers make up nasty jokes about us, like the one about the gorgeous young actress who meets Mike Ovitz at a cocktail party.

  “Omigod,” she says to the überagent. “It’s such an honor to meet you, Mr. Ovitz. You’re the most powerful, sexy, charismatic man I’ve ever met, and I’d like to take you into the guest bathroom, lock the door, and give you the most unbelievable blow job you’ve ever had in your whole life.”

  To which Ovitz says, “That’s fine for you, but what’s in it for me?”

  Then there’s the one about the agent who gets a call from a big-shot producer, asking what the agent thinks of his latest movie. The agent says, “Well, I gotta be honest. I didn’t think it was your best work ever, the script wasn’t all that good, and the actress who played the girlfriend of the lead really stunk up the room.” Furious, the producer tells the agent that the actress who played the girlfriend happens to be his wife. “Wait a minute,” the agent exclaims. “Let me finish!”

  The point being, an agent’s life is no tea party. Maybe not so much directors, but actors and writers are, by and large, big self-centered spoiled-rotten babies. Every one of their life’s little disappointments winds up on our doorstep. And every job they don’t get or every job they ever screwed up, whose fault is it? The agent’s. You bust your ass trying to build a guy’s career, he finally gets hot, and the first thing he does after he buys a new Mercedes is fire your ass and sign with some other agent, who’s blowing smoke up his ass about what he can do for your client now that he’s finally gotten the recognition he should’ve had years ago, blah blah blah …

  That said, I still love writers. They’re quirky, smart, fun to talk to, and often bizarre in their habits and lifestyles.

  I once represented an East Coast writer who’d relocated to Los Angeles after I’d sold his first novel to Warner Bros. Not long after arriving, he showed up at my office early one morning, asking if I could advance him five thousand dollars against his first paycheck, due shortly. I wrote him my own personal check for the amount, and as promised, he paid me back w
ithin days. The following week, he asked again, and again I wrote him the check. This time, he paid me back in hundred-dollar bills. I don’t know about you, but I don’t see that kind of cash every day. (I have a producer friend who maintains that if you walked into every negotiation with a bag full of money and dumped it on the table, you could close most deals at a fraction of what they generally make for. Agents these days routinely close deals for millions of dollars, but can you imagine if you dumped, say, $750,000, cash, on some actor’s coffee table? The IRS might be pissed off, but I bet the actor would love it.)

  Anyway, when I asked my client where he got the cash, he told me with an embarrassed grin that he was commuting to Los Angeles every morning on the six A.M. flight from Las Vegas, where he’d taken up temporary residence at Caesars Palace. He’d write all day, catch an eight P.M. flight back to Vegas, stay up all night drinking and gambling and God knows what else, then show up in L.A. the next day, ready to work.

  I had another writer once who I’d placed on staff at a hit TV show, and during a writers’ meeting in the second-floor office of the executive producer, this writer—who’d been animatedly pitching a story to the entire staff (including one female)—at some point realized that a window washer had climbed a tall ladder outside the building and was squeegeeing the windows during his pitch. Without missing a beat, this writer stripped down to his boxer shorts, backed up to the window, whipped his shorts down around his knees, and pressed his bare ass up against the glass. The guys in the room were convulsed with laughter, and the female quit the next day.

  And finally, I love writers because I don’t think there’s anything in the world that’s scarier than staring at a blank page and reaching inside yourself for the inspiration it takes to put your fingers on the keys and make something out of nothing, knowing the whole time that when you’re done, some idiot in a suit, with tons of opinions and no talent, will probably shit all over it. It takes courage, boys and girls, and courage is a fickle bitch at best.

  Now that I’ve had time to reflect on it, I suppose I could’ve waited a day or two before dropping the hammer on Bobby. But I guess I did what I did because I felt so sorry for the poor bastard, and I was afraid that if I didn’t do it right then and there, I wouldn’t have the guts to do it at all …

  CHAPTER 6

  It’s later that night, and the air temperature in the Hills is still in the high seventies, thanks to a blast furnace of a Santa Ana blowing in from the desert toward the ocean, leaving Hollywood a hot, glistening jewel under a shimmering, starlit sky. Bobby’s wandering around his house barefoot, in boxers and a T-shirt, shell-shocked from the worst day of his entire adult life.

  You can bet lots of men happily fantasize about dumping their wives, living large and single, picking and choosing from an endless supply of good-looking women dying to hook up with them. But the reality is, Bobby’s never lived alone his whole adult life, and without Vee to animate it, the house not only feels empty but abandoned.

  Half hating her, half missing her, hoping she’ll call and knowing she won’t, not even knowing where the hell she’s gone, Bobby winds up ransacking her drawers and closets in a jealous rage, hoping he’ll find evidence of her affair. He can’t help torturing himself all over again with the image of her kneeling on the floor in the back of Axelrod’s Mercedes, parked somewhere off Mulholland Drive, face down between his naked thighs, sucking the balls off him in the dark, then telling him how hot he makes her feel and how much she wants him.

  In a life that’s had its share of ups and, lately, more downs than the Dow Jones, this is the lowest Bobby’s been yet, maybe ever, and he just makes it to the toilet before vomiting up all the wine he’d been drinking on an empty stomach.

  CHAPTER 7

  At the same time Bobby Newman is cleaning up his puke and changing into fresh clothes, two people are having sex in the master bedroom of a house not too far down the canyon from Bobby’s. The man is a handsome Latino actor named Ramon, well built, in his mid-thirties, and the woman, Linda, is a dark-haired, white-skinned beauty with a knockout body, who, judging by the way she’s sliding up and down Ramon’s stiff dick, knows just what to do with it. Ramon’s no slouch either, and if fucking were a spectator sport, these two would draw a hell of a crowd.

  What’s interesting about the two of them fucking, aside from the fact that watching attractive people fuck is always interesting, is that this scumbag Ramon is secretly taping the encounter with a video camera hidden inside the armoire facing the bed.

  I suppose you could speculate about why Ramon likes to tape his sexual encounters, but one of the reasons I know he does it, at least in Linda’s case, is to extort money from her, should it come to that. Ramon’s been trying to get Linda to “lend” him a million dollars to start a production company, and she’s been stringing him along, telling him she needs to talk to her husband, Marv, about it, but the truth is, she has no intention of ever talking to her husband about it, because she knows Ramon is a scumbag and her only interest in this guy lies south of the border.

  And so it is, on this night, after a particularly athletic hour of sex, that Ramon presses his case for the money somewhat more aggressively than he has in the past, and Linda, with equal aggressiveness, tells him he ought to back off, that she doesn’t like being pressured.

  “You didn’t mind the pressure the last hour or so, did you, baby,” Ramon says, trying to play it off, but by now, Linda’s tired of playing.

  “Ramon, you’re a good actor. You’re a good teacher. You’re a great lay. But I can’t see talking Marv into investing a million dollars so you can suddenly be a Latin power player. It isn’t gonna happen.”

  Ramon’s not looking for a fight, not necessarily, so, nice as can be, he wonders what if he goes to talk to Marv himself?

  “Are you threatening me, Ray?”

  “I don’t threaten, baby. I’m just suggesting.”

  “Are you suggesting if I don’t come up with a million dollars you’re going to tell Marv about us?”

  “It don’t need to come to that, baby,” Ramon purrs. “I’m just sayin’ a million bucks to Marv is chump change, nada. He’d give you that just to keep you happy.”

  “And if I say no?”

  “You don’t got to take a tone with me. I’m just sayin’.”

  “What are you just saying, Ray?” And she is taking a tone by now. “Because if you think you can blackmail me—fuck me—out of a million dollars by threatening to tell my husband about us, you are making a serious mistake.”

  And by now she’s pretty much in his face, which Latin men don’t generally tolerate very well, as evidenced by the fact that Ramon points an angry finger in her face and says, “You think you can fuck with me ’cause you some rich bitch married to a fuckin’ billionaire? You think you can come sniffin’ around me, take my classes, get in my pants, for nothin’? It don’t work like that. Uh-uh. You play, you pay.”

  Linda gets out of bed, finds her thong panties on the floor, and steps into them. “You listen to me, Ramon,” she says. “It was fun. You got greedy. It’s over.”

  Ramon grabs the phone next to the bed and starts to dial. “How about I call Marv right now, huh, you cunt?”

  Linda smacks him hard, and without hesitating, Ramon smacks her harder, which sends her backpedaling, almost losing her balance, and Ramon, his blood up now, and liking it, is all over her, grabbing a handful of her hair, ready to hit her again, when she grabs a gold-plated trophy resting on his mantel and clubs him as hard as she can, base first, just above the temple. A four-pound trophy with most of its weight in the business end will take the fight out of you pronto, and Ramon is no exception, staggering around crazily for a few moments before collapsing onto the bed.

  CHAPTER 8

  Changed into a fresh t-shirt now, Bobby has wandered out onto the deck overlooking the Hollywood Hills (did I mention you can see the HOLLYWOOD sign from there?).

  When Bobby bought the house, the first thing h
e did was purchase a Bushnell XR90 electronic telescope. He told Vee it was for stargazing, and in fact, particularly on nights like tonight, you can see some pretty amazing close-ups of the moon, Venus, Saturn, and the Milky Way.

  But the real reason Bobby paid almost four thousand bucks for Big Bushy (as he calls it) was so he could go out on the deck at night and spy on people. Get a look at Uranus, as it were. I know this because he told me. He said when he was a kid growing up in New York City, he loved to scan the neighborhood buildings with his father’s binoculars, hoping to catch women undressing or couples fucking or whatever. He told me he once saw two guys doing the tango, nude. There was another guy he used to watch who’d screw his girlfriend in the morning, then lie around all day in bed jacking off to girlie magazines, then screw his girl again when she came home from work. He once even saw some guy looking at him through binoculars. But the absolutely coolest thing he ever saw was a guy making love to his pregnant wife on a mattress on the floor of their apartment bedroom. And the way the guy touched her, the sweetness of it, the tenderness with which he massaged her belly, was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen in his life. He said it wasn’t so much seeing the sex that excited him but rather the feeling that he was somehow violating people’s most private moments of intimacy without their knowledge.

  I guess writers, by definition, are voyeurs. Bobby sure is, and on that hot night, alone, sick with jealousy and loneliness, he scans the houses in the canyon below, looking for something to distract him from the further contemplation of his totally fucked-up life.

  And, boy, does he find it.

  Through the telescope, Bobby spies every adolescent boy’s wet dream: a man and a woman, really into it, fucking their brains out.