by Mario Puzo
In three minutes they were finished, and then the boy surprised Janelle. He pulled on his trousers, forgetting his shorts. He unlocked the bedroom door and flew into the living room. His first punch caught Doran square in the mouth, and then he was throwing punches like a windmill until his father restrained him.
Naked on the bed, Janelle smiled at me. “Doran hates me, even though it’s six years later. I cost him millions of dollars.”
I was smiling too. “So what happened at the trial?”
Janelle shrugged. “We had a civilized judge. He talked to me and the kid in chambers, and then he dismissed the case. He warned the parents and Doran they were subject to prosecution but advised everybody to keep their mouths shut.”
I thought that over. “What did he say to you?”
Janelle smiled again. “He told me that if he were thirty years younger, he’d give anything if I were his girl.”
I sighed. “Jesus, you make everything sound right. But now I want you to answer truthfully. Swear?’
“Swear,” Janelle said.
I paused for a moment, watching her. Then I said, “Did you enjoy fucking that fourteen-year-old kid?”
Janelle didn’t hesitate. “It was terrific,” she said.
“OK,” I said. I was frowning with concentration, and Janelle laughed. She loved these times best when I was really interested in figuring her out. “Let’s see,” I said. “He had curly hair and a great build. Great skin, no pimples yet. Long eyelashes and choirboy virginity. Wow.” I thought a little longer.
“Tell me the truth. You were indignant, but deep down you knew here was your excuse to fuck a fourteen-year-old kid. You couldn’t have done it otherwise, even though that was what you really wanted to do. That the kid turned you on from the beginning. And so you could have it both ways. You saved the kid by fucking him. Great. Right?”
“No,” Janelle said, smiling sweetly.
I sighed again and then laughed. “You’re such a phony.” But I was licked and I knew it. She had performed an unselfish act, she had saved the manhood of a budding boy. That she had a bell of a thrill along the way was, after all, a bonus the virtuous deserved. Down South everybody serves Jesus-in his own way.
And Jesus, I really loved her more.
Chapter 32
Malomar had had a hard day and a special conference with Moses Wartberg and Jeff Wagon. He had fought for Merlyn’s and his movie. Wartberg and Wagon had hated it after he had shown them a first draft. It became the usual argument. They wanted to turn it into schlock, put in more action, coarsen the characters. Malomar stood fast.
“It’s a good script,” he said. “And remember this is just a first draft.”
Wartberg said, “You don’t have to tell us. We know that. We’ve judged it on that basis.”
Malomar said coolly, “You know I'm always interested in your opinions and I weigh them very carefully. But everything you’ve said so far strikes me as irrelevant.”
Wagon said appealingly, with his charming smile, “Malomar, you know we believe in you. That’s why we gave you your original contract. Hell, you have full control over your pictures. But we have to back our judgment with advertising and publicity. Now we’ve let you project a million dollars over budget. That gives us, I think, a moral right to have some say in the final shape of this picture.”
Malomar said, “That was a bullshit budget to begin with and we all knew it and we all admitted it.”
Wartberg said, “You know that in all our contracts, when we go over budget, you start losing your points in the picture. Are you willing to take that risk?”
“Jesus,” Malomar said. “I can’t believe that if this makes a lot of money, you guys would invoke that clause.”
Wartberg gave his shark grin. “We may or may not. That’s the chance you will have to take if you insist on your version of the film.”
Malomar shrugged. “I’ll take that risk,” he said. “And if that’s all you guys have to say, I’ll get back to the cutting room.”
When he left Tri-Culture Studios to be driven back to his lot, Malomar felt drained. He thought of going home and taking a nap, but there was too much work to be done. He wanted to put in at least another five hours. He felt the slight pains in his chest starting again. Those bastards will kill me yet, he thought. And then he suddenly realized that since his heart attack Wartberg and Wagon had been less afraid of him, had argued with him more, had harried him about costs more. Maybe the bastards were trying to kill him.
He sighed. The fucking things he had to put up with, and that fucking Merlyn always bitching about producers and Hollywood and how they all weren’t artists. And here be was risking his life to save Merlyn’s conception of the picture. He felt like calling Merlyn up and making him go to the arena with Wartberg and Wagon to do his own fighting, but he knew that Merlyn would just quit and walk away from the picture. Merlyn didn’t believe as he, Malomar, did. Didn’t have his love for film and what film could do.
Well, the hell with it, Malomar thought. He’d make the picture his way and it would be good and Merlyn would be happy, and when the picture made money, the studio would be happy, and if they tried to take away his percentage because of the over budget, he’d take his production company elsewhere.
As the limousine pulled up to a stop, Malomar felt the elation he’d always felt. The elation of an artist coming to his work knowing that he would fashion something beautiful.
He labored with his film editors for almost seven hours, and when the limousine dropped him at his home, it was nearly midnight. He was so tired he went directly to bed. He almost groaned with weariness. The pains in his chest came and spread to his back, but after a few minutes they went away and he lay there quietly, trying to fall asleep. He was content. He had done a good day’s work. He had fought off the shanks and he bad cut film.
Malomar loved to sit in the cutting room with the editors and the director. He loved to sit in the dark and make decisions on what the tiny flickering images should do and not do. Like God, he gave them a certain kind of soul. If they were “good,” he made them physically beautiful by telling the editor to cut an unflattering image so that a nose was not too bony; a mouth not too mean. He could make a heroine’s eyes more doe like with a better lighted shot, her gestures more graceful and touching. He would not send the good down to despair and defeat. He was more merciful.
Meanwhile, he kept a sharp eye on the villains. Did they wear the right color tie and the right cut of jacket to enhance their villainy? Did they smile too trustingly? Were the lines in their faces too decent? He blotted out that image with the cutting machine. Most of all, he refused to let them be boring. The villain had to be interesting. Malomar in his cutting room truly watched every feather that fell from the tail of the sparrow. The world he created must have a sensible logic, and when he finished with that particular world, you usually were glad to have seen it exist
Malomar had created hundreds of these worlds. They lived in his brain forever and ever as the countless galaxies of God must exist in His brain. And Malomar’s feat was as astounding to him. But it was different when he left the darkened cutting room and emerged into the world created by God which made no sense at all.
Malomar had suffered three heart attacks over the past few years. From overwork, the doctor said. But Malomar always felt that God had fucked up in the cutting room. He, Malomar, was the last man who should have a heart attack. Who would oversee all those worlds to be created? And he took such good care of himself. He ate sparingly and correctly. He exercised. He drank little. He fornicated regularly but not to excess. He never drugged. He was still young, handsome; he looked like a hero. And he tried to behave well, or as well as possible in the world God was shooting. In Malomar’s cutting room a character like Malomar would never die from a heart attack. The editor would excise the frame, the producer call for a rewrite of the script. He would command the directors and all the actors to the rescue. Such a man would not be allowed to
perish.
But Malomar could not excise the chest pains. And often at night, very late, in his huge house, he popped angina pills in his mouth. And then he would lie in bed petrified with fear. On really bad nights he called his personal physician. The doctor would come and sit with him through the night, examine him, reassure him, hold his hand until dawn broke. The doctor would never refuse him because Malomar had written the script for the doctor’s life. Malomar had given him access to beautiful actresses so that he could become their doctor and sometimes their lover. When Malomar in his early days indulged in more strenuous sex, before his first heart attack, when his huge home was filled with overnight guests of starlets and high-fashion models, the doctor had been his dinner companion and they had sampled together the smorgasbord of women prepared for the evening.
Now on this midnight, Malomar alone in his bed, in his home, phoned the doctor. The doctor came and examined him and assured him the pains would go away. That there was no danger. That he should let himself fall asleep. The doctor brought him water for his angina pills and tranquilizers. And the doctor measured his heart with his stethoscope. It was intact; it was not breaking into pieces as Malomar felt it was. And after a few hours, resting more easily, Malomar told the doctor he could go home. And then Malomar fell asleep.
He dreamed. It was a vivid dream. He was at a railroad station, enclosed. He was buying a ticket. A small but burly man pushed him aside and demanded his ticket. The small man had a huge dwarf’s head and screamed at Malomar. Malomar reassured him. He stepped aside. He let the man buy his ticket. He told the man, “Look, whatever is bothering you is OK with me.” And as he did so, the man grew taller, his features more regular. He was suddenly an older hero, and he said to Malomar, “Give me your name; I’ll do something for you.” He loved Malomar. Malomar could see that. They were both very kind to each other. And the railroad agent selling the tickets now treated the other man with enormous respect.
Malomar came awake in the vast darkness of his huge bedroom. His eye lenses narrowed down, and with no peripheral vision, he fixed on the white rectangular light from the open bathroom door. For just a moment he thought the images on the cutting-room screen had not ended, and then he realized it had only been a dream. At that realization his heart broke away from his body in a fatal arrhythmic gallop. The electrical impulses of his brain snarled together. He sat up, sweating.
His heart went into a final thundering rush, shuddered. He fell back, eyes closing, all light fading on the screen that was his life. The last thing he ever heard was a scraping noise like celluloid breaking against steel, and then he was dead.
Chapter 33
It was my agent, Doran Rudd, who called me with the news of Malomar’s death. He told me there was going to be a big conference on the picture at Tri-Culture Studios the next day. I had to fly out and he would meet my plane.
At Kennedy Airport I called Janelle to tell her I was coming into town, but I got her answering machine with her French-accented machine voice, so I left a message for her.
Malomar’s death shocked me. I had developed an enormous respect for him during the months we had worked together. He never gave out any bullshit, and he had an eagle eye for any bullshit in a script or a piece of film. He tutored me when he showed me films, explaining why a scene didn’t play or what to watch for in an actor who might be showing talent even in a bad role. We argued a lot. He told me that my literary snobbishness was defensive and that I hadn’t studied film carefully enough. He even offered to teach me how to direct a film, but I refused. He wanted to know why.
“Listen,” I said, “just by existing, just by standing still and not bothering anybody, man is a fate-creating agent. That’s what I hate about life. And a movie director is the worst fate-creating agent on earth. Think of all those actors and actresses you make miserable when you turn them down. Look at all the people you have to give orders to. The money you spend, the destinies you control. I just write books, I never hurt anybody, I only help. They can take it or leave it.”
“You’re right,” Malomar said. “You’ll never be a director. But I think you’re full of shit. Nobody can be that passive.” And of course, he was right. I just wanted to control a more private world.
But still I felt saddened by his death. I had some affection for him though we did not really know each other well. And then too I was a little worried about what was going to happen to our movie.
Doran Rudd met me at the plane. He told me that Jeff Wagon would now be the producer and that Tri-Culture had swallowed up Malomar Studios. He told me to expect a lot of trouble. On the way over to the studio he briefed me on the whole Tri-Culture operation. On Moses Wartberg, on his wife, Bella, on Jeff Wagon. Just for openers he told me that though they were not the most powerful studio in Hollywood, they were the most hated, often called “Tri-Vulture Studios.” That Wartberg was a shark and the three VP’s were jackals. I told him that you couldn’t mix up your symbols like that, that if Wartberg was a shark, the others had to be pilot fish. I was kidding around, but my agent wasn’t even listening. He just said, “I wish you were wearing a tie.”
I looked at him. He was in his slick black leather jacket over a turtleneck sweater. He shrugged.
“Moses Wartberg could have been a Semitic Hitler,” Doran said. “But he would have done it a little differently. He would have sent all the adult Christians to the gas chamber and then set up college scholarships for their children.”
Comfortably slouched down in Doran Rudd’s Mercedes 450SL, I barely listened to Doran’s chatter. He was telling me that there was going to be a big fight over the picture. That Jeff Wagon would be producer and Wartberg would be taking a personal interest in it. They had killed Malomar with their harassment, Doran said. I wrote that off as typical Hollywood exaggeration. But the essence of what Doran was telling me was that the fate of the picture would be decided today. So in the long ride to the studio I tried to remember everything I knew or had heard about Moses Wartberg and Jeff Wagon.
Jeff Wagon was the essence of a schlock producer. He was schlock from the top of his craggy head to the tiptoes of his Bally shoes. He had made his mark in TV, then muscled his way into feature films by the same process with which a blob of ink spreads on a linen tablecloth and with the same aesthetic effect. He had made over a hundred TV feature films and twenty theatrical films. Not one of them had had a touch of grace, of quality, of art. The critics, the workers and artists in Hollywood had a classic joke that compared Wagon with Selznick, Lubitsch, Thalberg. They would say of one of his pictures that it had the Dong imprint because a young malicious actress called him the Dong.
A typical Jeff Wagon picture was loaded with stars a bit frayed by age and celluloid wear and tear, desperate for a paycheck. The talent knew it was a schlock picture. The directors were handpicked by Wagon. They were usually run-of-the-mill with a string of failures behind them so that he could twist their arms and make them shoot the picture his way. The odd thing was that though all the pictures were terrible, they either broke even or made money simply because the basic idea was good in a commercial way. It usually had a built-in audience, and Jeff Wagon was a fierce bulldog on cost. He was also terrific on contracts that screwed everybody out of his percentage if the picture became a big hit and made a lot of cash. And if that didn’t work, he would have the studio start litigation so that a settlement could be made on percentages. But Moses Wartberg always said that Jeff Wagon came up with sound ideas. What he presumably didn’t know was that Wagon stole even these ideas. He did this by what could only be called seduction.
In his younger days Jeff Wagon had lived up to his nickname by knocking over every starlet on the Tri-Culture lot. He was very much on the line with his approach. If they came across, they became girls in TV movies who were bartenders or receptionists. If they played their cards right, they could get enough work to carry them through the year. But when he went into feature films, this was not possible. With three-million-dollar bud
gets you didn’t fuck around handing out parts for a piece of ass. So then he got away with letting them read for a part, promising to help them, but never a firm commitment. And of course, some were talented, and with his foot in the door, they got some nice parts in feature films. A few became stars. They were often grateful. In the Land of Empidae, Jeff Wagon was the ultimate survivor.
But one day out of the northern rain forests of Oregon a breathtaking beauty of eighteen appeared. She had everything going for her. Great face, great body, fiery temperament, even talent. But the camera refused to do right by her. In that idiotic magic of film her looks didn’t work.
She was also a little crazy. She had grown up as a woodsman and hunter in the Oregon forests. She could skin a deer and fight a grizzly bear. She reluctantly let Jeff Wagon fuck her once a month because her agent gave her a little heart-to-heart talk. But she came from a place where the people were straight shooters, and she expected Jeff Wagon to keep his word and get her the part. When it didn’t happen, she went to bed with Jeff Wagon with a deer-skinning knife and, at the crucial moment, stuck it into one of Jeff Wagon’s balls.
It didn’t turn out badly. For one thing she only took a nick off his right ball, and everybody agreed that with his big balls a little chip wouldn’t do him any harm. Jeff Wagon himself tried to cover up the incident, refused to press charges. But the story got out. The girl was shipped home to Oregon with enough money for a log cabin and a new deer-hunting rifle. And Jeff Wagon had learned his lesson. He gave up seducing starlets and devoted himself to seducing writers out of their ideas. It was both more profitable and less dangerous. Writers were dumber and more cowardly.
And so he seduced writers by taking them to expensive lunches. By dangling jobs before their eyes. A rewrite of a script in production, a couple of thousand dollars for a treatment. Meanwhile, he let them talk about their ideas for future novels or screenplays. And then he would steal their ideas by switching them to other locales, changing the characters, but always preserving the central idea. And then it was his pleasure to screw them by giving them nothing. And since writers did not usually have a clue to the worthiness of their ideas, they never protested. Not like those cunts who gave you a piece of their ass and expected the moon.
