by Mario Puzo
It was the agents that got on to Jeff Wagon and forbade their writer clients to go to lunch with him. But there were fresh young writers coming into Hollywood from all over the country. All hoping for that one foot in the door that would make them rich and famous. And it was Jeff Wagon’s genius that he could let them see the door crack open just enough to jam toes black and blue when he slammed the door shut.
Once when I was in Vegas, I told Cully that he and Wagon mugged their victims the same way. But Cully disagreed.
“Listen,” Cully said. “Me and Vegas are after your money, true. But Hollywood wants your balls.”
He didn’t know that Tri-Culture Studios had just bought one of the biggest casinos in Vegas.
Moses Wartberg was another story. On one of my early visits to Hollywood I had been taken to Tri-Culture Studios to pay my respects.
I met Moses Wartberg for a minute. And I knew who he was right away. There was that shark like look to him that I had seen in top military men, casino owners, very beautiful and very rich women and top Mafia bosses. It was the cold steel of power, the iciness that ran through the blood and brain, the chilling absence of mercy or pity in all the cells of the organism. People who were absolutely dedicated to the supreme drug power. Power already achieved and exercised over a long period of time. And with Moses Wartberg it was exercised down to the smallest square inch.
That night, when I told Janelle that I had been to Tri-Culture Studios and met Wartberg, she said casually, “Good old Moses. I know Moses.” She gave me a challenging look, so I took the bait.
“OK,” I said. “Tell me how you know Moses.”
Janelle got out of bed to act out the part. “I had been in town for about two years and wasn’t getting anyplace, and then I was invited to a party where all the big wheels would be, and like a good little would-be star, I went to make contacts. There were a dozen girls like me. All walking around, looking beautiful, hoping that some powerful producer would be struck by our talent. Well, I got lucky. Moses Wartberg came over to me, and he was charming. I didn’t know how people could say such terrible things about him. I remember his wife came up for a minute and tried to take him away, but he didn’t pay any attention to her. He just kept on talking to me and I was at my most fascinating Southern belle best and, sure enough, by the end of the evening I had an invitation from Moses Wartberg to have dinner at his house the next night. In the morning I called up all my girlfriends and told them about it. They congratulated me and told me I would have to fuck him and I said of course I would not, not on my first date and I also thought he’d respect me more if I held him off a little.”
“That’s a good technique,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “It worked with you, but that’s the way I felt. I hadn’t ever gone to bed with a man unless I really liked him. I’d never gone to bed with a man just to make him do something for me. I told my girlfriends that, and they told me I was crazy. That if Moses Wartberg was really in love with me or really liked me, I would be on my way to being a star.”
For a few minutes she gave a charming pantomime of false virtue arguing itself into honest sinning.
“And so what happened?” I said.
Janelle stood proud, her hands on her hips, her head tilted dramatically. “At five o’clock that afternoon I made the greatest decision of my life. I decided I would fuck a man I didn’t know just to get ahead. I thought I was so brave and I was delighted that finally I had made a decision that a man would make.”
She came out of her role for just a moment.
“Isn’t that what men do?” she said sweetly. “If they can make a business deal, they’d give anything, they demean themselves. Isn’t that business?”
I said, “I guess so.”
She said to me, “Didn’t you have to do that?”
I said, “No.”
“You never did anything like that to get your books published, to get an agent or to get a book reviewer to treat you better?”
I said, “No.”
“You have a good opinion of yourself, don’t you?” Janelle said. “I’ve had affairs with married men before, and the one thing I have noticed is that they all want to wear that big white cowboy hat.”
“What does that mean?”
“They want to be fair to their wives and girlfriends. That’s the one impression they want to make, so you can’t blame them for anything, and you do that too.”
I thought that over a minute. I could see what she meant. “OK,” I said. “So what?”
“So what?” Janelle said. “You tell me you love me, hut you go back to your wife. No married man should tell another woman he loves her unless he’s willing to leave his wife.”
“That’s romantic bullshit,” I said.
For a moment she became furious. She said, “If I went to your house and told your wife you loved me, would you deny me?”
I laughed and I really laughed. I pressed my hand across my chest and said, “Would you say that again?”
And she said, “Would you deny me?”
And I said, “With all my heart”
She looked at me a moment. She was furious, and then she started to laugh. She said, “I regressed with you, but I won’t regress anymore.”
And I understood what she was saying.
“OK,” I said. “So what happened with Wartberg?”
She said, “I took a long bath with my turtle oil. I anointed myself, dressed in my best outfit and drove myself to the sacrificial altar. I was let into the house and there was Moses Wartberg and we sat down and had a drink and he asked about my career and we were talking for about an hour and he was being very clever, letting me know that if the night turned out OK, he would do a lot of things for me and I was thinking, the son of a bitch isn’t going to fuck me, he’s not even going to feed me.”
“That’s something I never did to you,” I said.
She gave me a long look, and she went on. “And then he said, ‘There’s dinner waiting upstairs in the bedroom. Would you like to go up?’ And I said, in my Southern belle voice, ‘Yes, I think I’m a little hungry.’ He escorted me up the stairs, a beautiful staircase just like the movies, and opened the bedroom door. He closed it behind me, from the outside, and there I was in the bedroom with a little table set up with some nice snacks on it.”
She struck another pose of the innocent young girl, bewildered.
“Where’s Moses?” I said.
“He’s outside. He’s in the hallway.”
“He made you eat alone?” I said.
“No,” Janelle said. “There was Mrs. Bella Wartberg in her sheerest negligee waiting for me.”
I said, “Jesus Christ.”
Janelle went into another act “I didn’t know I was going to fuck a woman. It took me eight hours to decide to fuck a man, and now I find out I had to fuck a woman. I wasn’t ready for that.”
I said I wasn’t ready for that either.
She said, “I really didn’t know what to do. I sat down and Mrs. Wartberg served some sandwiches and tea and then she pushed her breasts out of her gown and said, ‘Do you like these, my dear?’ And I said, ‘They’re very nice.’”
And then Janelle looked me in the eye and hung her head, and I said, “Well, what happened? What did she say after you said they’re nice?”
Janelle made her eyes look wide open, startled. “Bella Wartberg said to me, ‘Would you like to suck on these, my dear?’
And then Janelle collapsed on the bed with me. She said, “I ran out of the room, I ran down the stains, out of the house, and it took me two years to get another job.”
“It’s a tough town,” I said.
“Nay,” Janelle said. “If I had talked to my girlfriends another eight hours, that would have been OK too. Ifs just a matter of getting your nerve up.”
I smiled at her, and she looked me in the eye, challengingly. “Yeah,” I said, “what’s the difference?”
As the Mercedes sped over the freeways, I
tried to listen to Doran.
“Old Moses is the dangerous guy,” Doran was saying, “watch out for him.” And so I thought about Moses.
Moses Wartberg was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. His Tri-Culture Studios was financially sounder than most but made the worst movies. Moses Wartberg had created a money-making machine in a field of creative endeavor. And without a creative bone in his body. This was recognized as sheer genius.
Wartbeng was a sloppily fat man, carelessly tailored in Vegas-style suits. He spoke little, never showed emotion, he believed in giving you everything you could take away from him. He believed in giving you nothing you could not force from him and his battery of studio lawyers. He was impartial. He cheated producers, stars, writers and directors out of their percentages of successful films. He was never grateful for a great directing job, a great performance, a great script. How many times had he paid big money for lousy stuff? So why should he pay a man what his work was worth if he could get it for less?
Wartberg talked about movies as generals talk about making war. He said things like: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Or when a business associate made claims to their social relationship, when an actor told him how much they loved each other personally and why was the studio screwing him, Wartberg gave a thin smile and said coldly, “When I hear the word ‘love,’ I reach for my wallet.”
He was scornful of personal dignity, proud when accused of having no sense of decency. He was not ambitious to be known as a man whose word was his bond. He believed in contracts with fine print, not handshakes. He was never too proud to cheat his fellowman out of an idea, a script, a rightful percentage of a movie’s profits. When reproached, usually by an overwrought artist (producers knew better), Wartberg would simply answer, “I’m a moviemaker,” in the same tone that Baudelaire might have answered a similar reproach with “I am a poet.”
He used lawyers as a hood used guns, used affection as a prostitute used sex. He used good works as the Greeks used the Trojan Horse, supported the Will Rogers home for retired actors, Israel, the starving millions of India, Arab refugees from Palestine. It was only personal charity to individual human beings that went against his grain.
Tri-Culture Studios had been losing money when Wartberg took charge. He immediately put it on a strict computer with a bottom-line basis. His deals were the toughest in town. He never gambled on truly creative ideas until they had been proved at other studios. And his big ace in the hole was small budgets.
When other studios were going down the drain with ten-million-dollar pictures, Tri-Culture Studios never made one that went over three million. In fact, over two million and Moses Wantberg or one of his three assistant vice-presidents was sleeping with you twenty-four hours a day. He made producers post completion bonds, directors pledge percentages, actors swear their souls away, to bring in a picture on budget. A producer who brought a picture in on budget or below budget was a hero to Moses Wartberg and knew it. It didn’t matter if the picture just made its cost. But if the picture went over budget, even if it grossed twenty million and made the studio a fortune, Wartberg would invoke the penalty clause in the producer’s contract and take away his percentage of the profits. Sure, there would be lawsuits, but the studio had twenty salaried lawyers sitting around on their asses who needed practice in count. So a deal could usually be made. Especially if the producer or actor on writer wanted to make another picture at Tri-Culture.
The one thing everybody agreed upon was that Wartbeng was a genius at organization. He had three vice-presidents who were in charge of separate empires and competing with each other for Wartberg’s favor and the day when one would succeed him. All three had palatial homes, big bonuses and complete power within their own spheres subject only to Wartbeng’s veto. So the three of them hunted down talent, scripts, thought out special projects. Always knowing that they had to keep the budget low, the talent tractable, and to stamp out any spark of originality before they dared bring it up to Wartberg’s suite of offices on the top floor of the studio building.
His sexual reputation was impeccable. He never had fun and games with starlets. He never put pressure on a director or producer to hire a favorite in a film. Pant of this was his ascetic nature, a low sexual vitality. The other was his own sense of personal dignity. But the main reason was that he had been happily married for thirty years to his childhood sweetheart.
They had met in a Bronx high school, married in their teens and lived together forever after.
Bella Wartbeng had lived a fairy-tale life. A zaftig teenager in a Bronx high school, she had charmed Moses Wartberg with the lethal combination of huge breasts and excessive modesty. She wore loose heavy wool sweaters, dresses, a couple of sizes too large, but it was like hiding a glowing radioactive piece of metal in a dark cave. You knew they were there, and the fact that they were hidden made them even more aphrodisiacal. When Moses became a producer, she didn’t really know what it meant. She had two children in two years and was quite willing to have one a year for the rest of hen fertile life, but it was Moses who called a halt. By that time he had channeled most of his energy into his career, and also, the body that he thirsted for was marred by childbirth scans, the breasts he had suckled had drooped and become veined. And she was too much the good little Jewish housewife for his taste. He got hen a maid and forgot about her. He still valued her because she was a great laundress, his white shirts were impeccably starched and ironed. She was a fine housekeeper. She kept track of his Vegas suits and gaudy ties, notating them to the dry cleaner’s at exactly the right time, not so often as to wean them out prematurely, not too seldom as to make them appear soiled. Once she had bought a cat that sat on the sofa, and Moses had sat down on that sofa, and when he rose, his trouser leg had cat hairs on it. He picked up the cat and threw it against the wall. He screamed at Bella hysterically. She gave away the cat the next day.
But power flows magically from one source to another. When Moses became head of Tri-Culture Studios, it was as if Bella Wartberg had been touched by the magic wand of a fairy. The California-bred executive wives took hen in hand. The “in” hairdresser shaped her a crown of black curls that made hen look regal. The exercise class at the Sanctuary, a spa to which all the show people belonged, punished her body unmercifully. She went down from a hundred and fifty pounds to a hundred and ten. Even hen breasts shrank, shriveled. But not enough to conform to the rest of her body. A plastic surgeon cut them down into two small perfectly proportioned rosebuds. While he was at it, he whittled down her thighs and took a chunk out of her ass. The studio fashion experts designed a wardrobe to fit her new body and her new status. Bella Wartberg looked into her mirror and saw there, not a zaftig Jewish princess lushly fleshed, vulgarly handsome, but a slim, Waspy, forty-year-old ex-debutante, peppy, vivacious, brimming full of energy. What she did not see mercifully was that her appearance was a distortion of what she had been, that her old self, like a ghost, persisted through the bones of her body, the structure of her face. She was a skinny fashionable lady built on the heavy bones she had inherited. But she believed she was beautiful. And so she was quite ready when a young actor on the make pretended to be in love with her.
She returned his love passionately, sincerely. She went to his grubby apartment in Santa Monica and for the first time in her life was thoroughly fucked. The young actor was virile, dedicated to his profession and threw himself into his role so wholeheartedly that he almost believed he was in love. So much so that he bought her a charm bracelet from Gucci’s that she would treasure the rest of her life as proof of her first great passion. And so, when he asked for her help in getting a role in one of Tri-Culture’s big feature films, he was thoroughly confounded when she told him she never interfered in her husband’s business. They quarreled bitterly, and the actor disappeared from her life. She missed him, she missed the grubby apartment, his rock records, but she had been a level-headed girl and had grown to be a levelheaded woman. She would not make
the same mistake. In the future she would pick her lovers as carefully as a comedian picks his hat.
In the years that followed she became an expert negotiator in her affairs with actors, discriminating enough to seek out talented people rather than untalented ones, and indeed, she enjoyed the talented ones more. It seemed that general intelligence went with talent. And she helped them in their careers. She never made the mistake of going directly to her husband. Moses Wartberg was too Olympian to be concerned with such decisions. Instead, she went to one of the three vice-presidents. She would rave about the talent of an actor she had seen in a little art group giving Ibsen and insist that she didn’t know the actor personally but she was sure he would be an asset to the studio. The vice-president would put the name down and the actor would get a small part. Soon enough the word got around. Bella Wartberg became so notorious for fucking anybody, anywhere, that whenever she stopped by one of the vice-president’s offices, that VP would make sure that one of his secretaries was present, as a gynecologist would make sure a nurse was present when examining a patient.
The three VP’s jockeying for power had to accommodate Wartberg’s wife, or felt they had to. Jeff Wagon became good friends with Bella and would even introduce her to some especially upstanding young fellow. When all this failed, she prowled the expensive shops of Rodeo for women, took long lunches with pretty starlets at exclusive restaurants, wearing ominously huge macho sunglasses.
Because of his close relationship with Bella, Jeff Wagon was the odds-on favorite to get Moses Wartberg’s spot when he retired. There was one catch. What would Moses Wartberg do when he learned that his wife, Bella, was the Messalina of Beverly Hills? Gossip columnists planted Bella’s affairs as “blind items” Wartberg couldn’t fail to see. Bella was notorious.
