by Mario Puzo
I really hadn’t seen that coming, but I had an answer for her, an answer I couldn’t give. That a less skillful enchantress had been before her. I was married, wasn’t I?
The next day I had a meeting with Doran and he told me that negotiations for the new script would take awhile. The new director, Simon Bellfort, was fighting for a bigger percentage. Doran said tentatively, “Would you consider giving up a couple of your points to him?”
“I don’t even want to work on the picture,” I told Doran. ‘That guy Simon is a hack, his buddy Richetti is a fucking born thief. At least Kellino is a great actor to excuse his being an asshole. And that fucking prick Wagon is the prize creep of them all. Just get me off the picture.”
Doran said smoothly, “Your percentage of the picture depends on your getting screenplay credit. That’s in the contract. If you let those guys go on without you, they’ll work it so you won’t get the credit. You’ll have to go to arbitration before the Writers Guild. The studio proposes the credits, and if they don’t give you partial credit, you gotta fight it.”
“Let them try,” I said. “They can’t change it that much.”
Doran said soothingly, “I have an idea. Eddie Lancer is a good friend of yours. I’ll ask to have him assigned to work with you on the script. He’s a savvy guy and he can run interference for you against all those other characters. OK? Trust me this once.”
“OK,” I said. I was tired of the whole business.
Before he left, Doran said, “Why are you pissed off at those guys?”
“Because not one of them gave a shit about Malomar,” I said. “They’re glad he’s dead.” But it wasn’t really true. I hated them because they tried to tell me what to write.
I got back to New York in time to see the Academy Awards presented on television. Valerie and I always watched them every year. And this year I was watching particularly because Janelle had a short, a half hour film, she had made with her friends that had been nominated.
My wife brought out coffee and cookies, and we settled down to watching. She smiled at me and said, “Do you think someday you’ll be there picking up an Oscar?”
“No,” I said. “My picture will be lousy.”
As usual, in the Oscar presentations they got all the small stuff out of the way first, and sure enough, Janelle’s film won the prize as the Best Short Subject and there was her face on the screen. Her face was rosy and pink with happiness and she was sensible enough to make it short and she was guilty enough to make it gracious. She just simply said, “I want to thank the women who made this picture with me, especially Alice De Santis.”
And it brought me back to the day when I knew that Alice loved Janelle more than I ever could.
Janelle had rented a beach house in Malibu for a month, and on weekends I would leave my hotel and spend my Saturday and Sunday with her at the house. Friday night we walked on the beach, and then we sat on the porch, the tiny porch under the Malibu moon and watched the tiny birds, Janelle told me they were sandpipers. They scampered out of the reach of the water whenever the waves came up.
We made love in the bedroom overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The next day, Saturday, when we were having lunch instead of breakfast, Alice came out to the house. She had breakfast with us, and then she took a rectangular tiny piece of film out of her purse and gave it to Janelle. The piece of film was no more than an inch wide and two inches long.
Janelle asked, “What’s this?”
“It’s the director’s credit on the film,” Alice said. “I cut it
“Why did you do that?” Janelle said.
“Because I thought it would make you happy,” Alice said.
I was watching both of them. I had seen the film. It had been a lovely little piece of work. Janelle and Alice had made it with three other women as a feminist venture. Janelle had screen credit as star. Alice had a credit as director, and the other two~ women had credits appropriate to the work they had done on the film.
“We need a director’s credit. We just can’t have a picture without a director’s credit,” Janelle said.
Just for the hell of it I put my two cents in. “I thought Alice directed the film,” I said.
Janelle looked at me angrily. “She was in charge of directing,” she said. “But I made a lot of the director suggestions and I felt I should get some credit for that.”
“Jesus,” I said. “You’re the star of the film. Alice has to get some credit for the work she did.”
“Of course she does,” Janelle said indignantly. “I told her that. I didn’t tell her to cut out her credit on the negative. She just did it.”
I turned to Alice and said, “How do you really feel about it?”
Alice seemed very composed. “Janelle did a lot of work on the directing,” she said. “And I really don’t care for the credit. Janelle can have it. I really don’t care.”
I could see that Janelle was very angry. She hated being put in such a false position, but I sensed that she wasn’t going to let Alice have full credit for directing the film.
“Damn you,” Janelle said to me. “Don’t look at me like that. I got the money to have this film made and I got all the people together and we all helped write the story and it couldn’t have been made without me.”
“All right,” I said. “Then take credit as the producer. Why is the director’s credit so important?”
Then Alice spoke up. “We’re going to be showing this film in competition for the Academy and Filmex, and on films like this, people feel the only thing that’s important is the directorship. The director gets most of the credit for the picture. I think Janelle’s right. ”She turned to Janelle. “How do you want the director’s credit to read?”
Janelle said, “Have both of us being given credit and you put your name first. Is that OK?”
Alice said, “Sure, anything you want.”
After having lunch with us, Alice said she had to leave even though Janelle begged her to stay. I watched them kiss each other good-bye and then I walked Alice out to her car.
Before she drove away, I asked her, “Do you really not mind?”
Her face perfectly composed, beautiful in its serenity, she said, “No, I really don’t mind. Janelle was hysterical after the first showing when everybody came up to me to congratulate me. She’s just that way and making her happy is more important to me than getting all that bullshit. You understand that, don’t you?”
I smiled at her and kissed her cheek good-bye. “No,” I said. “I don’t understand stuff like that.” I went back into the house and Janelle was nowhere in sight. I figured she must have gone for a walk down the beach and she didn’t want me with her, and sure enough, an hour later I spotted her coming up the sand walking by the water. And when she came into the house, she went up to the bedroom, and when I found her up there, I saw that she was in bed with the covers over her and she was crying.
I sat down on the bed and didn’t say anything. She reached out to hold my hand. She was still crying.
“You think I’m such a bitch, don’t you?” she said.
“No,” I said.
“And you think Alice is so marvelous, don’t you?”
“I like her,” I said. I knew I had to be very careful. She was afraid that I would think Alice was a better person than she was.
“Did you tell her to cut out that piece of negative?” I said.
“No,” Janelle said. “She just did that on her own.”
“OK,” I said. “Then just accept it for what it is and don’t worry about who behaved better and who seems like a better person. She wanted to do that for you. Just accept it. You know you want it.”
At this she started to cry again. In fact, she was hysterical, so I made her some soup and fed her one of her blue ten-milligram Valiums and she slept from that afternoon till Sunday morning.
That afternoon I read; then I watched the beach and the water until dawn broke.
Janelle finally woke up. It was about ten
o’clock, a beautiful day in Malibu. I knew immediately that she wasn’t comfortable with me, that she didn’t want me around for the rest of the day. That she wanted to call Alice and have Alice come out and spend the rest of the day. So I told her I had gotten a call and had to go to the studio and couldn’t spend the rest of the day with her. She made the usual Southern belle protestations, but I could see the light in her eyes. She wanted to call Alice and show her love for her.
Janelle walked me out to the car. She was wearing one of those big floppy hats to protect her skin from the sun. It was really a floppy hat. Most women would have looked ugly init. But with her perfect face and complexion she was quite beautiful. She had on her specially tailored, secondhand, specially weathered jeans that fitted on the body like skin. And I remembered that one night I had said to her when she was naked in bed that she had a real great woman’s ass, that it takes generations to breed an ass like that I said it to make her angry because she was a feminist, but to my surprise she was delighted. And I remembered that she was partly a snob. That she was proud of the aristocratic lineage of her Southern family.
She kissed me good-bye and her face was all rosy and pink. She wasn’t a bit desolated that I was leaving. I knew that she and Alice would have a happy day together and that I would have a miserable day in town at my hotel. But I figured, what the hell? Alice deserved it and I really didn’t. Janelle had once said that she, Janelle, was a practical solution to my emotional needs but I was not a practical solution to hers.
The television kept flickering. There was a special tribute in memory of Malomar. Valerie said something to me about it. Was he a nice person? and I answered yes. We finished watching the awards, and then she said to me, “Did you know any of the people that were there?”
“Some of them,” I said.
“Which ones?” Valerie asked me.
I mentioned Eddie Lancer who had won an Oscar for his contribution to a film script, but I didn’t mention Janelle. I wondered for just a moment if Valerie had set a trap for me to see if I would mention Janelle and then I said I knew the blond girl who won a prize at the beginning of the program.
Valerie looked at me and then turned away.
Chapter 40
A week later Doran called me to go out to California for more conferences. He said he had sold Eddie Lancer to Tri-Culture. So I went out and hung around and went to meetings and picked up with Janelle again. I was a little restless now. I didn’t love California that much anymore.
One night Janelle said to me, “You always tell how great your brother, Artie, is. Why is he so great?”
“Well,” I said, “I guess he was my father as well as my brother.”
I could see she was fascinated by the two of us growing up, as orphans. That it appealed to her dramatic sense. I could see her spinning all kinds of movies, fairy tales in her head, about how life had been. Two young boys. Charming. One of your real Walt Disney fantasies.
“So, you really want to hear another story about orphans?” I said. “Do you want a happy story or a true story? Do you want a lie or do you want the truth?”
Janelle pretended to think it over. “Try me with the truth,” she said. “If I don’t like it, you can tell me the lie.”
So I told her how all the visitors to the asylum wanted to adopt Artie but never wanted to adopt me. That’s how I started off the story.
And Janelle said mockingly, “Poor you.” But when she said it, though her face smiled, she let her hand fall along the side of my body and rest there.
It was on a Sunday when I was seven and Artie was eight that we were made to dress up in what was called our adoption uniforms. Light blue jackets, white starched shirt, dark blue tie and white flannel trousers with white shoes. We were brushed and combed and brought to the head matron’s reception room, where a young married couple waited to inspect us. The procedure was that we were introduced and shook hands and showed our best manners and sat around talking and became acquainted. Then we would all take a walk through the grounds of the asylum, past the huge garden, past the football field and the school buildings. The thing I remember most clearly is that the woman was very beautiful. That even as a seven-year-old boy I fell in love with her. It was obvious that her husband was also in love with her but wasn’t too crazy about the whole idea. It also became obvious during that day that the woman was crazy about Artie, but not about me. And I really couldn’t blame her. Even at eight, Artie looked handsome in almost a grown-up way. Also, the features in all of the planes of his face were perfectly cut, and though people said to me we looked alike and always knew we were brothers, I knew that I was a smudged version of him as if he were the first out of the mold. The impression was clear. As a second impression I had picked up little pieces of wax on the mold, lips thicker, nose bigger. Artie had the delicacy of a girl, the bones in my face and my body were thicker and heavier. But I had never been jealous of my brother until that day.
That night we were told that the couple would return the next Sunday to make their decision on whether to adopt both of us or one of us. We were also told that they were very rich and how important it was for at least one of us to be taken.
I remember the matron gave us a heart-to-heart talk. It was one of those heart-to-heart talks adults give to children warning them against the evil emotions such as jealousy, envy, spitefulness and urging us on to a generosity of spirit that only saints could achieve, much less children. As children we listened without saying a word. Nodding our heads and saying, “Yes, Ma’am.” But not really knowing what she was talking about. But even at the age of seven I knew what was going to happen. My brother next Sunday would go away with the rich, beautiful lady and leave me alone in the asylum.
Even as a child Artie was not vain. But the week that followed was the only week in our lives that we were estranged. I hated him that week. On Monday after classes, when we had our touch football game, I didn’t pick him to be on my team. In sports I had all the power. For the sixteen years we were in the asylum I was the best athlete of my age and a natural leader. So I was always one of the captains who picked their teams, and I always picked Artie to be on my team as my first choice. That Monday was the only time in sixteen years that I didn’t pick him. When we played the game, though he was a year older than I was, I tried to hit him as hard as I could when he had the ball. I can still remember thirty years later the look of astonishment and hurt on his face that day. At evening meals I didn’t sit next to him at the dinner table. At night I didn’t talk to him in the dormitory. On one of those days during the week I remember clearly that after the football game was over and he was walking away across the field I had the football in my hand and I very coolly threw a beautiful twenty-yard spiral pass and hit him in the back of the head and knocked him to the ground. I had just thrown it. I really didn’t think I could hit him. For a seven-year-old boy it was a remarkable feat. And even now I wonder at the strength of the malice that made my seven-year-old arm so true. I remember Artie’s getting off the ground and my yelling out, “Hey, I didn’t mean it.” But he just turned and walked away.
He never retaliated. It made me more furious. No matter how much I snubbed him or humiliated him he just looked at me questioningly. Neither of us understood what was happening. But I knew one thing that would really bother him. Artie was always a careful saver of money. We picked up pennies and nickels by doing odd jobs around the asylum, and Artie had a glass jar filled with these pennies and nickels that he kept hidden in his clothes locker. On Friday afternoon I stole the glass jar, giving up my daily football game, and ran out into a wooded area of the grounds and buried it. I didn’t even count the money. I could see the copper and silver coins filled the jar almost to the brim. Artie didn’t miss the jar until the next morning and he looked at me unbelievingly, but he didn’t say anything. Now he avoided me.
The following day was Sunday and we were to report to the matron to be dressed in our adoption suits. I got up early Sunday morning before b
reakfast and ran away to hide in the wooded area behind the asylum. I knew what would happen that day. That Artie would be dressed in his suit, that the beautiful woman I loved would take him away with her and that I would never see him again. But at least I would have his money. In the thickest part of the woods I lay down and went to sleep and I slept the whole day through. It was almost dark before I awoke and then I went back. I was brought to the matron’s office and she gave me twenty licks with a wooden ruler across the legs. It didn’t bother me a bit.
I went back to the dormitory, and I was astonished to find Artie sitting in his bed waiting for me. I couldn’t believe that he was still there. In fact, if I remember, I had tears in my eyes when Artie punched me in the face and said, “Where’s my money?” And then he was all over me, punching me and kicking me and screaming for his money. I tried to defend myself without hurting him, but finally I picked him up and threw him off me. We sat there staring at each other.
“I haven’t got your money,” I said.
“You stole it,” Artie said. “I know you stole it.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I haven’t got it.”
We stared at each other. We didn’t speak again that evening. But when we woke up the next morning, we were friends again. Everything was as it was before. Artie never asked me again about the money. And I never told him where I had buried it.
I never knew what happened that Sunday until years later when Artie told me that when he had found out I had run away, he had refused to put on his adoption suit, that he had screamed and cussed and tried to hit the matron, that he had been beaten. When the young couple that wanted to adopt him insisted on seeing him, he had spit on the woman and called her all the dirty names an eight-year-old boy could think of. It had been a terrible scene and he took another beating from the matron.
