Dead Stars

by Bruce Wagner

  . . .

  He was turning 60 this year. A screenwriter since his mid-20s, Bud had a sole “written by” to his name, a co-credit (one of four others) on a forgotten horror film of the late 80s. When he turned 55, out of desperation, Bud took an early retirement, allowing him to collect a pension of $1,140 a month. The beauty was that WGA rules allowed him to continue to work, without being penalized. In fact, any income received post-pension would automatically be applied to a second retirement, collectible when he turned 65. The problem was, he was virtually unemployable. Until he found a job, he would have to keep living with his mother in the below-Wilshire apartment he grew up in as a boy. Dolly had lived there since the divorce, practically since Kennedy was shot (when the rent was $235 a month). Her husband Morris—Bud’s father—killed himself back in ’77.

  A few years ago, with the help of a therapist, Bud Wiggins arrived at the mature, painful conclusion that he lacked talent as a screenwriter. He’d been given so many chances to soar yet each time fell to earth. And now, through an uncertain alchemy, he transformed defeat into liberation—the liberation that came with admitting he was finished, done, his sojourn in the Business was over. Of late, mortality was very much on his mind. Just how did he want to spend the years he had left? He decided at last to try his hand at what he felt he’d been put on earth to do—novel writing. Bud smiled to himself at the inept timing of his strategem: fiction was becoming a dead thing before his & the world’s eyes, a faster death than anyone had imagined or been prepared for. But what could he do? You can’t fight the feeling.

  It used to be a cliché that actor-waiters, CPAs and dentists were all working on screenplays; then came the old joke “. . . but what I really want to do is to direct.” Now it seemed that no one cared about writing scripts or directing. They only wanted to be novelists.

  Novels were the new screenplays.

  . . .

  Truman Capote was such a fan that he famously declared Joyce Carol Oates to be “a joke monster who ought to be beheaded in a public auditorium.”* Bud wasn’t as opinionated. He did like the idea of writers whose work, either paraphrased or quoted, existed only in reviews; it had a Borgesian (Bolañoesque?) ring. Maybe he’d try his hand at a short metafiction with that theme.

  The halogen bulb of JCO’s industry attracted the moths of novelists manqué, old infants no longer so terrible who’d given up the ghost of authorial fame in mid-life, instead finding peace in the green-enough pastures of TLS and The London Review of Books. These gentlemen and gentle ladies inadvertently began their Sunday reviews of JCO’s latest eructation with a winking bow to her promiscuity on the page, which depending on individual temperament or even the mood of the moment, could be a swipe or a grovel.

  Bud thought her ageless, gazelle-necked, bug-eyed flap photos never really did synch with the characterization of her work. (He saw her as a Victorian figure on display in the Quality Lit wing of Tussaud’s, alongside other prodigies of indefatigable overprolificity: Cartland, Simenon, Dumas, King.) He gathered from reviews read over time that Oates’s thing was ultraviolent, hypersexual Gothic. With each long novel and long short story, the writer apparently upped the ante of outlandish narrative, her new releases storming the marketplace sometimes three at a time like soccer thugs intent on breaking the skulls of the books that came before them. The complex, superheated plotlines that Bud was able to skim from reviews placed her indeed in the prinicipality of the Grand Guignol soap. It was the vexing habit of the woman’s fiercely loyal critics to provide bizarrely fussy précis of whatever book they’d been engaged to appraise—much like competing technical manual writers vying for the prize of Best Instructions in the matter of operation of delicate scientific equipment. When it came to Shakti Oates, Mother Goddess of fertility, they shared a freemason-like covenant, a moral-ethical philosophy binding them together in an erotomanic rigor of thoroughness and objectivity. The sheer meticulousness of their endeavors launched them—obliviously—into cultism. It was a hobby of Bud’s to read all of her reviews, though sometimes just finishing them was daunting, as if her prolixity had gone viral, paralyzing the very coolies vested in carrying the palanquin.

  As a novelist, Bud wanted—needed—to study and profit from her example. The woman was some kind of witch. Her defamers were legion yet, in the end, through devilry, the nastiest cavils were massaged into batty, ecclesiastical pronouncements placing her squarely among the Immortals. So, aside from said carpings—the periodic hoots, hisses, graffiti, buckshot and urine-splashing afforded any writer worth their salt (cf: obsolescent belle-lettres blogsites)—the Oatress was critically bulletproof. She was a member of good standing in that country club Bud only dreamt of one day belonging, with its tenured, critically sun-kissed topnotchers: Auster, Vollman & McEwan, Cormac McC & Lorrie Moore . . . though Bud did remember that JCO’s memoir of her husband’s death* got respectfully slammed in the Times Sunday Book Review (front cover, no less!), second-fiddled to The Year of Magical Thinking. Well, you can’t have everything. Anyhow, Joyce was no Joan. Joan had another book out about the death of her daughter—take that, JCO! When it came to LA freeways, fires, & losing loved ones, Didion had the lock.*

  When JCO bailed, the Central Library suggested T. Coraghessan Boyle or Neil LaBute; Steve wasn’t thrilled. He rallied on learning Salman was in town to do Bill Maher, but the logistics didn’t work & Salman sadly declined. In six hours, the auditorium would be filled. The hosts were starting to sweat. Norman Lear, Carolyn See and James Franco were rejected out of hand.

  Steve had just given the (tepid) thumbs-up to Arianna, when Dave Eggers returned his call.

  They met in 2009, when Dave won the $100,000 TED “Wish” Prize. (Steve emceed the ceremony and later became a big supporter of 826 Valencia.) Dave said he’d loved to have done the Q&A but was home nursing a sick child. But he said he managed to get in touch with another winner of the TED award, Karen Armstrong. Karen was a former nun, a scholar of comparative religion who created the Charter for Compassion, a project that was dedicated to promoting awareness of the universality of the Golden Rule in world religions. Steve actually met Karen a few years before on Necker Island. Richard Branson invited a whole group to bat around ideas that might further the cause of reducing hate and extremism. It was a great time: Steve already knew Bono and, of course, Lou and Laurie—& Aby Rosen and his wife, the socialite psychiatrist Samantha Boardman. He’d never met Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, or Queen Noor, who had an elegant, California girl beauty. Steve also knew Peter Gabriel, Peter Morton and Michael J. Fox (& wife Tracy) but had never met Sean Parker, who he really only knew through Justin’s neat performance in The Social Network. Steve and Oliver Sachs marveled at how they’d never met, & happened to be big fans of each other’s work, though admittedly, Dr. Sachs wasn’t entirely au courant with his new friend’s literary contributions. The actor-comedian-novelist’s biggest love connection on that Necker Island trip was Desmond Tutu. The bishop was brilliantly congenial, with sunny, elastic features and a comedian’s natural timing. There was something of the impish forest elf in him, and he smelled like an animal. He told Steve he’d retired and was “completely over the moon” about spending his days doing nothing but watching movies with his grandkids. He told him their favorite was ¡Three Amigos! and Steve chose to believe him. Why would the bishop lie about something like that?

  Karen Armstrong was in LA and thrilled to pinch hit. She was perfect: Steve loved the idea of being interviewed by a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an organization founded by King George IV boasting Coleridge, Kipling, Hardy and Shaw in its lineage of Fellows. Rocking good company.

  . . .

  Bud Wiggins sat in the audience listening, yet found it hard to focus—one of the downsides of ADD. He began a casual catalogue of his miseries.

  He had zero savings and hadn’t sold a network pitch in years. His old school chum Michael Tolkin was an important ICM client, and Bud was convinced it was only Michael’s quiet inte
rventions that had kept him on the ICM books. Back in the day, it’d have been Bud doing the good deed; back in the day, for about six months, Bud was hot. That was a long time ago, when Ovitzsauruses roamed the Earth, Arabs were the only billionaires, & Teri Garr didn’t have MS.

  He was $200,000 in debt. His mother, the top earner at Neimans in Beverly Hills until she reluctantly retired at the age of 83, had managed to save over a million dollars. “That,” she liked to say, regally, “is your legacy.” Dolly was 92 now—op-ed sociologists were calling anyone over 85 “the old old.” The doctors had learned their trade too well; the old old had become a ruinous drain on the nation’s resources; the old old were very tough to kill. Dolly got nastier by the week. Like blood to a vampire, foulness gave her sustenance, and a certain élan.

  Just this morning she’d railed against one of her Salvadoran caregivers. “I told her that she was now required to wipe my ass. Do you know why? Because I want her hands in my shit.”

  Bud was 59 (the young old), and desperately eager to trade the burnt-out dream of Hollywood screenwriter for a new one, the dream of being a novelist. Since he was a boy, he’d thought of himself as a prose writer. Even a published one—when he was in his 20s, driving a limousine at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Bud wrote an article for New West magazine about what it was like to chauffeur the stars. He got fired for that, but gained confidence as a writer. He began writing long monologues in the voice of various habitués of a bar he frequented: Fast Eddie, wheelchaired as the result of a parking lot shooting; Aesop, the bearded hippie & sometime movie actor who went table to table selling turquoise jewelry; Soledad, the waitress whose bartender husband was shot and killed; Seymour, the bystander who got winged in the gunfight that killed Soledad’s husband, & squandered his settlement money on pinball machines. He was in the planning stages of writing a novel about those people, when fate intervened. He fell in love with an actress in a comedy group. They did improvisations in her living room and started to write up dialogue, scenes, & situations. They linked the sketches and a producer bought the results. A movie was made, and it didn’t really matter that it would never be released—for a while, they were an employable team. ICM gave their script to other writer-clients as the template to be aspired to.

  Bud never lost the sense that prose was his raison d’être. He felt like the proverbial woman who sacrificed a brilliant singing career to have babies; his babies were his scripts and they were all mongoloids. It was time to sing again. He knew he had a novel in him, but what kind? What genre? What kind of style, what type of characters? What would it be about? Sometimes when he got too crazy, Bud enjoyed going to events like the one at the Central Library because the grueling process of writing was usually presented in a relatable, somewhat entertaining light, and it relieved the pressure, at least for a little while. He already knew the life of a writer was arduous, and lonely too. You could be lonely working on some shitty TV script—if that was the way it was going to be, why not end up with a novel? With a novel, you at least had people’s respect.

  He tuned back in. Steve was telling Karen about the important lesson he was taught by Carl Reiner . . .

  What was the connection between Steve and Carl? He rooted around in the IMDB section of his brain to come up with the answer and found it: Reiner directed Steve in The Jerk and The Man With Two Brains. (Bud was impressed by his ability to access movie trivia, even though it felt a little like being in a convalescent home doing daily mental aerobics.) Carl Reiner, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart—all these guys were in a small file shoved in an unmemorable section of Bud’s amygdala. When he was a kid, Bud remembered how they all used to be on top of the world, the whole country knew who they were, and now that generation was finished, a living cemetery of dementia’d old olds, sequestered in falling-down Holmby Hills mansions, moldy and unkempt, horizontal hospice heads & groupies confined to their beds in stinky, understaffed, memorabilia-hoarded rooms, thousands of garish, encrusted picture frames with signed photos of the dead and dying, and the questionably alive: Carol O’Connor, Gilda and Gene, Bernie Brillstein, Brandon Tartikoff, Sandy Duncan, Karen Valentine, Mel and Anne, Sid and Imogene, Steve & Edie, Mickey & Judy, Kovacs and Freiberg, Roddy McDowell, Orson Welles, Chuck Connors & Orson Bean, Pat McCormack, Jack Paar, Pat Paulsen, herrrrrrre’s Johnny—all current enlistees and recruits to the Double Void: that terrifying 2nd erasure following career death——————

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Steve Martin was telling Karen Armstrong how he applied the simple advice Carl Reiner gave him about screenwriting to his novels: Give ’em the rules in the first few minutes—

  Maybe someone told Kafka, Leave ’em laughing . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Bud drifted again.

  He’d read in an article that morning in HuffPost about Steve selling a Hopper for 28 mill. But Steve said the Hopper he really cared about, “The Lighthouse,” was still hanging in his living room. Bud idly wondered what a thing like that would cost to insure . . . . .

  Last week, he wangled his way into an Art of Fiction Q&A with James Franco. (Sold-out, at the Chateau.) The actor had a new novel out, & was being interviewed by Liz Phair, a pre-millennium rockstar who supposedly made her name—Bud didn’t have much of a file on her—by doing an album that mirrored Exile on Main Street, song for song. Which explained how a few years ago she wound up reviewing Keith Richards’ memoir for the front page of The New York Times Book Review. At the time, Bud was surprised they engaged in that sort of “stunt reviewing.”* He quickly emailed the editor, touching briefly on his career as a journeyman screenwriter (currently in mid-novel), suggesting it might be “great fun” to pair him with any Hollywood books coming down the pike—unauthorized biographies of stars, say, or the more respectable A. Scott Berg–type histories of agencies and studios, of Jews in the business, even Hollywood fiction. Bud had the whimsical idea of enclosing a satirical Shouts & Murmurs–style essay (to give the editor a sample of what he could do) on the reality star Lauren Conrad’s New York Times Best Seller trilogy L.A. Candy. Ultimately, he decided not to, because he didn’t want to look like he was auditioning. He did his best to lay the groundwork. You never knew. Maybe the next time they were casting around for a “Hollywood insider” take on a new novel by Lauren or Snooki or the Kardashian family, they’d give him a shout (not a murmur).

  There was another writer Bud wanted to study: Fran Lebowitz. Some days he was of a mind that he could learn even more from Fran than from JCO. Fran was an examplar of a phenomena Bud always found as puzzling as it was terrifying: to wit, the counterfeit being taken for the real. Fran signified for the culturati, complicit in promoting the myth that she was of the same bloodline as Thurber and Wilde. Pundits and benefactors to whom those men were as foreign as Bud was to Proust had inexplicably anointed her as such and Fran made sure to sit very still as they lowered the papier-mâché crown upon her epigrammatically-challenged head. Because Bud was a writer who hadn’t really written, not in the way he was about to, not just yet, it was galling that Fran became famous—lionized—for (not) doing the very same. Bud was alternately in awe and enraged, & obsessed with solving the riddle of how she had managed to pull that off. Bud felt that as a preemptive measure, should he never be able to finish his book, he could sit at her feet and take notes. Why kid himself? He too wanted a hagiographic HBO documentary, he too wanted a Nobel Prize-winning friend singing his praises! Bud went online and scrolled through Fran’s aphorisms: Calling a taxi in Texas is like calling a rabbi in Iraq . . . Humility is no substitute for a good personality . . . Your life story would not make a good book—don’t even try . . . Bud thought: The tables are not round at the Waverly!——but why was he so angry? Was it mere jealousy? What business was it of his if the Empress’s new clothes were Weejuns & 501s? Why was it that her papal, erroneous mini-lectures on the difference between witty and funny—unseemly advertisements for herself—set Bud’s teeth on edge? Why, when what Fran had w
as what he wanted? Maybe he resented her because he wrote comedy for so many years. (Occasionally, Johnny Carson and Jay Leno used his stuff, though most of Bud’s material never made it to air.) Fran despised the very thing she was: a comic. She was no Louis C.K., nor was she George Carlin or a cross between—she was weak borscht, a third-string tummler in a tux, a poor man’s Steven Wright. An impressionist——no, an impersonator——no, illusionist——an Oscar Wiener Oscar Wilde. But just when he was in the thrall of h8ting on Fran, he fell into awe again . . . he had to admit his guru was possessed by social genius. She sure could pick friends. Hanging with Toni Morrison fifteen years before the Nobel. The perfect marriage: the bride wore black. Now Steve and Karen were talking about W. G. Sebald as the writer who influenced Steve’s placement of paintings throughout An Object of Beauty . . . Bud checked out again, letting the African ladies carry him down a ruminative stream . . . Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou . . . Toni Angelou, Maya Walker, Alice Morrisangelalker—more writers whose books he’d never crack . . . crazed black swans dressed as royalty (but don’t forget the royalties)—best look out when they hit the ground runnin’ to collect their awards. Cause dese bitches’ll run you down. Deez scary bitches are award-crayzuh, ebony & ivory don’t mean nuthin to dese bitches but black- & white-tie, as in gala, as in neverending shitstorm of tributes & lifetime achievements hoohahs celebrating mediocre lyrical gifts, shameless shamans mainlinin Kennedy Center Honors like heroin, bitches never had to go too far to cop, cause more mutherfuckin awards be waitin on every street corner! But the Nobel . . . woo woo woo! Toni & her Nobel——uh, well, whoa. Nuff said. Nobel be duh Big One, bigger than der Bingle, fo sho. So big nobody dared to dream, nor pay heed, nobody had the vision, nobody saw it comin—nobody but Fran! The Nobel! Took everybody by surprise . . . . . everybody but——