The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2

by Douglas Kennedy

  Bobby was shrewd enough to never again mention the subject of that disastrous dinner, though he always asked after Sally whenever we spoke. And once a month, I had dinner with him. Twenty-nine percent is twenty-nine percent, after all. But I genuinely liked Bobby and saw that behind all the gimcrack salesmanship, the slick bravura, he was just another guy traveling hopefully, trying to make his own mark in a deeply indifferent world. Like the rest of us, he filled the time with his own turbocharged ambitions and worries, in an attempt to believe that, somehow, what we do during that momentary spasm called life actually counts for something.

  Anyway, I was so damn busy with the second season that, aside from our monthly dinner, I was out of touch with Bobby. By the time Selling You season two went into production, I’d reached the conclusion that my life was running on a treadmill: fourteen-hour workdays, seven days a week. The few hours left over in the day were dedicated entirely to Sally. But she wasn’t exactly complaining about our lack of quality time together. For Sally anything less than a seventeen-hour day was lazy.

  The only real highlights in this breakneck schedule were the two weekends a month I’d spend in Sausalito with Caitlin. The breach between us didn’t take long to heal. On my first visit to her new home, she was distant with me. But we had a terrific day out in San Francisco, and her initial aloofness melted a bit. Early that evening, as we were having dinner in a restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf, she said, “I have to ask you a question, Daddy.”

  “Shoot,” I said.

  “Do you miss me and Mommy?”

  I felt an immense sadness come over me.

  “Only every hour of every day,” I said, taking her hand. She didn’t pull away but instead squeezed mine back.

  “Can’t you live with us again?” she asked.

  “I wish that was possible, but . . .”

  “Is it because you don’t love Mommy anymore?”

  “I’ll always love your mother . . . but sometimes people who love each other find it difficult to live together. Or they grow apart. Or . . .”

  “You could grow back together again,” she said.

  I smiled at the great turn of phrase.

  “It’s never that simple, Caitlin. People can do things that others find hard to forgive. Or they realize that they need to lead a different kind of life now.”

  She withdrew her hand and stared down at the table.

  “I don’t like not having you around.”

  “And I don’t like not having you around,” I said. “And I wish I could wave a magic wand and make it all better. But I can’t. Still, we will be together two weekends a month. During all your vacations you can spend as much time as you like with me . . .”

  “You’ll be working during my vacations.”

  “I’ll make certain I’m not.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “And you’ll visit me every two weeks?”

  “Without fail.”

  And I never missed a visit. On the contrary, there was no damn way that anything was going to get in the way of my twice-monthly trip to see my daughter.

  Another six months shot by. The second season was in the can. Early reaction within FRT was tremendous. Alison had already started taking calls from Brad Bruce and Ted Lipton about the third season—and we were still two months away from the launch of our second season. Life was chaotic but good. My career was cruising. My ardor for Sally hadn’t dimmed . . . and she still seemed entranced by me. My money was making money. And though Lucy still cold-shouldered me whenever I visited Sausalito, at least Caitlin seemed delighted to see her daddy and had even started spending one weekend a month with us in LA.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Alison asked me over lunch one day. “You seem happy.”

  “I am.”

  “Should I alert the media?”

  “Is there anything wrong with being happy?”

  “Hardly. It’s just . . . you’ve never really done happy, Dave.”

  She was right. Then again, until very recently, I’d never gotten what I’d wanted before.

  “Well,” I said, “maybe I can start doing happy now.”

  “That would make a change. And while you’re at it: take a little time off. Success has made you look seriously wrecked.”

  Once again, she was right. I hadn’t made acquaintance with that thing called a “vacation” in over fourteen months. I was tired and in deep need of a break. So much so that when Bobby rang up in mid-March and said to me, “Feel like going to the Caribbean this weekend . . . and you can bring Sally,” I instantly said yes.

  “Good,” Bobby said. “Because Phil Fleck wants to meet you.”

  THREE

  A COUPLE OF FACTS about Philip Fleck. He was born in Milwaukee, forty-four years ago. His father owned a small paper-packaging plant. When Dad dropped dead of a heart attack in 1981, Philip was recalled home from NYU film school to take over the family business. Though he was reluctant to shoulder this responsibility—as he was determined to become a movie director—he acceded to his mother’s wishes and became the company boss. Within ten years, he had turned this minor regional company into one of the major retail packaging players in the United States. Then he took the company public and made his first billion. After that, he started to dabble as a venture capitalist, deciding in the early nineties to back an obscure horse called “the Internet.” He chose his investments wisely—and by 1999, he was worth over $20 billion.

  The year 2000 was his fortieth. And it was also the year that he suddenly decided to vanish from view. He resigned the chairmanship of his family packaging company. He stopped being seen in public. He hired a security company to make certain that his privacy wasn’t invaded. He eschewed all requests for interviews or public appearances. He fled behind the large apparatus which ran his entrepreneurial empire. He vanished from view, disappearing so completely that many thought he was either dead, crazy, or J. D. Salinger.

  Then, three years ago, Philip Fleck reappeared in public. Correction: he himself didn’t reappear, but his name suddenly became common currency again when his first film, The Last Chance, hit the screens. He wrote, directed, and financed the thing himself—and in the one interview he gave to Esquire before the film’s release, he called it “the culmination of ten years’ planning and thought.” The film was an apocalyptic tale about two couples on an island off the Maine coast who face a crisis of metaphysical proportions when a nuclear accident wipes out most of New England. They are trapped offshore, hoping that the deadly toxins will not be blown their way. As they fight and argue and fuck, they begin to debate “the true meaning of temporal existence” . . . and, natch, their impending deaths.

  The film received suicidally bad reviews. Fleck was accused of being portentous and risible, a talentless rich guy who had bankrolled one of the most absurd vanity films ever made.

  After this warm critical reception, Philip Fleck dropped out of sight again—only seeing a very few members of his so-called inner circle of pals—though his name did appear briefly in the news again when word leaked out that he had finally gotten married . . . to his script editor on The Last Chance. (A quick aside—when Brad Bruce saw the marriage notice in the Milestones section of Time, he turned to me in our production office and said: “Maybe the guy married her because she was the only person who didn’t laugh at his fucking awful script.”)

  Though the critics may have dented Philip Fleck’s pride, they still couldn’t do much harm to his bank account. In last year’s Forbes survey of the 100 Richest Americans, he came in eighth, with a current net value of $20 billion. He owned homes in Manhattan, Malibu, Paris, San Francisco, and Sydney, not to mention his own private island near Antigua. He had his very own 767 jet. He was an avid art collector, with a penchant for twentieth-century American painters—specifically, sixties abstractionists like Motherwell, Philip Guston, and Rothko. Though he gave widely to charity, he was best noted for his obsession with the movies—to the poin
t where he had heavily funded such well-known organizations as the American Film Institute, the Cinémathèque Française, and the film department at NYU. He was a true cinephile—someone who, in that Esquire interview, admitted that he had seen over 10,000 movies during his lifetime. On rare occasions, he’d even been spotted haunting such famous small Parisian Left Bank cinemas as the Accattone and the Action Christine—though, from all accounts, it was difficult to pick him out in a crowd, as he was a notoriously ordinary-looking guy.

  “Forget the designer wardrobe upgrade [as the Esquire journalist wrote in that spiky profile of Fleck]. Up close and personal, he’s a chunky average Joe with a personality bypass. The guy is Mr. Taciturn. You can’t tell if he’s suffering from terminal diffidence or the sort of misanthropic arrogance which comes with stratospheric wealth. But with his mega-millions, he has no real need to engage with the rest of the world. You meet Philip Fleck, you survey his domain—his vast financial muscle—in all its infinite grandeur, and then you look him over carefully, and you think: occasionally, the Gods do smile down on geeks.”

  After Bobby had proposed the weekend at Fleck’s Caribbean hideaway, I had my assistant find me that Esquire interview. As soon as I finished reading it, I called Bobby at his office and asked him, “Is that journalist still alive?”

  “Just . . . though I gather the city desk at the Bangor Daily News doesn’t really compare with the heady world of Hearst Magazines.”

  “If I’d gotten those reviews, I would have signed up as a kamikaze pilot.”

  “Yeah, but if you had twenty billion in the bank . . .”

  “Point taken. Surely, after the shit flung at him over The Last Chance, he doesn’t want to get back into the directing game again.”

  “If there’s one thing I know about Phil, it’s this: he may be Mr. Brooding . . . but the guy doesn’t give up, and he never gives in. He’s relentless. If he wants something, he gets it. And right now, he wants you.”

  Yes, this was the underlying reason—the subtext—behind my summons to Fleck’s Caribbean retreat. I yanked this out of Bobby during his initial phone call, inviting me to meet the great recluse.

  “Here’s the deal,” Bobby said. “He’s hanging out for a week at his place off Antigua. It’s called Saffron Island—and, I’m telling you, it’s paradise de luxe.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “He’s built his very own Taco Bell on the island . . .”

  “Hey, what’s with the sarcasm?”

  “I just like giving you shit about your mega-rich friend.”

  “Listen, Phil’s really an original, a one-off. And though nowadays he guards his privacy like a nuclear test site, among his pals, he’s a regular guy.”

  And (according to Bobby) he really liked Bobby. “Because I’m also such a likeable guy.”

  “No offense,” I said, “but I still don’t get how you managed to infiltrate his inner circle. I mean, he makes the late Mr. Kubrick sound accessible.”

  So Bobby explained that he’d been “put together” with Fleck three years ago during the preproduction for his movie. As Fleck was completely footing the bill, he was working on ways of turning the whole setup into an enormous tax write-off. One of Fleck’s associate producers had been one of Bobby’s clients—and recognizing his financial genius (yes, those were Bobby’s exact words), he suggested that Fleck speak with him. So Bobby got the summons to San Francisco to “a modest little mansion on Russian Hill.” They eyed each other up. They schmoozed. Bobby outlined a plan whereby, if Fleck made the movie in Ireland, he could jettison the entire $20 million budget from his return the following year. And the IRS wouldn’t be able to say dick about it.

  So The Last Chance was made on some godawful little island off the coast of County Clare, with interior work shot in a Dublin studio. Though it was a disaster for all involved, at least Bobby Barra came away with a major prize: his friendship with Philip Fleck.

  “Believe it or not, we talk the same language. And I know he respects my financial judgment.”

  Enough to let you play with his money? I was about to ask—but I held my tongue. Because I was pretty certain that a man of Philip Fleck’s mega-means probably had twelve Bobby Barras on his payroll. What I couldn’t figure out exactly was what such an isolated figure saw in a hustler like Barra. Unless, like me, he found him diverting and considered him potential material.

  “What’s the new wife like?” I asked Bobby.

  “Martha? Very New England. Very bookish. Not bad looking, if you like the Emily Dickinson type.”

  “You know Emily Dickinson?”

  “We never dated, but . . .”

  I had to hand it to Bobby. He was fast.

  “I’ll tell you this, entre-fucking-nous,” he said. “No one was surprised when Phil decided she was the one. Before that, he was into arm candy in a big way—though he always looked awkward with some model who had trouble spelling her own name. Despite all the money, he’s never been much of a babe magnet.”

  “How nice that he met someone then,” I said, thinking that, despite her alleged Belle of Amherst credentials, this Martha woman must be one shrewd gold digger.

  “Anyway, the point of this invitation is a simple one,” Bobby said. “As I told you before, Phil loves Selling You, and he simply wants to meet you, and he thought you might like a couple of days with your lady under the Saffron Island palms.”

  “Sally can come too?”

  “That’s what I just said.”

  “And this is simply a meet-and-greet, nothing more?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Bobby said, a slight note of hesitancy slipping into his voice. “Of course, he may want to speak with you a bit about the business.”

  “That’s okay by me.”

  “And if you wouldn’t mind reading a script of his before heading out there.”

  “I knew there was a catch.”

  “It’s not much of a catch. All he’s asking for is a ‘courtesy read’ of a new script.”

  “Look, I’m not a script doctor . . .”

  “Bullshit. That’s exactly what you do on all the episodes of Selling You that you don’t write.”

  “Yeah—but the difference is: it’s my series. Sorry to sound up-my-ass, but I really don’t administer CPR to other people’s work.”

  “You are up your ass—but the thing here is no one’s asking you to play doctor. Like I said, it’s a courtesy read, no more. More to the point, the writer in question is Mr. Philip Fleck. And he is willing to fly you in his own private jet to his own private island, where you will have your own private suite with your own private swimming pool, your own private butler, and the kind of six-star service you will never find anywhere else, and in exchange for this week of absolute sybaritic luxury, all that is asked of you is that you read his screenplay—which, I should point out, is a mere hundred and four pages, because I have the damn thing in front of me—and after you read it, you simply have to sit down with him sometime under the Saffron Island palms, sip a piña colada, and talk for around an hour to the eighth-richest American about his screenplay . . .”

  He paused for breath. And also for effect.

  “Now I ask you, Mr. Armitage—is that such a fucking stretch?”

  “All right,” I said. “Messenger the script over.”

  It arrived two hours later . . . by which time Jennifer had pulled the Esquire profile off the Internet, and I was definitely intrigued. There was something so irresistible about the paradox that was Philip Fleck. So much money. So little creative ability. And—if the Esquire writer was to be believed—such a desperate need to show the world that he was a man of genuinely creative gifts. “Money means nothing without validation,” he told the journalist. But say it turns out that, for all your billions, you are actually talentless? What then? And I guess there was a schmucky part of me that thought it would be rather amusing to spend a few days observing this supreme irony.

  Even Sally was intrigued by the idea of spending a week i
n the proximity of such extreme wealth.

  “Are you absolutely sure this is not some ruse that little Bobby Barra has cooked up?” she asked me.

  “For all his big-time talk I doubt that Bobby actually has access to his very own 767, let alone a Caribbean island. Anyway, I did get a copy of Fleck’s script—and I had Jennifer run a SATWA check on it. Fleck is registered as the author—so, yeah, the whole thing seems perfectly legit.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Don’t know. I only got it right before leaving the office.”

  “Well, if we’re leaving on Friday, you’d better find the time to do some serious notes on it. You are going to have to sing for our supper, after all.”

  “So you are coming?”

  “A free week on Phil Fleck’s island idyll? Damn right I am. I can dine out on this for months.”

  “And if it all turns out to be utterly tacky?”

  “It’ll still be a story worth telling around town.”

  Later that night, after insomnia sprung me out of bed at two in the morning, I sat in our living room and cracked open Fleck’s screenplay. It was called Fun and Games. The opening scene read:

  INT. PORNO SHOP—NIGHT

  BUDDY MILES, fifty-five, lived-in face, cigarette permanently screwed into the side of his mouth, sits behind the counter of a particularly scuzzy porno shop. Though pinups and the lurid covers of assorted magazines bedeck the area where he sits, we quickly notice that he’s reading a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses. The opening movement of Mahler’s Symphony 1 is being played on the boom box next to the cash register. He lifts a mug of coffee, tastes it, grimaces, then reaches below the counter and brings up a bottle of Hiram Walker bourbon. He unscrews the top, pours a shot into the coffee, replaces the bottle, and sips the coffee again. This time it passes muster. But as he looks up from the mug, he notices that a man is standing in front of the counter. He is dressed in a heavy winter parka. A balaclava helmet covers his face. Instantly BUDDY notices that the hooded figure is pointing a gun at him. After a moment, the hood speaks.

  LEON