Temptation

by Douglas Kennedy

  Long silence. Finally I said, ‘Was it that bad?’

  ‘You know what I’m saying. He may be a brilliant broker . . . but socially speaking, he’s a fool.’

  ‘I find him amusing.’

  ‘And I can understand why – especially if you ever end up writing something for Scorsese. But he’s a people collector, David – and you’re this month’s objet d’art. If I were you I’d let him handle my investments and nothing more. He’s cheap and meretricious: the sort of hustler who might splash on Armani aftershave in the morning, but still stinks of Brut.’

  I knew that Sally was being cruel – and didn’t like seeing this unsympathetic side to her. But I said nothing. I also said little to Bobby when, a few days after the dinner, he called me at my office to announce that he was projecting a twenty-nine per cent return this year.

  ‘Twenty-nine per cent,’ I said, stunned. ‘That sounds positively illegal.’

  ‘Oh, it’s legal all right.’

  ‘Just joking,’ I said, picking up his defensiveness. ‘I’m very pleased. And grateful. Next time I’ll buy dinner.’

  ‘Is there going to be a next time? Sally really thought I was a jerk, didn’t she?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge.’

  ‘You’re lying, but I appreciate the sentiment. Believe me, I know when I strike out with someone.’

  ‘The chemistry just didn’t work between you guys, that’s all.’

  ‘You’re being polite. But hey, as long as you don’t share her sentiments . . . ’

  ‘Why should I? Especially when you’re making me twenty-nine per cent.’

  He laughed. ‘It’s always the bottom line, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’re asking me that?’

  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 per cent is twenty-nine per cent, after all. But I genuinely liked Bobby, and saw that behind all the gimcrack salesmanship, the slick bravura, he was just another guy travelling hopefully, trying to make his own mark in a deeply indifferent world. Like the rest of us, he filled the time with his own turbo-charged 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 series 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 one big time-and-motion study: fourteen-hour work days, 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 any more?’

  ‘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 series 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 series – and we were still two months away from the launch of our second season. Life was chaotic, but good. My career was cruising. My ardour 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.

  2000 was the year of his fortieth birthday. 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, dis appearing 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 ga
ve 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 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 point 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 Accatone 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 $20 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 pre-production for his movie. As Fleck was completely footing the bill, he was working on ways of turning the whole set-up 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 judgement.’

  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 which 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 104 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 Pina 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 in 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 WGA check on it. Fleck is registered as the author – so, yeah, the whole thing seems perfectly legit.’