The Burning Plain (6 page)

“Violent fags? What did they do, mix stripes with plaids?”

“Dante was Catholic, of course, so he thought of sodomy as an act against nature and homosexuals as the violent against nature. The seventh circle was a plain of burning sand. The souls of homosexuals are forced to run around the perimeter of the plain for eternity while a burning rain bakes them.”

We walked to my car in silence, past shuttered shops and a Mexican bar. From inside I heard a
rancheria
I recognized as one of my father’s favorites.

“So let me see if I get this,” Richie said. “You’ve got all these guys running on a track, so they’re in good shape, and there’s this burning rain that keeps them tan. Gee, Henry, that doesn’t sound like hell to me. It sounds like Palm Springs.”

We got into my car. “Where to, Richie?”

“Well, there’s nothing decent here,” he said, dismissing, with a sweeping gesture, the entire east side of Los Angeles. “Spago? No, it’s Tuesday. No one there but tourists. The Ivy? Even I can’t get us in without a reservation. Maple Drive’s too 90210. I know. Musso’s. I love their creamed spinach.”

Musso and Frank’s was the oldest restaurant in Hollywood, a place of dark wood, high-backed booths, starched tablecloths, elderly white-jacketed waiters, lethal martinis and a menu that listed such antiquarian items as consommé and a salad of iceberg lettuce. It was on Hollywood Boulevard, not far from Richie’s office, on the tenth floor of a high-rise that overlooked what Richie insisted on calling
Grauman’s
Chinese Theater, long after everyone else had accepted its change of ownership and name to Mann’s Theater. Such sites were holy places to Richie, who often said everything he knew about life he’d learned from watching old movies. And it was true that while he might not have read Dante, he could recite big chunks of Gloria Swanson’s dialogue from
Sunset Boulevard
by heart or rattle off the filmography of Maria Ouspenskaya.

I understood Richie’s childhood devotion to old movies, because I had been as devoted to books, which, just as his movies did for him, helped me escape the loneliness of being different by creating an alternative reality where I was not alone. Richie had once told me the only thing that had kept him alive in the private mental institution to which his parents had committed him when he was fourteen was creeping into the day room at midnight to watch the late show.

“The last time I was here,” Richie confided over his martini at Musso’s, “Bob Hope came tottering down the aisle. His
hair
, Henry. Bright orange. And his face looked like it was carved out of tapioca.”

“What are you going to say about the poetry reading?”

“Blah, blah, blah. I only need a couple of ’graphs. Did you get a look at that blond by the door? Yummy. Of course, he’s an actor.” Richie smirked. “I think every actor in town ought to wear a sign that says, ‘I am not a real person, I am an actor.’”

Our waiter came, a fussy ancient whose six dyed strands of hair were carefully plastered across his bald pate. He moued his disapproval over my order of an omelet and a salad, but Richie made up for it, ordering filet mignon in béarnaise sauce, a baked potato, broiled mushrooms, creamed spinach, a Caesar salad and a half-bottle of Bordeaux. I knew from other meals with him that Richie would eat every bite, then demand dessert, and yet he never gained weight. “I’m blessed with a starlet’s metabolism,” he boasted when I pointed this out to him, but a likelier reason was that his father used to scream at him at the dinner table to act like a man until Richie was so terrified his throat closed up.

“Alex Amerian is an actor,” I said, after the waiter left. “He seemed real enough.”

Richie raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you’re sweet on him.”

“Could you be serious for a moment?”

He dropped the supercilious eyebrow. “What’s wrong, Henry?”

“I think I’m cracking up here.”

All affectation vanished. “Tell me,” he said quietly.

I told him everything, about the frantic work and the aimless driving, the incident at Griffith Park, parking in front of Alex’s house, the neighbor who’d run me off, the shame, confusion, grief. I trusted Richie to understand me despite our many differences, because when I lay in bed at night in a small town in California, reading about Achilles and Patroclus, while he sat in front of a TV set in suburban Ohio, watching Joan Crawford in
Rain
, we had been learning the same lesson about the impossibility of our desire; a lesson that, as grown men, we were still trying to overcome.

“Ask him out,” Richie said, when I finished.

“Alex? Just like that?”

“That’s what people do when they’re interested in someone,” he said, signaling the waiter for another drink.

“It’s all mixed up with Josh.”

“Alex isn’t Josh. You’ll see that when you spend some time with him.”

“What if he says no?”

Richie said, “He won’t.”

Dinner arrived and we talked about other things. We were drinking coffee when Richie’s eyes widened at something or someone behind me. A tall, thickly built man in a beautifully tailored suit passed our table, with a thin woman on his arm. He nodded acknowledgment at Richie.

“Who is that?” I asked.

Richie dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “Are you serious? That’s Duke Asuras.”

“And he is?”

“The head of Parnassus Pictures, Henry.”

“Oh, he’s the guy who said Hollywood’s going to take over the world,” I said, telling Richie about the article in the
Times
.

“Don’t think he can’t do it,” Richie said.

“Who was that woman with him? His wife?”

Richie snorted. “He’s not married. That was Cheryl Cordet.”

I was trying to place the name. “Isn’t that—”

Richie stood up, again dabbing his mouth on a napkin. “I’ll be back in five minutes.” He returned in three. “Come on.”

“Where?”

“Duke asked us to join them for a drink.” He threw some money on the table. “You mind?”

“No, I’ve never met a movie mogul before.”

I followed Richie through the restaurant to a remote booth that was further protected by a curtained doorway. He poked his head in, mumbled something, and then pulled the curtain back and said to me, “Hop in.”

I slid into the booth. Richie followed and drew the curtain shut. The booth was very cold. Asuras and Cordet sat across from us, their backs to the wall. A wall lamp cast a pinkish light. A candle flickered on the table. The remains of a shrimp cocktail lay between them. Asuras was tanned to the color of mahogany. His bright blue eyes were the liveliest feature in a bullet-shaped, bull-necked head. He was bald except for patches of side hair which were shaved to salt-and-pepper stubble. Thick eyebrows, a flat nose and a wide mouth conveyed power and appetite. His shoulders were massive beneath the crepe-like material of his black suit—a weight lifter’s shoulders—but his jowl had begun to sag. He conveyed a combination of strength and self-indulgence, and his heavy, imperious face recalled profiles of a first-century Caesar on an ancient coin.

Cheryl Cordet was a thin woman, with pale skin and a frizz of graying blond hair. She had a strong, plain face and small, shrewd eyes. Her black sheath dress was made for someone younger and more opulent and it hung on her gracelessly. She radiated nearly as much authority as he did and, despite the intimacy implied by the candlelit booth, the shared food, romance was distinctly not in the air.

When Richie finished making introductions, Cheryl Cordet said, “You never returned my calls, Henry.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You defended the guy who was accused of killing the gay judge. His boyfriend? You got him off. I had my people call you to discuss selling the rights to his story.”

I had a vague recollection of talking to someone about the movie rights to the Chandler case. I remembered that the caller’s eagerness to buy the story had been exceeded only by his ignorance of the events.

“I wasn’t interested.” I said.

“I remember that case,” Asuras said. “I don’t know, the gay angle would be a problem.”

“We could change that,” Cordet said. “Soften it. Maybe make the boyfriend a girl? What do you think, Henry?”

The conversation was so ludicrous, I didn’t know what to say.

“Speaking of gay,” Asuras rumbled, in a voice so deep I thought he had bronchitis, “I read that piece in your magazine about attacks on homosexuals, Richie. Kind of an unusual piece for you, wasn’t it? You’re not the
Advocate
.”

“We cover the news,” Richie said.

“I guess you checked to make sure what those people in the piece said was true.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Of course. I’m a serious journalist, Duke.”

Asuras grinned. “Come on, Richie. As a journalist you’re somewhere between Liz Smith and the
National Enquirer
.”

“Well, in the interests of accuracy, Duke,” Richie said, “is it true the board of Parnassus Company is still trying to get you fired?”

Asuras turned a slow, angry gaze on him. “I better not be reading that in your magazine.”

“Is that a denial?”

“You ought to know better than to play games with me,” he said.

Cheryl Cordet glanced at her watch and said, “God, Duke, it’s almost eleven and I’ve got be on the set at five. Mind if we cut this short?”

Richie and I stood outside, waiting for the valet to bring my car. He was uncharacteristically quiet.

“Maybe I don’t understand the nuances here,” I said, “but did you just get into a pissing match with that guy because he criticized your gay-bashing piece?”

“That’s not the piece he’s worried about,” Richie said.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you know anything about Duke Asuras?”

“No,” I said. “Hollywood’s your obsession, not mine.”

He lit a cigarette. “That’s right,” he said. “I love the movies and I’m not going to let Duke Asuras destroy them.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The car came. The valet opened the passenger door and Richie deflated into the front seat. “Let me give you a crash course in the Industry,” he said. “The first thing you need to understand is that Hollywood isn’t one place, it’s two. LA, where the studios are and the movies get made, and New York, where the companies that own the studios are headquartered. It’s been that way forever, moviemakers versus moneymen, art versus commerce.” He blew a smoke ring. “Movies are risky investments. When they pay big, they pay really big, but when they flop, they can take a company down with them, like
Heaven’s Gate
killed United Artists. Every year, the cost of making movies climbs higher and higher until now, a medium-sized, medium-budget, no-big-name movie is costing a studio like Parnassus around fifty million to make.”

“That’s astonishing.”

“The moneymen try to contain the costs of their investment in case it goes down the toilet. The moviemakers complain that the only thing the penny-pinching accomplishes is to make sure the movies will suck and lose money. It goes back and forth between New York and Hollywood on almost every movie that gets made by the big studios.”

“Is that why you asked Asuras about his board?”

“Yeah. Duke runs Parnassus Pictures, but he doesn’t run Parnassus Company in New York. He answers to the president, Allen Raskin, and Raskin answers to the board of directors, and most of them are Wall Street types who know shit about movies. Raskin does. His grandfather was one of the original producers at Parnassus, back in the thirties and forties. His dad was an exec at Parnassus. When he became president, the company was about to go under because of the idiot they had hired to run things before him. He brought Duke back from the dead and made him studio president. That was four years ago. Now Parnassus is the most successful studio in town.”

“Then why would the board want to fire Asuras?”

“Because he’s a crook,” Richie replied.

“What does that mean?”

“It means he’s a crook, Henry. He steals.”

I pulled up in front of Richie’s building. “Steals what?”

“Money,” Richie said. “Duke started out as an agent representing some big names. He perfected the art of packaging, putting together stars with directors and writers and forcing them all down a studio’s throat while he picked up multiple commissions. One of his clients was Twila Rhodes. You remember her?”

“No,” I said.

“I’m not surprised,” Richie said. “She was a second-tier actress with a drug problem. Duke forged her name on twenty thousand dollars in checks.”

“He couldn’t have borrowed it?”

“He didn’t need it. The guy was clearing a couple of million a year.”

“Then why did he do it?”

“Why does a dog lick its balls?” Richie said. “Because it can.”

“That’s it?”

“Look up ‘greedy,’ ‘stupid’ and ‘arrogant’ in the dictionary,” he said, “and you’ll find pictures of studio executives and movie agents. Of course, Duke told a much more complicated story when he was found out. He said he had a nervous breakdown, that it was an act of self-sabotage. You know, the diminished-capacity defense.”

“Did the jury buy it?”

“It didn’t get that far,” Richie said. “Twila Rhodes overdosed and there was no one left to prosecute. But the scandal drove Duke out of agenting. He laid low for a while then started up an independent production company that had a couple of big hits before he suddenly quit and left the country to ‘find himself.’”

“I can hear the quotation marks in your voice.”

He flicked his cigarette out the window. “The rumor is that his partners caught him embezzling again and gave him the option of resigning or going to jail.”

“And then Raskin brought him back from the dead?”

“From Thailand, actually,” Richie said. “In any other business he’d be considered a criminal. In Hollywood, he’s a victim, but not to the Parnassus board.”

“Moral scruples?”

“Give me a break,” he scoffed. “With Duke as head of the studio, Parnassus’s stock has never done as well as it should have, given the company’s earnings. The board thinks it’s because Wall Street doesn’t like a crook at the till. They’ve been looking for a reason to get rid of him, but as long as he was making them piles of money, they were stuck. Last year, he lost money, ten million, not much, but it was all the board needed to start screaming for his head. When Raskin refused to fire him, they started threatening him.”