Wag the Dog (5 page)

“Officially, the story is that Beagle is sick. I don't believe it In fact, I'm certain I saw him once or twice up near his place in the Napa Valley. He owns a vineyard there. So do I. Also, there was a period between when the deal was made and the cancellation when I saw him mentally go away from the project. One meeting he was all there. This picture was the thing he most wanted in the world. And he was intently *** in me.”

“*** he name of it?”

“Pirandello.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know who he is? He's a playwright. Italian. But it's not about him. That was a working title. Not a finished title. The next meeting, he was off. There was something else he cared about more. There is nothing in Hollywood a director cares about more than his next picture.”

“He's supposed to be sick,” I say. “Does that mean AIDS? A guy who's going to die, he might care about something besides his next picture.” Young guys who are about to die, and know it, care about its not being fair. Or they care about convincing themselves it's not quite going to happen.
Maybe that's good, to go not believing that you're going. I don't know so much about what old people think when they're ready to die. I haven't seen that many old people die.

“A director who's about to die cares even more,” she says. “Good God, it's not only his next film, it's his last.”

“Where is he now?”

“He's missing.”

“I read somewhere,” I say, “that he's working with the Japanese on high-definition TV.”

“I've heard that story too. But you would think he would take my calls.”

“Oh,” I say, “it's that way, is it?”

She takes my arm. We walk a couple steps before she says the next thing, which is “When someone's lying to you, you know it.”

“Do I?”

“Oh, Joe,” she sighs and kind of leans into me. I'm a sucker for this, I admit it. “I'm a woman. Men are supposed to lie to me. I'm a beautiful woman, I'm supposed to enjoy it. I live in Hollywood where truth is a speech defect. You'd think I wouldn't care anymore.

“I wanted that movie. Someone took it away from me. They're lying to me about why. On one level it's about money. If they cancel because Beagle got sick, that comes under the act-of-God clause. It doesn't in all contracts, but in this one it does. If they cancel because Beagle changed his mind, or got another picture, or almost anything except tidal wave, earthquake, typhoon, or war, they have to pay me a serious cancellation fee.”

“How much?” I ask her.

“Bottom line, it cost me close to seven hundred fifty thousand dollars.”

“OK,” I say, “that's worth going after.”

“Joe, there's something else going on. I got pissed off. I wanted to know what was going on. What the game was. My own agent, Bennie Hoffrau, he bullshitted me. This means you have to do a little reality check. You have to find out what it is that's more important to him than you are. I went to Hartman—”

“Hartman?”

“David Hartman is the head of RepCo. Which makes him one of the ten or five or three most powerful people in this business. We had lunch. We talked about everything except what we're there to talk about. Which is, sometimes, how it's done. After the entree and before the coffee he says ‘Isn't it a shame about poor Linc—'”

“Linc?”

“If you know Beagle well enough, you call him Linc. It's one of those thing things. I'm about to reply, ‘Yes, isn't it. What exactly is wrong with him?' or something to that effect. But what I don't know is that Tom Cruise is coming up behind me. David has to schmooze. For that matter, if I'm smart, I have to do a number too, even if my act is that I'm totally disinterested. David timed his remark so that he could drop it into the conversation and I couldn't pursue it. That's a lot of work to say nothing.

“The day after I had lunch with Hartman, Bennie calls me, he's got a picture for me. It's a World War II home-front picture. Me, Gena Rowlands, Bette Midler. Heavy duty, right? You remember that movie
The Best Years of Our Lives?”

“Yes,” I say. It was supposed to be an ironic title. A story of three guys who went to war and came home to realize that that's what the war had been—the best years of their lives. They'll never make a movie about Nam with a title like that.

“This is a remake. From the women's point of view. How they blossomed, even though they hurt, while the men were away. Good concept, fair script. Woman director, Anita Epstein-Barr. She's not bad. It's not the Beagle film, but it's a definite A picture. A big enough prize to distract me from thinking about the movie that disappeared. So I say to Bennie, ‘Thank you very much. I am grateful, I am glad, I will do it, and by the way, what did happen to John Lincoln Beagle and the movie I was supposed to do?'

“Bennie says, ‘Maggie baby, be a good girl. Go do this picture with Midler and Rowlands, which is the most heavyweight women's cast since
The Witches of Eastwick.
Forget about what's not your business. You're being taken very good care of.'”

“Which you are,” I say.

“Which I am,” she says. “Very good care. Too good, almost. Knowing Bennie, if there was nothing wrong, what he would have said was . . .” and she does a Bennie Hoffrau routine. I've never met the man and still I know it is a deadly accurate imitation. “ ‘What the fuck, babe?' What the fuck? You lose one picture, you get anudder picture. You got action. Go wid the action. 'Cause that's what it's allll about. The action. Go make a pic-ture, collect your check, keep your panties on in publick places. What the fuck, you know what I'm saying.' See, that's what he would've done, his caricature of an agent. It's supposed to be a joke, but it's his real, true self. If it was normal Hollywood bullshit, if they were just trying to sleaze me out of some cancellation money, that's what he would have said.

“Two nights later,” she says, “I went to a party and got a little high. Bennie was there. I was talking to Janice Riley. She's an old, old friend. And I say, ‘See that, that's my agent over there. He takes good care of me, but he lies to me. That makes me unhappy. Do you think that should make me unhappy?' Janice asks me what I'm talking about. I tell her.

“The next day Bennie calls me to come to his office. A summons. OK, I go. ‘I told you to forget about the Beagle film. There is nothing mysterious or strange about the cancellation. He got sick. I can show you a note from his doctor. I'm sure he'll get well sometime in the near future. I don't know the details. You don't have to know the details. You're off this Rowlands-Midler picture. Sorry. Don't argue. Leave it alone. Go home. Go on vacation. Take a break, lie in the sun, somewhere you can breathe real air, you know what I mean. Forget about things. I'll send you a couple of scripts you should consider doing. Come back, we'll have something ready to shoot.'

“There are people,” she says, looking me in the eye, “who can actually say ‘You'll never work in this town again,' and your life is over. David Hartman is one of them. So I shut up and I left.”

“Sounds sensible. So why are you starting up again? With me.”

“Joe, please, let me finish. And Joe, if you agree that I
may be right about this, I have to be more than just a client to you.”

“What do I have to be, Maggie?”

She looks at me. When she's in heels, she's actually taller than me. But now, in bare feet, on the wet sand, her eyes are level, even a couple of millimeters below mine. I break eye contact first.

“Better finish the story,” I say.

“Well, I let it alone. Then, three days ago, my maid, Anita . . . you remember her?”

“Yes.”

“She said, ‘You remember Mr. Beagle, when he get sick and you don't believe it?' I said ‘I believed it,' but a little sarcastic, because we both knew that I didn't. ‘Well, my cousin,' she said, ‘she work for Mr. Beagle. I am going to see her tomorrow. I will find out for you.' ”

“Yeah? Then what happened?”

“She got deported,” Maggie says.

“When?”

“The next morning.”

“You're lucky they didn't come after you, employing an illegal.”

“She's not,” Maggie says.

“She's not?” I say, not understanding. Though of course I should. It's a real straightforward statement.

“She's not. She has a green card. A social-security number. All of it.”

“What do you want?” I ask her.

“I want to know what's going on,” she says.

“That is foolish,” I tell her. “You got sent a message. If you forget about whatever it is, they'll take care of you. If you mess around, they'll break you.”

“Tell me something, Joe. You're a guy. A man's man. For real. Not some actor playing a tough guy. What would you do?”

“I don't know, Maggie. The truth is, I don't play in the same league you do.”

“If someone owed you seven hundred fifty thousand dollars, would you let them walk away with it?”

“I guess I wouldn't. But that's what you got lawyers for.”

“Hey, this is Hollywood. It's not supposed to be nice,” she says. “But I feel like I signed on to swim with piranhas and suddenly I find out that the great white shark may be cruising in the same waters I'm in. Joe, I have to know what I'm up against. Is it about what they say it's about? Or is my career over? Do I have an enemy out there I don't know about? Is something going on that I don't know about? If I say the wrong thing by mistake, is my career over? Do they make me disappear like they did Anita?”

“What do you want me to do?” I say.

“I want you to find out what's going on. I want you to protect me. I want you to take care of me, Joe.”

“Why me?”

“Can they buy you, Joe?” she says, like she knows the answer, like she knows the part I'm supposed to play.

“I don't know,” I say. I smile. “No one ever gave it a serious try.”

“If they do try, come to me for a counteroffer first, promise me that.”

“That should be easy,” I say.

“It may not be. But I won't let anyone top what I can give you,” she says.

“We'll go back to the agency. I'll have a contract drawn up.” There was going to be some serious spending here. I tried to calculate the commission in my head. But standing that close to Magdalena Lazlo screwed up my powers of computation.

“I don't want you to mention the investigation to anyone.”

“How can I do that?”

“Have them assign you to me as my bodyguard and driver. Twenty-four hours a day. I do need protection. I do. This is serious, Joe. Don't tell them about the other. That'll work, won't it?”

“Maggie, you don't understand how an investigation works. The manpower, equipment, contacts, organization, sources. It takes a major company to do it right.” This is, of course, part of our standard sales pitch. It's the routine we use to steer a potential client away from some two-man shop that promises to do it cut-rate. It's true too.

“You don't understand how powerful they are. Think of RepCo as the Exxon of the movie business. Big, ruthless, and connected. Everywhere. If your company knows what you're doing, RepCo will know, within hours.”

“Our reputation for discretion, absolute discretion, is all we have. That's the bottom line,” I say. More sales-pitch stuff.

With that she kisses me. What the hell, she's younger than me, but she's seen more movies and she's maybe had more practice and she does it better than I do. Besides, I'm just a regular guy. When Magdalena Lazlo kisses me, I can't remember that she's Maggie Krebs, divorcée. I'm just an average Joe—my dick is twice the size of my brain. Somehow she makes it seem even more than that, more than just my lust hormone at work. Like it's got meaning is the best I can say it.

Afterward, I reach in my pocket. I told you we expect clients to sometimes want to talk about things in strange places, far from our built-in cameras and microphones. So as standard practice we always carry a minirecorder with us. I take it out. I rewind the tape.

“Why don't we just sit here and let the sound of the surf erase our conversation,” I say.

“We can do that, Joe,” she says. When the tape is back to the beginning, I push the record button and set the recorder down in the sand, the microphone facing the Pacific. We sit. Side by side. Maggie puts her hand in mine. She's got me in the palm of her hand. It's like she's taking me inside her movie. Which is an A picture, with a top cinematographer and director, the best Hollywood has to offer.

 

 

 

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