Joshua Then and Now (39 page)

There were more than twenty rooms in the producer’s mansion, which had been built in the Spanish style, smack on the ocean, a high electrified fence enclosing its ten choice acres. Approaching the estate, Joshua braked and hopped out of his rented Cougar to press a buzzer posted on the gate. A disembodied voice established who
they were before the gates slid open and they started into the winding driveway, both of them gaping at cascading fountains and towering iron sculptures that reminded Joshua of his Uncle Oscar’s scrap yard. An eager red-jacketed young man, carrying a huge umbrella, came on the trot out of nowhere to shelter them from the light drizzle as they stepped out of their car. Taking the keys, he smiled winningly and handed each of them a postcard. On one side, there was a glossy of him, pumping iron, with his vital statistics as well as the name of his agent listed below. On the other side, there was a list of his television credits.

The walls of the long tiled wall that led into the enormous living room were lined with paintings. A Warhol, a Lichtenstein, a Miró, a Leger. A reverently lit bust of Bobby Kennedy rested on a pedestal in an alcove. In the opposite alcove there was a matching bust of Ché.

The other guests were already there. Two bona fide stars, one male, one female. A once justifiably famous director, who now did Gallo wine commercials; his wife or daughter, it was difficult to be sure. Their host, his wife. Their host, beaming, told Joshua how much he admired his book on the men of the International Brigades, paying him the ultimate compliment. “There’s a picture buried in there somewhere.”

As soon as Murdoch and Joshua were introduced, a solemn waiter wheeled a tray over toward them. The tray’s surface was embossed with the Stars and Stripes. It was laden with coke, various uppers and downers, and an inlaid box overflowing with Colombia Gold, cigarette papers, and a rolling machine. “Mn,” Joshua said, contemplating the tray, “you wouldn’t have any chopped liver, would you?”

“Or a bag of all-sorts?” Murdoch asked.

No.

“In that case, we’ll both have Scotch.”

To Murdoch’s chagrin, Joshua was the one who was seated next to the female star. Who wouldn’t eat California grapes. Who was for abortion-on-demand and
ERA
, but against Zionist duplicity and
colored toilet paper. She was awfully good to look at, and Murdoch, glassy-eyed, couldn’t stop staring. With fetching concern, those celebrated eyes dazzling, she asked him about the National Front and Paki-bashing, even as Murdoch was trying to peek down her cleavage.

“I fancy you, my dear,” Murdoch allowed.

Ignoring him, the star cut into another conversation, this one about cancer-giving food additives. “Do you realize,” she said, her voice charged with moral outrage, “that the potato chips we buy in supermarkets are only twenty percent potato and the other eighty percent chemicals?”

Murdoch rocked with laughter. “Obviously, my dear, you are sadly obtuse, but you do have quite the most famous pair of titties I have ever seen. I hope you won’t misunderstand,” he said, reaching out for her, “if I just –”

Which was when he earned his well-deserved slap across the face.

“Fuck,” Murdoch said, knocking back his chair and bringing up his lunch over the floor of imported tiles.

“O.K., everybody. Easy,” Joshua said, rising. “I’ll take him home.”

But outside, Murdoch announced that he wasn’t going home yet. “Let’s go and drink in that bar where those writers who use electric typewriters can be found.”

“The Polo Lounge?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“You’re ashamed of me,” Murdoch said, “because I’m not Jewish. After all these years, you have finally acquired a social advantage.”

They drifted into the Polo Lounge and did indeed find a table occupied by a screenwriter Joshua knew, a girl who could only have been a starlet on his arm. The screenwriter, bronzed and denimed, his copper bracelet proof against cancer, recognized Murdoch’s name. “Hey, you were once one of the Angry Young Men, weren’t you?”

Murdoch turned pale. His forehead sweaty. “Get me to the gent’s. Quickly, Joshua.”

He held Murdoch’s head, as he retched again and again, bringing up bile. Then he propped him up against the bathroom wall, washed his face with paper towels that he had soaked in cold water, lighted a cigarette, and thrust it between lips that had gone purply. “Sidney, we’ve been drinking together for more years than I care to count. Why all this vomiting, suddenly?”

“It’s the chemicals.”

“What chemicals?”

“Would you get me back to my hotel?”

He got Murdoch into his room, out of his smelly clothes and into bed, and then he had to help him into the toilet again, where he rested on wobbly knees, chalky head lolling over the bowl, heaving miserably, without anything to bring up. Finally, Joshua managed to lead him back to his bed again. “Shall I call a doctor?” he asked.

“No, please. I’m fine now. You know, I adore it here. Everybody’s so wonderfully silly. They haven’t even heard that they’re going to die.”

Joshua drew a blanket over him.

“Groucho, if you remember, once said he wouldn’t belong to any club that would have him. Well, what ruined me, Joshua, was publication. I used to be consumed with such a respect for literature. The great tradition. But if even I could make some, and win praise for it, there couldn’t be that much in it. I now think they were all as vain and calculating and fraudulent as I am. Will. Dr. Johnson. Miss Austen. The lot. Prancing fools. Would you think it a bore to stay?”

Joshua hesitated.

“I’m afraid of being alone.”

Joshua plucked a pillow from the bed and curled up on the floor.

“I forgive you for fucking Margaret.”

Twenty years ago. More.

“I don’t care for anything I’ve written. Not a word of it. I’m going to become a package like that screenwriter, and make lots and lots of money.”

In their drunken stupor, they had forgotten to put the latch on the door or the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the handle outside. Joshua was jolted awake shortly after seven, a black maid staring down at him. “Oh, sorry,” she said, retreating.

Murdoch was sleeping soundly, but Joshua’s immediate concern, beyond a hammering head, was that Pauline had probably been trying to reach him at the Beverly Wilshire, discovered he hadn’t spent the night there, and assumed that he was at an orgy. Joshua left a hasty note for Murdoch, paused to retrieve a man’s pocket watch from the bedside table, and took a taxi back to his hotel. Pauline had called four times, Leopold twice, and Markham three times. Joshua called Pauline first, a frantic Pauline, and then he called Leopold.

“We can start work tomorrow,” Leopold said.

“Benny, I’m considering more than one offer here. I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

“You’ve got to say yes,” Leopold said, his manner grave. “I need you. You are absolutely the only writer I know who can save this project.”

Joshua met a perplexed, jumpy Markham for lunch, Ma Maison again, Markham not looking at him as they took their table, but soaking in the room. “Always good to see you, Josh. You look great. Here comes Sue Mengers. You want to meet her? It could be useful.”

“No thanks.”

“What are you doing here?”

He didn’t mention
Playboy
, but told him about Leopold, looking for information.

“There’s Natalie Wood. I wouldn’t put her into anything any more.… Ordinarily, I wouldn’t take a call from anybody like Leopold. But when he phoned, and I heard you were in town, I figured it was to check you out. I told him you were a great talent. Take the job.”

“You’re holding something back.”

“You have no idea,” Markham said, “how much I miss the old days in St.-Germain-des-Prés. Look, it’s Betty Bacall. With David fucking Susskind. I guess she’s willing to do
TV
now.”

“How’s Ellen?”

“I’ll get to that. First, tell me who ever would have believed that James Edward Peabody, one of Camelot’s most promising, would end up toiling for
Playboy?”

“They print articles by some damn good writers, you know.”

“Between the pubic hairs. He’s a drunk. His hands shake. He called me once when I was passing through Chicago, as supercilious as ever, and I squeezed him into a lunch, if only for old times’ sake. Sure enough, he had a young girlfriend who acts. He also had a script idea for me, who hasn’t? Well, he was in such pitiful shape, I tried to shove something his way, a retainer as a talent-spotter. But he wanted more money than I could reasonably justify. Hey, there’s Mary Tyler Moore with a little prick from the William Morris office. Josh, is it true that you and Sidney Murdoch are old friends?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’m counting on you to help me get rid of that loopy Englishman.”

“You brought him out here,” Joshua said coldly.

“It was only because of Ellen.”

Ellen, Joshua remembered, took slightly out-of-focus mood photographs for
Vogue
.

“She must have read everything he ever wrote for the
New Statesman
,” Markham said, “all his novels, everything, she’s some reader, and he writes a treatment of his novel, it’s a minor classic, that is just this side of hard-core. It’s been a shock to her. She’s hurting, Josh.”

Ellen, Markham explained, had been an admirer of Murdoch since her Bryn Mawr days, and for years she had pleaded with him to get the studio to make a movie out of Murdoch’s second novel. So
Markham had bought him for their tenth wedding anniversary, a gift, a surprise, and now she wanted him returned, like an unsatisfactory package from Nieman-Marcus. But Markham was determined to handle the matter delicately Ellen, he said, was very sensitive. “He’s got to go, Josh. I’ve got him coming round to the house for drinks at six, and I want you to be there when I tell him. He makes me nervous with all his ‘dear boys’ and all that other British bullshit.”

“O.K. I’ll come. On condition that you pay up his contract, no tricks, and fly him home first-class.”

“I was going to do that anyway. What do you take me for?”

So Murdoch, shaky but sodden again, finally got his Beverly Hills poolside party. No
Playboy
centerfolds, just a tight-lipped Markham, Ellen, and Joshua. Sipping champagne, but eschewing the smoked salmon, he took the bad news unemotionally, it seemed, even as Ellen, kneeling in the grass here, perching on a canvas chair there, snapped photographs of the rejected but renowned British novelist, ostensibly at ease in her garden, a first-class
BOAC
ticket to London tucked into his napkin. This time out, Joshua thought, I’m going to be the one to heave up the contents of my stomach.

Then, as Murdoch’s dismissal seemed to be passing without incident, he suddenly called for the Remy Martin bottle, poured an enormous quantity of cognac into his champagne glass, stirred the mixture with his finger and turned to Joshua. “I was lecturing at some grotty little university in New England once,” he said, not looking at Ellen, still clicking away, lying prone on the grass, “one of those finishing schools for the intellectually inadequate daughters of the new rich, when one of them leaps up to ask, ‘What makes you think your work will last, Mr. Murdoch?’ To which I replied, ‘I would rather that the novels were interred, all of them, and that I danced on the grave myself.’ I was determined to outlive everybody, Josh, even my grasping children. Especially Ralph, who is growing into a very nasty piece of work indeed.” Murdoch paused to fart resoundingly.
“I do beg your pardon,” he said, “but, not to worry, my dears, I believe the wind is blowing toward the flats. Where was I, Josh?”

“Outliving everybody,” Joshua said, reaching for the cognac bottle himself.

“But it’s not to be. I’m dying, you know. Leukemia. The ailment of the royals.”

Joshua choked, tears welling in his eyes. Murdoch, ever-conscious of his audience, leaned drunkenly toward him, offering him his big wet lips, and said, “Kiss me, Hardy.”

Joshua kissed him full on the mouth, the unspeakable Ellen clicking away, enthralled.

“And now,” Murdoch said, rising shakily, clutching Joshua’s hand, his face the color of wasting snow, “I’ve simply got to lie down.”

Ellen led them to a guest room, hastily spreading beach towels over the quilted cover before Joshua lowered him tenderly onto the bed. “Do you need anything?” he asked.

“Just let me close my eyes. Five minutes is all I need.”

Joshua waited until he had begun to snore before he joined the Markhams on the terrace again.

Ellen had been crying. “To look at him now,” she said, “and to remember what a talent he once was.”

“You promised me that you would pay off his contract,” Joshua said to Markham, “but you didn’t even mention it.”

“I don’t own the studio, Joshua. I have people to answer to there.”

“God damn you. God damn both of you. You’re not fit to shine his shoes.”

“Do you know he had a boy in his hotel room yesterday?” Markham charged. “He was with him all night.”

“I knew,” Ellen said, “for all his braggadocio, he couldn’t cope with women.”

“That wasn’t a boy, Bill, it was me.”

“Like fuck it was,” Markham said, just a hint of a wobble in his voice.

“Don’t worry. You’re not my type. You never were.” And, with a sweep of his arm, Joshua sent the champagne tray flying, glasses shattering against the flagstones.

“Those were my Baccarat glasses,” Ellen shrieked, fleeing for the house.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were in town for
Playboy?
Ashamed?” Markham asked.

“You’re rotten, Bill, always were.”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you why that prick Leopold needs you, Joshua. It has nothing whatsoever to do with your legendary skills. He’s financed by Canadian tax shelter money. In order to qualify, he has to have so much native content in his wretched films. It’s your Canadian name he wants on the script, that’s all. Mind you, any Canadian name will do. I think it’s worth a point-and-a-half under their quaint system. But in your particular case,” he said, rising from his chair, “that strikes me as about a point too high.”

Joshua surprised him with a not-very-satisfying right to the jaw, but it did knock Markham off balance, enabling Joshua to drive his shoulder into him, sending him sprawling backwards into the pool. Markham surfaced to see a crazed Joshua swinging a wrought-iron chair overhead. He immediately ducked again, avoiding it. Another chair went flying into the pool and then the table itself rolled over the edge, before Markham made it out of the water on the far side. He watched, heaving, as Joshua rolled a potted palm to the edge, kicking it over into the deep end, and then he ran for the house. Joshua kicked open the French doors, swept the jar of pickled eggs off the polished brass counter and smashed it against a wall. He was reaching for the Watney’s mirror when he saw Ellen standing there, hands on her hips. “Having fun?” she asked.