Juice (6 page)

Well, damn Harrison anyway, he thought. We can do without him. He's not on contract, and if he were we could buy it up. This is still my organization. Obsolete?

He laughed aloud.

Obsolete? I can hire and fire. When you can still do that, you're not obsolete. Replace Harrison? Any time. RCA, CBS, they'd all come over to me for the right price. And if Harrison's right, if I'd need more than one, I could buy up two or three. The whole damn thing's been slipping away from me. I've let them all forget that it's mine. Fifty years. Half a century. That's a lot of work. It takes a man. Not a college boy. A man.

When the telephone rang Arthur Rhein was sitting alone in the kitchen of his two-story, ten-room penthouse apartment. He was in his shirt sleeves, and by the bright light of a large frosted bulb over the sink he was swabbing the last trickle of dressing from a wooden salad bowl. Beside the bowl, shadowed, stood a glass of bubbling imported ale.

“Then,” John James Davis opined, his left index extended in minatory rigidity, “then the cowards took over.”

Sebastian (who had apparently no surname and who owned Là-Bas, in the cocktail lounge of which John James Davis was holding forth) waited in fascination. He glanced quickly at Davis' inamorata, who was, he realized gratefully, one of the two or three women of his acquaintance who could correctly be considered more plush than the room she now graced, a room which alone had cost Sebastian seventy-five thousand dollars. The woman, a Mrs. Newbery, was smiling slightly; in her eyes was adoration spiced freely with affectionate ridicule.

Davis slumped back, swirled his whisky, and sipped. “No,” he said. “Horrible. Gutenberg opened the floodgates. Removed the last barrier. Destroyed privacy forever. Exposed us to the charlatan, the pedant, the minor poet that lie in every man. And removed him from our reach. Impeded—terminated, really—the natural process of vengeance, upon which, quite reasonably, aesthetics had previously been based.”

“You're handsome, but hopelessly addled,” Mrs. Newbery said. She sat—delectable, a figurine—on the brown leather banquette. Davis, large and angular, in a club chair, faced her across the table. Sebastian was at his left, her right, in another club chair.

“And you,” Davis told her, “are devious. You know very well that it makes no difference to me what you think of my brain. A compliment to my looks enslaves me. You, on the other hand, being entirely and impossibly beautiful, are thoroughly flattered, to the point of bemusement, when I give you credit for normal intelligence. We are both, in other words, cliché personalities, taking our virtues for granted and responding only to sweet denials of our deficiencies. Which means simply that like everyone else we can exist only in an atmosphere of genteel deceit. When I tell Sebastian that he is possibly the best restaurateur on the West Coast, he shrugs; he is piqued at my geographical restriction. When I tell him he dresses beautifully, he smiles broadly, his eyes sparkle, and by some alchemy his tweed becomes visibly more luxuriant.”

Sebastian smiled broadly; his eyes sparkled.

Mrs. Newbery smiled. Davis caught his breath; he seemed to glitter at her. He was six feet three and dark; he was always intense; his concentration upon her was almost palpable. He wore a dark gray suit which had once been sharkskin and had then, Mrs. Newbery would have said, been Davisized: walked in, sat in, slept in, cleaned, pressed, impregnated with dust, rain, smog, coffee, spirits, ashes, until it was now simply exhausted cloth. With it he wore a light gray shirt, the collar slightly open; the effect was optimistically completed by a bright-yellow foulard tie spattered with muddy red diamonds. His hair was a mixed black-and-gray, his skin tanned, his eyes pouched, his nose long and straight (it gave him a look of intensity and confidence), his mouth sensitive, his jaw long (it gave him the look of a predatory carnivore). His eyes were a deep and expressive brown. In another face they might have been weak, beseeching eyes; in Davis' face they were almost hypnotically compelling.

Mrs. Newbery was also dark: black hair, tanned skin, blue eyes. Her face was a beautiful face; men would want her or not, but they would not deny her beauty. Davis, whose idea of beauty had been flexible and generous, more realistic than abstract, had taken her face now as his gauge of perfection and had set about trying to explain beauty. His answers were unsatisfactory: Mrs. Newbery was more than the sum of her parts. Davis was a lawyer, a trial lawyer; his mind was analytic and his tastes esoteric. In the presence of what he considered completion, perfection, virtual flawlessness, the unfragmented woman, he was helpless. But not, of course, speechless.

“Which is all right,” he went on, recovering, “as long as it's man to man, or—” with a slight ironic bow—“man to woman. But movable type has standardized—which is to say, has made accessible to those who don't come by it naturally and have no feeling for its proper use—even flattery, so that the serious
seduttore,
the artist in human communication, the maestro of the honeyed or stinging word, finds that his sharpest, most finely wrought creations have either been staled by a previous and similar, but awkward and inferior, utterance or been appropriated by the generality. The man who first said, humbly, when ordered out by an irate and overpuritanical matron, ‘Your command is my wish,' had a good line—”

“Who was it?” Mrs. Newbery asked.

“John James Davis,” he said. “Thank you, my dear. I have since seen the remark in three magazines and a gossip column, attributed to two film stars rapidly approaching geriatric impotence, a screen writer whose distaste for women is notorious, and, of all things, a former United States Senator, long deceased, who was alleged to have flung—flung, mind you, which would have been brutally tasteless—the words at the wife of a President of the United States, also long deceased. In eighteenth-century France—early eighteenth, of course, movable type existed, but its uses had not yet been so thoroughly perverted. The attribution would have been just and correct. I would have been named chevalier, Sieur Jean-Jacques,
sans peur et sans reproche
; all salons Would have been open to me. Louis the Fifteenth would have fed me twice a week.”

“I don't think it was very funny,” she said.

“You're a woman,” he said. “The outrage strikes you, but not the spirit.”

“You see,” she said to Sebastian. “In his moments of white heat the truth escapes him. I
am
stupid, or at least he believes it.
Belle, mais pas spirituelle,
I believe Louis the Fifteenth would have said.”

“Shucks,” Davis said, and then, with irritation: “May I interrupt for a moment?”

“I'm terribly sorry,” she said.

“My point was—” he disregarded the slight flare of her nostrils—“that diffusion necessarily implies dilution. That—”

“The enlightened man, you know,” she said to Sebastian. “What was it,
éclaircissement? Aufklaerung?
I must tell you an anecdote of—”

“I beg your pardon,” Davis interrupted furiously. “You have committed
lèse-avocat.
Do you disapprove of me in general, or only for this afternoon?”

“Hold my hand,” she said, offering it.

He took it. “Obvious,” he said harshly.
“Ad hominem.
Not worthy of—it burns,” he went on softly. “Sebastian, go wash a glass.”

Sebastian obliged, with a benedictory smile.

“This is entirely irrelevant,” he said. “But not immaterial, and certainly not incompetent.”

She grinned frankly. “You baby. You dope.”

He withdrew his hand. “I really must go. I have the most fearful headache.”

“From
lèse-avocat?
You should have cirrhosis. The medievals located the judicial function in the liver.”

John James Davis foundered in admiration. “Now how did you know that?”

“I read it in three magazines and a gossip column,” she said.

The rout was complete.

“You did that to me when we met,” he said gently. “I'm afraid I love you.”

She looked down and shook her head. “Not now.”

“All right,” he said. “But some day.”

Davis, who called himself a trial lawyer, was more: he was
the
trial lawyer. Among his three dozen major clients he had defended seven whose acquittal guaranteed him relative immortality and absolute solvency.

Four of these were defendants in Hollywood paternity trials.

Two were celebrated creative geniuses who stood accused of
crimes passionels
—i.e., assault and battery on men who had threatened their wives' honor. The first of the hapless plaintiffs was delivery man for a fashionable victualer—truffles, of course, potted breast of South African guinea hen, jugged hare, imported Nova Scotia smoked salmon (which Davis, during the trial, referred to constantly and dryly as belly lox)—whom an associate producer forty pounds heavier had dashingly and somewhat drunkenly pounded, diced, and garnished, having found him in the kitchen after midnight lecturing on cuts of beef with the aid of a live model, the producer's wife. Davis, in his defense, played freely on the phrase “midnight deliveries”; and he made it so clear that the lady had resisted with all the virtue of which she was capable (the ambiguity of that phrase delighted him) that the plaintiff, after losing his case, had almost been remanded for assault of another kind. Davis, who knew that justice was a titillating farce but felt no real amusement in gross injustice, saw to it that the charge was not pressed, collected forty thousand dollars, used part of it to pay, anonymously, the young man's medical fees, and closed the case, “cocking a snook,” as he said a few years later to Mrs. Newbery—“I'm not sure what that means, but the British know—at the blind goddess, who is raped regularly in this land, but knows better than to bring an action.”

The second of these two defenses was similar: a triangle, with the
seigneur
beating the liver and lights out of the aspirant, and capping his performance with a bullet along the fourth and fifth ribs. Here complications existed: Davis' Penelope was notoriously generous, his Antinoüs a matinee idol, and his Ulysses an unabashed wanderer. Davis could not insult the court, or the jury, by claiming injured innocence for the lady, who had hampered him from the beginning by her indifference to the fates of the two gentlemen. Nor could he claim blind fury, much less temporary insanity, for the outraged husband, who had previously shrugged off an imposing series of similar contretemps. Nor could he point up (though it was true) the habitual and irresponsible philandering of the plaintiff, who was, after all, Dutch husband to twenty or thirty million American women; by destroying him Davis would lose forever what credit or reputation he had with the man's studio, and one misstep would see Davis ruined: slander, libel, defamation of character, invasion of privacy.

Davis did it the easy way, and enjoyed himself immensely. He invited the three principals to a private meeting. There, in the presence of no witnesses, Davis catalogued their sins, naming names, specifying dates, giving particular weight to the “mistakes,” the socially embarrassing adventures: aging stars, drunks, teen-age boys, under-age girls, the occasional
partouse.
Within a minute the three were alarmed; within two, terrified; within five, helplessly racked by laughter. The case was settled that morning; there were interviews, statements, photographs, embraces. Davis was thanked personally, in dark corners at gay parties, by two heads of studio (who had footed the “research” bill), three executive producers, and two ravaged agents. He celebrated with a two-week trip to Hawaii, where he was virtuous and bored.

John James Davis' seventh notorious client was Kuno Landauer, the composer, whose scores were Hollywood's only challenge to
Nevsky
and
Kijé
: the imagination of a Stravinsky, the modernity of a Milhaud, the lyricism of a Prokofiev. Landauer, the little old man in shabby, somehow Franz Joseph, clothes; Landauer, who mangled cheap cigars; Landauer, who wiped Béarnaise off his vest, sat down to do what his hostess had risked his gaucherie against, and lost himself, forgot the party, the guests, the hostess; at one-thirty, when the last guest had succeeded in the last hypocrisy and left for home or a night club, Landauer was still at the piano exploring the mysteries of Charles Ives, having paused only to commandeer a bottle of Vieux Marc. Landauer, who was as much of a mystery as society ever tolerated: a man with no talk, no smiles, no spectacular eccentricities, no vices, who lived among musical instruments, books in several languages, bulky photograph albums, careless heaps of records; who came punctually to the studio and returned punctually to his home; who was the despair of his housekeeper (as she was of Landauer; he despised her for her notions of order, regularity, and corporeal ease; when she died, he told Davis later, he had composed a short choral movement, four voices, on Schopenhauer's words,
“Obit anus, abit onus”
); who seemed to have no friends, but received, and answered, some three hundred letters a year; who was never nostalgic for Europe, which he had once called “r-rotten and dead,” but never happy in America, which he had once called “alive but r-rotten”; who invariably lost his glasses early in the evening so that when you finally had his attention his face was so intense, his amblyopia so recklessly unpredictable, that conversation became impossible; whose pronouncements on his peers and betters had won him occasional space in national magazines and, more frequently, vitriolic letters from music students everywhere (“
The Magic Flute
is a fable for Boy Scouts, set to music for Moses,” “The Marschallin is the only woman in all opera whom an intelligent man could love,” “
Don Giovanni
is the only valid ‘protest' art I have ever seen or heard”).

Landauer, at the age of sixty-six, had stabbed to death the sixteen-year-old immigrant orphan boy who had replaced his housekeeper. Within twenty-four hours his acquaintances had made their assumptions, tried the case, and mourned his passing. Within another twenty-four the newspapers had done the same. Davis had been vacationing in Mexico; his first knowledge of the crime was a telegram from a studio executive who had panicked. When Davis reached Los Angeles he found that his services were not, after all, required; the studio had dissociated itself from the composer. But it was too late. Davis' curiosity had been fully roused; without knowing it, he had committed himself to Landauer's defense.