Selling Out (37 page)

On the other hand times had not just changed, time itself had seemingly been put on fast forward, like the speeded-up tapes on a video cassette recorder. Henry James was not just a tintype now, he was more like some ancient God, as remote as Zeus. Fitzgerald was a figure of legend, and the games and wars that meant so much to him now seemed closer to the life of Troy than of today's Los Angeles.

Maybe that's the sort of thing the Vees had in mind when they said the term “selling out” (which they hadn't even
heard
for ages) seemed “quaint” to them, a relic of the nineteen-fifties, like hula hoops and Ike buttons, a problem for that now primordial creature of the post-war American world, the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.

Perhaps they were right, perhaps Perry was needlessly flailing his conscience and letting outmoded cultural guilt get him down simply because he was trying to apply the standards of the past to the realities of the present. When he thought of it that way, he saw that there were damn good reasons for his taking on this assignment
besides
the money involved!

By doing this rewrite he could learn more about the craft of filmmaking, a craft he wanted to master. He'd be working with a successful producer—OK, so he wasn't the most intellectual or sophisticated of the new breed of movie moguls, but the bottom line was (remember?)
he got pictures made
. Besides, the reason Kling wanted
him
to take on this assignment was to bring some class to the project. Perry was getting the opportunity for the very reason that he was regarded as a
quality
writer. He could write quality dialogue—hell, that's what he was being hired to do! If Kling had wanted Harry the Hack he could easily have found hundreds of such eager robots, but no, he had purposely sought out a writer of quality. And he wanted the very best that Perry could deliver.

Despite this impressive accumulation of evidence, Perry felt a sudden yearning to talk it over with Jane. Maybe just because he was so used to doing that during the past five years. She seemed to have a knack for pointing out angles he hadn't observed, for alerting him to possible pitfalls he hadn't been aware of, and even for showing him positive aspects his own deliberations had overlooked. He even went and sat in front of the phone for a minute or so. Then he sighed, trying to imagine explaining to Jane the advantages of doing a rewrite job and the need for quality dialogue in a script about a psychic dog.

No.

She was too far away from the realities of the business, too far out of the picture. Maybe if she had stuck it out, had stayed here until he got it all together, she could have advised him as intelligently and sensitively about this as she had about so many other things. Of course, if he had been a little more intelligent and sensitive about her own feelings out here, had thought just a little about her own welfare instead of devoting total attention to his own, maybe she would be here now, beside him.

Damn. It was too late for that kind of thinking. Besides, it was just a cop-out. The fact was, Jane was simply too far away to be of help now. From clear across the country, in a farmhouse in Vermont, this whole thing would sound crazy. He was the one who was here, it was his own ass that was on the line, and he damn well better deal with it. Perry told himself it was time to stand on his own two feet and think for himself, anyway. He stood up and went to the refrigerator, throwing his shoulders back as he walked. He got out another beer and opened it, beginning to feel cheerful and confident.

The outdoor terrace of the Polo Lounge was the perfect place to celebrate. The colors of the clothes of the beautiful people (not just socially, they really looked physically beautiful, too, tan and sleek and perfectly proportioned) blended with the tropical blooms of the flowers, the stately green palms and the pink hotel, everything softly illumined by the warm sun.

Perry was back on his Perrier, the drink of success. The drink of people who were so together and confident they didn't need a drink. At least not at lunch. It made him feel crisp, clearheaded, concise.

“You look a lot better than last time,” Pru Vardeman said, no longer scrunched beneath her silk shawl but expansively throwing back her shoulders and tilting up her chin as she smiled on Perry and, at the same time, nodded acknowledgments and blew occasional kisses to actors, producers, directors and agents of note who were also having the pleasure of lunching here this lovely day. Vaughan, sticking to his personal style in Ivy League jacket and tie, raised his own Perrier to toast his pal.

“We've all come a long way from Harvard Square, Moss-back,” he said with a satisfied grin.

Perry laughed.

“From Mr. Bartley's Burger Cottage to the Polo Lounge!” he said.

Pru laughed too.

It was like old times.

At last.

The Vees were delighted at Perry's landing the job with Larman Kling, who they assured him had moved beyond his earlier horror flick and sci-fi stuff and gained high regard as an artist with the success of
Schtick
; but more important, was hot right now. This was not only good news for Perry but for the Vees too; if Perry had a feature credit under his belt it would make it much easier for Vaughan to eventually make “The Springtime Women.” Instead of being a handicap to a project Perry would be an important element once he had the feature credit in his cap.

“Oh, and I almost forgot,” Vaughan said. “I read that treatment you gave me. Not for me, but I think it might be just what Phil Clausen's been looking for. I hope you don't mind I sent it to him.”

“Huh? Hey, no, thanks, but he already passed on it.”

“Well, he mentioned that, but he thought he'd like to take a fresh look at it. Anyway, it can't hurt.”

“Hell no,” said Perry, shrugging loosely, relaxed, warm not only with the sun, but success.

He could feel a pleasant sensation, a sort of glow in the area between his stomach and his groin.

He was hot.

When Perry got back from lunch and called his service, instead of the familiar “All clear,” he had seven messages. It was as if the word of his being hot, a desirable person to call, had gone out through the atmosphere. There was a message to call his public relations person, who no doubt wanted to get his new deal in the trades as well as the atmosphere. Perry smiled, feeling glad he hadn't fired the guy out of fear of being broke. It was smalltime to try to cut corners and save a few bucks. “Don't think poor” was one of the vital rules of survival in this high-stakes game he was playing now—not just playing, but winning.

When he called Ravenna, her secretary got her right away. No delays, nothing about being in a meeting, when she was simply filing her nails, oh no. Not for a hot client. He hoped she had closed the deal so he could get right to work; he was anxious, eager, to get that sparkling dialogue onto the page, to establish the sha-boomlike pace of the story of the psychic dog. He had already begun to wonder if perhaps Ravenna, with her wily negotiating power, had even got him a little more than a hundred grand for the job; maybe a little sweetening of the pot, up to—say—one-twenty-five?

“
Darling
,” she cooed, “I think we have our deal.”

“Great,” Perry said, “how much?”

“Well, Ralph Stilleta—he's business affairs for Ursa Major—is a real hardass. He started at thirty, told me he was absolutely holding the line at thirty-five, but I got him to thirty-seven-fifty!
With
a guarantee on the back end of another five if it goes to film!

Perry was speechless for a moment. Had Ravenna confused him with some other client?

“I don't understand,” he said.

“What's that?”

“I don't understand. What's this shit about thirty-something? You said I ought to get a hundred.”

“Perry, I beg your pardon. I said no such thing. That's out of the question.”

“You, Ravenna Sharlow, did not tell me I ought to get a hundred grand for doing a feature? And isn't one of the whole points of my doing this to get a credit for a feature?

“Darling, this is a
re
write.”

“But it's a rewrite of a
feature
—and besides, it's not really a rewrite. Kling told me he wanted me to read the first script and then throw it away. Do what I want.”

“Darling?”

It was Ravenna's patient, instructive tone.

“Yes.”

“A rewrite is a rewrite is a rewrite.”

“You sound just like Larman Kling.”

There was some other successful person who said things in threes also, wasn't there? Oh—sure. Gertrude Stein. Perry had almost forgotten about her.

“I guess I have no choice,” Perry said.

“This is going to turn things around for you, sweets.”

“All right. I'll do it.”

Ravenna blew him a kiss through the phone.

Earlier, when Perry thought he was going to make at least a hundred grand on this, he had called Liz Caddigan and asked her to dinner. Now he called back and canceled. He figured under the circumstances he would only be thirty-seven-and-a-half-percent effective. Liz would probably be able to ascertain the exact figures of his new deal.

He called Ronnie Banks. Maybe a little hit of coke would bring him up again.

XIV

He didn't tell anyone but his agent he was moving to the Valley.

Before he came to Los Angeles that name always conjured up in his mind bucolic scenes from the lovely old movie
How Green Was My Valley
, and the lilting folk song “Down in the Valley”—gentle meadows and babbling brooks, heather and fern and sparkling pond. But here it meant the San Fernando Valley, a flat, featureless, anonymous expanse of sun-baked tracts, a grid of endless, seemingly identical streets of Dairy Queens and dry cleaners, used-car lots and Laundromats, storefronts with secondhand furniture sitting out front on the sidewalk, cement-block bars with slits for windows.

Of course there were nice places in the Valley, expensive places.

“The Valley is really coming up these days,” Ravenna said encouragingly. “Have you seen the new boutiques on Ventura Boulevard?”

Perry couldn't help thinking of the Vardemans' snide references to the Valley, locating it on their own social map.

Pru said the Valley was where one went to get inexpensive maids and baby-sitters. It was silly to seek such help in Beverly Hills when the rates were so much better in the Valley.

Vaughan had dismissed a novel once that was being promoted as “an inside peek at Hollywood” by protesting, “that's not about Hollywood, for God sake, it's about failed television writers who live in the Valley.”

Perry wasn't really living there, of course, he was simply staying with Ronnie Banks while he put his condo on the market. He was renting it out at a loss—there was no way he could get the three grand a month that the mortgage cost—but he couldn't concentrate on writing while realtors and prospective buyers roamed in and out. Ronnie invited him to come out and split the modest rent of $400 a month, using the fold-out bed in the living room, and it worked out fine.

It was good for Perry, not being alone right now. He and Ronnie had become real pals. They went out for pizza or Chinese food at night, drank, smoked some grass, occasionally did a line or so of coke, talked about the theater, women, art, you name it.

The only problem was the goddam script.

“So how is it going, are you into the flow, can you feel the flow, do you know?”

“Larman, great to talk to you!” Perry said, pressing his hand on his temples as if that might help force out a positive, upbeat response. He glanced at his typewriter and the card table set up beside it with his paper and what there was of the script so far. Then he turned away, as if not actually looking at the script while he spoke would make it easier to tell the necessary lies.

The fact was he only had three pages.

He had worked every day for two weeks and he only had three pages. Oh, he had written many more but he had torn them all up. After a fabulous start, it seemed as if the whole thing had shut down on him, like an iron gate.

“It's going great!” he shouted into the phone. “Yeah, the flow is flowing, I mean it's growing, growing every day, I just can't stop it flowing!”

“I can't wait to see, when can I see, can you bring some pages up to me?”

“Oh, well yes, hell yes, just give me about a week, another week, to put what I got together and get some more!”

What the hell else could he say?

Larman Kling's secretary came on the line and made an appointment for Perry to come up the following Wednesday at ten in the morning. Larman wanted to read the pages while Perry was right there with him.

Holy God.

He had to do something. He had to get words on paper by a week from tomorrow. Whatever he had to do to make that happen, he would do it.

FADE IN

EXT—JOHNSON HOUSE—DAY

A small yellow frame house on an ordinary block in an ordinary American midwestern town. There is an elm tree in the front yard. A toy red wagon is sitting beside it. DANNY, a boy about ten years old, freckle-faced and natural in muddy jeans and a St. Louis Cardinals T-shirt and Little League baseball cap worn backwards, comes out of the house, looks around, puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles. There is no response, and DANNY now cups his hands to his mouth, closes his eyes, and tilts his head back, calling as loud as he can.

DANNY

Here Spot, here Spot, here Spot!

Perry read the page over, smiling. He stood up, clapped his hands, and stuck a clenched fist in the air, triumphant.

He felt like a Rocky of writing!

The chips were down, but he was going to come through to glorious victory, he was going to win in the end, against all the odds. On the verge of being broke, abandoned by his wife (she had become increasingly villainous in his self-explanation of their separation, a deserter who left the ship at the first signs of a leak), the great but unappreciated literary man was relegated by the crass commercial creeps of Hollywood to a low-paying rewrite of a turkey script about a psychic dog, conceived by a hysterical producer who seemed to be a mad combination of the Marx Brothers and Gertrude Stein.