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Froug considered that. “What about a love-in?” he countered. “I’m very interested in kids. I’m executive director of Community Action for Fact and Freedom and we helped negotiate peace on the Sunset Strip when the kids rioted up there.”

Monash shook his head. “The problem with a love-in is that it’s not mobile enough in camera terms. Look, we don’t have to say the Century Plaza, but that’s what it’s all about.”

“Okay,” Froug said.

“And we’ve got to make the situation with the police chief more venal. Someone should have his hand in the till. We need a crime, because I don’t think the demonstration will fill out much in terms of plot. You get a crime, you get some pressures between Judd and the principals. And a crime works in the mytholand of TV.” Monash ran his fingers around the neck of his turtleneck sweater. “We might even have Judd lose this one.”

“Has he lost one yet?” Froug said.

Monash shook his head. “No, but I think the time has come. We can’t have every case turn on, ‘Yes, Mrs. Mazurki, but is this the prescription for your glasses?’ ”

Froug laughed. “The name of the game today is race riots and police brutality and we’re sitting here doing stories on crooked cops.”

“Don’t fight it.” Monash shrugged. “There’s one more thing. You got any good stories left over from your
Sam Benedict
days that we could steal? We’re hurting.”

“Sure, no problem,” Froug said. The suggestion did not seem to surprise him.

“You got any, we’ll disguise them,” Monash said. “Change a him to her, a gun to a knife, you know. But
we are really hard up for stories. I just bootlegged a copy of a
Defenders
script on the M’Naghten Rule to see how they handled it.”

“What’s mine is yours,” Froug said. He stood up and yawned. “I’ll go through the files to see what I have and then I’ll call you in a couple of days about the editor and the police chief.”

As the summer wore on, the Studio was more and more convinced that in
Valley of the Dolls
, which was still being scored and edited, it had its biggest non-roadshow grosser since
Peyton Place
. In its preliminary estimates, the Studio’s sales department predicted a gross of $20 million. The record hard- and soft-cover sales of
Valley of the Dolls
had made its author, Jacqueline Susann, a celebrity in her own right. So sanguine was the Studio about the box office prospects of
Dolls
that it was anxious to capitalize on the author’s celebrity by tying up the film rights for her unfinished new novel,
The Love Machine
. Jacqueline Susann’s business affairs were overseen by her husband, a shrewd former television producer named Irving Mansfield, who had a genius for promoting his wife,
Valley of the Dolls
and
The Love Machine
, in whatever order the circumstances dictated. The unprecedented success of
Dolls
had been as much a surprise to the Mansfields as to anyone else, and they were slightly perturbed that they had let the film rights of the book go to the Studio for relatively so little money—$85,000 down with an escalation clause that brought the final price up to $200,000. The Mansfields were convinced that if they had waited until the book had climbed to the top of the bestseller lists, they could have received a minimum of $450,000, along with a share of the film’s profits. With this experience in mind, they were determined not to let
The Love Machine
go for anything less than top dollar. Though Jacqueline Susann did not yet have a completion date for her new book, Fox was already jockeying to see the manuscript before any other studio in Hollywood, and was willing to pay handsomely for the privilege. One morning David Brown, the Studio’s vice president in charge of story operations, called George Chasin, Jacqueline Susann’s West Coast agent, and sounded him out on the possibility of Fox’s getting first look at
The Love Machine
. Brown’s inducement was $125,000. Rather than going directly to Jacqueline Susann, this sum would be paid to Mansfield to produce a picture mutually acceptable to himself and the Studio. If on the basis of its first look, Fox subsequently bought
The Love Machine
, Mansfield would receive an additional $125,000 to produce this picture also. The Studio’s offer of a quarter of a million dollars to Mansfield was only a sweetener; it would not be applied to the ultimate purchase price of
The Love Machine
(a figure estimated as high as $1 million). As a final lollipop, Brown told Chasin that if the Studio bought the book, it would also cut the Mansfields in on 5 per cent of the film profits on
Valley of the Dolls
.

“There’s not another studio in a position to make that kind of offer, George,” Brown said, sucking on his pipe. “We think
Dolls
is going to be a big one.”

When Brown hung up the telephone, he brooded for a moment, tamping down the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe with a book of matches. “Agents are so noncommittal,” he said finally. “He said he’d think about it and get back to us.”

Brown rang for his secretary and asked her to get Irving Mansfield at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The Mansfields were scheduled to leave for New York within the hour.

“Irving,” Brown said, when Mansfield came on the phone. “I just wanted to say safe trip. It was good seeing you, Irving. It’s always good seeing you and Jackie.” He leaned back in his chair and let a puff of smoke curl toward the ceiling. “I just talked to George Chasin, Irving, and made a little proposal to him. I’m sure he’ll be getting in touch with you. Well, have a good trip back, and Helen and I will get together with you and Jackie in New York. Friends, Irving, friends. It transcends business, Irving.”

Several days later, Owen McLean and Jack Baur walked over to Stage 2 where the New Talent Program was headquartered. They were scheduled to watch a young neophyte actress test for the program. The Studio had started the talent school in the chimerical hope that a roster of contract players could reverse the spiraling demands of the major independent stars. Talent scouts combed the U.S. looking for faces and figures. There were approximately twenty-five applicants to the school every week, and of these the Studio auditioned five and selected one. The chosen were signed to an exclusive
long-term contract; the initial salary was $175 a week, and at the beginning of the contract, there were options every six months. Once accepted, the students attended classes on voice, dancing, mime, action and acting techniques. The school was run by Pamela Danova, a diva-shaped European actress and voice teacher, and Curt Conway, a veteran Broadway actor, but responsibility for final selection to the school rested with McLean and Baur.

By the door of the stage was a sign that said, “Remember, An Actor Killed Lincoln,” and on the bulletin board a stern instruction sheet prepared by Pamela Danova and given to each new student:

The stage was bare save for a few props. McLean and Baur took chairs between Conway and Pamela Danova.
The girl being tested had worked up a scene from
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. She was a pert young thing in an orange miniskirt and matching orange arm bracelets. The actor appearing in the scene with her was already a member of the program. He was wearing chino pants and an open-necked button-down shirt. The girl sat on the prop couch, her legs hiked up underneath her. The actor did not have much to do in the scene, but he had been in the school long enough to know how to upstage the girl. He prowled behind her on the couch, where she couldn’t see him, picking up things, patting his hair, leaning on a chair almost as if he were doing pushups. The girl knew something was going on behind her, but she could not destroy the mood of the scene and look back. She played with her arm bracelet and ad-libbed a giggle after one of his lines. When the scene was over, she reached back over the couch and with a large smile squeezed the actor’s hand.

“Cute scene,” Baur said.

“But I couldn’t hear you,” McLean said to the girl.

She smiled nervously. Then she giggled. “I’ve got a little voice.”

McLean chewed on his eyeglasses noncommittally. “Thanks, kids,” he said.

The girl lingered before she left the room, adjusting her arm bracelets, flipping idly through a script that someone had left lying around. No one spoke and finally she left.

“She won’t photograph well,” McLean said.

“Didn’t you think she had a certain … gamine charm?” Pamela Danova said.

“From a certain angle, she’s got lousy teeth,” McLean
said. “But I liked the boy. He’s a strange-looking kid. A lot of balls. He looks like he might be dangerous.”

“Unfortunately, acting ability is not the primary requirement for pictures,” Curt Conway said a few afternoons later. He has long gray hair and he was inhaling deeply on a cigarette. The New Talent contractees were all in tights, bathed in sweat, going through a dancing lesson. They danced to themselves in a mirror, the dance director’s voice striking like a metronome. “One, two, three, four and
TURN
,” he said, “… and Kevin-Coates-you-turn-on-your-left-foot.” Conway absorbed the scene and walked back into his office, lighting another cigarette from the stub of the first. “I’m still limited to the beautiful people,” he said. “They’ve got a Tyrone Power tradition at this Studio and that’s what they’re looking for.” He raised his hands in resignation. “Now Christ, you see someone today who looks like a young Tyrone Power and what’s your first reaction? He’s got to be some kind of fag. Let’s face it, it’s hard to identify with the beautiful people. It’s the kids who buy the theater tickets, kids from fourteen to twenty-five. And the people the kids identify with are Belmondo, Streisand, McQueen—the people Jack Warner used to call the ‘ugs.’ They’ve got the sense of anarchy, right, and that’s what the kids like. Streisand, she’s an ug. Well, she’s an ug who’s getting a million bucks from this studio to do
Hello, Dolly!
” He waved his arm in the general direction of the dancing lesson. “You think any of those beautiful people out there are ever going to get a million bucks a picture?” Conway shook his head slowly.

“Someone who’s not beautiful isn’t conventional,” he said. “Out here a beautiful girl is just that—she’s got the long hair, the boobs, the nice legs, the suntan. It’s more original not to be beautiful. But you try telling the Studio that.” He snubbed out his cigarette. “These kids, though, they think they can con me, as long as I’ve been in the business. There was this one girl, Janine Something, she came in one day for a reading. Wanted to get in the program. Her agent was gushing all over me. Well, she wasn’t very good and I gave her the old routine, ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ As it happens, I had to go to the hospital for an operation. I get out of the hospital and her agent calls and I don’t return the call. Then one day I get a letter from this Janine. ‘Dear Mr. Conway,’ it says. ‘I’m so glad you’re out of the hospital and on the road to recovery. I’m especially glad because I’ve just had some bad news in my family. My father was in the hospital and they sent him home.’ Etc., etc. Cancer of the pancreas, I think it was. Inoperable. And then she says, ‘Every night my father looks at me and says, I just want you taken care of, Janine. If you got that Fox contract, I could die happy.’ ” Conway ran his fingers through his hair. “How do you like them apples?” he said.

The following week, a young actor in the New Talent Program sauntered into the commissary with his new agent, a dark, feral young man scarcely older than his client, very junior in the agency, just a few months out of the mail room. The agent headed for the producers’ dining room, but the head waitress steered him to a table in the far corner of the room. Annoyed by his
table, the agent started to move back across the commissary, then thought better of it and slipped down next to his client. He snapped an order of cottage cheese and lettuce to the waitress and then bit angrily on a piece of ice.

“We don’t take any crap from this studio or any other studio,” the agent said. Some of the ice had begun to melt and drip out the corner of his mouth. He berated the waitress for not having a napkin at the table, and when she stared coolly at him, he finally wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “When you sign with us, we call the shots,” he said. “We don’t think you should test, you don’t test. We don’t think you should read, you don’t read. They take you on our terms and they don’t like it, we take you someplace else.”

The young actor spread some butter on a roll. “I like it,” he said. “I really like it.”

Early in August the Studio began preparing for a meeting of eighty of its foreign distributors and publicity men from all over the world. The purpose of the gathering was to expose the distributors to the Studio’s upcoming pictures that were to be released during the next year. Planning for the convention was left in the hands of the publicity department, which began to resemble an isolated country convent getting ready for the annual visit of the auxiliary bishop. A full schedule of events was evolving. Public Relations had prepared a brochure for the conventioneers with a combination of firm and breezy advice (“You are lodged at the Century Plaza Hotel. No COD’s, please, and watch the long distance
calls.… The hospitality room is Joel Coler’s suite on the nineteenth floor, where the advice on all matters is a lot more free-flowing and less reliable than the liquor”). On Stage 2, the actresses and actors in the New Talent School daily rehearsed a variety show prepared especially for the exhibitors; the show consisted of scenes from Fox pictures shooting or in preparation interspersed with patter songs highlighting Studio successes past and present. A trip to Disneyland was on the distributors’ itinerary, and arrangements were made for French, German and Spanish-speaking interpreters to guide the delegates over the Matterhorn, through the Jungle Ride and on the Submarine Trip. The final event of the convention was to be a cocktail and dinner party, catered by Chasen’s, to be held in the elaborately landscaped garden of director George Cukor. Cukor was just lending his house; he did not plan to attend the party. It was agreed in preliminary discussions to invite only the girls in the New Talent Program to Cukor’s; the boys in the Program were scratched unless they had featured billing in a forthcoming Studio production. As a result of a Studio directive, producers of all pictures currently shooting were putting together trailers to show the exhibitors. Darryl Zanuck himself was scheduled to make his first appearance at the Studio since his takeover four years before. A few days before his arrival, posters went up around the lot welcoming the delegates. Each poster showed a waving American flag, a photograph of Darryl Zanuck wearing sunglasses, and the words: “A Salute to the President.”