The Boy Who Never Grew Up (4 page)

“Sounds wonderful,” I observed.

“It is wonderful,” he enthused.

“So what’s your problem?”

He stared at me. I stared back at him. That’s one of the things I am best at. He sipped his coffee. He cleared his throat. “If Pennyroyal gets half of Bedford Falls in her divorce settlement, she’s made it clear she intends to sell out immediately—to Panorama City. Schlom again. I hear he’s offering her $150 million. A sweetheart deal—she’ll get her own unit there and everything. And Schlom will own half of our studio.”

“Making him your partner.”

“Not for long, if he can help it. Once Schlom gets half of Bedford Falls he’ll stop at nothing to get the other half. He wants to gobble us up. Desperately.”

“Does Pennyroyal realize this?”

“I’ve tried to explain it to her, but it doesn’t seem to sink in. She’s in over her head.”

“You can’t convince her to accept cash in lieu of half the studio?”

“There is no cash, Hoagy. At least not that kind. Matthew sank his entire fortune into Bedford Falls. Other than his house, it’s all he owns. He and the bank. And the overhead is huge. The bank loan, the payroll, insurance, taxes. We rent out the sound stages, but that barely dents it. Matthew keeps it afloat himself. He’s our cash flow machine. Channels all of the profits from his movies and merchandising back into the studio. Twenty-eight million last year alone.”

“And this year?”

“This year he didn’t do quite so well,” Shelley replied tactfully.

“I see.” Now I understood why he wanted Matthew to make a movie with fuzzy aliens.

“Someday soon, we’ll be able to stand on our own,” Shelley vowed bravely. “I’m sure of it. We’ll make it. But right now he’s personally keeping us afloat.”

“You don’t own a piece of the studio yourself?”

“It belongs to him,” he said, with no trace of bitterness. “I earn a nice salary, and I’ve already made all the money my family will ever need. We’re also taken care of in case anything should happen to him. Half of Bedford Falls goes to Shelley and me, half to Georgie. Pennyroyal was to control Georgie’s half until he turned twenty-one, but I changed Matthew’s will the day she walked out. Shelley and I control it now.”

“Why is Schlom so interested in Bedford Falls? Because you pose a threat to him?”

“Because we’re an asset. If he takes us over, he makes Panorama City Communications even more attractive than it already is.”

“To whom?”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Who do you think?”

I poured myself more coffee and sat back in my chair. “Are we talking foreign investors, here? Pacific Rim, perhaps?”

“We are,” he informed me, gravely.

The selling of America. The business pages had been full of little else lately. One of the news magazines had gone so far as to run a picture of the Statue of Liberty on its cover adorned with a For Sale sign. This was no mere gossip column war I was walking into. This was bigger. Much bigger.

I said, “You’d better tell me the rest.”

“It’s getting harder and harder to make a movie,” he began. “The average cost has tripled in the last ten years—up to thirty million. That’s the
average
. Pictures like
Dick Tracy
and
Terminator 2
actually ended up costing a
hundred
mil by the time they finished marketing them. Revenues, meanwhile, have flattened out. All of the studios, no matter how big they are, are in desperate need of fresh capital. That means globalization. Four of the seven majors have already been bought up by foreign corporations. They’re suckers for the Hollywood mystique. They love it. Rupert Murdoch, who’s Australian, has bought Fox. Pathé, an Italian company, has bought MGM-UA. And the Japanese electronics giants are squabbling among themselves over the rest. Sony buys Columbia for $5 billion, so Matsushita turns right around and buys MCA for $6.6. And now their third biggest hardware empire, Murakami, wants to take over Panorama for who knows how much—that means Panorama City Studios
and
their theme park in Orlando, their TV production company, record company, cable system, publishing house … If Schlom can deliver them Bedford Falls on top of all that—even better. They’ll own the rights to all of Matthew’s movies then. They love Matthew in Japan. I hear Murakami wants to build a
Yeti
theme park in Osaka. It’ll be a major draw for them. Big time.”

“What’s Schlom’s stake in this?”

“He’s Panorama’s single largest shareholder. He personally stands to pull down $350 million on the deal in stock. Plus get a megacontract to keep on running the studio. He’ll swing the biggest dick in town, no question. So will the guy who’s brokering the deal. And guess who that is? Guess who is serving as the go-between?”

“Abel Zorch?”

“Doink—Penny’s lawyer. Who happens to be very tight with Schlom. And also happens to speak fluent Japanese. See how all the pieces fit together now?”

“Neatly.”

“So you can appreciate the position we’re in.”

“I can—you’re fucked.”

He puffed out his cheeks again. “It’s true. We are. Unless …”

“Unless what?”

“Unless Matthew and Pennyroyal somehow get back together.” He looked across the table at me pleadingly. “They have to patch things up, Hoagy. They just have to.”

“You’re not asking me to write his book for him. You’re asking me to save his marriage.”

“And his studio,” he admitted. “And all of the people who depend on it.” He sighed and ran a chubby hand over his face. “Maybe I’m asking too much.”

“You can drop the maybe.”

“It’s just that … there are no secrets in the film business. Everyone in town knows exactly what’s happening to us. No one’s bringing us any new projects—their agents are advising them not to. And the banks won’t finance any of our go projects. Not until this thing is settled. Matthew’s new movie is the only thing we’ve got going, and that’s coming out of his own pocket. All I can do is sit around, waiting for the ax to fall. I feel so totally helpless.” His eyes welled up. Again with the waterworks. He swiped at them with his napkin. “Maybe … maybe it is too late for us. Maybe we’re history. Whatever happens, it’s not your problem. I didn’t mean to lay it on you. I’m sorry. Really, I am. You write books. Good books. Write Matthew one. That’s all I ask.” He wadded up the napkin and laid it in the ashtray. “Will you do it? Please?”

I got to my feet, rousing Lulu. “Anything else I should know?”

His whole face lit up. He looked like Benjamin when it did. “Yeah. It was a hundred and seven in L.A. yesterday. The Santa Ana winds are blowing.”

“How nice of them.” I picked up my trench coat and hat and started inside.

“One other thing, Hoagy,” Shelley said nervously.

I stopped. There was always one other thing. I waited.

“Do you know how to duck?” he asked.

“Why?”

“Because you may get caught in the cross fire.”

“Oh, that.” I put on my hat and grinned at him. “Not to worry. I can see them just fine, but they can’t see me at all. I’m a ghost, remember?”

Not that I ever thought I would be.

Then again, I don’t suppose anyone purposely sets out to become an invisible man. Let’s face it—on the human dignity scale, ghosting ranks somewhere between mud wrestling and writing speeches for Dan Quayle. But it does finance my fiction, which is how I get my true, unbridaled jollies. And I am ideally suited for it. In fact, I happen to be the best. Three bestselling celebrity memoirs to my noncredit, as well as someone else’s bestselling novel. Not that the three memoirs weren’t what you’d call fiction, too. A memoir, after all, is an exercise in self-deception and self-glorification. People remember things the way they want to remember them. And celebrities are by nature fictitious creations. “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,” the great star once acknowledged. “
I
want to be Cary Grant.” My background as a world-class novelist comes in real handy. So does my own former celebrity. I know how to handle stars. The lunch pail ghosts don’t. They treat them like rational, intelligent human beings. I know better.

There is, however, a pitfall to my second career. Pretty big one, too. As a novelist, the greatest hazard I face is being called a no-talent bozo in the
New York Times Book Review
. Ghosting is a good deal scarier. Memoirs are about secrets, past and present. My job is to dig them up. The problem is there’s usually someone around who wants those dirty little secrets to stay buried, and will go to great lengths to see that they do. As a consequence, I’ve been shot at a number of times, punched, kicked, drugged, and suffocated—almost. And I can’t even begin to tell you what’s happened to Lulu. I haven’t been killed yet, but a lot of people around me have. This part of the job I’m not suited for. But I can’t seem to avoid it. Trouble has this way of following me around. I think it’s my personality. I figured I should warn you about it in case you’re an aging film star who is thinking of hiring me. Think again. Or in case you’re a young, ambitious writer who figures ghosting might be an easy way to make a shitload of money. It isn’t. Not even maybe.

I also don’t need the competition. So back off. I mean it.

I
FLEW OUT TWO DAYS LATER ON BEDFORD FALLS’
own Boeing 727 jet. Most studios have their own. Part of the image. The most important thing to remember about the movie business, an old-time director once told me, is that superficiality is everything. The family Selden wasn’t with me. Mr. Shelley still had more business in New York. But I was not alone. Several others had booked seats on the flight. The usual collection you get on a studio jet. A couple of record company executives. A VJ from MTV, who had just gotten her own sitcom, and who wore very little clothing. Peter Weller, the actor. Ed Bradley from
60 Minutes
. The agent who represents three-fifths of the Lakers’ starting lineup, and who spent four-fifths of the flight on the phone. I seemed to be the only one on board who wasn’t wearing cowboy boots, and that included our stewardess, Jennifer. I had on my white-and-brown spectator balmorals with my unlined suit of blue-and-cream cotton seersucker and my white straw boater. Lulu stuck with her shades.

Jennifer was very friendly and helpful, and she made an enemy of me for life before we’d even taken off. Just as soon as she got done fussing over Lulu. “Are you her trainer?” she asked me.

I stiffened. “Her what?”

“Isn’t she a movie dog? What did I see her in?”

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken.”

Nonetheless, Lulu snuffled with glee and was a giant pain in the ass from that moment on. Even more so than usual. She has this problem with her head, you see. It swells even more easily than mine does.

Lunch was a salad of assorted field greens topped with grilled chicken. Free-range, of course. I had pineapple for dessert, and a Bass ale. Lulu had the fresh linguine with red clam sauce, minus the fresh linguine. There was an extensive library of videocassettes aboard. Lulu spent much of the flight watching
Turner and Hooch
with Tom Hanks for the eighth time. It’s one of her favorites, though she’s always thought Beasley was a little over the top with that saliva thing. I spent my time plowing through the fat manila envelope the Bedford Falls publicity people had sent me. In it were the major magazine articles that had been written about Matthew Wax through the years. Profiles in
Rolling Stone
,
Esquire
, the
New York Times Sunday Magazine
,
American Film
. If you could call them profiles. They were really about his movies, not him. What he did on the screen. Not who he was. An enigma, several writers called him. What else could you call a director who didn’t grant interviews, didn’t promote his films, didn’t appear in public, period. About the only time he had was during the Film Colorization hearings in Washington, D.C., when he testified before a Senate committee in a halting, emotional voice that colorization was “like spray painting graffiti on the Liberty Bell.”

The biographical details were sketchy. Matthew Wax had grown up in the middle-class Sepulveda section of Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. He started writing and directing his own 8mm films when he was still in high school, and went on from there to USC film school. His first 16mm student short,
Bugged
, was the story of an unpopular teenager who awakens one morning to find himself transformed into a large, distasteful insect. It so impressed Norbert Schlom, then vice president of television production at Panorama Studios, that he immediately hired the nineteen-year-old to direct
Rick Brant, Adventurer
, a new CBS Saturday morning serial in the tradition of the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift. Within weeks of its premiere,
Rick Brant
was the most popular kids’ show in a decade. Matthew Wax never looked back. At age twenty-one he wrote and directed his first feature film,
The Boy Who Cried Wolf
, a low-budget Hitchcockian thriller about a lonely little boy who happens to witness the friendly couple next door committing a murder.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf
was a viscerally terrifying film right out of a kid’s worst nightmares. It made a vivid impression on filmgoers. So did its seven-year-old star, a wide-eyed little Canadian boy named Jean Forget. It also made $20 million. His second,
I Was Invisible
, a giddy spoof about an invisible teenager, became the sleeper box office hit of 1976. America’s most influential film critic, Pauline Kael of
The New Yorker
, breathlessly stamped young Matthew Wax with greatness when she wrote: “An adroit, look-ma-no-hands screwball farce by a young master who already knows more than Howard Hawks ever learned.”

That was the end of low-budget filmmaking for Matthew Wax. From then on he cranked out an unprecedented string of blockbusters, transforming his own childhood fears, fantasies, and fascinations into spirited special-effects extravaganzas that everyone simply had to see. It was uncanny how he kept topping himself. Even more uncanny was his impact. Because if there was one man who was responsible for the infantilization of American mass entertainment, it was Matthew Wax. It was due to his astonishing success that Hollywood virtually gave itself over to the making and marketing of huge, dumb, kid-oriented blockbusters. It was because of him that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg found film careers, stepping forward to direct comic book megasuccesses of their own, one after another after another.