The Hollywood Trilogy (38 page)

“I don't even exist!” Duveen yelled, and spent the next hour bathing and dressing for his showdown with IFA. The only thing he said to Jody was, “Listen, do I need a haircut?”

“You look all right to me,” she said.

Jody did not wait for him in the IFA waiting room because she was through with agents. None of the good ones would represent her because she was too old and had no picture experience, and the crummy ones only wanted to fuck her.

Jody liked the atmosphere of the back room of the Cock 'n Bull in contrast to the noisy darkness of the bar, and on this particular afternoon no one else was in the room except a waitress who was putting setups on the tables in preparation for the dinner crowd, until Harry Lexington came in with two men who looked like agents, and took the big round corner booth. When he saw Jody he smiled at her and she smiled back, and after the waitress had taken the drink orders for the three men, Harry came over to Jody and said, “I don't know your name, but we seem to keep running into each other. I'm Harry Lexington.” He held out his hand for Jody to shake, and she introduced herself. “I'd ask you to join us,” Harry said, “except I'm sure you're waiting for somebody, and we're talking business, at least for a few minutes.” He stood waiting for her to say something, and when she only smiled up at him patiently, he grinned, gave a mock salute and went back to his table. After their drinks came, he got up again and came back to her. “Listen,” he asked, “are you an actress, by any chance?”

“Yes,” Jody said.

When Duveen dragged in another hour later, Harry and his party were gone and the room was full of loudly talking prosperous and successful movie people, but she had Harry's business card in her pocket, the card which identified him as a genuine producer. Business cards are a dime a dozen, but Harry's telephone number was the same as Meador Studios, 464-0056. He might still be a phony but at least he was a legitimate phony, and he had asked Jody to call him next week during business hours. She did not mention any of this to Duveen, who was sullen and quiet for hours, and then, at home, full of dope and self-pity, began crying and told her that he had barely managed to stay on IFA's client list.

FIFTEEN

HARRY LEXINGTON did not expect anything to come of Jody's visit to his office, although he was certain that she would show up, and she did. That year he was officed on the third floor of the old Writers Building, just inside the Olive Street gate to the lot, and at this stage of his current production he wanted to save as much money as possible, so he did not have a secretary, just a suite of three rooms, with the entrance through the middle room and his office on the left. Later on, if the project went, a director would probably occupy the other office, and by then of course they would have a secretary.

At this point, Harry's project consisted of a screen treatment, an okay from the production head of the studio to go ahead to screenplay, and tentative approval to start preliminary casting and budgeting, with the assistance of the production department. The treatment was twelve pages of vague and overdramatic prose, describing an almost routine cops-and-robbers thriller, just barely a cut above movie-for-television material, but what the treatment said and what Harry intended his production unit to shoot were not necessarily the same thing. Harry was forty-six years old and had been in and around the movies all his adult life. He knew that getting financing required one approach, and making successful films another.

The writer of the screenplay, Wilbur Garton, was sitting at home in Marina del Rey, assembling a screenplay that Harry believed would put them all into the big money, if only they were terribly lucky and worked terribly hard. Wilbur was an excellent film writer, but one who had a tendency to write hard in first
drafts and then chicken out later, softening characters, eliminating scenes that might cause controversy and toning down the language. This was a highly successful formula used by many film writers, and Harry did not mind at all. He intended to film Wilbur's first draft, with certain inflexions of his own.

There actually was a part in the film for a woman of about Jody's age and description and Harry actually was having a difficult time casting the part in his mind. The character was that of a waitress in a small roadside restaurant. The three principals have already robbed a bank and, after various adventures, think they are safely away from harm. They are sitting in Jody's restaurant breathing easy and having lunch when two cops come in for coffee, become suspicious and get the drop on the gang. All would have been lost if Jody hadn't taken a shotgun from under the counter and held it on the cops. Then she joins the gang and is with them until the end. The woman has to be tough, hard, beautiful, but capable of playing the fact that she is stuck in this out-of-the-way gas station, and capable of playing the sudden change of character that leads her to reach under the counter for the shotgun, without blowing credulity. The studio thought this was a weak place in the story, and so did Wilbur, but Harry secretly felt that it was one of the bustout moments which made the picture worth shooting. He certainly wished he could find somebody good enough to play the part but cheap enough to cast. To bring in a name actress for this role would be to give away his game-plan.

As for Jody, she certainly had the look. She was beautiful all right, but you got the feeling that her beauty was assumed rather than real, almost an act of will; and underlying it was an animality, a fierceness, an independence, that Harry wished he could get onto the screen. But he was too experienced to hope. People who were marvels of charisma off screen often turned out to be dull and nervous once the cameras started to roll. So Harry's mind was divided: first, he wanted, hoped that this girl could carry off the role. On the other hand he knew she wouldn't be able to act (or she would have some credits, a woman her age) and so what he wanted was to fuck her. He assumed that she knew this, and if she showed it was both to read for the part and to allow him to make a pass at her.

But Harry had never done anything like this before. He had always been strictly professional in his relationships with actors, not out of any special rectitude but because the people he knew who did use their professional status
to get laid irritated and annoyed him. It was contemptible, really, to take advantage of the fact that there are hundreds of pretty girls in Hollywood for every acting job and that many of these girls have no money and very little intelligence and next to no talent. It took a special kind of arrogance to seduce these young people with no intention of offering them work.

So Harry did not like himself very much when, at ten o'clock on Monday morning, there was Jody McKeegan in his office, all dressed and beautiful and shiny with expectation. Oddly, he felt even worse when she did not look around his office with surprise and say, “Just us? Where are the casting people? Where is the director?”—which is what she might have said if she had had any real experience. But instead she sat opposite his desk and smiled at him with a heartbreakingly wise and wonderful grin and said, “I hope I'm not too late.” He would have felt much better if she had gushed over his last picture and touched his hand and pretended to be shy.

“I only have a few pages of what you might call first draft screenplay,” he said to her. He shuffled through his papers looking for the right scene. “Ah, here it is,” he said. He described the character of Helen the waitress to her and Jody laughed.

“I've been a waitress, God knows, but I never took a shotgun to anybody, at least not yet.” She slowly read the two pages he finally handed to her, and then looked up at him and said, “Do you want me to just read her lines?”

“I'll help you,” he said. He wished the whole interview was over. This was the most unprofessional thing he had ever done in his life. He felt like a shit. “All right,” he said, “just take it easy and read the lines just for the sound, don't worry about the sense.”

Jody put the pages on the desk where she could see them and then put her hands on her lap, seeming to steady herself, and then what happened next Harry was never able to figure out. As he remembered it, she seemed first to get a little larger, just sitting there in the chair, and when she spoke the hairs on the back of his neck stiffened, not that the quality or tone of the voice was so different, but that it seemed to be the voice of a different person coming out of her. Harry was used to actors' ability to mimic other people's voices but this wasn't the same, yet he did not know why it was not the same. He kept telling himself furiously as Jody read and reread the scene that if she could act as well as she seemed to be acting, he would have known about her before.

“That will be fine, thank you,” he said at last. His face felt flushed and he was very nervous. He did not know what to tell her. She had changed from one person to another right in front of him and he did not know whether it was acting ability or his own overreacting imagination, guiltily imputing great talent to her because he did not have the guts to grab her and throw her onto the couch.

“Thank you very much for the reading,” Jody said and stood up. She held her hand out for him to shake.

He stood up and took her hand and said, “Don't you have any film?”

“No,” she said.

“I think you ought to have a screen test,” he said. “You seem pretty good.”

“Thank you very much,” she said.

“Have dinner with me,” he blurted, and blushed.

SIXTEEN

THE CHATEAU Bercy was only a few blocks from Glenn Duveen's house, but remote and isolated from the shabby neighborhood it dominated. When she had been living with Duveen, Jody often passed the hotel's glass-and-wrought-iron entrance on her way to the big all-night Hughes Market on Highland. The hotel was built in the twenties in the type of architecture known then as Mizener Spanish: red tile roofs, moorish arches and creamy stucco walls. Jody had several times peeked in through the wrought-iron windows to the big living room, filled with massive wooden furniture, Persian rugs and a big dark grand piano over in one corner, hoping to see movie people, because this hotel was famous for the New York and British talent who used it as their home while they worked on pictures. It was not exactly the place she would have chosen for herself—the Beverly Hills Hotel was more to her liking—but when Harry Lexington asked her to visit him in his permanent suite on the eighth floor, she decided that if things progressed to the point where he asked her to live with him she would accept.

It was not a question of no longer loving Glenn Duveen because she had never loved him. She had been very fond of him and grateful to him, but these days he was going slowly to pieces waiting for jobs, and so to keep body and soul together he was dealing a little marijuana, and kept harping on the idea
of Jody getting a job somewhere. Jody did not want to get a job. She felt she had worked enough in her life, and so when Harry Lexington seemed to be interested in her, even though she had up to now refused to go to bed with him, she began feeling herself gradually moving from Glenn to Harry. Glenn was terribly unstable, and Jody was sure that he would find himself in deep trouble if he didn't get an acting job soon.

It was really too bad about Glenn Duveen. When he had mustered out of the Marine Corps in 1961 he had gone to acting school in New York, gotten a couple of small off-Broadway roles and then come West to do a Playhouse 90 segment. After a couple of empty months he got four featured roles in pretty good movies. His price went up and he was taken on by Ashley-Famous, who immediately got him all the jobs he could handle as a guest star on dramatic television shows. For a while he was seen on everything, and both NBC and CBS were thinking about him for his own series. And then, for no reason that Glenn could fathom, no one wanted to hire him anymore. For a long time he lived on residuals, and one summer he even went out on the road in a musical, but he really didn't like that kind of work and wasn't very good at it, so he came back to Hollywood and the game of waiting played by all actors. He got jobs from time to time, but the parts were never big or even interesting, and now they were coming less and less. His face could get him onto every lot in town, and so he sold cheap lids to secretaries and production people, never making much money and often lying awake nights afraid that the police were going to break into his house and arrest him.

When Jody had moved in with him he had been full of bright plans and promises. A friend of his was going to direct a movie to be shot in Israel as soon as financing could be arranged, and there were parts for both Jody and Glenn, another friend was working on a musical, even another was deep into the rebirth of dramatic radio; but as she got used to Hollywood Jody began to realize that everyone in and around the business was busy on some dreamy project, and so her hope of getting into the movies through Glenn faded, and with it her affection for him. He was just another dead-end boyfriend.

Harry Lexington, on the other hand, was actually working on an actual movie with a budget and everything. He had read her for a part and promised her a screen test, although that was a long way off, and Jody was half-sure all he really wanted was to make love to her in his fancy suite at the Chateau Bercy. That was all right, too. Harry was neither young nor handsome and he
didn't make any special effort to be outgoing, but there was a kind of warmth radiating from him that made her feel very good, and she imagined he would be very passionate in bed, like many quiet men.