The Hollywood Trilogy (41 page)

It took her an hour to walk back to the hotel, and she was less than drunk but more than sober when she came into Harry's apartment at ten-thirty. Harry was sitting in his favorite chair. The television was off. The radio was off. The apartment was silent and Harry was not working. He was just sitting there, looking up at her from across the room. She went in to take a shower after saying, “Hi!” over her shoulder, and Harry came into the bathroom while she was letting the hot water sluice down her body.

“Where have you been?” he shouted over the sound of the water.

“None of your goddamn business!” she shouted back.

TWENTY-ONE

LUNCH WITH Victor Ramdass Singh finally took place, but not in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Instead, Fats Dunnigan told Harry to meet them at a place called the Peach Pit, on Sunset, and when Harry came up the steps from the parking lot behind the restaurant he could see Fats with a man and a woman, sitting around an outside table with a big orange umbrella shading it. Harry had to smile to himself: the group he was joining looked almost too Hollywood to be real. Fats Dunnigan, a gigantic man, bald on
top but with long dark greasy-looking hair down over his collar, bright shirt, leather pants; Victor Ramdass Singh, wearing a dirty-looking pink turban, leather jacket and no shirt; and a woman whose name Harry never really got straight who was obviously with Singh, blonde, big-toothed, bland and pleasant, dressed in a black full-length gown with tight sleeves and a deeply plunging neckline. Singh looked about twenty years old except in the eyes, and the woman seemed to be somewhere over thirty. Harry shook hands and sat down and Victor Ramdass Singh said, “I think I'm going to like you after all. You might even find that you like me.” He laughed.

Already he sounds more like an actor than a director, Harry thought, but he smiled and said something pleasant to Dunnigan. The menus came and they all ordered salads (the Peach Pit was a health food restaurant), and after the waitress went away Harry said to Singh, “Well, have you had a chance to read the story?”

“Not completely,” Singh said. “I've gone through it, of course.” He laughed again, his teeth bright against his dark skin. He looked into Harry's eyes and said, smiling politely, “Is this your conception of an important motion picture?”

“I don't know about important,” Harry said. He thought he had detected a gleam of intelligent amusement in Singh's eyes, as if he and Harry were sharing a joke, that perhaps both of them were putting Dunnigan on. But Harry knew better than to act on it. “I think it's a pretty good story.”

Dunnigan said, “Victor sees it as an opportunity to show the American predilection for violence in a new light. Would you explain for Mr. Lexington, Victor?”

“I thought the story was just garbage,” the woman said softly.

“Yes, my love,” Singh said, and went on quickly, “Yes, America's predilection for violence, yes. I think it would be an excellent idea to show the essential emotionlessness of these characters as they rob and kill. They feel nothing, of course, except for each other.”

Harry said, “You mean, they're all psychopaths?”

“A word. Merely a word. Let us say their violence is existential instead of emotional. But those are only more words. I think the heart of this story—what are you calling it?”

“‘Shooting Spree' is the working title,” Harry said, “but we're planning on changing it as soon as somebody comes up with a better one.”

“At any rate, I think the heart of this story lies in the fact that these people do not differentiate between their acts. To them, going to the toilet, eating, making love, killing a bank teller, all have the same distant quality. It should be a film that strikes one emotional note repeatedly, up until they themselves are wounded and hurt and killed. Then, on an emotional upsurge, they cry out in anguish and even rage.”

“Why not call it
The Killers?
” the woman said. Singh put his hand on top of hers and patted it.

“Please mind your own business,” he said to her.

“I like what Victor's saying,” Dunnigan said. “What do you think? Isn't that just about what we had in mind for this story?”

“Wilbur Garton should be here,” Harry said. “After all, it's his story. In fact, I think Wilbur ought to be invited to come along on location.”

“I don't like to have writers around,” Singh said. “They cause so much trouble. You ask them to rewrite and they get terribly upset, yet the sole reason for having them along is so that they can rewrite. Don't you think so?”

Harry did think so, but he didn't admit it. He was beginning to realize that perhaps Fats Dunnigan was not the person who wanted to see this young man assigned to the picture, that Fats might be looking for a way out too. Harry said, “Who do you see in the major roles?”

Singh had very definite ideas about casting. He wanted to use British actors for the two leading men, and when Harry said something about accents, Singh said, “American accents are easy to imitate.” Fats kept smiling cheerfully and eating his salad, but Harry was now certain that he was furious. Singh must have had very powerful friends somewhere, because Dunnigan was not a man to hide his emotions unless there was a very good reason for it. Here he was, wasting his time on a bullshit meeting, holding in his emotions, eating what he probably considered to be rabbit food, and Harry began to suspect that maybe Dunnigan was under even more pressure than himself. Harry smiled and stuffed a large forkful of shredded cabbage into his mouth.

It turned out that Singh had his own British camera crew, and wanted to cut the film in London. “What would be the point of staying in Southern California for a year or so, when I can be where I am happiest?” he asked the table at large, and when lunch was over and they all stood up and shook hands with each other, Harry made sure he walked down to the parking lot
with Dunnigan. Standing beside Dunnigan's big maroon Mercedes, Harry said in a matter-of-fact voice, “Fats, are you kidding?”

Dunnigan looked sour and said, “I think he's a very talented young man.” He started to open the door to his car, but stopped and looked off into the distance. “I don't know,” he said.

Harry knew better than to mention the pressure, but Dunnigan seemed to be waiting for him to say something. “He's going to be damned expensive,” Harry said finally.

The next morning, while he and Jody were still making love, Harry got a telephone call from Dunnigan's secretary, telling him to meet Fats at Karl Meador's office at ten sharp. “All right,” Harry said.

Karl Meador was the head of the studio and the son of the man who had founded it forty years before. Max, the father, had been a flamboyant tyrannical near-genius who had helped to create the Hollywood film industry. His son Karl was a graduate of Dartmouth, a bachelor and had the coldest eyes Harry had ever seen. Meador's office was always kept dark and cold and was not much larger than Harry's.

“I understand you gentlemen are having trouble finding a director for your project, is that true?” he said to Harry and Dunnigan, at a few minutes after ten.

Dunnigan was sitting beside Harry on the couch across the room from Meador's desk. He smiled with all the charm of a top agent and said, “We're not really experiencing any actual difficulties. In fact we had lunch yesterday with Victor Singh, and I might be wrong but I think the meeting was productive, don't you?” He was now looking at Harry, obviously throwing the ball to him.

Harry sat quietly and did not speak. Dunnigan was the executive producer; let him do the talking.

Karl Meador, behind his desk, was wearing a dark-blue suit with thin red stripes, pale-blue shirt with french cuffs and a black silk necktie. To Harry he looked like a stock broker. His cold eyes were half-hidden behind tinted rimless glasses, and his thin feminine mouth was slightly pursed as he waited for one or the other of them to speak. Finally Dunnigan broke down.

“I feel we had a most productive meeting,” he said. “And I for one am ready to offer the man a contract.”

Meador looked at Harry. “Does Singh meet with your approval?”

“No,” Harry said. His palms were sweating and his crotch felt hot and
damp. “I think it would be a mistake to hire Singh for this particular project, although I'd be interested in talking to him again about something more down his particular alley.”

“What do you mean by that?” Meador asked.

“Bluntly,” Harry said, “the man wants to turn our project into an anti-American picture. He wants to use it as a vehicle for some half-baked philosophical notions about American violence, which in my opinion he fails to understand. Also, he wants to use British actors, technicians, camera crew, and he wants to cut the picture in England.”

“That's out of the question,” Meador said. “Fats, how much were we going to offer him?”

“Fifty thousand with fringes,” Dunnigan said, and added, “He got zip for that feature he did in England.”

“For that kind of money he could work here and work with our people,” Meador said. To Harry: “Did you have any particular candidate in mind?”

For one small moment Harry thought it was possible that he would get the director of his choice. “Calvin Fishler,” he said.

“What's he done?”

“Well, a lot of television work . . .”

“Any features?”

“No, but . . .”

“I don't know his work,” Meador said, and that was it for Calvin Fishler. Meador told them he would mull over the problem on the weekend and see if he couldn't come up with somebody everyone would be happy with, and they were dismissed. Harry walked Dunnigan down the long corridor to his office.

“Well, we got rid of the wog,” Fats said. “Sorry you couldn't get that kid on the picture, but he's not the guy to handle the caliber of stars we are going to have to hire.”

“I guess not,” Harry said.

Lew Gargolian, with a worried look on his face, was waiting for them in Dunnigan's secretary's office. He was wondering if there was any way, at this point, to pin down the number and type of cars that were going to be wrecked in the course of the picture. “The way it looks he's wrecking about twelve cars,” Gargolian said, meaning the script-writer. “In two places he specifies new Cadillacs.”

“I'm sure you fellows can handle it without my assistance,” Dunnigan
said, and disappeared into his private office. Harry and Gargolian went over to the old Writers Building and spent the rest of the morning happily fighting over how many cars, and what type, were going to have to be destroyed in order to make this an authentic-looking and exciting major motion picture. Gargolian felt it could probably be done with six, and fake the rest. Harry wanted all twelve, if they could find some way to afford it. An honest difference of opinion.

TWENTY-TWO

IT WAS one of those horrible weekends. Jody had run into an old acquaintance from New York in Beverly Hills, a fashion photographer who was on the Coast trying to arrange financing for what he called “a tryptich of films” about the life of Buddha, which he wanted to shoot in India and Southeast Asia. He was full of enthusiasm and took Jody to the Beverly Wilshire for coffee, and from him Jody got the name and telephone number of a man who could sell her some marijuana. The fashion photographer was so full of himself that he did not ask Jody anything beyond, “What brings you to the Coast?” which she answered by asking him if he knew where she could get some dope.

When Harry got home that night, his undershirt soaked in the acid sweat of anxiety, she begged, cajoled and finally convinced him that he needed some good old drugs, and with a shrug he said, “I'm going to take a long hot bath. If you can buy something, go ahead.”

“I need money,” Jody said. He had given her money before, but this was the first time she had asked for any.

“Look in my wallet,” he called out from the bathroom. The wallet was stuffed with money. Jody took three fifty dollar bills, planning to put back what she did not have to spend. After all, it was just possible that the dealer wouldn't deal anything under half a pound.

Jody really fell into it. The dealer knew a lot of the same people Jody knew from New York, and aside from having some of the best Asian marijuana, which was very hard to find in Southern California, he also had some really fine cocaine, and so Jody spent 130 dollars on drugs and the rest on cabfare. At the dealer's house in Laurel Canyon she snorted two lines of cocaine and
smoked some of the weed, and so by the time she got back to the Chateau Bercy she was mellow, holding her chin in the air and smiling mysteriously.

Harry was out of the bathtub, wearing an old robe and halfway through his second fairly strong drink of Scotch. “I don't see how you can drink that stuff,” she told him. “Do you have any papers?”

“No,” he said. She could tell he was a little nervous about the marijuana because he became sarcastic: “I quit rolling my own when I came in off the range.”

“Cute,” she said. “Do you have a pipe? I could run down to the market and buy some papers, I guess.”

“What about dinner?” Harry wanted to know. But dinner was very late that night, and came to the door in white paper cartons, delivered by a young Chinese. By the time it arrived Harry was in a fierce temper and Jody was stoned beyond her own recollections. Harry did not seem able to get high. First he smoked half a joint with Jody, and felt nothing beyond a tightening at his temples and an emptiness in the pit of his stomach, which could have been caused by his lack of dinner. He had another strong Scotch, and then Jody got out the cocaine. At first he was angry at her for spending so much of his money, but secretly he had always wanted to try cocaine, and so when she pulverized a small heap of the white powder on her hand-mirror and arranged it into lines with the tip of her knifeblade, he watched with interest and stopped making his bitching remarks.