The Hollywood Trilogy (49 page)

“Thank you very much,” Jack said into the intercom, “would you run the sixth take again for us?”

Harry thought the sixth take was the best one too, but wasn't Jack being more than thorough? Hadn't he seen enough to know whether he liked the performance or not? It took less than a minute to screen, and when it was over, Jack flipped on the houselights, thanked the projectionist, shut his notebook and put his pen into his shirt pocket.

“Well, boys,” he said.

Fats hung up the telephone and turned to face them. He looked tired and harassed; he was executive for three projects in one stage or another, and it seemed to be telling on him.

“That the girl you want?” he asked.

“That's my Helen,” Jack said flatly.

“Concur,” Harry said.

“Jesus,” Fats said. He got to his feet with a grunt. “Why'nt you pick somebody I heard of? I never heard of this person. What'er you paying her?”

“Scale,” Harry said.

“Well,” Fats said. “Looks like we got a movie.”

THIRTY-TWO

JODY FLEW first class from Los Angeles to Atlanta sitting next to a man who said he was an electronics expert and who tried to teach her to play chess with a tiny magnetized board. He was in his fifties and dressed in a dark-blue suit and had a flat Texas accent. Three times he gave Jody his business card and once he turned the card over and wrote a telephone number she was to call if ever she was in Houston. He drank throughout the trip and slept for the last half-hour or so, a light snore coming from his babyish open mouth. Jody did not drink anything except a glass of red wine with her lunch.

She had a two-hour wait in the Atlanta airport, and after twenty minutes of hanging around the book and magazine counters she accepted a man's offer to help her pass the time by going upstairs to the lounge, but when the man tried to buy her one of the outrageously expensive drinks she smiled and said she just wanted a cup of coffee. The man was tall and thin and had carroty red hair and a scarred angry complexion. He seemed to be about forty and wore a white shirt, bow-tie and tweed suit. He was a professor of economics, he told her, a married man albeit an unhappy one, although he suspected that Jody heard that a lot from this man or that man. Jody smiled and said she supposed that most people who were married were unhappy in one way or another, and he agreed eagerly and told her that his wife was a fine woman but she had never been what you might call attractive and now with the children in high school she had just let herself run down and they had frankly not
been engaging in any sexual activities at all for a considerable length of time. He had two drinks and continually ate handfuls of peanuts from the glass peanut dispenser on their table, and when he finally got up enough nerve to ask Jody to have dinner with him next time she was in Detroit and scribbled his name and a telephone number on the back of somebody else's business card he had in his pocket, he was so late for his plane that he had to make a rushed goodbye and lope out of the bar without waiting for her, leaving a twenty-dollar bill on the table to pay for everything.

Jody sat alone for ten minutes and then an Air Force lieutenant colonel sat down beside her and after only a minute smiled at her and asked if, like two ships passing in the night, they might have a drink together. He too was a married man, but out of sight, out of mind, he joked, and offered to buy Jody a drink, which she refused with a smile. He did not write down anything on a card for her, but he wondered if she wouldn't think him forward if he asked her to sleep with him that afternoon and catch a later plane to wherever she was going. He was not a man to mince words. He thought the two of them could have a hell of a good time in the sack. He considered himself to be an expert on lovemaking. He had made love to women of all ages in more than twenty countries. When Jody turned him down he told her she did not know what she was missing and for that matter he would pay her some money to go to bed with him, and by God if she didn't give the money back to him afterward and maybe add a few dollars of her own he was sadly mistaken. Jody laughed and said that she appreciated the offer, but no thank you, and he lost his temper and said between his teeth in a low voice, “You bitch, you have to. I need you. I have to do it at least twice a day, and my regular Atlanta girl didn't show up, damn her,” and Jody signaled for the black cocktail waitress to come over, and said to her, “This man is drunk and offending me,” got up, picked up the twenty dollars and left the colonel with the bill.

There was no first class in the little airplane that flew her from Atlanta to Montgomery, Alabama, and Jody sat between a fat black Army sergeant and a middle-aged woman who spent the entire time looking out the little window at the ground and working her lips.

At Montgomery Jody stepped out of the airplane directly into a wet oven blast of southern heat. It was almost dark and heavy clouds piled in the sky made it darker. There was a long covered walkway from the landing area to the terminal, with scattered handfuls of people greeting passengers or just
lounging around, but Jody did not see anybody she knew. While she was waiting for her luggage at the other end of the terminal a plump young man rushed up to her out of breath and asked her if she was Jody McKeegan.

“Yes,” she said. “Where's Harry?”

“Mister Lexington sent me. Ah'm Bobby, your driveh.” They sped through the Alabama night north and west with Bobby behind the wheel and Jody alone in the back seat. Bobby asked her if she minded if he played the radio and she said no, and those were the last words they exchanged until they crossed a bridge some fifty miles from the airport and Bobby turned around and said, “This's the Alabama River, ma'm.” On the other side of the river was the town of Selma and then they were out into the night again, speeding past acres of corn and cotton, the distant lights of an occasional farmhouse making Jody wonder who on earth could live here in the middle of nowhere. Then, at last, they crossed the Grissom County line and in another ten minutes arrived at the Sugartown Motel, on the eastern edge of Sugartown, Alabama. Bobby took the car through the motel drive entryway and up to a two-story row of units in back, stopped the car and turned to Jody.

“Now, ma'm, do you want to go to your room and maybe freshen up? They're shooting on the other side of town and Mr. Lexington asked me to ask you if you weren't too tired if maybe you might like to come out to the set. I'll wait for you here.”

Jody sighed. She was exhausted from the trip, but she was too keyed up to go to bed and wait to see Harry when he came back from wherever he was.

“Let me just pop into the shower,” she said to Bobby.

He had her key with him, and carried her luggage into the room. She looked around. A nice calm motel room, not classy but not crappy, and obviously all hers. She thought about asking Bobby where Harry's room was, but thought better of it. The poor kid probably didn't know they were living together. After he left she stripped off her clothes and stepped into the shower. One blessing: the shower threw a hard tight stream. She stood under it, letting the hot water hit the back of her neck for a long long time, getting the trip out of her nervous system, and then came out to lie on the bed for a few minutes.

When she awakened, Harry was looking down at her, one hand on his hip, one on his chin, his expression unreadable. “Hi,” she said.

“Are you all right?” Harry asked her. His voice seemed high and strained
and he did not sit down, take her in his arms, offer to kiss her or anything, just stood there.

“What did I do wrong?” Jody asked. She sat up.

“Nothing, only I've been waiting for you for a couple of hours is all,” Harry said like a child.

“Oh baby,” she said. “I just laid out for a minute and I must have fallen asleep.” She smiled her best even though she was still sleepy and did not understand what was the matter with Harry, and held out her arms for him. Abruptly he turned and went to one of the two easy chairs beside the air conditioner and sat down stiffly. Jody sighed and went into the bathroom and threw some cold water on her face. “Christ, I have to unpack,” she said to herself and came out into the room.

“I have to get back to the set,” he said. “I shouldn't have left at all.”

Jody turned on him, still naked. “Listen, goddamnit, I just spent the fucking day flying around and I got tired and fell asleep. If you don't like it, you can just fuck off.”

Harry stood up and put his hands against his cheeks. “What's the matter with me?” he said in a strained voice. “I just got so goddamn mad on the set. I thought you either missed the plane or got drunk in Atlanta or something. It never occurred to me that you'd fall asleep and the kid wouldn't know enough to knock on your door. He's still out there waiting for you.”

“Well, for your information I didn't have a single damned drink for the entire trip.”

“Oh, baby, I'm sorry,” he said and hugged her tightly. “Maybe you should just go on to bed and I'll see you tomorrow. We got another two hours tonight I think and we're behind schedule already.”

“I can be dressed in five minutes,” Jody said. “I want to come out to the set with you.”

“You might as well,” Harry said. “Everybody wants to get a look at you.”

He still did not seem normal to her. Even under the worst pressures of pre-production he had not gotten this uptight. As they drove though the darkness he told her in rapid disconnected sentences about the problems they had been having—rainfall, a grip dropped a hammer on somebody's foot, a couple of locations had come unstuck, equipment on the Cinemobile had had to be sent back and they needed it—problems Jody did not think sounded nearly as urgent as Harry made them.

They were driving down a narrow dirt country road through forest until at last Jody could see in front of them a mass of light coming eerily through the mist and darkness, and then she could make out the bulk of trucks, buses and cars. Harry pulled up behind a big bus with the word CINEMOBILE on its side. Harry said, “Shit, I don't think they've lit the fucker yet,” and got out of the car, leaving Jody to find her way over to the set by herself.

There were a lot of people Jody did not recognize standing around in the humid night while hundreds of insects flew in and out of the light from the big hissing arc lamp. There seemed to be around forty people there, and the only ones doing anything were apparently trying to get a little spotlight off in the woods to stand up by itself. Harry was with them and she could also see Lew Gargolian the production manager. She did not see any actors she recognized and she did not see Jack Meltzer, but after only a few minutes of standing there Jack came up to her from out of the gloom.

“Hey, I'm glad to see you!” he said. Unlike Harry, Jack seemed to be in excellent spirits. “Hey, come on, meet some of the people,” he said, and took her back to a trailer where the three principals were sitting jammed into a tiny room overflowing with costumes, clothes, boots, hats, bottles and scripts. All three of them were covered with dried mud and makeup, their costumes in rags.

“Hello friend,” Maggie Magnuson said to her with a happy grin. “You catch me in my trick suit.”

Jonathan Bridger and Elaine Rudman were polite and shook hands with her, giving Jody a little thrill, as it always did, to be close to people whose faces she recognized; and then Jack said, “Hey, come on, I want to show you something,” and took her hand.

“When are they going to be lit?” Jonathan Bridger asked.

“Any minute now,” Jack said, and took Jody off with him to where there were five or six canvas chairs, all inhabited by people, lined up a few yards behind the big camera.

“Get your ass off that seat,” Jack said not unkindly to a young man, and he jumped up and disappeared, leaving Jody looking down at her name,
JODY M
c
KEEGAN
, on the chair.

“Sit down,” Jack said proudly. “That's your chair.”

Jody sat down and smiled up at him, and Harry came over grinning and
said, “I see you found your chair,” and the two men had a nice laugh together and then walked off into the woods talking quietly. Jody stayed in her chair and watched the electricians fiddling with the light. At last a man in a striped tee shirt yelled, “All right, settle down, people, this is going to be a take!” Nobody seemed to pay much attention to him. No one went near the camera. But then the three actors and Jack came out from behind Jody and went into the woods in front of the camera. “All right, SHUT UP, EVERYBODY!” the man in the striped tee shirt yelled. “THIS IS A REHEARSAL!”

Jack came back and threw himself into a chair, crossed his ankles and wiped his forehead. The three actors had disappeared into the woods. “All right,” Jack said in a slightly-louder-than-normal voice, “Action . . .” While Jody watched, the three actors ran crashing through the underbrush, the girl falling down and being picked up by one of the men, and then they came to a forked tree where most of the lights seemed to be concentrated, and Bridger looked through the fork almost right into the camera.

“Cut,” Jack said. “That was fine, let's do it.” They shot two takes and then the little light they had been fussing with when Jody had arrived did something wrong and everything ground to a halt while the electrical crew tried to fix it.