The Hollywood Trilogy (52 page)

“I've been working my little tail off,” he said to Jody in an accusatory tone. “These things you bought are really dreadful, but I think if I could just work on them a bit more, we at least wouldn't be embarrassing ourselves out on the set.” He held up the cleanest of the dresses for Jody to look at. “See? I mean it's just nothing.”

“It's what waitresses wear,” Jody said.

“You should know, I suppose,” Donald Bitts said and walked into the adjoining room for a moment. When he came back he said, “Well, get into it, dear. Do you expect me to help you dress?”

“Which one?” Jody asked.

“My God, the clean one, you've been out running through the woods all night, wear the clean one. Which one, for God's sake. Oh, you need me, all right.” He picked one of the medium-soiled dresses and handed it to her and went out of the room again. Jody followed him.

“I need the underwear and shoes and stuff,” she said.

“Oh God,” said Donald Bitts.

Finally she was dressed and ready but Bitts made her turn around for him three or four times, sucking air in between his teeth and shaking his head.

“They are just all wrong,” he said. “I should never have allowed you to pick out your own things.”

“What have you got against me?” Jody asked him. She was getting nervous and she had missed her call. The driver named Tommy was sitting in the front of the office reading the paper and waiting for her.

Donald Bitts did not answer, but frowned as he looked at her clothes. “I think if I let out the waist you'd look a little less like a 1939 hooker and a little more what the part calls for. Take off the dress, please.”

“I'm late for the scene,” she said.

“I can't be responsible for that,” he said. “The costume is hanging wrong and I'm going to fix it. Take it off, please.”

“Does it really matter that much?” she asked him, but he went into the other room to wait for her to take it off. Forty-five minutes later he came back from his room, where he did his work, and said, “All right, now try it.” She put the dress on and modeled for him. He was still looking at her and
shaking his head when Harry came in. Harry's face was red from the heat, but otherwise he looked calm and even pleasant.

“You're fired,” he said to Donald Bitts. He went up to Alice Wanderove in the front of the room and said, “Get him on the three o'clock plane to Atlanta. Lew will call for a replacement.” He smiled at Jody.

“Sorry about the delay. Do you feel okay?”

Jody said, “I'm a little nervous.”

“Let's go.”

On the way out Harry told the driver Tommy that he was to wait around and take Bitts to meet his plane in Montgomery. Turning to Bitts, Harry said, “Do you need any cash or anything?”

“No,” Bitts said. “Why are you doing this to me?”

Harry took Jody's arm and they left the office.

“What happened?” Jody asked him as they sat sweltering in his car waiting for the air conditioning to work.

“I called Alice to see what was holding you up,” he said. “It's my fault. I should have waited. I knew he was getting ready to blow. He really wanted to get fired. He doesn't like this location one bit.”

They drove out the highway that bisected Sugarville and then down a side road, passing through parklike open fields and woods, past small herds of black cattle and down red dirt roads through forests of pine trees almost buried in bright-green kudzu vines, making the forest look like a jungle. Finally they came to a clearing by the banks of the Alabama River where the big grip truck, the Cinemobile, the honeywagon and assorted cars and small trucks were parked.

Harry pulled his car into a small patch of shade and turned off the motor. “Well, here we are. How do you feel?”

Jody felt nervous and frightened. “Fine,” she said.

Maggie, ragged and grimy, came over to the car and opened the door for Jody. “Missed you this morning,” he said. “I got up early and came out with the camera crew. I hear the little twitch got fired.”

“How did you know that?” Jody said.

“There's a gas station down the road about two miles,” Maggie said. He seemed to be feeling good. “Can I take you to lunch?” he said.

“Good Christ,” Harry said. “Is it lunch time?” In the shade of a gigantic mimosa the caterer's helpers were laying out the big tables, and two more
were bringing the food out from the back of the catering truck. The meals were trucked in all the way from Selma, forty miles away, because there was no restaurant in Sugarville that either Harry or Lew would trust with the job. Even so everybody was already bitching about the food, Jody noticed. She herself did not eat but sat quietly waiting for things to start and listening to the conversations around her. Harry was gone doing something. Maggie sat beside her, eating a heaping plateful of food and talking to Doug the electrician about golf. When he was finally through he said to Jody, “Take a little walk with me, okay?”

There was a road cutting down the bank to the river's edge, and then a large gravel bar jutting out into the middle of the river, making a big green lagoon on this side. The opposite bank of the river was much higher and looked like green rock. She and Maggie walked down to the river and then out onto the gravel bar, where there seemed to be fewer insects to bother them, although out in the direct sunlight it was blistering hot. Jody did not mind though. She was feeling less nervous all the time. After all, she was among professionals and everybody else seemed okay.

Maggie said, his hands in his pockets, “Listen, I have to apologize to you. Remember that screen test, and I blow up and quit the picture? I want to apologize for that. The reason I blew was because I hadn't expected you to have any talent. But you do, you have a lot of talent, and I used my reaction to you as an excuse to jack a little more dough out of the studio. I don't know what Harry's told you about my little number, but I want you to be my friend. Okay?”

He held out his hand and Jody shook it, smiling at him to let him off the hook.

There was a new-looking raft of one-by-eights lashed to steel drums in the lagoon, and Maggie told her that they had spent most of the morning making it and deciding where and how to tether it for the camera. He told about the searches for snakes before some of the crew would come down to the river, and then they discovered that nobody in the company knew what a water moccasin looked like and so when they did scare loose a couple of snakes nobody knew if they were deadly or harmless. It did not matter; the snakes wriggled down into the dark green river and nobody had to try to kill them.

“Let's go sit in a car,” Maggie said, and they were slowly walking up the bank when some of the crew started down. “I don't see any actors,” Maggie said, “let's keep going.”

“I want to be by myself for a while,” Jody said, and so Maggie left her in Harry's car, with the door shut, and the engine and air conditioning running. She could see Harry in the shade, sitting at one of the now empty catering tables, leaning forward talking to Lew, and then he got up and came over to her. He got into the car beside her and sighed for a moment in the air conditioning.

“You ready for the big moment?” he asked her.

“Sure,” she said. She was not nervous at all now, and not even impatient to begin. She had waited this long. She could wait.

“It all looks so goddamn beautiful when you're sitting in this air conditioning, but then when you step out into the bugs and heat, forget it.”

“Are those turtles?” Jody asked. She pointed to a jagged stick jutting out from the willows below them along the inside bank of the lagoon. There they were, three shaggy and evil-looking turtles, sitting in the sun with their eyes shut and their necks stretched out.

“How the hell did they get there?” Harry said in an irritated voice. “We combed this area for a whole damn half-hour already.” He got out of the car and a few minutes later Jody saw some of the technicians walking gingerly along the bank below, pushing the willows away from their faces and poking at the growth with long sticks. Jody's turtles slid off the bank with a single splash as soon as the men came near them, and nobody seemed to find anything else.

“Miss McKeegan?” said Bud Hanzer, the assistant director, wearing another of his striped tee shirts. “It's time to get ready.” He led her to the honeywagon and knocked on the little door. “Miss Rudman?”

A handsome middle-aged man opened the door and smiled at Jody and let her in past him. She had met the man the night before at dinner in the motel, although she and Harry did not sit with them. He was Elaine Rudman's husband, Burt Keeling. Jody decided he had probably gone to Abercrombie and Fitch or some place like it and said, “Outfit me for Alabama.” He was wearing a khaki suit, the jacket cut like a bush coat, the pants ending in high cuffs above new-looking lace-up boots.

“I'll leave you girls,” he said in his cultivated Ivy-League voice, and started to close the door behind him.

“Send Harry,” Elaine Rudman said. She looked more nervous than ever. To Jody she said, “Would you mind? I want to talk to Harry for a couple of minutes.”

Jody went out just as Harry, with a little fixed smile, went in.

After twenty minutes or so, Lew Gargolian came huffing up the hill, his face shining and red, and asked Jody where everybody was. She pointed to the honeywagon and Lew knocked on the door. Harry stuck his head out, said something to Lew, and then closed the door again. Lew stamped his foot on the ground and then saw that Jody was watching him. He grinned crookedly and went off. A little while later he came back with Burt Keeling, who went into the honeywagon. By this time Jody was back in Harry's car with the motor running. She could see a few of the crew and the two actors ragged and dirty in their costumes out on the gravel bar playing with a frisbee. Another of the crew was skipping stones out into the river and the rest were hidden in the few shady places, although as the afternoon moved along, shadows grew longer across the bar.

The honeywagon door opened and Harry came out and over to Jody. He got into the car and sat for a minute, looking straight ahead.

“What's the matter?” Jody asked.

“She's frightened,” Harry said. “She's never shown her tits on the screen before and she's worried that it will change her public image. She thinks it could cost her jobs.”

“Will it?” Jody asked.

“I don't know. I don't think so. Anyway, it doesn't matter because she signed the contract and she knew what the job was. She's just afraid, that's all. Burt's talking to her. He's on our side.”

And so eventually Burt and Elaine came out of the trailer, Elaine's head high and her eyes defiant, and they all went down the road to the gravel bar. Benny checked everybody's makeup and Nancy fussed with their hair, and out of nowhere came Jack, wearing a white golfing hat, no shirt and a pair of old Levi's. He took his four actors to one side.

“I'm sorry about all this,” Elaine said.

“It's not your fault,” Jack said. “Let's get to work.”

He described to them the way he thought the scene ought to look, and walked them around to their marks on the bank and in the shrubbery. In the first setup of the scene the four of them appear over the bank and Jonathan says they have to clean themselves up, get their clothes as respectable as possible, before they attempt to go through town. They begin to undress.

But clouds were piling up in the west, cutting the light and heat, and
before they had even finished a rehearsal, Bob Teague the cameraman, came over to Jack with his lips sucked into his mouth, shaking his head.

“We'll never make it this afternoon,” he said.

“Oh fudge,” Jack said, and then two of them went off.

“Well, fuck shit piss balls,” Maggie said drily. “Who's got the frisbee?”

“Oh God, it's all my fault,” Elaine said, looking at Jody. Jody smiled but said nothing.

Jack came back alone and took Jody and Elaine off to one side.

“Girls, we missed the light, and it wasn't your fault, and the person to blame was fired, so let's make the best of it. We can't shoot the beginning of the scene, but the light's going to be right pretty soon for the end of the scene. In fact, maybe everything worked out for the best, because those clouds might just give us a hell of a sunset to shoot into.” The end of the scene shows three of them swimming in the twilight, relaxed and enjoying themselves, even though they are on the run. The only one not joining them is Jonathan, who sits alone on the bank, brooding about his responsibilities.

“Then we can wear our suits,” Elaine said.

“You can,” Jack said, “but not Jody. I want to shoot her standing in the water up to about her knees.”

“Well, then, I won't either,” Elaine said.

Benny took the makeup off them and they undressed, as soon as the camera had been moved onto the raft and the raft located in position. Jack was wet to the waist by now, and everybody who was not needed for the shot had gone up the hill and supposedly out of sight. There were only the actors, Jack, Bud Hanzer, the cameraman and his operator, and, over on the bank, Harry and Burt Keeling.