The Hollywood Trilogy (64 page)

Then there were the hicks in front of Mann's Chinese Theater, gawking at the footprints, pawprints, titprints, etc., seeming less than immortal in the hot afternoon sunlight. Jerry was contemptuous of the tourists; after all, he was now an Angelino himself.

The Boulevard had a lot of movie theaters on it, and Jerry spent a lot of time in them until finally it became crippling to his work. He would go see a movie, and then all the way home he would compare it to his own screenplay, which would make him sweaty either because what he was doing was so much
better
or so much
worse
he felt he was losing his judgment. Pages would get ripped out, or other pages hastily written, Jerry grim and biting his nails as he sat naked on his towel, all to be sacrificed next time he saw another picture.

So there went going to the movies.

He liked to walk in downtown Beverly Hills, too, because it seemed like a regular city, with its expensive shops, tall buildings (but not too tall) and beautifully dressed people. It was here that Jerry made the delightful discovery that there was a street in Beverly Hills named Rexford Drive. Someday
when he became famous people would say that it was named after him. What about Hayworth Street in Hollywood? Which came first? Rita or the street?

Naturally, Jerry wanted to meet girls. The ones on Hollywood Boulevard were a little too tough-looking. He had never been a man who could pick up a girl on the street, although he had not realized this fact until now. In Beverly Hills, where the women were extravagantly beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful women Jerry had ever seen, they would not even look at him. There was no eye contact with these lovely rich young women, who had nothing to do all day but shop and be picked up in their limos and go play tennis. There was no friendly banter in the stores, either. Jerry was used to having good relations with the girls who worked behind the counters of stores, but here in Beverly Hills they took one look at him and moved off. The trouble was, Jerry did not look rich. Finally he decided that downtown Beverly Hills was crass, and it was no longer fun to go there.

There were places to go in his Porsche, drives to be taken in the hills, or to places he had heard about all his life but never seen, like Capistrano or Palm Springs, but after a while he had seen all he could see from the car, and it was no fun hanging around without anybody to talk to. And the Porsche was acting up. It did not like Southern California at all, and hated the drive from Jerry's apartment to the Boulevard, always carboning up and threatening to stop dead in the middle of the street.

Jerry took it in to the repair place at Wilshire and Doheney, sitting with his hands between his legs in the big hangarlike garage watching the mechanics working on Ferraris and Lamborghinis. Finally somebody looked into his car, and Jerry started to get up and go over to find out what was the trouble, but in roared a long expensive automobile, and a rich man jumped out, and Jerry's mechanic left the Porsche with its back obscenely open and ran to make jokes with the rich man. Jerry sat and boiled. An hour later they told him his car was okay, nothing wrong with it.

“Take the sumbitch out and open 'er up once in a while,” he was told. He had been driving too conservatively.

But Sundays were the absolute worst, because all he had to do on Sundays was sit in his apartment wishing he had the guts to go outside and make friends. Sundays were all for nothing, with the added pressure of Monday coming.

Gradually, his loneliness began to turn inward, in the form of self-dislike. He began to question his life-plan, his ambitions in the movie business.
He read the trades, he knew things were whirling on all around him, pictures were being made, men and women younger than Jerry finding themselves in the headlines for their accomplishments, while Jerry pecked and edited his life away at
Pet Care Hotline.
As for the screenplay he was writing so faithfully, what was it but a bunch of imitations, the same old whore of a plot with not even new clothes? It was a hunk of garbage, Jerry would think, lying miserably on his couch, dressed in his shorts and drinking beer. He should go over and throw it into the garbage sack.

Sometimes he would actually do it, and then feeling silly, take it back out and put it on the table. More than once this led him into a guilt storm of activity, and he would clean the apartment from one end to the other.

What a life!

“How did you make out with Adams, Ray & Rosenberg?” Toby asked him one Monday morning as they sat enjoying their coffee.

“Same as everybody else,” Jerry said. “They'd be glad to see my screenplay when it's finished . . .”

“You talk to one of the boys?”

“No,” Jerry admitted. “Just the girl at the door.”

“Fuckers,” Toby said, but not as if he were surprised. Toby seemed to think that a good agent should be able to tell from Jerry's sincerity that he would soon be a hot property, a surprisingly naive attitude considering its source.

“I'm not so sure I'm all that sincere,” Jerry said. “Maybe I just want to score the big bucks like anybody else . . .”

Toby was amused. “Yeah, that's what I mean by sincere.”

Jerry had come to realize that Toby was his only friend in Los Angeles, but even so, he was shy about asking him out for a drink, or even spending time with him at work, in the twenty-four-hour dirty bookstore. Toby did not mind, but Jerry imagined the customers were put off by having a man in a suit and tie standing there while they roamed among the pornography. So they saw one another only during the fifteen minutes or so in the morning when Toby would put the “
BACK IN 10 MIN
” sign on his door and duck out for coffee.

ON THIS particular morning, Toby was in rare good humor.

“Just the man I wanted to see,” he said, and patted the stool next to him.
There was nobody else in the place except Helen, who was refilling the Orange Whip machine, but Toby looked around conspiratorially, and pulled a magazine from under his newspaper. Jerry moved to look at it, but Toby said, “Back off for a minute,” and riffled the pages rapidly until getting the one he wanted. Then he pressed the magazine to the counter and said, “Okay, have a look . .”

Jerry looked, did a take, and looked again.

“Who does that look like to you?”

“It's Elektra Soong, isn't it?”

Toby's eyes wrinkled with cynical amusement. “Elektra Soong in a dirty magazine? With her ass up in the air?”

Jerry looked again. Elektra Soong had been on the cover of
Rolling Stone
a couple of issues back, with her boyfriend Richard Heidelberg. Jerry remembered that he and Toby had lusted over her photographs inside, and Toby had described her as “prime pussy.” Jerry had to agree. Now, looking at the semipornographic photograph, he could not help but think he was looking at Elektra Soong—badly photographed and obscene. “Good God,” he said.

“How much would you bet?” Toby teased.

“God, nothing. This picture could have been taken, you know, before she . . .” Jerry was not sure what he wanted to say.

“Before she made the big time, huh?”

“Yes. What a shame, to have it published now . . .”

“Shit, half the stars in Hollywood have pictures like this in the closet somewhere . . . but this ain't Elektra Soong.”

Jerry said just the right thing: “Well, she looks enough like her to be her sister . . .”

Toby laughed wildly. “Yer close! Yer close!” Dramatically he opened the magazine and showed the rest of the photo layout, the headlines, the text. Jerry's skin went cold. The photo he had felt deliciously lustful over had been that of a man. A man who was the spit and image of Elektra Soong, but nevertheless a man. Jerry felt immediately furious at Toby for trapping him like this.

“Don't lose your cool,” Toby said, “I fell for it, too. This is Elektra's brother, kid brother . . .”

“How do you know?” Jerry asked. “The name here is Karol Dupont.”

“Would I waste your time with this crap? I met her, last night at a party.”

“Her?”

“By courtesy,” Toby said. “A bunch of drag queens at this party up in the hills, and she was there. I got to talkin' to her, nice bitch. Crazy about her sister.”

“What's this got to do with me?” Jerry said a bit stiffly.

“Nothin', only this could be your connection, don't you get it?”

“My connection?”

“Yeah. Karol's in touch with her sister, her sister's livin' with Rick Heidelberg. I know Karol, you know me . . . get the picture?”

It made Jerry a little dizzy, but he got the picture. “You can't be serious,” he said, but looking into Toby's feverish eyes, he knew that Toby
was
serious, and thought he was being a great help.

“You gimme your script, I pass it to Karol, Karol drops it on Elektra, and Elektra hands it to Rick.”

Toby began to sing the Marine Hymn, but with new words:

            
From the cesspools here in Hollywood,

            
To the shores of Malibu . . .

He laughed wildly. “What a parlay!”

Jerry wondered how the hell he was going to keep this “parlay” from happening without losing Toby's friendship. Well, at first he would temporize. “I'm not finished yet,” he said. “But when I do . .”

“Crap,” said Toby.

Helen came over and turned her head to look at the magazine,
Queens on Parade,
but Toby slipped it under his newspaper again.

“Not for your tender eyes,” he said to her.

“Oh golly, I've seen about everything,” she said, but walked away blushing.

Toby turned back to Jerry. “Lemme ask you a question, what's this script of yours about?”

“Well, it's kind of complicated,” Jerry said.

“Strip it down for me . . .”

Jerry did not want to.

Toby was impatient. “What is it, love story, fantasy, Western, gangsters, what?”

Blushing as redly as Helen, Jerry told him a bald, simplified version of the story he was working on. As he stripped it of its nuances Jerry realized once again how corny it was. After a couple of sentences he stopped.

Toby looked thoughtful, and then said, “Dynamite. It's a great idea. I think you got a property there, my boy.”

“Don't say anything to anybody, okay?” Jerry asked. Toby had to get back. He slapped Jerry on the shoulder.

“Hurray for . . . Holly-wood!” he sang, and left.

Jerry looked helplessly at Helen, who blushed and stared into his eyes until he had to break contact.

CHAPTER SEVEN

RICK'S OFFICES were on the top floor of the Hendricks Building on La Brea just below Santa Monica, a four-floor building devoted to the motion-picture arts. Rick had the best suite, and his private office had belonged to a number of moguls before him, which accounted for the luxurious frosted blue glass backbar with the intaglio Venus emerging from the waves, and the huge (for an office) bathroom with its deep blue Mexican tile shower—big enough for two. There was even a tiny bedroom behind a sliding panel, with a view of the parking lot in back, and beyond that, the Goldwyn Studios, a block away.

With Rick's inhabitancy the office blossomed out in movie posters and modern art, furniture from the teens and twenties, all beautifully cared for and all in the best taste. It was normal for someone in pictures to put up movie posters, but only of movies one has worked on. Rick did more than that: he put up posters of movies he
wished
he had worked on. The biggest, right behind his desk and covering part of the panel which concealed the secret bedroom, was
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Beneath the poster was a low credenza filled with books, and upon it was the golden Oscar Rick had won for the screenplay of
The Endless Unicorn.
Rick had also produced and directed the picture, but those awards went to others.

Rick was paying an arm and a leg for these offices, and although everyone who came to see him on business was terrifically impressed, still no deal had been made, and Rick was still a one-picture wonder boy, someone to be watched, but meanwhile, where was his next biggie? And the rent had to be paid.

In the other offices were Rick's employees, three secretaries, two script readers, and his friend Jose Gonzala, a graduate of the UCLA Film School (3.6 grade average) and a director looking for a project. They hoped of
course to make a picture together, with Rick as executive producer, the marriage broker, as it were, but so far none of the properties they had looked at had rung any bells.

Input was tremendous, of course. First, when a new producer begins to make waves, the agents send him routinely all the loose scripts, in some cases stuff that has been lying around for years. In Rick's case, since he seemed to have a handle on the young, he got a lot of scripts and treatments for “youth-oriented projects”—most of it nakedly exploitive, some of it good but dated, but most of it just plain unreadable.

At first he swore he would read everything that came into the office, but in no time at all the huge stacks of red, blue, grey, black and green screenplays, the galley proofs from hopeful publishers, the old novels, the presentations and the treatments overwhelmed him, and he hired readers. Readers had been one of the things about “the old Hollywood” that irritated Rick. “You write a novel, see, break your ass on it;. and then some punk making fifty a day reduces it to a paragraph with a recommendation at the bottom, which the big boss reads while he's picking his teeth after lunch, and burp!—there goes your property!”