The Hollywood Trilogy (76 page)

So when she handed him a soiled piece of paper torn from a brown grocery bag with a name and phone number on it, and said, “Oh, would you call this guy? He's supposed to have a great idea for a picture . . .” he didn't just take it to throw away later.

“Who is the guy?” he asked her.

“Just some Hollywood dude,” she said. “It's a favor.”

There was not in Rick's mind the slightest thought that Elektra was messing around on the side, so it wasn't that. He shrugged and made the call, and now the project was a definite maybe. The first thing Rick had done was to call David Novotny. When the agent got back to him he said, “David, I'd like you to check out the availability of
The Lady in the Lake.”

“M-G-M owns it,” David said.

“Do you know if they have any plans to remake the picture?”

“No, at least, I haven't heard anything. But if you make them an offer, they'll sure look into it.”

This happened all the time. A property would lie with its feet up in the studio vaults for years, and then a casual inquiry as to the rights would start the studio heads shaking and muttering, “What's this all about? What do they see in it? Maybe we should make this picture . . .” And a gigantic argle-bargle would commence, gigantic sums offered and rejected, and then finally one day the press of business would make everybody lose interest, and the property would go back to the vault for another thirty years.

“Uh, what did you have in mind, if I may be so bold?” David said.

“A very successful formula,” Rick said, carefully, for it was important to have David on his side. “We take a classic murder mystery, an absolute classic, and we present it as a tragic love story. But fun. Like
The Maltese Falcon.”

“Who would do the script?” David asked, after a brief pause.

“I would,” Rick said. He didn't mention Rexford's script. It was a damned good script and would be a lot better when Rick got done with
it. But Rexford, whoever he was, was a total innocent. Let him stew, Rick thought with a smile. No point in telling him anything until there was something to tell. Once Rick owned the rights he would call the bastard and invite him to lunch.

It was only a couple of weeks later, right after Rick moved his operation onto the lot, that David was able to call and tell him that M-G-M was not interested in remaking
The Lady in the Lake
themselves (they weren't aware of the fun-tragic-love-story angle), but would sell the rights for a healthy fee. They didn't even care who was behind the inquiry.

“Buy it,” Rick said.

“As your personal property, or for your company?” David wanted to know.

“Oh, the company, of course.”

So began the complex, serpentine flow of energy that would ultimately result in the purchase, or not, of
The Lady in the Lake.
Rick relaxed and dropped the project from his mind. He would either get the rights or not, nothing for him to worry about. That was why David got ten percent.

Meanwhile something dramatic had happened, and for a couple of hours the studio was in an uproar. It was all because of Rick's company moving onto the lot. With him, of course, came his projects and his people, from Joyce his secretary to Jose Gonzala, who had finally found the script he was looking for.

The script had come to Jose through an old high school classmate, who thought Jose could help to get the classmate's uncle's novel published. The uncle was an old
camposino,
who worked the harvests from the Imperial Valley to Yakima and had written a book about it. The writing was dreadful and ignorant, but the scenes were innocently powerful. There was simple truth on every page, as well as a great number of grammatical and spelling errors. The old man had written the book over a period of years, in Scripto pads that were smudged and dirty from being carried through the valleys of the West Coast. Much was crossed out and much added in margins and over other words. There were over fifty of the Scripto pads, and the friend let Jose read them before having them typed up. It was part of the experience to begin reading in impatience and embarrassment for the old guy, and then find yourself in awe of him. He had painfully written it in English because all the best-sellers were in English.

The book was unpublishable, but the screenplay was going to be a masterpiece. It would speak for farm laborers without ranting, it would describe a pastoral migratory existence that was more important than the larger issues of law and economics. It was about real people who loved their lives.

And it could be made cheap, without stars, and still clean up. It was a natural. It was
Romeo and Juliet, King Lear
and
Hamlet
all rolled into one. There were no Gringo villains, indeed, there were no Gringos at all. What it had was a
beat!
Rick could feel it as he pawed through the dirty old Scripto pads. A heartbeat. Young people would batter down walls to see it, if Rick did it right, the right music, the right casting, the right innocence.

So one morning as the rain poured down so hard you were wet to the skin the minute you stepped outdoors, a car arrived at the main gate of the studio, an old nondescript car jammed full of Mexicans. Young Mexicans, drinking beer and steaming up the windows of the car with their marijuana smoke. The man sitting next to the driver yelled to Charlie Devereaux that he was Jose Gonzala and the others were his staff and his guests. Charlie refused to let them on the lot. The rain poured down, and people in other cars waved past by Charlie peered through the rain at the carful of Mexicans.

Charlie finally called Rick, when he had a moment, and said he had a carful of Mexicans on his hands, what to do? True, there was a Drive-On Pass issued to Gonzala, but nothing was said about a
gang.

“Oh, shit, Charlie,” Rick said. “Let 'em on.”

But Charlie was mad now. Thoroughly wet, with an undetermined number of Mexicanos glaring at him through the rain.

“I'll come out there,” Rick said. He was soaking by the time he made it down to the main gate, and in not such a good temper himself.

“What the fuck is this?” he demanded of Charlie. “Do I have the right to let people on the lot, or not?”

“By name, sir, yes you do. By name.”

Rick sighed and wiped some of the water off his face. He went around the car and tapped on the glass. The window rolled down and Jose's furious, embarrassed and humiliated face glowered up at him.

“We have to give the gate everybody's name,” he started to explain.

“Fuck that noise” was Jose's reply.

Rick had to make a decision. He made it quickly, and said to Jose, “Okay.” The window rolled back and Rick went around the car and up to the old man.

“Let them in, please. I'll be responsible.”

But Charlie was pissed off, too. These punks had been glowering at him and yelling threats. He didn't know if they had weapons in there, either. He said to Rick, stiffly:

“Not without a list of their names. Sir.”

“Get me Alexander Hellstrom, would you please? Or I can dial it myself.”

“You may use the phone, yes, sir,” Charlie said. Cars went by, and Charlie, stooping and peering, waved them by. Famous producers, directors, movie stars, all saw the car full of Mexicans stalled at the gate.

“Yes, Willi, tell him it's an emergency,” Rick said into the telephone.

“I'm in a meeting,” came Alexander's gruff voice.

Rick explained the situation as well as he could, with Charlie standing right there.

“The whole thing's gonna get spread all over the Spanish press,” he said at last. “Jose's no pigeon.”

“I'll come right down,” Alexander said.

“He's coming right down,” Rick said. He was sorry if this was going to cause the old man to lose his job.

Here came the Boss, through the mist and rain, head bent, fists clenched, sopping raincoat and overflowing shoes. He came straight up to the car and said loudly, “Gentlemen, I'd like to meet you and shake hands one at a time, but let's get the hell out of this rain, huh?” He dragged Charlie out of his hut and over to the car, grinning, his arm around the old man's shoulders.

“Charlie Devereaux here thought you guys were a bunch of
bandidos.
He was ready to shoot. He hasn't jacked that thing out for a long time, have you, Charlie? Come on, gentlemen, let's get dry and get some coffee and get acquainted.”

It worked.

They all went to Alexander's offices and were served coffee and there was a general conversation about the project, and then a shuffling and shaking of hands, while Alexander begged each of them to feel free to visit the studio anytime and look things over. He made a point of telling Willi to give each a book of Studio Tour passes “for your families and friends,” and it was over. Nothing in the Barrio press except a guardedly laudatory article about the project getting started, with a picture of Jose and the old man who had written the book shaking hands.

And it was a puzzlement, why the old guy at the gate hadn't gotten fired for pulling the Boss out of a meeting and into a rainstorm. Rick had to think about that one.

AND THEN, instead of winter, it became summer again. This was how Los Angeles fooled you. The new summer began bright and hot, with only a touch of the autumnal. The beaches south of Malibu were crowded again, and tens of thousands of happy Angelenos sat in open-air stadiums to cheer on their teams. But the smog still rose in gassy clouds over the freeways, and there would be sudden dense killer fogs, closing the airports and creating that too-cold, too-warm climate along the coast that drove a lot of people out of their minds and back to town.

At the beach you could hear the surf but not see the ocean. Rick couldn't stand it, and accepted Alexander's offer of the Errol Flynn apartment. Most nights during the week he wouldn't come home. Elektra was not all that lonely. For one thing, she was often in town running around or shopping, going to movies or visiting friends. And she was an important part of the beach life that included popular singing stars and musicians, movie people, dope dealers and a few of the idle rich. There were dinners and weekend parties for them to be involved in, and if Rick was not there, it was okay. These people understood the needs of art and profession, and someone was always coming back from London or New York, and someone else was always leaving for Australia. It was just what Elektra wanted whether Rick was there or not.

The project now called
Young Man, Old Man
had been through several evolutions. Rich had tackled the screenplay with vigor, the first writing he had done in a great while, and Joyce was under instructions to let no phone call, however important, interrupt the three sacred morning hours when he wrote. But the story didn't come along all that well. It seemed to run jaggedly between high comedy and something fit for a Daffy Duck cartoon. Casting was a problem. They were still trying to find two stars important enough and with the right qualifications to carry the project along.

Once Rick had even had to fly to London himself, for an audience with Mick Jagger, whose people had told Mick's American agency that he was looking for something along these lines to make a picture. Rick allowed himself to get excited on the flight. With Mick Jagger in the project, things
would be different. Of course the young man–old man part would have to go, it would just be a naked power struggle between two beautiful men for a beautiful woman, with songs. But what about Rex Harrison? With that talky-singy voice he could break your heart in two seconds. The girl would have to be older (she would anyway, they never really considered a teenager, at least not a young one) but that was okay, maybe they could get a really good singer. On he dreamed as the Atlantic Ocean slipped under him.

But alas, personal matters kept Mick busy, and Rick fuming in the London Hilton, until a meeting was out of the question. Rick Heidelberg didn't wait around no hotel room for nobody, and Mick couldn't be found. Rick flew home and walked into the beach house with a heavy load of jet lag to find a dinner party in progress, Elektra in the kitchen and people all over the house, many of whom he knew.

“How's Mick?” somebody yelled at him from the crowd.

“Fucked,” he said, and went into the bedroom.

Then the studio tried to force a casting on him, and he balked. Skye Davis and Dael Tennyson. As far as Rick was concerned, Skye couldn't get arrested. He had been top ten for a few years, a grizzled old drunk of a charmer. He lived in Nassau to work on his tan and be near his money, had a nice wife and numerous children, all in private boarding schools, and made a picture a year. Rick could not write with his big face in mind. It was like writing jokes for a grizzly bear.

Dael, he was a friend, almost, and would be fine as the young guy, but not with Skye Davis. But they had to have the interminable meetings of politely smiling agents and executives and sidekicks and lawyers before Rick could sense that things were easing off. And then one morning he read that Skye was going to make a picture at Universal.

“And we get stuck with a commitment we can't exercise,” Alexander said grumpily.

“Are we in turnaround?” Rick asked him. They were in the apartment, having an after-work drink. Then they both had dinner. Rick liked Alexander a lot more than he had expected to, and found great comfort in the older man's calm sturdiness. So they got together quite a bit, considering the pressures on their time. But there were no more crazy drunken nights, and when Rick brought out his bottle of cocaine, Alexander waved it off.