The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald (3 page)

“Business,” Todd said modestly, “is never slow.”

Boyd Samuels was into ugly. Ugly, kidney-shaped desk of salmon-colored plastic. Ugly art-moderne love seat of chrome and leopard skin. Ugly specimen cacti growing uninvitingly in pots in front of the window overlooking Madison Square Park. These Lulu ambled right for, sniffing delicately at them so as not to honk her large black nose on a prickle.

Todd eyed her warily. “Uh … she’s not going to … ”

“Just getting the lay of the land,” I assured him.

One wall of the office was floor-to-ceiling shelves displaying the many best-selling books by his many best-selling clients. Framed magazine covers and best-seller lists and rave reviews crowded the walls. Standing in one corner was a life-sized, full-color cardboard display cutout of Delilah Moscowitz, the statuesque, scrumptious, and sizzingly hot young sex therapist who was blowing Dr. Ruth out of the water, so to speak. Delilah’s looks, frisky wit, and bold irreverence toward such touchy subjects as fellatio, bondage, and her own rather uninhibited sex life had made her a sensation. She had a top syndicated newspaper column, a radio call-in show, a regular slot on
Good Morning America
, and now, thanks to Boyd Samuels, a surefire bestseller,
Tell Delilah
. “Good sex is all in the head,” read the promo copy on her cardboard cutout. “Take home the lady who gives the best head in the business.”

“Nice subtle approach,” I observed.

“Our newest star,” said Todd, beaming. “Her book has already hit the B. Dalton chain list. She’ll be appearing on
Donahue
and
Oprah
both, and Donna Karan and Norma Kamali are still fighting over her.”

“For … ?”

“They want her to wear their clothes on her national publicity tour. She looks fabulous in whatever she wears. The camera loves her.”

“Yes, she does give a whole new meaning to the word
bookish
,” I said, admiring her cutout. “I see Skitsy Held is her publisher. Interesting, considering what happened with Cameron Noyes.”

Todd frowned and shook his head. “No, not at all. B-Boyd always tries to make things work out even. Coffee?”

“Please. Black.”

He shambled out. I sat down on the love seat, which was as uncomfortable as it looked, and gazed over at the shelves crammed with all of the hot books by all of the hot authors. I listened to the phones ring — publishers calling with feelers, with firm offers, with promises of gold and village virgins. And I sighed inwardly. Once, the raves and magazine covers and phone calls were for me. Once, I’d swum in these swirling waters myself. And drowned in them.

Maybe you remember me. Then again, maybe you don’t. It has been a while since I burst onto the scene as the tall, dashing author of that fabulously successful first novel,
Our Family Enterprise
. Since the Times called me “the first major new literary voice of the eighties.” Since I married Merilee Nash, Joe Papp’s newest and loveliest leading lady, and became half of New York’s cutest couple. Since I had it all, and crashed. Dried up. No juices of any kind. No second novel. No Merilee. She got the eight rooms overlooking Central Park, the red 1958 Jaguar XK 150, the Tony for the Mamet play, the Oscar for the Woody Allen movie. Also a second husband, that brilliant young playwright, Zack something. She got it all. I ended up with Lulu, my drafty old fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-third Street, and a second, somewhat less dignified career — ghostwriter of celebrity memoirs.

I’m not terrible at it. Two No. 1 best-sellers, in fact. My background as an author of fiction certainly helps. So does the fact I myself used to be a celebrity. I know how to handle them. A lot of the lunch-pail ghosts don’t. On the down side, being a pen for hire can be hazardous to my health. A ghost is there to dig up a celebrity’s secrets, past and present, and there’s usually someone around who wants to keep them safely buried.

Danger is not my middle name.

My juices did finally return. Not like before they’ll never be like before. But I did actually finish the second novel,
Such Sweet Sorrow
, the bittersweet story of the stormy marriage between a famous author and famous actress. Somewhat autobiographical. I felt certain it would put me back on the map. A choice paperback sale. Movie deal. Great part for Merilee Nash. Tailor-made for her, in fact.

Deep down inside, I also hoped it would help me win her back — she and Zack had split for good over his drinking and carrying on. But things didn’t quite work out that way. For starters,
Such Sweet Sorrow
was not exactly a critical success. “The most embarrassing act of public self-flagellation since Richard Nixon’s Checkers speech,” wrote the
New York Times Book Review
. “The plot sickens.” That was actually the kindest review I got. Written, incidentally, by Tanner Marsh, who, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, is not one of my eight or nine million favorite people. But I can’t blame the book’s utter critical and commercial failure on Tanner. No one liked it. Particularly you-know-who. She called me in tears after she finished reading it to say she felt like she’d been stripped naked in the middle of Broadway, beaten to a pulp and left in the gutter, bleeding, for bums to urinate on. Her words, not mine. She also said she never wanted to speak to me again. And she hadn’t.

That spring found her starring with Jeremy Irons in Broadway’s hottest ticket, Mike Nichols’s revival of
The Petrified Forest
. Sean Penn was bringing the house down as Duke Mantee. And Merilee was considered a shoo-in for another Tony nomination for her portrayal of Gabby Maple, the Arizona truck-stop waitress who reads François Villon and dreams of running off to France.

Me, I was facing the gloomy realization that my season in the sun had passed. I was closing in on forty and didn’t have much to show for it — two small rooms, $657 in the bank, some yellowing clippings, a huge ego, and a basset hound who eats Nine Lives canned mackerel for cats and very, very strange dogs. I had no future. I was looking for one when Boyd Samuels called.

His assistant returned with a steaming
Bang
coffee mug. I thanked him. He lingered, examined the carpet. He was painfully shy. Not a positive quality in an agent, unless it can be harnessed into naked ambition.

“For what it’s worth,” he finally got out, “I thought
Such Sweet Sorrow
was an even better novel than
Our Family Enterprise
. I really loved it.”

“That makes you and my mother — and her I’m not so sure about.”

“What I mean,” he added, reddening, “is I think the critics were wrong to punch you out.”

“Could be. But don’t forget they weren’t necessarily right when they lavished praise on me before. They simply misunderstood me to my advantage.” I sipped my coffee. “Todd, isn’t it?”

“Why, yes,” he replied, startled. He was not used to people remembering his name.

“Thank you, Todd.”

“Sure thing,” he said brightly.

“Been working for Boyd long?”

“Ever since he started out. We were friends in college. Well, sort of friends. What I mean is … ”

Before he could finish explaining, Hurricane Boyd hit. The man seemed to explode into the room. He was a human exclamation mark. “Whoa, sorry about the delay, amigo!” he exclaimed as he hurled his bulging briefcase on his desk, whipped off his Ray-Bans, and stuck out his hand. “Glad to meet ya! Indeed!”

I shook it, half expecting to get an electrical shock.

Boyd Samuels was burly and bearded and over six feet tall in his ostrich-skin cowboy boots. He had thick black hair and he wore it shoulder length and didn’t bother to comb it. He wore a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his thick, hairy forearms, a bola-string tie of turquoise and hammered silver, and pleated khaki trousers.

“Coffee, Toddy!” he ordered as a greeting to his assistant.

“Right away, Boyd,” Todd said, hurrying off.

Lulu stirred on the sofa next to me. Boyd fell to his knees and patted her. “Hey, pretty baby, what’s happening?” She yawned in response. He made a face, turned back to me. “Jeez, her breath smells kind of … ”

“She has funny eating habits.”

“What’s she eat — old jock straps?”

“We’re going to pretend we didn’t hear that.”

Todd came back with the coffee. Boyd took it, dropped into his desk chair, and gave him the name of an editor he wanted on the phone at once. Todd nodded, retreated.

There was a bottle of Old Overholt rye whiskey in his desk drawer. Boyd poured a generous slug of it into his coffee, then offered me the bottle. I was starting to reach for it when a soft, low growl came from the sofa next to me. My protector. She was concerned that I was slipping back into my bad habits I had before when things went sour. I glowered at her. She glowered right back at me, baring her teeth like Lassie trying to protect Timmy from a hissing rattler. I was definitely losing the upper hand.

Boyd put the bottle away, struck a kitchen match against the sole of his boot, and lit an unfiltered Camel with it. Then he sat back with his boots up on the desk, smoking, sipping his laced coffee. The whole routine was pretty down-home shit-kicker; especially for an optometrist’s son from Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Only the eyes spoiled it. The eyes taking me in from across that desk were shrewd and alert and as piercing as twin laser beams. The man didn’t blink.

Not until his phone buzzed. Then he reached for the cordless headset on the desk and put it on. It had a mouthpiece and earphones and an antenna sticking out of it. It looked like a prop left over from an old episode of
Star Trek
, the one where somebody stole Spock’s brain. Boyd jumped to his feet and paced around the office as he talked, coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other.

“Yo, amigo, you sound like shit in a microwave! Gotta start living clean like me! How’s the little baby? … That’s beautiful, man. Beautiful.” Boyd shifted from chummy to grave. “So, listen, I have a firm offer on the table — buck and a quarter up front.” (Translation: another publisher had offered one of Boyd’s clients an advance of $125,000 for their next book.) He shifted to confidential now — the man worked through the gears as fast and furious as Emerson Fittipaldi. “None of this would be happening if it was up to me. You and me, we’re like family. I want you to have it. And if you’ll just match their figure by the end of today, you’ll get it, okay? … Sure, sure think it over.” He said good-bye, yanked off the headset, and flung it carelessly onto the desk. Then he sat back down, chuckling to himself. “Between you and me, the cheap bastard’s been all alone in the bidding since seventy-five thou. But what he doesn’t know won’t piss him off, right?”

“I thought that sort of thing wasn’t done,” I said.

“It wasn’t — yesterday. But that was when publishing was about books. It’s about bucks now, and anyone who says it isn’t is doing a yank on your frank.” He picked up a football from his credenza and gripped it by the seams. “I know, I know. A lot of editors think I’m a douchebag, and guess what — I like it that way. It means I’m doing my job. What’s important to me is that my clients are happy. And believe me, they are.”

He tossed me the football. It had been autographed by a drug-dependent pro quarterback whose memoir Samuels had peddled for six hundred thousand. Happy indeed.

He took me in with his nonblinking lasers. “What would you say if I told you I’ve convinced Cam Noyes’s publisher to accept a work of nonfiction for his second book instead of a novel. Exact same money.”

“I’d say,” I replied, “you’re almost as good an agent as you think you are.”

“It’s going to be a kind of portrait of his time,” he went on. “His life, his friends, his scene. Charlie Chu is doing original portraits and illustrations for it. An explosive collaboration, really. Like a labor of love for the two of them. Actually, there’s no existing term to describe what it is.”

“I can think of one — home movie.”

Boyd’s nostrils quivered, but he kept right on coming. “We’re talking about the top writer and top artist of this generation. There’s no doubt that it’ll be major.” He seemed utterly sure of this. And he was. Like all topflight salesmen, he was his own best customer.

“What’s happened to his second novel?” I asked.

“Too soon. Cam has to wait for his ideas to percolate — especially because everybody expects so much of him. In the meantime, he needs product out there. And some help — pulling it together. He needs a good editor is what he needs, only there are maybe three in the whole fucking town and his isn’t one of ’em. You interested in helping him out?”

“That’s not my specialty. There are plenty of competent free-lance editors out there if you —”

“You’re not gonna make this easy for me, are you, amigo?”

“That’s not my specialty either.”

He sighed, started to nibble irritably on the cuticle of his left thumb. Abruptly, he stopped himself. “Look, Cam Noyes is a cottage industry now. He has promotional commitments, personal appearance tours, speaking engagements — twenty grand a pop on the college campus tour. His time has become too valuable for him to spend it alone in a room generating material. Literary stars of his magnitude, they’re stepping back from the day-to-day writing. Subcontracting it. At least the smart ones are. They’re becoming like the great Renaissance artists. Those guys had a whole staff of studio artists grinding the shit out for ’em. Then they’d sign their name on it. Same thing.”

“I still don’t see anything here for me.”

“What, you need to hear the words?”

“It would help.”

“Okay. I want to hire you to ghost Cams … ”

“Labor of love?”

“I can’t offer you any kind of coauthorship of course. But if you —”

“Not interested,” I said, getting to my feet. I started for the door.

“Whoa, hold on, man! If it’s the money —”

“It’s not. You’re talking about a book I wouldn’t read. No one will. It’ll sell seventy copies. The rest will be recycled into low-cost housing material.”

“So make it a book people
will
read.” It was a challenge.

“How?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t need you, would I?”