The Hollywood Trilogy (86 page)

The next day should have been terrible, what with Jerry's guilty hangover and the endless prospects of nothing to do. But it happened to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's birthday, or so at least they said, and it was a good excuse for a party. Everybody was invited.

IT BEGAN as a loose-knit group sitting in the sun by the pool, curing their hangovers from a couple of big pitchers of fresh orange juice and a gigantic bottle of vodka. It was a warm morning, with a gentle breeze and the sky robin's-egg blue above. Somebody went out and came back with several white sacks of bakery goods and somebody else passed around a joint of what was described as “Thai-stick shake,” and there was a small argument as to whether it should be spelled “tie-stick,” since the stuff was literally tied to a stick. Others held that since it was supposed to be from Thailand . . .

Jerry stepped out his door in jeans, tee shirt (unmarked) and
huaraches,
on his way to get a cup of coffee and the Sunday L.A.
Times.
Somebody from the pool group called to him and he waved and kept going toward the garage.

“Hey, Jerry,” called Jack. He waved for Jerry to come over, and Jerry, head hanging, could not refuse.

“You all know Jerry,” Jack said. He was tanned and grinning, with powdered sugar in his moustache. “The Phantom Writer.” Everyone laughed easily, and Jerry realized he was an old character around here. He recognized most of the faces, from the garage, the walkway, the patio. People he nodded to. Now they all looked friendly and relaxed, and he laughed at the joke of being called The Phantom Writer. He kind of liked the title.

“How about one of these orange killer mamas?” Jack asked him.

“What's the occasion?” Jerry asked. He accepted his drink, and after the first tantalizing sip he tossed it off.

A dark man with a roll of fat peeping through his open Hawaiian shirt said, “The occasion, my friend, is that it's F. Scott Fitzgerald's birthday. We are all going to get bloody smashed.”

Jerry accepted his second drink from Jack. A girl in an emerald one-piece bathing suit offered him a slice of apple strudel.

“No, thank you,” Jerry said. His hangover was going away. He found a place to sit, and pretty soon he was no longer the center of attention. The conversation was full of names he did not know, but the activities being talked about were familiar enough. Who was getting together with whom, and how was it working out. Who was splitting up and who didn't care. It was a comfortable conversation. By his third drink Jerry was bloody smashed, and it was only just a little after noon. More people had been showing up all the time, and the patio was crowded and buzzing with conversation.

Jerry made a lot of friends when a newcomer, a short angry-looking man with a girl much too young for him, asked belligerently, “Who the hell's F. Scott Fitzgerald?” and Jerry just as belligerently said, “Why, man, he was the greatest silent film director the world has ever seen!” Jerry raised his glass, and so did nearly everybody else.

“Here's to . . . Effey!”

“Effey!”

It was not a wild party, it was just an empty Saturday onto which a party had been superimposed. No one really thought they were going to stay, and nearly everybody had afternoon plans. But the party took hold and it was fun to be there. People went out for more booze, and the girl with the fruit juicer kept grinding out the fresh orange juice. For Jerry what made it a party was the large number of good-looking girls, friendly girls, many of whom lived either here or nearby. He spent a lot of time talking to the girls, who were secretaries, actresses, waitresses, production workers, girl friends, unemployeds, and all fascinated by the fact that Jerry was working on a picture, and knew Richard Heidelberg personally.

“Rick and me are very tight,” Jerry said at least a dozen times that day. When he thought back to the party he was embarrassed by the number of times he had said that, but another memory covered his embarrassment and made this particular Saturday one of the landmarks of his life. He played it over and over in his mind, unable ever to get it exactly right, or in sufficient detail, but playing it over anyway, because it make him feel so good.

The first one had followed him into his apartment when he had gone in to piss. He turned around and saw her standing in the middle of his messy apartment.

“I'm going to the toilet,” he said.

“I'll wait here,” she said, Short girl, lived down the street. Dressed in jeans and a shirt tied up under her breasts. Eyes drunk, mouth saucy. When Jerry came out of the toilet he said, “Your turn”—still not getting it— and she threw her arms around him and planted a big wet kiss on his mouth.

“Mmm, you're cute,” she said.

Jerry took her into the bedroom, mess that it was, and within seconds the two of them were undressed and on the bed.

As they left Jerry's apartment he caught Brenda's eye, and she winked at him. He reddened, but did not care. Midge, the girl he had just fucked,
disappeared into the crowd around the grill, where something was cooking, and Jerry loafed over to the grassy strip in front of the big banana tree and sat. Funny, making love had heightened his desires instead of satisfying them, and he looked around wolfishly at the female flesh everywhere to be seen.

Soon he was deep in conversation with a girl who worked at the studio as an assistant editor, and they gossiped happily about the stuff that was supposed to be going on at the studio, and then Jerry found himself asking her if she wouldn't like to go with him while he picked up some more booze. “Can't take a free ride all day,” he said. “Come in while I change my duds,” he said, and she followed him into his apartment. Jerry just didn't give a fuck, so he turned around and grabbed her and felt her slide into his arms with eagerness. And, so, little pink lights exploding in his mind, Jerry dragged her into the bedroom.

They came out of his apartment just as Brenda was passing by. Brenda's expression this time had a tinge of respect in it, and instead of winking, she merely raised her eyebrows.

When Jerry and the girl got back from their booze run, having traded phone numbers, kisses and promises of lunch at the commissary, Jerry got rid of her and found Brenda.

“Let's go,” he whispered huskily.

“I thought you'd never ask,” she murmured, and they slipped into Jerry's
boudoir,
where the smell of sex was thick.

“Where's Jack?” he asked, but did not care.

“I dunno, prob'ly fucking somebody in the bushes,” Brenda said.

The party went on into the night, and Jerry made a couple of good friends among the residents. But there was no more sex. Jerry felt he had done his part. More than his part. When he finally went to bed he went alone, and the mingled odors wafted him into delicious sleep.

PART FOUR: WESTWOOD

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

RICK'S GLOOMY mood was not improved by the front of the theater, even though already there were lines of young people stretching around the short Westwood block and out of sight, and a mob of “studio personnel” crowding their way in through a special velvet-roped open door. Above them the center of the marquee read not
BRUIN
! but
RUIN
! in blue neon script, and Rick was far from strong enough emotionally these days to see anything but an ominous omen.

RUIN
!
RUIN
!
RUIN
! the blue neon blinked. Or maybe it was Rick blinking. He got out of the hired limousine after slipping a fifty to the driver
(“Buy yourself a drink!”)
and scooted into the lobby. Studio personnel crowded back to avoid his touch. Boss Hellstrom, standing by the candy counter in a beautiful grey suit, turned away from him. Elektra trailed six feet behind him, like a Japanese bride of twenty-five years ago.

Rick was
hot.

He stooped over the drinking fountain and let the icy water chill his swollen lips. He barely felt like swallowing. But swallow he must, or strangle on his own anxiety. Somehow he had gotten it into his mind that tonight's reaction from this audience, mixed UCLA students, studio people and their guests, and the Brass, would determine the fate of
The Lady in the Lake.

Rick looked around, half-expecting to see Donald Marrow.

At first, months ago, Marrow had been enthusiastic and full of ideas, actually moving west, taking up a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, occupying the big executive office across the hall from Rick's and generally bounding around like a jackrabbit. He was no longer dressing Main Street, so Teresa di Veccio must have gotten to him in more ways than one. She was his business partner and was putting up a lion's share of the bucks (Rick was not exactly certain how much) so that tonight's audience was being treated to

MARROW–DI VECCIO–RABALLO PRESENT

A RICHARD HEIDELBERG PRODUCTION

KERRY DARDENELLE'S

THE LADY IN THE LAKE

Raymond Chandler had somehow managed to elude this company of names, although way down in the billing he split a card with Jerry Rexford. Rick had decided at the last minute not to get in on the source card but stick to
PRODUCED BY RICHARD HEIDELBERG
. Perhaps it was the beginnings of a rudimentary modesty, although he doubted it. More likely preparation to lay the whole thing off onto Rexford if it was a disaster.

A disaster now would wreck Rick. He had long since worn out his welcome at the studio. The Boss must have hated him, although no one could have been more impeccable in his behavior than Hellstrom, who, once he found himself sandbagged, doubly sandbagged—not only overruled on the picture but finding the woman he had told Rick he loved in the delicate hands of a creep like Donald Marrow; nonetheless breaking his ass to make sure the picture had every advantage he could supply, from a miracle budget, utterly without padding, to a daily scrutiny to keep the little problems little, and waste at a minimum. And he got them the best below-the-line crew anybody had seen for years.

Rick had to admit that the production was first class because the Boss had made it so. Rick himself would have committed dozens of costly errors, and many times only the Boss's intervention had kept him from folly. And the Boss had been polite and never let anybody see the dislike he must have felt. Only Rick could feel the chill, and regretted the death of what might have been a lifelong friendship.

The Boss had even done his best to keep Marrow from forcing his idiotic notions down Rick's throat, once the production had started to roll. Jerry, whom Rick could see now across the lobby, grimmer around the eyes and firmer in the mouth than when he had come to Rick as a callow first-time writer some months ago, and now acknowledging Rick's wink with a flutter—no more—of his fingers and then pretending to be interested in a nearby tapestry, had feared Marrow more than any of them. Marrow would burst into Jerry's tiny cubicle with script changes and ideas that must have been baffling
to Jerry—worse than baffling, surrealistic—because Jerry had not been to the screenings of new product from the other studios that Marrow had been to, and so did not know that he was being offered the Big Moments from these other pictures, the Moments where the screening room or theater or living room full of executives and their mates burst into laughter or applause.

Marrow was not one to stand back from a little judicious theft if it would improve the product, and he seemed to have no memory for yesterday's suggestions. Rick finally had to teach Jerry to nod and smile and make notes until Marrow ran down. Sometimes this worked and sometimes Jerry would get an awful tongue-lashing from Marrow and would have to sit and clench his knees while his face turned redder and redder and Marrow explained how he wanted things.

“This is a perfect chance for Jody McKeegan to
sing,
while she's working in Bakersfield in this country-western hole in the wall, see? I asked you to run that scene up before . . .”

Miserable Jerry would look at Rick and then at Marrow, squeeze his knees and say in a strained voice, “But I thought we agreed against any musical numbers . . .”

“Jody McKeegan can sing, the audience expects it of her,” Marrow snapped.

McKeegan was playing Muriel Chess and had the biggest salary on the picture, although she was billed below Eric Tennyson.

Rick had actually fought casting McKeegan, on the grounds that she was too old, too expensive and too damn much trouble to work with, but the Boss had cut through all that by saying bluntly, “She's the best actor we can get for the money, and believe me, this part calls for an actor. The audience has to be fooled by Mrs. Fallbrook as much as Marlowe is.”

The real stroke of genius had been Eric Tennyson for Philip Marlowe, if Rick said so himself, and he certainly did.

Rick looked around the crowded lobby. There wasn't a Tennyson in sight. He broke out into a light sweat.

“You better go to the toilet or something,” Elektra said to him.

IT HADN'T exactly been Rick's idea to cast Eric Tennyson. Everybody wanted Peter Wellman, and Peter Wellman wanted to play Philip Marlowe
very badly. The studio had a three-picture commitment from Wellman, and now that his Texas movie was finished, except for an afternoon's looping, Wellman was getting impatient for work. Rick had come down to his place in the Malibu Colony for lunch, with David Novotny and William Galaxy (Wellman's producing partner) and they had all had a fine time, ate a wonderful lunch, drank white wine and played some doubles. Rick was not a very good player, and let Novotny do it all, even unto throwing the match, because, as he said to Rick later, “You don't beat an actor on his own court, especially not with a terrible partner like yourself.”