West of Paradise (10 page)

The towels were the skimpy variety of cheap hotels, no absorbency to them, too small to go around Lila's massive frame. Kate helped her out of the tub, struggling not to be repelled by the rolls of flesh, the broken veins on the enormous thighs. “Are you up to dressing yourself?” she asked Lila.

“What do I need to get dressed for?”

“Does this place have room service?”

“I don't think so.”

“You could probably use some coffee.”

“Yeah, okay. Sure.”

*   *   *

The Park Sunrise was one of those low-priced, high-gloss motels on the Sunset Strip that called themselves hotels. There was a coffee shop with bright brass bad-taste modern chandeliers shaped like spikey solar systems with too-high-watt candlebulbs that made Lila look even older than her seventy-some years. “How old are you exactly?” Kate ventured. “If you don't mind my asking.”

“Once you stop caring if you get laid you don't mind if people know,” Lila said. “I'm seventy-two.”

“How old was Larry?”

“The same.”

“How old were you when you got married?”

“Eighteen.” Her eyes got almost pretty for a moment, with vestiges of their probably once-bright blue, as she seemed to remember.

Maybe she'd looked really cute, Kate considered. Maybe underneath the flab and the years was the really snappy kid who had managed to capture him. Everyone seemed to agree, no matter how little they thought of his other qualities, that Larry had been sharp. Maybe Lila had been sharp, too. Sassy in an appealing way, different from the combative style she'd shown at the funeral, when there was nothing more left to lose.

“My parents had a furniture business,” Lila said, as if it hadn't been her looks alone she'd had to offer him. Dowries, in the guise of a line you had to offer someone, not quite the law firm he could partner into on a higher level, but the proud credentials of the lower middle class. “It was a pretty big business. Booming. End of the war.” She poured a couple of packets of sugar into her coffee. “Ended just in time, so he wouldn't have to dodge the draft or have his eardrum punctured like he talked about doing.”

She stirred her coffee, looking into it like tea leaves containing the past, smiling as though she considered that aspect of him cute, original, early indications of the guy who was to learn to worm his way out of anything. “It was not part of his program to die in somebody else's fight.”

“What was his program?”

“To conquer the world. I guess in his way he did. If you think Hollywood is the world, and a lot of people do. You really want to write a book about him?”

“Maybe.”

“Not an expose?” Lila left off the last syllable, not adding the final
a
sound, as though she had never really heard the word, only read it.

“That's not my style,” Kate said, not quite sure yet what her style really was, but knowing it would have to hold her own redemption in it, as well as Larry Drayco's. There was so much she wanted from life. There were so many little shadows of ambition and desire in herself she avoided looking at. Instead, she did what most people did when they started out: she ennobled her path before setting out on it.

Even when she spoke of her infatuation with Fitzgerald, she left out the part of his history she really coveted, besides loving him, cherishing his talent, saving him from Zelda. And that was the conscienceless enjoyment of life, selfish, with no other purpose than having a fine time. She would have happily encouraged him to run through Paris. Paris or the south of France. Isadora Duncan at the next table. The Murphys under brightly colored parasols on the beach. What an adventure they would have had together! And though she was sincere in her wish to have taught him that there
were
second acts in American lives, she would have liked to have been assured of a first act of her own. All it had been so far for her was a curtain raiser.

Lila sipped her coffee, holding the cup with two hands. “What did Larry do, besides the movies, and the bad stuff they've already written, that makes him worth writing a book about?”

“That's what I'd like to find out,” Kate said. “Socrates said, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.'”

“No shit. Socrates, huh?” Lila lifted her coffee to her lips, with shaking hands, and took a swallow. “Well, maybe it wasn't.”

“What?”

“Worth living. Look how he threw himself away on those people, on those drugs. Like he didn't really care about himself.”

“But you did.”

Lila smiled. “I was crazy about him. Always. Even when he took the money my father gave him to start his own furniture business and ran away to Hollywood. Even when he changed his name. Even when he married those other women.”

“You weren't upset he divorced you?”

“He never divorced me,” Lila said, and drank some more coffee.

“And you never said anything?” Kate said, after a stunned moment.

“Being a bigamist could get him in trouble. He made enough trouble for himself. I knew he'd come back. And he always did. Whenever they died, he'd come home to me, and I'd make him tuna fish sandwiches. He always said nobody made tuna fish sandwiches like mine.

“He'd come in his limousine, and it would wait outside. And we'd talk, and hug, and cry a little, and I'd pack him a few sandwiches for the plane. Even when he had a private plane, or the studio plane, he never left without a little paper bag, with
my
tuna salad in it.”

“So you forgave him.”

“I was never angry. Disappointed, sure. Hurt. Jealous of the women. But I was the one he loved, I always knew that. Those other women were for the guy he was trying to be. They were like the custom shirts he took to wearing, the ones with the pointy collars. They looked pretty snappy, but they didn't launder well. Anyway, they all died. Not that I wished it on them, but I admit I never shed a tear.”

“And you didn't mind that he never moved you out of Queens?”

“I like Queens,” Lila said. “It was Larry who needed to live like a king.”

“Will you tell me the whole story?” Kate asked.

“Maybe one day,” Lila said. “Right now, I'm hungover, and that always makes me reserved.”

*   *   *

In the far corner of the restaurant, in the last beige Naugahyde booth, a man sat hunched down, back to the room, elbows on the hard surface of the table, fists clenched against his cheeks so what little of his face peeked from beneath his porkpie hat and from behind his heavy sunglasses was obscured. He had known this hotel in the fifties, shortly after the death of James Dean, when Marlon Brando was thin and heartbreakingly handsome, and Natalie Wood was a reckless teenager no one ever considered would come to a tragic end. Vince Edwards had stayed here before he'd had a hope of a television series. Nick Adams, having flogged himself to the press as Jimmy Dean's best friend, thereby earning the eternal enmity of Linus Archer, who thought the title his, had set up residence here just before committing suicide. The act garnered him more press than he'd ever received from holding himself out as Jimmy's buddy. Even the then very young and appealing Tony Perkins commented that if Nick had known how much publicity his suicide would get him, he would have done it a lot sooner. Tony at the time of the comment was being groomed to be the romantic idol who would replace Jimmy Stewart, before
Psycho
typecast him as the weirdo he was to play for the rest of his life. He had made that remark to a very young writer secreted in the hotel by the man who was sitting now, back to the room, in the very last booth, with another very young writer he was keeping there for exactly the same reason.

Forty years had passed, and Rodney Sameth, though his technique as a director had changed—some said blossomed, some said diminished, some said disappeared—was exactly the same in this one respect at least: he had engaged an unknown, worshipful would-be screenwriter to write his next movie and promise not to tell anybody. For that reason, he was putting the writer up at this hotel, where nobody had ever bumped into anybody, since nobody came there unless they were very hard up, which nobody Rodney Sameth knew was, except the young writer.

The reclusive director, who lived in fortified seclusion on the Isle of Wight behind electrified fences and a frontline of attack dogs, had met the young writer at a party in Sameth's honor. The party marked the only event Sameth would have come back to America for: an honorary PhD from Stanford. The one area in which he felt incomplete, in spite of his constantly acknowledged genius, was education. Admittedly he had done more and better than anyone who had received a real PhD. But Rodney was at the time of his life when he realized, in spite of the fact that Billy Wilder had referred to him always as “Twenty-nine-year-old Rodney Sameth,” that he was no longer twenty-nine-year-old Rodney Sameth. And there were still some things he wanted, that he wouldn't have time to do, like get a PhD.

He had taken a ship and a cross-country train to get to the ceremony, since he didn't fly. On the Isle of Wight he wore safety belts when his driver, who was allowed to go no faster than thirty-five kilometers an hour, took him anywhere, which he rarely did. There was nowhere, really, that Rodney wanted to go. He sent second units out to locations to get exteriors for his films, used doctored process shots, invented ingenious special effects in his private lab, and filmed all interiors, as well as many pseudoexteriors, on a huge soundstage he had built inside his compound. If the tropical trees in his movies looked like plastic, which they were, the critics seemed to overlook it, so glad were they to get another film from him. Such was his stature that the world, what little he wanted of it, came to him. This included studio chieftains and his lawyer, who had emphysema and now had to travel with an oxygen tank. The man was frail and eager to retire, except that Rodney insisted he stay his lawyer. There was no one else he could trust.

He had never trusted Larry Drayco, but admired the Phi Beta Kappa key he'd gotten from Yale. So as long as Rodney had to be in California, he'd gone to the funeral. It was the first time in decades he'd been back in Hollywood, the only real reason being to have meetings with this boy, who would not return to England to hide out with him, as he was close to completing his doctoral thesis. He was bright enough to do that at the same time he was working on the screenplay for Rodney's movie.

“I just don't understand what all the secrecy is about,” said Morgan, the young writer. “Everybody knows you bought the Novotny novel.”

“Lower your voice,” Rodney said, in a controlling whisper. “If they hear the name Novotny, they'll guess you're talking to me. If they find out you're a writer, they'll think you're writing the screenplay.”

“But I am.”

“Shhh.” Rodney hunched down further in the booth. “You agreed to do it on the quiet because you want to work with me.”

“I do, Mr. Sameth. You're the finest director of your generation.”

“Call me Rodney. And I want to work with you. When I read your screenplay, I thought, ‘This kid writes the best dialogue of any writer in America.'”

“Thank you.” The young man tried not to beam, but it was difficult. Praise was new to him. The academic world wasn't particularly comfortable with graduate students who might be able to succeed in the world outside. His teachers had been close-vested with their accolades, saving their compliments for his work on Keats, which would not get him jobs except at other universities. That he aspired to writing movies threatened most of them. Some suggested he should consider transferring to UCLA. Most had declined to read his screenplay, and the ones who had had taken forever and then said they didn't know enough about screenplays to comment. So the fact that arguably the most original director of his lifetime had read it the same night it was given to him, and immediately asked Morgan to come to Los Angeles—all expenses paid—to start writing Sameth's next film, was intoxicating. He had agreed to Sameth's stipulation he not tell anybody where he was going or why.

“You're saving my life, Morgan. Josip Novotny can't write dialogue to save his own.”

“Then why do you need to say he's writing the screenplay?”

“Janet Maslin is only going to give me a good review in
The New York Times
because I've bought the work of an acknowledged literary genius. I'm not sure he even wrote his own sex scenes, or was really a Holocaust survivor. But it's not up to me to bust anyone's balloon. The world admires him. I can't say some graduate student is writing the screenplay because the genius can't. What do you mean, of my generation?”

It took a beat for Morgan to realize Sameth was back a few thoughts, still hanging on the rating of his talent. “Well, for those who are into Spielberg and Scorsese…”

“Never mind, never mind,” Sameth said, whisking it away with a thick-fingered hand. “I'll take care of whatever it costs to keep you here till you finish, and some pocket money. Maybe even enough to buy a used car. That way you won't have to walk to Schwab's.”

“There is no more Schwab's,” Morgan said. “I asked. They tore it down twenty years ago.”

“This town,” Rodney said, and shook his head. “No respect for history. Not enough they leveled the Garden of Allah, where Dorothy Parker stayed, and Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. They have to take away the drugstore where Sidney Skolsky found Lana Turner's tits. It's all just real estate.”

“So why do I have to stay at this hotel?”

“Because if you're anyplace else, somebody might see you, and then they'll know what you're doing.”

“But I hate it here. The only thing missing is Norman Bates.”

“You work fast. Look at all the pages you've written already. You'll be done in no time, and out of here. And when it's a hit…”