West of Paradise (35 page)

She quit her job and moved away without even telling him when he was thirteen years old, leaving no information with the guy who ran the drugstore how to find her. Larry thought his heart would break, and that his dickie would break off, he beat it so hard in his despair.

*   *   *

By the time he was a sophomore in high school, movies had clever dialogue. He went into the city to see plays, standing in the back, silently repeating the lofty words the actors spoke, pronouncing them as they did, mouthing them as he went back home on the subway. By the time he met Lila, he invited her for a “hahmburger.” The third time he took her out, with a bunch of his friends to a diner in their neighborhood, he sent the hahmburger back because, he said, it was medium, and he'd ordered it “raeh.” It came back with the bite still out of the bun.

They'd laughed a lot at that, Lila and his friends. Larry didn't see what was so funny. He got a little pissed off at her for laughing so hard and so long, a laugh that would erupt every few minutes as he walked her home.

“What are you laughing at?” he finally said.

“You sent it back!” she practically choked, doubled over. “Like it was the Stork Club.”

“You think I couldn't go to the Stork Club if I wanted?” he asked, quietly furious.

“Why, sure you could,” she said, not quite understanding the reason for his rage, contained.

“I could go anywhere I want,” he fumed. “And I will.
With
anyone I want.”

Just to show her, he didn't ask her to the prom. Instead, he invited the most beautiful girl in the school, a round-breasted strawberry-blonde, with legs that went up to her neck. To his delight and surprise, she accepted.

He had gotten a job after school as a delivery boy. With everything he had saved, he hired a limousine, rented a tuxedo, and bought her an orchid. He came to her building the night of the prom and rang the bell. And rang the bell. And rang the bell. Finally, a long time later, her father came out.

“I'm here to pick up Nancy,” Larry said.

“She's out for the evening.”

“What do you mean? She has a date with me.”

“Not anymore,” said her father.

*   *   *

He didn't go to the prom. He drove around Brooklyn in the limousine, as long as he had paid for it, looking out the window at the ordinary people, who envied him. The pain was so severe he could not even feel it. He saw her in school the next day, and didn't go near her or speak to her again. But twenty-five years later, when he had three pictures topping the box office simultaneously, he had his secretary make a number of calls and track her down.

She was living in the Bronx, which somehow pleased him, as it was a step down from Brooklyn in his mind. “Nancy?” he said, when he got her on the phone. “It's me. Larry Darshowitz, from Midwood High. Larry Drayco, I am now. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“No,” said Nancy.

“I'm a movie producer. Perhaps if you don't recognize my name, these might mean something to you.” He went on to list the titles of his movies, and the actors and actresses who starred in them, practically every glittering name in Hollywood. “There's a piece on me in
Time
magazine this week. I was supposed to be on the cover, but there was a shooting at some college in Michigan, so I got bumped. But there's a full color picture: I'm standing in front of my desk. It's twelve feet wide, carved teakwood from Tasmania. Do you know where that is?”

“No,” said Nancy.

“It's in New Zealand. I made a movie there. I make movies all over the world.”

“How exciting,” Nancy said.

“So you got married?”

“Yes.”

“Congratulations. What does your husband do?”

“He's a dentist.”

“You have children?”

“Three. All grown up now. Two boys and a girl.”

“Nice,” said Larry. “So, Nancy. Let me ask you something. How come you didn't go with me to the prom?”

He never heard her answer. He wasn't really listening. His ears and his heart and his blood were pounding. He was so full of the fact that her life was nothing, and his was gold, and he was shoving it to her. He sent her a book of passes to a theater in the Bronx, part of a chain owned by one of his investors.

*   *   *

The first time he made love to Lila was on her parent's couch. “Why don't you slip into something more comfortable,” he said, in between the kissing, the furtive reaching.

“Why don't you?” she said, and guided him between her legs.

*   *   *

Of all the stars he worked with and loved, at least until the deal was signed, and the thrill was over, the one he had been hottest to get in a picture was Jason Stone. There was no bigger actor in the world, not ever, not Edmund Kean or Edwin Booth or Sarah Bernhardt in her day. He'd had it researched. No one had ever trod the boards, as they said in the theatah, who was more magnetic, or made a greater impact. Jason had been beautiful and slender then, and women committed suicide as some of his children were later to do.

Larry sent Jason paints because he'd heard he painted. He sent him first editions because he'd heard he collected books. He sent him a pedigreed cat, because, as the note read, “I heard you like pussy.” He found all his favorite eating places and ate in them, bribing one of the waiters at each place to call him if Jason came in.

He made official offers through Jason's agent. “Zack,” he said, putting his arm around him as they ate lunch in La Dolce Vita, a gentle place for Los Angeles with-its, secluded booths and decent Italian food. “You let me have him for this picture, and I promise you you'll never have a bad day again.”

It was a really lavish promise, especially since Zack, the agent, had recently had as bad a day as an agent could have in Hollywood. He'd come home unexpectedly at lunchtime and found his wife in bed with his most important client. He'd had to choose between them. Of course, he'd divorced her and kept Jason.

“What picture are we talking about?” the agent asked.

“Whatever picture he wants to do. I have three scripts he can choose from. Or, if there's something else he likes…”

“He likes Tim McClure,” Zack said, naming the hot writer of the day. He authored westerns that a critic at
The New Yorker
had raved about, describing them as “mythic,” sending every studio in pursuit. That is, once the studio heads read the reader's reports on the books, or at least the reader's report on the review.

“Everybody likes Tim McClure,” said Larry. “His price has probably gone sky-high.”

“Hey,” said Zack. “I'm only trying to help you get Jason.”

“Jimmy!” Larry signaled one of the owners of the restaurant, and pantomimed holding a phone to his ear. A waiter brought him a telephone, plugged it in by the plaque dedicating the booth to Frank Sinatra. Every good, important customer of the place had a brass commemoration on the wall over the red-leather-upholstered booth that would always be his, specially held if he called. Larry had his own booth, but he liked Sinatra's better. He dialed the number for the Writer's Guild, which he knew by heart, since they were bringing him up on charges for paying writers less than minimum.

“Representation,” he said, when they answered. There was a click and some piped-in music.

“Agency,” said a woman on the other end.

“Tim McClure,” Larry said.

There was silence for a moment. “He's represented by Zack Arnold at MCA.”

“Thanks,” Larry said, hanging up the phone, and tried not to look like he'd been had. “I didn't know you represented writers.”

“Well, I never did before, but this guy is really special.”

“You want my balls in a vise,” Larry said.

“Hey, sweetheart,” Zack said. “Who trained me?”

“And this is how you pay me back?”

“What do you care? It's not your money.”

That was true. Using the gentle charm he could always call upon when he wanted to, Larry would court virgin investors, rich people who knew nothing about movies, except that they captivated them. Men and women who were delirious at being introduced to the stars Larry knew at the Cannes festival, thrilled to be asked to the lavish dinners he would throw at the Hôtel du Cap. The majors were already wary of him, since he'd gotten the upper hand in deals even with his mentors. These were men who'd brought him into the inner circles, guided him, and, when he succeeded, offered him presidential and production chief posts at their studios. But those positions paid only salaries. As a freelance producer, he could pay himself whatever he wanted, take a chunk off the top before the picture even started filming, so whatever its fate or grosses, he, at least, was always ahead. So he took the road of the independent, and occasionally the ocean, on a yacht. And when one source dried up, he would study his list of the
Fortune
500, write one or two or five of them on his very impressive letterhead, and arrange a meeting.

“So does he have a script for Jason?”

“I'll send it over this afternoon,” Zack said, and did.

It was a great script. He bought it with money he had from an Israeli investor and a Saudi prince whom he never told about each other's involvement. He bought an original edition, signed, of
David Copperfield,
and took it himself to Jason Stone's house in the Hollywood Hills.

“Not home,” said the maid, with whom it was rumored he had had a child. Down the cavernous marble hall there was the sound of a baby crying.

“Donde?”
asked Larry.

“Mexico.”

He called Zack Arnold. “You didn't tell me he was in Mexico.”

“I didn't know he was in Mexico.”

“When's he coming back?”

“Beats me.”

“You fuck!” Larry hung up the phone. He bought a bottle of tequila, some chips and salsa, and went back to the house, and found out from the maid exactly
donde
Jason had gone.

*   *   *

He took a plane to Mexico City and rented a car for the long drive into the hills of San Miguel de Allende. It was a retreat even for people who weren't as reclusive as Jason Stone, so Larry figured he would no doubt be furious at being found. In all the time he had pursued him, they hadn't had a real exchange. Larry was intimidated by the talent and personal power of the man, and he kept his distance. Besides, Jason was surly with all but his closest friends. Now, in San Miguel, a place dropped out of time, with art everywhere, and artists, and God in obvious charge of the art that was the mountains surrounding, Larry wondered how exactly he should approach him. Once again, he found out his favorite eating places, a little more limited in choice and distance from the casa than those in L.A.

The bar he found him in was not one tourists would frequent, even if they could find it, so off the beaten track that Larry literally had to climb there. The roads were rutted beyond ruts, with huge rocks in the holes. He was surprised the motorcycle parked outside the taverna had made it. Jason was seated at a carved wooden table in the corner, back to the room. He was with a woman.

Larry sat down, and when someone came, ordered a beer. The woman noticed him and murmured something to Jason.

Jason looked around. Then he turned back and put his head down on the table, the huge expanse of his shoulders collapsing in defeat. After a while, he got up and came over to Larry's table.

“Okay,” he said softly. “You want it so badly, you can have it.” He unzipped his fly and took out his penis.

There was later to be a privately circulated piece of film, one of the outtakes from
Last Dinner at Maxim's,
in which the director, Salvatore Guccione, told Jason to think of his character as “an extension of my cock.” During one scene, where Jason was supposed to be fucking the leading lady in the ass with the help of a jar of Vaseline, his penis fell out of his pants and was captured on celluloid. Both Guccione's cock, if Jason was really the extension of it, and Jason's own were, according to those who bought the piece of film, very disappointing, at least in their flaccid state. But at the time he took it out of his pants as a gesture of surrender to Larry Drayco, it seemed truly monumental.

*   *   *

And hilarious. They would laugh about that incident later, during the brief, intense time they were friends. The screenplay by McClure became a movie that wasn't the winner Larry hoped. But he didn't really care that much anymore, because McClure's gifts weren't limited to the page. He had a coterie of women, each of them eccentric, striking, and ready for it all the time. Larry's first Hollywood marriage, to a powerful woman agent, had ended with her death some months before. He was lonely, and stir-crazy, the way you got on location. These women were out of their heads, and he enjoyed that in women, as long as they weren't bimbos or someplace anyone important would see him with them. As it was, the movie was being made in the desert near Taos, New Mexico. They would take him on two and three at a time, one of them tracing her tongue on his scrotum, while another one rode him, and a third one sat on his face, but not before holding up a big mirror so he could see what was going on down there. And sometimes Tim would join them and they'd back and front them. Larry would get into a rhythm so he could feel the friction of his new buddy's prick on the other side of the delicate membrane that separated them.

He had such a good time he ended up more fixated on Tim McClure than Jason Stone. He made about four pictures with the writer, all of them bombs.

*   *   *

His second Hollywood marriage took place at the Beverly Hills Hotel, to the daughter of the head of Marathon. His new father-in-law made him sign a prenuptial agreement, and then offered him a job as president of the studio.