by Mario Puzo
“I’m particularly interested that we have Athena Aquitane do our next picture,” Bobby Bantz said.
Aha, Deere thought. Now that Bantz controlled LoddStone, he hoped to get Athena into bed. Deere thought that as head of production he had a shot, too.
“I’ll tell Claudia to work on a project for her right away,” Deere said.
“Great,” Bantz said. “Now remember I always knew what Eli really wanted to do but couldn’t because he was too soft. We are going to get rid of Dora and Kevin’s production companies. They always lose money and besides I don’t want them on the lot.”
“You have to be careful on that one,” Deere said. “They own a lot of stock in the company.”
Bantz grinned. “Yeah, but Eli left me in control for five years. So you’re going to be the fall guy. You will refuse to green-light their projects. I figure that after a year or two, they’ll leave in disgust and blame you. That was Eli’s technique. I always took the rap for him.”
“I think you’ll have a hard time moving them off the lot,” Deere said. “It’s their second home, they grew up on it.”
“I’ll try,” Bantz said. “Another thing. The night before he died, Eli agreed to give Ernest Vail gross with some money up front on all the pictures we made from his shitty novel. Eli made that promise because Molly Flanders and Claudia nagged him on his deathbed, which was really a lousy thing to do. I’ve notified Molly in writing that I’m not bound legally or morally to keep that promise.”
Deere pondered the problem. “He’ll never kill himself but he could die a natural death in the next five years. We should ensure ourselves against that.”
“No,” Bantz said. “Eli and I consulted our lawyers and they say Molly’s argument would lose in the courts. I’ll negotiate some money but not gross. That’s sucking our blood.”
“So, has Molly answered?” Deere asked.
“Yeah, the usual bullshit lawyer letter,” Bantz said. “I told her to go fuck herself.”
Bantz picked up the phone and called his psychoanalyst. His wife had insisted for years that he go into therapy to become more likable.
Bantz said into the phone, “I just wanted to confirm our appointment for four P.M. Yes, we’ll talk about your script next week.” He hung up the phone and gave Deere a sly smile.
Deere knew that Bantz had a rendezvous with Falene Fant at the Studio’s Beverly Hotel Bungalow. So Bobby’s therapist served as his beard because the Studio had taken an option on the therapist’s original screenplay about a serial murder psychiatrist. The joke was that Deere had read the script and thought it would make a nice low-budget movie, although Bantz thought it was shit. Deere would make the movie and Bantz would believe Deere was just doing him a favor.
Then Bantz and Deere chatted about why spending time with Falene made them so happy. They both agreed that it was childish for important men like themselves. They also agreed that sex with Falene was so pleasurable because she was so much fun, and because she made no claims on them. Of course there were implied claims, but she was talented and when the right time came she would be given her chance.
Bantz said, “The thing that worries me is that if she becomes some sort of half-assed star our fun may be over.”
“Yeah,” Deere said. “That’s the way Talent reacts. But what the hell, then she’ll make us a lot of money.”
The two of them went over the production and release schedules. Messalina would be finished in two months and would be the Locomotive for the Christmas season. A Vail sequel was in the can and would be released in the next two weeks. These two LoddStone pictures combined might gross a billion dollars worldwide, including video. Bantz would see a twenty-million-dollar bonus, Deere probably five million. Bobby would be hailed as a genius in his first year as successor to Marrion. He would be acknowledged as a true Number One exec.
Deere said thoughtfully, “It’s a shame we have to pay Cross fifteen percent of the adjusted gross on Messalina. Why don’t we just pay him back his money with interest and if he doesn’t like it, he can sue. Obviously, he’s leery about going to court.”
“Isn’t he supposed to be Mafia?” Bantz asked. And Deere thought, This guy is really chickenshit.
“I know Cross,” Deere said. “He’s not a tough guy. His sister Claudia would have told me if he was truly dangerous. The one I worry about is Molly Flanders. We’re screwing two of her clients at the same time.”
“OK,” Bobby said. “Christ, we really did a good day’s work. We save twenty mil on Vail and maybe ten on De Lena. That will pay our bonuses. We’ll be heroes.”
“Yeah,” Deere said. He looked at his watch. “It’s getting close to four o’clock. Shouldn’t you be on your way to Falene?”
At that moment the door to Bobby Bantz’s office burst open and there stood Molly Flanders. She was in fighting garb, trousers, jacket, and white silk blouse. And in flat heels. Her beautiful complexion was a blushing red with rage. There were tears in her eyes and yet she had never looked more beautiful. Her voice was filled with gleeful malice.
“OK, you two cocksuckers,” she said. “Ernest Vail is dead. I’ve got an injunction pending to prevent you from releasing your new sequel to his book. Now are you two fuckheads ready to sit down and make a deal?”
Ernest Vail knew his greatest problem in committing suicide was how to avoid violence. He was far too cowardly to use the most popular methods. Guns frightened him, knives and poisons were too direct and not foolproof. Head in a gas oven, death in his car by carbon monoxide, again left too much uncertainty. Slitting his wrists involved blood. No, he wanted to die a pleasurable death, quick, certain, leaving his body intact and dignified.
Ernest prided himself that his was a rational decision that would benefit everyone except LoddStone Studios. It was purely a matter of personal financial gain and the restoration of his ego. He would be regaining control of his life; that made him laugh. Another proof of sanity: He still had his sense of humor.
Swimming out into the ocean was too “movies,” throwing himself in front of a bus was also too painful and somehow demeaning, as if he were some homeless bum. One notion appealed to him for a moment. There was a sleeping pill, no longer popular, a suppository, which you just slipped into your rectum. But again, it was too undignified and was not completely certain.
Ernest rejected all these methods and searched for something that would give him a happy certain death. This process cheered him up so much that he almost abandoned the whole idea. So did writing rough drafts of suicide notes. He wanted to use all his art not to sound self-pitying, accusatory. Most of all he wanted his suicide to be accepted as a completely rational act and not one of cowardice.
He started with the note to his first wife, whom he thought of as his only true love. The first sentence he tried to make objective and practical.
“Get in touch with Molly Flanders, my lawyer, as soon as you get this note. She will have important news for you. I thank you and the children for the many happy years you’ve given me. I do not want you to think that what I’ve done is a reproach to you in any way. We were sick of each other before we parted. Please do not think my action is because of a diseased mind, or any unhappiness. It is completely rational, as my lawyer will explain. Tell my children that I love them.”
Ernest pushed the note aside. It would need a lot of rewrite. He wrote notes to his second and third wives, which sounded cold even to him, informing them that they were being left small portions of his estate and thanking them for the happiness they had given him and reassuring them they also were in no way responsible for his action. It seemed he was not really in a loving mood. So he wrote a short note to Bobby Bantz, a simple “Fuck you.”
Then he wrote a note to Molly Flanders that read, “Go get the bastards.” This put him in a better mood.
To Cross De Lena, he wrote, “I finally did the right thing.” He had sensed De Lena’s contempt for his waffling.
Finally his heart opened up when he w
rote to Claudia. “You gave me the happiest times of my life and we weren’t even in love. How do you figure that? And how come everything you did in life was right and everything I did was wrong? Until now. Please disregard everything I’ve said about your writing, how I demeaned your work, that’s just the envy of an old novelist as out of date as a blacksmith. And thank you for fighting for my percentage even though finally you failed. I love you for trying.”
He stacked up the notes, which he had written on yellow second sheets. They were terrible but he would rewrite them, and rewriting was always the key.
But composing the notes had stirred his subconscious. Finally he thought of the perfect way to kill himself.
Kenneth Kaldone was the greatest dentist in Hollywood, as famous as any Bankable Star within that small milieu. He was extremely skillful in his profession, he was colorful and daring in his private life. He detested the portrayal in literature and movies of dentists as extremely bourgeois and did everything to disprove it.
He was charming in dress and manner, his dental office was luxurious and had a rack of a hundred of the best magazines published in America and England. There was another, smaller rack for magazines in foreign languages, German, Italian, French, and even Russian.
First-rate modern art hung on the walls of the waiting room, and when you went into the labyrinth of treatment rooms, the corridors were decorated with autographed pictures of some of the greatest names in Hollywood. His patients.
He was always bubbly with cheerful good humor and vaguely effeminate in a way that was strangely misleading. He loved women but did not understand in any way a commitment to women. He regarded sex as no more important than a good dinner, a fine wine, wonderful music.
The only thing Kenneth believed in was the art of dentistry. There, he was an artist, he kept up with all technical and cosmetic developments. He refused to make removable bridges for his clients, he insisted on steel implants to which an artificial series of teeth could be attached permanently. He lectured at the dental conventions, he was such an authority that he had once been summoned to treat the teeth of one of the royal bloods of Monaco.
No patient of Kenneth Kaldone’s would be forced to put his teeth in a water glass at night. No patient would ever feel pain in his elaborately outfitted dental chair. He was generous in his use of drugs and especially in the use of “sweet air,” the combination of nitrous oxide and oxygen inhaled by patients though a rubber mask, which remarkably killed any pain to the nerves and transported his patient into a semiconsciousness as nearly pleasurable as opium.
Ernest and Kenneth had become friends on Ernest’s first visit to Hollywood almost twenty years before. Ernest had suffered an excruciating toothache at the dinner of a producer who was courting him for the rights to one of his books. The producer had called Kenneth at midnight, and Kenneth had rushed to the party to drive Ernest to his office to treat the infected tooth. Then he had driven Ernest to his hotel, instructing him to come back to the office the next day.
Ernest later commented to the producer that he must have a lot of clout for a dentist to make a house call at midnight. The producer said no, Kenneth Kaldone was just that kind of a guy. A man with a toothache was to him like a man drowning, he had to be rescued. But also Kaldone had read all of Ernest’s books and loved his work.
The next day when Ernest visited Kenneth in his office, he was effusively grateful. Kenneth stopped him with an upraised hand and said, “I’m still in your debt for the pleasure your books have given me. Now let me tell you about steel implants.” He gave a long lecture that argued it was never too early to take care of your mouth. That Ernest would soon lose some other teeth, and steel implants would save him from putting his teeth in a water glass at night.
Ernest said, “I’ll think about it.”
“No,” Kenneth said, “I can’t treat a patient who disagrees with me about my work.”
Ernest laughed. “It’s a good thing you’re not a novelist,” he said. “But OK.”
They became friends. Vail would call him for dinner whenever he came to Hollywood and sometimes he made a special trip to L.A. just to be treated with sweet air. Kenneth spoke intelligently about Ernest’s books, he knew literature almost as well as he knew dentistry.
Ernest loved sweet air. He never felt pain and he had some of his best ideas while he was in the semiconscious state it induced. In the next few years he and Kenneth built a friendship so strong it resulted in Ernest having a new set of teeth with roots of steel, which would accompany him to the grave.
But Ernest’s main interest in Kenneth was as a character for a novel. Ernest had always believed that in every human being there was one startling perversity. Kenneth had revealed his, and it was sexual but not in the usual pornographic style.
They always chatted a bit before a treatment, before Ernest was given sweet air. Kenneth mentioned that his primary girlfriend, his “significant other,” was also having sex with her dog, a huge German shepherd.
Ernest, just beginning to succumb to the sweet air, took the rubber mask off his face and said without thinking, “You’re screwing a woman who screws her dog? Don’t you worry about that?” He meant the medical and psychological complications.
Kenneth did not grasp what was implied. “Why should I worry?” he said. “A dog is no competition.”
At first Ernest thought he was joking. Then he realized Kenneth was serious. Ernest put his mask back on and submerged himself in the dreaminess of the nitrous oxide and oxygen, and his mind, stimulated as usual, made a complete analysis of his dentist.
Kenneth was a man who had no conception of love as a spiritual exercise. Pleasure was paramount, similar to his skills in killing pain. Flesh was to be controlled while indulged.
They had dinner together that night, and Kenneth more or less confirmed Ernest’s analysis. “Sex is better than nitrous,” Kenneth said. “But like nitrous, you must have at least thirty percent oxygen mixed in.” He gave Ernest a sly look. “Ernest, you really like sweet air, I can tell. I give you the maximum—seventy percent—and you tolerate it well.”
Ernest asked, “Is it dangerous?”
“Not really,” Kenneth said. “Unless you keep the mask on for a couple of days and maybe not even then. Of course, pure nitrous oxide will kill you in fifteen to thirty minutes. In fact about once a month I have a little midnight party in my office, carefully selected ‘beautiful people.’ All my patients, so I have their blood work. All healthy. The nitrous turns them on. Haven’t you felt sexual under the gas?”
Ernest laughed. “When one of your technicians goes by I want to grab her ass.”
Kenneth said with wry humor, “I’m sure she’d forgive you. Why don’t you come by the office tomorrow at midnight? It’s really a lot of fun.” He saw Ernest looking scandalized and said, “Nitrous is not cocaine. Cocaine makes women sort of helpless. Nitrous just loosens them up. Just come as you would go to a cocktail party. You’re not committed to any action.”
Ernest thought maliciously, Are dogs allowed? Then he said he would drop in. He excused himself by thinking it would only be research for a novel.
He did not have any fun at the party and did not really participate. The truth was, the nitrous oxide made him feel more spiritual than sexy, as if it were some sacred drug only to be used to worship a merciful God. The copulation of the guests was so animal-like that for the first time he understood Kenneth’s casualness about his significant other and the German shepherd. It was so devoid of human content that it was boring. Kenneth himself did not participate, he was too busy operating the controls on the nitrous.
But now, years later, Ernest knew he had a way of killing himself. It would be like painless dentistry. He would not suffer, he would not be disfigured, he would not be afraid. He would float from this world to the other in a cloud of benign reflections. As the saying goes, he would die happy.
The problem now was how to get into Kenneth’s office at night and how to figure out h
ow the controls operated. . . .
He made an appointment with Kenneth for a checkup. While Kenneth was studying his X rays, Ernest told him that he was using a dentist as a character in his new novel and asked to be shown how the controls for the sweet air worked.
Kenneth was a natural-born pedagogue and showed him how to work the controls on the tanks of nitrous oxide and oxygen, stressing the safe ratios, lecturing all the while.
“But couldn’t it be dangerous?” Ernest asked. “What if you got drunk and screwed up? You could kill me.”
“No, it’s automatically regulated so that you always get at least thirty percent oxygen,” Kenneth explained.
Ernest hesitated a moment, trying to look embarrassed. “You know I enjoyed that party years ago. Now I have a beautiful girlfriend who is acting a little coy. I need some help. Could you let me have the key to your office so I could bring her here some night? The nitrous would just tip the balance.”
Kenneth studied the X rays carefully. “Your mouth is in terrific shape,” he said. “I’m really a great dentist.”
“The key?” Ernest said.
“A really beautiful girl?” Kenneth asked. “Tell me which night and I’ll come and work the controls.”
“No, no,” Ernest said. “This is a really straight girl. She wouldn’t do even the nitrous if you were around.” He paused for a moment. “She really is old-fashioned.”
“No shit,” Kenneth said and looked directly into Ernest’s eyes. Then he said, “I’ll just be a minute,” and he left the treatment room.
When he returned, he had a key in his hand. “Take this to a hardware store and get it duplicated,” Kenneth said. “Make sure you let them know who you are. Then come back and give me my key.”
Ernest was surprised. “I don’t mean right now.”
Kenneth packed away the X rays and turned to Ernest. For one of the few times since Ernest had known him, the cheerfulness in his face was gone.