Tycoon

by Harold Robbins

  “Jack. Let me introduce Jason Maxwell.”

  Jason Maxwell was the author of the current best-selling novel, Voices from the Belly. He’d had another best-seller, too, though Jack couldn’t remember the title. Neither of Maxwell’s novels was the kind of stuff Jack cared to read, though Anne had read both of them and had talked about them.

  “It’s a real pleasure to meet you, Mr. Lear,” said Maxwell, extending his hand for a limp handshake.

  “I’m happy to meet you, too. I’ve heard your name often.”

  Jason Maxwell was twenty-nine years old. He was a pretty little man, and the skinny on him was that he was a homosexual. If he wasn’t, he was the caricature of one; he possessed every characteristic the straight community supposed homosexuals had: a high-pitched voice, girlish mannerisms . . . all of it.

  “Jason is a flowing fountain of gossip,” said Anne. “He knows everything about everybody.”

  “God forbid,” said Jack.

  “I’m catty,” Jason warned.

  “Fortunately,” Jack said, “we have no secrets.”

  “Oh, everybody does. If you really don’t, we should create some for you. I mean, what would life be without secrets?”

  “You mean, scandals,” said Jack.

  “Yes, of course!” Jason piped. “Delicious scandals.”

  “Jason has confessed,” said Anne, “that some of the characters in his novels are real people, thinly disguised.”

  “They recognize themselves,” Jason said happily.

  “How do you learn their secrets?”

  “Oh, they confide in me! I don’t know why. They know I’m a writer.”

  “It’s lucky you didn’t know my father and never told anything on him.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “He would have killed you,” said Jack.

  “How thrilling!”

  Three

  CATHY MCCORMACK PUT HER EYE TO THE PEEPHOLE IN HER door. Ah. It was Dick in the hall. Quickly she pulled off her blouse and bra, then unchained and unlatched the door and let him in. He kissed her firmly on the mouth, then bent down and lightly kissed each of her nipples.

  “I feel like going out to dinner tonight,” he said to her as they walked hand in hand from the foyer to the living room. “I’m feeling faintly celebratory.”

  “Wonderful! What will we be celebrating?”

  “Pour us a couple of drinks, and I’ll tell you.”

  While she was pouring drinks, he picked up her New Yorker and riffled through it, glancing at a few of the cartoons.

  “Cheers,” said Cathy as she handed him his rye and lifted her glass of bourbon. “So what will we be celebrating?”

  “The new show, You Bet! It’s gonna work. I’ve already got three first-class contestants lined up. Hey! Listen to this. We got a guy from Queens who works behind the counter in a deli, cutting sandwiches. He speaks fluent English, Russian, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish. He can speak a little Polish, a little Lithuanian, a little Hungarian. Everybody knows him for a linguist. He reads his neighbors’ foreign-language letters for them. He’s a cute little guy, too. He’s gonna win $100,000 on You Bet!”

  “You’re sure of that,” she said skeptically.

  Painter grinned. “Of course I’m sure. We start off with simple stuff that he already knows. Like ‘Now, Mr. Abraham, you know that the word “lungs” is the name of an important part of the human body. What’s the word for that part of the body in Russian, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish?’ He knows. If he doesn’t, we’ll help him a little.”

  “You’ll make sure he knows?”

  “Damned right. I’m not gonna take chances.”

  “You’re gonna feed him answers? Dick—”

  “This son of a bitch is gonna know the Swahili word for penis.”

  “Careful.”

  “No. We won’t use Swahili. Or Chinese. But he’ll know the Arabic word. A man who knows Hebrew could reasonably know Arabic. We’ll be careful to stick to things he could reasonably be expected to know, has a reputation for knowing.”

  “Well—”

  “There’s a seventeen-year-old girl in Scarsdale who knows more about baseball than Red Barber. Think of this: Cute blond kid. She chews gum and giggles. ‘What was Babe Ruth’s batting average for the 1924 season?’ She’ll know.”

  “Because you fed her the question in advance?”

  “Gimme a little credit, Cathy. For some smarts. She’s got a hell of a reputation for knowing more about baseball than anybody. She’s got that reputation already. That’s why it’ll be believable. If we used some kid who wasn’t known for a freakish knowledge of baseball, we’d fall on our face. With this kid—”

  “It’s still risky. What if somebody blows the whistle?”

  “Every winner that we coach will wind up with $100,000. The losers that we don’t coach will win, say, $10,000. Small winners won’t resent big winners. It’s not a competition. They’ll play against the questions, not against each other.”

  “Who’s going to know?” she asked. “Lear?”

  “Sort of. He doesn’t want details.”

  Four

  IN OCTOBER JACK MET REBECCA MURPHY, HIS PRIVATE INVEStigator, in a suite in a motel in Lexington, far enough from Boston so that it was unlikely he’d be seen or recognized. They sat together in the parlor, sipping Scotch and talking.

  “Her parents saw the show last night. I can’t promise you they won’t come again tonight. I can go in ahead of you, save us two seats, and watch for them. If they don’t show, there’ll be nobody else there who’ll know who you are.”

  “Can’t be sure.”

  “Well, all right. Are you willing to be melodramatic?”

  Jack thought the more appropriate word was “foolish.” Still, Rebecca, had to use disguises often in her work and was good at what she did. She darkened his hair and eyebrows. She glued on a mustache, promising him it definitely would not slip askew or fall off if he kept his hands off it. She pushed two pieces of gummy plastic between his gums and cheeks, which puffed out his face and completely changed its shape. She dressed him in a brown houndstooth-check jacket that did not fit him well and in a pair of dark-brown slacks. Over all this she put a rumpled raincoat and shoved down on his head a floppy khaki hat, supposedly rainproof.

  When he looked at himself in the mirror he was all but ready to risk entering the auditorium even if Dan and Connie Horan were there.

  If anyone recognized him, he would look like the biggest fool ever born.

  Rebecca drove him to the Convent of the Sacred Heart School. He waited in the parking lot while she checked the auditorium. She came out and beckoned him to come in. Their seats were halfway back. No one took any special notice of him. The audience stirred and buzzed.

  He read the program:

  THE MUSIC MAN

  An Original Play

  by

  Meredith Willson

  Featuring

  Professor Harold Hill . . . . . . . . . .. Brad Duncan

  Marian the Librarian . . . . . . . Kathleen Horan, E.C.

  “What’s E.C. mean?” Jack whispered.

  Rebecca put her mouth to his ear. “It means Child of Christ. It’s an honor given to girls who are most faithful in their religious duties.”

  He could be certain Kathleen was everything Connie wanted her to be: pretty, an achiever, something of an athlete, and, of course, a devout Catholic.

  This was her class play. She would turn seventeen next month, and in the spring she would graduate. Nearly every year Rebecca photographed Kathleen at a distance and sent Jack the pictures. He had seen copies of her school annuals, copies of her school newspaper when it carried something about her, and even a Globe account of a girls’ track meet where she had won a red ribbon in the hundred-yard dash.

  The curtain went up. He knew the play, so he knew when to expect Marian the Librarian on stage. She appeared, in a powder-blue dress. Oh, God! Jack thought. So beautiful! Blond. Mature of face and figure. Grace
ful. Self-assured. Happy.

  And of course she had no idea that the seedy-looking old man in the center of the audience was her father or that she was the daughter of Jack Lear, the media baron, as he was now sometimes called.

  Rebecca saw the tears shining in his eyes and took his hand.

  Five

  “COULD YOU SPARE TIME TO HAVE DINNER WITH ME?” JACK asked as Rebecca drove him back to Lexington. “On your hourly rate, of course.”

  “Not on my hourly rate,” she said quietly, staring intently at the road. “On the house.”

  They went back to the suite, so he could remove the mouth disguise and change his clothes.

  She poured Scotch for them. He slumped on the couch and shook his head. “What she couldn’t be if—” He sighed loudly. “Look at Joni. Look what she’s become! John might have—But little Kathleen hasn’t got a chance! Not a chance! Connie and Dan think a young woman is a baby-making machine, and that’s what they want of her! God damn!”

  “Jack . . .”

  Rebecca reached for his hand again. She moved closer to him, leaned toward him, and kissed him on the side of the neck. Jack put his arms around her. They kissed for a full minute, running their tongues inside each other’s mouths.

  When he drew back at last, he grinned. He pointed at her forehead. The darkener from his eyebrows had rubbed off on her. “I think I’ve got to wash all this makeup off before we go to dinner,” he said. “You want to help?”

  They showered together.

  “My God, it was twelve years ago!” he said to her when they lay down on the bed.

  It had been twelve years since they made love before. She had been thirty-one years old then and was forty-three now. It was a good memory. This one would be better. Rebecca Murphy threw herself into making love with him, without reservation, again and again and again. They never did go to dinner. Early in the morning they ate some chips from a vending machine.

  Six

  1963

  JACK AND ANNE FLEW DOWN TO ST. CROIX THREE DAYS AFTER Christmas. Joni and David Breck joined them for part of their two-week holiday as did the inimitable Jason Maxwell.

  Joni had signed a contract with Harry Klein to do another picture—this time without a nude audition or even the suggestion of a casting-couch performance. She had suggested that David Breck play opposite her, but Klein had said no, because Breck spoke with a finely tuned stage accent that would not fit in the western they were going to make. The role went to Trent Ambler, who could affect a cowboy drawl.

  She brought the script with her to St. Croix. Jack had some reservations about her doing a western, but when he read the script he saw that the film would be like very few westerns ever released.

  Joni’s role was that of a woman condemned to life at hard labor for the murder of her father. In a desert prison, she suffers cruelty and deprivation, until she escapes. The escape is hopeless because she’s alone in the middle of the desert. Fortuitously, she encounters a craggy gunman-drifter, played by Ambler, who is escaping from a robbery he’d committed a few days earlier. He takes her on as a sex toy, but ultimately comes to love her. Their escape becomes an odyssey.

  David said that her being chosen for this role was a measure of the respect she had won from Harry Klein and Ben Lang. She hadn’t gotten the hoped-for Oscar nomination for Brave Michelle, but if she brought this one off, the Academy could hardly deny her.

  Jason Maxwell read the script. He pronounced it “slick,” which offended Joni until she realized that in his lexicon that was a compliment. He asked her permission to use a pencil and suggest amendments to a few lines of dialogue. David told her in confidence that the changes suggested by this precious little man actually did make the lines more effective.

  Joni sat on the beach that evening, wearing the red bikini she had worn all afternoon. Jack sat down beside her, and the others, sensing there was going to be a father-daughter talk, kept their distance.

  “Why Jason?” she asked bluntly.

  “Anne picked him up. She met him at an antiques auction, I understand. He’s a best-selling writer, the darling of the critics.”

  “He’s darling, all right,” she said, nodding down the beach toward where he was cavorting in the surf. “You’re not afraid that he and Anne—”

  “Hardly. He’s as queer as a three-dollar bill. Anne thinks he’s amusing. I guess I do, too. He knows more about more people than anyone I’ve ever met, and I’m inclined to believe a lot of his gossip is true.”

  “Let me warn you about something, Daddy. Don’t trust him. Tell Anne not to trust him. It’s all right to have him around, but don’t tell him anything you don’t want the public to know. Remember, cute little lapdogs have ears, and this one’s got a voice, too.”

  THIRTY - TWO

  One

  1963

  HER WORK AS MAGGIE IN PRISONERS OF THE ROCKS WAS MORE arduous than Joni had imagined. None of it was shot in a studio. The first scenes took place in a jail, and they were done in an actual old jail in a desert county. When they shackled her wrists and ankles for the scenes of her being transported to the desert prison, the chains were real, heavy, and secured with real locks. She sat chained in the back of a wagon in the sun for three hours, while cameras on trucks followed and shot the film. Joni’s ordeal was only a little less unpleasant than Maggie’s. She sweated through the ragged clothes that were her costume, and by the end of the three hours she was sunburned and wet and exhausted, which was how she was supposed to look.

  The worst she had to endure was the shaving of her head. Some players were allowed to wear flesh-colored rubber caps. The star could not do that, because there were many close-ups of her and because the director wanted to show her hair growing back—it was a metaphor for Maggie’s recovering her personality.

  Her hair was cut off and her head shaved by an actress in the role of one of the guards. Though the woman was as gentle about it as she could be, her role called for her to be brusque, rough, and profane. First, she cut off Joni’s hair, not with barber shears but with a pair of big scissors. When she shaved her, she was not allowed to use lather, only to soap Joni’s head with a bar of laundry soap, after which she scraped her scalp with a straight razor. The scene was painful. The woman accidentally nicked her three times, and blood showed. Joni did not need any skill as an actress to cry. The cameras rolled and caught every wince and sob.

  Ben Lang had not wanted David Breck on the location, but he relented and actually sent for David before Joni asked for him. David comforted her. He caressed her head and told her she was beautiful even without her hair.

  Mo Morris came out to the location and saw what was developing between his star and the Welsh actor. He told Joni she would not have to date around anymore. Instead, he would build up David.

  TWO

  EDITH WOLCOTT DIED AT AGE SEVENTY-NINE. JONI WANTED to go Back to Boston for the funeral. Ben Lang readily agreed. He said he needed to take a break anyway, to give her hair a chance to grow in a bit. Harry Klein had supplied a wardrobe of wigs. Joni hadn’t worn any of them in the location camp; she had simply made a turban of a towel or worn a scarf over her head. But now she chose a wig and settled it on her head, testing carefully to make sure it would not turn or fall off. David helped her. They drove to Las Vegas, where Jack and Anne were waiting on the LCI company plane.

  “God, I’m tired,” Joni said. “I can sleep all the way to Boston. And the damned wig itches like a hair hat. Excuse me.” She pulled off the wig. “So what the hell? It’ll grow back. Somebody offer me a drink.” She had less than a quarter of an inch of dark stubble on her head. “Looked better when it was smooth,” she said. “Stare and get it over with.”

  “I’m tempted to do it myself,” Anne said lightly. “What a style!”

  “If you do, have it done by a barber,” said Joni. “Don’t let an amateur do it.”

  To Jack’s surprise, the Horans came to the funeral and brought Kathleen with them. Apparently they had decided
to let him have a look at her. He pretended he had never seen her before.

  They introduced her to him, and she shook his hand politely. She was more interested, though, in Joni, who was after all a famous film actress.

  Anne knew who Kathleen was. Joni did not. Anne suggested to Jack that he had better tell her, and she made an opportunity for the two to be alone together on the flight to Westchester.

  “You’re in a mood,” Joni said to him. She ran her hand over her stubble, a gesture she repeated again and again, as if she needed to reassure herself that her hair was growing. “I didn’t know you cared that much about Grandmother Wolcott.”

  “What did you think of Kathleen?” he asked.

  “Kathleen?”

  “Kathleen Horan.”

  “Oh. Well. Pretty girl. She has some growing up to do. Why?”

  “She’s your half sister.”

  “Daddy!”

  “She doesn’t know it.”

  Joni frowned. “Do you have other secrets, Daddy?”

  He returned the dark frown. “You told me yours. I’ve told you mine.”

  Three

  LEAR COMMUNICATIONS SOLD OFF ITS RADIO STATIONS. MOST of the commercials on radio now were for local businesses: furniture stores, carpet stores, car dealers, tire stores, restaurants. Recorded music filled most of the hours broadcast by most radio stations. Some stations still broadcast daily hypochondriac hours, in which people with complaints from cancer to ingrown toenails phoned in for advice from anyone and everyone but real doctors. Listeners began to hear about holistic healing and natural medicines. Programs giving ostensible investment advice were mostly just bucket shops touting penny stocks.

  It was not the kind of business Jack Lear wanted to be in anymore.

  Four

  LITTLE JACK, AT SIXTEEN, WAS A STUDENT AT BRUNSWICK Academy, a day school in Greenwich. The boys were encouraged to take part in athletics. Jack needed no encouragement. He loved all sports: lacrosse, soccer, field hockey, basketball. He especially liked sports that involved one-on-one competition and physical contact. Three times he was called before the headmaster.