The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  And of course if it is your office, you are the Big Guy.

  So Max really wasn’t taking any calls, and neither was Karl.

  This made me realize the importance of the meeting.

  “Well, shit, Max, may I call you Max?” I said.

  “Of course you can call me anything you want,” Max said coldly.

  “You have a movie idea for us?”

  “If you can control yourself I will tell you about it,” he said. Karl was glaring at me.

  “The world is full of trouble,” Max said. “The war gets worse and worse and nobody feels any patriotism anymore. Kids are going crazy and parents hate to see them come home. Everything is getting impossible, so I think maybe a small movie that pays no attention to the facts of life but just goes down the road, a few songs, a few laughs, a small romance, nothing to disturb anybody, and if we keep the costs down maybe there’s money to be made. A very old-fashioned kind of movie, a B picture. Are you interested?”

  We were interested.

  “It is the old story, older than Aesop, of City Mouse and Country Mouse,” Max said. “Don’t give the public new stories, give them new material. I don’t trust new stories, the public don’t know what to make of them, but a good old story that has fascinated people for a couple of thousand years, it can always be reworked to make people happy to hear it again. Mister Larson is the city slicker and Mister Ogilvie is the country bumpkin, it’s as simple as that, except they love each other like brothers and they fall for the same girl. It looks like the city slicker has all the marbles, but at the end of the last reel country boy is married to the girl and everybody in the audience goes home happy. Is this too corny for you fellows?”

  Not at all, not at all.

  AFTER THAT first meeting with Max Meador, we rode back to the studio in the limousine and picked up Jim’s car and then drove out to his place in the Valley. We didn’t know if we had the jobs or not, although Max seemed confident, even told us we wouldn’t make any money on the picture.

  “This is my picture,” Max said. “If I win, I win; if I lose, I lose. Either way, you boys will make your salaries. And forget about points, you get no points—points are for lawyers to divide up, nothing but a heartache.”

  Nobody said anything about Karl, sitting there, the producer of the picture, and even when he took us out to the limo he said nothing you could interpret as a fact.

  Jim’s house had a little aspen in the front yard, surrounded by burnt-out grass, double garage, faded green pseudo-shutters on the windows and a lot of cracks in the stucco, but the back was nice, several trees including a weeping willow, a nice swimming pool and some garden furniture in the shade. Kitty was out there wearing a bikini bottom and zori.

  I waited in the house while Jim went out and told her they had a guest, although I did peek through the drapes at the pretty little tits she never grew tired of showing people unless they were obvious about looking and then she got mad, watched her slowly unravel the towel from around her hair while Jim stood talking, I couldn’t hear him, but she nodded from time to time and pulled curlers and hairpins out of her hair for about twenty minutes.

  I went into the kitchen and got a beer and came back and resumed my peeping, she still hadn’t covered those tits, and I knew Jim would be upset if I just barged out there. The air conditioning was making me shiver. I finished my beer and went into the bathroom, marveling again and forever at the blue water in all the L.A. toilets, as if the inhabitants hated straight tapwater so bad they wouldn’t even piss in it, and then went on outside, the hell with Jim, and she draped a towel over herself, but not quick enough.

  C. C. “CHET” EUBANK was a chunky guy about my age, with brown hair that looked like he brushed it too much and pale blue eyes. He was from Connecticut somewhere and was supposed to be the President’s favorite adviser on world affairs, as opposed to domestic affairs or foreign affairs, and also a former Kennedy person, whatever the hell that meant. Tonight at dinner with Karl Meador he seemed like a modest likeable guy, comfortable with the bizarre California types he found himself surrounded with, and I noticed on the sly that he didn’t mind getting an occasional glimpse of the various ladies in the room earlier, when there had been a large gathering waiting to see Karl’s latest movie in the screening room just off the big living room. The picture hadn’t come from the studio in time, some kind of screwup with the director, who had opened up one of the reels to move something around, or maybe it was because the director hadn’t been asked to the screening, or maybe the transportation man who was supposed to bring the print out got lost, it depended on who you talked to, and so Karl had to call off the screening and somehow get rid of the people he didn’t want to feed, which was 90 percent of them, some drunker than others because they had been at it for a couple of hours while waiting for the print to arrive. But finally those of us who had been quietly invited to eat sat down at the table: me, Karl, Sonny, a guy named C. C. “Chet” Eubank, a couple of actresses I didn’t know and Jim, who had spent the cocktail hour sacked out in a room upstairs and now looked sleepy and sullen across the table from me.

  Also at the table was our Las Vegas boss, Gregory Galba, who didn’t exactly own the Golconda and didn’t exactly not own it, either, but when he barked everybody cringed, so it didn’t matter, and Gregory barked a lot, a tall wrinkle-faced black-eyed man with a reddish rug that kept hiking up in the back like a mallard’s ass, but of course he was Gregory Galba and so nobody would tell him, “Gregory, your toup’s loose in back,” so there it was, upflap in back, and it was hard not to laugh. There was a story going around that Gregory had a bad heart attack once and took the living heart out of another man in an operation south of the border somewhere. I never believed the story, but I had seen the deep red scar on his chest plenty of times. Gregory liked to play tennis without a shirt on, and he liked to play me because I never gave him a break.

  Max, of course, was nowhere to be seen.

  I had heard once that there was a little room behind the screen in the screening room, and that sometimes Max would sit there, not watching the movie so much as watching the faces of the audience, lit up from the picture; but the same guy who told me that story told me Max wasn’t crippled, either, and only used the wheelchair to intimidate people, which, if true, made Max the greatest actor in Hollywood. But I wondered about that little room.

  Eubank was telling a story about when he had been in the service, aboard a troopship heading for Japan during the Korean War, where a man had been murdered for wanting to keep the lights on so he could read in his bunk, and how the killer didn’t do a nickel’s worth of time after they let him out of the brig at Yokohama because the government couldn’t locate any of the eighty or ninety witnesses.

  The murder part of the story I recognized, because the same thing had happened on board the ship I was on, going the same way during the same war. I brought this up and it turned out that Eubank and I had been aboard the same ship, the U.S.S. Mann. He had been a member of the ship’s newspaper staff, working two hours each morning putting out the little mimeograph sheet, the “Mann-U-Script,” and spending the rest of the day topside, turning copies of the “Mann-U-Script” into gliders and sailing them off among the flying fish and porpoises.

  Meanwhile, I was deep in the hold, breaking apart frozen chickens twelve hours a day.

  Chet looked at me with a smile. “That was mighty good chicken, as I remember.”

  “The ‘Mann-U-Script’ wasn’t bad, either,” I said, and it turned out that Chet had a couple of copies at home in Connecticut and would send me Xeroxes.

  Earlier, during the Long Wait, when we were introduced, Chet had made a point of telling me how much he enjoyed our pictures and Jim’s singing, and couldn’t wait to meet Jim, and how important it was to create little islands of relaxation, such as our movies, in this modern sea of trouble. Now that we were old pals from the service, he seemed even more interested in talking to me, and through the early part of the meal
we jabbered away about Tokyo, where he had been in the 1st Radio Broadcasting & Leaflet Group, stationed right downtown, and about spending his days composing folk tales in Mandarin Chinese to bombard the People’s Army with, so that their resolve would shatter under the impact of the voices on the radio and they would give up Communism and go home. He made it sound very funny, but he did spend two years doing just that, and it wasn’t funny to them at the time.

  “We thought we were more important than the real soldiers,” he said. “We used to be proud of the fact that our unit had the highest educational level of any unit in the Far East.”

  “Our unit had the lowest,” Jim said.

  “Really?” said Chet, ready for a good joke.

  But Jim just looked at him seriously and said, “Yeah, I was in the band,” and went back to his food.

  Since then Chet had actually been to China several times, first with Nixon, then with a group that stayed six months and worked in the fields and factories for a little while just to see what things were like, and then a couple of times for the State Department.

  “I’ve been studying Chinese affairs for better than twenty years,” he told me, “but it didn’t prepare me in any way for the reality of the place.”

  “Are you ready to move there?” asked Gregory Galba from the other end of the table.

  CHET SMILED over at Galba’s big hard face. “Maybe that’s not the question,” he said. “Maybe the question is, Should we be doing here what they’re doing there?”

  “What’s your answer, Chester?” the big man asked. It seemed clear that Galba didn’t like C. C. Eubank, but Chet kept his party smile on. The other little conversations at the table stopped.

  “Well, to answer your question, they’d have to catch me first,” Chet said, and got a good laugh. “Which in a way is an admission that I regard my life as something less than devoted to the State—no matter which party is in power. The truth is, I like to eat high off the hog, and that is the one thing you can’t do in China today.”

  Galba gave a snort and filled his mouth with about five pounds of food, which didn’t stop him from commenting: “Then you’re just like the rest of us, aren’t you?”

  “I hope so,” Chet said. “I’m a little too old to start rehearsing Chinese rations.”

  “What about you, hotshot?” Gregory said to me. He grinned around at everyone, a big charming peasant grin. “This is my favorite political analyst, a man of the people,” he said. “Give us your opinion of the world situation vis à vis the People’s Republic of China,” he said.

  “When I go to China,” I said, “I’m going to ask for a fork.”

  This got a nice laugh and the dinner broke again into little conversations, Jim being very serious with Sonny, Karl with Galba. The two of them had a vested interest in me and Jim, since when Karl was done with us we would go to Vegas and work for Gregory at the Golconda, which he didn’t exactly own but had an interest in, a big enough interest to get him a floor of his own and make all the employees turn away from the glare of his majesty if he happened to be striding around the corridors, which he did sometimes, all six feet five of him, a Yugoslav by birth who spent the first years of his life in a Colorado mining town with other Yugoslavs and not speaking English until, as he told me once, “I figured out all the people with money were jabbering this foreign tongue, so I learned it myself.” He learned it pretty good, too, enough to have an ocean of little iron men he could swing in and out of various businesses, causing the market to topple or rise according to his desires, or close to it.

  Chet gave me a sly little look, as if to say, “Isn’t he cute?” and started a conversation with the actress on the other side of him, leaving me with Jody McKeegan, the actress who came with Gregory, his more or less steady date these days, a woman of about thirty or thirty-five, who knows how old anybody is anymore? She was eating at a good pace, and held her hand up for me to wait until she swallowed her potatoes.

  “You guys follow me at the Golconda,” she said finally.

  “That’s so far away I hate to think about it,” I said.

  “I hope you’ll come and see me,” she said, and got back into her food.

  “I hope so,” I said without meaning it.

  She flashed her eyes at me, and in an instant I could see why Galba ran around with her instead of the tasty younger women who must have been available to him. I watched her, having nothing better to do. She ate like an animal, not sloppy, just concentrated, shoveling the goods into her face with an expression of distant concentration, like, she would eat this food and then go find someplace to curl up and snooze for a couple of days, stretch, give herself a long lazy wash, and then back to the hunt.

  “I know a great story about Max,” Gregory said. “I hope you don’t mind if I tell it . . .”

  Karl laughed and dabbed at his lips with his white napkin. “Certainly not, I have a lot of stories about him myself.”

  “My favorite story about Max,” Jim said, just about the first thing he had said to the table at large, so everybody is leaning forward listening to him, except Galba, who looked a little irritated, “is . . .” and Jim’s head fell over, as if he had fallen asleep.

  “Anyway,” says Galba, “there was this Handsome Harry actor under contract to MGM, back a long time ago, in the seven-year-contract days, big fellow, could read and write English and sat good on a horse, getting important enough to be invited to some big parties. He brags one night in front of the wrong people that he would never on this earth work for a man like Max, an exploiter of the people, that his integrity was at stake, God knows what he thought of the people he was working for, but Max hears about this and lets it be known that he, Max, has a vehicle for this particular actor. The studio didn’t want him, the director didn’t want him, but Max says, ‘Dis picture don’t work widout Harry.’ The brass at MGM figure they can get an arm and a leg out of Max in return for the guy’s services, the poor actor gets his weekly wages and the studio keeps the rest.

  “The actor hears the studio is negotiating with Max and blows his top. ‘Never in a million years!’ MGM suspends him immediately and he says he don’t care, it’s time to get out of this dirty business anyway, and he goes and lives with his sister in Santa Barbara, sailing her little boat out to the Channel Islands and shooting wild pigs with his .38 pistol to get himself in a relaxed state of mind. Meanwhile, MGM is going crazy, Max is offering them more and more money to produce this actor, ‘alive and well,’ on the first day of shooting.

  “MGM sends an endless stream of executives up to Santa Barbara, each with a better offer for the actor, although not offering to share in the money Max is putting up, just perks and options to pick his next vehicle, veiled threats to poison his dog, you know, all bullshit of course, but the actor won’t budge. ‘I wouldn’t work for that slavedriver for a thousand a day,’ he would say, and then sail out into the channel with his pistol and a couple belts of ammunition around his neck to shoot the pigs. The studio people never followed him out there, probably afraid he might make a mistake in the fog and shoot one of them.

  “Finally, Irving calls Max and asks him about the property, what is it that only Handsome Harry can do, and why is Max offering MGM so goddamn much money for an actor who frankly couldn’t get arrested unless he was under contract?

  “Max won’t talk. He just tells Irving, ‘Never mind, I think I can get along without him,’ but still, through the agency involved, keeps trying to get the guy.

  “This drives Irving crazy. He comes up to Max at a party and tries to jolly him, but Max just laughs and says, ‘I never do business at parties,’ which is the biggest crock of shit imaginable and only makes Irving hotter under the collar. Then the story is all over town that Max has gone up to Santa Barbara himself in a huge yacht he borrowed from a friend and cuts Harry off as Harry is sailing out for his daily pigshoot; I can just see them out there in the fog and the current, Max yelling at the actor, ‘Come aboard or we’ll sink you!’ T
his is long before Max is crippled, of course.

  “Max and Harry meet on the yacht for hours, sailing up and down the channel, with Max coming up on deck every once in a while to toss his cookies into the water, Max being very subject to seasickness, and then wipe his mouth, swear a little bit and head below again. But it was no use, Harry would not budge, even though Max is supposed to have told him, ‘Listen, Harry, you are locked up in this situation. You think because two fellows like me and Irving are after you that you are somehow more valuable than you was before in terms of dollars and cents, but you ain’t because you don’t understand fellows like us. We get what we want because we don’t stop at nothing. You’re just an actor; what resources do you have? I can keep coming after you for years if need be, and how can you hold out? Family money? So what? Family money can’t put you up on the silver screen, there ain’t enough of it, and that’s what you love most. I can and Irving can, and we can also keep you off the screen, as I am sure Irving has told you.’

  “But the kid won’t relent, at least so the story goes, and Max has to come back to Hollywood a beaten man. People know how serious it is when Max misses a few functions around town, staying home and brooding about the whole mess, and this is when Irving comes up with his generous offer: he will buy the script from Max and produce the picture himself.”

  Galba sat back and drained his glass of wine, keeping a straight face like any good storyteller. “Irving paid an arm and a leg for the script, sight unseen, so convinced was he that Max had his hands on a winner, and to make it seem even more likely, Max insisted on a percentage of the picture’s profits for himself. The script, of course, was the worst dog Irving had ever seen, a complete piece of shit, which Max had paid too much for and couldn’t figure out how to get out from under until he heard about this actor at MGM who had bragged that he would never work for Max in a million years.”