2.Jim is kidnapped or dead.
3.They aren’t telling me where he is.
Twenty-five minutes into Showtime.
I hit the Perrier button and picked up a copy of Time in order to appear to be doing something important. After a couple of hundredths of a second the waitress, this time it was Doris, hurried in with the tray and the fresh bottle and the bucket of fresh ice, even though I had my own icemaker over in the corner.
“Hi, Doris,” I said. “How’s your little girl?”
“She’s just fine and dandy, Mister Ogle. Thank you for asking.”
“Here’s a little something, buy her a soda.” I gave her the fifty-dollar bill I had gotten out.
“Oh, Mister Ogle, you don’t have to do that,” she said, but I forced the money on her with a good-natured chuckle and patted her hand like a pal and said, “God, I’m nervous, Doris, let’s get somebody else to go out there.”
She laughed shyly and blushed, a young pretty girl with a good job, and left the room without trying a comeback. She had taken the money so nicely and been so perfect, what with her daughter and all, I almost cried. People are so wonderful, I thought, I should just let my face fall into the big open jar of cold cream and die.
Jim, Jim, Jim, are you laid up with some Mexican whore in Tijuana? Are you doing three-way nipups with a couple of gigantic black transvestites in Long Beach? Are you on the Parker Center tower, hanging from the cornice and hoping for the courage to jump?
Are you in your dressing room? Dressing? Drunk? In secret communion with a priest?
Who else was out there? Ron and Jim, Marty, our line producer who had gone without drinking for six whole months and then on the day Jim vanishes, and Marty is to within about eight cents of budget, he goes across the street and has the big Bucket of Gin, just one, and comes back to begin to try to find a way to cut the picture without the pickups. Marty will be out there with his wife, Zelda.
My relatives had all come early and were now in their seats, not great seats, but good seats. If I knew them, they were making friends with the booths on either side, same kind of people up in those seats, big raw red American faces, now don’t cry, Ogle, we know they’re all swell folks, your fans.
The SALT of the FUCKING EARTH!
SONNY WAS out there. As a friend, of course. Sonny and I had come to Appomattox the day Max Meador died and we all had to help Karl get straight before the worlds of art and commerce heard the news and came at him. At first I thought Karl was just grief-stricken at the loss of his father. That, too, sure, grief and shock, loss, but not the same for a man that age as a younger person. I felt it for Max, the whole bottom falling out, a black hole in space where a man had been, not as strong as for my own grandfather but strong enough, and I’m sure Jim felt some of that, too, but Karl was going berserk. One minute he would be sitting calmly telling stories about Max and the next he would wail and fall to the floor or burst out, “I can’t bear this!” and start to run out of the room. Once he looked as if he had had a heart attack right in front of us, gasping for air and grabbing at his throat, his face turning purple, etc. We finally figured it out, it was simple, of course, but we were drunk, shocked and confused at first.
Poor Karl had just had the control of an empire dumped on him, all the energies of a billion dollars landing flash and sizzle right in the middle of his soul. He told us the amount as we were driving him to my hotel that morning. We didn’t want him to officially find the body of his father, and we sure as hell didn’t want to be the finders. Let the staff find him in the due course of time, that was our philosophy, since we got the breaks and it could happen that way. So we got Karl in the back seat of my car and headed up Sunset. Most of the way he either cried or boasted about how much he was worth.
“It’s not just money at that level, you know,” he would say. “You don’t inherit a huge wad of capital. It’s all in things, goods, companies, services, people, agreements, letters, bits, God Almighty, it’s all over the world and in every goddamn form you can think of!” Or he might laugh meanly and say, “People always wondered about me. Well, now they’re gonna find out, all right, all right, certain people will find what can happen when a billion fuckin’ dollars gets in the way!”
“There, there,” I said at this point. Thinking, now that Max is gone, what is to become of us? What about Larceny & Ogle? Who’s been running the show? I could see already the complications of getting into a shitstorm with Gregory, part owner of the studio and the Golconda and half of the rest of the world, a man perfectly capable of starting to work picking Karl clean before the funeral. And as if reading my mind, Karl would quail and quake and mutter, “Oh, my God, help!”
Up at my place we sat him on the couch and put some coffee into him.
“Now, Karl,” Jim said. “You have to calm down.”
“Don’t worry, boys, don’t worry, I’ll be there when the shit hits the fan,” he said. “And don’t think I won’t be grateful when the time comes, you boys are my best friends, do you know that? Nobody the fuck likes me. Oh God!” And he would be off again, rolling back and forth in agony, “Oh, my God, what an asshole I am, talking like this! My father! My father!”
He wept into his hands for a while, and then was calm again.
“This was no ordinary death,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“This man who died was no ordinary man, my father, Max Meador, this was one of the kings of the world, can I tell you something? You want to hear something? Max Meador produced over three thousand movies! Three thousand fucking movies. Nobody will ever do that again. Nobody. Ever.”
He smiled, totally sane. “Certainly not me. We had a little game, from way back. He would pretend to be exasperated with me, act like I was a fool.”
Jim and I must have looked embarrassed, especially me who can’t control his face, because Karl looked at us fondly. “You boys,” he said, “my friends. You never saw it, that Max and I would play it all between us.”
Tears rolled down his face, but he was still sane, still smiling. “We put it over on everybody.”
Including Karl, I thought, but said nothing, naturally.
He talked some more about his father, getting it out, getting over it, and then he went into another crazy fit, really frightened about the future. What was he going to do? He could not manage his estate, he couldn’t even keep it from the people who were supposed to be protecting it, it was all twisted and unreal and political, oil wells here, land there, buried gold, numbered bank accounts, secrets, oh, it would be the death of him, and he would roll around in agony some more, with that billion dollars sitting on top of his head like a great electric elephant from outer space, buzzing and clicking, sucking him into its blazing guts . . . a billion dollars!
It even made me a little giddy.
So I dialed Sonny’s number and after nine rings, she answered.
“You alone?” I joked. She mumbled something and I told her what was up. She arrived at the suite about ten minutes later.
“How is he?” she asked.
“He needs a mama,” I said.
SO THAT was the end of me and Sonny Baer. I don’t blame her, in fact, we like each other, but in the face of that billion dollars she was helpless. Trained all her life to respect money and bigness like every good American child she was just another beagle in life’s drunken rabbit hunt. I told her so.
“Listen,” I said. We were in the kitchen getting coffee. “Give me a chance. If I make a million a year, tax free, I’ll be caught up to Karl in, let’s see, just about one thousand years. Will you wait?”
“Sure I’ll wait,” she said.
Somehow, I did not believe her.
But the big changes were being rung on Karl himself, with that billion-dollar dildo headed his way, and Sonny did help to calm him down and get him ready for the assault by press, public and those ravening maniacs, his fellow super-rich, many of whom would become convinced that with Max dead his fortune was out in the open and unp
rotected. At first I didn’t believe Karl’s babbling about a billion dollars, that’s a hell of a lot of money, three or four hundred million more than even Bob Hope, but after the funeral, which would have pleased Al Capone himself, the papers reported that Karl had inherited $60,000 in cash and securities and property worth “close to a million dollars.” Ha.
I should have known, also, that Karl was actually his father’s son, when after he was all calmed down and thanked us and begged for our support in his coming war against the universe, he asked us also to do something we had not done in years: to commit to three pictures instead of just one.
“I need you behind me,” he said. “We don’t have to sign anything, but if I come into the director’s meeting with you guys tied up for three years, and maybe a couple of other deals already working for me, then I stand a better chance. Those people still think of me as Max’s little boy, and it’s time to step out there.”
Jim smiled and said, “Or, you could take your money and retire to Mooréa, just off the coast of Tahiti.”
“Huh?” Karl said.
He begged us some more, bringing up the fact that with his crazy confessions of the night before, we had him by the balls.
Jim and I looked at each other. What the hell, we could always weasel out later.
“Sure,” I said to Karl.
He shook hands with us, and his palm was warm and dry.
“Thank you very much!” he said. My hackles rose. For the first time, I had heard a touch of the guttural in his voice.
Sonny and Karl went down to her place, hand-in-hand, to wait for the call from home. I probably looked woebegone, for Jim came up to me smiling and hit me on the back.
“Let’s go get some breakfast!”
AFTER ALL the fussing about Max’s death and the rumors that the studio would be sold, the actual making of our picture was an anticlimax. I won’t bother you with the title or the plot, either you like our stuff or you don’t, and the bald plots are not the meat of the thing. New songs and fresh jokes, that’s our game.
The rumors were funny. Nobody seemed to trust Karl, nobody seemed to think he could run the place, and a lot of people were smug in the idea that Karl would go to pieces. Of course we knew better, but nobody asked us. This was business.
One rumor had Gregory Galba selling all his stock to a tribe of Beduin, another that he was only a Mafia front man whose major work was laundering money through the picture and entertainment businesses, and that if the stock continued to drop, he, too, would be dropped—into the bay in a barrel of concrete. Also a rumor that a bevy of superstars were putting their heads together and talking about taking over the studio as a forum for their artistic concepts, and basically would restore Hollywood to its golden age—the 1930s. Everyone got a good laugh out of that one.
For Karl, the rumors were good for business. He came down to Sound Stage Five, where we were doing all our interiors, at least once a day, scaring the hell out of everybody just by marching into the place with his gophers and acolytes trailing along. Karl was back into suits again, but with the silk shirt open in front so you could see all the little gold chains, and he would stand and talk to Marty or Ron while his followers would find other people to talk to, our agents, the pretty girls—there were always pretty girls on our sets, following another of Max’s rules about making entertaining pictures: “All the women should have great tits, even the mammas and grandmammas, because it makes people emotional.” This rule is followed on all the television comedies; you can check it out for yourself.
Anyway, Karl would come into my trailer and sit down and the charm would fall away like old skin, he would look exhausted and beg me for a cup of coffee, which I would pour him, and then he would say something like, “Oh, Christ, the shits are killing me!”
I would recommend Lomotil and he would give me a pained smile and start into a whining series of complaints. In a way it was flattering, because I suppose it was old Max he used to do this to, and now me. His complaints were as various as he could make them, considering where he stood on the world pamper index, and I would nod and sip coffee with him, glad for the chance to get my mind off my own gripes.
“Well, it happened again last night,” he might start.
“What happened again last night?” I would ask sweetly. As long as Karl was in the trailer, nobody else would dare disturb me, so that was another positive.
“The damned herpes,” he would say with the darkest frown you could imagine. “It’s like a plague, an epidemic, a fucking invasion from outer space!”
“Oh, geez,” I would say. “That’s a shame . . .”
“Do you realize I can’t screw?”
“Yeah, I realize that, Karl. Well, relax, they say the best way to get rid of the ol’ herp is to relax . . .”
“How can I relax? I’ve got them again, twice in the same month! Do you know what it’s like to get turned on by some lovely girl and then do your damnedest to get her into bed and then go for a piss and find you have these ugly, red, pus-covered sores all over your dick?”
“You can’t buy happiness,” I would remind him.
“Shit!”
Outside the trailer about twenty feet away, Sonny might be sitting in her chair, reading a paperback. For some reason it irritated me to have Karl in here pissing and moaning about his sore dick and all the beautiful girls he couldn’t seduce, while she was out there. They “went together” for the whole shooting schedule, and then he dropped her during postproduction. During shooting she would arrive, when she had an early call, in Karl’s big stretch Mercedes, and then it and the driver would go down to Santa Monica (or wherever Karl spent the night) and get him.
Karl grinned. “There’s a guy in Europe,” he said, “a doctor who has been curing a friend of mine from Palm Beach with a series of smallpox shots, a permanent cure.” His smile was that of a man who has access to something the normal individual can’t have. “Maybe after things around here get straightened out, I’ll send for him.”
“Rumors are flying,” I said, to get off his herpes for a minute. “I heard the other day that Columbia and Warners are going to form a joint venture and buy you out when the stock gets low enough.”
Karl laughed easily. “You just go on believing it,” he said.
“I never said I believed it. And I don’t believe the one that says somebody saw you ducking into a spiritualist’s down in Santa Monica to have a chat with Max.”
“That one was true,” he said, with rare humor. “Every medium in town is working on her Max Meador impression.” He looked at his watch. “How’s the picture coming?”
“Ask Ron,” I said. “He’s the director.”
He stood up and looked at his handsome, well-dressed self in my big mirror. “Well, you just keep those rumors flying,” he said. “It helps the stock to drop, and that helps me to pick it up cheap.”
“Maybe I’ll buy a few million shares myself,” I said. “I have the fullest confidence in your managerial abilities,” and we would laugh and shake hands and he would open the door and step out, dropping the temperature on the sound stage fifty degrees, and I would close the door and sit down and let the sweat pop out all over me. Because Karl or no Karl, that billion bucks can make a fellow nervous, being cramped up in the same little room with it like that.
WE HAVE a happy set because we try to use the same people every year, everybody is making good money and there is plenty to talk about while the setting-up is going on because most of the crew are just getting back from location and have a lot of gossip, fresh juicy stuff about the big stars and lugubrious tales of life in America. When I say “happy set” I don’t mean that people are going around whistling, it’s just that the atmosphere of cold fear surrounding some productions is absent from ours except when guys like Karl show up and get everybody nervous. Even our picture could be canceled at any moment and no one told why, and there is nothing more ominous to the old hand than a bunch of front office types hanging around the set
looking at their watches.
The making and selling of motion pictures isn’t a very complicated process, and to run things does not require any particular genius, but like any other enterprise an air of quiet confidence is money in the bank. So, with Max’s death and Karl’s rise to power a certain uneasiness hounded us this particular year as it hadn’t since our first picture, when nobody knew anything about the future, whether we would hit, miss or go into limbo.
Now the problem was, would we continue under the same management, which meant jobs for all, or would some crazy man like Gregory Galba or any of a dozen others come bowling into things with an army of campfollowers and screw everything up.
This made the crew a little tense; it made the production department terribly tense, for they are the ones who get blamed for high costs; it made the promotion department tense because they weren’t sure on a daily basis what line to follow with an ever-curious world press; this made Marty the producer so nervous that he would sweat and this would make his tortoiseshell glasses slip down his nose so that he was always pushing them back up before speaking, which communicated his nervousness both upward and downward, and if anybody is charged with keeping the nervous element down, it is he; and this of course made Ron the director a little edgy, worried about the jokes, the blocking, the freshness of things, the time wasted getting it right; and this in turn would keep Jim the writer on the set making up one-liners or polishing our business, and it is tough to be funny under pressure.
Out of this whole bunch there was only one guy I really didn’t like, but there was nothing I could do about it. This was Jim’s camera standin, a guy he had known from the service, a former tenor saxophone player who called himself Baby Cakes, Jim’s general size and shape, of course, but a broad crude sly untrustworthy face, a guy who only looked at you sideways, and always got a hurt, I-told-you-so look on his face when it appeared he was going to be cut out of things.
A movie set operates on a straight status basis, just like the Marine Corps, and usually privates don’t hang out with generals, but this was different. Baby Cakes had known Jim from another life, and when he showed up in Hollywood a few years back to look up his wildly successful old dopesmoking buddy, Jim was glad to see him, polite to him, took him everywhere and fussed over him for a couple of days, until it became obvious that Baby Cakes was not going to leave without being thrown out, and if Jim said anything that might be thought of as a hint that the visit was over, he would pull a long face and start talking about how his life hadn’t turned out as lucky as Jim’s, etc&etc., until Jim’s happy solution to hire him as his standin.
The Hollywood Trilogy Page 14