But Baby Cakes wasn’t all that grateful and considered himself a cut above the rest of the crew, where in fact he was a buckass private in our little army. He was rude to the people he felt he could be rude to, and sucked up to the rest of us with a kind of growling whine that made you know he hated every minute of it and it was “just the breaks” that kept him from becoming a movie star or a big tycoon or something.
Naturally, since Baby Cakes felt he could walk into Jim’s trailer at any time, tag along to recording sessions over at Paramount or even sit with us in the commissary without particularly being asked, people who wanted to get to Jim might first butter up Baby Cakes.
And did he like butter! If it was a woman trying to get to Jim, she would often first have to fight off Baby Cakes, and since he really thought of himself as a demon with the ladies, this might take a while, and if the girl was dumb, Baby Cakes might even score. Which meant we would all have to sit still for his tales of conquest.
By this year, Baby Cakes was on familiar terms with every low-grade hustler, con-artist and dimwit promoter in both the music and movie businesses.
One nice thing: he was barred from the Golconda, and effectively from Las Vegas. He had been caught doing a swipe-and-run among the blackjack tables. This is a hustle where you carry in your hand two cards adding up to blackjack and do a quick double shuffle on the dealer. Usually when some halfass tries this they merely beat him up and throw him out the back door, but Baby Cakes was brought to the boss, he insisted on it, made a big fuss, had Jim there and everything.
“You’re eighty-six from the club,” Galba said in a voice like tungsten steel. “I ever see you again I’ll rip your head off.”
Baby Cakes looked at Jim, shocked and hurt, but a little of the sly I-told-you-so in his eyes. Jim only shrugged.
But couldn’t fire him. He just couldn’t. And so Baby Cakes was on the set when Jim was around, a source of negative energy, a boil on our collective neck.
Now he popped up and opened my door, ducking his head at me like a goddamn servant from the Middle Ages, and said, not looking at me, “Hey, Ogle, I think Jim’s on the way over here.”
“I’m not home,” I said. I had to be careful with the guy; he knew I didn’t like him, and if I made it too obvious he would pout all day and make Jim feel bad.
“That’s a good one,” he said. “No wonder they give you all the jokes.”
Jim came up behind Baby Cakes and pushed into the trailer around him. Outside on the set they were moving a couple of lights, nothing happening.
“What the fuck do you want?” I asked him.
He threw himself onto my couch, feet up, and pulled a joint out of his pocket. “You got a match?” he asked. There was a big bowl of matchbooks by his head, and he reached over and got some matches. Baby Cakes hovered in the doorway, waiting for somebody to ask him in. It wasn’t going to be me, but I couldn’t dismiss him, either. Jim took a deep hit at the weed and, holding his breath, offered the joint to me. I shook my head and he held the joint out toward Baby Cakes, who used it to segue himself into the chair by the couch.
“Great dope!” he said after exhaling.
Jim said to me, “How’s that stash of yours?”
“What stash?” I said. Jim knew I always had coke and weed at the hotel, even when I was working, not to use, but for confidence, just in case.
“I could really use a couple of good snorts today,” Jim hinted, and if it hadn’t been for Baby Cakes I would have gotten one of the drivers to take us to the hotel and let Jim pack his nose. But as things were, Baby Cakes would have gone along, and the thought of my hard-gained Merck going up his nose was too much for me.
“Fresh out,” I said.
The look Baby Cakes gave me meant, “You fuckin’ liar!” which did not make me any happier. Jim, of course, took me at my word and didn’t say anything more about it, and just for the hell of it we went over our next scene until Baby Cakes got bored and left.
“Thank Christ,” Jim said.
If I hadn’t been so pissed off, I would have taken Jim to the hotel then. I should have. We had a hell of a day ahead of us.
FOR A while things were slow and then they started to pick up. Marty came to the trailer a little after Baby Cakes left and said we were free until two o’clock because of an equipment problem, but there was nowhere I wanted to go and nothing I wanted to do. Well, I wanted to get drunk, but not with two o’clock staring me in the face. Marty stuck at the door, turning like he had just thought of something.
“You fellas up to seeing a few reporters? I could get a gang of them off my neck if you would.”
“You mean a full-scale press conference? What for? We ain’t done nothing yet,” I said.
But Marty convinced us that if we would go to lunch now and come back at one o’clock, we could meet with the reporters and have the excuse of the shot at two o’clock, so the press people wouldn’t hang on and nag us and try to get a good story.
“I don’t give a rusty fuck,” was Jim’s attitude. After Marty left he said, “You wanna go get some lunch?”
We started talking about where to go for lunch. Time and distance meant nothing; a driver would take us anywhere in the Los Angeles basin and bring us back by one.
“How about Musso & Frank’s?” I said. “Maybe get a big crab cocktail and some beer.”
“I don’t like the crabmeat in L.A.,” Jim said. He sat up and started lightly to drum his fingers on the edge of the coffee table, not the way a normal person would, but like a musician, with paradiddles, rim-shots, fingernails against an empty glass, etc&etc. “I like the crabmeat in Florida,” he said. “And Chesapeake Bay, goddamn, they got these little softshell bastards that just melt in your mouth, you can eat a hundred of them, with toast and butter, they make the west coast crabmeat taste like shit.”
“Maybe you’re talking about king crab, what do they call it? . . . Alaskan snow crab, which is tasteless as hell, I admit, but the crabmeat from around San Francisco is pretty good.”
He blew me down by pointing out that the crabmeat in L.A. was frozen, anyway.
“You could have lasagna,” I said.
“Naw, I’m all up for some of that Eastern seafood.”
“Well, we sure can’t fly to New York for lunch. How about the Studio Grill?”
Jim didn’t want to go to the Studio Grill. No reason.
“Or across the street,” I said. “I could eat some ramaki, glass of beer, sounds great to me . . .”
“You mean across the street from here?”
“No, across the street from the Studio Grill, the Formosa Cafe.”
“We could just walk across the street from here,” he said, “and get a big steak and potatoes.”
“Make me sleepy,” I said. “We could go to the health food place, what’s it’s name . . .”
“Or the Taco Bell . . .”
“Or El Coyote . . .”
“Polo Lounge . . .”
“Chez Jay’s . . .”
“Schwab’s . . .”
Obviously, neither of us was the least bit hungry, but if we didn’t go eat we’d have to do it later. I was explaining this to Jim while he tapped a pencil against the side of an empty glass, beautifully but irritatingly, when the telephone buzzed. It is not supposed to buzz unless Los Angeles is falling into the ocean. It always made my stomach lurch, and I fell across my big overstuffed chair grabbing for the phone, saying, “goddamn, if we’d only got out of here . . .”
“Don’t answer, we aren’t here now,” Jim said, but I had said hello by then.
WHAT I had for lunch was a soggy, fishy-smelling crab and avocado sandwich with shredded lettuce, Miracle Whip and tired-looking slices of tomato, all on this really bad French bread that cut the roof of my mouth and gave me the gut-rumbles for an hour. Also there was some pale champagne they must have recovered from the tomb of Tutankhamen.
“Luncheon” was in the office, across the lot, of Terrance Segebarth, truly one o
f the most repulsive and outrageous of Hollywood’s collection of contemptibles, and the point of the meeting was to try to get Jim and me to participate in Segebarth’s big annual telethon, which, of course, we refused to do. Segebarth was wearing a turtleneck sweater to cover up his real turtle neck, sunglasses to hide his little red eyes and clumps of transplanted hair all over his head that made him look more than ever like somebody assembled in Transylvania.
You probably get the idea I don’t like this man. So true.
The walls of his office were covered with framed photographs—Roosevelt, Truman, Dewey, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Humphrey, Nixon, you get the idea—all these presidents and hopefuls shaking hands with Segebarth or grinning at him while he beams at the camera, senators, judges, international leaders, kings and heiresses, all beaming and grinning and smirking at the camera to testify that they were on the side of God, Charity and Terrance Segebarth.
There were no photographs of teenage girls. How strange.
Naturally, Segebarth was not without ammunition. We had refused to be on his telethon every year for quite a while, and so he knew that even to get us to a meeting he would have to have something. One year he came at us with a straight blackmail proposition, it seemed there was this girl and her mother, both well known to Segebarth, who had an interesting story to tell about Jim. It took the old crock about an hour to slime out the proposal and to get around to the woman and her child, and when he finally oozed it all out, Jim laughed and said, “Yeah, they’re famous. They once fucked nineteen cops in one night, the two of them. You wanna put ’em on your show? I got the phone number here someplace . . .”
Didn’t work.
This year Segebarth had managed to get to Jim’s wife and put her, all fussed and twittering, onto the Committee to Save the Universe, or whatever the hell the old fart called his organization, and she was to be the crowbar that would get me and Jim to disgorge about fifty thousand dollars of free entertainment. She was at the meeting, Mrs. Larson, with her fox fur collar and her perfect ass, still perfect after all these years, a woman who just by walking past could make you grunt.
When Jim and I entered Segebarth’s office we saw her sitting there with Karl on one side and Sonny Baer on the other, the three of them lined up on the couch. Karl jumped up, his eyes mighty nervous because he must have known how edgy the situation was, Jim never divorcing his wife, loyal to her or maybe just nasty stubborn, never visiting her and never complaining that she used his name in her activities as if they were practically inseparable; and of course Sonny was there for me, Sonny was going to get to be on the telethon with us, Karl said, his eyes glittering as he shook our hands. I love the way they do that. They begin the meeting as if it were all over and everything perfect; we have agreed, of course, to appear this year because it was really going to be a family party, just about everyone in the business would be present, everybody loved Larson & Ogilvie, and (never spoken, always under several layers of implication) we wouldn’t want people to think we were skinflints, would we?
“Even Jack Benny did my telethon, heh heh,” the old fart said.
I had to put things on an official basis right away by saying, “This isn’t in our contract.”
Karl grinned and said, “I was counting on you guys, this particular year.” In other words, do it for poor dead Max, God rest his soul.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What do you mean?”
Just then Segebarth’s fat old secretary came in with the tray covered with sandwiches and the two bottles of pre-Ptolemaic champagne, and Segebarth “held sway” by cracking his own brand of one-liners, all filthy, all very funny, damn him, I hate him most when he’s funny.
Jim, with a mouthful of stale king crab: “What the hell makes you think we’ll play ball this year?” He is not looking at his wife.
But she replies, “I told them you were available. I hope that wasn’t the wrong thing to do.”
“What happens, do they kick you off the committee if I don’t show up?”
Segebarth laughing: “Not that easy, but we do hope this year after all, it’s the kids . . .”
“We don’t have kids,” I said. “Which makes it kind of impersonal.”
Karl gave me a hurt look. “Let me ask you, Why is it you never want to do any things like this? You’re not mean, you’re not cheap, you have plenty of free time, and I think the American public has been pretty good to you . . .”
“Why don’t you do the show, Karl?” I said.
“Yeah,” said Jim. “You and my old lady could sing a duet.”
Segebarth’s face darkened. Storm clouds. If flattery and blackmail won’t work, let’s try a little good old paternalism:
“Boys, I’m getting a little tired of this problem. You aren’t the only people in the business who won’t cooperate, but you’re among the biggest, and I think it’s a goddamn shame you don’t have any room in your heart for these kids.”
“This sandwich is the worst I ever tasted,” Jim said. He looked at me: “We should have gone to Musso’s when we had the chance.”
“Now, boys,” Karl said.
“Lissen, Karl,” I said, putting on a little heat, “us boys happen to be in the middle of shooting a movie for you, and we’re goddamn sick and tired of being harassed by evil-smelling old farts!”
“I represent that remark,” Segebarth said and cackled. You couldn’t insult the man.
“You really aren’t that strong,” Karl said to me, cold.
“What is this, Gunfight at the OK Corral? In front of these women? Maybe we’ll go someplace where they don’t ask us to work free!”
“You shook hands,” Karl said, trying to look shocked.
All through this Sonny is sitting there with her mouth shut and her hands in her lap. It must have been fun, watching these rich idiots, two of them in full makeup, waving their arms and yelling about what was, after all, a foregone conclusion. I thought it was charming myself and wanted nothing more than to be out of there, back in my trailer with my feet up, maybe a bottle of beer to calm my intestines. But no. If there was any one thing in this world I hated to be it was an imperious bastard.
SO THERE we were, the five of us, standing out in front of Producer XII, blinking in the sunlight. As far as I knew, Jim hadn’t said anything directly to his wife, and nobody had said anything to Sonny. Karl’s big metallic-blue stretch Mercedes was right there, the engine quietly mumbling, the driver, a nice guy named Jimmy, was leaning on the fender with his arms folded. We had been in Segebarth’s office for a long time, and I for one was tired and irritated.
We were not doing the benefit. Another six months of being ignored and reviled by Terrance Segebarth.
At a glance from Karl, Jimmy straightened up and opened the back door.
Karl said, “Can I give you a lift back to Stage Five?”
I said, “No, I’m gonna walk across the lot.”
“Me, too,” said Jim.
“Aren’t you going to see that I get home?” Jim’s wife said to him.
Karl said, “Oh, Jimmy will take you home.”
“Let him take her now,” Jim said. He went over to Jimmy and shook his hand, whispering something in his ear. Jimmy laughed broadly and put his hand in his pocket, putting away the money Jim had given him.
“Get in the car,” Jim said to his wife. To Karl he said, “Come on, walk across the lot with us.”
Karl looked at his watch meaningfully, having to poke at it a couple of times to get the digits to appear and then hold it away from the sunlight so he could see the time.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “Are you afraid to walk across your own lot?”
Jim closed the back door of the limo and patted it on the fender like a horse and the Mercedes moved off. Various people walking around or riding bicycles stared at the long famous car and tried to get a peek at its contents.
It was a nice pleasant walk on a sunny yet sweetly cool day, with, as I said, various types moving around on their own busi
ness. This was the new end of the lot, with acres of parking spaces and big military-looking two and three-story office buildings, some with lawns between them and little groups of secretaries and assistants, editors and whatnot sitting on the grass, making it almost look like a college campus. But not quite.
Here was a lot full of antique cars, everything from old Pierce-Arrows to 1922 Rolls-Royces, 1936 Ford three-windows, 1937 Chevy taxicabs, all kinds of old cars. I had spent many a blank afternoon looking over the old cars, enjoying their smell.
Then we were in the shady dim caverns between the enormous old brown sound stages, marching past the parked Mercedes and Jaguars of producers, directors and actors, each parking spot marked with a famous name, and sure enough, as we were striding by Stage Nine we saw a studio employee in grey pants and shirt pulling up the little sign with a guy’s name on it, just uprooting the sign and tucking it under his arm, with one backward contemptuous glance at the little green 280SEL with its rusty crease on the front fender.
“Sic transit Gloria Mundi,” I said.
“Oh, was that her parking space?” Jim joked, but nobody laughed.
“Poor fucker’ll come back from lunch all full of gin and plans, get into his office and find his secretary gone and a nice fat pink slip right in the middle of his desk,” I said.
Karl was walking faster now, and we almost had to trot to keep up with him.
“Karl probably fired him before lunch,” Jim said.
Our route took us past the little commissary just as a knot of people came out, and we saw a couple of apple-cheeked producers in cardigan sweaters look surprised to see Karl, and then wave and start toward us. Karl waved and grinned but was definitely not in the market for a conversation at this time. We sailed past the little group waving and grinning and not stopping, and watched the kissass grins turn to tight bitter lips.
The Hollywood Trilogy Page 15