The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  Karl Meador was the head of the studio and the son of the man who had founded it forty years before. Max, the father, had been a flamboyant tyrannical near-genius who had helped to create the Hollywood film industry. His son Karl was a graduate of Dartmouth, a bachelor and had the coldest eyes Harry had ever seen. Meador’s office was always kept dark and cold and was not much larger than Harry’s.

  “I understand you gentlemen are having trouble finding a director for your project, is that true?” he said to Harry and Dunnigan, at a few minutes after ten.

  Dunnigan was sitting beside Harry on the couch across the room from Meador’s desk. He smiled with all the charm of a top agent and said, “We’re not really experiencing any actual difficulties. In fact we had lunch yesterday with Victor Singh, and I might be wrong but I think the meeting was productive, don’t you?” He was now looking at Harry, obviously throwing the ball to him.

  Harry sat quietly and did not speak. Dunnigan was the executive producer; let him do the talking.

  Karl Meador, behind his desk, was wearing a dark-blue suit with thin red stripes, pale-blue shirt with french cuffs and a black silk necktie. To Harry he looked like a stock broker. His cold eyes were half-hidden behind tinted rimless glasses, and his thin feminine mouth was slightly pursed as he waited for one or the other of them to speak. Finally Dunnigan broke down.

  “I feel we had a most productive meeting,” he said. “And I for one am ready to offer the man a contract.”

  Meador looked at Harry. “Does Singh meet with your approval?”

  “No,” Harry said. His palms were sweating and his crotch felt hot and damp. “I think it would be a mistake to hire Singh for this particular project, although I’d be interested in talking to him again about something more down his particular alley.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Meador asked.

  “Bluntly,” Harry said, “the man wants to turn our project into an anti-American picture. He wants to use it as a vehicle for some half-baked philosophical notions about American violence, which in my opinion he fails to understand. Also, he wants to use British actors, technicians, camera crew, and he wants to cut the picture in England.”

  “That’s out of the question,” Meador said. “Fats, how much were we going to offer him?”

  “Fifty thousand with fringes,” Dunnigan said, and added, “He got zip for that feature he did in England.”

  “For that kind of money he could work here and work with our people,” Meador said. To Harry: “Did you have any particular candidate in mind?”

  For one small moment Harry thought it was possible that he would get the director of his choice. “Calvin Fishler,” he said.

  “What’s he done?”

  “Well, a lot of television work . . .”

  “Any features?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “I don’t know his work,” Meador said, and that was it for Calvin Fishler. Meador told them he would mull over the problem on the weekend and see if he couldn’t come up with somebody everyone would be happy with, and they were dismissed. Harry walked Dunnigan down the long corridor to his office.

  “Well, we got rid of the wog,” Fats said. “Sorry you couldn’t get that kid on the picture, but he’s not the guy to handle the caliber of stars we are going to have to hire.”

  “I guess not,” Harry said.

  Lew Gargolian, with a worried look on his face, was waiting for them in Dunnigan’s secretary’s office. He was wondering if there was any way, at this point, to pin down the number and type of cars that were going to be wrecked in the course of the picture. “The way it looks he’s wrecking about twelve cars,” Gargolian said, meaning the script-writer. “In two places he specifies new Cadillacs.”

  “I’m sure you fellows can handle it without my assistance,” Dunnigan said, and disappeared into his private office. Harry and Gargolian went over to the old Writers Building and spent the rest of the morning happily fighting over how many cars, and what type, were going to have to be destroyed in order to make this an authentic-looking and exciting major motion picture. Gargolian felt it could probably be done with six, and fake the rest. Harry wanted all twelve, if they could find some way to afford it. An honest difference of opinion.

  TWENTY-TWO

  IT WAS one of those horrible weekends. Jody had run into an old acquaintance from New York in Beverly Hills, a fashion photographer who was on the Coast trying to arrange financing for what he called “a tryptich of films” about the life of Buddha, which he wanted to shoot in India and Southeast Asia. He was full of enthusiasm and took Jody to the Beverly Wilshire for coffee, and from him Jody got the name and telephone number of a man who could sell her some marijuana. The fashion photographer was so full of himself that he did not ask Jody anything beyond, “What brings you to the Coast?” which she answered by asking him if he knew where she could get some dope.

  When Harry got home that night, his undershirt soaked in the acid sweat of anxiety, she begged, cajoled and finally convinced him that he needed some good old drugs, and with a shrug he said, “I’m going to take a long hot bath. If you can buy something, go ahead.”

  “I need money,” Jody said. He had given her money before, but this was the first time she had asked for any.

  “Look in my wallet,” he called out from the bathroom. The wallet was stuffed with money. Jody took three fifty dollar bills, planning to put back what she did not have to spend. After all, it was just possible that the dealer wouldn’t deal anything under half a pound.

  Jody really fell into it. The dealer knew a lot of the same people Jody knew from New York, and aside from having some of the best Asian marijuana, which was very hard to find in Southern California, he also had some really fine cocaine, and so Jody spent 130 dollars on drugs and the rest on cabfare. At the dealer’s house in Laurel Canyon she snorted two lines of cocaine and smoked some of the weed, and so by the time she got back to the Chateau Bercy she was mellow, holding her chin in the air and smiling mysteriously.

  Harry was out of the bathtub, wearing an old robe and halfway through his second fairly strong drink of Scotch. “I don’t see how you can drink that stuff,” she told him. “Do you have any papers?”

  “No,” he said. She could tell he was a little nervous about the marijuana because he became sarcastic: “I quit rolling my own when I came in off the range.”

  “Cute,” she said. “Do you have a pipe? I could run down to the market and buy some papers, I guess.”

  “What about dinner?” Harry wanted to know. But dinner was very late that night, and came to the door in white paper cartons, delivered by a young Chinese. By the time it arrived Harry was in a fierce temper and Jody was stoned beyond her own recollections. Harry did not seem able to get high. First he smoked half a joint with Jody, and felt nothing beyond a tightening at his temples and an emptiness in the pit of his stomach, which could have been caused by his lack of dinner. He had another strong Scotch, and then Jody got out the cocaine. At first he was angry at her for spending so much of his money, but secretly he had always wanted to try cocaine, and so when she pulverized a small heap of the white powder on her hand-mirror and arranged it into lines with the tip of her knifeblade, he watched with interest and stopped making his bitching remarks.

  Jody made four lines and then rolled up a dollar bill. She showed Harry how to stick the bill into his nose and sniff the powder, one line per nostril, and then did it herself. Harry tasted medicine in the back of his throat and felt his nose go cold and then numb. He felt nothing else.

  “Are you sure this is cocaine?” he asked her. “They sell a lot of things as cocaine . . .”

  “It’s coke,” she said. “Can’t you get off?” She stood up. “Play some music, I want to boogie,” she said.

  When the Chinese food came and they smoked another joint between them, this one laced with coke, and Harry had a couple more drinks and felt pretty good. “That’s all I needed,” he said cheerfully. “I was hungry, t
hat’s all. Now I want to fuck you.”

  “You’re going to have to do it right here,” Jody said. “I can’t move.” They were on the living room couch, the television set flickering, the radio playing old-fashioned music. Harry felt mellow and distant, and he really did want to fuck her, only he didn’t have the strength to get up. Thinking about fucking her was almost as good, he thought, and giggled. The stuff was affecting him after all. He had smoked marijuana before, but it had never really done anything for him. Perhaps it was the cocaine.

  He awakened at near dawn, still on the couch in his bathrobe. The coffee table beside him was a litter of dirty plates and paper cartons, wadded napkins and glasses smelling horribly of whiskey. But he had no hangover, just a certain tiredness and a bad taste in his mouth. He got up and went to the bathroom, pissed and brushed his teeth and went to bed. Jody stirred when he got in beside her, and in minutes they were deep into making love. Afterward they lay back and Jody said, “You know, let’s be evil. Let’s just get into it. You want to?”

  “Anything,” he said. He had been about to start thinking about work. This would be a way not to. They smoked a couple of laced joints and went back to bed and made love again, and then Jody rolled up a few joints for them to take along, and they went off to breakfast at Schwab’s. After breakfast they planned to go to some secluded beach and get even higher, but it was a bright clear sunny Saturday, and Harry said, “The beaches’ll be murder. Let’s go back to the hotel.”

  They had lunch delivered from Greenblatt’s delicatessen, and just for the hell of it, a bottle of champagne, and spent the afternoon alternately dozing and watching old movies and cartoons on television. If the marijuana made Harry sleepy, the cocaine brought him fully awake and gave him a delicious sense of authority and power: there certainly weren’t going to be any more problems on the picture because Harry knew now that all he really had to do was sniff a little coke and resume the reins of power. Indeed, as he watched the images on television he carried on in his mind several disjointed but seemingly clear fantasies about how to solve the major problems, which after a while faded out of his imagination and left him irritated and apprehensive. Jody was asleep on the couch, the late afternoon sunlight across her face, her mouth open as she snored lightly. He wanted to throw a glass of water onto her face and wake her up. It would be funny and she deserved it, for snoring. He actually got up and went into the kitchen for the water, but drank it instead, realizing that he was terribly thirsty. That was probably the champagne, he thought.

  When Jody woke up it was dark again, and Harry was watching The Sundowners and crying silently, the tears running unchecked down his face. She watched him for a while and then said, “You’re crying.”

  “Movies make me cry,” he said. Jody got up and went in to take a shower.

  Later they had a bitter argument about where to have dinner. Jody wanted to dress up and go to Chasen’s and flash herself. Harry wanted to walk down to Musso & Franks, the image in his mind of the two of them strolling down the street arm-in-arm, stoned to the eyes, and then go into the quiet old wood-paneled room and have a lot of really rich and satisfying Italian food. The thing was, they wouldn’t have to go to any trouble. But Jody was goddamned if she was going to put on clothes just to walk down to some joint on the Boulevard. Harry tried to explain to her that Musso & Franks was not some joint on the Boulevard, but a very high-class restaurant that had been a hang-out for Hollywood people since the Twenties. He even hinted that there might be some stars there, but Jody laughed at him. “Call the fucking Chinaman,” she said. “And come here.”

  They went to bed and made love for a very long time, but neither of them seemed to have any desire to come, and so after it got actually boring, Harry pulled out and they lay together looking at the ceiling, until the doorbell buzzed with the Chinese food.

  It was not possible to sleep that night. In fact the only thing Harry wanted to do was get deeper into the cocaine. He wasn’t interested in the marijuana. It was all right for something to get high, but the cocaine was different. Now that he was into it, he could see how people could become addicted; not so much what it did to you, but everything was all right when you were coked. Harry could feel rivers of power flowing from his fingertips, and with utter clarity he realized at last, aided by the cocaine, why he was in the movie business, why he put up with the shit-eating, the back-biting, the sleepless emasculate nights, the awful, stomach-walloping changes in plan, the day-to-day crises: it was for this sense of power, this feeling of controlling destinies, not just his own but everybody’s. This feeling he had now. Jody was there, he could exercise his power on her. He could talk to her, fuck her, cut her to pieces. He could order her out of his apartment. He could make her beg to stay. Ah, he thought, coming out of this odd reveries, some day I’m going to have to do just that, and the sense of power faded and Harry found that he was grinding his teeth. I need to brush my teeth, he thought.

  He began to learn something of the other side of cocaine when he caught himself throwing his toothbrush into the shower stall in a fit of rage because the toothpaste had fallen off into the sink.

  At around four in the morning Jody snapped off the television set and said, “I’m hungry again. Let’s go to a Denny’s or something.”

  “Oh God,” Harry said. “I just got ripped again. I don’t think I can drive.”

  “You can drive. Snort a little more lady.”

  So that was how it was done.

  They slept until nearly two on Sunday afternoon. Jody talked about going out by the pool and spending the afternoon getting some sun, but by the time they had sent for breakfast, gotten stoned, made love and taken their baths, the idea was no longer charming, and the sun had almost gone down. For several hours Harry was under the impression that it was Saturday, and when “The FBI” came on the television Harry took hold of his head and rocked back and forth. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said, “what the fuck kind of life is this?”

  Jody did not take her eyes off the set. “I lived like this for a couple of years once,” she said. “In New York. It’s easy.”

  “You mean stoned every day and every night? What the hell’s the point?”

  Her eyes flicked over toward him, and then back to the screen. “My boyfriend was on skag,” she said. “His mother used to send him money, and we’d go cash the check, score, and head back to the room. That went on for a couple of years.”

  Harry knew skag was heroin but he could not believe that Jody had been a heroin user. “What were you doing all that time?” he asked her. She just laughed drily and kept watching television. Harry said, “No, wait, I want to talk,” and went over and shut off the set. Jody looked faintly irritated for a moment but then smiled and came over to Harry’s side of the couch.

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Heroin,” he said. “Did you actually use it?”

  “Don’t be a pest, I’m watching the show.”

  “No, goddamn it, I want to talk. You’ll either talk to me or get your ass out of my apartment.” He had not realized until he opened his mouth just how angry he was, but now, on his feet looking down at her, he could feel himself trembling with a rage that was almost joyous. “Did you hear me?” he said in his most cutting voice.

  “Oh, you’ll get over it,” she said.

  “Fucking bitch,” he said, and went into the kitchen. He could not understand why he did not hit her. She had disobeyed him. This was his apartment and she should have either gotten out or cooperated with him. Instead she was sitting in there watching television. It occurred to him that he was helpless. Obviously he could not physically throw her out. He did not even want to throw her out. All he wanted was for her to do what he said. That was not too much to ask. But she would not do it.

  “Hey,” he said to her.

  She looked up at him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “The coke makes me into a bitch.” She got up and turned off the television and came to him, putting her arms aroun
d his waist and her cheek against his chest. He could smell her hair and it made him dizzy with love. “I’m sorry, sweet baby,” she said, and took him to bed. They made love for half an hour, their bodies slippery with cold sweat. Finally they just stopped moving, and as Harry lay on top of her he wondered if he could get to sleep without some more dope. But tomorrow was Monday and he would have to get back into it, so it would be better not to take any more. Not now. Not until next weekend in fact; but next weekend seemed years away. No more coke until next weekend. No more marijuana. And he should really quit drinking too.

  But he felt a tickle of panic in his chest at the thought that he would not be able to sleep that night.

  After what seemed hours, Jody asleep at his side, Harry got out of bed, went into the living room and, sitting in semi-darkness, smoked the last of the marijuana. Then he went to the window overlooking the city and saw that there was a nearly full moon in the western sky. He watched the moon for a while and then went to bed.

  TWENTY-THREE

  ON MONDAY morning things began to pop. Harry got to his office at a little before ten, still muzzy from the weekend, and found that a director had been picked, “subject to his approval, of course,” and that Harry, the director, Lew Gargolian and the as-yet-unpicked cameraman were scheduled to leave for a location survey at the end of the week.

  Harry had a secretary now, Alice Wanderove, whose long teeth and thin lips irritated him almost enough for him to complain to the studio, but Lew had recommended her highly as efficient beyond the requirements of the job, and so Harry swallowed his irritation (which, he realized, might be another side effect of his drug weekend anyway) and settled in to work on the budget with Lew.

  The new director showed up for his appointment with Harry at a little after twelve, and they crossed the street to the Cinema Grille on Olive for a quick lunch. The director’s name was Jack Meltzer. Harry had met him a couple of times through the years, once at the kiosk out in front of the commissary at Universal, where they were introduced by Martin Abramowitz, Jack Meltzer’s agent, and the other time in the lobby of the Director’s Guild, where the two men had arrived with separate parties to watch a screening of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Jack Meltzer had directed at least thirty pictures, Harry knew, and was regarded around the industry as a man who could shoot a fast clean movie, come in on budget, and most of all, as a man who had very little personal stake (ego involvement was how Fats put it) in the shape or consistency of his pictures. Jack was hired by producers who wanted to retain control over the shooting, and by stars whose pictures were less works of art and more personal vehicles.