But he knew how to do the work, and it took none of his attention, and having steady work was important. From a base like this, Jerry hoped to eventually make his way into the movie business. He would be, in Henry James’s wonderful phrase, “one of those upon whom nothing is lost.” He would keep his eyes and ears open, he would assimilate Hollywood through osmosis. Of this he was confident.
Mr. Harris, the president and publisher of Pet Care Hotline, was a small red-haired man in a stiffly starched white shirt. He shook Jerry’s hand at the door to his office and ushered him in. “Please sit down, Mister Rexford,” he said, and Jerry thanked him and sat and turned in time to see Harris rubbing his hands with a Kleenex and dropping the used tissue into a wastebasket beside his desk. The wastebasket was filled with white wads of Kleenex, and there was a box on the desk. Jerry’s heart sank.
But he got the job.
“Tell me about yourself,” Mr. Harris asked him with a shy boyish smile as he rocked back and forth in his truly impressive executive leather high-backed chair, the only impressive piece of furniture in the whole place.
“Well, I don’t know a thing about pet care,” Jerry said with a little smile. He knew he did not have to, to do his work. “But I can write and I can edit . . . I’m sure you’ve gone over my stuff,” he said, pointing at the tearsheets in front of Mr. Harris.
“Yes, you do quite good work, that’s certainly not at issue. Tell me, what brings you to the Sunny Southland?”
Jerry had been waiting for this one. He let a brief expression of pain cross his face, followed by what he hoped was manly determination. “New Horizons,” he said. “Plus that sunshine you just mentioned.”
“Married?”
Again the slight look of pain, quickly erased. “No,” he said.
Harris tugged a Kleenex from its box and idly began to polish the glass top of his desk. “Tell me what you think you can accomplish at Pet Care Hotline, Mr. Rexford.”
A tough order, but Jerry was ready for it. You have to treat the littlest publisher as if he were Henry Luce. Jerry gave Mr. Harris a verbal song-and-dance, hardly hearing the words himself. Beneath it all he was transmitting the information that he, Jerry Rexford, knew that selling advertising (not his job) was the important thing, and that the editorial columns did nothing much more than support those ads. To do this they had to be obsequious to advertisers and potential advertisers, hostile to government interference and sympathetic to the problems which beset those who provided pet care products to the public.
That was about the size of it for any small trade journal writer. His basic job was to rewrite press releases, publicity handouts and the illiterate, cliché-ridden and generally dreadful prose of those advertisers or potential advertisers whom Mr. Harris hoped to flatter by having their picture and byline over articles such as, “Are You Displaying Dog Toys at the Right Eye Level?”
He would also be expected to go to pet care conventions and to cover any hot fast-breaking stories relating to pet care, but these were few and far between, and if there was anything really hot, like a breakthrough in the tick situation, the boss would grab it for himself.
At the end of the meeting, Harris stood up and smiled at Jerry, holding out his hand.
“Welcome aboard,” he said.
Jerry got out before catching Harris wiping off his hands, his desk and the chair Jerry had been sitting in. The wages were okay, nothing spectacular, and he started work tomorrow. Soon enough then to meet his fellow employees, and he made his way through the bullpen with downcast eyes, as if he had been turned down.
In the elevator he felt a lurch of nausea. This was not Hollywood, nor was it the world of Henry James. More like Dickens, and Jerry Rexford hated Dickens. Now more than ever.
THEN THE Los Angeles weather turned hot, and Jerry Rexford learned to hate the place. It was not the maddening heat of the East or the South, or the blistering desert heat he actually enjoyed; it was a stinging acrid flooding heat that made everything hot to the touch. You could not rub your eyes, he found out quickly, because that just rubbed it in. You could not go to the beach, because, as the Los Angeles Times and the Examiner were always telling you, “200,000 JAM BEACHES!”
It cooled down somewhat at night, but not enough to cover yourself with a sheet, until you woke at four a.m. chilled and sticky. The best you could do, he decided, was leave all the doors and windows in the little apartment open, and sit naked either reading or watching television—even though lights and television sets radiated volumes of heat themselves—one couldn’t just sit there in the dark.
Jerry had finally found a place to live after depressing looks at a couple of really cheap but unbearable dumps. One on Del Mar in West Hollywood, Nathanael West country, a garage turned into a studio, with torn beaver-board walls and a toy kitchen but no insulation, so that when Jerry and the old man who lived in front and rented the place out looked at it, the heat billowed from the just-opened door as if they were entering a drying kiln. “Gets a little warm,” the old man said. His breath had a smell of dead animals, and Jerry got away as quickly as possible. The other place was a converted attic down in the flat industrial section of Hollywood, near Technicolor (it had never occurred to Jerry that Technicolor might be a factory—so much for romance) and again there was no insulation but, as the stringy young woman pointed out, “You open the windows at both ends you get quite a little breeze in here.” They were stooping under the sharp pitch of the roof, smiling at each other. The place was empty except for a big dark green cardboard wardrobe and a lot of wire coat hangers spilled across the linoleum.
So much for bargains. Jerry finally took a furnished apartment on a U-court on Fountain near La Cienega at a little more money than he had hoped, no air conditioning, but at least there was insulation, living room, bedroom, small but nice kitchen, and outside the part that secretly excited him, the life of the court around which the two-story building was built, a mysterious place with stepstones on lawn, trees, shrubbery, nooks and crannies, white wrought-iron garden furniture and a small kidney-shaped swimming pool. This was more like it.
Jerry had hoped, when he moved in, to be able to spend the warm evenings after work sitting around the pool, taking an occasional dip and meeting some of his fellow tenants, a couple of whom he had seen when the landlady, a nice woman with no gross physical deformities, had shown him the place. But he was too shy. He found out his first night, coming home from a fierce day at the office (no air conditioning—Harris was not throwing it away on overhead), taking a long cool shower that was marred only a couple of times by people flushing their toilets or running the tap, so that Jerry’s shower dropped to a trickle or suddenly became unbearably hot, and then getting into his old faded green-and-yellow Hawaiian-style bathing trunks. Unfortunately, he happened to look in the mirror at himself. He did not like what he saw. He was a little overweight, just enough for a roll of soft white fat to hang over the top of his trunks, and his arms and legs were too thin. The man and woman he had seen sunning themselves had been darkly tanned, and the woman had a very attractive figure, what he could see of it. If he went out there they would see his slug-white body. And the trunks were just perfect, the kind of bathing suit some middle-class type would wear to a backyard barbecue. As a matter of fact he had bought the trunks to wear to a backyard barbecue, with matching Hawaiian-type shirt. But he had lost the shirt somewhere.
He took off the trunks reluctantly, feeling like an idiot. He was paying for the right to use the court and the pool, and now he was too embarrassed to do it. The heat wave continued, and Jerry kept to himself nights, often sitting in the semidarkness drinking from a tinkling glass of whiskey on the rocks. After the first few nights he did not bother turning on his own radio, because the person next door played his or her radio so loud he could hear it in every room of his apartment. Instead of going crazy and beating on the walls, Jerry decided he liked his neighbor’s taste in music, and relaxed.
With the help of the whiske
y and his exhaustion from the day’s efforts, Jerry would often fall asleep early, sometimes on his couch, sometimes in bed, and then waken before dawn. For a while he would get up and make coffee and read the paper, but then he decided that he was too much alone, and started having his coffee after he had dressed and driven up to Hollywood Boulevard. There was a donut shop on the corner of Cahuenga and Hollywood that he liked at that hour of the morning. It was a tiny place with almost no decoration, a glassed-in donut counter in front, a row of stools along a short counter, and three tables, with fixed round stools. Everything was orange and white, including the uniform of Helen, the girl behind the counter. Jerry would come in and find a Los Angeles Times on the counter, serve himself a cup of fresh Farmer Bros. coffee, and half-eavesdrop as people came in for their donuts and coffee-to-go. There were others at the counter and tables, men and women in working clothes (some like Jerry in suit and tie), but they all seemed to know each other, and so Jerry kept quiet and listened to the banter and read the paper. It was enough, it kept him from being lonely, and after a bit he came to look forward to the early mornings as the best part of his day.
A couple of people from the office, including Lucille, the big fat woman, came into the donut shop just before time to go to work, and Jerry was friendly with them, in a distant sort of way. Frankly, they were not the sort of people he hoped to spend his off-work time with, although they were all friendly and the office was a happy ship whenever Harris was out selling advertising, which was most of the time. His fellow workers seemed to notice the slight distance he maintained, and tactfully did not try to breach it, although Richard, his fellow editor, had asked him home to dinner once.
Jerry had refused the invitation not because he didn’t like Richard, but because that kind of life, home-cooked meals, kids yelling and running around, heavy joking about everything, was part of the past. At least so he hoped. And Richard didn’t get mad, just grinned crookedly and said, “I guess you bachelor types got better things to do.”
“Well, I write at night,” Jerry said, although he didn’t. That was to be the next thing to get going. Richard smiled, the light reflecting off his rimless glasses, and said, “Yeah, well, that’s a good thing to do. I tried it for a while.”
And after that they left him alone. They were shy, too, he thought over morning coffee, they didn’t want their feelings hurt either.
If Jerry got there early enough, say, right around six a.m., there would be another familiar face at the counter, a scruffy young man with a long nose and dark hair down over his eyes. Usually he needed a shave, and he bent over his morning paper fiercely, drinking two or three cups of coffee rapidly and loping out of the place, yelling to Helen, “See ya!”
Jerry could not figure out where he knew this man from, but he did know him. The man never looked at him, or if they did make eye contact when Jerry came in, the man would break it immediately and go back to his sports section. And then one morning as Jerry was waiting for the elevator, keeping his eyes on the florist’s shop as usual, he suddenly saw the man’s reflection in the glass. Now, in reflection, the man was glaring at Jerry, and Jerry turned. There he was, the morning man at the all-night pornography store. Jerry went right past him every morning.
“Yeah, I thought you were a real stuck-up prick,” Toby told him over coffee, now that they were acquainted.
“I’m sorry about that,” Jerry admitted.
“Don’t be sorry! Who the fuck wants to be caught lookin’ in the window of a stroke shop? Jesus Christ, if I didn’t have to work in the fuckin’ place I wouldn’t look in either!”
Once the ice was broken, Toby was a very friendly guy. He was a small man, perhaps only five feet three or four. In the shop he sat on a high stool back of the glassed-in counter containing the reels of motion picture and the more expensive sex toys. On the counter were copies of various racing periodicals, Variety and the trades. All around him, on racks and shelves and in the store window, were the books and magazines that made up the store’s stock in trade. Toby did not allow any of this to embarrass him, nor did he defend his profession.
“You should meet some of the creeps who come into this place. Suits and ties, hats fer Chrissake, heavy operators, half the fuckin’ movie stars in the world—you see ’em in here, then you see ’em on the screens of America, I’m tellin’ you, it’s enough to disillusion a Texan.”
Jerry was fascinated by Toby for several reasons. First, it seemed he would say anything, anything at all, in front of anybody. Helen, the tall young girl behind the counter at the donut shop, was not the kind of person Jerry would say dirty words in front of, but Toby didn’t mind. “Hey, Helen, where’s za fuckin’ donut holes?” he might say. She didn’t appear to mind.
For another, Toby seemed to know everything about everybody in Hollywood, and once he understood Jerry’s secret ambition—to crack the movies as a writer—his liking for Jerry doubled, and he agreed that Jerry should not talk about it around the office. “Fuck those assholes!” is the way he put it. Toby knew how to crack Hollywood. “You gotta have the right property,” he said, ticking them off on his fingers, “the right connections, the right agent . . . and you got to be at the party.”
“What’s that mean?” Jerry asked.
“If you ain’t at the party, why should they hire you? When they can hire one of their buddies? Don’t make no mistake about it, man, things happen at parties, not at the goddamn studios. You could break your ass for ten years, writing dynamite property after dynamite property and never get within sniffin’ distance of the big money. But if you get fashionable—” this word made Toby’s lip curl—“it don’t matter what you write, you’re on the payroll . . .”
Jerry hoped this wasn’t so.
“Hey, fuckface, you can’t fight the system! I’m here to tell you!” Toby grinned. “But don’t take it so hard. You’ll make it . . .”
“Because you know me!”
Jerry did not see how knowing the morning man at a twenty-four-hour dirty bookstore was going to get him invited to “the party,” but he didn’t press the issue. Toby was too much fun to listen to.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE PARTY was a good one. There was none of this business of A list and B list, which Alexander hated, where the people on the A list would have a very formal sit-down dinner, smug in the knowledge that they were the mucho importantes, with the guests on the B list arriving at ten or eleven o’clock, often before the A list people had finished their meal, and often dressed more informally (after all, they hadn’t been invited to a dinner, only a party) and generally made to look and feel inferior. Not that there weren’t some satisfactions in seeing pompous millionaires and overfed hambones made to feel inferior, but God pity their wives and servants when they got home.
No, this party was okay, everybody had been invited for the same time and the same purpose, to celebrate the fortieth birthday of Kerry Dardenelle, as nice a man as you could hope to meet and one of the most interesting directors to come along in years, although Hollywood these days was overrun with brilliant young people. They came in waves, with their brilliant little personal pictures, usually financed out of town by doctor-and-dentist money. Sometimes they would strike gold, like Richard Heidelberg, and become immediately part of the industry; sometimes they would not make back their negative cost, but still impress the picture community. Then they would settle down to making commercial features and the hell with the personal stuff. A few of the very lucky ones would eventually rise to power for a while, and then submerge under the new wave. Or go on to become the grand old men of the industry at forty, like Kerry Dardenelle, plump and red-cheeked, balding and utterly charming to the ladies. The ladies saw him as a big overgrown baby who needed taking care of, although obviously he had been pampered by women all his life.
Kerry was a notorious pussy hound, and it gave Alexander a pang to see him standing in front of the big fireplace, obviously drunk, charming the pants off Teresa di Veccio. But Kerry was a
friend, and Alexander didn’t really think he was trying to steal his girl. Teresa’s eyes were wide as she looked up into the cherubic face of Kerry Dardenelle, that way she had of listening with her complete attention . . . when she looked at Alexander like that he usually lost the trend of his thought in rising passion, and if they were where they could do it, fell into bed with a rush and a moan.
Alexander had never had such a physical affair in his life. Just the mere thought of it, here in this crowded living room, made him want to run over and grab her, take her somewhere and fuck her. And yet she was one of the brightest, most cultivated and urbane people he had ever met. Indeed, she was all superlatives. The best. The most. The highest. The fuckingest, if there was such a word, which there was, because Alexander had just used it. He smirked to himself. The room was full of important people, interesting people, the people he did business with, and instead of having a good time he was standing around mooning about Teresa.
Christ! The bitch! he thought wildly, and started over toward her. A man got in his way, wanting to introduce him to a woman, whose eyes shined and blinked with anticipation. He shook her hand softly, put his other hand on the man’s shoulder and got through them.
Kerry and Teresa were talking about Edith Wharton, a subject which effectively cut Alexander out. He stood there beaming redly as they talked, and Teresa tucked her little hand into his. Now he just had to fuck her!
“Give us a minute, Kerry,” he said, and they moved off toward the huge dining room, which had for the evening been turned into a dancehall, with a Cajun band flown down from San Francisco making a racket in the corner, and various people flipping themselves around in the muted red and blue light. At once, Teresa began to dance, and unable to stop himself, Alexander danced with her. Everybody was glistening with sweat, and everyone looked erotic. Teresa’s eyes were on his, and she got the message, and they danced over toward the open French door and out into the garden, immediately coming together in a hot kiss in the shadows of the building. Naturally, the garden was full of people, too, and they made their way back down the garden path to the little recreation hut. There was a pool table in there, and some game machines. They could fuck on the pool table. But no, a couple of hambones were playing serious pool, money on the rail, their women sitting in silence watching the game. Of course when Alexander and Teresa came into the room, the other two women stood, but the hambones kept playing their game. Alexander saw that the bills on the edge of the table were hundreds. Dammit, he thought, waved cutely to the women, and backed out. They knew, too. He could see it in their eyes. So what!
The Hollywood Trilogy Page 42