The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  And others. An open-field fantasy. One about love in a rainstorm, with mud and thunder . . .

  “What’s on your mind?” Richard might say to him. Pulling him back to reality.

  “Oh, daydreaming different ways to fuck your sister,” he definitely never did say.

  “Dreams of lust and avarice,” he would and did say.

  Richard, with his fresh white shirt for every workday, all in bad taste, with backs that bulged out, instead of being tapered to Richard’s waist. Jerry was getting pretty clothes conscious, since his figure had improved. Barbara loved to take him to a small men’s store on Sunset, where the clerks, all gay as rats, fussed over him and acted as consultants. Jerry’s wardrobe was definitely getting classier, a bit more color, European cuts, silk ties . . . Richard was getting on Jerry’s nerves, with his assumption that Jerry was now “family,” that Richard was the matchmaker and therefore entitled to eternal gratitude. One day when they were the last two in the office (they would dine at Richard’s with the family and the television), Richard brought out a yellow-orange packet of Polaroid prints and started to show them to Jerry. Jerry could not believe his eyes. Badly photographed, with horrible highlights and shadows, red-eyed people, pornography that included not only Richard but his wife. And, Jerry recognized numbly, some of their neighbors.

  “Just a little hobby of mine,” Richard said proudly. “We belong to a swing group and I’m the official photographer.”

  Later Jerry asked Barbara if she knew about it, and she thought Jerry was making a bad joke. Finally he got mad at her.

  “I’ll steal some of the goddamn pictures and show them to you,” he said.

  “Oh, no, please don’t!” she said. She didn’t want to know.

  So the pictures were an intimacy between Richard and himself. The first of a long line of confidences, he imagined. Well, what about it? Barbara was perfectly wonderful, and he could imagine that being married to her would be wonderful as well. Barbara would immediately want children. They could start a family, and with their combined incomes, live pretty well, nice house, good big enclosed yard, swimming pool, hot tub, grapefruit tree, the works.

  But it would mean an end to his Hollywood ambitions. No, he thought furiously, it doesn’t have to be that way! If he could succeed in Hollywood before getting married or making any foolish moves, then he would be in the driver’s seat. That was the way to do it.

  Then, at the donut shop one morning, he ran into Toby.

  “A little late for you, isn’t it?” Jerry said. He hadn’t seen much of Toby lately.

  “I’m trackin’ you down,” Toby said. Now that Jerry noticed, Toby was a really shabby dresser. Plaid yellow shirt, green pants with grease stains on them. Played-out tennis shoes. Jerry already was wondering why he had spent so much time with this man, only a little while before. Lonely, I guess.

  Toby’s eyes were glittering. “I got a connection for you,” he said. “Remember Elektra Soong’s brother? Karol Dupont? The little drag queen?”

  Jerry remembered. He looked away from Toby with some embarrassment, and found himself staring into the eyes of Helen, the waitress. Helen smiled. Jerry looked back at Toby.

  “She’s makin’ some goddamn movie down the street here, in the basement under one of those scum theaters.”

  “Yes?” said Jerry.

  “Don’t you get it, man? You could meet her!”

  Toby was convinced that such a meeting would result in Jerry getting a “connection” with Richard Heidelberg. Jerry was not so sure, but Toby was all over him.

  “You don’t know Jack shit about how this town works!” He got a paper cup of coffee to take back to the bookstore.

  “Meet me right here on Saturday morning, around ten,” he said to Jerry. “We’ll hit the set.”

  But Jerry did not show up. Although he was fascinated by the idea of watching a pornographic film shot, even with transvestites, he really could not spare the time. He didn’t think Karol Dupont was a “connection” anyway.

  His new idea was a good one, if he did say so himself. Instead of trying to write another original, he would adapt a novel. And not just any novel, one that had been made into a movie already, so that he would learn what worked and what didn’t. It took him two weeks to find the right project, and then it was almost by accident. He was standing in the drugstore looking over the paperback rack for a copy of The Big Sleep, thinking to adapt it. Then he could compare it with the existing screenplay. There was much to be learned from such a process. But there were no copies of The Big Sleep, only some short stories and The Lady in the Lake. After some hesitation, he bought the novel and took it home to Barbara’s house.

  He stayed in the living room reading until after two. The book was fascinating, but what was more, there had not been a remake from the rather experimental movie of the mid-forties, in which the camera was Philip Marlowe. This picture did not make money.

  Jerry thought he saw something in the story that had been ignored. His idea held all the way through the novel, and even held up when he got back to his own apartment and looked through his film books and confirmed what he had guessed.

  The really successful detective movies, the ones that still played after thirty years, were the ones in which the detective had a strong love interest. Often bittersweet, often tragic. The Big Sleep was a terrific example of this, Bogart and Bacall, for Christ’s sake! In the novel the love story was smaller, almost a by-product. In the movie it was everything, and nobody really cared who killed Rusty Regan. And even a better example, The Maltese Falcon! What was the greatest line in the picture, the one that got all the hankies wet?

  “I’m sending you over, sweetheart!”

  Tragic love in a detective story setting.

  Marlowe has no love interest in Lady in the Lake.

  Jerry would give him one. And not just a love interest. The villain of the novel is a woman, Muriel Chess, AKA Mildred Haviland, AKA Mildred Degarmo, a desperate woman who has killed and will kill again. Why couldn’t Marlowe fall in love with her? He thinks she’s somebody else, somebody dead, that he’s falling in love with a murder victim, not the killer herself.

  It ain’t Chandler, he thought in the deep of the night, still so wrought up he knew he would not sleep without whiskey. It ain’t Chandler, but it’s sure Hollywood. My God, it takes elements from Laura, The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. Not exactly petty larceny.

  And then he remembered that it was only an experiment, just something to learn on. Nevertheless he tossed and turned. There was something about that scene, as yet unwritten, where Marlowe finds himself facing not just the woman he has come to love even though she was supposed to be dead, but the woman he must turn in for the murders. What a moment!

  The next day at the office Richard held up the telephone with his hand cupped over the mouthpiece and said, “Richard Heidelberg, for you.”

  Jerry thought it was Toby, angry that Jerry had not shown up. He took the phone with a sinking heart. Everyone in the office was staring at him.

  “Jerry Rexford,” he said.

  “Mister Rexford, will you hold for Richard Heidelberg?” said a warm confident female voice.

  “Hello, my friend,” came a warm male voice before Jerry could react.

  “Hello, there,” he said inanely. He grinned in a sickly way at Richard standing in front of him.

  “I’m told you have a terrific idea for a movie,” he heard the voice on the telephone say.

  “Uh, yeah,” he said.

  “Tell me this. Suppose your idea got made into a movie. And that movie is sold to television. What’s the one-sentence description of the movie that appears in the newspaper?”

  “Huh?” Jerry thought of his two original screenplays, and shit-canned them forever.

  “Give me your idea in one terrific sentence,” Rick said.

  “Well, it’s based on a novel, it’s just an experiment I’m trying . . . but it’s Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake, on
ly as a love story, like The Maltese Falcon.”

  Jerry listened miserably to the empty hum of the telephone. “What have you got on paper?” Rick said finally.

  “Not a whole hell of a lot,” Jerry said.

  “Could you messenger it over to me? I’d like to read the material. It sounds like a major movie. Lots of stuff to check over, though. Availability of rights, stuff like that . . .”

  It was Jerry’s turn to speak. Swallowing what seemed like a mouthful of cotton, he said, “I’ll—listen, give me a few days, okay? To smooth it out a little?”

  To get it on paper, he meant.

  Rick’s voice said, “Okay, and I’ll get back to you. Listen, Elektra says hello.”

  “Oh, hello to her, too,” Jerry said, stunned. He hung up the phone. Nobody was looking at him, not even Richard.

  So Toby had somehow burst the barrier. “Elektra says hello.” What had Toby said? What was Jerry obligated to? Did Richard Heidelberg think Jerry was an associate of Karol Dupont? But even with all the confusion, Jerry felt a pleasurable tightening of his resolve.

  That night he and Barbara got into a terrible fight on the telephone. He tried, without going into confusing or embarrassing detail, to explain that he had to work on his script tonight, that there was actual interest (although he cautiously held back the name Richard Heidelberg); and she was furious that he had not called her before. Good food was going to waste.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. But he wasn’t.

  RAIN CAME to Los Angeles, the swirling tips of subtropical storms brushing the great basin with torrents of pure water. It cleaned off the streets, the rooftops, the trees; it made mushrooms spring up on the glittering green highway dividers, it filled the concrete bed of the Los Angeles River and quickly flooded the vast underground run-off system, so that at the bottom of the hills, manholes would send up fountains of crystal water through the ring of one-inch holes in their covers. It rained and rained and rained, and erased one of the hottest, smoggiest summers in human memory. The first freshness created joy in people’s hearts; perhaps it was negative ionization, perhaps it was just relief. But after a while there was a new smell in the air, and the smell carried with it a sullen dread, genetic dread of The Flood, dread of endless years of rain after endless years of ice and snow, with only some long-dead ancestor’s tales to remind us of blue skies and sweet sunny days.

  It was the smell of mildew.

  Jerry’s apartment was full of it. It came out of the plaster walls and settled in the dirty clothes at the bottom of the closet. It hung from the drapes. It moistened the garbage sacks, already overrun with streams of hungry ants, and encouraged cockroaches from their crevices. It made his typewriter keys stick together and it caused him to make a lot of typographical errors.

  But Jerry did not care. He wrote, very rapidly, his first-draft screenplay of The Lady in the Lake just as the rain chose to begin. He wrote it on pure energy. He had never worked so hard in his life. Nor had he ever had so much fun. His gut rumbled and he wobbled on his legs as he made his way from toilet to typewriter to bed; he wrote all night and dozed with the dreams of scenes in his mind, and then got up without thinking and sat at the machine again and wrote again. Twenty, thirty pages a day, half of them thrown to the wind with enthusiasm as the new approach is tried and succeeds. He had never known it could be like this.

  When he was done he mailed the script to Richard Heidelberg. He felt a twinge at doing this without consulting Harriet Hardardt, but after all, she had had nothing to do with his relationship to Heidelberg. Might as well ship a copy to Toby! Then he felt a twinge about Toby, whom he had not taken into his confidence. But what was there to say? Jerry had been around long enough now to hear the empty talk that was on everyone’s lips, the deals about to be made, the parts one was “up” for, and Jerry definitely did not want to join the chorus.

  Of course Barbara and his employer had to be kept in the dark as well. To finish his script, Jerry had said he had the flu, and over Barbara’s protests that he bed down at her place and let her pamper him, Jerry weakly said, “I want to just lay here,” and Barbara, obviously sensing rebuff, accepted his story.

  So he was back working at Pet Care Hotline, but he was not back at Barbara’s.

  “I have a lot of writing to do,” he told her.

  “You could come here for dinner,” she said, “and then go do your writing.”

  “I like to get right at it,” Jerry said weakly. And, as weak and clumsy as it sounded, it was true. Without waiting for any response, Jerry was already into the second draft, working nights and weekends. Part of the weekends he spent with Barbara, dutiful, attentive, kind, loving, deliberately and with great effort putting the script out of his mind. Of course it wouldn’t leave him alone. He might be spooning crabapple jelly on his hot muffin, Barbara enthusiastically describing their outing to the beach or desert, when it would steal into his brain. The jelly would drip off his knife and onto the tablecloth and he would apologize and Barbara would make jokes, but he knew she was bitter about it.

  But then finally he would be free of her and able to go back to Fountain, strip, pull the cover from his machine and get back to work. He actually rubbed his hands together and chuckled. “Let’s go, honey,” he would say to the typewriter, and tickle her switch.

  There was plenty to do. For one thing, he had thrown out too much Chandler, he hadn’t seen how subtly Chandler had constructed his scenes, how easily he set up each scene, how important were the asides and apparent irrelevancies. So, back in went a lot of great stuff, and really only a few scenes had to be altered for the romantic overlay.

  It was extraordinary fun to play with these ideas and have them come out right. Ideas flowed out of his mind onto the paper before he could think them, and for the first time, Jerry Rexford felt the awesome humility of a writer who realizes that he is not the train but the track.

  In a way, it was a relief. He could read over something he had written and enjoy it fully, laugh or cry or feel anger, because he hadn’t really written it, it had just come out of him.

  It is like digging for buried treasure, he thought.

  No, it is like milking a cow.

  Now he understood why the writers of the Bible and other holy books thought they were inspired by God; they hadn’t made it up, where else could it have come from?

  He mailed off the second draft screenplay to Richard Heidelberg with a short note of apology for the first draft, and sat back and waited. The rain streamed down. He cleaned the apartment, got rid of the ants, caused the cockroaches to retreat to prepared positions, did his laundry and waited. The one attempt he made to get his relationship with Barbara back on some kind of friendly footing didn’t work. She actively resented his long absence and was grumpy over dinner and impossible in bed.

  He didn’t blame her. She had just found out that no matter what, she came in second.

  And then Harris began to complain about his work. He was getting sloppy. He was misspelling people’s names, and in this business you can’t do that. And his copy was too tame.

  “I think you’re perhaps giving a little too much to your, ah, other endeavors,” said Harris politely. They were in his office. Jerry was barely paying attention. Harris did not ask him to stop writing at home. He was really very nice. He only asked that Jerry earn his paycheck. Everyone else had to. That was the way things were. Jerry nodded sullenly and went back to work. He hoped the old bastard would fall off the wagon and get off his back. It would be great to see Harris come in some afternoon, drunk as a goat, dirty, piss-wet pants and blood on his cheek.

  But no, Jerry was ashamed for having such thoughts. Actually, he deserved firing; it was only Harris’s niceness that kept him eating.

  Once again, Jerry Rexford had screwed up his life.

  But he waited to hear from Richard Heidelberg with the certain knowledge that everything would work out. He had fabulous daydreams of accepting his Academy Award, of appearing on the Tonight sh
ow and cracking everybody up; daydreams of an estate in Beverly Hills, Manhattan tower suite, his own jet airplane. The first thing he would do would be to move out of this dump. Oh, quit his job. Then move out of this dump. He would move into the Beverly Hills Hotel, at the studio’s expense, of course. He would get rid of this little SCM, sweet machine that it was, and get himself a big IBM job, maybe the studio would furnish one free. He would be on the set every day, consulted by the actors and actresses wanting to know how to play the subtle aspects of their roles.

  He cast the picture, oh, many times he cast the picture. You can’t have just anyone play Philip Marlowe. No actor in the box-office top ten failed to pass before Jerry’s scrutiny. Yet none of them measured up to the ultimate Marlowe, Bogart himself. So Jerry would always come back to envisioning Bogart in the role. In his mind’s eye, as he wrote, and later as he feverishly went over every scene in his mind and waited for Richard Heidelberg to call him back, he saw Bogart’s face.

  And he drank, first to enhance the fantasies, and then to blot them out so he could sleep. You couldn’t sleep with Bogart racing around in your mind, doing scenes you had written. So about five shots of 100-proof bourbon would knock him out.

  All in all, he waited two months. In that time he learned how to hate. The person he hated was Richard Heidelberg. What a fool Jerry had been! He had not protected himself. When Heidelberg had said, “What’s your idea?” Jerry should have covered himself. He should have pitched one of his original scripts, and then, when he had a relationship with the bastard, spring the Chandler idea. Jerry always got depressed thinking about that brief conversation, because he realized he could have done nothing to protect himself, he was out in the open with no help in sight. The idea did not belong to him. It belonged to Raymond Chandler, long dead, and M-G-M, not so dead, and logically after that, anyone who would pay M-G-M’s fee to remake it. The more he thought about these things, the more foolish Jerry felt.