The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  “Where’s Teresa?” he asked, after they had gotten through the budget discussion.

  “She’s right here,” Alexander purred.

  “Then you’re really not mad.”

  “These things happen,” he said.

  But the next phone call was not so pleasant. Jose had been trying to reach Rick all day, could they have a meeting?

  “What for?” Rick asked.

  It seemed that the Committee for the Screenplay of The Pickers had just ejected Jose unanimously. Except for Jose’s vote, of course. The Committee?

  JOSE’S TALE was a sad one. They sat in Rick’s office in the late afternoon, drinking from beer bottles, Jose depressed and overwhelmed. His project was in danger of being cancelled, he knew, but he had to talk to somebody or burst.

  “Somebody without a Spanish surname,” he said with unaccustomed irony. Rick had always liked Jose, whose student thesis film at UCLA, Tostada! had won a lot of awards and attention for him. But that had been a few years ago. Jose’s youth was deserting him as he broken-marched toward a project. Jose and Rick both believed there was a place for him in Hollywood, even though The System was corrupt and malicious.

  But when The System came after him, it came from behind. Always an effective move when The System wants to break your balls.

  Jose’s own best friends were wrecking his movie.

  Rick read over the five pages of treatment Jose had handed him, while Jose sat morosely sipping his Dos Equis. What had been a simple story about the classical themes to be found in the ordinary lives of produce workers—the passions, the family rivalries and hatreds, the madness of old age and the impetuosity of youth—was now, to be kind, a Marxist pamphlet. In a story entirely free of the presence of Gringos there were now Gringos aplenty, and each one of them eviler and stupider than the last. In this treatment nobody with a Spanish name did anything but get exploited. The end of the picture cried for bloody revolution.

  “Good Christ,” Rick said quietly. He dropped the pages onto his desk top and looked over at the miserable Jose.

  “Yeah,” said Jose. “There was just never a moment when I could tell them no. We were all in this together, see? Now I’m accused of greed, turning my back on my people and generally selling out to the lowest bidder.”

  “What about the old guy?” Rick asked. The man who had written the book.

  “Oh, hell, he dumped us a long time ago. He’s not the naive old guy I thought, damned intelligent, he’s read everything in every library on the West Coast. He called the Committee a bunch of assholes and went to Fresno.”

  “Are they being paid?” Rick asked.

  Jose hung his head. The Committee pooled his salary as director with the stipulated salary for writer on the project. But of course officially one of them was listed as the writer, and Jose cashed his own checks and divvied up.

  “Okay,” Rick said. “Here’s what you got to do. Get rid of them. Clear up the financial mess. You bat out a treatment, a step outline anyway, from the original work. You get all this done in a couple of weeks and I’ll try to save the picture. I won’t talk to the Boss about it until then. Okay?”

  “I don’t know if I can fire them,” Jose said.

  “You have got to,” Rick said. “If I do it, you go with them, and with you a lot of my money. Now, get off your dead ass.”

  As if on cue, Joyce buzzed Rick.

  “Dael Tennyson on three,” she said.

  Jose got up, pained, like an old man, and hobbled out of the room, after a quick handshake and hug from Rick, who held the door open for him. Sigh. That would be the last of him.

  “Hello, dear boy, how’s everything at Hellstrom’s Hellhole?” Dael’s light voice was a relief.

  “What are you doing for dinner? I want to get you loaded and signed. This deal is starting to cook.”

  Dael laughed lightly. How wonderful to be a young rising movie star, but so accustomed to the pace that it doesn’t blow you out. Dael was a member of a show business family, many generations in the business. He was trained from birth to be a performer, his family delighted that he could sing and dance as well as act, but not surprised. They were all marvellously talented, father, mother, brothers, uncles, grandfather, all the way back into vaudeville and beyond, a pure strain of theatricality that probably descended from the chimpanzees or even before. A troupe of performing amoebas, Rick thought, oddly, as he and Dael tried to find a time to meet.

  “The trouble is, Grandpa’s here, the old fart . . . hey, why don’t you come out to the ranch?”

  “For dinner, or should I load up in advance?”

  “Aw, grab Elektra and come out.”

  The ranch was north of Los Angeles, as easy to reach by the Coast Highway as the Ventura Freeway, and was quite close to the beach. It had been closer, but Dael’s father, Eric Tennyson, had sold off several of the beach lots for a great deal of money, and the Tennysons contented themselves with one beach house for the whole family, five miles from the ranch proper. They raised horses and performers, they hunted and fished all over the world, they made friends everywhere they went and they didn’t try to win the employment sweepstakes. Dael himself was content to make a picture a year. He had nominal representation by David Novotny, but what he had most was the Tennyson family (renamed from Smith by his great-grandfather, who felt they couldn’t compete properly with the other Smiths in vaudeville) and the Tennyson family took care of its own.

  Rick hoped he could get Dael’s handshake that very night. The handshake would do it. The Tennysons kept their word.

  People who raised racehorses were class to Rick. He loved the long acres of low white fence that surrounded their property, the neatness of the stables, the early-morning beauty of the animals themselves and the quiet expectation of the workouts . . . he knew he got all this from old movies, but he still felt it, and the Tennyson ranch was all those things, and the Tennysons didn’t get it from old movies. Eric Tennyson’s father, the grandpa who was visiting them from his own home, an apartment in New York City, whose name was a synonym for actor, old Clay Tennyson, had for years dutifully wasted all his money at the racetracks near New York and in the bookie joints around Times Square, but when he had first come to Southern California he had made so much money he desperately threw some of it into real estate and then forgot about it as he went back to Broadway.

  Eric developed the property and bought the first horse. Now the old man reserved his wagers for family animals.

  Rick followed the white picket fencing around the curve of the road and up toward the cluster of buildings and trees, the red roofs of the buildings just catching the late evening sunlight. Rick had not grabbed Elektra, in fact, he didn’t know where she was. But it didn’t matter, as long as she wasn’t with Teresa. Rick liked Teresa, but he didn’t want Elektra running around with her. He would drive down the Coast Highway to the beach house tonight, instead of trying to get back to town, and she would be there or not.

  He had not been jealous of sharing her. It had all happened so quickly he hadn’t had time to take stock of any feelings. And now he couldn’t think about personal matters. He had to nail down Dael Tennyson, and it was not going to be easy.

  RICK WAS admitted to the house by Dael’s mother Kathryn and left to himself in the big low living room while a small boy was sent to find Dael. There were people all over the house, of all ages, busy with what they were doing, and there were at least six dogs, which had gathered around his legs in friendly fashion when he had gotten out of his car, and escorted him to the door, where Kathryn told them to stay outside, but they were not offended and came in anyway.

  Although the Tennysons were obviously very rich, the house had a worn, used look, a banged-up look, Rick decided, that came from having a lot of boisterous children and animals knocking things over, spilling, shedding and breaking. There was a Picasso lithograph over the fireplace, under glass, and even up there the glass seemed to have a lick of dried saliva across its lower portion.<
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  There went Eric Tennyson, movie star hero of the fifties, tall, lanky, grizzled, in dusty jeans and a dirty white tee shirt, an oily automobile part in his filthy greasy hand. “Where the hell is that roll of paper towels?” he asked the house in general, and soon Rick saw him heading out the front door with his roll of paper towels; a wink and a grin for Rick. Dogs and children came and went on various errands, and the smell of cooking came from the noisy kitchen. Not the homely smells of country cooking, but the rich dizzying odor of garlic frying in butter, and Rick felt a sudden leap of appetite.

  Pretty soon Kathryn came out from the kitchen and said, “I think you’ll find them out back.”

  Rick went along outside and around to the courtyard behind the house, where several men and boys surrounded a crippled automobile, its hood and trunk gaping open. Dael was among them, dirty and greasy from head to foot. He spotted Rick.

  “Rick Heidelberg!” he shouted. Others looked up, friendly, and then back at the car. It was getting gloomy out here, even with the spotlights, and Rick wondered, not for the first time, what it was about automobiles that so fascinated a certain type of man so that they would stand around out here filthy dirty in the dark and talk about transmissions or carburetors and feel comfortable and satisfied that they were doing something. Rick himself cared nothing for the internal workings of his car, as long as the car performed. If it didn’t he would pay to have it fixed. None of this standing around shifting from foot to foot talking about it.

  “Rick’s here to sell me the moon,” Dael said to the group.

  But it was not until after dinner and the family show that they could talk about business. Dinner was wonderful, plenty of everything, a big table for the grown-ups and two little tables for children. Dael’s niece and nephew, called “the twins,” were not at any of the tables, but were having their dinners in bed, watching television, because they had worked that day shooting a commercial in Santa Monica. Everybody in this family worked, even if the work was only indirectly show business. Eric’s brother, called Stooge in the family but hopefully named Drew at birth and now seated at the end of the table scrubbed as clean as possible, had been Eric’s lighting and stunt double for years, and when Eric stopped getting that much work, Stooge kept at it, doing stunts, until Dael became popular, and then became Dael’s double. Kathryn had spent twenty years on the stage. Dael’s brother Eric Jr. (not present) had been a television actor from the time he was ten years old, and was now working on a picture in England. His wife, the mother of the twins, had been a civilian and was now serving little red new potatoes ripe with garlic butter to Rick.

  “Will you have another of these fine chops?” asked the grand old man, Clay Tennyson, in his deep voice. He presided at the head of the table and monopolized the conversation with stories about New York, which he was again threatening to leave. No one seemed to believe him, but the stories were funny and there was much laughter.

  For dessert they had strawberry shortcake, giant helpings for everyone, and the old man waxed scornful.

  “Strawberry shortcake at this time of year! My God!”

  “I notice you’re eating yours,” Dael said.

  “How do you stay so thin, Grandpa?” asked Stooge, who was making do with a cup of coffee. “I have to break my ass dieting to stay at one eighty-five.”

  “No one cares,” Dael said with a puckish grin. “I’ll just look a little fatter in the action shots.”

  Pandemonium from the nearby children’s table as dogs overwhelmed a child and snatched her chop. Barking, crying, running around. Rick was the only one who seemed at all disturbed by this. He knew he would not have lasted a weekend in this kind of atmosphere, but still he envied them. They seemed to be a real family.

  And after dinner on this particular night, they were having a family show, and Rick was honored to have been invited to watch. Not that it was private, but it was not a part of their lives that was for sale. There were plenty of things they would and could do for publicity—the horses for example—but the family shows were private.

  With everyone gathered in the living room there must have been fifteen people there, all Tennysons except Rick and Brenda, the woman who helped Kathryn around the house. They sat in the semidarkened room and watched each other perform. A little girl danced to a record, her tutu white, her shoes black, gravity on her face along with the sweat of concentration. The family applauded her turn enthusiastically, and she ran to her great-grandfather to sit in his lap and hide her face from the applause. Then Dael’s younger brother Philip, thirteen and redly pimpled, played his guitar and sang a song he had written. The song was awful, Rick thought, and the guitar playing not exactly up to family standards, but the applause was long and enthusiastic. Rick caught Dael’s eye from across the room and saw, or thought he saw, an acknowledgment of the fact that Philip might not make it in show business. But Dael applauded as loudly as anyone, perhaps not quite as loudly as Kathryn, who was sitting next to Rick, but with great enthusiasm.

  Then the quartet. Dael playing cello, Eric and Clay violins and Stooge on the French horn. Here was a surprise: to Rick’s ear, all of them were excellent, symphony grade, especially Stooge. It sounded as if they were playing something by Mozart, and the long complex French horn parts were shatteringly beautiful. It was a formal piece of music, but the quartet worked the house, making eye contact with everybody and looking as if the music were being drawn up from their very souls. It was quite wonderful, Mozart mit schmaltz, and Rick had to get a Kleenex when they were done.

  Then it was Grandpa’s turn. Leaving the tiny ballerina in his big chair he went to the piano, spent a bit of time adjusting the gooseneck lamp so that it would illuminate his hands and not his face, and began to play, his long fingers light on the keys. He said, “I’m going to play a couple of Cole Porter tunes, just play them straight, the way they were written. We’re so used to his stuff we forget sometimes the musical qualities.”

  Rick decided after a few minutes of listening to the simple notes of “Night and Day” that old Clay could have made it as a pianist, and then he lost himself in the music. The old man seemed to add nothing to the tune and seemed, by the lift of his shoulders and the tilt of his head, to be deeply moved. He finished and played a few quick little notes to prevent applause, a practiced old cocktail lounge piano man, and said, “Cole was a great one . . . most arrogant son of a bitch who ever lived, brave as a chow dog . . . this is called ‘Miss Otis Regrets!’ Old Clay played the tune, and in a voice pitched higher than his own, sang the homosexual lyric for gentle laughs. As he was singing it, there was a bustle in the back of the room, and Rick saw a woman in shadow move forward and sit down somewhere behind Rick, quiet, not interrupting the performance. It was a campy comic song, but the old man knew where to take it, and somehow the bitchy note of a refusal became a tragic admission and Clay was an old swish at an old piano making an age-old cry to the heavens.

  His eyes twinkled in the wave of applause, and how he had done it, how he had turned the lamp to catch his eyes, Rick knew not.

  “Thank you,” he said, “thank you very much. Joanne, come up here, honey . . .” and the woman who had come in during the last song rose and went past Rick, kissed her grandfather and turned toward the audience. It was Dael’s cousin, who worked under the name of Joanne Clay, an old hand on the Hollywood scene. She leaned against the piano, and after a whispered conversation with Clay and some adjustment of the gooseneck lamp, swung into “You Go to My Head,” her voice torchy and deep, her tempo sexual. Rick hadn’t ever heard her sing before, she had certainly never sung in a picture, and again, here it was, these terribly talented people could have made it big in lots of ways, this was no conglomeration of lucky-break artists, this was a gene pool of sheer talent.

  Rick felt a wave of hopelessness pass through him like a ghost.

  After the torch song and sustained applause and laughter, Dael brought up the lights from the switch by the kitchen door, and a generalized
babble surrounded Joanne. When did she get in? How had the trip been? Had they rapped?

  From the general tenor of it all, Rick concluded that Joanne had been away making a picture and had arrived unexpectedly. When, after a while, they were introduced, she met Rick’s eye with frank curiosity.

  “He’s here to sell me the moon,” Dael said.

  It was decided to send the children all to bed, and the brandy bottle came out. The brandy had been passed around once or twice before, and so this round was greeted with mellow enthusiasm.

  “Well, Joanne,” the old man said, “sit down and enjoy yourself. Dael, give us a song, won’t you?”

  Dael arranged himself on a stool in front of the piano and Stooge dimmed the lights. Grandpa stayed on the piano bench, totally out of the light, and Rick marvelled. Even just among themselves they controlled that light. The gooseneck was tilted now, and showed Dael in high-key silhouette. Philip handed him the guitar, and Dael sang one of his own tunes, “Long Sweet Love.” Rick watched Joanne out of the corner of his eye. She was extraordinary close up, wrinkled and tired, over-tanned and dry-haired, eyes that could sentence ten thousand people to death or glisten with mother love, a firm amused mouth and a chin both strong and feminine.

  Rick wanted to make a pass at her.

  True, she was older than he was, and probably stronger. And smarter and richer. And married. Where was her husband, Dillingham the Rich Boy? Everybody in the world knew they were happily married. Was everybody wrong, as usual? It gave Rick hope to think so.

  Dael sang about passionate young love, and Rick plotted hotly against his cousin, the movie project utterly gone from his mind. Nothing could be done tonight, anyway, except let her know he wanted her. Then, if she decided to take him up on it, she would find a way. That was the good thing about a confident woman, she would find the way, and you did not have to make an asshole out of yourself.

  Only once did their eyes meet during Dael’s song, meet, lock for an intense moment and pass on. Rick had not put anything into his expression—it would already be there—and hers was unreadable, except for its duration. It seemed long, speculatively long, and Rick’s heart leaped about in his chest.