Maybe!
As a guest in the house, Rick was politely asked if he would like to perform, and just as politely refused.
“I can’t sing or anything,” he said. “And even if I could I wouldn’t, in front of such massive talent.”
He made no attempt to catch Joanne’s eye.
“Well, then,” said Grandpa. “Shall we call it a night?”
“Grandpa,” said Joanne, “I’d like to do a scene with you. Something meat-and-potatoes.”
“How about Shakespeare?” the old man said with a sly grin.
“Yeah,” said Eric, grinning himself. “I don’t want to sit through Grandpa bellowing ‘STELLA! STELLA!’ again!”
The woman Rick decided he was falling in love with and the former king of the Broadway stage stood whispering together, and finally she turned to the house and said, “We’ll do Macbeth and Lady Macbeth!”
Scattering of applause, and the audience sat back comfortably to watch these two performers take all the stops out of some of the most powerful scenes in the English language. Never did a brave man suffer such doubts, and never did a woman press her luck further. Rick was terrified by the thought of the bloody dead king offstage and the horrible powers this woman had over the confused warrior.
And then to break the mood, Macbeth sat at the piano and played “Over the Fence and Out.”
The lights came up. More brandy was poured. Dael came over to Rick, who was still trying to pull himself up out of the terrifying experience.
“Time for our meeting,” Dael said.
RICK FOUND himself facing six Tennysons, all sincere, all relaxed, all polite, sipping coffee or brandy and waiting for him to explain himself. Clay, Eric, Stooge, Kathryn, Joanne and Dael. Eric seemed to be in charge but everyone asked questions about the project, its financing, the intentions of the studio in regard to Dael’s time during both shooting and a later promotional tour, Rick’s role in the whole matter, and some particularly intense questions from Joanne about the plot of the picture and the other casting.
Up to now, Rick realized, he had been operating mostly on charm. But here in front of these people his charm was useless. These people were charm merchants. They knew all about charm. For a wild moment he thought of the great challenge: to charm these charmers on their own ground! To wrap them around his little finger and walk out of there with a commitment!
But no. He was not man enough. Or warlock enough. Or fool enough. He played it straight, and when he didn’t know the answer to a question, he would say, “I don’t know,” and wait for the next. Finally, it came down to two things. The ending of the picture, which seemed, in Joanne’s word, “flaccid,” with the girl giving up her fling with Dael to go back to her “old man”—again, Joanne’s words.
“Well,” Rick said. “I’m willing certainly to listen to a better ending.”
Old man Clay hadn’t said much, but now he leaned forward with his big hands on his knees and intoned, “But the kids will want to see Dael get the girl, don’t you think?”
Eric laughed. “And Peter Wellman’s agent will want to see Peter get the girl.”
Everyone had a good laugh, but nothing loosened up.
“That would seem to me to be a crucial point,” Joanne said. “Naturally, Peter’s people will tell him it doesn’t do his image any good to lose the girl. Next you’ll be asking him to play older parts.”
“How close are you to signing Peter Wellman?” Kathryn wanted to know, and Rick had to look into those deep blue eyes and say he didn’t know, pretty close, he guessed, the Boss was handling that end of things . . .
Kathryn looked at Eric and Eric looked kindly at Rick.
“Maybe we better have another meeting after Wellman’s signed—hell, I’ll give him a ring myself, he and Dael are good contrast . . .”
“And then you could work on that ending,” Joanne said, and the meeting was over.
Tennyson, one. Heidelberg, zero.
Somewhere along the line tonight, Rick had failed some sort of test—or tests—and the Tennysons were not going to commit their leading money-earner to a project that might not serve his best interests, a project that might falter or collapse before getting on the screen, or worse, bomb in the theaters. For the first time Rick thought of his project in terms of failure and saw how it could be: investment of millions to put the thing together—both Wellman and Dael would have to be guaranteed their salaries no matter what else happened, and so would the director, whoever the hell he was going to be—and then it could all come tumbling down in squabbles over screenplay, budget, a million things.
The floor opened up and Rick stared down into the flames. “That first picture of his was great, but you know, the old story—he went commercial in a big way and flopped.”
Flop. Like a dying chicken.
Cold sweat covered his body. Everyone could see it, even though they were talking about something else and not paying much attention to him. But that was only manners, they knew they had just killed his project.
And then Rick knew it. The project was dead.
What had the Boss said? “You nail down Dael Tennyson and we’re on the way.”
He had not nailed down Dael Tennyson. And they were not on the way.
He was frozen inside this thought when he noticed Dael looking at him, making a minute gesture that seemed to mean “Let’s talk in the corner.”
In the corner, Dael whispered, “You got any dope on you?”
“A jay for the road, why? You want to go outside?”
Dael winked, made a sign to Joanne, and the three found themselves out in the darkness by the cars, alone.
“Oh, good,” said Joanne. “I wanted some dope pretty bad.”
Rick pulled out his marijuana cigarette, lit it, and they passed it around silently. It was good stuff, of course, only the best for Rick Heidelberg.
“I guess the project is dead,” he said. It didn’t even hurt.
“Next time,” Dael said.
“What did you want to make a cornball movie like that for in the first place?” Joanne asked.
“How come we’re behind the barn smoking corn silk?” Rick wanted to say, but didn’t. Joanne was standing right next to him, he could feel her warmth. Her eyes looked at his over the hot red coal as she inhaled.
“I know how it is,” Joanne said with sympathy. “You get up to your ass in something, everybody around you tells you how good it is, nobody knows what the hell makes a hit, and so you find yourself with an armload of crap.”
Crap. Crap ?
Yes, crap. Crapcrapcrap.
Rick laughed. “You’re so right. Tell me, which test did I fail? Didn’t I pet the dogs enough? Did I fail to get greasy out by the cars? Didn’t eat enough helpings? Failed to applaud with sufficient vigor?”
Dael’s teeth glittered in the darkness. “Naw, you smell terrible, that’s all.”
“Because I know fucking well you didn’t have me out here just to kick my project to pieces. You would have gone for it if what?”
“You get Peter Wellman and watch our smoke,” Joanne said without conviction.
“The hell with that. You and I all know this picture just died.”
“Whoo,” said Dael. “I’m going in and get some of them strawberries, if there’s any left.”
And he was gone. Rick handed the tiny roach to Joanne and she got a last puff of smoke out of it.
She was, what, five years older than Rick. He did not know, he only knew that this was his chance.
“Let’s go for a walk, all right?”
“I’d like that,” she said. “Down by the stables, I like the smell of horses.”
They walked slowly under a row of pepper trees, not talking. Rick felt extraordinarily good. He felt clean. When they reached a gate at the end of the path under the trees, Joanne turned toward him and put her hands on his arms.
“I’m sorry, about my part in this,” she said.
Rick didn’t say anything, just leane
d in and kissed her gently. She returned the pressure slightly and then moved back. This put her face in the light.
“Maybe we’d better not,” she said.
“You’re right,” Rick said. Inside he was afire. Now if he could get her into his car. There was no place around there for them to go. Get her into the car. Talk awhile. Then drive down the road, anything, go to the all-night store for a quart of milk, just get off the premises.
“Walk me to my car?” he asked.
She took his arm and slowly they returned. Bodies touching. Rick felt like laughing wildly, but he kept his elation inside himself. Slowly, slowly, one step at a time, as if leading a lovely wild animal who can be spooked by sudden movement. He guided her to his car, and then said, “Let’s talk, okay?”
He held the door open for her. Shyly she got in, and delicately he closed the door.
Rick walked around the car barely able to control himself. He wanted to jump and yell. The project was out of his mind now. All he could think about was Joanne.
He got in the driver’s side, and with his door still open, kissed her. She responded shyly, wanting to be passionate but holding something back, some last trusting portion of her soul. He closed the door quietly and turned back to her. Her eyes glowed with a wondering and this kiss was deep and long, her lips wet and tender, her breathing growing deeper, her hands touching him, her smell in his nostrils.
“We better stop this,” she said throatily.
“Let’s drive down to the beach,” Rick said, his own voice thickening.
“No,” she said. They kissed again. Rick felt an urgency. She must know what she’s doing!
“Please,” he said.
“Maybe another time,” she said, barely able to keep the passion out of her voice. She opened the car door. Rick almost grabbed it out of her hand and slammed it again, but didn’t.
“Where are you going?” he begged her.
“Back to the house. You’d better come and say goodnight.” He could not believe it.
Impossible.
But it happened. And zap! he was driving down the Coast Highway, alone, trying to accept that she had only been playing with him.
The Tennysons had nailed him, all right. The old one-two.
Wrecked his project and kicked him in the balls for good measure.
What kind of people were they?
His testicles ached throbbingly, as if in reply.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ALEXANDER SAT quietly listening to Dr. Fieldstone talk about how he had bruised his nipples painfully while body-surfing at Malibu and now wore a tank top to the beach. The good doctor, a man in his middle thirties and a general practitioner in the heart of Beverly Hills, made a fortune by calling on his practice in their homes or offices and by making himself available at any time of the day or night. He seemed very full of himself to Alexander, handsome, tanned, muscular, casually dropping famous names into his conversation without ever actually giving away any professional secrets. And he was good at his job, which he likened to that of a mechanic administering high-level pit stop repairs to his clientele so that they could get back out there on the track without a moment lost.
“I understand the Hollywood game,” he said modestly, “because I’m the same myself. I work hard, play hard, sleep hard, and I give as good as I get.”
Alexander sat quietly. If there was one thing he knew how to do, it was sit still and listen, his own emotions tucked away.
“To continue with the mechanical model,” Dr. Fieldstone said abruptly, “think of what you put into yourself as fuel, and your innards as engine parts. Think of refined sugar products and alcohol as fast fuels.” On he went, explaining the problems of aging and blood sugar in homely metaphors while Alexander half-listened and half-daydreamed about Teresa. It was because he was having trouble suppressing his rages, blind, sky-blackening rages, that he had summoned Dr. Fieldstone. The other night they had been making love out by the pool and in a moment of great passion he had grabbed her tiny neck in his hands and felt a delicious rush of pleasure at the thought of clamping down, crushing her throat, driving the life out of her squirming body just at the moment of orgasm.
She must have felt the power of his emotion.
“Do it!” she croaked, and her body writhed like a snake.
It was only a lifelong discipline over his emotions that kept him from sweet murder. And to murder Teresa di Veccio, even if he got away with it, would be to deprive himself of the only woman, apparently, who could inspire him to lovemaking. She was at once the sentence and the reprieve, and it was driving him crazy.
Now Dr. Fieldstone was telling him to quit drinking sugared soft drinks and to stop eating foods that contained refined sugar.
“Eat lots of protein, some fats, and get your carbohydrates from natural foods like orange juice. Go back to exercising every day, but don’t try to break any records. And avoid caffeine.”
“No medicine?” Alexander asked. What he had hoped for was some pill he could take, as Charlie Devereaux took his Inderal every day and seemed to be in great shape. “These emotional outbursts . .”
Dr. Fieldstone laughed lightly. “No medicine, unless you want to go around half-zizzed all day long. Just take care of your machine a little better. You’re not hypoglycemic yet, my God, you should hear some of the things I hear . . .”
Alexander had not, of course, told him about the near-murder of Teresa.
“One director friend of mine, patient, really, lives on codeine while he’s making a picture, gets ’em from Canada, calls ’em Royal Canadians, eats six or eight a day, has a couple of drinks, five or six cups of coffee and heads out for the set feeling pretty good. But then the picture’s over and the pressure’s off, and he starts to panic about possible addiction and comes to me for an easy way down the ladder. Well, there ain’t no easy way down the ladder, as you must know, so he goes through a couple weeks of hell, drinking orange juice and dosing himself with gram after gram of Vitamin C. Then he’s okay and can go into the cutting room, maintaining on beer. But one of these days, he’s not going to make it off the codeine, and he’s gonna come to me and ask my advice. Do you know what I’m gonna tell him?”
“No,” said Alexander. He wanted very badly to tell Dr. Fieldstone to leave, please. But didn’t. There must be a point to this story.
“I’m gonna tell him to move to Canada,” Dr. Fieldstone said with a grin. He stood up and shook Alexander’s hand. “I guess the moral of this tale is, this is no time to slacken up on your good habits. The more pressure you put on yourself the less you should rely on drugs or candy or booze, see what I mean?”
And then he was gone, and with a depressed sensation Alexander faced his afternoon’s telephone calls. He had been neglecting business so badly he hadn’t spent an afternoon in the screening room for a week, and he knew he was slipping behind, losing currency.
The trouble was, he couldn’t just drop Teresa. He had gotten through the crisis of that afternoon strictly on automatic pilot, to use one of Dr. Fieldstone’s metaphors, but for days he had been shaken, not by what he had seen, he was not that naive, and not even by the implications—that Teresa made a habit of this sort of thing—he could even handle that. He still loved her. Perhaps he loved her more, and she had been so sweet and so apologetic, blaming herself for it all and confessing to a hopeless nymphomania and swearing never to embarrass Alexander again—no, he could handle that.
It was something inside himself that really ate away at him, filled him with unpredictable rages and depressions and made him, for almost the first time in his life, wonder what kind of human being he was. The only words he could find for it were moral outrage. The three of them lying there wet and stinking. Not even embarrassed, just surprised. If he had had a sword he would have put them to death on the spot.
Who the hell did he think he was?
Slowly, filled with dread, he pulled himself up out of his personal life (such as it was) and back to business.
He stared at the list of callers, which had grown by fifteen calls just since the arrival of Dr. Fieldstone, not counting, of course, the ones Willi hadn’t bothered to log. These people wanted to butter him up, get him to solve their problems, help them with their power games. Only a couple, from men in the same position as himself, could be said to be friendly calls. Ted Ashley. Sidney Beckerman.
He called Sidney and had a good schmooze, laughing at Sidney’s description of a cocktail party, and then Rick was on line 2.
“Gotta go, Sidney,” he said abruptly and hung up without saying goodbye. “Hello, young man, I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”
“Been busy,” Rick’s voice said.
“You don’t sound happy,” Alexander said.
“No Dael Tennyson,” came Rick’s reply.
Alexander had known that for a couple of days, but said nothing.
“Do you want to come over here and have a talk?” he said. Rick agreed to come by in a few minutes, and Alexander buzzed Willi. “Get me a nice Coca-Cola, huh?”
“Okay,” she said with only a hint of reproval in her voice. “Donald Marrow on five.”
“I’m in a meeting,” Alexander said, and felt a guilty schoolboy pang. Willi came in and poured the cola into a glass of ice, and Alexander listened to the ice cracking and watched the bubbles subside with great impatience. Then, as an ironic gesture aimed at himself, raised the glass, “Here’s to you, Doctor Fieldstone!” and drained his glass. Ah! Delicious!
It was too soon to talk to Marrow, anyway. He sat waiting for Rick, not knowing how he would respond to the young man’s troubles. One part of him, of course, wanted to crush, humiliate and destroy him. Another part, perhaps the stronger, felt a fatherlike feeling for Rick; no, more brotherlike; no, he just plain liked him. And not for his phony charm, either. Rick really was, deep down inside, charming and nice, a good boy. With the morals of a cat. That’s all.
The Hollywood Trilogy Page 57