The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  “If we can make a deal, I’d like to collaborate with you on the next draft,” Richard said. “I’ve got some dynamite ideas.”

  Jerry said, “If we make a deal?”

  Harriet said, “We haven’t decided on a price yet, and we have to take it to Marrow.”

  “It’s not up to me,” Richard said.

  “But I’m sure Jerry isn’t going to be more than usually greedy, nor Donald Marrow more than usually tight,” David said. “So at least for the purposes of this lunch, we can assume, can’t we, that Jerry has his deal?”

  “But what’s the matter with my script?” Jerry heard himself saying.

  “It lacks experience,” Richard said. “That’s all. Some of the stuff you call for can’t be done, or at least can’t be done for the money. That’s where I come in.”

  Jerry didn’t know much, but he knew a little. He was amazed at himself, even so.

  “Are you talking about splitting the screen credit with me?” David and Richard exchanged disappointed looks.

  “Screen credits already,” David said. He did not smile at Jerry.

  “As a matter of cold hard fact,” Richard said, looking right into Jerry’s eyes, “you might not get a screen credit at all.”

  Jerry’s heart sank. He looked at Harriet, who finished her Martini in silence.

  The clatter of the room was abnormally loud, to Jerry. Their food came, and instead of enjoying his first meal at Musso & Frank’s he could hardly remember it, except that it sat in his belly like a cannonball all afternoon.

  But at last Harriet said, “I think you fellas are getting too serious.” To Jerry she said, “Things will probably work out just the way you want them to, but you have to understand some things. What we’re negotiating for is to sell, outright, your version of The Lady in the Lake. After that, anything can happen to it, but you’ll have been paid for your work and your ideas.”

  “Nobody’s trying to screw you, man,” Richard said. “But you’re like every newcomer, you’re fuckin’ paranoid. Relax. Make your deal, and we’ll see what happens. Don’t you know, I’m offering you a good deal by offering to collaborate. I’m not just buying up your ideas, I want you along.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jerry said. “I’m acting like an idiot.”

  “Now you’re talking!” David said, and once again he bestowed his smile on Jerry. It was like a pardon from the governor.

  AT THE end of lunch, Jerry shook hands with the others and walked out the front door of Musso’s, onto Hollywood Boulevard. The others presumably went out the back and got into their machines. For Jerry the shock was greater coming out than it had been going in. Here he was back among the skulkoids, the sleazos, the bad genetic material shuffling up and down the sidewalk, mobs of used cars roaming the streets, low-grade merchandise peering hopelessly from dirty store windows. And yet after a block Jerry was saying hello left and right to people he actually knew and who knew him, merchants, donut shop habitues, fellow tenants of this block of the Boulevard. By the time he turned into the entrance of the Hany Building it was hard to remember the high-ceilinged room full of white tablecloths, red-jacketed waiters and the smooth bubbling relaxed hum of wealthy gab.

  “Where you been, sport?” cried Toby from his throne.

  “Musso’s,” he replied, pushing for the elevator. He did not want to talk to Toby right now.

  “Hey man!” cried Toby. “You gettin’ up there!”

  There was no more curiosity about his affairs in the office, his fellow workers having concluded that it was real and therefore none of their business, and even Richard, his white shirt bulging out over his belt in back, stayed bent over the pasteup he was working on. Jerry slipped into his chair and reached into his IN box for a press release. It described a new kind of shovel-and-broom arrangement for getting dog shit off stubbornly resistant sidewalks. After reading it through rapidly once and seeing the notation blue-pencilled up in the corner—“1 par”—Jerry propped the release up beside his Royal Standard typewriter, reached over for the first sheet, carbon and second sheet, and began cutting the item down to one paragraph, as per editorial instruction. All around him was the clatter of typewriters and adding machines, the low bubble of voices. Within him was a numbness.

  It is probably one of the basic fantasies. You find yourself among people who are not like you. You feel so different you are sure that you were plucked from your crib and spirited off. Someday you will be restored to your rightful place in the world. No mere commoner he, but a prince of the royal blood . . .

  That’s how Jerry felt. Right on the edge of being plucked from this unjust obscurity, just a few more days . . . a few weeks at the most.

  He ripped the item from his typewriter angrily, quickly scanned the enormous number of typographical errors and threw the pages into his wastebasket, bending down and retrieving the carbon paper, stacking another deck and feeding it into the machine. This time he wrote a classically correct paragraph with not a single error, marked it up quickly with his grease pencil and dropped it into the OUT basket. Next item: But he did not want to read the next item. He had a full IN basket, lots of stuff, stuff he could plow his way through in about five hours at this pace, some of the items unconsciously funny, but most of them with a dull sincerity that made Jerry want to scream. And never must a note of irony creep into his prose, never a moment of fun or lighthearted phrase.

  These people were goddamn serious about their products. Pushing pet care was a hard dollar in a tough world.

  Jerry looked around the room. Everyone he saw would have looked out of place at Musso’s. Did he look as out of place to them as they did to him? Did they know he was a prince in disguise?

  “What are you laughing at?” Richard said in a friendly way.

  Jerry wiped his eyes with a Kleenex and said, “Sometimes these weird thoughts come into my mind.”

  “I know what you mean,” Richard said seriously. He tilted back in his swivel chair so that his mouth was closer to Jerry’s ear. In a low voice he said, “I sometimes get these outrageous fantasies about my old lady . .”

  He appeared to be willing to go on with this, so Jerry kidded him out of it:

  “Have you seen this?” He handed Richard the copy about the dog shit invention. “You think we should replace the front page?”

  Richard read the paragraph and the press release clipped to it. He looked up at Jerry seriously. “Nice item,” he said.

  By this time Jerry had picked up his new item, concerning a series of price hikes in grain (“2 para”) and was well into typing it up.

  But in his mind he was thinking about financial matters closer to home. How much was he going to get paid? There had been no time to discuss this with Harriet after lunch had broken up. How much did people get for scripts, anyway? Jerry read the trades and the press and knew that fabulous sums were often mentioned as having been paid for one property or another. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  Jerry’s skin went cold at the thought of all that money. He pulled his item out of the typewriter and checked it carefully with the press release to make sure he had all the names and numbers correct. A couple of hundred thousand dollars. A quarter of a million dollars.

  A quarter of a million dollars?

  A quarter of a million dollars?

  When Richard, who could overhear him, left his desk, Jerry called Harriet Hardardt. The secretary said that Harriet was in a meeting and would get back to him. That killed the afternoon. Jerry worked mindlessly until six, a half-hour after everybody else had left, because he knew now that Hollywood worked until six, and then when the phone still didn’t ring he dragged himself out of the place, wondering what in the holy hell he was going to tell Barbara.

  Dinner was arroz con pollo, golden with saffron and picked out with bits of fresh pimento, utterly delicious, and followed by hot apple pie and coffee, brandy in the little pony glasses Jerry had bought for Barbara. During the meal she spoke of things at work, a romance between t
he head salesman and a new employee, a Korean girl who didn’t seem to know how to avoid Blusterbuttocks, as Barbara called the salesman. Jerry ate his chicken and rice and half-listened to her. He had not made up his mind what to tell her, if anything. Indeed, the Heidelberg Approach might be the way to go. Say nothing until there is something to say.

  Wouldn’t her face go all funny if he said, apropos of nothing, “Hey, I made a quarter of a million dollars today. . . .”

  Jerry helped himself to another piece of chicken, crispy where it had baked on top, soft and succulent where it had cuddled the rice. The steam rising from the freshly sundered meat was rich with herbs and butter. The white wine was chilled just enough to make him gulp happily after putting down his fork and thoroughly chewing his food.

  Barbara watched him with approval. She had brought him a long way from the bachelor chomp-and-swallow of only a few months ago.

  “My Jesus Christ this food is good!” he said with great enthusiasm. It was practically the only sincere thing he said to her the entire evening. He half-expected Harriet to call him there.

  It threw a pall over their evening. He was obviously preoccupied about something he was unwilling to share. Even as they watched television in bed, she with a glass of white wine and he with a second and then a third brandy, his answer to her every remark, even those not aimed at him, was, “Huh?”

  Finally she asked him. “Are you writing something again?”

  “Yes,” he said. It explained his preoccupation. Nevertheless, it worked as a wedge between them, and when it was time to decide whether to make love, both were looking for an excuse not to. Jerry lay awake after pretending to fall asleep, and he knew that Barbara, next to him in the darkness, was also pretending to sleep. He wondered how long they could go on like this, but soon slipped back into his mind’s whirl of fragmentary ideas. Ideas of wealth, of change, worried thoughts of the future, dread at the thought that he was going to have to drag Barbara into Hollywood with him because he didn’t have the guts to sever the thing right now.

  Well, he didn’t, and that was that. He was being oversensitive anyway. None of this was really going to happen, at least not as he fantasied. He shifted uncomfortably in the bed. This has been one of the happiest days of my life, he told himself. Or it should have been. Why wasn’t it? He shifted again. The pillow was awfully hot. Again his mind began to race, and he gave up the idea of sleeping. But he still had to lie there, as if asleep. For all he knew, Barbara might still be awake.

  Things did not get better over the next few days, when Harriet Hardardt did not call, and Jerry, thin-lipped with anger, refused to call her. He spent three nights in a row over on Fountain, pretending to be working on his script, but he couldn’t work. His mind was too full of fragments. Fountain was uncomfortable after Barbara’s place, and compared to Barbara’s cooking the stuff he fed himself was disgusting.

  But the whiskey was just as good as ever, and he found himself drinking more and more, until he was up to a pint on his third night, drunk to the point of stumbling by nine o’clock, when Barbara called to say goodnight.

  It was an embarrassing phone call because he was so drunk and had the foolish notion that he could hide it from her. The call ended with Barbara making an excuse and Jerry maudlin and loving and on the edge of tears.

  And then days later Harriet Hardardt did call, and Jerry sat numbly as Harriet’s voice explained to him that she had had to negotiate like a fiend to get him anything at all, with his lack of a track record and with the expense of buying the rights from M-G-M, and of course Rick’s participation, so that the budget didn’t allow much for script, but by dint of Harriet’s all-out war, Jerry was to receive twenty-five thousand dollars for his work on The Lady in the Lake, including working with Rick and the production company getting the script into shooting shape.

  “I think it’s a good deal,” Harriet said.

  So this was reality!

  But instead of telling Barbara that night, Jerry went back to Fountain and started in on a fresh bottle of whiskey.

  The next morning he woke up early and listened to the mockingbird outside his window for nearly an hour before getting out of bed. His running shoes and sweatsuit were at Barbara’s, thank God, so all he had to do was take a shower and get over to the donut shop for some life-giving coffee.

  Everyone was still in place, as if he had never stopped coming in here. There was Helen behind the counter, sacking donuts, smiling at everyone, remembering people’s favorites, making change, giving Jerry that same long loving look as he poured his own coffee and plunked himself down on a stool to wait for that first delicious just-too-hot sip.

  Toby came in and sat down next to Jerry. Toby’s breath was awful, reminding Jerry of the stench of a dead deer he had come across in the forest once. Jerry tried to shield himself, knowing his own breath might be just as bad.

  “How’s it goin’ with you and Rick?” Toby asked, after wolfing down three donut holes.

  “We have a deal,” Jerry heard himself saying. Toby’s eyes lit up.

  “Hey, what’d I tell you! Man, that’s great!”

  Jerry told Toby all about it, warming up with the coffee in him, and pretty soon the two men were laughing and babbling about Jerry’s first big break.

  Then it got awful.

  “Hey,” Toby said, as if it had just occurred to him, “you got to take me with you!”

  “What?”

  “You got to take me with you. Assistant producer or some shit like that. You got to.”

  There was no doubt that Toby was sincere. His face was strained and anxious as he stared into Jerry’s eyes.

  “But I’m just the writer,” Jerry said. It was true, yet he still felt like a betrayer.

  “You got to take me with you, man! You can’t leave me here! You think I wanna sell stroke books all my life? Hey, it was me that got you the gig!”

  “I can’t,” Jerry said. He felt himself harden inside. He got up and paid for his coffee. His hands were shaking and he knew without looking that Toby was giving him a heavy guilt-inducing stare. At the door, Jerry turned and looked at Toby, but Toby was hunched over his coffee, staring at the back wall.

  Helen was smiling at Jerry, though, and said “Goodbye!” brightly as he left.

  AND SO, feeling a little like Dick Whittington’s cat, Jerry Rexford went off to Hollywood to seek his fortune. He needn’t have worried what to do about Barbara, because she dropped him like a hot potato as soon as she was reasonably sure he had a girl friend on the side. Nothing Jerry said could change her mind, and in a burst of cruelty she invited him over after work one evening—he thought for supper—and when he got there found all his things stacked up on her porch. Her brother Richard tried to be polite but it was clear that he, too, thought Jerry had gone astray. It was hard working beside the man, and then impossible.

  Jerry went in to Mr. Harris and apologized for quitting. Mr. Harris, much to Jerry’s surprise, only pretended to be sorry, and talked about how Jerry’s work had been suffering these past few weeks, and perhaps it was all for the best. As Jerry left Mr. Harris’s office he could hear the fft! of Kleenex being withdrawn from its box.

  Twenty-five thousand dollars was plenty of money to get established, even though, as Harriet Hardardt had carefully explained, he would never actually see so much as half that sum, and no one part of it much more than the almost twenty-five hundred dollars he had already been paid. The gross amount had been five thousand. Jerry would get another check soon, and then, the first day of shooting, he would get another.

  “What if the picture never gets made?” Jerry asked, in a rare moment of fiscal intelligence.

  “Let’s not be gloomy,” Harriet said.

  Jerry worked it out. If the picture went into turnaround (oh, he was picking up the language!) he stood to make a total of something under five thousand dollars, cash to him.

  “But,” as Harriet said with a small smile, “we’ll get you a lot more for your
next screenplay, a hell of a lot more.”

  “If the picture gets made, gets released and makes money,” Jerry said cynically.

  “Let’s not rain on the ballpark,” Harriet suggested.

  Rick Heidelberg turned out to be one of the greatest people Jerry had ever met. He arranged a parking space right in front of the Administration Building, so that Jerry did not have to come in through the drive-on gate or walk halfway across the lot to his office. The production company had a shotgun row of four offices, but Jerry’s was not one of these. His was across the hall and down the corridor. “Writers need their peace and quiet,” Rick said, and Jerry agreed. Rick’s was the corner one, a splendid office, with its bar, its posters of great old movies, its view of the battlements and turrets of the big medieval castle. The company’s suite of offices was right under Boss Hellstrom’s, and when the Boss came into the conversation, Rick would point upward with an ironic wink.

  A funny thing happened the first day Jerry moved into his office. The place was tiny and bare, with its yellow oak desk and crippled-looking swivel chair, and the Royal Standard typewriter on the middle of the desk.

  “It’s not much,” Rick said to him.

  “Oh, gee, it’s just fine,” Jerry said, and as if to prove it, went over and sat on the swivel chair, which gave an angry squeak and almost dumped Jerry on the threadbare carpet. Jerry steadied himself, pulled over the typewriter and made as if to adjust it. He opened the top drawer looking for paper, but found only a couple of empty Dos Equis bottles.

  “Former tenant?” he asked Rick, and Rick got this really funny look on his face. On another man’s face it might have been called embarrassment, but Jerry couldn’t imagine Rick embarrassed.

  “The secretaries have all the supplies . . . just ask,” Rick said, and left Jerry to contemplate his splendor.

  The halcyon days lasted only a week, but what a week for Jerry Rexford! He would arrive fresh and bright at around eight o’clock, park in his slot, enter through the glassed-in police booth (“Good morning, Mister Rexford!”), past the seated double row of hopefuls, down the dim silent corridor that reminded him of nothing so much as a high school corridor except for the lack of lockers and the famous names on every door, up the staircase to the third floor, where Joyce, Rick’s secretary and Roberta, his secretary, were just in and making the fresh aromatic coffee.