“I just never went anywhere before that I couldn’t drive,” I said.
He bought me several drinks and I watched the world above the clouds as I drank. Bruce was okay. He had got me laid and he was also giving me my first plane ride. By the time we got to L.A. I was so drunk that I missed my first hour in the city. When I came to myself Bruce was shaking my hand and wishing me good luck with “them.” I was standing on a red carpet in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Bruce was going to the Beverly Wilshire. His cab began to pull away. Several bellboys looked at me curiously. I sobered up just in time to get intimidated. The last time I really noticed myself I had been swigging an early-morning Dr. Pepper at the Piltdown and it was hard to believe I was standing here, high from gin and tonics, in front of the Beverly Hills.
It was not like having a fantasy come true before you’re quite ready for it; it was more like having a fantasy come true before you’ve even had the fantasy. I had never given ten minutes’ thought to being a screenwriter. I had never even seen a screenplay. I felt as if I had suddenly become the puppet of remote but very powerful powers. The elegant bellboys kept looking at me, so I went inside. Everyone was extremely courteous to me. The remote powers had made me a reservation, and no one seemed to doubt that I was who I said I was. My room had a view of the city. I had some Dr. Peppers sent up, hoping they would steady my nerves, but they didn’t, really. The city I looked out on was smoggy. The palm trees had a gray cast. I had a huge television set and watched movies on it. I didn’t dare go out, for fear the remote powers would call me.
As I was finishing my third Dr. Pepper a bellboy arrived with a wrapped package. He assured me it was for me. I opened it and it was a large bottle of scotch. The card with it said Leon O’Reilly. While I was pondering the card the phone rang and it was Leon’s secretary. Leon O’Reilly was the power that wanted me to write the screenplay. I remembered that Bruce had mentioned him, but his was only one of scores of names Bruce had mentioned in the last few days.
Mr. O’Reilly hoped I was enjoying Los Angeles, his secretary said. His driver would pick me up at eight and Mr. O’Reilly would have dinner with me. I said that was fine. The secretary hung up, leaving me alone and at a loss in my huge posh room. It was nicely carpeted and had lamps and tables and closets and a huge bathtub in the bathroom. The bed was as large as the bed Renata Morris had. Nothing in the room bore scars. The carpet was white and looked like no one had ever walked on it. There was no sign that anyone had ever slept in the bed, or turned on the television set, or taken a bath in the bathtub. There were no hairs in the lavatory, no ring around the toilet. The room had led a spotless life and I felt that any move I made might blemish it. It was so different from my room at the Piltdown that I felt like someone I didn’t know. I had the creepy feeling that I was living my first hours with someone I was about to become. The changing of the years always disorients me. I never feel quite right in January, not because I worry about getting old, but just because I hate for particular years to go. I hadn’t really adjusted to the fact that it was 1962 instead of 1961, and the quiet, luxurious room only made my January melancholy the more pronounced. The room was so unlike any of the other rooms of my life that I felt like I must have skipped several years. It was the sort of room I shouldn’t have been living in until the 1970s, or maybe the 1980s, after I had become famous and begun a rich decline. The room made me uncomfortable but I knew right away I could get to like it. I was beginning to be able to imagine having forty thousand dollars—or even more. Renata Morris would probably come to see me, if I lived in such rooms.
The whole tone of my fantasies would begin to change. Soon it would be the Piltdown that was unimaginable. It wasn’t that I liked the Piltdown. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like poverty either. It was just that I had expected it to take longer than three hours to leave them behind. I was zooming again and there was no telling where I’d stop.
To slow myself down a little I went outside. After I walked a block or two I noticed that I was on Sunset Boulevard, which gave me a real thrill. I like to walk on famous streets. The farther I walked, the more normal I felt. The Beverly Hills Hotel receded behind me and I felt happy to have escaped from it, if only temporarily. I walked along, staring at things, and when I got down into Hollywood I felt normal enough to be hungry and stopped and ate two chili dogs. I felt slightly rebellious. Bruce would have been disgusted. They were great chili dogs—far superior to any I’d eaten in San Francisco. These were huge baroque L.A. chili dogs, with melted cheese and onions and even tabasco if I wanted it. I had mine with tabasco and drank a malt to cool me off. I felt like it might be my last real meal. Once Leon O’Reilly’s driver came for me there was no telling where I might have to go, or what I might be required to eat.
The tall, soft-spoken kid who made my chili dogs told me he was only working at the chili-dog stand in order to get enough money to go to the Islands, where he planned to spend his time surfing. He had a friendly grin and his face was so innocent that it was impossible to imagine him ever being forty years old. I often try to imagine teen-agers as they will be when they’re forty years old, but it wouldn’t work with this kid. “Waves are my life,” he said shyly, as he was making himself a malt. I had no reply. For the time being, zooming seemed to be mine.
10
SHORTLY after meeting me, Leon O’Reilly grew despondent. I don’t really think it was my fault. We were in the back seat of his yellow Bentley, and his fat secretary, whose name was Juney, sat between us. Leon was a small, neat man, with neatly combed hair and a neat black tie. His tie was very thin. Juney held one of his hands in both of hers and looked at me as if she expected to become despondent too. She was obviously standing ready to hold my hand, if the occasion required it.
“Danny, I want you to know I think your novel’s great,” Leon said, when we were shaking hands. He avoided my eye when he said it, and I avoided his. We almost looked at each other accidentally, while we were avoiding each other’s eyes. I felt very embarrassed. I hadn’t gotten used to the fact that strangers out in the world had read my novel.
“I’m out here wasting my education,” Leon said a little later. We were purring out the Hollywood Freeway, in the Bentley.
“I was brought up to believe that a gentleman does as little as possible with his education,” he said. “I think I’ve achieved pretty near the minimum. No one could expect me to do less than I’ve done.”
Juney looked at him tenderly and patted his hand. She was a motherly blonde. “Tough it out, baby,” she said. Leon did not respond.
“Leon went to Harvard,” she said, turning to me. “He operates from a very high level of taste. He really hates ostentation and affectation, but let’s face it, in this industry you can’t escape it. You have to be ostentatious, you have to have affectations. Leon actually has to affect affectations. It’s a sad thing. This Bentley is one of the affectations he’s affecting. He doesn’t really want to drive a Bentley.”
I couldn’t see why not. I was already in love with the Bentley and planned to buy one the minute I reached that level of affluence. I loved the way the leather seats smelled and the quiet way the car purred along. It obviously worked no wonders for Leon O’Reilly though.
“I have the only private jai alai court in the United States,” he said. “It’s lit, too. I could play jai alai at night if I wanted to. I also have a twenty-two-pound rat. We bought it for a science fiction movie I produced a few years ago. I kept it. It only weighed seventeen pounds at the time.”
“Those are some of his other affectations,” Juney explained. “You have to make the people in the industry feel like you’re one of them.” She patted Leon’s hand in sympathy. There was no doubt but that her heart bled for him.
“Nobody wants a movie producer to have a Harvard education,” Leon said. “I’ve had to adapt. I hope you won’t be offended by this restaurant we’re taking you to. It’s a relic of another era. We always take writers there because writers see
m to prefer that era. I’ve never understood why.”
“You don’t have to worry about me,” I said.
“He can’t help it,” Juney said. “Leon’s a born worrier. He worries about every detail. All his pictures bear his individual stamp. I think you’ll find he’s the most meticulous person in Hollywood.”
The restaurant was Scandinavian in decor. It had a tiny little sign on the front gate. The sign said THOR’S and was far and away the tiniest thing about the restaurant. After we parked we got in a boat. It was a Viking warship, poled by a muscular young man in Viking costume. He poled us up an imaginary fjord. The bluff they had cut the fjord through was only about ten feet high, but I was impressed anyway.
After the boat trip we had drinks in a huge mead hall, full of a lot of other muscular young guys in Viking costumes. One banged rhythmically on a huge skin drum. The drink Leon ordered for me tasted like honey, but it affected me like straight whiskey. Leon and Juney sat holding hands. Leon was looking a little less despondent. Just as I was beginning to get drunk he stood up, snapped his fingers and said, “Coats, coats!” He became authoritative suddenly. Three young Vikings came running up and helped us into three huge fur coats with big fur hoods. Leon’s coat weighed more than he did, but it didn’t daunt him. We were shown into the room where we were to eat dinner. It was an ice cave, or perhaps the inside of an iceberg. The walls were literally of ice. Literal ice. The room was freezing cold, which seemed to invigorate Leon O’Reilly. He looked happier and happier.
“In the old days this was the place,” he said. “All the great stars came here in order to be able to wear their furs. It’s the most vulgar restaurant in Hollywood. There won’t be anything like it in another ten years. I absolutely hate it but I thought you’d appreciate the experience. It’s like a set by De Mille, don’t you see? It’s life copying art. We’re going to have raw fish. When you go to Thor’s you have to go all the way. All the great stars ate raw fish here. What the hell, Juney. Anybody could have taken him to Chasen’s and fed him chili mac. We’ll show him a little of the Holly-wood that was.”
It was an eerie place and we were the only customers in it. Little seal-oil lamps flickered on the tables. Three shivering Viking youths brought us three huge raw fish and three huge knives. I touched my fish and it was cold as an ice cube.
“Maybe he should have had the seal,” Juney said, noting my hesitation. She looked at me from deep in her coat. I was even deeper in my coat and I was freezing anyway. Leon didn’t seem to mind the cold. He was hacking at his fish with the huge knife, and his eyes shone.
“Nonsense,” he said. “No seal. This is Viking food, not Eskimo food. I’ve always objected to them having seal on the menu.”
Leon seemed to love raw fish. He lectured us learnedly on its nutritional values while he ate. I felt as if I were freezing. Fortunately the shivering Viking youths returned with mugs of hot buttered rum. Juney and I seized them gratefully. Juney even choked down some of her fish, out of dedication to Leon, but I wasn’t that dedicated. I swallowed a bite or two without chewing it, but I spent most of the meal cutting the fish in bite-sized pieces and throwing the pieces under the table. Leon didn’t notice. I drank two mugs of rum, to keep warm, and almost fell in the fjord as we were getting back into the Viking warship. Leon had a few squid for dessert and he took more squid home with him in a doggy bag.
“I want the rat to try them,” he said.
Later, at Leon’s house, I was shown the rat. It lived in a very clean cage in one corner of Leon O’Reilly’s greenhouse, and it went at the squid like it had been eating squid all its life. Juney said she couldn’t stand to watch it, so she went outside and watched Leon’s teen-age son ride his Honda around and around the jai alai court.
“I used to hate the rat,” Leon said quietly. We were drinking brandy and watching the rat eat squid. “I made it a symbol of my fall,” he said. “But after all, it’s just an animal. It’s not the rat’s fault I became a producer. It isn’t even the largest rat in the world, for that matter. There’s one in Baltimore that weighs twenty-five pounds. We’ve been negotiating for it. I thought it might be fun to mate them, since the one in Baltimore is female. Maybe I could develop a strain of giant fur-bearing rats and breed them on rat farms, like the mink farms I used to see on Prince Edward Island. This rat is bigger than most minks. You’ll notice it likes seafood. It’s particularly fond of abalone. Whenever we have abalone we give it the scraps.”
The huge rat looked at us complacently. It could clearly afford to be complacent. The greenhouse was full of jungle-like foliage. After a while we strolled out with our brandy and rejoined Juney. I guess I was drunk. I had nothing to say. Neither did Leon. Neither did Juney. My head felt like it was a long way from my feet, or even from my hands. I felt more or less absent. Then I was in the Bentley, being driven back to my hotel. I couldn’t remember any words being said, at the end of the evening. Juney was in the Bentley with me, but she was asleep and snoring, slumped in her corner. I stayed awake, in order to enjoy the ride in the Bentley.
When I got out onto the red carpet at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Juney was still snoring. I went and sat in my room awhile, wondering where I would have to look to find someone with whom I had something in common. All the people I had things in common with were thousands of miles away, in Texas. Finally I turned on the television set and watched a movie with Rhonda Fleming in it. It was called The Golden Hawk. I hadn’t seen her in a long time and I enjoyed the movie thoroughly. By the end of it I had ceased being drunk. It also had Sterling Hayden in it. The movie was all about pirates, but I felt right at home with it. I didn’t feel at all at home with Leon O’Reilly.
The bed I lay in to watch the movie was almost as big as my whole room at the Piltdown. For a few minutes I thought I was going to cry. I had never felt less snug. Only the thought that the Beverly Hills Hotel was a silly place in which to cry kept me from it. What I really wanted was to be a student again. It occurred to me that I hadn’t been reading much, and I suddenly had a great longing to sit in the library and read. In my mind I kept seeing the thirty-nine-volume set of John Ruskin, the one I had never taken time to dip into. If I could have just been back in Houston I would probably have stayed up all night reading Fors Clavigera. For some reason it was the one Ruskin book I felt like I wanted to read. Also there were innumerable books about rivers I hadn’t read. I decided to start reading again and the decision cheered me up. While I was trying to decide in my mind what to read first, I went to sleep.
The next day, just as I was about to leave Columbia Studios, I met a person with whom I had something in common. It was five o’clock in the afternoon and I had spent the whole day in an office with Leon O’Reilly. He was extremely neat and brisk and talked about my novel until it made my head swim. We went completely through the manuscript, a page at a time, trying to work out how to turn the novel into a movie. It was just a simple novel about a good old man whose one son had gone bad, and when I went in the morning I didn’t envision many problems about it at all. To my surprise, Leon O’Reilly immediately suggested that we give the old man another son.
“Certainly,” he said. “Two sons, one good, one bad. As the story stands, our picture is too simple. What it needs is some ambiguity, some timbre it doesn’t have. Let’s give him a brother and let the brother be good. Maybe he’s even a preacher. Or maybe he’s just something dull. A grocer. He devotes his spare time to working with the Boy Scouts. I’m not sure, I’m just thinking out loud. And maybe deep inside himself the old man really likes the bad son better than he likes the good son. Only they fight anyway, and maybe it’s the good son that really gets broken. I don’t know. But you can see how that makes for a richer brew.”
I could see, but at the same time I didn’t have any good son in my imagination. I didn’t let Leon know that though. While we were talking a Negro came in and gave us each a shoeshine. He never said a word, and all the time he worked Leon kept adding ambiguities to t
he script I was going to write.
We decided to have the bad son get killed while illegally roping antelope from the hood of a speeding Cadillac. We also decided that the good son would have a sexy wife and that the bad son would either rape her or make her fall in love with him or both. Leon’s phone kept ringing and he would pick it up and I would faintly hear Juney’s voice coming through it and then Leon would say things like, “Not today,” or “Send him a little cognac,” or “MGM can go fuck itself,” and briskly hang up. We spent two hours debating whether the good son and the bad son could have an idiot half brother. Leon speculated at length about my old man and decided it was not unreasonable to suppose that he had had a mongoloid son by a prior marriage. “I know an actor who’s perfect,” he kept saying. “I’ve always wanted to cast him as an idiot.”
Then he decided it might be even more dramatic if the bad son had a wife who was secretly in love with the good son but was too good a woman to break her marriage vows. “There’s conflict for you,” Leon said. “You’re wonderful to work with, you know.” When five o’clock came I was exhausted, not from talking or even from thinking, but just from listening. Leon had not so much as loosened his tie all day, and his eyes were as bright as they had been when he was hacking at the raw fish.
“I think we’re solid,” he said, when he shook my hand. “I’ll have Juney type this up in outline form and send it right off to you. It’s not to be considered restrictive, of course. Feel free to invent and embroider. I want Brando and Burton for the two sons, maybe Spencer Tracy for the old man. Think what a picture that would make.”
I went on out. Just being in the hall made me feel better. It seemed to me I had been listening to Leon O’Reilly talk about my novel for several weeks. I didn’t mind all the things he wanted me to do to it. Most of his ideas were better than my ideas. I couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t had sense enough to give the bad son a good brother, and a wife who would be in love with the good brother. It would have made the book twice as interesting. But it was too late for me to do it and talking about it for eight hours was a big bore. My brain felt fuzzy from trying to keep myself listening to what Leon was saying.
All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers Page 12