The Last Man: A Novel

by D. W. Buffa

  “Little prick!” laughed Leonard. “Everybody wants him in their picture, and no one wants him twice. I remembered you were the one who sentenced him last time, sent him to rehab. I wanted to see how he would react. Wouldn’t even admit he remembered you. You probably saved the little shit’s worthless life, and instead of telling you what he owes you, he just walks away. Let him go screw himself. You watch, rehab didn’t do him any good; jerks like that don’t change. They think they’re God’s gift to the movie industry. He’ll get stoned one night and wrap his car around a telephone pole. And then you know what will happen,” he went on, hanging onto Bannister’s sleeve, his eyes beginning to glisten with the laughter that was forcing its way to his lips. “Every teenage girl in the country will go into mourning; same way they did when I was a kid and James Dean drove his Porsche off a cliff somewhere. The difference is that people who knew him liked James Dean.”

  “Are you suggesting that what we see on the screen isn’t real?” said Bannister, laughing with him. He had not much cared for Leonard before, but he could not help but like him now, after what he had just heard. To his surprise, instead of responding in kind, some off-hand remark about the empty vanities of Hollywood, Leonard became serious.

  “A few years ago, the Academy – they’re always changing things – decided to give the writers a little more attention. The only way they could figure out how to give the writers more credit was to enhance the visuals. This is Hollywood: no one noticed the irony. Anyway, what they did – maybe you saw it – they showed a page of script: the words, the dialogue, the description of what the actor is to do, and at the same time they showed the actor doing it. Well, Christ; I mean, anyone who saw it had to know that these great movie stars everyone likes to worship weren’t much more than glorified puppets, the wooden dummies on the lap of a ventriloquist. But you know what – no one noticed; I mean, no one said a damn thing about it. Everyone applauded, thought the writers got their credit – it’s what writers always want – and marveled at the great craft of the actor, able to turn the written word into something real and alive! It only proves what I’ve always known: you can sell anything in this town, anything: make even a smarmy little son-of-a-bitch like Driscoll Rose with his crooked nose and uneven teeth someone half the women in American want to go to bed with.”

  Leonard paused, an awkward, self-conscious grin hanging suddenly sideways on his mouth. He looked at Bannister as if he had only just realized he was there.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Maybe because you’re Roger’s brother-in-law; maybe because you’re a judge with just about the most goddamn honest face I’ve ever seen.” He looked at Bannister with new eyes, shrewder and more analytical. “They say you’re the best there is. Roger thinks you’re a legal genius. I’ll bet criminals plead guilty just so you’ll listen to their confession. You have that kind of look.”

  Bannister dismissed the suggestion with a quick, self-deprecating smile. It had no effect.

  “I’m serious. You make people want to talk. You Catholic? Priests would come to you to make confession. Roger was right, what he said that night at dinner: you could never play a criminal; you couldn’t even play a judge: you look too much like what a judge is supposed to look like and never does.” He stopped himself and shook his head at the absurdity of it. “Never does! Listen to me. You do, you look exactly the way you should.”

  “Thanks,” replied Bannister, rather enjoying the honest way Leonard had tried to explain himself. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “You should,” said Leonard, with a whimsical glance. “But now we have a serious problem and we need to solve it.” He turned first one way, then the other, searching the crowd. “We both have empty glasses; and that’s the last thing you want to happen at a party like this.”

  They moved through the dense crowd, avoiding anyone they might have to stop and talk to, on the lookout for a waiter. When they finally found one, they each grabbed a glass from his passing silver tray and started talking again about Hollywood and all the changing faces.

  “It happens faster now than it used to. It used to be harder to break in, and, once you started, it took longer to get to the top. Think about someone like Gary Grant, or Clark Gable, all those established stars. Gregory Peck. Seemed like they’d always been around, and always would be. There was a system in place. The studios – and you could count them on the fingers of one hand – controlled everything. Television changed all that; television and all the new technology. Anyone can make a movie now; and with hundreds of television channels, movies on the internet, all this reality T.V., no one can control anything. Pretty soon, everyone is going to be so busy making movies there won’t be anyone left to watch! I’m not kidding; trust me, I’m not. We’ll have a whole new category at the Oscars: best movie no has had time to see!”

  Bannister listened to this manic discourse with the smiling attention with which he watched the performance of a gifted lawyer, one who knew his way around a courtroom. Irving Leonard had been a part of Hollywood too long to be much impressed by it, knew it too well not to have become more than a little jaded and cynical. But there was no bitterness in his judgments, none of the false lament of lost success; he was a director’s director, a survivor in the jungle ways of Hollywood, part of the established order of things, at least for those who still believed there was an order, established or otherwise. However you answered that question, there was no doubt that a sure way to destroy your own reputation was to criticize his.

  “And what happens then?” asked Bannister, genuinely interested. “When everyone is so busy making movies no one has time to watch them.”

  A smile, rueful and uncanny, slipped quietly across Leonard’s sagging lower lip. He stopped walking and cocked his head.

  “Don’t you know? We’re about the same age. Haven’t you seen it coming?”

  Bannister was not sure what he was talking about, but he had a suspicion that it was something that, when he heard it explained, would conform exactly to his own misgivings about the recent tendency of things.

  “You mean, the way everything has speeded up; no one has time to think, or even understand what they see?”

  “Something like that: there isn’t any dialogue anymore; everything is visual. It’s worse on television. You don’t have to listen, don’t have to follow anything; not just what you hear, but what you see. Everything is fragmentary: quick, partial shots, then another – rapid fire images. You’re right: speed and more speed, faster and faster, everything dizzy, everything falling apart. It’s a drunk man’s nightmare.”

  “The slaves of what we see,” added Bannister, thoughtfully.

  “Yeah, I suppose. But it’s what everyone seems to want, what they pay for. The pictures speed up, and we all slow down. Let’s face it: compared to what we used to do, we’re all dumber than hell now. At least that’s how it seems to me,” said Leonard, puzzled, as it seemed, that things had gotten to this state.

  “Why don’t you make a movie about that,” suggested Bannister as they approached the dance floor that had been set up on the lower part of the lawn. An orchestra, the musicians dressed in dinner jackets, was playing a Cole Porter tune. A dozen couples of various ages were moving to the easy upbeat rhythm.

  “A movie about how stupid the movies have become?” laughed Leonard. “If you can get Roger to finance it, I’ll direct it. Probably win an Oscar.” He chuckled beneath his breath. “Idealistic young director – we’ll get Driscoll Rose to play the part – battles the studios for the chance to make the kind of movie Hollywood used to make. Everyone opposes him. Somehow he does it anyway. Only the movie he makes is all about Hollywood and what he had to do: the movie is all about him. All about him: that’s a role Driscoll Rose would kill to get.”

  Drawn by the music and the dancers, part of the gathering crowd, they moved closer to the dance floor and the orchestra. The dozen dancing couples were all of them well-dressed and some of them quite well-kn
own. There were a few, the Hollywood executives the public knew nothing about, who were middle aged, but most of the others were younger and already famous, with shining faces and eager eyes, certain, in the wonderful inconsistency of their age, that nothing could be better than the life they were now living and that every day would be better than the last.

  Bannister, who had not danced in years, liked watching them, the graceful, carefree way they moved, the hint of all the vagaries of romance. Without quite knowing how it got there, or even what it meant, he felt a smile on his mouth and nostalgia in his eyes, the vague memory of what he used to be, when he was still young and other, older, people stood at the edge of a dance floor watching him. The music brought it all back, all the possibilities he had known, and it seemed to him that what he had wanted but had not been able to have was as much a part of him as anything he had actually achieved, that the dreams he had had meant as much or more than the reality he had lived. There was a strange satisfaction in that, this knowledge that he had at least been capable of imagining a future more interesting than what, now that he could look back on it, his past had been.

  The distant smile fading from his lips, he shoved his hands deep into his pockets and stared down at the ground, reminding himself that the regret he felt was only the misplaced sentiment of age, the knowledge that it was too late to change anything, too late to go back and start again. And if he could, if it weren’t too late, if he could do something else with his life, it would only lead to a different regret, a regret that he had not done something different than that. He kicked at the grass as he listened to the rhythm of the music trace the perfect endless circle of his mind.

  Drawn by some instinct, the sense of something about to happen, he looked up. There, on the far side of the floor, Driscoll Rose was dancing with a gorgeous young woman in a half missing dress. They might as well have been on the dance floor alone: every eye was on them as he put her into one turn after another, each one more reckless than the other, each one more extreme. They started in the middle of the floor, but were soon twisting along the edge, and then, suddenly, Rose lost his balance, let go of the girl, and went flying into the watching crowd. He crashed headlong into a young Hispanic waiter carrying a tray load of glasses filled with champagne and both of them hit the ground. There was broken glass everywhere. The dark-eyed waiter, who had the quiet good looks of a well-mannered young man, started to get up and reached for Driscoll Rose to help him to his feet. But Rose was not interested in being helped. He was too enraged for that. He shoved the waiter hard in the chest and then, without warning, started to beat him with his fists, one blow after the other, beating him in the face. He was screaming at him, shouting every obscenity he knew, out of control, insane in his rage, beating him senseless, trying to kill him with his bare hands. And no one did a thing to stop him. They all stood there, afraid to get involved, afraid to get on the wrong side of the famous Driscoll Rose.

  Bannister grabbed him by the wrist just as he was about to hit the waiter again, and with a strength he did not know he had, bent his arm back behind him until he could not move. Rose turned around, swearing, but when he saw the look on Bannister’s face his shouted profanity died stillborn in the air. Forcing him to his feet, Bannister with both hands pushed him back into the watching, helpless crowd.

  “Get him out of here!” he demanded, without bothering to see who would do it. He did not have time to waste. He was on his knees, talking in a soft, reassuring voice, telling the young Hispanic whose face was now a bloody mask that it was going to be all right, that help was on the way. The waiter looked at him with grateful eyes and started to say something in reply, but when he opened his mouth he started to gag. Driscoll Rose had broken three of his teeth.

  Chapter Nine

  Roger Stanton was not happy about what had happened, he wanted Walter to understand that; but there were, after all, other considerations.

  Bannister raised an eyebrow. “Other considerations?”

  “Yes, of course,” he began to explain, a flash of irritation in his pale blue eyes. “Other considerations, things that have to….Oh, hell, Walter – I’m not defending what he did. Defending? – I wish that waiter had beaten the hell out of him. He probably could have, too, if Driscoll didn’t have him down on the ground and started hitting him first.” He shook his head, a withering look of disgust flying across his mouth. “The truth is, I wish he’d killed him; killed Driscoll, I mean: would have solved a lot of problems,” he added in a voice that, dropping to a whisper, carried the conviction of a private thought.

  Having said it, spoken it out loud, Stanton swung his legs to the side and, resting the side of his face against his thumb and two fingers, stared out through the French doors of his study to the terrace. He lapsed into a long silence.

  The party had been over for hours, brought to a sudden, unexpected end by the wail of an ambulance leaving the treasure dome of Roger Stanton’s west coast Kublai Kahn with the barely breathing body of Lorenzo Garcia, the latest victim of Driscoll Rose’s self-indulgent rage. In the yellow dying light of a late afternoon a few tired groundskeepers patrolled the littered grounds, bending over every few feet to pick up the miscellaneous scattered debris. The white silk tents were all empty, the temporary tables burdened with empty, lipstick glasses and dirty, half-empty plates of stale food. It was like a prodigiously expensive wedding that, half an hour later, had ended in divorce.

  Here, inside Stanton’s study, nothing was out of place; nothing, with the exception of the way Stanton sat, lounging back in his chair, any different than it had always been. It was a large room, an enormous room, fifty feet across in each direction, built as a library, with dark brown smooth plastered walls and a wood paneled ceiling twenty feet above the floor. Thick prayer rugs, hand woven in some dusty Persian village two hundred years ago, when the British still controlled it, lay scattered on Italian marble tiles the color of a deep maroon with streaks of gold running through them. Shelves that could have held ten thousand books held less than a hundred volumes, all of them stacked together immediately behind the desk where Roger Stanton sometimes worked. They were, as Walter Bannister had noticed the first time he had been here, sitting in the chair opposite, the shiny leather bound editions of books without importance, purchased for what in the trade was called their furniture value: books that were never read and, in all probability, never opened, unless by some witless stranger who, bored with the usual guests at a party, had nothing better to do than discover what the great Roger Stanton read at night. It did not matter what was written in them - blank pages would have served the same purpose – it was the look that was needed: the proper visual background of a place with an important impression to make. It was not so much a study as a movie set; what an audience, come to see a picture about a famous Hollywood mogul, would expect to see. Stanton’s desk, hand carved out of rosewood and other even more exotic things, sat near the corner, back from the French doors and the outside glare, sunk in the shadows and shielded from the afternoon sun: a dark, cool refuge where Roger Stanton could, all alone, sit quietly, the casual spectator of his own achievement.

  “No one tried to stop it; no one tried to help that kid,” said Bannister.

  Stanton turned his head and gave his brother-in-law a friendly, but slightly puzzled, glance. “You did, Walter; you probably saved his life. From what I heard, you stopped Driscoll cold.” He sat straight up. “No one else did anything, though, did they? Well – you have to understand,” he went on with a look of derision in his eyes, “cowardice is a condition of existence here. No one wants to be on the wrong side of Driscoll Rose. He has too many friends, too much influence.”

  “So they’d just let him beat some kid to death?” Bannister watched Stanton shift his gaze and look away, and he understood not just the reason, but the reluctance to speak plainly about what was on his mind. “And now you want me to help you keep it quiet, to make sure that nothing happens. Those ‘other considerations’ you started t
o bring up. Isn’t that what you wanted to talk to me about?”

  Stanton found himself on the defensive, a position that was unusual for him, and one he did not like. Worse yet, he had been put there by one of the very few people who did not need or want anything he could give. Walter Bannister could treat him as an equal, and, given the look on his brother-in-law’s face, perhaps as someone with even less claim to respect. In all the years he had known him, he could remember only a few occasions on which he had seen him angry, and never anything like as angry as he was now. There was no point trying to make things look better than they were.

  “I said it would have been better if that waiter -”

  “Lorenzo Garcia. He has a name.”

  “ – better if Lorenzo Garcia had beaten – No, killed! – Driscoll Rose. This is just the latest thing he’s done. I’m not talking about the drug stuff. That’s nothing. Everyone in Hollywood has that problem. He’s been in rehab – What? - half a dozen times. You sent him there….”

  “The last time,” interjected Bannister when Stanton seemed to hesitate. Stanton greeted this with a cynic’s knowing laugh.

  “He’s been there since. Don’t bother telling me that keeping clean was a condition of probation, that he should be back in jail; it’s what I’m trying to tell you: no one can afford that! He’s making a picture, a couple of them. Do you have any idea how much money is involved? – hundreds of millions: the cost of production, the future profits. We do what we have to do: we shove him into a private clinic out of the public eye, away from the press, and get him straight, and get him back to work.”

  “And you cheat the law, which makes you and everyone involved culpable, legally liable. If he goes out and kills someone – like he almost did today – you’re looking not just at lawsuits, but even criminal prosecution.”

  Stanton did not want to hear about it, not because he did not want to face facts, but because the facts were much worse than Bannister knew.