“You have a very cute bottom,” said B.
“Why thank you, sir.” And she straightened, turning to him, and did a little girl’s curtsy. She looked about sixteen, all dimples, thighs, and pert little breasts, with short, fluffy honey-colored hair and a very sweet smile.
“Yeah, how’d you like to be in a stag film?” said Sid gruffly.
“I’d like to be in one of Mister Boris Adrian’s films,” she said, still looking at B. with something close to adoration, “I’d like that more than anything in the world.”
Boris smiled and took her hand.
“You’re very pretty, darling. What’s your name?”
“Penny. Penny Pilgrim. I’ve seen every single one of your pictures, and I think you’re the greatest director in the world.”
“Wait’ll you see his new stag film,” said Sid, “with Taylor and Burton. Terrific. We got a little distribution problem though—the projector won’t fit in the sewer.”
“How did you like the movies?” Boris asked, gently pulling her down into a chair beside them, where she sat now, properly, all little-girl goodness, feet and knees together, hands clutched in her lap, just at the hem of her panty-line mini. She made a cute but definite expression of distaste. “Gosh, I thought they were just awful. I couldn’t take it after the first two—I went outside. I think most of the girls did . . . except for, you know, a few,” adding this in sotto voice with an uneasy look around the terrace, since Teeny had been cackling and whistling throughout, shouting “Sock it to me, baby!”
“Yeah,” said Sid dryly, “well, you see, that’s what we’re up against in this new project of ours—instant audience alienation. It’s sort of a new gimmick. Something like what was in the mind of the kamikazes.”
Neither Boris nor the girl paid any attention to Sid’s remark.
“Was there any scene,” asked B., “that, you know, interested you?”
The obvious sincerity of his question, along with her avid desire to please, made the girl take it very seriously. She thought about it for a moment, her brow crinkling cutely as she did.
“No,” she finally admitted, “there honestly wasn’t—unless it was when she was making up . . . in the first one, when she was sitting at the mirror, putting on her lipstick . . . just before, well, just before what happened . . . happened.”
She said it with exactly the right combination of coyness and a self-deprecating smile, as though to acknowledge an awareness of the possibility, in their eyes, of her own provincial ignorance—though preferably innocence, natch.
“I don’t think that coon had a real cock,” said Sid, “I think it was a strap-on.”
They both continued to ignore him.
“Have you ever seen anything in a movie,” Boris pursued it, “that sort of turned you on?”
Now the girl, wanting more than anything simply to be liked, and yet not be thought of as just another “dumb little broad,” was really pressed.
“Well, I don’t know,” she said, still smiling, of course, but her smile nervous now. “I mean, gosh, I love love scenes, I mean, you know, in the movies, but these were just so . . . awful.”
“Yes, but what if they were beautiful?”
“Huh?” Her great fawn eyes widened a little more.
“What if the film were done with good actors, beautiful costumes? All very romantic. What if it were the work . . . of an artist?”
“He means maniac,” explained Sid.
“And had a three-million-dollar budget?” Boris continued. “How do you think it would look then?” he insisted of the girl.
She glanced from one to the other, wondering if they weren’t surely putting her on.
“Well, gosh, I don’t know,” she admitted. “. . .I mean, you’d actually show . . . you know, show his thing—I mean, going in and out and everything, like in the ones we saw?”
“Yes, do you think that could be beautiful?”
The darling girl seemed to gulp slightly. “Well, gosh, I . . . I really . . .”
“Or to put it another way,” interjected gross Sid, “would you be interested in the role?”
“Wait a minute, Sid,” said Boris, “I’m not saying that you can’t use inserts there—I mean, in the close-ups, on the . . . on the cock, where you show, uh, penetration . . . I’m not saying you can’t use doubles there. I mean, it’s something I haven’t thought through yet.”
The girl, obviously sympathetic to anything either of them might suggest, was troubled. “But how could you get the film . . . well, you know, how could you get it shown anywhere . . . I mean, it’s against the law, isn’t it, a film like that?”
“Aw well, you’re missing the point, baby,” said Sid brusquely, “I mean that’s the whole idea, to spend three million dollars on a film and then never show it. Don’t you think that’s sort of cute?”
“Well, gosh . . .”
She was at a loss to continue, but reprieve came with the lurching arrival of matinee idol Rex McGuire, whacked out of his skull. He was half crying and half laughing; and while it is unlikely that he was actually wearing makeup at this hour, his face was so strangely tan that the two separate streams of tears seemed to be etching furrows down each cheek. In any case, it was a grand job of weeping, thesp-wise.
“Hi guys,” he said in the sepulchral tones of the New York stage; there was almost no discernible connection between his drunkenness and his voice control as he stumbled slightly then leaned over to support himself on one arm against the rail of the terrace.
“Hey, you know what that bastard Rat Prick Harrison just said? Go on, guess what he just said.”
“That you were pissed?” hazarded Sid.
Penny Pilgrim twittered nervously, thinking what a daring thing to say to Rex McGuire, but the latter was quite impervious. “Well, you know this thing we’re doing, it was supposed to be a three-way co-production—I mean, me and him and the director were supposed to have an equal say about everything. Democratic, right? Handshake deal, right? Good faith, right? Right. Okay, so Rat Prick Les has got this little cunt he wants to use in the picture—tests her, she’s lousy, he still wants to use her. So we argue back and forth, I don’t want her, Allen don’t want her, but he still wants her. Finally we say to him, ‘Sorry, Les, but, well, it looks like the vote is two to one against you.’ And he just smiles and shakes his head. ‘No, boys,’ he says, ‘it isn’t two to one . . . it’s one to nothing.’ So now we’re going to use this lousy little cunt, and it’s going to fuck up the whole picture! How do you like that for a dirty rat-prick trick?!?”
Sid shook his head solemnly. “Gower Street is paved with the bones of guys who thought it was two to one against the Rat Prick.”
“What’s the girl’s name,” Penny wanted to know, “the girl who did get the part?”
“Name?” Rex howled like a wounded Lear. “She has no name! Her name is Lousy Little Cunt, that’s her name! That is actually her name! Incredible, isn’t it? I mean how is that going to look in lights?” He turned, facing the rest of the terrace, and moved his outstretched arm in a dramatic sweep to define an imaginary marquee. “Night Song,” he intoned gravely, “starring Rex McGuire and Lousy Little Cunt!”
“Maybe she’ll get top billing,” said Sid.
“That’s right!” yelled Rex with hysterical glee, “that’s right!”
“Or you could make it the title,” suggested Sid.
“Perfect!” shrieked Rex, and began shouting at the top of his voice, à la Olivier: “Lousy Little Cunt! Lousy Little Cunt! That’s the name of our picture!”
People nearby looked around, startled not so much by the sentiment expressed as by its sheer volume and rage-like intensity. It seemed to herald violence of some sort; and he did actually wheel about then, and fling his empty glass in the general direction of Les Harrison—bad aim though, and it shattered explosively against a driftwood candelabra. “LOUSY LITTLE CUNT!” he bellowed.
“Did someone call?” asked Teeny Marie shrilly,
with a devastatingly sweet smile as she scurried up out of nowhere.
Rex, who was prepared for a stout kick in the groin, or at least a reprimand, was not prepared for this—or perhaps was especially prepared for it—and dropped to his knees, grasping Teeny about the legs. “Oh, Teeny, Teeny,” he sobbed, “Why must everything in the world be governed by such total shits?” Then he collapsed at her feet, a quivering heap of Man-tanned muscle.
Boris had regarded the entire vignette with an expression of bemused interest. He tended to think of most things in terms of pans, angles, close-ups . . .
“Dig that,” he said, raising the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, boxed by his right into a rectangular semblance of a view-finder, focused on the curious image of the internationally famous film star crumpled at the feet of this crippled boss freak.
“Forget it,” said Sid, “he ain’t gonna sign no release.”
“Gosh, do you think he’s all right?” gasped Penny.
“Sure,” said Sid, “nothing that a kick in the gourd won’t fix,” and he raised his foot to deliver a simulated stomp on the face of the fallen Rex.
“Oh, my God,” screamed Penny, bursting into tears, “don’t, please don’t!” Not realizing, of course, that iron-in-the-soul Sid couldn’t care less, and, in fact, wouldn’t hurt a fly—especially a fly.
Boris had to comfort the girl, drawing her close, smiling, whispering: “It’s okay, it’s okay—just a little Freudian equation being worked out.”
And, natch, Sid didn’t really kick him, just pretended to, and Teeny fell on top of him, cradling his Man-tan head in her arms, closed-eyed and murmuring, “Oh my baby, my baby, my precious motherfucking baby.”
Then his agent, Bat Orkin, arrived, all loyal efficiency to Rex but hip enough to be slightly embarrassed in the presence of Boris and Sid. “I’ll take care of him, I’ll take care of him,” he kept saying, hoping for Christ’s fucking sake there were no photographers present, giving a sly wink to B. and Sid as he began to hoist and drag Rex off the terrace.
Penny was still upset—not really too upset perhaps, but did recognize the chance of expressing a bit of emotional sensitivity, and also, of course, not adverse to her cute sobbing being calmed and soothed away by boss B., and she sat down in his lap to be cuddled.
“That loony fruit,” muttered Sid, “he’s as crazy as you are, B.—except he’s working. Excuse me, I gotta get a drink,” and he got up and trudged toward the bar.
“I’ll take you home,” said Boris, very gently to the girl. “Where do you live?”
“The Studio Club,” she said, dabbing at her eyes. She couldn’t cry as well as Rex, but somehow it was more engaging.
2
SHE DIDN’T REALLY smoke pot, but she was afraid to admit it—so, after they were there, at Boris’s place, on a terrace overlooking the dark-blue twinkling lights of Hollywood (each light, natch, fraught with promise), and he, not really caring much one way or the other, lit a joint, took a couple of drags, and handed it to her, she had just enough presence of mind to accept it and say, “oh, groovy” yet could scarcely repress surprise when, after passing it back (as she knew one was supposed to), he just smiled, and didn’t take it. Suddenly she was very much in the wrong—now he would think of her as some sort of dopey flower-person, and not a serious actress at all. “But I thought you . . .” she began, holding the smoldering stick helplessly between them, “. . . well, I mean, I don’t really . . . that is, I’ve never actually . . .” She stammered, holding it at a distance now, as though it were a hateful thing which had surely destroyed their future.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, taking it from her, “it isn’t important.” And he took a few deep pokes and sat it on the ashtray. “You know . . . the thing that really attracted me to you,” he began quietly, as though thinking aloud to himself, “the thing I find really . . . beautiful, maybe even uniquely beautiful in you, at least for today—and I say this with all humility and respect, because I know you must have other qualities, and I recognize that it may be some kind of weakness in myself—not weakness exactly, but still not the sort of thing I’d like to be able to say, the sort of thing I imagine you’d like to hear . . . but the thing that makes you really . . . exceptional—well, I mean to me, anyway . . . is your ass.”
He said it with such patent, introspective, almost childish sincerity that the girl was unable to take offense. It was as though two art dealers were discussing the qualities of a Dresden mantelpiece. In her loss for a reaction, she reached out and picked up the cigarette. “Well,” she began uneasily, but then channeled that into the motion of relighting it.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” said B., “I’ve been trying to figure it out—I mean, in the aesthetic sense. I’ve seen a lot of great, marvelous asses.” Saying this in an objective, clinical way, and proceeding then to give as examples a bevy of famous nifties, about whom his familiarity with their derrières could not be questioned. “Is there such a thing as the ‘perfect ass’—and if so—what does it mean?” Then he turned to Penny, looking at her very directly, almost as if he had suddenly remembered she was there. “I don’t think it’s homosexual,” he said, and she just stared at him and nodded dumbly. “I mean I don’t care about making love to a girl in the ass . . . you know, fucking her in the ass—it isn’t that. I’m not sure what it is. I mean, why should a girl’s ass be so aesthetically erotic? Maybe it’s just something to hold on to . . . an extension of her thing, you know, her cooze.”
He reached over and took the dead cigarette from her.
“Oh sorry,” she said, a little flustered, having forgotten it entirely.
He relit it, inhaled deeply, and stared out at the blinking world, his world, below.
But Penny was the kind who couldn’t stand silence—perhaps a subconscious cultural memory of the “no dead-air” radio concept. “Well,” she said, “I just hope that, uh . . .”
He handed the joint back to her.
“Take you, for example,” he said, “I mean, what was it about . . . your bottom that was so attractive? You leaned over, right?”
She nodded.
“But I’m sure you weren’t doing it deliberately to provoke.”
“Oh no, I . . .”
He retrieved the joint.
“I don’t mean to say you may not have been vaguely aware of what was happening. I don’t mean you’re insensitive, or imperceptive, or anything like that. I just mean that you weren’t really thinking of it as your best shot. Right?”
“Oh right, yes, right.”
“And yet . . . it was.” He sighed as though at a loss with himself to understand the vagaries of human nature, mostly his own. “Maybe it was . . .”—he searched for the answer, one hand to contemplative brow—“. . . maybe it was the underwear, maybe it was something completely superficial. Here, let’s do it again. Now, how was I sitting? Yes, I was sitting like this, and you were . . . yes, you stand here, and . . .”
The girl, under his direction, obeyed like someone in hypnosis. She took her place as though adroitly hitting her mark for the big production number in My Fair Lady.
“Yes, that’s it,” said B. “Perfect. Now bend forward. Not too fast,” he reminded her, “not too fast. Easy does it . . .”
3
WHEN THE PHONE rang at one-thirty the next day, he was already half-awake, and he knew it had to be important. His instructions with the service were never to ring through unless it was a call from one of his children—four, six, and eight. He reached for the instrument which, by chance, was still draped with the tiny, ice-blue, white-trimmed panties, just as they had fallen, and he didn’t bother to unveil it when he spoke—nor yet fail to consider the irony of talking to the eight-year-old boy (who, being the eldest, always initiated the calls) with the filmy sheen and scent of Arpège against his cheek. As it happened however, it was the gross Sid, who through the ruse of mimicking the child’s voice, had outmaneuvered the vigilant service.
�
�I got it,” said Sid with an excitement that trembled, “I mean, this time I really got it—and this is no fucking shit, B., I swear to Christ!”
Boris closed his eyes again, waited about five seconds, just breathing Arpège through blue sheen, then said: “Uh, what is it you’ve got, Sid?”
“The picture! The three-million-dollar dirty picture we were talking about last night! I got the money, baby, I tell you, I got the money!”
Boris didn’t reply, nor hang up. Eyes still closed, he reached his free hand behind him over to the other side of the bed—where it came to rest, as with a homing instinct, on the girl’s perfect bottom, she lying on her stomach, her marvelous tush perked out, round and all golden down, the resilience of two rubber balls inflated to exactly the right pressure.
“Uh-huh,” said B. slowly, “that’s swell, Sid.”
“Listen,” said Sid, “I’ll be right over.”
“Uh, don’t do that, Sid.”
Sid was becoming frantic. “Oh Christ, Christ, Christ, you gotta believe me! You gotta believe me!”
Boris gently replaced the phone, then took it off the hook and laid it on the night table—but all the while he could hear Sid shouting—and in a tone he had never heard Sid use before: “You got final cut, baby! You got final fuckin’ cut!”
4
THEY MET AT six that evening at the Polo Lounge, at a table on the side which, through an arrangement with the maître d’, was permanently reserved for Sid at this hour. The arrangement, incidentally, was that Sid would lay starlet cooze on the maître d’ by letting him come to the studio on his day off and introducing him to the girl at hand as an Italian film director “who will probably use you if he gets to know you better,” lascivious wink, “know what I mean? One hand washes the other. Hee-hee-hee.” By the same token he had run up a bar bill of about five hundred dollars.
Sid was already there, drinking a Ramos gin fizz (“keeps my weight up”), when Boris arrived. They were both wearing shades, which made B. look even more weary and brooding than usual, and big Sid, in his white linen suit and green silk shirt, just plain sinister.
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