This accounted for four of the six pictures, leaving two—and these were boss and monstro. One was the nine-million-dollar vehicle for Rex McGuire, Hi There, Heartbreak, and the other a hefty sixteen-point-five, Until She Screams, starring Angela Sterling, the highest-paid darling of the silver screen—nailing, as she did, a cool one and a quarter big ones per pic, plus ten percent of the boxoroonie, going in.
In any case, these last two were the sort of projects which interested Les—and he was highly doubtful that the Morris agents who had just come in would have anything of that caliber in mind—so it was rather laconically that he returned their “Hey Les baby” big hellos.
“Saw you at the Factory the other night,” said the older, heavier one, flopping down on the couch with an exaggerated show of relaxation.
Les looked at him momentarily, raised his brows in a quizzical indication of “So what?” and said, “Oh?”
“Yeah, you were with Liz and Dickie—I didn’t come over, I figured you might be, ha ha,” a sly wink to his partner, “talking business.”
Les continued to regard him without expression, then returned the wink, “I see what you mean—ha ha,” adding the laugh very dryly indeed.
“I was there with Janie,” the agent went on hurriedly, somewhat rattled, “Janie Fonda and Vadim. Whatta gal! Having that kid didn’t affect her figure one bit—she’s still a knockout!”
Les nodded silently.
“Say, Les,” said the second agent brightly, pointing at a small painting on the wall, “isn’t that a new one?”—his purpose in this being twofold: first, to impress on his colleague how familiar he was with Les Harrison’s office; and second, that Les himself might be somewhat touched by his interest. He was aware that the latter was extremely remote, because he was just bright enough to know that Les knew (and knew that he knew that Les knew) that this sort of thing—memorizing personal details of other people’s lives, the names of their wives, their children, their tastes, their infirmities—this relentless effort to ingratiate, was the talent agent’s bag,
Les looked up to see which picture he was talking about. Aside from the portrait of his father, there were six other paintings in the room—three on each of two walls, the third wall being an expanse of window, and the fourth, behind the desk, occupied by big Dad exclusively.
“I believe you’re right,” he said. It was a blue and white Picasso, of the “Girls of Avignon” series. “Do you like it?” he turned back to the agent, smiling.
“Terrific,” said the agent, shaking his head in admiration, “fabulous! Jeez, could that guy ever paint!”
I’ll tell Kelly you like it,” said Les, jotting something on a pad, “or at least that you noticed the change.”
Kelly, as she was called, was his personal assistant, or Gal Friday—if one may receive $1,200 a week and still be considered as such; in any case, among her responsibilities was the occasional rearrangement of the office decor, including the choice of paintings—which she selected from the family collection. She regarded this duty less a privilege than a necessity, because Les Harrison—suffering from an affliction that is curiously, even notoriously, prevalent on the executive level in Hollywood—was totally color-blind. So he would tabulate remarks about his office furnishings in much the same way he would study the opinion cards filled out at film previews . . . quite objectively.
“Say, tell me something,” he said, looking from one agent to the other. “The last time you guys were in here—weren’t you wearing shades,” pointing to the younger one, who was not wearing them, “and you,” pointing to the other, who was, “weren’t. Right?”
The two exchanged looks; the older, heavier one gave a low whistle, shaking his head.
“Wow,” said the younger one softly.
“Talk about sharp,” said the heavy. “Jeez, that must’ve been . . . two, three months ago, for Chrissake.”
“How come?” asked Les.
“Huh?” The young one seemed surprised, then slightly chagrined. “Oh yeah, well, it’s . . . it’s kind of silly, I guess. I mean, it’s the old man,” referring to the head of their agency, “he said we shouldn’t both wear them at the same time—said it’s a bad image. Looks spooky, he said.” He shrugged, smiling sheepishly, gestured toward the other agent. “So today it’s his turn.”
Les nodded thoughtfully, head resting on one hand. As he gazed at each in turn, the young agent shifted about uneasily, while the one wearing the glasses had removed them and was polishing them with his tie, chuckling and muttering, “Jeez, Les, that’s some memory you got, for Chrissake!”
Les appeared to be considering it, and it seemed to please him in a vague and absent way—as though this facility might, in some degree, compensate for his being color-blind.
He cleared his throat, and started to speak, but the intercom buzzed, and he hit the switch impatiently. “Yeah, Kelly?”
“Eddie Rhinebeck on two.”
“I’m in a meeting, Kelly.”
“It’s important.”
“Shit,” he said, flicking off the intercom, and picking up the phone. “Bad news, bad news, I can smell it. Yeah, Eddie?”
He listened intently, the frown on his brow growing darker.
“You gotta be kidding,” he said finally, with a remarkable lack of conviction. He closed his eyes, and listened some more.
“The cunt,” he said then softly, through clenched teeth, “the stupid . . . irresponsible . . . vicious . . . cocksucking little cunt!” Sigh. “I just don’t believe it. Wait a minute, Eddie.”
He covered the mouthpiece and looked up at the agents.
“I’m sorry, fellas,” he said, gesturing with his hand, his cool having undergone a Jekyll-Hyde collapse, “its disasterville—I’ll have to talk to you later.”
They rose almost as one, with smiles of perfect understanding. “No biz like show biz, right, Les?” quipped the older agent, winking broadly. “Talk to you later, Les,” said the other, and with several waves of camaraderie, they went out the door.
Les uncovered the mouthpiece. “Okay, Eddie, now what the hell happened?”
Eddie Rhinebeck was the studio’s head of publicity. For the past two months his exclusive concern had been Angela Sterling and their sixteen-point-five biggie, Until She Screams, promotion of which he was handling personally. And to this end he had recently engineered what promised to be a PR coup of the very first magnitude. Through an elaborate process of fête and cajolery, he had managed to persuade a state senator and a rear admiral to allow, even insist, that the men and officers who were to serve aboard the newly commissioned battleship California “elect” the lady who would christen their ship. The choice, to be determined by popular vote, was between: (1) Dr. Rose Harkness, most recent American female Nobel Prize winner, (2) Mrs. Hannah Bove, bereaved “Gold Star Mother of the Year,” who lost three sons in Vietnam,
(3) Storm Rogers, attractive wife of the governor of California, and (4) the perfect Angela Sterling.
Studio heads (including Dad Harrison) were apprehensive about the possible outcome. (“Why take the chance—who needs it?”), but Eddie was adamant, and Les went along.
“The prestige bit can’t hurt us,” he said, “should be good for a Life cover story.”
“Yeah?” asked Dad, “so what if she loses?”
“Aw, come on, Dad, Eddie’s got the vote in his pocket, for Chrissake, he knows where it’s at.”
The old man sighed, shook his head, whistled softly: “So what if Eddie’s wrong?”
Les smiled, faint and knowing. “Eddie’s not wrong, Dad—not when his head is on the line.”
Still, there had been a certain tension, a certain malaise, while they awaited the outcome—and ample relief when it was announced that Angela had won by a veritable landslide, garnering more votes than the other three ladies combined.
Naturally this was a boss feather in Eddie’s proverbial cap, vis-à-vis Les—as likewise it was for Les, vis-à-vis Dad and the New York off
ice. So there had been an abundance of backpatting all around in anticipation of the great day—which was finally at hand, on San Francisco’s big Pier 97, with the 6,000 men and officers of the California standing at attention in full parade regalia, while on the pier itself, seated in a festively draped grandstand, not far from the beribboned bottle of bubbly, a host of notables—including three admirals, the mayor of San Francisco, the governor of the state, and the Secretary of the Navy. Ranged about them, as in ambush, was an army of newsmen and photographers, and on the periphery sat three TV camera trucks.
In order to fully exploit the event, Les had shut down production on Until She Screams for the entire day, at, needless to say, considerable expense to the studio. It would be difficult then, to exaggerate his pique in learning that Miss Sterling, the fabulous object of all these arrangements, had, in fact, failed to show.
After waiting for more than an hour, there was no alternative to getting on with it, so a substitute was chosen. Trying to replace the boss beauty simply with an everyday run-of-the-mill beauty would have been folly. Instead they chose, and quite wisely, a very pretty little girl of seven, with a pink ribbon in her hair.
This substitution might have proved satisfactory, though far from ideal, granted, had not the girl, in her inexperience, and nervousness, missed with the ribboned bottle, and worse, was carried forward by her own momentum, lost her footing, and fell from the pier and into the water below, very nearly drowning before she was pulled out. All in all, the christening and the launching had been a fiasco—the worst, according to some, in naval history.
“I’ll kill her,” Les said to Eddie, “as God is my witness, I will kill her!” Then, very softly, he began to weep. “It’s not fair, Eddie,” he said, “it’s just not fair . . . and even worse, it’s . . . it’s insulting”—he glanced at the large portrait—“. . . especially to Dad. After all he’s done for her, the cunt. I swear to God, Eddie, if we weren’t eight weeks into the picture, and her in every goddamn shot, I’d fire her ass! Right off the picture! I don’t care how much she’s worth at the box office! Right off the picture! I swear to God!”
He paused, touching at his eyes with a Kleenex, shaking his head slowly, like an old man in unspeakable grief, listening to Eddie.
“Yes, Eddie, I know, I know,” he said quietly. “She’s got us by the nuts, the cunt.”
8
11777 SUNSET BOULEVARD, a gigantic stucco edifice of lavender and antique gold, surrounded by a spiked twelve-foot wall and an actual moat, was the home of Angela Sterling—beloved sex-goddess of silver screen and living color—whose last three times out had each grossed more than previous all-time champ at the box, big GWTW.
So incredible was her public appeal that it was literally not possible to open a magazine or newspaper without being confronted by yet another elaborately footnoted chapter of her rather imaginary life—imaginary in the sense that it was almost totally fabricated by the studio publicity department. And a grand job they did, too; her “page-count-index,” by which such matters are judged, was twice as high as that of Jackie Kennedy during the latter’s climax, exposure-wise.
Approaching the house was like approaching a major studio: Impasseville at the gate. Unless you were expected, the big iron doors of the wall simply remained shut come what might. If and when they did open, it was necessary to pass a gatehouse occupied by two uniformed and armed attendants, who, after ascertaining the guest’s identity, would cause the drawbridge over the moat to lower. It was generally believed that the natural security afforded by the moat was augmented by the fact that its dark waters were seething with flesh-eating piranha fish—but this was just more “studio bullshit,” as it was sometimes called by the two men with the guns, resenting as they did the implication that they alone were not enough to protect their movie-land princess, “without a bunch of goddamn fish stinking up the joint!”
It was through these portals, and past this boss-freak vigilance, that Boris and Sid had made their way, two hours earlier. And at almost precisely the moment when the perfect Miss Sterling should have been launching a battleship, she was delightedly signing a letter of agreement to play “one of the romantic leads,” as Sid had described it, “in a film, as yet untitled and unscripted, to be directed by Boris Adrian, and to be shot in and around Vaduz, Liechtenstein, principal photography to commence within three weeks of this agreement, dated May 2, 1970.
Boris had also signed, and then Sid had been quick to add, with a flourish, his own signature following “witnessed by . . .”
“Gosh,” said the girl, all smiling radiance, clasping her hands and raising them to her throat as though to trap the ecstasy before it could flutter out and away, bluebird of happiness style, “I just never thought it could happen! I still can’t believe it!”
Sid was beaming fanatically as he folded the paper and put it in his pocket. “Oh, it’s happened all right,” he said, nodding, “yessiree bob!”
“Well,” she said breathlessly, “let’s have some champagne or something!” And she rang for the maid.
If it was curious that Angela’s pleasure about these unexpected developments was equal even to gross Sid’s, it was also understandable. Despite her monstro wealth, her incredible boss beauty, her outlandish power—or, by way of summary, her fantastic “success”—she was truly a girl bereft. Two years previous she had undergone a fast and furious affair with a New York writer who had turned her on to certain phenomena variés, existence of which she had not previously suspected. It was nothing spectacular, just the standard below-Fourteenth-Street primer, or bag o’ tricks as some called it: I Ching, Living Theatre, Lenny Bruce, The Realist, Fugs, Grateful Dead, and so on, including the voguish notion that movies should or could be “good.”
Next, of course, she had found herself at Actors Workshop—not as a member (they wouldn’t accept her) but as “a distinguished visitor from the film capital,” auditing, four hours a week. It was there she learned she knew nothing whatever about her profession, and it gave her pause.
The studio (Metropolitan Pictures) flipped—first, because she was even interested in such a crackpot thing as a New York acting school, and second, and more important, because her being rejected had made the morning papers.
Her agent, Abe “Lynx” Letterman, was nonplussed. “Look, baby,” he gently chided, “we’re walking away with one million fucking dollars a picture—is that spit?”
“It isn’t that, Abe,” she tried to explain, “it’s just that, well, there are more important things in life than . . . money.”
“Say, that really grabs me, that does,” Abe fumed, “so whatta you do with them—cut ’em up and put ’em in the freezer?”
Angela Sterling, née Helen Brown, in the Oak Cliff section of Amarillo, Texas; age fourteen, cute-as-a-button drum majorette at James Bowie High; age sixteen, voted Most Beautiful Girl in the Senior Class; age seventeen, Miss Texas; and later that same year, in Atlantic City, she received the uniquely fun-laurels of Miss America.
And now she was twenty-four, veteran trooper of the silver screen and highest paid thesp in the history of cinema. But, here, the crux: although she had appeared in seventeen pictures, starring in the last twelve, not only had she never been nominated for any award, she had scarcely received a single decent notice. Granted, one of two kindly reviewers would occasionally refer to a “certain natural ability”—comparing her in this, and other (“natural”) regards, to the late Marilyn Monroe—but her only real accolades came in the form of several thousand fan letters a week . . . exclusively in the language of the adolescent, the moron, and the sex-nut. Thus, to Angela Sterling, at this critical point in her life and career, the prospect of working with the King B. Boris was salvation itself.
“Tell you what, Angie,” big Sid cautioned, “let’s just keep this on the q.t. for the time being, okay? That way, the studio, Lynx, Les Harrison . . . they don’t know, they don’t worry—when the time is ripe, we spring it—you know, with a lot of class
y PR, the real thing. Okay?”
“Sure thing,” gushed Angie, and beamed from one to the other, “whatever you say.”
TWO
The Magic of the Lens
1
THE SPIRES, TOWERS, turrets, and snow-capped peaks which compose the storybook skyline of Vaduz, Liechtenstein, also belie its essential fifteenth-century character. Heidi-time . . . Heidi-time in Heidiville. The nearest town of consequence is Zurich, seventy miles to the west—seventy miles, that is, as the 707 flies, except there are no airports in Liechtenstein, so that the trip from Zurich to Vaduz, meandering over mountain passes by train and bus, takes three hours. Therefore the first order of business on the part of Krassman Enterprises, Ltd., was to build an airstrip. This was accomplished by capable Production Manager Morty Kanowitz and his advance unit, who bribed and otherwise cajoled a local construction firm into working round the clock, in all weathers, to complete a 3,000-foot asphalt airstrip in forty eight hours.
“How ’bout that?” said Sid, not without a trace of pride, as their chartered twin-Cessna touched down smoothly on the virgin strip. “Old Morty’s right on the ball, huh?” Saying this with a nudge and wink at B., to suggest that it was, in truth, he, Sid Krassman who was on the ball in having accomplished this important step in their operation.
“Is it long enough for a jet?” asked Boris, peering out dubiously.
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