“Take it off your mind, Les,” Sid assured him, “she’ll be there.”
“That’s beautiful, Sid, and, uh, have her in that same outfit, okay? ‘Little Miss Marker’ . . . I mean, we’re thinking about doing remakes of the whole Shirley Temple series. Be a hell of a break for the girl who’s right for it—know what I mean?”
Sid nodded vigorously. “I’m with you, Les.”
By the time they came out of the screening room, it was about seven o’clock.
“What I see,” said Les, tight-lipped, nodding his head firmly, “I like. I like the look of it. Dad used to say, ‘Show me eight frames of film, and I’ll tell you what your picture’s going to look like!’” He repeated his, wise firm nod. “This I like the look of.”
Sid’s spirits were soaring, and his heavy gait took on the sort of prancing bounce which, on good days, he had used to saunter in and out of the executive dining room at the Metro commissary, every step reflecting outrageous confidence. He glanced at his watch. “Say, tell you what, Les—Jenny will be up to your room at eight . . . that gives you about half an hour to kill, why don’t you have a look at the terrific Casbah set we had Nicky Sanchez do for Angela’s sequence?”
Les nodded. “The kid’s a genius. I’ve said so for years. Dad discovered him, you know.”
Although it was Saturday, Sid knew that they had been shooting—but he also knew they had wrapped at five-thirty, because at about that time he had seen Helen Vrobel and a couple of the technicians come into the hotel bar when he went there to pick up Les. He was somewhat surprised, therefore, to find the heavy sound-stage door unlocked, and then inside, to see light from a distant set.
“What the hell,” snapped Les, looking at his watch and frowning, “don’t tell me you’re into overtime already!”
“Uh, no, no,” Sid assured him, falteringly, straining rather wild-eyed to see what was happening on the set beyond, “it’s probably the, uh, cleaning woman . . .”
“Cleaning women, my ass—that set is lit!” He looked furiously at his watch again, “Christ, man, it’s seven-ten Saturday night—that’s one hour and forty minutes golden time! What kind of operation is this, anyway?!?”
Then there was the unmistakable echoing snap of the clapboard, and the indistinct murmurs of: “Turning” . . . “Speed” . . . “Action” . . . and Les surged forward toward the set, only to be slammed back by the sheer visual impact of what confronted him there. It was the “double work” in progress, and all three girls were being used—or, more properly, ravished—by a dozen schwartzo-starkers in a spanking new “orgy version” of the so-called Around the Clock number, as devised by Boris and Tony that very afternoon. Three cameras were turning—the big Mitchell on the medium master-shot, taking in the entire scene, while the two Arries moved about freely, from one crotch and full-pen shot to the next . . . in and out, so to speak.
Boris, Lazlo, and a man holding a sun-gun, high-intensity portable light, were lying on their stomachs, about two feet from one of the most dramatic crotch actions occurring—Laz filming it with an Arrie, the sun-gun man lighting it from various angles, and Boris, like some mad scientist, peering through his view-finder, point-blank at the close-range crotch, and tersely whispering directions: “Slower, Simba, slower . . . raise your left leg, Gretchen . . . your left leg—oh Christ, get the translator out here. And bring the glycerin spray up, too—we’re not getting any refraction.” So that, with the German translator and the glycerin-man from Makeup, there were now five men lying on their stomachs, peering intently at the crotch and full-pen action two feet away—while the glycerin-man, at an occasional nudge from Boris, would dart a tiny burst of spray at the member when it reached full mast, poised at the very top of its downthrust, piston style—and the translator would repeat Boris’s whispers to the girl in an impassive, guttural growl.
Above, attacking each breast, was a ravenously sucking, apparently chewing great black mouth—while the lips of the girl (who appeared, of course, to be Angela herself) were eagerly wide in accepting the fourth member of this “ensemble macabre,” as Nicky had dubbed it.
This same, rather bizarre spectacle—give or take a degree or two of shock value—was being staged simultaneously on three parts of the set—so that the total graphic effect, especially for someone just coming down from six hours of Heidi-time, was considerable. Les reeled away from the scene as though taking a solid right to the jaw, and, as if that weren’t enough—like Archie Moore going down from Rocky’s monstro right and then getting the gratuitous coals-to-Newcastle left hook before he hit the canvas—even so, was Les smashed again, since, as in reeling, his eyes swept the scene, desperately searching for some explanation, only to strike, well off the periphery of the set, his Academy Award-winning art director, Nicholas Sanchez, stark naked, on hands and knees, in turbulent sexual consort with two giant blacks—avidly sucking the one in front, while writhing in catlike ecstasy from the unrelenting, full anal-pen of the one behind. It didn’t quite snap Les’s mind, but it was enough to bring forth the ultimate from his vast reservoir of righteous indignation—that, of course, being quasi-British: “WHAT THE BLOODY HELL!?!” he roared. But this only alerted the two heavies nearby—the extra “guards” they had hired, already derelict, having left the gate to catch some of the weirdness at hand, and now beset by extreme chagrin and remorse at being found out (since such jobs were not readily come by)—hence, the immediate backlash of monumental overcomp, rushing against Les, as they did, pummeling him wildly about the head and shoulders, even before Boris had looked up in dark annoyance at the interruption, recognized Les, and shouted impatiently: “Get that creep out of here!” nudging the translator, whose own relay was perhaps even more caustic, certainly more inflammatory, because then they fell upon Les in very real earnest indeed—with such vigor that it was probably only Sid’s intervention that spared him mortal injury.
“Don’t hurt him!” Sid kept repeating, frantically, as they hustled him toward the door amidst a sustained flurry of rabbit, kidney, karate, and weird Liechtensteinian knee-groin shots, “he’s okay, I tell you! I mean, Jeez, it’s . . . it’s all his money!”
11
MORTY KANOWITZ HAD taken the semiconscious Les to a private mental hospital in the big Merk, chauffeured on this special occasion by Lips Malone. Before they were halfway there, Les had started coming around, and had to be given his first morphine injection. (“Okay, he’s quiet,” Sid had told them, “let’s keep him quiet.”)
“Slow down, for Chrissake,” Mort shouted, his hypo flailing the air, “I can’t hit him, you driving like a maniac!”
Lips, who was not without a certain Jersey-flats type criminal outlook on life, was indeed driving as though from a Hollywood bank robbery, burning rubber on every curve.
“Don’t mainline him, for Chrissake,” he, too, shouting at the top of his voice, “we’ll have a fucking stiff on our hands!”
“Will you shut up! You think I don’t know what I’m doing? I was a medic with the Big Red in Normandy, for Chrissake!”
Lips, who had spent that time in prison—on various bookmaking and morals raps—was impressed. “Jeez, that’s great, Mort—I didn’t even know you been in the service!”
“You kiddin’?” demanded Mort in high dudgeon, “I give enough fixes in the Army I could be a first-class dope pusher awready!”
Posing as Les’s personal physician, Mort was able to remain at his bedside and to keep him under quite heavy, in fact, speechless, sedation for the next forty-eight hours. By way of additional security, Mort and Lips deemed it wise to wrap Les in surgical gauze, quite snugly, from head to toe—so that he now very much resembled a mummy, or a cocoon—a big, oblong packet of white gauze being fed intravenously. Mort maintained a bedside vigil, and every two hours or so, just as Les was about to come around, he would hit him with five grains of the Big M. And during this time, Boris managed to shoot two more superb scenes with Angela—one of which was fairly extraordinary in its implica
tions. It opened with her on top, sitting astride a single lover; when this had been exploited to full advantage, including several first-rate (thesp-wise) multiple orgasms on Angie’s part, they were joined by a second hulking black, who stood directly facing her, so that she, still sitting upright, could receive his full thrust orally. Quite before the novelty of this image—which was also being shot in the canopy’s mirrored reflection—could grow stale, yet two more lovers began to partake . . . standing behind her, for full, slow, and majestically sensual penetration of armpit, one on each. “The Human Cock Cushion” was how Tony referred to the scene.
Since Angie had steadfastly refused to work in direct contact with erections, it was necessary to shoot the scene—beginning with the arrival of the second lover—entirely from the rear, so that it would not be apparent that the members were, indeed, flaccid. For the actor with whom she was to simulate full-mouth pen, she had insisted upon gay Hadj as being the least likely to offend, by even so much as the merest phallic tremor beneath his stout restraint—for he was, in fact, required to wear a genital rig, not altogether unlike her own . . . a piece of heavy cloth over his member, so that she could press her face against the area in question without actually touching bare org, flaccid or no. When edited, of course, this footage would be indiscernibly intercut with the actual org-pen close-ups—one in vage, one in mouth, and one under each arm—all four going at the same time . . . moving in harmony, and in counterpoint, at varying speeds, and at different rhythms. “Like one of those Scandinavian industrials,” Boris explained, “you know, very abstract and lyrical . . . where you see pistons and things moving in close-up . . . so close sometimes you don’t even know what it is, you lose perspective. Beautiful.”
Also during the period of Les’s confinement, there had been a veritable spate of phone calls from the coast, and then a deluge of enigmatic cablegrams (“Red wing imperative potato time nil repeat nil,” that sort of thing) . . . enigmatic until realized that they were in code from C.D. Harrison himself.
For Sid it was panicville again. “Now that cocksucker will be on our backs!” He paced about rereading the gibberish.
Tony chuckled. “You’ve got to break the code, Sid—it’s our only chance. You and Lips get to work on it—I’d help you, but I’ve got to get laid.”
Sid shook the handful of cables dramatically. “You think you’re kidding, right? Well, I got news for you—we don’t send some kind of answer, he’s going to be here in twenty-four hours! Believe me, I know.”
Tony assumed a “last plane out of Lisbon” seriousness, and glanced hurriedly about the room. “There is only one man who can give you that code. I won’t speak his name, but . . . here, I’ll write it on this paper.” He tore off half a page of the script and scrawled on the back: “The Rat-Prick Man,” and handed it to Sid, who glowered at it, then crumpled it and flung it on the floor. “You know what you should of been?” he demanded, pointing angrily at Tony. “A gag-writer, that’s what—on some lousy TV show!” He paced about, muttering, “‘The Rat-Prick Man’! Jeez, you still think you’re kidding, right? Well, it just so happens that we tried that already!”
“Wouldn’t crack, huh? What’d you do, the fingernail bit? Electrodes to the prostate? I never said the ‘Prick’ didn’t have moxie—”
“What we did,” Sid interrupted firmly, “in case you are interested—and you fucking well ought to be, because I think we’re in some real trouble . . . okay, what we did, was to give him a shot of sodium whatever the hell it is—you know, the truth stuff.”
“Sodium pentothal?”
“That’s it, the truth serum, right?”
“What happened?”
Sid shrugged. “Well, seems like it don’t mix with morphine, so . . .” he shrugged again, “nothing happened . . . well, I mean he got kind of sick, or something. Started turning blue, I don’t know . . .”
Tony shook his head and gave a low whistle, “Wow, you guys must be crazy—don’t you know you could kill somebody like that?”
“Mort knows what he’s doing.”
“Mort? Morty Kanowitz? What the hell does he know?”
“He was a medic with the First Division in Normandy, that’s what.”
Tony sighed, “Oh wow.”
Boris came in from the set, and flopped down in a chair, groaning with fatigue. “Man, I never thought I’d get tired of watching people fuck—it’s really exhausting.”
“Sidney here just nearly killed Les Harrison with an O.D.,” said Tony.
“Now hold it, hold it,” Sid protested stoutly, pointing his accusing finger again at Tony. “In the first place it wasn’t me, it was Lips and Morty, and it wasn’t my idea to begin with, it was Morty’s. And in the second place, nobody said anything about being killed.”
“We got a problem,” said Boris quietly.
“Look,” Tony continued irately to Sid, “if he’s already so stoned on morphine that he can’t even talk, then you shoot him full of something else, and he starts turning blue, why that’s an overdose, for Chrissake! And people die like that every day!”
“Awright, awright. I told you awready I wasn’t even there!”
“We’ve got a problem,” Boris persisted, eyes closed.
“Oh bullshit, a minute ago you were trying to take credit for it, for Chrissake!”
“Okay, okay, let’s forget it,” and he turned to Boris, brandishing the cablegrams. “What’re we going to do about this, B.? C.D. hits this town, we’re in real trouble—believe me, I know.”
Boris sighed wearily. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you . . . he’s here.”
12
BY INFORMING C.D. that his coded cables went unanswered because Les had departed three days ago for Paris in the hope of persuading Belmondo to do the role opposite Angie, it was made to appear that they were quite deliberately trying to cover for him.
“Why that’s a damn lie,” snapped C.D. “Belmondo’s in Australia, and he knows it! He went to Paris all right, but he went there with some slut tramp of an extra! Isn’t that true, Sidney?”
“Well, C.D.,” Sid replied, waxing expansive in the manner he thought appropriate to conversing with the head of a major studio, “you know what the French always say,” and he gave the old man a salacious grin and wink. “‘Cherchez la femme!’”
“He’s sick in the head,” said C.D., “he’s got pussy-on-the-brain—that’s what’s wrong with him—the little son of a bitch!”
For the moment, Sid was able to distract C.D. with the same meaningless script and irrelevant footage, and, ironically enough, with the same Jenny Jeans whom Les had failed to nail, due to his untimely detour. Sid was required to explain to her, just before she left the set, still in her eight-year-old braids, her short, starched pinafore, her Mary Jane shoes, and her white ankle-socks, and her little-girl, white-cotton panties. “No, listen, Jen, you misunderstood—it wasn’t Les Harrison, it was C.D. Harrison—he practically owns the studio, for Chrissake. I mean, he can really do big things for you!”
“Well, I waited a couple of hours, for Chrissake.”
“Yeah, I know—he got hung up at this very important meeting—I mean, he feels terrible about it, so don’t mention it. Okay? And, you know, just sort of be nice to him.”
“You mean, like drop on him?” she asked acidly.
Sid didn’t crack. “Yeah, well, that would be swell, Jen.” He started to leave, then added, “And keep the dress and pigtails, okay, Jen?”
She glared at him, iceville. “You want me to bring a lollipop too, Sid?”
But Sid was not to be put on, now that the chips (big blue) were down. “Whatever you think, Jen,” he said with apparent innocence, “I mean, you know how much emphasis everybody puts on youth these days . . . including major producers. You just hang in there.” And he gave her a serious wink and walked slowly away, leaving her to glower after him, furious in pigtails and pinafore, her expression one of contempt for all mankind.
13
&
nbsp; ONE OF THE MORE curious aspects of C.D.’s presence was his surprising camaraderie with Lips Malone. Two people with less apparently in common would be difficult to imagine; yet they were together constantly, and it was fairly obvious—from their hushed tones and the occasional guarded exchange of confidential looks between them—that they were involved in something clandestine, or at the very least, secret from the others. Sid, especially, found it annoying; he knew that C.D. had not previously known Lips, so that whatever was happening between them could only have begun after his arrival. And Lips, of course, was scarcely more than a chauffeur, a runner, a flunky; to see him in hushed converse with the head of the world’s largest motion-picture studio was almost more than Sid could bear. “What the hell are they talking about?” he would demand of Morty, “I mean, Jeez, Lips Malone don’t know his ass from a hole in the ground—and there he’s yakking away to C.D. Harrison, for Chrissake! What the hell’s going on!?!”
Mort shrugged. “Who knows? Some kind of procurement, right? I mean, what else? He’s procuring something for the old man.”
Sid snorted. “Well, he ain’t come through with much, is he? I ain’t seen a broad yet with them two!”
Mort raised his brows. “So? Maybe the old man’s into a new bag . . . who knows?”
“Are you kiddin’?” Sid was growing irate. “That old man’s got a cunt for a brain, for Chrissake! Believe me, I know! What else could it be, for Chrissake? Dope?”
But wise Mort only shrugged. “With these two? Who knows?”
Sid’s concern, aside from the purely abstract annoyance and confusion (spiced with a dash of envy) at seeing Lips and C.D. together like that, was based on the very real fear that Lips would blow the “Les in Paris” cover story.
“He’d never do it,” said Morty. “Lips may be a lot of things, but one thing is sure, he ain’t no fink.”
Sid doubted it. “Oh yeah? The money’s right, Lips Malone is a fink—believe me, I know the type.”
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