She laughed and said, “Now, you're being catty. All right, Kay Henry. Years ago he worked for CRA, did you know them?”
“Sure. Career Representative Associates. They’re the ones who merged with my old agent, to become CNA. Career-Novak-Allied.”
Brett said, sounding grumpy, “All these damn initials. Everybody sounds like government agencies.”
I said, “You mean, like the CIA and the FBI?”
“Any of them.”
“Well,” I told him, “CIA is the Culinary Institute of America, and FBI is the Food & Beverage Institute.” He stared at me. “You’re putting me on.”
“Nope. Those are absolutely real.” Turning back to Blair, I said, “Kay Henry worked for CRA. In the mailroom?”
“No,” she said, “unfortunately not. He was a young agent here in their New York office, and he did some work for Rita Colby. She’d been pretty well known for a while, but she was just about breaking into the big time right then. What happens, the reason a lot of people change agents when they hit big, they get the feeling the agent still thinks of them as the old smalltimer. And maybe sometimes it’s the truth. Or maybe the brand new star has trouble throwing her weight around as much as she’d like, when she’s still surrounded by people who knew her when.”
Brett said, “Before her head got too big for her hat.”
“Pretty much so,” Blair agreed.
I said, “But she’s still with Henry.”
“No, wait a minute,” she said. “Rita Colby and Kay Henry were both with CRA, but he was just a lowly assistant. He was new and young, and he didn't act like he knew Rita Colby then, because he’d just got there himself. And what Colby wanted was a lap dog agent, somebody who knew how to do the job, but who would take orders and not give her a bad time.”
“Ah,” I said. I know of such agent/client relationships, and I’ve always thought they were mistakes. No matter how good you are, you’re still better off to have an objective eye around, to keep you from going off the deep end. An agent whose job is to agree with the client can maybe make the deals right, but he can’t necessarily make the right deals. I said, “So what you mean is, Rita Colby set Henry up in the agency business, with her as his first client.”
“Sure,” she said. “And he can have all the other clients he wants, but as soon as one of them starts to become important—”
“A rival,” Brett said.
“Out goes that client,” Blair finished. “Male or female, it doesn’t matter.”
“But the rest can stay,” I said, remembering that cosy clubhouse atmosphere in Kay Henry’s waiting room. Some of those people hadn’t been there to meet with Henry or his assistants at all, but merely to hang out together. For some of them, it would be a substitute for the acting career they’d originally planned. They’d earn their livings “temporarily”, waiting tables or driving cabs, and instead of the career, they’d have that false tribe over at Henry’s; comforting, accepting, encouraging, understanding. And since the agency did have Rita Colby, that one major star occasionally seen in their midst, it meant the lightning bolt could still strike.
Then there was the ambiguity of the relationship between Rita Colby and Dale Wormley; he’d escorted her to this or that function a few times, and she’d insisted on his being given the part in Four Square. Julie Kaplan was convinced there’d been nothing sexual between them, but was she necessarily right?
Was Kay Henry pimping for Rita Colby, out of the bullpen of that waiting room?
I said, “Blair, what do you know about Rita Colby’s private life?”
“What private life? Sex life, you mean?”
“I guess so, yes.”
“Nothing, thank God,” she said, with a delicate shudder.
Brett said, “She isn’t married. Not now, anyway.”
“No?”
“Seems to me,” he said, being a little awkward about it in front of Blair, “I’ve heard here and there she likes to have a handsome younger guy around sometimes.”
“Kay Henry clients?” I asked.
Blair’s eyes sparkled with the love of gossip. “Sam? Do you think so?”
“Well, as a matter of fact,” I told her, “there’s a possibility I’ll be finding out for myself, some time later today.”
28
The fellow who’d been in acting class with Dale Wormley, and who Julie had called on my behalf, was named Tom Lacroix, and we’d arranged to meet in his apartment in the East Village at three, so I walked down there after lunch with Brett and Blair. My background and persona—though not the Ed Dante name—were different for Tom Lacroix than for Kay Henry. This time, I was a freelance writer working on an article for Vanity Fair about success and failure in the arts, and the idea was that I wanted to use Dale Wormley’s life and death—the fact that he had become best-known for imitating someone more successful than himself—to illustrate some of the themes of my article. I would also, of course, be mentioning Tom Lacroix himself in the piece, as someone still teetering between those extremes of victory and defeat; but the main subject would be Wormley.
Lacroix lived on East 10th Street off 3rd Avenue, an area that hasn’t been gentrified exactly, but is moderately quiet and relatively safe, with rows of four and five story brick townhouses long ago converted to apartments and more recently converted to hot water and heat. His place was in one of these, on the fourth floor rear of a walkup. I identified myself on the intercom outside the front door, he buzzed me in, and I climbed to find him grinning down at me from the top of the stairs, saying, “I hope you’re in good shape.”
“Reasonably so,” I told him. “But I’m just as glad you’re not on six.”
“Lordy, Lordy, me, too,” he said, and I heard Texas—southwest, anyway—twanging in his voice. He was a rangy, athletic-looking fellow in his mid-twenties, with an amiable, unlined, not very memorable face. He wore jeans and a flannel shirt, and looked like the sort of actor they use to dress the bar set in beer commercials. When I reached the top of the stairs, he gave me a firm bony handshake and ushered me into an apartment approximately the size of a watch pocket. “If you sit there and I sit here,” he said, “our knees won’t bump.”
“Thanks.”
I sat where he suggested, and, true to his appearance, he asked if I’d like a beer. I said I would. “Lone Star,” he offered, “or Dos Equis?”
I laughed and said, “By God, you are from Texas, aren’t you?”
“Gave it away, did I?” He made a drat fingersnapping gesture. “Somehow, I always slip up.”
“Dos Equis,” I told him, and he crossed the room to a kind of bas-relief kitchen—all the necessary appliances in a wide shallow closet. Opening the refrigerator, he said, “I’ve noticed you Easterners tend to like glasses.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Good. Less work for mother.”
He too had chosen Dos Equis. Handing me mine, he sat in the chair facing me—it was true, our knees did not quite touch—and raised his bottle in a toast: “Remember the Alamo.”
I raised mine: “Remember the Maine. ”
He thought about that, decided it was acceptable, and said, “Carthage must be destroyed.”
“Fifty-four forty or fight,” I suggested.
“Drink before it gets warm,” he told me.
It was his house, so it was only right that he got to go last. We both drank from our bottles, and then he said, “So you write for Vanity Fair."
“I’m not on staff,” I told him, “just a freelance. In fact, this’ll be my first piece for them.”
“And it’s about success in the arts?”
“Success and failure in the arts,” I corrected. “Really, about the interface between the two.” For this impersonation, this version of Ed Dante, I’d mussed up the wig a little and thought myself into a sub-Columbo guise; a careless cerebral guy, probably not first-rate at what he does, unaware of any negative impression he might be making with his moustache and his sloppiness. Success a
nd failure, in other words; exemplifying my subject matter.
Lacroix said, “And you think Dale fits in there? The interface between success and failure?”
“Sure.” I gestured with the bottle. “You couldn’t call him a failure, he was making a living at his chosen profession. Not many do.”
His mouth curved in a rueful smile. “You can say that again.”
“But Wormley wasn’t really a success either,” I went on. “The highest he got was a parody of someone else’s success.”
“And that even got him killed,” Lacroix said, “which is about as big a failure as you can get.”
Bewildered, I said, “What do you mean?”
He seemed surprised by my surprise. “Well, Sam Holt killed him, didn’t he?”
Whoops. I had to tread carefully here. Was this the common public view of the situation, or was Lacroix’s opinion an odd one, a distortion caused by his having known Wormley? I said, “Did he? I didn’t think that had been established.”
“Oh, they’ll never get him for it,” Lacroix agreed, airily waving the Dos Equis bottle.
The old powerful-influence idea again. If only it were true. I said, “I’m not sure what the motive would be.”
“Well,” he said, the casual assurance of the uninvolved, “I don’t suppose he meant to do it, do you? There was some sort of funny history of violence between them, you know, and I guess it just got out of hand. You know,” he added, “you oughta talk to Holt, too, see what he thinks of success and failure.”
“I wrote him, as a matter of fact,” I said. “In California. Haven’t heard anything yet.”
“I bet you don’t.”
“Probably not,” I agreed. “I suppose, guilty or innocent, he’ll be keeping a low profile right now.” I brooded, partly real and partly for effect. “You know,” I said, “if Dale Wormley really was killed by Sam Holt, because he was mad at the imitation, that could screw up my whole article. I mean, the magazine might not want to touch it that way, I might have to start all over with a completely different approach.”
“You mean, forget Dale.”
“Yeah, I’m afraid so.”
“And me,” Lacroix said, with another crooked grin. “Story of my life, I’m afraid.” He drank some beer.
I said, “Well, let’s think about it. It’s only the celebrity thing that’s a real problem. You knew Wormley. If Sam Holt didn’t kill him, who else might have?” And I was astonished at how easily it had been possible to come around to ask that question directly.
I was also disappointed by Lacroix’s prompt answer: “Nobody. Or, that is, anybody who knew him might have, but that still comes out, really, to nobody. I mean, Dale was an irritation, a very irritating guy—don’t tell Julie I said that; you know, she had a different attitude toward him—but he wasn’t irritating enough to kill.”
“In what way irritating?”
“Career,” Lacroix said. “Anything at all about acting. He’d walk all over you without thinking twice. Even in class, in an exercise, he’d try to upstage you, steal the scene. People were always yelling at him to cut it out, lighten up, don’t be such an asshole.”
“Too competitive, you mean.”
“Cutthroat,” he said. “Myself, I like competition, I think it’s a good thing, but you can overdo it.”
“Sounds as though a lot of people would hold grudges against somebody like that,” I said.
“Well, sure, anybody might have,” Lacroix agreed, “if he was more successful at it. But he tried so damn hard, he screwed up most of the time. If you’ve got a guy trying to stick his thumb in your eye, but every time he makes a move he steps on his own dick instead, you can’t get really mad at him.”
I had no choice but to laugh at the image he’d conjured up, and he laughed along with me. “Still,” I said, “in fact, there are people in this world without a terrific sense of humor.”
“That’s true,” he conceded. “Down home, we say, 'Forget the Alamo, it’s over, man,’ but some people just have to be mad all the time, it’s the only way they can keep their heartbeat regular.”
“Like Dale Wormley, for instance.”
“A perfect example,” he agreed, and then he looked surprised and said, “You know, though, there is another.”
“Another what?”
“Another tough case, like Dale,” he told me. “Now, those two made a pair. But I just can’t see Matty taking it as far as all that.”
“Matty?”
“Matty Pierce.” Lacroix nodded, looking thoughtful. “He’s been in our class, part of the group, longer than me. Longer than Dale, even.”
Matty Pierce. The name rang a bell. It seemed to me Julie had said something about a Matty Pierce; not in Florida, but earlier than that, maybe in Mort’s office. I said, “Tell me about this Matty Pierce.”
“Well, one thing weird about him,” Lacroix said, “oddball, I mean, is that he’s a real New Yorker. The rest of us are all from to hell and gone, but Matty comes from Brooklyn.”
“Oh?”
“He’s kind of a tough guy,” Lacroix said, “or at least he likes to play tough guy. He grew up in some tough neighborhood out there. In fact, he still lives out there, takes the subway in.”
“I’m living in Brooklyn myself right now,” I said. “In Midwood.”
“Is there a section called Canarsie?”
“Yes. Way out by Jamaica Bay.”
“Well, that’s where Matty grew up,” Lacroix told me. “And where he still lives. The story is, they made some TV movie out there a few years ago. You know, they shot some exteriors there, used some of the neighborhood kids.”
I almost said, That's how 1 got started, which was the truth for Sam Holt but not for this journalist form of Ed Dante; so I stopped myself in time. But, in fact, I’d gotten into this career because a moive was being shot in Mineola, Long Island, where I worked as a cop on the town force. The movie people used a few of us cops as extras—to get on our good side, essentially, justify paying us some money that couldn’t be called a bribe— and someone like the way I looked in the dailies; and the rest is pop history.
Lacroix was going on, saying, “Matty got the bug, he pestered the movie people, and somebody gave him an introduction to one of the casting agencies in Manhattan. And Matty looks good, he looks like your average run-of-the-mill rotten local boy, which is what he is, so he gets extra work a lot. But what he wants is to be a star. Charles Bronson, or at the very least Robert Blake.”
“Stand in line,” I suggested.
“Oh, you know it. In two words, Matty’s getting no-where. And it makes him mad.”
“Sounds like he and Dale Wormley were born for each other,” I said.
“Sounded that way to Howard, too, for a while,” Lacroix agreed.
“Howard?”
“Howard Moffitt, our teacher.”
“Acting teacher.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well,” I said, “what changed his mind?”
“He assigned the two of them a scene together,” Lacroix told me, grinning at the memory. “From True West. The brothers are supposed to be mad at each other, and Howard figured they could use their intensity, learn to get it under control that way. We had to peel them off each other.”
“They fought?”
“It was grim,” Lacroix said, but he chuckled when he said it, and shook his head. “Howard said we’d all learned something that day.”
“Did Wormley and—What’s his name?”
“Matty Pierce.”
“Did they learn to get their intensity under control?”
“Not so’s you’d notice,” Lacroix said. “And they still hated each other afterward just as much. Maybe more.”
“I wonder,” I said, thinking about it, “if it’d be a good idea to talk to both of those people. Matty Pierce, and Howard.”
“Well, Howard, anyway,” Lacroix agreed. “If you want to talk about Dale in connection with success and failur
e, he’s the guy to see.”
“But also Matty Pierce,” I said. “If I’m going to give a rounded picture of the guy, I should have a variety of people’s viewpoints on him.”
“Could be,” he said, shrugging. “You know your business.”
“Could you help me set it up?” I asked. “Call these people, introduce me the way Julie did with you? I’d really appreciate it.”
“Well, I’ll see them both in class later today,” he said. “I could tell them about you, what you’re up to, see if they want to talk. Matty might not.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, well,” Lacroix said, grinning again, “he might feel he didn’t want to say anything bad about the dead, you know, and I know he doesn’t have anything good to say about Dale, so he might not want to say anything at all.”
“I’d particularly like to talk with him,” I said. “For the sake of balance. Tell him—Tell him I promise nothing he says will be for attribution.”
Lacroix smiled at me. “He can speak ill of the dead anonymously.”
“Not an offer you get all the time.”
“Indeed not. Okay,” he said. “I’ll be seeing them both in class later on today, I’ll ask them and see what they say.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Give me a call late tomorrow morning,” he said, “I’ll tell you what happened.”
“I appreciate it.”
Pointing at my bottle with his bottle, he said, “You done with that beer? Want another?”
“I’d better not,” I said. “I’ve still got more interviews to do this afternoon.”
“More about Dale?”
“Yes.” Then, to see what it might get me, I bounced the name off him. “Rita Colby, in fact.”
“Ah,” he said, with a knowing smile. “Now there's the interface between success and failure. It isn’t who you know, it’s who you fuck.”
“Really? Julie didn’t think—” I stopped at his little grin and headshake. “Oh,” I said. “Wormley told you so, huh?”
“Well, no,” he said. “I’ll give the lad that much, he didn’t kiss and tell. But figure it out for yourself. He meets Rita Colby through his agent. She’s separated from her husband—this is before he died—so she needs somebody to be her escort at a couple of public occasions, and Dale looked good, knew how to dress, didn’t spill things on himself when he ate, so he was it. And all of a sudden he’s walking around with this little grin, you know.”
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