“In the morning we’ll go to Mr. Mond,” she said. “He trusts me and I bet he’ll get the script for us.”
I was too tired to think about it. I hated the whole business: having to carry around scripts to some asshole like Bo Brimmer or old Mondschiem. I was tired of being the one smiling the shit-eating grin. Jill kept playing with me while I was trying to get to sleep. I guess she had been a late starter, I don’t know, but for once she was playing with the wrong cock. I went to sleep anyway and slept until my hangover woke me up.
The next day we drove up the hill to old Mondschiem’s. He lay on a chaise by his pool, looking like a ninety-year-old french fry, white hairs on his old brown chest. He had a big head, all right, and a jaw like an axe handle. His grandson, little Abe the butterball, was playing a game of grab-ass in the pool with a couple of Cuban teenagers he had found somewhere. The teenagers were topless, which annoyed old Aaron.
“Get ’em out,” he yelled when Jill and I walked up.
“I got no prudery, you see,” he said to Jill, “but, I mean, a lady like you shouldn’t have to see tits all over the place.”
“This is business hours!” he yelled to Abe. Abe finally dragged his blubber out of the pool and the girls ran off giggling, their little tits bouncing.
“I mean, there’s no respect,” the old man said, fixing an eye on me. “Who’s this, a foimer? Ain’t he from Texas? Football or something?”
I would have liked to pitch him out in the pool and watch him sink, but I held my peace.
“You’re da best,” he said, patting Jill’s knee. He took the script.
“If you say it’s good, I won’t even read it,” he said. “Tell me who you want, we get started. Tell me how much, ya got it. I should be so lucky, at my age, getting to woik with you, my darlin’.”
Jill was blushing. She couldn’t take compliments. “Oh, now read it,” she said.
I was glad to get out of there. What an old shitter he was. Of course, Womanly Ways had done about ten million better than anyone had thought it would. He could afford to buy himself a bigger tombstone.
“You ought to run a nursing home,” I said as we were driving downhill. “You’d be da best.”
She looked depressed. “Why does it make you so jealous that I’m nice to older people?” she said. “It doesn’t take anything away from you.”
I didn’t answer. She just looked more depressed. “Maybe I ought to give all this up anyway,” she said. “I don’t really have any business directing movies. I just have a good sense of story, that’s all. It’s just an accident I got this far—I just had that script at the right time. All this success is just some kind of dirty trick that worked.
“I don’t know why I let it become important to me,” she said a little later.
We went to a restaurant on the Strip and I had some eggs Benedict while she ate a salad. She kept talking, a mile a minute.
“You never talk to me when I need it,” she said, looking out the window. “It’s going to be awful making a movie with you if you keep on being sullen. What have I done to make you sullen?”
I didn’t explain it. Not that I knew, particularly, but even if I had known I wouldn’t have explained it. If I knew anything, it’s that you should never confess, never admit, and never explain, not with a woman. If you start doing any of that, they’ll unravel you strand by strand.
While she was playing with her coffee cup, a girl I had been fucking about a year before came in and sat down in the next booth. She was with a guy I knew vaguely, a lighting director who mostly worked in TV. The girl didn’t speak to me, I didn’t speak to her, and eventually Jill stopped talking. The girl was beautiful enough to be in pictures or on the cover of magazines or the mistress of a studio head, but she wouldn’t be any of those things. She was lazy and a dull fuck and half the time she chewed gum while she was having sex. She just forgot to get rid of it. A lighting director would be about tops for her, face or no face.
The next day old Mondschiem optioned the Western. Lulu Dickey got Sherry to agree to stay on it. Outtake opened in New York and got super reviews. Pauline Kael said it was the first honest movie about movie making. Vincent Canby saw it as an elegy to a Hollywood legend, and Judith Crist called it engaging. The kids flocked to it in droves.
Just as everybody had been about to forget us, Jill and I became news again. The Can’t Lose Couple, they called us. People Magazine wanted to do a piece on our life style, but Jill wouldn’t go along with it. The Western—we decided to call it One Tree, after the town where the madam gets hung—was budgeted at $7 million. It made Jill so nervous that she stayed up most of the night drawing pictures of my feet, or me sleeping, or whatever she could find to draw. Eventually it began to bug me. I got drunk one night and tore up all her sketches, and at that point we stopped fucking.
Old Mondschiem made us co-producers—I guess Jill talked him into it. What it meant was that we were both living under the shadow of the $7 million. In June we flew to Amarillo and drove down toward Clovis to look for locations. Jill was so scared and excited she squeezed my hand the whole flight.
We found some country down near the Palo Duro Canyon, as empty as plains can get, and six weeks from the time we picked the location we were on our way back to shoot. Anna Lyle went with us—she played a rancher’s wife, the mother of Sherry’s youthful lover.
Sherry was to arrive in three days, with Swan in tow. They had busted up, and stayed busted for a whole month, which was when she decided to do the picture. He had intended to produce her next picture, or maybe even direct it, but when he dragged himself back to her he found both jobs were filled. That wasn’t going to sit well—not at all. I knew it, and Jill knew it, too.
In eastern New Mexico the wheat was still green. We flew over a lot of wheat, and then over the scalds and broken country up the Canadian River. It wouldn’t be long before the combines rolled in from central Texas to start curling up that wheat. Once again Jill was nervous and kept squeezing my hand.
“I think I’d feel calmer if it was a war,” she said.
For a day or two she walked around West Texas as if it were paradise, her eyes as wide as they were just after we fucked. New places affected her that way. We were staying in Amarillo and shooting out north of the Canyon, near a place called Adrian.
Jill walked around looking turned on, and the crew started falling for her, one good old boy after another. I kept out of it, laid back. Let them make fools of themselves. I had a lot of other things to think about.
Sherry Solaré sort of hung on the horizon. I could feel her coming, and so could a lot of others. She was like those great banks of clouds that roll down out of Canada in June and July, beautiful and white on top, but rumbling, always rumbling, and capable of suddenly turning black on the bottom. Maybe we’d get a nice rain, an afternoon shower, even a few rainbows, and then maybe one of those black bottoms would fall out, cut loose the wind, gut the wheat, and drown every fucking thing in sight, including me. There was that waiting feeling people get on the plains when the clouds are just sort of hanging there.
She turned out to be a week late for rehearsals, and all that time she hung there. We all stayed busy and ignored it, but it hung there.
Jill began to talk too much, so much that I was ready to get a separate room. She talked half the night sometimes. The air conditioning broke down and the nights were sultry. The sheets practically dripped when we fucked—we started again while we were waiting on Sherry. You have to do something on location, particularly if you’re just sitting there, waiting for a cloud to make up its mind what it’s going to dump on you. None of us could figure out why we were even in such a business. I couldn’t even figure out why I was in it, and I had exactly the kind of job I had been hoping to get for three years.
Then she came, same coffin-lid glasses, same rat’s nest of hair, same silence, and Swan Bunting looking like he wanted to take a dull machete to us all. The hicks in the Amarillo airport stared at her like s
he was Jesus.
“Listen,” Swan said. “Our suite better be right, and I mean right.”
Sherry turned her sunglasses his way. “Ho ho, Daddy’s pissed,” she said. “Where the fuck do you think you are, Switzerland?”
After that, clams couldn’t have been more silent. Jill and I made conversation all the way back to the motel and then all the way to the set.
BOOK III
1
I WAS SITTING IN ONE OF THE COSTUME SHEDS, WATCHING IT drizzle and hating it, when Wynkyn Weil came in, his curly hair dripping. Wynkyn was Sherry’s son by her second husband, Willy Weil, the producer who drowned when his yacht sank.
“Jill, can I sit with you?” Wynkyn asked. “I don’t have my slicker.”
“Sure, Wynkyn,” I said. “Where’s the slicker?”
He sat down by me and immediately took my hand.
“Let’s hold hands,” he said. “The rain got me wet.”
I gave him a hug. Marie, one of the costume girls, was looking at him as if she’d like to brain him with a stick. Of course he took not the slightest notice of her. In regard to the crew, Wynkyn saw with his mother’s eyes, automatically distinguishing between people who were high enough up to associate with and people who weren’t. Naturally the crew hated him and denied him the affection they would have lavished on almost any other child—if only because they were bored, and homesick for their own kids. Wynkyn asked for nothing, and got nothing.
“I may have a fever already,” he said. He had almost died of pneumonia once, and of course had learned to play on his frailness. I felt his forehead.
“Nope, no fever,” I said. “All you are is wet. How come you don’t have your slicker?”
We all had slickers, big floppy yellow ones. I was beginning to think we should forget about sunlight and shoot the picture in the rain.
“Oh, my slicker’s in Sherry’s trailer, but I can’t go in and get it because she’s fucking somebody,” Wynkyn said plaintively.
Marie was so blasted that she almost knocked over a costume rack. She isn’t as sophisticated as she likes to think. Wynkyn looked at her censoriously.
I felt my face getting hot, a reaction I hate.
“I tried to go in and get my slicker because I don’t want to catch cold,” Wynkyn said, drumming his fingers on the trunk where we were sitting. “Momma said I had to go back to Hollywood if I let myself catch cold. But when I tried to go in they yelled at me. That means they’re fucking, don’t you think?”
“Maybe not,” I said. “There are lots of times when people don’t want to be disturbed.”
“Oh, but with Sherry it’s usually fucking,” Wynkyn said, examining a ring I had on. It was a small opal—I had bought it for myself, years before.
“Wynkyn, that’s not a nice word,” I said. “I don’t want to hear you using that word again.”
I meant it. The sound of it issuing from his severe little mouth made it all seem awful, everything.
“I think it was Mr. Oarson,” he added, unnecessarily. There was no one else likely. Swan Bunting was in L.A., negotiating a TV special.
“If it stops raining, will you take me riding?” he asked.
“Can’t,” I said. “If it stops raining, I have to go back to work.”
Wynkyn felt his own forehead, to see if perhaps I was wrong about his fever. “I don’t care if she does send me back to Hollywood,” he said. “Swan’s there, and he’s my only real friend.”
“Oh, really?” I said. “That’s interesting.”
Wynkyn suddenly began to talk faster, as children will.
“Yeah, because Momma’s mean to him,” he said. “She makes him eat a lot of shit . . . I mean that’s how Swan describes it. Not real shit that comes out of your ass but she talks mean and makes him cry. I’ve heard him. It’s when she says,” Oh, go jack off for all I care,’ and things like that. She says that all the time. But I never let her make me cry any more. If I let her make me cry, then she feels guilty and bores me to death kissing me and stuff later on. You know?”
Marie looked like she was about to turn green. I just sat and listened.
“It’s when she says,” Oh, go jack off, you asshole,’ or something like that, that Swan comes and plays with me. We play TV tennis, you know, where the little dot bounces around. Swan and I play that all the time. That’s when he’s my real friend.”
Before I could sort anything out in myself, Jerry, the assistant director, came in. He had a setup he wanted me to look at, in case it ever stopped raining. Actually, that was just his excuse. Jerry had gotten in love with me, or thought he had. He had never said anything, but I could see it all coming from the choked looks he kept giving me. Gauldin Edwards, the head grip, was doing the same thing, and already, with nothing being said by anyone, Gauldin and Jerry were beginning to have squabbles that were really nothing more than suppressed jealousy.
Wynkyn was still holding my hand. He ignored Jerry, who didn’t count in his system. I wish I could have ignored him, too, but I couldn’t. I could feel his desire from about twenty feet. Men’s eyes always seem to get bigger and more beseeching when that starts. Jerry’s eyes were already pretty big. He wasn’t going to be cool about it much longer.
“I can’t come right now, I’m looking after Wynkyn,” I said. “Sherry’s busy. I’ll be along in a few minutes.”
From a distance, behind him through the drizzle, I saw Anna Lyle come out of her dressing room. She made straight for the costume shed. Of course she would: it’s like my body contains a homing device, hooked into Anna, so she can always find me, particularly when I’m hoping not to have to deal with her.
The one thing Owen had been right about was that I shouldn’t have used her. The Oscar had ruined her, in a way. It hadn’t affected Pete Sweet much—he was still mostly hanging around Malibu, involved with the same hopeless women he seemed to like, but with Anna it was different. Champagne and roses had gone to her head and made her almost impossible to direct. All she had done since we got to Texas was niggle over her scenes. She kept finding subtleties in them that nobody else could sense. Of course what she was really doing was playing against Sherry. She kept trying to whittle down Sherry’s scenes and build up her own. That, among other things, was wearing me down.
Before she reached the shed Sammy slipped in the door. Sammy was the cutter; he was sixty-five and I loved him. Of course Owen said he was just another of my old men, but I never thought of Sammy as old. He had more life in his eyes than Owen had, that’s for sure. Owen’s eyes were like clouds, except when he was mad. Sammy was full of happiness. He loved his wife, he loved his kids, he loved his grandkids, and he loved his work. Today he wasn’t too joyous, though—the day before we had discovered that we had shot most of a morning with a hair in the lens. Sammy was trying to fix it, but there was still the possibility that we would have to reshoot.
But he hugged me and let me wear his cap, and we clowned a little. Wynkyn looked on solemnly. Then Anna tripped in, pretending to look dreamy. It was just an act. It bore no resemblance to her old genuine what-am-I-doing-in-this-world look.
“I just had a real good thought for the scene in the boardinghouse,” she said. “Real good, for some time when you’re not busy.”
“That’ll be Christmas Eve,” I said, holding on to Sammy so he wouldn’t leave me amid my problems. He had curly white hair, and freckles that were so old they gave him dignity. I was longing to put him in a scene, but he was too bashful.
“The missus wouldn’t like it,” he said. “Then all the women in the world would find out about me. She likes to think she’s the only one that knows, you see?”
“I know, baby,” I said. “I don’t blame her a bit.”
Anna plopped down on the trunk and gave Wynkyn a pat. He scooted away from her.
“Oh, Wynkyn, why can’t I pat you?” she asked.
Wynkyn maintained total silence, as if no one had spoken.
Meanwhile, Jerry hadn’t gone away. His face
seemed to become slightly bulbous when he was around me. One of the prop men came up looking for him, and neither of them went away. Pretty soon the whole crew would be there. I think they clustered around me for security, laughable as that would have seemed if it hadn’t been true. I was supposed to give them security, somehow—meanwhile, I hadn’t even had a second in which to deal with the knowledge of Sherry and Owen. It was there in my chest, at the bottom of my windpipe, a knot the size of a golf ball.
I thought maybe I could escape for a few minutes by getting Sammy to take me to the lab to see the footage. We even started, Wynkyn tagging along as if it was his right. What could I do? If his mother was indeed fucking my boyfriend, I couldn’t very well send her kid home to her. His highly paid nurse had disappeared. Sammy knew something was wrong with me, but Sammy is not a talker, he was just for playing with, flirting with, teasing; and anyway, we never even got to the car, much less the lab. While it was still drizzling the clouds broke and it suddenly looked like we might get to shoot. I went to deal with a problem in the sound unit that had come up yesterday but which, for some reason, no one had told me about. Someone had told Owen, who hadn’t mentioned it, no doubt because of the new thing he had on his mind.
I dealt with that, and went to look at the shot, and then it became a glorious afternoon, during which the only problem was getting Anna settled down. It took half the afternoon to get her to stop overacting and just do her scene straight, and the only thing that saved us was that Anna is so forgetful that eventually she forgot to concentrate on her new existence as an international film celebrity and sort of nodded back into the role, as if she’d just noticed it.
But I was never alone; not a minute all day, and Wynkyn was at my elbow for two hours, until his nurse finally showed up and got him. Sherry never appeared, and I didn’t see Owen until late afternoon, when I glimpsed him at a distance, talking to a wrangler.
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