by John Kaye
When the sky was light, Ricky left the hotel and walked down to Tiny Naylor’s, the twenty-four-hour diner on the northeast corner of La Brea and Sunset. And he—like Burk—was reading a copy of the Daily Variety, but Friday’s edition, which included a chart listing all the movies currently in production at each studio, along with the cast and other so-called “above the line” or creative personnel.
“Elliott Gould’s starring in something at Universal,” Ricky told Rose, his waitress, when she brought his coffee and a menu. “He sure got big all of a sudden. When I first got his autograph at the Funny Girl premiere, he was just some guy married to Barbra Streisand.”
Rose smiled. She was an ordinary-looking woman in her early thirties with a melancholy face and short dark hair that fit her head like a black beanie. Ricky sat in her section because he liked her not-too-bright smile, and the way she inflected the end of her sentences reminded him of Danny Lomax, a shortstop from Charlotte that he was secretly in love with in 1961, when he hit .351 and was voted Rookie of the Year in the Carolina League.
Rose said, “I hear Goldie Hawn’s doing a picture with Warren Beatty down the street at Columbia.”
“I already got her at the sneak of Cactus Flower.”
“She was good in that.”
“I didn’t see it,” Ricky said. He picked up the menu and ran his finger down the breakfast entrees. “I think I’ll have the hamburger patty and eggs, with the patty rare and the eggs up.”
“Tomatoes or potatoes?”
“Tomatoes.”
Rose plucked the menu out of Ricky’s hands and stuck it under her arm; she wrote up the order and clipped the check on the metal cylinder that spun in front of the kitchen slot. A fat black cook working over the big iron range stared at the check, then through the slot at Rose. “You know who was in here this morning?”
“Who?”
“Guess.”
“Paul Newman.”
“Guess again.”
When Rose hesitated, the cook said, “Marlon-fucking-Brando, that’s who.”
Ricky stared at the cook. He was smiling a wide smile and blisters of sweat popped off his forehead and his cheeks. Rose lit a cigarette,
leaving it burning in an ashtray while she moved down the counter, wiping away the crumbs and the coffee stains. “You’re teasing,” she said.
“Booth three,” the cook said, pointing with his right hand and using his left to crack two eggs in a frying pan that sizzled with grease. “Over there by the window. Ask Randi.”
“Ask me what?” said a bony-tough waitress who was totaling up a bill by the register.
“About Brando.”
“I waited on him. What’s the big deal?” Randi asked, speaking rather loudly as she looked in Ricky’s direction.
Ricky dropped his eyes into his lap and watched his agitated fingers refold his napkin. He knew Randi disliked him: A few weeks earlier, while he was leaving the restaurant—before the glass door had even closed behind him—he’d heard her say, “How can you stand waiting on that creep, Rose?”
“I don’t think he’s a creep,” Rose had said, springing quickly to Ricky’s defense.
“Yeah? So what do you call a guy who wears a baseball cap indoors and spends all day collecting autographs from movie stars? He’s a fucking creep if I ever saw one.”
After finishing his breakfast, Ricky left Tiny Naylor’s and walked north toward the intersection of Highland and Sunset. Once he reached the corner, he stood rigid and confused for several seconds, before he turned east, staying on the south side of the boulevard, where the stars of Gloria Grahame and Fred Astaire and several other of his favorite actors were enshrined on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. At Las Palmas, he stopped at Nate’s News and paged quickly through the latest issues of Photoplay and Modern Screen. As a general rule browsers were discouraged at Nate’s, but Phil Lasky, the grim-looking manager who roamed up and down the racks, honking “Pay or move on,” never hassled Ricky, knowing he would always purchase something, even if it was only a package of Necco wafers or Beeman’s spearmint gum.
Ricky continued east on Hollywood Boulevard. Near Seward a tall man in a wrinkled gray suit fell into step beside him. His gray hair and mustache were neatly trimmed, and he carried with him a battered black medical bag and a blue umbrella. As they passed the lurid display of lingerie in the windows of Frederick’s of Hollywood, he introduced himself to Ricky as Dr. Breeze. “What do you make of those crotchless panties? Doesn’t leave very much to the imagination, does it?” he said, tapping the tip of his umbrella sharply against the window glass. “Pretty soon they’ll be showin’ live sex in there. After that, all bets are off. Right?”
Ricky nodded but remained silent, keeping his eyes on the sidewalk and the stars passing underneath his feet.
When they paused for a red light at Cahuenga, Ricky felt the doctor’s fingers tighten on his sleeve. “How’s your health?” the doctor asked, his voice suddenly intense, his eyes large and soulless. “Tell me how you’re feeling.”
The light changed and Ricky pulled his arm away as he stepped off the curb. “I’m feeling fine,” he said.
“I can give you a checkup.”
“No, thanks.”
The doctor dug through his medical bag until he found a badly wrinkled diploma. “Here. I’m Maxwell Breeze,” he said triumphantly, trotting now to keep up. “See, I’m a board-certified dermatologist from the University of South Florida. I have many offices in Los Angeles, the nearest of which is four blocks away, behind the All American Burger on Bronson.”
Once they passed the Taft building, Ricky heard the doctor begin to wheeze. “Slow down,” he called out, his breath strained. “I can’t keep up.”
Ricky looked over his shoulder with an apologetic expression. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t. I’ve got things I have to do.”
Ricky crossed the boulevard at Wilcox and sidestepped a bedraggled group of hippies bunched in front of Do-Rite Donuts, hawking blotter acid and Malaysian hash. In the next block he encountered a girl no older than thirteen with a dazed, drugged smile on her sun-peeled face. She was wearing thigh-high red boots, silver hot pants, and a see-through blouse with a large battery-operated crucifix attached to her chest that blinked on and off. A few feet away a big-bellied man wearing just a soiled T-shirt was evacuating his bowels in the doorway of Kurtz’s electronics. “Don’t you dare look at me!” he screamed, as Ricky hurried past.
Then, just before he reached Vine, Ricky noticed a young man kneeling in the center of the sidewalk. He was thin and small-boned, and his round face was already damp with sweat as he furiously polished one of the coral terrazzo stars on the Walk of Fame.
Ricky paused and the young man looked up, probing him with his eyes as he continued to rub the chamois cloth across the nameless star in front of him. His ill-barbered hair was cut close to his skull, and next to him on the sidewalk was a can of Brasso, a root beer in a paper cup, and an open package of Hydrox cookies.
As he stared at Ricky, the young man’s eyes seemed to change from green to a deeper green—the eyes of an ageless child, Ricky thought, recalling a line from a poem he’d once read. “Will you be my friend?” the young man asked, looking in his lap and then back at Ricky’s face.
Not understanding why, exactly, but feeling united with this boy in some strange way, Ricky said, “Sure, I’ll be your friend.”
Late that same morning, when Bobby Sherwood moved into Ricky’s room at the St. Francis Arms, he would say, “I knew it would happen like this. It always does when I dream it will.”
Burk swiveled his chair and looked out the window of his office. The sky was a ceiling of deep blue, except for a few bruised clouds that were scattered over the Hollywood Hills. Directly below him a thin dark-complected man in his thirties was standing in the pale sunlight outside Stage Three, smoking a cigarette and reading the Hollywood Reporter. A gray Borsalino was tilted rakishly on his head and a shoulder holster was visible und
erneath his topcoat. Above the stage door, the red light was pulsating, indicating they were filming inside.
Laughter came from down the hallway and Burk spun around and sat back in the chair, staring at the blank walls and empty bookcases. After several seconds he picked up his phone and dialed Loretta.
“Guess what?” he said, trying to sound upbeat when she picked up. “I’ve got my own parking place. I don’t have to park in back with the rest of the peons.”
Loretta yawned. “That’s nice, Ray.”
“Al Pacino drove on the lot in front of me.”
“Ray?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought you started shooting at eight.”
“We did.”
“So how come you’re not on the set?”
Burk glanced at the memo he found on his desk when he arrived, then he said, glumly, “Warren wants to work with the actors alone for the first week. He said having the writer around right at the start might make them less spontaneous.”
“When did he tell you this?”
“He didn’t. He wrote me a memo.”
“What are you supposed to do?”
“I don’t know. I feel like shit.”
“I can imagine.”
Outside, the light above the stage door blinked off. The actor wearing the Borsalino put out his smoke with his shoe, but when he reached for the door handle Robert Evans suddenly exploded by him, into the sunlight, followed by an overweight man wearing a beard and thick horn-rimmed glasses.
“Check this out,” Burk said. “I can see Evans and Coppola arguing in front of the Godfather stage. I hear they’re way over budget.”
“Brando’s supposed to be wonderful,” Loretta said, and there was a long pause that Burk did not try to fill. “Look, Ray, I’ll be in my office around eleven. Call me if you want to talk.”
Burk sucked in his breath. “It’s fuckin’ bullshit,” he said, his voice soft but now filled with rage. “I wrote the script. I should be there, hangin’ out. That’s the whole reason I’m down here. Jesus. . . .”
Burk’s voice trailed off. Loretta said after a short silence, “I gotta go. Call me later.”
When the line clicked, Burk hung up hard and got to his feet, waiting a few moments before he called Maria Selene. Nora, her secretary, said she was on a long distance call. “That’s okay. I’ll wait,” Burk said, glancing over the interoffice mail that was placed on his desk earlier that morning, along with the memo from Warren.
According to the daily call sheet, the cast and crew would be at Griffith Park all day, shooting scenes four through nine in the newly revised script—scenes that focused on the relationship between Barbara Sinclair and Ricky Horton on the morning after their high school reunion. The night shots would be completed later that month, and the reunion itself—the movie’s opening scene—was slated for the second week. Tuesday the location would move to the Raincheck Room, a downscale bar on Santa Monica Boulevard where Tom Crumpler, the actor playing Eric Baldwin, was scheduled to step in front of the camera for the first time.
Burk had seen Crumpler earlier that morning, checking into the hotel. Slouched by his side, trying to look both interesting and bored, was a waifish blonde dressed in black velvet hip huggers and a Garboesque hat. According to Eddie Bascom, the head bellman and the hotel’s coke dealer, she was the current girl of the moment on the New York scene and “very proper pussy.”
“I already heard,” Maria told Burk when she came on the line. “Warren called Sanford last night, and Sanford got me at home this morning.”
“What did you say?”
“Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
“I said that keeping you away from the set was stupid, that Warren was acting out of fear and ego. I told him I thought your presence would be a major asset to the film.”
“If he starts improvising,” Burk said, “he’s gonna ruin the script.”
“I know. Sanford agrees, but he wants to see the dailies before he steps in.”
“That’s bullshit,” Burk said, his voice going up. “I should be on the set right now.”
“Don’t yell at me, Ray. Okay? I’m on your side. You can call and complain, but you can’t yell at me.”
Burk felt a drumroll of fear inside his chest. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“Take a drive. Go to the beach. You’re getting paid, what else do you want?”
Burk said nothing as he held the phone tight against his ear. A hummingbird zoomed by the open window and a gust of warm air blew inside, sending the call sheet off the desk on a short flight to the floor behind his chair. When he bent to pick up the paper he glanced outside: Two men with blond beards and worn Levi’s were unloading scenery from a truck parked by the stage. A secretary in red heels and a tight white miniskirt walked by, and one of the men reached out playfully to pinch her on the ass. She slapped his hand away without missing a step, saying, “You can look but you can’t touch,” and continued up the street, turning around in a circle once so they could see her dazzling smile.
The men laughed at the same time, and Burk heard the line go dead in his ear.
As Burk left the building, he passed by a suite of offices on the first floor with DICKY SOLOMON PRODUCTIONS lettered on the door. These offices were empty now—Dicky and his staff were in Hawaii shooting Curved Balls, a sitcom pilot for CBS that was based on the exploits of two retired baseball players who open up a private detective agency in Honolulu—but Burk smiled to himself, wondering what Dicky would think when he pulled into the Paramount lot the following week and observed Burk’s name on the parking space next to his.
Burk and Dicky had spoken only once since Burk was fired from the network—in January, when Sandra was convicted and sent to prison. Dicky said he’d followed her case in the LA Times, where it was on the front page of the Metro section for three straight days. “What a crazy broad. With the right plot there could be a TV movie in there someplace,” he told Burk. “Or a small feature. Great role for Ann Margret or Tuesday Weld.” Burk said he didn’t think he’d feel comfortable participating in something like that. “I don’t want you involved,” Dicky had said, his voice extremely cold. “I just wanted to check out your vibe.”
“I hope you drop the idea,” Burk had said disapprovingly, and he assumed Dicky had, because he never heard from him again, and when a list of his future projects was recently summarized in the trades, Sandra’s story was not mentioned.
After he bought a pint of Cuervo Gold and a package of beef jerky at White Horse Liquors on Western Avenue, Burk drove his rented red Mustang convertible north into Griffith Park. A sign with the Paramount logo pointed toward a parking lot adjacent to the carousel. A fat teamster sat in a folding chair by the entrance.
“Name?” he asked, looking up from the crossword puzzle in his lap. He wore blue aviator sunglasses and a black satin jacket with Larry stitched in red across the breast.
“Burk. Ray.”
The teamster picked up a clipboard and used a nicotine-stained finger to run down a list of names. “I don’t see Burk,” he said. “What do you do?”
“I’m the writer.”
“You’re not on the list.”
“So you’re telling me I can’t park here,” Burk said, louder than he intended.
The teamster shrugged. “I don’t make the rules,” he said, evading Burk’s eyes as he rocked slightly in his chair, “so don’t get in my face.”
“I’m not in your face. I’m just asking you a simple fucking question.”
The teamster shook his head in mild surprise and reached into his jacket for his walkie-talkie. “Chuck, Larry up in the lot,” he said, glancing at Burk as he spoke into the mike. “Got a problem.”
A voice crackled through the static. “What’s the deal?”
“Fella here says he’s the writer. I don’t have him on the list. You better send up Myers.”
“Will do.”
Glancing off to his
left, Burk could see the grips pulling cable and setting up lights near the carousel. Along with Hillary Yawky and Ben O’Reilly, the actors portraying Barbara Sinclair and Ricky Horton, the scene required twenty hippies—"atmosphere,” as the call sheet referred to them—but the extras he saw lounging around the set looked bogus: too many beads, bells, and Mexican serapes; costumed freaks in polka-dot bell-bottoms and fake fur vests, not the street kids he described in the script with “sickly white skin and burnt-looking eyes, shining with hate.”
Burk picked out Jon Warren amid the crew members. He was standing next to Chickie Green, the cinematographer, both of them supervising the placement of the camera. “Prick,” Burk said, under his breath, and took a long slug of tequila. When he lowered the bottle, he saw a man with a beard and long blond hair jogging across the parking lot. In his hand was a walkie-talkie with the antenna pulled out all the way.
“You really the writer?” the man asked Burk, looking at him admiringly while he caught his breath. Burk nodded and the man smiled. “Fuckin’ great script.”
Burk absorbed this compliment for a few moments before he said, “Thanks.”
“Thank you,” the man said, crouching down to extend his hand through the window. That’s when Burk noticed the coiled snake tattooed on his neck. “Snake Myers. First AD.”
“Ray Burk.”
Snake spit on the ground between his feet. “I do not know why they always have to fuck with the writer. I mean, if it wasn’t for you, none of us would be working.” Snake’s indignation and his smile made Burk’s anger begin to dissipate. “But you can rest easy, Ray, your stuff is playing excellent. Everything we got this morning was outasight.”
“What about the first scene between Barbara and Ricky?”
“What about it?”
“Did it work?”
“Work?” Snake rolled his eyes and looked at Burk, incredulous. “It fucking cooked. And they did it line for line. Ben wanted to improv part of the ending, but Warren said, and I quote, ‘When you’re ready to say what’s on the page, I’ll turn on the camera.’”