The Last Don

by Mario Puzo

  “Why should he help?” Athena said. “And how? Is he in the Mafia?”

  “Of course not,” Claudia said indignantly. “He’ll help because he loves me.” She said this with pride in her voice. “And I’m the only person he really loves except for my father.”

  Athena looked at her with a frown. “Your brother sounds just a little shady. You’re very innocent for a woman working in the movies. And, by the way, how come you sleep with so many men? You’re not an actress and I don’t think you’re a tramp.”

  “That’s no secret,” Claudia said. “Why do men screw so many women?” Then she hugged Athena. “I’m off to Vegas,” she said. “Don’t move till I get back.”

  That night Athena sat on the deck and watched the ocean, black beneath the moonless sky. She went over her plans and thought fondly of Claudia. It was really funny that she could not see through her brother, but that’s what love did.

  When Claudia met with Skippy Deere later that afternoon and told him Athena’s story, they both sat in silence for a while. Then Deere said, “She left some things out. I went to see Boz Skannet to buy him off. He refused. And he warned me that if we tried any funny stuff, he’d give the papers a story that would ruin us. How Athena dumped their kid.”

  Claudia flew into a rage. “That’s not true,” she said. “Anyone who knows Athena knows she couldn’t do such a thing.”

  “Sure,” Deere said. “But we didn’t know Athena when she was twenty.”

  “Fuck you too,” Claudia said. “I’m going to fly to Vegas and see my brother Cross. He has more brains and more balls than any of you guys. He’ll straighten this out.”

  “I don’t think he can scare Boz Skannet,” Deere said. “We already gave it a good try.” But now he saw another opportunity.

  He knew certain things about Cross. Cross was looking to get into the movie business. He had invested in six of Deere’s pictures and lost money overall, so Cross wasn’t that smart. It was rumored Cross was “connected,” that he had some influence in the Mafia. But everybody was connected with the Mafia, Deere thought. That didn’t make them dangerous. He doubted that Cross could help them with Boz Skannet. But a producer always listened, a producer specialized in long shots. And besides he could always pitch Cross to invest in another picture. It was always a great help to have minor partners who had no control over the making of the picture and the finances.

  Skippy Deere paused, then said to Claudia, “I’ll go with you.”

  Claudia De Lena loved Skippy Deere despite the fact that Deere had once screwed her out of a half-million dollars. She loved Deere for his faults and the diversity of his corruption and because Skippy was always good company, all admirable qualities in a producer.

  Years ago they had worked on a picture together and had been buddies. Even then, Deere had been one of the most successful and colorful producers in Hollywood. One time on a set, the star of the movie had boasted of fucking Deere’s wife and Deere, listening off a ledge on the set three stories above him, had jumped and landed on the star’s head and broken his shoulder in addition to then smashing his nose with a good right-hand punch.

  Claudia had another memory. The two of them had been walking down Rodeo Drive and Claudia had seen a blouse in the window. It was the most beautiful blouse Claudia had ever seen. It was white with almost invisible stripes of green, so lovely it could have been painted by Monet. The store was one of those that required an appointment before you could even go in and shop, as if the owner were some great physician. No problem. Skippy Deere was a personal friend of the owner as he was a great friend of studio chiefs, the great corporate heads, the rulers of countries throughout the Western world.

  When they were in the store, the clerk told them the blouse was five hundred dollars. Claudia staggered back, held her hands on her chest. “Five hundred dollars for one blouse?” she asked. “Don’t make me laugh.”

  The clerk was staggered in his turn by Claudia’s impudence. “It’s of the finest fabric,” he said, “handmade. . . . And the green stripe is a green like no other fabric in the entire world. The price is very reasonable.”

  Deere was smiling. “Don’t buy it, Claudia,” he said. “Do you know how much it costs to get it laundered? At least thirty bucks. Every time you wear it, thirty bucks. And you have to take care of it like a baby. No food stains, and definitely you can’t smoke. If you burn a hole, bang, there goes your five hundred.”

  Claudia smiled at the clerk. “Tell me,” she said, “do I get a free gift if I buy the blouse?”

  The clerk, a beautifully dressed man, had tears in his eyes and said, “Please leave.”

  They walked out of the store.

  “Since when can a store clerk throw a customer out?” Claudia asked, laughing.

  “This is Rodeo Drive,” Skippy said. “You’re lucky you even got in.”

  The next day when Claudia arrived for work at the studio, there was a gift box on her desk. In it were a dozen of the blouses and a note from Skippy Deere: “Not to be worn except at the Oscars.”

  Claudia knew that the clerk at the store and Skippy Deere were both full of shit. She had later seen that same beautiful green stripe on a woman’s dress and on a special hundred-dollar tennis bandanna.

  And the picture she was working on with Deere was a schlock love-action film that would never come closer to an Academy Award than Deere’s appointment to the Supreme Court. But she was touched.

  And then there was the day that the picture they had worked on reached the magical one-hundred-million-dollar gross and Claudia had thought she would be rich. Skippy Deere invited her to dinner to celebrate. Skippy was bubbling over with good humor. “This is my lucky day,” he said. “The picture goes over a hundred, I got a great blow job from Bobby Bantz’s secretary, and my ex-wife got killed in a car accident last night.”

  There were two other producers at dinner with them and they both winced. Claudia thought Deere was making a joke. But then Deere said to the two producers, “I see your eyes green with envy. I save five hundred grand a year in alimony and my two kids inherit her estate, the settlement she got from me, so I don’t have to support them anymore.”

  Claudia was suddenly depressed and Deere said to her, “I’m being honest, it’s what every man would think but never say out loud.”

  Skippy Deere had paid his dues in the movie business. The son of a carpenter, he had helped his father work on the houses of movie stars in Hollywood. In one of those situations that are probable only in Hollywood, he became the lover of a middle-aged female star, who got him a job as an apprentice in her agent’s company, a prelude to getting rid of him.

  He worked hard, learning to control his fiery nature. Most of all, how to coddle Talent. How to beg hot new directors, fast-talk fresh young stars, become best friend and mentor to horseshit writers. He made fun of his own behavior, citing a great Renaissance cardinal pleading the Borgia Pope’s cause with the King of France. When the King exposed his derriere, then defecated to show his contempt for the Pope, the Cardinal exclaimed, “Oh, the ass of an angel,” and rushed to kiss it.

  But Deere mastered the indispensable hardware. He learned the art of negotiation, which he simplified to “Ask for everything.” He became literate, developing an eye for those novels that would make good movies. He could spot acting talent. He scrutinized the details of production, the different ways to steal money from the budget of a film. He became a successful producer, one who could put 50 percent of the script and 70 percent of the budget on the screen.

  It was helpful that he enjoyed reading and also that he could screen-write. Not on a totally blank piece of paper, but he was adept at crossing out scenes and revising dialogue, and could actually create pieces of action, little set pieces, which sometimes played brilliantly but were seldom necessary to the story being told. What he prided himself on, what helped his pictures achieve financial success, was that he was especially good at endings, which were almost always triumphant, the exalta
tion of good over evil—and if that didn’t fit, the sweetness of defeat. His masterpiece had been the ending of a film that dealt with the atom-bomb destruction of New York, in which all the characters came out as better human beings dedicated to the love of their fellow man, even the one who had exploded the bomb. He had to hire five extra writers to get that done.

  All this would have been worth very little to him as a producer if he had not been especially astute about finance. He pulled investment money out of thin air. Rich men doted on his company, as did the beautiful women who hung on his arm. Stars and directors enjoyed his honest and bawdy appreciation of the good things in life. He charmed development money out of studios, and he learned that it was possible to get a green light out of some studio heads with an enormous bribe. His Christmas card and Christmas gift lists were endless, to stars, to critics on newspapers and magazines, even to high-ranking law enforcement people. He called them all dear friends and when they no longer became useful he cut them from the gift list but never from the card list.

  One of the keys to being a producer was to own a property. It could be an obscure novel, unsuccessful in print, but it was something concrete you could talk about to the studio. Deere secured rights to these with five-year options at five hundred dollars a year. Or he would option a screenplay and work with the writer to shape it into something a studio would buy. That was real ditch-digging work, writers were so fragile. “Fragile” was his favorite word for people he thought jerks. It was especially useful with female stars.

  One of his most successful relationships had been with Claudia De Lena, and one of the most enjoyable. He had really liked the kid, wanted to teach her the ropes. They had spent three months together working on the script. They went out to dinner together, they played golf together (Deere had been surprised when Claudia beat him). They went to the Santa Anita race track. They swam in Skippy Deere’s pool with secretaries in bathing suits to take dictation. Claudia had even taken Deere to Vegas for a weekend at the Xanadu to meet her brother, Cross. They sometimes slept together, it was convenient.

  The picture was a great financial success, and Claudia assumed she would earn a great deal of money on the back end. She had a percentage of Skippy Deere’s percentage, and she knew that he was always positioned “upstream,” as Deere liked to call gross percentage. But what Claudia did not know was that Deere had two different percentages, one on gross, the other on net. And Claudia’s back end deal called for a piece of Skippy Deere’s net position. Which, though the picture made over $100 million, came to nothing. The Studio’s accounting procedure, Deere’s percentage of the gross, and the cost of the picture easily wiped out net profits.

  Claudia sued, and Skippy Deere settled for a small sum to preserve their friendship. When Claudia reproached him, Deere said, “This had nothing to do with our personal relationship, this is between our lawyers.”

  Skippy Deere often said, “I was human once, then I got married.” More than that, he had fallen truly in love. His excuse was that he was young, and that he had married her because even then his keen eye knew she was a talented actress. In this he was correct, but his wife, Christi, did not have that magic quality on film that translated into a star. The best she could achieve was the third female lead.

  But Deere really loved her. When he became a power in the movie industry, he did his best to make Christi a star. He called in favors from other producers, from directors, from studio chiefs, to get her big parts. In a few pictures he got her up to second female lead. But as she got older, she worked less. They had two children, but Christi became more and more unhappy and this took up a fair amount of Deere’s work time.

  Skippy Deere, like all successful producers, was insanely busy. He had to travel all over the world supervising his pictures, getting financing, developing projects. Coming in contact with so many beautiful, charming women, and needing companionship, he often had romantic liaisons, which he enjoyed with gusto, but still he loved his wife.

  One day a Development girl brought him a script that she said was perfect for Christi, a foolproof star role that would exactly suit her talent. It was a dark movie, a woman who murdered her husband for love of a young poet and then had to escape the grief of her children and the suspicions of her in-laws. Then of course found redemption. It was very outrageous baloney, but it could work.

  Skippy Deere had two problems: convincing a studio to make the movie and then convincing it to cast Christi in the part.

  He called in all his favors. He took all his money on the back end. He persuaded a top male star to take a part that was really a featured role and got Dita Tommey to direct. Everything went like a dream. Christi played the part perfectly, Deere produced the film perfectly, that is to say, 90 percent of the budget actually got up on the screen.

  During that time Deere was never unfaithful to his wife except for one night he spent in London arranging distribution, and then he fell only because the English girl was so thin he was intrigued by the logistics.

  It worked. The picture was a commercial success, he made more on the sacrificial back end than he would have on a straight deal, and Christi won the Academy Award as best actress.

  And, as Skippy Deere later said to Claudia, that was where the movie should have ended: Happily Ever After. But now his wife had found real self-esteem, now she sensed her true worth. The proof was that she became a vehicle star, she now received scripts delivered by messenger, with roles for beautiful, celluloid-magic personalities. Deere advised her to look for something more suited to her, the next picture would be crucial. He had never worried about her being faithful, indeed had conceded her the right to have fun when she was on location. But now in the few months after her Award—the toast of the town, invited to all the top parties, appearing in all the showbiz columns, courted by young actors struggling to get roles—she blossomed into a fresh young womanhood. She went out, openly, on dates with actors fifteen years her junior. The gossip journalists took note, the feminists among them cheering her on.

  Skippy Deere seemingly took this very well. He understood the whole thing. After all, why did he himself keep screwing young girls? So why begrudge his wife equal pleasure? But then again why should he continue his extraordinary efforts to further Christi’s career? Especially after she actually asked him for a role for one of her young lovers. He stopped looking for scripts for her, he stopped campaigning for her with other producers and directors and studio heads. And they, being older men, took umbrage for him in masculine brotherhood and no longer gave Christi any special consideration.

  Christi made two more pictures in a starring role; both were flops because she was miscast. And so she spent the professional credit the Award had earned for her. In three years, she was back to playing third female leads.

  By this time she had fallen in love with a young man who aspired to be a producer, indeed was very much like her husband, but he needed capital. So Christi sued for divorce, winning a huge settlement and $500,000 a year in alimony. Her lawyers never found out about Skippy’s assets in Europe, so they parted friends. And now, seven years later, she had died in an automobile accident. By that time, although she had remained on Deere’s Christmas card list, she was on his famous “Life Is Too Short” list, signifying he would not return her phone calls.

  So Claudia De Lena had a twisted affection for Deere. For his exposing his true self to others, for his living his life so blatantly in his own self-interest, for his ability to look you in the eye and call you his friend while not caring that you knew he would never perform a true act of friendship. That he was such a cheerful, ardent hypocrite. And besides, Deere was a great persuader. And he was the only man she knew who could match wits with Cross. They took the next plane to Vegas.

  BOOK IV

  Cross De Lena

  The Clericuzio

  CHAPTER 6

  BY THE TIME Cross reached the age of twenty-one, Pippi De Lena was impatient for Cross to follow his destiny. The most important fac
t in a man’s life, conceded by all, was that he must make a living. He must earn his bread, put a roof over his head and clothes on his back, and feed the mouths of his children. To do that without unnecessary misery, a man had to have a certain degree of power in the world. It followed then, as night the day, that Cross must take his place in the Clericuzio Family. To do that, it was absolutely necessary he “make his bones.”

  Cross had a good reputation in the Family. His answer to Dante when Dante told him that Pippi was a Hammer was quoted happily by Don Domenico himself, who savored the words almost with ecstasy. “I don’t know that. You don’t know that. Nobody knows that. Where did you get that fuckin’ hat?” What an answer, the Don exclaimed with delight. So young a man to be so discreet, and so witty, what a credit to his father. We must give this boy his chance. All this had been related to Pippi, and so he knew the time was ripe.

  He started to groom Cross. He sent him out on collection assignments that were difficult and required force. He discussed the old history of the Family and how operations were executed. Nothing fancy, he stressed. But when you had to get fancy, it must be planned in extreme detail. Simple was extreme simplicity. You sealed off a small geographic area and then you caught the target in that area. Surveillance first, then car and hit man, then blocking cars for any pursuers, then going to ground for a time afterward so that you could not be immediately questioned. That was simple. For fancy, you got fancy. You could dream up anything but you had to back it up with solid planning. You only got fancy when it was absolutely necessary.

  He even told Cross certain code words. A “Communion” was when the victim’s body disappeared. That was fancy. A “Confirmation” was when the body was found. That was simple.