5 The Boy Who Never Grew Up

by David Handler

  I nodded. Hollywood celebrities live in utter terror of loons these days. Some of it is paranoia, but not all of it. Not even maybe.

  He held his arms out to his side and spun slowly around. “How do I look to you?”

  “Terrific. Don’t change a thing.”

  “I’m wearing bullet-proof body armor. Guy said it wouldn’t show. Cost me two thousand bucks.”

  I turned to his wife. “And you?”

  “You should see this little lady on the target range,” he said. “Dead solid perfect.”

  She lowered her eyes demurely. “Now, Twinkle …”

  “I’m serious,” he said. “She’s won all kinds of badges. Sure as hell beats the pants off of me.”

  “He’s just being modest, Hoagy,” she said.

  “And the other wives can’t even begin to touch her.”

  “A lot of us shoot,” she explained. “We want to be able to defend ourselves if we have to.”

  “What do you use?” I asked her.

  “Well, I started out with a Smith and Wesson Chief Special,” she replied. “But now I prefer the Glock nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. The other ladies seem to like it, too. There’s less recoil. The trigger’s lighter, don’t you think?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I replied. “I try to get by on my wits.”

  “Some people you just can’t reason with,” Mr. Shelley pointed out.

  “In that case, I have my protector,” I said, indicating Lulu, who was sniffing delicately at a vase of yellow mums on the coffee table.

  “I go to the range with my mother every Saturday,” Mrs. Shelley said. “Pennyroyal used to come with us, but not anymore.”

  “And Matthew?”

  “He hates guns,” said Mr. Shelley.

  “Is he here at the hotel with you?” I asked.

  “No, he’s home in L.A.,” he replied. “Press downstairs all think he’s here because we used the studio jet. They have informers who tip them off about stuff like that. Only this time they’re way off.”

  “They usually are.”

  “Mommy, let’s go!” whined Sarah. “C’monnn …”

  “Okay, okay, button. We’ll be back after lunch,” she said to her husband, as she gathered up her purse.

  “Take Frank with you, Cookie,” he said. “And don’t go out the Tower entrance. The chauffeur’s waiting for you around the corner outside of the Bull and Bear.”

  “We’ll be fine, Twinkle.”

  He kissed both kids, then kissed his wife, gazing at her adoringly. “Love you,” he cooed.

  “Love you back,” she murmured. “Nice meeting you, Hoagy. Let’s go, troops!”

  And out the door they went. It seemed uncommonly silent now.

  “God, I love my kids,” he confessed. “They make it all worthwhile. All the lies. All the bullshit. You got any?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “When I see Matthew and Pennyroyal fighting over little Georgie this way …” His eyes filled with tears. “The sweetest, sunniest baby you ever saw, Hoagy. Matthew adores him. Would you believe he had a fucking circus waiting there in the front yard when she brought him home from the hospital? Elephants, clowns, chimpanzees …” The tears began streaming down his face. He was a very emotional guy. I couldn’t imagine what he was like at a Shirley Temple movie. “It’s tearing him apart, Hoagy. Me, too. Because, Christ, we love Pennyroyal. She’s family. There are no villains here. Just two people who can’t stop hurting each other. She’s a mixed-up kid. An actress, and you know what they’re like.”

  “Intimately.”

  He dabbed at his eyes with a napkin. “That was her on the phone just now. She was crying, she’s so upset about this shit in today’s paper. It’s totally one hundred percent false. She’s absolutely not pregnant.”

  “There goes my bet.”

  “Which bet?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Seems she went to see her gynecologist yesterday. Routine checkup. Somebody must have spotted her in the parking lot, followed her up there, and seen the guy’s name on the door. One thing leads to another and—”

  The phone rang.

  “Sorry. It never stops.” He limped over to the desk by the window and picked it up. “Yeah? … Yeah? … No, absolutely not. We will not give Johnny Forget gross profit participation. What do you mean, don’t we love him? We’re offering him a job, aren’t we? Name one other studio that is. He hasn’t worked in a year. He’s been in jail for attempted murder. He’s been in Betty Ford for drugs. In spite of all of that we want him—because we love him. And because the public thinks of him as Badger,” he added quickly. “But if he holds out for gross points, we’ll just get somebody else … I am not threatening you. I’m stating our final position. Take it or leave it …” No cream puff indeed. This doughboy was solid muscle inside. “Fine! Deal’s dead! Deal’s dead!” Not a bad imitation by Benjamin, either. Maybe the kid had a future in mimicry. He certainly didn’t have one in sports. “Fine! We’ll be happy to forget it! … You’re sick of ‘Forget’ jokes? Hey, I knew Johnny long before you did, pal. I knew him when he still pronounced it For-jay. He happened to be a nice, sweet French Canadian kid then. And he didn’t have a greedy scumbag like you for an agent!” He slammed down the phone and grinned at me sheepishly. “Now you know what I do all day—I’m the Abominable No Man.”

  “Ever say yes?”

  “Somebody has to be the adult.”

  “And that’s you?”

  “That’s me. Just between us, I can’t stand Johnny. The little turd’s a train wreck waiting to happen. But Matthew has to have him.”

  “His new picture is a fourth Badger Hayes?”

  “Yes,” he replied curtly. He phoned downstairs and stopped all of his calls for an hour. Then he limped out onto the terrace.

  There was a table and chairs out there, and a not terrible view of the cabs playing bumper car up and down Park Avenue. A room service cart with coffee, pastries, and fresh strawberries awaited us. Lulu followed us out and curled up under my chair. Shelley poured us coffee and snatched a Danish.

  “Don’t tell my wife,” he said, gobbling it hungrily. “She’s always on me about my weight.”

  “Not to worry. Keeping secrets is my specialty.”

  “I hope it is, Hoagy,” he said, turning serious. “I hope it is. Now, where were we?”

  “Pennyroyal.”

  “Oh, right. All this crap in the papers. Half of it is nothing more than the tabloids playing their usual tricks. Like this bit about Matthew forcing her to make love to Johnny in a bathtub while he watched them.”

  “Did he?”

  “Of course he did. That was the big love scene in Badger Goes to College, when Badger tries to change Debbie Dale’s tire and gets all covered with mud, remember? It was in the movie. He was directing the two of them.”

  I nodded, though I hadn’t actually seen Matthew Wax’s last picture. The critics had massacred it. Most everyone had stayed away. Matthew Wax, it seemed, could do nothing right these days.

  “And the rest of it?” I asked.

  “A mean-spirited smear campaign on the part of Zorch. He’s trying to get Matthew to cave in.”

  “Will he?”

  “His attorney is advising him not to.”

  “Who’s his attorney?”

  “I am,” Shelley replied, grinning.

  I tugged at my ear. “All in the family, huh?”

  “It won’t work, Hoagy. We won’t give her half of the studio. I don’t care if the Iguana smells the record or not.”

  “Which record is that?”

  “Biggest Hollywood divorce settlement of all time,” he replied. “The record right now is the $112 million Frances Lear got from Norman. Amy Irving supposedly got a hundred mil from Steve Spielberg. Zorch won’t be satisfied unless he can top both of them.”

  “Can he?”

  “Not without one hell of a court fight from us.”

  “There was no pre
nuptial agreement?”

  “None. They just ran off to Vegas like a couple of crazy kids and got married. I just wish I could get the two of them in a room together. Get them communicating again. But Zorch won’t allow it. As far as he’s concerned, this is war. It’s criminal, the way he’s using her. That’s his specialty—preying upon confused, vulnerable women. He doesn’t care what happens to her or the baby. All he cares about is headlines. She swears she gave him all of that personal stuff about Matthew in the absolute strictest confidence. He promised her it was for his ears only. As soon as he got hold of it, he ran right to the papers with it.” He shook his head, disgusted. “I mean, really, whose business is it how often Matthew Wax cuts his toenails?”

  “Not mine.”

  “He’s even got detectives following Matthew around, hoping to catch him with another woman.”

  “Will he?”

  “No way. There’s nobody else. Doesn’t stop the scumbag, though. We had to kick one off the lot the other day, passing himself off as an electrician.” He reached for another Danish and bit into it. “I’ve tried to set her straight. The poor kid’s as much a victim here as Matthew is. She’s hurting. I told her, hey, sweetie pie, Zorch works for you. You turned him loose. You want to cool things off, fire him. You know what she said to me? She said ‘You’ve never respected me, Shelley.’ Can you imagine?”

  “Is she really having an affair with Trace Washburn?”

  He nodded. “Another prime user of vulnerable women. They’ve been seen together all over town, hugging and kissing. A man Matthew once looked up to. God, what a mess.”

  “How is he holding up under all of it?”

  “He’s tearing his hair out.”

  “And where do I come in?”

  “It seems Zorch has put Pennyroyal together with a publisher,” he said. “They’re giving her over a million bucks to tell all about her life with Matthew. The dirtier the better.”

  “Who’s writing it for her?”

  “A woman named Cassandra Dee.”

  I winced.

  He noticed. “You know her?”

  “I’ve scraped her off the bottom of my shoes a couple of times.”

  “She’s not reputable?”

  “Cassandra and reputable are not two words I would put together in the same sentence. Or novella. Cassandra D’Amico is her full name. She’s a bareknuckle fighter from Bensonhurst. Got her start stringing for Page Six of the Post, then moved up—or down—to the Enquirer, depending on how you look at it. She’s now considered the mistress of the slash and burn. Did that sleazy Rock Hudson book, the unauthorized Julia Roberts bio. She works the low road. She’ll do anything to get a scoop, and I do mean anything.”

  “So I’ve been told,” he acknowledged sourly. “You can imagine how Matthew feels about it. All he keeps saying is ‘Why can’t they leave me alone?’ ”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible anymore. Once this kind of thing starts …”

  “I know, I know. That’s why I contacted you.”

  “Dueling memoirs?”

  “Exactly. Only ours will be tasteful. The self-portrait of a Hollywood genius. I’m here to talk to publishers. Can I trust any of them?”

  “No.”

  He laughed. “Then I should feel right at home. I wanted your input before I sat down with any of them.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “We’re flattered that a writer of your caliber would even be interested.”

  The stroking. It’s what they give you out there, in exchange for your self-respect. Hardly necessary in this case. We were talking guaranteed best-seller. And my self-respect was long gone.

  “We want class,” he claimed grandly. “We want depth, taste, humanity. We want you. You’re the only writer Matthew would even consider.”

  I lapped this all up in silence. I never said I didn’t like the stroking.

  “And we’ll pay you whatever you want,” he promised. “Just name your price. We won’t even dicker.”

  I sipped my coffee. “You realize, of course, that Pennyroyal may not go through with it. This may be just a scare tactic.”

  “She’ll have to go through with it,” he snarled, turning tough on me. “Because we don’t scare. We fight back. And believe me, Pennyroyal Brim has a lot more to hide than Matthew Wax does.”

  “What have you got on her?”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll have to know.”

  He hesitated. His close-set eyes met and held mine. Then he reached for another Danish, either his third or his fourth. I’d lost count. “She had an abortion her senior year of high school,” he said, gobbling.

  “Who was the father?”

  “Some kid she knew. High school boyfriend. The point is, Hoagy, she’s never been the goody-goody that the public thinks she is. That’s strictly image. We created it. We nurtured it. Very carefully.”

  “What else?”

  “What makes you think there’s anything else?”

  I didn’t bother to answer. At my feet, Lulu began to snore softly. She thinks that’s sexy, too. Trust me, it isn’t.

  Shelley cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Before Matthew discovered her, she had, well, modeled in the nude—under another name. Carla Pettibone. We own the negatives. Bought ’em outright from the shakedown artist who took ’em. I was afraid he’d try to sell them to Penthouse or somebody. I keep them locked away in my office. Sure, I know exactly what you’re thinking—I ought to leak them to the press now and smear her. But I won’t do it.”

  “That’s not what I was thinking.”

  “What were you …?”

  “I was wondering why you didn’t just destroy them.”

  “Hey, I run a studio,” he reasoned. “You never know when you might need some leverage.”

  “Like now, for instance.”

  Shelley shook his head vehemently. “She’s the mother of Matthew’s child. I won’t destroy her. I won’t stoop to Zorch’s level. No way.”

  “Any chance this photographer will resurface with another set of negatives?”

  “Zero chance. He’s dead. Somebody shot him a few weeks after I bought him off. Small wonder, the kind of business he was in. Shambazza was his name. Rajhib Shambazza. Black dude. Convinced Penny he was getting her into show business, apparently. What the hell, she was seventeen. We’ve all been victimized. We’ve all done things we’re not proud of. I didn’t care. Strictly damage control, from my point of view.”

  “And from Matthew’s?”

  “As far as he’s concerned, Pennyroyal Brim was born on the day she met him. She has zero past of her own.” He puffed out his cheeks. “And to think I was the one who encouraged them. She was a sweet kid. I thought she’d make him happy. I thought she really loved him. Not like all of the others.”

  “Others?”

  “The women out there. They’ve pursued him for years, relentlessly. He was never interested. Not even just for fucking. He was always waiting for the right girl. True love. And with Pennyroyal, he found it. Or so he thought. Now she says she needs to be free. I don’t know. Maybe she was never the girl he thought she was. Maybe … maybe he saw in her only what he wanted to see.”

  “That’s as good a definition of love as any.”

  He drained his coffee and limped over to the railing and gazed thoughtfully out at the skyline. Or maybe he was searching the windows for a sniper. “Let me tell you about Matthew Wax, Hoagy. I’ve known him since he was thirteen years old, back when I first started dating Shelley. Matthew is a child, Hoagy, a gifted, special child who just happens to be thirty-eight years old. I say this in all seriousness. I’m not overselling you. Matthew is the exact same person he was when I first met him twenty-five years ago—a meek, sensitive, trusting, nutty kid who lives in a nutty kid’s world of make-believe. It’s a fact of human nature that people never grow up if they’re constantly being rewarded for not growing up. Well, that’s Matthew. He became such a huge success at such a young
age that he never had to. He didn’t want to. And, frankly, no one else wanted him to. Let’s face it—his childlike innocence is his greatest gift as a director. Matthew is genuine. He is that little kid sitting in the front row with a box of popcorn. He believes in that happy, wonderful, cornball world he puts on the screen. He’s at his best when he’s on the set. He’s got all of his new toys to play with, and everyone does just what he tells them to. They have to—he’s the director. And he’s a real pro. He always knows what he wants. Off the set, he has the social and emotional maturity of a thirteen-year-old. Would you believe he still eats a cheeseburger, fries, and a chocolate shake for lunch every single day?”

  “Has he had his cholesterol checked lately?”

  “His idea of a fun night is eating take-out pizza and playing video games. He owns the largest private library of old TV shows in America. Has tapes of every series you’ve heard of, and a lot you haven’t. He doesn’t travel. Doesn’t entertain. Doesn’t go to parties. Doesn’t have the slightest interest in the movie business, or in playing the game. That’s why he’s never won an Oscar. He’s never even been to the Awards. Mostly, he spends his time with us and with his mom, Bunny. It drove Pennyroyal crazy after a while. She said she felt like a shut-in.” He hobbled over to the coffee pot and refilled his cup. “Don’t get me wrong—I love the big goon. Took him under my wing right from the very start. I don’t know why. I guess because I never had a kid brother, and because he needed somebody to watch out for him. That’s what I’ve done. Watch out for him.” He reached for another Danish. “People in this business, they exploit talent like his. They devour it, they destroy it, and they enjoy doing it.”

  “Tell me something I don’t already know.”

  “I made it clear from the start that they had to go through me to get at him. That’s how it’s always been. I’m his human shield. When he needed someone to negotiate his contracts, I did that. When he needed someone to produce his movies, I did that. When he needed someone to run Bedford Falls, I did that, too. I stand between him and the scum. He never gets involved in any contract squabbles. Never talks to agents. The politics, the egos, the power plays, the lying, the cheating, the back-stabbing—I handle all of that. All he’s ever wanted was the freedom to be that little boy playing with his toys. I’ve made sure he got it. I’ve devoted my life to that. Not just me—all of us have. Shelley, Bunny, Sarge …”