Ordinary Joe

by Jon Teckman

  My main priority at work was putting together a new finance deal for PPP. Flushed with the success of Nothing Happened, Buddy was keen to move ahead with a slate of new films. I pulled in funds from all over Europe, exploiting government subsidies and intricate tax-offsetting schemes wherever possible to sweeten the deals for the investors. By the time I’d finished, Buddy had the capital he needed to give the green light to the impressive list of projects he’d been holding in development and Askett Brown had earned a healthy commission.

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  And so, just a few weeks into my new role as Director of the Entertainment and Media Division (temporary) – and complete with a new set of properly fitting teeth (permanent) – I found myself boarding the red-eye to Los Angeles to seal the deal with Buddy. I would be away from home for a week but, I thought as I boarded the plane and turned left towards Business Class, I might as well not be seeing my family in America as not seeing them in London.

  I spent my first full day in LA at my hotel acclimatising and relaxing by the swimming pool high up on the rooftop terrace. After a refreshing wake-me-up swim, I took breakfast by the pool, still wearing just my swimming shorts and a hotel robe: orange juice, coffee, French toast with maple syrup and bacon, all consumed whilst reading complimentary copies of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, sitting in the shade of a palm tree, warming in the Californian sun. All I needed was the big cigar and I was Sam Goldwyn.

  Over the next few days I had several meetings with Buddy’s people at PPP to iron out the final details of the financing package and made a trip to Rodeo Drive to buy some decent presents for Natasha and the children. When everything was sewn up, I went for lunch with the big man himself. Buddy drove me out to the coast at Santa Monica where we ate at a fabulously extravagant seafood restaurant right on the pier. He ordered a bottle of the best Californian wine on the menu and we drank a series of toasts to our friendship, to the greatest deal in the history of the movie business and to the conjoined futures of Printing Press Productions and Askett Brown.

  ‘So how’s your dick-for-brains pal, Bennett?’ Buddy asked me as he paid the bill and we rose from the table. ‘You know, I still haven’t got to the bottom of what really went on between him and Olivia. She absolutely refuses to talk about it, but the funny thing is that, whenever she has, she absolutely swears blind she’d never set eyes on the creep before that night on the beach. She must have been drunker than I thought that night. Or off her face on something stronger. It’s such a shame. She’s a beautiful and talented actress but it’s difficult to work with someone when you don’t know what they’re sticking up their nose after the director’s shouted “Cut!”’

  I’d already ruined Bennett’s career and now it looked like I was going to take Olivia down too. I knew I had to say something – to tell Buddy the truth and let him know that all this was my fault, not Bennett’s. That Olivia was neither mad nor off her face on drugs. But, once again, my courage failed me. ‘It was pretty dark on the beach,’ I said, ‘so she could have made a mistake. Or perhaps she’s been so traumatised by the whole thing that she’s trying to deny it ever happened at all. Isn’t that what some of these therapies recommend you do?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, Joey. You could be right,’ said Buddy, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and steering me towards the exit. ‘I don’t go in for that head-shrinking stuff myself. If I get depressed I just eat cheeseburgers.’ He patted his enormous stomach to underline his point. ‘As you can see, I’ve been pretty down these past few years.’

  On my final evening in LA, Buddy threw a party at his palatial home high up in the Hollywood Hills. The house boasted five large bedrooms on two levels, all of which offered incredible views across the valley. Extending out of the main entertaining room – neither ‘lounge’ nor ‘sitting room’ did this vast space justice, it was simply a room designed for throwing huge parties – was a decked terrace offering even more spectacular views, not least from the enormous hot tub, easily capable of swallowing ten people, built slightly off to one side to afford the occupants some privacy should they wish to do more than simply soak their cares away.

  A gang of hired staff roamed around serving drinks and canapés and, in one case, performing close-up magic to the delighted guests. All of them – male and female – wore the same uniform of long white frockcoats over red striped trousers – which was supposed to suggest Uncle Sam but in fact made them look like they’d escaped from an ice-cream vendors’ training school. All of them – male and female – were young, slim and strikingly attractive: foot-soldiers in the army of out-of-work actors, willing to do anything for a little money and the chance to meet a Hollywood powerbroker. All of them, that is, except one. One guy looked much older than the others, with a shock of ginger hair smeared untidily across his head, and, while most of the staff seemed eager for any opportunity to serve – scrambling to deliver a cocktail or barbecued tiger prawn to their next big chance of breaking into the movies – he stood idly, watching proceedings, serving those who approached him with all the enthusiasm of a London coffee-shop barista.

  When Buddy saw me, he called me over to join him and the small group he was standing with, introducing me with his usual hyperbole – I was the ‘miracle man’ who had saved his company and so on. The rest of the group seemed unimpressed. Miracle men are ten a penny in Hollywood.

  ‘I was just telling the guys this great story I heard about one of the studio tours,’ Buddy said after the introductions were complete, ‘you know, the ones where they take a bunch of fat rednecks around the studio lot on a golf cart? Apparently, there were these guys going round the Warner Brothers’ lot the other day, and they’re sitting in the back of the cart while the driver’s going through his spiel about what films were made on which sound stage and trying to keep his front wheels on the ground. Anyway, when they’re about halfway round they get to Sound Stage, I dunno, let’s say Ten and the driver, who’s just a college kid, says: “This is the famous Sound Stage Ten where Oliver Stone shot JFK.” And one of these fat pischers in the back shouts up: “I thought it was that commie guy who shot JFK. Whatsisname? Lee Haley Osment.” And his mate leaps in and says: “Yeah, and it wasn’t in LA, you dipshit, it was in Dallas, Texas. Don’t you know your American history, boy?” So the poor kid’s sitting there trying to remember the script and not knowing what the hell to say, when another guy chips in from the front, “Aw, lay off him, you guys. And anyways you’re both wrong. It wasn’t JFK who got shot in Dallas. It was J. R. Ewing. Now come on, already, let’s get on with the tour!” Priceless, isn’t it?’ Buddy asked, flakes of pastry flecking his lips and chin. ‘True story, I swear to God.’

  I left Buddy to his entertaining and went for a wander around his sumptuous pad. Everywhere I looked, I saw legends of every kind: demi-Gods I’d grown up with through the magic of the movies and younger stars with whom I hoped to grow old. Then I saw the one person I would rather not have bumped into that evening, the person who possibly still harboured some bizarre hopes of growing old with me. Fortunately, I spotted Olivia before she saw me and was able to duck out of sight while she handed her jacket to one adoring flunkey and accepted an extravagant fruit cocktail from another. She looked stunning. Her blonde hair was cut shorter than before, while the simple diaphanous dress she wore fought a losing battle to look casual as it flickered gently above her smoothly naked knees. Every pair of eyes turned to greet her as she entered the room, a low murmur following her casually balletic movements. An awestruck bubble of admiration for perhaps the most beautiful person in this city of beautiful people. I hunkered down behind a group of slack-jawed, junior studio execs and hoped that she might walk on by.

  She didn’t. The guys in front of me could barely contain their excitement as she advanced towards them, nor hide their disappointment when she continued past. They turned around, probably expecting to see a star of similar luminescence to Olivia, but found themselves instead looking at an ordinary bloke like
them. A bloke who, unlike them, was silently praying for the floor to open up so he could fall straight through it and keep going all the way down to Hell.

  ‘Hi Joe,’ she said, beguiling and threatening in equal measure. ‘Buddy told me you wouldn’t be here tonight. In fact, he promised me I’d never have to set eyes on you again as long as I lived.’

  All other conversation around us stopped. The strange ginger waiter approached us and almost forced Olivia to give up her half-full glass for another that was barely fuller. He didn’t offer me a drink but didn’t move away either. His uniform didn’t quite fit, as if it had been handed down to him by an older but smaller brother.

  ‘Hi Olivia,’ I said as calmly as I could, ‘how are you?’ I kissed her on both cheeks. ‘Not here,’ I whispered when my mouth was close to her ear, ‘not with so many people around.’

  She stepped back, ever the actress, in complete control of the scene. ‘We must have a proper chat sometime soon, Joe. Real soon.’ She leaned towards me and hissed in my ear: ‘John 8:45’. Then she turned on her delicate heels and disappeared back into the party.

  I had no idea what she was talking about. It sounded like another biblical reference, like the tattoo on her arm. Something from the New Testament – the Testament I hadn’t had to study in my pre-bar mitzvah Hebrew classes and had paid scant attention to in my Religious Education lessons, which I’d mostly spent playing games of pencil cricket with Nick Spencer. I could remember Don Bradman’s batting average from our all-time greatest Ashes Tests, but not a single word of the Gospels according to anyone.

  I circulated around the room and chatted to a few people, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what Olivia had said. Intrigued, I went in search of a bible.

  Almost every wall in Buddy’s house was fitted with built-in bookshelves, all of which were crammed to overflowing – with DVDs. As a voting member of both the US and British film academies, Buddy would have received hundreds of them every year, sent by the films’ distributors to encourage him to vote for their movies. Technically, these screeners remained the property of the distributors who could ask for their return at any time, and they couldn’t be loaned or given away to anyone else, but they were never recalled. So the collections of Academy members grew and grew until eventually they provided an extra layer of insulation for every wall in the successful movie executive’s house. The only printed materials I saw anywhere were dog-eared scripts, evidence of Buddy’s homework, casually littering almost every available horizontal surface.

  My search for the good book eventually took me into Buddy’s master bedroom. It looked like the kind of room you see in films about Las Vegas high-rollers. An enormous bed, draped in black satin sheets, dominated the room, which was also large enough to accommodate a three-piece red velour suite and a gigantic television, complete with cinema sound system. More DVDs and scattered scripts filled the shelves and tables. I searched for ages for any books and then found what I was looking for. Tucked in at the bottom of a small bookcase beside the bed, filed ironically between DVDs of The Ten Commandments and The Greatest Story Ever Told, I discovered an elderly, leather-bound book adorned with gilt images of six-pointed stars and seven-branched candelabra that could only have been a bible. I opened it carefully, noting from an inscription on the inside cover that it had been a bar mitzvah gift (to someone named Sidney Schulman) in 1954, and flicked through the pages in search of the Gospel according to St John – forgetting, like a schmuck, that not only would this bible stop short of the chapter I needed, but also that the whole thing was written in Hebrew, a language I remembered only sketchily, and back to front.

  I replaced the book where I’d found it and stepped back into the corridor. I’d been looking for Jesus for half an hour and it was now nine o’clock. Emerging into the bright lights of the party, I saw the funny ginger waiter holding an empty drinks tray and, beyond him, Olivia Finch being talked at by an eager young studio executive with a ponytail. I smiled and mouthed a hello, then tried to sidle past her on the pretext of having someone else to talk to.

  She grabbed my arm and dragged me towards her. ‘Where the hell were you?’ she breathed, ‘I’ve been waiting in that goddamn bathroom for fifteen minutes.’

  For once I didn’t have to feign incomprehension – I genuinely hadn’t a clue what she was talking about. She interpreted my open mouth, shrug-shouldered gesture perfectly and enlightened me. ‘I told you to meet me in the john at quarter to nine, you dummy. Don’t you understand the Queen’s English? Meet me there now, OK? You go in first and I’ll join you in two minutes.’

  I wandered back down the corridor, found the ‘john’, went in and locked the door. Then I thought I should leave it open for Olivia, so unlocked it again, but then wondered what would happen if someone else, unconnected with our arrangement, needed the facilities, so I locked it again, but then couldn’t see how she would announce herself, so I unlocked it and whistled the British national anthem loudly enough to be heard outside, so that if anyone disturbed me, I could pretend I hadn’t noticed the lock.

  Like every other room in the house, the bathroom was enormous, with a large white porcelain throne perched on top of a red velvet dais. There were twin his ’n’ hers vanity units, linked by a black marble top and a marble shelf which supported a forty-inch plasma screen and DVD player. Across the room was a two-seater wicker sofa with plump red cushions that could have been used as a vantage point either to watch the TV or observe Buddy at his toilet. Perhaps he conducted meetings while he was taking a dump. I shuddered at that thought giving an interesting vibrato to the final bars of ‘God Save the Queen’.

  I heard a faint knock at the door and was relieved, when I opened it, to see Olivia standing there rather than members of a coprophiliacs’ convention. She peered over both shoulders to check that no one had seen her joining me in the smallest (relatively speaking) room, then locked the door behind her, stepped towards me and slapped me hard across the face.

  ‘Ow! What was that for?’ I whined. In the movies I would have grabbed her arms and shaken her a bit until she melted sobbing into my embrace. But this wasn’t the movies. The bathroom wasn’t a film set and that slap hadn’t been a carefully choreographed miss accompanied by a man clapping his hands off-camera. It had been real and it had really hurt.

  ‘That was for all the horrible texts you’ve sent me since Cannes, you bastard. And for all the e-mails you didn’t even bother replying to. Why didn’t you look after me, Joe? After that awful man attacked me on the beach. I trusted you.’ There was a pause, which could have been for her to catch her breath or gather her thoughts or simply for dramatic effect, before she added, with perfectly understated passion, ‘I loved you.’

  I had no idea what texts and emails she was talking about. They would have gone to Bennett who would have answered them in his own inimitable style, fuelled by the terrible anger of his abrupt fall from grace. Then, when the company took away his phone and cancelled his e-mail account, he would have stopped receiving her messages – and stopped replying at all. While I was contemplating this, Olivia landed another ferocious smack on my left cheek.

  ‘Please stop hitting me,’ I said like an abused child, raising my hands to protect myself. ‘That’s not going to do anyone any good, is it?’

  She hit me again, this time around the back of the head, causing my glasses to fall forwards and my expensive new teeth to rattle in their moorings. ‘You speak for yourself, asshole. I’m finding it surprisingly therapeutic.’

  ‘Well, I’m not just going to stand here being slapped,’ I said, backing away from her towards the door. ‘I’m going back into the party. I’ll be happy to talk to you, Olivia, happy to explain why things are the way they are, but only where there are witnesses so you can’t hit me again. This isn’t getting us anywhere.’

  She lifted her hand again and I tensed myself for another blow. This time, though, when she brought her fingers down to my face it was to stroke the backs of them across my
reddening cheek. ‘I’m sorry, Joe,’ she said, ‘but you make me so mad. Please don’t leave.’

  ‘Let’s go out on the terrace and get a drink. It won’t matter if there are people out there if all we’re doing is talking, will it?’ I said. She nodded. ‘And keep your hands in your pockets.’

  She slid her hands down the sides of her shimmering, skimpy dress and shrugged. ‘Could be kinda difficult,’ she said with a smile. She stepped past me and planted a delicate little peck on my livid cheek. I felt a delicious tingle spread from the top of my head down to my toes, taking in all stations in between. Once again, I found myself torn between the need to do the right thing and the equally strong impulse to rip off her dress and throw her to the floor. A battle royal was being fought for my body and soul, and this time I – the real me: the caring, loving, happily married, ordinary Joe West – had to win.

  A small crowd had gathered outside the bathroom, some waiting to use the toilet, others investigating the rumours that a scuffle had been heard inside. I dare say it’s not that unusual for two or more people to emerge from the same toilet at a Los Angeles party, but people were clearly confused to see Olivia Finch emerge with a flushed, red-cheeked nonentity.

  Our friend the waiter was there, still holding an empty tray and coughing expansively into the sleeve of his jacket, like one of those royal protection officers talking into a hidden transmitter. I wouldn’t have put it past Buddy to have allocated a personal attendant to Olivia – but surely not the most disorganised, useless member of staff. Then it dawned on me. He wasn’t a waiter at all. The funny hair, the ill-fitting uniform, the implausibly poor service – Buddy must have hired a comedian to add a bit of spice to our evening. I leaned towards him and whispered discreetly in his ear. ‘I’m onto you, pal! I know your game. But I won’t say anything as long as you leave me and Ms Finch alone. So bring us a couple of drinks out onto the terrace and then bugger off. OK?’