Hollywood and Levine (2 page)

“No dice? For a hotshot screenwriter? That's hard to believe.”

“It's not so unusual. Theater people in the East look down on screenwriters. They resent the kind of money we make and take it out on us professionally. They claim we can't write seriously, that we've been compromised forever.”

“And that's why you can't find a backer for your play?”

Adrian shifted in his seat, looking glum. “It's the only reason that makes any sense to me,” he said, knitting his fingers together.

“How about some reasons that don't make any sense,” I said. “You got any of those?”

“No.” It was a cold and final “no,” the kind that generally precedes “trespassing.”

“Fair enough,” I told Adrian. The hell with it, there was no sense pushing him. “What do you want from me?”

“Find out why I'm being followed.”

“You don't have a clue?”

“None whatsoever,” he said flatly.

“Ex-wife, anything like that? Think hard, Walter. I'm not trying to be nosey, it's just that a tail can have its source in something you might think trivial or forgotten.”

He pretended to think about it, then shook his head vigorously.

“Nope, Jack. As for my ex-wife, she got alimony, and plenty of it, for three years. Then she remarried. No reason for her to have any interest in my affairs.”

I beat out a little Krupa time on the top of my desk. Adrian was as communicative as a toilet seat, but I didn't think he was holding out on me for any malicious reason. That's what bothered me: it's the ones with good intentions who get you pushed off the tops of buildings.

“What you're basically asking from me, then, is to tail the guy who's tailing you, find out who's paying him, and why.”

“That sounds about right,” Walter said vaguely. He was thinking about something else as he said it, then stood up abruptly. “You busy tonight, Jack?”

“No.”

“How about dinner at Lindy's, six-thirty? I just want to get back to the hotel and take a shower.” His eyes were pleading for a yes so I gave it to him.

“Six-thirty it is.”

I walked Adrian to the door. He opened it and suddenly gripped my upper arm.

“Jack, if I made a big mistake, would you still go to bat for me?”

“Depends on the mistake and on the bat.”

He smiled and his eyes relaxed. For the first time since he had arrived, Adrian was in the same room with me.

“I knew you would,” he said, and left.

I went back to my desk and stuck my feet up on the windowsill. The clerks at Fidelity were getting their coats and lining up at the time clock. I felt a familiar pang and wished for nothing more complicated than to punch out with them and ride the subway home to the wife, kids, and leaping pooch. Dinner, the sports pages, radio, yell at the kids a little, and bed down with my gentle and obliging missus. Not big demands, just impossible ones.

I watched the clerks file out and wondered about the possible dimensions of Walter Adrian's mistake, pretty sure that I was getting into another ungodly mess.

Adrian had gotten there ahead of me and was waiting in front of Lindy's, taller than most of the people who swept past him into the restaurant. It was a surprising night for February, mild and wet and gusty; the screenwriter's hair was blowing about wildly and he stood tightly wrapped in his raincoat like a ship's captain in an epic storm.

“Why didn't you wait inside?” I asked him.

Adrian just shrugged and we pushed through the revolving doors into the brightly lit interior. Lindy's was a famous hangout for show business types, gamblers, and dress manufacturers who thought they fit into the first two categories. The cheesecake was legendary, but I did not really like Lindy's at all; it was full of comedians, professional and amateur, who belittled each other and pretended it was done out of affection. The camaraderie and warmth was as genuine as an electric hearth.

We got a booth near the back and ordered a couple of drinks. Adrian looked better, having shaved, changed, and freshened up.

“Where did you leave him?” I asked.

“Leave who?”

“The tail.”

Our drinks arrived. The fat gray-haired waiter wanted to know if we were ready to order. When we said no, he grunted and walked away.

We clinked glasses.

“To old friendship renewed,” said Adrian, his eyes glittering. He seemed very happy.

“To crime,” I replied, delicately sipping my iced bourbon. “The tail, Walter, where did you leave him?”

“There isn't any tail, Jack. I made that up before.”

He opened up his menu and studied it.

“No tail,” I said quietly, as if to confirm it. I was surprised and not surprised. “You want to explain why you told me you were being followed, Walter?”

Adrian wouldn't lift his eyes from the menu.

“Don't be angry, Jack. I do need your help.” He finally looked up. “But I couldn't just come in off the street and spill. I had to see how I felt with you, had to chat and get comfortable. Trust is very important in something like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like what I need you for. When you asked what the problem was, I said the first thing that sounded plausible. Being followed sprang to mind. I used it in
Murder Street
.” He smiled. “Fooled you.”

“That's not so hard.”

The waiter returned and wouldn't leave until we ordered. Walter and I both opted for the brisket. The waiter tore the menus from our hands and departed.

“Okay, Walter, for real this time: what's the problem?”

The writer finished off his manhattan and coughed a bit, his cheeks flushing red. Then he folded his hands before him.

“It's kind of a long story,” he began. “The background, that is.”

“There aren't any short stories in my business.”

“So you'll be patient?”

“I'm even patient with strangers, Walter.”

He was moved by the remark. His eyes went a little wet and he nodded.

“I know, Jack. That's why I'm talking to you.” Adrian rubbed the corners of his eyes. “Okay. The short of it is that my career is on the rocks.”

“What's the long of it?”

“The long of it is that I don't know why.”

“All right, let me try and get a handle on this,” I said. “‘On the rocks' means you're not getting work?”

“It is very complicated, Jack. It's hints, rumors, feelings that I get. Plus actual tangible trouble that I'm having with Warners.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Contract trouble.” Adrian put one of those foreign butts in his mouth and lit up. I offered him a Lucky.

“For the love of God, Walter, those things smell like yak shit. Take a good old American Lucky.”

Adrian smiled and crushed out his cigarette, accepting one of mine. I lit us both up.

“This contract trouble,” the writer continued, plumes of smoke curling from his nostrils, “is very unusual, Jack. I've been on the Warners payroll since 1938 and it's the first time we've run into any problem.”

“They don't want to renew?”

He shook his head abruptly, either to shut off my line of questioning or to mute the conversation until the waiter, who was setting down our two bowls of barley soup, had departed. When he was out of earshot, Adrian leaned forward and whispered.

“They are giving us money problems.”

“And ‘us' means you and who else?”

“My agent, Larry Goldmark.” Adrian spooned some soup into his mouth, managing to drool a bit on his chin. “The bare facts are this: my current contract runs out on April 6 and we've been renegotiating since December. I was getting twenty-five hundred a week and we asked thirty-five.” He looked down into the floating barley, suddenly embarrassed by the gross amounts of money he was talking about.

“Seems fair enough to me,” I said. “The way prices are shooting up, how do they expect a fella to live on twenty-five hundred a week?”

Adrian did not find my remark amusing. T had not expected him to.

“Don't bust my nuts, Jack,” he said coldly. The writer's moods were as wildly unpredictable as an infant's. “You can't possibly understand the role of money out there.”

“I understand the role of money everywhere, Walter. It buys things: slacks, automobiles, legs of lamb, sex, fillets of fish, people.”

“No, Jack,” he continued, determined to beat his point through my head. “In the movie industry, money is a symbolic gauge of your standing. It measures you and determines your social and professional standing. Exactly and to the dime. Listen, I know the numbers are obscene, wildly out of line. In a world where people live and die in the streets, where children in the capitals of Europe go hungry, where Southern sharecroppers work from dawn to dusk for miserable, grotesque wages, that people should earn a quarter of a million dollars a year to write romance and trash is disgusting. In a decent society, in a society of equals, this wouldn't happen. I know all that, Jack.”

Adrian had raised his voice and was punctuating his words by beating his spoon on the table. A platinum blond at the next table and her companion, a fat man with a green cigar in his face, peered at us while pretending to look down at their menus.

“You took the words out of my mouth, Walter,” I told him. “Now why don't you slow down and tell me precisely what the problem is. I'll try and keep my bon mots at a minimum.”

The writer slumped back in his seat and idly ran his spoon through his soup, making little waves in the bowl.

“You see, Jack,” he said in an educational tone, “the studios use dollar amounts to pin labels on people: Big Star, Declining Star, Featured Player. Major Writer, Slipping Writer, Hack. It is very conscious and very, very cruel.”

“And you think you're slipping?”

“That's what the negotiations tell me. And I'm baffled, hurt, amazed. I've done great work for Warners in the past couple of years.
Berlin Commando
grossed three million bucks,
Boy From Brooklyn
did two-seven. That's serious dough.”

“You don't have to sell me, Walter.”

“First, they compromised at three,” Adrian went on, picking up speed. “Not what we asked for but good, very good. You never get what you ask for, that's why you ask for it. So they say yes to three and we're about to sign when they come back at us with twenty-five.”

Our steaming briskets arrived and the soup bowls were cleared. The waiter wanted to make some bad jokes at our expense by starting a “There's a hundred things on the menu and both these guys order brisket. Where you from, Cleveland?” spiel. We completely ignored him and he departed in poor humor.

“Same fucking waiters,” I muttered.

Walter picked up where he had left off, as if he had been holding his breath. “We were unhappy enough about the twenty-five, but the next day it was down to twenty-two. Like a goddamn stock market crash! I was about to leave for New York and got half-crazy, as you can well imagine. How come I suddenly had the plague? My agent told Warners they could shove the twenty-two. They told him to get wise and accept.”

“They give any reasons for this?”

“Reasons?” he bellowed. The platinum lady and the gentleman with the green cigar turned around. Walter blushed and lowered his voice. “Reasons? A collection of excuses, lame excuses, the kind they give when they want you to know they're only lame excuses. They're worried about television, they have to tighten ship, all a lot of crap.”

“Walter, this doesn't make too much sense. You're a top screenwriter, a moneymaker. If Warner Brothers is trying to force you down, go somewhere else. You'll find a studio that'll pay you what you want, no?”

Adrian picked at his brisket uneasily.

“I don't think so,” he said. “This isn't the time. My agent made some calls: Paramount, Metro, Fox, Selznick. But he couldn't say out front that Warners was trying to cut me out. It was a fishing expedition: he talked vaguely about Walter Adrian wanting to get more freedom. All he got were compliments and the stall.”

We ate in silence for a while, Adrian depressed and Le-Vine hungry. The brisket was lean and aromatic. When we finished, we ordered strawberry cheesecake and coffee, to complete a most excellent glut.

“So where does it stand right now, Walter, as we speak?”

“As we speak?” The writer played with his lip, kneading it between his fingers. “As we speak, it hardly stands at all. The agent told me to sit tight, that if we held out Warners would ultimately give us what we wanted. So I flew East with at least a little peace of mind. Last night I called the Coast.” He stared bleakly ahead. “The market has plunged again: they've gone down to seventeen-fifty. And that's just an insult, nothing else.”

“If you say so.”

Adrian's jaw muscles worked silently and fiercely. “Jack, will you please understand,” he said angrily and precisely, “that the dollar amounts are symbolic. The numbers mean they want me out.”

“Okay. Now the question is why?”

“I don't have the vaguest.”

Our cheesecake was brought forth; gloom and despair briefly vanished. We ate our strawberry-topped wedges with the solemn ecstasy of religious fanatics letting communion wafers dissolve in their mouths. When the last bites began their greased plunges to our respective stomachs, we settled back and called for more coffee. Walter was kind enough to offer me a Havana and I was smart enough to accept. We lit up and sat puffing like a pair of exiled princes. A Negro busboy cleared the dishes.

“Tough job, eh?” Walter asked the busboy in a tone of bogus comradeship.

“Yessir,” he replied softly, not looking up from his tray.

“You think seventeen hundred fish per week is a bum salary, kid?” I asked cheerily.

Now he looked up. He was light-skinned and just a boy, eighteen at the most.