Stages (24 page)

She forgot all about Peggy. When Jason finally brought her back to the table, Ethel realized that she was gone. She’d left her dessert plate.
Probably gone to find some big gloomy tree to sit under,
Ethel thought.

“Hey, look at that,” said Jason.

Ethel turned around.

There, at one end of the dance floor, was Peggy. She was holding on to the handles of Mr. Case’s chair, and turning him around in it slowly, dreamily, in a kind of waltz of the spirit. It was as if only the two of them could hear some far-off music playing.

And on Jack’s numbed face was an unmistakable smile.

42

Working in Donny Jacobs’ office, David would later say, was a way of learning a lot of positive things by negative examples. Karen, for example, was a study in the dissolution of a dream. In her midforties, Karen was given to little-girlish gestures and self-conscious giggles. Much of her life—even the color of her hair—was unresolved. She was one of those people who often live surprisingly long lives because they are eternally waiting for something to happen to them. Karen’s drinking had made her nose red, and she always looked moist and swollen, as if she were just getting over a cold, or had been crying.

His first week on the job, David saw calls from clients and central casting alike being short-circuited by Karen’s disjointed anecdotes.

“Oh… You were in
Hud,
weren’t you? You know, I grew up in Texas, and I had a girlfriend in high school who drove a Cadillac convertible
exactly like
the one Paul Newman drove in
Hud.
Wasn’t that Brandon de Wilde, the one with the great big behind, in
Hud
too? I can’t remember…. Did he
die,
or didn’t he? Or was it John Kerr who died? You remember, Lieutenant Cable in
South Pacific?
He either died, or he might have become a lawyer, like the one who was in
Where the Boys Are
who became a nun….”

Sometimes, when the desk drawer where Mr. Smirnoff lived had been opened, Karen would simply leave the phone off the hook and flip through the Rolodex. However the morning went, by midaftenoon of each day the weather would take hold of Karen, and she would go to the window to speculate about it, or about mother-daughter relationships, which she said depended on the daughter getting married at a decent age.

“My mother used to be my mother,” Karen would say, following the vapor trail of a jet across the sky as she stood at the window. “But now she’s just a sister I fight with.” Karen fought with her boss too. David would hear muffled thumps from Jacobs’ office, and the sound of glass breaking. Then Jacobs’ voice would blare, “Stop drinking, Karen, stop
drinking.
” Or he would yell, “
There’s the door.
”
Karen never came through it, though. David would hear her whimpering and pleading, saying things like, “I thought I could just have a
little
one, because it’s so close to the holidays.”

David could not understand what had kept them together for so long, or where all the broken glass went. He never saw any of it in the wastebaskets, nor did he ever see the maid sweeping it up. After the third week of listening to the crashing and tinkling, David had begun to wonder if Karen and Jacobs had something like a laugh track of breaking glass, which they played when they were fighting, rather like his grandmother and grandfather, who had always fought when they had the family over for the Jewish holidays, while in the background Jan Peerce sang on a scratchy record.

For David one of the most frustrating things about working for Jacobs was knowing that he had clients who could and should have been working. Gradually David was getting to know a lot of these people, and they were becoming aware of him. His reassuring voice, heard over the telephone, rekindled hope in them. David knew it. He also knew that you could throw a bucket of water on an out-of-work actor and still feed the fire of ambition.

With little but the hope of the desperate to urge him on (Moses had that
plus
God’s ear), David was beginning slowly and deliberately to feel his way. First, he got to know as many of the casting people at the studios and the bigger independent production companies as he could. Then he began to investigate the ones who were on their own, and to watch closely the bigger fish, the producers and directors, whenever one of their silver sides flashed in the muddy river.

But principally David concerned himself with Jacobs’ stable of clients. He would stay up to watch the late movie in order to see a client doing an ad. He went to the clubs where young comics had to compete with cocktails. He took the red eye in order to make opening nights in New Haven and Minneapolis and even Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Gradually David began to turn up work for people, and slowly but surely they began to ask for him when they called. David had been with Jacobs a little over a year when he managed to get an actor named Forrest Reston a supporting role in a B movie. The movie became a surprise hit, and so did Forrest Reston, who seemed to cause an itch that a lot of women wanted to scratch.

Even with all the attention that was suddenly being focused on Forrest Reston, Jacobs did not notice that the actor’s agency contract had only a few months to run. A number of new clients hadn’t signed contracts; Jacobs was not aware of that either.

So the defections came as a complete surprise to him. It didn’t shock him when David announced that he was going to “do something else.” Hardly any of his assistants had lasted more than a couple of years. Jacobs assumed that David was going to return to New York and perhaps get into PR. But barely a month after his departure the news appeared in the trades.

The David Whitman Agency was opening. And among its clients was Forrest Reston. Five other familiar names were on the list too.

As Donny Jacobs stood there in front of her, bellowing and shredding the copy of
Variety
in which this news had been published, Karen sat transfixed.
You get your punishment in this life,
her mother had always said. Now, right before her eyes, was the spectacle of Donny getting his just desserts. He’d come to look like a piece of raw liver anyway—and here he was at last hopping about on the hot coals, purple in the face and sizzling.

“Traitor!” Jacobs was shrieking. “The enemy within!”

“What’s wrong with a little competition?” Karen asked. She was running smoothly on the vodka, her breath odorless but heavy with vapors.

Jacobs flew at her.

“You knew about this!”

He was wrapping a phone wire around her neck when another phone rang.

Rather than commit murder Jacobs answered it.

It was his banker.

The starlet from Oklahoma City Donny had recently “adopted” (she was sixteen) had cleaned out their joint bank account to the tune of two hundred and eighty thousand dollars.

When the doctor, who wore a pince-nez and drove a Daimler, showed up a half hour later, he pronounced Donny Jacobs on the verge of a stroke.

Jacobs was taken by ambulance to a sanatorium with horseback riding outside San Diego, where his system was purged with grapefruit and papaya juice. While he was confined there, Karen moved back to Galveston with a young waiter she had met in one of the clubs where David had taken her to see a client. She and the waiter both got jobs in a restaurant, and they planted tomatoes in their backyard. Karen sent a postcard to David, on the back of which she wrote:
I wonder how sixteen years could have passed like a dream. Have you ever heard of suspended animation? I think sometimes a thing like that can happen with happiness. If you don’t have that one great big feeling of love, you don’t feel much of anything else.

Donny Jacobs surfaced again, having ridden out the tempest on an island of blended fruit drinks. He quickly hired a new assistant, a middle-aged woman who had the special competence of someone with nothing to lose or gain, and he began to plot his revenge.

David’s client list grew steadily. So did his income. He rented a house in the Hollywood Hills, which, within a year, he was able to buy. He leased a Porsche in the name of his corporation. He started buying his clothes on Rodeo Drive, at stores like Giorgio and Battaglia and Mr. Guy. Beautiful young women attached themselves like fresh carnations to his spiffy new lapels.

More and more frequently David was being invited to the parties where people made their important connections, and increasingly he was being recognized at those parties.

It was at a party thrown by the producer of the movie that had given Forrest Reston his big break that David met the person destiny—or something else—had intended for him. Like virtually everyone in Hollywood, David respected Weinberger the producer for coming up with a formula that worked. Weinberger thrilled teen audiences by slicing up on the screen tender butterball adolescents just like themselves. His movies were as ritualistic as a Thanksgiving dinner, from the carving knife to the picked-clean bones. Weinberger specialized in finger-licking violence, in gratification on the level of food and sex. So naturally he had made a ton of money.

He lived in Bel Air, in a white brick palace on a road as narrow as a driveway that snaked through a hollow darkened by hedges. On the night of the party David had been invited to there were lined up before the house eight Rolls-Royces, six Mercedes-Benzes, five Jaguars, two Porsches, and an Excalibur.

A maid admitted him to a marble-floored foyer that had at either end gilded French consoles on which stood big Oriental vases. The vases were filled with flowers that gave off a perfume oddly like that of brand-new dollar bills (it was one of Weinberger’s little jokes; he’d had them specially treated). Beyond the foyer was a living room the size of a hotel lobby. The living room was filled with modern art, some of it as violent as Weinberger’s movies. On the floor of the living room were thick Oriental rugs that felt so luxurious underfoot that David’s toes curled up inside his shoes.

From the number of important people he spotted in the first few minutes, David quickly got the idea he was among the very few young Hollywood types here. Could it be that Weinberger had begun to think of him as someone becoming
powerful
? Certainly this was no gathering of the meek and ambitious. They were all working the party all right, but out of instinct rather than necessity.

Christ, thought David, there were people here who were
dynasties.
The Fondas. And Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., the son of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford (incredible, he’d made a career out of acting the part of an actor). There was Orson Welles, larger than life.
Much
larger. And
Jesus,
Julie and Doris Stein, power made flesh. He, the ophthalmologist who’d booked bands on the side and
invented
the one-night stand and gone on to found MCA and take over Universal. The Jules Stein story was one that David’s mother never tired of listening to. She should only have known that, like her, he went to bed early.

With a bourbon and water in his hand, David sought out his host. He found Weinberger, talking to Mae West.

“So then,” Weinberger was saying to Mae West, “the baby-sitter gets…divided up.”

“Like a kid’s birthday cake, huh?” the aged blonde said, working her gums.

“Sort of,” Weinberger replied.

“Going to one of your movies is like going out trick or treating,” Mae West told him. “Only instead of getting candy when you ring the doorbell you have to have a terrible operation. Ugh.”

“What can I tell you?” Weinberger replied. “It’s a living.”

“So was
Myra Breckenridge,
” came the response, “and I’d already provided for my old age.”

A bodybuilder led Mae West over to the bar. David took the opportunity to thank Weinberger for the invitation.

“Glad you could come,” the producer said. “I hear you’ve been doing some nice things for people.”

“I try,” David said.

“Yeah, that’s all any of us can do, right?” Weinberger said, glancing around the room as if it were empty and he had it all to himself. “What is it they say, living well is the best revenge? Unless, of course, you’re like Sue Mengers.”

“I’d just like to live well,” said David. “I don’t care about getting revenge.”

“Give it time,” Weinberger counseled. “Real success is usually the product of real hatred. Of course out here there’s something that’s beyond even hatred.”

“What’s that?” David asked.

“The California divorce laws,” Weinberger said.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” David said.

“Do,” said Weinberger. “Myself, I’m never going to get married again unless it’s to some bitch who’s planning to write one of those kiss-and-tell books. That I’d almost enjoy—achieving immortality in the process of being fucked over. Have you ever met Britt Ekland, by the way?”

“No, I haven’t,” David replied.

“Then I’ll introduce you…to Shelley Winters. You might as well start at the top.”

A couple of introductions and three drinks later David happened to notice a young woman sitting on a sofa. She was talking to a man who looked like a studio executive who’d arrived in L.A. via Wharton or Harvard Business. Give him six months and he’d be back in Connecticut. David could see that the young woman he was talking to was less than fascinated with this guy; she kept subtly looking around the room. And if David wasn’t mistaken, her last glance had been at him.