The Executioner's Song (101 page)

Of course, this was only part of his feeling for Farrell. Barry was not only a craftsman, but a great ladies' man. The type to get away with three-hour lunches. He wore the right suits and right ties, and Schiller was frankly envious of anybody who could go out that long, come back a little tipsy, and still do a hell of a job. Schiller wasn't that good looking then, no beard, pointed nose, small chin, a hungry look.

                He was just a working photographer, a kind of maniacal smile on his face because he was trying to do ten pictures at once while toting a big load of equipment on his back. Knew he looked bizarre, but tried to be part of the woodwork. The less a photographer was noticed as a human being, the better the pictures. Your camera could be dynamite when people paid you no more attention than a fly on the wall.

                Whereas Farrell, the ladies' man, had a bit of magic about him. Schiller remembered how Barry began to go around with this black girl who was a researcher at Life. A beautiful black girl, oh, God, Schiller remembered, in the '60s to be black and beautiful was to be a star.

                She was sweet, she had this nice honey voice, she was intellectual and not street-wise. There was a whole fineness to her, beauty to her, black, beautiful and intelligent. Now she and Barry were married and had a child together. Schiller decided the hell with it, he was just going to see if he could hire Barry Farrell. It would be like getting a prize.

He called Barry and asked if he'd be interested. Right from the start, he said it would be no pie in the sky. Nothing like the Muhammad All project. No great returns promised. No book involved. But definite work for definite good pay. Five thousand dollars for editing the Playboy interview. That was all right with Farrell. He had his own book to get back to, he said, and they sparred a little, then discussed it back and forth. To Schiller's surprise, he had the feeling there was less of a selling job here than he had psyched himself up for. They ended with Barry agreeing to take a look at the letters and interviews done so far. In a week or so, he ought to be able to decide.

"I'm running a bold move," Schiller told Stephie.

                She didn't understand the interplays, didn't see how Farrell could write something like "carrion bird" and still respect you.

                Stephie was furious at the term. Besides, she didn't want Larry to give the interview over to anybody. He obviously wanted to do it himself, she said. Schiller only won the discussion by telling her about The American Dreamer. " 'Schiller went absolutely blank on Dennis Hopper's more mystical ideas'—you want to hear that again?" he asked her. "Don't you see, there's a side of Gary I can miss completely. I don't know from shinola about karma." That convinced her.

                When he could talk Stephie into something, he could convince anyone in the world. She was beautifully sales-resistant.

Barry Golson now flew out to L.A. to discuss Playboy doing the Gilmore interview, and Schiller could see that the editor was arriving in town with a $20,000 face, just what Schiller thought it was worth, plus expenses. It was also obvious that he and Golson were going to be abrasive on each other. Golson looked at him as a businessman, pure and simple.

                "We're going to need," said Schiller, "a really good writer to edit these interviews." He mentioned Barry Farrell. Golson didn't indicate he knew who Farrell was. "He wrote a book on the actress, Pat Neal," Schiller said. He also gave Golson Farrell's Life credentials. Golson didn't seem to care. Maybe he wanted his own man in. There might be trouble later, Schiller thought, but he tied the deal for $22,000.

Schiller couldn't resist telling Farrell that Barry Golson of Playboy didn't seem to know him: "It's perfectly understandable that I never heard of Golson," said Farrell in reply, "but I consider it a shocking bit of illiteracy that Golson doesn't react to my name."

                Schiller laughed. It would be a couple of weeks before he'd come to realize that Farrell had not said it altogether in jest, and was even annoyed that Golson, being the Playboy Interview Editor, might not be aware that Farrell had done one bang-up job for them years ago with Buckminster Fuller. Barry had come to the place in his life where he was counting his achievements in preference to scoffing at them.

One reason for accepting Schiller's offer was that Barry Farrell didn't mind getting out of L.A. He was feeling some unaccustomed doubts about himself as a professional. Lately, he had been having trouble on deadlines, his wife was not well, and he was being sued in a major way by a publisher for nondelivery of manuscript. Being a man who had always taken his good reputation for granted, his life in Los Angeles of late produced the feeling that he was spinning his wheels. He actually felt grateful to Schiller. Somebody who trusted him to do a job.

Barry had been doing a book about the Mustang Ranch in Nevada when the most extraordinary thing happened. This group of heavies and whores he had been writing about suddenly turned on each other. A killing took place. The dead man was the Argentine heavyweight Oscar Bonavena. A good friend of Barry's, just about the main character in his book, Ross Brymer, was arrested for the deed.

                That really knocked the wind out of Farrell's book. He couldn't go on with it. Felt the meaning of the word for the first time—crushed. Then Farrar, Straus & Giroux filed suit in Federal Court. The offer from Schiller felt like pure escape. To be able to labor long hours far away from his own concerns would be like an expense-paid vacation in Tahiti for him.

Tamera was now living in Salt Lake with her brother, Cardell. Out of nowhere, Larry Schiller called one night and said he would like to talk to her. Maybe she would be able to work with him. Just wanted to discuss the possibilities. Could they meet?

                Tamera suggested he come to her brother's home. Cardell was an insurance salesman, and fourteen years older, and she followed his judgment greatly. Schiller had a pretty questionable reputation around the journalists she knew.

                After all, a lot of newspaper people were having to get their Gilmore stories however they could, and Schiller had just flown in with his checkbook and tied the whole thing up. Everybody was mad at that. Still, she agreed to see him. She thought she was an open person.

                Even if she had a bias, she wouldn't be content to live with that.

Once Schiller began to talk, Tamera couldn't hold on to her dislike. Cardell, who was a shrewd businessman, was also swayed.

                Schiller just sat there and told them quietly, "I think you ought to know who I am." His career, as he recounted it, sounded pretty good.

                She could see Cardell liked the thorough way Schiller had handled the contracts so that there would be something substantial for Nicole's children, and the heirs of the victims. It didn't seem like he was just out to get the money.

                Once he finished talking about himself, he said to Tamera, "I'm not going to mislead you and suggest you're going to have a key part in writing a book or movie or anything like that." Still, there was a lot she could do for him, and a great deal he could offer her. If they could set up a working cooperation, he would let Tamera sit in as an assistant on many a meeting. She would meet a number of important people in journalism and television on a different basis from all her lunches and dinners with them heretofore. Those occasions might have been fun for her, but what he offered would be more substantial.

                She could be present when important decisions were hammered out in confrontation. She would get a dramatic inside view of how a big story is put together, and know a great deal more when she was done.

Schiller liked her, although that hardly mattered. She was not exactly pretty, but she was attractive. Her features were a little too irregular to make her a beauty, but she was tall and had nice ash-blond hair and was full of energy, real clean-cut country pep. Wham! Pow!

                Stick her tongue in her cheek to show her confusion, or—Sock!—skew her lower jaw to the side to register embarrassment. With such a girl, Schiller knew his offer was better than catnip. It was these clean, slightly straitlaced young ladies with a wild ambitious career streak who could never resist opportunity.

He needed, he said, a newspaper to be his source 24 hours a day. His eyes and ears in a strange city. He could tell Tamera that he had lived and worked in many a new town for a week or month, and before he was done, he sometimes knew more about what was going on in that region, be it Provo, or Tangiers, than the natives. Nobody could figure out how he did it, but he would tell her it was simple. He always tried to get a pipeline into a local newspaper. Would she be his pipeline to the Deseret News?

He wanted, he assured her, a relationship that the newspaper would understand and profit from. He would supply them with pieces of information about Gilmore. In turn, she would feed him the local Salt Lake news plus what came in from Orem and Provo. Let him know what was—he used the local expression—coming down, what the Governor was up to, and the Attorney General's office. He wanted to have his finger on it.

                When she began to look worried, as if he were proposing a little too much, he went back to his main theme. "Tamera," he said, "even if you don't drink yourself, you're going to see big reporters drinking, and going after a story, and working on their interviews. It's all there to learn."

What he did not mention was his private motive. He had to worry about Nicole. There would come a day when she would walk out of the hospital, and Schiller would go up to her. If, for any reason, she saw him as a Hollywood type waving a contract, then good relations with Tamera might be indispensable.

Cardell left the room for a moment, and Larry nailed the relationship.

                He was proud of it afterward. Just a hunch, just a gamble on his instinct, but he knew there had to be some inside reason Tamera had gotten so close to Nicole. Something the two girls had in parallel. When they were alone, Schiller said, "I bet you made it with a con, and then he fucked you over."

                Tamera couldn't believe it. She stammered, "It wasn't that kind of relation. Wasn't sexual. But I was in love, and Nicole let me read Gary's letters because I told her about the wonderful letters I used to get from my friend."

Schiller went back to L.A. on the night plane. He had a professional link with Sorensen on the Trib, and what might prove a real connection on the Deseret News. Barry Farrell, whom he called from the airport, said, yes, definitely, he would work with him. The pieces were coming together. Schiller enjoyed an airplane trip at such times.

The first few weeks Nicole was in the ward, they couldn't get her to do a thing. She really told them off. It was absolutely against the rules to have people locked up, but there they were running this surveillance on her all the time. She let them know they were breaking their own rules. She was a bitch, verbally.

Doctor Woods disgusted her. She would ask him innocent things, like, "Do I have to eat all you give me, every meal?" and he would look at her like you could lose your ass giving a solid reply. She thought he was a great pussy. This big, good-looking guy who would never commit himself.

She was so angry at herself for failing in that suicide. Now she had really lost control of her life. They took care of her actions. Told her when she could go to the bathroom, watched her when she ate, just about gave her permission to close her eyes. In the daytime, they didn't allow you to rest your head on a chair. You couldn't go to sleep before eight at night. Here were all these patients, fuck-ups and convicts, kids in for some bump or hassle with the law, yet letting that be done to them. Even acted like they liked this business of living by their own rules.

Every day the patients would sit down at a committee meeting—one came right after another—and discuss their rules. Rewrite them. Then they'd get into new hang-ups carrying out the new rules. It took Nicole a long time to realize that that was the way the place was supposed to work. A lot of them got to like writing and rewriting the rules. You could discuss the shit out of the changes, and play a lot of games with people. Fuck them over and get points for it. Go back to the world knowing the ropes. It was a comedy. A real shift in the power trip, thought Nicole.

She wasn't interested. Every time she would look out their second-story window, she would think of jumping through one day, making it to the road, making it out of town. But she knew she couldn't get free that way. They would really lock her in. Her best chance would be in her next Court appearance. She would have to convince them she wasn't suicidal.

                Nicole didn't try to decide where she was on that. If they let her out, maybe she would play it straight. Or, she might decide to start running down the Interstate until some big semi clapped her in the ass. She just wanted to get away. The place was too full of shit.