The Hollywood Trilogy (15 page)

But nobody wanted to speak. Karl looked from one of us to the other and we looked at Max, and he sipped his tea.

There was something about this meeting that was bothering me, not just Max's way of conducting a meeting, something else. . . . I tried to think of what it was and couldn't. Then, in the silence, it came to me: No telephone calls had been coming in. It is hard to tell you just what effect this had on me when I realized it, but I will try: normally anybody in Hollywood who is of any importance has hundreds of phone calls a day, and by the end of the day has a whole log of unanswered calls. In a normal meeting, that is to say, a meeting where nothing is going to happen, the Big Guy, the guy behind the desk, will take anywhere from one to ten calls while you are sitting there with your agent. Often, in fact, as soon as the Big Guy takes a call, your agent will pick up one of the instruments in the room and make a couple of calls himself, and then everyone apologizes for the interruptions and you get in about five minutes more of worthless meeting and the Big Guy's secretary apologetically interrupts again, because this is an
important call
: “Hello, Sidney!” And the Big Guy waves his cigar at you as if to say, “
Got
to talk to Sidney!” And the meeting goes on.

Of course the higher you are in the order of things, the less your meetings are interrupted, the theory being, I suppose, that the only calls that can interrupt your meeting are from people more important than either you or the Big Guy.

And of course if it is your office, you are the Big Guy.

So Max really wasn't taking any calls, and neither was Karl.

This made me realize the importance of the meeting.

“Well,
shit
, Max, may I call you
Max
?” I said.

“Of course you can call me anything you want,” Max said coldly.

“You have a movie idea for us?”

“If you can control yourself I will tell you about it,” he said. Karl was glaring at me.

“The world is full of trouble,” Max said. “The war gets worse and worse and nobody feels any patriotism anymore. Kids are going crazy and parents hate to see them come home. Everything is getting impossible, so I think
maybe a small movie that pays no attention to the facts of life but just goes down the road, a few songs, a few laughs, a small romance, nothing to disturb anybody, and if we keep the costs down maybe there's money to be made. A very old-fashioned kind of movie, a B picture. Are you interested?”

We were interested.

“It is the old story, older than Aesop, of City Mouse and Country Mouse,” Max said. “Don't give the public new stories, give them new material. I don't trust new stories, the public don't know what to make of them, but a good old story that has fascinated people for a couple of thousand years, it can always be reworked to make people happy to hear it again. Mister Larson is the city slicker and Mister Ogilvie is the country bumpkin, it's as simple as that, except they love each other like brothers and they fall for the same girl. It looks like the city slicker has all the marbles, but at the end of the last reel country boy is married to the girl and everybody in the audience goes home happy. Is this too corny for you fellows?”

Not at all, not at all.

AFTER THAT first meeting with Max Meador, we rode back to the studio in the limousine and picked up Jim's car and then drove out to his place in the Valley. We didn't know if we had the jobs or not, although Max seemed confident, even told us we wouldn't make any money on the picture.

“This is my picture,” Max said. “If I win, I win; if I lose, I lose. Either way, you boys will make your salaries. And forget about points, you get no points—points are for lawyers to divide up, nothing but a heartache.”

Nobody said anything about Karl, sitting there, the producer of the picture, and even when he took us out to the limo he said nothing you could interpret as a fact.

Jim's house had a little aspen in the front yard, surrounded by burnt-out grass, double garage, faded green pseudo-shutters on the windows and a lot of cracks in the stucco, but the back was nice, several trees including a weeping willow, a nice swimming pool and some garden furniture in the shade. Kitty was out there wearing a bikini bottom and
zori
.

I waited in the house while Jim went out and told her they had a guest, although I did peek through the drapes at the pretty little tits she never grew
tired of showing people unless they were obvious about looking and then she got mad, watched her slowly unravel the towel from around her hair while Jim stood talking, I couldn't hear him, but she nodded from time to time and pulled curlers and hairpins out of her hair for about twenty minutes.

I went into the kitchen and got a beer and came back and resumed my peeping, she still hadn't covered those tits, and I knew Jim would be upset if I just barged out there. The air conditioning was making me shiver. I finished my beer and went into the bathroom, marveling again and forever at the blue water in all the L.A. toilets, as if the inhabitants hated straight tapwater so bad they wouldn't even piss in it, and then went on outside, the hell with Jim, and she draped a towel over herself, but not quick enough.

C. C. “CHET” EUBANK was a chunky guy about my age, with brown hair that looked like he brushed it too much and pale blue eyes. He was from Connecticut somewhere and was supposed to be the President's favorite adviser on world affairs, as opposed to domestic affairs or foreign affairs, and also a former Kennedy person, whatever the hell that meant. Tonight at dinner with Karl Meador he seemed like a modest likeable guy, comfortable with the bizarre California types he found himself surrounded with, and I noticed on the sly that he didn't mind getting an occasional glimpse of the various ladies in the room earlier, when there had been a large gathering waiting to see Karl's latest movie in the screening room just off the big living room. The picture hadn't come from the studio in time, some kind of screwup with the director, who had opened up one of the reels to move something around, or maybe it was because the director hadn't been asked to the screening, or maybe the transportation man who was supposed to bring the print out got lost, it depended on who you talked to, and so Karl had to call off the screening and somehow get rid of the people he didn't want to feed, which was 90 percent of them, some drunker than others because they had been at it for a couple of hours while waiting for the print to arrive. But finally those of us who had been quietly invited to eat sat down at the table: me, Karl, Sonny, a guy named C. C. “Chet” Eubank, a couple of actresses I didn't know and Jim, who had spent the cocktail hour sacked out in a room upstairs and now looked sleepy and sullen across the table from me.

Also at the table was our Las Vegas boss, Gregory Galba, who didn't exactly own the Golconda and didn't exactly not own it, either, but when he barked everybody cringed, so it didn't matter, and Gregory barked a lot, a tall wrinkle-faced black-eyed man with a reddish rug that kept hiking up in the back like a mallard's ass, but of course he was Gregory Galba and so nobody would tell him, “Gregory, your toup's loose in back,” so there it was, upflap in back, and it was hard not to laugh. There was a story going around that Gregory had a bad heart attack once and took the living heart out of another man in an operation south of the border somewhere. I never believed the story, but I had seen the deep red scar on his chest plenty of times. Gregory liked to play tennis without a shirt on, and he liked to play me because I never gave him a break.

Max, of course, was nowhere to be seen.

I had heard once that there was a little room behind the screen in the screening room, and that sometimes Max would sit there, not watching the movie so much as watching the faces of the audience, lit up from the picture; but the same guy who told me that story told me Max wasn't crippled, either, and only used the wheelchair to intimidate people, which, if true, made Max the greatest actor in Hollywood. But I wondered about that little room.

Eubank was telling a story about when he had been in the service, aboard a troopship heading for Japan during the Korean War, where a man had been murdered for wanting to keep the lights on so he could read in his bunk, and how the killer didn't do a nickel's worth of time after they let him out of the brig at Yokohama because the government couldn't locate any of the eighty or ninety witnesses.

The murder part of the story I recognized, because the same thing had happened on board the ship I was on, going the same way during the same war. I brought this up and it turned out that Eubank and I had been aboard the same ship, the U.S.S.
Mann
. He had been a member of the ship's newspaper staff, working two hours each morning putting out the little mimeograph sheet, the “Mann-U-Script,” and spending the rest of the day topside, turning copies of the “Mann-U-Script” into gliders and sailing them off among the flying fish and porpoises.

Meanwhile, I was deep in the hold, breaking apart frozen chickens twelve hours a day.

Chet looked at me with a smile. “That was mighty good chicken, as I remember.”

“The ‘Mann-U-Script' wasn't bad, either,” I said, and it turned out that Chet had a couple of copies at home in Connecticut and would send me Xeroxes.

Earlier, during the Long Wait, when we were introduced, Chet had made a point of telling me how much he enjoyed our pictures and Jim's singing, and couldn't wait to meet Jim, and how important it was to create little islands of relaxation, such as our movies, in this modern sea of trouble. Now that we were old pals from the service, he seemed even more interested in talking to me, and through the early part of the meal we jabbered away about Tokyo, where he had been in the 1st Radio Broadcasting & Leaflet Group, stationed right downtown, and about spending his days composing folk tales in Mandarin Chinese to bombard the People's Army with, so that their resolve would shatter under the impact of the voices on the radio and they would give up Communism and go home. He made it sound very funny, but he did spend two years doing just that, and it wasn't funny to them at the time.

“We thought we were more important than the real soldiers,” he said. “We used to be proud of the fact that our unit had the highest educational level of any unit in the Far East.”

“Our unit had the lowest,” Jim said.

“Really?” said Chet, ready for a good joke.

But Jim just looked at him seriously and said, “Yeah, I was in the band,” and went back to his food.

Since then Chet had actually been to China several times, first with Nixon, then with a group that stayed six months and worked in the fields and factories for a little while just to see what things were like, and then a couple of times for the State Department.

“I've been studying Chinese affairs for better than twenty years,” he told me, “but it didn't prepare me in any way for the reality of the place.”

“Are you ready to move there?” asked Gregory Galba from the other end of the table.