The Hollywood Trilogy (22 page)

“It's not just money at that level, you know,” he would say. “You don't inherit a huge wad of capital. It's all in things, goods, companies, services, people, agreements, letters, bits, God Almighty, it's all over the world and in every goddamn form you can
think
of!” Or he might laugh meanly and say, “People always wondered about me. Well, now they're gonna find out, all right, all right, certain people will find what can happen when a billion fuckin' dollars gets in the way!”

“There, there,” I said at this point. Thinking, now that Max is gone, what
is to become of
us?
What about Larceny & Ogle? Who's been running the show? I could see already the complications of getting into a shitstorm with Gregory, part owner of the studio and the Golconda and half of the rest of the world, a man perfectly capable of starting to work picking Karl clean before the funeral. And as if reading my mind, Karl would quail and quake and mutter, “Oh, my God, help!”

Up at my place we sat him on the couch and put some coffee into him.

“Now, Karl,” Jim said. “You have to calm down.”

“Don't worry, boys, don't worry, I'll be there when the shit hits the fan,” he said. “And don't think I won't be grateful when the time comes, you boys are my best friends, do you know that? Nobody the fuck likes me. Oh God!” And he would be off again, rolling back and forth in agony, “Oh, my God, what an asshole I am, talking like this! My father! My father!”

He wept into his hands for a while, and then was calm again.

“This was no ordinary death,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“This man who died was no ordinary man, my father, Max Meador, this was one of the
kings
of the
world
, can I tell you something? You want to hear something? Max Meador produced over
three thousand movies!
Three thousand fucking movies. Nobody will ever do that again. Nobody. Ever.”

He smiled, totally sane. “Certainly not me. We had a little game, from way back. He would pretend to be exasperated with me, act like I was a fool.”

Jim and I must have looked embarrassed, especially me who can't control his face, because Karl looked at us fondly. “You boys,” he said, “my friends. You never saw it, that Max and I would play it all between us.”

Tears rolled down his face, but he was still sane, still smiling. “We put it over on everybody.”

Including Karl, I thought, but said nothing, naturally.

He talked some more about his father, getting it out, getting over it, and then he went into another crazy fit, really frightened about the future. What was he going to do? He could not manage his estate, he couldn't even keep it from the people who were supposed to be protecting it, it was all twisted and unreal and political, oil wells here, land there, buried gold, numbered bank accounts, secrets, oh, it would be the death of him, and he would roll around in agony some more, with that billion dollars sitting on top of his head like
a great electric elephant from outer space, buzzing and clicking, sucking him into its blazing guts . . . a billion dollars!

It even made
me
a little giddy.

So I dialed Sonny's number and after nine rings, she answered.

“You alone?” I joked. She mumbled something and I told her what was up. She arrived at the suite about ten minutes later.

“How is he?” she asked.

“He needs a mama,” I said.

SO THAT was the end of me and Sonny Baer. I don't blame her, in fact, we like each other, but in the face of that billion dollars she was helpless. Trained all her life to respect money and bigness like every good American child she was just another beagle in life's drunken rabbit hunt. I told her so.

“Listen,” I said. We were in the kitchen getting coffee. “Give me a chance. If I make a million a year, tax free, I'll be caught up to Karl in, let's see, just about one thousand years. Will you wait?”

“Sure I'll wait,” she said.

Somehow, I did not believe her.

But the big changes were being rung on Karl himself, with that billion-dollar dildo headed his way, and Sonny did help to calm him down and get him ready for the assault by press, public and those ravening maniacs, his fellow super-rich, many of whom would become convinced that with Max dead his fortune was out in the open and unprotected. At first I didn't believe Karl's babbling about a billion dollars, that's a hell of a lot of money, three or four hundred million more than even Bob Hope, but after the funeral, which would have pleased Al Capone himself, the papers reported that Karl had inherited $60,000 in cash and securities and property worth “close to a million dollars.” Ha.

I should have known, also, that Karl
was
actually his father's son, when after he was all calmed down and thanked us and begged for our support in his coming war against the universe, he asked us also to do something we had not done in years: to commit to three pictures instead of just one.

“I need you behind me,” he said. “We don't have to sign anything, but if I come into the director's meeting with you guys tied up for three years, and
maybe a couple of other deals already working for me, then I stand a better chance. Those people still think of me as Max's little boy, and it's time to step out there.”

Jim smiled and said, “Or, you could take your money and retire to Mooréa, just off the coast of Tahiti.”

“Huh?” Karl said.

He begged us some more, bringing up the fact that with his crazy confessions of the night before, we had him by the balls.

Jim and I looked at each other. What the hell, we could always weasel out later.

“Sure,” I said to Karl.

He shook hands with us, and his palm was warm and dry.

“Thank you very much!” he said. My hackles rose. For the first time, I had heard a touch of the guttural in his voice.

Sonny and Karl went down to her place, hand-in-hand, to wait for the call from home. I probably looked woebegone, for Jim came up to me smiling and hit me on the back.

“Let's go get some breakfast!”

AFTER ALL the fussing about Max's death and the rumors that the studio would be sold, the actual making of our picture was an anticlimax. I won't bother you with the title or the plot, either you like our stuff or you don't, and the bald plots are not the meat of the thing. New songs and fresh jokes, that's our game.

The rumors were funny. Nobody seemed to trust Karl, nobody seemed to think he could run the place, and a lot of people were smug in the idea that Karl would go to pieces. Of course we knew better, but nobody asked us. This was
business
.

One rumor had Gregory Galba selling all his stock to a tribe of Beduin, another that he was only a Mafia front man whose major work was laundering money through the picture and entertainment businesses, and that if the stock continued to drop, he, too, would be dropped—into the bay in a barrel of concrete. Also a rumor that a bevy of superstars were putting their heads together and talking about taking over the studio as a forum for their
artistic concepts, and basically would restore Hollywood to its golden age—the 1930s. Everyone got a good laugh out of that one.

For Karl, the rumors were good for business. He came down to Sound Stage Five, where we were doing all our interiors, at least once a day, scaring the hell out of everybody just by marching into the place with his gophers and acolytes trailing along. Karl was back into suits again, but with the silk shirt open in front so you could see all the little gold chains, and he would stand and talk to Marty or Ron while his followers would find other people to talk to, our agents, the pretty girls—there were always pretty girls on our sets, following another of Max's rules about making entertaining pictures: “All the women should have great tits, even the mammas and grandmammas, because it makes people emotional.” This rule is followed on all the television comedies; you can check it out for yourself.

Anyway, Karl would come into my trailer and sit down and the charm would fall away like old skin, he would look exhausted and beg me for a cup of coffee, which I would pour him, and then he would say something like, “Oh, Christ, the shits are killing me!”

I would recommend Lomotil and he would give me a pained smile and start into a whining series of complaints. In a way it was flattering, because I suppose it was old Max he used to do this to, and now me. His complaints were as various as he could make them, considering where he stood on the world pamper index, and I would nod and sip coffee with him, glad for the chance to get my mind off my own gripes.

“Well, it happened again last night,” he might start.

“What happened again last night?” I would ask sweetly. As long as Karl was in the trailer, nobody else would dare disturb me, so that was another positive.

“The damned
herpes
,” he would say with the darkest frown you could imagine. “It's like a plague, an epidemic, a fucking invasion from outer space!”

“Oh, geez,” I would say. “That's a shame . . .”

“Do you realize I can't screw?”

“Yeah, I realize that, Karl. Well, relax, they say the best way to get rid of the ol' herp is to relax . . .”

“How can I relax? I've got them again, twice in the same month! Do you know what it's like to get turned on by some lovely girl and then do your damnedest to get her into bed and then go for a piss and find you have these
ugly
,
red
,
pus-covered sores
all over your dick?”

“You can't buy happiness,” I would remind him.

“Shit!”

Outside the trailer about twenty feet away, Sonny might be sitting in her chair, reading a paperback. For some reason it irritated me to have Karl in here pissing and moaning about his sore dick and all the beautiful girls he couldn't seduce, while she was out there. They “went together” for the whole shooting schedule, and then he dropped her during postproduction. During shooting she would arrive, when she had an early call, in Karl's big stretch Mercedes, and then it and the driver would go down to Santa Monica (or wherever Karl spent the night) and get him.

Karl grinned. “There's a guy in Europe,” he said, “a doctor who has been curing a friend of mine from Palm Beach with a series of smallpox shots, a permanent cure.” His smile was that of a man who has access to something the normal individual can't have. “Maybe after things around here get straightened out, I'll send for him.”

“Rumors are flying,” I said, to get off his herpes for a minute. “I heard the other day that Columbia and Warners are going to form a joint venture and buy you out when the stock gets low enough.”

Karl laughed easily. “You just go on believing it,” he said.

“I never said I believed it. And I don't believe the one that says somebody saw you ducking into a spiritualist's down in Santa Monica to have a chat with Max.”

“That one was true,” he said, with rare humor. “Every medium in town is working on her Max Meador impression.” He looked at his watch. “How's the picture coming?”

“Ask Ron,” I said. “He's the director.”

He stood up and looked at his handsome, well-dressed self in my big mirror. “Well, you just keep those rumors flying,” he said. “It helps the stock to drop, and that helps me to pick it up cheap.”