The Hollywood Trilogy (23 page)

“Maybe I'll buy a few million shares myself,” I said. “I have the fullest confidence in your managerial abilities,” and we would laugh and shake hands and he would open the door and step out, dropping the temperature on the sound stage fifty degrees, and I would close the door and sit down and let the sweat pop out all over me. Because Karl or no Karl, that billion bucks can make a fellow nervous, being cramped up in the same little room with it like that.

WE HAVE a happy set because we try to use the same people every year, everybody is making good money and there is plenty to talk about while the setting-up is going on because most of the crew are just getting back from location and have a lot of gossip, fresh juicy stuff about the big stars and lugubrious tales of life in America. When I say “happy set” I don't mean that people are going around whistling, it's just that the atmosphere of cold fear surrounding some productions is absent from ours except when guys like Karl show up and get everybody nervous. Even our picture could be canceled at any moment and no one told why, and there is nothing more ominous to the old hand than a bunch of front office types hanging around the set looking at their watches.

The making and selling of motion pictures isn't a very complicated process, and to run things does not require any particular genius, but like any other enterprise an air of quiet confidence is money in the bank. So, with Max's death and Karl's rise to power a certain uneasiness hounded us this particular year as it hadn't since our first picture, when nobody knew anything about the future, whether we would hit, miss or go into limbo.

Now the problem was, would we continue under the same management, which meant jobs for all, or would some crazy man like Gregory Galba or any of a dozen others come bowling into things with an army of campfollowers and screw everything up.

This made the crew a little tense; it made the production department terribly tense, for they are the ones who get blamed for high costs; it made the promotion department tense because they weren't sure on a daily basis what line to follow with an ever-curious world press; this made Marty the producer so nervous that he would sweat and this would make his tortoiseshell glasses slip down his nose so that he was always pushing them back up before speaking, which communicated his nervousness both upward and downward, and if anybody is charged with keeping the nervous element down, it is he; and this of course made Ron the director a little edgy, worried about the jokes, the blocking, the freshness of things, the time wasted getting it right; and this in turn would keep Jim the writer on the set making up one-liners or polishing our business, and it is tough to be funny under pressure.

Out of this whole bunch there was only one guy I really didn't like, but
there was nothing I could do about it. This was Jim's camera standin, a guy he had known from the service, a former tenor saxophone player who called himself Baby Cakes, Jim's general size and shape, of course, but a broad crude sly untrustworthy face, a guy who only looked at you sideways, and always got a hurt, I-told-you-so look on his face when it appeared he was going to be cut out of things.

A movie set operates on a straight status basis, just like the Marine Corps, and usually privates don't hang out with generals, but this was different. Baby Cakes had known Jim from another life, and when he showed up in Hollywood a few years back to look up his wildly successful old dopesmoking buddy, Jim was glad to see him, polite to him, took him everywhere and fussed over him for a couple of days, until it became obvious that Baby Cakes was not going to leave without being thrown out, and if Jim said anything that might be thought of as a hint that the visit was over, he would pull a long face and start talking about how his life hadn't turned out as
lucky
as Jim's, etc&etc., until Jim's happy solution to hire him as his standin.

But Baby Cakes wasn't all that grateful and considered himself a cut above the rest of the crew, where in fact he was a buckass private in our little army. He was rude to the people he felt he could be rude to, and sucked up to the rest of us with a kind of growling whine that made you know he hated every minute of it and it was “just the breaks” that kept him from becoming a movie star or a big tycoon or something.

Naturally, since Baby Cakes felt he could walk into Jim's trailer at any time, tag along to recording sessions over at Paramount or even sit with us in the commissary without particularly being asked, people who wanted to get to Jim might first butter up Baby Cakes.

And did he like butter! If it was a woman trying to get to Jim, she would often first have to fight off Baby Cakes, and since he really thought of himself as a demon with the ladies, this might take a while, and if the girl was dumb, Baby Cakes might even score. Which meant we would all have to sit still for his tales of conquest.

By this year, Baby Cakes was on familiar terms with every low-grade hustler, con-artist and dimwit promoter in both the music and movie businesses.

One nice thing: he was barred from the Golconda, and effectively from Las Vegas. He had been caught doing a swipe-and-run among the blackjack tables. This is a hustle where you carry in your hand two cards adding up to
blackjack and do a quick double shuffle on the dealer. Usually when some halfass tries this they merely beat him up and throw him out the back door, but Baby Cakes was brought to the boss, he insisted on it, made a big fuss, had Jim there and everything.

“You're eighty-six from the club,” Galba said in a voice like tungsten steel. “I ever see you again I'll rip your head off.”

Baby Cakes looked at Jim, shocked and hurt, but a little of the sly I-told-you-so in his eyes. Jim only shrugged.

But couldn't fire him. He just couldn't. And so Baby Cakes was on the set when Jim was around, a source of negative energy, a boil on our collective neck.

Now he popped up and opened my door, ducking his head at me like a goddamn servant from the Middle Ages, and said, not looking at me, “Hey, Ogle, I think Jim's on the way over here.”

“I'm not home,” I said. I had to be careful with the guy; he knew I didn't like him, and if I made it too obvious he would pout all day and make Jim feel bad.

“That's a good one,” he said. “No wonder they give you all the jokes.”

Jim came up behind Baby Cakes and pushed into the trailer around him. Outside on the set they were moving a couple of lights, nothing happening.

“What the fuck do you want?” I asked him.

He threw himself onto my couch, feet up, and pulled a joint out of his pocket. “You got a match?” he asked. There was a big bowl of matchbooks by his head, and he reached over and got some matches. Baby Cakes hovered in the doorway, waiting for somebody to ask him in. It wasn't going to be me, but I couldn't dismiss him, either. Jim took a deep hit at the weed and, holding his breath, offered the joint to me. I shook my head and he held the joint out toward Baby Cakes, who used it to segue himself into the chair by the couch.

“Great dope!” he said after exhaling.

Jim said to me, “How's that stash of yours?”

“What stash?” I said. Jim knew I always had coke and weed at the hotel, even when I was working, not to use, but for confidence,
just in case
.

“I could really use a couple of good snorts today,” Jim hinted, and if it hadn't been for Baby Cakes I would have gotten one of the drivers to take us to the hotel and let Jim pack his nose. But as things were, Baby Cakes would
have gone along, and the thought of my hard-gained Merck going up his nose was too much for me.

“Fresh out,” I said.

The look Baby Cakes gave me meant, “You fuckin' liar!” which did not make me any happier. Jim, of course, took me at my word and didn't say anything more about it, and just for the hell of it we went over our next scene until Baby Cakes got bored and left.

“Thank Christ,” Jim said.

If I hadn't been so pissed off, I would have taken Jim to the hotel then. I should have. We had a hell of a day ahead of us.

FOR A while things were slow and then they started to pick up. Marty came to the trailer a little after Baby Cakes left and said we were free until two o'clock because of an equipment problem, but there was nowhere I wanted to go and nothing I wanted to do. Well, I wanted to get drunk, but not with two o'clock staring me in the face. Marty stuck at the door, turning like he had just thought of something.

“You fellas up to seeing a few reporters? I could get a gang of them off my neck if you would.”

“You mean a full-scale press conference? What for? We ain't done nothing yet,” I said.

But Marty convinced us that if we would go to lunch now and come back at one o'clock, we could meet with the reporters and have the excuse of the shot at two o'clock, so the press people wouldn't hang on and nag us and try to get a good story.

“I don't give a rusty fuck,” was Jim's attitude. After Marty left he said, “You wanna go get some lunch?”

We started talking about where to go for lunch. Time and distance meant nothing; a driver would take us anywhere in the Los Angeles basin and bring us back by one.

“How about Musso & Frank's?” I said. “Maybe get a big crab cocktail and some beer.”

“I don't like the crabmeat in L.A.,” Jim said. He sat up and started lightly to drum his fingers on the edge of the coffee table, not the way a normal
person would, but like a musician, with paradiddles, rim-shots, fingernails against an empty glass, etc&etc. “I like the crabmeat in Florida,” he said. “And Chesapeake Bay, goddamn, they got these little softshell bastards that just melt in your mouth, you can eat a hundred of them, with toast and butter, they make the west coast crabmeat taste like shit.”

“Maybe you're talking about king crab, what do they call it? . . . Alaskan snow crab, which is tasteless as hell, I admit, but the crabmeat from around San Francisco is pretty good.”

He blew me down by pointing out that the crabmeat in L.A. was frozen, anyway.

“You could have lasagna,” I said.

“Naw, I'm all up for some of that Eastern seafood.”

“Well, we sure can't fly to New York for lunch. How about the Studio Grill?”

Jim didn't want to go to the Studio Grill. No reason.

“Or across the street,” I said. “I could eat some
ramaki
, glass of beer, sounds great to me . . .”

“You mean across the street from here?”

“No, across the street from the Studio Grill, the Formosa Cafe.”

“We could just walk across the street from here,” he said, “and get a big steak and potatoes.”

“Make me sleepy,” I said. “We could go to the health food place, what's it's name . . .”

“Or the Taco Bell . . .”

“Or El Coyote . . .”

“Polo Lounge . . .”

“Chez Jay's . . .”

“Schwab's . . .”

Obviously, neither of us was the least bit hungry, but if we didn't go eat we'd have to do it later. I was explaining this to Jim while he tapped a pencil against the side of an empty glass, beautifully but irritatingly, when the telephone buzzed. It is not supposed to buzz unless Los Angeles is falling into the ocean. It always made my stomach lurch, and I fell across my big overstuffed chair grabbing for the phone, saying, “goddamn, if we'd only got out of here . . .”