The Hollywood Trilogy (59 page)

The day which had begun so well was now a disaster. Appointments were backed up, and naturally meetings would get shortened and some might even have to be cancelled. Alexander Hellstrom did not make a habit of cancelling, so God knew what people would think when told their meeting was off.

He pulled up to the entrance of the studio and paused for a moment's conversation with Charlie Devereaux, the guard captain, who had been a fellow pool-digger with Alexander back in the old days, had gone on the cops for a while and then moved into his present job. Devereaux had been working at the studio longer than Alexander, as a matter of fact, and this symbolic bit of seniority kept their relationship on a fairly even keel, where otherwise it might have collapsed. Alexander was always careful to defer to Charlie and never gave him orders, only requests; and Charlie, on his part, did not choose to attend most of the functions Alexander had him invited to—just a few key screenings and Alexander's New Year's Day party, which was just a bunch of hung-over guys getting drunk and watching football.

The two men liked each other, and their morning exchange of greetings was important to both. Today Charlie, in lieu of having a worried expression on his face, merely tapped the clock in front of him and said, “Big party last night?”

Alexander wanted to blurt, “Met a girl!” but didn't. There are certain things you don't burden people with, and a possible twenty-four-hour case of Hot Pants was one of them. At the thought he brightened. Hell, I might feel better by tonight, be laughing about the whole thing. He grinned up at Charlie. “How's the coffee this morning?”

“Tastes like shit,” Charlie said, handing it to Alexander for a sip—his first of the day.

“Yeah, but what did they
do
to it?” Alexander joked, as usual, and tooled on into the lot. He drove slowly around the Administration Building, past the gigantic standing sets of the most expensive movie the studio had ever made, turrets and battlements, gun loops and weathervanes, an overweight extravaganza that was still limping around the world in scarred and noisy prints, trying in vain to keep up with the interest payments.

This had been under a previous administration, but Alexander ruled that the sets, which had turned out to be so criminally expensive, should stand,
not only as a reminder of one of Alexander's favorite parables (“Sometimes it's cheaper to go to England”) but also as something for the tourists to look at as they rode around the lot in their little elephant trains. This
was
one of Alexander's innovations, right after he became vice president in charge of production. “Universal does it, and it comes out profit, so what the hell.”

A lot of people complained mightily that it was bush league and unprofessional and demeaning to have strings of tourists gawking at them as they worked, but the hambones didn't bitch, hell, it was their life, and for once Alexander agreed with them. And it was the hambones the tourists wanted to see, not some jerk who thought he was the new Shakespeare. He parked at the elevator door where the curb was painted red, and went up to the third floor to his office. He unlocked his private door and sat down behind his desk with a sigh. There was a cold cup of coffee sitting in the middle of his blotter, testament to his normal promptness. To be impulsive was to screw everything up, he thought a bit sadly, and then a rush of pleasure coursed through him as he remembered Teresa. He pressed the intercom: “This coffee's cold!” he said.

The first problem of the morning was, naturally, a picture that was running scared. The producer, the director, the writer and the production supervisor were ranged uncomfortably in Alexander's office, like boys who had been caught torturing frogs. They were slipping behind, and the production board was getting harder and harder to fit in with the star's commitments. According to the production supervisor, Ted Gage, an old salt thirty years in the business, if they lost any more days they would have to pay so much to the actor for his time that other aspects of the production would suffer, perhaps fatally.

Ted Gage put it strongly, while the producer stared at the rug. “We're gonna lose reality, we're gonna lose lighting time, and we may wind up having the actor unavailable for the loops we're gonna need if we have to rush through everything from this point on.”

“In other words, you need more money,” said Alexander, just to be saying something. The producer, Eric Seymour Katz, looked up hopefully.

Ted Gage said, “Time or money.
I would
prefer that we take another look at the script and see if we can't get a couple of extra days out of it.”

That explained the presence of Dick Matthews, the writer.

“I just don't see it,” the director said.

So there it was. Alexander looked at the sheaf of Daily Production Reports on his desk, glancing at the setup time, number of setups per day, shifts,
changes and utilizations. It was obvious that the director had been taking a lot of time with each setup, but there was nothing criminal in his slowness. Alexander had seen dailies, and the stuff was coming out okay. It was simply that the budget was too tight. Gage had won too many victories in the preproduction battles, shortchanging department after department until the picture was anemic with economy. All in response to front-office pressure, of course. But Gage had been too good at his job.

Alexander had been a production supervisor; into the business as a grip, then location manager, production manager, Executive in Charge of Production for the whole lot, and now head of production. Not the king, but the prime minister. He knew what Gage wanted, a typical production-style solution. He wanted the script cut down again, therefore fewer days shooting. At sixty thousand dollars a day it mounted quickly.

Reaching out with one hand, Alexander adjusted the Venetian blinds so that he could see the towers and battlements across the way. It was a pleasant sight, and added to the unreality of it all. There was, he could see, a big yellow tabby cat sitting in an embrasure, giving himself a thorough wash. There were several furtive cats living on the lot, keeping the rats and mice down, and, Alexander had heard, a couple of humans who existed somehow without leaving the grounds. Living in Fairyland on crusts of bread.

Alexander could just smell the odor of Teresa di Veccio rising from his clothes, and he wondered if anybody else could. Matthews, the writer? Would he be entertaining the boys at the Cock 'N Bull with tales of his meeting with the Boss? “Dresses like a banker, smells like a fag . . .” Sure, we're all fags in Hollywood, sensitive folks, screw anything . . .

The scent caught at him again, and he could feel his penis swelling slightly at the memory invoked. He had already made up his mind to give them the money, God knows where he would find it, because the mistake was his. The buck stops here. Meanwhile, Alexander smelled the faint ripeness of rutting, and watched the cat at his bath . . .

CHAPTER THREE

NORTH OF Malibu, almost to the Trancas light, a lonely beach house jutted over the cliff, surrounded by sheltering windswept Monterey cypresses, the
house itself old weathered lapstrake redwood, with a roof garage, a large wooden deck on three sides, potted shrubs and gaily striped beach furniture. From Highway 1 all you could see were two massive fieldstone pillars supporting a big double-doored automobile entrance, thick cypress, a dilapidated mailbox, and a fresh sign printed in bright red:
KEEP OUT. TRESPASSERS WILL BE VIOLATED
. This sign had several .22 bullet holes in it, but was still readable.

It was not a place you would enter unless you had a clear invitation.

Within, on this early Monday morning, were Richard Heidelberg and his lady love of the moment, Elektra Soong. Although it was just the kind of morning when one would love to walk down the sand-swept wooden steps to the beach and lie on a towel, getting a tan and listening to the radio, neither Rick nor Elektra was at all interested in the outside world, and every blind in the house that could be lowered was lowered, leaving the interior in semidarkness. Cold jazz trickled into every room from a network of loudspeakers, and in a couple of rooms there were color television sets making a morning soap opera visible but not audible. Rick and Elektra were in different rooms. Elektra was in the big master bedroom, reading a magazine, rapidly flipping the pages and rhythmically biting her reddened and puffed lips. She was also rubbing her toes together, making a sound like rats. This sound drove her crazy, but she would not or could not stop making it. The magazine was
Vogue
and she had read it thirty or forty times.

Rick was in the living room, still dressed in Arab costume made from sheets, bedspreads and scarves. He was trying his belt on around his forehead, looking critically at himself in the long mirror over the mantel. They were going to revolutionize the clothing industry, they had decided a couple of days before. It was simple, they would make Arab dress fashionable, and then corner the market. Rick wondered a hundred times why no one had thought of it before.

Satisfied that the belt did nothing for his costume, a decision he had made several times, Rick returned to the glass-topped table in front of the fireplace and kneeled beside it. On the table were the remains of a thousand dollars' worth of Peruvian pearl cocaine, and a variety of paraphernalia. He and Elektra had been having themselves a nonstop cocaine party, just the two of them, prepared for in advance: groceries, liquor, weed, the phones shut off, cover story (Tahoe) and all; and now they were down from the original
half-ounce to a couple of grams. This was the fourth day. Neither had slept or wanted to, but they made sure they took their vitamins and drank a little milk or orange juice every hour. Rick wasn't feeling too bad. He was frightened, of course, by the fact that they were going to run out some time that afternoon, and that the curtains would have to be pulled back, the blinds lifted, and the
sunshine
let into the place. It made him shudder to think of the
sunshine.
The sun was God, after all, for any practical human purpose, and God is not mocked.

“Lines!” he called out, and started cutting four, then eight, lines of the cocaine, now chalky from the sea air.

Elektra drifted into the room, naked, perhaps the most beautiful girl Rick had ever seen, a mix of Portuguese, Chinese, Hawaiian, a real
hapahaole
from the streets of downtown Honolulu. “Oh, swell,” she said, and got down beside him. He kissed her tiny shoulder affectionately and she gave his penis a squeeze. Then they snorted their lines.

Rick sat back against the couch. It would soon be over, this little trip into the white universe, but it had been a good one. No long nights of anxiety, no horrible thoughts crowding all pleasure from sight. Not much fucking, but long hours of quiet conversation about everything under the sun, both of them naked and hugging their knees. And of course the two great ideas. Rick often had great ideas when deep into cocaine, but sometimes you sobered up and the ideas turned out to be false. That was okay; this time, these two ideas would survive the
sunlight.

The first was the Arab dress idea, and for two days they played costume and looked through books and magazines for anything having to do with dress or fashion. It all seemed so childishly simple: fashions were dictated by what the “people of the moment” were wearing, and right now Rick was a “person of the moment,” and so, by extension, was Elektra. They were always being photographed and interviewed, and what they did became news. This would always work as long as they weren't pigs about it; the young public enjoyed success for its heroes, and Rick was certainly a hero.
The Endless Unicorn
had cost two hundred thousand dollars and had grossed worldwide something like forty million dollars,
because young people everywhere liked it.
Rick liked it, too, that's why he made the goddamn thing; he liked it and he forced it through, and it hit the bull's-eye. So even the establishment liked him, although it did not trust him.

Which brought his mind, now riding high on the new lines, to the second idea, which was not so simple as the first, but much more exciting to Rick. He would take over the studio, grab it away from Alexander Hellstrom, and with the whole creative power of the studio behind him, and with his friends, the young up-and-coming filmmakers of the world, he would begin a reign of moviemaking equal to the age of the pyramids.

At one point Rick laughed wildly and kissed Elektra and said, “We'll make
The Martian Chronicles,
with actual locations! On Mars!”

She loved it. “Can I be in the picture?”

It was time to blow the rocks out of his nose. Rick went into the bathroom off the bedroom, taking along a fresh wineglass, which he filled to the brim with warm water. He dipped his nose into the water, much as a bird might, and inhaled. Warm itchy water trickled down his throat, almost making him cough. He held the cough, and let the excess water drip from his nose. He looked at himself in the mirror. His eyes were feverish, big as prunes. He inhaled more water, repeating the process three times, and then with a shake of his head, blew. He could feel huge masses of wreckage up inside his head, and, closing off one nostril at a time, blew and blew. Once it started it rose to a torrent, and the sink was spattered with shiny crimson blobs and red rills of blood. God, but it felt good to blow that stuff out!

Rick cleaned the bowl thoroughly, reflecting on the fact that his snot was worth money. He was still high, and his nostrils felt like twin wind tunnels. In the bedroom Elektra was trying to get some sleep, lying on her side with the sheet up over her shoulder, breathing like a wounded buffalo. He did not disturb her, but walked on through to the living room and sat once again by the coffee table. Coffee table. There had been just about everything on that table but coffee. She was right. It was time to quit, even though there was a lot of coke left. His nose was clean and clear, even starting to hurt a bit; this was the time to take a double shot of 100-proof whiskey, lie back, and come gradually down.