The Hollywood Trilogy (68 page)

He patted her hand and looked at her miserably. They always did it to you, didn't they? No matter how or why, they always did it to you, and you were left holding the sack.

“Oh, hell,” he said. “It's not the most important thing in my life. You're a human being, you have rights, you should be able to kiss a guy without taking him to bed. I guess.”

“Do you think we shouldn't have kissed at all?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said miserably. “I mean, no. I mean, we
should
have kissed.”

He turned to face her and took both her hands in his. “You don't know me well enough to know this, but if we had, I mean, if we
did
make love, it wouldn't be something that would upset our relationship . . .”

She smiled. “You mean, you'd still respect me?”

That puckish sense of humor. Jerry smiled, getting the joke. He was a pretty funny guy, too.

“Well, I wouldn't
respect
you,” he said, “But I wouldn't hate you, either . . .”

“Are you hungry? Can I fix us a snack?”

“That sounds swell,” Jerry said, and she leaned toward him and kissed him inquisitively on the lips. Jerry didn't push it, he kissed her back but did not try for a big clinch. She got comfortable and kept on with the kiss, and Jerry touched her shoulder and then let his fingertips brush her breast under the tee shirt. With a thrill he felt her nipple rise immediately under his touch. He cupped her breast and felt her tongue slip inquisitively into his mouth.

CHAPTER NINE

NONE OF the doctors and dentists who formed the syndicate that paid for the making of
The Endless Unicorn
wanted to take their profits out, and so Richard Heidelberg was left in control of not only their original investments plus profits, but also the money being waved under his nose by the investors' friends. This gave Rick an immense pool of capital. He did not know how much. Most of the money had been filtered through a Dutch Antilles bank, and indeed, The Endless Unicorn Company was a Dutch Antilles corporation. The lawyers had their way of explaining what was going on, but to Rick it was just a case of pouring the money here and there to keep the IRS and everybody else from knowing just how much there was.

Plenty to make movies with, but Rick didn't want to just make movies. He had done that. He laughed with embarrassment (to himself) when he thought about his cocaine fantasy of toppling Alexander Hellstrom, but really, what was left to him? The idea of waking up in the morning with nothing to do genuinely frightened him. He was not a simple soul, he could not engage himself deeply in making breakfast eggs, like Elektra, or even in debauchery, like many of his friends. He had to be climbing.

So it was with high energy and a deeply concealed anxiety that he mounted his offensive against Hellstrom, hardly admitting to himself what he was doing.

Naturally every studio in town wanted Rick and the capital he controlled. They needed product, and Rick could provide it. The arrangement, after lunches and lawyers, was to be a negative pickup deal, with back-and-forth approvals. Rick would borrow money from banks, based on his company's assets, and produce his motion pictures, falling within a budget approved by the studio. The studio would provide facilities at a cost overhead of thirteen percent, make available to Rick their options and availabilities of properties, stars and directors and, when the negative was finished, pay Rick's costs to date plus a healthy fee. The studio would then distribute the film, adding to its share of the expense the cost of prints and advertising campaigns. The studio, through its overseas distributing company, also had the option of distributing the picture overseas itself or licensing another distributor, with a share of the profits to Rick's company.

It was a sweet deal, if everything worked. And if everything didn't work, Uncle Sam would take a screwing from all concerned. Rick's lawyers told him that by using money that would otherwise go into the government's purse they could make pictures for something like fifty cents on the dollar.

“So a ten-million-dollar picture, which used to cost about three million, would now only cost us five million,” Rick said.

“Now you're catching on,” said Lewis Corning, his main attorney. “But that's if the picture is a disaster. If it's a hit, everything is twice as expensive, strictly for the purposes of tax avoidance.”

The property Rick had chosen, almost casually, was not particularly geared to these immense sums of money. In fact, when first submitted it had been an obvious candidate for a “little” picture, a personal effort by some director to show his stuff, a European picture. Daffy young man tries to attract sophisticated woman by daffy means. Ha ha, cute, but where are the mobs three thick around the block? Where were the repeat business and the newspapers full of free columns of chatter?

Rick intended to supply those himself. The world market for films, in his analysis, was most interested in two things: American Movie Stars and American Popular Culture. Rick would jam his project with plenty of both.

As he explained it to Alexander Hellstrom, “It's John Travolta, falling in
love with the fifteen-year-old mistress of Paul Newman, with songs. It's the tortoise and the hare.”

“What's the gimmick?” asked Hellstrom. They sat in his executive dining room at the studio; white tablecloths, white napkins, dull food from the commissary.

“The gimmick is,” Rick said with a smile, “the tortoise wins.”

“Newman gets the girl?”

“Maybe getting the girl isn't winning,” Rick said. “Look at
Roman Holiday.
”

“Who's directing this picture?” Hellstrom wanted to know. “Haven't thought that much about it. There are half a dozen guys who could do it. I'm sure they're all on the list.”

“What kind of budget do you see, above the line?”

Rick grinned shyly. “Well, this is one of the reasons we'd like to come to you. You're the best maker of budgets in the business. I don't see us flinging money around, but on the other hand, this has to be the kind of picture that goes full-race. Top stars, constant promotion, worldwide interest. It's going to cost some bucks.”

At the end of the meal Rick had severe heartburn and a deal, although it would take the lawyers and agents several months to iron out the procedural matters. The two men who counted had shaken hands.

And the funny part was, Rick liked Alexander Hellstrom and felt relaxed around him. He felt almost as if Hellstrom would protect him, if things got rough. And at these prices, things could get very very rough. This deal would be scrutinized by large numbers of coldblooded men who knew nothing about movies, only about money, and these men would have to be convinced, layer after layer, all the way to answer print, that Rick Heidelberg could pull it off. Even though Rick and his company stood to lose the most, the studio's owners would look amiss at pouring several million dollars into a losing venture.

Rick drove the long winding drive back to the beach in his 1968 Mustang, listening to a cassette of Miles Davis. He could have a hit picture on his hands, another
Unicorn,
if everything went well. Yet many tried what he was trying, and most of them failed. The first picture makes it big because it somehow hits a public chord, people go because the picture is friendly and invites them in. Then, the guy who forced the picture through against all odds changes. No longer does he meet resistance everywhere—now it
is obsequiousness, agreement, open doors. It becomes nearly impossible for him to get an honest opinion.

“Gosh, that's a
great
idea, Rick!” would be mild praise.

So the second picture is covered with insurance. The biggest stars, never mind, pay what it costs; a director who can work with stars, come in near budget and still grease his own ego. A script that works. The best songs, written by the hottest songwriters. A topflight advertising agency to carry the promotion. The works. Can't lose. The number is covered six ways from the middle.

The wheel rolls, and it turns out there are thirty-five more numbers out there waiting to catch the little ball.

But Rick trusted his instincts. He was not a middle-aged banker trying to psyche out the young, he was a young man who was setting out to make a movie he would want to see himself, would go see again and take his friends. That was the only kind of picture to make.

“
And then what?
” said a little voice.

He thought about Hellstrom, that calm likable man. If Rick was a general, leading his troops into battle, then Hellstrom was a general of generals, overseeing not the battle but the war itself, a man who must be able to commit to disaster
here
in order to reach victory
there,
a man to whom the death of a single picture is not the crucial matter, a man who knows that he can win a few and lose a few, just as long as profits continue to go up.

So in spite of all the cooperation, and the niceness of the man, Rick knew he could not count on Alexander Hellstrom in a last-ditch battle. He could only count on himself.

Getting home after the long drive, without even the rush-hour traffic to deal with, Rick once again asked himself why he lived at the beach. The answer was simple, of course. This had always been his vision of himself as a Hollywood big shot. The house at Malibu.

So he was living in a worn-out dream.

“Honey,” he said to Elektra. “We have to move into town. This thing's going into high gear.”

“Do I get a part?” she asked.

“No-you-don't-get-a-part,” he said. “What's for snacks?”

“Eat this,” she said, giving him the finger.

“No, thanks. Where's the coke?”

“All gone. I wouldn't tell you, anyway.”

“You know anybody who's got any?”

“Nope.”

Rick got out his address book, and felt a twinge of fear. To get busted in a dope deal now would be fatal. They would jail him. There was only one kind of millionaire they jailed, and Rick was it. But he wanted some coke.

After he had found somebody who would deal to him, he said to Elektra, “You better be nice to me when I get back, or I won't cut you in.”

“I'll be nice,” she said, and gave him a kiss to prove it.

RICK DROVE up the winding empty road through the Malibu hills, past the heavily gated entrance to the Enrique estate—now, in the post-Manson era, always double padlocked and chained—winding up and around a couple more of the brush-covered hillocks until he came to a cattle gate, held in place by a loop of plastic line. He got out of the car, opened the long gate, drove through, got out again and closed it, and then drove down the rutty dirt road until he could see the yellow lights coming from Tommy Cone's shack. He parked next to Tommy's beatup pickup truck and was about to get out of his car again when he heard a low warning growl. Rick could just see the dog's eyes in the light from the building.

“Nice boy,” Rick said. He did not move. He felt a shiver, not at the dog, who was only doing his job, but at the remoteness of this place, this empty lonely spot, where anything could happen. Tommy Cone was the live-in caretaker and guardian of the Enrique estate. His cottage stood higher on the hill and looked down from its copse of trees over the garden and swimming pool area. Tommy had a dozen guns in his place, from .22 target pistols to a big ten-gauge double-barreled shotgun, and he had Enrique's permission to use them. Enrique himself owned a chain of small department stores throughout the West, lived with his family in their low rambling Spanish-style mansion, and was in deathly fear of being attacked and murdered in the night.

The dog was a Belgian shepherd, nine feet long and black as death, “The Hound of the Malibu Hills” Tommy cheerfully called him. No, he wasn't nine feet long, he could clear a nine-foot wall, or was it twelve feet? It didn't matter. Rick was glad enough when Tommy's door opened, spilling light onto the gravel. “It's okay, Tor,” he said.

“Is it okay?” Rick asked.

“Sure, come on in.”

Tor was seated beside Tommy in the doorway, getting his ears scratched by the time Rick got over to them.

“Nice warm night, huh?” Tommy said. Tommy Cone was a thin man who stooped his shoulders and had a pot belly, now much larger than the last time Rick had seen him. They moved into the house, leaving Tor to his duties, and Rick crossed to the big window overlooking the Enriques' back garden. The pool was lit and glowed like a gigantic aquamarine gem. The cottage was dark inside, except for the amber bulbs in the entryway and one red light over in a corner. Rock 'n' roll played softly in the background.

Tommy sat in his favorite chair, beside the big window. There were newspapers on the rug, stacks of magazines, candybar wrappers and a general sense of sloppy but hip bachelor living. Rick continued to look out over the lit pool. There were no lights in the house. Beyond, over a couple of hills, was the Pacific Ocean. Not for the first time, Rick wondered about the kind of man who would live up here and not build his house where it could look out over the ocean. Where there was all that fire danger. Where there were all those rattlers out in the brush. Where fear could come for him every night, even if nobody else did.