The Hollywood Trilogy (75 page)

“Huh?” Jerry thought of his two original screenplays, and shit-canned them forever.

“Give me your idea in one terrific sentence,” Rick said.

“Well, it's based on a
novel,
it's just an experiment I'm trying . . . but it's Raymond Chandler's
The Lady in the Lake,
only as a love story, like
The Maltese Falcon.”

Jerry listened miserably to the empty hum of the telephone. “What have you got on paper?” Rick said finally.

“Not a whole hell of a lot,” Jerry said.

“Could you messenger it over to me? I'd like to read the material. It sounds like a major movie. Lots of stuff to check over, though. Availability of rights, stuff like that . . .”

It was Jerry's turn to speak. Swallowing what seemed like a mouthful of cotton, he said, “I'll—listen, give me a few days, okay? To smooth it out a little?”

To get it on paper, he meant.

Rick's voice said, “Okay, and I'll get back to you. Listen, Elektra says hello.”

“Oh, hello to her, too,” Jerry said, stunned. He hung up the phone. Nobody was looking at him, not even Richard.

So Toby had somehow burst the barrier. “Elektra says hello.” What had Toby said? What was Jerry obligated to? Did Richard Heidelberg think Jerry was an associate of Karol Dupont? But even with all the confusion, Jerry felt a pleasurable tightening of his resolve.

That night he and Barbara got into a terrible fight on the telephone. He tried, without going into confusing or embarrassing detail, to explain that he
had
to work on his script tonight, that there was actual
interest
(although he cautiously held back the name Richard Heidelberg); and she was furious that he had not called her before. Good food was going to waste.

“I'm sorry,” he said. But he wasn't.

RAIN CAME to Los Angeles, the swirling tips of subtropical storms brushing the great basin with torrents of pure water. It cleaned off the streets, the rooftops, the trees; it made mushrooms spring up on the glittering green highway dividers, it filled the concrete bed of the Los Angeles River and quickly flooded the vast underground run-off system, so that at the bottom of the hills, manholes would send up fountains of crystal water through the ring of one-inch holes in their covers. It rained and rained and rained, and erased one of the hottest, smoggiest summers in human memory. The first freshness created joy in people's hearts; perhaps it was negative ionization, perhaps it was just relief. But after a while there was a new smell in the air, and the smell carried with it a sullen dread, genetic dread of The Flood, dread of endless years of rain after endless years of ice and snow, with only some long-dead ancestor's tales to remind us of blue skies and sweet sunny days.

It was the smell of mildew.

Jerry's apartment was full of it. It came out of the plaster walls and settled in the dirty clothes at the bottom of the closet. It hung from the drapes. It moistened the garbage sacks, already overrun with streams of hungry ants, and encouraged cockroaches from their crevices. It made his typewriter keys stick together and it caused him to make a lot of typographical errors.

But Jerry did not care. He wrote, very rapidly, his first-draft screenplay of
The Lady in the Lake
just as the rain chose to begin. He wrote it on pure energy. He had never worked so hard in his life. Nor had he ever had so much fun. His gut rumbled and he wobbled on his legs as he made his way from toilet to typewriter to bed; he wrote all night and dozed with the dreams of scenes in his mind, and then got up without thinking and sat at the machine again and wrote again. Twenty, thirty pages a day, half of them thrown to the wind with enthusiasm as the new approach is tried and succeeds. He had never known it could be like this.

When he was done he mailed the script to Richard Heidelberg. He felt a twinge at doing this without consulting Harriet Hardardt, but after all, she had had nothing to do with his relationship to Heidelberg. Might as well ship a copy to Toby! Then he felt a twinge about Toby, whom he had not taken into his confidence. But what was there to say? Jerry had been around long enough now to hear the empty talk that was on everyone's lips, the deals
about to be made, the parts one was “up” for, and Jerry definitely did not want to join the chorus.

Of course Barbara and his employer had to be kept in the dark as well. To finish his script, Jerry had said he had the flu, and over Barbara's protests that he bed down at her place and let her pamper him, Jerry weakly said, “I want to just lay here,” and Barbara, obviously sensing rebuff, accepted his story.

So he was back working at
Pet Care Hotline,
but he was not back at Barbara's.

“I have a lot of writing to do,” he told her.

“You could come here for dinner,” she said, “and then go do your writing.”

“I like to get right at it,” Jerry said weakly. And, as weak and clumsy as it sounded, it was true. Without waiting for any response, Jerry was already into the second draft, working nights and weekends. Part of the weekends he spent with Barbara, dutiful, attentive, kind, loving, deliberately and with great effort putting the script out of his mind. Of course it wouldn't leave him alone. He might be spooning crabapple jelly on his hot muffin, Barbara enthusiastically describing their outing to the beach or desert, when it would steal into his brain. The jelly would drip off his knife and onto the tablecloth and he would apologize and Barbara would make jokes, but he knew she was bitter about it.

But then finally he would be free of her and able to go back to Fountain, strip, pull the cover from his machine and get back to work. He actually rubbed his hands together and chuckled. “Let's go, honey,” he would say to the typewriter, and tickle her switch.

There was plenty to do. For one thing, he had thrown out too much Chandler, he hadn't seen how subtly Chandler had constructed his scenes, how easily he set up each scene, how important were the asides and apparent irrelevancies. So, back in went a lot of great stuff, and really only a few scenes had to be altered for the romantic overlay.

It was extraordinary fun to play with these ideas and have them come out right. Ideas flowed out of his mind onto the paper before he could think them, and for the first time, Jerry Rexford felt the awesome humility of a writer who realizes that he is not the train but the track.

In a way, it was a relief. He could read over something he had written and
enjoy it fully, laugh or cry or feel anger, because he hadn't
really
written it, it had just come out of him.

It is like digging for buried treasure, he thought.

No, it is like milking a cow.

Now he understood why the writers of the Bible and other holy books thought they were inspired by God; they hadn't made it up, where else could it have come from?

He mailed off the second draft screenplay to Richard Heidelberg with a short note of apology for the first draft, and sat back and waited. The rain streamed down. He cleaned the apartment, got rid of the ants, caused the cockroaches to retreat to prepared positions, did his laundry and waited. The one attempt he made to get his relationship with Barbara back on some kind of friendly footing didn't work. She actively resented his long absence and was grumpy over dinner and impossible in bed.

He didn't blame her. She had just found out that no matter what, she came in second.

And then Harris began to complain about his work. He was getting sloppy. He was misspelling people's names, and in this business you can't do that. And his copy was too tame.

“I think you're perhaps giving a little too much to your, ah, other endeavors,” said Harris politely. They were in his office. Jerry was barely paying attention. Harris did not ask him to stop writing at home. He was really very nice. He only asked that Jerry earn his paycheck. Everyone else had to. That was the way things were. Jerry nodded sullenly and went back to work. He hoped the old bastard would fall off the wagon and get off his back. It would be great to see Harris come in some afternoon, drunk as a goat, dirty, piss-wet pants and blood on his cheek.

But no, Jerry was ashamed for having such thoughts. Actually, he deserved firing; it was only Harris's niceness that kept him eating.

Once again, Jerry Rexford had screwed up his life.

But he waited to hear from Richard Heidelberg with the certain knowledge that everything would work out. He had fabulous daydreams of accepting his Academy Award, of appearing on the
Tonight
show and cracking everybody up; daydreams of an estate in Beverly Hills, Manhattan tower suite, his own jet airplane. The first thing he would do would be to move out of this dump. Oh, quit his job. Then move out of this dump. He would move into
the Beverly Hills Hotel, at the studio's expense, of course. He would get rid of this little SCM, sweet machine that it was, and get himself a big IBM job, maybe the studio would furnish one free. He would be on the set every day, consulted by the actors and actresses wanting to know how to play the subtle aspects of their roles.

He cast the picture, oh, many times he cast the picture. You can't have just anyone play Philip Marlowe. No actor in the box-office top ten failed to pass before Jerry's scrutiny. Yet none of them measured up to the ultimate Marlowe, Bogart himself. So Jerry would always come back to envisioning Bogart in the role. In his mind's eye, as he wrote, and later as he feverishly went over every scene in his mind and waited for Richard Heidelberg to call him back, he saw Bogart's face.

And he drank, first to enhance the fantasies, and then to blot them out so he could sleep. You couldn't sleep with Bogart racing around in your mind, doing scenes you had written. So about five shots of 100-proof bourbon would knock him out.

All in all, he waited two months. In that time he learned how to hate. The person he hated was Richard Heidelberg. What a fool Jerry had been! He had not protected himself. When Heidelberg had said, “What's your idea?” Jerry should have covered himself. He should have pitched one of his original scripts, and then, when he had a relationship with the bastard, spring the Chandler idea. Jerry always got depressed thinking about that brief conversation, because he realized he could have done nothing to protect himself, he was out in the open with no help in sight. The idea did not belong to him. It belonged to Raymond Chandler, long dead, and M-G-M, not so dead, and logically after that, anyone who would pay M-G-M's fee to remake it. The more he thought about these things, the more foolish Jerry felt.

But he had
learned.
The idea he had started out with had been good. It was only the idiotic idea of trying to sell it that was bad. Now Jerry should go right out and write another original. With what he had learned on
The Lady in the Lake
he could probably write a selling script this time. But he could not think of anything to write about. Every idea was pale, drab, uncommercial. Compared to you-know-what.

Two full months. Rain all the time. Depression. Each day one more step to cold reality. He was sweating out a phone call from a man who had probably forgotten he existed.

Then one morning on the front page of
Daily Variety
there was an article about Richard Heidelberg and his just-announced relationship to Boss Hellstrom. Definitely not among the projects mentioned in the article (there were about ten of them) was “a remake of Raymond Chandler's
The Lady in the Lake.”

The ants were trooping into Jerry's kitchen again, as the garbage mounted. Oh, hell, let them have it, he thought, heavily depressed. It's only garbage. He listened to the constant rain. He was a broken man.

That night Raymond Chandler appeared to him in a dream and told him to give up.

CHAPTER TWELVE

ONLY THE tension between himself and Elektra had caused Rick to telephone Jerry Rexford. Rick didn't know the man from Adam, and normally would have snorted and said, “Let your friend get an agent and do things right.” But this was not the time for that. As a matter of fact, Rick had never actually been in this kind of a spot before. If a girl objected to the way he did things, or didn't want to do what he wanted her to do, he would smile and say goodbye. But he did not smile and say goodbye to Elektra. He
needed
her. Corny, huh?

He liked to stroke her ear and the curve of her neck while they lay in bed watching television. He liked to watch her cook. He liked to watch her repot plants. Elektra was good with plants, and the beach house was full of them. Orchids, begonias, bromeliads, hoyas, cactus, ferns, succulents. Sometimes, when one or another of the orchids was in bloom, the house would be filled with the ripe odor of perfume in the afternoon sunlight. “Add some rotten fruit, a little shit, some vomit, and it would smell just like Hotel Street,” she said. She had been born in the rotting muck of downtown Honolulu, her mother a deranged prostitute and her father unknown, and Rick could not understand where she got her sense of humor. But she had it, and he needed it.

But mostly he needed her company. She was the best company he had ever had. They could do nothing for hours together. Or they could do
everything,
and it would be the same, their eyes would meet and affection,
love,
would shine back.

Okay, he
loved
her.

But he wanted to move to town and she resisted. She never actually came out and said she didn't want to move, she just inertly resisted. Rick's sensitivity to her made it impossible for him to just go ahead and hire a realtor and move. He knew he wouldn't lose her, but he would lose something, and whatever it was, he wanted to keep it.