The Player (2 page)

After that there were three more postcards, and none of them carried a message.

Across the street, he saw Mary Netter and Drew Posner, from Marketing. He braced himself for their buoyant onslaught. Drew waved his hand like the kid in fifth grade who has the answer all the time.

“Hey, Mister Vice President,” he said. Griffin tapped an invisible hat brim.

“So cool,” said Mary. Mary had short hair; a month ago it had been a crew cut. Once, at a party, Drew asked Griffin if he'd like to rub his dick over Mary's head. Mary's laughter had embarrassed Griffin, and he felt that embarrassment as proof of something bad about himself, an inability to play.

Levison's meeting was over, Griffin could see the back of the empty sofa by the window. He took the long way around the building to his office, to avoid passing Celia. The end of his job was inevitable. There would be other work, other studios, but the glow around him was probably lost, and he would never be the head of production, not for a major studio, not for this studio or Universal or Disney or Columbia or Paramount or 20th-Century Fox. These were the last studios with property, with soundstages and back lots, where you could point to a building and say, “That was Alan Ladd's dressing room” or “Over there we made
Bringing Up Baby.”
And if it was sentimental of him to get a little pleasure out of the history of these buildings, did that harm anyone? If the Writer knew he had held on for this last bad year with Levison because he didn't want to leave the lot would he like Griffin a little, see him as just another human being with the full assembly of reasons to be unhappy? Would the Writer understand that even if Griffin were offered a great job as head of a company with offices in a tall building in Century City or Beverly Hills he might not want it, that the thought made him miserable? Orion and Tri-Star, big companies, were in office buildings, what difference did it make where they were? It just mattered to him, and he couldn't resist the gloom that soon he would have to give up a real studio with a real gate, trade in a parking space with his name painted on a concrete bumper for a pass to an underground garage. He wanted to say, how can you make a movie in an office
building? That was another sentimental thought, but he caught himself and resisted the attack. Maybe he wasn't really sentimental enough. Wouldn't the studio's films have done better if he were more sentimental? Here he was, the centipede who tries to understand his own method, a sure way to stumble.

None of this was a surprise. For a few months Griffin had felt a slight change in the number of calls Jan logged during the day. One afternoon while she was away from her desk, Griffin had opened her files and compared a few days of recent phone logs with the logs from the year before. A year ago, in three days Griffin had received two hundred and ninety-five. In the last three days he had received two hundred and eleven. He hadn't counted the calls by category, but it looked at a few glances as though agents trying to sell him screenplays and directors were not calling him as often. He had no trouble getting calls returned, but something in the wind was telling people that Griffin Mill was not the best first choice anymore. Could the Writer sending him the postcards understand that they were in the same business, with the same rules for everyone?

When he walked into his office, Jan tickled the air in front of her, grinning. There was a postcard propped against her typewriter.
HOLLYWOOD AT NIGHT, THREE VIEWS OF THE GLAMOUR CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.

“It went to Accounting by accident, they just sent it over. Look on the back.”

“No.”

“Come on, it's a girl who's sending you these cards, it has to be.”

Griffin picked the card up and turned it over. The message: “Is it me, or is it you?”

“You were at a party,” said Jan, “and you told some girl you'd make her a star, and she went to bed with you. You said you'd call
her and you never did. You flashed her that big lover-boy smile of yours and you caught her on it.”

“I don't have to lie to women.”

“Honey, all men lie to women. It's in the blood.”

Griffin had an instant of clarity, and he smiled, he relaxed, he leaned forward, he brought his face near Jan's, he liked himself for the first time in weeks. “You got me,” he said. “It doesn't happen often. You know as a rule I don't mess with actresses.”

“But they have such nice legs.”

“I'll tell you the truth, it's not the length, it's the way they feel. It's the skin. It's how they get to be stars, too, it's something about the way they radiate. I'll tell you what happened. There was a party, I wasn't drunk, but she was. She told me to take her home. I took her home. I stayed a few hours. It was fun.”

“And now she wants you to make her a star. Except you don't even remember her name. So you caught her on your smile. I hope she knows it's like your car, that you have to give it back when you're fired.”

Griffin let the line pass, but he saw in Jan's eyes that she wished she hadn't said it. He pressed ahead with the story. “Are you ready for the punch line? She
is
a star. She's a television star, and she wants to make it in the movies. And she knows she never will, but she wants to try. And she thought I could help her.”

“So why doesn't she sign her name? Maybe you're lying right now. Maybe she isn't a television star. How would you know, you don't watch television. You're ashamed to admit a one-night stand with a girl whose name you can't remember.”

“Maybe she isn't a star?” Griffin said, trying to slump in defeat. Then he came back on the attack. “But you know why she won't sign? She's trying to be original. She thinks, of course I remember her, everyone else does. She didn't sign the postcards the
way bad writers who don't have agents draw cartoons and write jokes on the envelopes of screenplays they send in to famous directors. They draw big noses sticking out of the flaps and stars around the directors' names. They think that if they can't be good, at least they can be different. They go to novelty shops that print
YOUR NAME HERE
on the headlines of phony front pages and send these stupid things as cover letters with their scripts. The headline says,
STEVEN SPIELBERG WINS OSCAR FOR DIRECTING YOUR-NAME-HERE'S STUPID SCREENPLAY.
”

“It doesn't say ‘stupid' on the headline.”

“It doesn't have to.”

“She's got to sign her name one of these days. Maybe she'll call you. Would you see her again?”

“I'll do what you tell me to do.”

“Griffin, if she calls, or if you remember her name, or if she signs her name, be nice to her. If you use the casting couch, pay your debts.”

“You'll be the first to know.”

“The second,” she said. She had closed the case.

Griffin's indignation developed a life of its own, and it remembered a party, an actress's long hair, kisses, promises. At dinner that night with Dick Mellen, his lawyer, Griffin heard himself babbling on about the postcards and the actress. Mellen, sixty-five, silver-haired, with a tan like brushed gold, had known Bogart, he had been drunk with Bogart a dozen times, which was why Griffin had hired him. Mellen didn't care about the cards.

“Put her in a movie,” he said.

“But what if she can't act?” Griffin was surprised and annoyed with how shocked he sounded.

“That's what I'm telling you,” said Mellen. “You know what they did in the old days? Prison movie. Visiting day. Long tracking shot down the room with all the little booths with the telephones.
Wives and girlfriends, each one gets a close-up, each one the girlfriend of a different executive or producer.”

“But she's the star of a television series.”

“Which one?”

“I'm sworn not to say.”

“Griffin, this isn't a joke.”

“If she's any kind of grown-up, she'll keep it to herself.”

“No. Grown-ups turn everything to their advantage and don't worry about scandal. At least they do in this town. If she's smart, her agent'll call Levison to talk about projects.”

Griffin saw that he had lowered himself in Mellen's eyes, not for the actress but for making things inexcusably difficult.

Mellen changed the subject. “You know your job is not exactly secure right now.”

“Everything will work out. We're making some good pictures.” This was what he was supposed to say, and he didn't like the sound of it. The lie about the actress had upset his rhythm, he was measuring every thought now.

“I think they're bringing in Larry Levy.”

Griffin exhaled, and with the rush of air again he tortured himself, this time for collapsing, for taking the news as a body blow, taking it badly. He always tried to contain the air, contain the feeling, not show too much excitement, not show unhappiness. This was the closest he came to meditation; when other executives whooped and slapped each other's palms if an audience cheered during the first sneak previews of a film, Griffin kept the feelings to himself. And now, instead of keeping the air inside, to stay firm, he was breaking one of his first rules. Without any control now he heard himself add another hatefully dull thought to the conversation. “Larry Levy's a jerk.”

“Do you want to quit? I don't think you should.”

“I'd like to run Columbia.”

“You can't turn back the clock.” The job had been offered a year ago, and Griffin had told them no. He had wanted Levison's job, and there was talk that he'd get it. The talk had been wrong.

“Keep your eyes open,” said Griffin, another stupid phrase.

“That's what I do,” said the lawyer.

Griffin wanted to tell Mellen that the story about the actress had been a lie, every word of it. If he told the truth, would the fissure between his thoughts and their expression be healed? Or was purification impossible without greater sacrifice and harder work?

A fresh thought came to him and made him sick. He would end up having to sell something, real estate or cars. If he lost his job during a round of musical chairs, he would be on the way to exile from Hollywood. This wouldn't happen immediately. The favors due him would be paid off, if he couldn't get important work at a big studio, one of the stars or directors he'd fought for might hire him to run his office and find material, and let him produce something if he'd been there from the beginning. If the films died, and the next crew of bright young executives saw him as a relic, then where could he go? Smaller companies, with little funding and few contacts. They would hire Griffin for his address book, not understanding that the book was as out of touch as the book's owner. Eventually, his disgrace would catch up with him, and everyone would know he was old, over the hill. One day he would be out of money. The next day he would put his house on the market, then take the profit and rent an apartment somewhere, and look for work outside of Hollywood, outside of the movies. By then he would be, what, forty? He tried to see himself at forty, selling German cars to young producers and studio executives. He imagined the ad in a newspaper, “Hi, I'm Griffin Mill, here to help put the entertainment professional behind the wheel of a precision motor car.” Why not kill himself now? The fantasy ended with his funeral, and a crowd of pitying friends.

He didn't ask himself how he would come to die at forty. He would die of embarrassment. He chased these thoughts away, and tried to picture himself as an independent success, a real producer, a man of accomplishment, a man to be feared. Nothing. No such picture would emerge, there was too much interference from all the confusion in his life. He knew how anyone who had known him in the past would read the ad for the Mercedes dealership, “Hi, I'm Griffin Mill. I had promise, but I fucked myself.”

Home in bed, Griffin looked through the dark to the postcard writer. He concentrated, trying to beam his mind to the Writer's mind, asking him to stop the cards. If the night is alive, thought Griffin, then what I tell the night in my room, the night can tell you in your room.

Leave me alone.

I'm sorry if I broke a promise. That's life.

Griffin saw these thoughts fall to the middle of the bed, dead. He pictured the distance between himself and the secret correspondent as a series of contiguous dark boxes, and he spoke aloud, testing the air with his voice and receiving a slight echo. “Hello? It's me, Griffin Mill. I said I'd get back to you. Well, here I am. Please stop sending the postcards. I can't stop thinking about them, and they're getting in my way. Listen, if I find out who you are before you identify yourself or stop sending these cards, you'll never work for me.”

He thought the last part sounded stupid, and imagined an audience agreeing with him, saying, “Yes, Griffin, that pathetic threat sure is stupid.” The sense of someone watching felt like a good sign, that he'd gotten through.

The next morning he had breakfast at the Polo Lounge with Levison. They met every Wednesday; it was so much a part of their schedules that they no longer confirmed the meeting unless it was going to be canceled.

“Read any good scripts lately?” asked Levison.

“Chinatown.”

“They already made that one.”

“I read it last week.”

“You know they'd never make it now. They wouldn't even make
Saturday Night Fever
now.”

Griffin smiled. “Excuse me, but you and I are ‘they.'”

“I'm ‘they.' You're almost ‘they,' but not quite.” Griffin didn't like Levison's curdled smile. The mild remark came quickly, and it seemed to Griffin that Levison regretted it. Levison continued, “In
Saturday Night Fever,
Travolta wins the dance contest but realizes it's a hollow victory, that the world of the discos is an empty world. Can you see that now?”

“He grows up in the story. What difference does the background make? Plus the music is great. And the dancing is great.”