West of Paradise (36 page)

“That's my gift to you,” said Ernie Binderman. He was as close to aristocratic as a filmmaker could be, a man who had been in charge long enough to relax about his status and make it all the way to bona fide gentleman. Haute Hollywood was in full attendance. The bridal party's dresses were in deep shades of green to coordinate with the potted palms and the painted ones on the wall. The fifty thousand spent on floral arrangements had gone mainly to the sterling silver roses, which were wound around white trellises, set into crystal bowls, and trailing to the floor. The bridal bouquet was lightened by dainty bells of lilies of the valley. The designer of the bridal gown had flown in from Paris for the fittings and the actual occasion, bringing with him a new perfume he'd created especially for the day called Abby, the name of the bride. The scent was so subtle it hardly had a smell. All of the women present were given it as a gift, and all the men sniffed them when they sprayed it on, pronouncing it lovely, or sexy, except for the bridegroom, who said he couldn't smell anything.

A general amnesty on wounded feelings appeared to have been declared in the town, in view of whom Larry was marrying. Even those he'd offended or bettered were there, at least the men in the top positions. There wasn't room in the hotel, even with all of its ballrooms and restaurants, for everyone Larry had affronted.

“That's really kind of you, Ernie,” said Larry, fielding the offer of studio head. “And I hate to look a gift studio in the mouth. But you remember what they said about Selznick when he married Irene Mayer.”

“The son-in-law also rises,” Ernie said. “I remember. But you're already there.”

“Thanks, anyway,” Larry said.

“I just wanted you to know how much faith I have in you.”

“Faith is different from trust, I guess,” Larry said, and went off to kiss his bride, and accept an offer from another studio. He could still make more money as a producer, but he felt like chastening his father-in-law. He was smarting from the prenuptial agreement they'd made him agree to. Like he wasn't capable of delivering on a fiduciary agreement.
Fiduciary
was one of his favorite words. He used it in meetings all the time, to build up confidence. Not only in the sense that he was capable of entering into a fiduciary relationship, but also that he knew the word, like a lawyer.
Fiduciary
was second in his vocabulary only to
draconian.
He had read as a young man that a situation demanded draconian measures, and upon finding out how severe that meant the situation was, and that there had been an emperor involved, he chose it as the origin of his new name. Still, he thought his marriage to Abby called for nothing as draconian as a prenuptial agreement, since marriage itself was a fiduciary arrangement.

But as it turned out, he was just as glad that they had such an agreement, so Abby's money couldn't be counted as his. Because it wasn't long after that marriage that McClure took him to Vegas, where Larry had gotten hooked on gambling. He wouldn't have liked the civilized thugs he ended up owing, who now had lawyers as well as guns, to be able to move against Abby's bank accounts.

*   *   *

The forgery and embezzlement scandal broke just about the time Abby got sick. “Why didn't you just ask me for the money?” she asked him, lying in her bed, all the fearsome medicines on the table beside her.

“Because I love you,” he said. He really did. She was kind and pretty, and now that she was failing, her vulnerability gave her a pallid radiance. It really pained him that he'd brought grief to her. He was only glad Lila didn't read the trades. When this was all over, the lawyer crap, the trial, and maybe Abby, too, depending how strong she was—the prognosis was vague—he would have to make a trip back to Queens.

*   *   *

“How does your client plead?” the judge asked.

“Guilty,” said Gerald Morgan, Fletcher McCallum's criminal lawyer associate. McCallum's firm dealt strictly with entertainment law, but they did have a line to the best plea bargainers in town, just in case one of their clients went over the legal line, which many of them did. “With extenuating circumstances.”

The lawyer then described the circumstances that were so extenuating in Larry's life: that he had fallen into bad company, gambled, gotten into debt, run through his personal wealth, accrued from … at this point, the lawyer gave a list of Larry's best-known pictures, including a glittering name or two who had starred in them. The judge looked not just impressed, but enthralled. By the time the lawyer got around to the fact that Larry had started using a little cocaine to get over the sorrow of his wife's now terminal illness, and had probably been suffering from a kind of temporary insanity, the judge had already softened. He sentenced him to two years probation, mandatory attendance at a narcotics support group, another for compulsive gamblers, plus public service, which would involve making two short features about the evils of gambling and cocaine, starring a well-known actor who was in a nearby courtroom pleading guilty to possession.

Larry made the movies. The judge visited the set.

*   *   *

Abby died shortly after. All who had been at the wedding came to the funeral. In addition there were foreign dignitaries who were friends of her father's and had been unable to attend the festive ceremony, but knew the importance of being at the sad one. Plus members of the press who had covered Larry's trial, been taken with his manner, and become his friends. Abby had been genuinely adored by the women of the community, as for all her privilege she had never been other than loving and generous to everyone, totally lacking in the competitiveness that characterized even the soft aspects of the town: clothes and mentions in Joyce Haber. Abby had given freely of her time and energy to charity, and unendingly of support and affection to her friends. So even those who thought Larry a swine came to the service out of respect for her, and considered revising their opinion of her husband because of her respect for him. Also present were a few new candidates from the fresh list of the world's wealthiest men, compiled by
Forbes
magazine, to whom Larry had written to find out if they were interested in investing in movies. And although he had resigned as the head of the studio from which he'd embezzled, he'd been offered the same job at Cosmos. “There is more than one Teflon president,” Zack Arnold muttered to his wife, who still spoke to Larry although Zack did not.

*   *   *

So he was back on his feet again. The great men of the town came to make up the minyan that sat shivah. Their wives brought casseroles and pastries so that grief wouldn't weaken Larry after all his other troubles. As soon as a decent period of mourning had passed, he took a flying trip to New York to check in with Lila. Although she didn't read the trade papers, news of his conviction had made the national press, and there was a big story about the whole scandal in
Vanity Fair,
to which he'd bought her a subscription.

“You should never have started with those people,” she said, cutting up celery for the tuna salad. “They made you have delusions of grandeur.”

She pronounced it “grandoyer,” but he didn't correct her. He considered that part of what was dear about her, just as he wasn't bothered by the radical change in her appearance. The deliciously upstart little blonde he'd married long ago was lost in her somewhere, like Livingstone in the Congo, her old features indistinguishable, except for her pretty mouth, and the straight-ahead words that fell out of it. Her once-bright blue eyes were nearly obscured by the flesh that heavy-lidded them. But she still saw truth, and spoke it, and he'd had enough sleek women.

“They're not delusions,” he said, softly, but with some contention. As sharp as he considered her, she still didn't have a clue how big a man he was. There was nothing that could stop him now, except maybe a good deed.

*   *   *

He did one. In the beginning of Zack Arnold's career as an agent in Hollywood, Larry had taught him how to be a hardnose. Zack was a gentle man by nature, as Larry represented himself to be when the occasion called for it, or when he genuinely loved, as he did Lila. “You have to hang tough,” he'd told Zack, the first time Zack had blown a deal. The expression had not yet come into popular usage. In fact, Larry considered he might have invented it when he found out from Tim McClure that hanged men got erections. At the time, Larry was having a problem getting one of those, since McClure and his women had shown him so much that was fancy he could hardly get excited by plain. So he had said, “That's really tough,” meaning it seemed a terrible waste. Later he was to tell the titillating fact to Jason Stone, and Jason would agree to do another picture with him, playing a man who gets unfairly sentenced to death in the old West, but only if he could dangle with a visible hard-on.

“The condemned man ate a hearty beaver,” Jason was to say.

But on the day Zack blew his first heavyweight deal, Larry helped him to totally revamp his thinking and, more important, his behavior, teaching him to “hang tough.” They were meeting that afternoon, the two of them, with an actor who had just broken through as the number one box office attraction. Larry wanted him for a movie, Zack as a client. “We got to play good cop, bad cop,” Larry said. “You bully him, I make you be gentle.”

“I am gentle,” Zack said.

“You can't show that to an actor, or he'll have no respect for you. You got to make him think you're capable of killing for him, like a woman likes to imagine. And then you kill him with a laugh. It's like est. They beat you up, starve you, don't let you piss, then tell you you're wonderful, and you belong to them. After you give him a really hard time, you make him laugh.”

“I'm not funny,” said Zack.

“I'll make you funny,” said Larry.

They met with the actor. As they'd rehearsed, Zack came down on him very heavily, telling him he was blowing his future with lousy choices in scripts and lousy representation.

“I'm getting two hundred thousand a picture,” the actor said, the sum at the time being monumental. The joke of the twenty-million-dollar salary for a star was still a
Star Wars
galaxy away.

“You should be getting four. What if you lose your hair?”

“Don't scare him like that,” Larry said.

“He better be scared. He better be good and scared.”

“You're talking about me like I'm not here,” the actor said.

“You're not here. You're not here unless I tell them at the studio you're here. You're the Invisible Man. They don't care who actors really are. To them, you're whores. They bang you, and when they finish and you're all used up, unless you've got a great pimp, they don't even leave the money on the dresser.”

“How can you talk so ugly to such a sweet guy?” Larry said.

“Sweet counts for shit, and you know it. You, as the great producer you are, don't offer a guy a script because he's sweet. You offer it because you think he'll deliver tickets.”

“That's true.”

“I deliver tickets,” the actor said.

“And I deliver iron-clad contracts, so even if you slip, even if you don't show up, even if they don't make the movie, you still get your money.”

“Is that true?” the actor asked Larry.

“He's the one who started that policy,” said Larry, which was a lie, easy enough to check, but actors rarely did homework unless it was learning their sides.

“Okay,” the actor said, finally. “I'll sign. There's only one thing that bothers me…”

“Yes?” asked Zack.

“I heard about your agency having connections to the mob.”

“That's a vicious thing to say,” said Zack, who knew that rumor was out there. “How could you think such a thing?” He unbuttoned his jacket. Hanging on the front of his shirt was a holster, holding a .45.

They all cracked up laughing. The actor sent a letter of dismissal to his agent and signed with Zack, becoming his first major client. After that there was Jason, and a raft of box office stars. And after that, Larry kept his promise to make sure Zack had no more bad days. When he became studio president, he appointed Zack European production head.

Zack outlasted him, keeping the post past Larry's disgrace, his seeming expiation, his move to another studio. And then Zack had a heart attack.

Larry flew to London. He had buried his second California wife, and he wasn't about to lose the best friend he had, even though they weren't speaking.

“I'm finished,” Zack whispered, his arm connected to a network of machines, monitoring the life ebbing out of him.

“You aren't finished,” said Larry. “I'm taking you to New York. I got the best heart doctor in the country waiting for you. We'll get you a transplant. If I have to, I'll give you mine.”

“You don't have a heart,” said Zack.

“Fuck you,” said Larry.

“Up yours,” said Zack.

Larry took him back on a hospital plane, chartered for the occasion, charged to his old studio, the one Zack worked for now. Larry was set to pay it if anyone made an issue, with a check he'd already written himself from Cosmos.

“I don't know if my insurance covers this,” said Zack.

“Shut up and keep breathing,” said Larry.

Zack needed and got a four-way bypass. “They took the veins from my legs,” he said afterwards. “Can you imagine?”

“I offered them mine,” said Larry.

“You got lousy legs.”

“That's what the surgeon said. But I gave you some blood.”

“Did they check it for HIV?”

“In your ear.”

“How will I ever repay you?” Zack said, and started to cry.

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” said Larry. “Who's asking for anything?”