What Movies Made Me Do (7 page)

I pictured the lush Art Deco office in Burbank on the flat sunstruck movie lot with strolling actors, fancy German cars, and the fake New York streetfront.

“How’s business?” he asked meaningfully.

“The movie’s rolling,” I shouted back.

He laughed harshly. Something was up. Something bad. “I’m trying to get a hold of Paul Riley,” Michael said casually. “I need him to budget out a Clint Eastwood script.”

“Fine, but he’s wandering the desert with a Polaroid looking for the master shot of the Sermon on the Mount.”

“Tell him to give me a call.”

“Sure will,” I lied.

“He happy with Jack?”

“Ecstatic.”

“And Anita?”

“He thinks she’s going to get nominated and come in two weeks under schedule.”

He paused. “I need you to see some play in the Village, a midnight revue from England, homosexual.”

I was panicky. He had changed the subject too fast. He was planning something.

“Somebody big interested?” I asked blithely.

“Just judge the material,” he snarled. Michael Finley hated homosexuals. This meant that someone bankable wanted to get studio money to buy it.

“You flying in?” I asked brightly.

“I’ll be in New York in a few days. I’m stuck here for now. Oh, and let’s sit down and look at all of Anita’s dailies when I arrive.”

I gripped the phone. “But you’ve already seen them and an assembly.”

“Yeah,” and he laughed. I didn’t like the new menace in his voice. “Get a dozen Zabar’s water bagels to my hotel and make sure they got a toaster in my suite.”

He was the studio president and he liked the Carlyle’s rough towels and glitzy suites but he and his wife believed the bagels were stale.

“Bagels for Michael,” I passed down the order to Rosemary, “next week at the hotel.”

Then I heard a crackle over the phone like a loudspeaker in the background. It sounded to me like he was in an airport about to get on a plane. “Where are you?” I asked.

“In the office,” he snapped. “Get it? Hang on.”

I got it. Michael Finley was on the warpath. Michael Finley was tough. He was a legend in Hollywood, hanging in year after year despite rumors he was about to be fired. The studio refused to give him an employment contract for more than one year at a time and he was up for contract renewal this month. He was capable of doing anything to me to try and impress them.

Ambition kept Michael working. His father wrote jokes and sold instant coffee door to door. When his dad drove Michael to Beverly Hills High in their old Chevy, Michael hid on the seat and swore he’d someday drive a Rolls. His negative personality kept him working too. As head of production, he never made a movie because he liked it; he refused to consider
a film unless it was the sequel to a smash hit or a vehicle for a star.

“Why are you flying in next week?” I raised my voice over the sound of a departing airplane motor.

“The awards dinner,” he said smugly.

He was getting a statue for being the humanitarian of the year at a fancy black-tie dinner-dance at the Waldorf.

“What else?”

“Problems.” The airplane faded. I steeled myself. It was a sneak attack. I bet he was on his way here to wrestle the movie away from me. It was ironic, since he’d always hated it. “How’s your business?” he asked before he hung up.

“Smooth.”

Rosemary handed me my heavy raccoon coat. “You didn’t tell him about Anita?”

“If I show him my throat, he bites it,” I said. “Much worse than that,
he
didn’t mention problems with Anita.”

I was dialing his office in Burbank.

“He doesn’t know,” Rosemary said comfortingly.

“My gut reaction is that he knows, and unfortunately my instinct is rarely wrong.”

Michael’s secretary answered crisply.

“Hi, just confirming the meeting tomorrow with Arnie Berger,” I said blithely. I knew if Michael Finley was coming, he’d be sure to meet with the big New York agents.

“That’s not until the day after,” she said, before I signed off.

My heart hammered. I tucked my blouse into my pants. He was coming, just as I suspected. How in the world was I going to sneak off overseas?

Rosemary took a look at my face. “It’ll be sunny and warm in Israel, right? Let’s walk over now and fix your passport.”

Out on the street, office workers were stepping out of lunch restaurants. Our breaths made steam. I bumped shoulders
with strangers. I never understand why the midday ritual is to crowd together at hectic tables. I’d rather eat at my familiar desk. Over the traffic noises I heard a saxophone playing an up-tempo “We Shall Overcome.”

“It’s the Martin Luther King parade.” I walked faster.

At Fifth Avenue a small crowd was strung out along the icy curb. I was watching an elderly black man with a bare grizzled head walking slowly down the middle of the street. He carried a small scarlet cloth banner with gold letters: “Martin Luther King, Jr. 1929–1968.” He wore a black armband and a black necktie and a topcoat.

My mind was blank. Except for a picture of Michael Finley reading scripts on his plane.

Rosemary watched the old man strut past us. “You think Vicky found out about me from somebody else?”

“What? No way.”

“She asked a lot of mean questions.” Rosemary was smearing spearmint chapstick on her lips.

I was surprised she was still obsessing. “Like what?”

“She asked me if I had any weird jobs. Or if I was ever in trouble.”

“Try punching her first,” I told Rosemary while we looked down the empty street for the rest of the parade. “Ask her what’s wrong as soon as you see her. Get her defensive.”

The saxophone faded. I heard restless chatter from the crowd and car horns. My fingertips numbed with cold.

A black boy asked Rosemary incredulously, “That’s it, that’s the whole parade?”

I was picturing Michael smoothing his sleek hair as he searched the New York airport lobby for his driver. I could outwit him—I just had to concentrate. A trumpet player splashed into a New Orleans funeral dirge. The solitary musician marched toward us. His tune was as pure as an Irish love song. He looked about ninety-three, gaunt, and stooped over,
and he carried a small cardboard sign: “Montgomery Misses Martin.”

Then he laid down his sign and his trumpet on the street, turned toward the crowd, and began slowly applauding us. My eyes smarted. Rosemary hit my elbow. “Martin Luther King was your era,” she said.

A wave of feelings hit me. God, my life had changed since I took a bus down and marched on Washington and sat on the grass holding the little movie camera and listening to loudspeakers blasting Dr. King’s voice. It was twenty years since I cried over his passionate speech. He was a brave modern hero. I felt superior to my parents because their enthusiasm for him was qualified, uneasy. A few years later I remember opening
Time
magazine to a picture of him in a cutaway receiving the Nobel Prize. I was proud of him, a rich black American minister who sacrificed the easy life for justice. He loved his people. I found one wool glove smashed in the bottom of my raccoon coat, and put it on. Rosemary handed me a folded Kleenex. Why had I identified with him back when I was flying high on a liberal education and no life experience? I hadn’t thought about him in years. Lately my causes have been selfish. Don’t forget, I said silently, you’re fighting to finish a movie about Jesus, the standard-bearer for altruism.

But Jesus wouldn’t take a shine to studio politics. And maybe my fixation on the movie was just simple ambition. Boy, when I was younger I sure was different. I hadn’t even noticed myself changing either.

Rosemary pointed across the street. Among the crowd of spectators stood Ivy, our receptionist, with her children. Ivy was pushing a handkerchief under her small green eyeglasses. She was my age. We had our memories.

Then Ivy waved her handkerchief and Rosemary and I joined the rhythmic clapping.

“I’m glad we’re here,” I said.

“What was so great about Martin Luther King?” Rosemary asked.

“He was a Christ figure. He went pretty far out of his way for his fellow human beings,” I said, watching the old black man pick up his Montgomery sign and march away down the street.

We walked three blocks to the government passport office. Outsmarting Michael Finley required a hit of kryptonite. Rosemary hummed happily. It was a Thanksgiving hymn I recognized from elementary school.

Flash cut hands trying on fancy rings. Under big crystal chandeliers.

Michael Finley bent over a Tiffany’s counter at gleaming emeralds in thick yellow gold. There were fresh comb lines in his hair, slicked straight back like an Italian gigolo. “You like that one?” He tapped a manicured fingernail on the glass. I sensed a trap. To me they all looked the same.

“Sure, why not?”

“I hate it.” He smoothed his cashmere lapels. I balled my hands into fists. I was still unhinged by his arrival. When Rosemary and I returned from the passport office at four-thirty, there he was, sitting at my spot on my couch, smiling proudly at my shock.

“What a surprise,” I lied, kissing him robustly on the cheek. He smelled from new lime cologne. Without answering, he’d dragged me out shopping. Deeply insecure and always competing with somebody, the man lived for buying the best things, dropping famous names, grooming himself, playing power games, preferably on girls (this was the closest he came to extramarital sex). Since he’d worked abroad, he prided himself on looking more stylish than his Malibu neighbors. He wore English tweeds like a country squire. In fact he was Irish.

“Hold that emerald in your hair,” he commanded.

I obeyed. He scrutinized the jewelry, and sneezed twice. I handed him a tissue. “How’s your allergy?”

“Terrible, it acts up on planes.” He smiled gratefully as he squeezed the chunky emerald in one palm.

There is a certain kind of man who knew love first as nursing from an anxious mother. For the rest of his life he flirts with women by showing his ailments.

“You see Arnie much?” He loved courting the big local agent.

“Once a week.” I leaned my thigh against the glass counter. We were in for a lengthy purchase.

“Twice a week,” Michael Finley said firmly. “He like you.”

“He likes me well enough.” I didn’t say the man had offered to keep me once. We were having our weekly lunch of borscht and blinis at the Russian Tea Room. “I’ll come over Friday nights and I won’t bother you much. I’ll feed you my best clients.” He had depressed and flattered me.

“Men are drawn to you,” Michael said, flushing. I knew Michael had hired me because he had a crush. This was true of all the women he hired. He liked having me along at dinners when his wife stayed home in Los Angeles. I was his business courtesan.

“Anita might switch to Arnie,” I said, fishing bravely. Michael loves gossip, and so far neither of us had mentioned my movie.

“What’s with Anita?” he asked in an ominous purr, holding the emerald to his eyeball.

“Never been better.” I kept smiling. I was Method acting. Trying to remember what I liked about Michael Finley. I loved the ringing “yes” he shouted when I asked him to spend thousands of dollars on an idea I wanted to buy. I liked his wife, whom he obeyed when she ordered him to stop asking questions about my sex life at dinner. She was a former
beauty contestant from Oregon with strong calves who converted to Catholicism
before
he proposed. These days she ran with him barefoot by the Pacific Ocean despite chronic back pain. I also liked Michael’s cleanliness. He seemed above the ordinary problems of the flesh like hangnails, body odor, and flab. Besides his daily manicure, the man ran twice a day and showered three times. He often stopped at a cleaner’s before a big meeting to press his suit. I liked when Michael Finley took a rare drink and cracked Jack Benny jokes he claimed his dad had written.

Unfortunately I dislike his sprees at Tiffany’s and Gucci’s. I am tired of watching him buy and return watches and shoes.

Suddenly I wanted to get away from him. I couldn’t think straight.

“Where are you going?” He raised his voice.

“To comb my hair.”

“Don’t be such a girl.”

“I’m not going to press my suit,” I said shortly.

“Okay, okay.”

I dashed past the crowds of rich out-of-towners to the ladies’ room. Michael Finley had been a huge adjustment. Five years ago, he’d hired me and asked if I wanted to succeed on the job.

“Oh, yes.”

“Then just make sure I like you.”

Now I stood by the bathroom mirror and smeared colorless lipstick on my mouth, trying to look less worried.

My second week on the job I had a nightmare that I torched his curving Italian couch while he sat on my bed in my apartment stroking my hair. I hoped to God I didn’t harbor a sick attraction to his cruel authority.

Some days nothing I did was right. Michael criticized my clothing before our meetings. He made me dial his calls in front of his cronies and joked with them about my secretarial
skills until I spoke up. In good moods he warned me he’d given me my big break by hiring me away from the newspaper. In great moods he bragged to his colleagues about my fancy degrees.

Back at the emerald counter, he had narrowed his selection down to two green hunks. The tension was killing me. I wondered when he was going to hit me over the head with Anita’s disappearance.

“What do you think?”

I had had it with emeralds. “They look ostentatious or fake.”

He blinked. “She’s right, we’re going to pass,” he told the salesgirl. “How do you like Vicky?” I was following him as he made a beeline for the watch counter. “Nice chest, no?” To him women employees were walking dirty jokes, but progressive corporate policy. I watched him watch my fingers while I tucked some stray hairs behind my ears. I knew he pictured jumping into bed with me. I know one of my assets with powerful men is the fact they find me attractive. I play on it, but hypocritically. I dress in loose dark clothing and I talk like a library training student.

“Vicky’s my kind of person, a smart girl,” I said firmly.