Zeroville (23 page)

“I heard one of those words this morning. There was a press conference.”

“Yeah, that’s the other thing they’re all a-twitter about here.”

“It was only this morning.”

“News travels fast, vicar.”

“They called me by the wrong name. I had to set the record straight.”

“You set the record straight all right.”

“It’s important that in Hollywood they’re straight on the name.”

“I think in Hollywood what they’re straight on at the moment, vicar, is that you’re a lunatic. But then they just don’t know you like I do, and I suppose it could be worse—a lunatic means no one can figure out what you might do next, and since it might be something phenomenal and they don’t want to miss out on it, it can make them irritable in a potentially productive way.”

“We’ll make it work for us.”

“I’m not sure you should have said that thing about John Wayne.”

“Perhaps you’re right.”

“I have to take exception there, vicar.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“I mean, the man is dying. Vicar, you still there?”

“Can you hear me?”

“There you are … hey, vicar, listen—”

“Have you seen Zazi and Soledad?” Their voices cross.

“How’s that?”

“Zazi and Soledad?”

“Last I heard she was in New York on your movie there …”

“No …”

“… thought that’s what I heard. What?”

“I need to find them.”

“When are you coming back?”

“Tomorrow.”

“We’ll get together and drink tequila, amigo, scope out the local wenches who become more creatures of the Devil’s seed with every passing day. But listen.” A pause. “Vicar?”

Vikar has a momentary impulse to tell Viking Man how his film about the Berber chieftain wound up in a film about the death of the assassin the Generalissimo.

“Give Dot a call sometime. I know she would love to hear from you. She’s got to be peeing in her rubber panties about this Cannes thing.”

Back in Los Angeles, Vikar no longer has room in his apartment on its secret boulevard for all the movies he’s stolen. With the money from
Your Pale Blue Eyes
, he rents a house further west in the Hollywood Hills, which he could barely see from room 939 of the Roosevelt Hotel nine years before, if he had known to look for it.

It’s an old house for Los Angeles, dating back to the thirties. It cascades down the side of the hill in three levels, the large windows on the top level staring out at a panorama of trees and little houses and little cars driving up winding roads that seem to drop off in midair. As on a fjord of galvanized stardust, the house sits on the edge of the city, overlooking a vast shadowless sundial.

The top floor of the house, at street level, is the living room with the kitchen. It’s shaped like a half moon, walled in white brick with a wooden floor and fireplace, circled by the large bare windows with window seats. On the second level below are two bedrooms; Vikar’s has a window facing east. The one large room at the foot of the stairs, on the third and bottom floor, becomes the film library, with a small console for editing and enlarging stills. Large canisters line all four walls, except where a small window faces south.

In the distance to the southeast, Vikar can see downtown. Directly below the house and the hill, occasionally blurting into view between the knolls and gullies, is Sunset Boulevard, now an asphalt timeline with not simply geographical addresses but temporal ones, from the classic forties, when glamour ran like silver sewage, to the utopian sixties, when hippies rampaged the gutters, to the anarchic present at the boulevard’s far eastern end where a Sound grows, not unlike what Vikar heard in the Bowery.

Vikar goes to see a new movie by Buñuel. It’s a remake of Von Sternberg’s
The Devil is a Woman
and takes place near Soledad’s hometown of Seville. At first Vikar believes the movie is about a middle-aged widower in love with two women who share the same name, until he realizes, halfway through, that in fact two different actresses are playing one and the same woman. Buñuel knows about the profiles, Vikar realizes. He has taken it farther than anyone, actually showing each profile as played by an entirely different person. In one incarnation the woman dances flamenco, as Soledad did when she was a small girl.

He doesn’t install a telephone, as much by design as indifference. “Give Dot a call sometime,” Vikar hears Viking Man in his sleep one night, and when he wakes, he knows it’s too late.

“All of us are too fucking late, vicar,” Viking Man says quietly, a week later, “once someone is gone.” Subdued, he smokes his cigar in the bar of the Hyatt on the Strip below Vikar’s house, across from the Sunset Tower where Vikar used to look for a light in George Stevens’ window. The two sit at a small round corner cocktail table as young girls flit around in tiny cellophane dresses waiting for rock stars to appear. “Who thinks he did all he could, once someone is gone?”

“I should have called,” Vikar says.

A shot of Cuervo Gold sits on the small cocktail table before Viking Man. Vikar drinks a vodka tonic like Dotty first ordered for him at Nickodell’s. “You see the thing that ran in
Variety
?”

“Yes.”

“Not much,” says Viking Man. “It’s a cliché to say it doesn’t seem like much of a life when it comes down to an inch and a half in
Variety
, but that’s more than most of us get.” He puts out the cigar. “I mean, she worked on
A Place in the Sun
. Never was a George Stevens man myself, but still.”

Vikar says, “I didn’t understand about the note.” Viking Man doesn’t answer. “The part in
Variety
about the note.”

Viking Man nods.

“Did you understand about the note?”

“Well, vicar,” says Viking Man and stops, suspended for a moment, “just briefly, as a matter of fact, I saw the note, such as it was. Barely a note at all, really, some half-baked haiku on a cocktail napkin about sore throats and broken hearts—isn’t it just like Dot to leave a ‘suicide note’ on a cocktail napkin, to be read in a bar?”

“She was in love with an actor once.”

“Whose daughter died of strep … yeah, I know that story. That poor bastard had a shitstorm of a life, his last five or six years. The fucking patron saint of Hollywood martyrs.”

“God kills children in many ways,” says Vikar.

“She wasn’t a child.”

“I meant the little girl with the sore throat.”

“Does not caring if you wake up the next morning constitute suicide?”

“Sometimes God has help. A mother leaves her daughter in a car.”

“Vicar, are we having the same conversation?”

“Where is she now?”

“Hollywood Memorial, there behind Paramount. I tried to get word to you.”

“I know. I don’t have a telephone.”

“That constitutes aberrant behavior in Hollywood. They take away your Hollywood passport if you don’t have a telephone.”

“Cecil B. De Mille is buried there. Jayne Mansfield.” Vikar says, “I believe I may have killed a man there once.”

“Did this homicidal spree take place recently?”

“Three or four years ago. Perhaps five.”

“Jayne Mansfield isn’t buried there. She has a tombstone there, but she’s buried in Pennsylvania.”

“I’m from Pennsylvania.”

“I see your movie opens next week.”

“It’s not really my movie.”

“I gather the DGA sorted out the credit. Friedkin must have had an aneurysm,” Viking Man chortles. “You going to direct that French novel of yours?”

“I don’t know.”

“You might make more headway with a telephone. Just tempestuous wild-hair-up-the-ass speculation on my part.”

“It’s about God’s greatest disciple, the right hand of Joan of Arc.”

“I imagine Hollywood gets a hard-on thinking about that.”

“I don’t know.”

“I thought Siamese-twin sisters,” shrugs Viking Man, “was the stupidest idea in the history of cinema, so what do I know? But I would move if it’s something you want to do, vicar. Get yourself a phone and then get yourself an agent. Because it’s all changing, and not in our favor. We’ve run it into the ground. That egomaniacal wop in the Philippines is spending thirty million or whatever it is on a Vietnam movie no one understands, and that includes me and I wrote the bastard, or thought I did, with all apologies to Conrad, and you have that hermaphrodite up in Montana trying to follow up
his
Vietnam movie with some prairie
Gone With the Wind
or whatever it is he thinks he’s making. Oil companies own the studios now, vicar. Schmuck though Louis B. Mayer may have been, he knew the difference between movies and unleaded.”

“If God makes us bury our children,” says Vikar, “who makes us bury our parents?”

“We do that on our own.”

Seen from the bus, the shimmering black limos on La Cienega reflect the city as pieces of a jigsaw night rearranging themselves.
I am the passenger
, the radio plays,
I ride and I ride
, and it isn’t the soundtrack for an Antonioni movie but Vikar’s life, and he doesn’t even know it’s by the same man who sang the song about the dog.

In the waning days of winter, Vikar sits on the top floor of his house watching a serviceman install a telephone on his kitchen wall, next to a cork bulletin board. The man finishes, walks out the front door, and ninety seconds later the phone rings. Vikar runs after the serviceman to take the phone out, just as the truck is pulling away.

The truck disappears down the road that eventually empties onto Sunset Boulevard in one direction and Laurel Canyon in the other. Vikar watches it the whole way and then walks back into the house where the ringing has stopped. He looks at the phone and it begins ringing again.

He picks up the phone on the ninth ring. “Hello.”

“Hello?” The woman on the other end is about to hang up.

“Yes.”

“Is this Mr. Vikar Jerome?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Jerome, my name is Molly Fairbanks. How are you?”

“I’m all right.”

“May I call you Vikar?”

“Yes.”

“Vikar, I’m with Creative Artists.” Vikar doesn’t say anything. “CAA. We’re a talent agency. Have you heard of us?”

“I don’t know.”

She laughs. “Well, we’re still a little new, but we’re doing very well. Do you have a moment to talk?”

“All right.”

“Congratulations, first of all.”

“Thank you.” He says, “For what?”

There’s a pause. “The nomination.”

“Oh. Thank you,” Vikar says. “What nomination?”

“This is Vikar Jerome the motion-picture editor, is that correct?”

“I’ve edited motion pictures.”

“You edited
Your Pale Blue Eyes
, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been answering your phone, Vikar? Or read any newspapers?”

“I just got the phone.”

“You mean you just had a telephone installed?”

“Yes.”

“You just had a telephone installed this morning?”

“I couldn’t catch the phone man as he was driving away. I would have had him take it out, if I could have caught him.”

“Have you heard of the Academy Awards?”

“Of course.”

“The nominations were yesterday.”

“Oh.”

“Your picture received two, including for editing.” She says, “That’s you.”

“Oh.” He says, “Will they make me go like they made me go to Cannes?”

“Did you like Cannes?”

“No. But I met a nice woman who knew a lot about cinema.”

“I see.”

“I believe she wasn’t the woman who used to be a man. She knew what I wanted.”

There’s another pause. “I see. Do you want to go to the Academy Awards?”

“No.”

“Well, then, I think you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“They might try to make me.”

“Would you be relieved or disappointed if I told you that you probably won’t win?”

“Relieved.”

“Well, there you are. But as I understand it, there’s a project you’ve been wanting to direct, and if that’s the case, then this is a good time to pursue that.”

“The company hasn’t called me.”

“Well, they’ve been going through some changes.”

“I haven’t had a telephone, either.”

“There’s that as well.”

“Perhaps the company doesn’t want to make the movie.”

“They may be more interested, Vikar, if other studios are interested. Studios tend to be like that. Also, these days distributors are trying to figure out just how involved they want to be on the production side of things. The business has gotten a little unsettled the last few years.” That was a word, “unsettled,” that Rondell used. “But as to this project, I believe you had some sort of informal understanding with UA, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Normally, informal understandings don’t mean a great deal in this business. But you’ve just been nominated for the Academy Award.”

“I probably won’t win.”

“No, but the nomination is not a small thing and there’s a general feeling that, if not for you, UA might not have had a releasable picture, let alone an Academy Award nominee.”

“They booed in Cannes.”

“I know, and the reviews here were a little mixed too, but the good reviews were very good, and strange as it may sound, being booed at Cannes is not always bad, if you’re booed for the right reasons. Or maybe I mean the wrong reasons. Sometimes when people don’t like a picture for the right reasons, it makes other people want to see the picture, and studios appreciate that. They booed
L’Avventura
at Cannes, too.”

Vikar likes the way she talks. She sounds young and friendly, and he completely understands everything she says. He wonders if she’s related to Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. “I completely understand everything you say.”

“I don’t want to press you, but I can make inquiries for you among the various studios and production companies and represent you in trying to get this off the ground.”

“Thank you.”

“I would go to UA first and to Mitch Rondell, who’s started his own independent company and is no longer working for UA in the same capacity, although they maintain a partnership.”