IT’S AN ODD FEELING TO DIRECT A PICTURE AND THEN return to Hollywood only to find that you’ve been removed from it. Odd, and confusing to the emotions, sort of like it would be to get married and divorced before you even made love. In my case it was even more confusing because no one would admit that anything unusual was happening. Most of the principals didn’t have to admit anything, because they weren’t there. Sherry was up at Tahoe, in one of her numerous retreats. Abe was in Mexico, and Mr. Mond was sick. I was left to get what I could out of the likes of Barry Filson.
Finally, in considerable confusion, I had dinner with Bo Brimmer. Of course I knew it would drive Gauldin up the wall, and it did. He even hit me, evidence of more fury than I would have expected of him. I didn’t blame him for it a bit, since it was purely my weakness that had brought him to the point where he could be so goaded. He had the insecurity of the working man, always afraid of losing his woman to the boss, the brain guy. Who could blame him? I tried not to make Gauldin feel threatened, but then he had every right to feel threatened. There was nothing wrong with his heart, and nothing wrong with him as a man, and even though he went off cursing and crying and left his suitcase and had to send a friend back for it—he was so proud—I wasn’t worried about him, or very upset. He would always find women to respect him.
Bo had his problems, of course: too little, too smart, no sexual confidence. He was seen around town with a lot of women, but I doubt if he ever slept with any of them. He took me to the Bistro, a very dressed-up place. It always startles me a little to come into a dressed-up place—makes me realize how odd I am, how blind to a lot of styles and ways of life. I hadn’t dressed beautifully ten times in my life. I hated trying to make up my mind what to wear. I always postponed my decision until the last minute, and then I chose wrong. To conceal the fact that I was overawed, I told Bo that he should stop wearing bow ties, which he always wore and which I hated.
His eyes were methodically going over the room, to see if anyone important was there. “I wear them because they’re disarming,” he said. “People in bow ties look like rubes.”
Although he seemed to be his normal, perfectly controlled self, I knew he was really very nervous. His face was tight with it, and he smiled too continually. Bo lived with an even higher charge of tension than I do—our charges had never quite gotten aligned, but his tension certainly gave off signals. It made me wonder if he was going to try to fuck me. He had always intrigued me, in a strange way, and I felt sort of curious as to what he would do. My curiosity had some sexual content. Not a lot, but some. I felt a breath or two of interest as he gave the waiter precise commands and got us some mussels and some white wine.
But his talk, perhaps because he was nervous, was all business. He told me about the books he had bought, about the projects he had available, ready for me to produce.
“Sherry hates you,” he said, when One Tree came up.
“I know that, but we’re not talking about that,” I said. “We’re talking about the picture, and Sherry can’t possibly care about that. Not now. All I want is to see that the actors get a decent break.”
Bo shrugged. “Hating you might be her way to handle the grief,” he said. “Sometimes people stay alive that way.”
“So what do I do?” I asked. “Some of those actors are hanging their hopes on that picture.”
Instead of answering the question, he spun brilliant conversation around me for an hour, a lovely cocoon of words, observations, comments on food, criticisms of pictures currently playing, remarks about the nature of women, even a quick list of the painters my eyes reminded him of. Somehow he managed to eat without its affecting the rhythms of his sentences. I got a little fascinated with it—he had breath control like a singer.
The talk continued right up to my doorstep, and woven into it were a couple of subtle proposals of marriage. Each time he mentioned it, the little breaths of interest I felt in him died out. Nothing is more abstract than the concept of marriage apart from knowledge of a body—at least to me. He should have tried something first. On the other hand, he probably used the talk to ease himself past something he knew he didn’t want. We retreated from one another smoothly enough, when we got to my house, but I felt a little disturbed anyway, because a small but interesting possibility kept advancing and receding and never coming to anything.
In the morning Mr. Mond called, his voice as different from the voice I knew as if he had moved to a different planet.
“Come up here, my da’lin’,” he said, with an awful tonelessness.
“This dope I had to take, ya know,” he said. “I didn’t know what was happenin’, not until yesterday. I want ya to come up.”
I didn’t feel much like seeing him fade out before my eyes, but of course I had to go.
When I got there he made them wheel him out to the poolside, by all the telephones, where he had spent the better part of the last fifteen years. The better part in every sense, I guess. That little blue pool of water, in the beautifully green lawn, with the trees hanging over it and the flowers and the grass always freshly watered, had been his real place ever since I’d known him.
Now the beautiful high place was the same and Mr. Mond was different. It was horrible to see the pallor of death so rapidly eat away the tan of a man who had done nothing but burn himself brown for fifteen years. The tan hadn’t entirely left his skin, but the pallor spread underneath it, leaving him a shadowy color, with black splotches here and there on his arms. He took my hand absently and held it, almost as Joe did, and the flesh that was left on his fingers was soft, over the bone. Now that the flesh was sinking off his face, his skull was almost visible, and that enormous jawbone, that Joe was always claiming had actually knocked down a small actor once, was sunk down against his chest, his neck no longer powerful enough to move it, much less swing it. It lay there, propped on his chest, pulling his head to one side so that I had to tilt mine to really look him in the eye. Amazing. It reminded me of the jawbone of a horse I found in a field in Mendocino one time.
When Mr. Mond talked, it was slowly and tonelessly, I guess because the effort to really open his mouth was great. A number of attendants were around, at a respectful distance, but there was no sign of Abe, and no teenagers with bouncing breasts. The telephones with their panels of buttons were not ringing, not blinking, and the whole beautiful garden had a mortuary feel.
Yet, deep in his black eyes, Mr. Mond was still there. His eyes fastened on me more tightly than the hand that held mine, in a grip as toneless as his voice. The color was fading from the rest of him, as his life was fading, but there was still a mean glint in his eyes.
“Steal it,” he said, and then wheezed for a while, rasped, tried to clear the bubble and froth of mucus from his voice.
“Steal da picture,” he said, when he could.
“What do you mean?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“Some mischief,” he said. “I got nothin’ to live for but some mischief. It’s all been mischief, everything I done with you. I got away with it, ya see, because I kept my options. I’d a made too much trouble, so da board put up with me. And I’m da smartest anyway, so I made them money, ya see? I don’t know how much, hundred million a year, even when I was ninety, ninety-one. None of them others done that, not no fuckin’ Goldwyn, Harry Cohn, nobody.”
He lifted his jaw a little, stirred by pride, and then let it fall back on his chest.
“But they’re glad I’m sick,” he said. “They been waitin’ ten, twelve years for me to die. It’s all right. Way of da woild. I’m old, I’ll die. But I want ya to steal da picture foist.”
“How can I do that, Mr. Mond?”
“Ya disappoint me, my da’lin’,” he said. “How do I know how? Hire a burglar. Steal the keys to da lab. Get da negative. You can walk around, you figure it out. But steal it. Get everything you can find. Otherwise that whore that thinks she’s such a big star is going to ruin it.”
“To be honest, I’m not sure there’s that much to ruin,” I said.
“Not da point,” he said. “Didn’t I say mischief? We don’t let ’em get their way, ya see? We don’t let the big star get away with it. Why should they get their way? We done it, you an’ me! So we see that they don’t get their way!”
He was an amazing old man. He stared at me passionately—how many forms it takes. He wanted me to be his weapon, help him strike one last blow. I hadn’t realized how resentful the old must get of the people underneath them—the younger people. Now he had accepted the inevitable, but he wanted one last shot, one final act of pride, the victims of which would be the men who would get to live once he was dead.
Only it wouldn’t be my final act, just his. What was I supposed to do after stealing the film?
“You’re famous,” he said, when I asked him. “You’re da woman director. So ya steal your own film and what can they do? If they put you in jail the public won’t stand for it. Abe don’t care about the picture. He’d just as soon boin it. They’d get the insurance money and not have the problem of no release. Steal it. Make ’em pay a ransom. Make ’em give you da cut. You’ll get publicity like nobody’s ever seen, like if Garbo come back or somethin’. Da publicity will make da picture.”
I didn’t know what to say. It was a sickroom fantasy to end all sickroom fantasies.
“I’m not much of a criminal,” I said.
“What criminal?” he said. “Listen, ya got moral rights. Ya made the picture.”
Then his strength played out and he stopped talking. The life seemed to fade from his body. He was so weak he could barely mumble a goodbye, when they wheeled him in. Even his eyes faded, but they faded last, burning there in his ashen old face long after he had stopped talking.
I didn’t know what to make of it. Even dying, he was capable of some deviousness. I thought he liked me, and had always thought so, but then, who knows what old men really feel about young women? Years before, ten years maybe, well before I had ever worked for him, he had exposed himself to me once. I was just visiting the house with a friend who was doing a script for him, and as I was coming out of the ladies’ room he came out of a bedroom with his pants down, fumbling with a shirttail. I don’t think it was accidental, either. I think he was lying in wait. What reminded me of it was his eyes, watching to see how I’d react when he suggested I steal the film. Later, when I thought about it, it was his eyes I remembered, not his cock, which looked like a piece of old cork.
THE NEXT DAY I almost had an encounter with Abe. He was walking down a corridor with Jilly Legendre, who was just back from shooting a picture in Turkey. Abe flinched at the sight of me and made some hasty excuse before I got in earshot. He turned and hurried back down the corridor.
Jilly, immense, dressed in white pants and some kind of red Greek shirt, watched Abe go with surprise.
“What have you got?” he said. “Swine flu? I’ve never seen Abe move that fast, and I grew up with the little prick.”
Perhaps in a way that was Jilly’s secret. He was a native of movies. He had grown up among movie people, in Hollywood, Paris, New York, and he knew the industry and its ways as a farmer knows his fields. He stood out in Hollywood because he loved it all: the deals, the indulgence, the confusion. To Jilly it was all just like walking around home.
It was a bright day, and since I had inadvertently blown his appointment, we decided to go to the beach and catch up on one another. Jilly had a new Rolls—he liked all the appurtenances—and when we got to Malibu he sent his driver off for food and wine and we settled ourselves on his beach. We were an odd sight: a very fat man and a very skinny woman.
Yet for all his self-indulgence and sophistication, Jilly was not world-weary, which was why I liked him. He looked at it fresh. When I told him about Wynkyn he shook his head.
“Hollywood oughtn’t to try and propagate itself,” he said. “It ought to die out at the end of every generation. Experience never gets passed on here anyway.”
We had a pleasant day, good for me. Somehow I could always be at ease with Jilly—I guess we trusted one another not to get nonsensical. The notion of anyone so fat and anyone so skinny joined in the sexual act affronted our common sense of esthetics.
Besides, though Jilly shared Abe’s taste for Latin teenagers, he had a great love, an aging French actress, very imperious, who had skillfully kept him on the string for years and might keep him there forever. It left us free to indulge our mutually insatiable curiosity about one another’s life and work.
I told him about Mr. Mond’s strange suggestion—he agreed it would get the picture unbelievable publicity—and then he told me about an affair he had had with Sherry years before.
“You have to remember how concentrated she is,” he said. “Sherry has only one thing: herself. She needs nothing else, believes in nothing else, knows nothing else. But she absolutely has to be pleased with herself: nothing can be wrong, and in order for nothing to be wrong the whole world has to assume a certain shape. Everything she knows and relates to in any way has to help keep the world tilted so that it reflects Sherry in just the way she needs it to.
“She’s good at shoving the world around,” he added. “She puts the camera where she wants it, and society and friendship and love are like the camera. She puts everything where she wants it, and as long as she can do that she’s fine.”
“But she can’t do that now,” I said. “Wynkyn is dead.”
“No,” he said. “Death is not a camera.”
The ocean rolled in, and rolled in, hypnotically. The sun was not too bad, so I took a little nap, lying on my stomach on the warm sand. When I woke up, Jilly was still drinking wine. Black hairs curled into his navel, from the vortex of that great belly.
“It wasn’t much of a love affair,” he said, as if the conversation hadn’t lapsed. “A man isn’t really a camera, either. They don’t hold their focus that well.”
The water turned steel color, before we left.