THE RESURGENCE OF MISS ANKLE-STRAP WEDGIE

(Dedicated to the Memory of Dorothy Parker)

HARLAN ELLISON®

 
 
 
 
Handy

In Hollywood our past is so transitory we have little hesitation about tearing down our landmarks. The Garden of Allah where Benchley and Scott Fitzgerald lived is gone; it’s been replaced by a savings and loan. Most of the old, sprawling 20th lot has been converted into shopping center and beehive-faceted superhotel. Even historic relics of fairly recent vintage have gone under the cultural knife: the Ziv television studios on Santa Monica, once having been closed down, became the eerie, somehow surrealistic, weed-overgrown and bizarre jungle in which tamed cats that had roamed sound stages became cannibals, eating one another. At night, passing the studio, dark and padlocked, you could hear the poor beasts tearing each other apart. They had lived off the film industry too long and, unable to survive in the streets, lost and bewildered, they had turned into predators.

That may be an apocryphal story. It persists in my thoughts when I remember Valerie Lone.

The point is, we turn the past into the present here in Hollywood even before it’s finished being the future. It’s like throwing a meal into the Disposall before you eat it.

But we do have one recently erected monument here in the glamour capital of the world.

It is a twenty-three-foot-high billboard for a film called Subterfuge. It is a lighthearted adventure-romance in the James Bond tradition, and the billboard shows the principal leads—Robert Mitchum and Gina Lollobrigida—in high fashion postures intended to convey, well, adventure and, uh, romance.

The major credits are listed in smaller print on this billboard: produced by Arthur Crewes, directed by James Kencannon, written by John D. F. Black, music by Lalo Schifrin. The balance of the cast is there, also. At the end of the supplementary credits is a boxed line that reads:

ALSO FEATURING MISS VALERIE LONE as Angela. This line is difficult to read; it has been whited-out.

The billboard stands on a rise overlooking Sunset Boulevard on the Strip near King’s Road; close by a teenie-bopper discothèque called Spectrum 2000 that once was glamorous Ciro’s. But we tear down our past and convert it to the needs of the moment. The billboard will come down. When the film ends its first run at the Egyptian and opens in neighborhood theaters and drive-ins near you.

At which point even that monument to Valerie Lone will have been removed, and almost all of us can proceed to forget. Almost all of us, but not all. I’ve got to remember . . . my name is Fred Handy. I’m responsible for that billboard. Which makes me a singular man, believe me.

After all, there are so few men who have erected monuments to the objects of their homicide.

ONE

They came out of the darkness, a lightless tunnel with a highway at the bottom of it. The headlights were animal eyes miles away down the flat roadbed, and slowly slowly the sound of the engine grew across the emptiness on both sides of the concrete. California desert night, heat of the long day sunk just below the surface of the land, and a car, ponderous, plunging, straight out of nowhere along a white centerline. Gophers and rabbits bounded across the deadly open road and were gone forever.

Inside the limousine, men dozed in jump seats, and far in the rear two bull-necked cameramen discussed the day’s work. Beside the driver, Fred Handy stared straight ahead at the endless stretch of State Highway 14 out of Mojave. He had been under the influence of road hypnosis for the better part of twenty minutes, and did not know it. The voice from the secondary seats behind him jarred him back to awareness. It was Kencannon.

“Jim, how long till we hit Lancaster or Palmdale?”

The driver craned his head back and slightly to the side, awkwardly, like some big bird, keeping his eyes on the road. “Maybe another twenty, twenty-five miles, Mr. K’ncannon. That was Rosamond we passed, little while ago.”

“Let’s stop and eat at the first clean place we see,” the director said, thumbing his eyes to remove the sleep from them. “I’m starving.”

There was vague movement from the third seats, where Arthur Crewes was folded sidewise, fetuslike, sleeping. A mumbled, “Where are we what time izit?”

Handy turned around. “It’s about three forty-five, Arthur. Middle of the desert.”

“Midway between Mojave and Lancaster, Mr. Crewes,” the driver added. Crewes grunted acceptance of it.

The producer sat up in sections, swinging his legs down heavily, pulling his body erect sluggishly, cracking his shoulders back as he arched forward. With his eyes closed. “Jeezus, remind me next time to do a picture without location shooting. I’m too old for this crap.” There was the murmur of trained laughter from somewhere in the limousine.

Handy thought of Mitchum, who had returned from the Mojave location earlier that day, riding back in the air-conditioned land cruiser the studio provided. But the thought only reminded him that he was not one of the Immortals, one of the golden people; that he was merely a two-fifty-a-week publicist who was having one helluva time trying to figure out a promotional angle for just another addle-witted spy-romance. Crewes had come to the genre belatedly, after the Bond flicks, after Ipcress, after Arabesque and Masquerade and Kaleidoscope and Flint and Modesty Blaise and they’d all come after The 39 Steps so what the hell did it matter; with Arthur Crewes producing, it would get serious attention and good play dates. If. If Fred Handy could figure out a Joe Levine William Castle Sam Katzman Alfred Hitchcock shtick to pull the suckers in off the streets. He longed for the days back in New York when he had had ulcers working in the agency. He still had them, but the difference was now he couldn’t even pretend to be enjoying life enough to compensate for the aggravation. He longed for the days of his youth writing imbecilic poetry in Figaro’s in the Village. He longed for the faintly moist body of Julie, away in the Midwest somewhere doing Hello, Dolly! on the strawhat circuit. He longed for a hot bath to leach all the weariness out of him. He longed for a hot bath to clean all the Mojave dust and grit out of his pores.

He longed desperately for something to eat.

“Hey, Jim, how about that over there . . . ?”

He tapped the driver on the forearm, and pointed down the highway to the neon flickering off and on at the roadside. The sign said SHIVEY’S TRUCK STOP and EAT. There were no trucks parked in front.

“It must be good food,” Kencannon said from behind him. “I don’t see any trucks there; and you know what kind of food you get at the joints truckers eat at.”

Handy smiled quickly at the reversal of the old road-runner’s myth. It was that roundabout sense of humor that made Kencannon’s direction so individual.

“That okay by you, Mr. Crewes?” Jim asked.

“Fine, Jim,” Arthur Crewes said, wearily.

The studio limousine turned in at the diner and crunched gravel. The diner was an anachronism. One of the old railroad car style, seen most frequently on the New Jersey thruways. Aluminum hide leprous with rust. Train windows fogged with dirt. Lucky Strike and El Producto decals on the door. Three steps up to the door atop a concrete stoop. Parking lot surrounding it like a gray pebble lake, cadaverously cold in the intermittent flashing of the pale yellow neon EAT off EAT off EAT . . .

The limousine doors opened, all six of them, and ten crumpled men emerged, stretched, trekked toward the diner. They fell into line almost according to the pecking order. Crewes and Kencannon; Fred Handy; the two cameramen; three grips; the effeminate makeup man, Sancher; and Jim, the driver.

They climbed the stairs, murmuring to themselves, like sluggish animals emerging from a dead sea of sleep. The day had been exhausting. Chase scenes through the rural town of Mojave. And Mitchum in his goddam land cruiser, phoning ahead to have escargots ready at La Rue.

The diner was bright inside, and the grips, the cameramen and Jim took booths alongside the smoked windows. Sancher went immediately to the toilet, to moisten himself with 5-Day Deodorant Pads. Crewes sat at the counter with Handy and Kencannon on either side of him. The producer looked ancient. He was a dapper man in his middle forties. He clasped his hands in front of him and Handy saw him immediately begin twisting and turning the huge diamond ring on his right hand, playing with it, taking it off and replacing it. I wonder what that means, Handy thought.

Handy had many thoughts about Arthur Crewes. Some of them were friendly, most were impartial. Crewes was a job for Handy. He had seen the producer step heavily when the need arose: cutting off a young writer when the script wasn’t being written fast enough to make a shooting date; literally threatening an actor with bodily harm if he didn’t cease the senseless wrangling on set that was costing the production money; playing agents against one another to catch a talented client unrepresented between them, available for shaved cost. But he had seen him perform unnecessary kindnesses. Unnecessary because they bought nothing, won him nothing, made him no points. Crewes had blown a tire on a freeway one day and a motorist had stopped to help. Crewes had taken his name and sent him a three thousand dollar color television-stereo. A starlet ready to put out for a part had been investigated by the detective agency Crewes kept on retainer at all times for assorted odd jobs. They had found out her child was a paraplegic. She had not been required to go the couch route; Crewes had refused her the job on grounds of talent, but had given her a check in the equivalent amount had she gotten the part.

Arthur Crewes was a very large man indeed in Hollywood. He had not always been immense, however. He had begun his career as a film editor on “B” horror flicks, worked his way up and directed several productions, then been put in charge of a series of low-budget films at the old RKO studio. He had suffered in the vineyards and somehow run the time very fast. He was still a young man, and he was ancient, sitting there turning his ring.

Sancher came out of the toilet and sat down at the far end of the counter. It seemed to jog Kencannon. “Think I’ll wash off a little Mojave filth,” he said, and rose. Crewes got up. “I suddenly realized I haven’t been to the bathroom all day.”

They walked away, leaving Handy sitting, toying with the sugar shaker.

He looked up for the first time, abruptly realizing how exhausted he was. There was a waitress shaking a wire basket of french fries, her back to him. The picture was on schedule, no problems, but no hook, no gimmick, no angle, no shtick to sell it; there was a big quarterly payment due on the house in Sherman Oaks; it was all Handy had, no one was going to get it; he had to keep the job. The waitress turned around for the first time and started laying out napkin, water glass, silverware, in front of him. You could work in a town for close to nine years, and still come away with nothing; not even living high, driving a ’65 Impala that wasn’t ostentatious; but a lousy forty-five-day marriage to a clip artist and it was all in jeopardy; he had to keep the job, just to fight her off, keep her from using California divorce logic to get that house; nine years was not going down the tube; God, he felt weary. The waitress was in the booth, setting up the grips and cameramen. Handy mulled the nine years, wondering what the hell he was doing out here: oh yeah, I was getting divorced, that’s what I was doing. Nine years seemed so long, so ruthlessly long, and so empty suddenly, to be here with Crewes on another of the endless product that got fed into the always-yawning maw of the Great American Moviegoing Public. The waitress returned and stood before him.

“Care to order now?”

He looked up.

Fred Handy stopped breathing for a second. He looked at her, and the years peeled away. He was a teenage kid in the Utopia Theater in St. Louis, Missouri, staring up at a screen with gray shadows moving on it. A face from the past, a series of features, very familiar, were superimposing themselves.

She saw he was staring. “Order?”

He had to say it just right. “Excuse me, is, uh, is your name Lone?”

Until much later, he was not able to identify the expression that swam up in her eyes. But when he thought back on it, he knew it had been terror. Not fear, not trepidation, not uneasiness, not wariness. Terror. Complete, total, gagging terror. She said later it had been like calling the death knell for her . . . again.

She went stiff, and her hand slid off the counter edge. “Valerie Lone?” he said, softly, frightened by the look on her face. She swallowed so that the hollows in her cheeks moved liquidly. And she nodded. The briefest movement of the head.

Then he knew he had to say it just right. He was holding all that fragile crystal, and a wrong phrase would shatter it. Not: I used to see your movies when I was a kid or: Whatever happened to you or: What are you doing here. It had to be just right.

Handy smiled like a little boy. It somehow fit his craggy features. “You know,” he said gently, “many’s the afternoon I’ve sat in the movies and been in love with you.”

There was gratitude in her smile. Relief, an ease of tensions, and the sudden rush of her own memories; the bittersweet taste of remembrance as the glories of her other life swept back to her. Then it was gone, and she was a frowzy blonde waitress on Route 14 again. “Order?”

She wasn’t kidding. She turned it off like a mercury switch. One moment there was life in the faded blue eyes, the next moment it was ashes. He ordered a cheeseburger and french fries. She went back to the steam table.

Arthur Crewes came out of the men’s room first. He was rubbing his hands. “Damned powdered soap, almost as bad as those stiff paper towels.” He slipped onto the stool beside Handy.

And in that instant, Fred Handy saw a great white light come up. Like the buzz an acid-head gets from a fully drenched sugar cube, his mind burst free and went trembling outward in waves of color. The shtick, the bit, the handle, ohmigod there it is, as perfect as a blue-white diamond.

Arthur Crewes was reading the menu as Handy grabbed his wrist. “Arthur, do you know who that is?”

“Who who is?”

“The waitress.”

“Madame Nehru.”

“I’m serious, Arthur.”

“All right, who?”

“Valerie Lone.”

Arthur Crewes started as though he had been struck. He shot a look at the waitress, her back to them now, as she ladled up navy bean soup from the stainless steel tureen in the steam table. He stared at her, silently.

“I don’t believe it,” he murmured.

“It is, Arthur, I’m telling you that’s just who it is.”

He shook his head. “What the hell is she doing out here in the middle of nowhere. My God, it must be, what? Fifteen, twenty years?”

Handy considered a moment. “About eighteen years, if you count that thing she did for Ross at UA in forty-eight. Eighteen years and here she is, slinging hash in a diner.”

Crewes mumbled something.

“What did you say?” Handy asked him.

Crewes repeated it, with an edge Handy could not place. “Lord, how the mighty have fallen.”

Before Handy could tell the producer his idea, she turned, and saw Crewes staring at her. There was no recognition in her expression. But it was obvious she knew Handy had told him who she was. She turned away and carried the plates of soup to the booth.

As she came back past them, Crewes said, softly, “Hello, Miss Lone.” She paused and stared at him. She was almost somnambulistic, moving by rote. He added, “Arthur Crewes . . . remember?”

She did not answer for a long moment, then nodded as she had to Handy. “Hello. It’s been a long time.”

Crewes smiled a peculiar smile. Somehow victorious. “Yes, a long time. How’ve you been?”

She shrugged, as if to indicate the diner. “Fine, thank you.”

They fell silent.

“Would you care to order now?”

When she had taken the order and moved to the grill, Handy leaned in close to the producer and began speaking intensely. “Arthur, I’ve got a fantastic idea.”

His mind was elsewhere. “What’s that, Fred?”

“Her. Valerie Lone. What a sensational idea. Put her in the picture. The comeback of . . . what was it they used to call her, that publicity thing, oh yeah . . . the comeback of ‘Miss Ankle-Strap Wedgie.’ It’s good for space in any newspaper in the country.”

Silence.

“Arthur? What do you think?”

Arthur Crewes smiled down at his hands. He was playing with the ring again. “You think I should bring her back to the industry after eighteen years.”

“I think it’s the most natural winning promotion idea I’ve ever had. And I can tell you like it.”

Crewes nodded, almost absently. “Yes, I like it, Fred. You’re a very bright fellow. I like it just fine.”

Kencannon came back and sat down. Crewes turned to him. “Jim, can you do cover shots on the basement scenes with Bob and the stunt men for a day or two?”

Kencannon bit his lip, considering. “I suppose so. It’ll mean replotting the schedule, but the board’s Bernie’s problem, not mine. What’s up?”

Crewes twisted the ring and smiled distantly. “I’m going to call Johnny Black in and have him do a rewrite on the part of Angela. Beef it up.”

“For what? We haven’t even cast it yet.”

“We have now.” Handy grinned hugely. “Valerie Lone.”

“Valerie—you’re kidding. She hasn’t even made a film in God knows how long. What makes you think you can get her?”

Crewes turned back to stare at the sloped shoulders of the woman at the sizzling grill. “I can get her.”

HANDY

We talked to Valerie Lone, Crewes and myself. First I talked, then he talked; then when she refused to listen to him, I talked again.

She grabbed up a huge pan with the remains of macaroni and cheese burned to the bottom, and she dashed out through a screen door at the rear of the diner.

We looked at each other, and when each of us saw the look of confusion on the other’s face, the looks vanished. We got up and followed her. She was leaning against the wall of the diner, scraping the crap from the pan as she cried. The night was quiet.

But she didn’t melt as we came through the screen door. She got uptight. Furious. “I’ve been out of all that for over fifteen years, can’t you leave me alone? You’ve got a lousy sense of humor if you think this is funny!”

Arthur Crewes stopped dead on the stairs. He didn’t know what to say to her. There was something happening to Crewes; I didn’t know what it was, but it was more than whatever it takes to get a gimmick for a picture.

I took over.

Handy, the salesman. Handy, the schmacheler, equipped with the very best butter. “It isn’t fifteen years, Miss Lone. It’s eighteen plus.”

Something broke inside her. She turned back to the pan. Crewes didn’t know whether to tell me to back off or not, so I went ahead. I pushed past Crewes, standing there with his hand on the peeling yellow paint banister, his mouth open. (The color of the paint was the color of a stray dog I had run down in Nevada one time. I hadn’t seen the animal. It had dashed out of a gully by the side of the road and I’d gone right over it before I knew what had happened. But I stopped and went back. It was the same color as that banister. A faded lonely yellow, like cheap foolscap, a dollar a ream. I couldn’t get the thought of that dog out of my mind.)

“You like it out here, right?”

She didn’t turn around.

I walked around her. She was looking into that pan of crap. “Miss Lone?”

It was going to take more than soft-spoken words. It might even take sincerity. I wasn’t sure I knew how to do that any more. “If I didn’t know better . . . having seen all the feisty broads you played . . . I’d think you enjoyed feeling sorry for your—”

She looked up, whip-fast; I could hear the cartilage cracking in her neck muscles. There was a core of electrical sparks in her eyes. She was pissed-off. “Mister, I just met your face. What makes you think you can talk that way . . .” it petered out. The steam leaked off, and the sparks died, and she was back where she’d been a minute before.

I turned her around to face us. She shrugged my hand off. She wasn’t a sulky child, she was a woman who didn’t know how to get away from a giant fear that was getting more gigantic with every passing second. And even in fear she wasn’t about to let me manhandle her.

“Miss Lone, we’ve got a picture working. It isn’t Gone with the Wind and it isn’t The Birth of a Nation, it’s just a better-than-average coupla million dollar spectacular with Mitchum and Lollobrigida, and it’ll make a potful for everybody concerned . . .”

Crewes was staring at me. I didn’t like his expression. He was the bright young wunderkind who had made Lonely in the Dark and Ruby Bernadette and The Fastest Man, and he didn’t like to hear me pinning his latest opus as just a nice, money-making color puffball. But Crewes wasn’t a wunderkind any longer, and he wasn’t making Kafka; he was making box-office bait, and he needed this woman, and so dammit did I! So screw his expression.

“Nobody’s under the impression you’re one of the great ladies of the theater; you never were Katherine Cornell, or Bette Davis, or even Pat Neal.” She gave me that core of sparks look again. If I’d been a younger man it might have woofed me; I’m sure it had stopped legions of assistant gophers in the halcyon days. But—it suddenly scared me to realize it—I was running hungry, and mere looks didn’t do it. I pushed her a little harder, my best Raymond Chandler delivery. “But you were a star, you were someone that people paid money to see, because whatever you had it was yours. And whatever that was, we want to rent it for a while, we want to bring it back.”

She gave one of those little snorts that says very distinctly You stink, Jack. It was disdainful. She had my number. But that was cool; I’d given it to her; I wasn’t about to shuck her.

“Don’t think we’re humanitarians. We need something like you on this picture. We need a handle, something that’ll get us that extra two inches in the Wichita Eagle. That means bucks in the ticket wicket. Oh, shit, lady!”

Her lips skinned back, feral, teeth showed.

I was getting to her.

“We can help each other.” She sneered and started to turn away. I reached out and slammed the pan as hard as I could. It spun out of her hands and hit the steps. She was rocked quiet for an instant, and I rapped on her as hard as I could. “Don’t tell me you’re in love with scraping crap out of a macaroni dish. You lived too high, too long. This is a free ride back. Take it!”

There was blood coursing through her veins now. Her cheeks had bright, flushed spots on them, high up under the eyes. “I can’t do it; stop pushing at me.”

Crewes moved in, then. We worked like a pair of good homicide badges. I beat her on the head, and he came running with Seidlitz powders. “Let her alone a minute, Fred. This is all at once, come on, let her think.”

“What the hell’s to think?”

She was being rammed from both sides, and knew it, but for the first time in years something was happening, and her motor was starting to run again, despite herself.

“Miss Lone,” Crewes said gently, “a contract for this film, and options for three more. Guaranteed, from first day of shooting, straight through, even if you sit around after your part is shot, till last day of production.”

“I haven’t been anywhere near a camera—”

“That’s what we have cameramen for. They turn it on you. That’s what we have a director for. He’ll tell you where to stand. It’s like swimming or riding a bike: once you learn, you never forget . . .”

Crewes again. “Stop it, Fred. Miss Lone . . . I remember you from before. You were always good to work with. You weren’t one of the cranky ones, you were a doer. You knew your lines, always.”

She smiled. A wee timorous slippery smile. She remembered. And she chuckled. “Good memory, that’s all.”

Then Crewes and I smiled, too. She was on our side. Everything she said from here on out would be to win us the argument. She was ours.

“You know, I had the world’s all-time great crush on you, Miss Lone,” Arthur Crewes, a very large man in town, said. She smiled a little-girl smile of graciousness.

“I’ll think about it.” She stooped for the pan.

He reached it before she did. “I won’t give you time to think. There’ll be a car here for you tomorrow at noon.”

He handed her the pan.

She took it reluctantly.

We had dug up Valerie Lone; from under uncounted strata of self-pity and anonymity; from a kind of grave she had chosen for herself for reasons I was beginning to understand. As we went back inside the diner, I had The Thought for the first time:

The Thought: What if we ain’t doing her no favors?

And the voice of Donald Duck came back at me from the Clown Town of my thoughts: With friends like you, Handy, she may not need any enemies.

Screw you, Duck.

TWO

The screen flickered, and Valerie Lone, twenty years younger, wearing the pageboy and padded shoulders of the Forties, swept into the room. Cary Grant looked up from the microscope with his special genteel exasperation, and asked her precisely where she had been. Valerie Lone, the coiffed blonde hair carefully smoothed, removed her gloves and sat on the laboratory counter. She crossed her legs. She was wearing ankle-strap wedgies.

“I think the legs are still damned good, Arthur,” Fred Handy said. Cigar smoke rose up in the projection room. Arthur Crewes did not answer. He was busy watching the past.

Full hips, small breasts, blonde; a loveliness that was never wispy like a Jean Arthur, never chill like a Joan Crawford, never cultured like a Greer Garson. If Valerie Lone had been identifiable with anyone else working in her era, it would have been with Ann Sheridan. And the comparison was by no means invidious. There was the same forceful womanliness in her manner; a wise kid who knew the score. Dynamic. Yet there was a quality of availability in the way she arched her eyebrows, the way she held her hands and neck. Sensuality mixed with reality. What had broken that spine of self-control, turned it into the fragile wariness Handy had sensed? He studied the film as the story unreeled, but there was none of that showing in the Valerie Lone of twenty years before.

As the deep, silken voice faded from the screen, Arthur Crewes reached to the console beside his contour chair, and punched a series of buttons. The projection light cut off from the booth behind them, the room lights went up, and the chair tilted forward. The producer got up and left the room, with Handy behind him, waiting for comments. They had spent close to eight hours running old prints of Valerie Lone’s biggest hits.

Arthur Crewes’s home centered around the projection room. As his life centered around the film industry. Through the door, and into the living room, opulent beneath fumed and waxed, shadowed oak beams far above them. The two men did not speak. The living room was immense, only slightly smaller than a basketball court. And in one corner, Crewes, now settled into a deep armchair, before a roaring walk-in fireplace. The rest of the living room was empty and quiet; one could hear the fall of dust. It had been a gay house many times in the past, and would be again, but at the moment, far down below the vaulting ceiling, their voices rising like echoes in a mountain pass, Arthur Crewes spoke to his publicist.

“Fred, I want the full treatment. I want her seen everywhere by everyone. I want her name as big as it ever was.”

Handy pursed his lips, even as he nodded. “That takes money, Arthur. We’re pushing the publicity budget now.”

Crewes lit a cigar. “This is above-the-line expense. Keep it a separate record, and I’ll take care of it out of my pocket. I want it all itemized for the IRS, but don’t spare the cost.”

“Do you know how much you’re getting into here?”

“It doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, however much you need, come and ask, and you’ll get it. But I want a real job done for that money, Fred.”

Handy stared at him for a long moment.

“You’ll get mileage out of Valerie Lone’s comeback, Arthur. No doubt about it. But I have to tell you right now it isn’t going to be anything near commensurate with what you’ll be spending. It isn’t that kind of appeal.”

Crewes drew deeply on the cigar, sent a thin streamer of blue smoke toward the darkness above them. “I’m not concerned about the value to the picture. It’s going to be a good property, it can take care of itself. This is something else.”

Handy looked puzzled. “Why?”

Crewes did not answer. Finally, he asked, “Is she settled in at the Beverly Hills?”

Handy rose to leave. “Best bungalow in the joint. You should have seen the reception they gave her.”

“That’s the kind of reception I want everywhere for her, Fred. A lot of bowing and scraping for the old queen.”

Handy nodded, walked toward the foyer. Across the room, forcing him to raise his voice to reach Crewes, still lost in the dimness of the living room, the fireplace casting spastic shadows of blood and night on the walls, Fred Handy said, “Why the extra horsepower, Arthur? I get nervous when I’m told to spend freely.”

Smoke rose from the chair where Arthur Crewes was hidden. “Good night, Fred.”

Handy stood for a moment; then, troubled, he let himself out. The living room was silent for a long while, only the faint crackling of the logs on the fire breaking the stillness. Then Arthur Crewes reached to the sidetable and lifted the telephone receiver from its cradle. He punched out a number.

“Miss Valerie Lone’s bungalow, please . . . yes, I know what time it is. This is Arthur Crewes calling . . . thank you.”

There was a pause, then sound from the other end.

“Hello, Miss Lone? Arthur Crewes. Yes, thank you. Sorry if I disturbed you . . . oh, really? I rather thought you might be awake. I had the feeling you might be a little uneasy, first night back and all.”

He listened to the voice at the other end. And did not smile. Then he said, “I just wanted to call and tell you not to be afraid. Everything will be fine. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Nothing at all.”

His eyes became light, and light fled down the wires to see her at the other end. In the elegant bungalow, still sitting in the dark. Through a window, moonlight lay like a patina of dull gold across the room, tinting even the depressions in the sofa pillows where a thousand random bottoms had rested, a vaguely yellow ocher.

Valerie Lone. Alone.

Misted by a fine down of Beverly Hills moonlight—the great gaffer in the sky working behind an amber gel keylighting her with a senior, getting fill light from four broads and four juniors, working the light outside in the great celestial cyclorama with a dozen sky-pans, and catching her just right with a pair of inky-dinks, scrims, gauzes and cutters—displaying her in a gown of powdered moth-wing dust. Valerie Lone, off-camera, trapped by the lens of God, and the electric eyes of Arthur Crewes. But still in XTREME CLOSEUP.

She thanked him, seeming bewildered by his kindness. “Is there anything you need?” he asked.

He had to ask her to repeat her answer, she had spoken so softly. But the answer was nothing, and he said good night, and was about to hang up when she called him.

To Crewes it was a sound from farther away than the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was a sound that came by way of a Country of Mildew. From a land where oily things moved out of darkness. From a place where the only position was hunched safely into oneself with hands about knees, chin tucked down, hands wrapped tightly so that if the eyes with their just-born-bird membranes should open, through the film could be seen the relaxed fingers. It was a sound from a country where there was no hiding place.

After a moment he answered, shaken by her frightened sound. “Yes, I’m here.”

Now he could not see her, even with eyes of electricity.

For Valerie Lone sat on the edge of the bed in her bungalow, not bathed in moth-wing dust, but lighted harshly by every lamp and overhead in the bungalow. She could not turn out those lights. She was petrified with fear. A nameless fear that had no origin and had no definition. It was merely there with her; a palpable presence.

And something else was in the room with her.

“They . . .”

She stopped. She knew Crewes was straining at the other end of the line to hear what followed.

“They sent your champagne.”

Crewes smiled to himself. She was touched.

Valerie Lone did not smile, was incapable of a smile, was by no means touched. The bottle loomed huge across the room on the glass-topped table. “Thank you. It was. Very. Kind. Of. You.”

Slowly, because of the way she had told him the champagne had arrived, Crewes asked, “Are you all right?”

“I’m frightened.”

“There’s nothing to be frightened about. We’re all on your team, you know that . . .”

“I’m frightened of the champagne . . . it’s been so long.”

Crewes did not understand. He said so.

“I’m afraid to drink it.”

Then he understood.

He didn’t know what to say. For the first time in many years he felt pity for someone. He was fully conversant with affection, and hatred, and envy, and admiration and even stripped-to-the-bone lust. But pity was something he somehow hadn’t had to deal with, for a long time. His ex-wife and the boy, they were the last, and that had been eight years before. He didn’t know what to say.

“I’m afraid, isn’t that silly? I’m afraid I’ll like it too much again. I’ve managed to forget what it tastes like. But if I open it, and taste it, and remember . . . I’m afraid . . .”

He said, “Would you like me to drive over?”

She hesitated, pulling her wits about her. “No. No, I’ll be all right. I’m just being silly. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” Then, hastily: “You’ll call tomorrow?”

“Yes, of course. Sure I will. I’ll call first thing in the morning, and you’ll come down to the Studio. I’m sure there are all sorts of people you’ll want to get reacquainted with.”

Silence, then, softly: “Yes. I’m just being silly. It’s very lonely here.”

“Well, then. I’ll call in the morning.”

“Lonely . . . hmmm? Oh, yes! Thank you. Good night, Mr. Crewes.”

“Arthur. That’s first on the list. Arthur.”

“Arthur. Thank you. Good night.”

“Good night, Miss Lone.”

He hung up, still hearing the same voice he had heard in darkened theaters rich with the smell of popcorn (in the days before they started putting faintly rancid butter on it) and the taste of Luden’s Menthol Cough Drops. The same deep, silken voice that he had just this moment past heard break, ever so slightly, with fear.

Darkness rose up around him.

 
Light flooded Valerie Lone. The lights she would keep burning all night, because out there was darkness and it was so lonely in here. She stared across the room at the bottle of champagne, sitting high in its silver ice bucket, chipped base of ice melting to frigid water beneath it.

Then she stood and took a drinking glass from the tray on the bureau, ignoring the champagne glasses that had come with the bottle. She walked across the room to the bathroom and went inside, without turning on the light. She filled the water glass from the tap, letting the cold faucet run for a long moment. Then she stood in the doorway of the bathroom, drinking the water, staring at the bottle of champagne, that bottle of champagne.

Then slowly, she went to it and pulled the loosened plastic cork from the mouth of the bottle. She poured half a glass.

She sipped it slowly.

Memories stirred.

And a dark shape fled off across hills in the Country of Mildew.

THREE

Handy drove up the twisting road into the Hollywood Hills. The call he had received an hour before was one he would never have expected. He had not heard from Huck Barkin in over two years. Haskell Barkin, the tall. Haskell Barkin, the tanned. Haskell Barkin, the handsome. Haskell Barkin, the amoral. The last time Fred had seen Huck, he was busily making a precarious living hustling wealthy widows with kids. His was a specialized con: he got next to the kids—Huck was one of the more accomplished surf-bums extant—even as he seduced the mother, and before the family attorney knew what was happening, the pitons and grapnels and tongs had been sunk in deep, through the mouth and out the other side, and friendly, good-looking, rangy Huck Barkin was living in the house, driving the Imperial, ordering McCormick’s bourbon from the liquor store, eating like Quantrill’s Raiders, and clipping bucks like the Russians were in Pomona.

There had been one who had tried to saturate herself with barbiturates when Huck had said, “À bientot.”

There had been one who had called in her battery of attorneys in an attempt to have him make restitution, but she had been informed that Huck Barkin was one of those rare, seldom, not-often, random “judgment-proof” people.

There had been one who had gone away to New Mexico, where it was warm, and no one would see her drinking.

There had been one who had bought a tiny gun, but had never used it on him.

There had been one who had already had the gun, and she had used it. But not on Huck Barkin.

Fearsome, in his strangeness; without ethic. Animal.

He was one of the more unpleasant Hollywood creeps Handy had met in the nine Hollywood years. Yet there was an unctuous charm about the man; it sat well on him, if the observers weren’t the most perceptive. Handy chuckled, remembering the one and only time he had seen Barkin shot down. By a woman. (And how seldom any woman can really put down a man, with such thoroughness that there is no comeback, no room to rationalize that it wasn’t such a great zinger, with the full certainty that the target has been utterly destroyed, and nothing is left but to slink away. He remembered.)

It had been at a party thrown by CBS, to honor the star of their new ninety-minute Western series. Big party. Century City Hotel. All the silkies were there, all the sleek, well-fed types who went without eating a full day to make it worthwhile at the barbecue and buffet. Barkin had somehow been invited. Or crashed. No one ever questioned his appearance at these things; black mohair suit is ticket enough in a scene where recognition is predicated on the uniform of the day.

He had sidled into a conversational group composed of Handy and his own Julie, Spencer Lichtman the agent and two very expensive call girls—all pale silver hair and exquisite faces; hundred and a half per night girls; the kind a man could talk to afterward, learn something from, probably with Masters earned in photochemistry or piezoelectricity; nothing even remotely cheap or brittle about them; master crafts-men in a specialized field—and Barkin had unstrapped his Haskellesque charm. The girls had sensed at once that he was one of the leeches, hardly one of the cruisable meal tickets with wherewithal. They had been courteous, but chill. Barkin had gone from unctuous to rank in three giant steps, without saying, “May I?”

Finally, in desperation, he had leaned in close to the taller of the two silver goddesses, and murmured (loud enough for all in the group to overhear) with a Richard Widmark thinness: “How would you like me down in your panties?”

Silence for a beat, then the silver goddess turned to him with eyes of anthracite, and across the chill polar wastes came her reply. “I have one asshole down there now . . . what would I want with you?”

Handy chuckled again, smugly, remembering the look on Barkin as he had broken down into his component parts, reformed as a puddle of strawberry jam sliding down one of the walls, and oozed out of the scene, not to return that night.

Yet there was a roguish good humor about the big blond beach-bum that most people took at face value; only if Huck’s back was put to the wall did the façade of affability drop away to reveal the granite foundation of amorality. The man was intent on sliding through life with as little effort as possible.

Handy had spotted him for what he was almost immediately upon meeting him, but for a few months Huck had been an amusing adjunct to Handy’s new life in the film colony. They had not been in touch for three years. Yet this morning the call had come from Barkin. Using Arthur Crewes’s name. He had asked Handy to come to see him, and given him an address in the Hollywood Hills.

Now, as he tooled the Impala around another snakeback curve, the top of the mountain came into view, and Handy saw the house. As it was the only house, dominating the flat, he assumed it was the address Barkin had given him, and he marveled. It was a gigantic circle of a structure, a flattened spool of sandblasted gray rock whose waist was composed entirely of curved panels of dark-smoked glass. Barkin could never have afforded an Orwellian feast of a home like this.

Handy drove up the flaring spiral driveway and parked beside the front door: an ebony slab with a rhodium-plated knob as big as an Impala headlight.

The grounds were incredibly well-tailored, sloping down all sides of the mountain to vanish over the next flat. Bonsai trees pruned in their abstracted Zen artfulness, bougainvillea rampant across one entire outcropping, banks of flowers, dichondra everywhere, ivy.

Then Handy realized the house was turning. To catch the sun. Through a glass roof. The front door was edging past him toward the west. He walked up to it, and looked for a doorbell. There was none.

From within the house came the staccato report of hardwood striking hardwood. It came again and again, in uneven, frantic bursts. And the sound of grunting.

He turned the knob, expecting the gigantic door to resist, but it swung open on a center-pin, counterbalanced, and he stepped through into the front hall of inlaid onyx tiles.

The sounds of wood on wood, and grunting, were easy to follow. He went down five steps into a passageway, and followed it toward the sound, emerging at the other end of the passage into a living room ocean-deep in sunshine. In the center of the room Huck Barkin and a tiny Japanese, both in loose-fitting ceremonial robes, were jousting with sawed-off quarterstaffs—shoji sticks.

Handy watched silently. The diminutive Japanese was electric. Barkin was no match for him, though he managed to get in a smooth rap or two from moment to moment. But the Oriental rolled and slid, barely seeming to touch the deep white carpet. His hands moved like propellers, twisting the hardwood staff to counter a swing by the taller man, jabbing sharply to embed the point of the staff in Barkin’s ribs. In and out and gone. He was a blur.

As Barkin turned in almost an entrechat, to avoid a slantwise flailing maneuver by the Oriental, he saw Handy standing in the entranceway to the passage. Barkin stepped back from his opponent.

“That’ll do it for now, Mas,” he said.

They bowed to one another, the Oriental took the staffs, and left through another passageway at the far end of the room. Barkin came across the rug liquidly, all the suntanned flesh rippling with the play of solid muscle underneath. Handy found himself once again admiring the shape Barkin kept himself in. But if you do nothing but spend time on your body, why not? he thought ruefully. The idea of honest labor had never taken up even temporary residence in Huck’s thoughts. And yet one bodybuilding session was probably equal to all the exertion a common laborer would expend in a day.

Handy thought Huck was extending his hand in greeting, but halfway across the room the robed beach-bum reached over to a Saarinen chair and snagged a huge, fluffy towel. He swabbed his face and chest with it, coming to Handy.

“Fred, baby.”

“How are you, Huck?”

“Great, fellah. Just about king of the world these days. Like the place?”

“Nice. Whose is it?”

“Belongs to a chick I’ve been seeing. Old man’s one of the big things happening in some damned banana republic or other. I don’t give it too much thought; she’ll be back in about a month. Till then I’ve got the run of the joint. Want a drink?”

“It’s eleven o’clock.”

“Coconut milk, friend buddy friend. Got all the amino acids you can use all day. Very important.”

“I’ll pass.”

Barkin shrugged, walking past him to a mirrored wall that was jeweled with the reflections of pattering sunlight streaming in from above. He seemed to wipe his hand over the mirror, and the wall swung out to reveal a fully stocked bar. He took a can of coconut milk from the small freezer unit, and opened it, drinking straight from the can. “Doesn’t that smart a bit?” Handy asked.

“The coconut mil—oh, you mean the shoji jousting. Best damned thing in the world to toughen you up. Teak. Get whacked across the belly half a dozen times with one of those and your stomach muscles turn to leather.”

He flexed.

“Leather stomach muscles. Just what I’ve always yearned for.”

Handy walked across the room and stared out through the dark glass at the incredible Southern California landscape, blighted by a murmuring, hanging pall of sickly smog over the Hollywood Freeway. With his back turned to Barkin, he said, “I tried to call Crewes after you spoke to me. He wasn’t in. I came anyway. How come you used his name?” He turned around.

“He told me to.”

“Where did you meet Arthur Crewes!” Handy snapped, sudden anger in his voice. This damned beach stiff, it had to be a shuck; he had to have used Handy’s name somehow.

“At that pool party you took me to, about—what was it—about three years ago. You remember, that little auburn-haired thing, what was her name, Binnie, Bunny, something . . . ?”

“Billie. Billie Landewyck. Oh, yeah, I’d forgotten Crewes was there.”

Huck smiled a confident smile. He downed the last of the coconut milk and tossed the can into a wastebasket. He came around the bar and slumped onto the sofa. “Yeah, well. Crewes remembered me. Got me through Central Casting. I keep my SAG dues up, never know when you can pick up a few bucks doing stunt or a bit. You know.”

Handy did not reply. He was waiting. Huck had simply said Arthur Crewes wanted him to get together with the beach-bum, so Handy had come. But there was something stirring that Barkin didn’t care to open up just yet.

“Listen, Huck, I’m getting to be an old man. I can’t stand on my feet too long any more. So if you’ve got something shaking, let’s to it, friend buddy friend.”

Barkin nodded silently, as though resigned to whatever it was he had to say. “Yeah, well. Crewes wants me to meet Valerie Lone.”

Handy stared.

“He remembered me.”

Handy tried to speak, found he had nothing to say. It was too ridiculous. He turned to leave.

“Hold it, Fred. Don’t do that, man. I’m talking to you.”

“You’re talking nothing, Barkin. You’ve gotta be straight out of a jug. Valerie Lone, my ass. Who do you think you’re shucking? Not me, not good old friend buddy friend Handy. I know you, you deadbeat.”

Barkin stood up, unfurled something over six feet of deltoid, trapezius and bicep, toned till they hummed, and planted himself in front of the passageway. “Fred, you continue to make the mistake of thinking I’m a hulk without a brain in it. You’re wrong. I am a very clever lad, not merely pretty, but smart. Now if I have to drop five big ones into your pudding-trough, lover, I will do so.”

Handy stopped moving toward him. Barkin was not fooling. He was angry. “What is all this, Barkin? What are you trying to climb onto? No, forget it, don’t answer. What I want to know is why?”

Barkin spread hands as huge as catcher’s mitts. The fingers were oddly long and graceful. And tanned. “She is a lovely woman who finds the company of handsome young men refreshing. Mr. Crewes, sir, has decided I will brighten her declining years.”

“She is a scared creature who doesn’t know where it’s at, not right now she doesn’t. And turning you loose on her would be a sudden joy like the Dutch Elm Blight.”

Barkin smiled thinly. It was a mean smile. For the time it took the smile to vanish, he was not handsome. “Call Arthur Crewes. He’ll verify.”

“I can’t get through to him, he’s in a screening.”

“Then go ask him. I’ll be here all day.”

He stepped aside. Handy waited, as though Barkin might surprise him and leap back suddenly, with a fist in the mouth. Huck stood grinning like a little boy. Ain’t I cute.

“I’ll do that.”

Handy moved past and entered the passageway. As he walked hurriedly down the length of the corridor, he heard Barkin speak again. He turned to see the giant figure framed in the blazing sunlight rectangle at the other end of the dark tunnel. “You know, Fred chum, you need a good workout. You’re gettin’ flabbier than hell.”

Handy fled, raising dust as he wheeled the Impala out of the driveway and down the mountainside. There was the stink of fuel oil rising up from the city. Or was it the smell of fear?

FOUR

When he burst into Arthur Crewes’s office at the Studio, the reception room was filled with delight. All that young stuff. A dozen girls, legs crossed high to show off the rounded thigh, waiting to be seen. As he slammed in, Twiggyeyes blinked rapidly.

He careened through the door and brought up short, turning quickly to see an unbroken panorama of gorgeous young-twenties starlets. Roz, fifty and waspish, behind the desk, snickered at his double-take. Handy recognized the tone of the snicker. He was a man periodically motivated from somewhere low in his anatomy, and Roz never failed to hold it against him. He had never asked her out.

“Hello, Fred,” one of the girls said. He had to strain to single her out. They all looked alike. Teased; long flat blonde hair; freaky Twiggy styles; backswept bouffant; short mannish cuts; all of them, no matter what mode, they all looked alike. It was Randi. She had had a thing about touching his privates. It was all he could remember about her. Not even if she’d been good. But a publicist must remember names, and with the remembrance of her touching his penis and drawing in her breath as though it had been something strange and new and wonderful like the Inca Codex or one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the name Randi popped up like the NO SALE clack on a cash register.

“Hi, Randi. How’s it going?”

He didn’t even wait for an answer. He turned back to Roz. “I want to see him.”

Her mouth became the nasty slit opening of a mantis. “He’s got someone in with him now.”

“I want to see him.”

“I said, Mr. Handy, he has someone in there now. We are still interviewing girls, you know . . .”

“Bloody damn it, lady, I said get your ass in there and tell him Handy is coming through that door, open or not, in exactly ten seconds.”

She drew herself up, no breasts at all, straight lines and Mondrian sterility, and started to huff at him. Handy said, “Fuck,” and went through into Crewes’s office.

He said it softly, but he made noise entering the office.

Another of the pretties was showing Arthur Crewes her 8 × 10 glossies, under plastic, out of an immense black leather photofolio. Starlets. Arthur was saying something about their needing a few more dark-haired girls, as Handy came through the door.

Crewes looked up, surprised at the interruption.

The starlet smiled automatically.

“Arthur, I have to talk to you.”

Crewes seemed puzzled by the tone in Handy’s voice. But he nodded. “In a minute, Fred. Why don’t you sit down. Georgia and I were talking.”

Handy realized his error. He had gone a step too far with Arthur Crewes. Throughout the industry, one thing was common knowledge about Crewes’s office policy: any girl who came in for an interview was treated courteously, fairly, without even the vaguest scintilla of a hustle. Crewes had been known to can men on his productions who had used their positions to get all-too-willing actresses into bed with promises of three-line bits, or a walk-on. For Handy to interrupt while Crewes was talking to even the lowliest day-player was an affront Crewes would not allow to pass unnoticed. Handy sat down, ambivalent as hell.

Georgia was showing Crewes several shots from a Presley picture she had made the year before. Crewes was remarking that she looked good in a bikini. It was a businesslike, professional tone of voice, no leer. The girl was standing tall and straight. Handy knew that under other circumstances, in other offices where the routine was different, if Crewes had been another sort of man and had said, why don’t you take off your clothes so I can get a better idea of how you’ll look in the nude shots we’re shooting for the overseas market, this girl, this Georgia, would be pulling the granny dress with its baggy mini material over her head and displaying herself in bikini briefs and maybe no brassiere to hold up all that fine young meat. But in this office she was standing tall and straight. She was being asked to be professional, to take pride in herself and whatever degree of craft she might possess. It was why there were so few lousy rumors around town about Arthur Crewes.

“I’m not certain, Georgia, but let me check with Kenny Heller in Casting, see what he’s already done, and what parts are left open. I know there’s a very nice five- or six-line comedy walk-on with Mitchum that we haven’t found a girl for yet. Perhaps that might work. No promises, you understand, but I’ll check with Kenny and get back to you later in the day.”

“Thank you, Mr. Crewes. I’m very grateful.”

Crewes smiled and picked up one of the 8 × 10’s from a thin sheaf at the rear of the photofolio. “May we keep one of these here, for the files . . . and also to remind me to get through to Kenny?” She nodded, and smiled back at him. There was no subterfuge in the interchange, and Handy sank a trifle lower on the sofa.

“Just give it to Roz, at the desk out there, and leave your number . . . would you prefer we let you know through your agent, or directly?”

It was the sort of question, in any other office, that might mean the producer was trying to wangle the home number for his own purposes. But not here. Georgia did not hesitate as she said. “Oh, either way. It makes no difference. Herb is very good about getting me out on interviews. But if it looks possible, I’ll give you my home number. There’s a service on the line that’ll pick up if I’m out.”

“You can leave it with Roz, Georgia. And thank you for coming in.” He stood and they shook hands. She was quite happy. Even if the part did not come through, she knew she had been considered, not merely assayed as a possible quickie on an office sofa. As she started for the door, Crewes added, “I’ll have Roz call one way or the other, as soon as we know definitely.”

She half-turned, displaying a fine length of leg, taut against the baggy dress, “Thank you. ’Bye.”

“Goodbye.”

She left the office, and Crewes sat down again. He pushed papers around the outer perimeter of his desk, making Handy wait. Finally, when Handy had allowed Crewes as much punishment as he felt his recent original sin deserved, he spoke.

“You’ve got to be out of your mind, Arthur!”

Crewes looked up then. Stopped in the midst of his preparations to remark on Handy’s discourtesy in entering the office during an interview. Crewes waited, but Handy said nothing. Then Crewes thumbed the comm button on the phone. He picked up the receiver and said, “Roz, ask them if they’ll be kind enough to wait about ten minutes. Fred and I have some details to work out.” He listened a moment, then racked the receiver and turned to Handy.

“Okay. What?”

“Jesus Christ, Arthur. Haskell Barkin, for Christ’s sake. You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I talked to Valerie Lone last night. She sounded all by herself. I thought it might be smart therapy to get her a good-looking guy, as company, a chaperone, someone who’d be nice to her. I remembered this Barkin from—”

Handy stood up, frenzy impelling his movement. Banging off walls, vibrating at supersonic speeds, turning invisible with teeth-gritting. “I know where you remembered this Barkin from, Arthur. From Billie Landewyck’s party, three years ago; the pool party; where you met Vivvi. I know. He told me.”

“You’ve been to see Barkin already?”

“He had me out of bed too much before I wanted to get up.”

“An honest day’s working time won’t hurt you, Fred. I was here at seven thir—”

“Arthur, I frankly, God forgive my talking to my producer this way, frankly don’t give a flying shit what time you were behind your desk. Barkin, Arthur! You’re insane.”

“He seemed like a nice chap. Always smiling.”

Handy leaned over the desk, talking straight into Arthur Crewes’s cerebrum, eliminating the middleman. “So does the crocodile smile, Arthur. Haskell Barkin is a crud. He is a slithering, creeping, crawling, essentially reptilian monster who slices and eats. He is Jack the Ripper, Arthur. He is a vacuum cleaner. He is a loggerhead shark. He hates like we urinate—it’s a basic bodily function for him. He leaves a wet trail when he walks. Small children run shrieking from him, Arthur. He’s a killer in a suntan. Women who chew nails, who destroy men for giggles, women like that are afraid of him, Arthur. If you were a broad and he French-kissed you, Arthur, you’d have to go get a tetanus shot. He uses human bones to bake his bread. He’s declared war on every woman who ever carried a crotch. This man is death, Arthur. And that’s what you wanted to turn loose on Valerie Lone, God save her soul. He’s Paris green, he’s sump water, he’s axle grease, Arthur! He’s—”

Arthur Crewes spoke softly, looking battered by Handy’s diatribe. “You made your point, Fred. I stand corrected.”

Handy slumped down into the chair beside the desk.

To himself: “Jeezus, Huck Barkin, Jeezus . . .”

And when he had run down completely, he looked up. Crewes seemed poised in time and space. His idea had not worked out. “Well, whom would you suggest?”

Handy spread his hands.

“I don’t know. But not Barkin, or anyone like him. No Strip killers, Arthur. That would be lamb to slaughter time.”

Crewes: “But she needs someone.”

Handy: “What’s your special interest, Arthur?”

Crewes: “Why say that?”

Handy: “Arthur . . . c’mon. I can tell. There’s a thing you’ve got going where she’s concerned.”

Crewes turned in his chair. Staring out the window at the lot, a series of flat-trucks moving scenery back to the storage bins. “You only work for me, Fred.”

Handy considered, then decided what the hell. “If I worked for Adolph Eichmann, Arthur, I’d still ask where all them Jews was going.”

Crewes turned back, looked levelly at his publicist. “I keep thinking you’re nothing more than a flack-man. I’m wrong, aren’t I?”

Handy shrugged. “I have a thought of my own from time to time.”

Crewes nodded, acquiescing. “Would you just settle for my saying she once did me a favor? Not a big favor, just a little favor, something she probably doesn’t even remember, or if she does she doesn’t think of it in relation to the big producer who’s giving her a comeback break. Would you settle for my saying I mean her nothing but good things, Fred? Would that buy it?”

Handy nodded. “It’ll do.”

“So who do we get to keep her reassured that she isn’t ready for the dustbin just yet?”

Again Handy spread his hands. “I don’t know, it’s been eighteen years since she had anything to do with—hey! Wait a bit. What’s his name . . . ?”

“Who?”

“Oh, hell, you know . . .” Handy said, fumbling with his memory, “. . . the one who got fouled up with the draft during the war, blew his career, something, I don’t remember . . . aw, c’mon Arthur, you know who I mean, used to play all the bright young attorney defending the dirty-faced delinquent parts.” He snapped his fingers trying to call back a name from crumbling fan magazines, from rotogravure coming attraction placards in theater windows.

Crewes suggested, “Call Sheilah Graham.”

Handy came around the desk, dialed 9 to get out, and Sheilah Graham’s private number, from memory. “Sheilah? Fred Handy. Yeah, hi. Hey, who was it Valerie Lone used to go with?” He listened. “No, huh-uh, the one that was always in the columns, he was married, but they had a big thing, he does bits now, guest shots, who—”

She told him.

“Right. Right, that’s who. Okay, hey thanks, Sheilah. What? No, huh-uh, huh-uh; as soon as we get something right, it’s yours. Okay, luv. Thanks. ’Bye.”

He hung up and turned to Crewes. “Emery Romito.”

Crewes nodded. “Jeezus, is he still alive?”

“He was on Bonanza about three weeks ago. Guest shot. Played an alcoholic veterinarian.”

Crewes lifted an eyebrow. “Type casting?”

Handy was leafing through the volume of the PLAYERS DIRECTORY that listed leading men. “I don’t think so. If he’d been a stone sauce-hound he’d’ve been planted long before this. I think he’s just getting old, that’s the worst.”

Crewes gave a sharp, short bitter laugh. “That’s enough.”

Handy slammed the PLAYERS DIRECTORY closed. “He’s not in there.”

“Try character males.”

Handy found it, in the R’s. Emery Romito. A face out of the past, still holding a distinguished mien but, even through the badly reproduced photo that had been an 8 × 10 glossy, showing weariness and the indefinable certainty that this man knew he had lost his chance at picking up all the marbles.

Handy showed Crewes the photo.

“Do you think this is a good idea?” The producer looked at him with trepidation.

Handy looked back at him. “It’s a helluva lot better idea than yours, Arthur.”

Crewes sucked on the edge of his lower lip between clenched teeth. “Okay. Go get him. But make him look like a knight on a white charger. I want her very happy.”

“Knights on white chargers these days come barrel-assing down the streets of suburbia with their phalluses in hand, blasting women’s underwear whiter-than-white. Would you settle for merely mildly happy?”

FIVE

Cotillions could have been held in the main drawing room of the Stratford Beach Hotel. Probably had been. In the days when Richard Dix had his way with Leatrice Joy, in the days when Zanuck had his three rejected scenarios privately published as a “book” and sent them around to the studios in hopes of building his personal stock, in the days when Virginia Rappe was being introduced to the dubious sexual joys of a fat kid named Arbuckle. In those days the Stratford Beach Hotel had been a showplace, set out on the lovely Santa Monica shore, overlooking the triumphant Pacific.

Architecturally, the hotel was a case in point for Frank Lloyd Wright’s contention that the Sunshine State looked as though “someone had tipped the United States up on its east coast, and everything that was loose went tumbling into California.” Great and bulky, sunk to its hips in the earth, with rococo flutings at every possible juncture, portico’d and belfry’d, the Stratford Beach had passed through fifty years of scuffling feet, spuming salt-spray, drunken orgies, changed bed-linen and insipid managers to end finally in this backwash eddy of a backwash suburb.

In the main drawing room of the Stratford Beach, standing on the top step of a wide, spiraling staircase of onyx that ran down into a room where the dust in the ancient carpets rose at each step to mingle with the downdrifting film of shattered memories, fractured yesterdays, mote-infested yearnings and the unmistakable stench of dead dreams, Fred Handy knew what had killed F. Scott Fitzgerald. This room, and the thousands of others like it, that held within their ordered interiors a kind of deadly magic of remembrance; a pull and tug of eras that refused to give up the ghost, that had not the common decency to pass away and let new times be born. The embalmed forevers that never came to be . . . they were here, lurking in the colorless patinas of dust that covered the rubber plants, that settled in the musty odor of the velvet plush furniture, that shone dully up from inlaid hardwood floors where the Charleston had been danced as a racy new thing.

This was the terrifying end-up for all the refuse of nostalgia. Hooked on this scene had been Fitzgerald, lauding and singing of something that was dead even as it was born. And so easily hooked could anyone get on this, who chose to live after their time was passed.

The words tarnish and mildew again formed in Handy’s mind, superimposed as subtitles over a mute sequence of Valerie Lone shrieking in closeup. He shook his head, and not a moment too soon. Emery Romito came down the stairs from the second floor of the hotel, walking up behind Handy across the inlaid tiles of the front hall. He stood behind Handy, staring down into the vast living room. As Handy shook his head, fighting to come back to today.

“Elegant, isn’t it?” Emery Romito said.

The voice was cultivated, the voice was deep and warm, the voice was histrionic, the voice was filled with memory, the voice was a surprise in the silence, but none of these were the things that startled Handy. The present tense, isn’t it. Not: wasn’t it, isn’t it.

Oh my God, Handy thought.

Afraid to turn around, Fred Handy felt himself sucked into the past. This room, this terrible room, it was so help him God a portal to the past. The yesterdays that had never gone to rest were all here, crowding against a milky membrane separating them from the world of right here and now, like eyeless soulless wraiths, hungering after the warmth and presence of his corporeality. They wanted . . . what? They wanted his au courant. They wanted his today, so they could hear “Nagasaki” and “Vagabond Lover” and “Please” sung freshly again. So they could rouge their knees and straighten their headache bands over their foreheads. Fred Handy, man of today, assailed by the ghosts of yesterday, and terrified to turn around and see one of those ghosts standing behind him.

“Mr. Handy? You are the man who called me, aren’t you?”

Handy turned and looked at Emery Romito.

“Hello,” he said, through the dust of decades.

 
Handy

Jefferson once said people get pretty much the kind of government they deserve, which is why I refuse to listen to any bullshit carping by my fellow Californians about Reagan and his gubernatorial gang-banging—what I chose to call government by artificial insemination when I was arguing with Julie, a registered Republican, when we weren’t making love—because it seems to me they got just what they were asking for. The end-product of a hundred years of statewide paranoia and rampant lunacy. That philosophy—stripped of Freudian undertones—has slopped over into most areas of my opinion. Women who constantly get stomped on by shitty guys generally have a streak of masochism in them; guys who get their hearts eaten away by rodent females are basically self-flagellants. And when you see someone who has been ravaged by life, it is a safe bet he has been a willing accomplice at his own destruction.

All of this passed through my mind as I said hello to Emery Romito. The picture in the PLAYERS DIRECTORY had softened the sadness. But in living color he was a natural for one of those billboards hustling Forest Lawn pre-need cemetery plots. Don’t get caught with your life down.

He was one of the utterly destroyed. A man familiar to the point of incest with the forces that crush and maim, a man stunned by the hammer. And I could conceive of no one who would aid and abet those kind of forces in self-destruction. No. No one.

Yet no man could have done it to himself without the help of the Furies. And so, I was ambivalent. I felt both pity and cynicism for Emery Romito, and his brave foolish elegance.

Age lay like soot in the creases of what had once been a world-famous face. The kind of age that means merely growing old, without wistfulness or delight. This man had lived through all the days and nights of his life with only one thought uppermost: let me forget what has gone before.

“Would you like to sit out on the terrace?” Romito asked. “Nice breeze off the ocean today.”

I smiled acquiescence, and he made a theatrical gesture in the direction of the terrace. As he preceded me down the onyx steps into the living room, I felt a clutch of nausea, and followed him. Cheyne-Stokes breathing as I walked across the threadbare carpet, among the deep restful furniture that called to me, suggested I try their womb comfort, sink into them never to rise again. Or if I did, it would be as a shriveled, mummified old man. (And with the memory of a kid who grew up on movies, I saw Margo as Capra had seen her in 1937, aging horribly, shriveling, in a matter of seconds, as she was being carried out of Shangri-La. And I shuddered. A grown man, and I shuddered.)

It was like walking across the bottom of the sea; shadowed, filtered with sounds that had no names, caught by shafts of sunlight from the skylight above us that contained freshets of dust-motes rising tumbling surging upward, threading between sofas and Morris chairs like whales in shoal, finally arriving at the fogged dirty French doors that gave out onto the terrace.

Romito opened them smoothly, as if he had done it a thousand times in a thousand films—and probably had—for a thousand Anita Louises. He stepped out briskly, and drew a deep breath. In that instant I realized he was in extremely good shape for a man his age, built big across the back and shoulders, waist still trim and narrow, actually quite dapper. Then why did I think of him as a crustacean, as a pitted fossil, as a gray and wasted relic?

It was the air of fatality, of course. The superimposed chin-up-through-it-all horseshit that all Hollywood hangers-on adopted. It was an atrophied devolutionary extension of the Show Must Go On shuck; the myth that owns everyone in the Industry: that getting forty-eight minutes of hack cliché situation comedy filmed—only the barest minimally innervating—to capture the boggle-eyed interest of the Great Unwashed sucked down in the doldrum mire of The Great American Heartland, so they will squat there for twelve minutes of stench odor poison and artifact hardsell, is an occupation somehow inextricably involved with advancing the course of Western Civilization. A myth that has oozed over into all areas of modern thought, thus turning us into a “show biz culture” and spawning such creatures as Emery Romito. Like the cats in the empty Ziv Studios, nibbling at the leftover garbage of the film industry, but loath to leave it. (Echoes of the old saw about the carnival assistant whose job it was to shovel up elephant shit who, when asked why he didn’t get a better job, replied, “What? And leave show biz?”) Emery Romito was one of the clingers to the underside of the rock that was show biz, that dominated like Gibraltar the landscape of Americana.

He had forfeited his humanity in order to remain “with it.” He was dead, and didn’t know it. What, and leave show biz?

The terrace was half the size of the living room, which made it twice as large as the foyer of Grauman’s Chinese. Gray stone balustrades bounded it, and earthquake tremors had performed an intricate calligraphy across the inlaid and matched flaggings. It was daylight, but that didn’t stop the shadowy images of women with bobbed hairdos and men with pomaded glossiness from weaving in and around us as we stood there, staring out at the ocean. It was ghost-time again, and secret liaisons were being effected out on the terrace by dashing sheiks (whose wives [married before their men had become nickelodeon idols] were inside slugging the gin-spiked punch) and hungry little hopefuls with waxed shins and a dab of alum in their vaginas, anxious to grasp magic.

“Let’s sit down,” Emery Romito said. To me, not the ghosts. He indicated a conversation grouping of cheap tubular aluminum beach chairs, their once-bright webbing now hopelessly faded by sun and sea-mist.

I sat down and he smiled ingratiatingly.

Then he sat down, careful to pull up the pants creases in the Palm Beach suit. The suit was in good shape, but perhaps fifteen years out of date.

“Well,” he said.

I smiled back. I hadn’t the faintest idea what “well” was a preamble to, nor what I was required to answer. But he waited, expecting me to say something.

When I continued to smile dumbly, his expression crumpled a little, and he tried another tack. “Just what sort of part is it that Crewes has in mind?”

Oh my God, I thought. He thinks it’s an interview.

“Uh, well, it isn’t precisely a part in the film I’m here to talk to you about, Mr. Romito.” It was much too intricate a syntax for a man whose heart might attack him at any moment.

“It isn’t a part,” he repeated.

“No, it was something rather personal . . .”

“It isn’t a part.” He whispered it, barely heard, lost instantly in the overpowering sound of the Santa Monica surf not far beyond us.

“It’s about Valerie Lone,” I began.

“Valerie?”

“Yes. We’ve signed her for Subterfuge and she’s back in town and—”

“Subterfuge?”

“The film Mr. Crewes is producing.”

“Oh. I see.”

He didn’t see at all. I was sure of that. I didn’t know how in the world I could tell this ruined shell that his services were needed as escort, not actor. He saved me the trouble. He ran away from me, into the past.

“I remember once, in 1936 I believe . . . no, it was ’37, that was the year I did Beloved Liar . . .”

I let the sound of the surf swell inside me. I turned down the gain on Emery Romito and turned up the gain on nature. I knew I would be able to get him to do what needed to be done—he was a lonely, helpless man for whom any kind of return to the world of glamor was a main chance. But it would take talking, and worse . . . listening.

“. . . Thalberg called me in, and he was smiling, it was a very unusual thing, you can be sure. And he said: ‘Emery, we’ve just signed a girl for your next picture,’ and of course it was Valerie. Except that wasn’t her name then, and he took me over to the Commissary to meet her. We had the special salad, it was little slivers of ham and cheese and turkey, cut so they were stacked one on top of the other, so you tasted the ham first, then the cheese, then the turkey, all in one bite, and the freshest green crisp lettuce, they called it the William Powell Salad . . . no, that isn’t right . . . the William Powell was crab meat . . . I think it was the Norma Talmadge Salad . . . or was it . . .”

As I sat there talking to Emery Romito, what I did not know was that all the way across the city, at the Studio, Arthur was entering the lot with Valerie Lone, in a chauffeured Bentley. He told me about it that night, and it was horrible. But it served as the perfect counterpoint to the musty warm monologue being delivered to me that moment by the Ghost of Christmas Past.

How lovely, how enriching, to sit there in sumptuous, palatial Santa Monica, Showplace of the Western World, listening to the voice from beyond reminisce about tuna fish and avocado salads. I prayed for deafness.

SIX

Crewes had called ahead. “I want the red carpet, do I make my meaning clear?” The Studio public relations head had said yes, he understood. Crewes had emphasized the point: “I don’t want any fuckups, Barry. Not even the smallest. No gate police asking for a drive-on pass, no secretary making her wait. I want every carpenter and grip and mail boy to know we’re bringing Valerie Lone back today. And I want deference, Barry. If there’s a fuckup, even the smallest fuckup, I’ll come down on you the way Samson brought down the temple.”

“Christ, Arthur, you don’t have to threaten me!”

“I’m not threatening, Barry, I’m making the point so you can’t weasel later. This isn’t some phony finger-popping rock singer, this is Valerie Lone.”

“All right, Arthur! Stop now.”

When they came through the gate, the guards removed their caps, and waved the Bentley on toward the sound stages. Valerie Lone sat in the rear, beside Arthur Crewes, and her face was dead white, even under the makeup she had applied in the latest manner: for 1945.

There was a receiving line outside Stage 16.

The Studio head, several members of the foreign press, the three top producers on the lot, and half a dozen “stars” of current tv series. They made much over her, and when they were finished, Valerie Lone had almost been convinced someone gave a damn that she was not dead.

When the flashing red gumball light on its tripod went out—signifying that the shot had been completed inside the sound stage—they entered. Valerie took three steps beyond the heavy soundproof door, and stopped. Her eyes went up and up, into the dim reaches of the huge barnlike structure, to the catwalks with their rigging, the lights anchored to their brace boards, the cool and wonderful air from the conditioners that rose to heat up there, where the gaffers worked. Then she stepped back into the shadows as Crewes came up beside her, and he knew she was crying, and he turned to ask the others if they would come in later, to follow Miss Lone on her visit. The others did not understand, but they went back outside, and the door sighed shut on its pneumatic hinges.

Crewes went to her, and she was against the wall, the tears standing in her eyes, but not running down to ruin the makeup. In that instant Crewes knew she would be all right: she was an actress, and for an actress the only reality is the fantasy of the sound stages. She would not let her eyes get red. She was tougher than he’d imagined.

She turned to him, and when she said, “Thank you, Arthur,” it was so soft, and so gentle, Crewes took her in his arms and she huddled close to him, and there was no passion in it, no striving to reach bodies, only a fine and warm protectiveness. He silently said no one would hurt her, and silently she said my life is in your hands.

After a while, they walked past the coffee machine and Willie, who said hello Miss Lone it’s good to have you back; and past the assistant director’s lectern where the shooting schedule was tacked onto the sloping board, where Bruce del Vaille nodded to her, and looked awed; and past the extras slumped in their straight-backed chairs, reading Irving Wallace and knitting, waiting for their calls, and they had been told who it was, and they all called to her and waved and smiled; and past the high director’s chair which was at that moment occupied by the script supervisor, whose name was Henry, and he murmured hello, Miss Lone, we worked together on suchandsuch, and she went to him and kissed him on the cheek, and he looked as though he wanted to cry, too. For Arthur Crewes, in the sound stage somewhere, a bird twittered gaily. He shrugged and laughed, like a child.

Someone yelled, “Okay, settle down! Settle down!”

The din fell only a decibel. James Kencannon was talking to Mitchum, to one side of the indoor set that was decorated to be an outdoor set. It was an alley in a Southwestern town, and the cyclorama in the background had been artfully rigged to simulate a carnival somewhere in the middle distance. Lights played off the canvas, and for Valerie Lone it was genuine; a real carnival erected just for her. The alley was dirty and extremely realistic. Extras lounged against the brick walls that were not brick walls, waiting for the call to roll it. The cameraman was setting the angle of the shot, the big piece of equipment on its balloon tires set on wooden tracks, ready to dolly back when the grips pulled it. The assistant cameraman with an Arriflex on his shoulder was down on one knee, gauging an up-angle for action shooting.

Del Vaille came onto the set and Kencannon nodded to him. “Okay, roll—” Kencannon stopped the preparations for the shot, and asked the first assistant director to measure off the shot once more, as Mitchum stepped into the position that had, till that moment, been held by his stand-in. The first assistant unreeled the tape measure, announced it; the cameraman gave a turn to one of the flywheels on the big camera, and nodded ready to the assistant director, who turned and bawled, “Okay! Roll it!”

A strident bell clanged in the sound stage and dead silence fell. People in mid-step stopped. No one coughed. No one spoke. Tony, the sound mixer, up on his high platform with his earphones and his console, announced, “Take thirty-three Bravo!” which resounded through the cavernous set and was picked up through the comm box by the sound truck outside the sound stage. When it was up to speed, Tony yelled, “Speed!” and the first assistant director stepped forward into the shot with his wooden clackboard bearing Kencannon’s name and the shot number. He clacked the stick to establish sound synch and get the board photographed, and there was a beat as he withdrew, as Mitchum drew in a breath for the action to come, as everyone poised hanging in limbo and Kencannon—like all directors—relished the moment of absolute power waiting for his voice to announce action.

Infinite moment.

Birth of dreams.

The shadow and the reality.

“Action!”

As five men leaped out of darkness and grabbed Robert Mitchum, shoving him back up against the wall of the alley. The camera dollied in rapidly to a closeup of Mitchum’s face as one of the men grabbed his jaw with brutal fingers. “Where’d you take her . . . tell us where you took her!” the assailant demanded with a faint Mexican accent. Mitchum worked his jaw muscles, tried to shove the man away. The Arriflex operator was down below them, out of the master shot, purring away his tilted angles of the scuffling men. Mitchum tried to speak, but couldn’t with the man’s hand on his face. “Let’m talk, Sanchez!” another of the men urged the assailant. He released Mitchum’s face, and in the same instant Mitchum surged forward, throwing two of the men from him, and breaking toward the camera as it dollied rapidly back to encompass the entire shot. The Arriflex operator scuttled with him, tracking him in wobbly closeup. The five men dived for Mitchum, preparatory to beating the crap out of him as Kencannon yelled, “Cut! That’s a take!” and the enemies straightened up, relaxed, and Mitchum walked swiftly to his mobile dressing room. The crew prepared to set up another shot.

The extras moved in. A group of young kids, obviously bordertown tourists from a yanqui college, down having a ball in the hotbed of sin and degradation.

They milled and shoved, and Arthur found himself once again captivated by the enormity of what was being done here. A writer had said: ESTABLISHING SHOT OF CROWD IN ALLEY and it was going to cost about fifteen thousand dollars to make that line become a reality. He glanced at Valerie beside him, and she was smiling, a thin and delicate smile part remembrance and part wonder. It really never wore off, this delight, this entrapment by the weaving of fantasy into reality.

“Enjoying yourself?” he asked softly.

“It’s as though I’d never been away,” she said.

Kencannon came to her, then. He held both her hands in his, and he looked at her: as a man and as a camera. “Oh, you’ll do just fine . . . just fine.” He smiled at her. She smiled back.

“I haven’t read the part yet,” she said.

“Johnny Black hasn’t finished expanding it yet. And I don’t give a damn. You’ll do fine, just fine!” They stared at each other with the kind of intimacy known only to a man who sees reality as an image on celluloid, and by a woman confronting a man who can make her look seventeen or seventy. Trust and fear and compassion and a mutual cessation of hostilities between the sexes. It was always like this. As if to say: what does he see? What does she want? What will we settle for? I love you.

“Have you said hello to Bob Mitchum yet?” Kencannon asked her.

“No. I think he’s resting.” She was, in turn, deferential to a star, as the lessers had been deferential to her. “I can meet him later.”

“Are there any questions you’d like to ask?” he said. He waved a hand at the set around him. “You’ll be living here for the next few weeks, you’d better get to know it.”

“Well . . . yes . . . there are a few questions,” she said. And she began getting into the role of star once more. She asked questions. Questions that were twenty years out of date. Not stupid questions, just not quite in focus. (As if the clackboard had not been in synch with the sound wagon, and the words had emerged from the actors’ mouths a micro-instant too soon.) Not embarrassing questions, merely awkward questions; the answers to which entailed Kencannon’s educating her, reminding her that she was a relic, that time had not waited for her—even as she had not waited when she had been a star—but had gathered its notes in a rush and plunged panting heavily past her. Now she had to exercise muscles of thought that had atrophied, just to try and catch up with time, dashing on ahead there like an ambitious mailroom boy trying to make points with the Studio executives. Her questions became more awkward. Her words came with more difficulty. Crewes saw her getting—how did Handy put it?—uptight.

Three girls had come onto the set from a mobile dressing room back in a dark corner of the sound stage. They wore flowered wrappers. The assistant director was herding them toward the windows of a dirty little building facing out on the alley. The girls went around the back of the building—back where it was unpainted pine and brace-rods and Magic Marker annotated as SUBTER’GE 115/144 indicating in which scenes these sets would be used.

They appeared in three windows of the building. They would be spectators at the stunt-man’s fight with the assailants in the alley . . . Mitchum’s fight with the assailants in the alley. They were intended to represent three Mexican prostitutes, drawn to their windows by the sounds of combat. They removed their wrappers.

Their naked, fleshy breasts hung on the window ledges like Daliesque melting casabas, waiting to ripen. Valerie Lone turned and saw the array of deep-brown nipples, and made a strange sound, “Awuhhh!” as if they had been something put on sale at such a startlingly low price she was amazed, confused and repelled out of suspicion.

Kencannon hurriedly tried to explain the picture was being shot in two versions, one for domestic and eventual television release, the other for foreign marketing. He went into a detailed comparison of the two versions, and when he had finished—with the entire cast of extras listening, for the explication of hypocrisy is always fascinating—Valerie Lone said:

“Gee, I hope none of my scenes have to be shot without clothes . . .”

And one of the extras gave a seal-like bark of amusement. “Fat chance,” he murmured, just a bit too loud.

Arthur Crewes went around in a fluid movement that was almost choreography, and hit the boy—a beach-bum with long blond hair and fine deltoids—a shot that traveled no more than sixteen inches. It was a professional fighter’s punch, no windup, no bolo, just a short hard piston jab that took the boy directly under the heart. He vomited air and lost his lower legs. He sat down hard.

If Crewes had thought about it, he would not have done it. The effect on the cast. The inevitable lawsuit. The Screen Extras Guild complaint. The bad form of striking someone who worked for him. The look on Valerie Lone’s face as she caught the action with peripheral vision. The sight of an actor sitting down in pain, like a small child seeking a sandpile.

But he didn’t think, and he did it, and Valerie Lone turned and ran . . .

 
Questions that were not congruent with a film that has to take into account television rerun, accelerated shooting schedules, bankability of stars, the tenor of the kids who make up the yeoman cast of every film, the passage of time and the improvement of techniques, and the altered thinking of studio magnates; the sophisticated tastes and mores of a new filmgoing audience.

A generation of youth with no respect for roots and heritage and the past. With no understanding of what has gone before. With no veneration of age. The times had conspired against Valerie Lone. Even as the times had conspired against her twenty years before. The simple and singular truth of it was that Valerie Lone had not been condemned by a lack of talent—though a greater talent might have sustained her—nor by a weakness in character—though a more ruthless nature might have carried her through the storms—nor by fluxes and flows in the Industry, but by all of these things, and by Fate and the times. But mostly the times. She was simply, singularly, not one with her world. It was a Universe that had chosen to care about Valerie Lone. For most of the world, the Universe didn’t give a damn. For rare and singular persons from time to time in all ages, the Universe felt a compassion. It felt a need to succor and warm, to aid and bolster. That disaster befell all of these “wards of the Universe” was only proof unarguable that the Universe was inept, that God was insane.

It would have been better by far had the Universe left Valerie Lone to her own destiny. But it wouldn’t, it couldn’t; and it combined all the chance random elements of encounter and happenstance to litter her path with roses. For Valerie Lone, in the inept and compassionate Universe, the road was broken glass and dead birds, as far down the trail as she would ever be able to see.

The Universe had created the tenor of cynicism that hummed silently through all the blond beach-bums of the Hollywood extra set . . . the Universe had dulled Valerie Lone’s perceptions of the Industry as it was today . . . the Universe had speeded up the adrenaline flow in Arthur Crewes at the instant the blond beach-bum had made his obnoxious comment . . . and the Universe had, in its cockeyed, simple-ass manner, thought it was benefiting Valerie Lone.

Obviously not.

And it would be this incident, this rank little happening, that would inject the tension into her bloodstream, that would cause her nerves to fray just that infinitesimal amount necessary, that would bring about metal fatigue and erosion and rust. So that when the precise moment came when optimum efficiency was necessary . . . Valerie Lone would be hauled back to this instant, this remark, this vicious little scene; and it would provide the weakness that would doom her.

From that moment, Valerie Lone began to be consumed by her shadow. And nothing could prevent it. Not even the wonderful, wonderful Universe that had chosen to care about her.

A Universe ruled by a mad God, who was himself being consumed by his shadow.

 
Valerie Lone turned and ran . . .

Through the sound stage, out the door, down the studio street, through Philadelphia in 1910, past the Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, around a Martian sand-city, into and out of Budapest during the Uprising (where castrated Red tanks still lay drenched in the ashdrunkenness of Molotov cocktails), and through Shade’s Wells onto a sun-baked plain where the idiotically gaping mouth of the No. 3 Anaconda Mine received her.

She dashed into the darkness of the Anaconda, and found herself in the midst of the Springhill Mine Disaster. Within and without, reality was self-contained.

Arthur Crewes and James Kencannon dashed after her.

At the empty opening to the cave, Crewes stopped Kencannon. “Let me, Jim.”

Kencannon nodded, and walked slowly away, pulling his pipe from his belt, and beginning to ream it clean with a tool from his shirt pocket.

Arthur Crewes let the faintly musty interior of the prop cave swallow him. He stood there silently, listening for murmurings of sorrow, or madness. He heard nothing. The cave only went in for ten or fifteen feet, but it might well have been the entrance to the deepest pit in Dante’s Inferno. As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he saw her, slumped down against some prop boulders.

She tried to scuttle back out of sight, even as he moved toward her.

“Don’t.” He spoke the one word softly, and she held.

Then he came to her, and sat down on a boulder low beside her. Now she wasn’t crying.

It hadn’t been that kind of rotten little scene.

“He’s an imbecile,” Crewes said.

“He was right,” she answered. There was a sealed lock-vault on pity. But self-realization could be purchased over the counter.

“He wasn’t right. He’s an ignorant young pup and I’ve had him canned.”

“I’m sorry for that.”

“Sorry doesn’t get it. What he did was inexcusable.” He chuckled softly, ruefully. “What I did was inexcusable, as well. I’ll hear from SEG about it.” That chuckle rose. “It was worth it.”

“Arthur, let me out.”

“I don’t want to hear that.”

“I have to say it. Please. Let me out. It won’t work.”

“It will work. It has to work.”

She looked at him through darkness. His face was blank, without features, barely formed in any way. But she knew if she could see him clearly that there would be intensity in his expression. “Why is this so important to you?”

For many minutes he did not speak, while she waited without understanding. Then, finally, he said, “Please let me do this thing for you. I want . . . very much . . . for you to have the good things again.”

“But, why?”

He tried to explain, but it was not a matter of explanations. It was a matter of pains and joys remembered. Of being lonely and finding pleasure in motion pictures. Of having no directions and finding a future in what had always been a hobby. Of having lusted for success and coming at last to it with the knowledge that movies had given him everything, and she had been part of it. There was no totally rational explanation that Arthur Crewes could codify for her. He had struggled upward and she had given him a hand. It had been a small, a tiny, a quickly forgotten little favor—if he told her now she would not remember it, nor would she think it was at all comparable to what he was trying to do for her. But as the years had hung themselves on Arthur Crewes’s past, the tiny favor had grown out of all proportion in his mind, and now he was trying desperately to pay Valerie Lone back.

All this, in a moment of silence.

He had been in the arena too long. He could not speak to her of these nameless wondrous things, and hope to win her from her fears. But even in his silence there was clarity. She reached out to touch his face.

“I’ll try,” she said.

And when they were outside on the flat, dry plain across which Kencannon started toward them, she turned to Arthur Crewes and she said, with a rough touch of the wiseacre that had been her trademark eighteen years before, “But I still ain’t playin’ none of your damn scenes in the noood, buster.”

It was difficult, but Crewes managed a smile.

HANDY

Meanwhile, back at my head, things were going from Erich von Stroheim to Alfred Hitchcock. No, make that from Fritz Lang to Val Lewton. Try bad to worse.

I’d come back from Never-Never Land and the song of the turtle, and had called in to Arthur’s office. I simply could not face a return to the world of show biz so soon after polishing tombstones in Emery Romito’s private cemetery. I needed a long pull on something called quiet, and it was not to be found at the Studio.

My apartment was hot and stuffy. I stripped and took a shower. For a moment I considered flushing my clothes down the toilet: I was sure they were impregnated with the mold of the ages, fresh from Santa Monica.

Then I chivvied and worried the thought that maybe possibly I ought just to send myself out to Filoy Cleaners, in toto. “Here you go, Phil,” I’d say. “I’d like myself cleaned and burned.” You need sleep, Handy, I thought. Maybe about seven hundred years’ worth.

Rip Van Winkle, old Ripper-poo, it occurred to me, in a passing flash of genuine lunacy, knew precisely where it was at. I could see it now, a Broadway extravaganza

RIP!
starring Fred Handy

who will sleep like a mother stone log for seven hundred years right before your perspiring eyes—at $2.25 / $4.25 / and $6.25 for Center Aisle Orchestra Seats.

The shower did little to restore my sanity.

I decided to call Julie.

I checked her itinerary—which I’d blackmailed out of her agent—and found that Hello, Dolly! was playing Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I dialed the O-lady and told her all kindsa stuff. After a while she got into conversations with various kindly folks in the state of Pennsylvania, who confided in her, strictly entre-nous, that my Lady of the moist thighs, the fair Julie Glynn, née Rowena Glyckmeier, was out onna town some-wheres, and O-lady 212 in Hollywood would stay right there tippy-tap up against the phone all night if need be, just to bring us two fine examples of Young American Love together, whenever.

As I racked the receiver, just as suddenly as I’d gotten into the mood, all good humor and fancy footwork deserted me. I realized I was sadder than I’d been in years. What the hell was happening? Why this feeling of utter depression; why this sense of impending disaster?

Then the phone rang, and it was Arthur, and he told me what had happened at the Studio. I couldn’t stop shuddering.

He also told me there was an opening at the Coconut Grove that night, and he thought Valerie might like to attend. He had already called the star—it was Bobby Vinton, or Sergio Franchi, or Wayne Newton, or someone in that league—and there would be an announcement from the stage that Valerie Lone was in the audience, and a spontaneous standing ovation. I couldn’t stop shuddering.

He suggested I get in touch with Romito and set up a date. Help wash away the stain of that afternoon. Then he told me the name of the extra who had insulted Valerie Lone—he must have been reading it off a piece of paper, he spoke the name with a flatness like the striking trajectory of a cobra—and suggested I compile a brief dossier on the gentleman. I had the distinct impression Arthur Crewes could be as vicious an enemy as he was cuddly a friend. The blond beach-bum would probably find it very hard getting work in films from this point on, though it was no longer the antediluvian era in which a Cohen or a Mayer or a Skouras could kill a career with a couple of phone calls. I couldn’t stop shuddering.

Then I called Emery Romito and advised him he was to pick up Valerie Lone at six-thirty at the Beverly Hills. Tuxedo. He fumphuh’d and I knew he didn’t have the price of a rental tux. So I called Wardrobe at the Studio and told them to send someone out to Santa Monica . . . and to dress him au courant, not in the wing-collar style of the Twenties, which is what I continued to shudder at in my mind.

Then I went back and took another shower. A hot shower. It was getting chilly in my body.

I heard the phone ringing through the pounding noise of the shower spray, and got to the instrument as my party was hanging up. There was a trail of monster wet footprints all across the living room behind me, vanishing into the bedroom and thence the bath, from whence I had comce.

“Yeah, who?” I yelled.

“Fred? Spencer.”

A pungent footnote on being depressed. When you have just received word from the IRS that an audit of your returns will be necessary for the years 1956-66 in an attempt to pinpoint the necessity for a $13,000 per year entertainment exemption; when the ASPCA rings you up and asks you to come down and identify a body in their cold room, and they’re describing your pet basset hound as he would look had he been through a McCormick reaper; when your wife, from whom you are separated, and whom you screwed last month only by chance when you took over her separation payment, calls and tells you she is with child—yours; when World War Nine breaks out and they are napalming your patio; when you’ve got the worst summer cold of your life, the left-hand corner of your mouth is cracked and chapped, your prostate is acting up again and oozing shiny drops of a hideous green substance; when all of this links into one gigantic chain of horror threatening to send you raving in the direction of Joe Pyne or Lawrence Welk, then, and only then, do agents named Spencer Lichtman call.

It is not a nice thing.

New horrors! I moaned silently. New horrors!

“Hey, you there, Fred?”

“I died.”

“Listen, I want to talk to you.”

“Spencer, please. I want to sleep for seven hundred years.”

“It’s the middle of a highly productive day.”

“I’ve produced three asps, a groundhog and a vat of stale eels. Let me sleep, perchance to dream.”

“I want to talk about Valerie Lone.”

“Come over to the apartment.” I hung up.

The wolf pack was starting to move in. I called Crewes. He was in conference. I said break in. Roz said fuckoff. I thanked her politely and retraced my monster wet footprints to the shower. Cold shower. Cold, hot, cold: if my moods continued to fluctuate, it was going to be double pneumonia time. (I might have called it my manic-depressive phase, except my moods kept going from depressive to depressiver. With not a manic in sight.)

Wearing a thick black plastic weight-reducing belt—compartments filled with sand—guaranteed to take five pounds of unsightly slob off my drooling gut—and a terry cloth wraparound, I built myself an iced tea in the kitchen. There were no ice cubes. I had a bachelor’s icebox: a jar of maraschino cherries, an opened package of Philadelphia cream cheese with fungus growing on it, two tv dinners—Hawaiian shrimp and Salisbury steak—and a tin of condensed milk. If Julie didn’t start marrying me or mothering me, it was certain I would be found starved dead, lying in a corner, clutching an empty carton of Ritz crackers, some fateful morning when they came to find out why I hadn’t paid the rent in a month or two.

I went out onto the terrace of the lanai apartments, overlooking the hysterectomy-shaped swimming pool used for the 1928 Lilliputian Olympics. There were two slim-thighed creatures named Janice and Pegeen lounging near the edge. Pegeen had an aluminum reflector up to her chin, making sure no slightest inch of epidermis escaped UV scorching. Janice was on her stomach, oiled like the inside of a reservoirtip condom. “Hey!” I yelled. “How’re you fixed for ice cubes?” Janice turned over, letting her copy of Kahlil Gibran’s THE PROPHET fall flat, and shaded her eyes toward me.

“Oh, hi, Fred. Go help yourself.”

I waved thanks and walked down the line to their apartment. The door was open. I went in through the debris of the previous evening’s amphetamine frolic, doing a dance to avoid the hookah and the pillows on the floor. There were no ice cubes. I filled their trays, reinserted them in the freezer compartment, and went back outside. “Everything groovy?” Janice yelled up at me.

“Ginchy,” I called back, and went into my apartment.

Warm iced tea is an ugly.

I heard Spencer down below, shucking the two pairs of slim thighs. I waited a full sixty-count, hoping he would pass, just once. At sixty, I went to the door and yowled, “Up here, Spencer.”

“Be right there, Fred,” he called over his shoulder, his moist eyeballs fastened like snails to Pegeen’s bikini.

“The specialist tells me I’ve only got twenty minutes to live, Spencer. Get your ass up here.”

He murmured something devilishly clever to the girls, who regarded his retreating back with looks that compared it unfavorably to a haunch of tainted venison. Spencer mounted the stairs two at a time, puffing hideously, trying desperately to do a Steve McQueen for the girls.

“Hey, buhbie.” He extended his hand as he came through the door.

Spencer Lichtman had been selected by the monthly newsletter and puff-sheet of the Sahara Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A., in their August 1966 mailing, as Mr. Charm. They noted that he was charming whether he won or lost at the tables, and they quoted him as saying, after picking up eleven hundred dollars at craps, “It’s only money.” The newsletter thought that was mighty white of Spencer Lichtman. The newsletter also thought it was historically clever of him to have said it, and only avoided adding their usual editorial (Ha! Ha! Isn’t old Spencer a wow!) with a non-Vegas reserve totally out of character for the “editor,” a former junior ad exec well into hock to the management of the hotel, working it off by editing the puff-sheet in a style charitably referred to as Hand-Me-Down Mark Hellinger.

Spencer Lichtman was, to me, one of the great losers of all time, eleven hundred Vegan jellybeans notwithstanding. That he was a brilliant agent cannot be denied. But he did it despite himself, dear God let me have it pegged correctly otherwise my entire world-view is ass-backwards, not because of himself.

He was a tall, broad-shouldered, well-fried, blue-eyed specimen, handsomely cocooned within a Harry Cherry suit. Light-blue button-down shirts (no high-rise collars for Spencer, he knew his neck was too thick for them), black knee-length socks, highly polished black loafers, diminutive cuff links, and a paisley hankie in the breast pocket. He might have sprung full-blown like Adolph Menjou from the forehead of Gentleman’s Quarterly.

Then tell me this: if Spencer Lichtman was good-looking, mannerly, talented, in good taste, and successful, why the hell did I know as sure as Burton made little green Elizabeths, that Spencer Lichtman was a bummer?

It defied analysis.

So I shook hands with him.

“Jesus, it’s hot,” he wheezed, falling onto the sofa, elegantly. Even collapsing, he had panache. “Can I impose on you for something cold?”

“I’m out of ice cubes.”

“Oh.”

“My neighbors are out of ice cubes, too.”

“Those were your neighbors—”

“Right. Out there. The girls.”

“Nice neighbors.”

“Yeah. But they’re still out of ice cubes.”

“So I suppose we’d better talk. Then we can go over to the Luau and get something cold.”

I didn’t bother telling him I’d rather undergo intensive Hong Kong acupuncture treatments with needles in my cheeks, than go to the Luau for a drink. The cream of the Hollywood and Beverly Hills show biz set always made the Luau in the afternoons, hustling secretaries from the talent agencies who were, in actuality, the daughters of Beverly Hills merchants, the daughters of Hollywood actors, the daughters of Los Angeles society, the daughters of delight. The cream. That is the stuff that floats to the top, isn’t it? Cream?

No, Spencer, I am not going with you to the Luau so you can hustle for me, and get me bedded down with one of your puffball-haired steno-typists, thereby giving you an edge on me for future dealings. No, indeed not, Spencer, my lad. I am going to pass on all those fine trim young legs exposed beneath entirely too inflammatory minis. I am probably going to go into the bedroom after you’ve gone and play with myself, but it is a far far better thing I do than to let you get your perfectly white capped molars into me.

“You talk, Spencer. I’ll listen.” I sat down on the floor. “That’s what I call cooperation.”

He wanted desperately to undo his tie. But that would have been non-Agency. “I was talking to some of the people at the office . . .”

Translation: I read in the trades that Crewes has found this altacockuh, this old hag Valerie Whatshername, and at the snake-pit session this morning I suggested to Morrie and Lew and Marty that I take a crack at maybe we should rep her, there might be a dime or a dollar or both in it, so what are the chances?

I stared at him with an expression like Raggedy Andy.

“And, uh, we felt it would be highly prestigious for the Agency to represent Valerie Lone . . .”

Translation: At least we can clip ten percent off of this deal with Crewes, and she ought to be good for a second deal with him at the Studio, and if anything at all happens with her, there’re two or three short line deals we can make, maybe at American-International for one of those Baby Jane/Lady in a Cage horrorifics; shit, she’d sit still for any kind of star billing, even in a screamer like that. Play her right, and we can make thirty, forty grand before she falls in her traces.

I segued smoothly from Raggedy Andy into Lenny: Of Mice and Men. Except I didn’t dribble.

“I think we can really move Valerie, in the field of features. And, of course, there’s a lot of television open to her . . .”

Translation: We’ll book the old broad into a guest shot on every nitwit series shooting now for a September air-date. Guest cameos are perfect for a warhorse like her. It’s like every asshole in America had a private tube to the freak show. Come and see the Ice Age return! Witness the resurrection of Piltdown Woman! See the resurgence of Miss Ankle-Strap Wedgie! Gape and drool at the unburied dead! She’ll play dance hall madams on Cimarron Strip and aging actresses on Petticoat Junction; she’ll play a frontier matriarch on The Big Valley and the mother of a kidnapped child on Felony Squad. A grand per day, at first, till the novelty wears off. We’ll book her five or six deep till they get the word around. Then we’ll make trick deals with the network for multiples. There’s a potload in this.

Lenny slowly vanished to be replaced by Huck Finn.

“Well, say something, Fred! What do you think?”

Huck Finn vanished and in his stead Spencer Lichtman was staring down at Captain America, bearing his red-white-and-blue shield, decked out in his patriotic uniform with the wings on the cowl, with the steely gaze and the outthrust chin of the defender of widows and orphans.

Captain America said, softly, “You’ll take five percent commission and I’ll make sure she signs with you.”

“Ten, Fred. You know that’s standard. We can’t—”

“Five.” Captain America wasn’t fucking around.

“Eight. Maybe I can swing eight. Morrie and Lew—”

Captain America shifted his star-studded shield up his arm and pulled his gauntlet tighter. “I’ll be fair. Six.”

Lichtman stood up, started toward the door, whirled on Captain America. “She’s got to have representation, Handy. Lots of it. You know it. I know it. Name me three times you know of, when an agent took less than ten? We’re working at twelve and even thirteen on some clients. This is a chancy thing. She might go, she might not. We’re willing to gamble. You’re making it lousy for both of us. I came to you because I know you can handle it. But we haven’t even talked about your percentage.”

Captain America’s jaw muscles jumped. The inference that he could be bought was disgusting. He breathed the sweet breath of patriotic fervor and answered Spencer Lichtman—alias the Red Skull—with the tone he deserved. “No kickback for me, Spencer. Straight six.”

Lichtman’s expression was one of surprise. But in a moment he had it figured out, in whatever form his cynicism and familiarity with the hunting habits of the scene allowed him best and most easily to rationalize. There was an angle in it for me, he was sure of that. It was a sneaky angle, it had to be, because he couldn’t find a trace of it, which meant it was subtler than most. On that level he was able to talk to me. Not to Captain America, never to old Cap; because Lichtman couldn’t conceive of a purely altruistic act, old Spence couldn’t. So there was a finagle here somewhere; he didn’t know just where, but as thief to thief, he was delighted with the dealing.

“Seven.”

“Okay.”

“I should have stuck with eight.”

“You wouldn’t have made a deal if you had.”

“You’re sure she’ll sign?”

“You sure you’ll work your ass off for her, and keep the leeches away from her, and give her a straight accounting of earnings, and try to build the career and not just run it into the ground for a fast buck?”

“You know I—”

“You know I, baby! I have an eye on you. Arthur Crewes will have an eye on you. And if you fuck around with her, and louse her up, and then drop her, both Arthur and myself will do some very heavy talking with several of your clients who are currently under contract to Arthur, such as Steve and Raquel and Julie and don’t you forget it.”

“What’s in this for you, Handy?”

“I’ve got the detergent concession.”

“And I thought I was coming up here to hustle you.”

“There’s only one reason you’re getting the contract, Spencer. She needs an agent, you’re as honest as most of them—excluding Hal and Billy—and I believe you believe she can be moved.”

“I do.”

“I figured it like that.”

“I’ll set up a meet with Morrie and Lew and Marty. Early next week.”

“Fine. Her schedule’s pretty tight now. She starts rehearsals with the new scene day after tomorrow.”

Spencer Lichtman adjusted his tie, smoothed his hair, and pulled down his suit jacket in the back. He extended his hand. “Pleasure doing business, Fred.”

I shook once again. “Dandy, Spencer.”

Then he smirked, suggesting broadly that he knew I must have a boondoggle only slightly smaller than the Teapot Dome going. And, so help me God, he winked. Conspiratorially.

Tonstant weader fwowed up.

When he left, I called Arthur, and told him what I’d done, and why. He approved, and said he had to get back to some work on his desk. I started to hang up, but heard his voice faintly, calling me back. I put the receiver up to my ear and said, “Something else, Arthur?”

There was a pause, then he said, gently, “You’re a good guy, Fred.” I mumbled something and racked it.

And sat there for twenty minutes, silently arguing with Raggedy Andy, Lenny, Huck and old Captain America. They thought I was a good guy, too. And I kept trying to get them to tell me where the sleazy angle might be, so I could stop feeling so disgustingly humanitarian. Have you ever tried to pull on a turtleneck over a halo?

SEVEN

Valerie Lone had only been told she would be picked up at six-thirty, for dinner and an opening at the Grove. The flowers arrived at five-fifteen. Daisies. Roses were a makeout flower, much too premeditated. Daisies. With their simplicity and their honesty and their romance. Daisies. With one rose in the center of the arrangement.

At six-thirty the doorbell to Valerie Lone’s bungalow was rung, and she hurried to open the door. (She had turned down the offer of a personal maid. “The hotel is very nice to me; their regular maid is fine, Arthur, thank you.”)

She opened the door, and for a moment she did not recognize him. But for her, there had only been one like him; only one man that tall, that elegant, that self-possessed. The years had not touched him. He was the same. Not a hair out of place, not a line where no line had been, and the smile—the same gentle, wide pixie smile—it was the same, unaltered. Soft, filtered lights were unnecessary. For Valerie Lone he was the same.

But in the eye of the beheld . . .

Emery Romito looked across the past and all the empty years between, and saw his woman. There had been gold, and quicksilver, and soft murmurings in the night, and crystal, and water as sweet as Chablis, and velvet and plumes of exotic birds . . . and now

there was arthritis, and difficult breathing, and a heaviness in the air, and perspiration and nervousness, and stale rum cake, and the calling of children far away across the misty landscape, and someone very dark and hungry always coming toward him.

Now there was only now. And he lamented all the days that had died without joy. Hope had sung its song within him, in reverie, on nights when the heat had been too much for him and he had gone to sit at the edge of the ocean. Far out, beyond the lights of the amusement park at Lick Pier, beyond the lights of the night, the song had been raised against dark stars and darker skies. But had never been heard. Had gone to tremolo and wavering and finally sighed into the silent vacuum of despair, where sound can only be heard by striking object against object. And in that nowhere, there was no object for Emery Romito.

“Hello, Val . . .”

Tear loneliness across its pale surface; rend it totally and find the blood of need welling up in a thick, pale torrent. Let the horns of growth blare a message in rinky-tink meter. Turn a woman carrying all her years into a sloe-eyed gamine. Peel like an artichoke the scar-tissue heart of a lost dream, and find in the center a pulsing golden light with a name. She looked across yesterday and found him standing before her, and she could do no other than cry.

He came through the door as she sagged in upon herself. Her tears were soundless, so desperate, so overwhelming, they made her helpless. He closed the door behind him and gathered her to himself. Shrunken though he was, not in her arms, not in her eyes. He was still tall, gentle Emery, whose voice was silk and softness. Collapsed within the eternity of his love, she beat back the shadows that had come to devour her, and she knew that now, now she would live. She spoke his name a hundred times in a second.

 
That night, her name was spoken by a hundred voices in a second; but this time, as she stood to applause for the first time in eighteen years, she did not cry. Emery Romito was with her, beside her, and she held his hand as she rose. Fred Handy was there; with the girl Randi, from the office that afternoon. Arthur Crewes was there; alone. Smiling. Jubilant. Radiating warmth for Valerie Lone and the good people who had never forgotten her. Spencer Lichtman was there; with Miss American Airlines and an orange-haired girl of pneumatic proportions starring in Joseph E. Levine’s production of Maciste and the Vestal Virgins. (“You’ve got a better chance of convincing the public she’s Maciste than a virgin,” Handy muttered, as they passed in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel.)

Valerie Lone! they cried. Valerie Lone!

She stood, holding Romito’s hand, and the dream had come full circle.

Like the laocoönian serpent, swallowing its own tail. Ouroboros in Clown Town.

The next day John D. F. Black delivered the rewritten pages. The scenes for Valerie were exquisite. He asked if he might be introduced to Valerie Lone, and Fred took him over to the Beverly Hills, where Valerie was guardedly trying to get a suntan. It was the first time in many years that she had performed that almost religious Hollywood act: the deep-frying. She rose to meet Black, a tall and charming man with an actor’s leathery good looks. In a few minutes he had charmed her completely, and told her he had been delighted to write the scenes for her, that they were just what she had always done best in her biggest films, that they gave her room to expand and color the part, that he knew she would be splendid. She asked if he would be on the set during shooting. Black looked at Handy. Handy looked away. Black shrugged and said he didn’t know, he had another commitment elsewhere. But Valerie Lone knew that things had not changed all that much in Hollywood: the writer was still chattel. When his work on the script was done, it was no longer his own. It was given to the Producer, and the Director, and the Production Manager, and the Actors, and he was no longer welcome.

“I’d like Mr. Black to be on the set when I shoot, Mr. Handy,” she said to Fred. “If Arthur doesn’t mind.”

Fred nodded, said he would see to it; and John D. F. Black bent, took Valerie Lone’s hand in his own, and kissed it elegantly. “I love you,” he said.

Late that night, Arthur and Fred took Valerie to the Channel 11 television studios on Sunset, and sat offstage as Valerie prepared for her on-camera live-action full-living-color interview with Adela Seddon, the Marquesa of Malice. A female counterpart of Joe Pyne, Adela Seddon spoke with forked tongue. She was much-watched and much-despised. Impartial voters learned their politics from her show. Wherever she was at, they were not. If she had come out in favor of Motherhood, Apple Pie and The American Way, tens of thousands of noncommitted people would instantly take up the banners of Misogyny, Macrobiotics and Master Racism. She was a badgerer, a harridan, a snarling viper with a sure mouth for the wisecrack and a ready fang for the jugular. Beneath a Tammy Grimes tousle of candy-apple red hair, her face was alternately compared with that of a tuba player confronting a small child sucking a lemon, and a prize shoat for the first time encountering the butcher’s blade. She had been married six times, divorced five, was currently separated, hated being touched, and was rumored in private circles to have long-since gone mad from endless masturbation. Her nose job was not entirely successful.

Valerie was justifiably nervous.

“I’ve never seen her, Arthur. Working out there in the diner, nights, you know, I’ve never seen her.”

Handy, who thought it was lunacy to bring Valerie anywhere near the Seddon woman, added, “To see is to believe.”

Valerie looked at him, concern showing like a second face upon the carefully drawn mask of cosmetics the Studio makeup head had built for her. She looked good, much younger, rejuvenated by the acclaim she had received at the Ambassador’s Coconut Grove. (It had been the Righteous Brothers. They had come down into the audience and belted “My Babe” in her honor, right at her.)

“You don’t think much of her, do you, Mr. Handy?”

Handy expelled air wearily. “About as charming as an acrobat in a polio ward. Queen of the Yahoos. The Compleat Philistine. Death warmed over. A pain in the—”

Crewes cut him off.

“No long lists, Fred. I had one of those from you already today. Remember?”

“It’s been a long day, Arthur.”

“Relax, please. Adela called me this afternoon, and asked for Valerie. She promised to be good. Very good. She’s been a fan of Valerie’s for years. We talked for almost an hour. She wants to do a nice interview.”

Handy grimaced. Pain. “I don’t believe it. The woman would do a Bergen-Belsen on her own Granny if she thought it would jump her rating.”

Crewes spoke softly, carefully, as if telling a child. “Fred, I would not for a moment jeopardize Valerie if I thought there was any danger here. Adela Seddon is not my idea of a lady, either, but her show is watched. It’s syndicated, and it’s popular. If she says she’ll behave, it behooves us to take the chance.”

Valerie touched Handy’s sleeve. “It’s all right, Fred. I trust Arthur. I’ll go on.”

Crewes smiled at her. “Look, it’s even live, not taped earlier in the evening, the way she usually does the show. This way we know she’ll behave; they tape it in case someone guests who makes her look bad, they can dump the tape. But live like this, she has to be a nanny, or she could get killed. It stands to reason.”

Handy looked dubious. “There’s a flaw in that somewhere, Arthur, but I haven’t the strength to find it. Besides,” he indicated a flashing red light on the wall above them, “Valerie is about to enter the Valley of the Shadow . . .”

The stage manager came and got Valerie, and took her out onto the set, where she was greeted with applause from the studio audience. She sat in one of the two comfortable chairs behind the low desk, and waited patiently for Adela Seddon to arrive from her offstage office.

When she made her appearance, striding purposefully to the desk and seating herself, and instantly shuffling through a sheaf of research papers (presumably on Valerie Lone), the audience once again transported itself with wild applause. Which Adela Seddon did not deign to acknowledge. The signals were given, the control booth marked, and in a moment the offstage announcer was bibble-bibbling the intro. The audience did its number, and Camera No. 2 glowed red as a ghastly closeup of Adela Seddon appeared on the studio monitors. It was like a microscopic view of a rotted watermelon rind.

“This evening,” Adela Seddon began, a smile that was a rictus stretching her mouth, “we are coming to you live, not on tape. The reason for this is my very special guest, a great lady of the American cinema, who agreed to come on only if we were aired live, thus ensuring a fair and unedited interview . . .”

“I told you she was a shit!” Handy hissed to Crewes. Crewes shushed him with a wave of his hand.

“... not been seen for eighteen years on the wide-screens of motion picture theaters, but she is back in a forthcoming Arthur Crewes production, Subterfuge. I’d like a big hand for Miss Valerie Lone!”

The audience did tribal rituals, rain dances, ju-ju incantations and a smattering of plain and fancy warwhooping. Valerie was a lady. She smiled demurely and nodded her thank-yous. Adela Seddon seemed uneasy at the depth of response, and shifted in her chair.

“She’s getting out the blowdarts,” Handy moaned.

“Shut up!” Crewes snarled. He was not happy.

“Miss Lone,” Adela Seddon said, turning slightly more toward the nervous actress, “precisely why have you chosen this time to come back out of retirement? Do you think there’s still an audience for your kind of acting?”

OhmiGod, thought Handy, here it comes.

 
EDITED TRANSCRIPT OF SEDDON “LOOKING IN” / 11-23-67 ( . . . indicates deletion)

 
VALERIE LONE: I don’t know what you mean, “my kind of acting”?

ADELA SEDDON: Oh, come on now, Miss Lone.

VL: No, really. I don’t.

AS: Well, I’ll be specific then. The 1930s style: overblown and gushy.

VL: I didn’t know that was my style, Miss Seddon.

AS: Well, according to your latest review, which is, incidentally, eighteen years old, in something called Pearl of the Antilles with Jon Hall, you are, quote, “a fading lollipop of minuscule talent given to instant tears and grandiose arm-waving.” Should I go on?

VL: If it gives you some sort of pleasure.

AS: Pleasure isn’t why I’m up here twice a week, Miss Lone. The truth is, I sit up here with kooks and twistos and people who denigrate our great country, and I let them have their say, without interrupting, because I firmly believe in the First Amendment of the Constitution of these United States of America, that everyone has the right to speak his mind. If that also happens to mean they have the right to make asses of themselves before seventy million viewers, it isn’t my fault.

VL: What has all that to do with me?

AS: I don’t mind your thinking I’m stupid, Miss Lone; just kindly don’t talk to me as if I were stupid. The truth, Miss Lone, that’s what all this has to do with you.

VL: Are you sure you’d recognize it? (Audience applause)

AS: I recognize that there are many old-time actresses who are so venal, so egocentric, that they refuse to acknowledge their age, who continue to embarrass audiences by trying to cling to the illusion of sexuality.

VL: You shouldn’t air your problems so openly, Miss Seddon. (Audience applause)

AS: I see retirement hasn’t dampened your wit.

VL: Nor made me immune to snakebites.

AS: You’re getting awfully defensive, awfully early in the game.

VL: I wasn’t aware this was a game. I thought it was an interview.

AS: This is my living room, Miss Lone. We call it a game, here, and we play it my way.

VL: I understand. It’s not how you play, it’s who wins.

AS: Why don’t we just talk about your new picture for a while?

VL: That would be a refreshing change.

 
AS: Is it true Crewes found you hustling drinks in a roadhouse?

VL: Not quite. I was a waitress in a diner.

AS: I suppose you think slinging hash for the last eighteen years puts you in tip-top trim to tackle a major part in an important motion picture?

VL: No, but I think the fifteen years I spent in films prior to that does. A good actress is like a good doctor, Miss Seddon. She has the right to demand high pay not so much for the short amount of time she puts in on a picture, but for all the years before that, years in which she learned her craft properly, so she could perform in a professional manner. You don’t pay a doctor merely for what he does for you now, but for all the years he spent learning how to do it.

AS: That’s very philosophical.

VL: It’s very accurate.

AS: I think it begs the question.

VL: I think you’d like to think it does.

 
AS: Wouldn’t you say actresses are merely self-centered little children playing at make-believe?

VL: I would find it very difficult to say anything even remotely like that. I’m surprised you aren’t embarrassed saying it.

AS: I’m hard to embarrass, Miss Lone. Why don’t you answer the question?

VL: I thought I had answered it.

AS: Not to my satisfaction.

VL: I can see that not being satisfied has made you an unhappy woman, so I—(Audience applause) —so, so I don’t want to dissatisfy you any further; I’ll answer the question a little more completely. No, I think acting at its best can be something of a holy chore. If it emerges from a desire to portray life as it is, rather than just to put in a certain amount of time in front of the cameras for a certain amount of money, then it becomes as important as teaching or writing, because it crystallizes the world for an audience; it preserves the past; it lets others, living more confined lives, examine a world they may never come into contact with . . .

AS: We have to take a break now, for a commercial—

 
VL: I’d rather not discuss my personal life, if you don’t mind.

AS: A “star” has no personal life.

VL: That may be your opinion, Miss Seddon, it isn’t mine.

AS: Is there some special reason you won’t talk about Mr. Romito?

VL: We have always been good friends—

AS: Oh, come on, Valerie dear, you’re starting to sound like a prepared press release: “We’re just friends.”

VL: You find it difficult to take yes for an answer.

AS: Well, I’ll tell you, Miss Lone, I had a phone call today from a gentleman who volunteered to come into our dock tonight, to ask you a few questions. Let’s go to the dock . . . what is your name, sir?

HASKELL BARKIN: My name is Barkin. Haskell Barkin.

AS: I understand you know Miss Lone.

HB: In a manner of speaking.

VL: I don’t understand. I don’t think I’ve ever met this gentleman.

HB: You almost did.

VL: What?

AS: Why don’t you just let Mr. Barkin tell his story, Miss Lone.

 
She came offstage shaking violently. Romito had seen the first half of the interview, at his hotel in Santa Monica. He had hurried to the studio. When she stumbled away from the still-glaring lights of the set, he was there, and she almost fell into his arms. “Oh God, Emery, I’m so frightened . . .”

Crewes was furious. He moved into the darkness offstage, heading for Adela Seddon’s dressing room/office. Handy had another mission.

The audience was filing out of the studio. Handy dashed for the side exit, came out in the alley next to the studio, and circled the building till he found the parking lot. Barkin was striding toward a big yellow Continental.

“Barkin! You motherfucker!” Handy screamed at him.

The tall man turned and stopped in mid-step. His long hair had been neatly combed for the evening television appearance, and in a suit he looked anachronistic, like King Kong in knickers. But the brace of his chest and shoulders was no less formidable.

He was waiting for Handy.

The little publicist came fast, across the parking lot. “How much did they pay you, you sonofabitch? How much? How much, motherfucker!”

Barkin began to crouch, waiting for Handy, fists balled, knees bent, the handsome face cold and impassive, anticipating the crunch of knuckles against face. Handy was howling now, like a Confederate trooper charging a Union gun emplacement. At a dead run he came down on Barkin, standing between a Corvette and a station wagon parked in the lot.

At the last moment, instead of breaking around the Corvette, Handy miraculously leaped up and came across the bonnet of the Corvette, still running, like a decathlon hurdler. Barkin had half-turned, expecting Handy’s rush from the front of the sports car. But the publicist was suddenly above him, bearing down on him like a hunting falcon, before he could correct position.

Handy plunged across the Corvette, denting the red louvered bonnet, and dove full-out at Barkin. Blind with fury, he was totally unaware that he had bounded up onto the car, that he was across it in two steps, that he was flying through the air and crashing into Barkin with all the impact of a human cannonball.

He took Barkin high on the chest, one hand and wrist against the beach-bum’s throat. Barkin whooshed air and sailed backward, into the station wagon. Up against the half-lowered radio antenna, which bent under his spine, then cracked and broke off in his back. Barkin screamed, a delirious, half-crazed spiral of sound as the sharp edge of the antenna cut through his suit jacket and shirt, and ripped his flesh. The pain bent him sidewise, and Handy slipped off him, catching his heel on the Corvette and tumbling into the narrow space between the cars. Barkin kicked out, his foot sinking into Handy’s stomach as the publicist fell past him. Handy landed on his shoulders, the pain surging up into his chest and down into his groin. His rib cage seemed filled with nettles, and he felt for a moment he might lose control of his bladder.

Barkin tried to go for him, but the antenna was hooked through his jacket. He tried wrenching forward and there was a ripping sound, but it held. He struggled forward toward Handy awkwardly, bending from the waist, but could not get a hold on the publicist. Handy tried to rise, and Barkin stomped him, first on the hand, cracking bones and breaking skin, then on the chest, sending Handy scuttling backward on his buttocks and elbows.

Handy managed to get to his feet and pulled himself around the station wagon. Barkin was trying frantically to get himself undone, but the antenna had hooked in and out of the jacket material, and he was awkwardly twisted.

Handy climbed up onto the hood of the station wagon and on hands and knees, like a child, came across toward Barkin. The big man tried to reach him, but Handy fell across his neck and with senseless fury sank his teeth into Barkin’s ear. The beach-bum shrieked again, a woman’s sound, and shook his head like an animal trying to lose a flea. Handy hung on, bringing the taste of blood to his mouth. His hand came across and dug into the corner of Barkin’s mouth, pulling the lip up and away. The fingers spread, he poked at Barkin’s eye, and the beach-bum rattled against the car like a bird in a cage. Then all the pains merged and Barkin sagged in a semiconscious boneless mass. He hung against the weight of Handy and the hooking antenna. The strain was too great, the jacket ripped through, and Barkin fell face-forward hitting the side of the Corvette, pulling Handy over the top of the station wagon. Barkin’s face hit the sports car; the nose broke. Barkin fainted with the pain, and slipped down into a Buddha-like position, Handy tumbling over him and landing on his knees between the cars.

Handy pulled himself up against the station wagon, and without realizing Barkin was unconscious, kicked out with a loose-jointed vigor, catching the beach-bum in the ribs with the toe of his shoe. Barkin fell over on his side, and lay there.

Handy, gasping, breathing raggedly, caromed off the cars, struggling to find his way to his own car. He finally made it to the Impala, got behind the wheel and through a fog of gray and red managed to get the key into the ignition. He spun out of the parking lot, scraping a Cadillac and a Mercury, his headlights once sweeping across a row of cars in which a station wagon and a Corvette were parked side by side, seeing a bleeding bag of flesh and fabric inching its way along the concrete, trying to get to its feet, touching softly at the shattered expanse of what had been a face, what had once been a good living.

Handy drove without knowing where he was going.

When he appeared at Randi’s door twenty minutes later—having left her off from their date only a few hours before—she was wearing a shortie nightgown that ended at her thighs. “Jesus, Fred, what happened?” she asked, and helped him inside. He collapsed on her bed, leaving dark streaks of brown blood on the candy-striped sheets. She pulled his clothes off him, managing to touch his genitals as often as possible, and tended to his needs, all sorts of needs.

He paid no attention. He had fallen asleep.

It had been a full day for Handy.

EIGHT

The columns had picked it up. They said Valerie Lone had carried it off beautifully, coming through the barrage of viciousness and sniping with Adela Seddon like a champ. Army Archerd called Seddon a “shrike” and suggested she try her dictionary for the difference between “argument” and “controversy,” not to mention the difference between “intimidation” and “interview.” Valerie was a minor folk heroine. She had gone into the lair of the dragon and had emerged dragging its fallopians behind her. Crewes and Handy were elated. There had been mutterings from Haskell Barkin’s attorney, a slim and good-looking man named Taback who had seemed ashamed even to be handling Barkin’s complaint. When Handy and Crewes and the Studio battery of lawyers got done explaining precisely what had happened, and Taback had met Handy, the attorney returned to Barkin and advised him to use Blue Cross to take care of the damage it would cover, get his current paramour to lay out for the facial rebuilding, and drop charges: no one would believe that a hulk the size of Haskell Barkin could get so thoroughly dribbled by a pigeonweight like Handy.

But that was only part of the Crewes-Handy elation. Valerie had begun to be seen everywhere with Emery Romito. The fan magazines were having a field day with it. To a generation used to reviling their elders, with no respect for age, there was a kind of sentimental Albert Payson Terhune loveliness to the reuniting of old lovers. No matter where Valerie and Emery went, people beamed on them. Talk became common that after all those years of melancholy and deprivation, at long last the lovers might be together permanently.

For Emery Romito it was the first time he had been truly alive since they had killed his career during the draft-dodging scandal. But that was all forgotten now; he seemed to swell with the newfound dignity he had acquired squiring the columns’ hottest news item. That, combined with his rediscovery of what Valerie had always meant to him, made him something greater than the faded character actor the years had forced him to become. The fear was still there, but it could be forgotten for short times now.

Valerie had begun rehearsals with her fellow cast-members, and she was growing more confident day by day. The Seddon show had served to fill her once again with fear, but its repercussions—demonstrated in print—had effectively drained it away. These rises and fallings in temperament had an unconscious effect on her, but it was not discernible to those around her.

On the night of the second day of rehearsals, Emery came to pick her up at the Studio, in a car the Studio had rented for him. He took her to dinner at a small French restaurant near the Hollywood Ranch Market, and after the final Drambuie they drove up to Sunset, turned left, and cruised toward Beverly Hills.

It was a Friday night.

The hippies were out.

The teenie-boppers. The flower children. The new ones. The long hair, the tight boots, the paisley shirts, the mini-skirts, the loose sexuality, the hair vests, the shirts with the sleeves cut off, the noise, the jeering. The razored crevasse that existed between their time, when they had been golden and fans had pressed up against sawhorses at the premieres to get their autographs, and today, a strange and almost dreamlike time of Surrealistic youth who spoke another tongue, moved with liquid fire and laughed at things that were painful. At a stoplight near Laurel Canyon, they stopped and were suddenly surrounded by hippies hustling copies of an underground newspaper, the L.A. Free Press. They were repelled by the disordered, savage look of the kids, like barbarians. And though the news vendors spoke politely, though they merely pressed up against the car and shoved their papers into the windows, the terror their very presence evoked in the two older people panicked Romito and he floored the gas pedal, spurting forward down Sunset, sending one beaded and flowered news-hippie sprawling, journals flying.

Romito rolled up his window, urging Valerie to do the same. It was something Kafka-esque to them as they whirled past the discothèques and the psychedelic book shops and the outdoor restaurants where the slim, hungry children of the strobe age languished, turned on, grooving heavy behind meth or grass.

He drove fast. All the way out Sunset to the Coast Highway and out the coast to Malibu.

Finally, Valerie said softly, “Emery, do you remember The Beach House? We used to go there all the time for dinner. Remember? Let’s stop there. For a drink.”

Romito smiled, the lines around his eyes gathering in gentle humor. “Do I remember? I remember the night Dick Barthelmess did the tango on the bar with that swimmer, the girl from the Olympics . . . you know the one . . .”

But she didn’t know the one. That particular memory had been lost. He had had the time to nurse the old memories—she had been slinging hash. No, she didn’t remember the girl. But she did remember the old roadhouse that had been so popular with their set one of those years.

But when they came to the spot, they found the old roadhouse—predictably—had been razed. In its stead was a tiny beach-serving shopping center, and on the spot where Dick Barthelmess had danced the tango on the bar with that swimmer from the Olympics, there was an all-night liquor store, with a huge neon sign.

Emery Romito drove a few miles down the Coast Highway, past the liquor store, more by reflex than design. He pulled off on a side road paralleling the ocean, and there, on a ridge that sloped quickly down into darkness and surf somewhere below them, he stopped. They sat there silently together, the car turned off, their minds turned off, trapped in the darkness of loneliness, the landscape and their past.

Then, in a rush, all of it came back to Valerie Lone. The rush of thoughts waiting to be reexamined after twenty years. The reasons, the situations, the circumstances.

“Emery, why didn’t we get married?”

And she answered her own question with a smile he could not see in the darkness. It was possible he had not even heard her, for he did not answer. And in her mind she ticked off the answers, all the deadly answers.

It was the dreams each of them had substituted for reality; the tenacity with which they had tried to clutch smoke and dream-mist; the stubborn refusal of each of them to acknowledge that the dream-mist and the smoke were bound to become ashes. And when each had been swallowed whole by the very careers they had thought would free them, they had become strangers. They were frightened to commit to one another, to anyone really, to anything but the world that stood and called their names a hundred times in a second, and beat hands in praise.

Then Emery spoke. As though his thoughts had been tracking similarly to her own, heading on a collision course for her mind and her thoughts hurtling toward him.

“You know, darling Val, you always made more money than me. Your name was always star-billing . . . at best, mine was always ‘Also Featuring. ’ It wouldn’t have worked.”

She was nodding agreement, at the complete validity of it, and then, in an instant, the shock of what she was accepting without argument, believing again as she had the first time, the insanity of it hit her. Twenty years ago, in the fantasy-world, yes, those might have been real reasons—in the lunatic way that blasted and twisted logic seems rational in nightmares—but she had spent almost two decades in another life, and now she knew they were false, as specious as the life that claimed her on the screen.

But for a moment, for a long moment she had accepted it all again. It was the town, the industry, the way the show biz life sucked one under. For those in the industry it had rapidly become that way, as they had fallen under the spell of their own weird and golden lives; it had taken over twenty years to catch on completely, to permeate the culture. But now it was possible never to come up from under the thick fog of delusion. Because it hung like a Los Angeles smog across the entire nation, perhaps the world.

But not for Valerie Lone. Never again for her.

“Emery, listen to me . . .”

He was talking softly to himself, the sound of moths in the fog. Talking about screen credits and money and days that had never really been alive, and now had to be put to death fully and finally.

“Emery! Darling! Please, listen to me!”

He turned to her. She saw him, then. Even dimly, only by moonlight, she saw him as he really was, not as she had wished him to be, standing there in the doorway of the bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel that first night of her new life with him. She saw what had happened to the man who had been strong enough to deny war and say he would lose everything rather than fight against his fellow man. Emery Romito had become a willing prisoner of his own show biz life. He had never escaped.

She knew she had to explain it all to him, to unlearn him, and then teach him anew. An infinite sadness filled her as she readied her arguments, her coercion, her explanations of what the other world was like . . . the world he had always thought of as dull and empty and wasted.

“Darling, I’ve been out in the desert, out in nowhere, for almost twenty years. You’ve got to believe me when I tell you, none of this matters. The billing, the money, the life at the studios, it doesn’t matter! It’s all make-believe, we always said it was that, but we let it get us, grab hold of us. We have to understand there is a whole world without any of it. What if the show doesn’t go on? What then? Why worry? We can do other things, if we care about each other. Do you understand what I’m saying? It doesn’t matter if your picture is in the PLAYERS DIRECTORY, as long as you come home at night and turn the key in the door and know there’s someone on the other side who cares whether or not you were killed in the traffic on the Freeway. Emery, talk to me!”

Silence. Straining on her part, toward him. Silence. Then, “Val, why don’t we go dancing . . . like we used to do?”

The shadow came again to devour her. It showed its teeth and it prodded her, looking for the most vulnerable places, the places still filled with the juice of life, which it would eat to the bone, and then suck the marrow from the bone, till it collapsed into despair as had the rest of her.

She fought it.

She talked to him.

Her voice was the low, insistent voice she had cultivated in the star years. Now she turned it to its full-power, and used it to win the most important part of her career.

We have a chance to make it together at last.

God has given us a second chance.

We can have what we lost twenty years ago.

Please, Emery, listen.

Emery Romito had been falling for many years. A great, shrieking fall down a long tunnel of despair. Her voice came to him down the length of that tunnel, and he clutched for it, missed, clutched again and found it. He let it hold him, swaying above the abyss, and slowly pulled himself back up that fragile thread.

Pathetically, he asked her, “Really? Do you think we can? Really?”

No one is more convincing than a woman fighting for her life. Really? She showed him, really. She told him, and she charmed him, and she gave him the strength he had lost so long ago. With her career burgeoning again, it was certain they would have all the good things they had lost on the way to this place, this night.

And finally, he leaned across, this old man, and he kissed her, this tired woman. A shy kiss, almost immature, as though his lips had never touched all the lips of starlets and chorus girls and secretaries and women so much less important than this woman beside him in a rented car on a dark oceanside road.

He was frightened, she could feel it. Almost as frightened as she was. But he was willing to try; to see if they could dredge up something of permanence from the garbage-heaps of the love they had spent twenty years wasting.

Then he started the car, backed and filled and started the return to Hollywood.

The shadow was with her, still hungry, but it was set to waiting. She was no less frightened of the long-haired children and the sharp-tongued interviewers and the merciless lights of the sound stages, but at least now there was a goal; now there was something to move toward.

A gentle breeze came up, and they opened the windows.

Handy

My first premonition of disaster to come was during the conversation Crewes had with Spencer Lichtman. It was two days before he was to shoot her initial scenes for the film. Spencer had made an appointment to discuss Valerie, and Crewes had asked me to be present.

I sat mute and alert. Spencer made his pitch; it was a good one, and a brief one. A three-picture deal with Crewes and the Studio. Sharpel, the Studio business head, was there, and he did some of the finest broken-field running I’ve ever seen. He suggested everyone wait to see how Valerie did in Subterfuge.

Spencer looked terribly disturbed at the conversation as he left. He said nothing to me. Neither did Sharpel, who seemed uneasy that I’d been in the room at all.

When they’d gone, I sat waiting for Arthur Crewes to say something. Finally, he said, “How’s the publicity coming?”

“You’ve got the skinnys on your desk, Arthur. You know what’s happening.” Then I added, “I wish I knew what was happening.”

He played dumb. “What would you like to know, Fred?”

I looked at him levelly. He knew I was on to him. There was very little point in obfuscation. “Who’s dogged down the pressure on you, Arthur?” He sighed, shrugged as if to say welllll, y’found me out, and answered me wearily. “The Studio. They’re nervous. They said Valerie is having trouble with the lines, she’s awkward, the usual succotash.”

“How the hell do they know? She hasn’t even worked yet; only rehearsing. And Jimmy’s kept the sessions strictly closed off.”

Crewes hit the desk with the palm of his hand, then again. “They’ve got a spy in the crew.”

“Oh, c’mon, you’re kidding!”

“I’m not kidding. They’ve got a pile tied up in this one. That ski troops picture Jenkey made is bombing. They won’t get back negative costs. They don’t want to take any chances with this one. So they’ve got a fink in the company.”

“Want me to sniff him out?”

“Why bother. They’ll only plant another one. It’s probably Jeanine, the assistant wardrobe mistress . . . or old Whatshisname . . . Skelly, the makeup man. No, there’s no sense trying to pry out the rotten apple; it won’t help her performance any.”

I listened to all of it with growing concern. There was a new tone in Crewes’s voice. A tentative tone, one just emerging for the first time, trying its flavor in the world. I could tell he was unhappy with the sound of it, that he was fighting it. But it was getting stronger. It was the tone of amelioration, of shading, of backing-off. It was the caterpillar tremble of fear that could metamorphose easily into the lovely butterfly of cowardice.

“You aren’t planning on dumping her, are you, Arthur?”

He looked up sharply, annoyed. “Don’t be stupid. I didn’t go through all this just to buckle when the Studio gets nervous. Besides, I wouldn’t do that to her.”

“I hope not.”

“I said not!”

“But there’s always the chance they can sandbag you; after all, they do tend the cash register.”

Crewes ran a nervous hand through his hair. “Let’s see how she does. Shooting starts in two days. Kencannon says she’s coming along. Let’s just wait . . . and see how she does . . .”

 
How she did was not good.

I was on the set from the moment they started. Valerie’s call was for seven o’clock in the morning. For makeup and wardrobe. The Studio limo went to get her. She was in makeup for the better part of an hour. Johnny Black showed up as she was going into Wardrobe. He kissed her on the cheek and she said, “I hope I do justice to your lines. It’s a very nice part, Mr. Black.” We walked over to the coffee truck and had a cup each. Neither of us spoke. Finally, Black looked down at me and asked—a bit too casually—“How’s it look?”

I shrugged. No answer. I didn’t have one.

Kencannon came on the set a few minutes later, and got things tight. The crew was alert, ready, they’d been put on special notice that these scenes were going to be tough enough, so let’s have a whole gang of cooperation. Everyone wanted her to make it.

It was bright-eyed/bushy-tailed time.

She came out of Wardrobe and walked straight to Jim Kencannon. He took her aside and whispered to her in a dark corner for fully twenty minutes.

Then they started shooting.

She knew her lines, but her mannerisms were strictly by rote. There was an edge of fear in even the simplest of movements. Kencannon tried to put her at ease. It only made her more tense. She was locked into fear, a kind of fear no one could penetrate deeply enough to erode. She had lived with it unconsciously for too long. There was too much at stake for her here. The only defense she had was what she knew instinctively as an actress. Unfortunately, the actress who remembered all of it, and who put it to use, almost somnambulistically, was an actress of the Forties. Miss Ankle-Strap Wedgie. An actress who had not really been required to act . . . merely to look good, snap out her lines and show a lot of leg.

They ran through the first shot again and again. It was horrible to watch. Repetition after repetition, with Kencannon trying desperately to get a quality out of her that gibed with the modern tone of the film as a whole. It simply was not there.

“Scene eighty-eight, take seven, Apple!”

“Scene eighty-eight, take seven, Bravo!”

“Scene eighty-eight, take seven, China!”

“Scene eighty-eight, take fifteen, Hotel!”

“Scene ninety-one, take three, X-ray!”

Over and over and over. She blew it each time. The crew grew restless, then salty, then disgusted. The other actors began making snotty remarks off-camera. Kencannon was marvelous with her, but it was a disaster, right from speed and roll it. Finally, they got something shot.

Kencannon wandered off into the darkness of the sound stage. Valerie went to her dressing room. Presumably to collapse. The crew started setting up the next shot. I followed Kencannon back into the corner.

“Jim?”

He turned around, the unlit pipe hanging from the corner of his mouth. It was still before lunch, early in the day, and he looked exhausted.

“Will it be all right?” I asked him.

He started to turn away. He didn’t need me bugging him. I guess the tone of concern in my voice stopped him. “Maybe I can cut it together so it’ll work.”

And he walked away from me.

That afternoon Kencannon got a visit from Crewes on the set, and they talked quietly for a long time, back by the prop wagon. Then they began pruning Valerie’s part. A line here, a reaction shot there. Not much at first, but enough to let her know they were worried. It only served to deepen her nervousness. But they had no choice. They were backed against a wall.

But then, so was she.

The remainder of the shooting, over the next week, was agony. There was no doubt from the outset that she couldn’t make it, that the footage was dreadful. But we always harbored the secret hope that the magic of the film editor could save her.

The dailies were even more horrifying, for there, up on the projection room screen, we could see the naked failure of what we had tried to do. The day’s footage went from flat and unnatural to genuinely inept. Kencannon had tried to cover as much as he could with two and three angles or reaction shots by supporting actors, by trick photography, by bizarre camerawork. None of it made it. There was still Valerie in the center of it, like the silent eye of a whirling dervish. Technique could not cover up what was lacking: a focus, a central core, a soul, a fire. Her scenes were disastrous.

When the lights came up in the projection room, and Crewes and myself were alone—we wouldn’t allow anyone else to see the dailies, not then we wouldn’t—we looked at each other, and Arthur breathed heavily, “Oh God, Fred! What are we going to do?”

I stared at the blank projection screen. There was such a helplessness in his voice, I didn’t know what to say. “Can we keep the Studio from finding out, at least till Kencannon cuts it together?”

He shook his head. “Not a chance.”

“They move along behind you?”

“Close as they can. I think they’ve got the labs printing up duplicate sets of dailies. They’ve probably already run what we just saw here.”

Why? I asked myself. Why?

And the answer ran through my head the way those dailies had been run. Behold, without argument, self-explanatory. The answer was simple: Valerie Lone had never been a very good actress, not ever. The films she had made were for an audience hungry for any product, which was why Veda Ann Borg and Vera Hruba Ralston and Sonja Henie and Jeanne Crain and Rhonda Fleming and Ellen Drew and all the other pretty, not-particularly-talented ones had made it. It was a nation before teevee, that had theaters to fill, with “A” features starring Paul Muni and Spencer Tracy and John Garfield and Bogart and Ingrid Bergman; but those theaters also needed a lower half to the bill, the “B” pictures with Rory Calhoun and Lex Barker and Ann Blyth and Wanda Hendrix. They needed product, not Helen Hayes.

So all the semi-talented had made fabulous livings. Anything sold. But now, films for theatrical release were budgeted in the millions, for even the second-class product, and no one could risk the semi-talented. Oh, there were still the pretty ones who got in the films without the talent to get themselves arrested, but they were in the minority, in the quickie flicks. But Subterfuge was no quickie. It was a heavy sugar operation into which the Studio had poured millions already, not to mention unspoken but desperate needs and expectations.

Valerie Lone was one of the last of that extinct breed of “semi-stars” who were still vaguely in the public memory—though the new generations, the kids, didn’t know her from a white rabbit—but she didn’t have the moxie to cut it the way Bette Davis had, or Joan Crawford, or Barbara Stanwyck. She was just plain old Valerie Lone, and that simply wasn’t good enough.

She was one of the actresses who had made it then, because almost anyone who could stand up on good legs could make it . . . but not now, because now it took talent of a high order, or a special something that was called “personality.” And it wasn’t the same kind of “personality” Valerie had used in her day.

“What’re you going to do, Arthur?”

He didn’t look at me. He just stared straight ahead, at the empty screen. “I don’t know. So help me God, I just don’t know.”

 
They didn’t sign her for a multiple.

At the premiere, held at the Egyptian, Valerie showed with Emery Romito. She was poised, she was elegant, she signed autographs and, as Crewes remarked under his breath to me, as she came up to be interviewed by the television emcee, she was dying at the very moment of what she thought was her greatest triumph. We had not, of course, told her how much Kencannon had had to leave on the cutting-room floor. It was, literally, a walk-on.

When she emerged from the theater, after the premiere, her face was dead white. She knew what was waiting for her. And there was nothing we could say. We stood there, numbly shaking hands with all the wellwishers who told us we had a smash on our hands, as Valerie Lone walked stiffly through the crowd, practically leading the dumbfounded Romito. Their car came to the curb, and they started to get into it. Then Mitchum emerged from the lobby, and the crowd behind their ropes went mad.

There had not been a single cheer or ooh-ahhh for Valerie Lone as she had stood waiting for the limousine to pull up. She was dead, and she knew it.

I tried to call Julie that night, after the big party at the Daisy. She was out. I took a bottle of charcoal Jack Daniels and put it inside me as quickly as I could.

I fell out on the floor. But it wasn’t punishment enough. I dreamed.

In the dreams I was trying to explain. My tongue was made of cloth, and it wouldn’t form words. But it didn’t matter, because the person I was trying to talk to couldn’t hear me. It was a corpse. I could not make out the face of the corpse.

NINE

This was the anatomy of the sin against Valerie Lone:

The Agency called. Not Spencer Lichtman; he was in Florida negotiating a contract for one of their female clients with Ivan Tors for his new Everglades pilot. He wouldn’t be back for six weeks. It was a difficult contract: the pilot, options for the series if it sold, billing, transportation, and Spencer was screwing her. So the Agency called. A voice of metallic precision that may or may not have had a name attached to it, informed her that they were reorganizing, something to do with the fiscal debenture cutback of post-merger personnel concerned with bibble-bibble-bibble. She asked the voice of the robot what that meant, and it meant she did not have a contract with the Agency, which meant she had no representation.

She called Arthur Crewes. He was out.

The Beverly Hills Hotel management called. The Studio business office had just rung them up to inform them that rent on the bungalow would cease as of the first of the month. Two weeks away.

She called Arthur Crewes. He was out.

She called long distance to Shivey’s Diner. She wanted to ask him if he had gotten a replacement for her. Shivey was delighted to hear from her, hey! Everybody was just tickled pink to hear how she’d made good again, hey! Everybody was really jumping with joy at the way the papers said she was so popular again, hey! It’s great she got back up on top again, and boy, nobody deserved it better than their girl Val, hey! Don’t forget your old friends, don’t get uppity out there just because you’re a big star and famous again, doncha know!

She thanked him, told him she wouldn’t forget them and hung up. Hey!

She could not go back to the desert, to the diner.

She had tasted the champagne again, and the taste of champagne lingers.

She called Arthur Crewes. He was in the cutting room and could not be disturbed.

She called Arthur Crewes. He was in New York with the promotion people, he would be back first of the week.

She called Handy. He was with Crewes.

She called Emery Romito. He was shooting a Western for CBS. His service said he would call back later. But when he did, it was late at night, and she was half-asleep. When she called him the next day, he was at the Studio still shooting. She left her name, but the call did not get returned.

The hungry shadow came at a dead run.

And there was no place to hide.

Disaster is a brush-fire. If it reaches critical proportions, nothing can stop it, nothing can put out the fire. Disaster observes a scorched earth policy.

She called Arthur Crewes. She told Roz she was coming in to see him the next morning.

There was no Studio limousine on order. She took a taxi. Arthur Crewes had spent a sleepless night, knowing she was coming, rerunning her films in his private theater. He was waiting for her.

 
“How is the picture doing, Arthur?”

He smiled wanly. “The opening grosses are respectable. The Studio is pleased.”

“I read the review in Time. They were very nice to you.”

“Yes. Ha-ha, very unexpected. Those smart alecks usually go for the clever phrase.”

Silence.

“Arthur, the rent is up in a week. I’d like to go to work.”

“Uh, I’m still working on the script for the new picture, Valerie. You know, it’s been five months since we ended production. The Studio kept up the rent on the bungalow through post-production. Editing, scoring, dubbing, the works. They think they’ve done enough. I can’t argue with them, Valerie . . . not really.”

“I want to work, Arthur.”

“Hasn’t your agent been getting you work?”

“Two television guest appearances. Not much else. I guess the word went out about me. The picture . . .”

“You were fine, Valerie, just fine.”

“Arthur, don’t lie to me. I know I’m in trouble. I can’t get a job. You have to do something.”

There was a pathetic tone in her voice, yet she was forceful. Like someone demanding unarguable rights. Crewes was desolate. His reaction was hostility.

“I have to do something? Good God, Valerie, I’ve kept you working for over six months on three days of shooting. Isn’t that enough?”

Her mouth worked silently for a moment, then very softly she said: “No, it isn’t enough. I don’t know what to do. I can’t go back to the diner. I’m back here now. I have no one else to turn to, you’re the one who brought me here. You have to do something, it’s your responsibility.”

Arthur Crewes began to tremble. Beneath the desk he gripped his knees with his hands. “My responsibility,” he said bravely, “ended with your contract, Valerie. I’ve extended myself, even you have to admit that. If I had another picture even readying for production, I’d let you read for a part, but I’m in the midst of some very serious rewrite with the screenwriter. I have nothing. What do you want me to do?”

His assault cowed her. She didn’t know what to say. He had been fair, had done everything he could for her, recommended her to other producers. But they both knew she had failed in the film, knew that the word had gone out. He was helpless.

She started to go, and he stopped her.

“Miss Lone.” Not Val, or Valerie now. A retreating back, a pall of guilt, a formal name. “Miss Lone, can I, uh, loan you some money?”

She turned and looked at him across a distance.

“Yes, Mr. Crewes. You can.”

He reached into his desk and took out a checkbook.

“I can’t afford pride, Mr. Crewes. Not now. I’m too scared. So make it a big check.”

He dared not look at her as she said it. Then he bent to the check and wrote it in her name. It was not nearly big enough to stop the quivering of his knees. She took it, without looking at it, and left quietly. When the intercom buzzed and Roz said there was a call, he snapped at her, “Tell ’em I’m out. And don’t bother me for a while!” He clicked off and slumped back in his deep chair.

What else could I do? he thought.

If he expected an answer, it was a long time in coming.

After she told Emery what had happened (even though he had been with her these last five months, and knew what it was from the very tomb odor of it) she waited for him to say don’t worry, I’ll take care of you, now that we’re together again it will be all right, I love you, you’re mine. But he said nothing like that.

“They won’t pick up the option, no possibility?”

“You know they dropped the option, Emery. Months ago. It was a verbal promise only. For the next film. But Arthur Crewes told me he’s having trouble with the script. It could be months.”

He walked around the little living room of his apartment in the Stratford Beach Hotel. A depressing little room with faded wallpaper and a rug the management would not replace, despite the holes worn in it.

“Isn’t there anything else?”

“A Western. TV. Just a guest shot, sometime next month. I read for it last week, they seemed to like me.”

“Well, you’ll take it, of course.”

“I’ll take it, Emery, but what does it mean . . . it’s only a few dollars. It isn’t a living.”

“We all have to make do the best we can, Val—”

“Can I stay here with you for a few weeks, till things get straightened away?”

Formed in amber, held solidified in a prison of reflections that showed his insides more clearly than his outside, Emery Romito let go the thread that had saved him, and plunged once more down the tunnel of despair. He was unable to do it. He was not calloused, merely terrified. He was merely an old man trying to relate to something that had never even been a dream—merely an illusion. And now she threatened to take even that cheap thing, simply by her existence, her presence here in this room.

“Listen, Val, I’ve tried to come to terms. I understand what you’re going through. But it’s hard, very hard. I really have to hurry myself just to make ends meet . . .”

She spoke to him then, of what they had had years ago, and what they had sensed only a few months before. But he was already retreating from her, gibbering with fear, into the shadows of his little life.

“I can’t do it, Valerie. I’m not a young man any more. You remember all those days, I’d do anything; anything at all; I was wild. Well, now I’m paying for it. We all have to pay for it. We should have known, we should have put some of it aside, but who’d ever have thought it would end. No, I can’t do it. I haven’t got the push to do it. I get a little work, an ‘also featuring’ once in a while. You have to be hungry, the way all the new ones, the young ones, the way they’re hungry. I can barely manage alone, Valerie. It wouldn’t work, it just wouldn’t.”

She stared at him.

“I have to hang on!” he shouted at her.

She pinned him. “Hang on? To what? To guest shots, a life of walkons, insignificant character bits, and a Saturday night at the Friars Club? What have you got, Emery? What have you really got that’s worth anything ? Do you have me, do you have a real life, do you have anything that’s really yours, that they can’t take away from you?”

But she stopped. The argument was hopeless.

He sagged before her. A tired, terrified old man with his picture in the PLAYERS DIRECTORY. What backbone he might have at one time possessed had been removed from his body through the years, vertebra by vertebra. He slumped before her, weighted down by his own inability to live. Left with a hideous walking death, with elegance on the outside, soot on the inside, Valerie Lone stared at the stranger who had made love to her in her dreams for twenty years. And in that instant she knew it had never really been the myth and the horror of the town that had kept them apart. It had been their own inadequacies.

She left him, then. She could not castigate him. His was such a sordid little existence, to take that from him would be to kill him.

And she was still that much stronger than Emery Romito, her phantom lover, not to need to do it.

HANDY

I came home to find Valerie Lone sitting at the edge of the pool, talking to Pegeen. She looked up when I came through the gate, and smiled a thin smile at me.

I tried not to show how embarrassed I was.

Nor how much I’d been avoiding her.

Nor how desperately I felt like bolting and running away, all the way back to New York City.

She got up, said goodbye to Pegeen, and came toward me. I had been shopping; shirt boxes from Ron Postal and bags from de Voss had to be shifted so I could take her hand. She was wearing a summer dress, quite stylish, really. She was trying to be very light, very inoffensive; trying not to shove the guilt in my face.

“Come on upstairs, where it’s cooler,” I suggested.

In the apartment, she sat down and looked around.

“I see you’re moving,” she said.

I grinned, a little nervously, making small talk. “No, it’s always this way. I’ve got a house in Sherman Oaks, but at the moment there’s a kindofa sorta almost-ex ex-wife nesting there. It’s in litigation. So I live here, ready to jump out any time.”

She nodded understanding.

The intricacies of California divorce horrors were not beyond her. She had had a few of those, as I recalled.

“Mr. Handy—” she began.

I did not urge her to call me Fred.

“You were the one who talked to me first, and . . .”

And there it was. I was the one responsible. It was all on me. I’d heard what had happened with Crewes, with that rat bastard Spencer Lichtman, with Romito, and now it was my turn. She must have had nowhere else to go, no one else to impale, and so it was mea culpa time.

I was the one who had resurrected her from the safety and sanctity of her grave; brought her back to a world as transitory as an opening night. She looked at me and knew it wouldn’t do any good, but she did it.

She laid it all on me, word by word by word.

What could I do, for Christ’s sake? I had done my best. I’d even watched over her with Haskell Barkin, carried her practically on my shoulders through all the shitty scenes when she’d arrived in town. What more was there for me to do . . . ?

I’m not my brother’s goddam keeper, I yelled inside my head. Let me alone, woman. Get off my back. I’m not going to die for you, or for anyone. I’ve got a job, and I’ve got to keep it. I got the publicity Subterfuge needed, and I thank you for helping me keep my job, but dammit I didn’t inherit you. I’m not your daddy, I’m not your boy friend, I’m just a puffman in off the street, trying to keep the Dragon Lady from grabbing his house, the only roots I’ve ever had. So stop it, stop talking, stop trying to make me cry, because I won’t.

Don’t call me a graverobber, you old bitch!

“I’m a proud woman, Mr. Handy. But I’m not very smart. I let you all lie to me. Not once, but twice. The first time I was too young to know better; but this time I fell into it again knowing what you would do to me. I was one of the lucky ones, do you know that? I was lucky because I got out alive. But do you know what you’ve done to me? You’ve condemned me to the kind of life poor Emery leads, and that’s no life at all.”

She didn’t talk any more.

She just sat there staring at me.

She didn’t want excuses, or escape clauses, or anything I had to give. She knew I was helpless, that I was no better and no worse than any of them. That I had helped kill her in the name of love.

And that the worst crimes are committed in the name of love, not hate.

We both knew there would be an occasional tv bit, and enough money to keep living, but here, in this fucking ugly town, that wasn’t living. It was crawling like a wounded thing through the years, till one day the end came, and that was the only release you could pray for.

I knew Julie would not be coming back to me.

Julie knew. She was on the road because she couldn’t stand the Town; because she knew it would delicately slice her open, if she lay down and gave it the opportunity, and then pitch her insides out onto Wilshire Blvd. She had always said she wasn’t going to go the way all the others had gone, and now I knew why I hadn’t been able to reach her on the road. It was Goodbye, Dolly.

And the Dragon Lady would get the house; and I would stay in Hollywood, God help me.

Until the birds came to pick out my eyes, and I wasn’t Handy the fair-haired boy any longer, or even Handy the old pro, but something they called Fred Handy? Oh, yeah, I remember him, he was good in his day. Because after all, what the hell did I have to offer but a fast mouth and a few ideas, and once the one was slowed and the other had run out like sand from an hourglass, I was no better off than Valerie Lone or her poor miserable Emery Romito.

She left me standing there, in my apartment that always looked as though I was moving. But we both knew: I wasn’t going anywhere.

TEN

In a very nice little restaurant-bar on Sunset Boulevard, as evening came in to Hollywood across the rim of the bowl, Valerie Lone sat high on a barstool, eating a hot roast beef sandwich with gravy covering the very crisp french fries. She sipped slowly from a glass of dark ale. At the far end of the bar a television set was mumbling softly. It was an old movie, circa 1942.

None of the players in the movie had been Valerie Lone. The Universe loved her, but was totally devoid of a sense of irony. It was simply an old movie.

Three seats down from where Valerie Lone sat, a hippie wearing wraparound shades and seven strings of beads looked up at the bartender. “Hey, friend,” he said softly.

The bartender came to him, obviously disliking the hairy trade these people represented, but unable to ignore the enormous amounts of money they somehow spent in his establishment. “Uh-huh?”

“Howzabout turning something else on . . . or maybe even better turn that damn thing off, I’ll put a quarter in the jukebox.” The bartender gave him a surly look, then sauntered to the set and turned it off. Valerie Lone continued to eat as the world was turned off.

The hippie put the quarter in the jukebox and pressed out three rock numbers. He returned to his barstool and the music inundated the room.

Outside, night had come, and with it, the night lights. One of the lights illuminated a twenty-three-foot-high billboard for the film Subterfuge starring Robert Mitchum and Gina Lollobrigida; produced by Arthur Crewes; directed by James Kencannon; written by John D. F. Black; music by Lalo Schifrin.

At the end of the supplementary credits there was a boxed line that was very difficult to read: it had been whited-out.

The line had once read:

ALSO FEATURING MISS VALERIE LONE as Angela.

Angela had become a walk-on. She no longer existed.

Valerie Lone existed only as a woman in a very nice little restaurant and bar on the Sunset Strip. She was eating. And the long shadow had also begun to feed.