Awful!” Maxi exclaimed aloud to no one. Driving across town on Monday night, a gigantic billboard perched across from Tower Records on the Sunset Strip had caught her eye, a huge ad showing a pair of female larger-than-life legs in fishnet stockings, spread apart, elongated in five-inch heels. Atop these legs, a black leather miniskirt cupped just under the butt of the woman we couldn’t see. And between the legs crouched the Jack Nathanson character, the detective, looking up at her. It was an ad for Jack’s movie, his last, Serial Killer.
She’d read on the wires that the studio, in the wake of the star’s murder, was going to bring the picture out earlier than planned. Maxi knew the movie; she was married to Jack when they started shooting it. There was no female character like that in the film, no leggy sexpot in a leather micro-mini. The woman on the billboard did not exist in Serial Killer. Maxi looked up at it again. Large text beside the sleek pair of legs read: THE LAST TIME YOU WILL EXPERIENCE A NEW JACK NATHANSON THRILLER!
Maxi winced. Beyond tasteless. This exploitive publicity so soon after Jack’s murder had to be the work of the notorious Alan Bronstein, Monogram’s head of production. Bronstein—brilliant, charming, and a touch sinister by reputation—was coiner of the credo “It’s not how you play the game, but whether you open at number one.” He had met the young Janet Orson when she was the new “girl” in the steno pool back when they were both at Fox. He’d been her protector and big brother, and the one who’d encouraged her to become an agent. And she turned around and brought a lot of hot stars and great scripts his way. A symbiotic relationship. Diller and Von Furstenburg. And it was common knowledge in this company town that Bronstein was, and had been for years, in love with Janet Orson.
If it weren’t for Janet, industry gossip had it, Bronstein wouldn’t have looked at a Jack Nathanson movie. The two men had clashed famously several times through the years. Bronstein hated Nathanson, and he especially hated that the brash, charismatic actor had married the woman he loved. Also, Bronstein was a businessman, and Jack Nathanson hadn’t made a hit movie in ten years. That Monogram was distributing Serial Killer, Maxi knew, was strictly a gift for Janet.
Alan Bronstein was thinking about Janet Orson on the drive over Coldwater canyon to his lunch meeting at Mortons, the restaurant where he and Janet had had a long-standing habit of having dinner together on Thursday nights. When Janet met Jack Nathanson, Alan had warned her not to get involved with him. This was a bad guy, Alan had told her repeatedly, citing atrocities, stories about how badly Nathanson had treated people in the course of business or pleasure. But Janet was not to be dissuaded. Then came her call saying that Jack didn’t want her to have those Thursday night dinners with him anymore, because he wanted that time with her himself.
Soon after, Janet Orson became the third Mrs. Jack Nathanson. For a long time Bronstein had no contact with her, and that hurt. Until the day she turned up at his office unannounced. He’d surprised himself at how choked up he became. And then she laid it on him. Jack’s production company needed a distributor for Serial Killer, and she wanted Alan to take the project on.
“Really!” Alan had said, raising his eyebrows. “But Jack doesn’t even talk to me. Why would he want me bringing out his picture?”
He would, she’d told him, and she didn’t have to explain why. Word was out that the picture was a dog, and nobody wanted to touch it. But Alan Bronstein could never say no to Janet Orson.
She’d looked so small in his office, sitting opposite him in one of the big leather club chairs, Janet gamely standing by her man. Bronstein, who had always been in the industry gossip pipeline, knew exactly what was going on in that marriage, what he’d known was bound to go on, because Jack Nathanson was an animal who wouldn’t change. He was cheating on her in Vegas, partying with Sammy Minnetti and the good old boys when he’d go there to gamble or see a fight; he’d cheat on her on movie locations; he was even doing it right under her nose with some tough hooker disc jockey, Bronstein had heard.
He worried about Janet. He worried about Jack bringing home diseases. He worried that Janet would be publicly humiliated. And he worried about her assets, worried that being married to Jack, who was rumored to be pretty much tapped out, her money would go out a lot quicker than it came in. Somebody, he’d vowed to himself that day, had to stop Jack Nathanson.
He pulled into the parking lot at Mortons now, and a young parking attendant rushed over. “Hi, Billy,” Bronstein said, getting out of his car. “Watch the doors, will you?”
“Sure thing, Mr. Bronstein.” The young man beamed, jumping into the black Porsche Turbo. Bronstein was a regular at Mortons, one of that industry in-spot’s more colorful customers.
Bronstein was connected, the stories went. He had no trouble finding Mafia money to fund his projects if he needed it, people said. Word was that Bronstein had even killed a man, that he was taking a meeting with a certain mob figure who was investing in a certain movie, and in some way there were drugs involved, and the gangster turned up dead that night, shot in his own den on his own green plaid sofa, which they showed on the television news. But there was no record anywhere that he had been meeting with Alan Bronstein that night, and Bronstein had flown to Vegas and gotten a room at Bally’s, where the night manager was an old friend and predated his registration by a day. In a bit of revisionist history, the story went, Alan Bronstein had checked into Bally’s in Las Vegas at ten o’clock at night, and Tony “Ears” Ergatti was killed in Los Angeles sometime after midnight.
If Billy was going to be denting doors that afternoon, he was not going to dent the doors of Alan Bronstein’s Porsche!