“I’ll bite,” Johnny Fontane finally said. “Control of what?”
At first, Michael Corleone didn’t answer. He was tempted to say dreams. Didn’t people sometimes call the movie studios dream factories? Other people’s dreams. Talking about dreams wasn’t something he was up to. Control of everything, a younger version of himself might have said. But life had long ago humbled him too much for that.
“Let me ask you this,” Michael said. “When was the last time you had a meeting with Jack Woltz?”
“Oh, Jesus,” Johnny said. “Him?” He sized up Michael’s face and then looked over at Tom Hagen, then sighed, resigned. “Woltz,” Johnny said. “Well, Hollywood’s a small town. I see him at events, but it’s been a long time since I did anything with his studio. If there was a project we helped produce, it wasn’t one I, personally, had anything to do with.”
“We’ve done some research,” Hagen said. “There are two kinds of pictures that seem to be making money now. One is the sort that your company, to your credit, has been doing—star vehicles with responsible budgets. The other kind, though, are the big spectacles. With the, uh, anamorphic…the—”
“CinemaScope,” Johnny said.
“Right. CinemaScope. The thinking here is—correct me if I’m wrong—that these are event movies. People will turn off the TV and go see them.”
Fontane nodded. “That’s the thinking. But it’s Hollywood, so don’t be surprised when what everybody’s thinking today is what nobody remembers tomorrow.”
“Be that as it may,” Tom said. “You’re in a position to make both kinds of pictures, John, but you don’t. All we see are those small ones.”
“Right, because you need much more involvement from a studio to make epics like that,” Johnny said. “Money’s only part of it. It’s more because of all the people involved, the locations, the sets—everything. The kind of control you’re talking about? That’s exactly what you have to give up to put together something on such a big scale. Don’t forget, too, by the way, that spectacles can make you a king’s ransom, but they can lose just as much. The kind of projects we’ve been doing are just better bets.”
“Exactly,” Michael said. “Bets. In all your unlucky trips to the racetrack, did you ever see anyone get ahead who played nothing but the favorites?”
“No, you’re right,” Johnny said. “You’re speaking my language here. To be honest with you, I always thought of you gentlemen as different. Everything you have a business interest in—or your father before you, may he rest in peace—seems like a sure thing.”
“There’s a world of difference,” Michael said, “between a favorite and a sure thing.”
“I’ll give you that,” Johnny said. “You know, your timing’s perfect on this. I was just reading some scripts this morning and thinking along these same lines. For example, there was a great one I read about a Roman slave. Big story. Huge. Or Columbus. There’s never really been a great movie done about Columbus. But here’s what I need help understanding. Even if it was possible to develop a project like that with my company, our company, whichever, why would you, would we, want to work with Jack Woltz? The man’s almost eighty years old and oobatz. He brags at screenings that he’s got a magic bladder, that he can tell how much money a movie’s going to make by how often he’s got to get up and go piss. The less, the better, obviously, but this is the last guy in the industry I’d want to be making a big, long, expensive movie with. Not to mention that Woltz International ain’t exactly the hottest studio in town.” Johnny turned to face Tom. “In your research, Tom, you probably came across that.”
“We have a relationship with Mr. Woltz,” Michael said. “Whenever possible, I prefer doing business with people I’ve done business with before. The trust is already established.”
Hagen nodded, slowly, in corroboration.
Also, Woltz had a relationship with the Sheas and could probably still get in to see them on Michael’s behalf. And he could get the Corleones at the table with the Russian Jews who were the secret power behind everything in California. Even the Los Angeles and San Francisco Families essentially answered to them. Woltz’s lawyer, a man named Ben Tamarkin, was, for the Jewish syndicate there, a more powerful version of what Tom was for the Corleone Family.
“The kind of business venture I’m interested in building here,” Michael said, “is more complicated than just getting one picture made. Increasingly, movies are being filmed out of the country, and we can help with that. People we know in Italy, for example, who can keep the cost of shooting on location to a minimum. Also, the studios had to sell off their distribution companies, but we can help with that, too. The big, downtown movie theaters are struggling because of the crime in the inner cities, but we have interests in shopping malls in the suburbs, and nearly all of them have movie theaters in them.”
“With all due respect,” Johnny said. “That’s a problem. Nobody wants to see a spectacle on one of those little screens out in East Jesus.”
“They do if they already live in East Jesus,” Michael said. “If the reason they moved to East Jesus in the first place was to get away from the problems of the modern city. The screen may be a little smaller, but it’s new, it’s clean, it’s safe, there’s plenty of free parking, and on the way in or out you can duck into a store and buy shoes. It’s a vertically integrated business, or rather several businesses, completely separate from one another, working out of mutual interest. You’re not going to have any of the problems you had with the casino, because first of all Hollywood, as you know, is hardly regulated at all, at least in comparison with something like legalized gambling. And, second, because we’re going to help you. Tom will work with you. When the time is right—and I expect that will be very soon—he’ll go with you to meet with Mr. Woltz.”
Johnny looked over at Tom.
Tom shrugged. “The trust is already established.”
MICHAEL CORLEONE STOOD BY HIS KITCHEN WINDOW, peeling an orange and looking down at Johnny Fontane as he crossed the courtyard.
“You all right?” Tom Hagen asked.
Michael kept peeling the orange. Down in the courtyard, Connie rushed after Johnny like a common puttana. “With Johnny? Frankly, it doesn’t matter all that much if—”
“I don’t mean about Johnny. Or, for that matter, our Hollywood interests.” Hagen said Hollywood interests with a tinge of contempt so faint it would have registered only on a family member.
“What do you mean?” Michael asked.
“I mean, are you all right? I’ve known you since you were seven years old, for Christ’s sake. Something’s bothering you. Something’s been bothering you. And I don’t mean Tommy Scootch’s problems down Mexico way, either.”
That was Tom to a T: he got the dig in and didn’t even mention Joe Lucadello.
Michael shook his head. “It’s nothing.”
“Rough night last night, I hear.”
“Al told you that?”
Hagen smiled. “No,” he lied. “You just did.”
“Touché, counselor.” He finished peeling the orange and began to eat it.
“So you just couldn’t sleep or what?”
Michael turned to face him. For a moment, he thought about telling Tom about the series of dreams he’d been having. I have dreams about Fredo. A series of dreams. They feel real. In the most recent one, we had a fistfight. In all of them, he is bleeding. In all of them, he mentions a warning but won’t tell me what it is. But no. Michael Corleone was a man of reason, of logic. There were logical explanations: the diabetes, the medicine for that, stress. Maybe the dreams had to do with Rita. She never appeared in the dreams and was rarely mentioned, but she was always a presence in them somehow—just as Fredo was a presence in Michael and Rita’s waking moments, even though they never talked about him. (Why should they? She’d been with Fredo only once.) The dreams had begun after Michael had a sugar imbalance; now they were happening when he slept. It was ridiculous for Michael to think he’d seen Fredo’s ghost. Crazy. It was just a dream. What, among men, was less worthy of discussion than dreams?
“Forget it,” Michael said, turning back to the window. “It was a night, OK?”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
“I keep telling you,” Tom said, “when that happens, the insomnia, you can’t just stay in bed. You need to get up and go do something, maybe take a walk.”
Michael smirked, then paused for effect. He knew about Tom Hagen’s mistress, and Tom clearly knew he knew, though they’d rarely spoken about her, and never by name. She’d been a blackjack dealer in Vegas, a renowned beauty, married to a man who used to beat her, a situation Tom helped remedy. She also had a grown son in some kind of hospital, the cost of which Tom paid for entirely. She and Tom had been together for longer than Michael and Kay’s marriage had lasted. The whole matter struck Michael as the most characteristic thing Tom had ever done. He wasn’t Sicilian but was always trying to be, so leave it to him to have not just a comare but a steady one. Better yet, he found one he could feel noble about. He’d helped her, stayed loyal to her: it was perfect. He even used her as one of the Family’s fronts (real estate holdings, parking lots, movie theaters) and as a courier, delivering money to various people throughout the country. She lived in Las Vegas most of the time, but she was in New York now, too, staying in the apartment Tom kept for her here, a walk-up over a flower shop.
“A walk, huh?” Michael said.
“I mean a real walk,” Hagen said. “It’d do you good.”
Michael gave him a look. If there was ever a perfect way for a boss to ensure his own demise, it was to become such an insomniac that he got in the habit of taking walks at three a.m.
Michael watched Johnny Fontane, downstairs, waiting for the elevator. Connie was hanging on his arm. Francesca, arms folded, was watching them, shaking her head in obvious and—to Michael’s eye—overcompensating disapproval.
“Think she’ll ever get him to take her out?” Tom asked.
“Who, Francesca?”
“Francesca?” Tom frowned. Fontane was the same age as he was. “Jesus. No. Connie.”
“Never,” Michael said. “Didn’t you hear? Johnny’s distancing himself from our family.”
“Sure,” Tom said. With his index and middle fingers, he gently jabbed Michael in the chest. “But with the human heart, who the hell knows?”
Michael and Hagen discussed a few petty logistical matters and agreed to meet at the elevator in two hours for the car ride out to the Carroll Gardens Hunt Club.
“Plenty of time for a walk,” Michael said. Tom ignored him.
ONCE TOM LEFT, MICHAEL WENT OUT ONTO A SMALL balcony facing the river, where he kept the telescope his children had given him for Christmas. Mary had made a bittersweet joke about using it to watch over them up in Maine.
Now, in the twilight—magic hour, Hollywood people apparently called it, a term he’d learned from Fredo—Michael sat on a stool and looked through the telescope in that same general direction. His eye came to rest on what he could see of Randall’s Island, where Robert Moses lived and did business in a mansion there, hidden in plain sight beneath a tollbooth complex. A castle, practically. Michael knew more than a few things about Moses, that supposedly visionary builder of roads and parks, the de facto designer of the modern New York City, and practically a sainted figure in political circles and in the press. A native Clevelander, just like Nick Geraci, Moses had never been elected to any office, yet he was the most powerful politician in New York—city and state, both. He was also the most extravagantly corrupt. This would have surprised most people, but not anyone in Michael Corleone’s world. The dimmest cugin’ sitting on the stoop outside his social club could have told you that Robert Moses’s enormous power had an inevitable chicken/egg relationship to the epic scale of his sleaze and greed.
Somewhere on that island was a man who had thrown half a million New Yorkers out of their homes, most of them Negroes and poor immigrants, many of then Italian. Half a million people. More than the population of Kansas City. Moses tore their homes down and built buildings the evicted could never afford or—more often, more diabolically—housing projects that, even new, were more grim than the worst slums. All built with taxpayer money. Robert Moses built roads that cut the heart out of neighborhoods, creating crime-ridden ghost streets where families had once thrived, all to make life easy for the rich people from the suburbs, all to make Moses himself rich beyond Michael Corleone’s wildest imaginings. Moses had three yachts, each fully staffed, ready day and night. He had a hundred waiters and a dozen chefs on call around the clock as well. As gifts, he gave his friends skyscrapers and stadiums. Moses’s island was its own nation—a secret nation, one the American public did not know existed and yet paid for. And kept paying for it. Anyone who wanted to pass over the bridges their taxes had already funded had to pay a silver tribute to the Don, Robert Moses. He had his own seal, his own license plates, his own intelligence agency, his own military force, his own constitution and laws, even his own flag. Once, the mayor of New York took Michael aside and, friend to friend, whispered this warning: “Never let Bob Moses do you a favor. If you do, rest assured that one day he’ll use it to destroy you.”
Yet despite all this, there Moses was, out on his island, presumably cooking up new schemes to ruin the greatest city on earth and line his own pockets in the bargain, while in the eyes of the public and the eyes of the law, he was a pillar of the community.
A hero.
Robert Moses was not under constant threat of indictment or assassination. He wasn’t even under occasional threat of indictment or assassination.
His association with various crimes and atrocities had not caused him to lose two brothers to violent death.
It had not caused his children to come home from school crying because of what the other kids said about him. It had not caused his children to be fired upon with machine guns.
Robert Moses’s accomplishments were studied in university classes in political science and urban planning. Not criminology or criminal law. Robert Moses was a behind-the-scenes character known to everyone, and everything most people knew about him was good.
And most of it was bullshit.
Michael pushed himself away from the telescope.
Robert Moses probably possessed enough pure evil that he could sleep well. He probably woke up every morning refreshed and without the slightest anxiety about who might try to defame him today, who might try to throw him in jail, who might try to blow up his car or put a bullet in his heart. Robert Moses was probably never once tempted to go to the window of his mansion at dusk and stare through a telescope at the top of this building, wondering why he’d been so lucky, wondering, just for a moment, what it was like to be a man like Michael Corleone.