Just after Bill Hill closes the deal in Touch that will make Juvenal a media star, Leonard offers us a glimpse of the evangelical huckster’s thoughts, in free indirect discourse. Hill is glad to be back in the saddle and no longer selling motor homes, as he’s had to do ever since Uni-Faith folded: “Work work work. But damn he felt good. Bill Hill was promoting people again and not some dead-ass technical specs, which camper body to put on your GMC pick-up bed” (148). Wherever Leonard finds himself in whichever novel he happens to be writing on any given day, he remains responsive to what matters most to him: the satisfaction of knowing how to do a job and do it well, even if it’s turning the gifts of God into fungible commodities. In Be Cool, a similar moment occurs when we catch record promoter Nick Car (former mobster Nicky Carcaterra) sitting at his desk at Car-O-Sell Entertainment, wearing headphones and fielding simultaneous calls on three lines with the aplomb of a professional short-stop.
“Howard, what’s up, bro? You guys have a good rap? … That’s cool. Man, that is so fucking cool. Listen, I want to hear about it but I’ll have to call you back. I’m banging the phone like a fucking wild man. Five minutes, bro.”
Nick pushed a button on the phone console, looked up to see Raji in the office.
Raji saying, “Chili Palmer—”
Nick held up both hands to stop him, Nick’s hands free to gesture, scratch, lock behind his head, while he spoke into the little stainless mike boom that hung in front of his mouth—a mouth he never seemed to shut, always making Raji wait. (81)
Three pages of patter and eight button punches later, Nick gets “throw[n] off [his] rhythm” by someone named “Jer.” “I start thinking when I’m talking to him instead of just talking,” Nick tells Raji, who takes advantage of Nick’s momentary dysrhythmia to ask who they should hire to kill Chili Palmer.
Nick’s rat-a-tat recitative is a perfect example of Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow” in action: self-immersive, focused on the task at hand, and lost as soon as the promoter “start[s] thinking.” Nick plays his phone console the way Horowitz played his Steinway. “I can make more in one day wearing this fucking headset,” he later tells Chili, “than I do in months” working with Raji (216). Whatever we may think about Nick Carcaterra personally (he’s a tasteless, greedy bastard who would gift-wrap his own mother for a top-ten hit), he’s utterly cool when it comes to selling records. And he turns out to be crucial to the success of the book’s female protagonist, singer-songwriter Linda Moon.
It’s easy to get distracted from Linda’s story line by the accumulating perils—physical and technical—facing her new agent, Chili Palmer, not least because, in Be Cool as in Get Shorty, Leonard is writing a meta-fictional account of his own compositional process. A large part of Chili’s motivation for getting close to Linda stems from his desire to write a screenplay about an aspiring Janis Joplin–style singer overcoming abusive managers, corrupt record promoters, grasping studio executives, and sidemen of inferior talents in order to succeed with her artistic integrity intact. Like Leonard himself, Chili never plans how things will go, but waits to see “what happens next” based on what his potential characters (Linda and her associates) choose to do. Sometimes, however, he’ll arrange a scene just to see how someone will react, as he does when he schedules Linda for an on-air radio interview where she will hear a remixed version of her signature song, “Odessa,” for the first time, with the whole world listening in.
Chili knows that Linda walked out on a previous studio contract when the sound engineers tampered with her lean, lonely sound, and he respects her for it. But after discussing the advertising and promotion campaign for her new release with producer Hy Gordon of NTL (Nothing to Lose) records, Chili realizes that Linda will never succeed unless Gordon’s sound engineer, Curtis, gets the green light to remix “Odessa”—to “lay some samples around her, fill in, make it bigger” (150). Chili is pretty sure that, while on tour to promote the new record, Linda has gotten hooked on success to the point of accepting her new sound, if she has to. She’s already come down with a bad case of what her drummer, Speedy, calls “LSD”—“Lead Singer Disease” (211)—insisting on her own private suite, renaming the band after herself, and “starting to give orders” (245). She’s got that diva itch. This is a good thing. As Chili will later put it, Linda has made the transition from talented “little girl with ideals” to “the tortured artist” (256), distracted from the pure joy of singing by the adrenaline rush of fan acclaim and a growing sense of her own self-importance. Hearing the “Odessa” remix for the first time during a live, on-air interview will test whether or not she is ready for the final step, “to the pro, who knows exactly what she wants and is gonna make it happen” (256). If she isn’t, Chili still walks away with a knockout scene for his screenplay: “The Artist Betrayed.”
We might think that a book whose motto could be summarized by the repeated phrase “Just be yourself” would end with its outraged heroine punching DJ Ken Calvert in the nose for hyping this studio abortion, complete with bagpipes, especially when Ken tells her, “Well, you have your own style now” (252). If so, we would miss the point of both Be Cool and being cool. Just being yourself means not only doing what you do best but letting everyone else do the same. Linda can make music, but it’s “a business,” Hy Gordon tells Chili. “We don’t sell music, we sell records” (195). Which means, of course, you can’t take it personally, and that goes for Chili, too. When Hy says he’s lined up Nick Car to promote the new album and Chili objects because “the guy’s a schmuck”—not to mention trying to kill Chili—Hy replies, “We give Nick Car the record, he’ll get it on the air. That’s what he does” (195). Doing what you do is something Chili can understand, and because she has taken that final step up to being “a pro,” Linda can, too. “I loved it,” she says, when asked what she thinks of her new sound. If her fellow band members don’t, “it’s up to them, get with it or quit, the world’s full of musicians” (254). In fact, she’s going to have Curtis, the sound engineer, “work right through the CD, remaster the whole thing. Put in bagpipes, zithers, tubas, whatever he wants” (255). And by the way, she’s through with Chili and NTL—nothing personal. Days later Linda signs with heavy hitter Maverick Entertainment for a million bucks. “She’s got that killer instinct,” Chili says (273–74), in case we were still wondering.
Linda has learned how to be cool while remaining a team player. She now knows that a true pro draws a championship team together, and then leaves them alone. The book’s scenes with Steven Tyler and Aerosmith may seem like celebrity name-dropping, but as in other Leonard books they are meant to help us distinguish fake from real cool—here, in relation to teamwork. Thus, real cool isn’t about “hanging” with celebrities, it’s about using your contacts to get things done and improve everyone’s game. Edie Athens, head of NTL records after her husband’s murder, can’t wait to tell Chili how she “just pulled off something that is so cool you won’t believe it.” Hy Gordon steals her thunder: having lunch with her old buddy Steven Tyler, he says, knowing she used to do Aerosmith’s laundry as a roadie. No, says Edie, that’s cool, but what is “way cooler” is getting Steven to let Linda Moon open for them at the Forum (196). When Linda and her sidemen get a chance to talk to the Aerosmith band members before going onstage, only Linda and Dale, the lead guitarist, see it as a learning opportunity. Speedy takes Joey Kramer’s drumming tips as an insult, and Derek, another of Edie’s clients, is so intimidated he acts bored. “Waited for them to talk to him,” Chili later tells his movie-producer girlfriend, Elaine. “He could’ve asked questions, or just listened, like Dale, maybe learn something” (203). An apprentice who’s trying to master his craft won’t let pride get in the way of seeking advice from the old pros, who know how to “make it happen.”
The penultimate scene of Be Cool features Elliot Wilhelm, Raji’s former bodyguard, singing his own rap version of the book’s title song at the Troubadour nightclub, backed by a posse of six enormous Samoans. The lyrics seem pretty conventional—drug deals, drug busts, hiding the stash—until we reach the last verse, when the “Swat man” becomes “that man.”
I ain’t takin no more that man’s shit,
thought of a way to make him quit.
One I dream where I hear him scream
when I throw his ass from off a high place
and the man is gone without leavin a trace.
I know how, I’ve done it, see.
Throw him away and set myself free.
Uh-oh, uh-oh.
I’m gonna do it.
Uh-oh, uh-oh.
Leave me to it.
Uh-oh, uh-oh.
Hear what I’m saying?
Be cool. (272)
Elliot’s not only “gonna do it.” He’s done it. Just days before, he saved Chili Palmer’s life by tossing Raji, the Samuel L. Jackson wannabe, off the balcony of Chili’s hotel suite. Now that he’s stopped taking shit from his faux-gangsta boss, he can just be himself: lead rapper of “Elliot Wilhelm and his Royal Samoans” (271)—soon to appear in a theater near you. “The guy saved my life,” says Chili. “The least I can do is put him in a movie” (267). At last, Elliot has a chance to find out what he’s good at, perhaps even a chance to be cool.
Elliot’s freakish size, which belies his true talents, would seem to limit him to a career as bouncer, sumo wrestler, or “before” model for Weight Watchers. Like Zenon La Joie, the redeemed misfit of Leonard’s fifth-grade adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, he’s easy to make fun of and, like Zenon, he just needs the right situation to let the person “inside” him come out and show his stuff. Linda Moon, however, is the real star of this showbiz Bildungs-roman. Since the publication of Be Cool, Leonard’s women have begun hogging even more of the spotlight. Following closely on Djibouti, which recounted Dara Barr’s struggle to film, compose, and edit her documentary about Somali pirates, Leonard’s latest book, Raylan, uses its title character as little more than a point-of-view clothesline on which to hang three successive narratives featuring female protagonists whose technical proficiency—starting with black market kidney extraction in motel bathtubs, then moving on to mining company public relations and high-stakes televised poker—drives the action throughout.
Raylan ends with cowboy atavist Raylan Givens falling in love, this time with a woman who understands him. Jackie Reno is only twenty-three, but already accomplished enough at Texas hold ’em to walk away from a televised no-limit game with a million dollars of the old pros’ money. “To win a mil,” says Jackie, “tells me I could do it,” and that, not the money, is what gets her “high” (256). Raylan knows cool when he sees it. “She could be Miss Nevada,” he thinks, “but would rather play poker” (192). Nearly forty years old on his 1993 debut in Pronto, Raylan should be pushing sixty by now, although in Elmore Leonard’s imagination he never grows old.1 Givens at least seems aware of how it looks. “She isn’t the least interested in an old fart like me,” he tells his boss, Art Mullen. “ ‘He said humbly,’ ” Art replies (261). Jackie already has “a serious crush” on Raylan and is “excited by how cool” he is (256). Raylan returns the compliment by telling Jackie how much she’d enjoy being a U.S. marshal. “If I joined the marshals, could I be your partner?” she asks. “I’d make it happen,” he promises her (263).
Now in his eighty-seventh year, and hard at work on his forty-sixth novel, Blue Dreams, Leonard seems to be saying that age shouldn’t matter to two people who share a love of techne: being cool will find a way. The idea received a more severe trial run in Djibouti, where techne also supplied the premise. There, thirty-something filmmaker Dara Barr eventually succumbed to the charms of her septuagenarian assistant, the well-hung Xavier LeBo, who got some help from his own assistant, an aphrodisiac called Horny Goat Weed. Givens is similarly endowed, to judge from the postcoital allusion that ends the book.
She said, “Remember Young Frankenstein? The monster gets it on with what’s her name and she starts singing about finding the sweet mystery of life?”
“What made you think of that?”
“I don’t know,” Jackie said. (263)
The monster in Mel Brooks’s film is prodigiously outsized in every respect, and in the scene that Jackie refers to, Madeleine Kahn lets us know it through a series of orgasmic whoops that glissando into an operatic rendition of the hit song “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life,” from Victor Herbert’s Naughty Marietta. Thus, Raylan ends by returning as farce to the theme with which it began as noir: detachable body parts.
What happens next? Given the independent initiative Leonard’s characters have shown in the past, that question might be unanswerable. Does Jackie Reno have a future as a U.S. marshal? Law enforcement would, after all, be something that she and Raylan could do together—the realization of Carmen Colson’s marital ambitions, only way cooler. Leonard says no. Neither character will appear in Blue Dreams, and he cannot imagine Jackie ever coming back.2 At last report, as the first chapter of Blue Dreams comes to a close, a racist ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officer in a cowboy hat—aka the “Ice Man”—has arrested young bull rider Victorio Colorado on trumped-up charges.3 We can be pretty sure this arrogant asshole will be sticking around when we reach the penultimate line: “The Ice Man’s name was Darryl Harris.” Which means, for Elmore Leonard, “Remember this guy.”
Whatever happens next, it’s likely the Ice Man will provide his creator with some serious fun before the book is finished, and more than a few shots at being cool.