I spent two weeks in Hollywood playing tennis, going out to dinner with Doran and Malomar, going to parties. The parties were interesting. At one I met a faded star who had been my masturbation fantasy when I was a teenager. She must have been fifty, but she still looked pretty good with face-lifts and all kinds of beauty aids. But she was just a little fat and her face was puffy with alcohol. She got drunk and tried to fuck every male and female at the party but couldn’t find a taker. And this was a girl that millions of young red-blooded Americans had fantasized about. I found that sort of interesting. I guess the truth is that it depressed me too. The parties were OK. Familiar faces of actors and actresses. Agents brimming over with confidence. Charming producers, forceful directors. I have to say they were a hell of a lot more charming and interesting than I ever was at a party.
And then I loved the balmy climate. I loved the palm tree streets of Beverly Hills, and I loved goofing around Westwood with all its movie theaters and young college kids who were film afficionados with really great-looking girls. I understood why all those 1930 novelists had “sold out.” Why spend five years writing a novel that made two grand when you could live this life and make the same money in a week?
During the day I would work in my office, have conferences on the script with Malomar, lunch in the commissary, wander over to a set and watch a picture being shot. On the set the intensity of the actors and actresses always fascinated me. One time I was really awed. A young couple played a scene in which the boy murdered his girlfriend while they made love. After the scene the two of them fell into each other’s arms and wept as if they had been part of a real tragedy. They walked off the set hugging each other.
Lunch at the commissary was fun. You met all the people acting in films, and it seemed as if everybody had read my book, at least they said they did. I was surprised that actors and actresses really didn’t talk much. They were good listeners. Producers talked a lot. Directors were preoccupied, usually accompanied by three or four assistants. The crew seemed to have the best time. But to watch the shooting of a picture was boring. It wasn’t a bad life, but I missed New York. I missed Valerie and the kids, and I missed my dinners with Osano. Those were nights I’d hop a plane to Vegas for the evening, sleep over and come back in the early morning.
Then one day at the studio, after I had been back and forth a few times, NY to LA, LA to NY, Doran asked me to come to a party at his rented house in Malibu. A goodwill party where movie critics, scriptwriters and production people mixed it up with actors and actresses and directors. I didn’t have anything better to do, I didn’t feel like going to Vegas, so I went to Doran’s party, and there I met Janelle for the first time.
Chapter 29
It was one of those Sunday informal gatherings thrown in a Malibu house that had a tennis court plus a big pool, with steaming hot water. The house was divided from the ocean by only a thin strip of sand. Everybody was dressed casually. I noticed that most of the men threw their car keys on the table in the~ first receiving room, and when I asked Eddie Lancer about that, he told me that in Los Angeles male trousers were tailored so perfectly that you couldn’t put anything into your pockets.
As I moved through the different rooms, I heard interesting conversations. A tall, thin, aggressive-looking dark woman was falling all over a handsome producer type wearing a yachting cap. A very short little blonde rushed up to them and said to the woman, “Lay another hand on my husband and I’ll punch you right in the cunt.” The man in the yachting cap had a stutter and very deadpan said, “Th-th-that’s OK. She doesn’t use it mu-u-u-ch anyway.”
Going through a bedroom, I saw a couple head to toe and I heard a woman’s very schoolmarm voice say, “Getup here.”
I heard a guy I recognized as a New York novelist saying, “The movie business. If you make a reputation as a great dentist, they’ll let you do brain surgery.” And I thought, another pissed-off writer.
I wandered out into the parking area near the Pacific Coast Highway and I saw Doran with a group of friends admiring a Stutz Bearcat. Somebody had just told Doran the car cost sixty thousand dollars. Doran said, “For that kind of money it should be able to give head.” And everybody laughed. Then Doran said, “How do you get the nerve to just park it? It’s like having a night job while being married to Marilyn Monroe.”
I really went to the party just to meet Clara Ford, for my money the best American film reviewer who ever lived. She was smart as hell, wrote great sentences, read a lot of books, saw every movie and agreed with me on ninety-nine films out of a hundred. When she praised a film, I knew I could go see it and probably love it, or at the very least would be able to sit through the damn thing. Her reviews were the closest a critic could come to being an artist, and I liked the fact that she never claimed to be creative. She was content to be a critic.
At the party I didn’t get much chance to talk to her, which was OK with me. I just wanted to see what kind of lady she really was. She came with Kellino, and he kept her busy. And since most of the people clustered around Kellino, Clara Ford got a lot of attention. So I sat in the corner and just watched.
Clara Ford was one of those small, sweet-looking women who are usually called plain, but her face was so alive with intelligence that, in my eyes anyway, she was beautiful. What made her fascinating was that she could be both tough and innocent at the same time. She was tough enough to take on all the other major movie critics in New York and show them up as top-notch assholes. She did it A-B-C, like a prosecuting DA with an airtight case. She showed up as an idiot one guy whose humorous Sunday columns on movies were embarrassing. She took on the voice of the Greenwich Village avant-garde movie buffs and showed him for the dull bastard he was, yet she was smart enough to see him as an idiot savant, the dumbest guy who ever put words on paper, with a real feeling for certain movies. By the time she was through she had all their balls in her unfashionable J. C. Penny handbag.
I could see she was having a good time at the party. And that she was aware that Kellino was conning her with his romancing. Through the uproar I could hear Kellino say, “An agent is an idiot savant manque.” That was an old trick of his with critics, male and female. In fact, he had scored a great success with an astringent male critic by calling another critic a fag manque.
Now Kellino was being so fucking charming with Clara Ford that it was a scene in a movie. Kellino showed his dimples like muscles and Clara Ford, for all her intelligence, was beginning to wilt and hang on to him a little.
Suddenly a voice next to me said, “Do you think Kellino will let her fuck him on the first date?”
The voice came from a really good-looking blond girl, or rather a woman because she wasn’t a kid. I guessed she was about thirty. Like Clara Ford, what gave her face some of its beauty was its intelligence.
She had great sharp-planed bones in her face with lovely white skin over those bones, you couldn’t notice the skin owed something to makeup. She had vulnerable brown eyes that could be delighted as a child’s and tragic as a Dumas heroine. If this sounds like a lover’s description out of Dumas, that’s OK. Maybe I didn’t feel this way when I first saw her. That came later. Right now the brown eyes looked mischievous. She was having a good time standing outside the party storm center. What she had, which was unusual in beautiful women, was the delighted, happy air that children have when they are being left alone, doing what is to them amusing. I introduced myself and she said her name was Janelle Lambert.