I called his apartment, hut there was no answer. I wrote him a letter and got a letter in return. We had dinner together in New York. He looked terrible, but he had a great-looking young blonde who rarely spoke but ate more than Osano and I put together. He introduced her as “Charlie Brown,” and I realized she was Cully’s girl, but I never gave her Cully’s message. Why should I hurt Osano?
There was one funny incident I always remembered. I told Valerie to go out shopping and buy herself some new clothes, whatever she wanted, and that I would mind the kids for that day. She went with some of her girlfriends and came back with an armful of packages.
I was trying to work on a new book hut really couldn’t get into it, so she showed me what she had bought. She unwrapped a package and showed me a new yellow dress.
“It cost ninety dollars,” Valerie said. “Can you imagine ninety dollars for a little summer dress?”
“It looks beautiful,” I said dutifully. She was holding it against her neck.
“You know,” she said, “I really couldn’t make up my mind whether I liked the yellow one or the green one. Then I decided on the yellow. I think I look better in the yellow, don’t you?”
I laughed. I said, “Honey, didn’t it occur to you that you could buy both?”
She looked at me stunned for a moment, and then she too laughed. And I said, “You can buy a yellow and a green and a blue and a red.”
And we both smiled at each other, and for the first time we realized, I think, that we had entered some sort of new life. But on the whole I found success not to be as interesting or as satisfying as I had thought it would be, So, as I usually did, I read up on the subject and I found that my case was not unusual, that in fact, many men who had fought all their lives to reach the top of their professions immediately celebrated by throwing themselves out of a high window.
It was wintertime, and I decided to take the whole family down to Puerto Rico for a vacation. It would be the first time in our married life that we had been able to afford to go away. My kids had never even been to summer camp.
We had a great time swimming, enjoying the heat, enjoying the strange streets and food, the delight of leaving the cold winter one morning and that afternoon being in the broiling sun, enjoying the balmy breezes. At night I took Valerie to the hotel gambling casino while the children dutifully sat in the great wicker chairs of the lobby, waiting for us. Every fifteen minutes or so Valerie would run down and see if they were OK, and finally she took them all to our suite of rooms and I gambled until four o’clock in the morning. Now that I was rich, naturally I was lucky, and I won a few thousand dollars and in a funny way I enjoyed winning in the casino more than the success and the huge sums of money I had made so far on the book.
When we got back home, there was an even greater surprise waiting for me. A movie studio, Malomar Films, had spent a hundred thousand dollars for the film rights to my book and another fifty thousand dollars plus expenses for me to go out to Hollywood to write the screenplay.
I talked it over with Valerie. I really didn’t want to write movie scripts. I told her I would sell the book but turn down the screen-writing contract. I thought she would be pleased, but instead, she said, “I think it would be good for you to go out there. I think it would be good for you to meet more people, to know more people. You know I worry about you sometimes because you’re so solitary.”
“We could all go out,” I said.
“No,” Valerie said. “I’m really happy here with my family and we can’t take the children out of school and I wouldn’t want them to grow up in California.”
Like everybody else in New York, Valerie regarded California as an exotic outpost of the United States filled with drug addicts, murderers and mad preachers who would shoot a Catholic on sight.
“The contract is for six months,” I said, “but I could work for a month and then go back and forth.”
“That sounds perfect,” Valerie said, “and besides, to tell you the truth we could use a rest from each other.”
That surprised me. “I don’t need a rest from you,” I said.
“But I need a rest from you,” Valerie said. “It’s nerve-racking to have a man working at home. Ask any woman. It just upsets the whole routine of my keeping house. I never could say anything before because you couldn’t afford an outside studio to work in, but now that you can, I wish you wouldn’t work at home anymore. You can rent a place and leave in the morning and come home at night. I’m sure you’d work better.”
I don’t know even now why her saying this offended me so much. I had been happy staying and working at home, and I was really hurt that she didn’t feel the same way, and I think it was this that made me decide to do the screenplay of my novel. It was a childish reaction. If she didn’t want me home, I’d leave and see how she liked it. At that time I swear that Hollywood was a nice place to read about, but I didn’t even want to visit it.
I realized a part of my life was over. In his review Osano had written, “All novelists, bad and good, are heroes. They fight alone, they must have the faith of saints. They are more often defeated than victorious and they are shown no mercy by a villainous world. Their strength fails (that’s why most novels have weak spots, are an easy target for attack); the troubles of the real world, the illness of children, the betrayal by friends, the treacheries of wives must all be brushed aside. They ignore their wounds and fight on, calling on miracles for fresh energy.”
I disapproved of his melodramatics, but it was true that I felt as if I were deserting the company of heroes. I didn’t give a damn if that was a typical writer’s sentimentality.
Book V
Chapter 27
Malomar Films, though a subsidiary of Moses Wartberg’s Tri-Culture Studios, operated on a completely independent basis, creatively, and had its own small lot. And so Bernard Malomar had free rein for his planned picture of the John Merlyn novel.
All Malomar wanted to do was make good movies, and that was never easy, not with Wartberg’s Tri-Culture Studios hovering over his every move. He hated Wartberg. They were acknowledged enemies, but Wartberg, as an enemy, was interesting, fun to deal with. Also, Malomar respected Wartberg’s financial and management genius. He knew that moviemakers like himself could not exist without it.
Malomar in his plush suite of offices nestled in a corner of his own lot had to put up with a bigger pain in the ass than Wartberg, though a less deadly one. If Wartberg was cancer of the rectum, as Malomar jokingly said, Jack Houlinan was hemorrhoids and, on a day-to-day basis, far more irritating.
Jack Houlinan, vice-president in charge of creative public relations, played his role of the number one PR genius with a killing sincerity. When he asked you to do something outrageous and was refused, he acknowledged with violent enthusiasm your right to refuse. His favorite line was: “Anything you say is OK with me. I would never, never try to persuade you to do anything you don’t want to do. I only asked.” This would be after an hour’s pitch of why you had to jump off the Empire State Building to make sure your new picture got some space in the Times.
But with his bosses, like the VP in charge of production at Wartberg’s Tri-Culture International Studios, with this Merlyn picture for Malomar Films and his own personal client, Ugo Kellino, he was much more frank, more human. And now he was talking frankly to Bernard Malomar, who really didn’t have time for bullshit.