Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (23 page)

But I worry that I have presented Jack Hale as chauvinistic and calculating, so I want to be clear that, while those are not unfair assessments of him, he was nothing but kind to me in the years after my father died. In 1964, I was seventeen and newly fatherless. I'd spent the three years since my mother died hating my dad for what I saw as weakness. I thought he'd let her go, driven her away, and remained apathetic
to my sister's and my grieving. From 1961 to 1964, I spent every opportunity I could at the house of any friend whose father seemed to have a kind of John Wayne–type presence that I felt my life had lacked. But when an artery clogged with midcentury diet felled my father, I began skipping school, driving out to Burbank and talking my way onto the studio lot. At first I'd just wander around, hop on one of those intra-backlot bicycles, pedal past soundstages, those strangely blank boxes that open up geode-like to reveal fully imagined, if fragmented, worlds. I hadn't visited the lot since I was maybe ten or eleven, so now I enjoyed being old enough to be mistaken for a lackey of some sort, fetching coffee, delivering scripts. But this required that I look like I was heading somewhere with great importance, so I didn't allow myself the leisure to stop and peek into the soundstages, as I desperately wanted to, and I affected a scowl that I thought made me look stressed and therefore important but that probably made me look like exactly the person I was: a confused teenager biking furiously around a place I shouldn't be, trying to transfer all the anger I'd felt toward my father to a new and frighteningly nebulous subject—my father's death. Where precisely was I supposed to direct my anger? The backlot bikes, it seemed; I pedaled the shit out of those things. Actors, too. Whenever I saw people who seemed put-together but nervous, I pegged them for actors anxiously making their way to auditions, and I made a point of swerving around them, shouting to get out of my way, just to make them feel as out-of-place as I knew I was. While that never stopped being satisfying, I began to set my sights elsewhere. I found Jack Hale's office, a bungalow out past the important stuff. At first, I would just cruise by, trying to spot him through a window. My rubbernecking, however, did not
complement the furious pace I'd set for myself on the bicycle, and one day my front tire met a rather steep curb. I'd like to say that I sailed clean over the handlebars like people do in the movies, but instead, when the bike stopped and my body kept going, my groin met the handlebars and I folded over the contraption, quickly crumpling myself into a neat pile of pain on the lawn outside Jack's bungalow office. I used to tell this story so that I looked up and saw Jack standing over me, offering me his hand and quipping, “Your dad couldn't drive for shit either.” I told it that way for so long that I now distinctly remember it that way, but Jack was not there; what actually happened was that I dragged my deflated scrotum into his office and begged his secretary to show me the bathroom. She obliged and I spent a few minutes vomiting into his toilet. When I limped out, Jack Hale was standing there, quipless. I'd last seen him at my dad's funeral where he'd delivered a perfectly satisfactory eulogy but hadn't said much to me, and he still seemed unsure what to say. “I need a job,” I said.

His secretary said, “You need to look where you're steering that thing, is what you need.”

Jack turned around to give her what I hoped was a reproachful look, then turned back to me. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen.” It was a lie, though a small one. I'd be eighteen soon enough.

“Go home,” he said, and I felt the blood rush from my groin to my face, and I prepared to yell something at him, but then he said, “Come back tomorrow at eight.”

I tried to reconfigure my face into something less homicidal and said, “Yes, yes, okay.”

“That's
AM
,” he said, “not
PM
.”

I thanked him again, might have called him “sir” a few too many times, and ran out in a rush, somehow thinking that if I promptly followed the first part of his instructions, the “go home” part, then it would show him how promptly I would be back at 8:00
AM
.

It was my final year of high school, and I'd been cutting classes to go haunt the backlot, but only a couple days a week. Now that I'd be a regular employee, however, I figured I could just drop the pretense of school altogether. That simple realization, that I would be waking up tomorrow to go to a job rather than a classroom, felt like an initiation into adulthood, like with those words Jack had essentially said to me, “You're a man now.” Which is why I spent that evening dipping liberally into the liter of Gordon's gin that Aunt Paige kept in the kitchen cabinet. (She had moved in after Dad died, and was now my legal guardian, though I can't recall where she was that night.) When I showed up to my first day of work the next morning, festeringly hungover, I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I certainly didn't find it. I walked into the bungalow and the secretary said, “Report to Stage Five.”

“Where's Jack?”

“Report to Stage Five.”

“Is Jack going to be there?”

“Stage Five.”

Jack was not in Stage Five. First, a husky and handsome woman, holding pins in her teeth in a way that made me nervous she'd skewer her tongue, hustled me into wardrobe where she told me to take off my clothes (Levi's, white T-shirt) and gave me different clothes (slightly different Levi's, slightly different white T-shirt) to put on. “I
think there's a mistake,” I said, stepping out from behind the oddly Victorian changing curtain.

“You're Paul McWeeney?” she asked.

“I am.”

“No mistake. Says right here on the call sheet,” eyeing a clipboard, “that you're playing Wallace.”

My heart and stomach tried to trade places. “Who's Wallace?”

She just blinked, tightened her lips in a sphincterly fashion, those pins pointing right at me.

On her advice, I reported to the assistant director, a small man whose too-large flannel suit made it look like he was in the slow process of shrinking. He also held—or rather, brandished—a clipboard, and I began to realize that my transition into adulthood would not be complete until I had a clipboard myself. Where could I get one of these totems of authority?

The A.D. handed me one page of a mimeographed script with the header
Presidio
, which I recognized as the new show Jack had been trying to get off the ground ever since
Rampart
went off the air. (It only now occurs to me that Jack was strangely fixated on wall-themed titles, though I am resisting the urge to offer any armchair psychological insight into this motif.) My dad had been working a little on this new show, though I didn't really know the details. From the shard of a story I had in my hands, however, Jack seemed to be setting up a new cop show, this time with a lady lead (I'd turn out to be correct). There was just a setting (INT. HIGH SCHOOL CLASSROOM—DAY), a few lines from the LINDA character that gave the basic setup (she's saying goodbye to her students, leaving teaching to join the police force),
and one line from WALLACE: “But Mrs. Polk, I thought we had a great thing here. If you're looking for criminals, you got me!” To which Linda responds, “Oh, Wallace.” This was presumably Wallace's only appearance in the show. After this, the setting would surely be limited to the mean streets and the meaner police station. Wallace was just there for this one scene to establish the kind of stern but loving camaraderie she had with her students, the idea being that she would establish a similar relationship with the lowlifes she'd encounter on the beat. But there was something about that one line of Wallace's, its attitude and humor, that I recognized—or thought I recognized—from my father. I know I'd heard him use that expression before, “I thought we had a great thing here,” always ironically, though I couldn't quite place a specific instance of it. He'd surely written this line. I knew how dense and striated the archaeology of teleplays could be, each script a palimpsest of different drafts, different writers, different ideas, but this one line was clearly a relic left behind by George McWeeney, and now it was my job to brush the thing off, hold it up to the light. Things on the set moved a bit too fast for much relic-dusting, though. The A.D. sat me down in a classroom set with a dozen kids of indeterminate age. The actress playing Linda took her place. The lights were painfully bright, like that shock of the bathroom light at 3:00
AM
, and my eyes couldn't adjust. Linda started speaking. When I heard my cue, I said my one line, confused and robotically. As I spoke, I heard my own voice the way you do on a recording: detached from the person you think you are, from the way you think you sound, the words like strange, alien phonemes, unmoored from meaning. I'd thought it was just a run-through, but I heard the director—speaking somewhere
behind the blinding lights like an adenoidal and annoyed voice from the beyond—say, “All right, moving on.” Was that it? Had I just
acted
? While everyone seemed to know where exactly they were “moving on” to, and hustled off accordingly, I was lost and just wandered around the soundstage in a haze, trying not to get in anyone's way but also hoping someone would notice me, tell me I'd done a good job, tell me where to go now. No one did. I eventually found my way back to Jack's office and was relieved to find him there, his door open. He was sitting at his desk, reading what I assumed was a script. He was wearing a suit, the tie tight, not one button undone, no concession for comfort made, and I suddenly realized that he always dressed like this. Without looking up, he asked me how it went.

“I don't know.”

“Talk to Maud. She has some paperwork for you.”

“Did my dad write that script?”

Jack looked up, though not at me. The venetian blinds we closed, but he stared at them as if looking out on the sunny day. “He did a pass on it, yes.”

“Oh.”

Jack finally looked at me. I got nervous and left.

The next day, however, I went back, ostensibly to fill out that paperwork. Jack wasn't in but Maud said she was expecting him back any minute. I sat across from her desk and took my sweet time with the paperwork, partly to wait for Jack and partly because I'd never filled out tax forms before and had no clue what my social security number was. When he finally walked in, he nodded to Maud, gave me an unsurprised hello, then walked back to his office. After a minute
fussing with the tax form, I walked into his open doorway and asked if I could ask him a few questions. “Certainly,” he said. But I wasn't sure what those questions were. All I had was an abstract curiosity. So I sat down and mumbled the aborted beginnings of many questions—what, how, why—thinking the rest of the question would formulate itself once I got there, but it never did. Finally, mercifully, Jack interrupted me and said, “I'll tell you my favorite story about your father. This was a couple years ago. My wife threw a dinner party. She'd been reading this French cookbook and was really excited to try it all out. It was our usual crowd—George, a few producer friends of mine and their wives, but also that actor, um, Albert Finney. I can't remember why he was there, but he was. Well, Clare had seen that movie he was in, the British one,
Tom Jones
, and she was all nervous about the house looking just right, even though she'd met plenty of actors over the years. Guess she really took a shine to this guy, though. And it's all going well and everyone is having a great time, and Mr. Finney and my wife are getting on famously, and the food is full of butter and cream and delicious. But later on in the evening, when we're all in the living room, we, uh, catch a whiff of something. We all do our best to ignore it at first, but eventually that Albert Finney says, ‘I do believe it smells like sewage in here.' And he was right. Turned out there were some plumbing issues, and our toilets had begun to back up. So I call a plumber and we all spend the rest of the evening in the backyard to get away from the stench. It's all fine, but of course Clare is mortified, even though we're all still having a great time, enjoying our cocktails by the pool. At the end of the evening, after the guests have left, after the plumber has righted whatever wrong needed to be righted, and
while the maid was cleaning up the mess in the bathrooms, I have to go comfort Clare, tell her it's all right, that the night was a success regardless. She starts crying, takes a Klonopin and goes to sleep. I go into the living room to have a nightcap with your father. But of course now I'm stressed because I had to deal with Clare. Anyway, George, he just looks at me and, with that straight face of his, says, ‘Jack, maybe if Clare had served more fruits and vegetables, your guests' shit would smell a little better.'”

Jack looked at me for the first time in his monologue, and I could tell from his expression that he was expecting me to laugh at this line, but I had been too busy dissecting every detail of the story (who was Albert Finney? did he know my father? who were the other guests? what was the significance of it being a French cookbook? is bad plumbing a metaphor for my father's clogged artery?) to see any humor.

“Well,” Jack continued, “it was a damn funny thing to say, but only he could have said it, and only I could have found it funny, and he knew that.”

The next day, I came back to Jack's office, again without much of a plan. Again, it was just Maud there and beneath her show of annoyance I could tell that she was starting to like me, especially when I offered to help with whatever it was she was doing. She put me to work collating scripts. She told me about her family. Her son was in the military and she paid close attention to the developments in South East Asia, fearing he'd be sent over. After collating, I delivered the scripts to production offices elsewhere on the lot. I was back on a bike, though this time at much calmer pace. I kept going back to Jack's office, and Maud kept humoring me and giving me stuff to do. Jack was always in
and out, and always made me feel welcome there. As much as I appreciated having a place to go, however, I was growing increasingly anxious about my line on
Presidio
. It was a good line, probably my father's, and I'd screwed it up. One day, I went to Jack and said that I'd like to do some more acting jobs, that I could do better. He smiled, said sure. This time, however, it wasn't as easy as him just plugging me into a role. With
Presidio
, I discovered, I'd stumbled into his office just hours after he'd found out the guy originally cast as Wallace had dropped out. Now, however, I had to do it the normal way. Pictures, auditions, the whole deal. Jack did a lot to help me out, though. He set me up with an agent and an on-set acting coach. And suddenly my life had a focus, a clear trajectory. I was handed a list of things to fill my head with, a list of things to care about: what shows and movies were currently casting, which casting directors were the ones to get in front of. It doesn't matter, I don't believe, that years later I would discover that I did not, in fact, care about these things; at the time it was all I had and so I attacked it with all I was worth. I spent those years hauling myself to auditions all over town, occasionally landing a commercial, which buoyed my hopes and gave me something I could take to Jack, always hoping for his approval, which he always gave. When I landed the role of Donny Cannon on the new pilot
Loose Cannons
, I thought, This is it, the final piece of validation after which I won't need any more. But of course the show was trivial, absurd. The lines were hackneyed and I had to repeat them so many times in rehearsals and take after take that I began to remember my first moment in front of the camera, when I said my father's line and heard nothing but meaningless sounds come out of my mouth. By the time we were filming
Loose Cannons
before a
live studio audience, their desperate, rabid laughter just embarrassed me, shamed me even. After that show was canceled and I returned to school, I had what felt like an epiphanic moment—although, sure, in those days epiphanies were frequent and drug-tinged, but no less exhilarating—when someone—a girl addicted to polka dots and opium—played for me—on vinyl, the white noise hissing and popping like grease on a pan—Gertrude Stein reading her poem “If I Told Him,” and I listened to the way she explored and repeated words and phrases in endless variations—
Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it
—until they were just sounds—
If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon—
empty of all meaning. It was how I had felt standing on the set of that TV show, but the emptiness had horrified me then, and now it struck me as brilliant, revolutionary. I tried to explain this to the girl in the polka dots, how I'd been an actor and knew exactly what Stein was doing here, but she (the girl, not Stein) was unimpressed with my exegesis and did not let me fuck her.