Blue Movie (7 page)

In order to fully exploit the event, Les had shut down production on
Until She Screams
for the entire day, at, needless to say, considerable expense to the studio. It would be difficult then, to exaggerate his pique in learning that Miss Sterling, the fabulous object of all these arrangements, had, in fact, failed to show.

After waiting for more than an hour, there was no alternative to getting on with it, so a substitute was chosen. Trying to replace the boss beauty simply with an everyday run-of-the-mill beauty would have been folly. Instead they chose, and quite wisely, a very pretty little girl of seven, with a pink ribbon in her hair.

This substitution might have proved satisfactory, though far from ideal, granted, had not the girl, in her inexperience, and nervousness, missed with the ribboned bottle, and worse, was carried forward by her own momentum, lost her footing, and fell from the pier and into the water below, very nearly drowning before she was pulled out. All in all, the christening and the launching had been a fiasco—the worst, according to some, in naval history.

“I’ll
kill
her,” Les said to Eddie, “as God is my witness, I will
kill
her!” Then, very softly, he began to weep. “It’s not
fair,
Eddie,” he said, “it’s just not
fair . . .
and even worse, it’s . . . it’s
insulting”—he
glanced at the large portrait—“. . . especially to Dad. After all he’s done for her, the cunt. I swear to God, Eddie, if we weren’t eight weeks into the picture, and her in every goddamn shot, I’d fire her ass! Right off the picture! I don’t care
how
much she’s worth at the box office! Right off the picture! I swear to God!”

He paused, touching at his eyes with a Kleenex, shaking his head slowly, like an old man in unspeakable grief, listening to Eddie.

“Yes, Eddie, I know, I know,” he said quietly. “She’s got us by the nuts, the cunt.”

11777 S
UNSET
B
OULEVARD
, a gigantic stucco edifice of lavender and antique gold, surrounded by a spiked twelve-foot wall and an actual moat, was the home of Angela Sterling—beloved sex-goddess of silver screen and living color—whose last three times out had each grossed more than previous all-time champ at the box, big
GWTW.

So incredible was her public appeal that it was literally not possible to open a magazine or newspaper without being confronted by yet another elaborately footnoted chapter of her rather imaginary life—imaginary in the sense that it was almost totally fabricated by the studio publicity department. And a grand job they did, too; her “page-count-index,” by which such matters are judged, was twice as high as that of Jackie Kennedy during the latter’s climax, exposure-wise.

Approaching the house was like approaching a major studio:
Impasseville
at the gate. Unless you were expected, the big iron doors of the wall simply remained shut come what might. If and when they did open, it was necessary to pass a gatehouse occupied by two uniformed and armed attendants, who, after ascertaining the guest’s identity, would cause the drawbridge over the moat to lower. It was generally believed that the natural security afforded by the moat was augmented by the fact that its dark waters were seething with flesh-eating piranha fish—but this was just more “studio bullshit,” as it was sometimes called by the two men with the guns, resenting as they did the implication that they alone were not enough to protect their movie-land princess, “without a bunch of goddamn fish stinking up the joint!”

It was through these portals, and past this boss-freak vigilance, that Boris and Sid had made their way, two hours earlier. And at almost precisely the moment when the perfect Miss Sterling should have been launching a battleship, she was delightedly signing a letter of agreement to play “one of the romantic leads,” as Sid had described it, “in a film, as yet untitled and unscripted, to be directed by Boris Adrian, and to be shot in and around Vaduz, Liechtenstein, principal photography to commence within three weeks of this agreement, dated May 2, 1970.

Boris had also signed, and then Sid had been quick to add, with a flourish, his own signature following “witnessed by . . .”

“Gosh,” said the girl, all smiling radiance, clasping her hands and raising them to her throat as though to trap the ecstasy before it could flutter out and away, bluebird of happiness style, “I just never thought it could happen! I still can’t believe it!”

Sid was beaming fanatically as he folded the paper and put it in his pocket. “Oh, it’s happened all right,” he said, nodding, “yessiree bob!”

“Well,” she said breathlessly, “let’s have some champagne or something!” And she rang for the maid.

If it was curious that Angela’s pleasure about these unexpected developments was equal even to gross Sid’s, it was also understandable. Despite her monstro wealth, her incredible boss beauty, her outlandish power—or, by way of summary, her fantastic “success”—she was truly a girl bereft. Two years previous she had undergone a fast and furious affair with a New York writer who had turned her on to certain phenomena
variés,
existence of which she had not previously suspected. It was nothing spectacular, just the standard below-Fourteenth-Street primer, or bag o’ tricks as some called it:
I Ching,
Living Theatre, Lenny Bruce,
The Realist,
Fugs, Grateful Dead, and so on, including the voguish notion that movies should or could be
“good.”

Next, of course, she had found herself at Actors Workshop—not as a member (they wouldn’t accept her) but as “a distinguished visitor from the film capital,” auditing, four hours a week. It was there she learned she knew nothing whatever about her profession, and it gave her pause.

The studio (Metropolitan Pictures) flipped—first, because she was even interested in such a crackpot thing as a New York acting school, and second, and more important, because her being rejected had made the morning papers.

Her agent, Abe “Lynx” Letterman, was nonplussed. “Look, baby,” he gently chided, “we’re walking away with one million fucking dollars a picture—is that
spit?”

“It isn’t that, Abe,” she tried to explain, “it’s just that, well, there are more important things in life than . . . money.”

“Say, that really grabs me, that does,” Abe fumed, “so whatta you
do
with them—cut ’em up and put ’em in the
freezer?”

Angela Sterling, née Helen Brown, in the Oak Cliff section of Amarillo, Texas; age fourteen, cute-as-a-button drum majorette at James Bowie High; age sixteen, voted Most Beautiful Girl in the Senior Class; age seventeen, Miss Texas; and later that same year, in Atlantic City, she received the uniquely fun-laurels of Miss America.

And now she was twenty-four, veteran trooper of the silver screen and highest paid thesp in the history of cinema. But, here, the crux: although she had appeared in seventeen pictures, starring in the last twelve, not only had she never been nominated for
any
award, she had scarcely received a single decent notice. Granted, one of two kindly reviewers would occasionally refer to a “certain natural ability”—comparing her in this, and other (“natural”) regards, to the late Marilyn Monroe—but her only real accolades came in the form of several thousand fan letters a week . . . exclusively in the language of the adolescent, the moron, and the sex-nut. Thus, to Angela Sterling, at this critical point in her life and career, the prospect of working with the King B. Boris was salvation itself.

“Tell you what, Angie,” big Sid cautioned, “let’s just keep this on the q.t. for the time being, okay? That way, the studio, Lynx, Les Harrison . . . they don’t know, they don’t worry—when the time is ripe, we spring it—you know, with a lot of classy PR, the real thing. Okay?”

“Sure thing,” gushed Angie, and beamed from one to the other, “whatever you say.”

The Magic of the Lens

T
HE SPIRES, TOWERS,
turrets, and snow-capped peaks which compose the storybook skyline of Vaduz, Liechtenstein, also belie its essential fifteenth-century character.
Heidi-time . . .
Heidi-time in Heidiville. The nearest town of consequence is Zurich, seventy miles to the west—seventy miles, that is, as the 707 flies, except there are no airports in Liechtenstein, so that the trip from Zurich to Vaduz, meandering over mountain passes by train and bus, takes three hours. Therefore the first order of business on the part of Krassman Enterprises, Ltd., was to build an airstrip. This was accomplished by capable Production Manager Morty Kanowitz and his advance unit, who bribed and otherwise cajoled a local construction firm into working round the clock, in all weathers, to complete a 3,000-foot asphalt airstrip in forty eight hours.

“How ’bout that?” said Sid, not without a trace of pride, as their chartered twin-Cessna touched down smoothly on the virgin strip. “Old Morty’s right on the ball, huh?” Saying this with a nudge and wink at B., to suggest that it was, in truth, he, Sid Krassman who was on the ball in having accomplished this important step in their operation.

“Is it long enough for a jet?” asked Boris, peering out dubiously.

“Are you kidding?” demanded Sid with great indignation, albeit somewhat nervous, “do you think I’d make a goof like that, for Chrissake?”

Boris shrugged. “Looks short to me.”

Sid deprecated the judgment with a wave of his hand. “Ah, well, you’re talking about the
Concorde,
one of those
big
mothers—”

“No, man, I’m talking about a DC-Nine. I’m talking about five thousand feet.”

Sid scrutinized the strip with a frown as the plane turned and taxied over to where a gigantic Mercedes 600 waited, with three men standing beside it—able Morty Kanowitz and his trusty assistant, Lips Malone, the third party being dapper Art Director Nicky Sanchez.

The Mercedes 600 is the largest car in the world; an exaggerated limousine, about twenty-seven feet long, it looked oddly disproportionate against the miniature airstrip.

Giant hellos were exchanged all around, and Boris and Sid were flourished into the front-facing back seat to sit opposite Morty and the art director, while Lips slipped in alongside the driver—this being the present pecking order within the tiny hierarchy.

“Ya looking
beautiful,”
Morty was saying, with a playful slap to Sid’s knee, “both you guys are looking
beautiful,
for Chrissake!”

Morty, a short, fat sort of professional Bronx type, had complemented his smart Cardin combo with regional headgear—a tight-brim Tyrolean featuring two colorful feathers—as, of course, had his front-seat shadow, Lips Malone.

“I’m telling you,” Morty went on, “you guys are going to
love
it here!” He shook his head, rolling his eyes up, Eddie Cantor style, to indicate his hat. “Look, we gone native awready!”

Sid stared morosely at the short runway, then turned to scowl at Morty.

“Get rid of that freaky hat, will ya,” he growled. “Makes you look like a goddamn fruit!”

T
HE PRODUCTION OFFICE
had been set up on the top floor of the Imperial Hotel—a squat, four-story brown brick building in the middle of town.

“Come on,” said Morty, with a slightly nervous laugh, as he led Boris, somber in dark glasses, and Sid, mopping his perspiring brow, down a half-lit hotel hallway, “I’ll show you around the lot.”

An old-line production manager who knew where his bread was buttered, so to speak—or, in other words, a sort of sycophantic ass-hole—fat Mort had already fixed their names, in raised cardboard letters, painted gold, on the doors which they passed now in succession:

SIDNEY H. KRASSMAN

Executive Producer

BORIS ADRIAN

Director

MORTON L. KANOWITZ

Production Manager

ART DEPARTMENT

Nicholas Sanchez

WARDROBE

Helen Vrobel

ACCOUNTING

Nathan A. Malone

All the rooms were the same—ordinary hotel rooms, except that a desk and three telephones had been installed, and a large couch instead of a bed. Another unusual feature of each was a young, but not-too-nifty, miniskirted girl sitting behind a typewriter, smiling up eagerly when introduced as “Gretel,” “Gretchen,” “Gertrude,” “Hildegarde,” etc.

“Where’d you get those broads?” asked Sid, scowling. “I don’t know whether I’m at a whorehouse or a dog show!”

“Believe me, Sid,” Morty explained, “I could of gotten some ravers, but it was hard enough finding broads that could unnerstan’ English, let alone
type,
for Chrissake! So I thought to myself, ‘what the hell, the picture comes first!’ Am I right?” He cast a beseeching look around to the others.

“Whad’ya say the name of mine was?” Sid wanted to know.

“Grunhilde!”
said Morty, with a vaudeville leer and wink. “Takes twenty-seven words a minute and gives the best head in the city!”

Sid guffawed, and Morty, thus encouraged, tried to follow it up, grinning crazily:

“Swallows
it too, Sid—just the way you like it, huh?”

Sid, in grand good humor now, and wanting to infect the silent Boris with it, gave a snort of mock derision: “‘Best head in the city’!
What
fuckin’ city? This tank?” He looked at Boris in hopes of an appreciative take, but the latter seemed not to have heard, and Sid thought he might have said the wrong thing. “Not that we can’t make a whale of a movie in a
tank-town!”
he added, then nudged Boris, desperate enough now to insist.
“Get
it, King?
‘Whale?’ ‘Tank?’
Haw-haw!”

Morty, of course, joined in the laugh—but too heartily, considering the way the shaded B. looked at them now—one to the other, with a sort of deadpan compassion—so he choked it off abruptly.

“Yeah, I get it, Sid,” said Boris then with a sad smile. “‘Whale,’ ‘tank.’ Terrific. I guess I was thinking of something else.”