How to Save Your Own Life (17 page)

I hung up the phone with relief.

What was the point of calling Penny anyway? What was the point of dialing the past? Penny and I were not antagonists. We were fellow sufferers. My rage at her was just what Bennett might have wanted. She was not so bad really. An intelligent girl who quit college to marry a West Point cadet and almost immediately had six kids. She found herself moving from one part of the world to another every two years, having her babies while Lieutenant, Captain, Major, and finally Lieutenant Colonel Robby Prather was in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, or on field maneuvers in rural Germany. He came home chiefly to knock her up. And for a while it wasn't so bad—or at least, she thought there was nothing better. She was like me. She rationalized her marriage. But she was braver than I was. With six children, at the age of thirty-two, she picked up and left Robby, saying there had to be more to life than shlepping from one army base to another as he collected more and more spaghetti on his hat. Her affair with Bennett had been the catalyst for her leaving. It had opened her eyes. Good for her. It had opened my eyes too. But
she
was the courageous one. At thirty-two, she went back to finish college and got a degree in psychology. Had Bennett helped her to do that? Very well then, he had helped
someone.
Maybe there are times when we can help other people's spouses and not our own. And maybe that's better than helping no one at all.

The phone rang in my study and I made a dash for it. I was thinking so hard about Penny that I was sure it was going to be Penny.

“Hello,” I said, breathless.

“Hello.” The voice was unfamiliar at first, but nothing like Penny's.

“Who's
this?”
I asked.

“Who's
this?”
came the petulant Brooklynese reply. I was suddenly frightened. The very intonation was intimidating. “This is Britt Goldstein,” the voice went on. “I just got in from the Coast.”

Hello to Hollywood ...

Britt Goldstein belonged to a subspecies of human I had not been privileged to meet before I became famous: the Com pleat Parasite. She had no talents, no abilities, no charm, and boundless
chutzpa.
She lived by ripping-off the achievements of others: their work, their lives, their money. The money was the least of it. What was so infuriating about Britt was the way she identified herself with me, claimed to “understand” my book and to be more candid than the real Candida.

Britt and I were as different as Adolf Hitler and John Keats, yet I think that for a while I was as fascinated by her as I was repelled. Writers always get into trouble because they become fascinated by charisma—if utter vulgarity is a form of charisma.

Britt referred to herself as “B.G.” the air conditioner as the “a.c.,” her birth control pills as her “b.c.” pills, her Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud as the “S.C.” She was born in Flatbush, made a brief detour to Manhattan's Upper East Side, then went directly to Hollywood without passing Go. She lived in “Bev Hills,” loved “Mex” food, snorted “c,” rolled the tightest “j‘s” in the history of middle-class marijuana-smoking, had her “l's” waxed at Elizabeth Arden in Beverly Hills, her “h” frizzed at Kenneth in New York, and her two favorite expressions were “No pain, no gain” and “That's junior.” (“No pain, no gain” really meant “Your pain, my gain,” and “junior” meant “It's tacky if you do it, classy if
I
do it.”) She might have been entirely comical if she didn't cause so many people so much pain, in the process of grabbing so much gain. The key to Britt's personality was her voice: it whined, wheedled, and insulted the intelligence of the ear it slithered into. It was such a bad imitation of guile and cunning that in the beginning nobody ever took it for what it was: guile and cunning. Britt threw everyone off at first because they could never believe she was what she appeared to be: a shark in shark's clothing.

I met Britt through my unscrupulous New York agents—a firm with the improbable name of Creativity and Glory, Ltd. (better known as C&G). Britt had done time in publishing houses in New York (where she read slush piles), in an advertising agency (where she wrote ads for cunt sprays), at a ladies' magazine (where, monthly, she made up horoscopes), at a lecture agency (where she learned to falsify expense records). As a producer, she was able to bring all these nefarious skills together.

With the lack of imagination peculiar to her profession, Britt stayed at the Sherry-Netherland. She had a big suite with yellow-and-green silk curtains and telephones even in the bathrooms. This the “Sherry” and the “Bev Hills” have in common: telephones everywhere. God forbid you should miss a call while taking a shit or drinking cocktails. Every one of the plusher suites in each hotel has telephones by the can, and the cocktail lounges feature plug-in phones, which can be brought to the tables. Both, I humbly submit, are strictly for show. What producer, however crass, would negotiate on the phone while grunting out a large turd? In a profession in which appearances are all, and substance is the one utterly dispensable element, no one would ever think of putting a telephone to that use. Nor would anyone dream of having any significant business conversation in a cocktail lounge filled with one's eavesdropping competitors. So the plentitude of phones is strictly to impress the greenhorns. Like me. Enter Isadora Greenhorn, hapless author about to say hello to Hollywood.

Britt always made you meet her on her turf. She had come to New York to woo me, but began by insisting that I come to her hotel. Big gangsters do likewise, I'm told. So did the Wizard of Oz. Always bring the trembling supplicant onto one's own turf. And the Sherry-Netherland bears the same relation to Hollywood as the Russian embassy does to Russia: once within its portals, you are no longer a citizen of your own country.

If only I had trusted my first impression of Britt Goldstein! What grief could be avoided in this life if we trusted our first impressions! But I deceived myself. I was, like most members of my generation, in love with movies. I loved the unique ability they had to insinuate their way into our dreams, making the dreamer forget which images were celluloid and which were spontaneous generations of the synapses. I was also fascinated with Hollywood—its legendary evil, its Medusa-like power to destroy those who gazed at it. Of course, I pooh-poohed the stories. I knew which of my high school cronies had wound up in Hollywood—and they were, with a few notable exceptions, the least promising, the least imaginative, the most likely to be pacified for the world's injustices with Rolls-Royces, mansions, swimming pools, and a ready supply of cocaine. Still, I was fascinated. I had tested out most of the other clichés and found them wanting. It was time to test out the cliché of the evil of Hollywood.

 

The test begins in the Sherry-Netherland the day after Britt's fateful phone call.

First impressions. Britt Goldstein lies in a yellow chaise drinking a gin and tonic while her old high school friend from Flatbush, Sue Slotnik, gets up to let me in. That in itself tells the story: she does not get up to greet me. She reclines, her waxed legs from Elizabeth Arden exposed in the slit of an Indian caftan from Bendel's. She is tiny (about four feet ten), thin (I never trust anybody that thin), passionately orange-haired, with icy eyes and a hard little mouth. Her nose is bobbed into that curious S curve (a cheese paring? a crescent moon?) possessed by fully half the Jewish women in Beverly Hills. (If all the missing pieces of nose in Beverly Hills could be put end to end, they would reach all the way back to Poland!) But her mouth tells all. The tight muscles that pull on either side of her thin lips reveal her spiritual stinginess, her total lack of generosity. Apparently “No pain, no gain” is not a life credo that leads to the growth of the spirit.

“Hi.” The voice is nasal, almost a vaudeville parody of the voice of a Jewish girl from Brooklyn. “Hoyyy” would be the dialect-writer's transliteration. “This is my friend, Sue Slotnik —we're just catching up on old times.”

“Hoyyy,” says Sue.

“Hi,” say I.

The grouping of figures signifies everything—as in a Michel angelo
pietà.
Britt still reclining, Sue fumbling with her purse, me standing awkwardly above the couch to extend my hand.

Now, I should tell you-tell myself, really—that I have met Nobel Prize winners, living legends, mayors (if not presidents), and princes (if not kings) without the least nervousness, but there with Britt (whose diction alone would have caused me to snub her in my younger and more snobbish years) I was frightened. She had some weird kind of authority. The authority of the street urchin, perhaps. The authority of the playground bully—but authority nonetheless. You sensed at once that Britt would win out over others—not because she was either more intelligent or craftier—but because she would stoop to things no one else would even think of. I learned later, for example, from a former friend of hers (all her friends, as far as I could tell, were former friends) that when shopping for material to make curtains or slipcovers (back in the days when she did such mundane things) she would tear the fabric when the salesman's back was turned and then demand a discount from him without so much as a tremble in her throat. If I were a gentile, she would have confirmed my worst suspicions about Jews. If I were a man, she would confirm my worst mistrust of women. If I were old, she would have made me lose faith in the younger generation. But I was none of those things—so I quashed my mistrust of Britt and listened avidly while she told me what my book was “about.”

Sue Slotnik soon withdrew. I seem to recall her walking out of the hotel room backward—as courtiers were once said to have left the company of the king—but surely that is memory falsifying. Anyway, she left. With humility. And Britt continued to lie there regally on the chaise like the queen of mud-pies, the queen of leg wax, the queen of plastic charge plates.

“When I first read your book,” she said, “I knew it was the story of my life—and I knew immediately we'd be lifelong friends.” (I have come to understand, partly through my experience with Britt, to mistrust anyone who attempts to begin a business relationship with the expression lifelong
friends.
The less friendship is mentioned the better. The more friendship is mentioned the less likely one ever is to see a check.) “I see your book as the story of a woman's discovery that she can save her own life ...” (You will have to imagine the accent and the extreme nasality, coupled with the high-flown content.) And I just sat there like an idiot while she regaled me with the erroneous
explication de texte
of a book which, till that day, I'd supposed I'd written.

She wanted to option the screen rights and mentioned, that very night, an insultingly low figure. I'd consult my agent, I said, and instantly she switched into the role of bully. Nobody else would do it, she said; nobody else would buy it. Instead of saying “So what?” I got scared and saw all my celluloid dreams being burned away.

“If you really like the book as much as you say, why are you telling me nobody else will buy it?” Asking the question was already a show of weakness. With bullies, one does not question, one demands. Or walks away. But, unfortunately, it took me two more years to learn that.

“Because I take chances, I take risks, and I'm willing to take a chance on you.”

Willing to take a chance on me! This was the essence of Britt's strategy. She had come to me—whose book had already sold millions of copies—telling me she was “willing to take a chance.” She was doing me a favor, you see, like the saleslady at Saks who deigns to sell you a Trigère.

And it worked! Suddenly I was sweating, nervous, almost panicked. I visualized a wonderful Truffaut-Fellini-Bergman masterpiece based on
my
book—and all at once it went down the drain.

“You don't know what all those male-chauvinist producers would do to your work. They'll absolutely destroy it. This way, at least you know you'll have control.”

The old siren song:
Control. Artistic control. You have to give up money to get... artistic control.
The Hollywood rag. So elegant. So intelligent. Because of course you
never
get control. So if you give up money, what do you get? Nothing. And all your old pals in the literary world accusing you of having “sold out.” Ah, the literary world. They hate failure and despise success. They have contempt for authors whose books go unread and sheer hatred for authors whose books are too much read. Try to please the literary world and you will spend your life in a state of rage and bitterness. But Hollywood is simple, almost pure—if total venality is a form of purity. There, nothing at all matters but making money. And the more you make the better you are. And the end justifies any means at all.

That was why I was right to question Britt's insultingly low figure. It meant contempt for me and contempt for my work. If I accepted that, there would be no end to the insults they would ask me to accept. But if I walked away, they would suddenly get nicer. However, I had been trained by my mother to be insulted and come back for more, to be insulted and feel guilty toward my insulter. And Britt, with her street-urchin instincts, sized me up in a flash.

“Look,” she said, studying herself in a hand mirror—Britt was always studying herself in mirrors—“nothing prevents me from getting my own writer to rip off your book. It isn't all that original.”

I stared at her in disbelief. In the space of about two minutes she had utterly contradicted herself. She had just said it was the story of her life. She had just said it was absolutely unique. And she had just said it could be ripped off with no trouble at all. What stopped me from telling her to fuck off right then and there? What prevented me from saying “Go to hell” and slamming the door? Fear? Politeness? The inability to believe that anybody was really as rude, as crass, and as bullying as she appeared?