Magic Hour (9 page)
I sat still for a minute, staring out at the shimmering golden reflection of the sun in the bay. "Would a guy like me shell out six bucks to see it?"
"Hard to say, Steve. It's a film about breaking through your shell, discovering your humanity. The script has some of the best dialogue I've read in years. Genuinely witty. And some fine straight moments, before the kidnapping, when each starts to reveal himself to the other and then pulls back, as if they realize they're violating some unwritten Law of Superficiality of jetset marriages. But it certainly doesn't cover any new ground. And as far as I can recall, the plot is pedestrian. But the characters are unusually well drawn for a postliterate script." He slid his glasses back on. "In case you don't know it, we are living in what is, essentially, a postliterate era."
"Oh, I do know it. It's a tragedy I've got to live with every day of my life."
"I knew you'd feel that way."
We sat in comfortable silence for a minute. When you know someone since you've been kids, you have a kind of ESP. I could sense Germy, like me, relaxing, lifting up his face to feel the sun, and wanting—really, desperately wanting—to talk about all the amazing things that had happened to the Yankees since Steinbrenner.
But I had a your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine homicide hanging over my head, so I made myself stick to the subject. "It sounds like maybe you have a qualm about the
Starry Night
script."
"Well, it could make an exciting, stylish film. But it's all in the execution. Will the actors be credible? Will you believe in the possibility of a great love between Lindsay Keefe and Nicholas Monteleone? His appeal has always been more emotional than sexual. He's essentially a man's man; all his best movies have been about relationships between men—rodeo riders, Amazon explorers..."He grinned. "Homicide cops. But the question about whether the movie will work goes beyond the two principals: Will the Colombians be offensively stereotypical Latino greasers or genuinely terrifying? How good a job will the director do on the action sequences? Will the big chase scene come off? Also, the real problem—the reason Sy didn't get studio financing—is that it was felt there is a limited audience for this type of vehicle: Cary Grant
cum
balls. It probably won't play to the under-twenty-fives. It's not moving enough to be another
The Way We Were
. And it's not a sizzler; even if Lindsay does bare her breasts once again, or decides it's time for a change and moons the camera, it won't help. First of all, audiences have seen her body too many times; there's a strong inclination to say: 'Please, madam, keep your shirt on.' In the script, the compelling sex is verbal, lighthearted man-woman word play, not sex play." He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. "Is that substantive enough?"
"Yeah. Now what about money? I've heard twenty big ones. Where does that kind of dough come from?"
"Private investors. Or banks who had faith in Sy's track record."
"If you were a bank, what kind of faith would you have?"
Germy unclasped his hands, then crossed his arms over his chest. "I'd invest—although not twenty million. That seems awfully high for a film that will be shot primarily out here and in Manhattan, even with all the lavish set decoration and costumes and an anxious director who's known for a lot of retakes. But forgetting dollars and cents, Sy's films were really good. Bankable. He believed in starting with a polished script. He'd go for the gifted actor over the big name. I always admired his movies."
"Just admired? You ever love any of them?"
He took a minute to consider the question. "No. I can't really explain it, but there was something a little smug about every picture he produced. Each one seemed to be saying: 'Aren't I sensitive? Provocative? Don't I have superb production values?' There was always intelligence and care, but never any real spirit. I suppose his films were like Sy himself."
"From the little you knew him, what did he seem like?"
"Intelligent. Polished but not slick. And for the movie business, where hugging and kissing and screaming 'Dahlink, you're a very great genius' is an institutional requirement, he was notable because he was so restrained. A gentleman." Germy stopped short.
"What are you thinking about? Even if it seems totally irrelevant."
"Well, Sy wasn't definable. He struck me as something of a chameleon. Man-about-town with men-about-town. Lover boy with women. Tough negotiator with the unions—a real dirty street fighter. And full of Jewish show-biz warmth with a couple of the old-time reporters, dropping Yiddish all over the place. The few times he and I talked, he was very professorial—as if the only thing he lived for were discussions of Fritz Lang's deterministic universe. It made me laugh because I knew he had to have gotten me confused with another critic: I never gave a flying fuck about Fritz Lang."
"Which one of his personalities came closest to being the real Sy Spencer?"
"I haven't the foggiest."
"What do you think drove him, Germy? Money? Sex? Power?"
"Well, he certainly seemed to have enjoyed all of those. But he didn't
seem
driven, even though he must have been. He could be pleasant—even charming. But some integral part of his circuitry—the part that reaches out and makes human connections—seemed ... disconnected."
"What do you know about his ex-wife Bonnie Spencer?" Germy shook his head: never heard of her. "She wrote the screenplay for a movie called
Cowgirl
."
"I remember that one. It was a nice movie."
"What was it about?"
"A widow of a small-time rancher literally puts on her husband's boots. It deals with her relationships with the ranch hands, the neighboring wives. Some moving dialogue about her passion for the land. Beautifully photographed."
"A major motion picture?"
"No. But a really decent minor one." He took off his glasses again and did some more gnawing. "Her name wasn't Spencer when she wrote it. Something else."
"Sy married her after it came out. But then none of her other screenplays ever got made." I had this vivid image of Bonnie in her bicycle shorts and too-big T-shirt leaning against the sink in her kitchen. It was not an image of a person who could in any way be in the movie business. "Ever hear anything about her?"
"No," he said.
"It sounds like he cut her loose when he realized she wasn't the hot property he thought she was."
"That sounds fairly typical. Of the industry and of Sy."
"What about Lindsay Keefe? I've been hearing her acting wasn't very good this time around."
"Well, now we move on to gossip. I've heard the same thing, and I don't doubt it. She's a very cerebral actress. Her characters tend to be focused women, intelligent, passionately devoted to whatever they're doing, sometimes capable of deep emotion: abused women who write poetry, missionaries who join obscure revolutionary movements. That sort of thing. The character in
Starry Night
, though ... she's different. Soft, endearing, the poor little rich girl. My guess is, Lindsay may be enough of an actress to project endearingness. But she's mostly head, no heart. The role would be one hell of a stretch."
"Will they stop making the movie now that Sy's dead?"
"Are you joking? Making movies is a
business
. For an actor, a director, they'd have to stop for a few days until they could get a replacement. For an executive producer ... they won't even stop for a cup of coffee."
"Did you hear anything else about what was happening on the set?"
"The usual malicious innuendos."
"Good. What are they?"
"That Sy was dissatisfied, and he and Lindsay may have actually fought over her performance. Or, even if there was no confrontation, she sensed she was in trouble with him. In either case, she took a deep breath ... and pointed her major artillery at the director, Victor Santana. Made him an ally."
"How did she get him on her side?"
"Her side? Her side was the least of it."
"No shit! Lindsay was making it with Santana?"
"Steve, when the executive producer leaves the set for the day and the director and the leading lady then proceed to hold a script conference in the director's trailer for forty-five minutes with the blinds drawn
and
they don't ask a production assistant for coffee
and
the trailer is observed rocking back and forth, what do you think?"
"
The real question was, what did Sy think? What did he know? And what had he been planning to do about Lindsay Keefe?
We sat in his kitchen eating ice cream out of pint containers, the way we used to. Halfway through, we switched; I got Germy's cookies 'n' cream and he got my coffee Heath bar crunch. Neither of those flavors had been invented when we were kids.
He told me how his mother's cancer had metastasized and how excruciating her pain had been and how she'd finally ended it by OD'ing on the Seconal she'd accumulated over a month. I told him I always thought she'd go on forever with that funny old bonnet and the pruning shears and how truly sorry I was she wasn't around anymore to call me cutie-pie.
He put down his spoon. "Steve, when we were kids, I never had the courage to ask you ... Your father just walked? Your mother supported the family?"
"Yeah. After he sold the farm, he had a few different jobs, but he'd always get canned for coming to work drunk. I'm not talking a little slurring; I'm talking pissed out of his mind. When you're working over at Agway, it isn't a plus to puke all over the biggest farmer in Bridgehampton. Anyway, he took a hike when I was eight."
"You never heard from him again?"
"No. For all I know, he could still be alive somewhere, although I wouldn't make book on it."
My father was a lazy, disgusting, dirty drunk. He was also, in rare, semi-sober moments, a sweet man, talking sports to me, buying a buck's worth of bubble gum so I could have the baseball cards. And he'd sit beside Easton as he built his model ships and say "Good work," although he couldn't help, because his hands shook with perpetual D.T.s. And once in a while he'd come up to my mother and say, " 'Ah, love, let us be true to one another,' " or " 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' "—and for that second, you could see there had once been something between them.
"You never let me come into your house," Germy said quietly, as we walked back onto the terrace. "You always had an excuse. The painters. Your mother was expecting company."
"We didn't have any money. I couldn't have even offered you a soda. And the place was falling apart. You lived here, in all this richness, and this was just your summer house."
We fell silent for a minute because, although we had often discussed Roger Maris's troubles, we had never spoken about our own; we had no idea where to take the conversation next. I got up, walked to the edge of the terrace and, for a minute, watched the brilliant red-and-white sail of a Windsurfer skim across
"That was when you were starting to get pretty wild. I remember the next summer, before college. You were drinking too much, even for a rebellious kid. I started ... not to feel comfortable with you."
"I know."
"You were bragging about breaking into houses over the winter, trashing them—for fun." He looked straight at me. "Were you just bullshitting?"
"No. And it wasn't just a little vandalism. I'd gone bad, Germ. I was stealing. Color TVs, stereos. Sold most of the stuff to a fence over in Central Islip. I pissed the money away. Booze. Records. A leather jacket. Except one time I went to Yankee Stadium. Got a terrific seat, right near first. This was going to be my perfect day. But we lost. A shitty game."
"When was that?"
"July of '66."
"A shitty year," Germy recalled. "We finished last."
"I remember. The first of many shitty years. For me. The Yankees got better. I didn't. Not for a long time." I separated my thumb and index finger by maybe an eighth of an inch. "This much," I explained. "I missed being dead or in the slammer by this much."
"That must be scary."
"Yeah, it was." I thought for a second. "Still is."
By the time I finished with Germy, it was after three o'clock. And it was a Saturday afternoon and the set of
Starry Night
was closed down. So I had the movie people come to me in our temporary headquarters in the Southampton Village P.O. I'd gotten use of the Xerox/coffee machine room for interviews—with the understanding that I could be interrupted in the event of a catastrophic copying crisis.
The room was no more or less ugly than any other small, windowless, fluorescent-lighted, metal-and-green-leatherette-chaired government-bureaucracy utility room. Its state air was perfumed with prehistoric coffee grounds and the fumes of copier fluid, its floor decorated with the pink and white and blue confetti of torn-off ends of Sweet 'n Lows, Equals and sugar packets, as well as with a dusting of white powder that was not a controlled substance but nondairy coffee lightener. It was no different from any other room where cops work: a place that was habitable yet degrading to the human spirit at the same time.
Victor Santana, the short-haired, thickly mustached, spiffy dude of a director who sat across from me, was willing himself to rise above his surroundings. He was doing a damn good job. He did not seem to belong in the room. In fact, he did not seem to belong anywhere except in a three-star restaurant, a four-star movie or a five-star hotel. The guy was one suave package: a white shirt with a dark red tie, pale-gray slacks and a charcoal sports jacket made of some priceless fabric so exclusive a guy like me would never have heard of it.
Santana's name was Hispanic, and he was a pretty intense beige, but his accent wasn't Spanish. He sounded as if he was trying to have been educated at Oxford. It didn't quite work; his diction, like his sideburns, was a little too clipped. My guess was he wouldn't deny his heritage, but neither would he cry
"Caramba!"
to an offer to be grand marshal of the Puerto Rican Day parade.
He came off as urbane, the sort of guy James Bond would banter with at a
chemin de fer
table, whatever the hell
chemin de fer
is. But despite his civil smiles and even his I'm-so-accommodating dark-eyed glints, I knew I was getting nowhere fast. He seemed to be spouting the same essential script as Lindsay:
Starry Night
was great; Lindsay was a great actress; Sy Spencer had been a great producer. "Making a film," he was explaining, veddy Britishly, each consonant a pearl, "is a collaborative process. I cannot tell you what a joy it was—artistically
and
personally—to work with Sy and Lindsay."
So I said: "Mr. Santana, please cut the shit. We know for a fact that you and Lindsay Keefe were having an affair."
His torso twitched, as if I had, for an instant, electrified his chair. "That is absolutely untrue!" he declared. He pronounced the word "ab-so-lyutely."
"We have witnesses." Of course, all we had was a secondhand report of a rocking trailer. But it was worth a shot. "Witnesses who can testify to you and Ms. Keefe—in your trailer." Suddenly he appeared to be studying the veins in his hand. After a second, though, I realized he wasn't into veins; he was communing with his wedding ring. Santana was in his mid-thirties and had had a couple of successes. Maybe he was calculating how much each lurch of the trailer would cost him if his marriage blew up. Had Lindsay been worth a hundred thou per hump? Or maybe he just felt guilty. "Why not tell me about it?"
"All right," he sighed. Total mush: here was this cosmopolitan guy who didn't have the presence of mind to ask who the witnesses were and what they had witnessed. It was going to be a cinch, because Santana was dying to Tell All. He settled his perfectly tailored ass back in the chair but leaned the rest of himself forward. "We were having an affair," he confided, real whispery, as if to say: Swear to God you won't tell. "Please understand, this is no superficial run-of-the-play liaison. It is ... well, it is a love affair. I wouldn't want you to think..."
"No problem, Mr. Santana. Listen, normally, what you do is your own business. Two people working together can fall for each other. Happens all the time. It's just that in this case, the lady's boyfriend, fiance, whatever, was shot through the head and heart. So I have to ask a few questions."
"Maybe ... Do you think I should speak to an attorney?"
"You can speak to whoever you want. Hire a whole law firm. You're a sophisticated man. You know what your rights are. But why? You're not guilty of anything, are you?"
"Of course not."
"So just answer a couple of questions. Now, to make my life easier. Or later, if you want, with your lawyer." I really wasn't trying to trip him up. I just didn't feel like hanging around until the middle of the following week when some dork in a dark-blue three-piece pinstripe could manage to get here from Manhattan, hook his thumbs onto his vest pockets and give me a harangue on prosecutorial discretion. "Did Sy know about you and Lindsay?"
"No. Of course not."
"How do you know?"
"I asked. I was a bit nervous, but she said she was certain."
"Everything seemed lovey-dovey between them?"
"I'm quite certain he thought so."
"Which means what?"
"Which means he didn't know how Lindsay felt about me—and I about her." You know those hearts-and-flowers stories you read where the hero's eyes shine? Well, Victor Santana's eyes started to shine. He glowed with the glory of love. You wouldn't think a grown-up guy with such an expensive sports jacket could be such a sap, but he was.
"Was Sy happy with her acting?" This clearly was not Santana's favorite question. His glow dimmed. He sat up straight, tense. He tried to calm himself by stroking his tie; it had lots of little shield designs that I guess were supposed to be club insignias, or family crests. "Hey, Mr. Santana, I've been talking to a lot of people. I have an idea of what's going on, so do us both a favor. Don't get creative. Was Sy happy with what Lindsay was doing?"
"He was not thrilled."
"Objectively, how was she?"
"She was wonderful. I mean that sincerely." He stopped whacking off his tie; he started rotating his wedding ring.
"So Sy Spencer was wrong?"
"Yes. Completely."
"Why would a smart producer like him think an actress—someone who he's also supposed to be in love with—is crapping up his movie? Especially if she's not?"
"Sy wanted total control over every aspect of Lindsay's life. When she started showing the smallest signs of independence, he began to undermine her—so she would be more dependent on him." Santana's script was a little different from Lindsay's, but it was pretty clear from his mechanical delivery who had written his lines. "Sy was terrified of losing her. So he played on her vulnerability. Superficially, Lindsay seems strong. But she's a very vulnerable woman."
"What did Sy say to you about her acting?"
"He indicated that he felt Lindsay was cold." Santana shook his head as if unable to comprehend such insensitivity—except the gesture was way overdone, like an actor in a silent film.
"What did he want you to do?"
"He told me to warm her up."
"Did you try to warm her up in the acting area?"
"No. Truly, it wasn't necessary. She was giving a smashing performance." Come on, I wanted to say. Get real, Santana. Your old man was probably a building superintendent, and here you are saying "troooly" and "smahshing." "The warmth was there," he was explaining. "Not in words. But in a million tiny gestures. The camera really doesn't lie, you know."
"You saw this warmth in the dailies they show?"
"Definitely."
"Who else saw it? Besides you and Lindsay?" In his silence, I could feel Santana's embarrassment. So I changed the subject before he could start resenting me. "What about your work? Was Sy happy with it?"
Santana let go of his wedding ring and glanced up. "Other than our disagreement over Lindsay, I think he was pleased. This was only our third week of shooting."
"Did he ever have it out with you over how you were directing Lindsay?" More silence. "Come on. Why should I hear a lot of fancy stories from third parties when I should hear the plain truth from you?"
"He said..." He shook his head as if refusing to give words to the unspeakable.
"What?"
"He said if Lindsay didn't start showing some real warmth..."
"He'd do what?"
"He'd replace me with someone who would be able to..."
"Say it."
"He was ... crude. What do they say about men like Sy? You can take the boy out of Brooklyn, but you can't take the Brooklyn out of the boy. He said, and I quote: 'Give her a kick in the clit and get her to act like a real woman.' "
"End quote," I said.
"Oh, yes indeed," he agreed. "End quote."
I wasn't really sure why Nicholas Monteleone was such a famous actor. It's not that he was bad-looking. Dark-brown hair, matching eyes. Big lips that critics probably called sensuous. And for a slim guy, lots of muscles, even in unnecessary places, like his forearms, as though he moonlighted as a blacksmith.
If
he'd worked in Homicide, he'd be second or third best-looking. But that someone was paying him a million bucks a movie because he was such a hunk? I'd seen a couple of his pictures, and he'd never looked like a leading man to me. He had no intriguing dark corners; despite his sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes, he was all sunshine and light.
But he did look like his part in
Starry Night
: a playboy. His thick, almost shoulder-length hair was moussed back on the sides. He'd rolled up the cuffs of his pale-pink shirt just once, and miraculously, they stayed that way. But sitting in the Xerox/coffee room, Nick wasn't playing it smooth. More: Forget I'm a world-famous star. I'm a regular guy. Come on, let's be friends!
Temporary friendship was fine with me. He seemed genuinely good-natured, and what the hell, it's nice to have a movie star trying to grin his way into your heart. But for all his pleasantness, Nick Monteleone didn't seem to know anything worth knowing. Had he seen Sy angry? Hmmm. No, didn't think so. Had anyone been angry at Sy? Ummm, not that I know of. That type of thing for twenty minutes.
"Uhhh," he finally said, "I know this is a serious business, and I'm probably acting like a self-centered asshole, but I've gotta ask. By any chance did you happen to catch me in
"Yeah," I told him. It wasn't anything I'd go to the movies for; I'd caught it on cable, although I wasn't about to tell him that. "You were very good." In fact, he had gotten a lot of it right: the camaraderie of a homicide squad, the compulsive twenty-hour workdays and, especially, the fatigue. But he'd worn a shoulder holster—which hardly anyone I know wears—and he'd been physically slow, almost clumsy. By the time he'd have drawn his gun, he would have been dead about forty seconds; he hadn't moved right. And now, watching him, I realized he couldn't even sit right. He was doing the relaxed, manly, lean-back-on-the-two-rear-legs-of-the-chair, when suddenly he lost his balance and almost crashed over backward. He saved himself, barely, but couldn't admit defeat by bringing the chair down on all four legs, so for a minute his feet did a hysterical cha-cha until he regained his balance. Forget his expensive muscles; I saw that Nick had the coordination of a Frankenstein windup toy. When he was a kid, the guys probably muttered, "Not Monteleone!" when they were picking teams.
"Did you get what my character was about?" he asked. "I mean, did
you
buy him?"
"Sure."
Actually, thinking about it, I remembered shaking my head, wondering how come this white Chicago homicide lieutenant (in movies, homicide-cop heroes are always lieutenants) had a combo black-
Now
, putz.
"I mean, you probably think I'm just another narcissistic actor—and you're probably right—but I am just honestly curious: Could I have been someone you work with?"
What he wanted, I realized all of a sudden, was unconditional acceptance. Not just as my friend. As my colleague. I had to love him totally—and prove my love—or he wouldn't open up to me. So I gushed. "You know, it was the goddamnedest thing! You really were one of us," I told him. "No shit, you could have had the desk next to mine at Headquarters."
Nicholas's entire body eased. He let up on his macho chair routine. He stretched out his legs, crossed his feet at his ankles. He was wearing some kind of step-in shoes made from lots of thin strips of leather; they probably had some foreign name my brother would know.
"Tell me about dailies," I asked him, now that we were practically best friends, to say nothing of partners. "What are they exactly? The whole day's worth of film?"
"The film has to be processed, so what you're seeing is the footage shot the day before. All the takes. The director and the editor sit in the back and talk—whisper, actually—about which take is good, which isn't, what coverage they'll use, what kind of light and color corrections they'll want to order."
"Who else goes to see them?"
"Actors. Sometimes. Personally, I'm
superanalytical
about my own work, and I like to see what everybody else is doing too. You know. Like how is my lighting? My costume? My makeup?"
"Did Lindsay go to dailies?"
Nicholas compressed his big lips. "No. She always rushed back to Sy's house to work out. Swam laps in his pool. Had to keep those pecs toned."
"How come she didn't want to see her acting? She's supposed to be smart. Isn't she analytical about her work the way you are?"
"The real truth? Lindsay is an egomaniac." This said by a guy who went every night to watch his makeup. "She's totally convinced she can gauge her performance as she gives it, so why bother to see herself? Besides"—Nicholas shook his head wearily—"if she wants a reaction, all she has to do is look into Spanish Eyes after each take. You get what I'm saying? She can see her brilliance reflected."