The Cutting Room (8 page)

Afterward, as the sun was setting, Jeanine and I walked along the pier. We played Foosball, which I lost, and avoided gang members who pushed past and occasionally rammed into tourists. Looking at the water, we talked about
Baby Face
, the 1933 film we had just seen, which starred a very young Barbara Stanwyck.

“She sleeps her way up the corporate ladder,” I said. “It’s pretty raunchy, even for that period.”

“I know,” she said, “but they changed the ending.”

“I know. She has to become poor, and be punished—”

“I know, with that crude shot of the smokestacks of the bad neighborhood, cut in from—”

“Right, the earlier scene.”

There was no point in either of us mentioning that some speeches in
Baby Face
were redubbed to make them more “moral.” We both already knew.

The pleasure of being a trivial person is not just in knowing but in
telling
. Not being able to tell Jeanine anything made me feel more distant from her. Oddly, it made her feel more close. Maybe this was the difference between us, or the difference between men and women, I wasn’t sure.

Either way, sitting on a bench, she let her head drop down onto my shoulder. And, either way, I kissed her.

She pulled back, a bit flustered by my mild aggression. Before this, she had made every move, and maybe this had been safer. Just as her actions often seemed conflicted—maternal or amorous? kind or erotic?—perhaps her feelings were, too. I let it pass. I was no one to talk about romantic mental health.

“Thanks for coming with me,” I just said.

“Of course,” she answered. “I wanted to help.”

“But I guess there’s only so much that people like us can find out.”

“I guess so.”

We walked back to the car, left in the pier parking lot. Jeanine pushed the key in the lock, but, strangely, it was already open.

“Oh, no,” she said.

“You locked it, right?”

“Right.”

We both stood there, hesitant to get in.

“Jesus,” Jeanine said. “Do you think those kids, the gangs were . . . are the windows all—I hope they didn’t break anything, I didn’t buy any insurance in the rent-a-car—”

But she was stopped short in her list of worries. A hard, cold object was placed to the side of my head. Then, a voice—light, high, whispery, one I had heard many times before—spoke into my ear.

“Don’t even breathe, baby.”

It wasn’t Ben Williams, no matter what I thought.

It was a young gang member, his face hidden by the hood of his jacket. He sat in the backseat as Jeanine drove, his gun trained on the backs of our heads.

“Pretty good imitation, huh?” he said, with a slight Latino accent, and chuckled.

“You sure fooled us,” I said faintly.

“Hey, you should hear my Rosie.”

This remark, among others, suggested that this was no ordinary Crip or Blood. The route he made us take went not into any dicey neighborhood but straight up through the pricey hills of Malibu.

The sun had set, and there was little light on the roads. Even Jeanine’s driving was tested by the conditions, and her breathing was labored, as if she was unable to conceal her fear.

“ ‘I guess this is what they call true love,’ ” the boy said, with expert mimicry of Ben Williams’s wife. “Good, right?”

Spartacus
contained a controversial scene that suggested Laurence Olivier’s character is bisexual. Cut from the film in 1960, it was included in its 1991 reissue. Olivier, however, was dead, and Anthony Hopkins had to dub his voice.

“Okay, stop the car here,” he said.

Jeanine did. Way up in the hills, there was only darkness around us, and great gaps between houses. In the distance, we heard some sort of barking or baying, perhaps the coyotes that are said to roam L.A.

“All right, lady,” he said, then went immediately into another imitation. “ ‘Hey, lay-dy! Nice lay-dy!’ Who’s that?”

“Jerry Lewis, of course.” Jeanine still managed to be imperious, but with a shaky voice.

Jerry Lewis’s lost film is
The Day the Clown Cried
, a drama about a clown who had to lead children into the ovens in German concentration camps. Monetary problems caused it never to be finished. It may run a close second to
The Magnificent Ambersons
for most coveted lost film.

“All right, lady, that’s it for you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, you don’t drive,” the boy said evenly. “Right? So she drove, and now we don’t need her anymore.”

“But what are you going to do?” I said. “You can’t—”

“Don’t worry. It’s not what you think. We’re just going on without her.”

“But—just leave her here?” I said. “This is nowhere.”

“I’ll be fine,” Jeanine said, her voice more wiggly.

“First of all, this isn’t nowhere, it’s Malibu. And secondly, we’re not leaving
her
, she’s leaving
us
.”

The argument had fatigued everyone. The boy undid his seat belt—which surprisingly he had buckled—and opened the back door.

“You and I’ll do the rest on foot.”

“I’d like to stay,” Jeanine said, “if it’s all right with you.”

“It’s not,” he said bluntly.

Jeanine looked over at me, and I could make out her worried eyes in the dark. I winked one of my own worried eyes back at her.

“Bye bye, baby,” the boy sang, as a less convincing Marilyn Monroe. “Remember you’re my baby, when they give you the eye . . .”

He had finished getting out. I started to do the same, feeling Jeanine’s fingers trailing down my hand. I gripped hers before going.

Jeanine drove away, slowly, with obvious reluctance. Then I hoofed up the rest of the steep hill with my young friend. All the while, he had his gun placed squarely in the small of my back.

“That’s really not necessary,” I said. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Sorry, but I
am
a gunsel, you know, like that guy in
The Maltese Falcon
.” He did a mediocre Bogart. “ ‘You’re taking the fall.’ ”

Panting, I mentioned, “The John Huston movie was the third version. Did you know that?”

“No,” he said, genuinely interested. “Is that right?”

“Yes. One of them starred Bette Davis.”

“As Sam Spade?”

“No,” I said, actually smiling.

“Well, I should hope not.” He did a not-bad Bette.

“In the other, Ricardo Cortez was the lead.”

“A Latino? No kidding, that’s cool.” His tone became more confidential. “I’m a big film fan. That’s why this is my dream job.”

I was touched by the boy’s reaction to my information. Perhaps he was a trivial person-in-training. God knows we are an aging crowd, and we sorely lack minority representation.

I faltered on the stony street, and felt his gun stick painfully into my spine. Just as with Dick Burke, there was a limit to our camaraderie.

Then, through the darkness, a house appeared.

It wasn’t much bigger than a shack, but a satellite dish on the lawn hinted at wealth within. So did the two rottweilers slowly parading and protecting the grounds.

“Okay,” he said, incoherently using trade talk, “hope you get points.” Then he went into Arnold. “
’Hasta la vista, baby.’
I already been where you’re going.”

Slowly, I felt his gun withdraw. I faintly heard a fizzing sound, and realized that the boy was urinating in the street behind me—from nervousness or ignorance, I didn’t know. Then he left me there alone.

I looked at the huge dogs, who looked back, slightly perplexed. I remembered watching a TV movie version of
The Call of the Wild
, starring John Beck. In the scenes of dogs fighting, they are clearly playing, their growls dubbed in.

Hesitantly, I approached the two, and they gathered around me, sniffing, not snarling. Like everyone else I had met in Hollywood, they were a strange mixture of friendly and threatening, and I could never tell when they would turn.

Suddenly, from the small house, a blinding light was snapped on. Guarding my eyes, I saw a silhouette of a man at the glass porch door. With a wave, he beckoned me inside.

Leaving the dogs with a pat on their heads—they had been good and had not killed me—I walked up the small back lawn to where the man stood. Before I got there, he turned and went inside. I followed.

It was one level, a cabin, really, modest by the standards of the rich. A glass coffee table was set before a leather couch, and a skinny standing lamp hung over them both. State-of-the-art video and stereo equipment filled the walls. There was a Sixties bachelor pad feel to it, and the music was Brazilian bossa nova from that period.

“Sit down,” Ben Williams said.

He was dressed very casually, in jeans and a T-shirt, sipping a beer, albeit a fancy foreign one. I had once ridden a bus beside Tony Randall, and Jim Belushi once shot a film on my block, but Ben was the first superstar I had ever seen so close. I was surprised by how unimpressive he was. Everything about him was smaller in real life: his height, the amount of his hair, the tautness of his gut. His face was blandly handsome, but the flesh of his cheeks had fallen. His eyes were ringed and watery. Perhaps he was preparing for his role as Orson Welles?

I had met those who served and protected him, who reported on and reviewed him, who fell for and killed for him.
This
was where all those roads ended or began? Still, I had never been much of a fan. I knew Ben’s filmography, down to his earliest guest shots on
The Love Boat
. He had only been cast in
Cause Pain
after everyone else had turned it down.

The stars of today could not compare with those of yesterday. Especially when they hired older, out-of-work, out-of-control actors like Dick Burke to do their dirty work. And who knew what else?

“This is my little hideaway,” Ben said. “Few people have ever been here.”

He acted as if this was a great privilege for which I should be grateful. I nodded, and tried to seem impressed. “It’s very nice.”

“It’s a man’s place.”

“A clubhouse?” I said, but I knew he meant hiding place, trysting spot, party room. I wondered if he had brought Annie Chin here, and I figured that he had.

“Something like that.”

“I’m Roy, by the way. Roy Milano.”

He shrugged indifferently. He didn’t even extend a hand. For a moment, I wished to annoy him by saying “And you are . . . ,” but the feeling passed.

“You’re the one who wants
The Magnificent Ambersons
?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But you’re not one of those, you know, creepy guys, ‘Her-Man’ . . . guys?”

“No.”

“Good. Because if you were, you’d be—”

“Dead.”

He stared at me, very annoyed. “I was just going to say, the scum of the earth.”

I realized that Ben didn’t know what had happened to Gus, and didn’t want to know. Ben only ever wanted to know things—and people, for that matter—that would help him. He recovered from this irritating intrusion of the truth, and went on.

“Well, you can have it,” he said.

I did not respond with jubilance, because, having been in L.A. a few days, I knew that a condition was yet to come.

“But first you have to do something for me.”

This seemed obvious only to Ben, because no one in his world ever gave anything away. He also implied that, given my lowly status in life, my task would be more difficult than most, and that was as it should be.

“What is it?” I asked quietly.

“There’s a woman I want you to find.”

She was the most beautiful woman Ben Williams had ever seen.

And he’d been with some beautiful women, the most beautiful in the world, the ones other men only dream about. This one wasn’t even a star, for God’s sake, she wasn’t much more than an extra.

It was on the set of his current project,
Terra Nova,
a smart action movie that was allowing him to stretch. He played a scientist called in by the president to hunt down an IRA terrorist. No T-shirts this time, strictly suit and tie. And then—blammy!—fireworks at the finale! The fans wouldn’t be disappointed, and the critics would give him some respect. But who cared about them? They were capons, eunuchs. Still, an Oscar wouldn’t be a bad legacy for his kids. Forget it, he’d get one playing Welles.

Anyway, the woman was playing his lab technician, had maybe one line, delivered a beaker to him, or something. The minute he looked at her, he forgot his next line! And he was always letter perfect, if the words were worth saying.

She was tall and dark, seemed Hispanic—or Latina, whatever they say now. Early twenties. Piercing brown eyes, enough mouth for two women, and her body! Like Sophia Loren’s daughter, or something. Two takes, three takes, he kept going up!

“Are you all right?” she asked.

She wasn’t being cute, making fun of him, overstepping her boundaries. She seemed genuinely concerned, there was so much warmth coming off her. He did not doubt her motives for a minute, and that meant a lot, coming from him.

“I’m fine,” he said. “You’re just—distracting me.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

She meant it sincerely, and her Spanish accent made it sound even more innocent. But the crew heard her and, of course, whoops and hollers started coming. She looked as if she honestly didn’t know what all the fuss was about. Imagine—a starlet who seemed like a schoolgirl, wrapped up in the face and figure of a foreign goddess!

“No,” he said gently. “It’s my fault.”

The crew quieted down; Ben wasn’t going to join them—against her? Screw them! He was the one who’d
protect
her from these animals. That was how he was behaving, and she bought it.

“Let’s take ten,” Ben said to the director, whom Ben had chosen from music videos, and who thought that was a good idea.

In a corner near the craft services table, she said her name was Erendira. He made her say it twice, then spell it. She came from Barcelona, though she wasn’t born there. She had only just moved to L.A., and she wasn’t sure she’d stay. Acting was just a lark.

“Well, it’s a difficult profession,” he said compassionately. “Still, they always need exotics. And if you can speak English, that’s a plus.”