The Hollywood Trilogy (70 page)

His social life was as fully planned as his days, a round of dinners, parties, screenings, charity board meetings, public affairs and openings. It went with the job. Alexander himself did not give a damn about charities and allowed his tax lawyers and public relations firm to decide what he would join, attend, give money to or represent as a board member. They came up with what his main tax lawyer called “an acceptable social services package,” and Alexander signed the checks or attended the functions as he was told by his secretary.

But lately it had galled him. Until Teresa he had been able to carry out all these functions with ease, slipping his lady friends either into or between functions, carrying on like a pirate captain and still jumping out of bed at dawn full of piss and vinegar. Pirate captain. He liked that image for what he did, implying as it did that he bore down on the treasure ships and carried off his prizes with a high hand. But lately he had been thinking the metaphor was wrong. It was more like going to the butcher shop, poking the meat, counting your pennies and distrusting the butcher.

But that was not what was on his mind as he sat in the dark screening room behind his office watching a picture another studio was going to release in a week. It was a story with a good deal of flash—brief nudity—and every time a cute rear end or a pair of tits went by, Alexander would feel a flush of desire followed by something almost like revulsion.

At first he had not wanted any other woman. This was a rare feeling for him, and for several weeks he cherished it, remaining silently celibate with something like pride, but then at a party in Pacific Palisades a very young girl, a model who hoped to become an actress and who was very fashionable, made a play for him that he could hardly turn down. And so they went to his place, leaving behind the press agent who had brought her to the party. She was hip and funny and full of promise, but she was fresh from the New York
modeling scene, and chattered about what was going on in New York until Alexander could think only of Teresa, and when they started fooling around in his den, he could not get an erection. Or did not want to get an erection. They had been watching late-night television and drinking brandy, and all he wanted to do was brush his teeth and go to bed.

“I'm exhausted,” he admitted to the girl, and she said in a low purring voice, “I can take care of that,” and started to give him a blow job, but he had to say, finally, “No.”

“I understand,” she said, and she did, for she kissed him lightly goodnight and called a taxi for herself. They parted friends, and if ever her name came up on the list, Alexander would hire her in a minute. Except the trouble with those goddamn beautiful New York fashion models was that they could not act and did not know it, and would never know it. Who would tell them?

But for Alexander it was his first nonerection in years. Since he had been last married, in fact.

Food for thought, there. What had Teresa done to him? Or was it a coincidence? Was he going to have to endure one of those nonerectile phases? What would happen when Teresa came west, to Tahoe? With all those tall trees for inspiration? He laughed to himself. At least I still have a sense of humor about it. Pardon me, darling, but what we need here is a good stunt-fucker to stand in for me.
Stand in
is good. Plague of Drooping Peter Strikes Film Capital. Maybe it was happening to everybody at once, and everybody was keeping it as secret as Alexander himself. Good picture. Although you could hardly.

Well, there were dick doctors. “Sir, you need more Vitamin E.”

“It's simple, just say the word
manumission
under your breath for fifteen minutes every morning.”

“Well, old fellow, a tongue-depressor and a couple of Band-Aids should do the trick.”

Gasoline flames leaped skyward on the screen in front of him. The picture was coming to its climax. There went the hero's car through the flames and into the waters of the dismal swamp. So what? Would this picture make any money? Would it inspire imitations? Hardly, he thought, it was an imitation of an imitation already. But there was certainly no accounting for public taste. And the star was popular.

Alexander pressed the button putting him in touch with the projectionist:
“What do you think of this, Harry?” he asked. Back came the tinny-sounding voice:

“Piece a shit, Boss.”

But Harry always said that.

ALEXANDER LOOKED at himself with horror. He had just stepped out of the shower and was toweling off when he happened to catch sight of his buttocks. And couldn't believe what he saw. He finished drying himself numbly, avoiding the full-length mirror as long as possible. But then there was no avoiding it. His tanned and once muscular buttocks were turning into two drooping bulbs of fat!

Old age was attacking him from the rear.

But it couldn't be old age, he wasn't old yet. He was a man in his fifties. His middle fifties. And he was turning into a fatass. Alexander drew himself up, filled his chest and flexed into tightness every muscle he could control. He still looked good, his muscles rippling under his tanned skin, his chest wide, his stomach narrow . . . he turned slowly, his buttocks flexed as tight as he could get them. But there it was, the sagging fatty ass, looking even sillier with the rest of his body in flexion. He relaxed and his buttocks quivered. Good God! There were stretch marks on his ass!

Stretch marks. He reached back and ran his fingertips over the soft flesh. Rippled, scarry. Ugly ass.

He looked anxiously at his face, and saw his anxious face peering back at him. The face was heating up and getting red. He looked away, embarrassed. He had never thought of himself as abnormally vain, and he had not spent much of his life in front of mirrors. But, he thought, that was because he
knew
what a handsome roughneck he was. Well, it was all crumbling, now. First his ass, then his belly, then rolls of fat would appear under his jawline and he would have
jowls.
Or he could go on a crash diet regimen, jogging around the lot in a grey sweatsuit and a white towel around his neck, desperately trying to keep ahead of the fat globules, knowing that he was really racing against time, and nobody won that one.

Might as well heave a sigh and get fat. He probably already waddled, and nobody would say anything to him, but they were laughing behind his back.

Had all this happened since he had last seen Teresa? What would she
think of the new Alexander? Women don't care much about how men look, do they?
Bullshit.
Alexander was disgusted at himself for trying to make excuses. There was just no question about it. He would have to go back to lapping the pool every morning, eating his breakfast, cut down on the drinking and do more afternoon exercise. Daily tennis again. Cut out the nap. Push away sugar foods. Take vitamins. That was all there was to it. His own father had remained vigorous and lean into his eighties, and then fell over dead without a moment's illness. If he could do it, so could Alexander.

He dressed quickly in a three-piece Italian suit, a suit that made him look particularly dashing, and surveyed himself in the mirror. He turned sideways. Didn't the back panel of his jacket stick out a bit? As if the suit were just a tiny bit small? And, now that he thought of it, didn't that collar feel kind of tight? He buttoned the jacket. It did not want to button. Alexander had worn the same size suit for years. Would he have to go to his tailor and have everything remeasured? What good would that do if he was going to lose the weight anyway?

Vanity. Vanity.

He left the house and drove to work. At the gate, he said to his old friend Charlie Devereaux, “I'm turning into a fatass, Charlie.”

Charlie, as usual, offered his paper coffee cup, but Alexander waved it away.

“How do you stay so slim, Charlie?” he asked.

Devereaux snorted. “You must be kidding, Alexander. I'm on my goddamn dogs all day in this fucking booth, is how I keep slim.”

“Ha ha,” said Alexander and drove on into the lot.

The first thing waiting for him on his desk was a memo from his production assistant, Dick Katzman, that there were “obligations but no availability” between Paul Newman and John Travolta. In other words, the studio had calls on the services of both actors, but there was no time within the next year when both were simultaneously available. So there went
Untitled Love Musical,
the Richard Heidelberg project. He wondered how much Heidelberg had into it, how much farther he would press the issue. Of course they could try to find a match for whichever of the actors they couldn't get, or they could go for two entirely new performers. But bankable actors were rare, and availability was even rarer. He had liked the idea of Newman and
Travolta. In his mind he had already nicknamed the picture
The Battle of the Peepers.
And
NEWMAN SINGS
! would make good copy. Hell, shit.

“Let me talk to Dick Katzman,” he said over the intercom.

“Yes, sir. Richard Heidelberg on two, do you want me to put him on hold?”

“No, tell him I'll call him back.”

When Katzman came on the phone, Alexander said, “Dick, is there any way we can buy Newman and Travolta?”

“There's no time interface,” Dick said. Neither man could be broken out of his present commitments this year. “Next year is another ball game,” he said.

“See what you can come up with for alternate casting,” Alexander said. At least somebody would be working on it. He would get lists for days now, as Dick tried to make magical combinations of names for their picture premise.

“Do both of them have to be bankable?” Dick asked.

“Within reason,” said Alexander, and hung up.

“Get me Richard Heidelberg,” he said into the intercom. “Good morning, my young friend.”

“Hello, Boss. How're we doing?”

“You must have second sight. We just pulled the plug on Newman and Travolta. Not available. Aren't you glad you don't have to pungle up three million dollars?”

“I'd be willing. Look, that casting was just a way of clarifying the project, I never really expected . . .

“Well, I did, and I'm sorely pissed off. And to quote my assistant, the viability parameter of this project is rapidly shrinking.”

“The old shrinking parametric,” came Heidelberg's amused voice. He did not seem bothered by this setback.

“Well,” said Alexander, “let's have a meeting and see what we can come up with. Can you be at my office at about five-thirty? We'll drink company liquor and cast our crumbling project.”

The next problem he had to face was also negative. Travis Morgan was balking on the set, to the tune of sixty thousand dollars a day. They were on location in Utah, making a Western that was already six million dollars over budget because the director, Sandor Kielmann, had been sitting up nights with a whiskey bottle, rewriting the script, and his buddy the cameraman
was taking hours for every setup. It would be a disastrous situation except that Kielmann usually ended up with what the public wanted.

But this was different. Somebody on the location had gotten to Travis Morgan about the plight of the Indians, the threat to the ecology and assorted matters, and Morgan was making a lot of demands for script changes and attitude changes that were, to put it mildly, uninformed. Now, Morgan had flown home to Brentwood, the director had followed, and the first assistant director was shooting a lot of second unit stuff under the scornful eye of the cameraman. At least they hadn't had to shut down production. Yet.

Kielmann arrived first for their three-way meeting. He was a plump, sour-looking man with great rings under his eyes. He was dressed in dirty cords and a tee shirt advertising
THE LIQUOR LOCKER
. He had not shaved that morning. Alexander liked him.

“Well, my dear,” he said to the director, who was slumped on the couch opposite Alexander's desk. “How are we going to trim this cowboy's sails?”

“He's probably at home, waiting for Brando to call,” Kielmann said in a gravelly voice. He brightened. “Maybe I could pull it off. I do a pretty good Brando.”

He did his Brando impression, and Alexander laughed. “We could try it.”

“How's this: I pick up the phone and tell him, ‘Hey, lissen, you punk, yer crabbin' my act . . .'”

The intercom buzzed. “Travis Morgan and David Novotny,” she said.

Alexander got up and went to the door. Novotny, slender and handsome as ever, perhaps the best-articulated human body Alexander had ever seen, a tennis machine, a swimming champion, a delightful but always victorious poker and chess player and perhaps the best agent in Hollywood. The hilarious part was that David Novotny didn't have to work, his San Francisco-based family had been multimillionaires for generations, the family fortune coming from the mining camps of '49 and swollen by real estate dealings, oil property and Heaven knew what else. David worked because he loved the challenge of deal-making, he loved show people and he loved coming out on top.

Travis Morgan, Novotny's client, stood a bit behind his agent and grinned shyly, the same grin that had landed him in the top ten for six years running. He was dressed like a cowboy, boots, jeans and flannel shirt, while his agent looked as dapper as Alexander.