Tycoon (35 page)

“Think you can?”

“In six weeks.
But”—He patted Bob's shoulder—“why would I do a thing like that to my own brother?”

“The old man thought you had smarts,” said Bob. “I suppose that's why he left you half the showbiz end. You know, lately that was all he was interested in, really. He let hired guys run the salvage operations.”

“Can we be sure that Dale broad will keep her mouth shut?”

Bob's grin was broad and derisive. “Big brother, you don't know
shit
about how things go! You got it all backwards! What do
we
care if she talks?”

“Why did you hire a blond to say
she
was the one who was with him? Why'd you pay off the secretary?”

“For Wolf Productions, big brother! They own her. She's a valuable property that could be damaged bad if the word got around that she was giving head to Erich Lear when he died. Now Wolf owes us one, for sure, for covering up the deep, dark secret behind their new star. The new Jean Harlow, some say!”

“Okay, so Wolf owes us. How they gonna pay it off?”

“Who knows? We want the loan of one of their stars, say . . . Hey! I'll tell you what's been offered. I didn't take it, but maybe you'll want to. They've offered to send Monica around to finish the job she was doing for the old man.”

M
ONICA
D
ALE SAT WHERE SHE HAD BEEN SITTING NAKED IN
front of Erich Lear moments before he died.

“I can't tell you how important it is to me to have this secret kept,” she said to Jack. “When I went down on your father I didn't know that Wolf was about to offer me a marvelous new contract! I was hoping to get a contract with Carlton House.” She rubbed a tear from the corner of her eye. “Every girl does what I do, Mr. Lear, for the sake of getting someplace in this business.”

“You don't have to tell me that,” Jack said. “My father didn't have a casting couch, really. He wasn't really in the business. But—”

“You know, he almost never fucked anybody,” she whispered. “All he wanted girls to do was give him blow jobs.”

“Some of the biggest names in the business,” Jack suggested.

She blinked and nodded. “I suppose so. And for nothing, most of the time. Mr. Lear, I may be on the verge of a wonderful break. If the word got out that I—Goddammit! Why
me?
Half the female Oscar winners of the last twenty years went down on Harry Cohn, and there they are, big stars. But if the word gets out that I—”

“It's not going to get out, Monica. Not through Carlton House Productions, it's not, Now, if you should choose to show me your gratitude . . .”

He had resolved not to do anything like this with anyone. But
Monica Dale!

She wiped away more tears, then smiled. “Sure. Sure, Mr. Lear. Why not? I told your father I was going to quit blowing guys, except for him. Okay. You inherited the exception.”

She pulled her dress over her head. She had a spectacular body; there was no doubt of that.

As she worked on him, he wondered what his father's last thoughts had been—if maybe they'd been that she was not really very good at it. Monica didn't want to do this, really, and she couldn't conceal her disgust for it. She was making a sacrifice, doing a duty, and she performed woodenly. Some men probably exulted at being sucked off by a girl obviously nauseated by it. Jack didn't.

When she stood up and reached for her dress, he took her gently in his arms and kissed her lightly. “Thank you, Monica. I'll never forget this afternoon. But I'll never ask you to repeat it.”

She returned his kiss. “You're a gentleman, Mr. Lear.”

R
ICHARD
P
AINTER WAXED RHAPSODIC.
“T
HAT'S WONDERFUL!
We merge Carlton House Productions into Lear Communications, and we have an entertainment powerhouse.”

Grinning, he glanced at the three other directors of LCI, who were present at the meeting.

“We buy part of Jack's stock and part of his brother's,” Painter went on. “You're already a rich man, Jack. This will make you—”

“You're getting ahead of things, Dick,” Jack interrupted him. “My brother won't sell. And he owns half.”

“All right,” said Painter, his enthusiasm undiminished. “We buy part of yours, and you vote with us. He can't do anything with Carlton House without our consent.”

“And we can't do anything with it without
his
consent,” Douglas Humphrey said pointedly.

“There are ways to bring him around,” Painter replied.

“I wouldn't count on that,” Jack said. “Anyway, we've got something else to talk about. Something my brother will consent to. Our chief problem with our television stations is finding programming. Aside from
The Sally Allen Show
we've got
only two shows that are anything but local—
Bet a Buck
and Art Merriman running around a studio audience in the morning, trying on women's hats. Both of those shows make me sick, but they get decent ratings. Apart from that, our stations broadcast kinescopes of old network shows,
Victory at Sea,
and local amateur hours. Now—”

“Quality is not essential,” Cap Durenberger interrupted. “A substantial part of the TV audience will sit with eyes glued to the test pattern. That's why the thing is called the boob tube.”

“Well, it won't always be,” said Jack. “Now look. Over the years Carlton House has made more than a hundred feature films. When Carlton House acquired Domestic, it acquired their archives—everything from English-country-house comedies to swashbucklers of the Spanish Main. It acquired Bell in 1944, with a hundred horse operas in cans. Carlton House has something like four hundred fifty pictures in storage. That's a huge film library. We can contract to broadcast all those old movies on television. Some of them feature the great stars. Some are Oscar winners. They can fill hours and hours and hours of broadcast time, with something people will want to see.”

“What about the most recent films?” Painter asked. “Like
The Weed.”

Jack shook his head. “Not until there's no more demand for theater rentals. But look at something else. Carlton House has half a dozen important stars under contract. At the very least, they could become guest stars for
The Sally Allen Show.
And maybe, just maybe, we could start a live drama show.”

“These are the things I'd hoped to do with the merger,” Painter explained.

“We can do them without the merger,” said Jack.

C
ATHY
M
CCORMACK WAS ON HER HANDS AND KNEES ON THE
floor of her living room. Except for her white garter belt, her dark stockings, and her shiny black patent-leather shoes, she was nude. Her head and shoulders were down, and her bare bottom was thrust up. A big cruet of olive oil stood on the coffee table within reach, and three layers of bath towels were spread out beneath her to protect the rug.

Dick Painter poured oil on the palm of his left hand and used the fingers of his right to oil the cleavage between her hinder cheeks, pressing it well up into her. Then he poured more and spread it generously on his penis.

She grunted as he slipped his oiled shaft into her anus. She was used to it, and his entry was not as painful as it had once been. Even so, it did hurt. No matter how many times they did it, her body instinctively closed against this invasion, and only when he was in and slowly stroking did her muscles gradually loosen so she could stop gritting her teeth and sweating.

“'Kay?” he asked.

“Okay, honey. Easy, though.”

She had given him everything, and if this was what he liked best, it was okay with her.

She wondered how it felt to him and why he liked it better than putting himself in the regular place. He could feel her body slackening to let him in, and he began to thrust harder and deeper. The sweat came again, on her forehead.

He came explosively, She could feel the violent paroxysms of his ejaculation. She was grateful when he went limp and dropped over on his back, moaning in ecstasy.

Dick was a strange man, some ways, Cathy thought. They could not live together. She had never seen the inside of his apartment. They would have sex, go out to dinner or eat here, and spend the evening together; but he would go to his own
apartment and sleep alone. At first she had wondered if he had another woman, maybe his mother, living with him. But he didn't. A man of habit, he wanted to sleep alone, rise to shower and shave when he wanted to, fix his own breakfast, and read his morning papers at the table—alone.

He lived by rules he made for himself. He made rules for her, too. He prescribed what she was to wear—the white blouses and black skirts she wore every day. She was not to take off her garter belt, stockings, and shoes when they had sex. She was not to wear panties, any time. He was not to see her in slacks or jeans, only in skirts. Whenever they were alone together, she was to keep her breasts bare. He would not complain or sulk if she broke a rule, but she saw no reason not to accommodate him. His rules were no burden on her, and she benefited too much from their relationship to put it at risk.

He was intensely jealous and did not want her to have friends. That was all right with her. There was no one in the office she wanted for a friend.

Her little white poodle was the only friend she needed. She called him Whitey. It was funny to see him sit, watching alertly as Dick pumped away behind her. Sometimes Whitey tipped his little head to one side, as if he could get a better perspective that way. Cathy imagined he was trying to make sure the man wasn't hurting Mommy.

Now, Dick sat up and reached for one of the towels. He wiped the oil and ejaculate off himself, then wiped Cathy's backside. He kissed her there—the signal that he had finished wiping. He rose from the floor and dressed, except for his tie and jacket.

Cathy pulled on her half-slip and her black skirt. She put her blouse and bra aside on a chair, leaving her breasts bare, as Dick wanted. She was glad he liked them, because in her own judgment they were the mature breasts of a woman of forty, too big and too soft.

“Drink?” she asked, knowing he would want one.

“Well,” he said after he'd taken a sip of rye, “the goddamned Lears are going to hold out on us.”

“You have a problem, Dick. You knew you were going to have a problem.”

“Inheriting half of Carlton House Productions gave the bastard his independence, and today he issued his declaration.”

“Is that how Doug feels about it?”

“Not as strongly as I do, I suppose. But he has the same agenda I do—to take over and run the goddamned company as we see fit. I'm going to have somebody look into Carlton House. It may be carrying a load we don't know about. I hope so. I'd like to have both companies.”

1952

H
OME FROM
A
NNAPOLIS,
J
OHN SAT AT THE DINING TABLE IN
the house on Louisburg Square. He studied his mother subtly but critically, and he was appalled. She was forty-five years old, an age when a woman might well be at her prime, but she had deteriorated dramatically. Since he saw her only every now and then, when he came home for holidays, the change in her shocked him.

He remembered being proud of her. He remembered when she was called the most elegant woman in Boston. Now, in
his
judgment, she was thick and coarse, a caricature of what she had been. She smoked and drank more than ever before, and she wore more makeup than he had ever seen her use, which did nothing to disguise the lines around her eyes or the two deep, curving lines at the corners of her mouth. She had her hair dyed darker than was natural and puffed up in a bouffant style. She wore big beaded bracelets, but they shifted and did not entirely hide the dark bruises on her wrists, which Joni said were from the handcuffs she wore when she and Dodge were in the attic. Joni said their mother had white scars on her back from lashings. She couldn't wear swimsuits anymore when they went to the beach on the Cape.

Dodge seemed resistant to aging. He was self-contained and
placid. He was affectionate, and kissed and fondled Kimberly in the presence of her son and daughter and the servants.

“How much of the summer will you be home, John?” Dodge asked.

“Not much, I'm afraid. I'm going on sea duty this summer. Midshipman, you know.”

“Do you know what ship you'll be aboard?”

“Well, I asked that it be an aircraft carrier. I'd like to know my way around a carrier.”

“Why that, especially?” Kimberly asked. “Are you still obsessed
with flying?”

“Well, Mother, you have to know this. I'm going in the navy air training program. I'm going to fly.”