Winning is Everything (42 page)

84 

Gary sat in on the screening of the new Olympus soon-to-be release and listened as the men from the marketing and distribution departments discussed how they were going to best promote and sell the film on a worldwide basis.

The movie executives chatted until it was time for them all to take off for their various luncheon appointments. The top brass hurried off to 21 and the Forum of the Twelve Caesars; other execs headed out for Pearl’s and the Russian Tea Room. Gary went off to meet a senior editor from Viking at the Italian Pavilion.

Gary enjoyed being a movie executive and did his job well. His only regret was that he had come to the job when Nora had become too ill to work. It had been her own suggestion, however, once she had finally taken sick leave, that Gary temporarily move up and assume the major load of her duties. She told the boys upstairs that she had trained him well enough and that rather than bring in anyone new to replace her, they should simply upgrade Gary, who would do the job until she became well enough to return.

That had been six months ago, and with each passing week the powers that be at Olympus grew more and more accustomed to having Gary running the department.

After lunch, Gary returned the many phone calls that had been piling up. He met with an editor from Simon & Schuster, and sat in on another screening, this film a strange surrealistic short subject made by a young fellow eager to get financing from Olympus for a feature-length project.

Fat chance, thought Gary as he had trouble staying awake. Hollywood was devoting a great deal of time to recruiting young filmmakers. One of the reasons Gary had taken over the story department so easily was that his being in his mid-twenties worked for him in this era of “don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

Gary’s workday ended a little before six, and he taxied down to Greenwich Village to spend the evening with Nora.

“What have you done?” Nora asked as Gary placed the tray on the coffee table in front of the couch.

“Nothing much,” said Gary, unloading several dishes from the tray. “Some fettuccine noodles with fresh ricotta cheese and some light cream. A glass of buttermilk for you and a half-bottle of Beaujolais for me. Some bread pudding for dessert, and if this doesn’t start fattening you up, I’m going to have to insist your doctors start intravenousing you with chocolate malteds.”

Nora looked down at the tray of steaming food before her. “Looks delicious!” she lied, having little appetite.

“And you better lap it all up.” Gary placed a napkin and then the bowl of pasta on her lap. “I know what they say about women never being too rich or too thin, but you’re testing the limits.”

“Look at this!” Nora plopped a fork into the fettuccine. “Baby food!”

“I take that as an insult to my pasta!” said Gary with a smile.

“Oh, come on.” Nora patted the side of the couch for Gary to sit beside her. “Your pasta’s terrific, you know that. I’m just sorry we can’t be in Italy right now, gorging ourselves on some garlicky mussels marinara.”

“That sure would be bellissimo, wouldn’t it?”

“Please!” said Nora. “When I was a teenager, I used to have sexual fantasies about movie stars. Lately I’ve been getting excited in my sleep over the prospects of devouring a Maine lobster!”

“Sounds good enough to eat!” said Gary. “And that’s what you must do—stuff some noodles into your mouth right now, or I’ll start forcefeeding you like a Strasbourg goose!”

Nora wrapped some noodles around her fork, took a small bite, chewed for a while, and swallowed. “If things get screwy in the world of letters,” she told Gary, “you can always make it as a chef. But really, darling. You can’t keep coming down here night after night just to make me dinner. It’s crazy.”

“It’s not crazy,” Gary argued.

“It is,” said Nora. “Kathy can stay a few extra hours; won’t cost me that much. She can prepare dinner before she goes. I’d just have to heat it up.”

“First of all, Kathy is too expensive,” said Gary. “After five o’clock, she goes into the kind of overtime that would make it cheaper to charter the
Queen Elizabeth
for boating on Central Park Lake. And in the second place, I’ve tasted Kathy’s cooking and I think
that’s
the reason you’ve lost all this weight in the first place.”

“But it just doesn’t make sense; you always come here, cook dinner for me. You must have other invitations, other things you could be doing.”

“Now, listen to me.” Gary lifted the fork and tasted his noodles. “I’m here because I choose to be. Not only do I get to visit with you, but I get to make a mess in the kitchen. I get a free meal, and Kathy gets to do the dishes in the morning. I’ve got it made. Hey, this stuff tastes pretty damn good. Have another taste. Eat. Live! Put on a few pounds!”

Nora took the fork from Gary. “It is good, and … look, I am eating, aren’t I? Is it my fault I’m getting a little tired of this bland diet? Who needs food, anyway? Poets like myself are fueled by words.”

“You put a few more pounds on those bones, kid, and I bet the doctor’ll let me take you back to the Palm for one of those lobsters over which you’ve been having sexual fantasies.”

“You got a deal!” said Nora. “But I’m serious. Really. You simply can’t spend every night with me.”

“You don’t enjoy my company?” asked Gary.

“Don’t enjoy?” Nora clapped her hands for emphasis. “There is nothing I enjoy more than having you around, no one with whom I’d rather spend my time. I don’t know what I would be doing right now if it weren’t for you. Not trying to get healthy, that’s for certain. You, sweetheart, you’re the one who has made this entire nightmare bearable.”

“Good,” said Gary. “Then shut up and eat!”

Nora smiled and attempted to get down a few more bites. “You must know how much your coming here means to me,” she continued. “You bring me news of the business and gossip from work. I sometimes get the feeling I haven’t even left.”

“I sure wish you hadn’t,” said Gary.

“But your life, Gary … you’ve got to want more than—”

“Now, listen to me.” Gary put out an open hand to stop Nora from going on. “Understand now, so we don’t have to go through this boring discussion again. Right now, you
are
my life!”

Tears came to Nora’s eyes and she held out her hands to him. He put his bowl of pasta down on the coffee table, went to her.

“Oh, I do love you,” Nora whispered.

“I love you, too,” said Gary as he kissed her cheek. “Very much.”

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to finish your pasta, though, and it’s for a very good reason.”

“What very good reason?” asked Gary.

“Mainly because your elbow is now sitting smack in the middle of it.”

Gary looked down. Sure enough, the elbow of his blue wide-collar Van Heusen shirt was right in the middle of Nora’s fettuccine. “Don’t you know anything, Nora?” he asked. “I’m just starting preparations for tomorrow night’s dinner—we’re having elbow macaroni!”

They both laughed at his lousy joke.

After dinner, such as it was, Gary loaded the dishes into the sink for Kathy to wash the following day, and then he and Nora retired to her bedroom.

They lay together on her bed, arms wrapped around one another as they half-slept, half-watched Johnny Carson. It was amazing to Gary how very frail she had become in so short a time. Eventually they fell asleep like that, holding on to each other.

Sometime in the early hours of the morning, Gary woke up. He eased Nora into a more approachable position and began kissing her until she was gently aroused from her sleep.

She opened her eyes and smiled at him.

“I love you,” he whispered at her.

She put both her arms around his neck. He caressed her very carefully, gently squeezed her breasts, insinuated himself up and down against her. After a few minutes he very carefully and slowly entered her.

She let out a slight unintentional whimper.

“Did I hurt you?” he asked, concerned.

“No … no, darling … it was nothing. It’s … it’s fine. It’s … beautiful….”

Unfortunately, it wasn’t so fine, wasn’t so beautiful.

For as Gary began escalating his loving thrusts, Nora had to bite her lip to keep from telling him to stop—the pain was so great. Soon she would have to tell him that they wouldn’t be able to make love anymore. Soon she would have to tell him she knew she was slowly dying.

85 

Oh, how Ron loved Hollywood.

Cocktail parties and dinner parties, hippie parties, beach parties, pool parties, pot parties, barbecues in cutoffs, and award ceremonies in formal black ties; you name it, Ron was à la circuit.

If you were cool, you were fifties, if you were hip, you were sixties, and conforming to nonconformity was suddenly the order of the era,
youth,
the cry of the day.

Accordingly, Ron sported a wardrobeful of love beads and hand-embroidered jeans. He wore turtlenecks instead of shirts-and-ties and had a dozen hand-painted, psychedelically patterned, tie-dyed T-shirts. He let his hair grow long and his sideburns grow wide, and sometimes he ate health food, but more often he ate the chocolate soufflé at the Bistro or he nibbled the poached salmon at Scandia or had second helpings of the chili at Chasen’s.

He gained twenty pounds. And got tan. He traded in his Coke-bottle glasses for a set of contact lenses.

Through Kirkland’s connections he became a member of the Factory, the very exclusive only-for-the-rich-and-famous club of the moment, and he chatted with Anthony Newley and he shot pool with Peter Falk and got drunk with Lee Marvin and he danced with Faye Dunaway and he got his picture taken with Natalie Wood.

He went to the Academy Awards. He saw
2001
stoned. Five times. He contracted gonorrhea. When it suddenly became fashionable to take est, he signed up. He leased a tan-and-cream Mercedes for more than he could afford, but hell, this was L.A., where a person
is
his wheels; dare drive a Ford Fairlane onto the studio lot and you wait ten minutes at the security gate while the Pinkerton checks you out.

Kirkland Enterprises had their offices in Century City, up the road a piece from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and just spittin’ distance from Twentieth Century-Fox, across the way. Ron had his own office, his own secretary, and he had to admit it, he was cool, man, that is,
hip.

Youth had only recently stepped in as Hollywood’s savior of the moment, and studio executives and producers and movie stars and agents under thirty were popping up everywhere, and anyone who was over the hill at least dressed and acted like he wasn’t.

Films that had been targeted toward family patronage were being reconceived, postponed, shelved. Everyone was looking for a bike picture, a beach movie, a road film, a buddy epic, a property for the under-thirty generation. And it was Ron’s job to find the book, the screenplay, the screen treatment which would blossom into Dale Kirkland’s next film extravaganza.

Ron found a pleasant-enough one-bedroom furnished apartment in a fairly fashionable section of Beverly Hills, south of Wilshire Boulevard, and he spent his life on the telephone. He got paged in restaurants, summoned at parties, interrupted at meetings both in his office and in others he visited.

As Hollywood’s style is intrinsically garish, Ron felt right at home. A force to be reckoned with, he not only gave the impression of being exceedingly busy and ambitious, he
was
exceedingly busy and ambitious.

On a typical day, as Ron pushed his snooze alarm in for another ten minutes’ sleep, the phone rang with Kirkland’s orders for the day.

“What happened to my subscription to
American Film?
Goddammit!” the fat man screamed just as Ron was trying to clear the sleep from his eyes.

“Ask your secretary!” said Ron.

“I don’t want to ask my secretary,” Kirkland said testily. “That’s why I hired you—to follow through on these thousands of little details!”

Christ! thought Ron. Mother’s in a mood this morning!

“Right, Dale!” Ron told his boss as he sat and reached over for a yellow pad and a pen. “What else?”

“Elke Sommer hasn’t returned three of my calls. Get to her agent, tell him I don’t hear from her by four today, she loses the part.”

“Take my advice. You don’t want Elke Sommer for that part,” Ron told his boss.

“Why the hell not?” Kirkland asked gruffly.

“I’ll get you a few minutes of
The Prize
and
A Shot in the Dark “
said Ron casually. “Let you see for yourself.”

“You do that!” said Kirkland. “And get your ass over here, will ya? I got a million things poppin’ and I gotta find something to wear to the Bacharachs’ Friday night. What do you suppose Angie Dickinson will think if I show up in one of yesterday’s tents?”

“She’ll probably think she’s sitting through
Lawrence of Arabia
again,” said Ron. “Relax, okay? I have a seamstress due this afternoon. She’ll rearrange the beads on one of your gowns and you’ll be more resplendent than the pope!”

“Well, who’s going to dress me?” Kirkland wanted to know. “You still haven’t found a suitable replacement for the valet we fired last week.”

“Dale, you looked at a dozen applicants in three days,” Ron reminded his boss.

“And not one of them cute, Zinelli! A bevy of beauties they were not! Not an athlete or a body builder in the bunch.”

“All you need is someone to assist you into your wardrobe!” said Ron. “They should not have to be Mr. Americas!”

“Why the hell not?” seethed Kirkland. “I live to be surrounded by beautiful men. Most of these ex-hustlers we got on staff are such dummies they can’t figure out how to dial long distance. I want more results, more brains exhibited around here, or we’re going to clear the whole deck and start afresh, is that clear?”

“Perfectly,” said Ron. “I trust you’re not including me in that sweeping cleanup?” Ron asked in his fish for a morning compliment.

“No, dummy!” said Kirkland. “You know damn well you’re too smart for me to be able to function well without you. So get in your Nazimobile and haul your ass over here, will you? I ordered breakfast twenty minutes ago and haven’t seen an English muffin yet. I’ll probably starve to death before the café au lait arrives.”

“Patience, patience,” said Ron, standing up. “I’m out of bed, on my way. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes and start cracking my whip!”

Things did kind of snap to attention once Ron arrived at Dale Kirk-land’s Truesdale estate (or Tara, as the fat man liked to think of it). Ron had hired all of Kirkland’s staff, so the cooks, maids, chauffeur, secretaries, gardeners, pool men, and even the weekly hustlers reported to him.

“Those flowers are no longer fresh,” Ron told the maid who answered the door, as he stepped inside Kirkland’s cathedral and pointed to a vase of three-day-old lilies sitting gracefully atop a white baby-grand piano. “Replace them.
And
the ones upstairs in the vestibule. Mr. Kirkland is entertaining tonight, right? So find out what he wants for a centerpiece, call the florist’s, and make sure they all get here by three this afternoon, so they can have time to open.”

Ron walked toward the grand staircase leading to the second floor. Gayle, an attractive .and efficient secretary, trotted down the stairs. “He’s feeling foul this morning,” she told Ron as she handed him a stack of mail and a schedule of Kirkland’s appointments for the day, along with a four-page list of calls to be returned.

“What time does the plane get in from San Francisco?”

“Two this afternoon,” said Gayle.

“That should cheer the large boy up,” said Ron. “I’ve got a hunch tonight’s beauties will be extra special. Kirkland had to pay an additional hundred dollars for each of them, so you know they’re not likely to look like chopped liver.”

Ron had been in Kirkland’s employ only a short time when, after a little investigation, he came upon an outrageously expensive call-boy service in San Francisco that specialized in the blond-bronzed-and-baby-oiled surfer/body-builder types over which Kirkland so elegantly drooled.

Ron had the inside track on the fat man’s sexual fantasies, and by quenching Dale’s seemingly unsatisfiable thirst, he had set himself up right from the start as the indispensable commodity he’d hoped to become within the Kirkland empire.

Ron walked upstairs and entered the sound-stage-size master bedroom. Kirkland was sitting up in bed in a beaded, pleated, ribboned bathrobe, a telephone with trunk lines on either side of him, and spread out before him, copies of the New York
Times,
the Washington
Post,
the Chicago
Tribune,
the London
Times,
the Los Angeles
Times, Daily Variety,
the
Hollywood Reporter,
contracts, screenplays, books, gifts, record albums.

And breakfast.

“Where’ve you been?” Kirkland mumbled as he smothered a spoonful of raspberries in a bowl of freshly beaten cream.

“Looking at the mail downstairs,” said Ron.

“What time the boys coming tonight?” asked Caligula.

“They’ll get in sometime this afternoon. I’ll send Henry to the airport to pick them up. Probably keep them over at my place until your guests leave … unless you want them at your dinner party.”

“Can’t make up my mind,” said Kirkland, shifting weight positions in bed. “While I think it’s nice to have a few steamy guys around the dinner table, more often than not they can’t dress, can’t talk. Christ, some of’em can’t even fuck!”

“The price you pay for beauty, dear Dale,” said Ron, flipping through the pile of letters in his hands.

“True, true,” said Kirkland, loading up another shovelful of berries.

“I invited Virginia Michaels to dinner,” said Ron. “Thought you wouldn’t mind.”

“She’s pretty,” said Kirkland with his mouth full. “I certainly don’t mind.”

“Figured it would be good for her career to be seen here, especially if you decide to start managing her; good for the heterosexual quota, and good for me, later on.” Ron winked at his boss.

“Tell me about Virginia Michaels,” said Kirkland. “She any good in bed?”

“Good!” Ron raised his voice for emphasis. “She could be an E-ticket ride at Disneyland!”

“Fine,” said Kirkland. “You know I like to keep everyone happy.”

Ron agreed. One of the advantages of working for a man who surrounded himself mostly with homosexual workers was that when the token starlet would arrive for an evening’s entertainment at Tara, it was often Ron, the token heterosexual, who got to service the young lady before the evening was out.

Kirkland was pleased to see Ron getting laid. He knew it made for good table gossip around town, and with Ron so visible a spoke in the Kirkland wheel, helped to stave off some of the more negative gossip about Kirkland and his perverse Caligula activities.

“Get me my black slippers from the closet!” Kirkland snapped matter-of-factly.

A feeling of revulsion and disgust ran down the center of Ron’s spinal column. It was moments like these that made him long to get out from under the thumb of the Kirkland empire and be off on his own. Kirkland could supply Ron with all the perks in the world—the starlets, the parties, the tickets to the premieres—yet, let Kirkland launch into just one of his temper tantrums, and Ron would think about quitting.

In the end, reason prevailed. Ron knew he had to be patient, had to stick with Kirkland Enterprises until the right moment when he had a hot property of his own to produce.

Ron handed Kirkland his slippers and made hiring a new valet a priority. “All right …” He referred to his appointment pad. “You got Roger Smith and Allan Carr regarding Ann-Margret for
Captain’s Bimbo.
Right now she wants a quarter of a million against ten percent of the gross.”

“She’ll take a hundred grand and be grateful!” huffed Kirkland.

“You got lunch today here with Norman Jewison. Poolside. I ordered cold lobster with a mayonnaise-dill dressing, several bottles of your favorite Chablis, and raspberries with crème Chantilly for dessert—that is, if you haven’t lost your appetite for them by then.”

“Thing about raspberries,” said Kirkland as he popped a dozen or so into his mouth, “is, you can never get enough. They’re a lot like pretty young men in that regard. Which reminds me … I want you to interview the new boys when they arrive this afternoon. If they’re decent, put suits on them and let ‘em attend the party tonight. If they can’t speak English, keep ‘em holed up in your apartment till we’re through with dinner. We can send Henry to pick them up later on.”