Paperback Jack, page 12
“Then what—?”
“You hid it from me! It’s not just that you didn’t trust me to understand. You thought I was too stupid to figure out a way to read it. Like I don’t know where to find a drugstore and wouldn’t have a quarter in my purse.”
“I didn’t think it through.”
“You didn’t think, period. You’re not stupid either. So why did you do it? Why insult me?”
They walked a quarter-block before he spoke.
“I was ashamed. I didn’t have the imagination to spin something from whole cloth, so I exploited the woman I love. And I was afraid of losing her.”
“You made up the pawnbroker. You told me that when you started writing the book. That was before you clammed up; which would be just about the time Marcy came in.”
“He’s based on every tough guy I saw in the movies. I’m a fraud. I made such a fuss about research and not inventing anything, when the truth is I don’t know how.”
“Is this a trick? Confess to any piece of claptrap so I’ll forgive you out of pity?”
“How’s it working so far?”
She bumped against him hard. He had to scramble to keep his feet. “You’re such a shit.”
“It’s the truth. I used to be able to cook from scratch: None of those things in my magazine stories ever happened. After I got home, they all seemed so phony I couldn’t believe I’d ever thought I was a writer. Some guys came back missing arms and legs. I left my imagination back in Antwerp.”
They waited at the corner for a street sweeper to gush past, then crossed. She was silent most of the way. Then she steered closer and took his arm. “It’ll grow back.”
* * *
They lay in her bed, spent and sweaty. A fan hummed on the sill of the open window, slinging cool air over them from outside as it swung their way. Ellen had a cigarette out, but just to play with.
“I didn’t love him,” she said.
“Who?” He’d begun to drift off.
“Him, idiot! Ann was wrong about that. She got the rest right.”
He sat up. This was it: the Secret. “It must have been hard, though. She said he was killed.”
“Who said he was killed?”
He stared; reached over and switched on the lamp on his side.
“Ann told you I lost him to the service,” she said. “That’s what you said before, and that’s what she’d have said. It’d be a tidy little tragedy if he was killed, but I wouldn’t wish it on him. I did enough to him as it was.”
“What’d you do, break his heart?”
“Don’t make it sound like I wrote him a Dear John letter. That’s cheap.”
“Sorry. Go ahead.”
“His name was Harvey. We grew up in together. We were practically inseparable all through high school: You know, that couple that might as well be married, because that’s how everyone thought of them. Me included. When he enlisted and proposed, I thought he already had. I said yes without giving it any thought. I mean, it was inevitable, right? But I was smart enough to postpone things until he came back. I didn’t want to be a war widow. If this sounds callous—guilty as charged, officer.
“The marines sent him to the South Pacific. Over there he hooked up with a Filipino girl.”
Jacob was silent. The story had taken a twist even a pulp writer couldn’t foresee.
“I’m the one got the letter,” she said. “Pathetic. He scourged himself all through it. ‘I don’t deserve forgiveness; you deserve better.’ I was surprised the paper wasn’t so tear-soaked it fell apart in my hands. And every line was a knife through my conscience. It was almost as bad as if we’d gone ahead with the wedding and lived the lie for the rest of our lives.”
“Well—”
“Hold off on the comforting words. He was torn up with guilt. And I let him be.”
She fumbled her lighter off her nightstand, lit the cigarette, blew smoke at the ceiling. “I never wrote him back. Of course he’d think I was angry and devastated. What else could he? I didn’t want to tell him I never cared. I lied to myself that I was sparing his feelings. Telling him would’ve been more merciful.”
“Where is he now?”
“Raising a herd of pearl-divers in Fiji. I get a card every Christmas, with a picture of the happy family.”
“That’s the big mystery?”
“Yup. What do you think?”
“Fuck him.”
“What?”
“If he really believes he ruined your life, he must know he’s twisting the knife every time he sends you a Kodak memory. So he’s either a dope or a jerk. You dodged a bullet either way.”
“I never thought of it like that.”
“Neither did he. Imagine tying yourself to that blockhead till death you do part.”
She took one last drag and stubbed out the butt. He hoped to cure her of smoking in bed.
“Now you know everything,” she said. “Everything I plan to tell, anyway. Think you can get a book out of it?”
“I’m not sure. It depends on how long it takes my imagination to grow back.”
She smacked his face, not really hard enough to sting.
They wrapped their limbs around each other and began the old ritual all over again. The fan reached them in gusts, chilling naked skin drenched in perspiration.
PART THREE
1950
ONE IN A MILLION
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Scarpetti asked him what he thought of Truman.
“He’s a hell of a haberdasher.”
“Think he’s going into Korea?”
“Nope. He’ll send the army in his place.”
“The son of a bitch.”
Jacob changed the subject. The president was too far out of his reach. “Like your place?”
It was 1950. They were relaxing in the artist’s new apartment on the Upper West Side. He’d taken it for the big front room with north light. The sound was off on the TV. A pair of middleweights waltzed around a ring.
“I miss the loft. I liked the space and no neighbors. It’s been months since I blew anything up.” He sucked on the twisted brown cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, held the smoke, and let it stagger out, sinking like sediment into his armchair. Jacob sat facing him on the sofa. “I don’t miss the stairs,” Scarpetti said.
“How long have you been smoking reefers?”
“Since stir.”
“How come I’m just finding out now?”
“I didn’t know you so well before.”
“It’s been almost four years.”
“I had to go easy. I won’t get off as easy as Bob Mitchum.”
“All this time, and you could have offered me a hit.”
“Straight arrow like you?”
“Oh, I’m a Hollywood item now. They’re flying me out next month.”
“On the level?”
“I don’t know about that, but Ira got a telegram from a producer named Kaspar. He wants The Fence, and me to write the screenplay.”
“How many times has it gone back to print?”
“I lost count.” The latest edition had a new cover by Scarpetti, with the anti-hero looking even more rakish and the heroine even more naked than the first time, plus a yellow banner: OVER 100,000 COPIES IN PRINT!
“This guy got the bucks?”
“Rolling in it. He has houses in Beverly Hills and Palm Springs, an apartment on Park Avenue, and an office in Rockefeller Center. He asked me which of those places I wanted to meet him, all expenses paid.”
“No sense asking why you didn’t say Rock Center.” It was a gray drippy November.
“I might as well get some sun. It’s all I’m likely to get.”
“Bring me Rita Hayworth’s autograph.”
“I think she’s in Africa or someplace with that potentate she married.”
“Jane Russell, then. A signed photo.”
“I’d’ve thought you’d be sick of tits.”
Scarpetti looked at him quickly, then rolled his head back against the cushion. “It’s different with their clothes on.”
He passed the joint to Jacob, who set down his Scotch and drew the smoke in, coughing a little; he still wasn’t a smoker, but his drinking skills were improving. “Where are you setting the next masterpiece?” His voice was squeezed.
“The waterfront. The air’s too thin up here with the Vanderfellers.”
“Sure. I was thinking Central Park, but you can make a ransom drop anywhere.” Jacob paused. “It’s a Fairfax.”
“Christ. I hate that newshound.”
Sylvester “Screamer” Fairfax—Jack Holly’s invention—was a crack reporter for the New York Teller, a tabloid based loosely on The Greenwich Clock. He was a one-man cop, judge, and jury, hounding gang bosses, white slavers, and corrupt politicians for front-page material.
“Elk likes him. The first one didn’t do as well as The Fence or Guns of Gotham, but he thinks he’ll build a following.”
“He’s always yelling, ‘Stop the presses!’ Did you ever once say that?”
“At the Clock? I never get the chance. Newsprint costs dough, and Sam Rosetti’s cheap. Doesn’t mean someone didn’t say it somewhere, sometime.”
“With Screamer it’s all the time. When’s he write his copy? You never sit him down at a typewriter.”
“Would you pay two bits to watch him type?”
“Don’t go by me. I get the books for free. Thanks for coming to my celebration, by the way.”
“I didn’t know this was a housewarming.”
“It isn’t. My parole ran out yesterday. I’m free to go to bars and associate with known felons.”
“Haven’t you been doing that right along?”
“Sure. But now it’s legal.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
* * *
Robin Elk announced Down by the Docks, the second “Screamer” Fairfax mystery, in the trades. The first printing sold out in a week. Jacob gave notice at The Greenwich Clock.
“You’ll be back,” Rosetti said. “TV’s gonna kill books the way Detroit snuffed streetcars.”
“They report the news on television, you know.”
“The feds force ’em to. Madame Chiang can’t compete with Milton Berle in a dress. Newspapers are here to stay.”
He called Ellen to tell her he was now a full-time novelist. She met him at her door holding a bottle of bubbly and wearing nothing under a fur coat she’d borrowed from Phil Scarpetti’s private prop department. That was the night she and Jacob became engaged.
* * *
“Welcome to L.A. How was your flight?”
Jacob thought. “High.”
Edvard Kaspar chuckled. “Most say ‘long.’ Give me a writer with a sense of humor anytime. You can have Clifford Odets. He couldn’t raise a giggle in a feather factory.”
The producer was short and round, with a Polish accent and a tanned bald head, no hat. He wore a whipcord jacket, foulard scarf, chinos, and Italian loafers; only the beret and megaphone were missing. From the moment Kaspar met him at the bottom of the airplane steps, snatched his suitcase, and waddled ahead of him into the terminal, Jacob thought himself the victim of an elaborate practical joke.
Kaspar drove a wartime Cadillac with blackout headlights. The cracked leather upholstery smelled of garlic. He clipped red lights, braked inches from stopped cars, and changed lanes without signaling. By the time they got to his hotel, Jacob’s jaws ached from clenching.
Phil Scarpetti would have described the hotel décor as Art Schizo. It was a cathedral of cream-colored stone, towering ludicrously over the horizontal architecture that surrounded it, like an upraised middle finger.
It was dusk. Just as they came to a tooth-chipping stop in front, a set of ground-mounted spotlights came on, bathing the façade in a pink glow.
“All for me?” Jacob peeled his foot from the firewall.
“You’ll love it here. It’s one of the city’s oldest landmarks. Almost thirty years!”
He was spent from the long flight and the short ride. Kaspar said he’d pick him up in the morning and took off, tires chirping. Jacob carried his bag across a marble lobby the size of a train station, dotted with leather chairs and smoking stands. A petite female clerk found his reservation and the elevator took him to a room on the ninth floor, with a bathroom that sparkled and a swan-shaped bed on a dais. It was Garbo on a cracker.
* * *
“That’s Harold Lloyd’s house there on the right.”
It was a sunny morning; Kaspar had stashed the smog behind the foothills for his guest.
Jacob stared out the window of the Cadillac, seeing only a wall of whitewashed brick.
“I thought Lloyd was dead.”
“Retired. Saved his money, can you believe it? Mary Pickford too. Her place makes his look like a bungalow.”
“She’s still alive?”
“Nobody dies in Hollywood.”
“What about Valentino?”
“He croaked in New York. This is where people go after they die.”
Of course they dined at the Brown Derby. He saw no stars, ate corned beef hash while his host poked at watercress, drank fresh-squeezed orange juice, and held his tongue. Their waiter plugged a telephone into a jack and Kaspar made calls. There seemed to be a legal matter involved, but whether the producer was suing someone or being sued was unclear.
Today Kaspar wore a tweed jacket with elbow patches over a white silk shirt and another scarf, this one tied on one side of his thick neck pirate fashion. There was a crest of some kind on his cuff links.
He hung up the phone. “How’d you sleep?”
“So well I don’t remember it.”
“I knew you’d like the hotel. The linen’s spun from Greer Garson’s pubic hair.”
Jacob choked on his orange juice.
“Ever write a screenplay?”
He mopped his shirtfront. “No, but I read the ones you sent. They’re not that different from novels.”
“You’re one-up on most. I can’t tell you how many writers I gave the boot because they thought they were writing theatrical plays for the screen: yak, yak, yak. We shot a Tarzan last year with just two sides of dialogue: Well, not counting the yell, and we dubbed that in from Weissmuller. Grossed two million on a budget of six hundred grand. Keep things moving, that’s the secret.”
“I saw it. The chimp got more screen time than Tarzan.”
“That monkey was a sonofabitch. He bit Lex Barker on the cheek: eleven stitches. We had to shoot around him for two weeks, and you can’t build a jungle picture on extras in blackface. We doped the monkey.” He wiped his hands on his napkin. “Who do you see as Mike Cain?”
“Who?”
“The fence. Moynihan’s too Irish. Cain’s biblical. Can’t go wrong with Holy Writ.”
“That’d make him Jewish.”
“Me too, but don’t tell Breen in Standards and Practices; he’s a fucking Nazi. Cain okay with you?”
“It’s fine. Nobody remembers a character’s name anyway, not counting Long John Silver and Zorro.”
Kaspar grinned, showing bright veneers. “I knew we’d get on. Some of these pain-in-the-ass scribblers think they shit silver spoons.” The accent gave his sailor’s jargon an Old World flavor.
The formal tour began with the producer’s offices in Century City, an open layout with only glass separating one workspace from another and a four-sheet poster of Flesh and the Devil on the wall above his desk. During the next three days Jacob watched Desi Arnaz beat a conga drum in the Trocadero, walked down New York Street on the studio’s back lot, sat on Lana Tur-ner’s stool in Schwab’s, and considered, suggested, and rejected Humphrey Bogart as Cain (too old), Virginia Mayo as Marcy (“Suspended,” said Kaspar), and Dana Andrews as the police lieutenant (“Drying out in Sausalito”).
In a souvenir shop on Sunset Boulevard he bought an autographed picture of Burt Lancaster, Ellen’s favorite (they didn’t have Jane Russell for Scarpetti), packed it in his carry-on, and rode back to LAX with Kaspar. The producer talked all the way through the congealing traffic.
“Put in lots of pussy. Breen don’t like it, but you can bootleg it. We can’t take the girl’s clothes off like on your covers, but you’d be surprised what you can do with an exposed bra strap. Pussy, that’s what sells tickets.”
Jacob shook hands and climbed the steps to his plane. At the top he turned around for one last wave. Kaspar cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Pussy!”
The writer smiled wanly at a disapproving stewardess.
“College nickname,” he said.
* * *
Back home, he called Ira Winderspear.
“Kaspar’s a clown,” he told the agent, “but they grow them there like oranges. I think he liked me. If the money’s right, I’m writing the screenplay.”
“Not so fast, kid. I just got off the phone with him. He’s hired a local, pro with a box-office record. My guess? He brought you out there to Jew the guy down on his price.”
“Oh.” He didn’t know whether he was disappointed or just worn out. “Well, I got to see Harold Lloyd’s wall.”
“Hold your horses, I’m not finished. Kaspar wants to option the book for ten grand: another twenty thousand guaranteed on beginning of principal photography, whatever the hell that is. Could be just Californian for the old shafteroo; but like they say in the horse operas, I gotcha covered. Congratulations, kid. You’re in show business.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“So how was Tinseltown, apart from screwing you over?” Ellen asked.
“It’s just like you see in movies.”
“Explain.”
“Movie New York isn’t New York. It looks like New York, sort of, but the soot’s sprayed on and the horns don’t honk right. But Hollywood’s Hollywood. They take it down and stick it back up between productions.”
“What else?”
