The Deal, page 10
He hung up, turned to Deidre. “They sent the check. Should we stop payment?”
“I’m not sure that’s a very good way of beginning a relationship with a producer.”
“Yeah, but what if he did go somewhere?”
“As long as it’s not to another studio.”
“That’s not funny, Deidre. That’s not the slightest bit funny.” Norman leaned back in the chair, rubbed his eyes. He began to feel pains on his left side again. Shit, not here. He didn’t want to buy it in Deidre Hearn’s office. Maybe it was just stomach gas from the sushi.
This movie was turning into a nightmare already. They were barely in development and he felt like he had been on the picture for years. The producer had taken a powder. The star was a Black Zionist who got eight million plus a piece. They were going to be shooting in Israel. Shells were coming over the border daily from Lebanon. Palestinian terrorists put bombs in buses and airport lockers….
He felt another chest pain and started calculating how long it would take the paramedics to get him to Cedars in rush-hour traffic.
Lev Disraeli was in a tight spot. Pinned down on the near shore of the Litani River behind the carcass of his overturned Land-Rover, running out of clips for his AK47, low on water, he absently flicked his tongue against the cyanide capsule wedged against a molar and considered his options. He had one grenade of dubious manufacture and a radio with a bad cell. Who would he call anyway? The Mossad had a price on his head, convinced he was a double agent. MI6 had told his contact in Beirut that they would deny any knowledge of him. And Langley had kissed him off a long time ago. There was only one person he could turn to. And that person wasn’t even in Lebanon at the moment….
Bill Gladstone was sitting at a café in Nicosia sipping Metaxa and eyeing a small blue Fiat parked suspiciously close to the date stand he knew was a letter drop for Syrian intelligence. Embedded in one of the mother-of-pearl rims of his Italian sunglasses was a minuscule camera capable of photographing clear images at fifty yards.
A woman gets out of the blue Fiat. Tall, graceful, a walk that he would recognize anywhere. Click. Click. Click. He continues to snap pictures of Victoria Albert, the woman with whom he has just spent the night at the Hotel du Levant, her snatch dripping with his seed….
Charlie stopped writing, looked over at Madison Kearney, who was lying on the couch devouring pretzels and thinking out loud.
“I think that’s a bit much,” Charlie said.
“What?”
“That line about her snatch. There are a lot of women executives in the studios these days.”
“Forget it. It’s not going to work anyway. If he thinks she’s going two ways now we blow the fuck scene on the sailboat. The fuck scene on the sailboat is what’s going to send this picture through the roof. You see it? Water coming over the gunnels, the boom swinging back and forth above them, whomp, soundtrack of African drumbeats mixed with electronic synthesizers…there’s not going to be a limp pecker in the house, believe me.”
“So who’s in the blue Fiat?”
“Anybody. doesn’t matter. It’s just a cutaway from Disraeli pinned down in his jeep.”
Charlie pulled gently at his fingers to relieve the cramp in his right hand. On the floor was a pile of yellow legal pages filled with Charlie’s sprawling handwriting.
They had been at it for days now, maybe longer. Charlie had lost track of time. They slept like cats for a couple of hours, with Charlie going out periodically to bring back frozen pizzas, cigarettes and a tightly rationed supply of Hearty Burgundy. He was afraid that if he went away for more than half an hour, if he abandoned Madison Kearney too long, the writer would lose the thread and they’d have to start all over again. His attention span was fragile, his connective synapses frayed by years of bathing in alcohol.
Nonetheless, they were making slow, steady progress. Bill and Lev were up to their ears in trouble and bullets. Disraeli had already kicked a great deal of ass without having opened his mouth for more than a few tough laconic bursts of dialogue along the way. The plot was impossibly complicated but he wasn’t concerned. They’d throw in a Morris-the-Explainer scene somewhere at the end to tie it all together. At the moment, the trick was to keep the balls in the air.
To show that Lev Disraeli was not a man entirely without spiritual dimension, Charlie had managed to get Madison Kearney to insert a little Judaism between the bullets. There was a scene in a synagogue in the old section of Jerusalem, where Disraeli slips into the shell-scarred building to elude his Syrian tail and winds up lingering as a group of devout old men pray. He watches them, moved by their piety, overcome by thoughts of his tenuous connection with the faith. Madison Kearney had wanted one of the Syrians to take out the ark with a flamethrower, but Charlie vetoed it for the moment. Bobby Mason wanted Jewish. They’d give him Jewish. They could always cut it out in editing.
“Take five,” Charlie said, getting up and going into the kitchen to check out the supplies. There was less than a finger left in the Hearty Burgundy jug, not enough to get Madison Kearney seriously derailed. Charlie had discovered that the man was useless when totally dry. You had to keep him lightly lubricated in order to prevent his mind from slipping into one of his recurring paranoid fantasies. Once, late at night, when they had run out of wine, an ambulance siren down the hill on Sunset had sent the writer scurrying under the kitchen table, clutching a baseball bat as if it were an AK47, convinced they were about to be invaded by storm troopers. Charlie had to make an emergency run to an all-night Ralphs to restock.
He slipped outside, closing the broken screen door behind him, and got into his car. As he backed out of the driveway onto the narrow, hilly street, he realized not only that he had no idea what day it was but that he had no idea what time it was either. The clock on the Mercedes had been out for years, and Charlie never wore a watch.
He gazed through the dirty windshield and tried to make out whether the sun was coming up or going down. It was one of those gauzy gray-white days when you couldn’t see the sun. You had to take someone’s word that it was up there behind the cloud cover. The street was full of small sagging stucco houses, looking dark and forlorn inside. There were patches of unruly vegetation alternating with fallow stretches lying neglected. It was no longer a neighborhood. It was just a spot on the map above the Golden State Freeway.
He rolled down the hill to Sunset, cruised east looking for a phone, found one in a Chevron station. He got out of the car, put a quarter in the phone, dialed the studio switchboard.
“Charlie Berns please.”
After a moment that breathless, overaspirated voice that he had nearly forgotten came across the wire.
“Charles Berns’s office…”
Charlie rubbed the back of his neck. He suddenly remembered the wilting flower who had been assigned to him from the secretarial pool. But he couldn’t remember her name, so he said, “Hi. What’s going on?”
There was a silence on the other end. Then she repeated, “Charles Berns’s office. May I help you?”
“Hi. It’s me. Charlie. Any calls?”
A longer silence this time. Finally: “Mister? Berns?” That was her all right. Two separate sentences of one word each.
“Yeah. How you doing?”
“Oh, Mr. Berns. A lot of people. Want to know. Where you are.”
“Who?”
“Well. The studio. Deidre Hearn has called. Every day. Several times. Norman Hudris came by. Wednesday. Your nephew. Lionel Travitz. He’s worried about you. Where are you? Mr. Berns?”
“Excuse me, what’s your name again?”
“Enid.”
“Enid, listen, I’m doing research on the script. I’ll be back in Monday. Maybe Tuesday. Okay?”
“What should I say? When they ask me? Where you are?”
“Tell them…I’m in Lebanon.”
“I beg. Your pardon.”
“Beirut.”
“Mr. Berns?”
“Yeah…”
“You’re really not. In Lebanon. Are you?”
Charlie looked around at the graffiti-scarred landscape of East Sunset and figured he might as well be.
“No, I’m not.”
Another long silence on the line. Then she said, “About the painting…”
“Huh?”
“The office. Painting. It’s beige.”
“Beige?”
“With cocoa-brown trimming.”
“Excuse me?”
“I thought it was. Preferable. Restful. On the eyes.”
“Sure.”
“What about furniture? Danish modern? Country French?”
“Sounds good to me.”
“You’re supposed. To choose.”
“Got to run. I’ll see you soon.”
He hung up before she spoke again. Would he ever be able to have a normal conversation with that woman without feeling like he was sinking slowly into quicksand? As he walked back to the car he had a brainstorm. They needed someone to walk out of the blue Fiat and get mowed down by machine-gun fire from the date stand, right? She’d be perfect.
At about the same time that Charlie Berns left the phone booth on East Sunset, Bobby Mason was in the VIP Lounge of Lod Airport in Tel Aviv giving an impromptu press conference upon his arrival in Israel for six weeks of location shooting on his film Desert Commando. Beside him stood Rabbi Seth Gutterman, who had taken advantage of the opportunity of traveling in the preempted first-class section of the 747, along with Bobby’s bodyguards, to coordinate Israel Bond fund-raising with the home office.
Bobby fielded questions put to him by the world press concerning his decision to shoot his pictures in Israel and his interest in becoming a Jew. Security was tight. Israeli personnel, along with Bobby’s private muscle, watched for a telltale gesture, their eyes scanning the room like gun turrets.
After being welcomed to Israel and given a plaque by the Tel Aviv Chamber of Commerce, Bobby was asked why he had decided to shoot this picture in Israel.
“The people, man. They’re hospitable. They’re solid. Down home.”
He was asked what it was that appealed to him about Judaism.
“It’s a bottom-line kind of deal, you know what I mean? You have a pretty good idea where you stand with the Big Guy all along. He doesn’t fade in and out on you. In return you got to commit to Him. It’s like this coat, you see, once you put it on, you got to keep it on through all kinds of weather.”
Rabbi Gutterman looked over at his disciple, smiled with pride.
He was asked if he was learning Hebrew.
“Working on it. Shloom, haverim.” Smiles alternated with looks of total consternation. Nobody was exactly sure what he said. Bobby’s phrase was translated in a number of totally different ways. Der Spiegel thought he said, “Sie haben…” and construed it to be an attempt, albeit inaccurate, to respond to the question in German. The reporter compared it to Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner.”
He was asked if Clint Eastwood was going to be in the picture.
“Clint who?” Big smile. They ate it up.
He was asked if he thought that all the violence in his movies was not a bad image for world Judaism. Bobby looked sincerely wounded for a moment before he recovered.
“There isn’t a guy in any of my movies gets his ass kicked that isn’t some major slimebag, dope dealer, terrorist, Vietcong, that kind of degenerate. Anybody who’s against freedom, you know what I mean?”
The London Times correspondent asked him if he was in sympathy with Israel’s foreign policy.
“Yeah. Absolutely.”
Then the Mideast correspondent of France’s left-leaning Le Monde asked if he didn’t see any parallels between the plight of American blacks and that of the Palestinians.
Rabbi Gutterman chose this moment to wrap things up by thanking the assembled reporters for their warm welcome to Israel. They made their way through the crush of photographers out to the waiting car.
In the limo on the way to the Hilton, Bobby relaxed with a Pepsi and looked out the window at the arid countryside. Orange trees and condos. Just like Anaheim.
When they reached the outskirts of the city, Bobby turned to his head bodyguard.
“What paper was the Frog with?”
“What’s that?”
“The Frog, asked me about blacks and Palestinians.”
“I don’t know.”
“Find out.”
“Right.”
“He shows his ass on my set, kick it the fuck off.”
6
The Disraeli deal, as it was referred to at GTA, gained Brad Emprin a new respect from his colleagues. Packaging a Bobby Mason picture was major league, and Brad Emprin dined out on it. The agency was a buzz with misinformation surrounding the genesis of the deal. Some of the younger agents had never even heard of Charlie Berns.
The identity of the writer of the script that had attracted Bobby M. was a subject of intense speculation. Names as diverse as Gore Vidal, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams (posthumously) and, inevitably, B. Traven, still alive and eluding publicity in Mexico, were bandied about.
Brad Emprin reported the deal at the weekly staff meeting. When he outlined the main points—a floor of two-fifty with escalators going to a potential telephone number, and more, if worldwide grosses approached the level of Bobby Mason’s recent pictures—there was a respectful, almost awestruck silence in the glass conference room. You could hear the sound of Sy Green’s molars mashing the poppy seeds of his bagel.
“One point five in Asia?” Jeff Yankow articulated.
“That’s right,” replied Brad Emprin. “Two in Europe.”
“Jesus,” Bill Browner said, “after Mason takes his bite up front there’s not going to be anything left for the studio.”
“Don’t worry about the studio,” Sy Green said. “They’ll be crying all the way to the bank.”
“Who’s the writer?” Cissy Fuchs piped up.
“Somebody Charlie found. Some kid in film school or something.”
“We ought to go after him,” Jeff Yankow suggested.
“Sounds good to me,” Brad Emprin nodded.
Cissy Fuchs’s interest in the name of the writer had been titillated by Norman Hudris’s coyness on the subject. When she had asked Norman who it was, he claimed he had forgotten the name. She sensed that something unorthodox was going down. But it wasn’t until she met her friend Deidre Hearn for dinner one night, at a retro fifties diner on Melrose, that she learned that Brad Emprin had indeed been sitting with his head up his ass when the golden apple fell on him.
“You’re kidding,” she intoned.
“Afraid not,” Deidre Hearn responded with a sardonic smile. “Not only don’t we know who the writer is, but we don’t even know who’s doing the rewrite.”
“Don’t you have input on the rewrite?”
“Of course we do. The problem is we can’t find the producer.”
“Charlie Berns?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Doesn’t he live in town?”
“In a house in the Flats with defoliated shrubbery. The problem is he’s not there. And nobody knows where he is.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Doesn’t he have an office on the lot?”
“Yes. Except he’s not in it. There’s nobody in it but painters. This is the screwiest deal I’ve ever been around. We buy a property without reading the script, from an anonymous writer, put together by a semidefunct producer. And what’s it about? Benjamin Disraeli. Benjamin Disraeli is not exactly a hot property….”
She began to describe the herring-eating scene in the Radziwill Palace and stopped just in time. Just before the hysteria descended upon her. She didn’t want to lose it in a restaurant on Melrose with Cissy Fuchs.
She took a large slurp from her strawberry milk shake and shifted gears. “So how’s Norman?”
Cissy Fuchs shrugged.
“That good, huh?”
“I don’t know, Deidre. I’m beginning to think there’s no future in this relationship.”
“I could have told you that.”
“What?”
“It’s not going to happen with Norman Hudris.”
“How can you say that?”
“Cissy, Norman Hudris is forty-one years old and never been married. What does that tell you?”
“He’s not gay, Deidre. Take my word for it.”
“I’m not saying he’s gay. I’m saying he’s a write-off.”
Though Cissy Fuchs was perfectly prepared to bemoan her problems with Norman Hudris, she wasn’t necessarily willing to listen to someone else criticize him. She looked up aggressively from her guacamole burger and said, “What are you talking about?”
“A forty-one-year-old single man is single for a reason. I mean, it’s not like he hasn’t had opportunities. Norman’s a decent-looking guy, he’s got a good job.”
“He just hasn’t connected with the right person yet.”
“Norman doesn’t want to connect with anybody but himself. He spends most of his day in his office with the door closed worrying about the ACI stock going down. He doesn’t even read scripts anymore. And every time Howard calls him into his office, he stops by my office to tell me that this is it, that Howard’s going to can him. Now how can a guy like this give anything to a relationship?”
“Deidre, why are you saying this?”
“I’m just trying to be a friend.”
“No you’re not. You’re just being a bitch.”
“Cissy…”
“Just because you don’t have anybody in your life doesn’t mean that everyone else’s relationships are screwed up.”
“Come on, Cissy….”
“You know, maybe if you got laid now and then, you wouldn’t be so bitchy.”
For a moment neither woman spoke as the charged air settled in around the table. Cissy Fuchs hadn’t allowed herself an outburst like this for a long time. When she spoke again, her voice was softer. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way exactly….”
“It’s okay.”
Driving home, Deidre could still feel the sting of Cissy’s words. And she had only herself to blame. She had no business attacking Norman.
