How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (34 page)

“Let's just say it behooves us to give Danny Brode some slack at this point. You don't want to get known as a difficult writer. Give him one more polish and I promise you it'll be worth your while in the long run.”

When I threatened to go to the Writers Guild, she said she'd hate to end our professional relationship.

Maybe you've heard the one about the devil who goes to the agent and says, “I'll give you any client you want—Cruise, Costner, Pacino, you name it—in exchange for your immortal soul for all eternity.” And the agent says, “What's the catch?”

I stopped trusting my agent from that moment on, but I followed her advice. I wrote three drafts, got paid for one, and the project was in turnaround within six months. Though I didn't see Brode for a couple of years, in a sense my agent was right. I was bankable because I'd had a deal, and that led to other deals, and within a couple years I had my first movie in production and moved into a house in Benedict Canyon. And whenever I needed a villain for a story, someone rich and powerful to harass the protagonists, I had vivid impressions to draw on.

Danny Brode became even more rich and powerful. He married into a Hollywood dynasty and shortly thereafter was running the studio his in-laws controlled. Consolidation of power through marriage was established procedure in this particular family. Brode's father-in-law was supposed to be affiliated with a major crime family. In the film community it was whispered that in a premarital conference Brode had been made to understand cheating on his wife would constitute his precipitous fall from grace. This was considered slightly bizarre, since everybody fucked around in proportion to their power and wealth, most of all people who owned studios and casinos. But the old boy was apparently overfond of his first daughter.

“Some nice Faustian elements in this situation,” I said to the lunch partner who first filled me in on this story. I once heard someone say there are only seven basic stories, but in this business there's only one. In Hollywood the story is always Faust.

“Some nice what?” he said.

I smiled. “I was just thinking of an old German film.”

Brode got even fatter. In a town where everybody had a personal trainer and green salads were considered a main course, there was something almost heroic about his obesity. From time to time I would see him at Morton's or wherever, and after a while—once CAA took over my representation, for example, and I started dating actresses—he even began to recognize me. I heard stories. My first agent was right—the bitch. It's a small town.

One of the stories I heard was about a novelist I knew from Columbia. After his first novel made him famous, he star-tripped out here to soak up some of the gravy. Success came on him pretty fast, and he ran so fast to keep up with it that he got out in front of it. He bought a million-dollar co-op on Central Park West and a beach house in Maine, plus he had a little coke problem. He'd sold his book to Brode's studio outright, which is to say he got paid the same no matter whether it went into production or not. By the time the second payment was due, this writer was pretty desperate for money—he was overdue on both his mortgages, his girlfriend had an insatiable wardrobe and his wife was socking him for a big settlement. Brode knew about this. So when it came time to pay off, he called the writer up to his house in Malibu and said, “Look, I owe you a quarter mil, but at this point I don't know if we're going to go into production. Things are tight and your stock's gone down. Let's just say either I could give you seventy-five and we could call it even or I could tie you up in court for the next ten years.” The writer started screaming about the contract, his agency, the Writers Guild. And Brode said, “Talk to your agent. I think he'll see it my way.”

Even in Hollywood, this is not standard procedure, but the writer's stock had dropped; after being hot for a season, he'd cooled off fast, and the agency, after a lot of thought, decided to go with Brode and advised the writer to take the seventy-five and shut up.

By the time I heard this story, I wasn't even surprised. I'd learned a lot in three years.

I was doing well by local standards, and that I found myself doing business with Brode again wasn't really surprising. Several production companies were tracking an idea of mine when Brode told my agency he wanted to work with me. CAA packaged a deal with me, a director and two stars for a story about—well, let's just say it was a story of betrayal and revenge. This was the one I'd been wanting to do from the beginning. “A Yuppie
The Postman Always Rings Twice”
was the one-liner devised by my agent. For a variety of reasons, some of them aesthetic, it was important to me that the movie be shot in New York. Brode wanted to do it in Toronto and send a second unit to New York for a day. Toronto was far cheaper, and thought to resemble Manhattan. I knew I couldn't change any producer's mind when two or three million dollars was at stake, so I worked on the director. A man with several commercially successful films behind him, he was dying to be an auteur. He couldn't understand how the kind of respect that Scorsese and Coppola got had thus far eluded him, so it wasn't hard to convince him that New York's critical fraternity would take his film much more seriously if it was
authentic;
that is to say, if it was shot in New York. You couldn't fake these things, I said, not even in the movies. You think Woody Allen would shoot a movie in Toronto, or that they'd publish him in
The New Yorker
if he did? Or consider Sidney Lumet, I reminded him.

That did it. Though Brode kicked and screamed, the director was adamant and very eloquent; besides, his clout far exceeded mine, commercially. In the end, after I'd handed in the third draft, they headed off to New York with long lines of credit and suitcases full of cash for the friendly local Teamsters.

I went along for preproduction, since the director'd decided he liked having me around; so long as I didn't ask for a consulting fee, the studio was happy to pay my expenses. Brode's assistant, a woman named Karen Levine, would be on location, while he would fly out once in a while to check in. Levine was so petite, blond and terribly efficient that at first I hardly noticed her. In Los Angeles one can become accustomed to thinking of beauty as something languid, sexiness as a quality that adheres only to the slow-moving, self-conscious forms of actresses and professional companions. And while Karen was no odalisque, I began noticing her more and more. Despite the legendary informality of Southern California—the indiscriminate use of first names, the gross overextension of the concept of friendship—it was unusual to encounter someone who could sail straight between the whirlpool of craven servility and the shoals of condescension. Karen did, and I liked her for it. That she was doing more than working for Brode had occurred to me, but my discreet inquiries suggested they were strictly business associates and that Brode was living up to the contract with his father-in-law.

Then I heard Karen say she was looking to rent an apartment for the three months of filming. I thought of Alexis, who had finally thrown the rock manager out, losing several thousand in the process. I figured the studio would pay a bloated-enough rent to make up some of what Hollywood had taken out of her in the old, kissed Karen on both cheeks and ushered us into the upstairs parlor, where she'd laid out a tea service that would've done Claridge's proud. She then took us on a tour, pointing out pictures of herself with the Duke, and Bogie, a signed first edition from Faulkner, a set of candlesticks given to her by Red Skelton, the love seat on which she'd traded confidences (here she winked) with Errol Flynn. Some of this stuff even I hadn't heard before. She was laying it on a bit thick, but Karen seemed both attentive and relaxed. When we went downstairs, I knew Karen was hooked as soon as she saw the big canopy bed floating in the middle of the big paneled bedroom, wreathed in rose-colored chintz. Before Alexis had mixed her second Negroni—“I don't usually drink in the afternoon, but this is an occasion. Are you sure you won't have one?”—it was decided that Karen would move in for the three months and that Alexis would introduce her to the landlord as her niece; the rock manager had been her “nephew.”

When we finally left at six, I asked Karen out to dinner. She said she had a lot of work to do but would love to some other night.

When shooting started, I hung around and visited the set every couple days. Brode flew in most weekends, which surprised me, though he seemed to be taking an excessive interest in the project. Each of his visits managed to make someone miserable. Three weeks into shooting, it was me. Having decided he didn't like the ending, he wanted an upbeat rewrite. I kicked and screamed about the integrity of the story. Then I tried to go through the director; but Brode had worked on him first, and he was impervious to my warnings about what
The New Yorker
would think of the new ending. Apparently, he was more concerned about his two points of the gross.

“It comes down to this, Martin,” Brode said as he sawed into a veal chop one night at Elaine's. “You write the new ending or we hire somebody else. I'll give you another twenty-five, call it consulting.” I watched him insert half a pound of calf's flesh into his maw, waiting for him to choke on it and die. It occurred to me that he was too fat for anybody to perform the Heimlich maneuver successfully, so I could say to the police officers,
Hey, sorry, I tried to get my arms around him, but no go
.

I rewrote the ending. For me, it ruined the movie, but the American public bought sixty million dollars' worth of tickets, a big gross at the time.

I visited Alexis frequently and used these occasions to knock on Karen's door. One night, she finally allowed me to take her to dinner. I told her what I'd never told anyone before, about how my ex-New York girlfriend ran off and married my best friend. Karen was appalled and sympathetic. By now she'd adopted the Manhattan uniform of nighttime femininity, looking very sexy in a small tight black dress. At her door we exchanged an encouraging kiss, but when it began to develop into something else, she pulled back and announced she had to be up at five.

A week or so later I went over to visit Alexis. As she was mixing the Negronis, she said, “Who's Karen's boyfriend anyway? I take it he's some big shot.”

“I don't think she has a boyfriend,” I said, somewhat alarmed.

“I can't understand how someone as pretty as Karen could let that fat man touch her.”

I felt relieved. “That wasn't Karen's boyfriend; it was her boss.”

Alexis snorted. “Call it what you want. I know all about girls and their bosses.”

“It's not like that with Karen.”

“Don't tell me what it's like,” she said. “I have to listen to them. And now I have to buy a new bed.”

“What're you talking about?”

She put a finger to her lips, walked over to open the stairway door and listened. Then she motioned for me to follow her down.

The canopy bed was wrecked. The box spring and mattress, which had previously floated a couple feet off the floor, were now earthbound, the bedposts and chintz draperies tangled and splayed.

“I've had bosses like that,” Alexis said. “But thank God I never had that one. The poor girl's risking her life every time she climbs into bed with that whale.”

Brode had flown back to the West Coast that morning, so I had a whole week to plot my strategy. I called a meeting as soon as he got back to town. The only time he could meet me was breakfast: the Regency, at seven-thirty.

When I arrived at eight, he was just finishing off a plate of ham and eggs. “I'm just leaving,” he said. “What's up?”

“I have another movie. You might like this one.”

“What's the pitch?” he said. “I've got exactly three minutes.”

“It's a mob story.”

“That turf's pretty well worked,” he said.

“You'll like this one,” I replied. “In my story, a young mobster's career takes off when he marries the don's daughter. But there's a catch: If he ever screws around, the don tells him, he'll be a piss-poor scuba diver, fifty feet under without oxygen. At first the son-in-law does very well. However, a young wise guy within the organization happens to live in the same building as this very attractive girl, and there's a farcical scene involving this broken bed. The broken bed leads to very dire consequences for some of the parties concerned.”

Brode's face turned dark red as he listened. At the end of the pitch he looked into my eyes to see if he might've misheard me. Then he said, “What do you want?”

“I want another movie with you. Okay, maybe not this one, but something else. And I want to coproduce.”

“I could have you …” He didn't finish.

And that's how I became a producer, on terms that were highly satisfactory from my point of view. I don't think Danny felt it was the best deal he'd ever made, and I knew I'd have to watch out for him. But the project I eventually developed made money for both of us, which made me feel a little safer when falling asleep at night.

A year after this breakfast, I flew back to New York for Alexis's funeral. One of ten mourners, I cried when they lowered her coffin into the ground out in the cemetery in Queens. The last time I remembered crying was on a day that should've been one of my happiest. I'd just gotten a call from an agent in Los Angeles who'd read my script and decided to represent me. I'd waited two hours for Lauren, my girlfriend, to come home from work. I'd bought flowers and Champagne and called everyone I knew. Finally, Lauren got home, and I almost knocked her over in my excitement. We'd talked about moving to California together if anything happened for me. I sprayed Champagne all over us and talked about our future in the promised land. “We can live near the beach,” I said, following her into the bathroom, where she rubbed a pink towel back and forth across her dark hair. “We'll drive up to Big Sur on weekends.” That was when she told me. One minute I've got Champagne streaming down my face, and tears the next. I thought about that as I listened to the words of the minister at the cemetery, and felt the wetness on my cheeks. I remembered that day years ago in a one-bedroom apartment on West 111th Street as being the last time I'd cried. Somehow, I don't think it will happen again.