LITMIR.BIZ

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you, not net. It’s a bloody fortune.’ She nodded. ‘And he plots against me in my own home.’ He turned to Jasper. ‘Pity you couldn’t fix it so we could hear the other end.’

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      ‘OK, Jasper. Goodnight. I’ll drive Miss Delft home.’

      ‘Goodnight, sir.’ Jasper closed the tape-recorder and put it away before going out. As soon as the door closed the girl got to her feet and put her arms round Stone’s neck. ‘We can’t go on meeting like this,’ she said, and giggled.

      ‘Seriously,’ said Stone, ‘you’re the only one I have. You’re all I live for, darling.’

      ‘I know,’ said Suzy Delft.

      2

      What does [Upton] Sinclair know about anything? He’s just a writer.

      Louis B. Mayer

      1949

      ‘All my brother ever wanted to do is make this a better town.’

      The taller of the two men fingered the lock of the safe and turned to face the angry young cowhand. ‘Wait a minute, boy. Americans built this town with bare hands and know-how: anyone who don’t like it here can go back to where they come from.’

      The young cowboy leaned across the banker’s desk and spoke in the manner of a man trying hard to control his temper. ‘Did you ever walk as far as your own ranch-house, Mr Sanderson? Did you ever see what kind of shacks those Mexicans live in, did you?’

      ‘Would,’ explained the banker, ‘but I just can’t stand the smell.’ He smiled.

      They both turned as a sound of gunfire and galloping horses grew louder. Half a dozen horsemen galloped past, firing six-guns into the air. The young cowboy said, ‘Seems like you might be taking yourself a long deep sniff.’

      Baxter kicked open the doors of the light-trap because he was balancing two thick-shakes and my pastrami on rye: a Hollywood breakfast! I used my thumbnail to prise the lid off the shake carefully, so as not to spill it. Around the cardboard lid, serpentine coils of film spelled out ‘San Fernando Valley Drugstore established 1934’. I flicked it as far as the front row of seats. Some days I could hit the screen. I always sat at the very back of the viewing theatre alongside the glass panel of the projection room. The big fans were there, so I could ignore the ‘No Smoking’ signs without worrying about top brass wandering in to sniff and see why the red light was on. Baxter unwrapped my straws and arranged the hot sandwiches and dill pickle on a paper plate. He was flustered. Normally he would have ducked under the projection beam, but now the mayor of the township was only one inch high as he stamped around on Baxter’s forehead.

      ‘You’re in the light, Baxter.’ He nodded but he hadn’t heard me. I wondered why I’d put up with him for five years, but in 1944 only dopes like Baxter and layabouts like me had escaped the Army.

      ‘You’re in the light,’ I said again.

      ‘They are not renewing your contract, Peter.’

      We both knew I didn’t have that sort of contract. I was on monthly salary and that’s all they had to give me to say goodbye.

      I started on the sandwich. ‘Every day I tell you, no lettuce. Every day!’

      It wasn’t really unexpected. I was fighting a desperate rearguard action to protect my script against a ‘creative producer’. That’s always a mistake, but in 1949 it was a fatal one.

      ‘McCann, the cop on Gate Three, told me. There’s an envelope waiting for you when you check out. The girl from accounts told him what was in it.’ Things were tough all over: the mayor was being held down on Baxter’s chest by three cowboys, and when Baxter moved they rippled.

      I ate only the meat out of the sandwich. I put the thick-shake under my seat and got up. It was a bright idea to put fascist-style arguments into the mouths of my heavies, but like so many of my ideas it was sadly mistimed.

      Baxter said, ‘It was a great gesture, Peter. And on your kind of salary an unmarried guy can afford a gesture now and again.’ I nodded. He said, ‘You could talk to the Guild, but you’ll be grabbed by Warner’s, or Paramount, you see. You’ll maybe double your take-home pay. It’s the best thing that’s happened to you.’ He had a big smile fixed on his face and for a moment I was tempted to see how long he could hold it, but I remembered the good times.

      ‘OK. I’ll phone Jim tomorrow and tell him you are some kind of genius. He’ll probably find you some other hack.’

      ‘He will if you ask him, Peter. He respects you.’

      ‘Sure.’ I didn’t turn the lights up. I groped along the seat backs and out of the double-doors of viewing theatre number eight without saying another word. I suppose Baxter told the projectionist to stop showing Last Vaquero, or maybe it’s still running. Anyway, it was a lousy script. Maybe the first draft I’d written would have made a decent film but the rewrite had got too much stuff about hard work and truth bringing success. That took care of any irony that I’d tried to bring to it. Koolman Studios had a standing order about ‘values’ and I’d been crazy to try to get by it, let alone to add a few ideas of my own.

      I didn’t realize that it was going to be the last time I walked through the Koolman Studios for over fifteen years. I blinked in the daylight and went past the big sound stages to the writers’ building.

      A tractor train with pieces of a Hawaiian village rumbled past. The kid driving it shouted something to me and I waved. A group of men in heavy make-up and silk dressing-gowns were standing outside the door of Number Two stage, smoking desperately. They looked up when the kid shouted and they looked at me. Already I felt a twinge of the paranoia that an investigating subcommittee had brought to Hollywood.

      It was still only 8.45 A.M. on a February morning but the sun was bright enough to burn your eyes out. I called into my office to collect a couple of shirts and a half-completed short story. The typewriter and the ten-dollar fan belonged to the management.

      From my window I could see the empty lot where walls and stairs were stored. Beyond it there was the block that housed the accountants and the lawyers. Significantly, theirs was a two-storey brick building with fitted carpets and air conditioning; the writers’ ‘block’ was two timber sheds linked by a dimly lit corridor that was part of film storage.

      Around the Koolman layout there was a high white stucco wall surmounted with rows of barbed wire and broken glass, but the executive building faced inwards to bright green lawns above which hovered white sprinkler mist. I took the forbidden short-cut to the main gate. It was time I lived dangerously. I passed Leo Koolman – the Studio’s whizz-kid – and my producer Kagan Bookbinder. They were sitting in Bookbinder’s brand-new convertible. It was bright red, with a grinning chromium front that people who were still on the waiting-list for new cars called ‘Japanese Admirals’. The car radio was singing quietly.

      Bookbinder was trying to remember how to look embarrassed, but then decided I’d not had my news yet. He was a tough-looking bastard, like an extra for the desert island set that had been in constant use since Pearl Harbor day.

      Leo Koolman was a vain kid with a perfect suntan and a Hawaiian shirt with red and orange flowers on it. In those days he was tipped as the only person with the youth, drive and experience to get the studio out of the jam it was in. As one of his first victims I still find it difficult to admire his judgement.

      Koolman said, ‘Do you know the nominees?’

      ‘The Academy Awards,’ Bookbinder explained. ‘They weren’t on the early bulletin. We’re waiting for the nine o’clock.’

      ‘Hamlet,’ I said, ‘Laurence Olivier.’

      ‘You’re guessing,’ Koolman accused. He was hoping that I wasn’t just guessing. A British winner would automatically mean a rise in the Stone stakes.

      ‘Who else?’ I said

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