Irritated by this underling’s elfin shine of perverse admiration, Bech said to Rantoul, “To get back to your point: I can’t believe a jury of L.A. working men and women is going to identify that much with a ruthless Hollywood wheeler-dealer.”
“Oh, they identify,” was the drawled answer. “Everybody thinks movies out here. They’re as proud of their local product as the good folks in Iowa are of corn. The opposition is sure as shooting going to present this as an effete Eastern smart-aleck maligning a worker in the fields. What you call gouging the plaintiff will endeavor to construe as the going rate and simple honorable enterprise.”
Bech’s voice, after Rantoul’s, sounded rather anxious and hurried in his own ears—high-pitched and, he supposed, effetely Eastern. “But what about what he did to poor Lanna Jerome? He absolutely disembowelled her money.” Violent gory images—buzz-saws ripping through stacks of dollar bills, vultures and hyenas tugging at the ribbed carcass of a succulent chanteuse beneath a blazing desert sun—assaulted the defendant’s head. Perhaps the lawsuit was right; he was too suggestible to be a trustworthy journalist. His father had always scoffed at Bech’s dreams of being a writer. Writing a hard-boiled exposé like “The Only Winners Left in Tinseltown” for a fly-by-night rag like Flying Fur had been an attempt, perhaps, to convince the old man that he could turn a dollar when he needed it. Abraham Bech had died last year, in the subway, under the sliding filth of the East River. At least he hadn’t lived to crow over this debacle.
“Now you’re talking the local language,” the lawyer said, his eye moving from his very clean plate to Bech’s half-eaten sole. “You get Lanna Jerome up on the stand, the jury’s yours. But she’s hiding out in Palm Springs and has dodged every summons we’ve put out on her.”
“Anyway,” said Gregg Nunn, “there’s no telling how the jury would react. That long affair she had with the governor of Nevada didn’t sit too well with a lot of fundamentalists.”
Rantoul explained, “L.A’s a lot like Persia these days; everybody’s either a fundamentalist or a whore. And then there’s this: if we seem to have Lanna on our side, the jury may figure there’s tons of money and why not throw poor old Morris a sop of a million or so?”
My non-existent million, Bech thought. The fish he had swallowed bit the tender lining of his stomach, and he devoutly wished he were back in the twelve-table Italian restaurant he knew, just off upper Broadway on 97th, sitting solitary with a plate of spinach fettuccine and that afternoon’s Post. Not even in his idealistic post-war Partisan Review and Accent stage had he dreamed that words, mere words, had so much power—the power to pull him across the continent and dump him in this sumptuous restaurant with these three expensive strangers. The restaurant was wide and deep and dark, in that heavy baronial style that had possessed Hollywood at the height of its grandeur. There were carved dadoes and corbelled stones and leaded windows with Gothic arches. Errol Flynn and the sheriff of Nottingham (played by Basil Rathbone) might stroll in at any minute.
The fourth person at the table, the “lady” of Rantoul’s jocular announcement, was a female paralegal named Rita: tightly pulled-back long black hair, carmine lips, hoop earrings, and an unsmiling Latina intensity. On a blue-lined pad beside her plate she sporadically took rapid notes.
Flying Fur had carried some libel insurance but bankruptcy had cancelled it. If the jury found for the defense, Rantoul planned to countersue for legal expenses. In the meantime, Bech had drawn out his savings and borrowed from his publisher on a novel he felt much too distracted and put-upon to write. Four pricey days had already been spent waiting for the Los Angeles legal system to find a judge with space on his docket for this case. Ohrbach’s attorneys had asked for a jury trial and that would take more days. Biting, nibbling, churning hatred of Morris Ohrbach robbed Bech of his appetite, and he asked his lawyer if he’d like to try his sole. “Just a taste,” the big man obligingly drawled, reaching with his fork. “There was quite a to-do in the Food Section of the L.A. Times when they hired this chef all the way from Grenoble, France, and Ah confess Ah couldn’t much tell from my pork chop what the fuss was all about.”
The judge was really more the color of a pale briefcase, and surprisingly young, and amazingly, Bech thought as the days in court wore on, patient. The judge sat for hours without saying a word, leaning a bit to his left, as if away from the winds of justice blowing out of the slowly filling jury box. When he did speak, it was firmly and softly, with an excessive fairness, Bech felt, to the inept, time-wasting shenanigans of Ohrbach’s counsel, a short and excitable man called Ralph Kepper. The defense team named him Sergeant Kepper. He always wore khaki pants and baggy sports jackets, which amounted to a statement: he was no fancy-Dan pinstriped Eastern-establishment cat’s-paw, he was an honest workaday legal man.
In questioning the prospective jurors, Kepper would ask them if they had ever read a magazine called Flying Fur (they answered, invariably, no) and if they had any prima-facie prejudice against “sophisticated, cynical, New York-style journalism.” Sometimes he would ask them if, when they heard the words “Hollywood agent,” they suffered any pejorative input. Language did strange things in Kepper’s mouth, and he frequently announced himself as having “misspoken”—“Yeronner, I misspoke myself.”
Nevertheless, this rumpled clown was regarded by the pale-brown judge with unwinking gravity, and his endless peremptory challenges caused juror after juror to leave the box, humiliated. The tactic, Bech’s team explained to him, was merely to prolong the proceedings and make the defendant all the more willing to offer a settlement as the cheapest way out.
“Well?” Bech asked. “Would it be? The cheapest way out.”
Rantoul was stunned enough to stop chewing. He swallowed and rested a thick hand on Bech’s sleeve. “Even if it were,” he said, “this team won’t let you. Now, don’t tell me that you lack team spirit.”
A spacious cafeteria occupied the top floor of the Los Angeles Courthouse, and here the defense team gathered for lunch every day, during the long recesses. Protocol dictated that, but for curt, prim nods of recognition, they ignore Kepper as he ate in morose solitude, gnawing at a sandwich that kept getting lost under sheaves of legal paper. Ohrbach, over a week into the proceedings, had not deigned to appear yet. Rantoul thought the jury, when at last in place, would resent this show of indifference, whereas Nunn thought it might, on the contrary, signify an impressively crowded schedule and enhance his eventual appearance. “Not being here,” Nunn fancifully continued, his little hands flickering and his elfin face gleaming under the even blond bangs, “makes him the central figure of our drama, the awaited Godot, the Kafkaesque deity whose minions carry on on behalf of his obscure but majestic authority. Absence is an awesome statement, as the world’s religions testify.”
“He lets hisself get arrogant,” Rantoul allowed, shifting in his chair before engulfing a thick wedge, topped with whipped cream, of cafeteria pecan pie. “That’s come out in some of his other trials. He goes along real smooth on the stand, and then he gets cute. He stops minding the store. It’s hurt him before, and it’ll hurt him again.”
The description touched a furtive chord of sympathy in Bech. “Cute” and “not minding the store” were phrases his late father would have used for what his only son had chosen to do in life. Young Bech didn’t have his feet on the ground, he didn’t know his ass from his elbow. It was true. Just writing “arch-gouger” showed a kind of dreaminess; he should have let the facts and the percentages speak for themselves. He had been inflamed by misplaced love for Lanna Jerome, confusing her with dear lost Claire. He had tried to get her attention with the fervor of his denunciation of her despoiler. But how could Lanna Jerome care about him and what he wrote in a doomed 17th Street rag? She received three million plus some points of the unadjusted gross for a feature film, and her last album went platinum within a week of issue.
Outside the cafeteria, the roof held an open-air promenade, from which one could see vast
hazed tracts of pastel housing, glass skyscrapers, merging ribbons of freeway, and far hills dried to the gold of the southern-California winter. On a near hill perched the shiny blue stadium where the once-Brooklyn Dodgers played, and, down below, across the street, stood a gold-trimmed opera house, with a small green park around it. Though it all looked nothing like his idea of a metropolis, Bech felt at home on this roof. When he was an awkward thirteen his family moved from the Upper West Side to Brooklyn. The West Side was getting too full of blacks and spics, his father felt, and Brooklyn was where two of Abe Bech’s brothers, Ike and Joe, had lived for years. His father was a dealer in diamonds and precious metals on West 47th Street. Though the materials were precious, the competition was stiff and the profit margin ever more finely shaved. Life was a struggle. Even in Brooklyn, it turned out, it was a struggle. The kids weren’t necessarily tougher than those on the Upper West Side, but they were provincial—intolerant of outsiders, un-understanding of nuances. Henry was already a creature of nuances. For fresh air the easiest thing for him, rather than walking the eight blocks to Prospect Park and risking getting hassled by bigger teenagers, was to go up on the roof of their 9th Street brownstone. The other rooftops of Brooklyn spread out in a vast dark plain thickly planted with chimney pots; on one edge of the plain, like a rectilinear mountain hazed by carbon dioxide, Manhattan unreally rose. Now, on the opposite side of the continent, he found himself remembering those monotonous tarpaper vistas and again, as when an adolescent, yearning to fly away, to launch himself from the roof into another life, an airy, glamorous life of literature.
• • •
The trial finally got under way. The plaintiff’s side had exhausted all its challenges. Rantoul tried to expedite matters by challenging almost nobody: only one old dignified Chicano gardener, whose command of English appeared halting (he was insulted; he protested, “I understand good, I am citizen since twenty years!”), and a snappily dressed Bel Air matron who had once been married to a lawyer. “You never know how she might react,” Rantoul explained. “Ex-wives just aren’t rational where the law is concerned.”
The solemnly impanelled twelve jury members, with the two alternates, sat on the left of the courtroom. Bech and what spectators there might be—a stray street person; a courthouse office worker taking a break—faced the judge’s high desk across an area of chairs and tables; here the lawyers, the agonists, performed and the court stenographer, like an unspeaking Greek chorus, rippled out yards and yards of typed notes. The paper folded itself, accordion-style, into a cardboard box on the far side of his shorthand machine. The stenographer was a thin pale bald man with a yellow toothbrush mustache and an unfocused blue gaze. He dressed like the old vaudeville comedians, in checked suits and polka-dot ties. When the lawyers held a conference with the judge, he hurried with his machine to eavesdrop and kept on tapping. When the judge declared some passage of procedure off the record, his tireless long white fingers dropped to his lap and his glazed stare rested on a blank wall near the American flag. He was the only person in the room who seemed to Bech not to be wasting his time.
Though by modernist prescription artists live on the edge of respectability, in a state of liberating derangement, Bech had never before been hauled into court. He had heard that the wheels of justice ground fine, but he had not expected those wheels to be so wobbly, so oddly swivelled in every direction but that of the simple truth.
The first witness for the plaintiff was a mincing professor of English at Southern Cal who responded at length to Sergeant Kepper’s questions about the words involved. The prefix “arch,” by way of Anglo-Saxon and Old French, derives from a Greek verb meaning “to begin, to rule,” and signifies either the highest of its type, as in “archbishop” or “archangel” or, to quote Webster, “most fully embodying the qualities of his or its time.” Mr. Bech’s article asserted, then, that Mr. Ohrbach was the chief, or most fully developed, gouger in the entire Los Angeles area. “Gouge,” authorities tend to agree, is a word of Celtic origin, by way of Late Latin, referring to a chisel of concave cross section. Had the word Mr. Bech chosen been “chiseller,” it was interesting to note, the implication of wrongdoing would have been more distinct, and the connotation of brute strength rather less. The phrase “greedy reasons of his own rake-off” is less easy to decipher, and for a time the expert thought there might be a typographical error or an editorial slip involved. The expression “rake-off,” of course, stems from the old practice in gambling houses of the croupier with his rake taking the gambling house’s percentage out of the chips on the table. “Widened the prevailing tragic rift between the literary and cinematic arts” is also far from clear, since the two arts have never been close and the tragedy of their separation would seem to lie only in the eye of the beholder, in this case a writer of modestly paid fiction and journalism who might have had in mind the much greater financial rewards of film work.
“Objection: conjecture,” Rantoul automatically growled.
“Sustained,” the judge as automatically responded.
All this semantic disquisition was putting the jury to sleep. They sat there, in their two sextuple rows (five men, seven women; five whites, four blacks, two Asian-Americans, and a part-Cherokee) plus the two alternates, who sat beside but not in the elevated jury box, all hoping to see Lanna Jerome, with her rice-powder makeup, her artificial mole, her slinky, slimmed-down figure, her hair dyed soot-black and moussed into short spikes. “Slinky, slimmed-down”: as was common knowledge among her millions of fans, Lanna had a weakness for Dr Pepper and junk snacks. After her relationship with the governor of Nevada had broken up she put on thirty pounds in mournful bingeing. Bech had loved her all the more for that vulnerable, blubbery side of her.
Rantoul and the word-expert batted the prefix “arch” around, the latter finally conceding, mincingly, that its use here might signify merely a relatively high standing as a gouger, not a supreme and ruling status in an organized group of them.
The next witness for the prosecution, a self-styled “expert in media,” discoursed on the circulation figures of Flying Fur during its eighteen months of existence. Though the subscriptions in southern California were only forty-two in number, of which eighteen went to libraries, the influence of those few copies would be hard to overestimate; the magazine, as the latest “hip” word from New York City, was avidly read by agents, actors, producers, and other persons active in Mr. Ohrbach’s business, and an adverse reference in its pages would certainly do him incalculable professional damage.
Rantoul had a field day with that witness, and ate an especially hearty lunch in the sky-view cafeteria. The trial was under way, and still Ohrbach had not showed up. However, Bech did have a glimpse, one afternoon, of the judge out by the elevators, going home. He was wearing a denim suit the tasty shade of honeydew melon, with bell-bottom pants and a lapel-less jacket. Out of his robes, he looked like a smooth young dude heading into the pleasures of the evening. He studiously avoided Bech’s eye.
In the legal world, eye avoidance is an art. Morris Ohrbach turned out to be a master of it. When, the next day, he at last appeared, he entered the courtroom bobbing and smiling in all directions, but his smiles landed nowhere, like the fist-flurry of a boxer warming up. His gaze, as benign and generalized as that of a Byzantine icon, flicked past Bech’s face. One of Ohrbach’s well-known eccentricities was a virtually religious avoidance of being photographed, so Bech had had no idea of what his archenemy looked like. The elderly plaintiff, of middle height, hunched over like a man about to break into a run; he had this vaguely smiling mouth, a large nose, and a shock of wavy white hair thrust forward by a cowlick that reminded Bech of his own stiffly wiry, hard-to-control hair. Bech’s hair was still basically dark, and his posture had not yet acquired an elderly stoop, but the resemblance was nevertheless strong. Ohrbach looked enough like him to be his father.
The jury stirred, excited by the presence of someone who, if not exactly famous, had bilked the famo
us. The judge momentarily sat up straight, and paid scrupulous attention to the morning’s witnesses, a series of character witnesses on Ohrbach’s behalf. They were women, Hollywood hostesses, who, at first timidly and then irrepressibly, testified to the plaintiff’s humanity—his courteous manners, his unfailing good humor and even temper, his personal and financial generosity to a host of causes ranging from the state of Israel to a little-league baseball team of impoverished Mexican-American youngsters.
“Morrie Ohrbach is a superb human being!” one especially pneumatic widow cried, in an abrupt release of pressure; she had been previously stifled by Rantoul’s objections to her breathy account of how, during her bereavement some years before, the agent had been assiduously attentive and beautifully considerate. Further, she added defiantly, as Rantoul half-stood to object again, all the investments he had talked her into had made money—scads of it.
Another woman, squarish and brown and bedecked with Navajo jewelry, testified that when she heard that her dear friend Morris had been called a gouger in one of these snide Eastern magazines she broke down and cried, off and on, for days. He would drop by the house in the late afternoon and looked an absolute wreck—he got so thin she was afraid he’d sink, just a bundle of bones, in her swimming pool and drown. Morrie himself, poor soul, didn’t have a swimming pool any more; he lived in this tiny two-bedroom condo in Westwood and had had to sell all but one of his sports cars, that’s how much of a gouger he was.
Rantoul in cross-examination elicited that the move to Westwood and the sports-car sales had followed the adverse legal judgment in the Lanna Jerome case. “Oh, that hideous woman!” was the unabashed response. “Everybody knows how she chased after the governor of Nevada until she broke up his lovely home and absolutely wrecked his career! He could have been President!”