A picket fence, unpaid bills, and babies was not the future he saw for himself, so he cheated on Vicki with her best friend, and made sure she found out. Then he left town and returned to New York, where he soon realized it was too cold for him – but not before doing a small part in a porno video for a fast thousand bucks cash.
The money bought him a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, where he rented a two-room run-down house in Venice – on the boardwalk – and worked as an extra in a few movies. After a while he got bored hanging around film sets, and drifted back to tending bar at a variety of Hollywood hang-outs.
One day he woke up and he was thirty-three.
* * *
Luckily Wes was not in his own bed, as he would have been so depressed he might have killed himself. He groped for a cigarette and looked around, while a thousand needles jabbed relentlessly at his temples. He had no idea where he was.
A half-full glass of scotch stood on the bedside table next to a pink telephone and a frilled Kleenex holder. There was also a cheap plastic alarm clock, and an ashtray shaped like an owl, overflowing with old cigarette butts.
Well, he obviously hadn’t hit pay dirt. For years he had been looking for another Swede. Being kept by a woman was the kind of cushy lifestyle that appealed to him.
Yawning loudly he sat up. A stuffed ginger cat stared down at him from a shelf. ‘Good morning,’ he said amiably.
Was it his imagination, or did the cat wink?
Shit! Too many late nights and hard women.
The bedroom was small and hot. No air conditioning. He had definitely lucked out.
‘Anyone home?’ he called, and his hostess made her entrance. She was a plump blonde with teased hair, caked makeup, and silicone breasts displayed through a polyester negligee.
‘I thought ya’d never wake up,’ she said. ‘Y’can put it away quicker than my old man; an’ that’s goin’ some.’
He could swear that he’d never set eyes on her in his life. And he must have been very drunk to have honoured her with the pleasure of his cock. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked.
She eyed him appreciatively. ‘At least y’can get it up, which is more’n he could when he ran out on me. You’d be amazed at the number of fagolas around today.’
‘Really?’ He dragged on his cigarette and pretended to be surprised.
‘I ain’t kiddin’ you, hon.’ She fluffed out her hair and gave him a long, lingering look. ‘I gotta be at work in half an hour… What the heck, I’ve time if you have.’
He would sooner have walked on hot coals all the way back to New York. This drinking of his had to stop.
She began to divest herself of the negligee. Underneath she wore a red garter belt, red patterned stockings and nothing else. Her bush – wiry and black – grew all the way to China. He was surprised she didn’t back-comb and style it.
‘Nothing I’d like better,’ he said, lifting the sheet and peering down at his penis – rigid, but only with the need to take a piss.
‘Looks good t’ me,’ she leered.
‘Just checking,’ he said.
‘What for?’
‘I’ve got this ongoing case of herpes. The doc says it’s only catching when it flares up. However, in the interest of not passing anything on, I like to keep an eye on it.’
She froze. ‘You low-life!’ Quickly she struggled back into her negligee, rolls of fat shaking indignantly. ‘Get out of my bed and take a powder.’
‘It’s not communicable now,’ he protested.
‘Just get lost, scumbag.’
She turned her back while he pulled on his pants and shirt. He left her house without another word being exchanged, and was surprised to find himself in the Valley. How had he made it to the Valley in the condition he must have been in?
Fortunately his car was parked outside. An old Lincoln won in a poker game. He did have his moments.
Stopping at a coffee shop on Ventura Boulevard, he went straight to the men’s room. In the mirror above a cracked basin he wished himself a happy birthday. On the wall somebody had scrawled MY MOTHER MADE ME A HOMOSEXUAL and underneath someone else had written IF I GIVE HER THE WOOL WILL SHE MAKE ME ONE TOO?
Leaning closer to the mirror he saw the marks of time and too much booze. Right now, unshaven, with a hangover and bleary eyes, he didn’t look too good. But he washed up nicely, and when he had lived with the Swede he had been positively good-looking. Of course, manicures and facials and massages and new expensive clothes helped anyone look good. Life with the Swede was quite a few years ago though. He missed her steely thighs, and her money.
Anyway, he could still get most women if he put his mind to it. He had longish brown hair and regular features marred only by a broken nose (acquired in a bar-room brawl), and a small inch-long scar beneath his left eyebrow (the result of an argument with Vicki when they split). His eyes were the colour of fresh seaweed, and while he didn’t exercise or any of that crap, his five feet eleven inches was in pretty good shape – give or take a few extra pounds.
He knew how to please the ladies too. Sober or drunk he could still make ’em sing Streisand.
After coffee and a couple of sugar-packed doughnuts he set off home, almost stopping for a teenage hitchhiker in red shorts – only changing his mind when he realized he was playing Russian roulette with his sex life. There were all sorts of things to consider nowadays: herpes, which he didn’t have – not to mention AIDS, which did not mean a shot of pencillin and goodbye Charlie. AIDS meant death. Slow and lingering.
Shuddering, he decided he definitely had to clean up his act. No more lost-weekend nights. In future he had to know who he was sleeping with.
Outside his house lurked a local prostitute. Once, when he was really busted, he had let her use his bedroom for a week. She entertained forty-two men and the place had smelled like a doss house toilet. Never again.
‘Hiya, Wes,’ she trilled. ‘I brought you a present.’
He was touched. The local hooker had remembered his birthday.
No such luck. It was a packet of cocaine he had ordered for an acquaintance.
‘How much?’ he asked.
Money was exchanged for goods, and he realized funds were alarmingly low. Even though he could sell the coke at twice the price, it was time to find another job.
Inside his house nothing had changed. Dirty clothes, dirty ashtrays, dirty sheets – the usual mess. Idly he wondered if he could hire the hooker for maid service. Probably not. She would think it was beneath her.
Punching on his phone answering machine he waited for the message that would tell him he was wanted for another group. Singing was his life – only he hadn’t done any in years.
‘Listen, pal,’ said the voice of his friend Rocky. ‘You gotta do me a big favour. Tonight there’s this party up in Bel Air at some TV star’s place. Silver Anderson. Me and Stuart were supposed to take care of the bar, only the stupid sonofabitch broke his arm jumpin’ out of a movin’ car. Don’t ask me why. Sixty bucks for a coupla hours. You can’t let me down. Okay, pal?’
It was his birthday. He had nothing else to do.
Chapter Seven
Jack Python drove a dark racing-green Ferrari. He did not like anyone else behind the wheel, and as most of the parking valets in town were aware of his idiosyncrasy they were quite happy for him to park it himself.
Leaving The Beverly Hills Hotel, he walked briskly to his car, trailed by a couple of tourists from Minnesota who, camera in hand, hoped to get his picture. Before they could summon the courage to ask, he roared off into the hazy afternoon sunshine.
He was supposed to play tennis, but breakfast with Howard and Mannon had sapped his energy and he didn’t feel like it, so he cancelled the appointment on his car telephone, making it for the next morning. Then he tried Clarissa at the studio, only to be informed that she was on the set and unavailable.
‘I know who you are!’ a girl in a white convertible at a stoplight yelled.
His smile o
f acknowledgment was uncomfortable. He honestly did not enjoy public recognition – unlike Mannon, who revelled in it, or Howard, who craved it. When Howard was first made the head of Orpheus, his finest moment was getting the front round table at Morton’s restaurant, wiping out two movie stars and a very important producer.
The Three Comers. Well, they sure had come a long way. Three guys with big ambitions sharing one small apartment. And they’d all made it to the top. He was proud of their achievements.
He drove slowly to his penthouse in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, preferring the looseness of hotel life to the responsibility of his own apartment or house. It gave him a nice sense of freedom.
Clarissa rented a home on Benedict Canyon, and he spent a lot of time there. Lately he had been thinking of leasing a place at the beach for the summer. Not in the Malibu Colony, that was too full of recognizable faces. More like Point Dume or Trancas. The idea really appealed to him. Maybe he’d just take the summer off and become a beach bum. He also thought it would be good for Heaven, who might like to come and stay with him for the summer.
Clarissa wasn’t thrilled at the prospect. She was a city person, more comfortable with dust and smells and bustle. She was always complaining about Los Angeles as opposed to New York. And she hated the beach.
They had met in New York at a fund-raising party for a Democratic Senator, who he later found out she was sleeping with. Their meeting was no big deal, apart from the fact that she dumped the Senator and ended up in his bed. After that they saw each other intermittently for a couple of months, always pursued by frantic paparazzi.
When Clarissa appeared on his show it was considered a big deal, a first, because she didn’t do television talk shows. Struggling through an hour with her he understood why. She was a difficult guest, and he was sorry he’d asked. Face to Face with Python depended on a lively exchange of interesting conversation between Jack and his guest of the hour. He wanted people to feel that after they’d watched his show they walked away from their television set with a new knowledge and understanding of the person in the hot seat. With Clarissa they found out nothing. She was a brilliant actress, and a lousy interview.
Face to Face with Python had been running with consistently excellent ratings for six years. The show aired once a week on Thursday nights, which left him plenty of time to pursue other activities. He had formed his own television production company five years before, and oversaw the making of docu-dramas with something important to say.
Jack had an image problem. He was too good-looking to be taken as seriously as he would like. And his womanizing reputation was hard to live down. But he was trying.
* * *
Howard Soloman drove a gold Mercedes 500 SEC. He stood, or rather fidgeted, beneath the portico of The Beverly Hills Hotel and waited for the valet to bring it round.
To his eternal disgust Howard was on the short side for a man. He barely made five feet six inches, although when he wore his specially made European shoes with the hidden lifts he could sometimes add another four inches, making him a respectable five feet ten inches. In his weekend uniform of sweat pants and Adidas jogging shoes, lifts were not possible. Yet Howard had asked his shoemaker in London to work on it.
Howard was also – at only thirty-nine – losing his hair. It had started to thin alarmingly years before, and prudently he had added a custom-designed hairpiece before people began to notice. The hairpiece was good, the only drawback being that it made him sweat. Once, on a weekend in Las Vegas, he had taken a girl to his hotel room. He had removed his clothes, shoes, and then his hairpiece, because it was so damned hot and she looked like a certain maniac who would pull crazily at his hair in moments of passion.
She had stared at him in amazement. ‘Shee… it!’ she exclaimed. ‘I came up here with a nice lookin’ guy, an’ I end up with a bald midget!’
Which, of course, had swiftly ended that night of sexual high jinks.
The only time Howard removed his hairpiece now was in the privacy of his own home with only his wife and visiting children to mock him.
There had been four wives – one of them current, three of them ex. And there were five children. Nobody could ever say that Howard Soloman didn’t have what it took. He was a walking hormone!
Wife number one was a black activist who moonlighted as an ‘artistic dancer’. In spite of Jack begging him not to, he married her when he was nineteen and she was forty. It was not a lasting marriage. They both decided it was a mistake, and after forty-eight hours of fucking their brains out they got an annulment.
Wife number two was somebody else’s wife when he met her. She was pretty and sweet – nothing to get into a lather over. Howard railroaded her into divorcing her husband. Then he married her, fathered three children by her, and divorced her – all in the space of five years. She was exhausted by the time it was over, and now lived in Pacific Palisades with the kids and a new husband.
Wife number three was an incredibly tall, sophisticated, Brazilian ball-breaker. She generously gave him a child and two years of her life, and then hit him for so much alimony he thought he might never recover from the shock.
Wife number four was Poppy, his former secretary. They had been married for three years and had a daughter named Roselight. Their daughter was the reason they married in the first place. Poppy did not believe in abortion, so when she became pregnant she put the screws to him and he married her. Well, what else could a nice Jewish boy do?
Poppy made the Brazilian ball-breaker look like the good fairy.
‘Howard!’ A hand clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You old son of a gun! I haven’t seen you in too long.’
Howard recognized Orville Gooseberger, the producer. He wished he had on his lifts: Orville was tall enough to make him feel uncomfortable. The only tall people he wasn’t uncomfortable with were women. That feeling of dominance was a turn-on. Once, he had made a very tall woman stand open-legged on a table while he went up on her. He got quite horny just thinking about it. It was definitely a scene to be repeated, only not with Poppy, who was short. And besides, there was no way he’d suggest an act like that to her – she thought he was perverted as it was.
‘You know, Howard,’ Orville boomed, ‘we have to do a project together. It’s about time.’
Why hadn’t it been time before Howard was head of Orpheus?
‘Why?’ said Howard.
‘What?’ said Orville.
Ah, the hell with it. Orville was an ace producer, and he brought his pictures in on time and within budget, which is more than you could say for most of the assholes running around calling themselves producers.
‘We’ll take a meeting,’ Howard said expansively, using Hollywoodese.
‘Lunch?’ Orville suggested. ‘Perhaps here. On Monday or Tuesday?’
‘I gotta check my book,’ Howard said. ‘Call the office on Monday. My girl knows every move I make better than I do.’
He realized he could see right up Orville’s nose and the view was not pleasant.
The parking valet zoomed up with his Mercedes. Howard slipped him a ten, impressed with his own generosity, and slid behind the wheel, inhaling the smell of the rich leather which never failed to please him. There was nothing like having money. No thrill in the world. Even naked ladies standing on table tops with their legs spread.
* * *
Mannon Cable drove a blue Rolls-Royce. The Roller, he called it.
He did not leave the hotel at the same time as Jack and Howard, because he had to pick up Melanie-Shanna in the hotel beauty shop.
She was not ready when he arrived, which infuriated him. Major movie stars were not supposed to cool their heels while ex-beauty queen wives primped and fussed.
Whitney had never spent hours in the beauty shop. She was naturally beautiful, and how could he have ever let her go?
The final split, when it came, was clean-cut. They had been fighting for months, mostly over her career, which had taken off with alarming speed ??
? thanks to Howard Soloman, who Mannon barely spoke to for a while, until he got out of agenting and left Whitney alone. She had become an enormous television star and the demands on her time were insatiable. Mannon had just finished a difficult movie and needed to get away. ‘Let’s go to the south of France,’ he’d suggested.
‘I can’t,’ Whitney replied. ‘I’ve got fittings, interviews. Oh, and I promised to do the Bob Hope special. And the photo spread for Life magazine is being scheduled now.’
‘I can remember when I came first,’ he’d said angrily.
She had turned on him, all hair and teeth and pent-up frustration. ‘And I can remember when I wanted you to.’
‘Jesus! I took you out of hick town to be my wife, not some trumped-up starlet. I’ve giving you a choice, Whitney. It’s me or your career.’
He never weighed his words before saying them. In retrospect he wished he had, for they were both too stubborn to retreat.
‘You want me to choose?’ she’d said, very slowly.
‘Goddammit. Yes.’
‘Then I’ll take my career, thank you very much.’ Her eyes, filled with hurt and anger, challenged him to back down.
He didn’t. He packed a suitcase and left the house.
A week later she started divorce proceedings.
One thing about Whitney, she was scrupulously fair. No Hollywood Wife she. There were no demands. She didn’t want alimony or a settlement. She kept half the money from their house when it was sold, and that was it.
‘I don’t believe your luck!’ Howard had exclaimed.
‘I’d still be married if it wasn’t for you,’ Mannon growled.
He had never stopped wanting her back.
Chapter Eight
The photo session was going well. Lionel Richie tapes flooded the studio, and Silver, watched by a large entourage, put the photographer through his paces.