Between the Bridge and the River Page 21
Off camera, Leon and Bo, his costar, got along famously. They both shared a love of obvious, pneumatic women and partying. They did the talk-show circuit together, joking on couches, and then Leon would get up to sing while Bo looked impressed.
They attended movie premieres and industry parties and became fixtures on the Hollywood circuit, always surrounded by blond, shiny women. Saul was everywhere that Leon went too, keeping an eye on him, making sure things didn’t get out of hand, but he stayed in the background as much as a three-hundred-pound sweaty man can. He was noticed by the press, however, and the physiques of Saul and Bo got the little gang their nickname—the Fat Pack. Although Leon was as lean as a rail, he was seen as the leader, but anyone who spent any time around the brothers soon guessed who was really in charge.
The money was not terrific at first—season one salaries never are, and season two is not much better—but Leon and Saul were also producers of the show, so they’d get a piece of the real action when and if the show was sold into syndication (repeat showings on America’s hundreds of small syndicated TV stations, not to mention foreign sales).
For that to kick in the show had to stay on the air for about five years or 105 episodes—the recognized number that was the industry standard to make a syndication sale. Given the viewing figures at the end of season one, that looked highly likely.
Season two went even better, and at the end of that year Saul began to exercise the power that being an executive producer, brother, and manager to Leon had given him.
The first two years the show was on the air and his brother was becoming a star, Saul had trodden carefully. He was a little unsure of how to deal with the network executives and his fellow producers but they started kissing his ass anyway because even if he wasn’t really aware of how much power he was attaining, they were. He found his jokes got funnier, doughnuts would be carried to him even if he didn’t ask, and strangest of all, women started to come on to him.
He couldn’t believe it. All his life women had looked at him with a mixture of pity and disgust and he had grown to hate them, all of them, and now they had changed the rules. He was attractive now to some women because he had money and power. That made him hate them even more but at least now he could have revenge.
The first time a woman approached him without first getting paid was in a nightclub called the Foxy on the Sunset Strip. He had gone there with Leon and Bo and their coterie the night after the first big article about the Fat Pack had appeared in Peephole magazine, the weekly celebrity Bible.
A tall, stunning brunette in a silver dress came over to him as he stood in the VIP enclosure. She took him by the hand and led him to the ladies’ restroom, to the cheers of Leon and Bo and the laughter of the ladies in the Plastic Pussy Posse, who later became known as the Snatch Batch.
She squeezed him into a stall and took his pants down, lifted his massive gut with the top of her head, and sucked his tiny penis while she gently scratched his enormous, swollen scrotum with her taloned finger-nails for the thirty seconds it took for him to come in her mouth.
She swallowed his juice, licked her lips, and pulled up his pants for him, then she left without saying a word, although she put her card in his jacket pocket on the way out.
It read, “I’m Candy. Call me, sweetie,” and had her number.
He sat down in the stall after she left. This didn’t happen to him, this is the kind of thing that happened to Leon. Leon must have paid her, put her up to it.
He started crying, his heart breaking on every exhale.
After he’d pulled himself together, he headed back out to the club.
“Thanks, bro,” he said as he returned to Leon, who was drinking a tequila and looking out at the dance floor trying to make his mind up who to fuck.
“For what?” asked Leon.
“The hooker in the john. That was very cool.”
“I didn’t do that, Saul. She was flying solo.”
Saul had never felt better.
He later called the number and it turned out the woman, whose name was Candy Chambers, was in fact a hooker but she said she’d wanted to give Saul a freebie because she “liked his style.”
She was a very astute businesswoman, and over the years he was in Hollywood, Saul spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for her services and she would eventually help topple his empire.
Cadence Powers became a pain in the ass to Saul, as did David Trundle. They both thought they knew the best way the show should go, from story lines to guest stars, even trying to pick the song that Leon would sing at the end of the episode. Saul began to feel that they were hindering him, trying to get between him and Leon, so he went to work on his brother, telling him that Cadence was trying to cheat them on their points on the syndication deal and that Trundle was saying that he was a bad actor and the show was only a hit because of the scripts that he and the other writers came up with.
Leon told Saul that he had to protect them from these guys.
Saul said he’d try.
During contract negotiations for seasons three and four, Cadence and Trundle found themselves being edged out. They fought like hell but the network knew that the power lay with Saul, that Leon and Saul were an unbreakable unit.
Saul wanted Cadence and Trundle gone, they were gone.
They sued, of course, standard business practice under the circumstances, and received, out of court, a sweet kiss-off financially but nothing like the amount they would have made if they had managed to stay in the game.
Saul was now in sole charge of Leon, his career and the show. Bo Ness’s representatives tried to stop that but they also knew that, bottom line, Leon would be fine without the show but this was Bo’s moment in the sun and they had to stay in there no matter what. Oh Leon! could not go on without Leon but it might without Bo.
They swallowed their pride and watched as Saul took the reins. Leon had become one of the biggest TV stars in America and all the old orphans, The Bastards, came out of the woodwork selling their stories and trying to cash in or get near their former school chum but Saul kept them all at bay.
He built a fortress of lackeys around his brother.
One of the supermarket tabloids found the old court records about their mother and that became a story for a few weeks until Saul booked Leon on one of the phony serious news shows on television and had him cry in an interview along with the journalist/ridiculous old matron who was asking the prearranged questions.
It actually helped Leon’s career. Poor little orphan boy who single-handedly raised his obese brother.
America wept.
No one found out the truth about their fathers. That secret had died with Sophie.
They became richer and richer and more and more famous.
Of course, they moved from their apartment on Sweetzer but they wanted to stay together, so they bought an eleven-thousand-square-foot home in the Hollywood Hills that had been built in the French Baronial style in 1933. The same year Hitler had risen to power in Germany.
The boys lived in opposite wings of the house. Leon’s wing was reserved for himself and whatever famous actress, singer, or model he was dating at that moment. He had fun but if ever he got too close to a woman, as he genuinely wanted to, Saul would have her removed in some way. He couldn’t have Leon being used by some bitch.
In Saul’s wing, he began to indulge in a gluttony that was breathtaking. He gave in to his every whim for food or sex or prescription medication. He loved prostitutes, peanut butter, and Vicodin, sometimes, many times, all three at once.
He hired hookers. Candy Chambers became his pimp and his regular accomplice in his private kinky sex games. He got heavily into sadomasochism in a dominant role. He liked nothing better than “turning out” a young girl. This meant introducing a girl to S&M by beating her ass black and blue with a paddle and then taking a shit on her face as he jerked himself off and Candy whispered obscenities in his ear. That really turned him on.
He got a rep as being a “
tough trick” among L.A. prostitutes but work’s work and he wasn’t as bad as some action-movie producers.
As long as Saul made money, no one felt in a position to judge him, the only morality in Hollywood being success, and the girls saw themselves as hapless victims of a ruthless, male-dominated town. Every now and again, a hooker would refuse to indulge Saul, and once a girl named Dawn Hawthorn, who was just in from Nebraska and new to prostitution, was so repulsed by him she actually left the game, took a pay cut, and got a real job as a waitress.
Leon had been dating Roseanne Hannah for about two months when he came to see Saul. Roseanne was a serious actress and had been nominated for a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Barbara, the female cop who has to choose between her career and the man she loves, in the movie Fingerplay. Roseanne had stayed in touch with David Trundle and had a copy of his latest script. He had returned to his first love, writing screenplays, and had produced a brilliant, intense, dramatic work based on the true story of Tootsiepop Ted, the Atlanta serial killer. It was called Killing by Starlight.
Roseanne had read it and given it to Leon because she thought he would be perfect for the leading role of Detective Kenny Irwin, the slow-talking Southern policeman who finally catches the maniac. A tough but likable maverick cop who doesn’t play by the rules.
Leon read the script before taking it to Saul. He had never done that before but he really liked Roseanne and he knew how smart she was. (If she was really smart, she would have given the script to Saul first.)
He told Saul he desperately wanted to do the movie. He wanted to do a serious role. He was tired of being some lightweight TV guy, he wanted a serious role in a proper big, dramatic movie. He wanted to win an award. Plus, think of the publicity angle—they used to ride on the bus that Tootsiepop Ted drove! Saul listened, took a deep breath, and said he would read the script and see what he could do.
Saul did read the script and was surprised to find that he agreed with Roseanne and his brother. It might be a smart move for Leon to do a dramatic role, the sitcom wouldn’t last forever, and look at Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity. And the publicity angle really was good.
He called Trundle, and although the two men had been involved in a bitter lawsuit only eighteen months previously, they had both been in town long enough to know that business comes first.
Saul said he had read Killing by Starlight and wanted to know what studio it was at. Trundle said it wasn’t anywhere, he hadn’t sold it yet.
Saul offered him a million dollars for it and Trundle agreed. Done deal.
Saul owned the project and could now set it up wherever he pleased with his brother as the star. He made a mental note to get rid of Roseanne.
Roseanne didn’t mind being dumped.
Trundle had promised her 10 percent if Leon took the bait. He gave her fifty thousand dollars.
Trundle had actually written the role for Leon. The first night he talked to him, at his showcase on Melrose, Leon had mentioned that Tootsiepop Ted, who was in the news, having just lost yet another appeal that week, used to drive his school bus. Trundle had stored that away as a useful piece of information.
It was a little more difficult to set up the movie than Saul thought. Although Leon was a big comedy star on TV, the studios were wary of him in a dramatic role. Eventually he got a deal at Uniwarn Pictures, though with the stipulation that he get a big female star to play the part of Blanche, the detective’s loyal and beautiful wife. That was easy enough. Leon had moved on from Roseanne to Meg Roberts, America’s flame-haired, green-eyed, twenty-million-dollar-a-movie sweetheart. She had met him at a charity event for underprivileged dogs and left her husband of three years for him that very night.
She jumped at the chance of working with him.
Saul was slightly worried because she was as nuts as his late mother and was well known for being an ardent follower of Brainyism.
* * *
Brainyism was the latest funky religion that was catching on with the privileged and bored in the entertainment business in Los Angeles. A bit like the way Christianity had caught on with upper-class Romans.
Brainastics, or Boondtists, as they called themselves, were members of a cult that had built up in Hollywood around the teachings of a bankrupt ex–carnival roustabout who had died in the 1970s, Darren Boondt.
Boondt had given up the carnival and had come west in 1956 to seek his fortune. He failed in the profession he thought he would excel in—writing commercial jingles—achieving only one minor success, a radio ad he wrote and sang for Kliphorn canned peas. It went, to the tune of “Frere Jacques”:
Kliphorn canned peas please
Kliphorn canned peas please
For me and you
And Grandma too
They go well with chicken
They go well with chicken
And taters too
Taters too.
Not much, but it kept him going for a few months while the ads ran on the local stations. He got no follow-up work, so he had to improvise some way of making cash. Boondt had grown up in the thirties when people believed in the supernatural power of com puters. In the fifties, science was still all the rage, so he claimed to have invented a machine that he said could cleanse the soul, unleashing its true energy. It had a lot of wires and dials and the machine certainly looked the part but really it was just a blood pressure pump, some bits of a telephone and part of a prop a friend of his had managed to steal from the set of This Island Earth while working as an extra.
The customer or patient or devotee or whatever was hooked up to the machine by little suction cups cannibalized from a children’s bow-and-arrow set, and then the operator or priest or technician or whatever would chant some gibberish about Jehovah, Ancient Egypt, and Cherokees. He thought he might be able to charge a few suckers a few bucks for it but was amazed at how popular it became. He invented a whole spiel and legend to go around the machine, which he called the Boondtdock.
“Plug In to the Power of God.”
Predictably, once a few gullible movie stars fell for it, then the rest of the town followed in the hope that somehow moviestardomness would rub off on them if they did the things that movie stars did. Like have themselves connected to the Boondtdock and joining the Church of Brainyism, which is what you had to do in order for the Boondtdock to function properly.
Boondt came up with this after reading about tithing in the ancient church and finding out what it was.
The original Boondtdock was placed under glass and treasured as a sacred relic by the faithful. New, flashier Boondtdocks were built and some of the richer Brainastics had their own personal machines at home.
Boondt died young but rich and Brainyism became popular with people who were very ambitious and a bit stupid. It was the fastest-growing religion in America at the time and Meg Roberts was very involved.
Saul hated the thought of Leon being around these nutters but he needed Meg to get the movie made, so he took the risk. Brainastics were famous for their lack of humor and for being very sensitive about their faith. They would viciously counterattack anyone they even suspected of making fun of them or casting aspersions on their beliefs. In this respect they were like any other emerging religion.
The award-winning Scandinavian director Janus Borg was set to helm Killing by Starlight, and in the role of Tootsiepop Ted they got Guillame Maupassant, the classy French actor who had just won the Palm d’Or in Cannes for his role in Le Pamplemousse du L’Horreur.
They hired Stevie Zabadan, an expensive hack, to rewrite the role of Ted as a French immigrant. Two weeks before shooting was set to begin, Saul had a small party for the cast, some crew, the director, studio executives, and producers. Everyone was outside by the pool enjoying the beautiful California evening when Guillame and his companion arrived late, having just gotten off the plane from Paris.
Leon took one look at Claudette and he knew that this was it.
He was in love.
COMBAT
CLAUDETTE WAS IN LOVE.
It scared her that she should feel this way for a man she’d only just met and, over breakfast, she told him so. She said that if he felt threatened or weird, he should go and break her heart now before it got any worse.
George told her that he had the same problem, that he was in love with her and he wondered if he just felt that way because he was losing his marbles on account of his impending death. Thus they remained honest in the face of convention, and after finishing the pastries and coffee they went back to bed and made love again.
Their entire morning was spent enjoying each other until they were both spent, hungry, and a little bit stir crazy. They went out for lunch.
They had to go out because if they were indoors for more than half an hour together, they were pawing and mauling at each other, trying to climb inside each other. They needed the civilizing effect of polite society or they’d never get anything done.
They returned to Les Deux Magots, the café where they had met, because they were too stoned on their carnally released endorphins to think of anywhere else. They sat at the same table where Claudette had lit George’s cigarette the night before and they caught up on the blanks that they had in each other’s stories.
Claudette grew thoughtful when listening to George, and when he asked her what was on her mind she hesitated, but he persisted.
“We have to do battle,” she said.
“No,” said George. “It is a foregone conclusion. It’s lung cancer. I’m not going through what my folks went through. It’s painful, undignified, and shitty. I’m screwed. I’m not going to spend the time I have left with my arse hanging out of a hospital gown with everybody telling me I look younger with no hair. When the pain becomes too great, I’ll jump.”
But Claudette would not back down. She was stronger and fiercer than any hostile lawyer he had faced in a Scottish courtroom; also she said the battle was not only for him, it was for her.