Authors: John Kaye
Burt Driscoll said, “In 1957, when I was waiter at Chasen’s, Max came in all the time. And he was treated very well, as well as anyone.”
“Of course he was. In the fifties that teenage-bikini-monster shit was huge in the drive-ins. ‘Max Rheingold Presents’ meant money in the bank. He was the king of the schlockolas.”
“I was a sucker for musicals,” Van Wood said, with a girlish laugh. “I still am.”
“Burt was a dancer,” Jack Rose said, smiling. “He auditioned with Rita Hayworth for
You’ll Never Get Rich.
”
Burt Driscoll was gazing nostalgically out the window. “I was too short,” he said. “Of course, I couldn’t dance like Astaire, either. Who could?”
“No one,” Jack Rose said, and stretched his arm across the back of the couch. “Still, I bet you had some moves. Come on, let’s see something.” Burt Driscoll started to protest but Jack Rose pivoted
his head back to Van Wood. “Burt was a real smoothie. A pussy hound par excellence.”
The phone rang on Burt Driscoll’s desk. He stared at it gratefully before he picked it up. “Hello. . . . Yes . . . that’s correct. This morning, sometime before eight. . . . No. . . . Yes. I’ll call you then.” Driscoll hung up the receiver and nervously pulled at his mustache. “
LA Times.
They want details. I told them I would call them after the police report was released.”
Jack Rose turned toward Driscoll and crossed his legs. Several seconds passed. Burk felt he should say something, that it was his turn, but this impulse to speak was overwhelmed by an unwanted memory that forced its way into his mind.
He is ten years old and Gene is twelve. They are playing baseball in the street in front of their house. Gene is pitching and Ricky Furlong is at bat, standing over a shirt cardboard that serves as home plate. When the pitch comes, Ricky hits a line drive, and the tennis ball they are using caroms off a lamppost and bounces into a flower bed beneath the shiny windows that look out over Burk’s front lawn. While he searches for the ball, Burk glances up and sees his father standing by the sink in the kitchen. He’s slicing a large red onion. Next to his elbow is a platter of hamburgers massaged into thick patties. Ada Furlong is sitting in the kitchen nook, flicking the ashes of her cigarette into the palm of her hand.
From outside this window Burk can see through the kitchen into their small backyard, where bees and dragonflies circle the bowls of potato chips and the open bottles of mustard and relish that are placed in the center of the patio table. He cannot see the barbecue from this angle—it’s below the windowsill and too close to the house—but the flames that leap up are reflected in the panes of glass.
Burk hears Ricky’s voice. He says, “Let’s go, Ray. Hustle it up.”
Gene’s voice follows quickly. “To your right. It’s over to your right.”
Inside the house Ada Furlong stands up; she is wobbly but smiling a stupid smile. On a side counter is an open bottle of bourbon. She reaches out but Burk’s father slaps her arm away.
“Come on, it’s starting to get dark,” Ricky shouts, and Burk hears him jog across the lawn. In the kitchen Ada Furlong’s hands are striking out blindly, the smile no longer on her rage-twisted face.
“Your mother drinks too much,” Burk says, when he feels Ricky standing behind his shoulder. Burk’s father has Ada Furlong backed up against the icebox, holding her wrists.
Gene reaches inside a low hedge that runs along the driveway. His fingers come out grasping the tennis ball. He holds it in the air. “Let’s go. Play ball.”
“Wait!” Burk now has
his
hand up.
“I hate it when they touch,” Ricky says.
Burk speaks into Ricky’s eyes, which are mirrored in the window. “I hate it too.”
Gene bounces the ball twice in the driveway. Ada Furlong squirms away from Nathan Burk and pounds her tiny fists into his chest; then she turns her back and sobs into her hands. “She’s always crying,” Ricky says. “All the time. I hate it.”
“My dad cries sometimes,” Burk says, as his older brother joins him by the window. In a moment he feels Gene’s fingers close around his upper arm, squeezing him hard.
“Stop spying,” Gene says, and Burk allows himself to be pulled away. “Come on, let’s finish the game.”
Ricky turns and starts across the lawn.
Gene says, “It’s gonna be all right, Ricky. Don’t worry. They won’t stay mad.”
Ricky says, “I wish she would go back to our house.”
Burk says, “I don’t want her around either.”
Ricky gives Burk the middle finger. “Pitch the ball,” he says to Gene.
“Gene doesn’t want her around,” Burk says. “Do you, Gene?”
Gene glances over his shoulder at his brother. “Drop it, Ray.”
“Do you?”
“I’m quitting,” Ricky says. He kicks the shirt cardboard into the gutter and flings the bat against the curb, cracking the handle. “I’m going home. Tell my mom.”
Burk walks forward. “You tell her, asshole,” he says when he’s standing next to Gene. “She’s your mom.”
“They were just having an argument,” Gene says. “That’s all.”
“I’m going home,” Ricky says again. This time Burk can hear the ache in the bottom of his throat. “Tell her.”
Burk arrived at the studio just before lunchtime. After he found a vacant parking space outside the administration building, he glanced over and saw Jerome Sanford standing next to a blue chauffeur-driven limousine. He was talking to Bernie Leeds, the head of distribution, a handsome gray-haired man who was wearing dark blue crepe slacks and white Gucci loafers. When he made eye contact with Burk, Sanford gave him a small smile of acknowledgment before he turned back and resumed his conversation.
On his way over to the sound stage, Burk passed by some gaffers and other members of the camera crew he recognized from his earlier visits to the set. They were heading toward the commissary. Before they walked inside, someone (Burk thought it was a hung-over-looking prop man wearing a plaid golf cap) said, “That’s the writer. What the fuck’s he doing here?”
As soon as he turned the corner at the end of the street, Burk noticed Boyd Talbott steer a striped golf cart up to the stage door. Snake Myers was standing nearby in the shade, chatting with the teamster captain, the same guy who turned Burk away from the location in Griffith Park. When they saw Burk approach, Myers’s eyes showed alarm and he mouthed the word “fuck.” Simultaneously the stage door opened and Jon Warren walked into the noonday sun with his arm around Loretta Egan’s shoulder.
Talbott got out of the golf cart and Warren took his place behind the wheel. Loretta slipped into the seat next to him. Both had their backs turned away from Burk, unaware that he was nearby, until Snake Myers shifted his eyes and said, “We got trouble, Jon.”
Warren glanced over his shoulder and saw that Burk was walking toward him with a smile on his face that was not real. “Got the revisions right here,” Burk said, pulling a manila envelope out of his shoulder bag. Loretta turned around and Burk waved and continued to smile, and she smiled in return before she dropped her eyes. “Sorry I was late. Something came up at the hotel.”
“I think we better have a chat,” Talbott said. He started to move forward but stopped when Snake Myers raised his hand.
“This is a big surprise,” Burk said. He was speaking to Loretta now, and he was still smiling, but there was a note of anger in his voice. “Couple of lovebirds. When did all this happen?”
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Loretta said, leaning away from Warren. “This is just business.”
“Business?”
“We’re not going to need your revisions,” Warren said. He unfolded his legs and stood up to face Burk. “We’re going in a different direction. You’re off the picture.”
“Off the picture.” Burk carefully repeated the phrase to himself as his eyes flicked across Loretta’s face and back to Warren’s. “No kidding. I’m off the picture.”
Snake Myers saw the smile leave Burk’s mouth. He said, “Take it easy, Ray.”
Talbott said, “Jon spoke to Maria Selene this morning. You must have already checked out.”
“You did a really good job,” Warren said, “but I thought we needed a different touch.”
“A woman’s touch,” Burk said, and Warren nodded.
“It’s just a polish,” Loretta said. “I’m not changing the structure. You’ll still get all the credit.”
Warren added, “And just so you know—when I hired Loretta, I didn’t realize you had a thing going.”
Snake Myers moved alongside Burk and put his hand on his shoulder. “C’mon, let’s go across the street and get a drink.”
Burk opened his mouth to say something but shut it quickly when the thought got lost in his mind, overwhelmed by an insistent ringing in his ears. The skin on his face was hot and his body was trembling, out of control, unable to absorb the excruciating feelings of embarrassment and betrayal that raged through his chest.
“There’s something wrong here,” Burk said as he flexed his fingers and shifted his weight from his right leg to his left. Then, without hesitating, he dipped his shoulder slightly and threw a left hook that landed on Warren’s chin, knocking him out cold.
Maria Selene was sitting at her desk, chain-smoking, when Burk’s call came in from LAX. “Tell him I’ll be on in a sec,” she told Nora, in a voice that was deceptively casual, disguising what she had just learned from Jerome Sanford: that when Burk came by the set to
drop off his revised pages, he and Warren got into an altercation that escalated into a full-scale brawl.
“Burk decked Warren,” Sanford told Maria. “Then he went after Talbott and the teamster captain. Fortunately, Snake Myers tackled him before he did any more damage.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“Warren lost two teeth, so we’re going to have to shut down the picture for at least a day. After that—”
“No. I mean to Ray.”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jack Rose spoke to Warren. They worked something out. But now Crumpler has decided he won’t say a line unless Burk writes it. And he’s not kidding.” Sanford drew in a long breath. “What a fuckin’ mess,” he said. Maria suddenly heard his side of the connection click off and the dial tone resume.
“Ray?”
Maria’s voice surprised Burk when she came on the line. He was standing inside a phone booth, sweating and nervous, his face glowing from the four straight shots of vodka that he’d gulped down in the airport lounge. In the booth next to him was a short, pretty woman with shapely hips and pale-blue eyes. She was speaking with someone called Leslie, and every few seconds she would repeat the phrase, “What a shame.”
“Ray? Are you still there?”
“Yeah. I’m here.”
“I heard.”
“Yeah?”
“You fucked up, but it’s not fatal.”
“I did the rewrite, Maria.”
“I know.”
“I had it with me. It was good stuff. They had no right to bring in another writer.”
“They own the script. They can do anything they want.”
“They’ve been fucking with me all week.”
“Welcome to Hollywood, Ray.”
Burk suddenly felt a sharp pain in the center of his back, the result of the fall he’d taken outside the sound stage. He remembered
blacking out for a short period of time, maybe ten seconds; then he heard a flurry of excited voices and felt the weight of Snake Myers’s body holding him down. “Take it easy,” Snake said, through his panting breaths. “Just take it easy.”
When he was finally allowed to stand up, there were two beefy security guards on either side of him, tightly gripping the flesh above his elbows. A knuckle on his left hand was gashed and a thin trickle of blood ran diagonally across his fingers. Off to the side he was aware of Warren lying on the ground, attended by Loretta and a studio nurse. Someone said, “Jack Rose is on the way down,” and thirty minutes later Burk was escorted off the lot.
Burk turned his face away from the mouthpiece. A cowboy past his middle years was sitting next to Louie in the airport lobby. He wore a bolo tie and a Stetson hat that was flawlessly white. In his eyes was a compassionate look.
“Ray?”
“Yeah.”
“Go home and come up with an idea for something new.”
“I already have one.”
“I’d love to hear it when you’ve worked it out.”
“I have worked it out.”
“Ray—”
“It’s about these two kids, Jack and Diane. She’s fifteen, he’s fourteen. Think Romeo and Juliet in LA,” Burk said. His voice, which was faintly slurred in the beginning of the conversation, now had a confident tone. “She lives with her dad, a cop. His mom’s an emergency room nurse. The boy’s a rockabilly fanatic. The girl’s a genius car thief. The whole thing takes place over Labor Day, on the three hottest days in the history of the city.”
“Ray, can’t we do this—”
“Just give me five minutes, Maria. Just five. Okay?”
Maria was silent for a moment. Then her voice came out sounding tired, without enthusiasm. “Okay,” she said, “let’s hear it.”
Burk began to speak quickly, outlining the plot. At first it seemed to Maria that he was making up the story on the spot, but with the steady advance of his words it became clear that all the elements— the characters, their relationships, the key locations, the setting and mood, and so on—had been worked out in great detail.
“I think it works,” Maria said when Burk finished his pitch. But it didn’t just work; she thought it was so fresh and relevant that she could walk into Fox or Warner’s—or any studio in town, for that matter—and quickly set up a development deal for Burk. Seventy-five thousand for a first draft and a set of revisions was not out of the question. If he wrote it on spec the price could go much higher, maybe even triple. “Have you got a title?”
“
Jack and Diane.
”
“Hmm. I’m not sure that’s it. I mean, eventually the parents and the kids end up together, so the piece is really about four people. What about something with ‘love’ in it?”
Burk said nothing for a moment. The woman in the booth next to him was holding a match up to a cigarette while she spoke into the mouthpiece. “I’ve got to go. I’ll call you when I get in,” the woman said. “My plane leaves in ten minutes.”