He lifted his bony shoulders, dropped them and stared blankly at the frozen action on the screen.
“His parents asked me to sue the county,” I said.
Larry made a disgusted noise. “Why?”
“For not preventing their little boy from trying to kill himself.”
“Vultures,” he said without heat.
“I thought so, too. Jim’s dad and I got into a little scuffle.”
“You draw blood?”
I shook my head.
“Too bad.” He pushed a button on the remote control and the action on the screen began again.
“What are you watching?”
“Do you remember Sandy Blenheim?”
I nodded. “The agent.”
“There’s an actor he wants me to represent. Tom Zane. He’s one of the stars of this show.”
The cop on the screen raced down a dark alley in pursuit of a shadowy figure ahead of him. He commanded the figure to stop, then fired his gun. He came to the prone body, knelt and flipped it over. He saw the face of a boy and said, “Oh my God, Jerry.” “Who’s the corpse?” I asked.
“The cop’s son,” Larry replied. “I’ve seen this one before.”
On the screen the cop was sobbing. Then there was an aerial view of Los Angeles and the words “Smith amp; Wesson” appeared as music began playing. The screen split and displayed the faces of two men, one on each side. The man on the left was a white- haired, elegantly wrinkled old party who smiled benignly into the camera. On the right was one of the handsomest men I had ever seen. At first it was like looking at two different men. His slightly battered nose — it looked like it had been broken, then inexpertly set — and firmly molded jaw gave his face a toughness that kept him from being a pretty boy. But there was prettiness, too, in the shape of his mouth, the long-lashed eyes. At second glance, though, the parts fit together with a kind of masculine elegance that reminded me of dim images from my childhood of an earlier period of male stars, Tyrone Power or John Garfield. Only his dark hair seemed wrong, somehow.
Larry stopped the picture. “The fellow on the right is Zane.”
“Who’s the other?”
“Paul Houston. He’s been on the tube for twenty years in one series after another. This was supposed to be his show but Tom Zane’s edged him out.”
“Why? His looks?”
Larry sipped his brandy. “Watch.”
He fast-forwarded the tape until he reached a scene in which Tom Zane was standing in the doorway of Paul Houston’s office. Larry turned off the sound. Even with the sound off, Paul Houston was clearly an actor at work. His face was full of tics and pauses meant to convey, by turn, cranky good humor, concern, exasperation, and wisdom. It wasn’t that his acting was obvious but merely that it was unmistakable. He was trying to reach the audience beyond the camera.
Tom Zane, on the other hand, hadn’t the slightest interest in anything but the camera. He opened his face to it and the camera did all the work. It amounted to photography, not acting, and yet the effect was to intimate that, next to Tom Zane, Paul Houston looked like a wind-up toy. Larry shut off the tape and turned to me.
“See?” he said.
“He has a lot of charisma,” I observed. “But can he act?”
Larry said, “He couldn’t act his way out of the proverbial paper sack, but the camera loves his face.”
“Well, it’s some face. I’ve never heard of Tom Zane before.”
“He came out of nowhere about a year ago and got a bit part in the pilot of this show. The response to him was so overwhelming that they killed off the actor who was originally supposed to play Houston’s partner and replaced him with Zane.”
“What’s he want with you?”
“He’s putting together a production company.”
“I thought you weren’t taking new business.”
“Sandy’s persistent,” Larry said. “In fact, he was just here a while ago to drop off the cassette and,” he picked up a paperback, “this.”
I looked at the cover. “Edward the Second by Bertolt Brecht. Why?”
“Zane’s performing the title role in a little theater on Santa Monica. Sandy wants me to come tonight.”
“Are you?” I asked. We’d planned to have dinner out and take in a movie.
“If you’ll come, too,” he said, setting the book down.
“Sure,” I said. “Did Sandy say anything about Jim Pears?”
Larry shook his head. “That was last week’s sensation.”
“Tough town you got here,” I said. I picked up the book. “Isn’t Brecht sort of ambitious for an actor who can’t act?”
“I guess we’ll find out tonight,” Larry said. “It’s kind of a vanity production.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, flipping the pages of the play. It was in verse.
“Zane’s producing it himself. It’s not to make money but to show people in the industry what he can do as an actor. I suspect his wife’s behind it.”
“Who’s that?”
“Irene Gentry.”
“Irene Gentry?” I put the book down. “I saw her in Long Day’s Journey Into Night three years ago. She’s wonderful.”
“Yeah,” Larry said dubiously.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s not about her acting. She really is a fine stage actress but in this town she has-” he smiled “-a reputation.”
“What sort?”
“Nothing specific, just that she’s difficult to work with. Not that she ever got much work here. She’s always had too much going against her.”
“For instance?”
“She’s plain, she’s now past forty, she’s New York, and she’s too damned good an actress.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Which part?”
“All of it.”
He lit a cigarette. “The days when movies could tolerate a Katherine Hepburn or Bette Davis as a leading lady are over. The public wants candy for the eyes. Irene Gentry is a five-course meal.”
“I wrote her a fan letter once,” I said.
“Henry, you surprise me.”
I shrugged. “I was a lot younger, then,” I offered, by way of explanation. “She was doing Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra.”
“Yes,” Larry said, exhaling a stream of smoke, “I saw her in that, too.”
We were both silent.
“Well, you may get to meet her tonight,” he said, finishing his drink. “I’m going to take a nap, Henry. Wake me in an hour or so, all right?”
“All right.” After he left I turned the tape back on, with the sound, and listened to Tom Zane deliver excruciatingly bad lines with all the animation of a robot. He was such a bad actor that it was almost possible to overlook his face. Almost. After a minute or two, I shut the tape off and picked up the Brecht.
Edward the Second was an English king who ruled from 1307 to 1324. His calamitous reign culminated in a thirteen-year civil war that ended with his abdication. Two years later he was murdered by order of his wife’s lover, a nobleman named Mortimer. Much of Edward’s misfortune resulted from a love affair he conducted with a man named Piers Gaveston in an age when sodomy was a capital offense. Edward’s homosexuality was less disturbing to his vassals than his insistence on carrying on openly with Gaveston. Parliament twice exiled Edward’s lover only
