Broach shook his head. “You’ll know—or your instinct will.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
They heard the two-note front door chimes. Broach rose and said,
“He’s here. I’ll go down, bring him up, introduce you and be on my way.”
“Do I look all right?”
Jack Broach didn’t bother to reply.
Ione Gamble, wearing jeans, a checked shirt and scuffed Timberlands over bare feet, was standing at the glass wall, staring out at ocean and canyon, when Broach came back with the Washington lawyer. She turned and found him to be a medium-tall man in his forties who wore a very expensive but ill-fitting dark blue suit along with plain black shoes, a white shirt and a muted tie. He had extraordinarily long arms, a face that seemed to have been put together from odds and ends, and the wisest black eyes she had ever seen. As Gamble looked into them she found herself engulfed by an intense feeling of relief.
Jack Broach said, “Ione Gamble, Howard Mott.”
Gamble smiled and walked toward Mott, her right hand outstretched. “I very much hope you’ll be my lawyer, Mr. Mott.”
Howard Mott took the cool dry hand, smiled back and said, “Let’s see whether you still feel that way after we talk.”
Mott had arrived at 11 A.M. And at 12:45 P.M. They sent out for a giant cheese and pepperoni pizza. The Salvadoran housekeeper-cook served it in the office-study along with a bottle of beer for Mott and another diet Dr Pepper for Gamble.
Mott took a polite bite of the pizza, chewed, swallowed, drank some beer and said, “Tell me how you met him.”
“Billy Rice?”
Mott nodded and had another bite of pizza.
“You know who he was, don’t you? I mean, before?”
“Before Hollywood? Yes, but tell me who you think he was.”
“He was the Kansas City Post,” she said.
“The paper Hemingway didn’t work for.”
“It was also one of the first newspapers to go into radio in the twenties and TV in the late forties. It wound up owning three TV and four radio stations around the country, six small dailies, a farm magazine, a block-long printing plant and a big chunk of downtown Kansas City. Ninety percent of the stock in all this was owned outright by William A. C. Rice the third, who was the grandson of William A. C.
Rice the first, the one who’d started it all. When Billy the third died, everything went to Billy the fourth.”
“When did the third die?” Mott asked. “Ten years ago?”
“Twelve,” she said. “Billy the fourth hung onto everything for eight years, then sold out in early eighty-six at the top of the market. He walked away with at least a billion, maybe more. Then he moved out here and announced he was an independent motion picture producer and, with a billion or so in the bank, everybody said, ‘That’s right, you are.’”
“Is that when you met him?”
She nodded. “He had an office in Century City—just him, a secretary and a story editor.”
“That was when—eighty-six, eighty-seven?”
“Late eighty-six—a month after my thirtieth birthday, which makes me thirty-four, going on thirty-five, if you don’t want to bother with the math.”
Mott only smiled and drank more beer.
“I also got drunk and blacked out on my thirtieth birthday,” she said, making it a statement of fact rather than a confession.
“Why?”
“For an actress, thirty means you’re no longer on the ascent but’ve reached the plateau where you’ll stay, if lucky, till you hit forty and
start the descent, which is sometimes slow and sometimes fast, very fast.”
“Thirty’s awfully young,” Mott said. “But so is forty, for that matter.”
“But forty-five isn’t and that’s why I used every trick I knew to get directing jobs. That meant guesting on TV sitcoms and episodic action-adventure stuff—but only if they’d let me direct. And that’s how I served my apprenticeship.”
“I get the impression that directing to you is something like an annuity.”
“Look. I still intend to act when I’m forty-five and fifty-five and sixty-five, if I live that long, although the roles will get fewer and fewer. But a good director can get work at almost any age.”
“You decided all this at thirty?”
“Sure,” she said. “For an actor, thirty’s still young. He’s just getting rid of the last of his baby fat and for the next twenty-five or thirty-five years he can go on playing leads opposite actresses who’re twenty-five and thirty and forty. But do you know any fifty-five-year-old actresses who’re doing love scenes with thirty-year-old actors—unless it’s some kinky incest story? I’ll give you an hour to name one.”
