'Great,' I said. 'Good luck with Jeff Wagon.'
I spent the rest of the day moving out of my office at Tri-Culture Studios and doing some shopping. I didn't to go back on the same plane as Osano and Chrlie Brown. I thought of calling Janelle, butI didn't.
'Yeah,' Ediie said, 'I'll need it.'
A month later, Jeff Wagon called me in New York. He told me that Simon Bellfort thought that Frank Richetti should get a writing credit with Lancer and me.
“Is Eddie Lancer still with the picture?” I asked him.
“Yes,” Jeff Wagon said.
“OK,” I said. “Good luck.”
“Thank you,” Wagon said. “And we’ll keep you posted on what happens. We’ll all see each other at the Academy Awards dinner.” And he hung up.
I had to laugh. They were turning the picture into a piece of schlock and Wagon had the nerve to talk about Academy Awards. That Oregon beauty should have taken a bigger piece out of his balls. I felt a sense of betrayal that Eddie Lancer had remained on the picture. It was true what Wagon had once said. Eddie Lancer was a natural-born screenwriter, but he was also a natural-born novelist and I knew he would never write a novel again.
Another funny thing was that though I had fought with everybody and the script was getting worse and worse and I had intended to leave, I still felt hurt. And I guess, too, in the back of my head I still hoped that if I went to California again to work on the script, I might see Janelle. We hadn’t seen or spoken to each other for months. The last time I had called her up just to say hello and we had chatted for a while and at the end she had said, “I’m glad you called me,” and then she waited for an answer.
I paused and said, “Me too.” At that she started to laugh and mimicked me.
She said, “Me too, me too,” and then she said, “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” and laughed gaily. She said, “Call me when you come out again.”
And I said, “I will.” But I knew that I would not.
A month after Wagon called, I got a call from Eddie Lancer. He was furious. “Merlyn,” he said, “they’re changing the script to screw you out of your credit. That guy Frank Richetti is writing all new dialogue, just paraphrasing your words. They’re changing incidents just enough so that it will seem different from your scenes and I heard them talking, Wagon and Bellfort and Richetti, about how they’re going to screw you out of your credit and your percentage. Those bastards don’t even pay any attention to me.”
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I wrote the novel and I wrote the original screenplay and I checked it with the Writers Guild, and there’s no way I can get screwed out of at least a partial credit and that saves my percentage.”
“I don’t know,” Eddie Lancer said. “I’m just warning you about what they’re going to do. I hope you’ll protect yourself.”
“Thanks,” I told him. “What about you? How are you coming on the picture?”
He said, “That fucking Frank Richetti is a fucking illiterate, and I don’t know who’s the bigger hack, Wagon or Bellfort. This may become one of the worst pictures ever made. Poor Malomar must be spinning in his grave.”
“Yeah, poor Malomar,” I said. “He was always telling me how great Hollywood was, how sincere and artistic the people there could be. I wish he were alive now.”
“Yeah,” Eddie Lancer said. “Listen, next time you come to California call me and we’ll have dinner.”
“I don’t think I’ll be coming to California again,” I said. “If you come to New York, call me.”
“OK, I will,” Lancer said.
A year later the picture came out. I got credit for the book but no credit as the screenwriter. Sreenwriting credit was given to Eddie Lancer and Simon Bellfort. I asked for an arbitration at the Writers Guild, but I lost. Richetti and Bellfort had done a good job changing the script, and so I lost my percentage. But it didn’t matter. The picture was a disaster, and the worst of it was Doran Rudd told me that in the industry the novel was blamed for the failure of the film. I was no longer a salable product in Hollywood, and that was the only thing about the whole business that cheered me up.
One of the most scathing reviews of the film was by Clara Ford. She murdered it from A to Z. Even Kellino’s performance. So Kellino hadn’t done his job too well with Clara Ford. But Houlinan took a last shot at me. He placed a story on one of the wire services headlined MERLYN NOVEL FAILS AS MOVIE. When I read that, I just shook my head with admiration.
Chapter 49
Shortly after the picture came out I was at Carnegie Hall attending the Women’s National Liberation Conference with Osano and Charlie Brown. It featured Osano as the only male speaker.
Earlier we all had dinner at Pearl’s, where Charlie Brown astonished the waiters by eating a Peking duck, a plate of crabs stuffed with pork, oysters in black bean sauce, a huge fish and then polished off what Osano and me had left on our plates without even smearing her lipstick.
When we got out of the cab in front of Carnegie Hall, I tried to talk Osano into going on ahead and letting me follow with Charlie Brown on my arm so that the women would think she was with me. She looked so much like the legendary harlot she would enrage the left-wingers of the convention. But Osano, as usual, was stubborn. He wanted them all to know that Charlie Brown was his woman. So when we walked down the aisle to the front, I walked behind them. As I did so, I studied the women in the hall. The only thing odd about them was that they were all women and I realized that many times in the Army, in the orphan asylum, at ball games I was used to seeing either all men or mostly men. Seeing all women this time was a shock, as if I were in an alien country.
Osano was being greeted by a group of women and led up to the platform. Charlie Brown and I sat down in the first row. I was wishing we were in the back, so I could get the hell out fast. I was so worried I hardly heard the opening speeches, and then suddenly Osano was being led to the lectern and being introduced. Osano stood for a moment waiting for the applause which did not come.
Many of the women there had been offended by his male chauvinistic essays in the male magazines years ago. Some were offended because he was one of their generation’s most important writers and they were jealous of his achievement. And then there were some of his admirers who applauded very faintly just in case Osano’s speech met with disfavor from the convention.
Osano stood at the lectern, a vast hulk of a man. He waited a long moment; then he leaned against the lectern arrogantly and said slowly, enunciating every word, “I’ll fight you or fuck you.”
The hall reverberated with boos, catcalls and hisses. Osano tried to go on. I knew he had used that phrase just to catch their attention. His speech would be in favor of Women’s Liberation, but he never got a chance to make it. The boos and hisses got louder and louder, and every time Osano tried to speak they started again until Osano made an elaborate bow and marched down off the stage. We followed him up the aisle and out the doors of Carnegie Hall. The boos and hisses turned to cheers and applause, to tell Osano that he was doing what they wanted him to do. Leave them.
Osano didn’t want me to go home with him that night. He wanted to be alone with Charlie Brown. But the next morning I got a call from him. He wanted me to do him a favor.
“Listen,” Osano said. “I’m going down to Duke University in North Carolina to their rice diet clinic. It’s supposed to be the best fat farm in the United States and they also get you healthy. I have to lose weight and the doctor seems to think that maybe my arteries are clogged and that’s what the rice diet cures. There’s only one thing wrong. Charlie wants to come down with me. Can you imagine that poor girl eating rice for two months? So I told her she can’t come. But I have to bring my car down and I’d like you to drive it for me. We could both bring it
