Fools die

read my book, at least they said they did. I was surprised that actors and actresses really didn’t talk much. They were good listeners. Producers talked a lot. Directors were preoccupied, usually accompanied by three or four assistants. The crew seemed to have the best time. But to watch the shooting of a picture was boring. It wasn’t a bad life, but I missed New York. I missed Valerie and the kids, and I missed my dinners with Osano. Those were nights I’d hop a plane to Vegas for the evening, sleep over and come back in the early morning.

Then one day at the studio, after I had been back and forth a few times, NY to LA, LA to NY, Doran asked me to come to a party at his rented house in Malibu. A goodwill party where movie critics, scriptwriters and production people mixed it up with actors and actresses and directors. I didn’t have anything better to do, I didn’t feel like going to Vegas, so I went to Doran’s party, and there I met Janelle for the first time.

Chapter 29

It was one of those Sunday informal gatherings thrown in a Malibu house that had a tennis court plus a big pool, with steaming hot water. The house was divided from the ocean by only a thin strip of sand. Everybody was dressed casually. I noticed that most of the men threw their car keys on the table in the~ first receiving room, and when I asked Eddie Lancer about that, he told me that in Los Angeles male trousers were tailored so perfectly that you couldn’t put anything into your pockets.

As I moved through the different rooms, I heard interesting conversations. A tall, thin, aggressive-looking dark woman was falling all over a handsome producer type wearing a yachting cap. A very short little blonde rushed up to them and said to the woman, “Lay another hand on my husband and I’ll punch you right in the cunt.” The man in the yachting cap had a stutter and very deadpan said, “Th-th-that’s OK. She doesn’t use it mu-u-u-ch anyway.”

Going through a bedroom, I saw a couple head to toe and I heard a woman’s very schoolmarm voice say, “Get up here.”

I heard a guy I recognized as a New York novelist saying, “The movie business. If you make a reputation as a great dentist, they’ll let you do brain surgery.” And I thought, another pissed-off writer.

I wandered out into the parking area near the Pacific Coast Highway and I saw Doran with a group of friends admiring a Stutz Bearcat. Somebody had just told Doran the car cost sixty thousand dollars. Doran said, “For that kind of money it should be able to give head.” And everybody laughed. Then Doran said, “How do you get the nerve to just park it? It’s like having a night job while being married to Marilyn Monroe.”

I really went to the party just to meet Clara Ford, for my money the best American film reviewer who ever lived. She was smart as hell, wrote great sentences, read a lot of books, saw every movie and agreed with me on ninety-nine films out of a hundred. When she praised a film, I knew I could go see it and probably love it, or at the very least would be able to sit through the damn thing. Her reviews were the closest a critic could come to being an artist, and I liked the fact that she never claimed to be creative. She was content to be a critic.

At the party I didn’t get much chance to talk to her, which was OK with me. I just wanted to see what kind of lady she really was. She came with Kellino, and he kept her busy. And since most of the people clustered around Kellino, Clara Ford got a lot of attention. So I sat in the corner and just watched.

Clara Ford was one of those small, sweet-looking women who are usually called plain, but her face was so alive with intelligence that, in my eyes anyway, she was beautiful. What made her fascinating was that she could be both tough and innocent at the same time. She was tough enough to take on all the other major movie critics in New York and show them up as top-notch assholes. She did it A-B-C, like a prosecuting DA with an airtight case. She showed up as an idiot one guy whose humorous Sunday columns on movies were embarrassing. She took on the voice of the Greenwich Village avant-garde movie buffs and showed him for the dull bastard he was, yet she was smart enough to see him as an idiot savant, the dumbest guy who ever put words on paper, with a real feeling for certain movies. By the time she was through she had all their balls in her unfashionable J. C. Penny handbag.

I could see she was having a good time at the party. And that she was aware that Kellino was conning her with his romancing. Through the uproar I could hear Kellino say, “An agent is an idiot savant manque.” That was an old trick of his with critics, male and female. In fact, he had scored a great success with an astringent male critic by calling another critic a fag manque.

Now Kellino was being so fucking charming with Clara Ford that it was a scene in a movie. Kellino showed his dimples like muscles and Clara Ford, for all her intelligence, was beginning to wilt and hang on to him a little.

Suddenly a voice next to me said, “Do you think Kellino will let her fuck him on the first date?”

The voice came from a really good-looking blond girl, or rather a woman because she wasn’t a kid. I guessed she was about thirty. Like Clara Ford, what gave her face some of its beauty was its intelligence.

She had great sharp-planed bones in her face with lovely white skin over those bones, you couldn’t notice the skin owed something to makeup. She had vulnerable brown eyes that could be delighted as a child’s and tragic as a Dumas heroine. If this sounds like a lover’s description out of Dumas, that’s OK. Maybe I didn’t feel this way when I first saw her. That came later. Right now the brown eyes looked mischievous. She was having a good time standing outside the party storm center. What she had, which was unusual in beautiful women, was the delighted, happy air that children have when they are being left alone, doing what is to them amusing. I introduced myself and she said her name was Janelle Lambert.

I recognized her now. I’d seen her in small parts in different movies and she’d always been good. She gave her part second effort. You always liked her on screen, but you never thought of her as great. I could see she admired Clara Ford and had hoped the critic would say something to her. She hadn’t, so now Janelle was being funny malicious. In another woman it would have been a catty remark about Ford, but with her it was OK.

She knew who I was and said the usual things about the book that people say. And I put on my usual absentminded act as if I had barely heard the compliment. I liked the way she dressed, modest, yet stylish as hell without being high fashion.

“Let’s go over,” she said. I thought she wanted to meet Kellino, but when we got there, I saw her trying to get Clara Ford into a conversation. She said intelligent things, but you could see Ford putting the ice on because she was so beautiful, or so I thought then.

Suddenly Janelle turned and walked away from the group. I followed her. She had her back to me, but when I caught her at the door, I found that she was crying.

Her eyes were magnificent with tears in them. They were golden brown flecked with black dots that were maybe just darker brown (later I found out they were contact lenses), and the tears made the eyes bigger, with more gold. They also betrayed the fact that she’d given the eyes a little help with makeup that was now running.

“You’re beautiful when you cry,” I said. I was imitating Kellino in one of his charming roles.

“Oh, fuck you, Kellino,” she said.

I hate women using words like “fuck” and “cunt” and “mother-fucker.” But she was the only woman I ever heard who made the word “fuck” sound humorous and friendly. The f and the k were Southern slurry soft.

Maybe it was obvious that she had never said the word until lately. Maybe it was because she grinned at me to let me know she knew I was imitating Kellino. She had a great grin, not a charming smile.

“I don’t know why I’m so silly,” she said. “But I never go to parties. I just came because I knew she’d be here. I admire her so much.”

“She’s a good critic,” I said.

“Oh, she’s so smart,” Janelle said. “She once wrote something nice about me. And you know, I thought she’d like me. Then she put me down. For no reason.”

“She had plenty of reason,” I said. “You’re beautiful and she’s not. And she’s got plans for Kellino tonight, and she was not going to have him distracted by you.”

“That’s silly,” she said. “I don’t like actors.”

“But you’re beautiful,” I said. “Also, you were talking intelligently. She has to hate you.”