hundred TV feature films and twenty theatrical films. Not one of them had had a touch of grace, of quality, of art. The critics, the workers and artists in Hollywood had a classic joke that compared Wagon with Selznick, Lubitsch, Thalberg. They would say of one of his pictures that it had the Dong imprint because a young malicious actress called him the Dong.
A typical Jeff Wagon picture was loaded with stars a bit frayed by age and celluloid wear and tear, desperate for a paycheck. The talent knew it was a schlock picture. The directors were handpicked by Wagon. They were usually run-of-the-mill with a string of failures behind them so that he could twist their arms and make them shoot the picture his way. The odd thing was that though all the pictures were terrible, they either broke even or made money simply because the basic idea was good in a commercial way. It usually had a built-in audience, and Jeff Wagon was a fierce bulldog on cost. He was also terrific on contracts that screwed everybody out of his percentage if the picture became a big hit and made a lot of cash. And if that didn’t work, he would have the studio start litigation so that a settlement could be made on percentages. But Moses Wartberg always said that Jeff Wagon came up with sound ideas. What he presumably didn’t know was that Wagon stole even these ideas. He did this by what could only be called seduction.
In his younger days Jeff Wagon had lived up to his nickname by knocking over every starlet on the Tri- Culture lot. He was very much on the line with his approach. If they came across, they became girls in TV movies who were bartenders or receptionists. If they played their cards right, they could get enough work to carry them through the year. But when he went into feature films, this was not possible. With three-million-dollar budgets you didn’t fuck around handing out parts for a piece of ass. So then he got away with letting them read for a part, promising to help them, but never a firm commitment. And of course, some were talented, and with his foot in the door, they got some nice parts in feature films. A few became stars. They were often grateful. In the Land of Empidae, Jeff Wagon was the ultimate survivor.
But one day out of the northern rain forests of Oregon a breathtaking beauty of eighteen appeared. She had everything going for her. Great face, great body, fiery temperament, even talent. But the camera refused to do right by her. In that idiotic magic of film her looks didn’t work.
She was also a little crazy. She had grown up as a woodsman and hunter in the Oregon forests. She could skin a deer and fight a grizzly bear. She reluctantly let Jeff Wagon fuck her once a month because her agent gave her a little heart-to-heart talk. But she came from a place where the people were straight shooters, and she expected Jeff Wagon to keep his word and get her the part. When it didn’t happen, she went to bed with Jeff Wagon with a deer-skinning knife and, at the crucial moment, stuck it into one of Jeff Wagon’s balls.
It didn’t turn out badly. For one thing she only took a nick off his right ball, and everybody agreed that with his big balls a little chip wouldn’t do him any harm. Jeff Wagon himself tried to cover up the incident, refused to press charges. But the story got out. The girl was shipped home to Oregon with enough money for a log cabin and a new deer-hunting rifle. And Jeff Wagon had learned his lesson. He gave up seducing starlets and devoted himself to seducing writers out of their ideas. It was both more profitable and less dangerous. Writers were dumber and more cowardly.
And so he seduced writers by taking them to expensive lunches. By dangling jobs before their eyes. A rewrite of a script in production, a couple of thousand dollars for a treatment. Meanwhile, he let them talk about their ideas for future novels or screenplays. And then he would steal their ideas by switching them to other locales, changing the characters, but always preserving the central idea. And then it was his pleasure to screw them by giving them nothing. And since writers did not usually have a clue to the worthiness of their ideas, they never protested. Not like those cunts who gave you a piece of their ass and expected the moon.
It was the agents that got on to Jeff Wagon and forbade their writer clients to go to lunch with him. But there were fresh young writers coming into Hollywood from all over the country. All hoping for that one foot in the door that would make them rich and famous. And it was Jeff Wagon’s genius that he could let them see the door crack open just enough to jam toes black and blue when he slammed the door shut.
Once when I was in Vegas, I told Cully that he and Wagon mugged their victims the same way. But Cully disagreed.
“Listen,” Cully said. “Me and Vegas are after your money, true. But Hollywood wants your balls.”
He didn’t know that Tri-Culture Studios had just bought one of the biggest casinos in Vegas.
Moses Wartberg was another story. On one of my early visits to Hollywood I had been taken to Tri-Culture Studios to pay my respects.
I met Moses Wartberg for a minute. And I knew who he was right away. There was that shark like look to him that I had seen in top military men, casino owners, very beautiful and very rich women and top Mafia bosses. It was the cold steel of power, the iciness that ran through the blood and brain, the chilling absence of mercy or pity in all the cells of the organism. People who were absolutely dedicated to the supreme drug power. Power already achieved and exercised over a long period of time. And with Moses Wartberg it was exercised down to the smallest square inch.
That night, when I told Janelle that I had been to Tri-Culture Studios and met Wartberg, she said casually, “Good old Moses. I know Moses.” She gave me a challenging look, so I took the bait.
“OK,” I said. “Tell me how you know Moses.”
Janelle got out of bed to act out the part. “I had been in town for about two years and wasn’t getting anyplace, and then I was invited to a party where all the big wheels would be, and like a good little would-be star, I went to make contacts. There were a dozen girls like me. All walking around, looking beautiful, hoping that some powerful producer would be struck by our talent. Well, I got lucky. Moses Wartberg came over to me, and he was charming. I didn’t know how people could say such terrible things about him. I remember his wife came up for a minute and tried to take him away, but he didn’t pay any attention to her. He just kept on talking to me and I was at my most fascinating Southern belle best and, sure enough, by the end of the evening I had an invitation from Moses Wartberg to have dinner at his house the next night. In the morning I called up all my girlfriends and told them about it. They congratulated me and told me I would have to fuck him and I said of course I would not, not on my first date and I also thought he’d respect me more if I held him off a little.”
“That’s a good technique,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “It worked with you, but that’s the way I felt. I hadn’t ever gone to bed with a man unless I really liked him. I’d never gone to bed with a man just to make him do something for me. I told my girlfriends that, and they told me I was crazy. That if Moses Wartberg was really in love with me or really liked me, I would be on my way to being a star.”
For a few minutes she gave a charming pantomime of false virtue arguing itself into honest sinning.
“And so what happened?” I said.
Janelle stood proud, her hands on her hips, her head tilted dramatically. “At five o’clock that afternoon I made the greatest decision of my life. I decided I would fuck a man I didn’t know just to get ahead. I thought I was so brave and I was delighted that finally I had made a decision that a man would make.”
She came out of her role for just a moment.
“Isn’t that what men do?” she said sweetly. “If they can make a business deal, they’d give anything, they demean themselves. Isn’t that business?”
I said, “I guess so.”
She said to me, “Didn’t you have to do that?”
I said, “No.”
“You never did anything like that to get your books published, to get an agent or to get a book reviewer to treat you better?”
I said, “No.”
“You have a good opinion of yourself, don’t you?” Janelle said. “I’ve had affairs with married men before, and the one thing I have noticed is that they all want to wear that big white cowboy hat.”
“What does that mean?”
“They want to be fair to their wives and girlfriends. That’s the one impression they want to make, so you can’t blame them for anything, and you do that too.”
I thought that over a minute. I could see what she meant. “OK,” I said. “So what?”
“So what?” Janelle said. “You tell me you love me, hut you go back to your wife. No married man should tell another woman he loves her unless he’s willing to leave his wife.”
