When David Jatney arrived in Los Angeles, he did not know a single soul.
That suited him, he liked the feeling. With no responsibilities, he could concentrate on his thoughts, he could figure out the world. The first night he slept in a small motel room and then found a one-room apartment in Santa Monica that was cheaper than he had expected. He found the apartment through the kindness of a matronly woman who was a waitress in a coffee shop where he took his first breakfast in California. David had eaten frugally-a glass of orange juice, toast and coffee-and the waitress had noticed him studying the rental section of the Los Angeles Times. She asked him if he was looking for a place to live and he said yes. She wrote down a phone number on a piece of paper and said it was just a one-room apartment but the rent was reasonable, because the people in Santa Monica had fought a long battle with the real estate interests and there was a tough rent control law. And Santa Monica was beautiful and he would be only a few minutes away from the Venice beach and its boardwalk and it was a lot of fun.
David at first had been suspicious. Why would this stranger be interested in his welfare? She looked motherly, but she had a sexy air about her. Of course she was very old-she must be forty at least. But she didn't seem to be coming on to him. And she gave him a cheery good-bye when he left. He was to learn that people in California did things like this. The constant sunshine seemed to mellow them. Mellowing. That's what it was. It cost her nothing to do him the favor.
David had driven from Utah in the car that his parents had given him for college. In it was his every worldly possession, except for a guitar that he had once tried to learn to play and which was back in Utah. Most important was a portable typewriter, which he used to write his diary, poetry, short stories and novels. Now that he was in California he would try his first screenplay.
Everything fell into place easily. He got the apartment, a little place with a shower but no bath. It looked like a dollhouse with frilly curtains over its one window and prints of famous paintings on the wall.
The apartment was in a row of two-story houses behind Montana Avenue, and he could even park his car in the alley. He had been very lucky.
He spent the next fourteen days hanging around the Venice beach and boardwalk, and taking rides up to Malibu to see how the rich and famous lived. He leaned against the steel link fence that cut off the Malibu colony from the public beach and peered through. There was this long row of beach houses that stretched far to the north. Each worth three million dollars and more, and yet they looked like ordinary countrified shacks.
They wouldn't cost more than twenty thousand in Utah. But they had the sand, the purple ocean, the brilliant sky, the mountains behind them across the Pacific Coast Highway. Someday he would sit on the balcony of one of those houses and gaze over the Pacific.
At night in his dollhouse he sank into long dreams of what he would do when he too was rich and famous. He would lie awake until the early hours of the morning weaving his fantasies. It was a lonely and curiously happy time.
He called his parents to give them his new address, and his father gave him the number of a producer to call at one of the movie studios, a childhood friend named Dean Hocken. David waited a week. Finally he made the call and got through to Hocken's secretary. She asked him to hold In a few moments she came back on the phone and told him that Mr. Hocken was not in. He knew it was a con, that he was being sloughed off, and he felt a surge of anger at his father for being so dumb. But he gave the secretary his phone number when she asked. He was still on his daybed brooding angrily an hour later when the phone rang. It was Dean Hocken's secretary, and she asked him if he was free at eleven the next morning to see Mr. Hocken in his office. He said he was, and she told him that she would leave a pass at the gate so that he could drive onto the studio lot.
When he hung up the phone, David was surprised at the gladness welling up in him. A man he had never seen had honored a schoolboy friendship. And then he was ashamed of his own debasing gratitude. Sure, the guy was a big wheel; sure, his time was valuable-but eleven in the morning? That meant he would not be asked to lunch. It would be one of those quick courtesy interviews so the guy wouldn't feel guilty. So that his relatives back in Utah could point out that he didn't have a big head. A mean politeness basically without value.
But the next day turned out differently from what he had expected. Dean Hocken's office was in a long low building on the movie lot, and impressive. There was a receptionist in a big waiting room whose walls were covered with posters of bygone movies. Two other offices behind the reception room held two more secretaries, and then a larger, grander office. This office was furnished beautifully with deep armchairs and sofas and rugs; the walls were hung with original paintings, and there was a bar with a large refrigerator. In a corner was a working desk topped with leather. On the wall above the desk was a huge photograph of Dean Hocken shaking hands with President Francis Xavier Kennedy. There was a coffee table littered with magazines and bound scripts. The office was empty.
The secretary who had brought him in said, 'Mr. Hocken will be with you in ten minutes. Can I get you a drink or some coffee?'
David was polite in his refusal. He could see that the young secretary was giving him an appraising glance, so he used his real shit-kicker's voice. He knew he made a good impression. Women always liked him at first; it was only when they got to know him better that they didn't like him, he thought. But maybe that was because he didn't like them when he got to know them better.
He had to wait for fifteen minutes before Dean Hocken came into the office through a back door that was almost invisible. For the first time in his life David was really impressed. This was a man who truly looked successful and powerful; he radiated confidence and friendliness as he grabbed David's hand.
Dean Hocken was tall and David cursed his own shortness. Hocken was at least six foot two and he looked amazingly youthful, though he must be the same age as David's father, which was fifty-five. He wore casual clothes, but his white shirt was whiter than any Jatney had ever seen.
His jacket was some sort of linen and hung beautifully on his frame. The trousers were linen also, sort of off-white. Hocken's face seemed without a wrinkle and painted over with bronze ink sprayed from the sun.
Hocken was as gracious as he was youthful. He diplomatically revealed a homesickness for the Utah mountains, the Mormon life, the silence and peace of rural existence, the quiet cities with their tabernacles. And he also revealed that he had been a suitor for the hand of David's mother.
'Your mother was my girlfriend,' Dean Hocken said. 'Your father stole her away from me. But it was for the best, those two really loved each other, made each other happy.'
And David thought, yes, it was true, his mother and father really loved each other and with their perfect love they had shut him out. In the long winter evenings they sought their warmth in a conjugal bed while he watched his TV.
But that had been a long time ago.
He watched Dean Hocken talk and be charming and he saw the age beneath that carefully preserved outward armor of bronzed skin stretched too tight for nature. The man had no flesh beneath his chin, not a sign of the wattles that had grown on his father. He wondered why the man was being so nice to him.
'I've had four wives since I left Utah,' Hocken said, 'and I would have been much happier with your mother.' David watched for the usual signs of egoism, the hint that his mother too might have been much happier if she had stuck with the successful Dean Hocken. But he saw none. The man was still a country boy beneath that California polish.
Jatney listened politely and laughed at the jokes. He called Dean Hocken 'sir' until the man told him to please just call him 'Hock,' and then he didn't call the man anything. Hocken talked an hour and then looked at his watch and said abruptly, 'It was good seeing somebody from down home, but I guess you didn't come to hear about Utah. What do you do?'
'I'm a writer,' David said. 'The usual stuff, a novel that I threw away and some screenplays, I'm still learning.' He had never written a novel.
Hocken nodded approval of his modesty. 'You have to earn your dues. Here's what I can do for you right now. I can get you a spot in the reader's department on the studio payroll. You read scripts and write a summary and your opinion. Just a half page on each script you read. That's how I started. You get to meet people and learn the basics. Truth is, nobody pays much attention to the reports, but do your best. It's just a starting point. Now I'll arrange all this and one of my secretaries will get in touch with you in a few days. And soon we'll have dinner together.
Give my best to your mother and father.' And then Hock escorted David to the door. They were not going to have lunch, David thought, and the promise of dinner would stretch out forever. But at least he would get a job,
