“Really?”
“Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. They were there with him. All of them going doo-doo on the happy dust.”
The hotel building was a white mock-gothic chateau. I said good-bye to the chauffeur and checked in; I did not ask about the room in which Belushi had died.
I walked out to my chalet through the rain, my overnight bag in my hand, clutching the set of keys that would, the desk clerk told me, get me through the various doors and gates. The air smelled of wet dust and, curiously enough, cough mixture. It was dusk, almost dark.
Water splashed everywhere. It ran in rills and rivulets across the courtyard. It ran into a small fishpond that jutted out from the side of a wall in the courtyard.
I walked up the stairs into a dank little room. It seemed a poor kind of a place for a star to die.
The bed seemed slightly damp, and the rain drummed a maddening beat on the air-conditioning system.
I watched a little television—the rerun wasteland: Cheers segued imperceptibly into Taxi, which flickered into black and white and became I Love Lucy—then stumbled into sleep.
I dreamed of drummers intermittently drumming, only thirty minutes away.
The phone woke me. “Hey-hey-hey-hey. You made it okay then?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Jacob at the studio. Are we still on for breakfast, hey-hey?”
“Breakfast . . . ? ”
“No problem. I’ll pick you up at your hotel in thirty minutes. Reservations are already made. No problems. You got my messages?”
“I . . .”
“Faxed ’em through last night. See you.”
The rain had stopped. The sunshine was warm and bright: proper Hollywood light. I walked up to the main building, walking on a carpet of crushed eucalyptus leaves—the cough medicine smell from the night before.
They handed me an envelope with a fax in it—my schedule for the next few days, with messages of encouragement and faxed handwritten doodles in the margin, saying things like “This is Gonna be a Blockbuster!” and “Is this Going to be a Great Movie or What!” The fax was signed by Jacob Klein, obviously the voice on the phone. I had never before had any dealings with a Jacob Klein.
A small red sports car drew up outside the hotel. The driver got out and waved at me. I walked over. He had a trim, pepper-and-salt beard, a smile that was almost bankable, and a gold chain around his neck. He showed me a copy of Sons of Man.
He was Jacob. We shook hands.
“Is David around? David Gambol?”
David Gambol was the man I’d spoken to earlier on the phone when arranging the trip. He wasn’t the producer. I wasn’t certain quite what he was. He described himself as “attached to the project.”
“David’s not with the studio anymore. I’m kind of running the project now, and I want you to know I’m really psyched. Hey-hey.”
“That’s good?”
We got in the car. “Where’s the meeting?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It’s not a meeting,” he said. “It’s a breakfast.” I looked puzzled. He took pity on me. “A kind of premeeting meeting,” he explained.
We drove from the hotel to a mall somewhere half an hour away while Jacob told me how much he enjoyed my book and how delighted he was that he’d become attached to the project. He said it was his idea to have me put up in the hotel—“Give you the kind of Hollywood experience you’d never get at the Four Seasons or Ma Maison, right?”—and asked me if I was staying in the chalet in which John Belushi had died. I told him I didn’t know, but that I rather doubted it.
“You know who he was with, when he died? They covered it up, the studios.”
“No. Who?”
“Meryl and Dustin.”
“This is Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman we’re talking about?”
“Sure.”
“How do you know this?”
“People talk. It’s Hollywood. You know?”
I nodded as if I did know, but I didn’t.
PEOPLE TALK ABOUT books that write themselves, and it’s a lie. Books don’t write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you’d believe.
Except for Sons of Man, and that one pretty much wrote itself.
The irritating question they ask us—us being writers—is:
“Where do you get your ideas?”
And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra!
It began with a documentary on Charles Manson I was watching more or less by accident (it was on a videotape a friend lent me after a couple of things I did want to watch): there was footage of Manson, back when he was first arrested, when people thought he was innocent and that it was the government picking on the hippies. And up on the screen was Manson—a charismatic, good-looking, messianic orator. Someone you’d crawl barefoot into Hell for. Someone you could kill for.
The trial started; and, a few weeks into it, the orator was gone, replaced by a shambling, apelike gibberer, with a cross carved into its forehead. Whatever the genius was was no longer there. It was gone. But it had been there.
The documentary continued: a hard-eyed ex-con who had been in prison with Manson, explaining, “Charlie Manson? Listen, Charlie was a joke. He was a nothing. We laughed at him. You know? He was a nothing!”
And I nodded. There was a time before Manson was the charisma king, then. I thought of a benediction, something given, that was taken away.
I watched the rest of the documentary obsessively. Then, over a black-and-white still, the narrator said something. I rewound, and he said it again.
I had an idea. I had a book that wrote itself.
The thing the narrator had said was this: that the infant children Manson had fathered on the women of The Family were sent to a variety of children’s homes for adoption, with court-given surnames that were certainly not Manson.
And I thought of a dozen twenty-five-year-old
