Hot Properties (21 page)
Tony laughed. Garth smiled mischievously. “Okay.” Tony said to him. He felt completely at ease with Garth. He seemed bright, accessible, and reasonable. “So how do I convince you to hire me?” Tony said. He didn’t know if it was too bold a remark. But it was what he wanted to know, and Garth’s honesty made him feel that truth was the best approach.
“You don’t have to,” Foxx said.
“Let me tell you why you’re here,” Garth said. He ran a hand through his straight black hair, another gesture straight out of his roles. “I saw your play last year in New York—”
“Youngsters?”
Garth smirked. “Yeah. Did you have more than one play on that year?”
“Yes,” Tony said quietly.
Garth looked abashed. “You did?”
“I had two one-acters on at the Quest Guild right after
Youngsters.”
“I didn’t know that. I wish I’d seen them. I guess I wasn’t in town—”
“You might have been. They were only on for four weeks. It was a limited run.”
“Anyway, I did see
Youngsters.
You know, I’ve seen a lot of stuff about the sixties, the antiwar movement, the sexual revolution—nobody got it the way you did. There were no preachy monologues, you snuck in the politics painlessly, you made terrible fun of all of us, and then you turned it around beautifully. I cried at her speech …” He turned to Foxx. “You know, the druggie who yells at her kid sister about how it was worth it, no matter how badly they failed.”
Foxx nodded throughout gravely, but again with that abstracted look of someone who has heard it too often.
“Thank you,” Tony said. He was astonished that Garth had been to his play (and surprised that he hadn’t known it; usually the presence of a celebrity in an off-Broadway theater doesn’t go unnoticed) and intensely flattered by Garth’s vivid recall and detailed praise. Why he should so value Garth’s admiration—hadn’t the
Times
said he was “touched with genius”?—he didn’t know, but he felt himself suffused with a happy warmth.
“Anyway, I had just read the fourth, the fifth, I don’t know what draft of
Concussion
—”
“Is that the title of this project?” Tony asked.
“Working title,” Foxx said hastily. “We need something—”
“Less medical!” Garth said impatiently. “Anyway, I’m sitting clapping at the curtain, tears coming down my face, and I think: Why the fuck didn’t we hire this kid to write
Concussion?”
Tony smiled. “So why didn’t you?”
“ ’Cause the studio wants people with credits, as if that proves something.
Concussion’s
a thriller, that’s what’s gonna sell it to the public. Like a Hitchcock movie, it’ll mostly be a glamorous chase picture. But—and it’s a big but—what gives it resonance, some depth, is this: we take a guy in his mid-thirties, he’s in Washington, he’s made it, he’s a partner in a firm that does a lot of antitrust work, basically fighting the Environmental Protection Agency, you know, all the regulating bodies of the Justice Department. So, he’s an establishment guy. But in the sixties, he was a radical. And a real radical. Fell in love with a beautiful, mysterious woman—”
“Meryl Streep,” Foxx offered.
Tony smiled involuntarily, but then he remembered who these people were. If they wanted Meryl Streep for a part, they could get her.
“Yeah, I’d love to work with Meryl again,” Garth said. “She’s terrific. And she’d be perfect for this. Anyway, she’s very radical, and part of the reason he went along with going underground, making bombs, was that he was in love with her.”
“This is all back story,” Foxx said.
Garth smirked. “He says that ’cause it scares the shit out of the studio. Like I’m gonna make a movie in which I blow up the President.”
“Not a bad idea,” Tony said.
“Yeah.” Garth winked at him. “You get the idea. It’s all back story, and he’s sorry he ever had anything to do with making bombs—”
“Why did he stop?”
“Ah!” Garth leaned forward eagerly. “This is how the movie begins. It’s 1968. We see a quiet town house in Greenwich Village. I’m in the basement with Meryl. Quickly establish I love her while I argue with her that we shouldn’t place the bomb—which we see her making along with two other characters—in a situation where anyone could be hurt. She’s very hard-line. Finally, I say we need milk, or they want sandwiches for lunch—”
“He goes out for lunch,” Foxx said impatiently. “He can’t go out for milk.”
“Whatever,” Garth said. “Doesn’t matter. I go out. I’m about halfway down the block—”
“Town house blows up,” Tony said for him. “You’re doing the Eleventh Street incident.”
“Exactly. You see?” Garth said to Foxx. “Tony knows what I’m talking about. The other writers had never heard of the Eleventh Street town house.”
“That’s great that you know about it,” Foxx said with a big smile at Tony.
“So,” Garth said, again running a hand through his hair, “the town house blows up. Cut, dissolve, fifteen years later. I’m an establishment guy in a real conservative law firm. You find out that Meryl was presumably killed in the explosion, that I’ve never gotten over her, that I was totally turned off politics by her death, and so on. And then, Nyack happens.”
“This is great,” Tony said. “It’ll be like
Vertigo,
only it’s the sixties coming back to haunt him.”
Garth leaned back with a big smile and gestured toward him, the star asking the audience to acknowledge the presence and talent of his costars. “You’ve got it.”
Foxx, however, was frowning. “Nyack?” he said with distaste, as if someone had asked him to move there.
“You know, the terrorist bank robbery,” Garth said.
“In the script?” Foxx asked.
“Yeah,” Garth said patiently. “That’s based on a real incident. The Nyack thing. You didn’t know that?”
“I thought that was invented. Is there going to be a legal problem?”
“No, no, no.”
“Do we need it?” Foxx said. “I don’t think it works. Can’t Meryl’s character come back as something else? I don’t like her killing cops and being a bank robber.”
“But she hasn’t actually done the robbery!” Garth said, his tone so aggrieved that Tony knew this was a point that had been argued many times.
“That distinction is unimportant,” Foxx said. “All the audience will know is that she’s a terrorist. Saying she’s innocent of a particular act of terrorism won’t change that. She won’t be sympathetic. Meryl would never play the part!” Foxx burst out with abrupt impatience.
“Why make it clear?” Tony asked.
They both stared at him. Their looks were blank, as if they had forgotten he was there. “What do you mean?” Garth snapped.
“Hitchcock wouldn’t make it clear. Our hero, after the flashback, would be sitting at home watching the TV news coverage of the Nyack robbery with a look on his face that’d tell the audience it frightened him, and then there’d be a knock on the door. And Meryl, beautiful and distraught, would be there, telling a breathless and confused story of how she was being set up, of her years underground, and so on. A story whose truth we wouldn’t know until the end of the picture. We’d have a hero who intellectually thinks she’s guilty, but emotionally needs her to be innocent.” Tony turned to Foxx. “Meryl, if the part was written properly, might want to play it because it would allow her to simultaneously play a villain and the romantic lead. The best of both roles in fact.”
Foxx listened. He looked Tony in the eyes while nodding agreement: his eyes were suspicious, however, searching doubtfully for a catch, a hidden trick to Tony’s explanation. At the finish they flickered, and Foxx leaned back, looking up at the ceiling.
Garth, meanwhile, reached across the table and rubbed Tony’s head—an affectionate big brother. “That’s brilliant,” he said.
Tony knew it wasn’t brilliant. But he loved Garth saying so. He flushed at having his hair tousled: he knew his ego was being seduced; but he didn’t care; it felt too good to protest.
Tony looked at Foxx. He knew now that Foxx was the impediment to his being hired. He had also realized that Gloria Fowler’s sudden inspiration to be his agent had come from her certain knowledge that Garth wanted to hire him. She had been dishonest, pretending that she had picked him out of the haystack of off-Broadway theater; but the credit for that belonged to Garth. I’m too naive, Tony said to himself while he waited for Foxx’s eyes to come back down from the ceiling. He knew Foxx wanted the political background out of the script, and therefore he would see Tony as a step backward. Tony had made it sound like he would only use it as a Hitchcockian veil of suspense: if Foxx bought that, he’d get the job.
“Well … ?” Garth said to Foxx. “What are you doing? Checking the sprinkler system?”
Foxx lowered his eyes. They brightened at something. A smile came over his face and he seemed to straighten in readiness. Garth followed his gaze and also smiled. Tony, still waiting for Foxx’s judgment, felt hands come around his head and cover his eyes. He smelled a perfume he had known all his life.
“What’s the matter? You never write. You never call.” said a guttural female voice. Laughter lay only an inch below its deep surface; an amusement that had cued audiences in the subtle way only a great comedienne can that a joke was being played, and thereby got even bigger laughs than the lines deserved.
“Hi, Ma,” Tony said, playing the comedy in the harassed voice of a teenager.
His mother released her blindfold and then he was hugged violently, pressed into her substantial breasts, suffused by her familiar odor. Out of the crush, he could see with one eye that surrounding tables were looking on with self-conscious delight.
“What have you been doing to my boy?” Maureen demanded of Garth in a melodramatic tone while still crushing Tony.
“I’m innocent,” Garth said. “The producer made me do it.”
“He comes to town.” she said, releasing Tony and slapping him on the shoulder. “Doesn’t phone, doesn’t tell me where he’s staying. Is this a son or a viper?”
“Neither, darling,” Foxx said. “He’s a screenwriter.”
Maureen pushed at Tony. “Let me in, you louse.” Tony slid over. Maureen got in, saying, “You making a deal with my boy, or just jerking him off?”
“Around, darling, not off,” Foxx corrected, while Garth convulsed with laughter.
“I always get idioms mixed up,” Maureen said, winking at Tony. Her double entendre, disguised as naïveté, was an old joke between them. “Well, which is it?”
Garth smiled. “That was the question I was going to ask Jimmy. But I was going to wait until Tony left.”
“Since when are you diplomatic?” Maureen said to Garth.
Tony kept waiting for an entrance into this banter—and praying that his mother would stop just short of totally humiliating him. She usually did, but there had been miserable exceptions.
“Maureen, I’m hurt,” Garth said, and looked it too.
“Of course
we
want to hire him,” Foxx said. “But the studio has to approve.”
Garth smiled.
Tony wondered.
Maureen said, “That’s bullshit, darling. If Bill Garth and Jimmy Foxx tell a studio they want a writer, the studio hires him.” She turned to Tony and kissed him full on the lips. “You’ve got the job. Stick it to them on the negotiation. They’ll pay your price.”
Garth roared, throwing his head back and slapping Foxx on the back. Even Foxx couldn’t control his face, beaming at Maureen.
Tony, stunned, the exhaustion of his trip and the long night of talk returning through the anesthesia of adrenaline, looked away from the group and scanned the Polo Lounge.
Most of the tables were looking at him.
Wondering.
Who was that kid with the famous actor and actress? Who was that masked man seated with Jim Foxx? Should we know him?
Yes, Tony answered silently, while the others laughed.
GARLANDS DEAL MEMO
re: Fred Tatter novel.
The Locker Room.
$20,000 advance. Payable: $5,000 on signing; $5,000 on delivery of a mutually satisfactory one hundred pages; $10,000 on delivery of a mutually satisfactory completed manuscript. Bart Cullen, agent. Robert Holder, editor.
NEWSTIME
INTEROFFICE MEMO
John Syms will be detached from senior-editing Nation to Future Projects for six months. Jim Daily will senior-edit Nation during his absence. David Bergman will fill in to senior-edit Business.
SHADOW BOOKS DEAL MEMO
Patty Lane, flat fee, $5,000 for untitled romance novel.
INTERNATIONAL PICTURES DEAL MEMO
Tony Winters hired to write first-draft screenplay on
Concussion.
William Garth. Jim Foxx producers. William Garth star. $50,000 draft and set against $175,000. Contracts to follow.
For nine months Fred had lived a life once only dreamt of: he was a writer under contract for a novel. The legal agreement itself was precious. He kept the thirty-five-page document at the front of his file drawer. He saw the edge of its nineteenth-century typeface at the start and finish of each work session, when he would remove and replace that day’s writing. Sometimes, late at night, he would get out of bed and surreptitiously sneak into his study, quietly pulling open the drawer, and gaze at the contract: a teenage boy enjoying a stash of pornography.
At first the glances were passionate, their purpose to reexperience a thrill. But after two months, bogged down in the second chapter, feeling inadequate to the task of actually producing a novel, he made the nightly excursions for reassurance. A confirmation that he, in fact, had a contract.
After nine months, Fred started to
read
the legal agreement. By then he was close to finishing the first one hundred pages of his novel. Now he worried that his prose was bad, that Bob Holder would reject the novel when he handed it in. He knew, from Marion among others, that the five-thousand-dollar portion of the twenty-thousand-dollar advance he had received on signing the contract would have to be returned only if another publisher wished to accept Fred’s novel. Nevertheless, late one night he read through the document to confirm this fact.
The quest was pointless, in a way. If his novel were rejected by Holder, and then by every other publisher, not having to return the five thousand dollars would hardly compensate Fred for such a devastating failure. Better never to have gotten a deal than to have had one and blown it. He would rather have died of thirst in a desert of mediocrity than have had his lips cruelly wetted by a few drops of the rain of success.