“Ab-solutely Live in Person,” the lawyer repeated, putting top spin on the word Live. “Even with the now-deceased stars of earlier years, the Diana Demarests who’ve become as close as any to the iconic stature of a Harlow, a Garbo. Monroe. Duke Wayne. Chaplin and Pickford before them. Quite the miracle worker you are.”
Mickey chose to overlook the lawyer’s sarcasm. He gave a modest shrug, anchored an acknowledging grin on his face, and ran an invisible chalk mark in the air.
“I’m also the biggest, the best, the most successful. I have put life back into the bank accounts of their heirs. And their lawyers.” He let the remark sink in. “Mr. Coopersmith, I have never run a losing tour and that’s because I’ve never run into anyone who knows more about show business history than me. A walking encyclopedia. I know what the public’s hungry for and I know how to feed that hunger.”
“I admire your modesty, Mickey. Let’s settle on another seventy-five grand to sweeten the pot and push forward. How’s that sit with you?” His left eye doing its little dance again, but something in the lawyer’s manner that was stronger than a simple bluff.
Mickey drew some comfort from his belief that the offer he’d put on the plate twenty minutes ago represented more bread than Coopersmith and the Demarest estate had seen in the twenty years since Diana had vanished.
Poof.
She’d been there one minute, gone the next, on the day she shot her last scene for what nobody suspected at the time would be her last movie for United Artists, for anyone — Street Corner Sinners, back in the early eighties.
She was never heard from again.
After seven years, she was declared legally dead, but—
Mickey hadn’t just drawn Diana Demarest’s name out of the hat and made her next in line for the Absolutely Live in Person treatment. He’d actually been thinking about a show that paired Lemmon and Matthau, “One More Night with The Odd Couple,” but—
He’d fallen into proof Diana Demarest might still be alive.
Even dead she would provide good value, only slower, over the long haul, especially if he could score the London Palladium for two nights, but—
Alive? Diana Demarest back among the living?
That’s what had gotten the adrenaline pumping and made him hop the American to JFK and round one of this gamesmanship with Forbes Coopersmith, Esq.
Mickey was certain finding Diana Demarest could mean the biggest payday of his career.
She would be his General Tom Thumb, his Jenny Lind, “The Swedish Nightingale,” his Jumbo the Elephant — the same kind of international attraction that had helped make his great-great-great grandfather, the great, the one-and-only Phineas T., rich and famous and an icon in his own right.
It was the rich that interested Mickey most. For all the success of Absolutely Live in Person and his other shows, his ultra-expansive lifestyle routinely kept him teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Not that he didn’t enjoy being there.
Living on the edge was his drug of choice. It helped him to keep his engine recharged, as it had his father, his grandfather, and all the other family members who had devoured challenge as soul food.
They’d managed to survive, better than survive, come out on top, live happily ever after. Most of them, anyway, so he wasn’t going to be the one who defied Barnum tradition by conforming to the Average Joe Code of Conduct: a job and a weekly paycheck, a mortgage, a ten-year-old car in desperate need of brakes, braces for the kids. Clipping discount coupons and shopping at BuyCheap U.S.A.
Truth be told, he admired the people who lived that way and sometimes wished he could be one of them. He had even tried it once or twice when he was younger, but he had failed. The failure had pushed him back on a course that dictated a million-dollar bankroll before the age of thirty-five.
He had accomplished that.
He had scored it by the age of twenty-five — nine, almost ten years ago — and he’d lost most of it by the age of twenty-six. On and off the Golden Chariot.
Damn, what a rush.
And here he was making another charge.
Mickey could feel the invisible sweat washing his scalp and the roots of his thick, curly, coal black hair, collecting in his armpits, beading in the deep trenches of his broad forehead. In show business they called it “flop sweat.”
If Forbes Coopersmith noticed, he wasn’t saying, but maybe that’s what made him rear back in his cushy executive chair, fold his legs, lock his fingers on his lap, and tell the space between them, “Truth is, you don’t have seventy-five Gs to pull me in, much less a hundred thou, isn’t that so, Mickey?”
“What’s so, counselor, is that my offer of five thousand up front is what good faith is worth to me in this situation. Any dollars after that go into development, getting a Diana Demarest Absolutely Live in Person up and running and on the road.”
“I thought not,” Coopersmith said, as if he had answered the question. He removed his wire-rimmed frames, steam cleaned the lenses with his breath, and dried them with the patterned silk handkerchief he pulled from his shapeless Armani jacket. “Why don’t you come around and test your luck next time you have a hundred thousand to go with your five thousand up front. Then, we can talk about it again, though I can’t promise it won’t be more the next time, inflation being what it is.”
“You said plus-seventy-five would make the deal today.”
Coopersmith shrugged and flashed an insincere smile.
“The clock ran out on seventy-five, Mickey.”
“So, a hundred thousand and we would have a deal? Exclusive rights to a tour and all that goes with it. A souvenir program, posters, calendars, a book, maybe even a movie, and—”
“You’re dreaming pretty large, but why not? Yes. A hundred and five out the door, but I fear it’s only you heading for the door right now.”
Coopersmith started to rise, but Mickey pushed out his palm like a traffic cop.
“Not necessarily,” Mickey said. “A hundred-five and we can shake on it?”
Coopersmith challenged him with a puzzled look, but after a second added a discreet nod.
Mickey leaned down to retrieve his travel-pocked attaché case, its lid lost under destination stickers of various sizes, shapes, and countries. Settled it on the desk. Snapped open the lid and extracted a large manila envelope. From it he removed a series of smaller envelopes, checking notations until he found the two he wanted and offered them to the lawyer. He closed the case and returned it to the floor while Coopersmith checked them both for contents.
One envelope held five thousand-dollar bills.
The other contained a certified check made out to cash in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars.
Coopersmith blew out enough air to sail the QE2 across the Atlantic.
He decided finally, “I must say I’m surprised beyond words, Mickey.”
“What I’d like to hear you say, Mr. Coopersmith, is the one word: deal. Exclusive rights across the board, overseas as well as here in the States.”
Coopersmith stretched his hand over the desk, smiled for real this time, and said, “Call me Smitty.”
Mickey waited until he was back at his suite at the Plaza to phone his father in Los Angeles. Murray Barnum layered some asthmatic breath in the air and said, “So we only had to go the hundred G on top of the five?”
“Right, Pop. He was a total goner on the yarn you fed him about me dangling from the crest of Mount Disaster by my short hairs. Otherwise, he and I would probably still be doing battle somewhere north of five hundred thou. When he saw the bills and the certified check, he didn’t pause to consider how much might be in the other envelopes. We had him.”