“Peters?” Adelman asked.
“Right.”
“All right. All right,” Adelman shouted. “Turn it off.” Nothing happened. “That deaf son-of-a-bitch. Robby,” he shrieked, “turn that fucking thing off.” Sid was one of a townful of Hollywood characters who swore two decades before it became generally popular.
The projector went off with a whine and the lights went on.
“Some kids in Ohio,” Adelman said, shaking his head toward the screen.
“Illinois,” corrected the young man at his side.
“What’s the difference,” sighed Adelman. “These kids made that picture, a full-length version, silent of some Russian or Greek play, Peer Gynt. Who wants it?”
Sid looked at me. I looked at him. As bad as I looked, he looked worse. At least I hoped so. Even with his elevator shoes, Sid Adelman topped no more than five foot four. His hair was dirty grey and as thick as style would allow, to give him another fraction of an inch on the world. The bags under his eyes were permanent, dark heavy, packed and ready to go for more than twenty years. The light brown suit fit perfectly around his stomach, but the shoulders were too wide. Throwing in the suit, elevator shoes, haircut and paunch, he weighed no more than 120 pounds.
The young man stood beside Adelman, waiting. If he straightened up, he would have been a good four inches taller than his boss. And if he took off the glasses, he would have been a good looking man, but he wasn’t about to straighten up or take off his glasses with Sid around. He reeked of brains and ambition.
Sid came out of the aisle and took my arm, pulling me down a little toward him.
“I’ve got a job for you,” he stage whispered, ushering me through the doors and back into the sunlight.
“Cunningham, go write a letter to those guys,” he barked over his shoulder.
Young Cunningham nodded efficiently and hurried away without a glance at me. Cunningham, a damn good yes man, would go far at the studio. Sid was now dragging my left shoulder dangerously close to the ground.
“The things these actors get into,” he whispered, “you remember.” He paused to put on a gigantic fake smile for a fat, well-dressed man well up in his sixties, who passed by us, a cigar in his mouth as big as Sid.
“Looking good, Morris.”
Morris nodded, preoccupied.
“An asshole,” confided Adelman, guiding me into his office building. “A producer with three straight shit bombs.” He smiled and shook his head in mock sympathy.
We passed an open office door, and I could see Jack Benny sitting in a chair and looking up with full attention to a minute, ancient woman in black who was shouting, “Every time, every time.”
Esther lifted her heavy head as we entered but didn’t bother to put away her magazine.
“Mr. Peters and I are not to be disturbed,” Sid told her, guiding me into his office and closing the door.
His office was large, with a big window looking directly at another huge window about ten yards away in a similar building. There was a man in the other window. He wore a dark sweater, had a mustache and unruly hair and held a pipe in one hand as he looked up in the sky.
“That,” said Adelman pointing directly at the man, “is Faulkner, the writer.”
Adelman looked at Faulkner, who smiled genially and went back to looking at the sky. Sid shot me a look to see if I knew who Faulkner was. I didn’t bite, and he continued:
“You know what he’s costing us for two weeks’ work? MGM didn’t want him, and you know what we’re paying him?”
“No,” I said sitting across the desk from Adelman, who had not offered me a seat.
“Don’t ask,” he said, tearing his eyes away from the writer and sitting uncomfortably in his chair, an oversize leather monster.
The office was remarkably plain for a producer: dark carpeting, a big desk, a bookcase full of scripts, and two pictures on the wall, one of the Brothers Warner and one of President Roosevelt. Both were autographed. A small refrigerator stood in one corner, and there were two plain chairs for visitors.
“Well,” beamed Sid, turning from studio hen to salesman, “How have you been? Can I get you a drink?”
“No drink, thanks. I’ve been doing fine.”
He shoved a couple of pens and pencils into a desk drawer and looked over at me.
“You’ve been doing lousy,” he said evenly.
“I’ve been doing lousy,” I agreed, “and I’d like a beer.”
He got up and hustled to the refrigerator. He talked as he moved and brought me a bottle of Ballantine’s beer with a glass. The glass had a decal of Porky Pig on it.
“You know, Peters, I had nothing to do with your getting booted two years ago. I want you to know that.”
“It’s four years, Sid, and I never blamed you.”
I poured the beer slowly and watched Porky’s eyes turn amber from the liquid. Faulkner smiled across at me and turned away.
“You know,” Sid went on, after looking at me intently while I took a long drink, as if I hadn’t a care in the world, “you had one quality I always admired.”
“My rotten temper. But I’m older now.” I tried to make it sound wise and ironic.
“No, no, no,” he said. “You’re honest. You keep things to yourself. You saw something here and you kept your mouth shut even when you got axed. You follow me?”
“You’ve got a secret for me to keep.”
“In a way. In a way.” He took the pens and pencils out of the drawer he had just put them in and arranged them on his desk. He was silent for about thirty seconds, looking at his pencil and pen arrangement. I drank my beer and looked at Bill Faulkner’s back. I felt like he and I were old friends, and things were finally going our way.
“Blackmail,” Adelman finally spat out. The pens and pencils went back in the drawer. “One of our stars is being blackmailed.”
“And?”
“What do you mean, ‘and’? And I’ve got to take care of it,” he said, looking at the photo of his employers on the wall.
I finished my beer.
“We … I’ve decided to pay them,” Adelman said, reaching into the drawer again and pulling out a thick envelope. “There are five thousand dollars in one hundred dollar bills in here. I want you to deliver them to a certain address at two in the morning. We don’t want any studio people involved, and we don’t want anyone to know anything before or after. You give me your word that if anything goes wrong in the transaction, you don’t involve me, the studio or the actor.”
“What do I get in exchange for the envelope?”
“A negative and a positive print,” said Adelman softly. “You don’t give up the money until you have the negative and print. Then you bring them back to me.”
I shook my head.
“They can have a hundred copies of that picture, a dozen negatives,” I said. “The five thousand is just a down payment.”
“You think I’m some kind of putz off the street,” Adelman said, rubbing his forehead and standing. “Our actor says the picture’s a fake. Maybe it is; maybe it isn’t. We have a man who can tell if he sees the original negative.”
“And if it’s real?” I asked with a slight grin.
“We’ll handle it.”
“You mean pay some more, find someone nastier than me to handle it, or dump the actor?”
“That’s our business,” said Adelman, turning in his chair where he was again sitting.
“Where’s the print the blackmailers sent your actor?”
“I destroyed it immediately,” Adelman barked. “I didn’t want someone else to get it and make more copies.”
“All right,” I said standing. “Answer three questions, and you have a delivery man.”
“Good,” Adelman sighed, turning to face me. “The answer to your first question is $200 now and the same when you hand me the negative and print. Now your second question.”
“My second and third,” I said holding up two fingers. “What’s in the picture, and who’s the actor? I’m going to know both answers when I make the trade, and you want to be sure I know what I’m dealing for.”