At this I had to protest. “Listen, you ask me my opinion about anything and I’ll give it to you. Don’t even ask. Your last book was a piece of shit, and you run this review like a lunatic.”
Osano laughed. “I don’t mean that kind of stuff. I never said you weren’t honest. But let it go. You’ll know what I’m talking about someday. Especially if you start chasing broads and wind up with somebody like Wendy.”
– -
Wendy came around to the review offices once in a while. She was a striking brunette with crazy eyes and a body loaded with sexual energy. She was very bright, and Osano would give her books to review. She was the only one of his ex-wives who was not afraid of him, and she had made his life miserable ever since they were divorced. When he fell behind in his alimony payments, she went to court to get her child support and alimony raised. She had taken a twenty-year-old writer into her apartment and supported him. The writer was heavy on drugs, and Osano worried about what he might do to the kids.
Osano told stories about their marriage that were to me incredible. That once, going to a party, they had gotten into the elevator and Wendy refused to tell him the floor the party was on simply because they had quarreled. He became so infuriated that he had started to choke her to make her tell him, playing a game, as he called it, of “choke the chicken.” A game that was his fondest memory of the marriage. Her face turning black, she shook her head, still refusing to answer his question about where the party was being held. He had to release her. He knew she was crazier than he was.
Sometimes when they had minor arguments, she would call the police to have him thrown out of the apartment and the police would come and be stunned by her unreasonableness. They would see Osano’s clothes scissored to pieces on the floor. She admitted doing it, but that didn’t give Osano a right to hit her. What she left out was that she had sat on the pile of scissored suits and shirts and ties and masturbated over them with a vibrator.
And Osano had stories to tell about the vibrator. She had gone to a psychiatrist because she could not achieve orgasms. After six months she had admitted to Osano that the psychiatrist was fucking her as part of the therapy. Osano wasn’t jealous; by this time he really loathed her, “loathe” he said, “not hate. There’s a difference.”
But Osano would get furious every time he got the bill from the psychiatrist and he would rage to her, “I pay a guy a hundred dollars a week to fuck my wife and they call that modern medicine?” He told the story when his wife gave a cocktail party, and she was so mad that she stopped going to the psychiatrist and bought a vibrator. Every evening before dinner she locked herself into the bedroom to shut out the kids and masturbated with the machine. She always achieved orgasm. But she laid down the strict rule that she was never to be disturbed during that hour, by the children or her husband. The whole family, even the children, referred to it as “The Happy Hour.”
What made Osano finally leave her, as he told the story, was when she started carrying on about how F. Scott Fitzgerald had stolen all his best stuff from his wife, Zelda. That she would have become a great novelist if her husband had not done this. Osano grabbed her by the hair of her head and shoved her nose into The Great Gatsby.
“Read this, you dumb cunt,” he said. “Read ten sentences, then read his wife’s book. Then come and tell me that shit.”
She read both and came back to Osano and told him the same thing. He punched her in the face and blackened both her eyes and then left for good.
Just recently Wendy had won another infuriating victory over Osano. He knew she was giving the child-support payments to her young lover. But one day his daughter came to him and asked for money for clothes. She explained that her gynecologist had told her not to wear jeans anymore because of a vaginal infection, and when she had asked her mother for money for dresses, her mother said, “Ask your father.” This was after they had been divorced for five years.
To avoid an argument, Osano gave his daughter’s support money to her directly. Wendy didn’t object. But after a year she took Osano to court for the year’s money. The daughter testified for her father. Osano had been sure he would win when the judge knew all the circumstances. But the judge told him sternly not only to pay the money directly to the mother but also to pay the support money for the past year in a lump sum. So in effect he paid twice.
Wendy was so delighted with her victory that she tried to be friendly with him afterward. In front of their children he brushed off her affectionate advances and said coldly, “You are the worst cunt I’ve ever seen.” The next time Wendy came around to the review he refused her entrance to his office and cut off all the work he had given her. And what amazed him was that she couldn’t understand why he loathed her. She raged about him to her friends and spread the word that he had never satisfied her in bed, that he couldn’t get it up. That he was a repressed homosexual who really liked little boys. She tried to keep him from having the kids for the summer, but Osano won that battle. Then he published a maliciously witty short story about her in a national magazine. Maybe he couldn’t handle her in life, but in fiction he painted a truly terrible portrait, and since everybody in the literary world of New York knew her, she was recognized immediately. She was crushed, as much as it was possible for her to be, and she left Osano alone after that. But she rankled in him like some poison. He couldn’t bear to think about her without his face flushing and his eyes going a little crazy.
One day he came into the office and told me that the movies had bought one of his old novels to make into a picture and he had to go out there for a conference on the script, all expenses paid. He offered to take me along. I said OK but that I would like to drop off in Las Vegas to visit an old friend for a day or two while we were out there. He said that would be OK. He was between wives and he hated to travel alone or be alone and he felt he was going into enemy territory. He wanted a friend along with him. Anyway, that was what he said. And since I’d never been to California and I’d get paid while I was away, it looked like a good deal. I didn’t know that I would more than earn my way.
Chapter 24
I was in Vegas when Osano finished up on the conferences for that movie script of his book. So I took the short flight to LA to fly home with him, keep him company from LA to New York. Cully wanted me to bring Osano to Vegas just to meet him. I couldn’t talk Osano into it, so I went to LA.
In his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel Osano was more pissed off than I had ever seen him. He felt the movie industry had treated him like shit. Didn’t they know that he was world-famous, the darling of literary critics from London to New Delli, from Moscow to Sydney, Australia? He was famous in thirty languages, including the different variations of the Slavic. What he left out was that every movie made from one of his books had lost money for some strange reason.
And Osano was pissed off about other things. His ego couldn’t stand the director of the film’s being more important than the writer. When Osano tried to get a girlfriend of his a small part in the film, he couldn’t swing it, and that pissed him off. It pissed him even more when the cameraman and the supporting actor got their girlfriends into the movie. The fucking cameraman and a lousy supporting actor had more clout than the great Osano. I just hoped I could get him on the plane before he went crazy and started tearing the whole studio apart and wound up in the clink. And we had a whole day and night to wait in LA for the plane the next morning. To quiet him down, I brought him around to his West Coast agent, a very hip, tennis-playing guy who had a lot of clients in show business. He also had some of the best-looking girlfriends I had ever seen. His name was Doran Rudd.