For a few minutes she gave a charming pantomime of false virtue arguing itself into honest sinning.
“And so what happened?” I said.
Janelle stood proud, her hands on her hips, her head tilted dramatically. “At five o’clock that afternoon I made the greatest decision of my life. I decided I would fuck a man I didn’t know just to get ahead. I thought I was so brave and I was delighted that finally I had made a decision that a man would make.”
She came out of her role for just a moment.
“Isn’t that what men do?” she said sweetly. “If they can make a business deal, they’d give anything, they demean themselves. Isn’t that business?”
I said, “I guess so.”
She said to me, “Didn’t you have to do that?”
I said, “No.”
“You never did anything like that to get your books published, to get an agent or to get a book reviewer to treat you better?”
I said, “No.”
“You have a good opinion of yourself, don’t you?” Janelle said. “I’ve had affairs with married men before, and the one thing I have noticed is that they all want to wear that big white cowboy hat.”
“What does that mean?”
“They want to be fair to their wives and girlfriends. That’s the one impression they want to make, so you can’t blame them for anything, and you do that too.”
I thought that over a minute. I could see what she meant. “OK,” I said. “So what?”
“So what?” Janelle said. “You tell me you love me, hut you go back to your wife. No married man should tell another woman he loves her unless he’s willing to leave his wife.”
“That’s romantic bullshit,” I said.
For a moment she became furious. She said, “If I went to your house and told your wife you loved me, would you deny me?”
I laughed and I really laughed. I pressed my hand across my chest and said, “Would you say that again?”
And she said, “Would you deny me?”
And I said, “With all my heart”
She looked at me a moment. She was furious, and then she started to laugh. She said, “I regressed with you, but I won’t regress anymore.”
And I understood what she was saying.
“OK,” I said. “So what happened with Wartberg?”
She said, “I took a long bath with my turtle oil. I anointed myself, dressed in my best outfit and drove myself to the sacrificial altar. I was let into the house and there was Moses Wartberg and we sat down and had a drink and he asked about my career and we were talking for about an hour and he was being very clever, letting me know that if the night turned out OK, he would do a lot of things for me and I was thinking, the son of a bitch isn’t going to fuck me, he’s not even going to feed me.”
“That’s something I never did to you,” I said.
She gave me a long look, and she went on. “And then he said, ‘There’s dinner waiting upstairs in the bedroom. Would you like to go up?’ And I said, in my Southern belle voice, ‘Yes, I think I’m a little hungry.’ He escorted me up the stairs, a beautiful staircase just like the movies, and opened the bedroom door. He closed it behind me, from the outside, and there I was in the bedroom with a little table set up with some nice snacks on it.”
She struck another pose of the innocent young girl, bewildered.
“Where’s Moses?” I said.
“He’s outside. He’s in the hallway.”
“He made you eat alone?” I said.
“No,” Janelle said. “There was Mrs. Bella Wartberg in her sheerest negligee waiting for me.”
I said, “Jesus Christ.”
Janelle went into another act “I didn’t know I was going to fuck a woman. It took me eight hours to decide to fuck a man, and now I find out I had to fuck a woman. I wasn’t ready for that.”
I said I wasn’t ready for that either.
She said, “I really didn’t know what to do. I sat down and Mrs. Wartberg served some sandwiches and tea and then she pushed her breasts out of her gown and said, ‘Do you like these, my dear?’ And I said, ‘They’re very nice.’”
And then Janelle looked me in the eye and hung her head, and I said, “Well, what happened? What did she say after you said they’re nice?”
Janelle made her eyes look wide open, startled. “Bella Wartberg said to me, ‘Would you like to suck on these, my dear?’
And then Janelle collapsed on the bed with me. She said, “I ran out of the room, I ran down the stains, out of the house, and it took me two years to get another job.”
“It’s a tough town,” I said.
“Nay,” Janelle said. “If I had talked to my girlfriends another eight hours, that would have been OK too. Ifs just a matter of getting your nerve up.”
I smiled at her, and she looked me in the eye, challengingly. “Yeah,” I said, “what’s the difference?”
– -
As the Mercedes sped over the freeways, I tried to listen to Doran.
“Old Moses is the dangerous guy,” Doran was saying, “watch out for him.” And so I thought about Moses.
Moses Wartberg was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. His Tri-Culture Studios was financially sounder than most but made the worst movies. Moses Wartberg had created a money-making machine in a field of creative endeavor. And without a creative bone in his body. This was recognized as sheer genius.
Wartbeng was a sloppily fat man, carelessly tailored in Vegas-style suits. He spoke little, never showed emotion, he believed in giving you everything you could take away from him. He believed in giving you nothing you could not force from him and his battery of studio lawyers. He was impartial. He cheated producers, stars, writers and directors out of their percentages of successful films. He was never grateful for a great directing job, a great performance, a great script. How many times had he paid big money for lousy stuff? So why should he pay a man what his work was worth if he could get it for less?
Wartberg talked about movies as generals talk about making war. He said things like: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Or when a business associate made claims to their social relationship, when an actor told him how much they loved each other personally and why was the studio screwing him, Wartberg gave a thin smile and said coldly, “When I hear the word ‘love,’ I reach for my wallet.”
He was scornful of personal dignity, proud when accused of having no sense of decency. He was not ambitious to be known as a man whose word was his bond. He believed in contracts with fine print, not handshakes. He was never too proud to cheat his fellowman out of an idea, a script, a rightful percentage of a movie’s profits. When reproached, usually by an overwrought artist (producers knew better), Wartberg would simply answer, “I’m a moviemaker,” in the same tone that Baudelaire might have answered a similar reproach with “I am a poet.”
He used lawyers as a hood used guns, used affection as a prostitute used sex. He used good works as the Greeks used the Trojan Horse, supported the Will Rogers home for retired actors, Israel, the starving millions of India, Arab refugees from Palestine. It was only personal charity to individual human beings that went against his grain.
Tri-Culture Studios had been losing money when Wartberg took charge. He immediately put it on a strict computer with a bottom-line basis. His deals were the toughest in town. He never gambled on truly creative ideas until they had been proved at other studios. And his big ace in the hole was small budgets.
When other studios were going down the drain with ten-million-dollar pictures, Tri-Culture Studios never made one that went over three million. In fact, over two million and Moses Wantberg or one of his three assistant vice-presidents was sleeping with you twenty-four hours a day. He made producers post completion bonds, directors pledge percentages, actors swear their souls away, to bring in a picture on budget. A producer who brought a picture in on budget or below budget was a hero to Moses Wartberg and knew it. It didn’t matter if the picture just made its cost. But if the picture went over budget, even if it grossed twenty million and made the studio a fortune, Wartberg would invoke the penalty clause in the producer’s contract and take away his percentage of the profits. Sure, there would be lawsuits, but the studio had twenty salaried lawyers sitting around on their asses who needed practice in count. So a deal could usually be made. Especially if the producer or actor on writer wanted to make another picture at Tri-Culture.