“Right.” And David turned, leaving this exalted floor, the home of the Animal Crackers, certain, for the first time in his career that he would one day work there. He smiled to himself, once alone in the back stairway, thinking of himself in college, not quite bright enough to be at the top, not handsome enough to dominate the coeds, not angry enough to be a radical, not talented enough to be an artist. But if tomorrow’s promise came true, he would be at the head of his class.
CHAPTER 4
Tony took a seven P.M. flight to Los Angeles a week after his meeting with Gloria. He had signed a twenty-page contract with her agency. Creative Artists International, and fired his sweet-tempered but lax theatrical agent, Boris. “I knew someday you’d go with the big boys,” Boris said in a resigned but friendly tone. “They may make you money — but they won’t love you like I have. They won’t notice that your scripts don’t have peanut butter on them anymore, or that your wife likes to fluff the hair around your ears.”
But it was precisely because Boris saw himself as a second mother, rather than as a businessman, that Tony wanted to fire him. He was signed with Creative Artists International for only seven days and already they had him flying first class on a 747 to LA, booked into the Beverly Hills Hotel, and scheduled for a meeting the next morning with Bill Garth, the actor, and Jim Foxx, the producer. All this was courtesy of International Pictures to discuss a project that was certain to be made. If Garth and Foxx liked his ideas, he would be perhaps a year away from seeing his name on the big screen. Sooner or later success in LA would get him to Broadway. That was Gloria Fowler’s love, and Tony preferred it.
Tony had flown first class to LA before. His father, using his CBS expense account, used to fly Tony out and back for summer vacations and alternate holidays. He had stayed with his mother at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He had met famous actors and producers before. But Tony had never been the object, the cause of spending, the focus of a Hollywood summons. While the stewardesses kept cheerfully getting him new drinks and extra dessert (only now, at thirty-two, did Tony finally treat the experience with the greedy enthusiasm of a boy), he realized: This is fun!
He sat in the back of his limousine during the ride from LAX to the Beverly Hills Hotel and played with the bar and the temperature-control dial — he wanted to see if he could tell the difference between sixty-eight and sixty-six degrees — and said to himself over and over, this isn’t depressing, this is fun! And though the difference between his childhood visits and this trip was obvious — to see a father who has given your mother a nervous breakdown and blacklisted his friends is presumably of a different quality than being summoned by a world-famous actor and a powerful producer to “save the script”—nevertheless, the pure thrill of it, the preposterous treatment of him by the driver and hotel clerks as if he were the scion of royalty, the silly extravagance of first-class travel, all of it, was wonderful, perhaps his first real Christmas ever.
Two messages were waiting for him at the desk, from his father and mother. Of course, their names didn’t mean that to the slavish clerk. She was the star of the number-one television sitcom and his father was the head of programming for a major network. As always their stature in television land amused Tony, but once upstairs, disappointed that his room was small (writers don’t get suites, I guess, he thought), the two names scrawled on the message-form slips depressed him, reminded him of the other LA, blew in to the air-conditioned room a Santa Ana of greed, cowardice, and disloyalty.
He decided not to phone, his excuse being that it was late and he had an early meeting. But he couldn’t sleep and after unpacking with a meticulousness totally unlike him, he wanted to talk to someone. New York was out of the question; it was already late there. He was stumped for a while, until he thought of Billy Feldman, the son of a neighbor of his father’s, also a child of divorce, with whom Tony would play during his summers in Beverly Hills. Tony’s father had mentioned the last time they talked that Billy was in town working in the business. Tony found him through information, living in Hollywood.
“Hey, man! How are you? This is incredible, I was just talking about you.”
“I’m in town. I can’t sleep. I was hoping …”
“Sure — where are you?”
Fifteen minutes later Billy arrived at the hotel entrance and waved away the valet-parking attendant as Tony approached. Billy was driving a BMW sports car, wearing a pink T-shirt and white shorts and a pair of sunglasses pushed back onto the top of his head.
“What’s this?” Tony asked, getting in. “The Hal Prince look?”
Billy looked puzzled.
“The glasses,” Tony explained.
“Oh.” Billy seemed worried suddenly, as if he had committed a gaffe. “I forget I have them on, I’m sorry.”
“I was teasing,” Tony said. He slapped Billy on the leg. “Thank you for rescuing me. I was so lonely in that hotel room.”
“I know what you mean, man. They’re the worst. What are you doing in a hotel anyway? Between your mom and dad you’ve got forty-five rooms to stay in.”
“I’ve never seen Mom’s place. Think it’s big?”
“I know it is. I was there last week.”
“You were! For what? Don’t tell me she had a party.”
“Script conference. Haven’t you heard? You haven’t!” Billy seemed slightly miffed. “I’m a writer on her series,” he continued, obviously proud of this fact, and hurt that Tony wasn’t aware of his accomplishment.
“You are! No kidding. That’s terrific!” Tony said with conviction. Billy relaxed and told the story of how he landed his job as a “story editor” on Tony’s mother’s series. His account was given in a tone that implied the anecdote had the significance of legend, the way a war veteran might talk of his participation in the Normandy invasion. In telling how he got the assignment to write an episode, Billy seemed to discount that he had known Tony’s mother, as well as the executive producer, since childhood.
“So they gave me a week to write the script. I didn’t fucking sleep at all. By the time I handed it in, I was sure it was shit. And I just felt — I mean, I’m sure I was overdramatizing — that this was my last shot. If this script didn’t go, I don’t know, I would have just given up. Gone back east or something.”
“So after you wrote one episode, they made you a story editor?”
Billy frowned. He seemed both confused and irritated. “Well, the script I wrote was the car-wreck episode.”
Tony nodded and waited. Billy looked away from the road to glance at Tony and saw that his explanation had been insufficient.
“You know?” Billy said, now a little doubt creeping into the tone of the war veteran: perhaps his listener had never heard of World War II.
“The car-wreck episode,” Tony repeated. “That was this past season?”
“Tony, your mom won an Emmy for the car-wreck episode. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen that show!”
“Well …” Tony was about to say that he vaguely remembered seeing a few minutes of an episode about a car wreck, when he realized that such a comment would be more insulting than saying he had never seen it. Obviously Billy believed the car-wreck episode, if one saw it, would haunt the memory.
“Here we are!” Billy announced, in time to prevent Tony from saying anything.
“Joe Allen’s!” Tony exclaimed with genuine delight. “I forgot they have one in LA.”
“I thought it might make you less homesick,” Billy said.
When they walked in and Tony saw the familiar brick walls and the long old-fashioned bar at the entrance, he said, “You’re right.”