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  “Keiku-san, are you a baseball fan?”

  Everyone in the room bobbed their heads knowingly. Koji interjected, “He loves the Tokyo Giants more than me.”

  “Think about two players, one who gets thirty-three hits in a hundred at bats, the other twenty-five. They both fail far more often than they succeed. Only eight hits out of one hundred separate them. But if that pattern continues over their careers, the former will enter the Hall of Fame while the latter disappears from the sports pages. It’s the same situation in the movie business. Executives strike out a lot. In that sense Goldman is correct. But the great producers make a higher percentage of right decisions, they create more than enough memorable movies to cover their failures. The companies they manage become legendary assets for all time.”

  “You think you are destined for your Cooperstown?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you do not secretly say to yourself that a Japanese whaler will be as dumb a partner as Coca-Cola?”

  AJ laughed. “By asking that question, you have answered it. I trust you will let me manage our affairs while I teach your son about the film business. Over time he will become more involved; then we can marry the strengths of our cultures.”

  Seiji Keiku took a final draw on his whiskey. “Why is your company called J-Squared?”

  “My father and I had a dream to be in business together. He died long before that was possible. But I believe he would approve of our venture.”

  The negotiations proved arduous, but only one point threatened to derail them. Seiji insisted on a fail-safe mechanism specifying that Keiku Enterprises could assume control of J2 if the company suffered losses in excess of fifteen million dollars. “We’ll operate with a samurai sword over our heads,” Leventhal complained as he suffered through an almost raw hamburger drenched in wasabi mayonnaise. “If we have an expensive failure early in the program, you’ll lose control.”

  “I’ll be supercareful, keep budgets down.”

  “I say we tell them we’re sorry but it won’t work.”

  “Just blow it off?”

  “Believe me, they won’t let us get on a plane to L.A.”

  “And suppose you’re wrong?” AJ shook his head.

  Pete threw down his napkin. “You’ve made me believe in J-Squared as much as you do. I’m bored being a full-time lawyer. I want to build the company with you. But you have to hear me. Signing an agreement with this clause is dumb. You never listen to me, but on this point, you have to.”

  The issue was no longer logic. “Maybe you’re right—”

  “I am right.”

  “I’ve come too far to go back empty-handed. But, Pete, I can’t operate without the support of my colleagues. It’s too easy to lose my way in a fog of second guesses. I want you on board. But that means all the way on board.”

  Leventhal ran his hand through his curls. “They’re all I’ve got left of my youth.”

  “I won’t let you down.”

  “I’ll close it tomorrow.”

  For AJ’s final night in Japan, Seiji organized a celebration at a hole-in-the-wall dive called Kyubei that purveyed the finest sushi in the city. Rather than offend his host, AJ anesthetized himself with sake to sample fugu, the infamous blowfish that was poisonous if improperly prepared. He survived—but carried the sake strategy a tumbler too far, which explained why he was standing at midnight in front of a microphone at a nightclub in the Roppongi district. The joint specialized in a weird new form of entertainment called karaoke. Seiji was a freak for it, and after AJ’s performance of John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane,” he led the crowd in cheers of “Ankooru.”

  “Hello, Tokyo!” AJ shouted into the microphone. “Are you ready to rock ’n’ roll?” They were. “Are you really ready?” He grooved on the rock-star fantasy. “Because for my next number I’ve decided to be . . . the Boss. I don’t mean Keiku-san. He’s a big boss, but he’s not the Boss. Do you guys know who the real Boss is?”

  “Bruuuce! Bruuuce!”

  “That’s right! But Springsteen needs his E Street Band, so gimme some backup. Pete, come on up. And Koji. Keiku-san, get up here too.” It didn’t take coaxing. AJ wailed away on air guitar as the bass and sax of “Hungry Heart” pulsed over the sound system. He and Seiji went nose to nose for the chorus, banging away on their imaginary instruments. The banzai spirit lived in the old man’s eyes.

  Together—J and K—they’d deliver Hollywood a swift kick in its flabby butt.

  CHAPTER 38

  On the bulletin board at Riviera a wise guy with handicap envy had posted a caricature of AJ hanging from the flame tree beside the ninth green. He wore a noose fashioned from a twisted putter around his neck. After failing in the finals of the club’s match-play championship a record ten times, his pursuit of the Hogan Cup had reached the status of a standing joke. His eleventh attempt stood “all square” with Jeff Danna, the top-seeded player in the field.

  As he teed up his ball on the thirty-sixth and final hole, AJ knew exactly what he had to do, which was not think—just swing. But in the next two seconds he warned himself to slow his take-away, extend his left arm, keep his right elbow tucked, drop the club into the slot, and, above all, avoid casting over the top. That he made contact was miraculous, that the ball duck-hooked to the left inevitable. He always made the same mistake under pressure.

  “You goddamn idiot! Forty years of practice and that’s the best you can do?” A self-loathing, two-hundred-yard uphill hike wore out his rage. The result was even worse than the shot. The ball was buried on a down slope in a spongy nest of Kikuyu grass, nature’s Velcro. AJ repeated his mantra, “Play it as it lies.”

  “Lays.”

  AJ stared at his caddie. “What’d you say?”

  “It’s ‘play it as it lays,’ isn’t it?”

  “No, you lay your club down, but the ball lies.”

  “You’re so clever.” A smile stole across Megan O’Connor’s face.

  “Why do you torture me like this?”

  “So you won’t torture yourself.” Megan unsheathed a seven-iron from the bag she was humping. “Lay up short of the green.”

  “I can reach with a five-wood if I hit it perfectly.”

  “If you hit it at all. There’s a good chance you’ll pop it up and stay in the rough.”

  “Danna’s in perfect shape. Ben Hogan—”

  “Wouldn’t have hit it here in the first place. Lay up, then put your third shot close and sink your putt. It will demoralize the Golden Boy.” Megan gestured toward their opponent, whose UCLA team visor couldn’t hide his smirk. Danna had ogled Megan’s butt since the first hole. At fourteen AJ had overheard him ask her how an old man like Jastrow could have a girlfriend half his age who was a total babe, a ten-handicap golfer, and a willing caddie to boot. But as he’d prepared to tell Danna to fuck off, Megan had jabbed a pitching wedge into the guy’s crotch, which had produced the desired effect.

  AJ executed his orders and laid three on the green, with a twenty-foot putt for par. Meanwhile, Danna’s second shot sailed wide right but luckily rebounded off a eucalyptus. He chipped onto the green, where he faced a five-foot putt for par on the same line.

  Megan leaned over AJ’s shoulder, both of them trying to read the break. They had lived together for the past six months, but he still found her closeness exhilarating. “How can you smell so good after six hours?”

  “Concentrate. I think it’ll swing left to right about a ball.”

  “I’m following my own instincts here.” AJ approached the putt but was distracted by the sun glinting off the quarter that Danna had used to mark his ball. At his request Jeff shifted the coin four inches to the left. AJ exhaled and shook his arms to rid them of tension, then swung his putter like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. The ball rolled downhill, gathering speed. Just when it seemed destined to run past the hole to the right, the Titleist detoured left, rimmed the circumference, and plopped in. The small gallery applauded, while AJ
smiled at Megan.

  Her kiss tasted of Gatorade. “How’d you see right to left?”

  “Hogan had the same putt in the ‘48 Open.”

  “God, you’re old.”

  Now Danna had to sink his putt to force a sudden-death play-off. But in the shock of the shifting fortunes, he forgot to replace the ball in its original location and was about to putt from the spot he’d marked after AJ had asked him to move his quarter. Doing so meant a one-stroke penalty. AJ was sure he was the only person who spotted the imminent mistake. If he remained silent—and nothing in the rules of golf required him to speak—the match was over and the championship his, regardless of the outcome of Danna’s putt.

  The sportsman in him—the guy who’d learned to play by the side of the fairest of the fair—cursed the idea of winning on a technicality. But how fair was it that he’d lost two of his prime golf years to a stroke or that his opponent got to play six times a week to his two? What did fair even mean anymore? It was a “look out for yourself” world. Sign an ironclad contract; negotiate a tight prenup; gate your home; bank your “fuck you” money. Today’s Good Samaritan was the schmuck who got sued tomorrow. AJ stared at the carpet of green beneath his steel spikes, his lips sealed.

  When his putt fell in, Danna shook his fist in the air and headed gleefully toward the first extra hole. AJ remained by the eighteenth green and called quietly after him, “Jeff, I think we have a problem.”

  “What?” As soon as he saw AJ’s cool expression, he understood his error. “You knew, didn’t you? You knew all the time.”

  “On twelve I called a penalty on myself for hitting a tree on my back-swing, which you didn’t even see. Those are the rules.”

  “Congratulations, asshole.” Danna left before the awards ceremony.

  AJ bought rounds for everyone in the Grill. This time when he kissed Megan, she tasted of Dom Pérignon. “You were fantastic, AJ.”

  His mouth was stale with beer. “I couldn’t have done it without you.” Her advice, her belief, and her energy rallied him.

  “You know what frightened me?” Megan asked, caressing the Hogan Cup between her thighs.

  “That I’d run out of gas?”

  She shook her head. “That you’d chicken out and warn that privileged piece of shit that he was putting from the wrong place.” She nibbled on his ear. “I was scared you didn’t want to win enough.”

  The prospect of sex with Megan had stirred him before they’d even met.

  Ronda Gomez, the Paramount story editor turned literary agent, had slipped him The Scholarship, the first screenplay by a young reporter for the The Philadelphia Inquirer. AJ had taken it along for a holiday weekend with his girlfriend, Carrie McDougal, at the San Ysidro Ranch, near Santa Barbara. Carrie was a gutsy lady with powerful ambitions and hair to match. As an executive at Columbia, however, she competed with AJ, who produced his movies for Fox. Predictably, Carrie had peeked at the title page the moment she saw him engrossed in the script. He’d put it aside, made love to her, then sneaked it into the toilet to finish it.

  The Scholarship was a drama about a coed who paid her tuition at Princeton by moonlighting as a call girl for high rollers in Atlantic City. The character was as daring as she was self-destructive. When AJ finished he wondered if the script was autobiographical. Monday morning he shopped Melrose until he found a Bakelite brooch as a gift for Ronda and delivered it with a card thanking her. Carrie had already requested a copy, so AJ made a peremptory bid.

  But Megan O’Connor feared allowing a razor-cut Hollywood producer to turn her lead character into a movie prostitute with the clichéd heart of gold. She wouldn’t close the deal until they met. When she entered his office, AJ decided the woman had the looks to charge a thousand bucks a night. Megan was black Irish, who, according to legend, were descendants of sailors from the Spanish Armada. After their ships had broken up in a gale off the coast of Ireland, the Spaniards had swum ashore and coupled with the local women, producing an exotic combination of black hair, blue eyes, and pale skin.

  Her mother had died when she was ten, and she’d raised her two younger brothers while her father took care of the greens at the famed Merion Golf Club. At the University of Pennsylvania she’d worked multiple part-time jobs to finance her college degree. Just as she’d emerged as a star on the Inquirer’s city desk, she’d smashed her car into a lamppost rushing to cover a plane crash at the airport. Megan had written the first draft of The Scholarship in a body cast.

  At twenty-four, Megan was as suspicious and pointed a questioner as Mike Wallace. To allay her anxiety, AJ offered to work together on the script so she could see the kind of changes he wanted before she agreed to sell. Megan defended every scene to the barricades, then returned with brilliant improvements. Was it her challenge that turned him on? Or her passionate commitment to what she believed? Or that heartfelt thank-you she offered for his help? After wandering through meaningless relationships for too many years, the promise of Megan was like the return of his sight after the stroke.

  “Jessie Jastrow. How can I help you?”

  It was her philosophy of life as well as a phone greeting. As the youngest in a family obsessively pursuing their own agendas, Jess had gracefully adapted her personality to the service sector. She found satisfaction solving the problems of others, so much so that her mom fretted that she’d become a doormat. Some doormat—a year out of UCLA, Jess already had a dream job reading scripts and meeting writers, her own cool apartment in one of those kitschy Hollywood buildings on Fountain—and the best boss in the world.

  “You’re sure?” Concern clouded her face as she listened to the caller. “Thanks.” She bit hard on her lip, then picked up the intercom. “Dad, can I stop down?”

  “Son of a bitch!” Her father heaved a script across the room. “I should know by now that people in this town would murder their mothers for an extra buck. I should have protected us. Pete should have.”

  He stomped around the office in a fury, his neck stiffening as if a puppeteer yanked on his strings. Jess worried about him having another stroke but had given up asking him to calm down once he’d made the J2 deal. Dad was determined to prove wrong those people who considered his effort to create a new studio an act of arrogance. In Hollywood, envy was as common as a cold, but it hurt Jess to discover that even his supposed friends hoped he would fail.

  “Mike Ovitz, please. It’s AJ Jastrow.” Waiting to be connected, he signaled her to pick up the extension next to the sofa in his office.

  “How are you, AJ?”

  “Lousy. I thought we’d signed Debra Winger to do The Scholarship. But now I hear that you’re backing her out.”

  “We had discussions about Debra doing your movie. We had interest.”

  “We had a deal.”

  Jessie cringed. They had aimed their first-year production slate at the youth market, so the actors in their films were mostly young unknowns rather than established movie stars. Winger was their biggest name, she was perfect for the part, and Mr. Keiku was excited that the star of An Officer and a Gentleman and Terms of Endearment would appear in J2’s first feature.

  “Debra likes your project, she enjoyed meeting you and the writer. Maybe if you’re willing to wait . . .”

  “So you can tell me she’s found another movie for the fall.”

  “AJ, I thought Rick informed you there were competing projects.”

  Rick was Rick Nicita, the actress’s personal agent. “This isn’t Rick’s issue. You guys represent Redford and Ivan Reitman and you packaged Winger into Legal Eagles because Universal’s paying through the nose.”

  “Frank Price made an aggressive offer.”

  “How can you do this, Mike? You know how important getting her is to what I’m building.”

  “AJ, you must believe I’d never do anything to hurt you intentionally.” It was the “must” of “you have no choice,” not the “must” of “you know how much I care.” Ovitz was transparent and unflappable in
the same breath. For the next three minutes he blamed everybody but the KGB for the misunderstanding. Finally, in a faux attempt to be conciliatory he suggested Sally Field as an alternative. Rather than remind him that the part called for a college senior, not an actress in her late thirties, AJ hung up.

  Jess stared at the receiver. “I don’t believe that.”

  “A vintage performance, even for Mike.”

  “My friend at Universal said Winger hated Legal Eagles and wanted to do our movie, but Mike convinced her that an ‘art-house’ movie like The Scholarship would hurt her career.”

  “Mike does what he thinks is in the best interests of his clients. Regardless of how good they are, he doesn’t believe actors and directors can manage their own careers. Hell, he’s probably right. The talent, the studios, producers like us—we’re pawns in his chess game. But go argue with results.”

  Ovitz hired the best young agents and taught them to function as a team rather than compete as rivals. Their savage loyalty to their mentor and their “CAA-speak” inspired bad jokes about Jonestown West. But despite criticism, they swarmed Hollywood seeking new talent and raiding established stars from William Morris and ICM. Everyone said CAA would soon become the most powerful organization in the movie business. But Jess didn’t care—Mike’s betrayal sucked. “Did he forget all the packaging fees from Grandma’s talk show? That money kept the agency alive in the early years.”

  “Yeah, but he can’t commission her now. It’s always been a ‘What have you done for me lately?’ town. Now the question is, ‘What have you done for me this week?’ ”

  “Sue his butt.”

  “All that does is lose us Kinison from General Assembly.” The next J2 film slated for production was a comedy about a New York cabdriver who impersonated the head of state of a fictional country at the United Nations. Her father had chosen a young shock comic named Sam Kinison to play the lead, but CAA represented him as well.

  “Okay. How about Diane Lane?” Jess offered. “Before we landed Winger, I thought she’d be great.”