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  After bidding Stark good night, Harry dialed Zukor in New York.

  “Shalom. This is Abba Eban speaking.” Eban was the representative to the United Nations from the provisional state of Israel, which was days away from declaring its independence. Arab troops from five countries had massed on Israel’s borders. In their desire to assimilate, most moguls shunned any connection to Zionism. The polo-playing Louis B. Mayer even denied having Jewish blood. But Zukor staunchly supported Israel. Harry apologized for calling late.

  “No problem, Mr. Jastrow. We operate on Holy Land time here. I’ll get Adolph, but I’m sorry to hear of your defeat today. I understand it was a monumental injustice.”

  Bombs could fall on Tel Aviv, but Hollywood’s grief grabbed the spotlight. “I appreciate that,” Harry replied.

  “We helped rally this country through the war,” Zukor whined. “Where’s the thanks?”

  “Politicians have notoriously short memories.”

  Zukor was silent for several seconds. “The real loss, Harry, it’s not the money . . .”

  “No, sir?”

  “All of us—Marcus Loew, Bill Fox, Carl Laemmle, the Warners—we started with theaters. They were how we connected to the audience. You sit on your ass night after night, next to other people sitting on their asses, you get to know what people want.”

  “We can still go to theaters, Adolph.”

  “It won’t be the same. But maybe it won’t be such a big problem. Barney says you think you can make a deal to save us.”

  Now the deal was Harry’s idea! It was useless to drag any mogul into reality. “I’ll do my best.”

  “Give my love to my gorgeous niece and say hello to the bar mitzvah boy.”

  Upstairs in their bedroom Maggie spread cardboard cutouts of table assignments across their bed while chain-smoking Viceroys. Harry hated her habit but didn’t understand the pressure the bar mitzvah created. The biggest headache was seating—not the number of guests but their egos. Hollywood was a company town, so any event, even the birthday party of a thirteen-year-old, functioned in part as a business conclave. Since Paramount was paying for half the affair, she tried to arrange a few tables that might inspire a movie. She seated her friend Olivia de Havilland next to William Wyler, whose next film was The Heiress. The director wanted de Havilland as his leading lady and would have five courses to make his pitch.

  The other problem Maggie faced was the strict caste system in the business. If it was violated, some people would sulk in the powder room all night. Unfortunately, perceptions of what caste you belonged to differed. And then there were the “untouchables.” Harry was friendly with senior agents such as George Wood of William Morris, superagent Myron Selznick, and Ray. But Maggie struggled with where to seat them. The stars they represented considered their agents beneath them. So did most studio executives, who regarded the “ten percenters” as parasites. If she stuck them with civilians, like AJ’s orthodontist, they’d have nothing to talk about. On the other hand, if the agents shared a table, they might eat each other rather than the roast beef. She installed them at table 20 and prayed for the best.

  “This is an even bigger mess than I thought.” Harry entered the bedroom, yanking at his tie. At first Maggie thought he hated her seating choices but then realized that he remained preoccupied with the Supreme Court ruling.

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know. But my instincts tell me I’m in trouble.” Now he couldn’t get the knot out of his shoelace.

  She studied him. “You’re feeling guilty, aren’t you, that you couldn’t save their arrogant asses? You think you screwed up.”

  “I told them to compromise . . .” He rubbed his eyes. “Somebody else should have pleaded the case.”

  Harry’s exquisite sense of responsibility left him vulnerable to a world willing to take advantage. The best remedy was a kick in his butt. “That’s bullshit! No one could have done a better job. If Balaban and Uncle Adolph point a finger in your direction, tell them to look in the mirror!”

  Harry kicked his shoe across the room, walked over to the bed, and picked up a cutout of the Paramount “exec table.” “Seat Barney next to my mother. He won’t mess with me again.”

  Maggie removed the girdle she didn’t need, slipped on one of his threadbare oxford shirts, then turned on the radio. Patti Page was singing “Every So Often.” Leaning over to kiss him, she made sure her breasts rubbed his chest. It was clear what he needed next.

  “Honey, I’m really tired.”

  “You only think you are.” She patted the bed.

  Harry swept the bar mitzvah onto the floor and urged her back on the pillows.

  From the fourth tee at Riviera Country Club, Harry saw the swells on the Pacific Ocean. Gaping sand traps guarded the green 230 yards to the west, giving the hole a reputation as the toughest par three in America. Harry swung as hard as his reconstructed knee allowed. The ball banana-arced to the right, directly into the prevailing wind, and failed to carry the lip of the last bunker. “Another day at the beach.”

  “How do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “You know.” AJ shrugged. “Stay calm.”

  “If I didn’t, I couldn’t lecture you.” Last year AJ had broken a nine-iron heaving it into a drainage ditch after a sculled shot. Harry had made him pick it up and walk back to the clubhouse. He wasn’t allowed to play again for a month. That was punishment for both of them, because nine holes together in the fading Sunday sunlight was their favorite time of the week. When AJ was six, Harry had given him a cut-down set of clubs as a Chanukah present, and they were in the middle of a lesson when the news of Pearl Harbor reached the coast. His son had outgrown the clubs, but they remained on display in the garage, like bronzed baby shoes.

  AJ stepped to the forward tees and threw grass in the air. It blew back in his face. “Lot of wind up there.”

  “It won’t stop you, son.” AJ was the youngest golfer in the club’s history to break eighty, and Harry was so proud that he sometimes asked him to fill out a foursome with his business friends.

  The boy’s drive bored through the wind, bounced once on the green, and began rolling. Thirty feet from the hole it appeared to come up short, but the topspin kept it going and the slope of the green directed it on target. Harry grabbed AJ, hugging and slapping his back. “It’s going in! It’s going in!”

  “Dad! Did it drop? Did it?”

  From the distance it was impossible to tell, so they ran as fast as they could lugging their bags, then dumped them and sprinted the final fifty yards, until they saw . . . the ball hanging on the lip, a half inch from elation.

  AJ sagged. “One more lousy revolution. How could that happen?”

  To be thirteen and not know the answer—his son would learn about life soon enough. “I know what you’re feeling.” Harry thrust his arms around him. “But by the time you’re my age, you’ll have ten holes in one—make that twenty.”

  AJ seemed unconvinced. “Let’s find yours, Dad.”

  Harry’s ball had come to rest in the jagged footprint of a previous visitor to the trap. “Why people can’t take thirty seconds to rake after they’ve finished hitting.”

  “Give yourself a drop,” AJ offered graciously.

  “What?”

  “Okay, okay, I know. Play it as it lays.”

  “Lies.”

  “ ‘Lies’ doesn’t sound right.”

  “You ‘lay’ your club down, but the ball ‘lies.’ ” Harry insisted upon proper grammar because the phrase described the fundamental rule of golf. Wherever and however your ball landed, you did the best you could with it. Harry hacked at his Titleist, and it exploded, flying into the cup without touching the green. He celebrated by meticulously raking his divot. They collapsed on the hillside to savor birdies reached through unlikely routes. “Capricious game,” he mused.

  “Capricious game,” AJ agreed. “What’s ‘capricious’?”

  “Sometimes things happ
en for no apparent reason, as if the golf gods were teasing to see how we handle the good and bad.” He watched the boy memorizing capricious for one of those vocabulary tests in Reader’s Digest. “So, who do you like in the Open?” Riviera was set to host the national championship next month.

  “It’s got to be Hogan,” AJ said. “He owns this course.” The incomparable Ben Hogan was his son’s hero. “Dad, do you still think I should go into the business?”

  “Sure. We’re going to be partners, right?”

  “Absolutely. That’s what I want. I even came up with a name for our company last week in math class: J-Squared Productions, but written J to the second power.”

  “I love it! When you have a son, we can change the name to J-Cubed. So what’s bothering you?”

  “I guess my question is . . . will there be a business to go into?”

  It’s amazing, Harry mused, how much a kid could pull from the ether, or from Variety . . . or from eavesdropping on Ray Stark. He stared out to the ocean. “Remember our fishing trip to Baja?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We headed south out of Cabo and came to that juncture where the waves pounded against each other.”

  “The captain said they were fifteen feet high.”

  “The phenomenon’s called ‘cross seas.’ It happens when the waves from one sea smash into the waves from another. There was no line, but you could imagine where the Sea of Cortés ended and the Pacific Ocean began. The water must have been six or seven degrees warmer in the sea.”

  AJ nodded. “And a lot bluer.”

  “That’s because the Sea of Cortés is sheltered by land on three sides. The movie business has been sailing in that kind of sea. Now it’s hit the Pacific. All the protections we’ve counted on—owning our theaters, owning the stars, owning the audience—they’ll soon be gone. But that doesn’t mean the business can’t sail on without them.”

  “I guess so.”

  “If you’re still up for it when you finish college, we’ll start J-Squared. We can build our offices right near here so we can go play a few holes at lunch.”

  AJ stared dubiously at the empty fields and endless eucalyptus trees of the Pacific Palisades. “I’m not sure people will want to visit us in the boonies.”

  “It won’t always be like this.” Unfortunately.

  “Would you mind if we quit? I’ve got stuff I need to work on.”

  “Sure.” Harry masked his disappointment. He would have played all night.

  CHAPTER 6

  Paul Herzog never deigned to visit his colleagues, so when Anita announced that he was pacing in the outer office, Harry’s skin prickled. During the war the instant itch had proved a reliable early-warning sign of lurking danger. And in the two days since the Justice Department had rejected his fool’s-errand compromise, the halls of Paramount reminded him of those miserable atolls in the Pacific, booby-trapped by nature and the Japanese.

  “Barney and I decided you should see this before it appears in the trades.” Herzog forked over a press release. Its headline read, NO PAR PIX ON VIDEO PER BALABAN.

  Harry skimmed it, his feet dancing nervously in the well of his desk. “Paramount has no intention of offering its old films to television on either a licensing or sales basis, because the interests of our exhibitors are the first consideration of the company.” It was a defeat for him and the company. Take the high road, Harry. “Congratulations, Paul. For all our sakes, I hope your advice was right.”

  Herzog smiled tightly. “As a kid I had rheumatic fever. The doctors told me I couldn’t play sports.”

  “Really?” Harry couldn’t think of any information less relevant.

  “So on Saturdays I went to matinees to watch movie stars overcome obstacles bigger than mine. They’re the ones who inspired me to believe I could do anything.” He leaned across the desk until Harry felt the air stream between the gap in the man’s front teeth. “When the going gets tough, Jastrow, the tough get going. Regardless of our past disagreements, we have to stand shoulder to shoulder.”

  Harry imagined Herzog as a young boy, standing in front of a mirror memorizing a new cliché each day. “Those would be admirable sentiments, Paul, if we were fourth and long with thirty seconds to play. But this isn’t a football huddle where one guy calls the plays. I intend to say what’s on my mind.”

  Herzog abandoned his pep talk. “Balaban asked me to head up the team to dispose of our theaters, and I need you to run revenue projections.” He removed a thick file from his briefcase. “Get started on these. Also, Barney approved my idea to broadcast a Crosby concert next year on theater TV. You need to introduce me so I can propose it to Bing.”

  “He prefers ‘Mr. Crosby’ if you’re not his friend.” Harry’s two-by-four failed to graze Herzog.

  “Stop by my office when you’ve got all the information—the sooner the better.”

  Harry deposited Paul’s assignment in the wastepaper basket, then thought better of it. The meeting had unnerved him. The guy was too damn cocksure. And why had Barney sent an emissary rather than delivering his news in person? There was no cause for panic, he told himself, even as he sensed the enemy outflanking him.

  “I’m finished.”

  “Was something wrong with the chicken?” Maggie asked.

  “It was delicious.” Harry pushed aside his half-eaten dinner. He had no appetite, even for her freshly baked seven-layer cake. “Paul Herzog’s out to get me.”

  “That sleazy sales guy? Are you sure?”

  “Ray took the reporter at Film Weekly to dinner at the Brown Derby and got him so drunk he copped to who spread the rumor about my ‘screwing up’ at the Court. It was Herzog.”

  “You should knock his block off.”

  That was always her solution—to everyone and everything that stood in her way. Harry avoided conversations about corporate politics whenever he could, but this time Maggie had a right to know. “I’ve got to be careful. Herzog’s sly. He told Balaban that the exhibitors had targeted Paramount for a boycott because of my role in the Supreme Court case. It was a lie, but the boss believed it and caved on the TV issue.”

  “Have you talked to Barney?”

  Harry shook his head. “He’s home with gallstones.”

  “Call him there.”

  “No, I’m going to low-key it for a while.”

  “Passive resistance?” She regarded him skeptically. “Like your friend Gandhi.”

  “He’s not my friend, but he did defeat the British empire.”

  “And look how he wound up.” She sealed the chicken in a bell-shaped container and stored it in the fridge.

  Harry escaped the kitchen—and their skirmish. He closed the door to his tiny home office, which was off-limits to Maggie and AJ, and cracked open a notebook filled with his large, scrawling handwriting. After returning from the war he’d resolutely refused to discuss what he had endured. So many men had died or suffered worse fates. It was time to get on with life. And maybe he could have put the horror behind him if it wasn’t for Hollywood’s war movies. They ripped the scab off his experience and deluded the public with their ridiculously romantic visions. He wasn’t sure if the screenplay he was writing was an exposé or therapy, but it portrayed combat as madness in a way no one else had done. Lest anyone discourage his efforts, he wrote in secret.

  Tonight he reached the turning point of his story, inspired by the real-life events of March 6, 1943. His alter ego, Lieutenant Farber, was scouting enemy positions when a camouflaged Japanese soldier emerged from behind a fabulous rhododendron—looking like a clown with flowers sprouting from his helmet—and fired point-blank. Click, click, click. Thank God, nothing worked in the stinking jungle. Banzai! The Jap charged and Farber stuck out his bayonet.

  Perspiration dripped down Harry’s forehead, causing the ink from his fountain pen to bleed down the page. No loss—his attempts at writing the character’s dying words were nothing but cross-outs. In that final moment he’d wondered what the real
soldier had said. Was it good-bye to a beloved wife? Or “Get the fucking blade out of my gut”? Harry had killed from afar, but that was the one time he’d cleaned a man’s intestines off his rifle.

  It was macabre, but now he was hungry—no, ravenous—so he headed to the kitchen. When he opened the plastic container, it whooshed. The drumstick was perfect. But even if it kept stuff fresh, who was going to buy a product called Tupperware?

  Three days later he arrived at the studio early, just as Chicago Deadline completed its night shooting. Harry waved to a weary Alan Ladd, headed home at his day’s end. “Are you okay, Mr. J.?” Mike Inman asked from his guard post.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Damn right you are.” He raised the barrier and waved him onto the lot.

  Unlocking his office, Harry reached for the trade papers tucked under the door. In the left-hand column of Variety, above the fold of the paper, the headline read, EXEC SUITE FLUX AT PAR. He blanched but forced his way through the article. “A shakeup in top management may be imminent at the Gower Street studio, informed sources are speculating. Gordon Stern, until recently head of business affairs at RKO, appears headed to the Admin Building. Stern’s arrival would be part of a reorganization long favored by prexy Barney Balaban for two senior vice presidents to head all functions under him. Production would remain the fiefdom of Y. Franklin Freeman, while all marketing, business, and legal execs, including Stern, would report to Paul Herzog. The Big Loser in the shakeup appears to be Par vet Harry Jastrow, currently a VP at the Herzog and Freeman level. His future looks cloudy at best.”

  No wonder the guard had been so solicitous—Harry was seconds from tumbling off Paramount Mountain.

  Harry camped in Balaban’s anteroom until the president arrived. “I’m glad you’re here,” Barney lied. “I was going to call you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He beelined for his desk—an eight-foot-wide mahogany bunker. “I don’t know where they get this garbage.”

  Harry wasn’t letting him off the hook. “Not from you?”