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  The gruff McQueen requested a third for his wife, who was due back from Las Vegas next week. AJ had hoped Neile was Steve’s girlfriend, but wife was better. Stephanie Salinger was available. At least it seemed so, because the way she hopped on the back of McQueen’s bike and slipped her arms around his waist made AJ wonder. He hung back so that they wouldn’t see his boring wheels. Then he remembered that the order he had forgotten was his own, so he returned to the back of the line. He wasn’t leaving without his extra-spicy chili dog.

  AJ’s phone rang at five-thirty A.M. When the same thing had happened two weeks ago, he’d thought his mother had taken sick. Now he didn’t flinch and his stomach remained settled. “Hey, Mike.”

  “Did you find him?” A month ago Todd offered the part of Sancho Panza, Quixote’s faithful servant, to the Mexican actor Cantinflas, but he’d passed because the role was too similar to the one he played in Around the World. Mike had then ordered AJ to locate the actor so he could make a personal appeal.

  “His agent and publicist stonewalled me, so I hired this private eye in Mexico City.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Señor Julio Ago. The guy sounded creepy, but he called at midnight to say he had tracked Cantinflas to Tijuana. He’s attending a bullfight tomorrow.” AJ yawned. “I mean today.”

  “Pick me up at seven. And brush up on your Spanish.”

  AJ showered, half-expecting Todd to blast into the bathroom and hand him a towel. It made sense that his first movie had been Around the World, because Mike identified with Phileas Fogg, the lead character played by David Niven, who accepted a dare that he could circumnavigate the globe in record time. Don Quixote reflected another aspect of the producer’s personality: his outsized dreams and desire for nobility. Initially, AJ’s job had involved researching the details of seventeenth-century Spain to inform the script and production design of the movie. Once a week he and Mike lunched, talking for hours about the themes of the book and the tragedy of its hero. Increasingly, Todd had AJ shadow him throughout the day. It made his learning curve steep, even if the hours were awful.

  They were thirty minutes from the Mexican border when Mike awoke from a nap. “Is your mother still on the rag about your leaving?”

  AJ ignored his crassness. “She’s an iceberg when I call.”

  “So don’t call.”

  “I’m all she’s got.”

  “She wants you to believe that. And you want to because it makes you feel special. Your mother will squeeze guilt out of you until you show more spine than a sponge. I’m not a big fan of mothers. Junior’s gave him a hard time.”

  “I think your son’s great,” AJ replied. Mike Jr., who was as self-effacing and quiet as his father was self-promoting and garrulous, was the company’s chief of staff.

  “He likes you too. Everybody does, except Guy.” Fifty-year-old Guy Biondi was Todd’s gofer extraordinaire. “He’s paranoid I’ll get rid of him. But I won’t, at least not until I see how you work out. You’ve got the cash, right?”

  “A thousand in tens and twenties.”

  “You ever fight a bull?” AJ shook his head. “Good experience for making a movie.”

  Two hours later they walked where AJ had never expected to set foot—the center of the Toreo de Tijuana at Agua Caliente, the city’s foremost bullring. Mike had managed to bribe the local promoter for the opportunity to present Cantinflas an award, which was actually a trophy they’d picked up at a pawnshop in the Mercado Hidalgo. AJ felt like Sancho Panza—solidly in tow but distressed by his boss’s bizarre behavior. It didn’t help that he spotted blood in the sand where the last bull had died. Since Mike didn’t speak Spanish, AJ interpreted. The feedback through the ancient microphone jolted the crowd. Mike looked to a nearby box, where Cantinflas sat in shock.

  “Today is the happiest day of my life.” AJ couldn’t believe that Todd had stolen Lou Gehrig’s farewell at Yankee Stadium. “Because I have the chance to present the United Nations Fellowship Award to a great performer, a great man, and a great Mexican—your very own Cantinflas.” AJ tripped on the translation, but Mike was on too much of a roll to notice. “His work in Around the World in 80 Days created goodwill throughout the globe. In his honor I’m establishing a foundation to educate deserving Mexican children who come to America.” People stomped, forcing Cantinflas to acknowledge the tribute. “I only hope we can work together in the future to bring more joy to the world.”

  The ride home took six hours because AJ had drunk too much tequila and refused to drive faster than forty miles an hour. Cantinflas hadn’t accepted the part but had agreed to give it serious consideration when the script was ready. “We’ve got him,” Todd said confidently.

  “Isn’t he eventually going to realize that there’s no such award?”

  “Nobody checks on good news. Shit, the U.N. should give him one. He’s done more for international relations than they have.”

  “And the foundation?”

  “It’s a great idea. I’ll put up ten grand. You did such a good job, keep whatever money we didn’t use on bribes.”

  The two hundred dollars would come in handy, but the offer left AJ feeling more like a bagman than a producer in training.

  “We’re going to throw the biggest birthday party New York’s ever seen.”

  Todd’s staff blinked en masse.

  “Boss, your birthday was last month.”

  “Thank you, Guy. I didn’t know that. Who can tell me what happened on October fifteenth one year ago?”

  “The premiere of Around the World in 80 Days.”

  Todd rewarded his son with a stogie. The movie’s reserved-seat road-show release in big cities had proved a fabulous success, Mike explained, but with Around the World opening nationwide in late October, the publicity from a party could blow the box office through the roof. They would have to drop their other activities to make it happen.

  There were a thousand problems—but not a word of warning. Like most cult personalities in Hollywood, Todd surrounded himself with people who believed his genius was their salvation. A few were sycophants, but others were born executors who admired his ability to formulate the big idea that eluded them. Mike fed on their zeal.

  “The question is where do we hold the party.”

  Guy Biondi might be Dopey or Sleepy but never Bashful. “They got this giant new amusement park in the New Jersey Palisades.”

  “The press aren’t schlepping to Jersey. Don’t be a schmuck all your life.”

  “How about the Fifty-ninth Street Armory?” The suggestion came from Bill Doll, whose job as Todd’s publicist rendered him redundant.

  “Too militaristic.”

  “In Chicago we’d hold this kind of bash in the Madhouse on Madison.” Everyone looked at AJ blankly. “Chicago Stadium . . . where the Blackhawks play?”

  “That’s brilliant. We’ll give people skates,” Biondi joked, “and watch them fall on their asses.”

  Todd beamed. “The Madhouse on Madison. That’s it! We’ll hold our shindig at Madison Square Garden. Eighteen thousand of my intimate friends in the prime indoor venue in the world.”

  Over the next two weeks AJ developed a crick in his neck spending morning, noon, and night on the telephone arranging entertainment for Todd’s “Garden Party.” Mike’s notion was to use different nationalities to highlight the theme of Around the World. AJ managed to book twenty-one folk-dancing troupes representing as many cultures to perform before dinner, but he faced a touchy problem. “The Armenian belly dancers from Hoboken won’t appear if the Turkish sword dancers from Queens are on the floor.”

  “So promise exclusivity.” Todd moved on.

  AJ didn’t. “They’ll see each other. I can’t just lie to them.”

  “Of course you can! Both of them want to be there, right? It’s only their bullshit history talking.”

  “There’s a holocaust in that history.”

  Todd turned tomato red. “I didn’t hire you to give me a
lecture from some fucking college history course!”

  Those in shouting range swiveled to see AJ sweat and sway like a schoolboy caned on the hands. He swallowed his self-respect and grinned, as if to say “No big deal.” But it was.

  AJ was still unnerved when he ran into Art Cohn in the parking lot after work. Mike had hired Art to write his biography because he believed his own life story was so valuable a property it would be the basis for a great movie—and a legacy for his son. Maybe Todd was right, but AJ couldn’t believe any man had that much chutzpah. “Has Mike always been so . . . unstable?”

  “I interviewed guys who knew him back in Minneapolis when he was Avrom Goldbogen, guys who backed his plays on Broadway, men who took his marker in high-stakes gin rummy. They all made the same observation: Mike only feels alive when he’s hanging on the edge, forty stories in the air.”

  “It doesn’t scare him?”

  “Nah. Because he never really believes he’ll fall—no matter how many times he’s chewed concrete.”

  Based on his one fall, AJ hated the taste. He couldn’t simply write today’s incident off as “nothing personal.” Heading home, he decided to be so professional that Mike would never have reason to attack him again. And if that meant keeping his mouth shut more than he liked, so be it.

  For a hundred dollars a month he rented a studio apartment in a gracefully shabby Art Deco building in Hollywood called the Ravenswood, where Mae West, the sex symbol of the ‘30s, had once lived. AJ had sexual ambitions of his own—number one being Stephanie Salinger. Their dates had been great, even the ones when her unemployed actor friend tagged along. But tomorrow night McQueen’s wife was due to fly into L.A. from Vegas, where she was starring in The Pajama Game at the Desert Inn, so AJ counted on having Steph to himself.

  He fretted that she would hate his decorating choices—cinder-block bookshelves and painted plywood tables. To liven it up, maybe he could buy some flowers or, better still, a bushy plant, although he couldn’t keep anything green alive for more than a week. Flopping down on his mattress on the floor, AJ decided that his first priority was to get that brass bed he’d spotted in a secondhand store on Highland, and maybe the afghan that went with it. . . . Without warning he yawned loudly. Work was a hell of a lot more exhausting than school. In the past month he’d scalded his hand cooking spaghetti and bleached the color out of his best madras shirt. He wasn’t a gifted homemaker, but bachelors weren’t supposed to be. What mattered was that he was coming and going as he saw fit and on his way to big things in the movie business.

  CHAPTER 12

  AJ sat on the horn, weaving through traffic, jumping lights. His big day had started with both a dead battery and a flat tire and now he was late for a barbecue at Ray Stark’s. Turning west on Santa Monica, he glanced at the Fox lot and recalled his day at the Supreme Court when Spyros Skouras had boasted that the studio system was impregnable. Last week the banks had forced Skouras to sell most of Fox’s back lot to real estate investors, who intended to construct apartments and stores in a development, anachronistically named Radio City of California.

  Skidding to a stop in front of a mini-mansion in Holmby Hills, AJ handed his keys to a valet. Apparently, the good times weren’t completely history, because providing someone to park your guests’ cars—even with dozens of spots available—remained de rigueur. In the acre of garden that constituted Stark’s backyard, AJ whistled at a bronze sculpture by Henry Moore next to a Rodin. “Your place is like the Louvre.”

  “It’s the Hollywood dream—win big early, then play with the house’s money.” Ray patted his shoulder. “I expect you to do the same.” A few months earlier Stark had surprised the town—and caused Ava Gardner to weep—by resigning as a senior agent at the Famous Artists Agency. He had been traveling ever since, generating projects for Seven Arts, his new production company. Ray looked AJ up and down, an affectionate, amazed grin spreading across his face. “After all this time . . . it’s great to have you back here. How’s the job working out with Todd?”

  “Mike’s one of a kind.”

  “Did I hear someone use the devil’s name in vain?”

  Stark did the honors. “AJ, meet S. J.—Perelman.” The bespectacled writer had won the Academy Award for his screenplay of Around the World in 80 Days, but the only time AJ had heard Mike mention the writer’s name, he’d spit in disgust.

  “The next time you see that sinister dwarf, send him my best wishes.”

  Now he understood why. “The boss can be hard to get along with.”

  “You are working for a man who has no peer in his profession. And that profession is to humiliate and cheapen his fellow man, fracture their self-esteem, convert everyone around him into lackeys, hypocrites, and toadies, and thoroughly debase every relationship, no matter how casual. I suggest you shed his company soon because his enormity grows on you like a fungus.”

  It was a blistering indictment, even in a town where venom was the vernacular. As a writer, Perelman was smarter and angrier than most people, but AJ knew enough to give the attack credence. “Don’t worry, kid,” Stark reassured him as they walked away. “Some people would say the same thing about me.” He then edged AJ over to a man with sunnier advice on the vagaries of life in Hollywood.

  Ronald Reagan was taller in person than he appeared hosting CBS’s General Electric Theater on Sunday evenings. “I’m the local poster boy for surviving job insecurity. Back in 1952, I was president of the Screen Actors Guild, but I couldn’t get an acting gig. After twenty pictures, the studios figured they’d given me enough screen tests.” Reagan indicated a petite brunette in a nearby cluster of women. “Nancy and I were newlyweds and struggling to pay the mortgage on this beautiful parcel of ranchland I’ve got near Santa Barbara. I went riding in the hills to figure out what else I might do, but I couldn’t imagine anything I enjoyed as much as acting. So we let fate—and MCA—take its hand.”

  The fourth member of their group laughed like a man paid 10 percent to do so. Taft Schreiber was the right-hand man of MCA’s topper, Lew Wasserman. AJ recalled his dad describing the talent agency as an octopus, and in the years since his death, it had grown more tentacles. Schreiber explained how MCA, which produced G.E. Theater, had convinced the appliance maker to give Reagan a try. “Since you became their spokesman, Ronnie, sales are up in all divisions.”

  “Thanks, Taft.” Reagan turned back to AJ. “My advice, son, is make sure you love this business. If you do, believe in yourself, play for the long haul . . . and get yourself a good agent.”

  “I didn’t think that agencies were allowed to produce shows and movies,” AJ commented as he and Ray wended their way to another clump of guests. “Doesn’t the Screen Actors Guild prohibit it because it can be a conflict of interest?”

  Stark nodded. “They do prohibit it, but you can apply and get a waiver. I got tired of applying and being rejected. That’s why I quit to produce full-time.”

  AJ was perplexed. “But MCA got a waiver for General Electric Theater?”

  “And for their other twenty hours of television. MCA’s the only agency with a blanket waiver from SAG.”

  “Which they got back in 1952 . . . ?” AJ hastily sewed two and two together. “So MCA convinced Reagan to push the blanket waiver through when he was president of SAG. That’s why they had to land him the G.E. job.”

  “Go to the head of the class. A lot of competitors are furious; so are the studios. Rumor is, the Justice Department is trying to prove that Wasserman got a sweetheart deal.”

  “I bet everyone’s just envious they didn’t think of it first.”

  Ray smiled amiably. “I certainly am.” They approached a man who was whispering in the ear of a handsome blonde. “Rabbi, look who I’ve tracked down for you.”

  Hollywood encouraged reinvention—an actor’s stock-in-trade—but the metamorphosis in Leon Ginsberg stunned AJ. The man’s German accent was almost undetectable. He sported a dazzling tan, highlighted by a white Lacoste shirt
. AJ recognized the blonde as Eve Arden, who’d recently starred in the CBS comedy Our Miss Brooks. “Albert Jastrow, how are you?” Ginsberg pumped his hand and bragged to Arden, “This young man gave a speech once that moved me to tears. I said to myself that he would do great things one day. And he has.”

  “Sorry, Rabbi, but I haven’t done anything yet, great or otherwise.” AJ remained cool until he could figure out why Ginsberg was interested in him.

  “Phi Beta Kappa, University of Chicago law school, now an important job with Mr. Mike Todd? I hear all about you from this man.” The rabbi gave Stark a Hollywood hug, the appearance of which suggested intimacy, though it signified nothing more than “good to see you.” “Ray and Fran are valued members of my new congregation in Brentwood. Lots of people in your business belong, above and below the line.” It startled AJ to hear a rabbi use an insider’s terms to describe the division between actors, producers, writers, and directors and the technical crew on films. “By the way, how’s your mother?”

  “She’s fine. Back in Chicago.” They made small talk until AJ apologized for having to leave early for another engagement. Curiously, the rabbi walked him to his car.

  “AJ, I wonder if I can do both of us a favor.” Magically, a script appeared. Ginsberg announced that he had written the story of his adventures in Europe—his harassment by the Nazis and the good deeds he’d done for people before escaping to America. The title was Exile. Todd was the perfect producer, Ginsberg reckoned, because he’d demonstrated a bent for internationally based projects. After working for Mike, AJ was used to people slipping him scripts, whether they were members of the Writers Guild or pumped gas at the Esso station. “We’ll consider it right away, sir.”

  “Is that the worst idea for a movie you’ve ever heard?”

  Stephanie sucked the cherry in her mai tai. “Second worst. Steve wants to do a film version of An Enemy of the People. When I told him Ibsen doesn’t sell tickets in Omaha, he said, ‘With me in it, it will.’ Someday we’ll probably find out.”