Квентин Тарантино - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - The First Novel By Quentin Tarantino

The blonde turned around and shouted back to the cowboy, “Sure thing, Ace, see ya in the movies.” She waved one last time and walked off.

And when Sharon Tate eventually made her motion-picture debut opposite Tony Curtis in the silly comedy Don’t Make Waves , she told Tony Curtis, “Ace Woody says hello.”

Chapter Seven

“Good Morgan, Boss Angeles!”

Saturday, February 8, 1969

6:30 A.M.

Cliff’s Karmann Ghia drives down the practically deserted street known throughout the world as the Sunset Strip. For Cliff, this is the start of his working day, driving his car to his boss’s house, to drive his boss to Twentieth Century Fox Studios for his eight o’clock call time. As Cliff pushes the little Volkswagen engine down Sunset Boulevard at six-thirty in the morning, he thinks, If New York is the city that never sleeps, Los Angeles in the middle of the night and early wee hours of the morning turns back into the desert it was before it got paved over with concrete. A lone coyote digging through a public garbage pail demonstrates how correct that thought is. On the car radio Cliff hears the voice of Robert W. Morgan (“the Boss Tripper”), the early-morning disc jockey of AM radio’s 93 KHJ, yelling to his audience of early risers, “ Good Morgan, Boss Angeles! ”

In the sixties and early seventies, all of Los Angeles pulsed to the beat of 93 KHJ. It was known as Boss Radio and it was known for playing the Boss Sounds by the Boss Jocks in Boss Angeles. That is, unless you lived in Watts, Compton, or Inglewood. In that case, you pulsed to the soul beat of KJLH.

KHJ played the groovy sixties’ sounds of the Beatles , the Rolling Stones , the Monkees , Paul Revere and the Raiders , the Mamas and the Papas , the Box Tops , the Lovin’ Spoonful , as well as later-forgotten groups of the era like the Royal Guardsmen , the Buchanan Brothers , Tompall and the Glaser Brothers , the 1910 Fruitgum Company , the Ohio Express , the Mojo Men , the Love Generation , and others of their ilk. Plus the station had an all-star lineup of disc jockeys, including, along with Morgan, Sam Riddle, Bobby Tripp, Humble Harve (who, like Cliff, would later kill his wife. But Harve wouldn’t get away with it), Johnny Williams, Charlie Tuna, and the number-one disc jockey in America, the Real Don Steele. Also, Robert W. Morgan, Sam Riddle, and Don Steele all had local Los Angeles music shows on KHJ-TV Channel 9. Morgan hosted Groovy , Riddle hosted Boss City , and Steele had, naturally, The Real Don Steele Show.

The KHJ radio and TV stations dominated the market with their zeitgeist sounds, crazy promotional contests, wild station-sponsored concerts, and a genuine sense of humor emanating from their on-air cast of cutups.

Sam Riddle would greet his nine-A.M.-till-noon listeners with his catchphrase, “Hello, music lovers!” And the Real Don Steele would constantly remind listeners that “Tina Delgado is alive!” (his most popular and never-explained running joke).

As Cliff drives up one of the residential hills of Hollywood, while Robert W. Morgan’s live commercial for Tanya Tanning Butter blends into the melodic do do do opening of Simon and Garfunkel’s ubiquitous Top 40 hit Mrs. Robinson , he sees four young hippie girls, age ranged sixteen to early twenties, cross the neighborhood street in front of his car at a stop sign. The girls look dirty, and not just normal unbathed hippie dirt but like they’ve been having an orgy in a garbage pail.

All the young ladies seem to be lugging some bundles of food. One girl carries a crate of cabbage heads, another three packages of hot dog buns, still another cradles a bunch of carrots. But the fourth—a sexy, tall, thin, bushy-haired brunette flower-child type, in a crochet halter top, short-short cutoff jeans that show off her long dirty white legs, and filthy big bare feet—waddles in caboose position of this hippie-chick train, lugging a big round jar of giant green pickles as if it were a papoose.

The dirty brunette beauty glances in Cliff’s direction and sees him through the windshield of the rumbling Karmann Ghia. A smile spreads across her pretty face in the blond dude’s direction. Cliff smiles back. The brunette hoists the pickle jar up to one arm by her right breast, leaving the other arm free to flash the Karmann Ghia driver the peace sign with her two fingers.

Cliff holds up two fingers, flashing it back.

They share a moment together, then the moment’s over, she’s on the other side of the street, and the filthy females baby-elephant-walk their way down the residential sidewalk. Cliff watches hippie pickle girl from behind as she walks away, willing her to take one glance back at him. One … two … three , he counts in his head, then she takes one more look back at him over her shoulder. Victory. He smiles to her and himself and presses down on the gas pedal with his moccasin-covered foot and zooms uphill.

6:45 A.M.

When Rick’s clock radio wakes him up to the voice of 93 KHJ’s morning disc jockey, Robert W. Morgan, he immediately feels that his pillow is soaked cold with alcohol sweat. Today will be his first day of work on a new CBS western pilot named Lancer . Naturally, he plays the heavy. A kidnapping, cold-blooded, murdering leader of a bunch of cattle rustlers, which the script refers to as “land pirates.”

It’s a pretty good script and a darn good part, even though Rick thinks he should be playing the series lead, Johnny Lancer. Rick inquired who got the part—it’s some fella named James Stacy, who had guested on a good Gunsmoke , that CBS decided to give a show of his own. The other regulars are rugged horse-faced Andrew Duggan as the father, Murdock Lancer, and Wayne Maunder, who recently starred in a canceled series on ABC about Custer, as the other brother, Scott Lancer.

The script is not only good but he has good dialogue, including a lot of dialogue on the first day. So he was up late last night running lines with his tape recorder.

He usually does that floating in his swimming pool, in his floaty chair, while he smokes and drinks whiskey sours. He makes the whiskey sours and pours them into one of the German beer steins from his German beer stein collection. How many did I have? he thinks as he lies in bed, nursing a hangover that feels closer to polio and a belly full of last night’s booze.

The beer stein holds two barsized whiskey sour cocktails.

How many steins?

Four.

Four?

Four!

That’s when he vomited all over himself in his bed.

Most actors and actresses in the sixties had a couple of cocktails or glasses of wine to wind down with once they got home. But Rick turned a couple of whiskey sours at the end of the day into eight whiskey sours, till he blacked out. Rick had no memory of leaving the pool or taking his clothes off or climbing into bed. He just woke up in bed with no idea of how he got there. He looks down at the disgusting mess he made of himself, then glances at the clock radio beside the bed. It reads 6:52. Cliff’s going to be there in about twenty minutes, so he better get his shit together. The bad part about barfing on yourself when you wake up in the morning is you feel like a disgusting-pig pathetic-loser. The good part is without all that poison sloshing around in your belly you feel much better.

What Rick didn’t know, and wouldn’t know for years, is he suffered from a condition that was not commonly known at the time. Since high school, Rick had experienced violent mood swings. His blues were bluer than most, and his highs could border on manic. But since completion of the Universal four-picture deal (and specifically Salty, the Talking Sea Otter ), his downswings seemed to find a deeper basement than before. Especially alone at home at night, when loneliness, boredom, and self-pity combined to create a toxic self-detest fest, with whiskey sour cocktails his only form of relief-inducing medication.