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

While all through the sixties it bugged Dalton to be in McQueen’s shadow, it really stuck a weed up his ass to be in Peppard’s. However, by this late date, the two former swinging dicks had been sufficiently humbled. The two men got along in Mexico both on screen and off. They matched up well together, and the antagonistic dynamic between them had real power. In fact, Peppard later got Dalton to guest on his TV series Banacek .

But it was another actor in Cannon for Cordoba that Rick Dalton really hit it off with. Pete Duel was a handsome thirty-one-year-old actor, who had already acted in two television series. He played Gidget’s brother-in-law opposite Sally Field on Gidget . And he starred in a sitcom titled Love on a Rooftop alongside Burt Reynolds’s wife, Judy Carne. He was part of the team’s Magnificent Five. Two years later he would become an exciting TV star with his hit western series on ABC, Alias Smith and Jones (a TV-series knockoff of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid . But a really really good knockoff). Dalton and Duel, on location in Mexico, both enjoyed drinking tequila, chasing Mexican poontang, bitching about Hollywood, and each other’s company. But they shared something else, something neither knew intellectually but both sensed internally. Both Dalton and Duel were undiagnosed bipolar. And drinking alcohol was their only form of self-medication. But since neither man knew this, to them their drinking was a sign of internal weakness.

But Pete Duel was far worse than Rick, culminating with—at the height of his Alias Smith and Jones success—Pete Duel shooting himself in the middle of the night. The whole town wondered why Duel did it. But Rick, in his heart of hearts, felt he knew the answer. After Duel’s death in 1971, Dalton would do the hard work it took to not lean so heavily on booze. By 1973, when Dalton shot the revenge western The Deadly Trackers opposite Richard Harris in Durango, Mexico, both men (heavy drinkers) had reached an equilibrium while on location. They stayed off the sauce Monday through Thursday. But starting on Friday night into Sunday afternoon, the two men drank enough tequila, sangria, margaritas, and Bloody Marys to float a boat.

As Rick looks into his bathroom mirror, putting the final touches on his pompadour, he hears Cliff’s Karmann Ghia zoom up into his driveway. He looks at the watch on his wrist: seven-fifteen on the dot. While barfing when he woke up initially made him feel better, it didn’t clean out his pipes completely. There’s still enough of last night’s old booze swirling around in his stomach to keep his belly feeling ill, his face sweaty, and his complexion a little green. He’s just going to have to nurse coffee and smoke cigarettes till about one or two in the afternoon. But, Jesus Christ , Rick thinks, that’s seven hours from now? I bet James fuckin’ Stacy ain’t startin’ his first day on his new TV show hungover as fuck.

He looks at himself in the bathroom mirror and says out loud, “And you fuckin’ wonder why CBS is starring him in a new series and not you! Because they think that prick’s got potential. The only potential you got is potentially fucking up your life!”

Cliff knocks on his front door. Rick yells from the bathroom, “Yeah, I’m comin’!” He takes one more look at the pathetic fuckup in his bathroom mirror. “Don’t worry, Rick,” he says intimately to his reflection, “it’s the first day. It’s gonna take ’em a while to get their shit together. Just take it one cup of coffee at a time.” Then, putting on his “show must go on” face, he pumps himself up by saying Jackie Gleason’s catchphrase at the time, “And away we go!” Before he exits the bathroom, he spits in the sink, then looks down and sees a little red blood mixed in with the saliva. Rick examines the spit wad closer and asks, “Now what?”

7:10 A.M.

Squeaky’s filthy petite bare feet pad their way across the dirty cracked linoleum floor of George’s kitchen, over the dusty wood boards of the living room, and down the matted carpet of the hallway leading to George’s bedroom at the end of the corridor. She knocks on the door and says cheerfully, “Good morning.”

She hears bedsprings squeak as the old man rustles awake. Then, after a moment, she hears his grumpy voice come from the other side of the door.

“Yeah?”

She asks, “Can I come in, George?”

Old man Spahn has his de rigueur morning coughing fit, then says a phlegmy “Come in, sweetheart.”

She twists the doorknob and steps inside the eighty-year-old man’s stuffy bedroom. George, lying under the covers in his bed, turns in the young girl’s direction. Squeaky leans against the doorframe, balances her right foot against her left knee, and tells the old man, “Good morning, honey, I’ve got eggs cooking on the stove. Do you want Jimmy Dean sausage or Farmer John bacon?”

“Jimmy Dean,” says the old man.

She continues with her questions: “Do you want to eat breakfast casual and comfortable, or would you like me to help you get dressed and make y’all handsome?”

George thinks about it for a moment, then decides, “I think I’d like to get dressed.”

A smile breaks across her pixieish face. “Ahh, trying to steal my heart, getting all spruced up.”

“Stop it,” George grunts.

She instructs him, “Lay back down for a second, honey. I’ll take the eggs off the stove and come back and get you lookin’ all sharp.” Squeaky adds, “You’ll melt all the girls’ hearts, you handsome devil.”

“Stop teasing me, honey,” George whines.

“Oh, you love it,” Squeaky flirts, as she heads back up the hallway, through the living room, and into the kitchen, removing the bubbling eggs in the frying pan from the stove burner. She walks over to the General Electric radio plugged into the wall on the kitchen counter and switches it on. Barbara Fairchild’s heartbreaking novelty country hit The Teddy Bear Song fills the kitchen.

I wish I had button eyes and a red felt nose

Shaggy cotton skin and just one set of clothes

Sittin’ on a shelf in a local department store

With no dreams to dream and nothing to be sorry for

Whenever George is awake, the radio is always playing KZLA, Los Angeles’s country music station.

I wish I was a teddy bear

Not living nor lovin’ or goin’ nowhere

I wish I was a teddy bear

And I’m wishin’ that I hadn’t fallen in love with you

It’s been Squeaky’s job to take care of this blind old man for the last few months. The man who leads her commune, Charlie, impressed on her how important her job was. After their Family had moved all around Los Angeles like a nomadic tribe for months, George Spahn’s old western movie set and ranch finally offered them a home. A home from which they could lay down roots and test Charlie’s societal theories, expand their numbers, and, who knows, hopefully create a new world order.

She was to be the blind old man’s cook, his nurse, his friendly companion, and if she wouldn’t mind masturbating him every once in a while, that would go a long way to securing “the Family’s” position on the ranch. Or, as Charlie said as he broke the news to the twenty-one-year-old, “Sometimes, kiddo, ya gotta take one for the team.”

The night Charlie told her she was going to have to jack this old man off periodically, and maybe do even more than that, was the only time during her tenure with Charles Manson she ever considered hightailing it back to San Francisco and maybe patching things up with her parents. But then a funny thing happened that Squeaky never could have foreseen. She fell in love with this blind old bastard. Not Romeo-and-Juliet type of love, but a deep love nevertheless. This grouchy old bastard wasn’t really a bastard at all. He was just lonely and forgotten.