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

If she likes Last Train to Clarksville better than A Day in the Life , she likes it better; she doesn’t care who wrote it. Anyway, Paul Revere and the Raiders are sorta like the Monkees . They sing catchy groovy songs, they’re funny, and they’re on TV all the time. She really likes their songs Kicks , Hungry , and especially Good Thing. Rudi Altobelli told her Mark Lindsay and Terry Melcher wrote Good Thing on the white piano in their living room. Cool. She thinks about that as she places the needle on the vinyl and listens to the cool opening guitar riff come out of her speakers. She starts immediately moving her shoulders and hips to the bubble-gum beat. Then she goes back to what she was doing before. Which is packing Roman’s suitcase. Roman’s leaving for London tomorrow, and she always packs his suitcase for him. It’s just a sweet thing she started doing for him, and now it’s just a sweet thing she does.

Her ex-fiancé, Jay Sebring, is in the kitchen, making himself a sandwich before he drives Sharon over to his salon on Fairfax and does her hair for a TV appearance Roman and Sharon have to do tonight (Jay exclusively does men’s hair. Sharon is the only woman he does). They all attended a party at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion last night. And during the night Hefner hit up Roman to appear on his quasi-talk show, Playboy After Dark , filmed on top of the 9000 building, toward the end of the Sunset Strip. Sharon was irritated that Roman committed them to two things in a row without consulting her. Not only that, but she’s also reading a really good book, Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge , and Roman knows she’d rather spend the evening in bed alongside him reading it. Instead, she’s going to have to get all dolled up for the second night in a row and do her “sexy little me” act (“sexy little me” is Sharon’s self-deprecating nickname for her sixties-starlet persona).

As she folds the white turtleneck sweater she bought for Roman when they were in Switzerland and places it inside the suitcase laid open on the guest room bed, she doesn’t see the shaggy-haired dark little hippie fellow in the long untucked blue-denim shirt with the brown rawhide vest over it, the Jesus sandals, and the dirty dungarees emerge from her foliage and wander into the cement parking area in front of her house. But Jay spots him through the kitchen window as he takes a bite of his Wonder Bread turkey-and-tomato sandwich. As Jay follows with his eyes the dark little hippie’s path from the driveway to the front of the house, he thinks, Who’s this shaggy asshole walking around the property as if he owns it?

Sharon, packing at the far end of the house, hears Jay’s voice by the front door say to somebody authoritatively, “Hello? Can I help you?”

Then, from outside the house, she hears a muffled answer from a voice she isn’t familiar with. “Yeah, hey, man, I’m lookin’ for Terry. I’m a friend of Terry and Dennis Wilson’s.”

Who the hell is that? she thinks, keeping her ears peeled.

Then she hears Jay’s response to the stranger: “Well, Terry and Candy don’t live here anymore. This is the Polanski residence now.”

Sharon puts down the paisley shirt she’s holding and leaves the guest bedroom to investigate who Jay’s talking to. As she walks through the carpeted hallway leading to the living room, in bare feet and Levi’s cutoffs, she hears the stranger say with surprise and disappointment, “Really? He moved? Dang it! You know where?”

Sharon turns the corner leading to the entry hall with The Fearless Vampire Killers one-sheet framed on the wall. (Roman thought it was embarrassing and juvenile to hang up in their house the posters for movies they’d done. But then Sharon reminded him he knew she was embarrassing and juvenile when he married her.)

The front door is wide open, and Jay has moved outside to talk with this creepy-looking dude with a mop of shaggy hair and a two-day growth of dark stubble on his face.

She reaches the door and calls out to her former fiancé, “Who is it, Jay?”

The shaggy stranger’s eyes rise to the beautiful blonde in the doorway. Her radiant eyes look past Jay’s for a moment to lock with the dark little man’s.

Jay turns toward her and says, “It’s okay, honey. It’s a friend of Terry’s.” Then he turns back to the shaggy stranger and directs him to where the owner of the house lives. “I’m not sure where Terry moved to, but the owner of the property, Rudi, might know. He’s in the guesthouse.” With his hand, Jay points the way. “Take the back path.”

The shaggy stranger smiles and says, “Thank you kindly.”

As he turns to leave, he lifts his eyes again to the golden blonde in the doorway with the long legs, wearing a striped T-shirt that looks like she bought it in the little boys’ section of a department store. His hand rises in a wave gesture and he says, “Ma’am.”

Even though she finds this dark little intruder creepy, she nods at him and returns a slight smile. As the little man makes his way around the back of the property, Sharon’s eyes follow him until he disappears from view.

Rudi Altobelli has just stepped out of his shower when he hears his dog, Bandit, pitching a bitch at somebody by his open front door. He knows it’s a somebody rather than a something because, when it comes to intruders intruding on the property, the dog has three distinct barks. Cats get one bark, lizards, raccoons, and other varmints get another, and humans the dog doesn’t know get a third. Rudi throws a towel on top of his head, puts his naked, still-wet body in a terry-cloth bathrobe, and steps out of his bathroom, heading toward the front door to investigate.

Altobelli is a small-time Hollywood manager, who—once upon a time—represented (in some capacity) Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda. But these days his client list boasts Christopher Jones, Olivia Hussey, Sally Kellerman, and two out of the three members of the pop trio Dino, Desi & Billy (he repped the Juniors, Desi Arnaz and Dean Martin). The property was a pretty good investment; he lives in the guesthouse out back and rents out the big house to Hollywood highfliers. As he approaches the wide-open front door, which is really the side door, the television set plays a black-and-white rerun of the TV series Combat! The opening credits of the show flash across the screen, and the series’ military theme blares out of the speakers. The deep-voiced announcer announces:

“ Combat! Starring Rick Jason. And Vic Morrow.”

His dog is excitedly barking at the small-in-stature shaggy figure on the other side of the screen door. As Rudi reaches the visitor, he shouts at Bandit to calm down, grabs him by his collar, and pulls him out of the way. The damp man in the bathrobe looks through the screen door and realizes he recognizes the man on his doorstep.

“Rudi?” Charlie asks.

“Yeah?” answering a one-word question with a one-word answer.

Charlie goes right into it: “Hey, Rudi, I don’t know if you remember me, I’m a friend of Terry Melcher’s and Dennis Wilson’s—”

“I know who you are, Charlie,” Rudi tells him without any warmth. “What do you want?”

This dude ain’t too friendly , Charlie thinks, but at least he knows I know Terry.

“Well, I came down to talk to Terry, and the dude at the house said Terry moved?”

“Yeah, they moved about a month ago,” Rudi confirms.

Charlie does a little frustrated dance, kicking at the grass in the ground, cursing, “Gosh dang it, dagnabit! Looks like I came all the way down here for nothing.” He then turns back to the man behind the screen door and asks with a big open face, “You know where he moved to or his number? I really got to get in touch with him. It’s kinda an emergency.” Which, from Charlie’s perspective, isn’t a lie.