Dan Wakefield - Selling Out - A Novel

“I’m not very good at that.”

“Remember a marvelous little novel back in the sixties called One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding? ”

“Sure. Robert Gover. A preppy guy doesn’t understand this black girl he’s fallen for is a hooker, because he doesn’t know her language.”

“See? In your story, the preppy doesn’t know the matron’s language. And you carry it through a whole affair, shooting on location in Boston.”

“That’s not bad at all.”

“Not bad? It’s beautiful.”

“So what do we do now?”

“I’ll send you on the rounds. The best producers in town. It won’t be easy, but I’ll pull it off.”

“Why won’t it be easy? Is the word out against me? Because of my quitting the series?”

“That’s nothing. People quit all the time. The problem is, you’re an unknown quantity.”

“For God sake, I wrote a TV pilot that became a series, and I’ve written all those stories. My books.”

“But none of that counts, you see. You haven’t done a feature .”

“That’s crazy.”

“It’s the business. But getting you in is my problem. Once you get in, though, you have to sell yourself.”

“I have to tap dance.”

“We all do.”

Ravenna got up and shucked off the lounging robe she was wearing. She took off the bra of her bikini and made a perfect dive in the water.

Perry had a bite of squab and some more wine. Ravenna was fabulous. She was not only solving his professional problems, but was evidently about to take care of his sexual needs as well. The flimsy bra lay on the tile edge of the pool, like a signal, a gauntlet thrown. Perry had lusted for Ravenna from the moment he first saw her, but he feared that he would really fall for her, that she was the kind who might really make him stray from his marriage. Well, now that Jane had taken off without so much as a goodbye on Christmas, wasn’t he free to do as he pleased?

When Ravenna got out of the pool, dripping, Perry stood up. His penis was standing too. He went over and picked up a towel and started drying her off. She didn’t protest. He rubbed her down and then turned her to him, pressing his mouth against hers, digging his tongue in. She pressed against him for one throbbing moment, then pulled away and put on her robe.

“Finish your salad,” she said. “It’s time to go home.”

“Hey, what the hell! What’s going on?”

“Nothing whatsoever,” she said.

“I thought—”

“Let’s get this straight, darling. It’s my job to get you work, not to get you laid.”

She tied the cord of her bathrobe, slipped into her high-heeled clogs, and undulated into the house.

Perry felt old.

He even looked old. He didn’t look old when he stared full face in the mirror, it was when he caught himself in the glass of a window, unsuspecting, sideways. His California diet that had enabled him to lose six pounds hadn’t done much for his middle, which was still flabby, but it made the skin of his neck sag. It looked like the neck of a turkey.

That’s what he felt like, preparing to make the rounds of the powerful producers.

A tap-dancing turkey.

Worse, an old tap-dancing turkey.

Perry took another hard look in the mirror and made himself smile.

His teeth were brown. The tobacco smoke from his pipe had started to stain them years ago, but he never had worried about it. He chalked it up as a kind of occupational hazard of being a writer. Didn’t most good writers smoke pipes? Hell, they posed that way on book jackets!

But now the stain seemed gross, a sign of the general decomposition of his body, a telltale mark of advancing age and Eastern-style decadence.

He asked Ravenna to supply him with a dentist.

“I didn’t want to mention it,” she said, “but I’m glad you asked.”

She gave him the name of a dentist in Beverly Hills who worked on her actor and actress clients, people whose teeth had to sparkle if they wanted to get any jobs.

Arnie Lawler looked more like an actor himself than a dentist. Perry had the feeling it was actually the tanned, suave George Hamilton peering into his mouth.

“I’m afraid we can’t do anything for you,” Arnie said, offering a Perrier in his office following the examination.

“I just want to have my teeth cleaned!” Perry said.

“I’m afraid you’ve let them go too long. Also the gums. I’d want you to have gum surgery before we even considered taking you on.”

“You mean you’re turning me down? You won’t clean my teeth because they’re too dirty?”

“If you have the gum work, we’ll be happy to reevaluate your situation,” Arnie said. “But I can’t make any promises.”

Perry went home and gargled some Chardonnay. Holy God, even his teeth had been rejected. He couldn’t stand the thought of making the rounds of dentists, hoping to have one take him on. He decided he would simply try to keep his lips over his teeth in the event he was called upon to smile while taking any meetings.

He prayed these producers he was going to see would at least be polite.

Most of them were quiet men, a bit aloof and studious, proud and self-possessed. There was nothing ostentatious about them, either in their personal dress or office decor. They wore no flashy clothes or gold chains, but sported the casual elegance of highly polished loafers, fine slacks, and long-sleeved shirts of muted colors, buttoned at the neck, without a tie.

Their offices were located on the sun-parched lots of once-mighty studios that were now simply part of the intricate web of the Industry’s interwoven system of production, engaged in their own trimmed-down enterprises and renting out space to independents. Producers who were individual entrepreneurs did not belong to any company’s hierarchy but simply had an office at Fox or MGM, or Paramount, or the gigantic Burbank lot that once was all Warner Brothers and now was home for not only that major but also a host of lesser, newer companies, any one of which might come up with tomorrow’s biggest smash hit. The independent producer was not a mere employee of the studio where he kept his office but simply had a deal with that company, a two- or three- or four-picture deal that gave him a base rather than a home. Perhaps at least partly because of that temporary situation the offices tended to be starkly if tastefully furnished. A fine rug on the floor, a few new prints on the wall, indicating an educated appreciation of the arts. Nothing that hinted of flash or glitter.

The personal manner of the powerful producers not surprisingly matched the style of their dress and office decor. They looked their guest directly in the eye, and after their secretary or assistant had brought a hospitable cup of coffee or tea or glass of Perrier, they spoke of the type of material they wished to involve themselves in to bring to eventual fruition on the screen. Then, perhaps lightly placing hands together at the fingertips, the host gave a brief, sometimes almost imperceptible nod to the guest to indicate granting him the opportunity of presenting his own proposal.

In their studied detachment, their polite but cool attention, the sense they conveyed of a calm and almost gracious condescension that stemmed from their superior understanding and mastery of life, these men rather reminded Perry of Freudian analysts. In these meetings, he had the odd sense he was in a psychiatrist’s office, about to have his words and thoughts scrutinized by some scientific process beyond his own ken. After he then poured out his words in what seemed a rush and tumble of childish enthusiasm, his attentive listener would nod, perhaps pose a few pertinent questions, and then conclude the session with a phrase as standard to his own procedure as the “Yes, go on” of the therapist or the “Bless you, my child, go and sin no more” of the priest. Standing, the producer would extend a well-manicured hand, and, bestowing a thin smile like a benediction, utter the ritual words that finalized this discreet little ceremony: