Dan Wakefield - Selling Out - A Novel

Perry was stunned.

“Why?” he asked.

“Sweetheart, I’m an agent, not a psychic. There’s a number of good ones in town, but I haven’t heard of any who can read the minds of producers.”

“But didn’t Phil say anything? About the story?”

“He said he was passing on it.”

A crucial distinction in just the order of words in a sentence: not passing it on but passing on it .

“Damn,” Perry said. “Do you think he really read the story?”

“Did you leave it with him?”

“Of course!”

“Well, then either he did or he didn’t,” Ravenna said, with a rising edge of irritation in her voice. “All I know is he passed on it .”

The phrase this time sounded to Perry almost like “pissed on it,” which was probably closer to the truth.

“Goddam it, Ravenna, I told you in the first place I wanted to send the story first before I had meetings about it with any producers, so I’d know if they’d read the thing.”

“And I told you it’s not done that way. You pitch the idea and then you leave a copy of the treatment—or story, or book. Whatever.”

“But it doesn’t make sense. It’s backwards. Look, it’s simply logical that if you’re going in to talk to a guy about a story, he ought to read it first. Then he knows what you’re talking about.”

“That’s not how it’s done out here.”

“Why not, if it makes perfect sense?”

“Darling—don’t blame me. I didn’t make the rules.”

“Well who did?” Perry shouted. “And where are they written down? Can I go out and buy a rule book, so I can play this ridiculous game?”

“Why don’t you go out and take a walk on the beach,” Ravenna said, more soothingly now, as if trying to comfort a distraught child. “You know, that stretch you like out at Venice? It’ll do you good. Clear your head. Sweetheart, I’ve got to scoot—”

She made a kissing sound into the telephone and then hung up.

Perry stood for a moment still clutching the receiver, the kiss ringing in his ear.

Thank God for the Vardemans. Maybe they hadn’t been able to get Perry’s movie off the ground exactly when he wanted (he knew they would in time, of course, they were eminently “bankable,” as Ravenna put it in the argot of the business), but simply having them as friends out here was a crucial source of comfort.

“I’ve been to almost a dozen producers now,” Perry told them, pouring out his heart between gulps of Japanese beer, “and the plain fact is, I’ve struck out.”

Pru Vardeman pulled her silk shawl up tighter around her neck and shivered slightly, as if a chill wind had just blown past. She was wearing a pair of dark glasses with enormous round lenses, and looked like some kind of wealthy celebrity on the lam. The spot the Vardemans had chosen to meet Perry—a newly opened sushi bar on a side street in Playa del Rey—was a perfect place for assuring anonymity from the press or a prying public. Perry was in fact disappointed in their choice of a rendezvous, thinking it might boost his sagging morale to be seen with his prestigious friends in one of the popular luncheon spots of the entertainment elite (He had suggested the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel), but their overextended schedule only allowed them a quick late lunch on the way to pick someone up at the airport, so Pru had suggested this tiny, almost hidden spot as both convenient and amusing.

Vaughan tilted back his head, dropped a giant prawn in his mouth and washed it down with a slug of Kirin.

“Moss-back,” he said, “I bet you’re a lousy meeting.”

Pru winced as she picked at her squid.

“Gawd,” she said, “it sounds like you’re calling him a lousy lay.”

“That I wouldn’t know about,” Vaughan said, emitting a belch and rubbing his stomach. “All I know is there are writers who give good meeting and writers who don’t, and it’s got nothing to do with how good they are at writing.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do?” Perry demanded. “Suck off these guys in their office?”

“ Please ,” said Pru, putting her fork down and readjusting her shawl.

“Excuse me,” Perry said, “but for God sake, I’m not a nightclub act, I’m a writer.”

“Didn’t your agent tell you,” asked Vaughan, “you’ve got to learn to tap dance?”

Perry finished off his beer and ordered another.

“Listen,” said Pru, leaning forward across the small Formica table, “why don’t you go to your friend Ned Gurney with this and be done with it?”

“Are you kidding? You guys are the ones who told me he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting a feature off the ground.”

Pru sighed.

“That was months ago.”

“Don’t you read the trades?” Vaughan asked. “Ned Gurney’s hot now.”

Perry could feel his own face getting hot.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “How?”

Vaughan popped another prawn.

“He finally got Nirvana to do his picture. They signed Meryl and Warren for the leads.”

“Sonofabitch,” said Perry.

He heard himself laughing, a hoarse, croaking kind of cackle. The friend—or former friend—he’d betrayed because he had no clout had magically, overnight, become hot.

“We’ve got to run,” said Pru, sipping the last of her tea and rising. “Sophia’s flight is due in at four.”

“You’re picking up Sophia Loren?” Perry asked.

“Sophia Kolski,” said Vaughan, “the new Polish sexpot. Just came off a big French flick.”

Vaughan molded an outline of a voluptuous body in the air with his hands.

“She’s hot right now,” he said with a wink.

“ At the box office ,” Pru added, taking Vaughan firmly by the arm. “We hope to make a deal with her—a business deal.”

Vaughan winked again, pulled out his wallet, and peeled off a couple of twenties he tossed on the table as Perry rose feeling dizzy.

“Please, finish your lunch,” said Pru, giving him a quick peck on the cheek and starting out.

“Wait!” Perry called. “I want you guys to read something.”

He bent down and grabbed the briefcase he had stuck beneath the table, rummaging through it with trembling hands and pulling out a folder encased in a handsome green binding. He shoved it at Vaughan, who instinctively backed away, as if Perry were trying to hand him a snake.

“It’s a treatment,” Perry explained. “Instead of just giving the short story to producers, I thought it might help if I left them a real screen treatment, but I’ve never done one before, so I wanted you guys to look it over, tell me if it’s OK. OK?”

Vaughan tucked it under his arm and nodded, moving now toward the door.

“Tell me what you think of it—honestly!” Perry called after the departing couple.

Vaughan waved the folder at Perry as he hurried out, looking back over his shoulder and saying just as he disappeared, “We’ll get back to you on it!”

Perry sat down again at the little table, staring at the white raw pieces of fish. They didn’t look very appetizing, but they seemed quite fitting fare for him now.

They of course were cold.

“I’m hot!” Ronnie Banks exclaimed, raising aloft a bottle of beer from his perch on a stool at the bar of La Traviata.

Perry recoiled, as if Ronnie had announced he had just become a vampire.

Damn. The whole point of getting together with Ronnie was to try to find someone who was not hot, someone who would be sympathetic to the devastating news Perry got hit with out of the blue that morning.

He had to tell someone, and yet he didn’t want to reveal this shameful secret to anyone who wouldn’t understand what it was like, or who might even think less of him for knowing it. He wanted to lay it on someone who was out of work, had little or no money, no hot prospects, was generous of spirit and liked to drink.