Mario Puzo - Fools die

“That’s something I never did to you,” I said.

She gave me a long look, and she went on. “And then he said, ‘There’s dinner waiting upstairs in the bedroom. Would you like to go up?’ And I said, in my Southern belle voice, ‘Yes, I think I’m a little hungry.’ He escorted me up the stairs, a beautiful staircase just like the movies, and opened the bedroom door. He closed it behind me, from the outside, and there I was in the bedroom with a little table set up with some nice snacks on it.”

She struck another pose of the innocent young girl, bewildered.

“Where’s Moses?” I said.

“He’s outside. He’s in the hallway.”

“He made you eat alone?” I said.

“No,” Janelle said. “There was Mrs. Bella Wartberg in her sheerest negligee waiting for me.”

I said, “Jesus Christ.”

Janelle went into another act “I didn’t know I was going to fuck a woman. It took me eight hours to decide to fuck a man, and now I find out I had to fuck a woman. I wasn’t ready for that.”

I said I wasn’t ready for that either.

She said, “I really didn’t know what to do. I sat down and Mrs. Wartberg served some sandwiches and tea and then she pushed her breasts out of her gown and said, ‘Do you like these, my dear?’ And I said, ‘They’re very nice.’”

And then Janelle looked me in the eye and hung her head, and I said, “Well, what happened? What did she say after you said they’re nice?”

Janelle made her eyes look wide open, startled. “Bella Wartberg said to me, ‘Would you like to suck on these, my dear?’

And then Janelle collapsed on the bed with me. She said, “I ran out of the room, I ran down the stains, out of the house, and it took me two years to get another job.”

“It’s a tough town,” I said.

“Nay,” Janelle said. “If I had talked to my girlfriends another eight hours, that would have been OK too. Ifs just a matter of getting your nerve up.”

I smiled at her, and she looked me in the eye, challengingly. “Yeah,” I said, “what’s the difference?”

– -

As the Mercedes sped over the freeways, I tried to listen to Doran.

“Old Moses is the dangerous guy,” Doran was saying, “watch out for him.” And so I thought about Moses.

Moses Wartberg was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. His Tri-Culture Studios was financially sounder than most but made the worst movies. Moses Wartberg had created a money-making machine in a field of creative endeavor. And without a creative bone in his body. This was recognized as sheer genius.

Wartbeng was a sloppily fat man, carelessly tailored in Vegas-style suits. He spoke little, never showed emotion, he believed in giving you everything you could take away from him. He believed in giving you nothing you could not force from him and his battery of studio lawyers. He was impartial. He cheated producers, stars, writers and directors out of their percentages of successful films. He was never grateful for a great directing job, a great performance, a great script. How many times had he paid big money for lousy stuff? So why should he pay a man what his work was worth if he could get it for less?

Wartberg talked about movies as generals talk about making war. He said things like: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Or when a business associate made claims to their social relationship, when an actor told him how much they loved each other personally and why was the studio screwing him, Wartberg gave a thin smile and said coldly, “When I hear the word ‘love,’ I reach for my wallet.”

He was scornful of personal dignity, proud when accused of having no sense of decency. He was not ambitious to be known as a man whose word was his bond. He believed in contracts with fine print, not handshakes. He was never too proud to cheat his fellowman out of an idea, a script, a rightful percentage of a movie’s profits. When reproached, usually by an overwrought artist (producers knew better), Wartberg would simply answer, “I’m a moviemaker,” in the same tone that Baudelaire might have answered a similar reproach with “I am a poet.”

He used lawyers as a hood used guns, used affection as a prostitute used sex. He used good works as the Greeks used the Trojan Horse, supported the Will Rogers home for retired actors, Israel, the starving millions of India, Arab refugees from Palestine. It was only personal charity to individual human beings that went against his grain.

Tri-Culture Studios had been losing money when Wartberg took charge. He immediately put it on a strict computer with a bottom-line basis. His deals were the toughest in town. He never gambled on truly creative ideas until they had been proved at other studios. And his big ace in the hole was small budgets.

When other studios were going down the drain with ten-million-dollar pictures, Tri-Culture Studios never made one that went over three million. In fact, over two million and Moses Wantberg or one of his three assistant vice-presidents was sleeping with you twenty-four hours a day. He made producers post completion bonds, directors pledge percentages, actors swear their souls away, to bring in a picture on budget. A producer who brought a picture in on budget or below budget was a hero to Moses Wartberg and knew it. It didn’t matter if the picture just made its cost. But if the picture went over budget, even if it grossed twenty million and made the studio a fortune, Wartberg would invoke the penalty clause in the producer’s contract and take away his percentage of the profits. Sure, there would be lawsuits, but the studio had twenty salaried lawyers sitting around on their asses who needed practice in count. So a deal could usually be made. Especially if the producer or actor on writer wanted to make another picture at Tri-Culture.

– -

The one thing everybody agreed upon was that Wartbeng was a genius at organization. He had three vice-presidents who were in charge of separate empires and competing with each other for Wartberg’s favor and the day when one would succeed him. All three had palatial homes, big bonuses and complete power within their own spheres subject only to Wartbeng’s veto. So the three of them hunted down talent, scripts, thought out special projects. Always knowing that they had to keep the budget low, the talent tractable, and to stamp out any spark of originality before they dared bring it up to Wartberg’s suite of offices on the top floor of the studio building.

His sexual reputation was impeccable. He never had fun and games with starlets. He never put pressure on a director or producer to hire a favorite in a film. Pant of this was his ascetic nature, a low sexual vitality. The other was his own sense of personal dignity. But the main reason was that he had been happily married for thirty years to his childhood sweetheart.

They had met in a Bronx high school, married in their teens and lived together forever after.

Bella Wartbeng had lived a fairy-tale life. A zaftig teenager in a Bronx high school, she had charmed Moses Wartberg with the lethal combination of huge breasts and excessive modesty. She wore loose heavy wool sweaters, dresses, a couple of sizes too large, but it was like hiding a glowing radioactive piece of metal in a dark cave. You knew they were there, and the fact that they were hidden made them even more aphrodisiacal. When Moses became a producer, she didn’t really know what it meant. She had two children in two years and was quite willing to have one a year for the rest of hen fertile life, but it was Moses who called a halt. By that time he had channeled most of his energy into his career, and also, the body that he thirsted for was marred by childbirth scans, the breasts he had suckled had drooped and become veined. And she was too much the good little Jewish housewife for his taste. He got hen a maid and forgot about her. He still valued her because she was a great laundress, his white shirts were impeccably starched and ironed. She was a fine housekeeper. She kept track of his Vegas suits and gaudy ties, notating them to the dry cleaner’s at exactly the right time, not so often as to wean them out prematurely, not too seldom as to make them appear soiled. Once she had bought a cat that sat on the sofa, and Moses had sat down on that sofa, and when he rose, his trouser leg had cat hairs on it. He picked up the cat and threw it against the wall. He screamed at Bella hysterically. She gave away the cat the next day.