Mario Puzo - Fools die

But power flows magically from one source to another. When Moses became head of Tri-Culture Studios, it was as if Bella Wartberg had been touched by the magic wand of a fairy. The California-bred executive wives took hen in hand. The “in” hairdresser shaped her a crown of black curls that made hen look regal. The exercise class at the Sanctuary, a spa to which all the show people belonged, punished her body unmercifully. She went down from a hundred and fifty pounds to a hundred and ten. Even hen breasts shrank, shriveled. But not enough to conform to the rest of her body. A plastic surgeon cut them down into two small perfectly proportioned rosebuds. While he was at it, he whittled down her thighs and took a chunk out of her ass. The studio fashion experts designed a wardrobe to fit her new body and her new status. Bella Wartberg looked into her mirror and saw there, not a zaftig Jewish princess lushly fleshed, vulgarly handsome, but a slim, Waspy, forty-year-old ex-debutante, peppy, vivacious, brimming full of energy. What she did not see mercifully was that her appearance was a distortion of what she had been, that her old self, like a ghost, persisted through the bones of her body, the structure of her face. She was a skinny fashionable lady built on the heavy bones she had inherited. But she believed she was beautiful. And so she was quite ready when a young actor on the make pretended to be in love with her.

She returned his love passionately, sincerely. She went to his grubby apartment in Santa Monica and for the first time in her life was thoroughly fucked. The young actor was virile, dedicated to his profession and threw himself into his role so wholeheartedly that he almost believed he was in love. So much so that he bought her a charm bracelet from Gucci’s that she would treasure the rest of her life as proof of her first great passion. And so, when he asked for her help in getting a role in one of Tri-Culture’s big feature films, he was thoroughly confounded when she told him she never interfered in her husband’s business. They quarreled bitterly, and the actor disappeared from her life. She missed him, she missed the grubby apartment, his rock records, but she had been a level-headed girl and had grown to be a levelheaded woman. She would not make the same mistake. In the future she would pick her lovers as carefully as a comedian picks his hat.

In the years that followed she became an expert negotiator in her affairs with actors, discriminating enough to seek out talented people rather than untalented ones, and indeed, she enjoyed the talented ones more. It seemed that general intelligence went with talent. And she helped them in their careers. She never made the mistake of going directly to her husband. Moses Wartberg was too Olympian to be concerned with such decisions. Instead, she went to one of the three vice-presidents. She would rave about the talent of an actor she had seen in a little art group giving Ibsen and insist that she didn’t know the actor personally but she was sure he would be an asset to the studio. The vice-president would put the name down and the actor would get a small part. Soon enough the word got around. Bella Wartberg became so notorious for fucking anybody, anywhere, that whenever she stopped by one of the vice-president’s offices, that VP would make sure that one of his secretaries was present, as a gynecologist would make sure a nurse was present when examining a patient.

The three VP’s jockeying for power had to accommodate Wartberg’s wife, or felt they had to. Jeff Wagon became good friends with Bella and would even introduce her to some especially upstanding young fellow. When all this failed, she prowled the expensive shops of Rodeo for women, took long lunches with pretty starlets at exclusive restaurants, wearing ominously huge macho sunglasses.

Because of his close relationship with Bella, Jeff Wagon was the odds-on favorite to get Moses Wartberg’s spot when he retired. There was one catch. What would Moses Wartberg do when he learned that his wife, Bella, was the Messalina of Beverly Hills? Gossip columnists planted Bella’s affairs as “blind items” Wartberg couldn’t fail to see. Bella was notorious.

As usual Moses Wartberg surprised everyone. He did so by doing absolutely nothing. Only rarely did he take his revenge on the lover; he never took reprisals against his wife.

The first time he took his revenge was when a young rock and roll star boasted of his conquest, called Bella Wartberg “a crazy old cunt.” The rock and roll star had meant it as a supreme compliment, but to Moses Wartberg it was as insulting as one of his vice-presidents coming to work in blue jeans and turtleneck sweater. The rock and roll star made ten times as much money from a single album as he was being paid for the featured part in his movie. But he was infected with the American dream; the narcissism of playing himself on film entranced him. On the night of the first preview he had assembled his entourage of fellow artists and girlfriends and taken them to the Wartberg private screening room crammed with the top stars of Tri-Culture Studios. It was one of the big parties of the year.

The rock and roll star sat and sat and sat. He waited and waited and waited. The film ran on and on. And on screen he was nowhere to be seen. His part was on the cutting-room floor. He had immediately gotten stoned out of his mind and had to be taken home.

Moses Wartberg had celebrated his transformation from producer to head of a studio with a great coup. Over the years he had noticed that the studio moguls were furious with all the attention given actors, writers, directors and producers at the Academy Awards. It infuriated them that their employees were the ones who received all the credit for the movies that they had created. It was Moses Wartberg who years before first supported the idea for an Irving Thalberg award to be given at the Academy ceremonies. He was clever enough to have included in the plan that the award would not be a yearly one. That it would be given to a producer for constantly high quality over the years. He was also clever enough to have the clause put in that no one would be eligible to receive the Thalberg Award more than once. In effect many producers, whose pictures never won Academy Awards, but who had a lot of clout in the movie industry, got their share of publicity by winning the Thalberg. But still, this left out the actual studio heads and the real money-making stars whose work was never good enough. It was then that Wartbeng supported a Humanitarian Award to be given to the person in the movie industry of the highest ideals, who gave of himself for the betterment of the industry and mankind. Finally, two years ago, Moses Wartberg had been given this award and accepted it on television in front of one hundred million admiring American viewers. The award was presented by a Japanese director of international renown for the simple reason that no American director could be found who could give the award with a straight face. (Or so Doran said when telling me this particular story.)

On the night when Moses Wartberg received his award, two screenwriters had heart attacks from outrage. An actress threw her television set out of the fourth-floor suite of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Three directors resigned from the Academy. But that award became Moses Wartberg’s most prized possession. One screen writer commented that it was like members of a concentration camp voting for Hitler as their most popular politician.

It was Wartberg who developed the technique of loading a rising star with huge mortgage payments on a Beverly Hills mansion to force him to work hard in lousy movies. It was Moses Wartberg whose studio continually fought in the courts to the bitter end to deprive creative talent of the monies due them. It was Wartberg who had the connections in Washington. Politicians were entertained with beautiful starlets, secret funds, paid-for expensive vacations at the studio facilities all over the world. He was a man who knew how to use lawyers and the law to do financial murder; to steal and cheat. Or so Doran said. To me he sounded like any red-blooded American businessman.