West of Paradise Read online

  “I always imagined if I had been his love instead of Zelda, I could have saved him. Saved him from drink, saved him from his lack of belief in himself. Talked him out of his conviction that there were no second acts in American lives. Given him a second act. Here, in the place where his life ended. The last frontier of the American dream, where things still happen Overnight.” She capitalized the word with her inflection. “Instant love, instant recognition, instant table from the headwaiter. Where he wrote his last book, but only a fragment. The Last Tycoon.”

  “You going to finish it for him?”

  “I wouldn’t presume to try. But the fascination he had with the prototype of the Hollywood producer, the character of Monroe Stahr…”

  “He had Irving Thalberg for a model. A genius. A visionary. An infant industry that had magic. And you’ve got this prick.”

  “How do you know there wasn’t some aspect of Larry Drayco’s life that was memorable? ‘Action is character,’ Fitzgerald said. Maybe Drayco once did something … meaningful. An act that ennobled his life.”

  “You’re not a romantic. You’re delusional.”

  “Maybe I could find it. What made him matter.”

  “Like redeeming social significance in pornography?”

  “It’s worth a try.”

  “And I thought I was the one who was stoned,” said Wilton. “Turn left at the next intersection.”

  A Party at Wolfgang Puck’s

  The parking attendants at Wolfgang Puck’s were as good-looking as some movie actors. Some movie actors were as good-looking as parking attendants. And for good reason: they had once been them. Harrison Ford had been a carpenter, so a raft of carpenters still had the dream. Demi Moore had come from a trailer park. Anything was possible.

  The parking attendant who opened the door for Samantha Chatsworth, West Coast editor of East, was a cast-off lover of Norman Jessup, the town’s most powerful producer. Norman had never promised him anything, as he never promised any of them anything. Still, it was a little humiliating for the parking attendant to open the door for a woman he had sat on the right of at a black-tie dinner party when he was in favor. But since he was now in a different kind of uniform, she didn’t recognize him, so he didn’t have to worry.

  “Be careful with the Rolls,” she said.

  “I’d be careful even if it was only a Porsche, ma’am,” he said, despising her.

  As she did not look at or hear him, and since feeling what other people felt was not her strongest suit, the moment was lost on her. Most moments that would not make good stories for the magazine or photo opportunities or a little good late-night gossip were lost on her. And her focus right now was strictly on the duchess, helped from the other side of the limo by an even better-looking attendant than the one helping Samantha. The Silver Cloud Samantha had succeeded in promoting for the duchess pulled away as a swarm of photographers descended.

  The shoes the former duchess wore, though no longer Cinderella’s slippers, were Manolo Blahnik, their straps snapped by one alert paparazzi who knew that unusual shots of Wendy were at a premium. So far, there had been no glut of her toes. She was dressed in the dark, dark, dark blue that was this season’s fashion substitute for black, unless one was in genuine mourning.

  The duchess was not. She had known the fallen producer only from a dinner party he paid a great deal to her favorite charity to attend, one of the few there who hadn’t toadied or fussed, so she’d liked him. The scandalous tales that broke out like a fever within hours of his death, along with the vilifying chapter in the book, had made her decide to go to his funeral. She knew firsthand what cormorants fed off idle talk. In her own way, she was grieving, if not for him, for the death of decency. For a lost time when people left each other alone.

  “I’m still not sure I should have let you come,” Samantha said, in a British accent that outstripped the duchess’s.

  “He was generous to the children’s hospital,” the ex-duchess said in a gentle tone, but with a slight edge to it, concluding that argument. Strength, like knowing exactly what to wear, had come unexpectedly to her, and she was still trying it on.

  Photographers continued to take her picture, from every conceivable angle, shouting “Your Highness! Your Highness!”—a term that no longer applied. Bureaus and worldwide services had an insatiable appetite for her photo. But in this environment, her looks seemed a little plain, almost homely. She could not hold a physical candle to movie stars, whom Americans had made their aristocracy, as they had made politicians into movie stars, if for only one Kennedy season. Since there was no royalty in America, films had given the nation the closest it could come to lineage. So, when an indisputable blueblood fell into the place, no one knew quite what to do, besides invite her to everything.

  “Samantha!” Wilton cried, as he got out of his car, waving. “Here’s someone you have to meet!”

  The slender blond woman smiled tolerantly, already having at her side the only one at the event who really mattered, and continued to steer the duchess through the crowd like a prize float in the Rose Bowl parade. But she did make a step in Wilton’s direction, since she found him amusing, a word she had learned to use rather than fun.

  “This is Kate Donnelly,” Wilton said, proprietarily, and put his hand to Kate’s waist. “She’s F. Scott Fitzgerald’s granddaughter.” He pinched Kate into silence.

  “Really,” Samantha said, obviously impressed, and gave her her card. “You must call me. We’ll lunch.” She turned to introduce the duchess.

  “Why would you tell a lie like that?” Kate whispered, as though there were degrees of lies. In spite of his pinching her into silence, once past the shock, she’d been moved to dispute him. But as she’d already transgressed by being in a place she didn’t belong, she’d kept quiet. And the card with its raised lettering felt good in her hand. East magazine, it said. The best magazine in the country.

  “It’s not a lie, it’s a fable.” Wilton edged his way into the main room of the restaurant. “This whole town is filled with fabulists. They don’t even know what they’re making up.” He grabbed an hors d’oeuvre from a passing tray and popped it into his mouth. “You’re only as good as your last picture, and you haven’t made any.”

  Past his bantering mouth she could see Norman Jessup in deep conversation with Victor Lippton, the tobacco heir, who’d just taken over Cosmos Pictures. And not a moment too soon, the wags had noted, what with Congress uncovering amounts of nicotine doctored to keep smokers hooked, and Jesse Helms having to seem friendly to Vietnam to try and help the tobacco industry. Lippton had shaved off his beard since coming to Hollywood, but Kate still recognized him from the leonine mane of golden hair and the exquisite woman on his arm, the wife said to be even richer than he was, the daughter of a Hong Kong billionaire.

  There was a stunning woman with Jessup as well, the fashion model Carina. Their engagement had been announced in a very social way in The New York Times, besides the trades.

  “You want to find out what you need to know for your book,” Wilton was saying, munching, “leave your credits to me. People will only accept you if they think you’re somebody.”

  He took her by the hand and whooshed through the proceedings as though lightened with helium, slightly above it all, nodding, smiling, taking stock of those attending. “What a pity Mavis isn’t here to cover the funeral. She would have given it an A.”

  “Mavis?”

  “A gossip columnist who used to rate parties. Her husband left her for another man. She felt so vulnerable she stopped being vicious, lost her power, and fell mortally ill. No one even visited her in the hospital but her hairdresser, a genuine act of allegiance since she’d lost most of her hair. She died. Nobody came.

  “Perry!” he called out to a well-known agent. “I want you to meet someone. She has an unpublished manuscript by her grandfather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, that would make a terrific movie!” He pinched her again.

  “Fitzgerald!” Perry said.
“My favorite.”

  “Kate Donnelly, Perry Zemmis. Agent, producer, former studio head, manager, Father of the Year…”

  “Ease up,” Perry said, and ran a big hand through a shock of silvering black hair. “This ain’t my funeral.”

  “Were you close to Drayco?” Kate asked.

  “Not so close that he could sting me,” said Perry. “Kate Donnelly, huh?” His black eyes, flat, took her in, Rolodexing her name. “What’s the story?”

  “It’s sort of a sequin to The Last Tycoon,” Wilton said, and chuckled. “Really, it’s a sequel, but in this town…”

  “I meant the personal story,” said Perry, the eyes suddenly taking on some depth, little flecks appearing like lights around his irises, x-raying her. “Are you involved? Married? Divorced?”

  “She’s new in town,” Wilton said.

  By the bar, Charley Best was talking to Sarah Nash. Already Kate had picked up the darting attention of the local residents, though her eyes stayed fixed on Perry. But she could hear Charley’s voice, grainier than it had been when he was in his prime, the number one box office draw.

  “I had the best time of anyone. I was King Kong. I have no complaints,” he was telling Sarah.

  “How unlike you. No whining. So self-effacing.”

  “You better explain to Brandy what that means.” He turned to the buoy-breasted blonde. “Sarah was a producer once, but now she’s gone all literary.”

  “Do you know what literary means?” Sarah asked Brandy.

  “It means you knew Swifty Lazar,” the blonde said.

  “And you thought I liked her for her body,” beamed Charley.

  “You good with kids?” Perry asked Kate. “My wife is the greatest with kids. Unfortunately she can’t have any of her own, but we’ve adopted five—”

  “They’re crippled,” Wilton said.

  “Where you been living, on the moon?” Perry said, annoyed. “They’re not even called handicapped anymore. Crooks in Washington are now referred to as ‘ethically challenged.’”

  “Perry knows a lot about Washington,” Wilton said. “Along with Father of the Year, he’s been named West Coast Political Coordinator of the Decade. That means he’s raised and contributed enough money so that if his candidate gets in, he’s up for ambassador.”

  “Mere speculation.”

  “What country?”

  “Tonia was hoping Italy, but I’d settle for Holland.”

  “Greenhouses that grow grass along with tulips. Open bars that sell hash,” said Wilton dreamily. “The French are highly critical of the Dutch, you know. All the Froggies do is set off bombs in the Pacific, sabotage Greenpeace, and have a right wing that’s worse than Germany’s.”

  “I’ll try not to ask for Paris,” Perry said. “Fitzgerald. What a great writer. A shame he blew his brains out.”

  “That was Hemingway,” noted Wilton.

  “But they were very good friends,” Kate said quickly, already understanding the politics of the land was appeasement.

  “How good a friend could he have been, that he wrote Fitzgerald had a little dick?” Perry asked.

  “You read A Moveable Feast?” Kate said, astonished.

  “I saw the coverage. We were thinking of using the title for a movie on Wolfgang.”

  “Puck,” translated Wilton for Kate. “This is his restaurant.”

  “Some writer, that Hemingway,” Perry mused.

  “I remember in my youth,” said Wilton, “I was in Charley Best’s pool with Swifty Lazar, and Hemingway had just published ‘The Dangerous Summer’ in Life magazine, about the rivalry between Ordonez and Dominguin. And I asked Swifty if he had read it, and he said, ‘No, but I saw the bullfights.’” Wilton laughed.

  “What’s funny about that?” asked Perry.

  “Like, ‘No, but I saw the movie.’”

  “You find it comical to be on the inside? You wouldn’t have beat your ass to Pamplona if you were invited?”

  “I wasn’t saying…”

  “He’s frequent flyer mileage–challenged,” said Kate.

  “Quick. I like quick,” Perry said, standing up to his full height now, so he could lean over her. “I forgive him because he’s with you.”

  “Forgive me for what?”

  “For being insensitive to Fitzgerald’s having a little dick.”

  “I heard that Jake Alonzo has none at all,” said Arthur Finster, the publisher, hovering behind them, eating an hors d’oeuvre.

  “Is he here?” Kate asked, trying not to seem too excited.

  “Why would you care, when he has no dick?” Perry asked.

  “He’s a fabulous actor,” Kate said.

  “You think he can act like he’s fucking?” asked Perry.

  “Arthur, why don’t you publish a book about the size of movie star dicks?” asked Wilton.

  “We were going to incorporate it into the hooker book, but it seemed a little tasteless.”

  A little of what Wilton was drinking shot out of his nose.

  * * *

  By the buffet table, Norman Jessup prepared a plate of hors d’oeuvres for the reed-slender Carina, spooned some caviar into her mouth. “What a touching display of bisexuality,” Sarah Nash observed.

  “You better get off his case,” advised Charley Best. “He doesn’t make a good enemy.”

  “He didn’t make that good a friend,” said Sarah, sipping a Singapore Sling the color of the center path of her hair.

  “Funny. That’s what he says about you. How much did that trial cost him?”

  “Court costs and lawyers’ fees. He could afford it.”

  “He isn’t a man who likes to lose.”

  “He isn’t a man,” said Sarah. “A shame he’s still pretending.”

  “You still shouldn’t have outed him in print. No wonder he sued.”

  “That wasn’t what he sued for. Truth is a defense in libel. All I had to do to prove he was gay was produce a few of his squeezes. There’s one parking cars outside.”

  “So what was the suit then, exactly?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Sarah looked suddenly old, the punch gone even from the combative scarlet of her spikes. “It took years out of my life.”

  “But you won.”

  “Nobody wins in a lawsuit but the lawyers.”

  “Just tell me what it said on the subpoena. I’m thinking of sending Brandy to law school.”

  Sarah gulped her drink. “Fraud and breach of contract.”

  “You had a contract not to blow the whistle on him?”

  “He claimed we had an oral contract.”

  Charley snickered. “Well, as Sam Goldwyn said, ‘An oral contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.’”

  * * *

  On the far side of the buffet table Rex Hanson, producer of most of the glittering successes of the fifties, stood untalked to, his face a mask of ill-concealed grief, his toupee more of a wiglet. It had been decades since he’d made a film, years since anyone who could green-light a project had even asked him to lunch. He was a man who had made not just movies, but careers. He did so by giving other people an endless supply of style, while he himself had the grace and generosity of spirit not to mind that he was rather bland. He had put a whole studio in the black. A few of the people who ran that studio were still in power. But he couldn’t get them on the phone. The only one who returned his calls, and always on the same day, was Darcy Linette, the current head of Marathon, a woman who not only knew how to play the game, but made people feel they mattered, and kept all her friends, even when they were no longer—as they said in Hollywood—bankable. Rex was no longer bankable.

  Gazing into the crowd that exemplified the full extent of his loss, he stood white-faced and frail at the edge of the gathering, tears glistening on his cheeks. Another good friend of Darcy’s, a once-powerful gossip columnist who’d lost her clout because she wasn’t shallow enough to be manipulated, proved to be far more intelligent than anyone e
xpected, was good to her parents, and interested in God, made her way to Rex and touched his shoulder consolingly. “I’m so glad to see you,” she said, kindly. “A real producer. A man who loved movies. A fan. You’re a vanishing breed, Rex.”

  He wept openly now, his thin shoulders wracked with sobs. She embraced him.

  “I didn’t realize you were so close to Drayco.”

  “I couldn’t stand the son of a bitch. I only came as a favor to Darcy. I knew she’d have trouble pulling a crowd.”

  “Then why are you crying?”

  “Dead, he has a better chance of making a deal than I do.”

  * * *

  “Why is Algernon Reddy here?” Kate asked Wilton. Among her other reading materials to acquaint herself with the culture of the city, sub- in certain cases, was the L.A. Weekly, an underground publication that had profiled him. He was no less vocal about the fact that he was grievously ill than he’d been about his drug usage, except that in this case there was no chance of going to jail. “Was he friendly with Larry?”

  “He’s friendly with Death,” Wilton said. “Maybe he’s here to remind us that the Reaper isn’t that Grim. Or maybe he’s reminding himself.”

  “He’s still very handsome.” Kate noted the fine jut of jaw, starkly angular cheeks beneath piercing blue eyes.

  “In the sixties he was known as Ever Reddy,” Wilton said. “He had this legendary cock that hung to his knee, and the word was he could do it for days. Longer than Rubirosa. Such things are not listed in the Guinness Book of Records, but they have been chronicled by Harold Robbins, under fictional names of course. Then Algernon found God and this heiress who subsidized him.”

  “Are you Kate Donnelly?” a husky voice said behind her.

  The hairs on the back of Kate’s neck stood on end at the sound as she recognized the voice. “I’m Jake Alonzo,” he said as she turned. A genial smile softened the slightly battered face, the jagged nose that had once been part of a profile that made him too handsome for anything but romantic leads, the dark eyes set on reconstructed cheekbones. Somehow, the spectacle of that shattered face, no matter how cleverly put back together, rendered him even more appealing, evincing as it did that male beauty could be just as fragile and evanescent as a woman’s, especially when coupled with character flaws. The tree he had slammed into at the base of the Hollywood Hills had a plaque on it now, part of a prepaid pilgrimage for fans who couldn’t afford to go to Paris to visit Jim Morrison’s grave and weren’t quite sure where Kurt Cobain was buried. They celebrated Jake’s being alive, the fact that drugs had nearly killed him but missed. The darkness that had obviously been inside him was now evident in his face, getting him better, more shadowy roles. He held out his hand.