Somebody's Darling Read online

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  THE “ALL THIS” THAT JILL PEEL WAS AFRAID OF WAS NOTHing less than impending fame. In three days’ time a picture she had directed would be premiered at the New York Film Festival. It was called Womanly Ways, and there was no doubt in my mind that it would make her famous, if only temporarily and for circumstantial reasons.

  First among the circumstantial reasons was simply that she was a woman. The studios were tired of having the women’s movement on their backs—even though, in their terms, its weight was not especially formidable. Several studios had been casting about rather timidly for some time, hoping to turn up a woman director they could more or less trust. Hollywood lives on rumor, and for several months rumors of which woman would land which directing plum kept certain segments of the populace agog. One heard talk of Shirley Clarke, of Eleanor Perry, even of Joan Didion. Obscure quantities were sometimes mentioned: Susan Sontag, two French women, and a Swedish documentarian. There were also some local candidates. Two very bright ladies had spent their lives in editing rooms, snipping and splicing, and a third was a highly competent casting director—any of the three would have been happy to be shoved behind a camera, but no executive quite had the nerve.

  Somehow none of the obvious prospects worked out, and the talk gradually trailed off. Joan Didion preferred to write novels. Susan Sontag, Shirley Clarke, and Eleanor Perry proved difficult, each in her own way; it was generally agreed that they were all much too New Yorky. The French women talked too fast, and the Swedish documentarian didn’t need Hollywood, or even want it. There were a couple of talented girls at U.C.L.A., but nobody was about to gamble on anyone young.

  For practical purposes, that left Jill Peel. She had been in Hollywood so long that everyone assumed they knew her. Up until her hour came round she had been quietly making a name for herself as an art director, a craft she had arrived at by a somewhat circuitous route.

  She had shown up in Hollywood in the late ’50s, fresh out of high school, and immediately landed a job as an animator. When she wasn’t animating she hung around U.C.L.A., auditing film classes, art classes, whatever. Three years later she had an Oscar, for an animated short called Mr. Molecule. The Oscar went to every head but hers. For the next few years every cartoon producer in town tried to hire her, and then to fuck her. I didn’t know her well in those years, but I eventually found out a good deal about her ups and downs, which included an early marriage and a child she couldn’t really cope with. Her second marriage, to a French cinematographer, was unlikely, but evidently it proved to be therapeutic. The cinematographer wanted to be a director, but in the long run he wasn’t obsessed enough. They wrote several scripts together, none of which ever quite got made. In Europe, where they lived for a time, she began to work as a set designer, and while the two of them were in Sicily, doing a picture, he left her for a younger woman.

  Jill came back to Hollywood, but not to cartoons. Henry Bennington, a stable older director with a lifetime of modest successes behind him (he got his Oscar in ’56, for Frosting on the Cake), used her on a couple of good pictures and touted her highly to anyone who would listen. Out of nearly thirty pictures, Henry Bennington had only had about four flops, so people listened. From set designing it was a comparatively short step to art direction, although, unfortunately, Henry Bennington wasn’t around to see Jill take it. His wife, never as stable as Henry, drove their car into an irrigation ditch south of Fresno, drowning them both.

  Leon O’Reilly, of all people, helped Jill to an immediate Oscar nomination as an art director. Leon had just had a tragedy in his life: his faithful secretary, Juney, whose devotion to her boss would have been rare anywhere in the world except Hollywood—where all the best secretaries are bound to their bosses with ties of steel—had killed herself in a particularly foolish way. She jumped off an overpass on the Hollywood Freeway during rush hour, a way out that would usually at least have got her headlines. In her case the headlines were several days late, due to the fact that she landed on top of a trailer truck. The truck was carrying three bulldozers north to Alaska—Juney landed in the seat of one of them, broke her fat, devoted neck, died, and was not discovered until the trucks were well up into British Columbia.

  That was the Hollywood of romance: a town where secretaries died for their bosses, one way or another. In a town with any story sense—much less any real respect for passion—Juney’s story might have resulted in a good film. But in the town we all know, and more or less love, and continue to work in, it resulted in nothing.

  Juney flung herself from the overpass because Leon, normally the most manageable of men and certainly the most predictable of producers, suddenly did something that no one—least of all Juney—would have predicted. He too had come to Hollywood in the ’50s, straight from Harvard, and had not budged since. The wife he brought with him did budge, however. She found the level of taste in L.A. insupportable—I heard her use that very word, several times—so after a few years, during which I guess she satisfied herself that she had tried, she went back to Greenwich, Connecticut, where I imagine the level of taste must be terrific.

  Leon survived her departure with the help of Juney, who spent the next thirteen or fourteen years taking very good care of him. A Swiss hotel would have had nothing on Juney when it comes to taking care, but there were limits to what one could do for Leon O’Reilly. His soul was no problem—Juney made it a home—but his body was something else. Perhaps his wife’s departure shocked him into a state of dormancy that lasted fourteen years. If true, it was a state from which Juney—in appearance she was not unlike a sea cow—was simply not the person to release him.

  At any rate, for several tranquil and productive years Leon was the straightest man in Hollywood. He didn’t smoke, he drank nothing more deadly than an occasional brandy and soda, and he had no affairs. The eight or ten pictures he produced in those years were among the worst stinkers of their era, but somehow they made money. Then, just after making a highly profitable stinker called Cloverleaf—about the biggest, most awe-inspiring L.A. freeway wreck of all time, three hundred cars totally destroyed—Leon, as if jolted from a long sleep, opened his eyes and discovered beautiful girls. It occurred to him, one day, that he too might have a beautiful girl, and the minute this novel thought entered his head he reverted, as it were, to his roots. He flew straight home to Binghampton, Mass., and married a remarkably beautiful Boston deb named Elizabeth (“Betsy”) Rousselet. A few days later, heartbroken, Juney dove onto the bulldozer.

  Jill had always thought Leon O’Reilly an uptight Eastern creep—though when it came to uptightness she really had no room to talk, and she had grown up about as far west as you can get. (She was from Santa Maria, a nondescript little town a couple of hundred miles up the coast.) But Jill, like everyone else in Hollywood, loved Juney, a good-hearted woman who didn’t mind that everyone in the industry knew she had a hopeless crush on a silly man. Juney was the archetypal studio secretary, a woman with no children, no hobbies, no boyfriends. Her life was Leon O’Reilly. The two of them worked almost around the clock, putting together his pictures—a quixotic pair, Leon the mad knight of Century City, Juney his faithful squire. What the rest of us took to be pretensions were to Juney grand visions, I guess.

  Anyway, Betsy Rousselet was too much. Juney didn’t bother adjusting. In a town filled with therapies of every description, she chose the simplest one.

  A little later, when Leon asked Jill to be the art director on Burning Deck, Jill accepted, in memory of Juney. In the ’60s, when Columbia was still over on Gower Street, she had had an office across the hall from Leon’s, and she and Juney had taken their lunch breaks together.

  “If Juney were alive, I’d turn him down in a minute,” Jill said. “She’d understand. But I can’t turn him down with her dead. I’ll just do this one picture.”

  Burning Deck—the one picture—took off like it was headed for Mars. It was, as one might guess, about a fire on a ship: in this case, an oil barge in the Pers
ian Gulf. It had terrorism; it had sex; Soraya, the former empress of Iran, played a bit part; and AI Pacino, the lead terrorist, got burned to a crisp fighting for his cause. America could be thought to be a nation of pyromaniacs from the way people flocked to that movie. In six months it had grossed $78 million, a record that stood for almost a year, until Jaws broke it. With one stroke, Burning Deck made three reputations: Leon’s (it was by far his biggest winner), Jilly Legendre’s (he directed it), and Bo Brimmer’s. Bo, with exquisite timing, had escaped from Metro and become Head of Production at Universal the very week that Leon brought the project in.

  None of this had much to do with Jill, not even the fact that the director she ended up working for had a first name so much like her own that the gossip columnists immediately tried to conjure up a romance between them. If there’s one thing Hollywood adores, it’s alliteration. While the picture was being shot, and for a few months after its release, all the smart magazines published rumors that Jill and Jilly were becoming—as they still love to put it—“more than friends.”

  In fact, Jill and Jilly got on admirably, but it was because they were both dead-serious professionals. Obsessive professionals, in fact. Jilly Legendre was an interesting filmmaker, and in this instance it didn’t hurt any that he had close ties to the international jet set. Not only did he coax Soraya into performing, but he also persuaded an old family friend, Aristotle Onassis, to rent Universal an oil barge at a very cheap rate.

  The picture was really Bo Brimmer’s gamble. It cost a lot of money, and if it hadn’t worked he would have probably been out on his ass. But what Leon O’Reilly had done, quite inadvertently, was bring together the two hardest working, most upwardly mobile young hustlers in Hollywood: Jilly, the French-Swiss-Creole aristocrat, who weighed in at the time at close to 300 poorly distributed pounds, and Bo, 115 pounds soaking wet, the former paperboy from Little Rock who still looked like a paperboy from Little Rock.

  Lost in the shuffle, ironically, was Betsy Rousselet O’Reilly. She couldn’t stand the Persian Gulf, nor the un-Bostonian groves of Holmby Hills. In less than a year she was back in the East. Poor Juney should have hung in there.

  Jill, of course, did her usual thorough job. She probably should have had an Oscar for it, but the nod that year went to an aging Austrian art director named Bruno Himmel—an old drinking buddy of mine. Bruno had worked on a rather ham-handed remake of King Solomon’s Mines, a case of misjudgment that cost Fox what everyone kindly hoped were its last shekels. It cost Bruno too: one night in the bush, drunk out of his skull and bored with listening to lions grunt, he wandered off to the equipment shed, got his feet tangled up, and fell into a pile of assegais, poking out one of his piercing blue eyes. I seem to have been the only person hardhearted enough to be disgruntled when the Academy rewarded this act of clumsiness with an Oscar, mostly because I know Bruno for the old pussy-hound that he is. With his snow-white hair, his European good health, and his raffish eye patch, he’ll be lucky not to fuck his brains out.

  In any case, when the studios finally concluded that there might be PR benefits to letting a woman direct, there was Jill. Her competence was one of the givens of the industry. She had one Oscar in her pocket, and, had it not been for a pile of assegais, would have had another. She was known to be stubborn, but then all directors were stubborn—none of them ever willingly submitted to the rule of reason.

  What clinched it, though, was that Jill actually had something essential, over and above her undoubted talent: she had a produceable script. Jill and two actor friends, Pete Sweet and Anna Lyle, had done the script way back in the ’60s, when the three of them had shared rent on a little beach house near Malibu. The script had been passed around Hollywood for so long that everyone had forgotten it existed—everyone, that is, except Lulu Dickey, the agent, and old Aaron Mondschiem, the patriarch of Paramount. In this case, Mr. Mond, as he liked to be called, was one step ahead of the redoubtable Lulu.

  He bought the script and Jill and, what was most surprising, Pete Sweet and Anna Lyle, only a day or two before Lulu Dickey managed to suck the script out of her formidable memory. Her uncharacteristic delay in remembering it seems to have been caused by a troublesome boyfriend, a rock star named Digby Buttons, who kept overdosing every few weeks. Lulu was always in the papers, trailing along as Digby was wheeled into or out of one hospital after another. She was six feet three and crazy-looking—the scandal sheets just couldn’t get enough of the two of them.

  In this case, love proved bad for business, giving point, in fact, to one of Lulu’s most famous statements, which was: “Fucking clouds the mind.” She made the remark in an interview with Women’s Wear Daily, when that paper chose to honor her ascendance as an agent. They broke precedent and ran it verbatim, without even putting in any little dashes. Since it brought her a degree or two more celebrity, Lulu adopted the remark as her motto, and had it engraved on an ivory-and-gold plaque, which hung in her office.

  In this case it didn’t seem quite applicable, since Digby was known to be far too dopey to get it up, even if he hadn’t been more gay than not. In fact, Lulu hated Jill and had thrown the script away years before—a rare professional slip. The minute she remembered it, without even bothering to steal a copy and reread it, she got on the phone to Bo Brimmer and offered him a package which included Jill to direct, Toole Peters (the hottest screenwriter in town) to do a rewrite, and Sherry Solaré to star. Since Sherry was one of the two immediately finance­able female stars left, Bo was intrigued. He had never seen the script—it had been a forgotten hunk of paper before he even arrived in town—but he was ready to buy the package, contingent only upon something resembling producibility.

  When Lulu found out, from Jill, that Aaron Mondschiem had just bought the script, she drove home and went into such a froth that two maids quit and Digby Buttons decided he’d rather live in a hospital. Then she calmed down, abandoned her hopes of a coup, and set about a salvage operation. Before the picture was even shot she had talked both Pete Sweet and Anna Lyle into dumping their agents and signing up with her. It was her way of covering the only bets that Mr. Mond had left uncovered.

  Pete and Anna were both good actors whose careers had never been commensurate with their abilities. It’s a common story in Hollywood—too common to dwell on. Mostly they did television work—spots on Gunsmoke and Marcus Welby and the like. A lot of it was done at Warners, so I bumped into them from time to time. Anna was a bosomy, slightly blowsy brunette with a permanently distracted expression and a considerable flair for comedy. If she had come along in the ’50s, when she was slimmer, she might have made it to the level of Linda Darnell, or even Ann Sheridan, but probably she wouldn’t have. Her features weren’t quite good enough. Pete was a big, jowly guy with sorrowful eyes and a kind of slow, self-deprecating charm.

  I’m sure they were excited that their script had finally sold, and happy that they were going to get to act in it—still, Lulu Dickey’s invitation must have been the real shocker. Anyone can finally luck into a picture, if they hang around long enough and keep working, but to be courted by Lulu was something else again. What it meant was that Lulu smelled a winner. Old Aaron smelled it too, and the scent had carried all the way to Bo Brimmer, over the hills in Studio City. How this could be, with the script unrevised in nearly a decade, an untried director at the helm, and not a frame shot, was a puzzle to all—but there it was. The three quickest noses in Hollywood had sniffed out Womanly Ways, and of the three, the old man’s had been the quickest.

  I was happy about the deal, myself, partly for Jill but mostly for Pete and Anna. They were members of Hollywood’s oldest club: the ones who wait. They weren’t has-beens, because they had never been. Three minutes on The Waltons or ten minutes in an overbudgeted Western shot in Old Tucson was what they thought of as good exposure. Only the most compulsive film buffs would have known their names: the kind of people who, in another sport, can tell you the batting average of every third baseman Detroit has ever
had. Pete and Anna were just part of the Hollywood troops, camping in the canyons, moving out to the Valley and then back to Santa Monica, then back to the Valley again, getting married and divorced, fucked and fucked over, and, I would imagine, a little more strung out all the time. They were not in shape, like Jill, who had done nothing but work since she came to L.A. They had been waiting a long time, and with people like that you never know for sure what will happen, not until the cameras begin to roll.

  Bo Brimmer, smart as he is, would never have cast them. Bo was too new to it all—he still worked in concepts. Old Aaron was different. People—and of course the press—liked to call him an old fox, an absurd delicacy on their part. That wheezing, sulking, malign old man, with the longest and for all I know the strongest jaw in America, was no fox. He was an old wolf, looking down from his floodlit lair atop Mulholland Drive at the city he had known since 1912. I like to think that old Aaron stayed up there, in those dry, unfashionable hills above the Hollywood Freeway, so he could see both directions, keep his eye on it all. His house was at the highest point in the hills, giving him a view of both the basin and the Valley.

  His jaw was so long that if you were standing too close to him and he turned suddenly his chin could knock you down: I saw it happen, at a party in the ’30s. The person he knocked down was a meek little character actor named Sweeney McCaffrey, whose temple was just on a level with Aaron’s chin. He wouldn’t help you up, either: in his view you shouldn’t have been standing so close. He was the old wolf of the hills, and he cast Pete and Anna out of instinct—not an instinct about them, an instinct about Jill. He let her have her friends, knowing that if he did she’d make it work.

  He was right, too. Under Jill’s direction they both gave fine performances. Of course the fact that they had written the roles for themselves didn’t hurt anything. Womanly Ways was about the wife of the world’s most successful automobile dealer. Such a supersalesman actually exists, in California; for many years he has been an all-too-familiar figure to people who watch late movies on TV. Jill and Pete and Anna, after years of having this superenergetic figure interrupt their favorite flicks in order to prance up and down in front of thousands of new cars, finally stopped detesting him and began to be curious about him. Then Pete thought of a wonderfully grisly opening. The salesman frequently brought lions and elephants and other exotic beasts into his salesman act, and he also kept donkeys and ponies and goats and what-have-you so the kiddies could be kept amused while their parents were filling out credit forms. Pete’s idea was to have one of the lions go berserk, maul the supersalesman for a while, then run off with a donkey in its mouth. All this would be happening on live TV, of course, and we would see it over the shoulder of the salesman’s wife, alone in her huge bed in their home in the Palisades.