16

Pop died in the summer of my high school graduation, and I heaved with sobs day and night for weeks. I never knew a human body could contain so many tears. I believed him to be happy now and free, so the tears were not for him. They were for me. I just loved him so much. I had no thoughts of college. I would work, I decided, and I went to Los Angeles and lived with Lourdes and her husband, Bobby, for a couple of years. They had a house in the San Fernando Valley where the scent of orange blossoms mixed with that of the loam in flower planters out in front of so many newly built tract houses, and the scent was so sweet and so pure I would deeply inhale it and wonder what I ever could have done to deserve it. Lourdes and Bobby were doing quite well, and worked at Hanna-Barbera. They were movie cartoon artists. I asked Lourdes if it ever made her think about my paint sets, and she grimaced and then she laughed and nodded and said, “Oh, yeah!” She and Bobby had a lot of movie contacts and I wound up with a job as a production assistant at Paramount Pictures. I wanted to act and “do voices” but then little by little I started to write, if only as a way of trying to break into acting. The quickest and easiest path to success, I believed, was the so-called high-concept movie idea. This was basically a dynamite premise for a movie that you could tell to the studio “suits” in a single sentence before they’d give you coffee or water or even an undoctored Vanti Papaya—for example, “Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde,” or “Bonnie and Clydene,” or “All the men in the world wake up one day to find out that all the women in the world have disappeared.” And then the probing queries: “This thing contemporary or a costumer?” or “Is there a part for Asa Maynor?” You were lucky when the questions weren’t deeper than that, like, “What happens when the men find this out?” or “How is life supposed to go on? Do the women reappear one day looking better?” Any query at all like these was certain trouble, as was also any ill-advised attempt on your part to adapt the old “total topic shutdown” formula and parry, “Well, now how would Bernard Shaw or Fritz Lang have worked it out?” I made a slew of failed high-concept attempts. One was “Hammacher and Schlemmer are Israeli agents who’ve been tied to each other for years while hunting Hitler’s private secretary, Martin Bormann, and it’s the thirtieth anniversary of the start of the hunt and one of them has forgotten.”

Nobody liked this.

Another one I pitched was, “God and the Devil meet for truce talks at four in the morning in the Carnegie Deli.”

Nobody liked this one either.

Those were the better ones.

It might have helped, I suppose, if I’d also had “high-impact” titles for my stories in the vein of My Stepmother Is an Alien, or the film’s original title, Who Knew. It made me wonder whether The Brothers Karamazov would have ever come down to us as a classic if its title had been The Karamazov Brothers. Who knows?

I got lucky. Columbia Pictures finally bit: they bought my high concept, paid me peanuts to write the treatment and then, liking it, cashews for writing the script, which was made—and so was I because the film made money, big money, which meant I could write a few flops in a row and it really wouldn’t matter inasmuch as my name would be forever entwined with that first hugely profitable hit.

I didn’t walk anymore. I strutted.

Bad, Joey! Bad! Pride bad!

Especially the false kind.

I was taught not to strut anymore but to walk, and very slowly at that, by “The King,” Elvis Presley. MGM had hired me to write his next film. Wow! Was I not the Himalayan cat’s rectum?! This delusional hubris ended when I met another screenwriter at the water cooler, which was far down the hall from my office—an unfortunate distance inasmuch as if I happened to have writer’s block on any day, the long walk for water turned into a confidence-killing field because all the offices along that hallway were occupied by writers, and the sound of twenty electric typewriters clattering away at warp speed drove me absolutely bonkers and I would find myself muttering a litany consisting of the two words “Hostile assholes!” as I made the dreaded trips back and forth. But then maybe it was worth it because that’s how I met Bill Faye, a middle-aged, heavyset man with a fuzz of gray hair and the milk of human kindness all over his face. He’d written dozens of the trickiest kind of fiction, the short story, for The Saturday Evening Post and we got friendly and on breaks we would visit and schmooze. One of those times he took a call from an editor at the Post asking if he “had anything in his trunk,” to which Bill said, “I’m empty,” and the editor said, “Okay, do the boxing one again.”

I was green, if not livid, with envy.

“Who are you working for?” I asked him one day.

“Ted Richmond.”

“Oh, really? Me too,” I remarked. “Nice guy.”

An affable and chatty man who said he loved to smoke cigars in his bath-bathtub “or any warm Jacuzzi-type thing,” Richmond had turned to producing after years of being Tyrone Power’s publicist.

“Yes, he is a nice man,” was Faye’s answer, the same one he would have given about either Jack Oakie or the Marquis de Sade. I never heard him say anything bad about anyone.

“And so what are you writing?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s a boxing thing. Kid Galahad. It’s for Elvis.”

My brow wrinkled up. I said, “For who?”

Oh, well, I guess you can imagine how both of us were flummoxed when I said that my script was for Elvis too. It got even worse when we started asking around and it turned out that because of his packed fixed-concert schedule and the need to be sure that by a “date certain” there’d be a screenplay that both MGM and Elvis liked, in addition to me and Bill Faye there were three other Elvis screenplay writers!

And this, my dear children, is how El Bueno lost his strut.

And learned to walk very slowly.

Meantime, as almost every detective in a British TV series is constantly saying, “May I have a word?” You think American movies are worse now than ever and getting worse every year? Okay, they stink to high heaven. The old-time studio chiefs loved movies. Harry Cohn said he kissed the feet of talent, whereas today most studio executives don’t even like movies—the only thing that excites them is “the deal.” Except for that, though, the suits behind the choices being made these days are the same as back then, except they’re forty to fifty years younger. Nurse Bloor isn’t out of the mainstream. Fling a Frisbee out a second-floor movie studio window and I promise you that one out of two will hit somebody just like Sam Kaddish, the oldster who once ran Kaddish Studios. He hired me to write a screenplay based on an idea I had pitched and which he liked, but when I’d finished it he called me into his office and told me that he wanted some major changes made in accordance with specific ideas that he had, or that maybe his niece or his granddaughter had, and when he’d finished I just sat there and thought for a while, and then I told him that the changes he’d proposed would be ruinous. “You’re telling me you refuse to make the changes?” he huffed, and then hoping to win him over with diplomacy, and pretty much oozing a sympathetic and complete understanding of his views, I said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Kaddish, really very very sorry, but I just can’t be a party to the mindless destruction of this material.” I was fired, and if the grounds were for stupidity, justly. Another writer was hired, a very good one in fact, but unfortunately highly obedient, and he rendered unto Kaddish every change, every scene, every ditsy line of dialogue he wanted and the picture was made and released and lost more money than any other studio film ever made. About nine years later my agent H. N. Swanson, or “Swanny” as he was called, went to see Kaddish, who was looking for a writer to adapt a big bestselling novel for the screen. Swanny had a little black book that he carried around in a jacket vest pocket to remind him of the names of the writers he represented and how much in commissions he was owed on the King James Bible, and he hauled it out now, flipped through some pages, and then looked up and said, “How about Joseph El Bueno?”

Kaddish’s eyebrows sickled up in horror and he leaned back aghast, his manicured fingertips gripping the edge of his desktop tightly and his knuckles turning white as, “El Bueno?” he thundered. “El Bueno? Don’t even mention his name in these premises! That phony bullshit artist was connected with the biggest disaster of my professional career!” That’s the world I was living in, dear hearts, and while I’m really not sure what that says about me, I not only survived but did well: married a wonderful girl, a set designer; had a house in Encino with a view, and pretty much kept my head down and tried to be good, not exactly a breeze in the movie business with all those gorgeous starlets running around on the loose. But to help me there was prayer of both kinds, Pop’s and Jane’s, and somehow I managed to skate past the abyss.

Barely.

But a win is still a win.