The Player

  Praise for The Player:

  “One of the most wounding and satirical of all Hollywood exposes: dark and mordant … savage … A portrait of life among the high rollers and deal makers of a major Hollywood studio in the post—Golden Age. Unnerving … A nightmare rendered with icy dispassion.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “[A] surely crafted novel … that defines the machinery of moviedom in incisive vivid strokes … A winning black comedy.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Bizarre and brilliant … A grand guide through the private offices, board rooms, and restaurants where Hollywood deals—and throats—are cut.”

  —Boston Herald

  “Deliciously amoral. Just like Hollywood; full of asides and in-jokes and wisecracks.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “[A] memorably vivid Hollywood novel.”

  —Rolling Stone

  “Reminiscent of The Last Tycoon … suspense keeps you flipping the pages. The Player is thoroughly convincing, both as a portrait of a power broker and as a depiction of the stratagems within the coterie that runs Tinseltown.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “An unusually classy mystery.”

  —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  “Reverberates with the ghosts of Cain and Camus.”

  —Women’s Wear Daily

  “Gets inside Hollywood today…. What makes The Player such a standout work is that it examines the mind-set of the film industry and all its posturing behind the cameras…. It reveals a continuum of viciousness that seems indigenous to Hollywood.”

  —The San Diego Union

  “A thoroughly up-to-date fable that maybe Kafka would have written if he’d been employed at MGM. The book has a sinister inevitability about it and it’s probably as detailed an account of the contemporary Hollywood psyche as we’re likely to find in current fiction. Anyone who has some connection with the film industry should get a big, knowing kick from the book and never be able to look at a studio executive in quite the same light again. Michael Tolkin just about convinces us that the devil is alive and well and hanging out at Morton’s.”

  —Bret Easton Ellis

  “Icy irony and extreme accuracy.”

  —The Village Voice

  “A scathingly funny tale … a corrosive novel of Hollywood hustling.”

  —Premiere

  THE PLAYER

  ALSO BY MICHAEL TOLKIN

  The Return of the Player

  Among the Dead

  Under Radar

  Three Screenplays: The Player,

  The Rapture, The New Age

  THE PLAYER

  a novel by

  Michael Tolkin

  Copyright © 1988 by White Mountain Company

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  “Provide, Provide” copyright © 1936 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1964 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Copyright © 1969 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Reprinted from The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem, by permission of Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

  “To the Film Industry in Crisis” copyright © 1957 by Frank O’Hara.

  Reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tolkin, Michael.

  The player: a novel/by Michael Tolkin

  I. Title.

  PS3570.042781P55 1988 813′.54—dc19 87-33478

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4747-0

  Design by Laura Hough

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  This book was written with the good counsel

  of

  Wendy Mogel and Louis Breger

  This book is dedicated

  to

  Horace Beck and Olga Smyth,

  two fine teachers

  The witch that came (the withered hag)

  To wash the steps with pail and rag

  Was once the beauty Abishag,

  The picture pride of Hollywood.

  Too many fall from great and good

  For you to doubt the likelihood.

  Die early and avoid the fate.

  Or if predestined to die late,

  Make up your mind to die in state.

  Make the whole stock exchange your own!

  If need be occupy a throne,

  Where nobody can call you crone.

  Some have relied on what they knew,

  Others on being simply true.

  What worked for them might work for you.

  No memory of having starred

  Atones for later disregard

  Or keeps the end from being hard.

  Better to go down dignified

  With boughten friendship at your side

  Than none at all. Provide, provide!

  —Robert Frost,

  “Provide, Provide”

  Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants, nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruition is wedding Poetic Insight perpetually, nor you, promenading Grand Opera, obvious as an ear (though you are close to my heart), but you, Motion Picture Industry it’s you I love!

  In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.

  —Frank O’Hara,

  “To the Film Industry in Crisis”

  THE PLAYER

  One

  Just as Griffin suspected, there was a meeting in Levison’s office without him. From the path outside the administration building he could see the back of Levison’s couch on the second floor. Was the meeting over? Levison was shaking hands with someone; Griffin couldn’t see who it was. He knew he was watching the end of his job. He debated whether he should go to his office or return to the screening room he’d just left. He could use the phone there to call Jan, his secretary, for messages. If he went straight to his office, he would pass Levison’s, and he didn’t want Celia, Levison’s secretary to see him in this moment of shame. Well it is shame, he thought.

  He stared at the notebook in his hands and hated Levison for putting it there. Levison had asked him to watch the directing debut of a British producer, an old friend. And out of respect for Levison and his friendships, Griffin had made a careful assessment of the film, since Levison said he hadn’t time to see it before a meeting with the director. Did Levison really care about the film or his old friend? Not enough to screen the thing for himself. Twenty-one minutes into the movie, Griffin could have stopped it, because not enough had happened. He had stayed in the screening room to hide, because he knew that Levison needed him, literally, in the dark for a few hours. Griffin was used to hiding at the right moment. Once he had gone to Paris to hide, when a film he had supervised was coming out. The film was terrible, and he wanted to avoid the blame. That was only last year, when he had been heir apparent. Everyone thought Levison was finished, but Levison held on.

  He went back to the screening room. When he opened th
e door, he saw the production staff of a television show about to watch the film they had shot the day before. He didn’t know anyone’s name, but they all knew his. He apologized for interrupting them, someone asked if he wanted to stay. It was a transparent flattery, and he closed the door. The room across the hall was empty. He called Jan.

  “Griffin Mill’s office.”

  “It’s me.” He sounded weak, something caught in his throat.

  “You got another postcard. Maybe I should call Walter Stuckel.” Stuckel was head of studio security.

  “What does this one say?”

  He waited while Jan went through the pile of mail on her desk. “It says, ‘You said you’d get back to me. I’m still waiting.’”

  “What’s the picture?”

  “It’s a joke card. There’s a wagon pulled by mules, and in the wagon there’s this huge watermelon. It’s some kind of a trick picture. It says, ‘We grow’ em big in Texas.’ Come on, Griffin, let me call Walter.”

  “No. A watermelon? I think I know who it is.”

  “Tell me.”

  “If I tell you, you’ll tell Celia, and then everyone will know.”

  “So what, whoever it is who sends these cards looks like the jerk, not you.”

  “Trust me, it’s contagious.”

  “What is, looking like a fool?”

  “Yes. Besides, I know who it is, it’s either Aaron Jonas or Steve Baylen, probably Baylen.”

  “No,” said Jan, “I don’t think the cards are coming from an agent, I think your secret correspondent is a writer. If you ask me.”

  Griffin knew it was a writer. The cards began about four weeks ago, a few a week, and yesterday, one of them appeared in his mailbox at home. It was in his pocket now. He supposed he had been followed home. Friends have my address, he thought, but this isn’t from a friend. Why hadn’t he called Walter Stuckel? Why was he so scared of him?

  “Jan, trust me, this is some jerk friend of mine playing a stupid game. Let’s change the subject. Any calls?”

  “There’s a meeting of all the department heads in Levison’s office. You weren’t invited.”

  “That’s not a call.”

  “I thought you should know.”

  “Am I out?”

  “Who knows?”

  They said good-bye.

  It was March, and when Griffin stepped out of the editors’ building, the streets between the soundstages were empty. He wasn’t sure why, but the idea that in this stillness lay all that was Hollywood excited him; he was almost embarrassed by this excitement over nothing, because there were no hordes of Indians and armies of Napoleon wandering around the lot, there was no sense of activity. Almost everyone said they hated the harsh yellow light that bounced off the high walls of the stages, but Griffin was not depressed by this calm. He liked the way he always separated into parts in the worst of the midday sun. It reminded him of marijuana, the pleasant terror of getting stoned in the middle of the day, of marching in step with the significance of things. Hot bright noons in Burbank were a kind of cosmic experience for him, because they were pointless, because the only tonic for the light, which was, in some sense, redemption’s gleam, was money, work, authority. In what sense? he asked himself. In the sense that if Judgment Day is the only reason for conscience, then the bad feeling stirred by the light is an echo of some ultimate regret.

  Now he was mad at this writer who had been sending him postcards. He took yesterday’s card from his pocket. Paris Nightlife, the Eiffel Tower surrounded by cameos showing the Moulin Rouge, a fountain, Notre Dame. And the message. Typed, so the thin plastic coating of the card was broken, rippled: “You said you’d get back to me. We had a meeting, I told you my idea, you said you wanted to think about it, and you said that you’d get back to me. Well?”

  The first postcard had come with a short message: “You said you’d get back to me.” The handwriting was even, the letters a bit high and slanted but not eccentric, they were carefully spaced; it was like the impersonally romantic script of a love letter seen close-up in a movie. The postcard was probably from the early 1950s, a woman on the beach in Fort Lauderdale, under a bright orange umbrella. She wore extravagant sunglasses and a tortured smile. Griffin thought she would be happy that a Hollywood bigwig was finally looking at her. A few days later another postcard arrived, a glossy shot of the Eiffel Tower. The message was, “I’m waiting for your call.” The day after that the third card came, with only one word. “Well?” The card was a picture of THE LATEST ADDITION TO UNITED’S FRIENDSHIP FLEET, a shortened version of the Boeing 747.

  After that there were three more postcards, and none of them carried a message.

  Across the street, he saw Mary Netter and Drew Posner, from Marketing. He braced himself for their buoyant onslaught. Drew waved his hand like the kid in fifth grade who has the answer all the time.

  “Hey, Mister Vice President,” he said. Griffin tapped an invisible hat brim.

  “So cool,” said Mary. Mary had short hair; a month ago it had been a crew cut. Once, at a party, Drew asked Griffin if he’d like to rub his dick over Mary’s head. Mary’s laughter had embarrassed Griffin, and he felt that embarrassment as proof of something bad about himself, an inability to play.

  Levison’s meeting was over, Griffin could see the back of the empty sofa by the window. He took the long way around the building to his office, to avoid passing Celia. The end of his job was inevitable. There would be other work, other studios, but the glow around him was probably lost, and he would never be the head of production, not for a major studio, not for this studio or Universal or Disney or Columbia or Paramount or 20th-Century Fox. These were the last studios with property, with soundstages and back lots, where you could point to a building and say, “That was Alan Ladd’s dressing room” or “Over there we made Bringing Up Baby.” And if it was sentimental of him to get a little pleasure out of the history of these buildings, did that harm anyone? If the Writer knew he had held on for this last bad year with Levison because he didn’t want to leave the lot would he like Griffin a little, see him as just another human being with the full assembly of reasons to be unhappy? Would the Writer understand that even if Griffin were offered a great job as head of a company with offices in a tall building in Century City or Beverly Hills he might not want it, that the thought made him miserable? Orion and Tri-Star, big companies, were in office buildings, what difference did it make where they were? It just mattered to him, and he couldn’t resist the gloom that soon he would have to give up a real studio with a real gate, trade in a parking space with his name painted on a concrete bumper for a pass to an underground garage. He wanted to say, how can you make a movie in an office building? That was another sentimental thought, but he caught himself and resisted the attack. Maybe he wasn’t really sentimental enough. Wouldn’t the studio’s films have done better if he were more sentimental? Here he was, the centipede who tries to understand his own method, a sure way to stumble.

  None of this was a surprise. For a few months Griffin had felt a slight change in the number of calls Jan logged during the day. One afternoon while she was away from her desk, Griffin had opened her files and compared a few days of recent phone logs with the logs from the year before. A year ago, in three days Griffin had received two hundred and ninety-five. In the last three days he had received two hundred and eleven. He hadn’t counted the calls by category, but it looked at a few glances as though agents trying to sell him screenplays and directors were not calling him as often. He had no trouble getting calls returned, but something in the wind was telling people that Griffin Mill was not the best first choice anymore. Could the Writer sending him the postcards understand that they were in the same business, with the same rules for everyone?

  When he walked into his office, Jan tickled the air in front of her, grinning. There was a postcard propped against her typewriter. HOLLYWOOD AT NIGHT, THREE VIEWS OF THE GLAMOUR CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.

  “It went to Accounting by acc
ident, they just sent it over. Look on the back.”

  “No.”

  “Come on, it’s a girl who’s sending you these cards, it has to be.”

  Griffin picked the card up and turned it over. The message: “Is it me, or is it you?”

  “You were at a party,” said Jan, “and you told some girl you’d make her a star, and she went to bed with you. You said you’d call her and you never did. You flashed her that big lover-boy smile of yours and you caught her on it.”

  “I don’t have to lie to women.”

  “Honey, all men lie to women. It’s in the blood.”

  Griffin had an instant of clarity, and he smiled, he relaxed, he leaned forward, he brought his face near Jan’s, he liked himself for the first time in weeks. “You got me,” he said. “It doesn’t happen often. You know as a rule I don’t mess with actresses.”

  “But they have such nice legs.”

  “I’ll tell you the truth, it’s not the length, it’s the way they feel. It’s the skin. It’s how they get to be stars, too, it’s something about the way they radiate. I’ll tell you what happened. There was a party, I wasn’t drunk, but she was. She told me to take her home. I took her home. I stayed a few hours. It was fun.”

  “And now she wants you to make her a star. Except you don’t even remember her name. So you caught her on your smile. I hope she knows it’s like your car, that you have to give it back when you’re fired.”

  Griffin let the line pass, but he saw in Jan’s eyes that she wished she hadn’t said it. He pressed ahead with the story. “Are you ready for the punch line? She is a star. She’s a television star, and she wants to make it in the movies. And she knows she never will, but she wants to try. And she thought I could help her.”

  “So why doesn’t she sign her name? Maybe you’re lying right now. Maybe she isn’t a television star. How would you know, you don’t watch television. You’re ashamed to admit a one-night stand with a girl whose name you can’t remember.”

  “Maybe she isn’t a star?” Griffin said, trying to slump in defeat. Then he came back on the attack. “But you know why she won’t sign? She’s trying to be original. She thinks, of course I remember her, everyone else does. She didn’t sign the postcards the way bad writers who don’t have agents draw cartoons and write jokes on the envelopes of screenplays they send in to famous directors. They draw big noses sticking out of the flaps and stars around the directors’ names. They think that if they can’t be good, at least they can be different. They go to novelty shops that print YOUR NAME HERE on the headlines of phony front pages and send these stupid things as cover letters with their scripts. The headline says, STEVEN SPIELBERG WINS OSCAR FOR DIRECTING YOUR-NAME-HERE’S STUPID SCREENPLAY.”