Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by John Niven
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: America
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Part Two: England
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Copyright
Music from Big Pink
Kill Your Friends
The Amateurs
The Second Coming
Cold Hands
For my brother, Gary Niven
(1968–2010)
HE RECROSSED HIS legs, comfortable in the club chair, and gazed out through the floor-to-ceiling windows, pretending to consider the question. From where he sat, nicely chilled by the AC, high in Century City (the shark tank of CAA just down the street), Kennedy Marr could look east and see downtown Los Angeles broiling in the July heat. ‘Broiling’. Ach – these Americans. He’d been here eight years and he still didn’t really know what ‘broiling’ was. Somewhere between frying and boiling? Wouldn’t ‘froiling’ be better? Whatever – it was just after 11 a.m. and it was already froiling. This demented city, this insult to nature: a garden carved out of desert basin. Like maintaining a 20,000-hectare greenhouse in the Arctic. He became aware that Dr Brendle – one of this demented city’s more demented creations, Kennedy thought – was looking at him expectantly, his pinched, serious face demanding an answer. Kennedy now realised he had completely forgotten what the question had been. Not a listener.
‘Could you, ah, could you rephrase that please?’ he said, smoothing down the leg of his linen suit, feeling the sluggish tug of the enormous screwdriver he’d guzzled at a bar off Santa Monica Boulevard on the way here, to fortify himself for this hellish, weekly appointment.
‘Well, another way of putting it,’ Brendle said, clicking his pen on and off, ‘would be to ask why, as an intelligent man whose working life must involve a good degree of self-analysis, do you continue to indulge in behaviour that you know is hurtful to those around you?’
Kennedy pretended to think about this while he framed his response. What he wanted to say was ‘Ach. Stick it up in your fucking hole.’ He imagined saying it, his accent hardening, veering from the soft, southern Irish brogue he used for general American consumption – restaurants, women, chat shows – into the rougher-edged Limerick estate one he was born with. Finally Kennedy said, ‘I don’t see how my work is that relevant, Les. You know, “be not too hasty to trust the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels but they live like men”, and all that bollocks.’
Brendle smiled. ‘I see.’ He made a note.
You see? You see what, you horrible fucking gobshite?
Brendle sighed, removed his glasses and rubbed his eyeballs. ‘I’m perfectly aware you don’t want to be here, Kennedy. I’m also aware that you, ah, preferred Dr Schlesinger.’ The bastard, Kennedy noticed, even allowed himself a little smile here. ‘And I’m also very conscious of Freud’s maxim that there are no people more impervious to psychoanalysis than the Irish. However, as you have no choice, wouldn’t it be an idea to try and obtain something from the experience? To try and understand why you’re here? It seems to me . . .’
Kennedy drifted off. He had another meeting to go to after this, at his manager’s office. Two meetings in one day? How on earth had he allowed this hell to be scheduled? He looked at the wall behind Brendle, at the framed diplomas and citations. Why was he here? He felt it was hard to answer this more simply than with R. P. McMurphy’s response to the same question: As near as I can figure out it’s cause I fight and fuck too much.
A couple of months back, in the spring, happy hour in the Powerhouse just off Hollywood Boulevard, a regular, fertile hunting ground where Kennedy had been enjoying his fifth or sixth Long Island iced tea of the evening, he’d got talking to a woman at the bar – in her early thirties, not unattractive, looked like she knew how to work a cock, so to speak – and it turned out she’d vaguely heard of him. She’d heard of one of his books and had certainly heard of some of the movies he’d worked on.
As they tended to when you were writing a novel, one sentence led to another and, pretty soon, Kennedy had his hand jammed inside her blouse, her hands in his thick black hair, in a booth in the back corner, near the pool table. Low orange light, the Stooges on the jukebox, their teeth mashing together and a nipple tautening pleasingly between his thumb and index finger when he heard the words, ‘HEY! WHAT THE FUCK!’ Quickly followed by ‘Oh shit’ from the owner of the nipple.
And the guy – this BAW (Boyfriend, Asshole, Whatever) – wasn’t bad, Kennedy had to admit later. He didn’t instantly swing a wild, badly aimed punch like so many would have done. Or start the trash-talking, giving his opponent valuable seconds to get to their feet. No. He simply reached across the table, grabbed Kennedy by the lapels – the lapels of a very nice suit from Gieves & Hawkes of No. 1 Savile Row as a matter of fact – and tore him out of the booth. Which was when Kennedy realised exactly how very big the fellow was. He wore some sort of mechanic’s outfit, with the name ‘Todd’ stitched above the breast pocket. This Todd held Kennedy up, Kennedy’s feet cartoon bicycling in the air, and held him close to his empurpling face. And it was a useful face this, no question – latticed with acne, a broad, trenched forehead, bulbous nose dotted with broken blood vessels, but the eyes hard and clear. He started to say, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re . . .’ which was a mistake. Because it gave Kennedy a moment to think.
With pub fighting, as in all the creative arts, it was crucial to avoid cliché. You had to come at it from strange angles and oblique perspectives. Your opening had to be strong and unexpected. Then, scene by scene, you had to make your point quickly and get the fuck out of there. In this last respect pub fighting was very much like the bitch Kennedy had betrayed the novel for. It was like screenwriting, where economy was king. So, while Todd tore on into the words ‘doing with my fucking girlfriend’, Kennedy cast his opening sentence.
He clamped his hands around the back of the guy’s head, lunged forward, and sank his teeth into the luscious strawberry of his nose.
Todd now tried to reverse his strategy – to get Kennedy the fuck off him. The two of them spun around the bar, smashing glasses, knocking into people, while the girlfriend screamed, Iggy howled ‘1969’, and blood streamed into Kennedy’s mouth. (Brief Aids fear.) Then, with a superhuman roar, Todd tore Kennedy off his face and threw him across the room, sending him smashing down onto the pool table. Man, that hurt. Kennedy looked up to see – bad this, very bad – his opponent hurtling towards him, his face and shirt covered in blood. Just as Todd reached him, drawing his fist back, getting ready to pummel Kennedy into the red baize, Kennedy became aware of shapes and noises behind the guy – black outlines, the crackle and fizz of radios, and the clatter of nightsticks being drawn in a confined wooden space.
The LAPD.
‘Thank you,’ Kennedy said, straightening his tie, wiping blood from his mouth, as two of the cops piled onto his thrashing, screaming foe, driving him to the floor, fumbling for the plastic cuffs.
‘You OK, buddy?’ the third cop was asking Kennedy.
‘I think so, officer,’ Kennedy panted, wiping blood that the cop had clearly taken to be his own from his face.
‘HEY! HEY!’ from the cops on the floor as Todd bucked and kicked and raged, throwing one of them off. ‘Shit. This guy. Here, get his—’
‘Fuck this – CLEAR!’ one of the cops shouted.
Kennedy picked up an abandoned whisky from a nearby table and drained it while he watched his opponent being tasered unconscious.
He really was, as his mother had often told him, born under a lucky star.
But not that lucky of course. Inevitably, boringly, there were many witnesses to how the actual thing got started, to the fact that Kennedy had drunk half a dozen cocktails, that he’d been cleaning the guy’s girlfriend’s lungs with his tongue, that he’d nearly chewed the guy’s hooter off. This being California and Kennedy being the only one in the bar with any real net worth, the lawsuits soon started flopping into the in-tray of the weary Bernie P. Wigram, Attorney-at-Law, Kennedy’s lawyer.
Todd was suing Kennedy for the cost of a new nose. His girlfriend was suing Kennedy for sexual assault. Some woman was suing Kennedy for the trauma of having witnessed the fight. The fucking bar was suing Kennedy. He was only mildly surprised that Iggy Pop wasn’t filing a suit for something like ‘conducting an unlicensed fight to the soundtrack of his music’. Everyone settled in the end – the whole tab running into the low six figures – and Kennedy went to court only on the assault charge. As it was his third appearance on a public disorder indictment in less than two years (punching out a director by the pool at the London Hotel in West Hollywood, urinating in someone’s garden on Fountain) the judge gave him a stark choice: court-mandated therapy or sixty days in jail. So here he was, gazing hatefully at Brendle and wishing for the umpteenth time that he’d taken the jail term. The forty-four-year-old author, the youngest writer ever to make the Booker shortlist: sitting in an office in Century City on a Monday morning listening to the wisdom and insight of a man with a lower-second-class degree from a state university.
And that crack about Dr Schlesinger . . .
Dr Nicole Schlesinger had been Brendle’s predecessor as Kennedy’s court-appointed therapist. And she’d been far more agreeable. So agreeable in fact that after their third session Kennedy had taken her for drinks at the Chateau Marmont, where he’d introduced her to Brett Ratner, Angelina Jolie and the concept of double Martinis.
He hadn’t even made it home that night. He fucked her in a bungalow out by the jungly pool at the Chateau.
Enter Dr Leslie Brendle. Who was now looking at him again, expecting an answer to something or other. God, he wanted a cigarette. ‘Sorry?’ Kennedy said.
Brendle sighed. ‘Let’s try something less contentious. Tell me about your weekend. What happened?’
‘Oh, the usual. Nothing much.’
But stuff always happened.
Friday night had been the usual: dinner with the boys at some new restaurant a friend of a friend was opening, then on to Soho House for drinks and then home in the early hours with some actress girl who had once been in an ABC sitcom. Saturday he’d had a quiet night in. Ah, well, after a fashion . . .
Kennedy had been stretched out in bed with whisky, cigar and laptop, quietly enjoying some YouPorn footage – a lesbian duo with a brace of draught-excluder-sized dildos – when a Skype call burbled through from a girl called Megan he’d met in New York a few months back. He clicked on ‘accept’ and one thing led to another and pretty soon Megan was providing Kennedy with her own floor show, live from her Brooklyn apartment. He reduced the YouPorn window and was enjoying Megan’s work very much – such brio! such determination! The enthusiasm of the amateur versus the slick professionalism going down next to her – when he felt his iPhone buzzing on the bed next to him: a text from PattyCakes2, Patricia, a red-headed live wire he’d met at a reading in San Francisco last year. She was replying to a message he’d sent her earlier asking ‘How’s tricks? What you up to?’ Her reply took the form of an attached photo. Kennedy’s eyes strayed from the laptop to the phone and saw that she seemed to be . . . was . . . was that an aubergine? He started typing an encouraging reply with his thumb, one eye still on Megan who was now – Jesus – and one hand languidly massaging the front of his boxer shorts. Suddenly a phone started ringing somewhere. He looked around the room, spilling whisky in the process, before he realised it was coming from the screen. Megan saying, ‘Hang on, baby, I gotta take this,’ and walking out of shot.
Well, fucking hell. Moving the cursor and re-enlarging the YouPorn window Kennedy found that, at some point in the last few minutes, his lesbians had been joined by a seven-foot ebony quarterback and that the business had reached a happy conclusion. Indeed it looked like someone had hosed the trio down with a water cannon directly connected to a mains supply of wallpaper paste.
Scrolling down the YouPorn menu Kennedy clicked on the words ‘I’M KHLOE – PLAYING WITH MYSELF LIVE NOW!’ and soon found himself having a chat with a twenty-something Midwestern girl wielding an atomic-pink vibrator.
‘Hi, Jim,’ she said, using the name Kennedy had given. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Well, just, I think, just use your best judgement, Khloe,’ Kennedy said. And very soon, she was. Oof. Then his mobile was buzzing again – the ‘FaceTime’ app. Incoming. He clicked on it to discover that Patricia in San Fran had decided to go live. There she was – mashing two heavy breasts together, tugging on her nipples as though she were trying, urgently, to remove them and saying, ‘I want you inside me.’ Then another voice was saying, ‘Sorry, baby, where were we?’ And Kennedy realised Megan was back on Skype. He tapped the volume on the laptop down and shuttled his gaze between Khloe and Megan on the two open windows on the laptop and Patricia on the iPhone, like an air traffic controller working three screens, trying to head off impending disaster as the converging flight paths racked up above him. (He also became aware of something physical, a vaguely unpleasant sensation. It took him a moment to identify it. Rolling the pad of his thumb up and down over his erect penis he felt something, undoubtedly felt something beneath the skin. It was tiny but hard, like there was a grain of sand embedded just beneath the skin of his cock. This was new. By manoeuvring his thumb more up the side of the shaft rather than directly on top of it – almost like he was holding it while making a ‘thumbs up’ gesture – he found he was able to avoid direct contact with the area and continue wanking in satisfactory fashion.)
While juggling all of this Kennedy was also trying to drink and smoke a Cohiba, clearly giving the lie to the myth about the contemporary male’s inability to multitask. Kennedy was multitasking like a surgeon in a busy field hospital who was studying for the Bar while talking down a fleet of hijacked 747s.
‘Oh oh oh, Jesus Christ . . .’ Patricia in San Francisco was moaning. (And just how long could an aubergine take that kind of punishment?) ‘I want you to come in my fucking face,’ Megan in New York was screaming, one stockinged leg hooked over the headboard, middle and index fingers of her right hand moving like a hummingbird’s wings over the tuft of her crotch.
‘YOU WANT THIS TO BE YOUR COCK, DON’T YOU, JIM?’ Khloe in Fuck-Knows-Where was yelling as, on all fours, she began pushing the pink monster into her rectum. (And who the fuck was Jim?)
Wearing two different headphones in each ear – one giving him Patricia from the iPhone, the other Khloe and Megan from the laptop – and responding only in generic sex-speak, avoiding using any real names, solved the problem of alerting the girls to one another’s presence, but it did mean that, as matters advanced on all fronts, Kennedy was increasingly being treated to a deafening stereo barrage of what sounded like the inside of a delivery room during a fire. Panic. Confusion. Grunting and screaming. It was here, his legs juddering and shaking as the point of no return approached, that Kennedy made what would prove to be his cataclysmic mistake. Hurriedly reaching for the Kleenex he felt the headphone to the iPhone tugging loose from his right ear. Grabbing the phone and lifting it over up – he was very keen not to lose Patricia’s feed at that particular moment, when she so close to proving his theory about the limited resilience of eggplant correct – he fumbled and dropped the device straight into the tumbler of iced Macallan and soda balanced on his chest. Leaping forward to try and whip it out he upended the whole glassful – sending it cascading all over the keyboard of the MacAir balanced on his stomach.
A few minutes later, as he sat there panting and blinking amid the soaked 500-thread-count sheets and the thousands of dollars’ worth of ruined technology, Kennedy reflected – and he reflected ruefully. Yes, rue was definitely involved here – that he might just have avoided disaster, might just have been able to rectify the situation, had he not been ejaculating at the same time.
Man, the Internet.
In the olden days, back in wanking’s Jurassic age (Kennedy often felt wanking was now at some zenith, some Renaissance peak. Technology was allowing self-abuse to enjoy its Elizabethan drama moment), grimly buck-toothed over the cracked, waxed copy of Razzle, of Shaven Ravers or Spunk Sluts, your only loss or damage might be the odd matted pair of pages or a written-off sock. Say what you like about having a turn at yourself back in the day, he thought – sipping philosophically on a fresh cocktail as he inspected the fizzing, sputtering ruin of the laptop, the corpse of the iPhone – it didn’t set you back the sharp end of three thousand fucking dollars.
Why did he do this stuff to himself? Hormones, he supposed. The human body: why did its – frankly – limited repertoire of moves manage to fascinate him so endlessly? Like the number of symphonies you could wring from the same twelve notes. The degree to which people like Kennedy (and as a writer he had to believe people were like him. Boy, did he need to believe that) would willingly wreck their lives for a slightly different varietal of orgasm.
These were questions definitely worth pursuing.
‘You’re withholding,’ Brendle said.
Maybe it was worth listening to the guy. He might be a dull, second-rate intellect, but it was probably a very safe bet that the good doctor’s evening hadn’t ended with him sleeping in the spare room: his own bed, phone, laptop and dignity the smouldering victims of a hellish, continent-spanning four-way wank.
But how to tell Dr Brendle that it was not just the sexual act itself, but really just the very sharpest part of the act, the final stretch, the home run, when he was keening against himself, taut over some twenty-something with skin like a fresh page, when he could feel life itself hammering and boiling within his centre, desperate to be let loose and throw itself forward, when he was just on the verge of touching that third rail, of completion, if he could only stay there and ride the most urgent part of the thrill for as long as possible, until sweat beaded his face and his scrotum disappeared concave inside his body and his eyes narrowed and with his teeth bared and snarling, his face that of a speeding chipmunk with an overbite in a wind tunnel as he screamed unholy madness and cursed the gods and punched the headboard just to hang on, only in that part could he forget it all. Only there could he truly forget his dead and dying and the gravestone with his name being etched upon it. Only there could he forget the faces of his daughter, of his ex-wives, his mother, his sister, of those he had loved and betrayed and lost in his unquenchable desire to do just this very thing.
Saul Bellow spoke of the ‘pain schedule’ we must all tally towards the end of life, about that sad ledger where most of the debits are to do with love, to do with offences against love. And he had offended love. Fuck him ragged had Kennedy Marr offended love. He had sinned against it. He had caused pain and heartbreak and had bled trust from women, beautiful women who had once lain beneath him and looked at him with eyes that said, ‘I lay it all before you. This is everything I am and I trust you with all of it.’
Well, he had sprayed semen over all of that and gone looking for more. He thought of Millie and Robin, his ex-wife and daughter, back in England. Robin was sixteen now. He and Millie had split when she was only four – she didn’t really have any concrete memories of them being together. He saw her half a dozen times a year – she’d come out for a week or two here and there. Usually a month in the summer holidays. They’d meet in London when he was over on business. They were pals. They swapped compilations over iTunes, Robin trying to get Kennedy into stuff she was listening to (what was that thing she sent the other week now? Something J? Jaysuss – the voice on that fella, curdle milk so it would) and Kennedy trying, usually with more success, to get her into the music of his youth. She played bass in a wee band. Was what they called an ‘indie kid’ nowadays. As he’d been himself back in the eighties. Though it wasn’t routinely called that then. It was just called ‘not being a dickhead’. Not being into Bon Jovi and wearing double denim. She was cute too, Robin. Super-cute. What was it Kennedy’s grandfather had said, back in Limerick, all those years ago, about having daughters as opposed to sons? That was it – ‘If ye have a son you only have one cock to worry about.’ You don’t have to think about all the free-floating lust out there, all the other Kennedys. His daughter seemed to like him. But did she . . . was it . . . ach. Get it away from me, Kennedy thought. He’d do his thinking about all this when he usually did: at night, with the whisky bottle close to hand. You had to think about it – ‘Existence was the job’, as Bellow said.
How to tell Dr Brendle that he had mortally offended love and that he knew love would be there at the reckoning? That he would owe it the most when he needed it the most, when he had nothing left to offer? And love would not be denied its debit. So. You uncapped the whisky. You chopped the line or popped the Xanax or the Vicodin. You bent the girl over and you held on to the third rail as hard as you could for as long as you could and you did it again and again and again.
How to tell the good doctor all of this? Kennedy sighed. ‘Ach,’ he said. ‘Stick it up in your fucking hole.’
‘YOU’LL HAVE IT soon, Eric. Very soon. I know we’re running late on this but, as you know, Kennedy takes his responsibilities seriously. He takes every draft seriously. Very seriously. Even a polish. In fact, he hates the word “polish”.’
Braden Childs, long-suffering manager to Kennedy Marr (and now might be a good time to clear this up: anyone involved with Kennedy Marr in a professional or personal capacity – from cleaners to agents to ex-wives – thoroughly deserved the prefix ‘long-suffering’), listened hopefully into the silence on the other end of the receiver. Nowadays he rolled this speech out with the practised assurance of ‘Hi, welcome to Burger King, may I please take your order?’ Or of a seasoned escort listing her dos and don’ts. It used to astonish him how often he had to give it on Kennedy’s behalf. Now he was just numb. Like a German soldier on retreat through the hinterlands of the Soviet Union in ’44 – another day, another horror.
‘He hates the word “polish”, huh?’ Finally. This was Eric Joffe, producer (Demonic Force, Unfaithful Memories). ‘Have you any idea how seriously fucking late we’re running on this picture?’
‘You’re anxious, Eric,’ Braden said. ‘I can hear that.’
‘Anxious? Braden, I passed anxious back in April. I’m into outta-my-fucking-mind now. I’m into search-and-destroy. The Writers Guild? I’m thinking about hit men. WE’RE SHOOTING IN SEPTEMBER AND THERE’S NO FUCKING SCRIPT!’
‘Friday, Eric. I guarantee it.’
‘Listen. If a UPS van does not roll up to my house on Friday with the script I am suing you and your client for breach. For the two-fifty I paid that Irish cocksucker on signature and for the costs and damages due to the delayed start of my shoot. You hear me? This is real. This is a real thing.’
‘I hear you, Eric. Friday. I’ll talk to you in the week.’
‘Friday!’
Click.
Braden replaced the receiver and extended his middle finger to it. In truth Joffe didn’t worry him too much. He was over the hill. A has-been who hadn’t had a hit since forever and who was just about hanging on to a three-picture deal at Universal. He still did the whole Don Simpson/Joel Silver shouting-swearing thing some of the old guys thought was a thing to do. He’d wanted some class lent to his piece-of-shit thriller and a polish from someone with Kennedy’s reputation seemed just the ticket. He was paying half a million bucks just to have Kennedy’s name somewhere on the marquee of a movie that, in all likelihood, wouldn’t earn dollar one at the box office. However, eyes flicking down his call sheet for the afternoon now, Braden quickly alighted on a name that did worry him. Greatly.
Scott Spengler.
The last four movies Spengler had produced had grossed a combined 1.2 billion dollars domestic. He was smart, he was hip, he understood material and stars loved him. He didn’t shout or scream. He’d just quietly make sure nothing he had any influence over ever came your way again. In a town that ran on influence – on the nod – this was power. Spengler had juice. Real juice.
‘Danny,’ Braden called out of the open door, ‘can you get me Scott Spengler’s office?’ He looked at his watch. ‘And find out where the fuck Kennedy is.’ Outside, Danny – twenty-two, UCLA film grad – started working the phone.
Braden swung his feet up onto the desk (battered Adidas. Agents wore suits, managers wore jeans and sneakers) and started leafing through half a dozen stapled sheets of A4 paper. Kennedy’s pipeline. By his elbow on the desk were some documents from the IRS and a report from Kennedy’s accountant, Craig Baumgarten. (Baumgarten himself was, at that very moment, waiting in the conference room down the hall.) In Braden’s head was a Rolodex of the producers, studios and publishing houses they were delinquent in delivering projects to.
The difference between a manager and an agent: managers guide and shape your whole career. Agents – in Kennedy’s case Jimmy Warr over in the glass tower of ICT – simply try to generate as much work as they can. In addition to Childs & Dunn, Kennedy also had his British book agent, Connie Blatt, and Stropson & Myers, his British film and TV agents. Add to this Craig Baumgarten at Baumgarten, Finch & Strunk (accountants) and Bernie Wigram (legal) and you had the team who guided and managed the career of Kennedy Marr. Everyone taking their piece.
‘Jenny at Scott’s office on two,’ Danny shouted through the door. Lifting his eyes from an entry in Kennedy’s pipeline for a novel called ‘UNTITLED’ (it nestled just below a novel called ‘UNDELIVERED’), Childs picked up the phone and hit the flashing green light.
‘Hi. Jenny?’
‘Hi, Braden. I have Scott from Australia for you.’
‘Oh, right. Sure.’ The great man himself, straight on the line from the outback. He was on location, shooting a picture with Tom and Scarlett. (You soon learned this: the real players returned their calls. The wannabes fucked you around.)
‘Braden.’
‘Hey, Scott. Sorry I missed your call earlier. How’s things going out there?’
‘Fine. Look –’ Another thing about true moguls: no small talk – ‘Michael wants to meet with Kennedy.’
‘Right.’
‘He’s a fan. Just wants to say hello.’
‘Great.’ Michael Curzon, the twenty-six-year-old lead actor in Spengler’s new picture Kennedy had written. Curzon was hot. A comer. Not a true star yet.
‘Jenny’ll come back to you and schedule a dinner.’
‘Sure. I’ll check with Kennedy. I’m seeing him shortly.’
‘Good. One other thing –’ Crackle and static, the line cutting out for a moment. A pause. Childs could hear wind. He pictured Spengler walking around outside his undoubtedly vast trailer somewhere on the set. ‘Julie signed her deal this morning.’
‘I . . .’ Shit. Holy fucking Christ.
‘I wanted to tell you because it’ll probably be in the trades by tomorrow.’
‘That’s . . . wow. Congratulations, Scott. That’s . . . huge.’
‘You can tell Kennedy. I’m sure she’ll want to meet him in due course.’
‘What’s that mean for your budget?’
‘North, pal. Hundred mil?’
Childs whistled respectfully.
‘I’m figuring the studio will want to push principal photography up now. Kennedy’s on schedule with the rewrite, yes?’
‘Absolutely,’ Childs lied.
‘Good. Speak to you soon. Bye.’
‘Bye, Sc—’ Click.
Childs sat back and let the enormity wash over him.
Julie Teal, arguably the biggest female star under thirty, had committed to the picture. Budget, interest and expectations would all rise accordingly. The studio wanted to start shooting sooner in order to have the movie ready for the following Christmas. Where was Kennedy with the script? In fact – fuck the script, where the fuck was Kennedy? Another glance at his heavy IWC Chronometer – it was approaching 1 p.m. Kennedy would probably demand lunch the moment he arrived. Which would mean kissing the rest of the afternoon goodbye. ‘Danny?’ he called again and this time Danny appeared in the door. Slim, bearded. White shirt loose outside chinos. ‘Is Craig here yet?’
‘He’s waiting in the conference room.’
‘Thanks. Try Kennedy again.’
Childs took the pipeline statement and stacked it on top of the accountant’s report and the IRS documentation. He added another pipeline statement – from Connie Blatt in London: projected European book royalties and advances for the coming year – to the pile and sat it on top of a fat file containing Kennedy’s bank and credit card statements for the past twelve months.
These would form the tools of their intervention.
THE INTERVENTIONEE STOOD sweltering on the corner of Robertson and Wilshire – savouring the last lungful of sweetly toxic Marlboro smoke before re-entering the building. As was his habit Kennedy had parked in the basement (‘Sweet ride, man,’ the Mexican valet kid had cooed at his growling DB9) and extinguished his cigarette before taking the elevator to the first floor, where he went out through the glass doors of reception to smoke another cigarette before resuming the elevator ride to the joyless, nicotine-less ninth-floor offices of Childs & Dunn. In retrospect this gratuitous, deeply unnecessary cigarette (as opposed the other fifty-nine or so non-gratuitous, deeply necessary cigarettes he smoked during the course of an average day) was a mistake, because it allowed his phone to ring (his spare phone: when you drank like Kennedy did it was a good idea to always have a spare phone backed up and ready to roll) and him to answer it.
‘Hello?’
‘You’ve got to be kidding me with this, Kennedy.’
‘Vicky. Hi.’
‘I mean, without even telling me?’
‘Ah, you’ll have to be more specific, Vicky.’
Vicky Marr, formerly Lombardi, the soon-to-be second ex-Mrs Marr, twelve years his junior, a features writer who’d interviewed him, someone who’d loved him intensely, someone whom Kennedy had, in the most appalling way possible, turned into his enemy.
‘You reduced the credit limit on my Amex without telling me? Have you any idea how embarrassing this is?’
‘I, uh, I did what now?’
‘I just had my card declined. I rang them and they told me the limit had been reduced.’ The sorrow the current Mrs Marr managed to wring out of ‘reduced’ was impressive, Kennedy thought.
‘Ah, Vicky, are you on meth or something? Think about this now. Me? Ringing American Express? Talking to some bastard, being put on hold, arranging something like this? Can’t you see the effort that would all take?’
‘Well, it did seem . . . out of character,’ she allowed.
‘Anyway, it’s not like I have to let you have a card on my account. I said you could continue to use it while the divorce was finalised because –’
‘Maybe because you’re still feeling a little guilty about fucking my best friend at our wedding! Huh? Would that be it, Kennedy?’
A bad business. Yes. Unedifying.
Kennedy hadn’t intended to be unfaithful at their wedding, just over two years back. Not that he’d ever been faithful to Vicky in any real sense anyway.
He dimly recalled a drunken grope-and-fumble session with a cloakroom girl on his first date with her, at some high-priced steakhouse on the Upper West Side. He’d left his cigarettes in his jacket, forgotten the ticket, and she’d let him into the cloakroom to look for it. She was reading English at Columbia, she was a fan, and pretty soon they were thrashing about in the sweet-smelling folds of expensive Manhattan overcoats while, sixty yards away, Vicky swilled a 200-dollar Barolo around a goldfish-bowl-sized balloon. He could still remember the texture, the firmness, of the cloakroom girl’s rump through the thin cotton of her dress. Kennedy Marr would have taken two or three stabs to give you his daughter’s birthday, but he could give you chapter and verse on the ass of a girl he felt up, what, three years ago? What was going on there? Maybe he needed to be in therapy. Then he remembered – he was in fucking therapy.
But the wedding. Simone at the wedding. In his defence (and Kennedy needed defending, oh Christ did he need that) it was very late in the day, he was fucking punished with booze and his own bride had just surprised him in their suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel with a very choice line of cocaine. Then stumbling along the corridor, making his way back to the Polo Lounge, and bumping into Simone who – and again the defence steps forward here, hiking its thumbs into its lapels – did look ridiculously hot that night, and they’d always had a little thing between them, and she was wrecked too, and the disabled toilet near the lobby was close to hand. A mad blur. A cord being pulled in the throes of passion. Very much the wrong cord. Then Kennedy was hearing screams and turning – light barking in his face – and there were the members of staff, expecting to find a distressed handicapped person, finding instead the author on tippy toes, his wife’s friend splayed forward over the throne of the toilet, her hands clutching the extra assistance bars while Kennedy pounded her from behind. And Vicky right there in between the staff, still in her wedding dress, growling, fists balled, and the sensory realisation that it was quite something being punched in the face while your cock was still in someone’s ass. The judge in the divorce case had laughed – actually laughed – when Vicky’s lawyer read out the (mercifully sanitised) account of the events of their wedding night. They had been married less than nine hours. The divorce settlement was still rumbling on. Fucking California.
And Vicky was rumbling on too, the iPhone growing hot against his ear here on the sidewalk. ‘And another thing – Murray will be in touch about the Warhol.’ Murray Chalmers, attorney for the soon-to-be second ex-Mrs Marr.
‘I bought the fucking Warhol!’
‘You bought it FOR ME, KENNEDY!’
‘For the house!’
‘Our house.’
‘Look, Vicky, I’m going into a meeting, OK? I’ll talk to you later.’
‘DON’T YOU DARE HA—’
Click. Then onto silent.
FROM ONE CIRCLE of hell into another.
‘It can’t be as bad as this now,’ Kennedy said, refusing to look properly at the satanic columns of figures. ‘I mean, shit, are you guys fucking kidding me?’
He’d known something was up – that something had gone badly tits – when he saw the accountant guy (Craig something?) already sitting at the conference table as Braden ushered him into the room. (After the usual rituals had been adhered to, of course. After the staff had fussed over Kennedy, after someone had brought him his restorative lunchtime whisky and soda, after one of the new kids had told him he was ‘like, just their favourite writer of all time’ and so forth.)
Silence. Braden got up and said, ‘Craig.’
‘It is bad, yes. The IRS is very serious about these back taxes. Your spending is just, well . . . but there are things we can do. I’ve come up with a plan. Let me take you through it . . .’ He slid a sheet of paper across the table to Kennedy. Who used it as a coaster. ‘Now. Outgoings . . .’
Kennedy looked at the column of zeros, almost charging off the page, like the row of wheels on a rampaging locomotive, while Baumgarten went through them. Maintenance payments for Vicky pending a final – and undoubtedly hefty – divorce settlement, alimony and child support for Millie and Robin back in England. (Oh, we’ll get to Millie and Robin back in England soon enough. Not in daylight, mind. Later, in the Scotch-y amber of the Los Angeles twilight, when England was safely asleep. When Kennedy had a pint of liquor in him and he could almost face thinking about them.) The mortgage on the house up in the Hollywood Hills, the cars, the plane tickets, the insane restaurant tabs, the holidays, the health care, the utilities, the magazines and periodicals (he spent nearly three thousand dollars on magazines and periodicals in fiscal 2012? Really? Where were all the fucking things?), the charge accounts at Barney’s and Saks, at Turner’s liquor on Sunset, the concierge service he used, ‘professional services’ – the fees to lawyers, accountants and PR people – the limo account, the maid, cleaners and gardeners, the pool guy, the fact that, on top of all this, he somehow still seemed to owe the Internal Revenue Service ONE POINT FOUR MILLION DOLLARS. Then, finally, Baumgarten was saying, ‘And, that’s about it.’ It was enough. Enough? It was fucking deranged.
Kennedy went to speak. Braden held a finger up. Kennedy filled his mouth with Scotch instead. ‘In terms of income due over the next twelve months . . .’ Baumgarten began. There were several delivery fees due on the various outstanding polishes and rewrites he was working on, ranging from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to half a million when the Spengler picture commenced shooting. There was the steady, dependable flow of royalties from his six novels, similarly the trickle of residuals arriving biannually in their pale green WGA envelopes. It was a lot too. Enough every year to keep any sane man in comfort for a decade. (Was this the problem, Kennedy wondered – I’m not sane?) But clearly the debit column was outstripping the credit.
‘We can’t pay the IRS and have you live like you do, Kennedy. It just doesn’t add up. You’ll be broke by the end of the year.’
‘OK,’ Kennedy said, ‘I’m Mr Micawber here. Right, I get it.’
‘Good. I’ve already had Craig reduce the limits on all your ancillary cards.’
Ah. Vicky. Kennedy tried for incredulous – ‘Without my fucking permission?’
‘You wouldn’t return my calls. This is very, very serious, Kennedy. Whichever way Craig and I slice this up we’re coming up way short.’
Kennedy sighed. ‘So what are you suggesting?’
‘Two routes,’ Braden said. The American pronunciation, rhyming with ‘doubts’. ‘One – we immediately make a down payment to the IRS of about two-fifty – which will just about clean out your reserve account, I’m afraid – and you follow the cuts Craig’s suggesting here . . .’
Another sheet of A4 came sliding across the table. ‘You sell the house, move into a condo and put the difference toward your tax bill. Should be six, seven hundred thou easy. You can cut back on your personal spending hugely. Look at this.’ He fished something, a receipt, out of a file. ‘Eighteen hundred dollars for dinner at Dan Tana’s? On a Tuesday night? What was the occasion?’
‘It, uh. A Tuesday? Let me see . . .’
‘Shit, Kennedy, there are things you can cut back on that you won’t even miss. Here.’ Another receipt came out. ‘Nearly four thousand dollars on a pair of goddamn shoes? One of those laces –’ Braden pointed to Kennedy’s fine handmade brogues – ‘probably cost more than the average pair of –’
‘You want me to wear average shoes?’ Kennedy said, flattening a hand on his chest in mock horror. Baumgarten shook his head, deeply upset to hear money being disrespected in this way.
‘Do you really need to buy your shoes from –’ Braden looked at the receipt again – ‘John Lobb of Mayfair?’
‘“O reason not the need”,’ Kennedy said. ‘“Our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life is as cheap as beast’s.”’
‘Great. Make with the Shakespeare. You’ll be the best-read guy in tax jail.’
In his inside pocket Kennedy felt his phone vibrate against his heart. He ignored it. Probably Vicky. Kennedy felt like this might be an activity he would be doing much of today – ignoring his phone. He did owe his brother Patrick a call though. Would definitely have to get around to that one some time.
‘Oh, lighten up,’ Kennedy said. ‘OK. Route one? The whole austerity thing? Not hugely feeling that. What’s route two?’
‘Finish the novel.’
‘Ach. Fuck.’
Suddenly route one seemed hugely alluring. Kennedy saw himself staying home at nights, in his cosy little condo in, where? Silver Lake? Fucking Mount Olympus? Eating pizza from . . . Raffallo’s? Sandwiches from Chick-fil-A? Driving a Hyundai. Shopping at Ralph’s. (Did Ralph’s do shoes?) Having ‘staycations’. Deliver the novel? Contrary to what Braden – and Jimmy at ICT, and Connie in London, and every publisher they’d taken huge commencement advances from, and every interviewer he’d spoken to in the last five years – thought, Kennedy hadn’t even started the novel. He hadn’t written a word of fiction in five years. He’d been too busy making too much money as a script doctor.
An interesting and misleading term this, Kennedy thought. ‘Script doctor’ was used in Hollywood to mean someone brought in to fix sick, dying screenplays. In reality you often had more in common with Nazi doctors, for the process frequently involved performing unnecessary surgery on perfectly healthy patients purely to assuage the fears of panicking executives, producers or stars who all believed that one more pass, one more draft, might be the thing that put the movie ‘over the line’. Who gave a fuck about paying someone like Kennedy a few hundred grand when the budget was over eighty million dollars? Other times the patient was so far gone that the term ‘doctor’ was woefully inadequate. ‘Script executioner’, ‘script undertaker’ would have been nearer the mark. Why had Kennedy succeeded ‘out here’, at this dark art, where so many novelists before him had failed? Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Chandler had all crapped out in Hollywood. Possibly because, as Billy Wilder noted, none of them had taken it seriously. A small part of him was always aware of the primacy of the novel, but Kennedy took the screenplay seriously enough to keep the cheques flowing, to keep busy.
Busy inserting meaningful speeches into blockbusters for starlets who moved their lips when they read. Busy fixing the third-act problems of people who could barely write (and remember – the problems of the third act are the problems of the first). Busy jumping from rewrite to polish to dialogue pass because, of course, all this was easier (and much more remunerative) than spreading his intestines across the page for two fucking years writing a novel. Because the only things he wanted to write about he couldn’t. He wasn’t blocked so much as . . . finished. The novel? That was a man’s business. He was done with it. Not that anyone knew that yet of course.
‘And route three?’ Kennedy said, swishing the ice in his empty glass.
‘Seriously, Kennedy,’ Braden said. ‘Talk to Connie. There’s been a huge gap. People are desperate for a new novel from you. The various delivery advances owing around the world?’ He consulted another sheet of paper. ‘UK, US, Germany . . . there’s several hundred thousand due when you turn the book in. Delivering this one also fulfils your contract so Connie can go out and negotiate a new two-book deal. Granted the market’s not what it was ten, even five, years ago, but she thinks she’d still be looking at maybe half a mil on signature.’
‘Of course,’ Baumgarten cut in, tapping at his calculator, ‘even if you did all that, less tax and commission . . . you’d end up with about 700k in dollars.’ ‘Thou’. ‘Grand’. ‘K’. ‘Bucks’. ‘Benjamins’. Kennedy thought of the Eskimo, with all their words for snow. ‘Which isn’t going to completely solve the problem, but we’d be getting there. You’d keep your flow healthy at least.’
‘Can’t we, you know . . . let’s just go out and get some more work?’ Kennedy said hopefully. ‘A few nice rewrites, a couple of dialogue polishes . . .’
‘Are you kidding me?’ Braden said. ‘We are delinquent on about half a dozen projects right now. I had Eric Joffe on the phone earlier threatening to kill me.’
Kennedy’s brow knotted. ‘Who the fuck is Eric Joffe?’
‘Maximum Velocity? The rewrite you’re doing for him?’
‘Oh yeah. Nearly there. Lick of paint. Terrible fucking title.’
‘It’s a small town, Kennedy. Word gets around. I cannot in good conscience go out and get you more work when we have studios and producers screaming for delivery on overdue projects.’
‘“In good conscience”?’ Kennedy repeated. ‘Who the fuck have you been talking to? The Agent Santa?’
‘Ha. You know, you don’t have a reputation for being easy.’
‘When am I not nice?’
‘Don Rainer questioned a character motivation issue. You asked him what it was like living with brain cancer.’
‘Well, he was –’
‘You told Tony Scott, God rest his soul, to stick his notes up in his fucking hole.’
‘Oh, they were completely –’
‘Finish the novel, Kennedy.’
Kennedy looked at these men – these bloodsucking animals suggesting that he tear his insides apart and rearrange them on paper over the course of many hellish months, years, just for the health of his ‘flow’ – and made his longest speech of the meeting.
‘I really need to be taken to lunch. Braden? Lunch. Right now.’ He held his bone-dry glass upside down.
Braden Childs sighed. He sighed as he saw the rest of his day vaporising in a cloud of spirits, being borne away on the gilded wings of aperitifs, good wine and strong digestifs. The goddamned Irish. He looked at his client, sitting there in his good suit and his 4,000-dollar brogues, holding his empty glass, making a sad face. It was like Fellini presents Angela’s fucking Ashes.
PROFESSOR DAVID BELL looked around the long conference table at the other members of the committee. There were only five of them and the meeting could easily have been held somewhere smaller. But the grand tradition of the F. W. Bingham Award demanded that things be done in a certain way. So here they were, in the grandest meeting room at Shelton’s, one of the grandest, oldest gentlemen’s clubs in Mayfair. Light, summery London rain patterned on the high Georgian windows behind Bell as he cleared his throat.