Splendid Girl's Splendid Climax

It's arrived at last: the culmination, the finale, the payoff, the big finish of the multi-part romance of Will Jones and Splendid Girl! Lives are destroyed and regained! Lover is pitted against lover! The future is revealed! Alcohol is consumed! References are made to Larry Storch and Cantinflas! It's called "Who Knows What Tomorrow Will Bring?" and it's online at My Pal Splendid Man. This one truly has it all!

Next Sunday, July 19th, we bring you Chapter Four of The Burly Boys. Then one Sunday later, July 26th, we'll follow with the final installment of My Pal Splendid Man, an Epilogue that we call "To the Ends of the Universe." And so the adventures of Will Jones and his splendid friends will join Million Dollar Ideas as a complete humor book, archived online for whoever discovers it or wants to rediscover it, leaving The Burly Boys (and the last four chapters of Million Dollar Ideas—The Photonovel) to keep Sundays with Will & Gerry going for the rest of the summer.

Chapter One. Ed and Johnny Pitch the Goods

Darryl F. Zanuck tossed the screenplay on his desk and growled, “It stinks.”

His yes-man said, “Yes, D.F..”

“When does shooting start?”

“Monday, D.F..”

“Monday? That’s what…three days from now?”

It was four days from now, but just to be on the safe side the yes-man said, “Yes, D.F.”

Zanuck threw up his arms and roared, “Get me Ed and Johnny!”

The man’s skill at saying yes, and at leaping up to do his master’s bidding, had earned for him a glistening silver Buick Phaeton convertible, and shortly that convertible was glistening its way eastward through Beverly Hills and into the wild but prosperous stretch known as the Sunset Strip. At last it came in sight of the Garden of Allah Hotel and Villas, that legendary retreat of Hollywood Bohemia where on any day one might find the poolside festooned with the most daring and brilliant of actors and writers. The Phaeton slowed down at the Garden. Then it turned right and continued down the hill, past cheap houses and empty lots, its driver cursing his quarry the whole time for not owning a phone.

Ed and Johnny lived in an apartment complex that had been modeled after the Garden of Allah but was a fraction of its famous namesake’s size and possessed none of its opulence. Nor did it have a pool, not even a miniature version of the real one. It did have a garden, however, which comprised the center of the horseshoe around which the Spanish-style “bungalows” were arrayed, but the garden hadn’t been tended since the advent of talkies. A dwarf palm provided the centerpiece, around which sprouted, with an abandon comparable to that of the hungover guests at the grand hostel up the hill, an array of exotic weeds.

The builder of the establishment, Sid Nussbaum, now deceased, had faced a conflict when the time came to christen it. Should he name it after the hotel that had inspired him, or after his blushing bride? After much agonizing, he had settled on a compromise and called it The Garden of Edna. A large sign by the gravel driveway announced the name in a florid script of neon-filled tubing, and it was under this sign that the Phaeton hissed to a stop and its driver stepped out and listened.

Just as he’d hoped and expected, the air was rent by a single sound: a typewriter clattering at inhuman speed. Following the racket around the weeds and past the dwarf palm, he closed in on a room in a distant corner, perhaps not accidentally the room furthest from the building office.

* * *

“Brilliant line!” Ed boomed, his fingers flying over the typewriter keys. “How about we follow it with, ‘Then who the heck are you looking at?’”

“Aces!” Johnny crowed, pacing back and forth in front of the card-table on which the typewriter sat and tearing bites from a sandwich. “We got a winner here, chum!”

“Then he holds his fist over an open flame,” Ed said between bites of his own sandwich. “Academy Award winner, that’s what we’ve got!”

“And barely winces,” Johnny said. “Better than that crap Brackett and Wilder copped the statue with last week.”

“Brackett and Wilder,” Ed said, in a tone that suggested only pity for those men who had no idea what was about to hit them. Then he added, “God, I’m sick of Spam.”

“It was the only thing Louie’d let me have on credit. What do you want on our budget, a porterhouse?” Between bites of Spam Johnny dictated the next eight lines. Then Ed suggested nine of his own, although suggest might be the wrong word, as his fingers never stopped pounding. As Johnny came back with the next five, a knocking sounded at the door.

“Let’s introduce the hooker now,” Ed said. “Do I hear knocking?”

“Make sure she’s wearing something pink,” Johnny said. “Christ, I hope we didn’t wake up Edna again.”

“With white polka dots. What if it’s a bill collector?”

“Nice detail,” Johnny said as he peered cautiously around the curtain. “Hey,” he exclaimed, “it’s Paulie Affirmato from Zanuck’s office!” As he threw open the door the typing stopped. In the sudden silence, his ears continued to ring with the staccato hammering. “Say, Paulie! How’s tricks?”

Paulie was impassive and wasted not a breath. “D.F.’s got a stinker he needs rewritten in four days. You in?”

“A top to bottom rewrite?” asked Ed, appearing alongside Johnny in the doorway. “In four days?”

“That’s what I said,” said Paulie.

“Well, I hope you left a deck of cards in the office,” said Johnny, “so we can while away the extra time!” He punched Ed in the arm and laughed.

Paulie only stared at them. “Are you in or are you not in?”

“The usual remuneration?” asked Ed.

“Guild minimum.”

“And a pitch meeting with D.F.?”

“That’s extra.”

“Ah, for Christ’s sake, Paulie!” yelled Johnny. “If we do a full rewrite for the mug, we deserve a meeting!”

“If I get you in there and you lay a turd in the middle of his rug, the stink sticks to my shoes. I’ve got to balance the ledger of my career here.”

“Hokay, hokay,” said Ed. “We do the rewrite for Guild scale and then we kick back a quarter of it to you for a pitch meeting with the master.”

By way of an answer, Paulie turned and walked toward the car. Ed and Johnny had learned by experience that this signaled an agreement. Paulie had long ago stopped wasting the word “yes” on anyone but his employer. Had he refused their terms he would first have described them in a manner unacceptable to the Motion Picture Production Code and then turned around.

The Phaeton glistened back to the west with Ed and Johnny in the back seat. Ed secretly wished that he could take the front, as his large frame fit only with discomfort into the convertible’s modest rear, but he knew that anyone seen riding in the front seat through Beverly Hills would be taken for another studio flunky and not a top-drawer writer being wooed. Johnny was content with any seat, so long as the view was rewarding. Today it was. A young housemaid turning up the steps to Ronald Colman’s house gave him a smile. He smiled right back.

“Fifty thousand dollars,” said Ed in a hushed tone.

“For her?” Johnny yelped. “You’re off your nut!”

“Not her, numbskull,” said Ed. “The mansion. Fifty grand easily. When we start selling our original scripts and make the big time that house could be ours.”

“Yeah,” said Johnny dreamily. Then he frowned at Ed. “But I thought Ronnie and Benita said they were gonna hang onto the joint for a while.”

Paulie shot them a glance in the rearview mirror but never opened his mouth until they’d left Beverly Hills and the Hillcrest golf course behind and turned in at the Fox studio gate. “Look who I got,” he said to the guard.

“Hi, Ed! Hi, Johnny!” said the guard cheerily. “You got any more great movie ideas?”

“You know it!” chirped Johnny. “This ex-Marine lands in the Big Apple but hates it, see…”

Paulie accelerated abruptly and stopped even more abruptly at the Writers’ Building. He handed them the screenplay, told them what office they were in, and roared off without another word the moment Ed and Johnny had disembarked.

“That chiseler gives me a pain,” Johnny said.

Ed was looking all around with a smile on his lips and a gleam in his dark eyes. “Yeah, but it’s nice to be back on the Fox lot.”

Johnny agreed that it was indeed nice, but his opinion abruptly changed when they got a look at the office. Plaster was flaking off the ceiling, the carpet had more cigarette burns than the waiting-room floor in a maternity ward, the sharp bite of mildew assaulted their nostrils. Stepladders, paint cans, a battered accordion, and a dusty Tyrolean hat sans feather were piled in a corner. “Say,” Johnny said, “this is the same dump they gave us last time! I recognize the stupid hat!”

“Nice of them to hold it open for us. They must’ve known it brings us luck.”

Johnny snorted. “The least they could’ve done was fix us up with a secretary. Did you see the eyeful they gave Swerling?”

“Hell, the dame hasn’t been made who can type half as fast as I can,” Ed said. “What do you want, a finished script or an eyeful?”

“Did I hear somebody say eyeful?”

They spun around at the voice. Betty Grable was leaning against the doorjamb, swinging a dainty little bag against her thigh. She wore a dark gray skirt that barely covered her knees and a canary yellow cashmere sweater. A black hat about the size of a teacup clung to her golden locks just above the right ear.

“Hello, Mother,” Ed said. “What happened to your tights?”

“Oh, you!” Betty said. She held out both hands and Ed and Johnny each clasped one, too late to hide their frayed cuffs. “It’s so nice to see you both again!”

Ed nodded smugly, as if he expected nothing else. When Johnny gazed into those radiant blue eyes he melted and flashed a wide grin. With his straw-colored hair and chiseled good looks he resembled Alan Ladd when he grinned, only his teeth were nearer to six feet off the ground than Ladd’s five.

“So how have you been?” Betty asked. “Jeepers, when you two vanish you vanish but good. You naughty boys haven’t even given me your phone number!”

They hadn’t given her their phone number because they hadn’t had one last time she’d asked. Nor a phone to go with it. They still didn’t, but one of their neighbors at the Edna, a struggling actor named Beaumont, had recently offered to let them use his. Ed had started to rattle the number off when Betty said, “Any great new movie ideas, boys?”

“And how!” Johnny said. “Picture this for a meet-cute: this guy’s driving his cab, see, and he’s broken up because some high-hat dame he was chasing just gave him the fingeroo. When suddenly into his cab jumps…”

“Don’t spoil it now, Johnny,” Betty put in. “Harry and I are throwing a party next Friday and we’d love for you two to come and tell us all about it!”

“You can count on us!” Ed roared.

“What time should we be there?” Johnny asked, but by then Betty was already sashaying off, tossing a toodle-oo back over her shoulder.

“Well,” Ed said, “it looks like we’re moving up in this old town!”

Johnny waved the screenplay in the air and said, “So let’s see what we can salvage outta this pile of rags.”

As was their custom, Ed sat with his eyes closed, visualizing the movie as Johnny paced and read it out loud. Halfway through the opening scene, Ed barked, “Stinks! Rewrite!” Johnny had nearly made it to the fade-out of the next scene before Ed again said, “Stinks! Rewrite!” The next section, a brief montage, something with swirling newspapers to show the passage of time, went by without a word from Ed, but Johnny was only two lines into the scene where the boy meets the girl when Ed’s voice filled the room again. “Stinks! Rewrite!”

So it went, until at the end Johnny flipped back through the pages and announced, “That’s forty-two scenes to redo. How much time left ‘til D.F. needs it?”

Ed pulled a pocket watch from his overstretched vest and said, “Eighty hours and thirty-five minutes.”

Johnny did some scribbling on the last page of the script. “That’s an hour and fifty-five minutes per scene.”

“But what about time for sleep?” Ed asked. “We can’t do a good rewrite unless we get enough sleep.”

Johnny looked at him, and for a moment he and Ed held each other’s gazes. Suddenly they both burst into guffaws.

“Okay, okay,” Ed said, settling at the typewriter. “It’s a lead-pipe, union-laid cinch. Ready?”

Johnny flipped back to the opening page of the screenplay. “Ready,” he said. And they were off. The typewriter hammered through the evening, when the other writers milled in the corridors and tossed pleasant insults at each other before driving home to their wives and mistresses, through the long night when only they and the security guards remained on the lot, into the hours before dawn when sleep-hungry actresses began arriving to be painted into presentability by their make-up crews. Occasionally the typing would slow as they wrestled with complex narrative decisions.

“This joker who’s trying to get the girl before the guy has the balls to propose,” said Johnny as the sun rose. “He’s got to be oilier. Let’s make him a Nazi.”

“Great,” said Ed. “He went into hiding right before Uncle Adolph traveled to the great beyond.”

“With a ton of stolen Nazi gold,” said Johnny.

“Oh, wait a minute,” said Ed, vigorously rubbing his eyes. “His name’s Pedro and they want him written for Cesar Romero.”

“Crap,” said Johnny. “Were there Nazi Mexicans?”

“There were Spanish fascists.”

“Who the hell knows what a fascist is?” snapped Johnny. “How about since he got out of Berlin he’s been laying low in Mexico or Havana or wherever those people go.”

“Paraguay,” Ed said. “A villa in Montevideo.”

And the typewriter began picking up speed again, roaring through the morning like the Super Chief across the heart of America. Then suddenly, as if a herd of cattle had stampeded across the track, it ground to a halt.

“’Grant me but one kiss, Señorita,’” Johnny was dictating. “’For a fleeting taste of your ruby lips I would run roughshod over the….” He broke off when he realized Ed had stopped typing. “What the hell?”

Ed was shaking the typewriter. “Damned contraption went blooey on me!” he said. “I think it’s jammed!”

“Jammed?” Johnny said, and into that single word the hard edge of desperation had crept.

Ed glanced at his watch. “Come on,” he said, “It’s early enough that we should be able to appropriate another one.”

They ran out of their office and barged through the first door they came to. Unlike the storage closet to which they had been assigned, they found themselves in a vast, opulently appointed office, complete with a secretary with Veronica Lake hair, Lana Turner lips, and a Jane Russell bosom. She sat erectly and very decoratively before a typewriter, taking dictation from Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

“The Klempner novel shows possibilities, but there are just too damned many wives. If we…”

Mankiewicz broke off and turned to regard the intruders, a livid frown on his face. But when he saw who it was the corners of his lips reversed their trajectory and a gleam appeared in his eyes. “Ed! Johnny!” he grinned. “And what makes today my lucky day?”

“Sorry, Mank,” Johnny said. “We need your machine-gun, but bad!”

“Then it’s yours,” Mankiewicz said. “I’d never be the man who impedes your genius.”

“Thanks a million,” Ed said, cradling the machine in his arms with barely a glance at the astonished secretary. “You know how impatient Zanuck is.”

“We’re all bees in a beehive,” Mankiewicz said. “But promise me you’re not neglecting your own dazzling ideas.”

Johnny grinned from ear to ear. “We’ve got a honey in the roller right now, Mank! This is the one that’s gonna make us!”

“Something made of music and fire, eh?”

“You said it! The hero’s a real dope, see, but he saves the girl in the last reel…”

“A Preston Sturges sort of thing,” Mankiewicz said.

“Sturges never wrote anything like this!” Ed said.

“I’ll bet not,” Mankiewicz said. “You’ve got to promise to come tell me about it before you’ve won your beachhead on the shores of immortality.”

“Aye aye, sir!” Ed said. And as they hurried off they heard Mankiewicz saying, “Can you take shorthand, honey?”

The typewriter was soon shooting bullets again, but five minutes later they hit another snag. “Oh, crap,” Johnny suddenly blurted. “This Pedro’s marrying the number two doll. He’s supposed to be a good guy! How the hell did we miss that before?”

“Let me see that!” Ed said, snatching the script out of Johnny’s hands. He scanned a few pages and his face went white. “Christ. We’ll have to go back and rewrite the earlier stuff. Who ever heard of rewriting a rewrite?”

“The hell with that,” Johnny said. “We just change the finale to show he was really working for some anti-Nazi resistance. He was laying low, see, to protect secrets for Uncle Sam.”

“Brilliant!” Ed said, and his fingers returned to the races.

* * *

At three o’clock Monday afternoon, Paulie Affirmato walked down the corridor to the sound of that same inhumanly fast typing. He took this as a bad sign. Unless Ed and Johnny were deep in the final scene, they were evidently not going to make their deadline. He threw open the door and without formalities asked, “How close are you?”
“Oh, howdy, Paulie,” said Johnny, as Ed kept typing. “I’d say we’re about two-thirds through.”

“Two thirds?!” roared Paulie. “What the hell am I gonna tell D.F.?”

Johnny looked blank for a moment, then he grinned. “Oh, that script! Hell, we polished that off yesterday! We’re working on our new original.”

“On D.F.’s nickel?” said Paulie threateningly.

“When we pitch him this idea he’ll thank us plenty for letting us write it at the Ritz here,” said Johnny, digging the rewrite out from under their new pages. “Don’t forget our deal, now!”

Paulie took the rewrite and left. Ed never stopped typing.

* * *

Two hours later, Zanuck tossed the pages of the rewrite on his desk. “Good enough,” he said. “Now get those hacks out of here.”

“Well, actually, D.F.,” said Paulie, shifting uncomfortably. “There’s one more thing.”

“What more thing?”

“They’re expecting a pitch meeting with you.”

“Then they’re nuts.”

“Yes, D.F.. But I had to promise it to them. They said they wouldn’t do the rewrite unless it was part of the deal.”

Zanuck rolled his eyes. “Get them in here. Let’s make it quick.”

* * *

Zanuck’s office wasn’t quite as big as the waiting room in Union Station, but to Ed and Johnny it promised journeys to more and better destinations. They took in all the details as Paulie ushered them in. The vast mahogany desk that had seen the negotiating of so many colossal deals. The sumptuous couch that had launched the careers of so many starlets. And Zanuck himself, sawed off, bull-necked, his mustache already twitching with impatience over what Ed and Johnny had not yet said.

“You won’t be sorry you’re seeing us, D.F.,” said Ed.

“This one’s like nothing you’ve ever heard,” said Johnny.

“I can believe that,” Zanuck said. “Get to it.”

Johnny began, “We open in Times Square, see? Lights, crowds, colorful characters…”

“One sentence,” Zanuck said. “Just tell me what the picture’s about in one sentence.”

“A cinch,” Johnny said.

“Hold onto your hat,” Ed said.

“A taxi driver falls in love with a twelve-year-old hooker and shoots her pimp,” Johnny said.

There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of Paulie’s tense, shallow breathing.

“What?” Zanuck said at last.

“Picture Ty Power as the cabbie and George Sanders as the pimp,” Ed said.

“And that little doll from the Lassie movies as the tart,” Johnny added.

Zanuck’s face turned red and his mustache began to do something reminiscent of the shimmy. “Elizabeth Taylor?” he hissed. “You actually think 20th Century Fox is gonna plaster little Elizabeth Taylor all over the movie screens of America as a whore?!”

“You don’t think Metro will loan her out?” Johnny asked.

“I’ll bet Shirley Temple could still pull it off,” Ed offered eagerly. “Just put her in one of those little pinafores she used to wear.”

Zanuck rose slowly to his feet. “Are you fucking nuts?” he roared. “I could be laughed out of this town just for listening to this idea!”

Ed and Johnny exchanged quick eye contact. As ever, they were thinking on their feet and thinking in harmony.

“That’s it, D.F.!” brayed Ed.

“Laughs! Comedy!” yelled Johnny.

“Don Ameche as the cabbie!”

“Clifton Webb as the pimp!”

“And Jane Withers! How old is Jane Withers now, anyway?”

Zanuck was now addressing Paulie, with an ominous quiet. “Get them out of here.”

“If you’re worried about the Hays Office we could clean it up a little,” Ed ventured.

“We just tack on a new ending,” Johnny said. “The girl’s really the pimp’s niece from the country, and everybody just thinks she’s a whore. Then after Ameche shoots the pimp…”

“Out of here!” yelled Zanuck.

Ed and Johnny felt Paulie’s hands on their shoulders and knew they had to pitch fast.

“Of course, it could be best suited to a specialized market,” Ed said.

“They’d go crazy for it in Harlem,” Johnny said.

“There’s a grand tradition of pimps and hustlers in Negro humor,” explained Ed.

“Look at the Kingfish,” Johnny said.

“And who are his foils?” Ed asked with a triumphant grin.

“Taxi drivers!” beamed Johnny.

“This is just what Amos and Andy need to get back on the big screen!” crowed Ed.

Then Paulie’s hand tightened on his shoulder.

Chapter Two. The Jungles of Edna

For three days they did nothing but drink, sleep, and eat Spam. No typewriter clatter issued from their windows, but only periodic retching and an occasional explosion of verbal bile aimed at Darryl F. Zanuck in particular or the studio system in general.

By the fourth morning their landlady was worried enough to come banging on their door. Johnny hoisted himself unsteadily from the middle of the living-room floor to open it, where he found Edna frowning her most furrowed frown and pursing her voluminous lips so tightly that they extended like a carnation-painted funnel from her chinless face. He took an involuntary step backward. Although she had never reached five feet in height, Edna projected an impression of imposing size into his and Ed’s minds, if only because they knew no one else would be as patient with late rent checks as she, and that even she was not without limits.

“G’morning, Edna,” he said.

“Don’t you good morning me, young man!” she tsked. “You can’t trick me! You’ve been fooling with those movies again, haven’t you?”

“But gee, Edna, you know me and Ed are…”

“Haven’t I warned you enough about those ridiculous ‘motion pictures’? They’re simply not going to last! Oh, yes, people love novelties, and there’ll be money to be made for a few years. But then what happens? Where will all these ‘studio moguls’ and ‘movie stars’ be ten years from now? Wishing they’d learned a real trade, that’s where!”

“But Edna…”

“Why, just imagine where I’d be today if my Sid hadn’t gotten out of ladies’ corsets and into real estate!”

Johnny tried to imagine it, but Edna didn’t give him time.

“My cousin Sophie’s husband has a brother who owns a doughnut stand in the Farmers Market. Now that’s a job with a future! People will always need doughnuts, you know!”

The thought of doughnut grease frying was not one that Johnny wanted to be thinking at that moment, and with a mumbled, “’Scuse me, Edna,” he hastily shut the door.

When he came out of the bathroom, Ed was sitting at the dining room table with the bourbon bottle in his hand. “I heard Edna,” he said.

“So?” Johnny said.

“So, Betty’s expecting us at her party tonight. We can go there and hobnob with what passes for royalty in this kingdom of fools, or we can sit here and drink and make plans for our futures in the doughnut business.”

Johnny thought about it for a moment. Then he nodded.

* * *

Sunday night found Ed and Johnny, as did every Sunday night, playing poker with a couple of their fellow residents at the Garden of Edna, Hugh Beaumont and Horace McCoy.

Hugh was a hard-working actor in his thirties. He’d been in dozens of films, mostly as an uncredited extra, a fate with which the boys could fully relate. He’d recently landed a few meatier roles, but all in Poverty-Row quickies, usually playing rather unsavory characters. Ed was bemused that Hugh should be cast in such roles. The guy just dripped amiability and solid American goodness, and Ed could easily see him as the subject of one of those homey Rockwell Kent covers on The Saturday Evening Post. In fact, Ed was sure that Hugh’s days of playing muddy GIs and mad-dog killers were numbered, and he would soon find his niche playing the kindly uncle or the wise dad in heartwarming family pictures.

Horace was nearly fifty, and he’d already put in a full life as a war hero, sports reporter, bouncer, and actor before he’d settled on writing. Like Ed and Johnny, he’d launched his literary career writing for the pulps, but he’d soon turned to novels, whereas the boys had continued their apprenticeship on true-crime rags, Big Little Books, local radio variety hours, and Tijuana bibles. Horace had had three novels published that hadn’t sold very well. He was revered in France, the boys understood, but here at home he was virtually unknown. Hollywood had heard of him, however, and because one of his novels had the word “horses” in the title, he was usually put to work writing scenarios for westerns. Horace often complained that he didn’t like Hollywood, and frequently groused that he should have stayed home, but the easy money kept him imprisoned. He was a wily poker player, a decent amateur aviator, and an indefatigable dancer.

The game was being played at Horace’s bungalow tonight, and after the first hour of play the host was by far the biggest winner, having racked up forty-eight cents. As play became routine, conversation turned to other matters. Hugh remembered that the boys had been invited to a party at Betty and Harry’s a couple of nights before and asked how it had gone.

“Oh, brother!” Ed grinned.

Johnny frowned.

“Now don’t leave us hanging,” Horace said, adding a couple of chips to the pile. “Raise.”

“Look boys, “ Ed said, “I just don’t know how to talk about last night without sounding like a blow-hard.”

“Well, now!” Hugh said, rubbing his hand vigorously. “This sounds promising!”

Johnny sneered. Then he bestirred himself and added some chips to the pile himself. “See ya and raise.”

“I tell you,” Ed said, “even I didn’t know how popular we were in this town. We couldn’t take two steps without a new knot of people forming around us. We had them hanging on our every word. And that Rhonda Fleming! Mother of mercy! For a minute there I thought she was going to sit on my lap!” He threw his cards on the table. “Fold.”

Without looking up from his cards, Horace said, “So to what exactly would you attribute this fascination for Ed and Johnny?”

“Our ideas,” Johnny said, whose frown had grown fiercer. “Everybody wants to hear about our story ideas.”

Hugh threw his hand in and said, “Now you boys ought to be a little more careful about airing your ideas in public. There are a lot of unscrupulous people in this town, you know. It’s sad but true.”

“Oh, I don’t know if they need worry too much,” Horace said with a little smile. He tossed five more chips in the pile and said, “Raise.”

“You’re damn right, Horses,” Johnny said. “Why the hell should we worry? It’s not like a stinking one of our ideas has ever hit the payola.”

Ed scoffed. “The only people who don’t want to hear about them are the ones who dispense the mammon.”

“What is it with this burg, anyway?” Johnny said. “How come the dumbest people get to be the big shots? Even the guards can’t wait to hear our latest idea. But the studio heads? They’re strictly from know-nothin’!” He threw his cards on the tabletop with a loud slap.

Horace raked up the chips and said, “Well…”

Hugh caught his eye and shook his head. “I’ve got to hand it to you boys. You two come up with more ideas than any twenty writers I’ve ever met.”

“Hell, you haven’t heard a tenth of them!” Ed crowed, and he and Johnny shared a meaningful glance. Indeed, for years—long before Hollywood, long before the War—their startling ideas for pulp stories and comic strips and vaudeville acts and confessions magazines had been their life’s blood and what linked them together. “We just need to find a buyer with the vision to appreciate them, that’s all!”

“Maybe we’re wasting our time with these high-monkey-monks like Zanuck,” Johnny said. “They’re all so full of themselves they don’t want to admit that a mere scripter could actually come up with something great.”

“Why shoor, that’s it!” Ed boomed. “Say, Hugh, I’ll bet some of those bottom-drawer studios you work for would just die for one of our scripts.”

“Well,” Hugh said tentatively. “I suppose I could mention you to Sig Neufeld, the head of PRC. His brother, Sam Newfield, directed my last couple of pictures.”

Johnny gave a barking laugh. “That’s screwy. If the guy’s name is Neufeld, how could his brother be named Newfield?”

“Well,” Hugh said delicately, “sometimes when a popular artist’s name might sound a bit foreign he’ll adopt a more ‘all-American’ screen name to make himself more memorable and, well, comfortable to his audience.”

“That’s right,” Ed said. “Did you know that Al Jolson’s name is really Israel Baline?”

Johnny grinned and narrowed his eyes to show that he knew his leg was being pulled. “Sure,” he said. “Next you’ll be telling me Edward G. Robinson is a made-up name too.”

“Anyway, Hugh,” Ed said, “that sure is white of you. Will you be able to talk to this Sig Romberg tomorrow?”

“Well,” said Hugh, with only a few seconds’ hesitation, “I suppose I could. But you know, they do have a regular group of established writers whom they…”

“Name recognition!” Ed snorted. “That’s what’s stifling us in this town! If we only had one screen credit…”

“God knows we’ve been cheated out of enough of them,” added Johnny.

Ed snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it! Hugh, you tell him that if he buys our script, you’ll star in it!”

“That’s the ticket!” Johnny said. “A package deal!”

Hugh blanched. “Well…gosh, it would sure be a thrill to deliver some of your lines, fellas…of course…but…”

Horace had been watching Hugh with an amused smile on his face, but as Hugh began to flounder he cut in. “Let me tell you something about these Poverty-Row outfits, boys. They’re copycats. Trend chasers. They don’t want to hear anything unless it’s what the majors are selling right now. I have to wonder if your bold inspirations might be wasted on…”

“Then we’ll serve ‘em what’s hot!” Ed said. “What are the big fish biting on this week?”

“Well,” Hugh said, “I understand that there are a number of pictures in the works taking daring looks at war and its aftermath.”

“Everybody’s buzzing about this flick Goldwyn’s making,” Horace said.

“War!” Ed said.

“Jungle war!” Johnny said, his eyes glazing over as if he were suddenly seeing distant vistas.

“Yeah. But no Japs. Everybody does Japs.”

“We set it in Vietnam!” Ed said.

“Where the hell is Vietnam?” Horace asked.

“Where the hell is Vietnam, he asks!” Johnny laughed, and looked expectantly at Ed.

“The western half of Indochina,” Ed explained. “It follows a long river, running down from deep jungles…”

“This American general’s gone up the river and disappeared, see,” Johnny began, “and these GIs have to go up in boats to find him…”

“But why would there be American troops in Vietnam?” Hugh asked.

Ed gave a disdainful wave. “The Commies have moved in! Everybody’s buying Commies these days.”

“And when they get up there, see,” Johnny continued, “it turns out this guy’s gone screwball and taken over this native civilization…”

Horace looked slightly incredulous. “Sounds a little like Heart of Darkness.”

“What’s that?” Johnny asked.

“Just a Hoagy Carmichael song,” Ed said. “Keep going.”

Johnny opened his mouth to speak, but Hugh was suddenly pushing his chair back with a great scrape of wood on linoleum. “Will you look at the time?” he said. “I’d better get home to the little woman. I’m not free and easy like you bachelors, you know!”

“So you’ll run it by this producer with the phony name tomorrow?” Johnny asked eagerly.

“Oh,” Hugh said. “Don’t you think you should develop the idea a little more before you try to pitch it? I mean…”

“Ah, hell, Hugh!” Ed said with a confident laugh. “We have all night! How long do you think it takes to work out a movie plot?”

Hugh opened his mouth but couldn’t seem to find the words. Horace spoke up again.

“Hugh, I’m sorry if this offends you,” he said, “but I really don’t think these boys should waste their talents on a dump like PRC. How will they get the majors to take them seriously once they’ve got that on their credits?”

“He’s got a point, Hugh,” Ed said.

“I’ll tell you what,” Horace said. “A producer at Warners still owes me one from when I was writing a boxing movie for them a few years ago. He and that bastard Errol Flynn sent a mash note to Ward Bond and signed my name to it. Maybe it’s time I cashed that in.”

Johnny gulped. “You’d do that for us, Horses? You’d get us a meeting at Warners?”

McCoy held up a hand. “I can’t promise anything, fellas. But I’ll bet he can do something for you.”

Hugh winked and wished them luck and left more quickly than usual. Horace wanted to keep playing a three-handed game, but Ed and Johnny said they wouldn’t be able to sit still, not with this new screenplay demanding to be written.

“I thought you wanted to pitch it first,” Horace said.

“When Warners bites,” said Johnny, “we want to have something to hit ‘em with fast.”

“And what if somebody else comes along pitching something like it?” asked Ed.

“Welp,” Horace said, “can’t argue with that.” And they were gone.

* * *

The next day found drizzle enveloping the Garden of Edna, one of those California rains when the clouds seem too depressed to lift into the sky and sit dully on the rooftops for days. It also found the sound of a typewriter issuing from Ed and Johnny’s windows. Bleary, punch-drunk, propped against the wall, Johnny was dictating a scene in which a squadron of helicopters attacked a Vietnamese village.

“Money in the bank!” Ed roared as he typed. “Warners loves aircraft! Look at God Is My Co-Pilot!”

Johnny nodded and continued. “So the helicopters come swooping in low over the water, and when the villagers see them they start scurrying for cover like rats.”

“It would be great to have classical music blaring while the helicopters are attacking,” Ed said.

“Long-hair stuff, eh?”

“Yeah,” Ed said. “Wagner would be great. I know! The Hall of the Mountain King!”

“Well, you’re the expert on that stuff.”

Just then a loud knocking sounded at their door.

“That must be Horace!” Ed cried.

“With word from Warners!”

But even in his excitement Johnny had the presence of mind before throwing open the door to peer around the blinds and make sure it wasn’t a bill collector. He was relieved that it wasn’t, but in the same instant disappointed that it was only Suzette O’Shea, another of their neighbors.

Suzette was a hooker, but a profoundly lazy one. A stunningly beautiful girl in her early twenties, she could have been earning a fortune but turned only enough tricks to pay her rent and afford a few little sundries. Her only passions seemed to be for English murder mysteries and afternoon tea, the latter having been kindled by the former. Johnny saw that she carried a tray on which tea things were handsomely arranged. When he threw open the door Suzette chirped, “Tea time, boys!”

Today she had on her Daisy Mae outfit: an off the shoulder polka-dot blouse, cut-off jeans, and bare feet. She wore no makeup and her hair was nearly as disheveled as Johnny’s. But to Johnny she looked like a million dollars. In unmarked bills.

“Hello, gorgeous,” Ed said, appearing at Johnny’s elbow. Unshaven and rumpled, he looked like a grizzly bear. “Come in, come in!”

Suzette was hardly through the door before the boys were snatching the little sandwiches from the tray. She set the tray down on the card table that served as Ed’s desk and started pouring tea into two cups.

“Orange pekoe,” she said. “Bring me the dishes back when you’re done.”

“Aren’t you going to join us?” Ed asked, around a mouthful of cucumber.

“Can’t. Got a pressing appointment. But I wanted to make sure you two lunatics had something to eat.” She looked up and fixed them with an expression in which mother-hen was plainly writ. The boys didn’t notice. Women of all ages had been looking at them with that very expression ever since they’d first met and started writing together. Any other look they might have noted. This one they took for granted, unconsciously and unquestioningly. “Try and get a little sleep, will you?”

“Can’t, sweetie,” Johnny said. “We’ve got another fantastic idea for a picture!”

“Uh-huh,” Suzette said, and let herself out.

When the door closed Johnny started pouring bourbon into the pekoe and let out a laugh. “Remember the night when we moved in here? You came running in and said you’d just met the flashiest dame you’d ever seen.”

“Yeah. And the next day you came barging in and said you’d met the simplest, sweetest girl in all of L.A.”

“And when we went looking for these girls we found out they were both Suzette! I tell you, brother, what they do with clothes and make-up is just a big fakeroo.”

“Ah, but what a sweet fakeroo!” said Ed, and clinked cups with Johnny. “Lucky for us we like such different things in dames.”

“No kidding, brother. No danger of a skirt ever busting up this team!”

They wolfed down the rest of the sandwiches and scones and got back to work.

* * *

When they finally remembered Suzette’s tea service it was dark, and they made a great deal of noise trying to set it gently outside her door. Over the sounds of the breaking china they heard someone call their name. At first they thought it was Horace, from whom they’d still not heard a word, and turned eagerly toward his door. But then they realized the voice came from behind them, from the screen door of yet another of their neighbors, the dread Reverend Clapp.

Jeroboam Clapp was a bony, yellowish man with hair like a patch of dead grass. He was the leader of a small congregation that frequently changed its name and even more frequently its place of worship, known currently as the Church of the Blazing Spotlight of God and conducting its services (every day but Monday, twice on Wednesday and Saturday) in a car wash on Pico Boulevard that lay frozen half-completed by some city mix-up about water supplies. When not preaching to his followers he would sit behind his screen door and wait to catch any unwary fellow tenant who passed. Hugh would sometimes stop to argue theology with him, Hugh himself being a devout Methodist who’d even talked about quitting acting for the ministry, but Ed and Johnny had become expert at traversing the Edna without slipping into his line of vision.

“So I understand you’re working on a new picture,” the Reverend intoned from the darkness beyond the screen. “Be sure to say hello to your executive in charge of production…Lucifer!”

“Wish we could stay and chat, Reverend,” Ed said, “but we’ve got to...get some sleep.”

“Yes, sleep. And as you lay you down to sleep, shall you beseech the Lord to lift your souls from the corner of Hollywood and Gomorrah toward the sweetness of His redemption?”

“You betchum!” Johnny called. As they hurried into their bungalow they heard the Reverend intoning a homily that also happened to be the title of his next sermon: “Movies are but previews for the full-length feature of Hell!”

“You know,” Johnny said as he closed the door, “I think Clapp may’ve stumbled onto something there. Let’s give this picture a really hellish atmosphere.”

“You said it! Downright apocalyptic! Warners loves that doom and gloom! Remember Dead End?”

“And Hell’s Kitchen!”

“Back to work, then?”

“Do you have to ask?”

* * *

The next day brought a shocking change to the Garden of Edna: The staccato hammering of Ed’s typewriter had fallen silent. Only the pattering of the rain, like a weak echo of the keys, could now be heard.

“I can’t take this anymore!” Ed said, sitting at his customary post at the card table, but with his hands folded in his lap like crippled tarantulas. “Where the hell is McCoy?”

Johnny was stationed at the window, peering out from behind the blinds at Horace’s door. He hadn’t moved for hours. Nor dictated a line in all that time. “You don’t suppose the mug’s entered into one of those marathon dances again, do you?”

“Naw. I think those things are illegal now. God knows where he…”

“Wait. Hugh just drove in. Maybe he’s heard something!”

The boys piled out of the apartment and accosted their pal as he climbed out of his blue Studebaker. Before they could even open their mouths Hugh said, “Good news, boys! I ran into Horace at Chasen’s and he was just off to Warner Brothers. He made it sound like he might have made something happen for you!”

For a moment, Hugh thought that the boys were going to kiss him. He quickly patted their shoulders and darted into his apartment.

“Good old McCoy!” Ed cried. “I knew he’d come through!”

Johnny just stood there grinning like a half-wit.

As one they spun around toward their apartment and almost bowled Edna over. She’d materialized, seemingly, out of thin air.

“Good news, boys!” she chortled.

When the same phrase had issued from Hugh’s mouth, the boys’ spirits had soared. Hearing it from Edna’s lips made their souls shrivel and all but die.

“Good news?” Ed asked guardedly.

“My cousin Sophie’s husband’s brother says he can use a couple of good doughnut men right now! During the War he mostly hired Mexicans, but now he wants to give a break to the boys who fought to keep this country free. All he wants are two boys who served in uniform, are willing to work hard, and don’t have any particular skills. Now who does that sound like to you?”

For a terrible moment, Ed and Johnny both knew exactly who that sounded like to them, but then their pride reasserted itself. They were writers, damn it. Zanuck wasn’t the only executive who’d said that their work was good enough. Their eyes met and a spark flashed between them.

“Thank you for the offer, Edna,” Ed said, drawing himself up with rigid dignity. “But at this very moment Horace McCoy is setting us up with a deal at Warner Brothers.”

Edna tsked again and took one of their hands in each of hers. “Well, you just come ask Edna,” she said warmly, “when you’re ready to grow up.”

As gracefully as they could they scurried off to their apartment. “Oh, Jesus,” Ed said, leaning against the door. “We’ve just got to get that break at Warners!”

“You ever fry doughnuts?” Johnny said.

“No, thank God. You?”

“For a week. For one God-forsaken week in Decatur when I was working my way up to Chi. You don’t know the horror, jack!”

Suddenly Ed pushed himself away from the door. “I’ve got it. I’ve got it. A great catchphrase for the crazy general!”

“Wait, lemme set it !” Johnny cried. “Interior. General Curt lays dying in his cave, his bloated body barely visible in the gloom! Then his lips begin to move…slowly…tortuously…and he says…”

“’It’s horrible!” Ed said in a croaked whisper. “’It’s horrible!’”

“Bingo!” Johnny cried. “And Warners loves giving catchphrases to their big actors!”

“Here’s lookin’ at you, keed!” Ed said.

And with gasps of “It’s horrible! It’s horrible!” they rushed back to the card table.

* * *

When the knock they’d so desperately awaited finally came, the boys didn’t hear it. They were on page one hundred and twelve, and their voices were rising in one of those arguments that even the most concordant of collaborators fall into in the fevered final stretch of a major work.

“Why the heck would they kill an ox?” Ed demanded.

“Okay, then, make it a pig!” Johnny snapped.

“Now you’re talking!” Ed grinned, and the song of the typewriter rose again.

But then the knock changed to a pounding and they heard a familiar voice call their names.

“Horses!” Johnny yelled, throwing the door open.

Horace had a hard time wedging himself into the apartment as the boys seemed to be crowding him from all sides.

“What’d they say?” Ed demanded.

“Oh, not much,” Horace drawled. “Just that you’re to report to the Writer’s Building tomorrow morning.”

Ed and Johnny looked at each other expressionlessly for a moment. Then huge grins split their faces and they were hopping up and down like battery mates celebrating the last out of a no-hitter.

“The Writer’s Building!” Ed boomed. “You mean you sold the idea without us even having to do a pitch?”

The boys’ excitement abruptly subsided when they noticed the embarrassment stealing across Horace’s face. “Well, no. You see…”

“Then we’re pitching it in the Writers Building?” Johnny asked incredulously.

“No, no,” Horace said. “Actually, this isn’t about the Cambodia movie at all…”

“Vietnam,” Ed said.

“This is more in a nature of a…well, a job.”

Ed and Johnny let that sink in. “Another rewrite, eh?” Ed said at last. “Oh, well. At least it’s writing.”

Horace’s embarrassment now seemed positively acute. “Uh, actually…it isn’t precisely a rewrite either…”

“Oh, Jesus,” Johnny said. “Don’t tell me we’ll be frying doughnuts in the commissary!”

“No, no, no,” Horace said, and he managed a grin. “This is much better than that. You’ll sort of be acting like it’s a rewrite…”

Ed’s brow furrowed. “Acting? You mean you got us a job as actors?”

Horace threw up his hands. “The hell with it. I’m sorry, fellas. But the best I could get you is a babysitting job for some novelist who’s been hired to write the next Errol Flynn movie. He likes to punish the bottle, see, and they need somebody to ride herd on him.”

“Babysitting,” Johnny said.

“Babysitting,” Ed said.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Horace said. “You’re not going to start bawling on me, are you?”

Ed shook his head, more as if clearing the cobwebs from it than as if answering in the negative. “Hold on, McCoy. You did tell this guy about our new idea, didn’t you?”

“Oh, yeah. I told him.”

“And what did he think?” Johnny prodded.

Horace looked at them. For a long, terrible moment he considered telling the truth. Describing the twist of the man’s mouth, his colorful use of invective, his incredulity that American troops would ever find themselves in Vietnam, his clever suggestion as to where Ed and Johnny might journey in search of their crazy general. But Horace remembered too well his own years of literary struggle, and a phrase came to him that had often been used to insulate him from unkind reality.

“He said it doesn’t suit their needs at the present time,” said Horace.

“What the hell does that mean?” Ed barked.

“It means we’re babysitting a drunk,” Johnny said.

“Unless you’d rather fry doughnuts,” Horace said.

Johnny shuddered.

Ed sighed. “What time at the Writers Building?” he asked.

“Ten sharp,” Horace said. “Ask for Mr. Wald.”

The boys thanked him, if a bit ungraciously, and closed the door. Johnny sank into their one good chair.

“And it was so perfect for Warners,” he said. “ I wonder what went wrong?”

“I’ll tell you what went wrong!” bellowed Ed. “That goddamn McCoy told him it was set in Cambodia, that’s what went wrong!”

Johnny thought about that. The more he thought about it, the screwier it sounded. But he didn't have the heart to say so to Ed. Instead he said, “Well, his heart was in the right place. Let’s not tell the poor guy he queered it for us.”

For the rest of the night only the patter of the rain could be heard at the Edna.



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