Zeroville: A Novel Read online

are the movies of the past

  and Vikar looks at the cassette again. “I like songs about movies,” he says.

  She says, “I don’t care about movies. I like the music.”

  “Everyone in Hollywood,” he says, “likes music better than movies. I hope your mother is coming back soon.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you shouldn’t be out here a long time by yourself.” He says, “I should go before she returns.”

  “O.K.”

  “If I see her on the lot, I’ll tell her to come back.”

  Zazi looks at Vikar. “I want a picture on my head.”

  “It’s from the movies.”

  “You picked the picture you wanted?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll get one of Bowie,” she says, waving the cassette.

  116.

  He wanders around the studio in the rain looking for Soledad but doesn’t find her. When he goes back out to the gate to check on Zazi, the Mustang is gone.

  117.

  On the television news is a story that the granddaughter of Charles Foster Kane has been kidnapped. The story says at least one or two of the kidnappers were black, but Vikar is certain some fucked-up white hippies did that business, no matter how hard they tried to pin it on black folks. It’s not clear whether they have kidnapped the granddaughter of Charles Foster Kane because they believe Citizen Kane is a very good movie or not a very good movie; Vikar wishes he could ask the burglar who broke into his apartment about it. He imagines all of the kidnappers watching Citizen Kane on television together in the middle of the night, while the granddaughter lies writhing on the floor, bound and gagged.

  118.

  When he’s finished reading The Death Ship, Vikar returns to Book City and buys whatever catches his attention. He reads all the Brontës, The Book of Lilith and the Arabian Nights which confounds him because it’s written by the actor married to Elizabeth Taylor, The Ogre by Michel Tournier and Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne de France by Blaise Cendrars, The Memoirs of Fanny Hill, a book called Les Diaboliques by Barbey d’Aurevilly, Memoirs of an Opium Eater and Theodore Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X, The Alexandria Quartet and the Freak Chronicles of one Charles Fort as catalogued in The Book of the Damned, with its accounting of a “super” Sargasso Sea in the sky from which reptiles, animals and elements fall to earth. He reads a book by a man named Bataille called Blue of Noon that he likes very much except he doesn’t understand the politics, this as the radio announces that the President of the United States has resigned.

  119.

  Nocturnally he begins to tour all the crypts and cemeteries of Los Angeles. Marilyn Monroe is buried in Westwood and Bette Davis is buried in Burbank along with Fritz Lang and Buster Keaton; below Bette’s name on her tomb Vikar might expect the inscription to read, Let’s not ask for the moon, we have the stars. Rather, it says: She did it the hard way.

  Vikar goes to the graves not to pay his respects. He pays his respects in the movie theater. He goes so that he can, futilely, try to come to grips with a revelation that unsettles him and that he can’t articulate. In an old cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard he finds Douglas Fairbanks, Cecil B. De Mille, Marion Davies, Tyrone Power, Peter Lorre and, just recently interred, Edward G. Robinson. When he reaches Jayne Mansfield’s headstone, he sees in the fluttering dark of clouds passing the moon the forms of people moving, and realizes only after a moment what appears to be a man and woman having sex.

  120.

  Then he realizes there are two men, and the whimpers from the woman sound to Vikar like cries of distress.

  Later he’ll wonder whether the rage that surges in him is from the act of rape or that it’s taking place on Jayne Mansfield’s headstone. Within seconds he’s yanked one man from off the woman and kicked in the face the other just as he looks up from what he’s doing. In the confusion of sex and surprise, neither of the assailants gets his bearings. Vikar kicks the second man again and takes the first by his hair and smashes his face into the headstone.

  The man lies still, blood spilling around the 1933 – 1967. In the dark the woman leaps to her feet, stops for a moment to take one look at the very still man on the headstone and another at Vikar, and bolts.

  121.

  The one man collects the other and drags him off in the dark. It’s hard for Vikar to tell whether the man whose face he smashed into Jayne Mansfield’s headstone is conscious or alive. Oh, mother, Vikar says to himself. He rips off his shirt and for the next hour cleans the headstone, mopping up the blood in the moonlight. Vikar tries to think when his last violent episode took place: Was it the morning he first arrived in Los Angeles, that hippie he hit with the food tray? No, the burglar I hit over the head with the radio. I had violent thoughts as well about the kid behind the front desk at the Roosevelt. When the headstone is clean, light begins to rise over the eastern hills and Vikar can read what’s inscribed: We live to love you more each day. Years later he’ll learn Jayne Mansfield is not buried here at all but in Pennsylvania where both she and Vikar were born, and then he’ll wonder about all the tombs and headstones, and how many hold phantom bodies. The movies are in all times, but the people are in no times.

  122.

  After he’s cleaned the headstone, he begins wandering south, away from the direction he originally came and into which the woman and two men ran. A few minutes later he’s stunned to reach the end of the cemetery and find himself at the back of the Paramount lot.

  123.

  He stashes the bloody shirt in a dumpster in the back of the lot and washes in the men’s room. Mid-afternoon he returns to his apartment on his secret street and waits for the police and movie-star chief of detectives who interrogated him on his fourth (fifth?) day in Los Angeles. He watches a movie on TV about a man who is abused as a boy and becomes an arsonist, and then meets a beautiful blond high-school majorette and tells her he’s a spy working on a top secret operation. When he commands her to have sex with him in order to prove her loyalty, he believes he has her under his power. But it becomes clear that she has him under her power, involving him in a scheme to murder her mother, after she’s already killed several others in an orgasmic rush.

  124.

  Vikar watches this young blonde in a kind of hypnosis. With her wild-child beauty and demeanor, she’s an American Bardot. She made this movie when she lost the role in another movie of a young mother pregnant by the Devil. The studios refused to cast her: Who would believe the Devil ravished this girl when everything about this girl gave every indication of having ravished the Devil? With the death of her father, at the age of three the actress supported her mother and two older sisters by modeling for catalogs; by the age of twelve, she attempted suicide. Was it on a Tuesday, whose name she then took for her own? As Vikar slumps in the couch in front of the TV, he dreams of her on her knees, mad between his legs. As he comes, her mouth curls into that smile of murder, her eyes glow red and he wakes in terror.

  125.

  When the phone rings, Vikar hasn’t seen or heard from Viking Man in nearly a year. “George Stevens man!” booms the voice on the other end. “Kind of a pussy, Stevens, if you don’t mind my saying. I’m off to Spain to make a movie.”

  “I heard.”

  “I’m psyched, vicar, I must confess. Same part of Spain where Leone’s shot a bunch of stuff. A few casting matters to sort out still … I was going to see if I could coax you over to design some sets for me, but Dot tells me you’re editing now.”

  “She’s teaching me.”

  “She says you’ve got an eye. Big compliment, considering the source.” My eye? Vikar wonders, touching the tattooed red teardrop beneath his left one. “Maybe we can bring you in on some of the cutting when we get back.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Huston’s in Morocco shooting his Kipling thing. Maybe I can get you on that too, once they’ve wrapped.”

  “I would like that very much,” Vikar says.

  “Morocco
is India in his movie and Spain is Morocco in mine. There’s movie-making in a scrotum sac, vicar.” There’s a long pause. “Take care of Dot, O.K., vicar?” he says.

  “All right.”

  “To the extent she lets anyone take care of her.”

  “All right.”

  “You see Margie’s Siamese-twin movie?”

  “Yes.”

  “A fucking hit, so that shows what I know.”

  “Yes.”

  “Too bad about separating the twins before the story starts. Really wanted to see Margie Ruth joined at the tits.”

  “Film history will have to survive.”

  “Ha! God love you, vicar, you’re getting wry. O.K., I’m off to Spain. If I tell you I’ll send a postcard, I’m probably lying, so I won’t. Hang in there on the editing gig, O.K.?”

  “All right.”

  “Keep an eye on Dot.”

  126.

  All the Los Angeles movies are the same movie, Vikar thinks riding the bus at night into the city of the wrong turn, where there’s no love just obsession, which lovers would choose over love even if they had a choice. A hitchhiker gets to L.A. and finds himself at the end of a leash, coiled around the hand of an actress named Ann Savage (… lose my heart on the burning sand / Now I want to be your dog); blond and bland, not a line of character in his baby face, the actor playing the drifter will spend the end of his life in jail for murdering his wife. A private eye who makes a living pursuing L.A.’s infidelities finds himself at the center of its most forbidden secret, when the woman he’s sleeping with is her own father’s lover, from whom she’s desperately trying to protect the daughter she had by him. Later, the actor playing the private eye will learn his mother is his grandmother and his sister is his mother. God has seeped into Los Angeles after all, and found His instruments there by which to sacrifice the city’s children.

  In another movie, the most famous and romantic of L.A. private eyes finds himself at the beach, amid the lazy decadence of the seventies. Vikar almost can recognize the beach house where he was seduced by Margie Ruth. When the gangster’s girlfriend is smashed in the face with a Coke bottle and people in the theater cry out, Vikar is only surprised that she’s not Soledad Palladin; Vikar finally recognizes Soledad among the naked nymphs dancing along the ramparts of Hollywood faux-castles. “It’s all right with me,” the private eye shrugs, not seeming to care about anything until it becomes clear he’s the only one who does care. Three years later Marlowe will move to New York, change his name to Bickle and drive cabs for a living.

  127.

  Variety, September 24, 1974: “LOS ANGELES—Dorothy Langer, veteran motion-picture editor who worked on the Academy Award-winning A Place in the Sun and the Oscar-nominated Giant under chief editor William Hornbeck—as well as The Heiress, The Barefoot Contessa, Suddenly Last Summer, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Americanization of Emily and The Greatest Story Ever Told—has been named by Paramount Pictures vice president of cultural affairs effective immediately, it was announced today.

  “In a joint statement Gulf + Western CEO Charles G. Bludhorn, Paramount chairman Barry Diller and head of studio production Robert Evans said: ‘Dotty Langer is a legend in the business with a deep understanding of both a proud tradition that dates back to Cecil B. De Mille’s The Squaw Man in 1914—the first Hollywood feature—and the recent winds of change that have produced such modern Paramount classics as The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby, Paper Moon, Serpico, Lady Sings the Blues, Murder on the Orient Express, and Love Story, on which she worked as editor. Paramount Pictures is excited by Ms. Langer’s new position and the possibilities it presents for both her and the company, and expects in the coming years to continue a fruitful relationship that already has lasted more than two decades.’”

  128.

  Vikar stands in Dot’s new office. It’s less grand than he expected. “She’s vice president,” he tells the blank-looking receptionist at the front desk, but when he’s shown into the office Dotty gently explains, “Vikar, there are about three thousand vice presidents at this studio.”

  “Three thousand?”

  “Maybe not three thousand,” she says, “but it’s like ‘associate producer.’ In this town, if you don’t have a job or you’re not the least bit important, you’re an associate producer. At a studio, you’re a vice president.”

  The office is filled with unpacked boxes and Dotty’s desk is in disarray, with no sign of the Jack Daniels bottle, although Vikar feels certain he detects bourbon. The office is small and Dotty appears smaller in a big black chair behind a big black desk. “Well,” Vikar says, “congratulations.”

  “God love you,” Dotty laughs, “as our viking friend would say, you’re probably the only one in Hollywood naïve enough to believe it and sincere enough to mean it. I’ve been Hornbecked, Vikar. Like what they did to Billy over at Universal, which is one level of purgatory away from retirement. ‘Vice president of cultural affairs’? It sounds like I’m having a tryst with Chairman Mao. One morning I’ll come into the studio and my furniture will be out on the lawn. The funny thing is I was doing better when the studio was tanking four years ago. Now it’s the hottest studio in the business and I’m on the way out.” She sees the look on Vikar’s face. “Forget it. I hear you’re editing the Max Schell picture.”

  “Another as well, with Rod Steiger as W. C. Fields.”

  “Jesus,” Dotty rolls her eyes.

  “There’s a very attractive actress in it.” Vikar can’t think of her name. “The one from Lenny.”

  “Our viking friend is in Spain making a big picture,” Dotty says.

  “He called me.”

  “It’s MGM but maybe we can fix things so you can work on it in post. You probably could learn some things on a big picture like that.”

  “Viking Man said perhaps a John Huston movie as well.”

  She says, “You’re still vexing them, from what I hear.”

  “Perhaps I’ll always be vexing.”

  “It’s good for the town to get vexed now and then. Don’t worry about me, Vikar. It’s pretty civilized, really, this vice-president thing. Not that many studios would take the time to ease me out rather than just pull the lever on the trap door underneath, and the writing is on the wall anyway—all the higher-ups are devouring each other, which is what they do when they get successful. Evans is entertaining enough and I’ll make the best of it, as long as I don’t have to score his coke or deal with the crazy Germans at the top of the food chain.”

  For several moments, neither of them says anything. Finally Vikar asks, “Are there any movies I should see?”

  “What are you in the mood for?”

  “Not a comedy,” he says.

  129.

  Because Dotty doesn’t hear the “not,” she recommends The Lady Eve at the Vista. “Positively the same dame!” Vikar remembers from the burglar in his apartment, and is enthralled by Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda’s love story of labyrinthine treachery and desire. This is a very good movie, he concludes, disconcerted only by the laughter around him.

  He reads a nineteenth-century French novel called Là-Bas about a writer living in a bell tower in Paris. The writer becomes obsessed with an historical figure named De Rais, who at the behest of the king of France became Joan of Arc’s right-hand man. It’s not clear, even to history, whether De Rais betrayed Joan or defended her, but after she was burned at the stake he went on to become the greatest child murderer in history, leading a cult of homicidal priests. Investigating De Rais, the writer receives strange letters from an unknown woman called Hyacinthe. God I hate this book, Vikar thinks to himself as he reads Là-Bas in a single night; the next night he reads it again, and the night after that, each time telling himself, God I hate this book, until finally, halfway through the eighth consecutive reading, he whispers to himself, God I love this book.

  130.

  When Michael has Fredo killed, it isn’t just Cain slaying Abel.
It’s Abraham sacrificing Isaac, because Michael has assumed the role of father to his older brother, who has assumed the role of son. Michael sacrifices the child to the god called Family; he destroys the family in its corruptible human form to preserve the idea of Family that’s more divine, and to preserve Michael’s love for Family that the older brother has betrayed. God has love only for purity, and everything is washed pure by blood, burned pure by fire, rendered pure by gunshot.

  131.

  Vikar is in an editing room on the Paramount lot one morning when he gets the phone call. The line has a lot of static and the voice on it sounds as though from the other side of the world, which it is. “… making my Lawrence of Arabia, vicar,” he finally hears. “Barbary pirates, bedouin armies, desert battles, Moroccan castles—well, they’re really Moorish castles …”

  “You sound far away,” Vikar says. There’s a delay in the voices back and forth.

  “Of course I sound far away,” Viking Man says, “I’m in the fucking depths of Spain, not far from Gibraltar. Some grand surfing, though.”

  “How’s the movie?”

  “I’m going to be David Lean while I’m waiting to become the next John Ford.”

  “What about the other David Lean?”

  “There you go getting wry on me, vicar.”

  “They made Dotty vice president.”

  Sometimes the lag in transatlantic response is longer. “I just talked to her,” Viking Man finally says. “Listen, vicar, this call’s expensive and I don’t know how long the connection will last, so here’s the thing. While you’re busy getting wry on me, I need you in Spain for a couple of months.”