would have made a swell cowboy.’
Edgar stood up and Stone did too. ‘Get going,’ said Bookbinder, ‘I’m going to phone the cops now.’
‘What about the waitress?’
‘Manageress,’ said Bookbinder. ‘Weinberger will see to that. You haven’t been here tonight.’
When they were outside in the dark, Edgar said, ‘I’ll lead the way, you follow. Flash me if you want to stop.’ Stone didn’t answer. He turned away. Edgar Nicolson touched his sleeve.
‘Did you hear anything about Ingrid? Will she be OK?’
Stone kicked an empty beer can. The entrance to the tourist court was littered with them. ‘Edgar,’ said Stone gently, ‘she’s dead. That’s what everyone is so worried about.’
3
I have a washbasin but no shower in my office. Dory [Schary] has a shower but no bathtub. L.B. [Mayer] has a shower and a bathtub. The kind of bath facilities you have in your office is another measure of the worth of your position.
Gottfried Reinhardt
No oriental potentate had a more attentive retinue than followed Leo Koolman through the London offices of Koolman International Pictures Inc that Wednesday afternoon. And, like the entourage of an Eastern ruler, this following was entirely male. Koolman lived in Santa Monica, but he also lived in London. Because so many KI films had been shot in Spain he used some of the tied-up money to buy a house in Marbella too. Each of his houses provided cars, horses, paintings, servants, food and love. And such was the style of Koolman’s life that for three or four years at a time, all of these elements would remain unchanged.
However, most of his year was spent in New York. For that was where he found the computers and the accountants and the men from the banks and investment companies, and that therefore was the centre of power. Call him president, chairman or production chief, in the Koolman company it was the man who sat in New York who called the tune. So his European executives kept close to Leo Koolman that afternoon. They made sure that no possible whim might be frustrated or allowed to cool. Cigarettes – always Parliaments – and cigars – Monte Cristo – appeared and were lit by steady hands almost before they reached his mouth. Stiff Martinis were delivered in heavy cut-glass goblets, tinkling with ice. Inside each was a row of olives transfixed by a plastic spear with The Long Tornado embossed upon its stem. The Long Tornado was KI’s latest film; Leo Koolman liked to be reminded of what his advertising men were doing for it. He used the spears to emphasize his words, and he punctuated his theories by biting into the olives with strong white teeth.
The men in the room were curiously alike. They were slim and healthy: tanned by lamps and exercised by machines. They wore expensive suits of dark wool or tailor-made blue-flannel blazers. White shirts set off club ties both real and ornamental. Their hair was short, and more than half of them were wearing tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles. Their fingernails were manicured, their faces showed a trace of talc and their voices were soft and sincere and, because the Englishmen tried to speak like the Americans and vice versa, it was difficult to tell which were which. They moved constantly, turning so as to keep Koolman in sight. None sat down. They conversed and laughed and drank and patted shoulders, but it was all done in a rehearsed and subdued manner, being little more than displacement activity for men who knew that their livelihoods could depend upon a murmur or a gesture from Leo Koolman. So only Koolman could look where he liked, and he moved among them talking in the soft sympathetic tones of a Schweitzer among incurables.
Leo Koolman was a tall man in his late forties. He wore a dark-grey silk suit and a cream shirt with a Palm Springs Raquet Club tie. He had a thin bony nose and a large generous mouth which a small scar caused to pucker on one side. His eyelids were heavy, which prevented any but the lowest-placed lights reflecting from his eyeballs. It gave him a dead-eye appearance. Photographers used eye-lights to avoid such a look, and thus portraits of Leo Koolman made him look younger and more active than he looked in life. But those unlit eyes were not dead; they studied the men in the room. He looked at their ears and their shoes and their spectacles and the knot of their tie and all the time he judged their capability and remembered their salaries. Koolman was an attractive man: few men and even fewer women resisted the spell of the energy he generated and wasted with profligate disregard. He slept less than four hours a night, and could get off a transatlantic plane looking as neat and tidy as ever he did, and be ready to confute teams of lawyers single-handed. He played tennis like a pro, swam, danced and rode a horse with far above average skill. What he could never get from reading books, he got from reading accounts, and he’d add up columns while talking. His memory was a widely discussed phenomenon. By any standards Koolman was a remarkable man. If he had failings – and few of his associates believed that – they were an indifference to books, a hostility to serious music and no discernible sense of humour. Koolman laughed only at disasters; particularly those of his rivals.
If the last of the Hollywood czars has gone, then Koolman was one of the first Stalins. Perhaps by the turn of the century even journalists will be suspecting that such men are with us to stay. Stalins don’t live by movies alone. Koolman’s contemporaries governed conglomerates and were as interested in car rentals, airlines, frozen food and computers as they were in movie-making. Koolman International also owned subsidiaries, but Leo Koolman had grown up in Hollywood and he never forgot his childhood, and never ceased to implement his dreams.
All the executives in the room had once been agents, lawyers or actors. Koolman had found another way of calling the tune in the movie business: he’d inherited the president’s chair from his Uncle Max, who’d formed the company when both the movies and the accountants were silent.
These men were Koolman’s janissaries: men he’d brought from New York and California, the dukes of distribution and the princes of publicity. Perhaps they too lit Koolman’s cigars back there on Fifth Avenue but here in London they enjoyed a different, vicarious power. They were praised and pandered to. For they would have Koolman’s ear in the days to come, when he was deciding what he really thought about his European offices and the men who manned them.
At five-thirty Koolman retreated beyond the ramparts of the outer office, through the anteroom where Minnie guarded the sofa worn shiny by nervous behinds, and to the extraordinary art-encrusted office which was kept for his exclusive use. He spoke to New York and California, as he did every day from wherever he was. He retired to his private bathroom, took a shower and changed his clothes. By six o’clock he was ready for the audience.
An agent brought a director who wanted to do a musical about Marx and Engels and a girl who’d spent all afternoon painting her eyes. A Cockney actor was modelling his Biafra hairdo. A producer showed everyone a photo of his new house in Palm Springs and a scriptwriter in a studded leather jacket brought the eighth rewrite of Copkiller – Anarchy Rules in Youth’s New State.
‘There’s a frisson or two there,’ said the scriptwriter modestly. He took off his dark glasses and scowled. Koolman flipped it carelessly and read a line. ‘It’s good,’ said Koolman, although the line he read had remained unchanged in all eight versions. In fact Koolman had read none of them: his script department took those sort of chores off his back. He looked around the room. A girl in a see-through dress embraced the European head of publicity enthusiastically enough to break a shoulder strap. Suzy Delft brought a friend named Penelope and they both kissed Leo Koolman, who blushed.
The gathering continued for two hours, although few visitors stayed that long. Agents paraded their clients and cued their exits. One of the first people to leave was a pretty young girl named Josephine Stewart. She was one of the few people in the room to address her host as Mr Koolman and yet the very formality of that might have indicated the influence she wielded. Not only was she a beautiful young wife with a wealthy family and a brilliant Oxford degree not so very far behind her, she was also an active campaigner against the bomb, apartheid and censorship. She was in addition one of the most influential London film critics.
She gave her readers sociology, history and art for the price of a film review. She could recall shot by shot a Jean Vigo masterpiece, relate it to the abortion rate in pre-war