“It’s a simple, straightforward deal, Hoagy,” said Stan Wexler, who was famous throughout the worlds of television and publishing for being a total stranger to simple, straightforward deals. “I send your agent a check for seventy-five thou this afternoon. You get the other seventy-five when you’ve turned the Anna Childress diary into a coherent 400-page manuscript. The password is … speed. Deep River Press is so pumped that they’re hoping you can knock it out in a month. Terrific bucks for a month’s work, am I right?”
“Plus twenty-five percent of the royalties,” I reminded him.
“I can’t give you a percentage of the royalties.”
“Stan, you told me yesterday I’d get twenty-five percent of the royalties.”
“I was lying yesterday. Today I’m telling you the truth.”
I patted my mouth with my napkin, slid out of the banquette and climbed to my feet. “Come on Lulu, we’re out of here.”
Here was the boisterous Russian Tea Room on West 57th Street, which back in those days—those days being the frigid winter of 1989—was the place to be seen eating lunch in New York City. Situated smack in between the East Coast offices of ICM and HWA, the two largest talent agencies in the world, the Russian Tea Room positively teemed with heavyweight publishing executives, Broadway producers, actors, actresses, supermodels, directors and writers, not to mention so many pint-sized agents they looked as if they’d all come spilling out of a clown car. Waiters laden with trays snaked their way through aisles that were crowded with dealmakers dealing, schmoozers schmoozing and gossip columnists such as Liz Smith and Cindy Adams collecting their daily morsels of wishful thinking and half-truths.
Me, I couldn’t stand the place, with its snooty vibe and garish, gilded décor of bright red banquettes, putrid green walls and collection of horrid paintings. Whenever I walked in there I felt as if I were having an acid flashback. Plus the food was awful, with the notable exception of their signature dish—buckwheat blinis slathered with sour cream and topped with caviar—which was what we’d been eating right up until Stan Wexler, who Rex Reed once dubbed the “impresario of schlock,” pulled one of his signature fast ones on me.
“Come on, Lulu, we’re out of here!” I repeated, louder this time.
Fat chance. Lulu, my basset hound, was under the table scarfing up her own plate of blinis with sour cream and caviar, and she wasn’t budging. She has rather unusual tastes for a basset hound, and the breath to prove it. I know this because she likes to sleep on my head.
“Sit down, will you, Hoagy?” Stan pleaded with me. “We’re both reasonable men.”
“You may be, I’m not. No royalty participation, no deal.”
“I can explain. Just sit back down, please?”
I didn’t have much left anymore—just Lulu, my wardrobe and my ego, which was so large that it recently applied for statehood. I stood there in the navy blue pinstriped suit I’d had made in London by Strickland and Sons. Stood there a long time.
Long enough for Stan’s face to get scrunched with concern. “Please?”
I sat back down, studying him across the banquette. Stan Wexler was in his fifties and not exactly easy on the eyes. He was no taller than five feet five, even in his chunky heeled boots, and no less than a hundred pounds overweight, with protruding eyes, chipmunk cheeks and receded gray hair that he combed forward in that Roman gladiator style that Sinatra had made popular for a while. It hadn’t looked good on Ol’ Blue Eyes and it did even less for Stan. The snug-fitting brown tweed jacket and beige turtleneck he was wearing made him look disturbingly like an overcooked bratwurst that was about to burst. He had a fine sheen of sweat on his forehead. Stan had gotten his start booking road tours of former Broadway hits like The Odd Couple starring former TV stars who couldn’t get jobs anymore. From there he’d branched into publishing as a packager of celebrity diet and exercise books by former TV stars who couldn’t get jobs anymore. Soon he became the number one producer of late night infomercials for an array of dubious products and services pitched by, wait for it, former TV stars who couldn’t get jobs anymore. Before long he was producing and hosting syndicate
TV game shows as well as a syndicated daytime talk show that catered to an audience that thought Zsa Zsa Gabor was still glamorous. The man was always hustling, always in the middle of something. And he had done well for himself considering that he was known to be a dishonest chiseler. Well enough to own a co-op in the high-toned Carlyle Hotel apartment tower, where he lived alone, unless you count his penchant for high-end call girls, the kind who charged $1,500 for an all-night sleepover.
“Okay, so explain,” I said finally.
“I’m boxed in on the royalties. Anna Childress spelled it out in her will. Her lawyer-slash-lover, Janet Tara, told me that all of the royalties of Anna’s diary—which she wished to have published posthumously—are to go to that place in the San Fernando Valley where old actors go when they can’t work anymore.”
“You mean the coffee shop at the Sportsman’s Lodge?”
“No, it’s a retirement home. In Woodland Hills I think. It’s a worthy cause. The Screen Actor’s Guild supports it. And Janet, her lawyer-slash-lover, says there’s no wiggle room. But, hey, it’s still $150,000 for a month’s work. Plus great exposure for you. A live telecast syndicated from coast-to-coast that’ll be front-page news. It’s easy money.”
“There is no such thing as easy money.”
Stan eyed me shrewdly. “And how much of it have you got in the bank?”
The answer was $57.23, not that it was any of his business. Right around now, you may be asking yourself what I, Stewart Hoag, the man whose first novel, Our Family Enterprise, had inspired The New York Times Sunday Book Review to call me “the first major new literary voice of the 1980s,” the man who’d been married to Oscar and Tony Award-winning actress Merilee Nash and had lived the high life in a fabulous eight-room apartment on Central Park West, was doing at the Russian Tea Room swallowing blinis and my pride with Stan Wexler. I crashed and burned, that’s what. Got writer’s block. Couldn’t come up with a second novel. All I developed was an unhealthy interest in nose candy. I lost Merilee. Lost my key to our eight rooms overlooking Central Park and our red 1958 Jaguar XK-150. Lost everything except for Lulu and my crappy old unheated fifth floor walk up on West 93rd Street.
Last year, my agent had convinced me to take a job ghosting a memoir out in Los Angeles for Sonny Day, the famous old-time comedian. It became a number one bestseller, mostly because some lives were lost in the making of the book. Nothing generates heat around a celebrity memoir like a murder. Or two. And now Stan Wexler wanted me to craft a number one bestseller out of the legendary diary that had been kept by one of one of the great Hollywood blonde bombshells of the Fabulous Fifties.
For those of you who are
too young to remember Anna Childress or have no interest in vintage films—in which case I don’t want to know you—Anna was one of the film world’s biggest and most controversial stars. It was the czar of 20th Century Fox himself, Darryl F. Zanuck, who spotted her photo after she won a beauty contest in San Diego in 1945. He brought her in for a screen test and signed her to a contract on the spot, convinced she was going to be the next Rita Hayworth. She was stunningly gorgeous, a statuesque strawberry blonde with shimmering blue eyes, pillowy lips and a smoky sex appeal that reeked of desire, deception and danger.
But her career at Fox was never to be. Zanuck, who was famous for summoning juicy young contract starlets to perform sexual favors for him in his office, got a bit more than he bargained for with Anna. She became an instant legend when, five minutes after she was called to his office, she flung the door open and in a voice loud enough to be heard by two dozen secretaries and front office executives, cried out, “Mr. Zanuck, I signed with this studio to perform in motion pictures, not to suck dick. Especially one that small!”
Not surprisingly, she was immediately cut loose. Ended up over at RKO, where she made such a strong impression in a small role in a heist picture that she was immediately paired with Robert Mitchum in one of his finest noir crime films and joined that exclusive league of sexy sirens such as Gloria Grahame, Jane Greer, Audrey Totter, and Marie Windsor who were collectively known as “The Bad Girls.”
Anna married her agent, William Lasher, and had a son, Tommy—who, as I don’t have to tell you, grew up to become Tommy Lasher, currently one of the top three leading men in Hollywood. William Lasher steered Anna out of the dark little crime pictures she’d been making and into the big, sunny Technicolor toga epics that became popular in the 1950s. Anna was still a bad girl, but now she was tormenting pharaohs and kings, not mob bosses and crooked cops. The sword and sandal sagas were also ideally suited to her mile-wide smile and abundant physical attributes. Her career zoomed and soon her name was being mentioned along with the likes of Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, and Grace Kelly. She worked for Hitchcock twice. Even received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for a racy drama she did for Otto Preminger opposite James Stewart.
But the audience is always searching for new stars. Young stars. By 1962 she’d been big for more than a decade and was a 40-year-old widow, having lost her husband to a heart attack. She began getting offered smaller roles in lower budgeted films. It was while she was filming a Western with Mitchum in 1965 that Anna discovered she loved horses and bought herself a sprawling 1,000-acre ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley near Santa Barbara. She also discovered that the great love of her life wasn’t William Lasher. It was Janet Tara, a 19-year-old UC Santa Barbara student whom she’d hired to groom her horses. After Janet
graduated from UCSB Anna put her through USC law school and the two of them lived happily ever after, dividing their time between Anna’s ranch and her house in Holmby Hills.
Soon, Anna drifted out of the business and into relative obscurity. Very few people would have paid much attention to her anymore if she hadn’t been Tommy Lasher’s mother. Except, that is, for one thing:
She’d let word slip out that she kept a diary during her golden years. Damned juicy one, too. Popular legend had it that she knew every secret there was to know about every Hollywood star’s secret sexual preferences, fetishes, and drug habits. She knew which wholesome, All-American sweetheart carried on a long, passionate love affair with a jazz trumpeter who happened to be married and black. She knew which of director John Ford’s stock troupe of rugged Western roustabouts liked to dress up in women’s clothing and frequent gay bars in Venice. She knew the truth about whether Cary Grant and Randolph Scott did or did not do more than simply share a beach house in Santa Monica together. She knew which happily married leading men were secretly gay and which married leading ladies were lesbians or bi-sexual like herself. She knew who spanked little boys, who spanked little girls, and she named names.
For years, Anna’s thoroughly naughty hand-scrawled diary had been much sought after. Hollywood’s most powerful moguls kept trying to buy it from her so that they could destroy it. No luck. The supermarket tabloids were so desperate to splash its contents all over their front pages that her house in Holmby Hills had been broken into and ransacked several times. Again, no luck, but her lawyer-slash-lover Janet Tara did convince her to tuck it away in a safety deposit box in the Westwood Village branch of Conestoga Savings Bank.
Last year, Anna had suffered a massive stroke that left her unable to speak or to recognize anyone. Janet had been forced to move her to a nursing home in Santa Monica. Two weeks ago she’d slipped away in her sleep at the relatively young age of sixty-seven.
Right away, Anna’s death set off an intense bidding war for the publishing rights to her diary, with Janet running the show. Deep River had landed it for $1.2 million. Enter Stan Wexler, who’d needed only three magic words to convince Janet that he could turn Anna’s diary into one of the biggest bestsellers of all time: Al Capone’s Vault.
In 1986, Stan had been involved in producing what had to rank as one of the greatest fiascos in television history—a live two-hour special officially known as “The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault.” It seemed that construction workers had recently uncovered secret tunnels in Chicago’s Lexington Hotel, which had served as Scarface’s headquarters during his
Prohibition heyday. The tunnels had led to a sealed vault under the hotel. A huge hoopla was made about what the vault’s contents might be. Untold millions of dollars? His enemy’s corpses? Cases of bootlegged whiskey? All of the above? So keen was America’s interest that no fewer than 30 million viewers watched the live TV event, hosted by so-called journalist Geraldo Rivera, in which the vault was unsealed to reveal that it contained … nothing. Just “unidentified debris,” which I later heard was a euphemism for desiccated rodent droppings. None of which mattered. What mattered was that 30 million people had tuned in to watch a colossal hoax.
And the Anna Childress diary was no hoax. Stan had convinced Janet that many, many more millions would tune in this coming Friday evening to a live syndicated TV event—hosted by none other than Stan Wexler himself—during which she, Janet, would open Anna’s safety deposit box at Conestoga Savings Bank in Westwood Village and remove Anna’s prized diary, which would then be whisked by police escort to Janet’s law office in Beverly Hills, deposited in her office safe and guarded around the clock by private security guards.
Then the work would begin. Someone discreet who knew how to craft a compelling narrative—which is to say me—needed to take over. Have the hand-scrawled diary transcribed by a small army of typists, then organized and cut down to no more than 400 pages. There was no telling how much good material there was and how much would be of no interest to anyone. Since Anna wasn’t a professional writer I’d need to find a voice for her and keep it consistent throughout. It was a big job, especially considering that it had to be done so fast, but it could be done. ...
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