Wag the Dog Read online

  So even if he sounds like Ding Bat Woo, I have to understand that the problem is in my listening, not in his speaking. After I became a sergeant and got my own squad, I began to use what he said as well as I could. It worked. It helped me to save my people and to kill the enemy. When we had a captain who insisted on violating the principles of Sun Tzu, we had great trouble and many of us died.

  At first I don’t like this translation. In fact, I resent it. Sun Tzu wrote about war. Real war. This book changes War to Strategy and calls itself the “World’s Most Widely Read Manual of Skillful Negotiations and Lasting Influence.” It is aimed at those business people who would like to think that business competition is war, that lawyers and accountants and agents are soldiers in the field, that money is blood, that a neurotic tic is the equivalent of life in a chair in a VA hospital, needing someone to wipe your ass and change the urine tube coming out of your dick. But if I refuse to hear what is said because I am prejudiced, then I am as blind as the men who lead us in Vietnam. So I try to listen as one who is ignorant to one who is wise.

  The sentence to which Kim pointed is, The strategy of positioning evades Reality and confronts through Illusion. It is in chapter 6, which is called, in this translation, “Illusions and Reality (Using Camouflage).” The standard translation is “Weakness and Strength.” The translator’s commentary says, “The idea of creating illusions to obscure reality is a specific tactical maneuver designed to keep the opponent at a constant disadvantage.”

  It is a very empty house without Maggie there.

  I try to stay sober and come close to succeeding. I go into the screening room and watch Maggie’s films on videotape. The bottle comes with me. At some point I doze off. I awaken around 3:00 A.M. I have to piss and my mouth tastes like death. The house is still empty.

  Shortly thereafter a car pulls in. Not the limo. It’s Maggie come home. With a ride or with someone. It’s not my place to be waiting up and watching for her. To appear to do so would be—bad strategy. I go upstairs to my room. I leave the door open so I can hear, go across the room and look out the window to see the car they’ve arrived in. It’s a white Ferrari 348 with the top down.

  I hear the door. I hear the footsteps. Then the laughter floats up to my room. She sounds high. I can’t help but go to the bedroom door and look down. She is somewhat disheveled. I’m like an aged and jealous husband looking at a young and lively wife. Her nipples are distended. Erect and popping out. Is that from the cool air and the ride in the open car? Or is it the man she’s with: Jack Cushing, who plays young pilots and soldiers and gunslingers and spends a lot of screen time with his shirt off. His muscles have lots of definition. In his own way, I suppose, he’s as good-looking as she is. His eyes are famously blue and Fredo does his hair too.

  They’re talking about who said what and who did what and reliving the party. But the subtext is what it always is. He wants her and she’s not sure. He wants it as soon as possible. She wants to drag out every measure of admiration and ego fulfillment that she can get before she commits. Apparently, Hollywood gossip has not taken Maggie off the A-list. At the party the famous actress-turned-director came on to her so strong that her current girlfriend stalked out of the party early. Someone, I didn’t hear who, told Maggie—in front of Melanie Griffith—that she had the most beautiful figure in films. Melanie was furious and shook her tits at whoever it was who spoke. Maggie, telling the story, does a deadly imitation of Melanie.

  “Are those really real?” Jack says.

  “You bet,” Maggie says. “A hundred percent homegrown organic, no preservatives added.”

  “I don’t believe you. They’re too good. Let me do the touch test,” he says. “You know, these are infallible fingers. They can always tell.”

  Maggie says, “I need the ocean air.” She rushes away from him and goes out on the deck.

  Now I can’t hear them. I step out of the shadows of my room onto the walk that runs around the living room so I can see them better. The wind coming off the water plays with her hair. I’m in some damn nightmare of a movie. He sidles up beside her. He touches her hair. She responds with pleasure. He puts his other hand on her back, running it down to her hip. She moves away. But not far. Now they’re side by side. He turns to face her. She keeps looking out. He puts a hand on her shoulder, gently turns her so that they’re looking right at each other. She doesn’t make eye contact with him. He lifts her chin with his fingers. They make eye contact. Shit. This is it. You might as well cut away or cut to the hard-core from here.

  Yeah, he lowers his mouth to hers and she lets him kiss her.

  Didn’t I just play this scene with her. Damn her.

  Then his arms go around her and she lets him pull her close. Her breasts against his chest. Him feeling her nipples hard. Her belly against his sculpted, every-day-at-the-gym-with-his-personal-trainer torso. The bottom of her belly, the soft rounded part feeling his cock, stiff or not. The mound of her against the thigh that he rubs gently between her legs. His hands find the shape of her ass.

  He’s gyrating into her. She moves against him. My mouth is dry, my heart beats high in my chest. I should leave. Find a place to be that’s far, far away. I can’t even take one step back and hide in my room. I watch mesmerized.

  He lifts her dress. The skin of her legs is smooth and fair in the moonlight. His mouth’s on her neck and then her shoulders.

  She pushes him away. Panting. Her eyes are shining, her lips swollen and wet.

  She backs into the house. He follows. They leave the door to the deck open so the night can come in, blowing cool against the fevers. Now they start again. Slower, but just as intense. Totally stoned into sex. I’m watching a porno film of two of Hollywood’s top stars and I’m lucky I don’t have a gun in my hand.

  He unhooks her dress. It slides off her shoulders. Beautiful unblemished skin. His mouth moves down her neck to her collar bone. His hands push the dress lower. She lets him push it down to her waist. She covers her breasts with her hands. Half-naked, half-defensive.

  Now he falls to his knees in front of her. He eases the dress the rest of the way down. His hands come back up, caressing from ankle to buttock. His head moves forward and he begins to kiss her belly. She sighs with pleasure. Damn her. His mouth is finding its way down, toward the fine line of lace that covers her mound. His tongue snakes between the fabric and the flesh. Her hands are on his head. Her head tilts back in anticipation of the pleasures to come. Her eyes are closed.

  Then they open and she is looking into my eyes.

  Up on the balcony, watching her. God knows what she sees in them.

  “Stop,” she says to Jack.

  He makes a sound in his throat and pushes his mouth downward.

  “Stop,” she says again.

  He doesn’t. She pulls away. He holds tight. She puts her hand in his face and pushes back at him.

  “What the fuck’s the matter with you?” he says.

  “Stop,” she says.

  “Magdalena, baby,” he says in his sexiest voice. He looks at her. He sees that she’s not looking at him, but upward. So he looks up too. He sees me. “Who the fuck is that?”

  “My . . .”

  “ . . . chauffeur and bodyguard,” I say.

  She’s standing there, nipples popping, naked but for her panties, his saliva drying at the bottom of her belly.

  “Get rid of him,” he says.

  “Yes, Joe. You should go.”

  “No,” I say. Much to my surprise. This is not what is planned.

  “Jesus, fire this asshole,” Jack says.

  “I can’t do that,” Maggie says.

  “Of course you can,” Jack says.

  “Joe,” she says. “You should go. You really should.”

  “I wish to God I could.”

  “Listen, the lady said go. Now go. Or I’ll make you go.”

  I walk slowly down the stairs. I should go. She’s not mine. She didn’t give me permission, or an invitation
. Maggie’s body has been warm. Perspiring lightly. Now the breeze is evaporating the moisture. Her skin is alive with goose bumps. I’ve never seen so much life in a woman.

  “Beat it, dude,” Jack says.

  In spite of myself, I say no.

  Everybody in Hollywood does some kind of martial arts. Jack does taijutsu. That is the technique they’re teaching at Ninja, the trendiest martial-arts school in L.A., which is run by Sakuro Juzo.

  I’m shorter than Jack. Fifteen, twenty years older. My thickness looks like weight. Plus, everybody’s brain is in their dick at this point. He thinks he’s going to take me out with a Ninja attack that he’s been studying for six months. He assumes a stance. Goes for a quick strike. Maggie yells, “No.” I block. I step inside. I’m a close-in guy. I hit him hard, a straight punch into the solar plexus.

  And it’s over.

  Jack is on the ground gasping for air. I pick him up. Put him over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry. His gasps are desperate. Which is what happens when you take a hard shot in the solar plexus, it just pops the air right out of you, the lungs collapse with an internal vacuum effect and you can’t get them to open again. Not right away. Until you can, it’s terrifying. Even if it’s happened to you before. Which I don’t think it has, to Jack.

  “Stop it,” Maggie says. “He’s hurt, Joe. He’s really hurt.”

  “No,” I say. Because he’s not. And I know it I take him outside to the car. Maggie dragging along beside me, naked and, I think, loving the scene. I certainly am—now. I dump the movie star down beside his Ferrari. He’s starting to get his breath. His erection is definitely gone.

  “You got your car keys?” I ask.

  “Fuck you. I’ll kill you. Kill you. Sue you. You’re dead, dead in this town . . . fucking weirdos . . .” he says from the ground.

  “You’ll catch cold,” I say to Maggie and lead her back inside.

  34 Jewish Jr.’s are rare, II’s and III’s even rarer. It is considered “bad luck” to name someone after someone living. However, this is merely a custom, not an actual religious prohibition.

  35 I guess it’s time to deal with this.

  Certain details may lead some readers to think that Hartman is a thinly disguised Ovitz.

  When I began to research the “Hollywood” portion of this book—I know less about Hollywood than the average viewer of Entertainment Tonight—I asked my then West Coast agent, Michael Siegal, to find me a researcher who could pull up some articles about various subjects, including major packagers like Mike Ovitz, since the concept of packaging was central to the events. His assistant called back the next day with a name—someone who did a very adequate job—but he also said, “If your next book concerns Mike Ovitz, Michael [Siegal] doesn’t want to represent it.”

  I repeat that story to give the reader an insight into the power that someone like Ovitz commands. Subsequently, the reaction was repeated. Two things are worth noting. One is that these people did not wait for Mr. Ovitz to express disapproval or distaste, they anticipated for him that he might, and that was sufficient. The second is that no one has yet suggested that they feared, or that I should fear, the reactions of the (then) president or the (then) secretary of state who are not “characters like,” but named George Bush and James Baker.

  And, of course, I want to confront the issue of whether this is a thinly disguised portrait of Ovitz and if it is and he doesn’t like it, or even if his people think he wouldn’t like it, does that mean I will never work in that town again? And am I afraid of that?

  You bet I am. A writer can make more bucks off one film flop than from a best-selling book.

  So, Mike, let me say this to you: This is not a thinly disguised portrait of you. If anything, it is a sort of homage, in general, to how important agents and packagers have become in our society and how truly creative their underrated contributions can be.

  Chapter

  FIFTEEN

  IT WAS TUESDAY, 5:00 P.M. Mel Taylor drove down to Little Saigon. The two women were waiting for him, chattering and laughing in that lovely, feminine Vietnamese way.

  He wondered once again why it was that American women couldn’t be that way—exotic, erotic, inventive, always lovely and trim, willing and able to really please a man, in short, subservient and good at it. Most people bitched and moaned about the war. And every time you saw a vet on TV or in the movies or in the news, they were miserable and screwed up. Mel wasn’t. He’d had what the British used to call “a good war.” The Saigon years had been, in many ways, “the best years of his life.” No question. The women, the food, the gracious living. In Vietnam he’d been a rich man. He’d had servants: cook, house cleaner, laundry boy. He’d been a powerful man, with an adoring mistress, and he only had to keep her, he didn’t have to answer to her or be faithful to her. What did he have in America? A microwave, a Hoover, a Westinghouse, and a wife.

  Mel was actually early. Not by more than three or four minutes. But certainly early. And he was erect inside his pants when he walked in. That was unusual. No delicate little butterfly touches to cleverly coax blood down to engorge the spongelike cells of the penis, causing it to enlarge and stiffen, step by tiny step. No warm bath in a pretty mouth, where it could measure its own increase against tongue, teeth, cheeks, and throat. This last being a measure that proved how large and potent he must be, for even the experienced mama-san had to retreat when Taylor swelled to his full status.

  Taylor had been listening to the tape. Over and over, for days. The tape of the night that Magdalena Lazlo came home with Jack Cushing and Joe Broz punched him out. The night that the microphones heard, and the linked slo-play Panasonics recorded, the sounds of Magdalena Lazlo submitting to the lust and passion of Joe Broz. They’d gone at it for hours. Moans of desire, shouts of orgasm, subtle sounds of moisture, a variety of endearments, endless praise for each other’s body parts, encouragement and satisfaction.

  A new day, a new tape. They sent Mary Mulligan away and they’d gone at it again. The first day they’d started hard and fast and ended sensual and slow, with sleepy endearments. The second, they’d started slow and tender, but it got away from them quickly and they became animals, grunting and—Taylor could swear he could feel it on the tape—sweating.

  Somewhere in the middle—Taylor didn’t know why he remembered it, fixated on it—maybe because amidst all that moaning and sighing it had been so unexpected. A vividness, like a child’s bright plastic toy, cartoon colors, in the middle of a flesh-tone landscape. Somewhere in the middle, giggling, Maggie said, “You know what the best part of being your lover is going to be, Joe? Do you know?”

  “No. What’s the best part?”

  “It’s going to be dressing you.”

  “Aww, come on.”

  “We’re going to start with those gym socks of yours. No more white socks, except for running. Then we’re going to get you underwear and ties and shirts and slacks and shoes and I’m going to get Fredo to do something with your hair.”

  Which is where they were now. Taylor knew. They’d finally left the house, after two days behind closed doors, except for a run on the beach and splash in the sea. He had a two-man team on them. They’d last reported in when Maggie took Joe into an exclusive men’s store on Rodeo Drive at 2:00 P.M.

  Taylor stripped. He tossed his clothes on the chair in the corner. The mama-san folded them neatly. The daughter-san gaped with respectful awe at his organ. He walked over to the massage table. With each step his erection bounced up and flopped sideways, describing an eccentric oval that leaned toward the right and was wider at the bottom than the top. He hopped up on the massage table.

  Mama-san rushed to hand him his brandy. He slurped it down, felt the burn, and lay back with his head on the pillow. The sheet beneath him was clean and crisp and just about body temperature.

  “Oh, you are very strong today, Captain Taylor. Very powerful,” the daughter said. He’d been ROTC, entered the Army as a lieutenant, then rose to the rank of
captain in Vietnam.

  “Oh my, yes. You are a giant,” the mother said.

  “I am afraid to touch it,” the daughter said. It was obviously fake whore talk. But fake was not the issue, was it? The issue was whether a woman wanted a man to feel good, to feel strong and manly. To feel respected and powerful.

  “Do not be afraid,” the mother said. “Come, I will show you.”

  She took her daughter’s hands and placed them on the stiff penis.

  At the first touch, much to the surprise of all three of them, it began to ejaculate.

  Always before, by design, it had taken a full hour. And then, when it did, it spurted hugely, in a high and perfect arc, like the arc of urine of an undiapered infant boy lying on his back, reaching at least as far as Taylor’s own chest, sometimes as far as his head. An ejaculation of power and grandeur.

  But this. This just spilled. It spilled out the tip and dripped down and kept on spilling in small, powerless pulses until he was empty. It was a dribble. It didn’t even feel like an orgasm. The big ejaculations felt like something. You bet they did. They were timeless, wordless screams of ecstasy. This was nothing. He’d received greater sensation and achieved more release from taking a plain old piss than from this.

  Taylor was angry. He felt ripped off. “You fucked up,” he snarled to the women. “You fucked up.”

  They said something in Vietnamese. And giggled. Taylor found the giggles, in this situation, to be entirely without charm. In fact, the laughter was infuriating. They were laughing at him. Laughing at an American. He hopped off the table and loomed over them. “Goddamn you, you bitches, you fucked up.” The mama-san started to apologize, but Taylor said, “If you think I’m going to pay you for this, you’re out of your fucking mind.”

  This started an argument as to whether he was paying by the hour or per ejaculation. There was justice to both sides of the case, and an outside arbitrator certainly could have settled it rapidly and even with good feeling all around: “Girls, do ’em again, and Mel, tip ’em an extra fifty.” But their giggles and his threat not to pay had pushed each other’s fear and anger buttons. Each immediately brought baggage to the conflict. It was no longer Mel against the girls; it had become customer versus whore, male versus female, Caucasian versus Asian, America versus Vietnam.