Wag the Dog Read online

  45 There actually are Coca-Cola aficionados, and while they don’t have vintages, they do claim to detect differences based on where the beverage is bottled. St. Louis is considered the best, its bottles treasured in Coke cellars and served on special occasions.

  Chapter

  NINETEEN

  IT’S LIKE PRETTY WOMAN. Except I’m playing Julia Roberts and Maggie’s playing Richard Gere. We start at ten in the morning. By noon I’m ready to quit. She’s enjoying herself more than I’ve ever seen, girlish and carefree. She tells every salesperson that I’m her very own GI Joe doll. Except I’m a special issue for girls because I can be dressed up. This, I swear, makes me blush. I protest, but Maggie does this number about I’m so manly I can be secure in my manhood and I should indulge her because she’s a little girl at heart. Which may or may not be bullshit. But it’s a whole lot sweeter and more digestible than her saying it’s her money and if I want to be seen with her I better look right. She doesn’t say that at all. So it’s OK and I let her pick out clothes and I let a series of strange salespersons, virtually all with accents from places that don’t quite exist, eye me and measure me and use their very best imagination to discern what would flatter and suit me.

  Camouflage and an M-16. A blue suit from Sears that wears for ten years, with a white shirt and cop shoes. A pair of sweats, loose and comfortable for sitting in a Ford all day watching someone do nothing. That’s what suits me.

  Point of fact, I’m grumbling because I think it’s expected of me. Point of fact, I’m flattered.

  We grab a light lunch at one of those places that you have to call two, three months in advance for. Unless you’re Magdalena Lazlo or Gena Rowlands or David Hartman. Then you just walk right in, and somehow they just knew you were coming and a table’s waiting. I get a sandwich. I recognize it as tuna on white with mayo, lettuce, and tomato, though every one of those items has a different and more expensive name. We have an eight-dollar bottle of water with lunch.

  After lunch Maggie takes me to Yamato’s for Men on Rodeo. She leaves me with Ito, a tall, slender, stylish Japanese salesperson-artist. He’s done several of the pieces hanging on the wall as well as designing many of the jackets. Yamato of Tokyo has a philosophy: “We are art. Each and every person. For me to match a human being with his clothing is an act of creation as deeply moving and sometimes more important than putting paint to canvas.” All Yamato salespeople must be trained in the psychology of colors and fabrics and must have produced artwork worthy of exhibit. Prices are not marked.

  Ito places me in proximity to a variety of jackets. Many of them are made out of things I have never heard of. He has a set of color cards, and he wants me to rank them in order of preference.

  I turn around. There’s Jack Cushing. He’s with Tom Berenger. They’re looking at jackets also. They’re with two salespersons, Hiro and Nikio. Hiro throws pots. Niko does sculptures in plastic. Ito claims it is a very angry medium.

  Jack and I see each other at the same time.

  This is about sixty hours after I punched him out and dumped him on the pavement beside his car. We look at each other. One beat. Two. He smiles. Big-time. And marches over to me. Hand out. I take it. I shake it.

  “Sorry, old man,” he says. “About the other night—I didn’t know. About you and Maggie.”

  “That’s OK,” I say graciously. “We didn’t know either. Not till right then.”

  “It happens that way sometimes, doesn’t it. Sometimes that’s the best way.”

  “It hits hard and it hits fast,” I say.

  “So do you,” he says. And we both smile. The amazing thing is, that his seems sincere. “Hey, do you know Tom?”

  Of course, I don’t. He calls Tom’s name and gestures him over. “There’s someone I want you to meet,” he says to Berenger. “This is Joe Broz—am I saying it right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Joe and Magdalena Lazlo are . . .” He searches for the right word.

  “In love,” I say.

  “That’s what I heard,” Jack says. “But I hate to repeat gossip. Joe is in the security business,” he says to Berenger.

  “Nice to meet you,” Berenger says like he could give a shit.

  “Good to meet you,” I say. And like a hick I add, “Loved you in Platoon.”46This definitely was his best picture. In my opinion. Love him or hate him, Oliver Stone gets performances from his actors.

  “Thanks,” he says absently. Then he looks at me. Registers my age. And my haircut, probably. “You were there. Right?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I was there.”

  “Decorated too. Weren’t you?”

  This is amazing. I’m new to this world so I’m not used to it. Two days after the thing with Maggie and I begins, these people know who I am, the business I’m in, that I’m a vet, and that I can pin medals on my chest if I want to. In my world, at the office, a guy gets divorced and maybe nobody notices for a couple of years.

  “You know Stone? You gotta meet Stone,” Berenger says. “He’s still into that Nam shit. So you liked me in Platoon.”

  “I thought you were terrific.”

  “You were there. So you thought it was accurate? It was right on? Man, I worked at making that right. But of course my knowledge is secondhand, so I had to depend on other people to tell me.”

  “Yeah, I thought it was pretty right on. Everybody’s Vietnam was different.”

  “I like playing characters with an edge to them,” he says. “There’s more grit in that. More out there, you know.”

  “Hey,” I say, starting to build my own legend, “I didn’t think of your character as out there. Not at all.”

  “No?”

  “No. You were the guy I identified with.”

  “Ah,” Ito says, “I have it! This”—he holds up a jacket—“A blend: sixty percent silk, thirty-three percent viscose, seven percent wool.”

  We get home with a carload of boxes. Mostly for me: socks, boxer and bikini underwear, ties, handkerchiefs, six pairs of shoes, hats, belts, dress shirts, T-shirts, sweatshirts. More will follow, after alterations. CDs, including k. d. lang, Ray Charles, and Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline—country music for people who don’t like country. Maggie starts tearing through the packages like they’re hers, as happy as a four-year-old at a birthday party. In five minutes the living room is littered with bags, boxes, packing material, designer-label tissue paper, and several thousand dollars worth of fabric and leather.

  “Let me see this on you, Joe . . . Now that tie, with that shirt . . . This tie with that belt and that shirt. Just hold the tie up and put the belt on without putting it through the loops . . . Oh, you look so—manly and fierce. Come on, smile. This is fun . . . I want to see you in the bikini underwear. The silk ones. Don’t blush. Don’t make homophobic statements. There are many heterosexual men who wear silk underwear . . . OK, if you won’t dress up, then I will.” She starts to pull off her shirt. “Cover your eyes. You’re peeking.” I am. She snakes out of her jeans. “Turn around.” I do. She’s humming to herself. “OK,” she says, “you can turn around.” I do. She’s like a little girl playing dress-up in Daddy’s clothes. A pair of boxer shorts, a dress shirt, a tie, a belt, her hair tucked up under a Borsalino, and a pair of Bally dress shoes on her feet. Of course, she’s not a little girl, and while some of it is cute and comic, like the oversize shoes and the baggy shorts, it’s also sexy as hell.

  She goes to the mirror and draws a mustache on her face. A pencil-thin mustache. “What do you think people are saying, Joe?”

  “If you keep buying me stuff, they’ll say I’m using you. You can’t keep buying me things.”

  “If you had the money, you’d buy me things all day long. Wouldn’t you? Smother me in diamonds, cover me in minks, cover me in diamonds, smother me in minks.”47

  “That’s different and you damn well know it.”

  “Is it, Joe? What is money? A sign of virtue? Of masculinity? Of cleverness?”

 
“Where I come from . . .”

  “Joe, where you come from doesn’t exist anymore. Money comes by accident. Like freeway collisions. Why do you think we’re all so frantic? Because we know it’s all an accident. The face, the body, the way I come across on camera—accidents. Oh, I work at it. Acting classes, acting coaches, exercise, skin care, this hairdresser, that makeup person, trying to make it better, trying to keep it. But fifteen plastic surgeons doing the surgical version of the home show couldn’t put one Magdalena Lazlo together. You can go in and get Barbara Hershey’s lips, one of Lee Grant’s noses, Melanie’s tits, Cher’s butt, and walk out and you’re still nothing. All the desperate wannabes in all the desperate acting classes can’t learn how to do whatever the hell it is that the people who pay me a million-plus dollars a picture think I do. It’s a goddamn accident. Like winning the lottery or getting hit by a bus and suing the city. So if I want to spend my accident money, dressing you up because it’s fun, I’ll do it.”

  “There’s a name for men who take money from women,” I say.

  “There’s a name for women who take money from men,” she says.

  “It’s different.”

  “Hey, Joe, you got twenty dollars on you?”

  “I got a hundred or so,” I say.

  “Just give me a twenty,” she says.

  I reach in my wallet, I give her a twenty. She reaches through the fly of the boxer shorts she’s wearing. She’s got her own underwear on beneath mine. She folds the bill neatly and sticks it under the elastic. “What’s the name for women who take money from men, Joe?”

  “I got problems with some of your games, Maggie.”

  “What’s the name, Joe?”

  “Whore, Maggie. They call them whores. Is that what you want me to say?”

  “That’s what I want you to say. I took your money, now I can say I’m your whore.”

  I don’t know how she does it. Whether it’s a thing with her face and her posture or some more subtle trick of acting, or a thing with her soul, but in spite of the comical way she’s dressed—the man’s hat and shoes that are too big, the boxer shorts with hearts on them, the Hopalong Cassidy hand-painted tie from 1952, and the eyebrow-pencil mustache—she changes from cute and girlish into something kinky and sluttish.

  She struts over to her handbag. She takes out a twenty-dollar bill. “Take it,” she says.

  I take it.

  “Now you’re my gigolo,” she says. She giggles. “That’s such a funny word.” So she says, in a husky voice, trying not to laugh, “You’re my kept man. I’m your whore and you’re my kept man. Guess what, the names for women who take money from men are much worse. Aren’t they? So no more bullshit, Joe, about where the money comes from, OK?”

  “I’ll try. But the first time I hear someone say I’m using you . . .”

  “You’ll punch ’em out and show how tough you are,” she teases me. “Joe, I need someone. My instinct says you’re smart. And you’re loyal. Put Someone to Watch Over Me, on the stereo and dance with me.”

  “Maggie, I’m not doing this to get somewhere.”

  “What are you afraid of? That someone will say you’re fucking your way to the top? In this town that’s a compliment. It should be, because everybody fucks, but damn few do it good enough to get to the top.”

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “Joe, if you don’t want to play ‘Someone to Watch Over Me,’ put on ‘Lay, Lady, Lay.’ ”

  “Too cute.”

  “Yeah,” she says, “but it’s country.”

  I turn the music on. Because that’s our way of saying we want to talk, for ourselves, not for the listeners. It’s what she asked—Bob Dylan. Maybe it is country. Singing about laying a lady across a big brass bed. “What the hell,” I say, my throat dry as sandpaper, “dance with me.”

  46 Platoon (1986), written and directed by Oliver Stone. This is the film that “made” Stone. There are three main characters: a male ingenue, played by Charlie Sheen, through whose eyes we sec the story, and two sergeants. While both sergeants are effective combat soldiers, one, Willem Dafoe, is a compassionate, fair-minded, pot-smoking killer, and the other, played by Berenger, in great scar makeup, is a vicious, murderous, dangerous-to-his-own, booze-swilling, killer. The Berenger character murders Dafoe.

  47 A casual quote from Big Daddy, Tennessee Williams’s Cat On a Hot Tin Roof. Maggie played Maggie the Cat on stage in L.A. before she made it on film.

  Chapter

  TWENTY

  “HE’S RIGHT. TOO cute,” David Hartman said.

  The tape on the table in front of him kept rolling. Music started to play. Hartman was not particularly fond of Dylan. Though he’d once pretended to be when he was trying to steal Jack Nicholson away from his agent. And sat through Laker games, watching giant black people sweat profusely while they bumped against other giant black people. It stimulated his latent racism. Which he’d overcome sufficiently to sign several of them. They made fortunes with commercial endorsements and assorted personal appearances. They were employed half of the year and in training the rest; therefore they had less time to demand unnecessary attentions, and in terms of dollars-per-agent-hour they out-performed film stars. So Hartman was still capable of pretending enthusiasm for sporting events but saw no need to do so for Dylan.

  “That tape,” Sheehan said to impress the client, “is less than an hour old.” Sheehan looked far more rumpled than he liked. Too many people believed that security is a low-rent business, little but supplying semiliterate semialcoholics as security guards for supermarkets and intimidating convenience-store employees with polygraph machines to make them admit they’d eaten Hershey’s kisses without paying for them. Sheehan made a point of wearing $1,800 suits just for that reason. He called them his CEO and head-of-state suits, because that’s how spiffy they were.

  Unfortunately, at 10:03 that morning, about when Maggie made her first public appearance with Joe Broz, shopping, half a dozen people had vied with each other to be the first to reach David Hartman with the rumor. Although he was in a meeting and did not take any calls and was not interrupted, he apparently knew about it by the time he emerged at 10:40. At which point he called Mel Taylor and said that he wanted a full update. He turned Taylor over to his secretary, Fiona, who found the first available time slot—8:00 P.M. that evening.

  Taylor called Chicago as he had been instructed to do if anything happened in the Beagle matter. The call was directed to C. H. Bunker himself. Bunker called Sheehan into his office and said: “Go to Los Angeles. Be at the meeting. Make sure the client is a very happy person. Thank you.” Damn, C. H.’s voice always made him feel like genuflecting. The closest living thing to it was James Earl Jones in a Darth Vader echo chamber.

  Sheehan called Taylor. He said, “I want a dog and pony show. I want buttoned up. Neat Labels. Typed or excellent penmanship. Organized. I want all the materials there. But nothing extraneous.” Sheehan had been taught by nuns.

  He cleared his other affairs and called his wife personally to say he would not be home for dinner. The first flight he could get was at 5:00—ETA, 7:17. The only available seat was coach. Tight for a big man and hell on clothes. There was no place to hang his jacket. He folded it, neatly, and laid it carefully on top of the other stuff in the overhead rack. But something shifted or fell over, and a box of books pressed it against a paper bag of loose fruit for twelve hundred miles. There were grape stains at the shoulder and every time he moved his arm the aroma of banana rose from his sleeve. The flight arrived at LAX on time, but even with only carry-on baggage, he didn’t reach the cab stand until 7:38. There was no time to change. It was a hot and smoggy day. The taxi had no air-conditioning. He arrived in time, but wrinkled. The pants of his $1,800 suit had as many lines around the crotch as the face of an AKC champion Shar-Pei.

  Besides, Hartman’s suit cost $3,600.

  “It certainly sounds like Maggie and Joe are an item,” Hartman said. “How did we get to here?”


  Mel Taylor had a written summary, a short narrative, with the appropriate tape numbers marked alongside the actions described. “Ms. Lazlo came home early in the morning after the bar mitzvah. She was driven home by Jack Cushing.”

  Hartman nodded. Cushing was a RepCo client.

  Taylor held up tape 1, slipped it in the cassette player. It had been cued up to the action. “They started to become intimate,” Taylor said, and pushed PLAY. The sound was remarkably good, a testament to the quality of the microphones employed. It was possible to hear not just words, but heavy breathing and the slurp of passionate kisses. “Joseph Broz was already in the house. He appeared from wherever he’d been. They saw him.” Mel fast-forwarded the tape. Stopped it. “They both ordered Broz out. He refused. There was a fight. Broz won.” Mel pushed PLAY. They heard shuffles and grunts.

  “There’s a gap here,” Mel said, pulling tape 1 out and putting tape 2 in. “Actually, two gaps. They went outside, the front. They came back in. And then we assume they went out on the beach. If you listen, you’ll hear various . . . noises. The analysts tell me that thunk is the front door and the lighter, thwack sound is the back door. Beach door.” He popped out tape 2 and put in 3. “They came back to the house and they became intimate.”

  All three men did their best to pretend to be unaffected by the sounds of passion. Taylor grew erect. He was seated so it was hidden, but still it confused him and made him angry. He wondered if he had become a voyeur. A pervert. He sensed that somehow Broz was not only nailing the bitch, he was slipping out of reach, as if immersion in the golden pussy conferred invulnerability, a social kind, as the physical kind had been bestowed upon Achilles by being dipped in the river Styx.