“Yes,” I said. “He wanted me to tell you that he’s called in Harlow Perkins.”
“Who’s that?”
“He’s an insurance investigator. He’s called him in to work on this situation.”
“Yeah, okay, fine,” Mann said, and went back to his conversation.
I was amazed. I knew Mann was stupid, but I didn’t think he wasthatstupid. Did he really not know who Harlow Perkins was? It was like a Spaniard not knowing who Torquemada was in the days of the Inquisition. At least I think it was Torquemada. You know the one I mean, the fanatic.
Anyway, I needed a little more information, so I kept standing there, and Mann kept talking to the cop, and finally I said, “Would somebody mind telling me what happened?”
“Nothinghappened, Jason,” Mann said. “Nothing at all. Arthur had too much to drink and he fell down in the bathtub and hit his head and passed out and died. Now don’t go making a whole big deal about this.”
I must have looked at him strangely. So did the cop.
“I mean,” Mann said, “let’s not get hysterical.”
“Fine,” I said. “When will I have more details?”
“Look, Jason,” Mann said, “don’t worry about the publicity here. You’ll have lots of help on the publicity.”
He gave me a look of dismissal, and then he seemed to have a new thought. “Listen, why don’t you go see Clete? Keep him away from the reporters.”
I nodded and left the room. As I was leaving, the cop asked Mann who I was.
“Harvey Jason,” Mann said. “He does publicity. Don’t even bother about talking to him. He’s an asshole.”
See what I mean? Everybody dumps on the unit publicist. It just comes with the job.
CHAPTERTHREE
Clete Williams, looking craggy and weathered and handsome, said, “You know what I want now? I want a really nice peppermint ice cream cone with sprinkles on top. That’s what I want.”
He was sipping a glass of bourbon and pacing back and forth in his room. I sat on the bed and watched him. There were several reporters outside, but Clete was barricaded in, not talking to anyone. The reporters made a lot of noise, and every so often one of them would accidentally kick the door to remind us that they were waiting out there.
Clete bunched a fist. “Sons of bitches,” he said. “They better get off my back.” He stared at the door, and then looked back at me, and then he seemed to force himself to relax. He finished the bourbon. “You ever had one of those when you were a kid?”
“What?”
“Peppermint with sprinkles.”
“Sure,” I said.
“They’re the greatest.”
Clete Williams is, according to the bio I wrote, thirty-six years old (really forty-two) and born in Newport, Rhode Island (actually Saugus, Massachusetts), of a well-to-do family. Most of the moviegoing public knows how Clete rejected the standards of his upbringing, became a sort of bum, worked his way across country, and eventually became a tough brawling leading man in the tradition of Mitchum and Wayne. It’s all crap. Actually, his father was a plumber who took off, stranding his mother, who was a waitress in a fried-clam place on the beach, and Clete got a job as an extra working on a film shooting in Boston. One of the leading women became fond of him and started referring to him asthe Stallion, and he turned into a local celebrity and eventually got film offers.
As a star, Clete is tough publicitywise. Most of your big stars today are straightforward. Like Redford and Newman, everybody knows they’re married, and where they live, and so on and so on. Their style is much more human. But Clete is from the old school. He’s really a personality, not an actor. Let’s face it, Clete can’t act. But he has what we call screen presence. And on camera, his forty-eight-inch chest looks enormous. Women go nuts over him.
Clete is a physical guy. He does all his own stunts, does his own riding. He likes all that, but of course it makes insurance trouble. He’s almost impossible to insure because he drinks too much and gets into fights all the time. And also, he’s always getting injured on the set, because the truth is that he’s accident-prone. How the hell could somebody who’s made ten billion Westerns let a goddamned horse step on his foot and break his toe?
In other pictures, Clete Williams had twisted his knee; shot himself in the leg with a blank, producing a hematoma; dislocated his shoulder in a fight scene; gotten whiplash on a pickup truck spill; and cracked a rib doing a fall.
Early in the picture, I had the delicate job of writing a press release about all these past injuries and his new broken toe. It’s delicate because you’d love to use that angle—the dangers of moviemaking—but you aren’t supposed to get any mileage out of injury. Otherwise, the insurance companies are all over you. They suspect rigging, or they suspect a phony ploy to hide some other production delay.
So I had to write a very circumspect, mournful press release commenting on how poor Mr. Williams had broken his toe. But I couldn’t tell how he’d broken his toe—that was too humiliating. So I said it was “in the course of production,” or something vague like that.
Clete later told reporters that he was dodging away from a hissing rattler that had appeared unexpectedly in a sequence where he had to climb a cliff. Clete can be very inventive on his own behalf.
