Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [282]
On the drive away from the house, he had his first big fight with Stephanie. Her father was in the garment business. Way Schiller saw it, Stephanie's father had always been as deep in business as a sheep is thick in wool, but Stephanie was her dad's delight, and dad had done his best to protect her. Stephanie Wolf was one beautiful princess who hated to see business operating. She might have worked as a secretary, but it never rubbed off. She detested business.
Now, Stephanie was telling him that he'd acted like a manipulator with Kathryne Baker. "How dare you take advantage of that woman by talking business in the middle of all her grief? Her daughter was just committed yesterday." Larry tried to lay it out for her. "You don't mind," he said, "going to ABC's cocktail parties, but ABC couldn't care less whether they're going to have Larry Schiller at their party next week. I'm only as good as what I can do for ABC. Damn it," he said, "if you're interested in me, you've got to accept me as who I am. You've got to love the part you love, and if there's a part you don't like, you've still got to learn to deal with it. You can't bawl the shit out of me because of what I say in a living room, the very minute I walk out of that room." They really had a big fight, Stephanie, after all, was the girl for whom Schiller was ready to break up a marriage that had gone on for sixteen years, but he could see that their relation was going to be put to every strain during this Gilmore business. Part of his brain was beginning to work already on the possibility of sending Stephanie to Europe to take care of foreign rights. If she stayed around, he could lose the Gilmore story. The aggravations between him and her over this one episode had been close to apoplectic.
That night, unable to sleep, he got up at two in the morning and dictated a contract for the Gilmore rights to a legal service in Salt Lake City. Over the telephone, his words were recorded, and early in the morning some girl would type it up. However, he didn't like the idea that a stranger would hear the terms of the contract. It could easily be leaked to a newspaper. Schiller knew that if he was working for a local paper, he would try to have a pipeline into such places. You could get a story that way.
Still, he had to have something ready to show Vern's and Mrs. Baker's separate lawyers. So he pretended to be a buyer of sheep and cattle from California, and dictated how many lambs and cows were to be sold in return for conveying full rights to said stock. The humor of it appealed to him at two in the morning.
Tomorrow, he would change the sheep and cows into specific people. There were a lot of good businessmen in the world, and a lot of good journalists, thought Schiller, but maybe he was one of the few who could be both.
Over the weekend Barry Farrell interviewed Larry Schiller in Los Angeles. They had worked together on Life years ago, but Farrell had not been feeling friendly to Schiller lately. A little over a year before, Larry had been getting a book of photographs together on Muhammad All. He had called Barry to say he wanted him to do the text, and Farrell had gotten into conversations with his publisher about it.
Then Schiller signed Wilfred Sheed. Farrell felt he had been merely another name to feed into the hopper, and was pissed off over that.
Every December, however, he liked to clean the slates, so he wrote Schiller a letter saying in effect, "I'm over my pique.