Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [33]
I phoned for a week. He was either out to lunch or in conference or otherwise engaged, so I wrote him that I wanted out of Reaves Brothers, in my best Marine language.
Val was outraged. “They’ll know about your letter all up and down Madison Avenue. Haven’t we had enough trouble finding a publisher?”
“You’re asking me to stay with those sons of bitches after what they think of my new work!”
God damn, there were some things that Val just didn’t understand about me. Compromise, back down, keep quiet. God damn, Val! Don’t you ever get mad at anyone but me?
I put out a call for a literary agent, not really knowing one from another. I can’t say why I settled on F. Todd Wallace. He had a veddy/ veddy uptown manner and represented some good authors. He reminded me of those jerks at the Algonquin Round Table, but he obviously was one of them and knew his way around the literary scene. And that name, F. Todd Wallace—INTEGRITY, like the Rock of Gibraltar.
“Can’t go wrong with old Todd.”
As time unfolded I might as well have been represented by the Mother Superior at a Carmelite nunnery. Anyhow, I’d never have to deal with J. III or that bloody house again.
I left ahead of Val and the girls, to get set up at the studio and find a place for us to live. It was on a sour note. Things I always believed that Val would understand automatically—she didn’t understand at all.
Hollywood, 1954–1956
THE ACTUAL FILM DEAL on Of Men in Battle had been made by my Hollywood literary agent, Sal Sensibar.
From our first meeting, I realized Sal was a back stabber who might well have been in the white slave traffic if he hadn’t been a literary agent. Sal had terminal cases of diarrhea of the mouth and megalomania. Nevertheless, I liked him. We came from the same side of the tracks, way back when. As long as I remained a marketable writer, Sal Sensibar would always find work for me. He liked things, lots of things, things with big engines, things that sparkled, furry things to drape on his tawdry wife and tawdry girlfriends, huge things to swim in.
When Sal dined me at Chasen’s and Scandia, back to back, I knew I was the bright new boy in town. The restaurant prices automatically signaled the value of the writer. Advice was doled out in huge globs. Some of it was even worth listening to.
Sal gave it to me straight. The studios usually pacified the author with four to six weeks’ work as a little icing on the cake in order to get his general ideas, nothing more. Few producers were ever serious about letting a novelist complete his own screenplay.
“Remember, Gideon, what you have written is preserved forever between the covers of a book.”
“Sal, I’m going to do this screenplay.”
“I’m not saying you’re not,” he said, “but you got to bear in mind a studio might buy a book for any number of reasons—as a star vehicle, because a director likes it, for its title value, or just as a rough outline for a film. They own it. You sold the rights to them. They’re not obliged to make a faithful rendition.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I like you, Gideon. Get through this alive and we’ll both make a lot of money together. But don’t go in there with any farcockta ideas of grandeur.”
THE FIRST DAY at Pacific was awesome! I had passed through the gates of a place of glamour and power second only to the White House. I was assigned to an old-time staff producer, Kurt von Dortann, who had come over during the Lubitsch era when monocled Germans were all the rage.
Von Dortann had some great early successes. In a weak moment, after a big hit, the studio chief, Stanley Gold, gave him an ironclad ten-year contract worth millions, in order to keep him at Pacific.
When von Dortann started to bomb with one picture after another, Gold tried every which way to get rid of him. Von Dortann hung in there through public insults, humiliations, and degradations. Gold did everything but kick his shins and slap his face. Von Dortann would merely smile and bow crisply and pick up his paycheck.
What I met was a rag of