'Nash?' I enquired tentatively.
He lowered the paper, thrust it into my hands and in explosive fury said, 'Shit!' Then he turned on his heel and stalked off, leaving me to discover what had upset him.
I saw. I read, and felt equally murderous.
BUMMER OF A FILM ON THE T TURF.First reports of 'Unstable Times', now in front of cameras in Newmarket, speak of rows, discord and screeching nerves.Author Howard Tyler's vibrant tale, ten weeks on bestseller lists, is mangled beyond recognition, my sources tell me. Nash Rourke, superstar, rues his involvement: says 'Director Thomas Lyon (30), ineffectual, arrogant, insists on disastrous last-minute script changes.'Lyon vows to solve a 26-year-old real-life mystery, basis of Tyler's masterpiece. The police failed at the time. Who is Lyon kidding?Naturally those closely touched by the tragic unexplained hanging death of a leading Newmarket trainer's wife are distressed to have cold embers fanned to hurtful inaccurate reheat.Lyon's version so far has the hanged wife's trainer-husband Rourke tumbling her sister, prompting apoplectic revenge from consequently cuckolded top Jockey Club steward, later ga-ga. None of this happened.Why do the giants of Hollywood entrust a prestigious film-of-the-book to the incompetent mercies of an over-hyped bullyboy? Why is this ludicrous buffoon still strutting his stuff on the Heath? Who's allowing him to waste millions of dollars on this pathetic travesty of a great work?Isn't Master Thomas Lyon ripe for the overdue boot?
There was a large photograph of Nash, looking grim.
Blindly angry, I went up to my rooms and found the telephone ringing when I walked in.
Before I could speak into the receiver, Nash's voice said, 'I didn't say that, Thomas.'
'You wouldn't.'
'I'll kill that son of a bitch, Tyler.'
'Leave him to O'Hara.'
'Are we still going to Doncaster?'
'We certainly are,' I said. Anywhere but Newmarket, I thought. 'Ready in half an hour?'
'I'll be down in the lobby.'
I phoned O'Hara's mobile phone and reached only his message service.
I said, 'Read the Daily Drumbeata Daily Drumbeata, page sixteen, feature column headed, "Hot from the Stars". Nash and I are going to the sports. I'll have my mobile. Take Prozak.'
Howard Tyler's phone rang and rang in his room, unanswered.
I showered in record time, put on steward-lunching clothes and went down to ask questions of the helpful soul behind the reception desk.
'Mr Tyler isn't here,' she confirmed. 'He left.'
'When did he leave?' did he leave?'
'Actually,' she said, 'he picked up a newspaper from the desk here and went into the dining-room to have breakfast, as he always does. It's so nice to have him here, and Mr Rourke too, we can hardly believe it.... So Mr Tyler hurried out of the dining-room five minutes later he didn't eat his breakfast he went upstairs and came down with his suitcase and said he didn't know when he'd come back.' She looked worried. 'I didn't ask him for payment. I hope I haven't done wrong, but I understood everything should be charged to the film company.'
'Don't worry about that,' I reassured her. 'Did Mr Tyler say where he was going?'
He hadn't, of course. He'd been in a great hurry. The receptionist had asked him if he'd felt ill, but he hadn't answered. He'd taken the newspaper with him, but the staff had had another copy. They had all read the column. She'd thought it best to show it to Mr Rourke. Her virtuousness nearly choked her.
'What will happen, do you think?' Nash asked, ready for the races, listening to a repeat from the receptionist.
'Short-term, we've got Howard off our backs.'
We went out to the Rolls and along to where the helicopter waited.
'I'll sue the bastard,' Nash said furiously, strapping himself in, 'saying I rue my involvement!'
'Did you?'
'Did I what?'
'Say it.'
'Shit, Thomas. I said I was sorry not to be staying home with my wife. And that was on day one. I don't in the least regret it now.'
'She could have come with you.'
He shrugged. We both knew why his wife had stayed at home: her insecurity in a four-months pregnancy with complications. She'd been annoyed with him for agreeing to Newmarket. He'd made too public an apology.
'As for all that trash I was supposed to say about you personally...'
'Howard put his own words into your mouth,' I said. 'Forget it.'
The helicopter lifted off from the Newmarket grass and swung round north-west.
However glibly I might say 'forget it', I had uncomfortable suspicions that the parent movie company, our source of finance, would come thundering down like a posse to lynch me from the nearest crossbeam. Any bad odour clinging to their investment called for dismissals to exorcise it. O'Hara might have to dump me: might even want to.
Bye-bye career, I thought. It had been great while it lasted. I couldn't believe what was happening.
Smart move on Howard's part to decamp out of reach of my fists. I could have killed him. I sat quietly in the helicopter looking out at Lincolnshire passing beneath and felt queasy from the turmoil in my gut.
I accepted that in general the most disliked person in the making of any film was the director. The director required people to do things they considered unnecessary/ridiculous/wrong. Directors (a) demanded too much from actors and (b) ignored their well-thought-out interpretations. Directors were never satisfied, wasted time on detail, worked everyone to death, ignored injured feelings, made no allowance for technical difficulties, expected the impossible, screamed at people.
I accepted also on the other hand that a director needed an overall vision of the work in progress, even if details got changed en route. A director had to fight to bring that vision to revelatory life. Excessive sympathy and tolerance on the set were unproductive, vacillating decisions wasted money and inconsistency left an enterprise rudderless. A successful movie was a tight ship.
It was more in my nature to be a persuader than an ogre, but sometimes, as with Howard, when persuasion failed to work, the ogre surfaced. I knew, too, that it was what O'Hara expected and in fact required of me. Use your power, he'd said.
Now everyone working on the film would read the piece in the Drumbeat Drumbeat. Half of Newmarket also. Even if O'Hara left me in charge, my job would be difficult to impossible, all my authority gone. If I had to, I would fight to get that back.
The helicopter landed near the Doncaster winning post, where a senior official was waiting to give Nash a suitable greeting and to lead him to the mandarins. The minute I followed him onto the grass my mobile phone buzzed, and I told him to go ahead, I would join him after I'd talked to O'Hara; if it were in fact O'Hara.
He looked at me straightly and asked the official to pause for my call.
I answered the phone's summons. 'Thomas,' I said.
'Thomas!' O'Hara's voice was loud with annoyance. 'Where are you?' Nash could hear him shouting: he winced.
'Doncaster racecourse.'
'I've had Hollywood on the line. It's not yet five in the morning there but the company is already furious. Someone made a phone call and then sent a fax of the Drumbeat Drumbeat.'
I said stupidly, 'A fax? fax?'
'A fax,' he confirmed.
'Who sent it?'
'The mogul I talked to didn't say.'
I swallowed. My heart raced. The hand holding the instrument visibly trembled beside my eye. Calm down, I thought.
'Who did Tyler talk to?' O'Hara demanded furiously.
'I don't know.'
'You don't know? know?'
'No. He was grumbling to everyone who would listen. He may not have known he was spouting to a journalist or to someone who knew knew a journalist.' a journalist.'
'What does he say about it?'
'The hotel says he blasted off the minute he saw the paper. No one knows where he's gone.'
'I tried his home number,' O'Hara shouted. 'They say he's in Newmarket.'
'More likely the moon.'
'The mogul I talked to is one of the very top guys, and he wants your head.'
This was it, I thought numbly: and I couldn't think of anything to say. I needed an impassioned plea in mitigation. Drew a blank.
'Are you there, Thomas?'
'Yes.'
'He says you're fired.'
I was silent.
'Hell's teeth, Thomas, defend yourself.'
'I warned Howard yesterday not to shoot his mouth off, but I think now that he'd already done it.'
'Two weeks ago he tried to get the moguls to fire you, if you remember. I pacified them then. But this this!' Words failed him.
I began finally to protest. 'We're on target for time. We're within budget. The company themselves insisted on story changes. I'm making a commercial motion picture, and it isn't true that there are rows and discord, except with Howard himself.'
'What's he saying?' Nash demanded impatiently.
'I'm sacked.'
Nash snatched the phone out of my hand.
'O'Hara? This is Nash. You tell those brain-deads who are our masters that I did not not say what the say what the Drumbeat Drumbeat says I did. Your boy is doing an OK job on this movie and if you take him off it at this stage you says I did. Your boy is doing an OK job on this movie and if you take him off it at this stage you will will get a bummer of a film, and what's more, they can whistle for me to sign with them ever again.' get a bummer of a film, and what's more, they can whistle for me to sign with them ever again.'
Aghast, I snatched the phone back. 'Nash, you can't do that. O'Hara, don't listen to him.'
'Put him back on the line.'
I handed the phone over, shaking my head. Nash listened to O'Hara for a while and finally said, 'You told me to trust him. I do. This movie has a good feel. Now you trust me me, trust my nose in these matters.'
He listened a bit longer, said 'Right' and pressed the power-off button.
'O'Hara says he'll call you back in five hours when they will have talked it through in Hollywood. They're going to hold a breakfast meeting there at nine o'clock, when the big-wigs are all up. O'Hara will sit in on a conference call.'
'Thank you,' I said.
He smiled briefly. 'My reputation is at stake here, same as yours. I don't want my green light turning amber.'
'It never will.'
'Bad reviews give me indigestion.'
We walked with the patient official across the track and up to the stewards' privacy. Heads turned sharply all the way as racegoer after racegoer did a double take at the sight of Nash. We had asked for no advance publicity the parent film company was security hyper-conscious so that only the top echelon knew whom to expect. I was glad, I found, to have an anonymous face.
They hadn't waited lunch. Even for mega-stars, racing timetables couldn't be changed. About twenty stewards and friends were at their roast beef and suitable Yorkshire pudding.
From behind the forks the welcome was as warm and impressed as the most inflated ego could desire, and Nash's ego, as I was progressively discovering, was far more normal and unassuming than seemed consistent with his eminence.
I'd been in awe of him before I'd met him. I'd metaphorically approached him on my knees, and I'd found, not the temperamental perfectionist I'd been ominously told to expect, but essentially the man I'd seen him play over and over again on the screen, a man, whatever the role or the make-up, of sane intelligence, mentally tough.
I forlornly hoped that the Doncaster stewards and their wives and other guests weren't avid readers of Drumbeat's Drumbeat's 'Hot from the Stars', and with relief I saw that the two papers most in evidence were the 'Hot from the Stars', and with relief I saw that the two papers most in evidence were the Racing Gazette Racing Gazette and the and the Daily Cable Daily Cable, both of them lying open at the obituary page for Valentine.
Nash and I shook a fair number of hands and were seated in prestigious places, and while Nash asked a dumbstruck waitress for fizzy mineral water, nearly causing her to faint from her proximity to the sexiest eyes in screendom, I read both farewells to Valentine, and found they'd done the old man proud. Cremation, the Gazette Gazette also noted, was set for eleven am, Monday, and a memorial service would be arranged later. If I were truly out of work, I thought gloomily, I could go to both. also noted, was set for eleven am, Monday, and a memorial service would be arranged later. If I were truly out of work, I thought gloomily, I could go to both.
By the coffee stage, the Drumbeat's Drumbeat's pages were fluttering across the table and inevitably someone commiserated with Nash over the mess his director was making of his film. My own identity, remarked on round the table behind sheltering hands, produced universally disapproving stares. pages were fluttering across the table and inevitably someone commiserated with Nash over the mess his director was making of his film. My own identity, remarked on round the table behind sheltering hands, produced universally disapproving stares.
Nash said with authority, his expert voice production easily capable of silencing other conversations, 'Never believe what you read in the papers. We're making an excellent film in Newmarket. We're being bad-mouthed by a spiteful little man. I did not not say what I am reported to have said, and I have complete confidence in Thomas here. I shall complain to the paper and demand they print a retraction.' say what I am reported to have said, and I have complete confidence in Thomas here. I shall complain to the paper and demand they print a retraction.'
'Sue them,' someone said.
'Perhaps I will.'
'And as for you, Thomas,' said one of the stewards whom I knew personally, 'you must definitely sue.' must definitely sue.'
I said, 'I'm not sure that I can.'
'Of course you can!' He stabbed at the pages with a forefinger. 'This is defamatory in the extreme.'
I said, 'It's difficult to sue anyone for asking questions.'
'What?'
'Those defamations are written carefully in the form of questions. The question marks tend to take the certainty out of the slurs.'