A case of matricide, p.21
Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, page 21
He interpreted my ramblings as a request to take me back to the hotel, but upon arrival, I knew I couldn’t stay there either. I couldn’t go from one box to another; I had to roam, like the free-range actor I was, and sort out my confusions.
My belligerent meanderings led me into nearby SoHo and past a familiar theater, the Angelika, which specializes in revivals, off-beat stuff, and lots of independents.
Bleary-eyed from sensory overload, I looked up at their marquee. Showing, through special arrangements, was a “Troubled Child” film series, featuring filmmakers who fought the studios. The films currently in exhibition were Apocalypse Now, Brazil, and Bonfire of the Vanities.
Yeah, fought the studios, I thought. And lost.
Each of the three films had great potential, but were hamstrung by a volatile mix of auteur excess and studio meddling. Let’s Make Love! had all the warning signs of a troubled movie, but Mike Nichols was never prone to such excess in the past. Something stunk in La-La-Land. I began to suspect that Mike was being manipulated by that movie geek of an executive, Rob Stern, but the only way to know for sure was to puncture the corporate world of Paramount Studios and sniff around. I had a week off, and I had connections — they weren’t A-list, but they were connections nonetheless.
17
Last Supper
Lanny Sticks, my costar from Death of the Dead, was a fine actor. I met him in Detroit, years prior, on a training film for Chrysler where Lanny played a mechanic and I was a disgruntled customer. During the three-day shoot, we shared dreams of acting in films that would be seen outside of car dealership conference rooms, and became fast friends. In the late ’80s, we both relocated to Los Angeles, and our professional association continued for the next decade.
But work slowed for Lanny and, like many actors, he took a job to make ends meet, as a security guard at Paramount Studios. “At least I’m still in the movie business,” he used to joke, trying to keep a brave face on his economic situation. Over the next decade, big-city distances and faraway locations diminished our contact until we lost touch entirely. It was time to change all that — I needed Lanny to get me in.
“Hey, Lanny —”
“Who is this?”
“Bruce.”
“Bruce who?”
I rolled my eyes. Surely, my costar of big and small screen hadn’t forgotten so quickly. “Bruce Campbell, your only true friend.”
“Oh....”
This was followed by a pause that made me think the line had gone dead, but Lanny broke the silence.
“It’s been awhile.”
“Yeah, when was the last time I saw you, two, three years ago?” I asked.
“Seven.”
“No way.”
“I haven’t heard from you in seven years,” Lanny confirmed. “Does my pal Bruce call me just to shoot the breeze? Nah. Does he call me when he’s doing the special-edition DVD for Death of the Dead? No, too much trouble. Why are you calling me now? Did someone die?”
“No, no, everyone’s all right. Hey, Lanny boy, easy. I know I was lame at keeping in touch, but it’s a two-way street, my friend. I haven’t heard boo from you either.”
“You moved once a year, on average, for a decade,” Lanny said, with building anger, “and never forwarded — well, not to me, anyway — your contact information. Great way to maintain friendships, amigo.”
“Okay, Lanny, I’m guilty. It’s all my fault. Can we move on now?”
“What do you want?” he asked tersely.
“I need your help.”
“You’re right, Mr. B-Movie Man. You do need help. I saw your film Icebreaker the other day on cable, and I got two words for you: ‘acting lessons.’”
There was a distinct hang-up click on the other end of the line. I stared at the phone as my mind veered toward self-doubt.
Had I been cruel to him? Had I been insensitive? Had I really been that bad in Icebreaker?
Well, okay, he had me there, but Lanny’s role of a backwater hick in Death of the Dead was a lot of fun for him. And while maybe I had been a disappointment in the friendship department, I didn’t recall Lanny reaching out over the years. My thoughts shifted to anger: That bastard! Here I am, calling to see how he was, and he bites the hand that has fed him in several films. But then I thought, Okay, let’s give it one more shot. If he blows me off after this, at least I can say that I tried.
I let Lanny’s phone ring long enough to get his answering machine: “This is Lanny, and this is the beep —”
Beep
“Lanny, this is Bruce. Hey, I’m just looking for some help, for old times’ sake. If you won’t do it for me, I understand. All a guy can do is —”
Click — “What do you need?”
The shock of Lanny picking up the phone made me jump. “Well, I’m working on Let’s Make Love!”
“The Nichols flick, sure. I hear it’s in trouble.”
“Yeah, same here. So here’s the deal: I need to be a fly on the wall — get on to the lot, catch some dailies, and nose around the executive offices a little bit.”
“Let me get this straight. After ignoring me for seven years, you want me to risk getting fired to sneak you into a place I’m paid to protect?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, I’ll do it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Long story. Come on over tomorrow night for dinner and we’ll talk.”
Sticksville, USA.
Lanny lived out in Canyon Country, California, where I bought my first house west of the Rockies. In the mid-80s, this area was just beginning to experience a building boom. Almost twenty years later, it was completely out of control.
I took the Soledad Canyon exit off the Antelope Valley Highway, made my way past brand-new, homogenous, “American Beauty”–style developments, and pushed into the Los Angeles backcountry.
Lanny had a modest trailer on a small piece of desert. He lived alone these days, mostly because he wanted to and, frankly, because he was so cantankerous. His four dogs surrounded my car as I drove up. Two Rottweilers, one pit bull, and a German shepherd — not the friendliest dogs on earth.
Lanny stepped out, grinning that troublemaking grin of his. He was weathered and unshaven, and seemed comfortable with both.
“Aren’t you gonna come and say hi?”
“Hell no. I have a wife and kids and these dogs look hungry.”
Lanny shouted something guttural and unintelligible, and his dogs immediately sat on the ground, eyes still on me, tongues wagging in the hot air.
“They only understand German,” he explained. “It’s a strong language.”
“And so romantic.”
“You can get out now.”
I stepped around the dogs gingerly and greeted Lanny on his porch. I offered a shake, he went for a hug, and it was all a little awkward, mainly because he had a double-barreled shotgun in his right hand. Lanny squeezed me hard, like he was pissed off.
“Hey, man, great to see you. Welcome to my humble abode.”
“Thanks,” I said, getting the air back in my lungs. “You’ve got yourself some place here.”
“I make do. I bought this with Death of the Dead money, you know.”
“Did you? That was smart. I pissed my money up a rope.”
“It’s a blessing and a curse.”
“How do you mean?”
Lanny began to walk around his expansive rock-and-garbage-strewn lot.
“Well, some days I look out at this forty acres and I think, my God, I own this, and other days I look out, and I think about...the injury.”
“The injury?”
“You say that like you don’t remember,” Lanny said, with hurt in his eyes. But before I could respond, he slapped me on the shoulder. “Great to see you, Bruce — let’s get some grub!”
The moon was full over Canyon Country that night. In the desert, an exposed moon makes everything look like a 1950s western — fully illuminated and washed in a blue tint.
Inside the trailer, Lanny was acting as short-order cook, and he had a greasy mixture of fried eggs, onions, and hamburger spread out on his oft-used grill.
“Lanny’s hash — served twenty-four hours a day.”
I was at his dining table, looking at an overhead schematic of Paramount studios, map grid number 593-G6. Latitude: 34.08365; Longitude: -118.32219 — otherwise known as Hollywood, U.S.A.
“I borrowed that from the maintenance department,” he said proudly.
“So, Lanny, any ideas how we pull this off so there’s no paper trail, or ‘drive-on pass’ hassles?”
“Easy. Look north to the cemetery.”
According to the map, the Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery, resting place of Marilyn Monroe and other Hollywood heavyweights, was due north of the studio. The second I saw the configuration, a story told to me fifteen years ago suddenly made sense.
“Wait a minute. I know this place. My makeup man on Maniac Cop — another film where you beat me up — was a young makeup apprentice on The Ten Commandments.”
“I think I know this story,” Lanny said, squinting at the memory, “but I thought it was just Hollywood B.S.”
“No. This guy was there. His job was to spray dark body makeup on the extras in a special ventilated shed on the Paramount lot. But, as the wind blew, so did the makeup residue —”
“Directly on the tombstones in the cemetery,” Lanny said, finishing my thought.
“Cecil B. DeMille was so horrified when he heard the news that he dispatched a small army of U.S.C. students with brushes and buckets to scrub the tombstones.”
"I command you to wash those tombstones!"
Lanny laughed at the image. “That’s how close together they are. There’s a hidden gate back there that connects them. I know the groundskeeper. We used to hook up and raise hell — gave ‘graveyard shift’ a whole new meaning. Now, look, if you want to sneak into the Paramount lot, here’s what I would do: I’d go to the cemetery, pretending I was visiting the grave of some big star. Who do you like?”
“The old-fashioned guys, like Tyrone Power — is he there?”
“Sure as shit — right next to Harry Cohn, the prick who ran Columbia.”
“Hey, don’t say that — Columbia is responsible for The Three Stooges.”
“He was still a prick. The point is, you stop by to pay your respects to Ty or whoever, and then make your way back to Rosemary Avenue, the road behind the pond, until it dead-ends. The gate is back there. I’ll meet you.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said, smiling. “But Lanny, tell me your reason for doing this. On the phone, you said something about a long story.”
Lanny was about to answer, but dinner was fried up and ready. “Grab your plate, cowboy — grub’s on!”
I held out the mismatched plates to my bachelor friend, and he heaped on the food like it was our last meal together. Sitting down at his Formica-topped table, I couldn’t help notice Lanny’s pressed guard uniform hanging on the back of a chair.
“Pretty snappy duds, Lanny.”
“I tailor mine,” Lanny said, digging out two Coronas from his small refrigerator. “I picked that up from the film The Border, with Nicholson. He tailored his uniform. At first I thought it was just an ego thing, but then I realized that it makes a lot of sense. When you’re put together, you look together, and when you look together, folks assume that you are together. It’s all smoke and mirrors, but hey, we are in Hollywood, right?” Lanny said, dropping a beer in front of me. “If you were being squeezed out, you’d do the same thing.”
“You’re being forced out by the studio?” I asked, wiping my greasy lips.
“Yeah, it’s been a long time coming. I made a name for myself right away there, see? I started as a pass checker at Gate Two. That’s where they break you in, see how you do under pressure. My failure rate was 4 percent the first year of my guard career —4 percent. Most guys are 13, 14 percent.”
“You were a climber.”
“It wasn’t that,” Lanny continued, “I was just a natural. So they moved me up to the Gower shipping gate. I did check-ins there and turned a few heads. I caught five loads of stolen shit going out the door in the first month. In thirty days, I saved the studio my entire year’s salary. That’s when the squeeze began,” he said through a clenched jaw.
“For doing a good job?”
“Yep,” Lanny said, taking a slug of beer. His quiet, understated reserve fell away, and a hidden anguish played out like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront.
“I was too good, Bruce — that was the problem. I started to shake up a good-ol’-boy guard system that had been in place since the Great Depression. Some of these guys used to drink with John Barrymore, for Chrissakes, you know what I’m saying? Suddenly, here comes a guy who ain’t makin’ mistakes, and he’s payin’ attention, and he starts to see that the security infrastructure in place here isn’t any good. And what did they do to reward me?”
“It doesn’t sound good, whatever it is.”
“They gave me ‘the watch.’”
“I hope it was a Rolex.”
“No,” Lanny said impatiently. “They put me back in what we call the DMZ, no-man’s-land. They did it to break my will. Because of the isolation, most guys would crack within three months. I did it for five years, Bruce.”
There was a clunky pause, as I tried to think of something to say that wasn’t stupid, rude, or insensitive. How do you say, “Yeah, that must have sucked,” without saying that exactly? The best I could do was, “Yeah, freaky shit. Why not just quit and work at Universal, or Sony?”
Lanny turned his hash over and over, defiantly. “That’s just what they would want me to do.”
After a second helping of everything, Lanny and I watched the sun set from the porch of his trailer. Across his small patch of desert, a cacophony of barking dogs serenaded us. We shared a beer and talked about the good old days, before Death of the Dead and “the accident,” whatever that was.
18
Dailies from Hell
Parking in Hollywood is a nightmare: No Parking without a Special Permit; No Parking between the Hours of Ten and Two on Tuesdays for Street Cleaning; No Overnight Parking. Why not just put up a concrete riot barrier around the entire city?
That’s why I took a cab to 6000 Santa Monica Boulevard, the address of the Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery.
“You know, Mary Mon-roe is buried here,” my Pakistani driver informed me, counting out the change from my twenty.
“Do you mean Marilyn Monroe?”
The driver looked at me like I was a fool. “Tha’s wha I say — Mary Mon-roe.”
I stuffed the change in my pocket and stepped out of his gypsy cab. There it was before me, the cemetery that housed the tombs of Hollywood’s greatest old-timers: Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, John Huston. It was a classic cemetery, built in 1899, with Gothic tombstones, and giant mausoleums for the long-forgotten elite. The only time I saw it before this was on an episode of Charmed.
I glanced at my watch. The time read 5:30 p.m. — half hour until closing. I was to meet Lanny at 5:45, so I paid ten bucks to get in, and consulted the free map they included. From the main entrance, I turned left and headed toward the pond. Lanny’s secret gate was on the far side. As I walked along Lakeview Avenue, I began to pass the final resting places of well-known showbiz people. Cecil B. DeMille, the Steven Spielberg of his day, was housed in a giant tomb.
And it probably went over budget, I reasoned.
Around the corner was Jayne Mansfield, a blonde bombshell made prominent as a studio threat to Marilyn Monroe. Marion Davies, a forgettable actress from the 1920s and ’30s, had a massive tomb as well — but then again, her sugar daddy was William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate.
Just beyond Marion, my man Tyrone Power was laid out in a fine memorial. Ty was a man’s man from the old school, with dark, penetrating eyes, and a cigarette-enhanced voice. This dashing leading man had a permanent place in my friend Sam Raimi’s household. His mother, Lu-Lu, was so crazy about him, she hung framed portraits everywhere. Sam even faked his autograph on one picture, convincing Lu-Lu to this day that it was real.
Raimi favorite Tyrone.
Tyrone’s hypnotic powers were still in evidence. A woman in her sixties was standing silently by his grave, cradling an old black-and-white glossy of the handsome star, and dabbing her glistening eyes. As I got closer, the fan spotted me, but she didn’t try and hide her sorrow — or rage, for that matter.
“Damn you. We could have had such a life together. Why did you have to leave me so young, so virile? You bastard!”
Assuming she was talking to Tyrone Power, I offered my condolences. “Rumor has it, ma’am, he died of a heart attack while in the act of bedding a much younger woman. At least he went with a smile on his face.”
“That’s not true,” the fan shot back defiantly. “We made beautiful love in the afternoon. Ty told me he was tired, so I let him drift off to sleep. I tried to wake him several hours later, but he...he was gone....”
The grief etched on the woman’s face seemed real, not some delusional story.
“You’re the woman?” I asked incredulously.
“Not everyone in this town is a phony, mister,” she said bitterly.
I decided against baiting her further, and headed north to Rosemary Avenue. Near the end of the poorly maintained street, I spotted an overgrown, rusted gate with a simple lock. There were no others like it in this part of the park, but Lanny was nowhere in sight.
Then, through the thick foliage, I heard the secret call: “Where do you think you’re goin’?”
It was one of Lanny’s favorite lines from Death of the Dead, when his redneck character takes control of a group of people in an isolated cabin and forces them outside to certain death. I walked over to the gate as Lanny was unleashing the padlock. With a quick look around, I ducked into an obscure, overgrown section of the Paramount back lot.
