Keep in mind that I was already in solid with the kid for getting him out of school for the day. This was a Wednesday, and he had something like a week and a half left before summer vacation. So I was cool, for a dad.
He did complain that I didn’t have a convertible, which in California was a criminal offense. My wheels, technically part of the A-1’s fleet, were merely a white 1960 Jaguar 3.8, leather seats, walnut interior, disk brakes, automatic transmission.
“Convertibles blow my business papers around,” I said at the wheel, tooling around the Fox lot. “And muss my hair.”
“Get it cut,” he said, rubbing his hand over the bristle of his crew cut.
“I don’t like the smell of butch wax.”
“Come on, Dad. Grow up.”
I didn’t share with Sam my opinion of crew cuts, which was that they were for servicemen, bodybuilders, and homosexuals, not necessarily mutually exclusive groups. Kids his age didn’t need having their sexuality undermined. In fact, my mission today was just the opposite.
Of course, in trying to impress my kid-whose “other” father was a producer (did I mention the fat prick used to be successful?)-I should have picked a lot other than Fox’s. The grand old studio was scrambling to stay afloat. Clouds of dust crowded the blue out of the sky over bulldozers making way for apartment buildings and office towers. The out-of-control Liz Taylor picture Cleopatra, currently filming in Rome, had required the selling off of such fabled backlot locations as Tyrone Power’s Zorro hacienda, Betty Grable’s Down Argentine Way ranch, and Lana Turner’s Peyton Place town square.
Marilyn’s new picture, which Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons called “troubled,” was in fact the only going project on the lot.
“Jeez,” Sam said, elbow out the rolled-down window. “It’s a lousy ghost town.”
The streets of this soundstage city had once been hopping with cowboys and Indians, pirates and dancing girls. Even the trees and lawns were brown and dying-palms and ferns, too. Had they cut off the water? Or had the water company cut off Fox?