Hoogly Moogly

Women Beset Me. But when you are a Hollywood hero, that is your lot in life. Let's face it: Lots of people have worse lots and lots worse, too. I'm a lucky stiff. Hoogly moogly.

Call me Buddy Burns, which is my character's name in the only movie out of eight I've made so far that I am not ashamed of. I have two main women, and they have me, and, oh, how miserable are we three. They're in the movies, too, wouldn't you know? Call them Debbie and Sasha--not their real names, of course.

Debbie is exactly half the age of Sasha, and I am roughly in the middle. Debbie and I met on the picture that made us stars, Invasion of the Wiffleheads. She calls me her best friend. This is her way of denying that I am in love with her. I have to tell myself that it's her mind I love, because her famous bodily unit heretofore has been off limits.

"You could have ten million girls that way," she says when, after perhaps 13 flaskets of sake, I attempt to reach up her skirt one night in the dark little Japanese place off Highway One in Oxnard where nobody bothers us. She squirms out of my reach.

"It's not as though I just want to drain my gland, you know"

"But it would change everything, Buddy."

Technically, Debbie is still married to another of the screen's leading heartthrobs, a self-infatuated cad so afflicted with the need to hump anything that draws a breath in the Los Angeles Basin that he makes satyriasis seem like a simple attitude problem. The celebrity mags would have us running in a pack, like so many Rottweilers, but that is hardly the case. In fact, we have met exactly twice, across the court at a couple of charity tennis tournaments, when the cad thrashed me in straight sets. More disastrous, he exercises some sexual hoodoo power that holds his wife in humiliating thrall. She talks to me about it all the time without ever really making it comprehensible. Me, the sympathetic friend. The good listener.

"Does he have a big thingie, or what?" I ask as we drive up Victory Boulevard during a stolen hour after the day's shooting.

"Look"--she ignores my question and points into the (continued on page 134) Hoogly Moogly (continued from page 120) neon smudge beyond the windshield--"Drunken Blownuts." She really ought to be a comedian, but she's too beautiful and they pay her too much to play straight roles, usually the spunky female outsider.

"What's he got that I don't have?"

"Pizza Slut," she says, still pointing.

She's all right.

We turn now to the Princess Sasha. Sasha, though of Russian parentage, hails from England. Her voice alone, that deep dulcet murmur, is renowned anywhere men no longer wear tusks in their nostrils. I hear it on the phone and up goes Little Willie. Forty-nine summers this gal has seen, but Sasha is as succulent as a pear that has been left to ripen perfectly under a glass dome on the sideboard, at her absolute peak. No tits to speak of, really, but a marvel below the waist. "My little wet bottom," she refers to it. She's no dumb bunny, but all in all, I love Sasha mostly for her body.

Wouldn't you know that we three are at work now on the same picture? I'm the guy wrongfully accused of committing a murder. Debbie is the victim's wife. Sasha is my lawyer. Sound familiar? Don't blame me. Hey, you can always read a book or play Monopoly with your kid.

Princess Sasha has been married so many times that you'd need a genealogist on staff to keep the exes straight. I don't hold it against her. She is currently single, the longest stretch since she was a teenager, as a matter of fact. I think it is good for her. There's only one offspring: an overweight daughter who found Jesus some years ago and leads the righteous life with a hubbie and three offspring of her own in Virginia. Whatever his strong points as a personal savior, Jesus has not wrung the venom out of this daughter's heart. She calls up Sasha and rants about boarding schools she was sent to 15 years ago, how bad the food was. I once picked up the phone and she ranted at me. I told her to fuck off. A week later, it's in the National Enquirer that I'm slated to be Princess Sasha's eighth husband.

"Is it true?" Debbie asks me as we drive to the little Korean joint down in Laguna, another one of our secret hideaways. (She likes the fiery pork in pickled cabbage.) Debbie is so modern. She knows about me and Sasha, of course. But, hey, best friends are entitled to lives of their own.

"I'm surprised at you, believing that squalid crud sheet."

"What's it like, sleeping with someone's grandmother?"

"It's not like sleeping with your own grandmother."

"It's pathetic, my being jealous of her," Debbie says.

"I couldn't agree more."

"Then drop her and act your age."

I glance over from the driver's seat. Pouting, Debbie slouches with her arms crossed in such a way that the cleft between her magnificent, world-famous mammaries--which I have seen unclad only on screen, like half a billion other males--looks like the Grand Canyon at 30,000 feet.

"Hoogly moogly."

The next day on the set, things begin to get ugly. We're shooting out of sequence because of location scheduling. The scene is near the climax, when my character and the lawyer (Sasha) confront poor misguided, vengeful Debbie outside the courtroom in the hall of justice. Sasha is supposed to slap Debbie. It's all worked out. We rehearse the scene a few times. Fine. Take one: Sasha slaps Debbie perhaps a little bit harder than she did in rehearsal. Suddenly--whap--Debbie hauls off and wallops the princess in the gut, literally knocks her off her feet. Sasha is on the floor, making these wheezy-squealy noises--dare I say like a pig? She's lost her wind.

"Are you out of your skull?" I ask Debbie.

Tony, the director, who is more deferential, to put it mildly, says, "Gosh, Deb, that was brilliant, but I thought we had it all set in rehearsal." (Meanwhile, Sasha is being helped off to her trailer.)

"I felt internally motivated," Debbie says. "We have to illuminate the subtext here."

"You're so full of shit your eyeballs are brown," I whisper in her ear.

"You really think it has to be that complicated?" Tony says.

"Put it this way," Debbie says. "Why did Achilles drag Hector's body around the city of Troy?"

"I dunno," says Tony in Cockney-inflected English.

"Think about it," Debbie says and sashays off. What a minx!

I report to Sasha's trailer to offer consolation. The trailer is full of plants turning pale yellow because there's nothing available that remotely resembles sunlight. We're on a sound stage, so outside is actually indoors. Hence, inside the trailer is double indoors. In I go.

Sasha's wardrobe girl, Barb, is sitting at the edge of the bed, where Sasha is lying face down, quietly crying. I sit down, too, and stroke Sasha's hair to make my presence known. She looks up--goddamn, it's that same tear-streaked girlish face that made her famous when I was a zygote. I feel like Montgomery Clift in Til Forever.

"Leave us, please," she tells Barb. When she is really upset, Sasha's voice slips into a squeaky upper register, some emotional attic where all the things of childhood are stored and she is forever 15. I've heard her do it in a dozen movies, usually in the third reel, after someone has shot her pony, or revealed that her young husband is a fairy, or said that he was leaving her for Kim Novak.

When Barb is gone, Sasha rolls over onto her back and wipes her tears. A strange look of cheerful determination makes her radiant but oddly out of focus--say, the emotional equivalent of smearing petroleum jelly on a camera lens.

"I'm going to fix that little cunt," she says. In her English accent, the word has a special astringent bite. "I know a lot of people in this town."

"Aw, don't say that." Believe it or not, this comeback is the best I can manage. But Sasha is more pathetic than she realizes, because 99 percent of the people she knows haven't had any real power out here since Lassie came home. Of course, I let that slide.

"You don't find her attractive, do you, Buddy?"

"Who? Debbie?"

"No, the fucking queen of Norway!" Sasha shrilly replies. "Forgive me. That was uncalled for. Don't be coy, darling."

"Well, for goodness' sake, Sasha, she's a movie star," I say, a tad impatient myself. "Of course she's attractive. To millions of men out there," I am quick to qualify this remark. "Other men."

Sasha makes a pouty face. But the ridiculous truth of the matter is, just lying there on the bed, she is turning me on. The woman is a walking aphrodisiac. I think of those seven husbands serially entwined in her silky arms: first, the heir to the rectal-suppository fortune, followed by the Korean War air ace, the hard-drinking director renowned for his virility (subsequently revealed to be a cross-dresser; he ruined her tiny brassieres), the polo-playing Polish count, the Secretary of Commerce (those four years of social catatonia in our nation's capital almost finished her), the psychiatrist who fell in love with her (whoops!) at the Kipplinger Clinic and finally, when she was shed of him and his dreary talk of "hidden agendas" and "life scripts," the courtly Mexican banker, their union so tragically short.

Her ability to stave off the ravages of time is legendary out here, especially considering (continued on page 158) Hoogly Moogly (continued from page 134) her bouts with the bottle. For a person hooked on life's luxuries, she works like a maniac on her bodily unit. Before the limo comes to fetch her at six a.m., Sasha has already done 100 laps in the pool. I admire that.

"Do I find you attractive? Isn't that the real question?" I ask. "Yes. Yes, I do. Sasha, you drive me batshit."

"I'll never understand your generation," she says, smiling now as she hikes up the tweed lawyer's skirt. "Come to my little wet bottom."

And I do.

•

Tony has proved himself more of a diplomat than I gave him credit for. Shrewd. By the time we're ready for take number two on the hall-of-justice scene, he has done a job worthy of Kissinger. We do seven retakes in all. Throughout, Debbie stands there and gets slapped, taking her lumps like a good soldier. Personally, I sense that four of those seven retakes are gratuitous, and I'll be interested to see the rushes.

Afterward, Debbie and I head for a little Thai place up Topanga way, where my crib happens to be located. Over garlicky prawns in lemon grass, my best friend sulks, pushing the little stir-fried creatures hither and thither about her plate. For a week now, she has been out of the Holmby Hills palazzo she shared with the cad, and temporary lodgings at the Chateau Marmont depress her--they've given her the same room John Belushi checked out of feet first.

"Did you ploink her in the trailer?" she finally asks.

"What a question," I say, trying to be blasé.

"I thought I detected a caviarlike aroma when you got back on the set."

"I had a tuna sandwich," I lie. "By the way, why did Achilles drag Hector's body around the city of Troy?"

"Because he was just that pissed," Debbie says.

How could you not be crazy about such a clever girl?

Later still, we find ourselves up the canyon at my establishment, a modest aerie with a distant view of the Pacific, except, of course, at night. Without, all is terrifying blackness. I realize that she has never been here before after dark, and it makes me weak with anticipation. We build a fire.

I have been working on the place between jobs--trying to remind myself what normal work is--and the interior walls are mostly knocked out, so it's all like one big room. Somehow, we wend over to the bed. The house warms up rapidly. We both sit Indian style on the bedspread, an absurd thing made of more than 100 genuine coyote muzzles. I rather regret the purchase--made after the whopping success of Crybabies, my first flick. I think about those poor little wild pups often, and something catches in my throat. But as a practical matter, I hesitate to get rid of it, you know, give it to the maid or the Salvation Army. After all, the damn thing cost more than $10,000. In any case, with surprising suddenness, Debbie whips off her clothes, as if to prove a point in some kind of argument that hasn't even taken place. Physiologically, the stress is so awful that I fear some kind of medical disaster: an aneurysm, perhaps cardiac arrest--rare in fellows under 35 but nonetheless possible.

"Give her up," she says.

"Huh? Who?"

"The fucking queen of Norway."

"I can't believe you said that."

"I can't believe you said 'Who?' "

"You just said that, right? That thing about the queen of Norway?"

"I've been rehearsing it for eleven years, saying it over and over again in my head like a mantra, just waiting for exactly the right moment to spring it, and here we are, Buddy, here we are."

"This is one of the problems with sarcasm," I point out. "It's a very inefficient means of communication."

"Take your clothes off this very minute," she says. "Is that direct enough for you?"

For the second time that day, I disport myself upon another of the world's most desired female bodies. We go on and on for hours. The convulsions of love barely even satisfy my desire for this extraordinary maiden. Then, afterward, we lie side by side as our breathing slowly returns to normal. Overhead, stars twinkle coldly through the skylight. Somewhere out there, I think, the poor lost Wiffleheads are wandering.

"Now will you give her up?" Debbie asks.

"She's fragile," I say. "She'll feel rejected."

"Who cares?"

"She could flip out, hit the bottle, attempt suicide again. Down the drain goes this picture, along with our profit participation."

Debbie considers this for a few moments. She is no child. You can see the wheels turning, hear the digital bleeplets as she racks up her calculations.

"I'd have to let her down gently...."

A look of transport suddenly lights up Debbie's face as though it contained a 150-watt bulb.

"I've got it," she says. "Ask her to marry you. She'll drop you like a sack of radioactive shit."

"Isn't that just a bit cruel and devious?"

"Hey, after all, who do you love?"

"Hoogly moogly."

The very next day, in that trailer full of dying plants, I ask Sasha to marry me. This provokes a sidelong glance, followed by a wicked smile. "Silly boy. I'm old enough to be your mother."

"A technicality."

It so happens that even as this conversation occurs, I am deep inside her, doggy style, thinking, What a pig I have become.

"Oh, what the hell," she says with a girlish laugh. "It's only life. Let's do it."

Imagine my shock.

"Uh, can we keep it a secret?"

"A secret marriage? How absurd, Buddy."

"No, just the announcement."

"Oh. Well, yes, for a while, I suppose, darling."

That was noon. Before we break for supper on the set, someone gets hold of that evening's Herald-Examiner, and what should be at the bottom of page one but a big glamor-puss photo of Sasha with an inset mug shot of me taken the night I was booked for punching that paparazzo who hid himself in the back seat of my car during the Academy Awards show. That will teach you to buy a big English car, won't it?

Debbie is remarkably self-possessed, considering.

"Looks like we sort of miscalculated there, pard," she tells me the first opportunity we get to be alone, with Sasha off having her hairdo repaired.

"Ha," I glumly agree.

"Maybe you'll only last as long as that spick billionaire."

"How long did he last?"

"Eight days," Debbie says. "A vein burst in his head."

"Omigod."

"That was on day five, as I recall," she rattles on. "The marriage was already on the rocks. The illness actually brought them together for a while."

"Lord, have mercy on me," say I, though generally not given to sanctimony.

"You'll handle it," she says.

I can't help but think that she is daring me. Very well.

Witless with anxiety, I repair with Sasha to the princess' fairy castle in Bel Air after the day's shooting. Such a big place for such a tiny woman. Fountains, stables, the renowned pool with its statue-clogged grotto. "What's mine is yours now, dear boy," she says.

A supper is arranged. At nine p.m., the limos begin cruising up the circular drive, as though for somebody's funeral, discharging the gerontic princelings of the silver screen and their consorts: Vance Huddle, king of the cowpokes; Mort Klotz, dwarfish chairman emeritus of Paramount; Chuck Brawn, often confused with Moses and sometimes even with God Almighty; Bunny Hassler, "the funniest man in America" (according to Franklin D. Roosevelt); Chet Lally, the superagent who, at the age of 91, begins to look like Amenhotep; and so on down the list. It is obvious that they loathe me.

For about an hour, everybody talks extreme right-wing politics around the enormous marble table--"Your colored are draggin' this great country right down into the mud," says Vance Huddle--and then one by one, they start dropping off to dreamland in their seats. Old habits die hard. Although most of these coots haven't been on a set in a decade or more, you'd think they just finished a week of six a.m. calls.

Then we are in Sasha's boudoir, a spacious suite of linked chambers (bath, dressing, bed), a seraglio in so many shades of pink that it would make a gynecologist cry for mercy. Entering her here, I have the eerie sense of entering history. I imagine my rutting predecessors having at her little wet bottom, just as I do: the ace of Korea, the Cabinet officer, Count Kluzwizcski in his jodhpurs and jaunty helmet, and so on--not to mention the famous one-night stands. This is a wicked world. I sleep poorly.

•

It all happens so rapidly. Our wedding is set for the day after we wrap the picture. Since neither of us is a pious practitioner of our native-born sects (mine Lutheran, hers Hebrew), we are to be joined by a California Court of Appeals judge on Sasha's terrace. Select members of the press corps have been allowed in to avoid the obstreperous shenanigans that barring them always entails.

It is to be "a small ceremony," according to Sasha. "Just a few old friends." At least 200 show up. They are deployed all over the Italianate garden. I wait before a shell-carved marble niche with the judge. A concupiscent look on his face tells me that he has had the princess a time or two and doesn't care if I know it. The desire to be blind drunk in a Mexican hotel registered under a phony name almost overwhelms me. A string quartet, hired for the occasion, strikes up Mendelssohn's moth-eaten march. Sasha appears from the house, a queen bee attended by a swarm of drones. She looks frighteningly lovely in a little white-and-gold Charmeuse, not only a goddess but a virgin. This is, after all, Hollywood.

Then I see Debbie among the faded lions and the hollow-cheeked duchesses. She is smiling. She wears a look of complete serenity and confidence. She mouths some words. I can't make them out. Huh? Huh? I squint at her. Finally, I realize what she's saying: "You... can... handle... it."

Then Sasha is by my side, glowing, and as the judge begins to speak, the blood rises in my brain like bubbles in a glass of champagne. There are so many words. He has to lean forward to get my attention.

"Do you, Mr. Burns?" he intones.

"Do I what?" I croak.

"Take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?"

Once again, I see Debbie, this time over Sasha's head. Something in my heart suddenly seems to burst, and a flood tide of emotion rises in my gorge.

"Mr. Burns," the judge repeats a little impatiently.

"Oh, say it, darling," Sasha whispers. "Say it!"

I say it: "Hoogly moogly."

"What was that?" the judge says, squinting at me.

"Did you happen to see The Return of the Wiffleheads? That picture I made about the Alpha Centaurians who get marooned on Nantucket?"

"Oh, Buddy," Sasha whimpers, wobbling in her Christian Lacroix slippers.

Opprobrious murmurs undulate through the crowd.

"I only want to know one thing, Mr. Burns," the judge whispers venomously. "Does it mean yes or no?"

"Well, it can mean several things. 'Pardon me,' or 'Sorry,' or 'Forget it.' See, the Alpha Centaurians are these feckless, insecure little beings--hey, you must have seen the picture. It is the second-leading grosser of all time----"

There is a small thud as Sasha's petite body folds up on the flagstones like a puppet with its strings cut.

All of a sudden, people are noisily swirling about, and nobody hears me say, "They were harmless little beings, sent to Earth to teach us good manners."

Vance Huddle, 6'5", swaggers by to say, "Son, for two goshdarn cents, I'd squash yer head like a mango."

Mort Klotz mutters, "You'll never work in this town again."

Chuck Brawn, Bunny Hassler, Chet Lally, a virtual wax museum of Hollywood's Golden Years, file past me promising swift and horrible retribution. Crucifixion is suggested. It is an interesting idea, since in her salad days, Sasha starred in half a dozen major Bible epics and was present at Calvary often enough (once with Chuck Brawn) to qualify for honorary sainthood, or at least a star on the Vatican sidewalk.

Finally, and mercifully soon, the Italianate garden is empty except for Debbie and me.

"Are we bad people?" I ask her.

"We're modern," she says.

"So was the princess in her day. The time may come when somebody makes us ridiculous."

"We'll handle it," Debbie says.

A servant comes out and informs us that we will be arrested for trespassing if not off the property in five minutes. He has a Slavic accent and, with shaven head, the look of a professional sadist. We fly away into the citrus-scented night on winged wheels, two feckless wanderers on a strange planet, left behind by the mother ship.

"Just lying there on the bed, she is turning me on. The woman is a walking aphrodisiac."

"'I'll never understand your generation,' she says, smiling as she hikes up the tweed lawyer's skirt."