‘Mr Guyland. Sir, your director’s here!’ said Thursday in her singing-telegram voice. She laughed raunchily. ‘Sure, lover. You got it.’ Then she turned. ‘I’m sorry if I seem a trifle flushed. Lorne’s been balling me all day. He’s right up there.’
I climbed a padded spiral staircase. I climbed from the stalls to the gods. Lorne surged across a cloud of carpet, seventh heaven, dressed in a white robe and extending a broad-sleeved arm through the conditioned air. With silent urgency he swivelled, and gestured towards the bank of window—this was his balcony, his private box, over sweating Manhattan. He poured me a drink. I was surprised to taste whiskey, rather than ambrosia, in the frosted glass. Then Lorne gazed at me for a very long time, in ripe candour. I delivered what was to be my longest speech of the evening, saying that I gathered he was keen to talk about his role, to talk about Gary. Lorne gazed at me for a very long time again. Then he started.
‘I see this Garfield as a man of some considerable culture,’ said Lorne Guyland. ‘Lover, father, husband, athlete, millionaire — but also a man of wide reading, of wide … culture, John. A poet. A seeker. He has the world in his hands, women, money, success— but this man probes deeper. As an Englishman, John, you’ll understand what I’m saying. His Park Avenue home is a treasure chest of art treasures. Sculpture. The old masters. Tapestries. Glassware. Rugs.
Treasures from all over the world. He’s a professor of art someplace. He writes scholarly articles in the, in, in the scholarly magazines, John. He’s a brilliant part-time archaeologist. People call him up for art advice from all over the world. In the opening shot I see Garfield at a lectern reading aloud from a Shakespeare first edition, bound in unborn calf. Behind him on the wall there’s this whole bunch of oils. The old masters, John. He lifts his head, and as he looks towards camera the light catches his monocle and he …’
I stared grimly across the room as Lorne babbled on. Who, for a start, was Garfield? The guy’s name is Gary. Barry isn’t short for Barfield, is it. It’s just Barry, and that’s that. Still, this would no doubt be among the least of our differences. Lorne now began mapping out Garfield’s reading list. He talked for some time about a poet called Rimbo. I assumed that Rimbo was one of our friends from the developing world, like Fenton Akimbo. Then Lorne said something that made me half-identify Rimbo as French. You dumb shit, I thought, it’s not Rimbo, it’s Rambot, or Rambeau. Rambeau had a pal or contemporary, I seem to remember, with a name like a wine … Bordeaux. Bardolino. No, that’s Italian … isn’t it? Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It’s so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You’re given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour, you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how hard, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.
Yes, all in all, a dreadful little show was being staged for me, up here on the twenty-first floor. I knew that at least. In his gilt sandals Lorne walked with poised uncertainty from one window to the other, his rapt face upturned, the hands both summoning and offering the revelations which the gods now fraternally distributed. Like all filmstars Lorne was about two foot nine (something to do with the condensed, the concentrated presence), but the old prong was in good nick, you had to admit, with that tan-and-silver sheen of the all-American robot-kings. Yeah, that was it: this isn’t a man, I kept thinking, it’s a mad old robot, all zinc and chrome and circuitry coolant. He’s like my car, he’s like the fucking Fiasco — way past his best, giving everyone grief, and burning up money and rubber and oil.
Lorne had gone on to explore Garfield’s sumptuous lifestyle, the art galleries he superintended in Paris and Rome, his opera-nut vacations in Palma and Beirut, his houses in Tuscany, the Dordogne and Berkeley Square, his Barbadian hideaway, his stud ranches, his Manhattan helicopter pad … And as this fizzy old dog bayed and barked into the night, I spared a tender thought for my project, my poor little project, which I had nursed in my head for so long now. Good Money would have made a good short, with a budget of, say, £75,000. Now that it was going to cost fifteen million dollars, though, I wasn’t so sure. But I must keep a grip on my priorities here. A good film didn’t matter. Good Money didn’t matter. Money mattered. Money mattered.