The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald Page 2

  CHAPTER TWO

  YOU COULD TAKE YOUR pick with Cameron Sheffield Noyes.

  You could call him the brightest, most gifted boy wonder to shine on American fiction since F. Scott Fitzgerald lit up the Jazz Age. Or you could call him an obnoxious, big-mouthed, young shithead. The only thing you couldn’t do was ignore him.

  Not since his sophomore year at Columbia, when this strapping young part-time male model and full-time blue blood had submitted the manuscript for a slim first-person novel to Tanner Marsh, who teaches creative writing there. Marsh also edits the New Age Fiction Quarterly, and happens to be the single most influential literary critic in New York. Marsh read the little manuscript, which told the story of a shy, privileged, young Ivy Leaguer who suffers a nervous breakdown while studying for finals and runs off to an Atlantic City hotel-casino with the middle-aged cashier at the diner where he regularly breakfasts. There, besotted by drugs, alcohol, and sex, he blows both of their brains out. The novel was called Bang. Marsh was so knocked out by it he showed it to Skitsy Held, editor in chief of the small, prestigious Murray Hill Press. She shared his enthusiasm. Bang was published one month before Cameron Noyes’s twentieth birthday. A spectacular front-page review in the New York Times Book Review catapulted it, and its author, to instant celebrity. “It is as if young Scott Fitzgerald has come back to write The Lost Weekend while under the influence of cocaine and José Cuervo tequila,” raved the Times’ reviewer, who was none other than Tanner Marsh. “Indeed, Cameron Sheffield Noyes writes so wincingly well he must be considered the most brilliant new literary find since Stewart Hoag. One can only hope he will fare better.”

  Critics. One thing they never seem to understand is that everyone, no matter how gifted, can roll out of bed one morning and have just a really rotten decade.

  I read the damned thing, of course. How could I not? I read all 128 pages of it, and I thought it was absolutely brilliant. Oh, I wanted to hate it. Desperately. But I couldn’t. Bang captured the itchy ennui of the young as so few novels ever had. Cameron Noyes had a gift — for peering into the depths of his own soul and for coming back with pure gold. And he had the rarest gift of all. He had his own voice.

  Lulu stayed out of my way for a whole week after I read it. I was not in a good mood.

  Lonely, alienated teenagers who before might have turned to Plath or Salinger for comfort found Noyes much more to their liking. Bang understood them. It was dirty. It was theirs. It took off and stayed near the top of the bestseller lists for thirty-six weeks, the name of Noyes crowding out more familiar ones such as Michener and King. The paperback reprint went for close to a million. The movie version, which starred Charlie Sheen and Cher, made over $100 million, though fans of the book not to mention the movie’s first director — were put off by the studio-dictated happy ending, in which the hero has only dreamt the violent climax and awakens from it sobered and determined to get his degree.

  Cameron Noyes wasn’t the only hot young novelist in town. It seemed as if a pack of baby authors had been let loose on the literary world with their hip, sassy tales of the young, the restless, the stoned. There was Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City, Bret Easton Ellis with Less Than Zero, Tama Janowitz with Slaves of New York. They were a kind of universe unto themselves, an undertalented, overpaid, over-publicized universe at that. But Cameron Noyes was not like the others. He actually knew how to write, for one thing. And he knew how to grab like no one else. He appeared in ads for an airline, a credit card, a brand of jeans, a diet cola, and the Atlantic City casino where Bang was filmed. Saturday Night Live made him a guest host. MTV sent him to Fort Lauderdale to cover spring break as its guest correspondent. Rolling Stone put him on its cover. So did People, which called him the sexiest man alive. He was seldom lonely. Not a week went by without his appearing in the gossip columns and the supermarket tabloids, squiring one famous film or rock ’n’ roll beauty after another to Broadway premieres, charity bashes, celebrated murder trials. He had been with Charlie Chu, his current live-in love, for two months now. It was, they both told Barbara Waiters on network TV, a “once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

  He made good copy. Indeed, Cameron Noyes seemed to revel in his own enfant-terrible outrageousness more than any young celebrity since John Lennon. “It’s true, I brought the remote-control generation to literature,” he told Esquire. “And they will keep on reading great books just as long as I keep writing them.” When he wasn’t blasting literary sacred cows of the past (“Hemingway and Fitzgerald are officially sanctioned culture — the boredom comes built in with the product”) and present (“Saul Bellows been dead since 1961. Isn’t it time someone told him?”), he was acting out his own style of commentary. He became so outraged, for instance, when real estate developer Donald Trump’s book hit number one on the bestseller list that he bought up every copy in every store on Fifth Avenue — several hundred in all — carted them into Central Park and made a bonfire out of them. For that he spent a night in jail. And while that little demonstration might have displayed a certain spirited cheekiness — not to mention good taste — a number of his lately had not. He ran over a pesky paparazzo with his car one night and nearly crippled him. He punched Norman Mailer at a black-tie benefit for the New York Public Library and broke two teeth. Currently, he held the unofficial record for turning over the most tables at Elaine’s while in the heat of a drunken argument: three.

  He was a powder keg, a troubled young genius blessed with James Dean’s looks and John McEnroe’s personality. He was the perfect literary celebrity for his time, so perfect that if he hadn’t come along, someone would have invented him.

  In a way, someone had. The mastermind behind the meteoric rise and phenomenal marketing of Cameron Noyes was twenty-four-year-old Boyd Samuels, who had been his college roommate and was now the most notorious literary agent in the business. Boyd Samuels had made a name for himself in publishing almost as fast as his star client had — for trying to steal big-name talent from other agents, for being unprincipled, for being a liar, and most important, for being such a damned success at it. Take Cameron Noyes’s much anticipated second novel. He wasn’t writing it for Skitsy Held. Samuels had simply blown his nose on his client’s signed contract with her, snatched Noyes away, and delivered him to a bigger, richer house willing to pay him a reported advance of a million dollars. Just exactly how Samuels had managed to pull this off — and why Skitsy Held, no cream puff, had let him — had been the subject of much speculation around town. Just as Noyes’s second novel was. Word was it was on the late side. Word was his new publisher was getting edgy. Hard to blame them. A million is a lot of money for a serious novel. Especially one by an author who had only just turned twenty-three.

  It was Boyd Samuels who got me mixed up with Cameron Noyes. He called me one day and invited me up for a chat. I went. I had nothing better to do.

  The Boyd Samuels Agency had a suite of offices on the top floor of the Flatiron Building, the gloriously ornate skyscraper built in 1902 at the elongated triangle where Broadway meets Fifth and Twenty-third. It was about 1957 in Boyd Samuels’s outer office, and it wasn’t so much an outer office as it was a diner — cute and kitschy as hell, too, right down to the shiny chrome counter and swivel stools, the pink and charcoal linoleum on the floor, the neon clock and the vintage jukebox, which was playing Eddie Cochran. It seemed as if everywhere I went that season I bumped into the fifties. I suppose young people are always nostalgic for a decade they didn’t have to live through.

  Phones were ringing, people were bopping in and out of different office doors, snapping their fingers to the juke. None of them looked over twenty-five. Lulu and I waited at the front door until one of them, a tall, gangly, splay-footed kid with a Beaver Cleaver burrhead crew cut, hurried over to us from behind the counter. He wore a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt, jeans, and the look of someone who was used to getting whipped. His shoulders were hunched in the anticipation of blows, his eyes set in a permanent wince.
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br />   “Stewart Hoag, isn’t it?” he asked timidly, fastening his eyes to a spot on the wall about a foot over my head.

  I said it was.

  “I’m Todd Lesser, Boyd’s assistant. H-He’s on his way.”

  “From … ?”

  “Home,” he replied, explaining quickly, “he’s running a bit late this morning. He’ll be here in just a few minutes. Really. Care to wait in his office?”

  “Nice decor,” I commented as we crossed to a corridor of offices. “If business is ever slow, you can sell burgers.”

  “Business,” Todd said modestly, “is never slow.”

  Boyd Samuels was into ugly. Ugly, kidney-shaped desk of salmon-colored plastic. Ugly art-moderne love seat of chrome and leopard skin. Ugly specimen cacti growing uninvitingly in pots in front of the window overlooking Madison Square Park. These Lulu ambled right for, sniffing delicately at them so as not to honk her large black nose on a prickle.

  Todd eyed her warily. “Uh … she’s not going to … ”

  “Just getting the lay of the land,” I assured him.

  One wall of the office was floor-to-ceiling shelves displaying the many best-selling books by his many best-selling clients. Framed magazine covers and best-seller lists and rave reviews crowded the walls. Standing in one corner was a life-sized, full-color cardboard display cutout of Delilah Moscowitz, the statuesque, scrumptious, and sizzingly hot young sex therapist who was blowing Dr. Ruth out of the water, so to speak. Delilah’s looks, frisky wit, and bold irreverence toward such touchy subjects as fellatio, bondage, and her own rather uninhibited sex life had made her a sensation. She had a top syndicated newspaper column, a radio call-in show, a regular slot on Good Morning America, and now, thanks to Boyd Samuels, a surefire bestseller, Tell Delilah. “Good sex is all in the head,” read the promo copy on her cardboard cutout. “Take home the lady who gives the best head in the business.”

  “Nice subtle approach,” I observed.

  “Our newest star,” said Todd, beaming. “Her book has already hit the B. Dalton chain list. She’ll be appearing on Donahue and Oprah both, and Donna Karan and Norma Kamali are still fighting over her.”

  “For … ?”

  “They want her to wear their clothes on her national publicity tour. She looks fabulous in whatever she wears. The camera loves her.”

  “Yes, she does give a whole new meaning to the word bookish,” I said, admiring her cutout. “I see Skitsy Held is her publisher. Interesting, considering what happened with Cameron Noyes.”

  Todd frowned and shook his head. “No, not at all. B-Boyd always tries to make things work out even. Coffee?”

  “Please. Black.”

  He shambled out. I sat down on the love seat, which was as uncomfortable as it looked, and gazed over at the shelves crammed with all of the hot books by all of the hot authors. I listened to the phones ring — publishers calling with feelers, with firm offers, with promises of gold and village virgins. And I sighed inwardly. Once, the raves and magazine covers and phone calls were for me. Once, I’d swum in these swirling waters myself. And drowned in them.

  Maybe you remember me. Then again, maybe you don’t. It has been a while since I burst onto the scene as the tall, dashing author of that fabulously successful first novel, Our Family Enterprise. Since the Times called me “the first major new literary voice of the eighties.” Since I married Merilee Nash, Joe Papp’s newest and loveliest leading lady, and became half of New York’s cutest couple. Since I had it all, and crashed. Dried up. No juices of any kind. No second novel. No Merilee. She got the eight rooms overlooking Central Park, the red 1958 Jaguar XK 150, the Tony for the Mamet play, the Oscar for the Woody Allen movie. Also a second husband, that brilliant young playwright, Zack something. She got it all. I ended up with Lulu, my drafty old fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-third Street, and a second, somewhat less dignified career — ghostwriter of celebrity memoirs.

  I’m not terrible at it. Two No. 1 best-sellers, in fact. My background as an author of fiction certainly helps. So does the fact I myself used to be a celebrity. I know how to handle them. A lot of the lunch-pail ghosts don’t. On the down side, being a pen for hire can be hazardous to my health. A ghost is there to dig up a celebrity’s secrets, past and present, and there’s usually someone around who wants to keep them safely buried.

  Danger is not my middle name.

  My juices did finally return. Not like before they’ll never be like before. But I did actually finish the second novel, Such Sweet Sorrow, the bittersweet story of the stormy marriage between a famous author and famous actress. Somewhat autobiographical. I felt certain it would put me back on the map. A choice paperback sale. Movie deal. Great part for Merilee Nash. Tailor-made for her, in fact.

  Deep down inside, I also hoped it would help me win her back — she and Zack had split for good over his drinking and carrying on. But things didn’t quite work out that way. For starters, Such Sweet Sorrow was not exactly a critical success. “The most embarrassing act of public self-flagellation since Richard Nixon’s Checkers speech,” wrote the New York Times Book Review. “The plot sickens.” That was actually the kindest review I got. Written, incidentally, by Tanner Marsh, who, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, is not one of my eight or nine million favorite people. But I can’t blame the book’s utter critical and commercial failure on Tanner. No one liked it. Particularly you-know-who. She called me in tears after she finished reading it to say she felt like she’d been stripped naked in the middle of Broadway, beaten to a pulp and left in the gutter, bleeding, for bums to urinate on. Her words, not mine. She also said she never wanted to speak to me again. And she hadn’t.

  That spring found her starring with Jeremy Irons in Broadway’s hottest ticket, Mike Nichols’s revival of The Petrified Forest. Sean Penn was bringing the house down as Duke Mantee. And Merilee was considered a shoo-in for another Tony nomination for her portrayal of Gabby Maple, the Arizona truck-stop waitress who reads François Villon and dreams of running off to France.

  Me, I was facing the gloomy realization that my season in the sun had passed. I was closing in on forty and didn’t have much to show for it — two small rooms, $657 in the bank, some yellowing clippings, a huge ego, and a basset hound who eats Nine Lives canned mackerel for cats and very, very strange dogs. I had no future. I was looking for one when Boyd Samuels called.

  His assistant returned with a steaming Bang coffee mug. I thanked him. He lingered, examined the carpet. He was painfully shy. Not a positive quality in an agent, unless it can be harnessed into naked ambition.

  “For what it’s worth,” he finally got out, “I thought Such Sweet Sorrow was an even better novel than Our Family Enterprise. I really loved it.”

  “That makes you and my mother — and her I’m not so sure about.”

  “What I mean,” he added, reddening, “is I think the critics were wrong to punch you out.”

  “Could be. But don’t forget they weren’t necessarily right when they lavished praise on me before. They simply misunderstood me to my advantage.” I sipped my coffee. “Todd, isn’t it?”

  “Why, yes,” he replied, startled. He was not used to people remembering his name.

  “Thank you, Todd.”

  “Sure thing,” he said brightly.

  “Been working for Boyd long?”

  “Ever since he started out. We were friends in college. Well, sort of friends. What I mean is … ”

  Before he could finish explaining, Hurricane Boyd hit. The man seemed to explode into the room. He was a human exclamation mark. “Whoa, sorry about the delay, amigo!” he exclaimed as he hurled his bulging briefcase on his desk, whipped off his Ray-Bans, and stuck out his hand. “Glad to meet ya! Indeed!”

  I shook it, half expecting to get an electrical shock.

  Boyd Samuels was burly and bearded and over six feet tall in his ostrich-skin cowboy boots. He had thick black hair and he wore it shoulder length and didn’t bother to comb it. He w
ore a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his thick, hairy forearms, a bola-string tie of turquoise and hammered silver, and pleated khaki trousers.

  “Coffee, Toddy!” he ordered as a greeting to his assistant.

  “Right away, Boyd,” Todd said, hurrying off.

  Lulu stirred on the sofa next to me. Boyd fell to his knees and patted her. “Hey, pretty baby, what’s happening?” She yawned in response. He made a face, turned back to me. “Jeez, her breath smells kind of … ”

  “She has funny eating habits.”

  “What’s she eat — old jock straps?”

  “We’re going to pretend we didn’t hear that.”

  Todd came back with the coffee. Boyd took it, dropped into his desk chair, and gave him the name of an editor he wanted on the phone at once. Todd nodded, retreated.

  There was a bottle of Old Overholt rye whiskey in his desk drawer. Boyd poured a generous slug of it into his coffee, then offered me the bottle. I was starting to reach for it when a soft, low growl came from the sofa next to me. My protector. She was concerned that I was slipping back into my bad habits I had before when things went sour. I glowered at her. She glowered right back at me, baring her teeth like Lassie trying to protect Timmy from a hissing rattler. I was definitely losing the upper hand.

  Boyd put the bottle away, struck a kitchen match against the sole of his boot, and lit an unfiltered Camel with it. Then he sat back with his boots up on the desk, smoking, sipping his laced coffee. The whole routine was pretty down-home shit-kicker; especially for an optometrist’s son from Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Only the eyes spoiled it. The eyes taking me in from across that desk were shrewd and alert and as piercing as twin laser beams. The man didn’t blink.