The Boy Who Never Grew Up Page 4

  Lunch was a salad of assorted field greens topped with grilled chicken. Free-range, of course. I had pineapple for dessert, and a Bass ale. Lulu had the fresh linguine with red clam sauce, minus the fresh linguine. There was an extensive library of videocassettes aboard. Lulu spent much of the flight watching Turner and Hooch with Tom Hanks for the eighth time. It’s one of her favorites, though she’s always thought Beasley was a little over the top with that saliva thing. I spent my time plowing through the fat manila envelope the Bedford Falls publicity people had sent me. In it were the major magazine articles that had been written about Matthew Wax through the years. Profiles in Rolling Stone, Esquire, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, American Film. If you could call them profiles. They were really about his movies, not him. What he did on the screen. Not who he was. An enigma, several writers called him. What else could you call a director who didn’t grant interviews, didn’t promote his films, didn’t appear in public, period. About the only time he had was during the Film Colorization hearings in Washington, D.C., when he testified before a Senate committee in a halting, emotional voice that colorization was “like spray painting graffiti on the Liberty Bell.”

  The biographical details were sketchy. Matthew Wax had grown up in the middle-class Sepulveda section of Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. He started writing and directing his own 8mm films when he was still in high school, and went on from there to USC film school. His first 16mm student short, Bugged, was the story of an unpopular teenager who awakens one morning to find himself transformed into a large, distasteful insect. It so impressed Norbert Schlom, then vice president of television production at Panorama Studios, that he immediately hired the nineteen-year-old to direct Rick Brant, Adventurer, a new CBS Saturday morning serial in the tradition of the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift. Within weeks of its premiere, Rick Brant was the most popular kids’ show in a decade. Matthew Wax never looked back. At age twenty-one he wrote and directed his first feature film, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, a low-budget Hitchcockian thriller about a lonely little boy who happens to witness the friendly couple next door committing a murder. The Boy Who Cried Wolf was a viscerally terrifying film right out of a kid’s worst nightmares. It made a vivid impression on filmgoers. So did its seven-year-old star, a wide-eyed little Canadian boy named Jean Forget. It also made $20 million. His second, I Was Invisible, a giddy spoof about an invisible teenager, became the sleeper box office hit of 1976. America’s most influential film critic, Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, breathlessly stamped young Matthew Wax with greatness when she wrote: “An adroit, look-ma-no-hands screwball farce by a young master who already knows more than Howard Hawks ever learned.”

  That was the end of low-budget filmmaking for Matthew Wax. From then on he cranked out an unprecedented string of blockbusters, transforming his own childhood fears, fantasies, and fascinations into spirited special-effects extravaganzas that everyone simply had to see. It was uncanny how he kept topping himself. Even more uncanny was his impact. Because if there was one man who was responsible for the infantilization of American mass entertainment, it was Matthew Wax. It was due to his astonishing success that Hollywood virtually gave itself over to the making and marketing of huge, dumb, kid-oriented blockbusters. It was because of him that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg found film careers, stepping forward to direct comic book megasuccesses of their own, one after another after another.

  But there was only one Matthew Wax.

  The young master’s first blockbuster was To the Moon, his lavish 1978 homage to those schlocky space flight movies of the 1950s. The story of a moon launch set off course by a meteorite storm, it broke box office records nationwide for fourteen straight weeks. And made an international star of Trace Washburn, the lean, rugged former USC quarterback and movie stuntman who played Rip O’Keefe, the fearless astronaut who single-handedly battles a race of demented, slavering Martian mutants. Its sequel, Back to the Moon, in which Rip discovers the moon to be populated by demented, slavering Nazi scientists, became the first movie in the history of Hollywood to gross more than Gone with the Wind. That particular record would not stand for long. Lucas would break it with Star Wars, Spielberg with E.T. Wax would go on to break it himself three more times. He broke it in 1982 with Yeti, his $40 million monster epic based on The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, a 1957 B-movie starring Peter Cushing and Forrest Tucker. Filmed on location in the Himalayas, Yeti featured both the greatest avalanche in movie history and Lord Laurence Olivier as the Dalai Lama. Trace Washburn returned to action in the role of Duke Jardine, fearless adventurer. Pro football’s John Matuszak shot to stardom, briefly, as the hairy behemoth with the heart of gold and the fatal weakness for Baby Ruths. Yeti would spawn Yeti II, which featured a surprisingly scary Glenn Close as the snowman’s revenge-crazed mate. The sequel did even better.

  But the biggest was yet to come. Exhausted by two years of rigorous location filming, Wax turned next to a heartwarming animated fable about a young brontosaurus named Dennis who becomes separated from his family and encounters all sorts of strange, magical creatures as he tries to find his way back to them. Jean Forget, the child star of Matthew’s first film, provided the voice of Dennis. A roster of notable actors joined him, including Meryl Streep as Dennis’s mother. Dennis the Dinosaur was an unabashed homage to Bambi and Dumbo and the other Disney classics of Matthew Wax’s own childhood. And it was a phenomenon. Audiences of all ages went back to see it again and again. Within four months of its 1985 summer release it had become the top grossing film of all time. (It still is—to date, it has grossed $367 million.) Before long, there was a top-rated Dennis prime-time TV show, a Dennis Ice Capades show, a series of children’s books featuring all-new Dennis adventures. There were Dennis dolls, Dennis shower curtains, beach towels, sheets, pillowcases, pajamas, calendars, notebooks, puzzles, hats, sneakers, shoelaces, lunch boxes. There was no escaping Dennis. Dennis was everywhere. Dennis was loved.

  And so was Matthew Wax. His movies were a tonic. “High priest of the New Optimism” was what Time called him when they put him on their cover at the height of the Dennis craze. Looking back, they could just as easily have labeled him the unofficial voice of the Reagan years. Just like the President, he reminded people of the good old days before Vietnam and Watergate. He put smiles on their faces. He made them believe again in that America of spunk and determination, that America where Good triumphed over Evil, and Love triumphed over all. That America we all wanted to believe in—the America of happy endings.

  He did stumble. Even a master can stub his toe. And Matthew Wax did with The Three Stooges in Orbit, the unfortunate 1986 remake starring Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and Steve Martin as Larry, Curly, and Moe. “A thirty-million dollar wind-up gadget that lurches from one dim-witted idea to the next,” sniffed Kael in The New Yorker. “Staggeringly unfunny,” agreed Siskel and Ebert, who gave it two thumbs down. So did Wax himself. He clashed repeatedly with the stars and with the studio. He disavowed the final cut that Panorama released into the theaters, where it barely broke even. Through his spokesman, Sheldon Selden, he announced he would never make another film for Panorama City. Or anyone else for that matter. He took his toys and went home.

  Home to Bedford Falls, formerly Lucerne Studios, which he bought with the vast fortune he’d earned from Dennis. Here, as lord of his own realm, he immediately made Badger Hayes, All-American Boy, his most nostalgic and evocative work. Badger was a misty-eyed look back at growing up in a small American town called Homewood in the fifties. Homewood was the America that never was, except perhaps in a Norman Rockwell painting. It was ham radios, soap box derbies, and malt shops. It was sturdy, fresh-scrubbed boys and neat, pretty girls. There was no such thing as orthodonture or acne in Homewood. There was no teen pregnancy, no drug abuse, no divorce, rape, suicide, poverty, or racial injustice. Homewood was everyone’s fantasy hometown. It was Carvel, where Andy Hardy was from. And Badger Hayes was another Andy Hardy—eager, irrepressible, good-natured,
and utterly confused. Little Jean Forget, who was now eighteen and going by the Americanized Johnny Forget, soared to teen stardom as Badger. Pennyroyal Brim, the complete unknown who played Badger’s girl-next-door, Debbie Dale, captivated audiences, too. She was so fantastically cute. Trace Washburn returned from a rather long screen absence in the role of Badger’s dad. Teri Garr played his mom. The movie was immensely popular. Wax made a sequel, Badger Hayes and His Chemistry Set, which scored again. He also married Pennyroyal Brim. His world was complete now. It was time to live happily ever after.

  Only he hadn’t. His latest movie, Badger Goes to College, had been a colossal flop. His first. It was a typical Wax job, a warm-hearted bit of nostalgic fluff about Badger and Debbie’s ups and downs at Homewood U in the midsixties. Only this time, audiences stayed away. And the critics sneered. Laughed at its portrayal of a sixties college campus totally devoid of long-hairs and blacks and even the slightest awareness of Vietnam. They called it a pathetic joke. They didn’t just attack it—they went after the director himself. “What Matthew Wax doesn’t seem to realize,” wrote David Denby in New York Magazine, “is that he isn’t nine years old anymore, and neither are we.”

  Times had changed. Reagan had ridden off into the sunset. The stock market had crashed. Donald Trump was broke. Mike Milken was in jail. The eighties were over and out, and Matthew Wax was over and out with them. The public turns fast when you’re on top. They had turned on Matthew Wax. Suddenly they saw something inherently false about his dogged determination to make everything over into a feel-good experience. Suddenly his movies weren’t sweet anymore. They were saccharine. A sham. If anyone needed proof, all they had to do was pick up a newspaper. Johnny Forget, all-American boy, got himself busted in Los Angeles for coke possession one week after the movie opened. A few weeks later he was arrested for attempting to murder his manager, who also happened to be his mother. And now there was this business, the House of Wax. Matthew’s storybook marriage to Pretty Penny had gone boom. And it looked like Bedford Falls would be next to have a great fall. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men …

  I sat back in my plush club chair, stared out the window at the clouds covering the Midwest, and thought about my own storybook marriage. My sunshine days, I called them. When I was that tall, dashing, fabulously successful author of that fabulously successful first novel. When Merilee was Joe Papp’s newest, loveliest darling. New York was ours then. The red 1958 Jaguar XK-150 was ours. Lulu was ours. We had it all. God, we were something. Until I lost it. Lost my voice, my juices, my touch. Lost Merilee. She got the Tony for the Mamet play, the Oscar for the Woody Allen movie. I got Lulu, my drafty fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-third Street, and my ego, which requires its own room and bath, with kitchen privileges.

  My sunshine days were gone, and they don’t ever return.

  My juices did come back. There was a second novel, Such Sweet Sorrow, which the critics hated. Readers merely ignored it. Merilee came back, too. We were still something. We just didn’t know what. Somehow, we stuck it out. Or at least we had. I wasn’t sure what was happening between us right now. All I knew was that something was wrong and that she wouldn’t talk about it. And that she was in Fiji and out of my life for the next three months. Part of me understood. Part of me didn’t. All of me felt alone.

  Los Angeles isn’t terrible to fly into by night. The lights spread out beneath you like jewels, a hundred miles in every direction. Pretty, almost. We began our descent in the middle of the afternoon. Not so pretty. Just a vast, arid expanse of tar and concrete shrouded under a thick blanket of saffron-colored smog. The end of so-called civilization as we know it.

  Our bags were waiting for us in the air-conditioned charter terminal, along with a row of limo drivers and four or five dozen members of the House of Wax press corps. It was me they were waiting for. Our mutual publisher had already commenced banging the drum over Matthew’s million-dollar book deal, and my association with it. He was fond of drum banging. Almost as fond as he was of telling you that he knew more about publishing than anyone else in publishing. I wouldn’t know. I do know you can always count on him to overpay.

  I was assaulted the second they spotted me. Microphones were shoved at me. TV lights blinded me. Shouts deafened me.

  “TELL US ABOUT THE BOOK!”

  “GONNA NAIL HER?!”

  “WHAT’S PRETTY PENNY SAY?”

  Me, I had nothing to say. Blinking, I pulled my boater down low over my eyes and began fighting my way through the reporters. Of course, that would have been a lot easier if Lulu hadn’t stayed behind to vogue it up for the cameras like Jayne Mansfield arriving for her latest star-studded premiere. All she needed was a mink stole and false eyelashes. I wasn’t kidding about how her head swells. Cursing, I fought my way back toward her, so as to strangle her. Only now I was being carried along by the crowd—jostled, buffeted, helpless. Until a rampaging wild woman came bursting through the crowd, grabbed me, grabbed Lulu, and spirited us toward the door, ramming, roaring, elbowing, shoving at anyone who got in our way. She was a black woman, and quite some woman. A good three inches over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, high-rumped, long-legged, big. And as sleekly muscled as a thoroughbred racehorse. A redcap waited by the glass doors with my bags and the carton of the only canned food Lulu will eat, Nine Lives mackerel for cats and very weird dogs. My rescuer grabbed the whole load from him and stormed out into the bright sunshine, moving very fast. Lulu and I followed her, the pack in pursuit.

  I was unprepared for just how searingly hot it was. Well over a hundred. Dry hot. My skin tightened, my hair crackled, my throat constricted. This was no heat wave. This was the earth moving closer to the sun. Black limos were baking at the curb. Press vans were parked everywhere. We made for a tan Toyota Land Cruiser that was double-parked, engine running, tailgate open. My rescuer threw my stuff in and slammed it shut. I reached for the passenger door.

  “Don’t touch!” she warned, her voice deep and straight up from the diaphragm. “Handle’ll burn you!”

  I used my linen handkerchief on it. Then I jumped in, Lulu on the floor at my feet. The air-conditioning was on but it wasn’t what you’d call cool inside. My rescuer jumped in behind the wheel and pulled away with a screech, working her way through the snarled airport traffic with total mastery. She gripped the wheel and gear shift tightly in her powerful hands, cords of muscle standing out on her neck and forearms.

  “Nice weather if you happen to be a lizard,” I observed.

  “They been saying it’ll break tomorrow,” she boomed. “Of course, they been saying that for, like, three days. Otherwise people’ll start murdering each other in the streets, y’know what I’m saying?”

  We were clear now, zipping out of the airport onto Century Boulevard. She let out a breath of relief and smiled. Big smile. Everything about her was big. “Charmaine Harris, Mr. Hoag.”

  “Make it Hoagy.”

  “In that case, make it Sarge.”

  The woman who ran Matthew Wax’s life was in her midthirties, totally fit and totally no-nonsense. She wore no makeup and no jewelry, other than the Dennis the Dinosaur watch on her wrist. Her hair was cut short in a flattop fade. She had on a pink polo shirt with the sleeves turned up, khaki shorts, and running shoes. She exuded readiness, capability, and efficiency. I would have been perfectly happy to have her run my life. Also to have her on my side in a fight. She was as imposing a woman as I’d ever seen. Next to her, Merilee, the woman who Frank Rich once called the Connecticut Yankee Amazon, looked like Annie Potts.

  “Shoot, smell like something died in here,” she said, making a face.

  “That’s Lulu.” She lay there under the dashboard, panting miserably. She doesn’t do well in the heat, being covered with hair. I wasn’t feeling too sorry for her though. “Pull another stunt like that,” I warned her, “and you’ll spend the rest of this assignment in a carrier—eating steak!” She grumbled at me and dripped some doggy saliva on my
shoes. Fiji. I should have sent her to Fiji, C.O.D.

  “Y’all meet the two Shelleys?” Sarge asked.

  I said I had.

  “He’s a real rarity in this business,” she said. “A human being. Not a whole lotta them running studios. He gives you his word, he means it. The rest of ’em are just trying to give you some kind of lower body root canal job, y’know what I’m saying?”

  “And Matthew?”

  “Matthew is a spoiled little boy who wakes up in the middle of the night screaming ‘Zeppelins! Zeppelins! I wanna do a battle between two zeppelins!’ It’s my job to find out who can pull it off and how much it’ll cost. Shelley’s his go-between with the suits. I’m his go-between with the troops.” She glanced over at me. “Not that I know what Matthew says when he wakes up in the middle of the night,” she added carefully. “Or at any other time.”

  She pulled off Century onto the San Diego Freeway, heading north toward the west side. The traffic was at a standstill, five lanes of cars stacked up end to end. More than a few drivers rode their horns as they sat there in anguish, broiling under the midafternoon sun.

  I sat back and relaxed. “It certainly is nice to be back in paradise.”

  “Hey, any fool back East still thinks of this as El Lay, land of quiche-eating volleyball players, is living in the seventies,” Sarge declared flatly. “Ain’t nobody smiles and says have a nice day around here no more. Too afraid they’ll get their head blown off. We got it all, man—high crime, bad air, lousy schools, too many people, not enough water. Lot of folks are moving on. Finding some new place to mess with. Portland, Seattle … Well, lookie, lookie …” Her eyes were on her rearview mirror. “We got us some company.”

  “Who?” I asked, turning around for a look.