Seven Men
There is really only one thing to do when everyone in one’s life expects something grand of one — and that is to disappoint them.
Not by default, you understand, but by design. I would have undertaken this task, this mitzvah to myself, with alacrity and without compunction, had I not been absolved from the effort by a chance meeting between my husband Zack and Henry David Franklin at a boring Academy[1] meeting — something about changing the dates for the Academy Awards, and the identification number system on screeners.
The fact that it was boring is significant because had it not been, they would have stayed around as is the usual habit of Academy members (you should see them after a screening), and happily, vehemently argued with each other all the points they had just finished going over in the meeting and may have ended up leaving at different times.
Instead, there being no substantial or entertaining reason to join the vociferous extension of the confabulation, Henry (always called Harry) and Zack (never called Zachary), men of purpose both, made straight for the elevator to the underground parking lot, and there met for the first time (not counting the meeting) since the week we had left for Wales five years before.
They had been heads of rival studios some years back, though rival was hardly the word that characterised their relationship. At that level in the movie business (or any business really), there are very few people with the same experience, the same responsibilities, the same knowledge or the same power. Very few people who understand what a day in one’s life is like. At the time that Zack and Harry were both at the helm of the two most successful and powerful studios in the world, that few numbered seven.
Seven men. Seven people on planet earth who knew what it was to run a mammoth movie studio, who held American entertainment in their hands and each of them had exactly six people in their lives to whom they did not have to explain anything; six people who, when they met them at various meetings and Hollywood events, didn’t want them to read a script, hire them for a part, introduce them to an actress, air a grievance, employ one of their relatives, or extract a bit of insider information that they could haggle in the marketplace of the tabloids like a cheap rug-seller in a dusty bazaar.
That was before the tabloids just started making things up. They used to be one degree less repugnant. They used to try for actual facts.
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Anyway, Harry and Zack met in the elevator and each, surprised by the degree of camaraderie, nostalgia and relief he had felt in the other’s brief company in the meeting after five long years, decided simultaneously two things that would change my life: 1) that it would be a good thing to catch up with each other and 2) that they were hungry.
And so, instinctively and decisively as was characteristic of them both, they thought of Kate Mantilini’s,[2] which is the closest decent restaurant to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It’s also one of the places you can go where the gaucheness of approaching famous people you don’t know is both understood and prevented, and private discussion is possible under the protective cover of well padded booths, vigilant staff and the noise level of other diners. Long habit, then, made them wordlessly turn right instead of left when they walked out the front door of the Academy, having synchronously (and again instinctively) exited the elevator at lobby level instead of the parking level.
Over a Cobb (Zack) and a Club (Harry) — with a side of Kate’s ‘Those Potatoes,’ Harry, who was still running Maxiam, and Zack, who had both launched a new art gallery and was expanding SoloVision (a television and film consulting business), had the kind of conversation that only two moguls of a certain age could have, ranging over a spectrum of experience that is unmatchable in executives today, encompassing as it did, shared references to a Hollywood history that they not only influenced but in no small measure helped create: Hollywood legends who were friends, industry secrets that still no one knows, deals on a scale incomprehensible to most, the Yiddish that everyone in the business uses whether Jewish or not, and the easy detectable slang of their Ivy League alma maters (almae matraes), Harvard in Harry’s case and Dartmouth in Zack’s.
Not much personal information was exchanged. Both men of (what is now called in the business) ‘the old school’ — over-busy, intensely private and almost wholly focused on their work, understood each other. A disgusted shaking of the head from Harry when Zack outlined our last year in Wales and a quiet mazel tov from Zack in reference to the long-widowed Harry’s recent marriage carried the weight of far longer conversations. In fact that would have been the extent of their foray into personal matters, but for the fact that I had worked in Hollywood for so long. Because of that and my marriage to Zack, I was known to Harry, so his enquiries about how I had fared during what he persisted in calling ‘The Wales Disaster’ were a little more specific.
He asked Zack about my work in Wales and expressed incredulity that I had left Time Zone, the show I was writing for at the time, for something ‘as pointless as another degree’; he asked what I was writing now and Zack told him about my latest book, which had just launched, my Writer in Residence appointment, my lectureship in the English Department at St Diflan’s, and my PhD, which was another book.
“She’s writing a book for her doctoral dissertation,” he said, “About her experience in Wales.” He went on to tell Harry that I didn’t believe it was my destiny in life to talk about literature, but rather to produce it. Whereupon, I was told later, Harry looked up, sat back, and ordered coffee for both of them.
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Copyright 2008 Y. Harrison Solow (Published in the UK — publishing soon in the USA)
[1] The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: http://www.oscars.org/rentals/goldwyn.html
[2] Alas, now no more: http://deadline.com/2014/06/r-i-p-kate-mantilini-beverly-hills-haven-for-oscar-voters-and-so-many-others-788181/
