Authors: Helen Nielsen
Shot on Location
HELEN NIELSEN
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
For Rex
THE OCTOBER SUN was sloping towards the horizon curve of the Adriatic when George Ankouris banked the small, single-engine sports plane and turned back towards the craggy range of mountains. Moments earlier Harry Avery had switched off the camera he had been shooting over the side of the open cockpit, and closed the canopy.
“Okay, I’ve got enough for today,” he said. “Man, I’m tired. I don’t know why I’m so tired.”
“Tension,” George declared. “You’re not used to this kind of flying—no pressure cabin, no reclining seats, no pretty stewardess serving martinis. Hey, I could do with one of those right now myself.”
Harry laughed. “So I’m just a spoiled American—is that what you think?” Compared to George he looked the part. George was a handsome Greek—about thirty-two, Harry guessed. Broad shouldered, thick black hair on his head and arms and curling up out of the deep V opening of his faded army shirt. Black moustache and, when he smiled, gleaming white teeth. The typical Greek virility symbol. Harry Avery had a good eye for virility symbols. Projecting them was his business. Officially, it was called Saga Productions with home offices in a very modern, air-conditioned and wired-for-music suite on the tenth floor of a Sunset Boulevard hi-rise on the Strip. Harry Avery, who, at thirty-six, had produced the hit television series,
The Bandits
, which was now going into its fourth season and would be good for at least four more, and who was now, four years later, starting production on his third feature film with a budget bigger than anything George Ankouris, and all his kin, could accumulate in several lifetimes. And yet Harry, in his custom-built flight boots, hand-tailored trousers, doeskin bush jacket and an old baseball cap, habitually worn for luck, wasn’t half the man George was physically. He wondered how Rhona, his wife, had missed that obvious fact and then immediately wondered if she had. There had been several unaccounted for evenings back on Corfu, before she returned to Athens. The thought crossed his mind with no twinge of jealousy. It was too late for that now.
But he still had his vanity.
“You’re wrong, George,” he said. “American I am and spoiled I may be, but I’m also a pilot. I jockeyed a jet all over Korea for almost three years.”
“Combat?” George asked.
“Reconnaissance. That can be even hairier. But I’ll have to say that I had a lot more plane under me than this tree-topper. What did you say you built it from—an old box-kite?”
“Bolköw!” George corrected. “She’s basically Bolköw. I altered the canopy so I could fly with the wind in my hair and added a few other things of my own.”
“I see the bicycle horn. Where are the pedals?”
George feigned instant indignation. “That’s a very important bicycle horn!” he insisted. “And don’t you belittle my plane! She took you where you wanted to go. ‘Into Albania,’ you said. ‘I need a ship that flies low—under the radar screen. Who cares about the danger? A man needs a little danger in his life to keep from getting rusty!’” George’s voice dropped from his mocking imitation of Harry’s speech. “Okay, so she does everything you asked for. She flies as low as you wanted to fly—”
“Now all she has to do is get us back to civilization before dark. Damn, but I’m tired.” Harry had finished locking up the camera in its case while they talked. He had placed it with the other equipment in the small baggage space behind the seat, and settled back to relax. His right hand hovered over the bulging breast pocket of the bush jacket. The case was intact. He could give himself a booster now, but he hated using the needle before another man. Weakness was for private places. He glanced at his watch to see how much longer he could hold out, and then George grabbed his attention with a sharp cry.
“We’ve got company on our tail! Hey, I think we’re being followed.”
George’s eyes were sharper than Harry’s. By the time he sighted the plane it was almost over them. It shot past and banked in a wide, circling sweep.
“It’s a jet,” George said. “Looks like a MIG.”
“Russian?”
“Not coming from behind us. Look, it’s coming back. Hey, that’s too damn close!” George flipped open the mike and radioed a blast from the bicycle horn as the jet passed again. “It keeps birds away from the propeller,” he said. “I think they want me to land.”
“How far are we from the border?”
“It should be just over that highest ridge of mountains. The jet’s coming back. They may open fire. Hang on, I’m dropping down out of range.”
Due to the great speed of the jet, each turn required a wide sweep that gave the slower plane time to lose altitude. They were flying over a rough terrain, wild and melancholy in the late afternoon light. The mountains were creased with narrow ravines into which the jet could not fly without great hazard—certainly not at the tree-skimming height of the sports plane. And every mile brought them closer to the border. By the time the patrol plane had completed its wide circle and started back for another sweep they were approaching the first range. Now the Greek pulled back on the controls and the small plane rose sharply, gaining just enough altitude to skim over the highest crag. The jet screamed over them—they dropped again. The radio was still on. The Greek grabbed the mike and began to call Corfu; Harry understood enough of the language to grasp that much. But there was time for only one terse message before they were forced to gain altitude again, and now the patrol had perceived their manoeuvre and was coming towards them, like a hawk swooping down on its prey. Ahead, over the high ridge, the late light shimmered on a patch of blue lake.
“Helias!” George shouted. “We’ve made it!”
The jet dived as they cleared the ridge. Instinctively, the Greek shoved the controls forward and this time he was seconds too soon. The plane shuddered and wrenched free, leaving a part of the landing gear wedged in the rocks. Damaged, the plane hurtled downwards as the Greek grappled with the controls. They were over the border, but there was no place to land in the rock-strewn shrub growth that was rushing towards them. The first fringe of brush tore at the right wing and then the trees came up in a tangled canopy to blot out the sky.
The patrol jet circled high above, until it was certain the small plane would not appear again.
Beverly Hills is a city where even the service station ladies’ rooms have bidets. This observation was not original to Omar Bradley Smith, through whose awakening hours it wandered like an irrelevant vagrant. It was, he recalled, as the morning began to evolve from an over-indulged night, a direct quote from Rhona Brent, who had been just plain Rhoda Brandt the first time he went to bed with her. Not that Rhoda was a tramp. They had had more going for them than mere youthful lust and loneliness. Fun, yes, but more because it was Rhona’s words he remembered on an early morning, and it was her waifish smile that he looked for, without finding, in the many faces of the women he had known during the five years since their parting. Rhona was his first love. That might be the reason she lingered in his mind.
Or it might be because she had married Harry Avery, and Harry Avery was the biggest rat east of the Vietcong.
Most lives get nowhere at all, but everybody’s life starts somewhere. Brad’s life (nobody but his mother ever dared call him Omar) had started in Marshalltown, Iowa, on the twenty-fifth of October, 1944. It was his mother who had bestowed the heroic name. His father, whom Brad knew only as a rather pleasant face on a wedding picture and a few yellowed snapshots, was, at the time, working fourteen hours a day at a local defence plant to ease his soul of the pain of being classified 4F. The pulmonary condition which caused this classification ended his life almost half a year later, just as the victorious allies were closing in on Berlin and the entire nation, even the stubborn conservatives of Iowa, were mourning the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt and wondering how an obscure little politician named Harry S. Truman would make out in the toughest job on earth.
The little man from Missouri did all right, and so did Brad Smith. Eighteen years later he graduated from high school in the possession of three letters for athletics: basketball, football and track. He stood six feet three inches, weighed one hundred and eighty pounds and had inherited his mother’s lungs. In lieu of a father image, Mother Smith had over-compensated, by feeding young Brad a steady diet of heroes, all through his impressionable years. The result was that Iowa, in spite of proffered athletic scholarships from several mid-western universities, held no allure for Brad, once the diploma was in his hand. Neither did the prospect of brawling on the football field or basketball court for the glory of old Alma Mater. Life was adventure. Life was short. It was time to get moving.
Two weeks after reaching this conclusion, Brad Smith drove west on Hollywood Boulevard in a seven-year-old Ford convertible, made a left-hand turn and, with one eye on the address in the classified ad. circled in red ink, continued approximately two and a half blocks and parked in front of an unimpressive stucco bungalow court with a sign in the front window proclaiming the availability of a single apartment—furnished. Unimpressive as the building was, the view was still exciting. The view was definitely feminine: 110 pounds, 36 in.—24 in.—36 in. She wore a blue polka-dot bikini, a wrist watch and a white painter’s cap partially covering unbelievably blonde curls. The cap was generously splattered with orange enamel paint and a dripping from the paint brush, that was poised over a half-painted shutter, was sliding tantalizingly down one sun-tanned thigh. It was difficult to be certain, since her eyes were guarded by large, round, blue sunglasses, but Brad guessed that she might be a well-preserved twenty-one.
It was a picture that stayed clear. Now, so many years later, crawling out of the bed he had finally learned to sleep in, because all that time in Vietnam seemed to reform the spine and make an innerspring mattress tortuous, he could recall exactly the way Rhoda Brandt looked as he climbed out of the Ford and walked towards her.
“Hello,” Brad said. It seemed a logical beginning.
The girl stopped painting and stared at him through the large round lenses.
“I came about the apartment,” Brad continued. “Do you live here?”
The girl replaced the paint brush in the can of enamel paint and looked past him at the Ford. It was dirty and the body-work was in bad condition. The top was down and Brad’s suitcase and bedroll were in the back seat.
“Do you have a job?” she asked.
“Not yet. I just drove in from Iowa.”
“The apartment is seventy-five a month—first and last month in advance. And I live here. I own the place.”
The prospect of having such a landlady was impossible to resist. Brad took the apartment, leaky shower, sagging mattress and all. He didn’t worry about the rent because he was going to become very rich very soon. It was almost a month before Brad became intimate with Rhoda. She was the aloof type. And then it wasn’t the unsatisfying, just-for-laughs kind of intimacy like most relationships of the region. It was unpremeditated, occurring after he had found her crying. What she had been crying about was long forgotten, but not that first night together in her tiny apartment at the end of the court, when she confided that Brandt was her maiden name which she had taken back after the divorce, that she had married at sixteen, chiefly to get away from a small town in Arizona, and that Charley (she never referred to her ex-husband by any other name) was a wholesale shoe salesman, who took her to Los Angeles, where they were happy for six months, until he started bringing his girls home for the night.
“Charley was a dynamic businessman,” she confided. “He used to boast that he had a new woman and a new idea every day. I’m sure he was right about the woman, but it was always the same idea. I stood it as long as I could, and then I met this lawyer, who said I could get a divorce and a property settlement, so I did and bought this bungalow court. It’s almost paid for and I net three hundred a month. I also do small parts in TV. I was rehearsing when you came in a while ago.”
“Is that why you were crying—rehearsing?” Brad asked.
“No. But I cry easily. It’s stopping that’s hard. I know Charley was a heel, and he was nearly forty, but he was something that belonged to me. Have you ever wanted to belong to anyone, Brad?”
“Not exactly,” Brad said.
“I don’t mean
really
belong. I mean just feel that you belong. Feel comfortable.”
As long as she wasn’t thinking of marriage, Brad decided to get comfortable. They spent that first night in her apartment. Afterwards, she usually came up to his. She helped him get a job as a TV cowboy and later, at a studio crowd party, introduced him to Harry Avery, who was an assistant director on the series and serious about making big money.
“You’ve got to make it before you’re forty or you’re dead,” Harry declared. “I’m going to produce my own series as soon as I line up a few good writers.”
“Brad can write,” Rhoda said. “He wrote that last script he starred in.”
It wasn’t true. In the first place, Brad hadn’t starred; he had exactly four lines and one close-up, and all he had written was the condensation of one speech that had to be cut to leave time for the commercial. But Rhoda said there was nothing wrong with lying as long as you were straightforward about it. Madison Avenue did it all the time, and look at all the money Madison Avenue made.
“And Brad has a terrific idea for a series with a part in it for me,” Rhoda added.
“Great!” Harry said. “Give me a shout when it’s ready to shoot.”
There was this about Rhoda: she was ruthless with a delinquent tenant, but she made Brad feel needed and seemed confident that he could accomplish anything he set out to do. He continued to pick up bits in the bang-bangs, but now he studied the scripts carefully and hung around the sets when he wasn’t working to pick up camera and directorial techniques. He watched the shows when they were screened, absorbing every nuance, and at night he visited actors’ labs and writers’ workshops. One day he bought a portable typewriter at a second-hand store and started to work. A month later he had a set of characters, including a rôle for Rhoda, a story line and one completely finished script of
El Bandito
, a western with a light touch. Harry Avery was a hard man to contact even then. It was several months before Brad nailed him at a party and told him about the script. Harry was enthusiastic. He told Brad to deliver it to his office and he would read it over the week-end. Three months later, after a severe case of telephone nerves, Brad decided to forget the whole project and took Rhoda to dinner to celebrate the anniversary of his first year in Hollywood. They went to a small supper club in Santa Monica where fresh, new talent tried out for the ever-vigilant scouts, and there he encountered Harry once more.