Read Online Once Is Not Enough by Jacqueline Susann - Free Book Online

gross, baby—got it right off the top.”
    “Honest?”
    “Honest.”
    He had gone back on the plane determined to knock down windmills. His talk with Dr. Peterson had been unsettling. (“Mr. Wayne, you must think of January’s future with much care. She is so very beautiful but also so very innocent. She talks of being an actress, which is natural because it is your business. But you must realize how protected she has been in the world of our Clinique. She must be eased back into your world, not thrown into it.”)
    He thought about it on the plane. Somehow he’d manage to have one hell of a world waiting for her. When they ran into some rough weather, he was hit with the crazy idea that a plane crash might solve everything, until he realized he had already cashed in his insurance.
    A hit picture was the only solution. Maybe with the threebad ones behind him, the curse was off. He returned to Los Angeles and once again holed up at the Beverly Hills Hotel reading scenarios and treatments. Oddly enough he found one almost immediately. It was from a writer who had not had a hit in the past ten years. But in the fifties, he had one blockbuster after another. He had Oscars for doorstops. And this one would get him another. It had everything. Big love interest, action, a violent chase scene. He met with the author and paid him a thousand dollars for a month’s option.
    Then he went to the heads of the big studios.
    To his amazement, he couldn’t raise any money or any interest in the script. The answer was the same everywhere. The industry was in a slump. A scenario from a screenwriter meant nothing. Now if he had a best-selling novel . . . perhaps. But scenarios were flooding the studios. And everyone seemed in a state of quiet panic. Changes were happening everywhere. Studio heads had come and gone. At some studios he didn’t even know the new people in charge. The top independent film-makers also refused to back him. They felt he was a bad risk and the author was old hat. At the end of the month he was forced to relinquish the property. Three days later, two kids in their twenties who had come up with a sleeper the year before grabbed it and got immediate backing from a major studio.
    He returned to New York in a frantic search for some action. He invested a hundred thousand in a show a top producer had in rehearsal. The trouble began when the leading man quit the second week of rehearsal. The out-of-town tryout was a nightmare—eight weeks of hysteria, fights, cast replacements, and finally his decision to close the show without bringing it in.
    After that he spent two months pouring money into an idea for a television series. He worked with the writers; he paid for the pilot himself, spent over three hundred thousand dollars. The networks looked at it, but “passed.” His only chance to recoup some of the money would be as a one-shot slot filler in the summer.
    A few weeks later he went to a private screening of the picture he had lost. The production room was filled with youngmen with beards, tank shirts, and hair hanging from their armpits. The girls wore tank tops and no bras and their hair was either Afro or long and stringy. He felt sick as he watched the picture. They had ruined a great script. Put the ending at the beginning, flooded it with flashbacks and out-of-focus camera work, made the love scene a psychedelic dream sequence with hand-held cameras—the cinéma-vérité crap. Sure, they had to play it that way with the beasts who were passing as actors and actresses today. There were no more faces around like Garbo’s or Crawford’s, or actors like Gable and Cary. . . . Today was the world of the Uglies. That’s what everything seemed to be, and he didn’t understand it.
    A week later he went to a sneak preview on Eighty-sixth Street. The same crowd was there, along with college kids and young married advertising executives. The audience cheered.
    Three weeks later it opened, and broke box-office