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parties. Or rather discouraged. Most of them took the hint.
Screenings of the new movies took place at midnight and Johnny and
Nino arrived at eleven. Roy McElroy proved to be, at first sight, an enormously
likable man, well-groomed, beautifully dressed. He greeted Johnny Fontane with
a surprised cry of delight. “What the hell are you doing here?” he said with
genuine astonishment.
Johnny shook his hand. “I’m showing my country cousin the sights.
Meet Nino.”
McElroy shook hands with Nino and gazed at him appraisingly.
“They’ll eat him up alive,” he said to Johnny. He led them to the rear patio.
The rear patio was really a series of huge rooms whose glass doors had
been opened to a garden and pool. There were almost a hundred people milling
around, all with drinks in their hands. The patio lighting was artfully arranged to
flatter feminine faces and skin. These were women Nino had seen on the
darkened movie screens when he had been a teenager. They had played their part
in his erotic dreams of adolescence. But seeing them now in the flesh was like
seeing them in some horrible makeup. Nothing could hide the tiredness of their
spirit and their flesh; time had eroded their godhead. They posed and moved as
charmingly as he remembered but they were like wax fruit, they could not
lubricate his glands. Nino took two drinks, wandered to a table where he could
stand next to a nest of bottles. Johnny moved with him. They drank together
until behind them came the magic voice of Deanna Dunn.
Nino, like millions of other men, had that voice imprinted on his brain
forever. Deanna Dunn had won two Academy Awards, had been in the biggest
movie grosser made in Hollywood. On the screen she had a feline feminine
charm that made her irresistible to all men. But the words she was saying had
never been heard on the silver screen. “Johnny, you bastard, I had to go to my
psychiatrist again because you gave me a one-night stand. How come you never
came back for seconds?”
Johnny kissed her on her proffered cheek. “You wore me out for a

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month,” he said. “I want you to meet my cousin Nino. A nice strong Italian boy.
Maybe he can keep up with you.”
Deanna Dunn turned to give Nino a cool look. “Does he like to watch
previews?”
Johnny laughed. “I don’t think he’s ever had the chance. Why don’t
you break him in?”
Nino had to take a big drink when he was alone with Deanna Dunn.
He was trying to be nonchalant but it was hard. Deanna Dunn had the upturned
nose, the clean-cut classical features of the Anglo-Saxon beauty. And he knew
her so well. He had seen her alone in a bedroom, heartbroken, weeping over her
dead flier husband who had left her with fatherless children. He had seen her
angry, hurt, humiliated, yet with a shining dignity when a caddish Clark Gable
had taken advantage of her, then left her for a sexpot. (Deanna Dunn never
played sexpots in the movies.) He had seen her flushed with requited love,
writhing in the embrace of the man she adored and he had seen her die
beautifully at least a half dozen times. He had seen her and heard her and
dreamed about her and yet he was not prepared for the first thing she said to him
alone.
“Johnny is one of the few men with balls in this town,” she said. “The
rest are all fags and sick morons who couldn’t get it up with a broad if you
pumped a truckload of Spanish fly into their scrotums.” She took Nino by the
hand and led him into a corner of the room, out of traffic and out of competition.
Then still coolly charming, she asked him about himself. He saw
through her. He saw that she was playing the role of the rich society girl who is
being kind to the stable boy or the chauffeur, but who in the movie would either
discourage his amatory interest (if the part were played by Spencer Tracy), or
throw up everything in her mad desire for him (if the part were played by Clark
Gable). But it didn’t matter. He found himself telling her about how he and
Johnny had grown up together in New York, about how he and Johnny had sung
together on little club dates. He found her marvelously sympathetic and
interested. Once she asked casually, “Do you know how Johnny made that
bastard Jack Woltz give him the part?” Nino froze and shook his head. She
didn’t pursue it.
The time had come to see the preview of a new Woltz movie. Deanna
Dunn led Nino, her warm hand imprisoning his, to an interior room of the
mansion that had no windows but was furnished with about fifty small two-
person couches scattered around in such a way as to give each one a little island

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of semiprivacy.
Nino saw there was a small table beside the couch and on the table
were an ice bowl, glasses and bottles of liquor plus a tray of cigarettes. He gave
Deanna Dunn a cigarette, lit it and then mixed them both drinks. They didn’t
speak to each other. After a few minutes the lights went out.
He had been expecting something outrageous. After all, he had heard
the legends of Hollywood depravity. But he was not quite prepared for Deanna
Dunn’s voracious plummet on his sexual organ without even a courteous and
friendly word of preparation. He kept sipping his drink and watching the movie,
but not tasting, not seeing. He was excited in a way he had never been before but