Daniel Martin by John Fowles

Steve was neither of them’s first choice the man Gold had pulled box-office.
    Steve has some hang-ups, said Bill.
    He’s a prick, said Dan.
    I can handle it, said Bill. It is there.
    And then Dan smiled at me, the faintest wink, partly at that clumsy use of ‘it’, but something nicer. Both tender and wry, some kind of simple English current between us in the posh-lousy eating-place. An alliance. And it said he’d decided to like me, we’d find a way to cope with the Prick. Which we didn’t, but never mind.
    Then next days: meeting the Prick, fighting wardrobe, the awful run-throughs, rewrites, arguments. Trying to get it to the P. that I didn’t want to make it quite yet in the sack, thanks very much all the same. One god-awful statutory evening alone with him and his hang-ups well, what Dan would call anthropologically quite interesting, they all seemed so calculated, part of his image, and ludicrously dolled up with Nam and all the okay political attitudes. I got very prim and English with all his sloppy clichés. He’d have done fine as a beach bum or a gigolo. It was trying to be a thinking actor. And irresistible penis. I let him kiss me at the end. Killed the groping before it got anywhere, and any repetition of it.
    All this was against the (for me) whole freak background of the thing, making a movie in Hollywood for gosh sake, maybe we should start an industry here. Ha ha. Of course I knew my real career (thou dark enigma) didn’t depend on this very much, if at all Dan didn’t have to teach me that. But I had some sort of culture shock. I couldn’t tell the P. what I really thought of him, as I would have back home. He had to be made to want to help me a little, with all the sex scenes ahead. And then the awful synthetic gloss (I hadn’t met Abe and Mildred then, remember) over the other people in this world, the constant gescheffting, gossiping, organizing, like hundreds of little plastic cogs in a clock that won’t keep real time anyway. Nothing ever seemed to stop, one always had to be doing something, planning something, saying something that was ‘meaningful’. It was like a foreign language I couldn’t speak (not American English, the movie-biz use of it) yet had to listen to because I could understand it. All those boring evenings with people I never wanted to see again. Worse even than boring publicity. Feeling I was being dragged down into the gloss and the plastic and the piddling self-importance, all of which made me long for England and people who do their own thing naturally and not because it’s a trendy little phrase. Long for hours that drift and conversation that hops about and has silences, with nobody really believing one another or expecting to be believed, because it’s all a game. All you pointed out to me later about old and recent users of a language. The awful giveaway of trying to be ‘meaningful’.
    Sorry. All Dan pointed out to me.
    Which made me look forward more to that than to Dan to an evening with him. His suggestion, very tentative, an English exiles’ evening, just the two of us. I had lost touch with him a little after that first day. He was around during the read-throughs and I’d got to admire him professionally. The P. was always coming up with ‘better’ (shorter) lines, or no lines at all because he could get it across by some piece of fantastically subtle sub-sub-Brando (Jesus) stifle which he could never quite demonstrate, let alone explain. Bill and Dan must have agreed how to handle it. Bill would sound sympathetic and interested, Dan would finally shoot him down. I think they were right, it was the only way. But it was so longwinded. And the P. started taking against Dan and the whole script and tried to enlist my support. I used to sit there silent in all the gas and think how much simpler the whole bloody process was at home.
    So our evening. We drove back over the hills to the San Fernando Valley and some dotty Russian place, where the food