Once Is Not Enough by Jacqueline Susann Read Free Book Online Page B

was good. Business was weak, but Sid Goff was still cheerful. “Wait till it plays across the country. The people will love it. That’s where it counts.”
    It received a lukewarm reception at the Chinese in Los Angeles. It limped along in Detroit. In Chicago it bombed completely. And Philadelphia and other key cities refused it at first-run houses.
    He couldn’t believe it. He had been so sure of the picture. Two flops in a row. And now he faced the old show business superstitution. Everything bad comes in threes. Deaths . . . plane crashes . . . earthquakes—and flop pictures. Obviously the heads of Century pictures felt the same way, because when he called, everyone was always busy in meetings or had “just stepped out of the office.” And the final clincher was when word came from the New York office that they would allot him only two million dollars (including advertising) for his third picture.
    He couldn’t bring it in on that kind of a budget unless he settled for actors whose names went under the title and a new director or an old one with a long backlog of flops. But he had no choice. He had to do the picture; it was part of his contract. He had a three-picture deal. Well, if that’s the way the cards were stacked he’d get the third flop out of the way, pack it in, go back to New York, and do a smash Broadway show. The more he thought about it, the more his confidence grew. His return to Broadway would be an event. Money would be no problem. Hell, he’d back it himself. He was worth several million. What was a few hundred thousand bucks? The only thing—he had to come up with a hot script.
    These were his emotions that summer of ’68 as he started his third picture. He was in high spirits when he flew to Rome tosee January, but when he saw her hobble toward him, still dragging her leg, it hit him for the first time that she just might not walk again. Her bright smile and eager excitement only added to his feeling of despair. She wanted to know all about the new picture. Why had he picked unknowns? Who was the leading man? When could she read the final shooting script? He forced himself to invent stories and gossip with an enthusiasm that came hard. He held his panic until he was alone with the doctors. Then his rage and fear exploded. What was all this crap about her making steady progress? All the good reports he had received during the past few months? She hadn’t improved one iota.
    They admitted she was not responding as quickly as they had hoped. But he must realize . . . They had not been able to start the physical therapy as soon as they should. Then they told him the facts. She would improve. But she would always limp and possibly have to use a cane.
    That night he went on a wild drunk with Melba Delitto. And when they wound up at her apartment, he paced and raged about the doctors, the hospital, the hopelessness of it all.
    Melba tried to calm him. “Mike, I adore you. I not even hold my one big flop against you. But now you have done another bad picture. You must not let your daughter’s misfortune destroy your life. This next one must be good.”
    “What do you want me to do? Just go to work and forget about her?”
    “No, not forget. But you have your own life to live. Stop fighting for the impossible.”
    His anger made him suddenly sober. His whole life had been a fight to attain the impossible. Son of a mother who deserted him when he was three. Father, an Irish prizefighter who died from a lucky punch from a third-rate kid. A life of growing up on his own in South Philadelphia. Enlisting in the Air Force at seventeen because anything seemed better than the world he knew. And then the war . . . being in the midst of it . . . seeing guys you lived with and slept with catch a bullet at your side . . . wondering why they got it and not you. They had families who were waiting for them to come home. Families and sweethearts who wrote long letters and sent food packages.And gradually the