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It's arrived at last: the culmination, the finale, the payoff, the big finish of the multi-part romance of Will Jones and Splendid Girl! Lives are destroyed and regained! Lover is pitted against lover! The future is revealed! Alcohol is consumed! References are made to Larry Storch and Cantinflas! It's called "Who Knows What Tomorrow Will Bring?" and it's online at My Pal Splendid Man. This one truly has it all!
Next Sunday, July 19th, we bring you Chapter Four of The Burly Boys. Then one Sunday later, July 26th, we'll follow with the final installment of My Pal Splendid Man, an Epilogue that we call "To the Ends of the Universe." And so the adventures of Will Jones and his splendid friends will join Million Dollar Ideas as a complete humor book, archived online for whoever discovers it or wants to rediscover it, leaving The Burly Boys (and the last four chapters of Million Dollar Ideas—The Photonovel) to keep Sundays with Will & Gerry going for the rest of the summer.
"Monday? That's what, three days from now?" Zanuck growled. "Get me Ed and Johnny!"
The man's skill at saying yes, and at leaping up to do his master's bidding, had earned for him a glistening silver Buick Phaeton convertible.
The Phaeton slowed down at the Garden of Allah, that legendary retreat of Hollywood Bohemia where on any day one might find the poolside festooned with the most daring and brilliant of actors and writers.
Then it turned right and continued down the hill.
Just as he'd hoped and expected, the air was rent by a single sound: a typerwriter clattering at inhuman speed.
Ed suggested nine lines of his own, although "suggest" may be the wrong word, as his fingers never stopped pounding.
Paulie turned in at the gate to the Fox lot. "Look who I got," he said to the guard.
He accelerated abruptly and stopped even more abruptly at the Writers' Building.
"Did you see the eyeful they gave Swerling?" Johnny said.
"Did somebody say eyeful?" Betty asked.
"His name's Pedro," said Ed, "and they want him written for Cesar Romero."
"Ed! Johnny!" Joe Mankiewicz grinned. "And what makes today my lucky day?"
"Good enough," Zanuck said. "Now get those two hacks out of here."
"Picture Ty Power as the cabbie," Ed said.
"And George Sanders as the pimp."
"And that little doll from the Lassie movies as the tart," Johnny added.
"Now that's a job with a future!" Edna said. "People will always need doughnuts, you know!"
Ed could easily see him as the subject of one of those homey Rockwell Kent covers on The Saturday Evening Post.
And because one of his novels had the word "horses" in the title, he was usually put to work writing scenarios for westerns.
Hugh remembered that the boys had been invited to a party at Betty and Harry's a couple of nights before and wondered how it had gone.
"Well now!" Hugh said. "This sounds promising!"
"And that Rhonda Fleming!" Ed said. "Mother of mercy! For a minute there I thought she was going to sit in my lap!"
"Oh, I don't know if they need to worry too much," Horace said with a little smile.
"Everybody's buzzing about this flick Goldwyn's making."
"Jungle war!" Johnny said. "But no Japs. Everybody does Japs."
"It's the western half of Indochina," Ed said. "It follows a long river, running down from deep jungles..."
"He and that bastard Errol Flynn sent a mash note to Ward Bond and signed my name to it," Horace said.
"It would be great to have Wagner blaring while the helicopters are attacking," Ed said. "I know! The Hall of the Mountain King!"
When they finally remembered Suzette's tea service it was dark, and they made a great deal of noise trying to set it gently outside her door.
Jeroboam Clapp was the leader of the Church of the Blazing Spotlight of God, which conducted its services in a car wash on Pico Boulevard that lay frozen half-completed by some city mix-up about water supplies.
"Downright apocalyptic!" Ed said. "Warners loves that doom and gloom! Remember Dead End?"
"Then his lips begin to move slowly...tortuously...and he says..."
"It's horrible...it's horrible...!"
Johnny did not look forward to spending days trying to force a man to do work he didn't want to do. Not to mention keeping him, as Horace's friend Mr. Wald had put it, "sober at all costs."
Faulkner’s face went utterly expressionless. Then, from far down in those depthless eyes, a dim light appeared and gradually brightened into a gleam of understanding.
But when Faulkner suggested they get off “this hill-cradled patch of desolation” and motor into Hollywood in search of real food, they dug in their heels.
Bacall raised an eyebrow. “Oh yeah?” she said.
Then Hawks was narrowing his eyes and peering at the boys thoughtfully. “Not the Ed and Johnny?”
They wandered around the eerily moon-washed lot, calling Bill’s name, but to no avail.
The boys sprinted to their car and tore out of the lot. Or drove, at least, as fast as their thirteen-year-old Nash would allow.
Half an hour later they rumbled to a halt in front of Union Station.
The waiting room was apparently deserted, not an author in sight.
Faulkner, without further ado, started to type. He wrote without cease for exactly forty-seven minutes. Johnny timed him.
Faulkner's jauntiness evaporated before their eyes. His sentences grew longer as he waxed indignant about prostituting himself in Hollywood. Ed gave up and looked around.
At a table in the corner, Nicholas Ray and John Huston were arm wrestling.
A guy with big ears egging them on might have been John O'Hara.
Erskine Caldwell did a double take. "I say balderdash!"
Whereupon the two of them had driven out to the Glendale airfield to admire Hawks's lovely new Beech 35 Bonanza.
They sat in the plane sampling a number of bottles the director had left strewn about the floor and seats...
...and the next thing Hawks knew he was lying on his back in an avocado orchard in Pico Rivera.
"The bastard stole my plane," Hawks growled. "He stole my plane and flew his drunken bastard ass back to Mississippi!"
But as J.L. began to read this script, they saw the same facial transformation in reverse. His beet-red flesh turned to a mellow tan. His eyes unsquinched, his brow lifted...
...and by the bottom of the second page his mouth had relaxed into something between a smirk and a smile. “Okay,” he said. “It looks good enough.”
"Not one of my best books, I'm afraid," Bill said, "but a man has to keep the pot boiling."
“I still don’t get how a guy could trade in celluloid for pulp,” Johnny said. “But thanks.”
The great man called back, "Just don't you trade in celluloid for anything."
Click on "Older Posts" for Chapter 4 and beyond...
It's arrived at last: the culmination, the finale, the payoff, the big finish of the multi-part romance of Will Jones and Splendid Girl! Lives are destroyed and regained! Lover is pitted against lover! The future is revealed! Alcohol is consumed! References are made to Larry Storch and Cantinflas! It's called "Who Knows What Tomorrow Will Bring?" and it's online at My Pal Splendid Man. This one truly has it all! 
