Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard

Conclusion: What Happens Next?

conclusion what happens next? Just after Bill Hill closes the deal in Touch that will make Juvenal a media star, Leonard offers us a glimpse of the evangelical huckster’s thoughts, in free indirect discourse. Hill is glad to be back in the saddle and no longer selling motor homes, as he’s had to do ever since Uni-Faith folded: “Work work work. But damn he felt good. Bill Hill was promoting people again and not some dead-ass technical specs, which camper body to put on your GMC pick-up bed” (148). Wherever Leonard finds himself in whichever novel he happens to be writing on any given day, he remains responsive to what matters most to him: the satisfaction of knowing how to do a job and do it well, even if it’s turning the gifts of God into fungible commodities. In Be Cool, a similar moment occurs when we catch record promoter Nick Car (former mobster Nicky Carcaterra) sitting at his desk at Car-O-Sell Entertainment, wearing headphones and fielding simultaneous calls on three lines with the aplomb of a professional short-stop. “Howard, what’s up, bro? You guys have a good rap? . . . That’s cool. Man, that is so fucking cool. Listen, I want to hear about it but I’ll have to call you back. I’m banging the phone like a fucking wild man. Five minutes, bro.” Nick pushed a button on the phone console, looked up to see Raji in the office. Raji saying, “Chili Palmer—” Nick held up both hands to stop him, Nick’s hands free to gesture, scratch, lock behind his head, while he spoke into the little stainless mike boom that hung in front of his mouth—a mouth he never seemed to shut, always making Raji wait. (81) Three pages of patter and eight button punches later, Nick gets “throw[n] off [his] rhythm” by someone named “Jer.” “I start thinking when I’m talking to 202 Being Cool him instead of just talking,” Nick tells Raji, who takes advantage of Nick’s momentary dysrhythmia to ask who they should hire to kill Chili Palmer. Nick’s rat-a-tat recitative is a perfect example of Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow” in action: self-immersive, focused on the task at hand, and lost as soon as the promoter “start[s] thinking.” Nick plays his phone console the way Horowitz played his Steinway. “I can make more in one day wearing this fucking headset,” he later tells Chili, “than I do in months” working with Raji (216). Whatever we may think about Nick Carcaterra personally (he’s a tasteless, greedy bastard who would gift-wrap his own mother for a top-ten hit), he’s utterly cool when it comes to selling records. And he turns out to be crucial to the success of the book’s female protagonist, singer-songwriter Linda Moon. It’s easy to get distracted from Linda’s story line by the accumulating perils— physical and technical—facing her new agent, Chili Palmer, not least because, in Be Cool as in Get Shorty, Leonard is writing a meta-fictional account of his own compositional process. A large part of Chili’s motivation for getting close to Linda stems from his desire to write a screenplay about an aspiring Janis Joplin–style singer overcoming abusive managers, corrupt record promoters, grasping studio executives, and sidemen of inferior talents in order to succeed with her artistic integrity intact. Like Leonard himself, Chili never plans how things will go, but waits to see “what happens next” based on what his potential characters (Linda and her associates) choose to do. Sometimes, however, he’ll arrange a scene just to see how someone will react, as he does when he schedules Linda for an on-air radio interview where she will hear a remixed version of her signature song, “Odessa,” for the first time, with the whole world listening in. Chili knows that Linda walked out on a previous studio contract when the sound engineers tampered with her lean, lonely sound, and he respects her for it. But after discussing the advertising and promotion campaign for her new release with producer Hy Gordon of NTL (Nothing to Lose) records, Chili realizes that Linda will never succeed unless Gordon’s sound engineer, Curtis, gets the green light to remix “Odessa”—to “lay some samples around her, fill in, make it bigger” (150). Chili is pretty sure that, while on...