Flavor of the Month (52 page)

“In my briefcase, over there.” It hadn’t been easy to smuggle out a copy of
Three for the Road
, not even for April Irons. Marty DiGennaro was running a closed set and didn’t want a knockoff of his stuff to appear the same season his show debuted. But in the end she’d managed.

She watched as Sam crossed the room, naked except that his cute buns were encased in those cute blue boxer shorts. He crouched, retrieved the tape, and popped it into the VCR. His eyes were glued to the screen, watching the opening credits. “I just want to see what Marty DiGennaro can do.”

After the great critical reception of
Jack and Jill
, April was ready to move ahead with Sam on another picture. And Sam was glad April had made the offer; since he hadn’t written anything else in the last two years, it might be what he needed.

April was certainly what he needed. After all, she was powerful. She’d never mentioned Crystal and seemed not at all bitter over his affair with the actress. After all, Sam figured the performance he had gotten out of Crystal had sweetened April’s bottom line. So now they were talking preproduction. Costs, casting, above the line, below the line, the whole ball of wax. This was a big one. April was going to trust him.

Now he looked up. April had left the room.

“Wait. Where did you go?” Sam called out to her. “Come on back. I want you to see something…a genius at work.”

“That would be a nice change,” she snapped from the doorway, but her curiosity was piqued. Know your enemies better than your friends, her father used to tell her. And she hated Marty DiGennaro. She hoped the show died like a dog. There’d already been so much buzz: new techniques, feuds on the set, enormous budgets. Maybe it would bring that self-important little prick down. Might as well see what all the talk is about, she decided. She sat down on a far corner of the bed.

He patted the place by his side. “Come on, it’s business,” he said in a coaxing voice.

April leaned back against Sam’s chest and took a deep breath. She had taken out her contacts, expecting to get right into bed with Sam and now she couldn’t see the screen too well. But that was all right, she thought. It’s only TV. They watched in silence for a few minutes; then April sat up and leaned forward, squinting. This was
not
your usual Sunday-night television fare. But, then, she thought, how could it be, with Marty DiGennaro behind it? He was a prick, but he was a talented prick. This was
good
. More like the big screen than television. But different from both.

“Sam, hand me my glasses. They’re in the drawer of the night table,” she said, not taking her eyes off the monitor.

She watched carefully. He’d used every trick in the book, but all in new ways and to great effect. He had the wiggle and the jiggle, but the women were tough, liberated, almost androgynous. He had nostalgia, but his cuts and fades and smears, his matching shots, were startlingly different. Better, hotter, newer than MTV.

And maybe, just maybe, there was a lead here for
Birth of a Star
.

“What do you think of the redhead?” Sam asked, reading her mind. “We saw her at the party.”

April watched the girl. There was the angle that her mother, Theresa O’Donnell, had starred in the last reincarnation of
Birth of a Star
. That would be good for some free publicity. She was gorgeous, and sly, but…Anyway, April didn’t want this film to look like nothing more than a shlocky parlor trick, a shtick remake. No.

“Too obvious. And the blonde is doing a Vanna White impersonation.”

Sam kept staring at the screen. “Yeah, but watch the other one. The dark one.”

April did. The girl was undeniably beautiful, but she had something else. Her voice, her movements were so…natural. The girl could act.

“Not bad,” she admitted.

“We need a new face for the part.”

“Well, she’s a possibility.”

They fast-forwarded through much of it. It was fascinating. The show ended, credits rolled. She looked over at Sam, his hard-on obvious through the sheet. “Is that for her or for me?” she asked him.

“For you,” he said, reaching out and cupping her left breast in his hand. “But let’s audition
her
.”

“Sam, it’s unlikely we can afford to use a television star, even if we yoke her with Michael McLain the way I want to do. We need a
movie
person.”

“Yeah, so get me Kikki Mansard. She’s hot. Or how about Julia Roberts.”

“Come on. The Hermit of Hollywood? Unavailable,
and
her people insist on a big position. I don’t give six percent of the gross to
anyone
. Bear that in mind, Sam: I don’t give head, I don’t give percentage of gross, and I don’t give final cut.”

She had signed him for a hundred thousand for a first draft and one set of revisions against four hundred thousand if they went into principal photography with him directing. He’d come cheap—his pussy agent had folded when April threatened to walk away. Sam didn’t know she’d had another quarter of a million she was willing to throw below the line for it. Well, she told herself, she’d use the money to fix up a nice trailer for Michael McLain. It would come in handy.

“Please can I have final cut?” he asked in a wheedling voice. They had been arguing about it for days.

“Since
Heaven’s Gate, no
director gets final cut.”

“Woody Allen gets final cut.”

She raised an eyebrow and looked at him. “To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen: ‘You, Sam, are no Woody Allen.’”

“But I give better head.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” she told him. “Now, what else? Or can we just call it a deal and go fuck?”

“I shouldn’t mix business with pleasure,” he said, grinning at her now.

“You shouldn’t, but you do. Just don’t right now.” She reached out for his crotch with one hand and flicked off the TV with the other.

Since seeing Neil at Ara’s party, Jahne had been searching for him. Discreetly, of course. She began by calling Directory Assistance, but they had no listing. Then she looked him up in the white pages. When they yielded no listing, she stopped at the L.A. Central Library and looked for Morellis in last year’s L.A. phone book, and in Orange County and all the surrounding areas for the last two years. There was nothing. Could he have an unlisted number? Or, worse, did he have no number at all? An out-of-work actor without a phone number was an ex-actor. Had Neil given up?

Next Jahne began calling answering services, trying to leave a message for Neil Morelli. But each night, as she worked her way through a dozen or so of the hundreds listed, she felt her hopes fade. It was tiring, depressing, to come up empty again and again.

She missed Neil, and she worried about him. But what would she do if she found him, she wondered. Would she reveal herself? She didn’t think she could. Not yet. But maybe she could help him indirectly: send him some money, or ask Marty to use him in a small role on
3/4
.

She wished she could have a friend like Neil. Pete had been kind, but they’d had so little in common. He was still friendly, but not a friend. Sharleen had been friendly, but Sharleen was too limited. Jahne realized she was lonely. Jahne missed the fun of Neil’s sharp rants, of the heart-to-hearts she’d had with Molly, the deep conversations she and Sam had shared.

Of course, the thrill of the show’s coming together was fun. But her life, aside from work, was nonexistent. Now that she was getting into the rhythm of it, putting out the show was becoming, if not easy, at least routine for Jahne. She looked good on the screen, even in close-ups. She’d tested her face for still photography back in New York, but stills and film were completely different; one was a cool medium, the other hot. She agonized over it. It was the lights that had scared her the most at first. She hadn’t thought about it until she was under them. Television lighting was brighter than theater lighting. It shone on every pore, making them look cavernous if the skin were not made up properly. Onstage, lighting was more highlighting and spotlighting. And there were no close-ups, no dense light. On the television soundstage, however, its purpose seemed to be to bring the sun right onto the set. Jahne would sometimes walk under the lights and know, just
know
, that what were tiny, hairline scars in the lighting at home in her bedroom turned here into deep, red gashes. Hester’s scarlet letter. But it wouldn’t be an “A.” Perhaps “F” for fake. Or “I” for impostor. She would hold her breath as the cameramen did run-throughs, waiting for the inevitable cry of discovery. That they never came didn’t lessen Jahne’s vigilance. Even if there was nothing she could do about the lighting except submit to it.

Makeup, however, was one area where she could exercise some control. Her concerns for her makeup went beyond a professional’s concern for perfection. For Jahne, it had become an obsession. She had made a point of becoming friendly with the makeup guy. Both agreed that the Flanders stuff didn’t hold up. He smuggled in MAC and some stuff of his own, despite the contract. And since he would stand back every day and look at her face as if he had created the Mona Lisa, Jahne was more relaxed with that part of her preparation for the camera.

But all in all, going before the camera on this show wasn’t the exciting opportunity Jahne had at first believed it would be. Marty DiGennaro was directing. She had assumed that meant the show would be above average in every way—camera work, writing, costumes. Unfortunately for Jahne, she became too painfully aware how limited a director’s control could be. The writing seemed to her atrocious. A team of writers created dialogue like a “David Mamet-does-Huey-Dewey-and-Louie.” It was stunted, unbalanced, hard to develop timing with. She started a sentence and Sharleen interrupted, only to have Lila finish it. So much for art, Jahne had thought after their first script run-through. Well, maybe on the air, finished, it would work.

Meanwhile, the persona of the three characters on the show seemed to have flowed over to the set itself. Jahne was perceived as the smart one, Lila the sexy one, and Sharleen the dumb one. They were being forced to play their roles in real life. Jahne knew she was smart. Or, more accurately, experienced. Because of her perceived age, it came across as smart. And Lila was sexy. Not sexual, really, Jahne could tell. But sexy. And there was poor Sharleen. She wasn’t dumb, exactly. Just never exposed to much. And the mistake that the jaded almost always made was that “ignorant” meant stupid. Jahne was sure that that was not the case with Sharleen.

But of the three of them, it was Lila who was smart enough to have ingratiated herself with Marty. Now that she’d seen the first six shows, Jahne could see that Lila had somehow managed to get more close-ups, better lines. And “smart” Jahne was looking less and less directly into the camera, and getting fewer and fewer lines. Of course, all the lines were crap, but still. She laughed to herself. She was reminded of the joke about the two old women who met in the lobby of a Catskills hotel after dinner. The first woman said, “The food is terrible.” The second woman added, “Yes, and the portions are so small.” So Jahne’s portion of bad lines was decreasing. Silly as they were, she admitted she would have liked to have more.

None of it was what she had imagined. It was only when Jahne was with Mai Von Trilling that she was able to feel she was really in show business. During the long waits on the set, she spent hours talking to Mai, hearing the stories of her life. And her loves. Jahne never tired of listening, and Mai seemed to take as much pleasure in telling them. Mai was a survivor of the earliest days of Hollywood.

Now Jahne was in Wardrobe, working on next week’s costumes, hanging on Mai’s every word. She looked down at Mai, who was managing to tuck a seam, hold her beer glass, talk, and keep the spare pins in her mouth, all at the same time. “So I left him, my dear. Vat else vas I to do? He vould alvays be jealous of my success. It vas poisoning him. After a time, he vould no longer haff luffed me anyvay.”

“But you loved him?” Jahne asked.

“Huff course. He vas the vun great luff I had. For he truly luffed
me
. Not the image on the scrin. Alvays I could see the others, later on, seeing not me, but my image from the scrin. Or, vat vas verse, comparing me to it. You know. You vill see it. ‘Oh, she’s not as tall as I thought. Her teeth are not as good. She is thinner, smaller. Not as
much
as I thought.’” Mai laughed, but there was no humor in it.

It seemed so cruel, watching this wrinkled old woman as she knelt at the hem, remembering her glory years, how she’d been one of the world’s first screen idols and how even then she had not been beautiful enough. What was it like
now
, when no one looked at her, at least not as a woman? When she couldn’t trade on her face, or her body? And she
had
been stunning. One of the most beautiful. What was it like for her now? Jahne had neither the courage nor cruelty to ask. She looked down again to see Mai staring up at her.

“You are a strange one,” Mai said. “Your eyes are too old for your face.” She took the last pin out of her mouth and thrust it hard through the tough denim fabric. Jahne felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. Could this old woman see through her? “You are alvays thinkink,” Mai said. “As if you are in danger. But vat does such a pretty girl have to think about? I never thought until I vas forty.”

“Just a habit.” Jahne smiled at her as she stepped off the little platform before the mirror.

“No. You are strange.”

“How?” Jahne tried to sound casual. But she was frightened. Did she give herself away?

“Vell, you let me say somesink like that. This is unusual. And you come here, not make
me
come to
you
…”

“But this is a favor you’re doing for me! It was the least I could do.”

“Silly girl. A favor for the star is a pleasure. It is money in the bank, a paid insurance premium, my dear.”

“What kind of insurance?” Jahne asked, confused.

“Unemployment insurance,” Mai said, and laughed as she stood up, slowly and stiffly. “Now, vith luck, you von’t let me get fired.”