Show Business Kills (6 page)

Today’s meeting in the conference room had been going on for four hours, and it threatened to keep going on for a
few more. She had to pee, but she didn’t dare get up and go to the bathroom again, since she’d already excused herself twice,
and not one of the men had left room once.

As usual, there was more testosterone in the air than at a fraternity party on a Saturday night, and the late-adolescent arbiters
of America’s taste in film were really going at it.

“Even Shakespeare couldn’t polish this turd of a script,” Bibberman said.

“He could,” Schatzman said. “But Ovitz told him he’s not available ‘til July.” A blast of a laugh from Richardson.

“He’s doing Last Action Hero Two,” he said, which got an even bigger laugh from the boys, and Ellen thought how lucky it was
for her that she’d once been the room mother for the second grade, so she understood their behavior.

Why did it still amaze her what yo-yos the three of them turned into the minute the door to the conference room was closed?
Why did it gall her how ruled by their maleness they became? All day long they all kissed the asses of the talent and made
nice with the agents and spoke in conciliatory, unctuous tones to the lawyer. So when they finally got into the room to talk
among themselves about the details and the projects, the rage they’d been holding inside finally blew, and it wasn’t a pretty
sight.

After so many years in this town, during which she’d somehow managed to work for some of the legendary pigs in the business,
Ellen was sure she’d seen and heard it all. And yet now and then she still found herself embarrassed by the behavior of these
three. Just that morning, Randy McVey, a gifted British director, was in a meeting with all of them, discussing a project,
and he brought up his background in classical theater.

“Of course,” he said, “my first love is to work in the summer
season at Chichester. If only they played all year long, I’d never leave the place.”

And behind the very elegant man’s back, for the entertainment of the others, Bibberman actually made that open fisted moving-in-and-out,
jerking-off gesture the boys used to make, back when she was in elementary school. Ellen wanted to grab him by his Armani
lapels and shake some sense into him. Later when the director left, Bibberman imitated McVey’s dialect and his passion for
the theater, thinking he was being terribly funny. Now they were talking about one of the writers.

“How much does he want?” Bibberman asked.

“Two hundred thousand.”

“Pass,” Bibberman said. “I could shit on the page and it would be better than his first draft.”

Ellen had her usual wave of wishing she could afford to quit this job. Give up the perks and the pricks and go open a bookstore
in a beach town somewhere. Or at least work at a company that was run by grown-ups. This was getting to be too much, watching
the boys sitting there all day, wagging their dicks at one another.

Each of them believing with the hubris that their excessive salaries gave them that they were going to be in these heady positions
of power forever. And worse yet, claiming that they actually knew how to predict what the audiences wanted to seem what would
make money. All Ellen knew was that even Nostrafuckingdamus couldn’t tell how a movie would do until the popcorn was popped
and the audience was either cheering, laughing, crying, or walking out in the middle.

But she chose to shut up and do what Rose told her, which was not to “rock the yacht.” Not let the “boys” win their battle
to get her out of the locker room, since they were the only
real downside of the job for her. Otherwise it had a lot to recommend it.

She’d grown accustomed pretty damn quick to the expense-account life, including the high-priced car that the studio transportation
department not only provided, but had serviced, detailed, washed, gassed, and waiting in her personal parking spot for her
every day. And since day one of the announcement in the trades that she had this job, she always got the great tables everywhere
in town. At Morton’s and at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant Granita in Malibu, with Barbara Lazaroff fawning over her.

But what stoked her more than the trappings, what kept her awake at night with excitement, was the charge she got putting
together the deals to make the movies. There was something incredibly heady about the alchemy of matching just the right script
with a director no one else would have dreamed of using for that genre, and watching the project take off. It was a spike,
the part of the job that made her as giddy as the studio secretaries when Daniel Day-Lewis walked into the commissary. That
was what made it all worthwhile for her. Spending her days locked in a room from early morning to midnight, shepherding a
film from its conception to its premiere.

Nothing could beat those hours of being part of the process, when the director and the writer worked to make a product that
was bigger, broader, grander than the sum of its parts. To watch each idea bring forth the next one, to see the product metamorphose.

And then to be the one who could make words on a page come to life by finding the right stars, to give it what Ellen jokingly
called Tina Turners, meaning not just legs, but the greatest
legs in the business. That part of the job meant so much to her that she could put up with the “boys club” to have it.

Now the fucking panty hose were rolling over and sliding down her belly, goddamn it. She promised herself to have her secretary
call Neiman Marcus to order a dozen pairs of panty hose without the control top. Then she could be comfortable and not care
if her stomach stuck out.

Schatzman was droning on about casting the male and female leads for
Out There
, a hot action-adventure film the studio was eager to make. Ellen knew these casting discussions could go on forever. Each
of the men had his personal favorite actors, and hated the other’s favorites, so they could fight about casting for days on
end.

Names of stars were flying, careers were hanging in the balance. First they talked about the women. “You’d like to fuck her,
wouldn’t you?” “Only with your cock, in case there’s something wrong with her.” “Hey, believe me, when I visit the set, I’ll
bring my good dick.”

Ellen was sure they sometimes overdid the childish male shit just to fry her. To see how bad they could make it before she
fell apart and said, “I quit, you infantile assholes.” Probably they were wishing she’d walk, so they wouldn’t have to have
a broad around, and more important, if she left on her own, they wouldn’t have to pay her off.

Now they’d moved on to talk about casting the men, so what Bibberman called the “pussy factor” was being weighed, because
they needed to lure the women audiences into the theaters. They were all ripping apart the available actors. One male star
was a “wimp,” another a “wuss.”

Ellen made what she thought was a great suggestion for the role.

“No chance.” Bibberman sneered when he heard it. “He’s too high-maintenance.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I’m not interested in being the one who goes to the emergency room to pull the gerbils out of his ass.” Big laugh.

“Why gerbils?” one of them said. “Why not hamsters or mice, or maybe white rats?”

“White rats would show the dirt!”

Screams of laughter.

“White rats never ask, ‘Was it good for you?’ ” More screams.

Ellen sighed. Let them play, she thought. When they get serious, I’ll jump in. Her mind was wandering as she doodled with
her Mont Blanc pen on the legal pad in front of her. She knew if she didn’t stand soon and start packing up her briefcase,
she’d never get out of there. And she wasn’t going to disappoint Roger. It was his birthday, and she was meeting him at Adriano’s
for dinner.

Rogie, her gorgeous son, whose father left him and Ellen and Los Angeles when Roger was less than a year old. Today her divine
boy turned twenty-four, and they would celebrate and reminisce. And for a few hours she’d forget about the scripts that were
stacked on her night table, piled in her briefcase, sitting on the passenger seat of her car, and being delivered in a steady
stream to her office every time the mail room gofer came by her studio bungalow.

“Ellen?”

When she looked up from her doodling, she realized that all of the men were not only looking at her, they were waiting for
the answer to some question Bibberman must have directed at
her, which she’d been too preoccupied to hear. All of their eyes glistened with glee. He had to have guessed she hadn’t heard
the first time, because now he repeated it. “I asked, which one of the men on this list makes your snatch get juicy?”

Heat burned her face. Typical Bibberman, putting her in a spot where she ought to tell him to rephrase his juvenile question
or she’d go get a job somewhere where men were men, not spoiled brats trying out the provocative words on the girls in the
class. Her mind ran through the possible answers, but before she could speak, Bibberman added, gleeful at his own cuteness,
“Or at your age, does your snatch still
get
juicy?”

This wasn’t sexual harassment, this was just plain harassment. Get nasty and see if you can make the girl fall apart, lose
it, be sorry she ever came into the locker room. Ellen fought to keep her stoic expression, took a deep breath, and said,
“I’d go with Kevin Costner and some K-Y jelly.”

Her joke got a tepid laugh from Richardson and Schatz-man as she stood. She had to get out of here.

“Gentlemen,” she said, “and I use the term loosely, I have to go now. I have a pressing engagement.”

“Get out the K-Y jelly,” Bibberman said. “Sounds like a hot date. Forget ‘women who run with the wolves,’ we have ‘woman who
sleeps with cats.’ ”

“It’s my son’s birthday,” Ellen said, and she realized she’d stopped herself from saying which birthday, since they all had
young children.

“Again?” Richardson joked. “Didn’t your son just have a birthday last year?”

“My kids have all their birthday parties in a screening room downstairs,” Schatzman said.

“See you tomorrow,” Ellen said, walking out the door of
the conference room and down the hall, where she could hear Bibberman’s laughter at Schatzman’s comments about being so devoted
to the job that he never left the studio, so his family had to move their lives there in order to see him. Wait until she
told them she was leaving early Friday night, too, because it was Girls’ Night.

She had to go to the bathroom so badly she knew she’d never make it out of the building and over to the bungalow to her own
office, so she stopped in the employees ladies’ room near the elevator. “At your age.” Bibberman’s pointed words, the amusement
dancing in his beady little eyes. Yes, she was getting to be what was perceived as old to have her job in this town, and she
knew it. Most of the other women in top studio jobs, with the exception of Sherry Lansing, were in their thirties.

“Now who could this harridan be?” Ellen thought, wondering if it was the fluorescent lights that were making her face look
yellow in the mirror, or the new shade of auburn, the hair color Lizanne tried on her last month. God bless Lizanne, who always
fit her in when those telltale gray hairs started sneaking in. Gray hair, tired eyes. I’ve got those just-looked-in-the-mirror-and-thought-I
saw-my-mother-blues, Ellen thought, looking wearily at herself.

Sometimes the young hairdresser at José Eber would stay in the salon until ten, long after the others were gone, just to fit
Ellen in. Too bad she didn’t do pubic hair, too, Ellen thought, and then laughed a why-bother laugh at herself in the mirror
at how dumb that thought was. No one saw her pubes anyway but the cats, and this coming Friday night in the hot tub, her buddies.

Once at a Girls’ Night last year, while they were on God-knows-what
glass of champagne, someone, probably Rose, had asked “What’s the most narcissistic thing any of you have ever done?” Ellen
remembered how Janny piped right up with a giggle, and then when she could get her words out, after the stream of laughter
at herself, she confessed, “Put a mirror between my legs and tweezed out all the grays.”

“How about the time after a good mammogram,” Marly said, “when I was so relieved that after the radiologist left the room,
I kissed my own breasts.”

“If I could only reach my breasts to kiss them,” Rose said, “I never would have remarried.”

Ellen sighed, thinking how ready she was for Friday night. Jan, who was always so elegant on “My Brightest Day,” with her
great red hair and her green eyes and those gorgeous high cheekbones, would be the first one to holler, “Let’s get naked,”
drop her clothes, and head for the hot tub.

Then she’d probably have some new stories about all the shit she took from the people who worked on her show, the backstage
plots, all of which were tons more interesting than the ones on that dopey daytime show. And Marly would have the latest chapter
on her ex-husband Billy’s awesome ego, and Rosie would be half there and the other half of her brain would be in her current
screenplay. They’d sit naked in the hot tub, where their aging bodies felt healed and light, and so did their world-weary
souls.

Christ, they’d been close for so long, they each knew who had taken the others’ virginity and the stories that accompanied
the deflowering. They each knew what the other wore or didn’t wear to sleep, and what each of their bodies looked like when
they were young and effortlessly hard, before gravity took its toll, in spite of the Stairmasters they’d all
climbed so ferverently that if they were really ascending, by now they’d all be in heaven.

Ellen even knew their scents by heart, probably because it was their custom every year to exchange cologne, soap, body lotion,
some product of their favorite scent for Christmas. Marly wore Joy, she had since the sixties. Rose liked Opium, Jan still
loved sultry Jungle Gardenia, and every year each of them gave Ellen some product from her own favorite scent, Norell. Last
year she announced at their private Christmas dinner that maybe it was time to switch to another kind of gift, since she had
enough Norell to last until she was a hundred.