West of Paradise Read online

  The phone rang. “Baby!” It was her agent’s voice. Mel had never called her baby before. In fact, he had never called her, only occasionally accepting her calls, one of them the one she had made to him in terror because there were rats in her house, at which time he had put her on hold. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Mel was saying now.

  “Tell you what?”

  “About Grandpa. And the manuscript.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Haven’t you seen the trades?” he said.

  “I’ll call you back,” said Kate.

  “You better,” he said. “Don’t forget who was in your corner when you were nobody.”

  She ran to the mat outside her front door, where the trade papers were delivered, along with the Times, and took them with her to the bathroom. It was in the middle of the party column in the Reporter, along with photos of celebrities who’d been at Drayco’s funeral. Her name was in bold print, with Perry Zemmis’s, and her “grandfather,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, and underlined and in bold, The Last Tycoon. Perry Zemmis had bought the “sequin,” it said in quotes, like he had been being clever. Like he’d been making a witty joke. But they’d spelled her name right, which, according to Tallulah Bankhead, and the theatrical histories she’d read that she remembered, was all that mattered. A little quiver went through Kate at the sight of her name in print, along with all the celebrity names. Bold. She experienced something greater than relief, as she felt the release of her urine.

  It was only after she’d washed, brushed her teeth, put on makeup and done her hair, and dressed very well in case somebody called to take her to, or rather, “do” lunch, that she remembered the rat in the freezer. She picked it up with the classified section of the L.A. Times and put it outside in the garbage. And just before she left the house, she put the cereal back in the closet, in case there was another one.

  * * *

  When she awoke this annoyingly sunny morning, Sarah Nash had a hangover. It took her a while to realize she hadn’t had anything to drink the night before and was no longer on drugs. She tried to assess what would make her feel so dragged, so totally lacking in energy. Then she remembered the funeral, and what had happened with Norman Jessup.

  Automatically, she reached behind her ear, checking it for stickiness. The bastard. Guacamole. It didn’t bother her so much that he had done that to her in front of everybody, as that he had done it to her in front of her. It was almost as though she had set herself up, so he could humiliate her. Like she had something to feel guilty about.

  She picked up the phone and hit the second button, programmed to speed-dial her researcher in New York. “Chuck?” she said, at the sound of his “Hello.” He hated being called Chuck. He was twenty-two years old and desperate to seem mature, and so longed to be addressed as Charles. But this way he would be put immediately on the defensive. So much of Sarah’s life had gotten away from her, she seized what control she could.

  “Oh, hi, Sarah,” he said, the juice instantly squeezed out of him.

  “What did you find out?”

  “You only called me yesterday afternoon. It was Monday. All the theaters were dark.”

  “Not so the people who work in them. Couldn’t you find anybody who knew that Paulo what’s-his-name?”

  “Nerys,” Charles said.

  “Well, at least you’ve done that much for me,” she said, in a dismissive tone. He was on a small retainer, the most she could honestly afford at the moment, since her publisher was holding back her royalties in the event anyone else sued before the statute of limitations had expired. She hated to be forced to be on a budget. Numbers were loathsome to her. In spite of the money the book had made, between the hiding out and the IRS, she could not afford a business manager. So she had to keep track of her own figures, and that made her nervous.

  As Charles did. He was another generation, full of the resilience of youth, when you didn’t really need the resilience, because people gave you a chance. If she didn’t keep him backed into a corner, he might go out and find some other job. And she needed him, much as she hated to admit it to herself, and would never admit to him.

  “Do you have any idea when he and Norman Jessup stopped being lovers?” Sarah asked.

  “Like I said, I haven’t had time to connect yet with anyone who knew him. I got his name from the dance library at Lincoln Center.”

  “Well, that was industrious,” she said, meaning it, throwing him a bone. “See if you can find some track I can pick up. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” Charles said anxiously.

  “I have work to do,” Sarah said, not adding, as she didn’t dare even think, that there was nothing for her to do here. No one who wanted her. No one she even wanted, sadder to say.

  She clicked the receiver and hit the fifth programmed number: Wilma, her travel agent and friend. One of the few people she trusted enough to let know her whereabouts, in charge of arranging them. She asked her to make the plane reservation to New York, and see if she could get her a break at some hotel.

  “Are you alright?” Wilma asked. “You sound a little played out.”

  “I have not yet begun to play!” said Sarah.

  * * *

  Maybe when she was in her crib, people had been able to keep their eyes off Helen Manning. Maybe when she was an infant, the mother who so cloyingly telephoned her now daily, asking why she didn’t call, had been able to resist little Helen, not giving her the love and attention and affirmation she needed, creating the narcissist that actors needed to be to be actors. But from the time she was in her stroller, not yet completely able to walk, she remembered people stopping to stare, and ooh and ahh, to twirl the white-gold curls, and lift the dimpled chin, and exclaim they’d never seen a more beautiful child. Once on her feet, she’d toddled her way onto the screen. After that it was a profusion of lights, and people whose job it was to look at her, and no way of her knowing that she wasn’t actually the center of the universe. Not that she hadn’t made an attempt to discover that she wasn’t. Not that she hadn’t read books, and gone to see therapists, to try and find the antidote for being self-centered, seeing so much of the disease around her that she wanted to immunize herself even though she knew she was already infected, probably a carrier. She had given her glow over to causes, and actually come to believe in many of them. And cultivated a garden, of flowers, and people, so there would always be something to putter around in that would make her lose herself.

  But then there were the men, fawning, adoring, covering her with gifts, traveling to the other side of the world, where a few of them came from, to find things she couldn’t lavish on herself. And in spite of the rush she always felt when the romance was new, or the marriage ceremony was performed, it never lasted. So for all her success, she felt failed. And now this boy, this very young, very beautiful boy, had untethered her from the one balloon that kept her afloat: the given that no man could resist her.

  “Helen Manning?” Norman Jessup said to his secretary, on the intercom. He still had an intercom in his office because the whole world had become too high-tech for him. He longed for a time when Cary Grant would have felt comfortable, when a man could make an impression with style and wit and fine tailoring, and it wasn’t all computerized, on-line, virtual reality, virtual talent, virtual life. “Here?”

  “In the outer office,” his secretary, Carol, said.

  “Not anymore,” said Helen, bursting through the double doors.

  She was dressed, unaccustomedly, in Lycra. Designer Lycra, to be sure, but Lycra nonetheless, this woman who prided herself on being the antithesis of grunge, who castigated the Up-and-Comings for not respecting the eye of the beholder, as she said in her interview in GQ, the first female movie star to make the cover. A fitting breakthrough for one who still made gentlemen feel like gentlemen. Norman Jessup leapt to his feet at her presence, his basic good manners galvanized by the force of her entrance.

  “Forgive the intr
usion, my darling,” she said, and, moving towards him, swept what would have been in better days a train, but was now just the air behind her Donna Karaned buttocks. She stood on sneakered tiptoe to kiss his cheek.

  “It’s never an intrusion,” he said, as though she had done this before, which she never had. He was stunned, not only by the unexpectedness of her appearance, but her appearance itself. Besides the Lycra, she was wearing a square-necked, tight, funky black sweater which Norman knew was Alberta Ferretti, because Carina had one. But anyone else might have thought it came from the Gap. Neither he, nor anyone else in the industry that he knew of, had ever seen her in clothes that might not have marked the second coming of Barbara Stanwyck.

  “I was just out for a jog…” she said, her wide-set amber eyes making a quick tour of his staff, who, in spite of trafficking daily with movers and shakers and stars, sat gape-mouthed at her presence.

  “A what?”

  “A jog.”

  “But when I invited you to have a run on the beach, you said it was bad for the breasts.”

  “Well, I’ve had them long enough where they are,” she said, and smiled. “Can I speak to you alone for a moment?”

  “Certainly,” he said, and nodded. The young men all left, one or two of them awkwardly bowing to her as they backed out of the office.

  “I wanted to ask you—” she started to say.

  There was a buzz on the intercom. “Hold all calls,” he said.

  “But this is the travel agent,” said Carol. “The travel agent.”

  “Oh,” said Norman. “Excuse me a moment, Helen.” He picked up the phone. “Yes, Wilma?” His brow furrowed. “What flight?” He wrote something down. “Thank you. Get one on the same flight for a Tyler Hayden. He’ll pick the ticket up tomorrow at American … of course … the usual arrangement.” He hung up the phone, seemed to refocus, looked at Helen. “Now what can I do for you?”

  “Do?”

  “You wanted to ask me something?”

  “How are you, Norman?”

  He seemed a little taken aback. “Well, I’m fine. How are you?”

  “Fit as a fiddle,” she said, and got up from the carved oak chair she had temporarily settled on. “Or, unless I do a little work on these hips, more like a guitar. Well, I know how busy you are. Thank you for seeing me.”

  “That’s it?” he asked, confused.

  “Can’t one just show interest in a friend? Does everything in this town have to be about self, and needing something?”

  “You never cease to amaze me,” he said, and came around the desk to kiss her good-bye.

  “Good,” she said, and went home to call American Airlines.

  * * *

  It took a bit of doing. She had to weep on the phone to the man on reservations, who told her for security reasons he couldn’t let her know which flight Tyler Hayden was taking, especially since she didn’t know his destination, or time of departure. But without revealing who she was, she explained he was her boyfriend, and they’d had a dreadful row. She actually said row because she knew from the one time she’d done a play, to not bad reviews, really, that the word had more dramatic resonance than fight. So forty or fifty sniffles in, he looked it up on the computer and told her Tyler Hayden was on flight 2 the next day to New York. She thanked him profusely, hung up the phone, and called her travel agent.

  * * *

  “But it’s a total fabrication!” Kate said to Wilton. They were in the Daily Grill in Beverly Hills, in the corner booth where no one could hear them, except maybe the O.J. attorney in the next booth.

  “Keep your voice down,” Wilton said.

  “He’s not interested in anything I might say. I saw him on Larry King. He has his own agenda.”

  “Everybody has their own agenda,” Wilton said. “Why are you denying it? Don’t you want to be a hit?”

  “As myself,” she said. “As who I really am.”

  “After you’re a hit, you can be a hit as who you really are.”

  “Well, well,” said Mel, coming over to their booth.

  “Wilton Spenser, this is my agent, Mel Brynner.”

  “Why didn’t you call me back? Did someone else make the deal for you?”

  “There is no deal,” Kate said. “There is no manuscript.”

  “Isn’t she a caution,” said Wilton. “Some people just aren’t comfortable in the laps of the gods.”

  “CAA,” said Mel. “You’re going with CAA.”

  The restaurant was decorated in the sterile way of places that had nothing to prove, since the food was simple and good and the location convenient. It was filled to capacity with blue-suited men from law firms and talent agencies within walking distance, though few of them had walked. Most of them had treadmills, and/or were members of a health club, so a walk was nothing they took casually or for pleasure. The women present were not the Ladies Who Lunch crowd, those who had been spiritually dispossessed by the closing of the Bistro Gardens, but businesswomen of similar ilk, except with lower salaries. They were dressed in softer shades than the men, grays and olives and beige, but the cut of their clothes was serious stuff, often Armani.

  “There’s Victor Lippton, the new head of Cosmos,” Wilton said to Kate.

  “Where?” Mel asked excitedly, scoping the room. He saw him and then sat down in their booth.

  “Of course you may,” said Wilton.

  “Huh? Oh,” Mel said. “May I sit down?” Mel gave Victor Lippton a subtle gladhand, trying to catch his eye. He kept focused on him all the time he talked to Kate, or rather to her through Wilton. “What do you suppose her problem is, Winston?”

  “Wilton,” Wilton said.

  “Why would she keep it a secret from me, who her progenitors were?”

  “Hard to believe you’re a Hollywood agent, using a word like that.”

  “It was in Jane Austen. I can’t believe the career she’s having.” Eyes still on Lippton, he addressed Wilton, carom-shooting at Kate. “So why do you think she kept it from me? Did she think I wouldn’t love her for herself?”

  “Maybe she already knew that,” said Wilton.

  “Well, she’s wrong. If I didn’t care about her, why would I have taken the time to read those crummy little stories?”

  Kate tried not to seem wounded. “I didn’t even think you read them.”

  “Saving the big guns,” Mel said. “Your grandpa—”

  “He isn’t.”

  “Why do you deny it?”

  “Because it isn’t true. He had only one daughter. Scotty.”

  “That was with what’s-her-name. Zelda. You came from the kid he had with the gossip columnist. Sheilah Graham.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t have to do this dance with me, kiddo. I already got a call from the Enquirer. Somehow they found out I was your agent. Out of loyalty, I told them nothing, except how talented you are.”

  “He didn’t have a child with Sheilah Graham,” Kate said.

  “Don’t tell me. I saw Beloved Infidel. I always knew they left something out.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Kate said.

  “I find it very entertaining,” said Wilton.

  “If you’re as smart as you’d like to think you are, and I thought you were, or I wouldn’t have taken you on,” Mel said, “you’ll work up a CV. A sample of your writing, and a short pitch on the Fitzgerald novel. I hope it has more balls than The Last Tycoon. That laid a really big one.” He suddenly was on his feet, as Victor Lippton, gray suit matching his leonine head of hair, strode towards their corner.

  “Victor!” Mel cried, hand extended. “Victor! How kind of you to come over. I wasn’t sure you saw me.”

  “I’ll be with you in a minute,” Victor Lippton said to the O.J. lawyer, at the table where he had obviously been heading.

  “Victor Lippton, say hello to Winston, and my new star client, Kate Donnelly.”

  “Well, hello,” Lippton said, and held out his hand. “It’s a privilege t
o meet you.” His smile was quite wide, and sincere. “That’s exciting about the manuscript. I’m sorry it’s sold. How are you, Wilton?”

  Wilton just smiled.

  “I haven’t closed the deal for her yet,” Mel said excitedly.

  “Really?”

  “That’s the truth,” Kate said, caught between disgust and elation. Victor Lippton. The top power player of them all.

  “We’re having a screening tomorrow night of Arnold’s new picture at the studio. I’d like you to come as my guest. You, too, Wilton…” Lippton hesitated. “And…”

  “Mel. Mel Brynner. We met at the party for Eva Marie.”

  “A lovely woman. Proof that our industry can produce and sustain first-rate people with balanced lives.” Victor Lippton had moved to Los Angeles only a few months before, after an entire young lifetime in the tobacco business, and had made his adoptive city and movies his primary connection, as though he had lived and worked there always. There was a formality to his speech, a studied grace to his proprietary effort at belonging, like Joseph Conrad’s writing in his second language what nobody else could in their first. “Too many of the people who have written about Hollywood have come at it with bitterness. They don’t see the heroes and heroines here. Your grandfather did.”

  “But then he was a dreamer and a drunk,” Kate said. “And he didn’t live here very long. So he didn’t really know the place that well.”

  “We’ll be at the screening,” Mel said quickly. “What time is it?”

  “Eight o’clock.” Victor smiled at Kate. “I’ll look forward.”

  * * *

  “How could you be so disrespectful,” Mel said, sitting down again, covering his face, as though he were grieving. He took his hands away. “Is that a way to talk about a grandfather? Calling him a drunk?”

  “Well, he was. And he wasn’t my grandfather.”

  “Look, kid.” He touched her shoulder. “Yesterday I couldn’t have gotten you a meeting at Cosmos with the twelve-year-olds they have running their development program. Today you got invited by the owner. Not the president. Not the CEO. The owner. We’re going to a screening at his studio. At his invitation.”