The Actress: A Novel (14 page)

Sometimes his mother could be a bad person; as a kid, he’d hear her screaming on the phone, and afterward she would say something innocuous about what she was making for dinner. She was like two different people.

“As second position, I have a question for you,” he said to Maddy on the phone. “I was talking to the casting director on
Freda Jansons
, and he said you hadn’t come in to read. I was surprised because it seemed right up your alley. They’ve been searching all over the country. Kira auditioned here. What happened? Did you not like the script?”

“I don’t know anything about it. I’ve never heard of it.” Her voice was tinny and afraid.

“It’s directed by Tim Heller, who did
Grande Dame
. The screenwriter, Erin Hedges, is going to be one of the top”—he started to say “woman” but stopped himself—“screenwriters in Hollywood in another year or so. It’s about an autistic scientist and her relationship with a little boy. Kind of a
Miracle Worker
set in the ’fifties. I couldn’t understand why you weren’t seen.”

“Maybe Bridget’s going to send it to me,” she offered.

“It’s already been cast. Lael Gordinier is Freda.”

“What? Well, maybe the problem was Nancy. Maybe she never got the script.”

“Nancy had to have gotten it. Everyone saw this.” It was exactly as he’d suspected. Bridget was withholding information from her own client. Representatives did it all the time, but not the ones who really cared.

“I’ll call Bridget,” Maddy said.

“Don’t tell her we spoke, okay?”

“Why? You don’t want her to know you’re trying to get me as a client?”

“No, I don’t want her to tell George. You see, I’m helping you, and the number one rule of agenting is ‘Don’t work for anyone who isn’t paying you.’ ”

It was a lie, of course. Bosses loved employees who wooed clients from rivals. But he wanted to make Maddy feel that he was putting himself out in order to call her. If she did, she might become loyal, and loyalty would get him halfway to his goal.

A
fter Maddy hung up, she couldn’t shake the jumpy feeling in her chest. She couldn’t fathom why Bridget hadn’t told her about such an important role. Wasn’t Bridget’s whole job to be her client’s eyes and ears?

She tried Nancy first. “What can I do for you, Maddy?” she asked. They had seen each other only a few times since Mile’s End; most of their interaction was by phone. Nancy had a well-modulated voice, like the ones you heard on yogurt commercials.

“What do you mean you never read it?” Nancy asked after Maddy told her.

“I just heard about it now, from a friend. Steven doesn’t like me reading the trades.”

“I sent it to Bridget, God, it must have been last month. I can look it up. She said you loved it, but it conflicted with
Husbandry
. I’m sorry for any miscommunication.” This was a classic Hollywood coping mechanism, Maddy had learned. CYA. Cover your ass. She couldn’t tell whether Nancy was being honest and it occurred to her that she might need a new agent. But before she could make a decision like switching agencies she needed to know what Bridget had to say.

“Honey, I didn’t send it because the shooting dates conflicted with your commitment to Walter’s film,” Bridget said.

“But maybe we could have figured it out. I mean, at least if I’d seen it.”

“Not really. You had signed the contract by the time I got the script.”

“Can’t contracts be broken?”

“No, it’s more difficult that you would think. Look, the last thing in the world I want is for you to dwell on this. There will always be projects you lose because you’re too busy. Hollywood history is made on the basis of who’s available when. Frank Sinatra almost played Dirty Harry. And Steve McQueen was going to be Butch Cassidy.”

“That makes me feel worse. Lael Gordinier might make history doing that role, and I didn’t get a chance to go in.”

“You’ll make history doing
Husbandry
.”

“Why did you lie to Nancy?”

“Huh?”

“Why did you tell Nancy I loved the script when you knew I hadn’t read it?”

Bridget had handled these situations before. The key was to be calm
and never admit you’d done something wrong. “Honey, I just didn’t want to get into it with her. I’m sorry. I was only trying to protect you from being disappointed. One thing you should understand is that you can’t be two places at once.”

“Don’t lie to my agent, Bridget. And don’t hide scripts from me. Are we clear?”

“Of course.”

Maddy hung up feeling uneasy. She wanted to trust Bridget, she had to, but this was not the kind of thing a manager was supposed to do. Especially not in the beginning. Bridget had encouraged her to do the psychological thriller and then
Jen,
and both had worked out well. Now she wasn’t sure she had an ally. She thought she heard a call coming in on the dashboard phone, but it was only a horn beeping from far away.

A
s she and Steven were lying in bed reading, she told him she’d heard “from a girl I see at auditions” that Tim Heller was casting a movie called
Freda Jansons
, and Bridget hadn’t sent her the script because her
Husbandry
contract was signed. “I thought a manager was supposed to relay all the phone calls,” Maddy said.

“Bridget knew you were booked,” he said. “I was with her when she got the call. She had the executed contracts in front of her.”

“Why couldn’t I delay?”

“We don’t want to hold up Walter. He’s taking a gamble on you. Delays can be more dangerous to the actor than the director.”

“You mean he would fire me, when he’s been trying to cast Ellie for a year?”

“Bridget’s not perfect,” he said. “We’ve had our conflicts, but don’t dwell on this. She only wants the best for you.” He closed the script he was reading, a much buzzed-about drama about the 1968 New York City teachers’ strike. “One thing you have to get used to is that it’s impossible to be two places at once.”

“That’s exactly what she said.”

W
hen Maddy walked into the restaurant in West Hollywood, for a moment she didn’t recognize him. The man waiting for her at the table was so tan and muscular, his hair grown out, his biceps visible in his T-shirt, that she thought he was an actor. But then he waved eagerly, and she realized it was Dan. As they hugged, she said, “You look fantastic.”

He had called to ask her to breakfast, saying he wanted to catch up. “Thanks,” he said. “This climate’s actually good for me, despite everything I thought about L.A. before.”

“So what have you been doing to get this buff?” she asked.

“Well, surfing.”

“You? Surfing?”

“I know. I go to San Onofre. I have all these new buddies. I feel like, if I made the choice to live here, I should take advantage of the the water and get in shape.”

She thought about her own nascent L.A. social life—Ananda McCarthy’s friends, mostly ex-models and ex-actresses. All of them had used their looks and sexuality to get money, jobs, or men. Most were housewives, with full-time nannies. Maddy felt young around them and bored by their anecdotes. She wondered if Dan’s surfing buddies were real friends.

“You look like you’ve lost weight,” he said. “Please don’t tell me you’ve been dieting.” Through yoga and swimming, Maddy had dropped from a size ten to a size six. “Just eating better. I want to be a little smaller for
Husbandry
.”

“Don’t get too small.”

They ordered food, and before it came, he reached for her hand on the table. “Mad,” he said. “I’m sorry about those emails I sent when you were in Venice.”

“It’s okay. It was sudden. You were angry. You don’t have to apologize.” Delicately, she moved her hand away, not wanting there to be any ambiguity. This was a friendly coffee, not a relapse date. Since Catalina, she and Steven had been making love at least once a day, even on nights when they came home late from events. She had decided that the key to her happiness was to trust him and give him his space. When she did that, he was not only warmer but hornier, which made her more confident and certain of his love.

“I want you to know that I forgive you,” Dan said.

“Uh-oh,” she said with a smile. “Did you join A.A.? Are you doing the steps?”

“No, but I started therapy. I’ve been seeing a female shrink who’s helped me a lot.”

Watching her swirl her spoon in her coffee, Dan couldn’t believe how much he had hated her once. For months he had been furious, convinced that she was a sellout. In his bleaker moments, he had told himself the online rumors were true: She had been offered a contract to become Weller’s wife and draw attention away from the fact that he was gay: $1 million a year, with a five-year minimum and a $1 million bonus for each baby.

But even if he believed such contracts existed, he couldn’t believe that Maddy would agree to such a thing. She had too much pride. And too much craft, as she would call it. She never would take money to be a prop.

More recently, he had come over to the less interesting, more depressing version of the story, the one that Rachel favored: Steven was straight and Maddy loved him but had subconsciously chosen him because he could help her career. Dan couldn’t blame her. On the screen, she was a natural. He had been a yutz for not casting her in one of his films before. He had told himself it would harm their relationship to collaborate—but it was mainly a cover for his fear. He had been afraid that if he put her in a movie, she would overshadow him.

If Maddy was with Steven for her career, then she was no more cynical than most people he had met in L.A. Everyone in the entertainment industry was an opportunist; they all just had different standards for how far they would go. He was an opportunist for taking the directing job in Sofia, and for dating Rachel Huber—even though the sex was only so-so, and she was too svelte for his taste—because he felt she could get him more jobs with Worldwide Films.

“Anyway,” Dan continued, “I spent all this time being angry with you. But now I understand that . . . we love who we love.”

“That’s true,” she said.

The food came—she got a spinach-and-goat-cheese omelet and he got oatmeal, both of them so healthy now—and they talked about her recent
acting jobs. He said she’d been right about
The Valentine
being a bad script, but he expected it to do well at the box office because of its stars. He was renting in Venice Beach and doing the color correction on
I Used to Know Her,
and he said it was going to be really good when it came out. “But honestly,” he said, “even if all it does is earn back the advance, I’ll be fine with that. Even if it plays a couple weeks, then dies.”

She was surprised to hear him say this. The movie had been his heart and soul, and now he didn’t care how it did? “You don’t want it to die,” she said.

“No, I want you to get good reviews. And Kira. But I’ve moved on from it. It was a stepping-stone. Now I’m ready for studio jobs.”

This was the opposite of the Dan Ellenberg she once knew. “You don’t want to alternate—one for you, one for them, one for you?”

“It’s funny you should say that. I’ve been thinking about
The Nest
lately.”

“Are you working on it by yourself?” She hadn’t thought about the script in months. The part of her that had written
I Used to Know Her
with Dan seemed so young. When she remembered writing it, she had to think about the breakup, which made her feel guilty.

“Sort of. I showed it to this screenwriter buddy of mine. His name’s Oded Zalinsky. He wrote
Hazing
.” He coughed a little into his napkin. “And
Butterface
.”

Maddy had not seen either one, but the posters had been enough for her. They were misogynistic screeds about idiotic horndogs. “Why would you show
The Nest
to Oded Zalinsky? It’s a subtle, feminist, character comedy.”

“He was over at my place, and I mentioned the script, and he said he wanted to read it. He went crazy for it. I mean, he was so impressed by what we came up with. The idea of a girl who loves her parents more than she loves her boyfriend. So he and I were just riffing, kind of spitballing, and we reconceived it as a more adult comedy. A relationship comedy. With a male lead instead of female. He wants to collaborate with me on it, cowrite it, because he already has a vision for how he would direct it. But because you and I had started working on it together . . . um. It’s a little complicated.” He took something out of his jeans pocket and handed it to her.

“What is this?”

“Kind of a release. Basically, it says that for a small consideration, you’ll let me do whatever I want with
The Nest
.”

“I don’t understand.” She scanned the page. She saw the phrases “all of my rights of every kind throughout the universe in and to the Work” and “sum of one dollar.” She lifted her head slowly. “You want me to give up my rights to
The Nest
for a dollar?”

“Well.” He coughed again. “It sounds like you’re focusing more on acting these days, and there’s no use having those pages just sit there. I didn’t think you’d care about the money since, you know . . . Steven . . . This way Oded and I can take the grain of the story, the concept, and develop something new from it, without having to worry if you’ll—”

“Sue you?” So this was what their friendly breakfast was all about. It was sneaky to do it here, one-on-one, instead of through her manager or lawyer. Dan had been trying to appeal to her nostalgia, her affection for him, all to get her to give up her intellectual property.

She had a copy of
The Nest
on her laptop but never looked at it. If he had rewritten it without consulting her and the movie had come out, she wouldn’t have sued; at least she didn’t think so. But he had played his hand. Dan had always been a terrible businessman.

“I have to show this to my attorney,” she said.

“Oh, sure,” he said, swallowing some water. “No problem.”

“And I’m sure he’s going to say no way.”

Dan nodded and chewed his lip, which he always did when he was chagrined. She’d been feeling generous toward him, like maybe he still understood her, but he’d just wanted something for nothing. For a buck.