Flavor of the Month

by Olivia Goldsmith

  “I said, ‘Who are those people who just came in?’” Bethanie knew she couldn’t afford to whine, but she almost was. After being dumped by that bastard Sam Shields, she had no intention of letting Marty get away. She knew the rule of Hollywood survival—“Fuck upward.” Only someone as powerful as Marty could afford to fuck someone beneath him. She and Sam, just breaking through, needed more powerful partners, like Crystal Plenum and Marty DiGennaro. What she didn’t need was competition from this Amazon.

  “Why don’t I introduce you?” Marty stood, extended his hand to Paul, and kept looking at the young woman who reminded him of someone. “Paul, good to see you. This is Bethanie Lake, Paul Grasso. He’s one of my oldest friends.”

  Paul’s handshake was vigorous, his good mood apparent. “Marty DiGennaro, Lila, and Bethanie…Lake, right?”

  “Yes,” Bethanie answered, but her displeasure was evident in the way she bit the word off. Shit! Who needed a bitch who looked like this one sitting across from Marty all night? she asked herself. Why was she so unlucky?

  The maître d’ had pulled out the chair for Lila opposite Marty, and she smoothly slid into it.

  “I have to apologize for making Paul late, Mr. DiGennaro.” She turned her eyes to Bethanie, then Marty, and smiled.

  “Marty. Please call me Marty, Lila. And it’s very nice of you to take the responsibility for Paul’s lateness. Except I expect him to be late.” Looking at Paul, smiling, he added, “Paul and I go back a long time.”

  Marty noticed Lila looking intently at Bethanie, who was now sitting up stiffly on the banquette. “Bethanie Lake. Didn’t you create the role of Leora in Houston last season?” Bethanie nodded, perhaps a bit defensively. “You left that show just in time,” Lila continued. “After that, the writing went downhill.”

  Marty noticed Bethanie relax slightly beside him, but he kept his eyes on Lila. In fact, he couldn’t take them off her. Gracious, very gracious, he thought. Everyone knew that it was the stupidest move Bethanie could have made, to leave a successful TV series to try to do a mediocre movie that fell apart. Her agent and manager tried to talk her out of it, advising her to wait another year. But she wouldn’t listen. A standard case of biting off more than you can chew. Bethanie wasn’t ready, and it had really fucked up her career. Unless he gave her another shot. As he looked at the divine redhead, he suspected Lila knew that, too.

  Marty forced himself to speak. “I’ve ordered a California merlot, if that’s okay with everyone,” he told them, as the waiter poured.

  Lila held her hand over her glass. “Actually, I’d prefer a Manhattan, if it’s all the same to you.” She turned to the waiter and said, “Straight up, with a twist,” then dropped her eyes and snapped her purse open. Marty nodded to the waiter, then noticed the cigarette Lila held to her bow-shaped lips in the long fingers of her left hand. Nobody smoked in California anymore! She was a trip. He immediately pulled out his rarely-used Dunhill lighter, and beat the waiter’s hand to Lila’s cigarette.

  She inhaled deeply, holding her cigarette hand straight up with its elbow cupped in her other. Where had he seen that gesture? God, it was driving him nuts! She raised her face to the ceiling and released a long, slow stream of white smoke, then dropped her head and stated to no one in particular, “I hope no one minds if I smoke.”

  He knew her, he was sure he knew her. Her gestures, her voice. It was maddening really, the familiarity of her, mixed with the utter strangeness. Yet how would he have forgotten her? He hated to stoop to the oldest line in the book, but he felt compelled. “I seem to know you from somewhere,” Marty said, “but have we met before? You look very familiar.”

  Bethanie, her wineglass to her lips, choked, put down the glass, nearly spilling it, and coughed to clear her throat.

  “Something tough to swallow?” Paul asked her, and gave her a smack on her back.

  Lila smiled, raised her lovely brows at Marty, allowing the gesture to speak for itself. “Westlake School for Girls?” she asked. She looked away as if bored. “No, I’m sorry to say. We’ve never met.” Then, looking back at him, she added, as if she had almost forgotten her manners, “But you’re very nice to ask.” Oh, Christ, Marty thought wryly, you can take the nerd out to Hollywood but…He watched her as she sipped her drink, holding the glass by its stem. It accentuated the length of her fingers, and he felt a tingle in his groin at the thought of those same fingers wrapped around another stem. But he was still perplexed.

  “Do you act? I’m sure I’ve seen you in something.” She was just so familiar…yet so distinctive.

  “The one thing I do not do is act. My mother tried to push me into the business, but I won.”

  “Hey, I thought we weren’t talking business tonight, gumba,” Paul reminded Marty. He picked up his menu. “So, Beth, what’s good?”

  Bethanie looked away, but only for a moment, from Marty and Lila. She knew she couldn’t afford to. Marty studied Lila some more, ignoring both Paul and Bethanie. “What did your mother do, Lila?”

  “About what?” she purred.

  He laughed. He was enjoying this woman, and he could see that she seemed to make Paul more like his old self. Only Bethanie was definitely not at ease tonight. She was way out of her league. Well, he thought, almost sympathetically, she was losing the chance of a lifetime. That could make anyone uneasy.

  Marty smiled at Lila, and returned the conversational ball over the net. “About life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And about a paycheck—or perhaps she was born rich?”

  “She was born poor and made herself rich. And I was born rich and intend to stay that way. I just haven’t yet figured out a way to do it. My mother had talent. I just resemble her.” With a dip of her head, she indicated to the waiter she wanted a refill. Marty marveled at the familiarity of the gesture, sinuous, almost dramatic, yet still natural. Lila looked at him. “Now, you were born poor and became rich, and Paul was born poor and became rich, and then poor, and then rich again,” she said, poking Paul gently in his side. She laughed, the noise a deep purr.

  “You could act, Lila, I keep telling you,” Paul said. “Your mother wasn’t wrong about everything, remember? I knew her when. You’re just like her. Even when she was on the balls of her ass, I had to sell roles to her harder than I had to sell her to the producers.”

  Then the light dawned. Of course! The resemblance was there, not only to her mother but to her fabulous father, too, a guy who had always been too beautiful to be a man. Marty smiled, placed his wineglass on the table, and said, “Theresa O’Donnell’s daughter.” He was almost embarrassed, but it would have been a lot easier if Lila had cooperated. She obviously was not the typical “my mom’s a star” kid.

  “I’d prefer that people say she’s Lila Kyle’s mother, but I haven’t yet figured out how to make that happen. Anyway, I’m Kerry Kyle’s daughter, too.” Looking around the table, she said to no one in particular, “I’m famished. Would someone slaughter me a fatted calf?”

  “Days and Knights, 1949,” Marty said. It was a great old line from Theresa’s first movie. She’d played a vaudeville hoofer.

  “Nineteen forty-eight,” Lila corrected. “But how did you know that? It’s a little obscure for someone who’s as current as yourself.” He saw the surprise in Lila’s face.

  “It was shot in 1948, but it wasn’t released until 1949.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Lila said, obviously impressed.

  “And I believe it was in that movie that she first met Kerry Kyle.” He watched Lila sit back in her chair, her surprise growing. Picking up the menu, he looked over the selections and said, “‘I believe there are no more calves, my dear. Would a thigh do?’”

  Lila’s small shriek of delight pleased him. He knew not only Theresa’s line, but also Kerry Kyle’s response. Now Lila leaned over the table, took his face in both her hands, and kissed him on the forehead. The skin where she had brushed it tingled. “Oh, thank you!” she cried. Bethanie made a noise that
sounded to Marty like a snort.

  “I used to watch it whenever it came on television,” Lila was saying. “It’s how I got to know my father. He died when I was little. And I watched all my mother’s films, over and over. I think it made me miss her less when she was away. But how do you know those lines?”

  The waiter, who had been discreetly standing at the table for some time, finally cleared his throat. They ordered, the appetizers were served, and they ate and chatted. Or, rather, they ate while he chatted. About every film, about the fifties and sixties in Hollywood. Marty finally paused as their meals were placed before them. “It’s sad, you know, that that era has passed. But I’m so grateful that I have some of the original prints from those times.” He chewed and thought for a moment more. “Ted Turner, of course, should be horsewhipped.”

  Paul, who was never very interested in anything except gambling—who was playing the main rooms in Vegas, and how could he make some fast money—asked, “Why, what did Ted Turner ever do to you?”

  Lila became indignant. “Ted Turner took Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and had someone change the color to green!”

  “So what?” Paul shrugged. Marty looked at him and shuddered. Watching Paul eat was a lot like watching a horror movie: you wanted to cover your eyes, but you couldn’t look away. Marty tried to explain. “Eh, gumba, what Lila means is, you don’t change a work of art once it’s been created. Turner is taking hundreds of classic black-and-white films and putting color into them with the use of computers. That’s batz, capisce?”

  “Yeah, sure, Marty; okay, it’s crazy. But, you know, I’m not so sure. I can’t remember wanting to watch too many black-and-white movies lately. Shadows and Fog didn’t pack ’em in.”

  Marty and Lila laughed. Bethanie jumped in to join them. But her laugh sounded more like a death rattle, Marty thought. He could feel her urgency to join the conversation somehow.

  “So, Lila, what was it like growing up the child of Theresa O’Donnell and Kerry Kyle?” Bethanie asked. “You must have received a lot of special treatment.”

  “Well, to be honest, when I was a kid, I didn’t think I was different from anyone else, really. I was alone a lot. And when I was old enough to go to school, I was going to school with other kids like myself—you know, Tori Spelling, the Nelson boys, Cary Grant’s daughter—so I still was like everyone else.” Marty watched Lila break a roll in half and butter a small piece.

  “High school was the same. Well, not really; by then I was reading more about life outside the Hollywood ghetto, but, still, none of it seemed very real to me. I guess I was too sheltered,” she said, and nibbled at the roll. “But I also took a lot for granted. I do remember a couple of really exciting times.” Marty saw her look around the table to be sure everyone really was interested. “Once, Uncle Cary played Santa at my house and I sat on his lap. I knew immediately he was Cary Grant. My mother had every one of his movies at home, and every movie magazine had pictures and stories of Cary Grant. He had silver hair, he wasn’t young anymore, but he was still gorgeous. Still, I was so disappointed, because in that role I wanted the real thing, not any old actor. I cried and said, ‘You’re not Santa Claus, you’re just Uncle Cary.’ I got off his lap and wouldn’t return. I couldn’t understand then why all the women laughed so hard.”

  Bethanie said it for everybody. “Cary Grant came to your house and played Santa Claus for you?” After a pause, however, she laughed a forced, throaty laugh, said, “Oh, come on, Lila,” then took a dismissive sip of her drink.

  Lila appeared almost embarrassed, her translucent white skin momentarily flushed pink. Her beauty was not lost on Marty’s professional eye; for most of the evening, he had been looking at her as if through a camera’s lens. She’s more beautiful than her mother, has the eyes of her father, skin like Merle Oberon, a voice like Lauren Bacall, and the body of Ann-Margret, except taller. What a package!

  Lila shrugged one shoulder. It was an elegant movement. “That’s what happens when I talk about my childhood. People get jealous.”

  Bethanie suddenly wasn’t laughing. “Jealous? I’m not jealous. I just don’t believe you. I can’t picture Cary Grant putting on a Santa Claus beard and having some snotty Beverly Hills kid sit on his knee. Why would Cary Grant do that?”

  “Because he wanted to fuck my mother. And that was the deal,” Lila said. “Anyway, that wasn’t so much. When one of the Mankiewicz kids locked himself in the bathroom, they got the Three Stooges to do a show on the lawn so he’d come out. Of course, they worked cheap by then.”

  Marty gave up on Bethanie at that moment. He found himself staring intently at Lila. What he saw was more than beauty. She had poise, intelligence, and—instinct told him—talent. Plus a face that could move through a camera lens and be welcomed in every living room in America. And every bedroom. He wondered if she and Paul had set him up for this, with the reluctant-virgin bullshit. But what if they had? Selznick had never complained when his brother shlepped Vivien Leigh over the night that shooting for Gone With the Wind began. Marty could take a lucky break however it came. “Lila, I think Paul’s right. I’d suggest you think seriously about acting on TV.”

  “But TV is crap,” she said.

  “Not when I do it.”

  “You don’t do TV.”

  “I do now. And I’m going to change it for all time.”

  Marty watched as Lila, keeping her eyes on his face, put down her fork and stared. Finally, she spoke. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  “No, I’m not. And in fact, if you give me a call tomorrow, I might even have an idea for you.”

  Lila put her hand to her throat and tilted her head back, letting her long, red hair cascade over the back of the chair. She seemed to be searching the ceiling of Spago for words.

  Paul Grasso, quiet too long, said, “For chrissakes, Lila, just say Thank you, Mr. DiGennaro’ and then kiss my ass for taking you out to dinner.”

  Lila smiled and said, “Thank you, Marty. I’ll give you my number.” Then she turned to Paul Grasso. “But it’s a little too soon for any ass-kissing, Paul. After all, I haven’t even had dessert yet.”

  13

  After the Jack and Jill wrap party, Sam Shields drove home from the studio alone. He was exultant, because he knew the picture in the can was good, and had the potential to be great. He had the wonderful feeling of all creators when they look upon their work and find it good. His words had been made flesh, and the flesh was delicious.

  Of course, it hadn’t been accomplished without a certain amount of pain and suffering. And compromise. Well, that was appropriate for a work titled Jack and Jill and Compromise, he told himself. All of life was a compromise, after all. Wasn’t that the home truth he was trying to express? And also trying to live?

  For a moment, only for a moment, he thought of Mary Jane Moran’s transfiguring performance as Jill. Filming the part she had created had brought her image back to him over and over again. There had been times in New York when he had felt that her face, her plain muffin of a face, had actually lit the stage. Well, he had managed to coax a good performance out of Crystal Plenum. It might not be as intense, as sensitive as Mary Jane’s, but it was good. Crystal had never worked as a stage actress; it was only now that she was in her thirties and off a long string of ingenue roles in films that she wanted to try acting. And, Sam told himself proudly, he had gotten her to act.

  He smiled as he drove the BMW onto the expressway. Even now, months later, when he was a soon-to-be-successful director, he was surprised that he, Sam Shields, was sleeping with a movie star. Crystal Plenum.

  And, he had to admit, it was a thrill to look down at that perfectly exquisite face as he made love to her. It was a face he had already seen in ecstasy on the screen as Mel Gibson, Warren Beatty, Kevin Costner, and other stars had made love to her. Now he was doing it in real life. Her silken skin, her perfect breasts, her long legs—all for him. It certainly enhanced his pleasure, knowing that she was probably one of t
he three most beautiful, most desired stars in the country, maybe in the world. And he possessed her.

  He possessed her and her image in the cans of film. Immortality in tin. There was still so much to do, and to learn. There was the cutting and editing, the soundtrack had to be laid down, the final looping done. Even the credits had to be designed and laid in. And it would be a lot easier to learn the next batch of tricks of the trade without the entire cast and crew as his audience. From now until release date, he and a handful of pros would work without witnesses to any foolish question he asked or mistake he made.

  And then—the release. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the rearview mirror, and the stupid smile of triumph was still on his face. Well, why not? He had done well, and he was almost sure he’d get another shot at directing. For a moment, he felt a small shiver of anxiety tarnish his day: he had no other vehicle that he felt he could sell as a film.

  The fact that he hadn’t written a word since he came out to L.A. shouldn’t worry him. After all, working on Jack and Jill had been a full-time job. But the idea of finishing this film and retiring to a quiet corner of his rented house and writing alone for a year did not excite him. Well, he’d cross that bridge later. Meanwhile, he had a triumph to prepare for.

  And he had to admit that showing the film to his mother and father would be a sweet part of it. They had never been much interested in his stage career: to them, theatrical success meant Broadway. Now they were impressed. He’d had them flown up from Florida for a week during the shoot. They’d stayed at his Laurel Canyon house, swum in his pool, come down to the studio, watched him direct on the soundstage. His mother, perfect and immaculate as ever, still more than pretty despite her age and the toll that drinking took, surveyed it all coolly. He longed for some warmth, some sign of approval: a hug, a kiss, a loving look. Finally, at the airport, his mother had looked up at him with tears in her eyes and a tremor in her voice and said, “You’re not like your father.” It was hardly an embrace, but Sam took it as a benediction.