by Joe Keenan
Max and Maddie arrived to the delight of Gilbert, who, aping Moira’s strategy vis-à-vis Stephen, pinned himself to Max like a wrist corsage. He then passed the night happily chatting up the A-list, all of whom were duly apprised of his pivotal role in bringing the happy honorees together.
If Max was disgruntled at having been strong-armed into a deal permitting Stephen and his newbie partner to greenlight three pictures a year, he betrayed no sign of it. And Maddie was even more ebullient than usual, delighted by her former daughter-in-law’s sudden but no doubt well-deserved success. I overheard her gushing to Stephen, who was standing with his new Siamese twin in a group that included his mom, Bobby, and George Clooney.
“Boy, ain’t life something! First my Gilbert comes out here and writes a script so good Bobby Spellman hires him to write one for you guys. Then he introduces you to Moira and bang, just like that you’re partners!”
“Astounding,” agreed Stephen.
“I’m so happy Moira and Gilbert have stayed friends. They used to be married, you know. They were nuts about each other but one day Gilbert woke up and realized he was gay. Kinda sticky, ain’t it, when the man doesn’t figure that out till after he’s married?”
Diana turned her sympathetic gaze to Moira.
“How immensely trying that must have been.”
“It was, Diana,” said Moira, with a stoic little smile. “But all that really mattered to me was that Gilbert be happy.”
“How teddibly generous of you.”
I have in the course of this account displayed a certain cattiness regarding Diana’s dramatic abilities. But her performance at the Finch/Donato launch party convinced me that, the occasional flight of hamminess aside, she is the greatest American actress of her generation. Stephen, faced with a similar challenge, acquitted himself competently but could not entirely subdue a certain manic quality that those who noted it ascribed (accurately enough) to Oscar jitters. But Diana’s fears for her son and passionate loathing of Moira were completely undetectable beneath her amiable and gracious veneer. It is no small task to clutch a viper to your bosom all night while pretending it’s a puppy, but Diana pulled it off with remarkable aplomb.
BENEATH THE WAVES OF admiration on which Moira happily surfed that evening there ran an undercurrent of gossipy speculation as to why Stephen had hitched his wagon to a woman of such limited experience. Some smelled an affair, a theory bolstered by Gina, whose anxious glances at the new partners inspired many a whispered comment. There were, however, a number of gentlemen present who more accurately surmised why Stephen now found himself yoked to Moira. These men, many with wives in tow, had been to Les Étoiles before and sampled its more furtive pleasures. They gathered in corners, exchanging looks both knowing and leery, for if Moira had stung Stephen, might she not do the same to them? In the days that followed, most of these skittish fellows wisely kept their counsel. A few though could not resist airing their suspicions, and when word of this reached Moira they received photographic reminders that discretion was its own reward.
MONTY, OF COURSE, knew what was what the instant he read the LA Times’ coverage of the party.
“Blackmail, plain and simple,” he declared as we waited for Lily to stir herself. “My emotions, I confess, are mixed. On the one hand it saddens me to see that a woman I’d admired and trusted to uphold the madam’s sacred code has betrayed it so basely. And for what? A movie deal! Common, I call it.
“On the other hand, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow. Don’t mistake me—I love Stephen as a dutiful uncle should, but his ego’s gotten quite out of hand lately. His head, always a tad swollen, has taken on the proportions of a zeppelin. It’s good to see him brought to heel now and then. Builds his character. Be frank, Glen — did Moira confide her nefarious scheme to you?”
“No! Never! And I don’t work for her anymore. She fired me.”
“Ah,” he said, eyebrows levitating. “So the rumors are true?”
“Rumors?”
He explained that an acquaintance of his had recently visited Les Étoiles and requested the services of Hans. He was informed that Hans no longer worked there. Requests for Adrian, Rudolfo, Sven, and Horst met with the same response.
“She’s fired the lot of you. She’s gotten what she wanted and now she’s gone respectable.”
It was the first I’d heard that cock was off the menu at Les Étoiles, but it certainly made sense. Having achieved her dream of mogulhood, why would Moira jeopardize it by continuing to peddle boys on the side, risking arrest while giving new customers cause to intuit the roots of her partnership with Stephen? Far better to close shop and let the whole enterprise fade into oblivion. Tongues might wag for a while, but the story would eventually recede into legend. In time it would be just another showbiz myth, one laughed away as easily as that of the gerbil once said to have met its maker in Richard Gere’s bottom.
“Hang on,” said Monty, suddenly brightening. “If Moira’s let you go, mightn’t that free you up to spend more time on Lily’s book?”
“Uh, perhaps,” I said.
There was, in fact, no reason I could not now devote myself full-time to Lily, Moira having informed me and Gilbert that we weren’t to start our next draft till she’d hired a director and received his input. I’d looked forward to having my afternoons free, but I realized that more time with Lily meant more time to convince her not to expose Stephen. As success in this seemed my sole hope of regaining his affection, I leaped at the chance.
Lily was elated to hear she could henceforth have me all to herself and even cheerily consented to my proviso that we limit ourselves to one glass of wine with lunch so as not to impede our afternoon progress. “Elated” seemed, in fact, to be Lily’s default mood during those brief tranquil days before the Showbiz Gods, reviewing my case file, returned it to the Downfall Department with a Post-it attached reading, “Sad, yes, but tragic? Try again. Cf. Oedipus.”
She was delighted with the results of her face-lift, chemical peel, and Botox injections, which had indeed shaved a decade off her appearance. They’d done so, unfortunately, at the cost of permanently raised eyebrows and badly decreased lip mobility, the combined effect suggesting a startled ventriloquist. She was atwitter too over the forthcoming release of Guess What, I’m Not Dead and the critical bouquets she felt certain it would win her. The only thing that marred her consistently fizzy mood was my persistent harping over the question of outing Stephen.
Having failed with the argument that to do so risked eclipsing her own story, I changed tactics, saying it risked making her seem cruel and spiteful.
“Spiteful? Oh, no, I don’t think so, Glen. If anyone comes off as spiteful, it’s Diana. She’s the one who hit the ceiling when she found out about Stephen and his friend. She’s the one who said, ‘You get over this gay business right now, young man, if you want any sort of career!’ I was the one who accepted him as he was and bought him Bette Midler tickets.”
I next tried arguing that the gay stories would not be worth the legal fracas they’d inevitably provoke.
“You know he’ll claim its libel,” I said as we diced avocados for our lunchtime Cobb. “What if he gets an injunction to keep you from publishing? The book could wind up in limbo for years. Think of your fans!”
I’d felt certain this would unnerve her, but her response was well to the left of fiddle-dee-dee.
“It’s not libel if it’s true, Glen. And it is. I can prove it. It’s all in here,” she said, lovingly patting the diary she’d kept twenty years ago. “All written down long before he was a big star. Let him argue with that! Now set the table, dear, while I pour my one glass of wine. What a taskmaster you are!” she said, emptying half a bottle of Chablis into a soda tumbler.
That afternoon we reached the point in her memoir where she discovers Stephen in flagrante with his tennis coach, the aptly named Randy. Lily recounted it with gusto, throwing in juicy details I hadn’t heard before. My stomach churned like
a LAVA lamp as I typed up the results and e-mailed them to Stephen, asking whether I should send the day’s output, per usual, to Sonia and Diana or provide them a doctored version. He phoned almost immediately. His tone frosty and commanding, he instructed me to inform Sonia that Lily had the flu and we wouldn’t be working this week. He then asked me to meet him at midnight on a scenic outlook on Mulholland Drive.
I arrived early to find him already there. I parked, then joined him in the front seat of his Lamborghini. At first he said nothing. He just stared into the Valley with the tight-lipped brooding air one would expect to see in an action star whose aunt has just laid bare the full scope and tumult of his first gay affair. (“He didn’t molest me! He’s my boyfriend! Will you close the damn door?! ”) The acrid silence lengthened uncomfortably, then he finally spoke.
“You’ve let me down, Phil,” he said, not looking at me. “I was counting on you to take care of this.”
“I’m so sorry,” I bleated, then outlined the strategies I’d employed, including the threat of legal action. “She says it’s not libel, that she can back it all up with this damn diary she kept back then.”
He turned to me, his gaze icy and penetrating.
“Steal it.”
My eyes bugged like those of a Tex Avery wolf who’s just spotted a pinup girl.
“Her diary? ”
“All of it. You can still fix this, Phil. Just take her diary, every copy of what you’ve written so far, plus the notes, scrapbooks, photos— everything. I want her back to square one with nothing to back up a word she says. Then Glen will disappear. With any luck she’ll be so discouraged she’ll quit. But if she doesn’t I’ll sue her ass off and she’ll have nothing to fight back with.”
I could only stare openmouthed, stunned by the enormity of what he was proposing. I had, in the pursuit of romance, pulled some pretty low stunts before, but nothing like this, an act of such black treachery that Moira herself, hearing of it, would shed proud tears like a parent on graduation day. Stephen, sensing my reluctance, put his hand on my thigh and stared even more deeply into my eyes.
“I’m fighting for my life here, Phil. You’re the only one who can help me.”
“Gosh, Stephen, I know how you feel about her writing this, and how you’d prefer to come out someday in your own book —”
“Hmm? Oh, right. That too.”
“But to steal an old woman’s memories —!”
His hand tightened its grip on my thigh and inched north toward the capitol.
“It’s the only way. Be a buddy, Phil. I need a buddy right now.”
As I stared, torn, into his sad, beautiful face, a single tear welled in the corner of his left eye. Seeing it, I winced in gentle sympathy and he kissed me. The kiss tasted lightly of scotch and I knew even as his lips pressed against mine that he was performing a sort of reverse resuscitation, not forcing air in through the mouth but sucking scruples out through it.
“Mmm... nice,” he murmured, savoring the taste of my last qualm. “So you’ll do it?”
“Absolutely!”
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?!”
“I’ll come by your place about seven. I’ll bring a joint. We’ll celebrate.”
“Tomorrow it is!” I said and, grabbing his crotch, greedily kissed him again. In the language of Hollywood contracts, this is known as a signing bonus.
NOTHING IN THIS ACCOUNT pains me as much to confess to you as the cold-bloodedness with which I perpetrated my despicable crime against Lily. Following a cheerful and productive morning, I suggested that in lieu of our usual positively Mormon glass of Chablis, we toast our progress with a pitcher of that yummy lemonade she so favored.
Lily thought this a capital idea and whipped one up. We enjoyed it with our salads as Lily chatted away about the dress she’d bought for her premiere and the state of Martin Scorsese’s health, the latter concern prompted by his failure to get back to her about the Amelia script.
“That was refreshing,” I said as we finished the pitcher. “Another?”
Lily said, “Aren’t we naughty!” and something else I didn’t catch as she was already in the kitchen. Two hours later Lily, having consumed most of the third pitcher, fell into a doze on the living room sofa. Tiptoeing about like her personal Grinch, I packed up my laptop, then collected her notes, diaries, and scrapbooks, the printed copy with her scrawled revisions, and a photo album with pictures of young Stephen and Randy. I loaded it all into a shopping bag and, casting a final pained glance at my slumbering victim, crept perfidiously away.
I SPOKE A WHILE back about lust’s efficacy as a guilt suppressant. At the time I’d had only my dirty daydreams of Stephen to distract me. Now I had actual porn, which, as studies have shown, is 80 percent more effective. As soon as I’d stashed the shopping bag in the kitchen closet, I hastened to fetch my precious DVD from its hiding place and popped it into my laptop.
Though I’d played it dozens of times and never tired of it, I’d always felt a twinge of melancholy when watching my own scene, since the encounter, however sizzling, seemed to represent both the beginning and end of my romance with Stephen. How thrilling it was to view it now as more of a trailer—coming attractions, so to speak, for delights still to be savored. Somewhere in my third viewing I was startled to hear a knock on the door. I checked my watch and saw that it was six forty-five. My beloved was early! It would not, of course, have done for him to see what I’d been watching, so I hastily closed the laptop and stowed it on the coffee table’s lower shelf. I primped briefly in the foyer mirror, then, flinging open the door, saw that my caller was not Stephen at all.
“Monty!”
“What the hell, please, happened today?” he demanded hotly. “I just left Lily, who’s in a state of complete hysteria!”
“Over what?” I asked, opting for confused innocence with Gilbertian swiftness.
“The book’s gone! Her only copy! Not to mention her notes, her diaries, everything!”
I gasped like a Wes Craven heroine. “My God! Who could have taken them?!”
“I was hoping you’d know. You were there today.”
“I don’t know a thing! Lily dozed off so I went home. When I left it was all still on the — wait a minute!”
“What?!”
I said that on leaving I’d noticed a black sedan parked across the street with a man at the wheel, reading a newspaper. “Gosh, you don’t suppose Sonia sent her goons in!”
“Well someone’s goons were certainly there! Poor Lily’s sobbing her eyes out and I’m not feeling too well myself. My tummy’s in a dreadful uproar. I don’t suppose you have any antacids about?”
“Sure,” I said, glancing anxiously at the hall clock. It was imperative that Monty leave before Stephen arrived. “Hang on,” I said and dashed upstairs to the master bath.
It is, of course, axiomatic that the more urgently one needs to complete a task swiftly the more circumstances and one’s own nervous fumbling conspire to draw things out. It took me two minutes to locate a linty roll of Tums and convey it to Monty. I found the poor old boy sitting on the foyer bench, literally panting with anxiety. It pained me to see him in such a state, know that I was the cause of it, and still have to give him the bum’s rush. But what’s a treacherous mole to do?
“Here you go. Look, I’m really sorry about this but I’ve got a... well, a client due really soon, so —”
“Yes, of course. I should be getting back to Lily as it is.”
Stephen arrived five minutes later, displaying a promptness rare among megastars and unheard of in the nominee class. He’d clearly popped an extra sexy pill that morning. He wore snug jeans, a black leather jacket, plus a two-day growth of beard and, had he brought a stethoscope along, would have found my heartbeat indistinguishable from Gene Krupa’s drum solo in “Sing, Sing, Sing.”
“So you do it, big guy?”
I smiled roguishly. “I don’t let a man down when he asks me so nicely.”
/> We retired to the kitchen, where he inspected the merchandise, lingering over the photos of him and Randy.
“You sure this is all of it?”
I said I was and that Monty’s visit had confirmed it. For a moment I feared that, having gotten what he wanted, he’d renege on his promised tryst. Fortunately for me, recent events had made him risk-averse and hustlers were the new carbohydrates. His needs had gone unmet for several weeks and he was disinclined as such to pass up any trustworthy penis on offer. He asked me for a shoulder rub and as I obliged, he lit a joint, took a long drag, and passed it to me.
Having already yodeled at length over our first dalliance I’ll refrain from any chest-thumping over the second, which did not differ greatly. True, it was nice having an actual bed and Stephen seemed a bit bossier this time, but I didn’t mind as I was eager to prove I could take direction.
The only thing that marred my complete bliss (excepting, of course, the treachery that had secured it) was Stephen’s firm insistence that it remain entirely our secret. When one has the good fortune to bed a megastar, one’s natural impulse is to tell people afterward. Hell, had Stephen permitted me I’d have told people during it, phoning friends at random to say, “Hey, guess where my penis is!” Still, forfeiting bragging rights is a small price to pay to have a stunning Best Actor nominee writhe beneath you, loudly insisting you play with his nipples.
When we’d finished, Stephen, pot-parched, asked for water, and I padded downstairs to fetch some. As I passed through the living room I felt a sudden prickle of paranoia over my failure to return the DVD to its hiding place. I squatted to retrieve my laptop from the lower level of the coffee table where I’d stowed it when Monty arrived.
It was gone.
I tried for a few desperate moments to persuade myself that I’d put it somewhere else or that Gilbert had come home unexpectedly and moved it. But the hideous truth was clear even to a stoned idiot like myself.