“That was quite a show you put on,” said Micah, after the guys had left. “I’m impressed.”
“Don’t be. You could be dying of boredom, and I wouldn’t put on a show for you. Now why am I here?” said Cassandra.
“That’s what I want to know. Why are you here?” said Micah.
“You mean StarBash?” asked Cass.
Micah nodded.
“I’m here because I’m a pissed-off actor who’s tired of watching some reality-star goon attack our reputation on national TV. You wanna know why I’m here? I’ll tell you. I’m here because you’ve turned meanness and hatred into a blood sport, and I’m going to beat you at your own game!”
Talk about a canned speech. Micah didn’t believe a word of it. He grabbed a small stack of letters off the workbench, held them up for Cass to see, and said, “Let me help you out a little bit. You sent four letters and ten emails asking for a meeting with Lenora. She declined. The next thing I know, you’re on StarBash, and you’re having a meeting with Lenora.”
“How do you know I had a meeting with Lenora?” asked Cass.
“It’s my job,” said Micah. “I get paid to stay one step ahead. Now, do you care to revise your monologue? And I should probably warn you that the angry-drama-queen thing doesn’t work with me. You have to remember who I work for. I’m immune to it.”
“OK, fine,” said Cass. “You’re immune to drama queens, and I’m immune to pompous assholes. I guess we won’t be having any sleepovers. What a shame.” She tossed out a fake smile and started looking around the workshop.
That was good, thought Micah. He was a pompous asshole…but only with actors. Pompous asshole versus pretentious movie star. What could be more fun? He eyed Cassandra as she looked at some photographs on the wall by his desk. This was the first time he’d seen her up close without bright stage lighting, and it surprised him. She wore minimal makeup, if any at all, and she looked normal, which was saying something for a Hollywood actor pushing thirty-five. The mere fact that her lips hadn’t been Botoxed into a couple of pouting bratwursts was a miracle in itself. She had a friendly, natural smile and innocent hazel eyes. And either she hadn’t been raised in sunny California, or her mother had locked her in a closet because she still had smooth, youthful skin. He’d seen her face in magazines for makeup ads. She looked good, but he liked this natural version better. Even her blonde hair, with long body curls, steered more toward the natural side. All in all, Micah could see how Hollywood, in its deep shallowness, had made such a big deal over such a package.
“I recognize these,” said Cass, motioning to the pictures. “That’s from Operation Scorpion, this is Irish Lullaby, and this is Mobster and the Maid. Who’s the kid?”
Micah didn’t answer. She looked at him, looked at the pictures, looked back at him and said, “All right, this really screws things up. You’re the big actor-basher, but here you are—what, six, seven years old?—hanging with the actors.”
Micah shrugged and said, “I had a relative who worked at the studio.”
“Sorry, that doesn’t make any sense. These movies are from different studios. Do you care to revise your monologue, Mr. Drama Queen?”
Micah tried not to smile.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the car Micah had been working on.
“A 1956 Ford Thunderbird. It’s being restored,” said Micah.
“And then what? Are you going to cruise Main Street and maybe hang out at the malt shop?”
“Then it goes in here,” said Micah. He walked to the far end of the shop and opened a set of double doors.
She followed him through the doorway and said, “Whoa.”
Micah liked that response better than her usual sarcasm. “Do you like cars?” he asked.
“Not particularly, but I like shiny things. What is it?”
“It’s part of the museum,” said Micah, looking over a giant showroom of cars. “They’re famous cars from famous movies. Lenora added it mostly for the husbands…and anyone else who might like cars better—” A loud shriek interrupted him. He watched Cassandra dash over to a burned-out Chrysler.
“Oh my gosh! I love this car!” she said, as Micah caught up with her.
“‘Do you feel this vehicle is safe for highway travel?’” said Cassandra in a deep voice. She then changed her facial expression and said, “‘Yes, officer, I do. I really do,’” And then she burst out laughing.
Micah watched.
“Come on! It’s from Planes, Trains & Automobiles, one of my all-time favorites!”
Micah said nothing.
“All right, you know what? You really know how to kill the moment.”
“I don’t go to movies.”
Cass stared blankly and then said, “How come I’m not surprised? What about Lenora’s movies?”
“Especially not hers,” said Micah.
“I don’t know…it sounds like you’ve got a passive-aggressive thing going on there. You might want to deal with it before it gets worse.” She delivered a smart-ass smile and then said, “Goodbye, Micah Bailey, the terminator from Timbuktu.”
“You still haven’t answered my question,” said Micah. “Why are you here?”
“Because I love reality TV. What else could it be? Now I have a question for you. Why do you hate actors?”
“Because the actor promised the ring around the collar would disappear, and it didn’t. What else could it be?”
“Goodbye, Micah.”
She turned and left. Micah called out after her, “I will find out why you’re here, Cassandra. You can count on it. And if you have any more meetings with Lenora, I need to know about them in advance.”
“And why is that?” she yelled, over her shoulder.
“Let’s just say it’s better that way.”
She didn’t respond.
***
The day after Cass’s meeting with Lenora, she found a small envelope that had been slipped under the door of her trailer. For the briefest moment she thought that maybe Lenora had given up the charade and had coughed up the birth certificate. She had to know that her act hadn’t fooled anyone. First, she practically fainted when Cass mentioned the birth certificate, and the private detective, and the phony family in Milwaukee. Secondly, super meticulous Lenora Danmore claimed not to have a copy of her very own birth certificate. And, thirdly, she immediately started stalling with some story about getting the certificate from a foreign country. The lady was guilty as hell, but Cass had done the right thing; she’d given her a chance to tell the truth. She didn’t deserve even that much. Now, while Lenora pretended to wait on slow mail from Siberia, Cass already knew her next move, and it didn’t require her to stay with StarBash one minute longer. Mission accomplished.
The envelope under the door turned out to be a duplicitous note from Lenora that said:
Dear Cassandra,
Every friendship has issues. That is just one of the joys of being human. I have no doubt that in time our friendship will be stronger than ever. To that end, if you have any other questions, I’m happy to meet with you at any time.
Kindest regards,
Lenora
Forget it, lady, thought Cass. Your robot already decked me once. I’m not going anywhere near you.
It had certainly been a strange few days at Rancho de Fresas. First Cass had played cat and mouse with Lenora, and then she played a loopy game of screwball with Micah, Lenora’s forty-year-old babysitter. What a bizarre combination: Lenora Danmore, the ruthless, scheming maniac, and Micah Bailey, the actors’ manager who hated actors. That was pretty messed up, even by Hollywood standards.
The story about how the two got together was also quite bizarre and actually something of a legend in the business. The most common version of the story said that by the mid-nineties Lenora’s career had stalled due to a reputation for temper tantrums that led to cost overruns on every project she worked on. Besides the directors and produ
cers who’d stopped taking her calls, she’d also lost favor with the best agents and managers; either they knew her and didn’t want the grief, or they were newbies who abandoned ship after the first storm. Enter Micah Bailey, who couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. He took the job and drove straight to Beverly Hills to see Fred Suggerman, who at the time happened to be casting the female lead for Melancholy Murder. According to the legend, Micah smoothed Fred over with a bunch of double-talk about some special technique for Lenora that worked every time, and Fred gave the part to Lenora, presumably just to see how the whole thing played out, more than anything else.
And, whether this account is to be believed or not, Micah really did have a special technique, and it actually worked quite well. Whenever Lenora got out of control, Micah dove right in and took the fight to her. This meant that when she crossed the line, she always had a war on two fronts waiting for her: the producer and Micah or the director and Micah or the costume designer and Micah, etc. Of course, Lenora didn’t put up with mouthy subordinates, so she’d go after Micah and shred him from top to bottom. Then she’d fire him. By this point in the ordeal, more times than not, Lenora’s spleen would be mostly drained, and she’d be inclined to listen to reason. But the real beauty of it all, whether by plan or not, was that Micah never stayed fired. Lenora fired the hell out of him one day, and he showed up the next day like nothing had ever happened. Micah ended up making a great living by being the most fired employee in the world.
Where did the facts of this story end and the embellishment begin? Nobody cared. Hollywood likes stories with some swagger. But it probably contained elements of both. On one hand, nobody doubted Lenora’s shrewdness. You don’t reach the top of the Hollywood heap without it. She saw that her career had faltered, so she took action. She didn’t need to concoct a scheme with a teenager. On the other hand, it was a fact that Micah took no shit from Lenora. He did what it took to keep her moving forward, and that included toe-to-toe combat that had been witnessed dozens of times all over town. And he did get fired over and over again. It was a bizarre arrangement but the bottom line was that Lenora added ten years to her career and did some of her best work. And Micah, even now, fifteen years later, had the reputation of a miracle worker. Any number of the best producers and directors, especially the older ones, would gladly take his call, and the offensiveness of StarBash didn’t faze them at all.
For Cass personally, the guy came off as more of a handsome simpleton than a miracle worker. He had simple clothes, a simple short haircut, and a ninety-nine-word vocabulary. She’d cast him as the dumb potato farmer any day of the week. He looked like the kind of guy who could go to a party, not say twenty words, and have a wonderful time. He looked like the kind of guy who flossed daily and checked the air in his tires once a week. He looked annoyingly punctual. He was the exact opposite of any man Cass had ever been involved with…which probably wasn’t saying very much.
And that pretty much summed up Cass’s first week at the ranch. Except…since she had been the fortunate witness of all this free weirdness, she must have felt compelled to add some of her own because she had an exceptionally weird dream about her ex-husband during this same time. In the dream he kneeled piously, decked out like Sir Lancelot, as the pope prepared to bestow a medal on him. The ceremony took place in a giant cathedral, where Cass sat in the audience. Just before the pope placed the medal around his neck, Cass stood up and interrupted the ceremony with a poem:
Oh so many important things to say
But who will listen to your speech today
He’s a dandy man who’s fond of many words
Fold your humble hands and let the words flow
Nobody cares that you really don’t know
He’s a dandy man who’s fond of many words
Fancy speeches always seem to make sense
Until the dirty dog jumps the back fence
He’s a dandy man who’s fond of many words
Then two medieval guards escorted Cass to the dungeon to be tortured.
***
Lenora and Micah lived in the hundred-year-old Victorian on top of the hill. They each had private living quarters on the second floor. Micah’s wife, Heather, had also lived there when the two had been married. The honor and prestige of sharing a mansion with a living legend had sounded like a dream come true to Heather. And Micah bought into her excitement even though he should have known better. Now he lived alone in two thousand square feet, and it felt like an airplane hangar. Thankfully, the staff of eight added enough humanity to the house to make it habitable. He also sometimes enjoyed sitting in on the weekly get-togethers Lenora hosted for her old actor friends—except when the get-togethers turned into drunken fan-club meetings for her highness. All of these friends had enjoyed some success in Hollywood, but that success had stopped putting food on the table decades ago. They faithfully played Lenora’s party games, careful not to ever outshine their hostess, and then they devoured enough food and drink to hold them over until the next get-together.
Micah had started a private tradition in the house many years earlier: he took on the nightly job of serving Lenora her nightcap. At first he had done it because of an imaginary bond between the two of them that he thought deserved some special attention. Later, when he figured out that his bond with Lenora had never existed, he did it for business reasons; Lenora was a moving target who didn’t have the best communication skills, so Micah used the time to talk business or get answers to questions. Nowadays he served the nightcap out of habit, like most things in his life.
On this night, however, Micah actually had a question on his mind as he took Lenora her drink that contained two ounces of cherry juice, half a shot of bourbon, and a twist of lemon—a recipe that never changed under pain of death. He knocked on the door. She said, “Put it on the coffee table.”
Micah entered the reception area that separated the office from the bedroom. He put the tray on the table and poked his head into the office doorway. Lenora sat at the desk and had her eyes locked onto a computer monitor that showed the latest exhibit set designs. Micah said, “Lenora?”
“What?”
“How, exactly, did you convince Cass Moreaux to go on the show?” asked Micah.
Lenora’s head slumped, and she sighed, just loud enough for Micah to hear. She removed her reading glasses, swiveled around, and said, “Has she said something to you?”
“No.”
“Then why worry about it? She’s ratings gold. That’s all that matters.”
“You’re pulling strings behind my back, and I don’t like it. Does it have anything to do with Wendy Rainy?” asked Micah.
Lenora hated getting cornered. She glared for a second and then said, “She wanted me to answer questions about her mother, and I wanted her on the show. So we made a deal. You should be thanking me, unless an extra million is too much of a burden for you.”
“And will you be having any more meetings?” asked Micah.
“I hope so. Imagine what she could do for the museum—not that it’s any of your business.”
“She’s on the show, so it’s my business, and I keep track of my business.”
“Good. Keep track of your business, and keep your nose out of mine,” said Lenora.
Micah turned around. On his way out he said, “Good night, Lenora. See you in the morning.”
She didn’t answer.
Chapter five
“And here’s your StarBash host, the Tinseltown terminator himself, Micah Bailey!”
“Hello, America! Welcome to StarBash 2020, and welcome to the grand ballroom of the Plaza Hotel!” said Micah, like an infomercial hawker.
Cass watched as her fellow contestants, with whom she had been grouped, ardently fawned over Micah Bailey. They clapped and smiled and nudged one another aside so that they might be seen by his highness. Cass didn’t bother. Micah stood nearby and filmed his opening monologue, the format of which never cha
nged: insult Hollywood, belittle the actors, and reveal the challenge that will get one of them fired from the show.
He said, “Wow! Congratulations to each of you. You’ve made it to the top. You are living large at the Plaza Hotel. You slumber in a bed of the finest linen, sometimes with your spouse, sometimes with the nanny. Your morning Bloody Mary is served on a silver platter. You prepare for the rigors of the day with a massage and a manicure. Your million-dollar face is coated with the finest Corinthian mud. Be careful now; don’t get any of that stuff under your fingernails. And then you are ready. More than ready. You are important. You are powerful. You take power lunches and make power deals. You power through the day trailing a glittery blanket of powerfulness. And after you’ve unleashed all the power that is humanly possible, cocktail hour arrives just in the nick of time. And, my friend, with your Wang or your Armani and your surgically sculpted boozy glow, it can truthfully be said that nobody does cocktail hour better than you.
“Oh my, it has certainly been a busy day, but, alas, there’s no rest for the adored because now it’s time to retire to dinner, where you will cast aside the menu and tell the chef exactly how to cook the meal, right down to the last sautéed truffle. And then it’s off to the televised awards ceremony. It’s the third one this week, but that’s OK because actors just love it when the world watches them pat one another on the back. You pose and smile and clap on cue. And, cross your fingers, if your name is called, you will boldly mount the soapbox and turn the American people into your personal political prisoners. When the speech ends, your enlightened peers will rise to their feet in admiration. And then the celebration continues at the after-party, where you will pontificate about tolerance and the importance of respecting opinions. Unfortunately, the only difference of opinion at this party will be about which Westside bistro serves the best veggie burger. And now, at last, it’s time to return to your suite and bring the day to a close. You apply a generous portion of the Essential Essence of Essentialness to your face and put cucumbers on your eyes. Then you turn out the light. Oh, what a day! What a marvelous movie-star day!”
Death of a Movie Star Page 4