Some Nerve

by Jane Heller

  “Nope. Not ‘try.’” He shook his head again. “There are plenty of wannabes ready and waiting to ‘try.’ Take a walk down to human resources and check out all their résumés.” He leaned forward so he could regard me with his third eye. “You see what I’m saying, don’t you, Ann?”

  Now I did see what he was saying: Get the big get or get the hell out.

  I felt an unfamiliar chill ripple down my spine, and my shoulders did this odd little shimmy. He was putting me on notice and I hadn’t expected it and I wished I could go back to sleep, wake up again, and start the day over. But then I reminded myself that I had a track record. I had experience. I had credibility. I had nothing to fear.

  “Ann Roth is on the case,” I said jauntily as I rose from my chair. “One interview with Malcolm Goddard coming right up.”

  Chapter Two

  “I’m totally buying this sweater,” said my best friend, Tuscany Davis, referring to a DKNY turtleneck that was not only her favorite shade of purple but had been marked down to half its original price. It was the day after my meeting with Harvey, and she had decided I needed retail therapy instead of lunch. At noon on the dot, we were in the giant bull pen of a dressing room at Loehmann’s, where women of all sizes and zero modesty were trying on bargain merchandise, some of which was stained with lipstick.

  “Go for the sweater,” I said distractedly. I was staring at the woman next to us. The pants she had on were so tight they reminded me of sausage casing. They were also extremely low-rise, hitting her well below her navel and pushing her stomach up and out, the effect of which was that she looked about six months pregnant, just like Britney. Oh, and she was probably in her seventies. In L.A., there’s no such thing as age-appropriate fashion.

  “Aren’t you getting anything?” asked Tuscany when she saw me standing there empty-handed.

  “I’m getting Malcolm Goddard.” I sighed. “Or I’m supposed to be getting him. I really can’t concentrate on anything else. Sorry.”

  She put her right arm around my shoulder. Her sculpted, toned, buffed right arm. Tuscany, who was in the graphic-design department at Famous, spent many hours at the gym every week in a never-ending quest for the perfect body, which, in L.A., means a size 2. She’d grown up in Los Angeles and embraced the it’s-all-about-how-you-look culture. How she wanted to look was as thin as a piece of dental floss. She wasn’t a beauty—her nose was a little too broad and her brownish-red hair was kinky and cut so severely it resembled a clipped hedge—but she was rarely without a date.

  She attributed her popularity to the fact that she was willing to sleep with just about anybody except actors (she and I both had a rule about them, actors being on the self-absorbed side and, therefore, lousy relationship material). She slept with the guy at the car wash, the guy at the coffee place, the guy at the farmers’ market, whatever. People say it’s hard to meet men in L.A. because of all the gorgeous babes who spoil things for the rest of us, but Tuscany met men left and right. Adorned with a pink rose tattoo on each ankle, she was a free spirit who wasn’t raised with the strict Midwestern values that had been drilled into me.

  I was often guilty of lecturing her about her promiscuity, but who was I to judge her? While I was holding out for Prince Charming, she was the one having a good time. I hadn’t had a boyfriend since I’d been dumped by Skip Atwater, who was Denzel Washington’s massage therapist. He said he loved me (Skip, not Denzel) and wanted us to move in together, and after we found a place we both liked, he broke up with me. I vowed never again to date a man who gave massages for a living. Since I already had a No-Actors rule in effect and since just about everybody else in L.A. gives massages for a living, I’d been spending most Saturday nights alone.

  So in a way I envied Tuscany her free-spiritedness and laughed to myself as I remembered the day she’d shown up at Famous four years earlier. She’d introduced herself by saying, “In case you’re wondering about the name, my parents conceived me thirty-two years ago while they were on vacation in Tuscany. Don’t you think Travel & Leisure should do an article about that?”

  “About what?” I’d said.

  “About children who are named after the place where their parents did it. It’s a trend. A woman in my Pilates class is named Kenya and a woman in my spinning class is named Mauritius, and all I can think about when I see them is that their parents had condomless sex under mosquito netting.”

  As it turned out, her parents never did stop traveling after her mother gave birth to her. Flush with the stock options her father had cashed in, they dumped Tuscany on her biker-chick aunt’s doorstep in Topanga Canyon, then roamed the world, sending postcards and e-mails and enjoying a life of irresponsibility. Tuscany essentially raised herself. Maybe her obsession with physical love was really just a need for emotional love and she couldn’t tell the difference. Or maybe she was, in her own words, just a natural-born slut. Either way, I couldn’t help wishing she’d take her relationships more slowly instead of hopping from man to man, never settling down. But, as I said, I wasn’t one to be giving anybody advice in the romance department.

  My own background was stricter but just as messed up. I grew up with a father whose drawn-out battle with lung cancer reduced him to a wraithlike, barely-there, ghostly presence and reduced me to a person who equated sickness and death with helplessness, weakness, a lack of control. After Dad died when I was ten, my aunt Toni got divorced and moved in. Since my mother and I already had the long-widowed Grandma Raysa living with us, we were now four females sharing one house. It was an unorthodox arrangement and not always pretty. My grandmother had a powerful fear of germs and went around disinfecting everything. Aunt Toni was petrified of enclosed spaces; she flat-out refused to take a shower in a stall instead of one with a curtain, for example. My mother became the most phobic of all, turning her grief over my father’s death into a dread of heights, dogs, and dentists, and she would only ride on escalators if they were going up. At age twelve I developed a problem with peanut butter (I imagined it would stick to the roof of my mouth and make me choke) and clowns (they just scared the shit out of me), and I knew I’d better get out of there as soon as I was old enough or else I might really succumb to the family curse. Fleeing to L.A. and working for Famous had been my salvation as well as my dream.

  “So you talked to Goddard’s publicist?” said Tuscany as we walked out of the store and into the underground parking lot. It was unseasonably warm for L.A. in January—in the eighties. We were both wearing summery high-heeled sandals and they made clickety-clack sounds on the pavement.

  “I’ve called Peggy Merchant, the überflak, three times in the last twenty-four hours, and she still hasn’t called me back,” I said.

  “Maybe she’s still mad at you for skipping that Winona Ryder thing last year.”

  “Peggy’s not the easiest person to deal with, but I don’t think she holds grudges.” She had organized a handful of entertainment reporters to visit the Palm Springs set of the movie that Winona, a client of hers, was shooting. My editor had left it up to me to decide if I wanted to go and I’d passed. The plane Peggy had chartered was one of those dinky, single-engine prop planes and I didn’t do prop planes. No sir. They were synonymous with death as far as I was concerned. Too terrifying to contemplate. Yes, I’d pretty much escaped the family curse except for a paralyzing fear of flying. I got the shakes even making the reservation for a flight, let alone taking one, and if I absolutely had to fly for business, I took jets—and consumed many, many Bloody Marys.

  “Then maybe she’s just busy,” said Tuscany.

  “No, she’s ducking me,” I said. “I left a message saying I wanted to sit down with Goddard as soon as possible. No call back is her way of telling me no interview.”

  “Isn’t it possible that she’s taking the time to try to convince him to do it?” said Tuscany. “Famous isn’t exactly the Star. He could do worse.”

  “Are you kidding? To him, we’re the same as a tabloid. We might as well
be covering aliens and Elvis sightings.”

  “Why does he hate the media so much?” she asked.

  “He thinks we’re out to exploit his vessel.”

  Her eyes widened. “Is it that big?”

  Tuscany was obsessed with the size of men’s penises. As I told you, she was earthy. “I meant the vessel for his acting,” I said. “He believes that he channels the characters he plays, that his body is merely the instrument through which these characters find their voice. He’s one of those.”

  “Too bad,” she said with a shrug. “He’s incredibly hot.”

  I stopped walking and looked at her. “You think so?” Sure, he was attractive, but I honestly didn’t see what all the fuss was about.

  “Duh.” She said it with a lot of blinks, which emphasized that I must be nuts not to feel Malcolm Goddard’s heat. “He’s got a great face—one of those classic, WASPy, chiseled faces—but it’s the clothes and the hair and the eyes that make him so hot.”

  “Okay, I can understand the eyes,” I said as we resumed the trek to our cars. “They’re almost turquoise. I’ve never seen a blue like that; it’s the color of a body of water in the Caribbean. And I admit, his black-leather look is very bad boy, sort of the flip side of Tom Wolfe’s white suit. But the hair? It’s just your basic brown.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s serious hair,” she insisted, patting her own, which was as tightly curled as a Chia pet’s. “It’s thick and wavy, and there’s a little lock of it in the front that falls in his eyes.”

  “Right. The signature lock of hair that every woman is dying to comb back with her fingers,” I said, rolling my own eyes. “Personally, I’d like to take scissors and snip it off, because if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be so rattled right now.”

  We arrived at our cars. “You going back to the office?” she asked.

  “Not right away,” I said, opening the door of the Honda I’d driven all the way from Missouri five years before. It was old and ugly, especially by L.A. standards, with dents and dings and scratches galore. When the valet-parking attendants saw it coming, they actually looked away. Tuscany, on the other hand, leased a used (“pre-owned”) Mercedes. The valet guys sniffed when they saw it coming too, but at least they didn’t fight over who’d get stuck having to park it. “There’s a press junket for the new Pierce Brosnan movie at the Four Seasons this afternoon. Peggy Merchant’s his publicist, so my plan is to grab a minute with her to talk about Goddard.”

  “You’re so lucky that you get to meet all the stars,” she said wistfully. “All I get to do is airbrush their photos.”

  I hugged her. “You’re the lucky one. Harvey didn’t ask you to do the impossible.”

  PIERCE BROSNAN’S NEW film was yet another thriller in which he played a suave and sophisticated thief. Whether the character was a stealer of jewels or artwork or Sub-Zero refrigerators I couldn’t tell you, but suffice it to say, I wasn’t interested. Peggy Merchant was my target, and the instant I spotted her in the hushed, lavishly appointed hotel suite where she was greeting members of the press and setting limits on how long each of them would have with Brosnan and his costars, I made a beeline for her, stopping only to grab a fistful of crab cakes off a silver tray, stuff them into my mouth all at once, then chew and swallow them dry. Well, I hadn’t eaten lunch.

  The sixty-year-old doyenne of Hollywood publicists, with a client list that included dozens of A-list actors and directors, Peggy was an angel if she needed you and a barracuda if she didn’t. At first glance, she disarmed you with how down-to-earth she seemed. Her short, pixie-ish blond hair was flecked with gray. Her face was lined and freckled in the manner of someone who lived anyplace other than L.A., where there’s a law against lined, freckled faces. She wore human clothes—i.e., nothing that required a thong. And she smiled relentlessly, as if she were your long-lost grandmother. But, I’m telling you, she was tough. Having all those big clients gave her power, and she flaunted it. If you were a magazine reporter who wanted Pierce Brosnan, you had to sign a written guarantee that you’d put him on the cover, give him photo approval, and avoid asking him anything that would make him uncomfortable, which meant anything juicy. If you didn’t sign the waiver, you’d lose him to someone who would sign it. She had you over a barrel. Still, there were times when she was desperate for positive publicity for her stars so she could rehabilitate their image—when their movie tanked or when they were arrested for drunk driving, shoplifting, or hooking up with a hooker—and it was under those circumstances that she’d be the one who’d come begging.

  “Ann, dear,” she said when I tapped her on the elbow. “What a lovely surprise. I thought Famous was sending someone else today.”

  I started to respond, but the crab cakes hadn’t gone down after all. I looked around for a glass of something—anything—and found a flute of champagne on yet another silver tray. I drank up.

  “Hi.” I coughed, cleared my throat. “It’s nice to see you too, Peggy. But I’m not here for the junket.” I plunged ahead even though she started to turn her attention elsewhere. “It’s about another matter. Since I couldn’t reach you on the phone, I thought I’d try this.”

  She smiled. “Couldn’t reach me? I didn’t know you’d called, dear.” Such a manipulator.

  “Well, I did call, Peggy. Three times. Famous wants to interview Malcolm Goddard, as I told your assistant.”

  “Famous and everyone else.” She smiled even wider. Her teeth were tiny, I noticed. Like baby teeth. “But Malcolm doesn’t do interviews, Ann. He’s a very private person.”

  Private? He once took off all his black-leather duds and dove naked into the pool at the Chateau Marmont, the occasion being a birthday party for that illustrious thespian Paris Hilton. “He did the Vanity Fair piece last year,” I reminded her. “And he did Inside the Actors Studio on Bravo with James Lipton.” I’d watched a tape of the show the night before, hoping it would give me some insight into Goddard, but all it gave me was indigestion. He sat on that stage not only mumbling about how he used his body as a vessel for his characters but insisting that he dreaded doing love scenes because they were so demanding technically. Please. The guy made on-screen love to the sexiest women on the planet. Even if there were a thousand cameramen watching, the scenes were hardly the chore he made them out to be. “I’ll give him the star treatment he deserves, Peggy,” I said, moving into grovel mode. “Naturally, he’ll get the cover of the magazine and I promise I won’t ask him about his little brawl at the Skybar, and I’m a fast interviewer, so I won’t take up much of his time. We could do it at your office if he’d rather not have me at his house, or he could come to Famous and we’ll chat in the conference room, or I could camp out on the set if he’s shooting.” I took a breath, then resumed my pitch. “Maybe he has a favorite spot in L.A. and we could do the interview there. How about Griffith Park if he goes hiking on Sunday mornings, or the beach in Malibu if he—”

  Peggy held up her hand. “Ann, dear. There’s no point in going on,” she said. “You and I both know that Malcolm doesn’t need any publicity. He’s got the look, he’s got the talent, and he’s got more projects in development than he can count. His aversion to the media has made my job easy. All I have to do is say no to you people.”

  “It does sound easy, but what about his fans? Doesn’t he owe them something?”

  “His position is that he gives them one hundred percent when he’s acting. Beyond that, he doesn’t feel he owes them anything.”

  “That’s pretty shortsighted, Peggy,” I said. “It’s because of the fans that he can afford to blow off the media. They’re the ones buying the tickets and they want to read about him.”

  “Ann, Ann. You have such a refreshing take on the business.” She smiled patronizingly. “Why don’t we have lunch in the next few weeks and discuss some of my other clients? I’ll have my assistant—” Just then, Pierce Brosnan stuck his head out of one of the suite’s bedrooms and motioned for her. She nodded to h
im that she’d be right in, then turned back to me. “So sorry. Duty calls.”

  She served up one last phony smile and was about to dash off when I caught her arm and held it.

  “Wait,” I said, abandoning my professional tone for my desperate one. Suddenly, Harvey’s words reverberated in my head and all I could hear was I want Goddard and you’re gonna get him! “Couldn’t you at least ask Malcolm if he’ll do it?”

  She wriggled out of my grasp and smoothed the fabric where my fingertips had made indentations. “I can ask,” she said wearily, as if I were overtaxing her by merely suggesting that she do her job. “But I wouldn’t get my hopes up. As far as he’s concerned, you’re all—”

  “Parasites, I know,” I said, feeling my heart sink.

  “I might be able to help you with Pierce, though,” she said. “I booked him with Diane Sawyer for next week.” She beamed with admiration. “That woman is amazing when she wants a story.”

  “In what way?” I asked out of genuine curiosity.

  She looked at me as if I were simple. “She courts people.”

  “You mean her producers court people.”

  “No, she does it herself.”

  “By calling and writing them notes and that sort of thing?”

  “No, she gifts them.” For the uninitiated, “gift” is a verb in Hollywood. “She does her research and finds out all the little things they love and then she sends the gifts as a surprise. Her strategy scores points. No doubt about it.”