The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Ruth Saunders for Mr. McLaughlin,” I said as firmly as I could. She gave me a professional smile. Her white teeth gleamed; the space-age metal earpiece in her left ear flashed green, then blue.

  “Have a seat,” she offered after I’d refused water, tea, or coffee. I did, and picked up an issue of Variety, and tried not to fidget with my hat or yank my hair over my cheek.

  Ten minutes later, the door swung open. “Ruth Saunders,” boomed Chauncey. I wondered briefly whether Loud Lloyd had learned volume management from him. Chauncey wore suit pants, a dress shirt, and a tie, but his sleeves were rolled up, his tie was askew, and his face was flushed a red so brilliant that I feared an incipient cardiac event, and quickly reviewed the CPR procedures I’d learned as a lifeguard while he led me into his office.

  “Sorry about this,” he said, fanning at his face before taking a seat behind a desk roughly the size of a city bus. He gestured at a comfortably upholstered chair across from the desk, and I sat down with my purse in my lap and my leg muscles tensed to keep them from shaking. “W-O-D.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Workout of the day. Cross-fit. You don’t do cross-fit? I thought everyone did cross-fit! Rolph!” he hollered. A door from somewhere in the back of the office swung open, and a man the size of a telephone booth emerged, dressed in skin-tight bike shorts and a T-shirt with the legend PAIN IS WEAKNESS LEAVING THE BODY printed across his impressive chest. “Give Ruthie here your card.” Wordlessly, Rolph dipped into his fanny pack—yes, he was wearing a fanny pack, and somehow he was making it work—and handed me a card that contained only two words: ROLPH. CROSS-FIT, followed by a website and an email address. Evidently Rolph did not deign to communicate by actual voice-to-voice conversation.

  “Thanks,” I said, and slipped it in my pocket.

  Rolph gave me a terse nod and then pointed two fingers at Chauncey. “Protein,” he said.

  “Protein,” Chauncey repeated. The two of them exchanged a complicated handshake, and then Rolph walked out of the office. It took him, I noticed, a very long time. He was fit, but that office was enormous.

  “Now, Ruth,” said Chauncey. “What can I do for you?”

  I’d written out what I meant to say—about how the scene that Lloyd had written set the wrong tone, how it relied on painful stereotypes, how it was broad and unfunny and damaging to women, and I had rehearsed that speech, first in the privacy of my bedroom, then in front of the Daves. They’d been supportive but not encouraging.

  “You can try,” Big Dave said, but he sounded dubious.

  “Chauncey might like your moxie,” offered Little Dave, who sounded equally skeptical. I heard the truth in what they weren’t saying: Once a network president makes up his mind, good luck to you, lowly showrunner. Still, though, this was my grandmother. She’d raised me; she’d loved me; she’d sacrificed her life for mine. I had to try. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t.

  “It’s about the A scene in the pilot,” I said.

  Chauncey stared at me blankly. A bead of sweat trickled down his cheek and darkened the knot of his tie.

  “The Next Best Thing,” I said quickly. “Girl and her grandmother move to Miami? Cady Stratton’s starring?”

  He gave a sudden, booming laugh. “I know that. You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t know my own shows?”

  My face flushed. “No, no, of course, I was . . . I mean, I thought . . .”

  He boomed more laughter at me. “Don’t worry. Man, I love messing with creatives. You’re so gullible!” He reached into a glass apothecary jar on his desk and extracted a bright-red gumball. “Sugar-free,” he announced, popping it into his mouth. “Aspartame.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Rolph doesn’t approve. Want one?”

  “Sure.” My gumball was the brilliant yellow of Tweety Bird. I wondered if it meant something and then scolded myself for overthinking.

  “Look. I understand the arguments you could make about why that scene works,” I said, breaking Little Dave’s first rule: Don’t negotiate against yourself. “The idea that Nana Trudy has basically, um, had sex with her boyfriend until he ended up in the hospital, and his sons aren’t happy with her. I get the joke, and I know we need something big and funny right at the top, something that will play in the ads and establish the characters and their world, but I just feel . . .” And here, I froze. I knew how I felt, I’d practiced the words, but with Chauncey’s red-faced, intense gaze on me, in this football stadium of an office, I found myself speechless. “It’s my grandmother,” I finally blurted. Chauncey stared at me, sweating, silent. “She hates it,” I said. “She thinks it’s mean. And because the character’s kind of based on her . . .”

  There was a pause. A long, painful pause. From somewhere far away, in the outer office, I could hear laughter, and I wondered if Rolph was flirting with that beautiful receptionist.

  “Sometimes clichés are clichés because they’re true,” Chauncey said.

  I nodded before I could stop myself. “But the stuff about early-bird specials and Viagra . . .”

  “I hear you,” he said. Which was, I knew, executive-speak for I know you have a problem, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to fix it. “Tell you what,” he finally said. “Let’s see if we can come up with a compromise.”

  I felt faint with gratitude as the room swam in front of my eyes. “Whatever you think,” I said. “I can rewrite it today.”

  He waved his hand. “Nah, let’s just talk it out. The ‘bite my Boniva’ line stays. Pending the approval of the Boniva people.”

  I nodded, trying not to wince. I’d hated that line, but I would learn to live with it, and my grandmother would, too.

  “How about this,” he said. “We’ll let the boys get in their digs about how she’s basically been trying to fuck him to death and take his money.”

  I found myself nodding like a broken bobblehead, not letting myself think about how my grandmother was going to feel about being portrayed as an overage gold digger who used sex as a weapon.

  “But . . .” He leaned back, staring at the ceiling, before pulling a monogrammed towel from his desk drawer and dabbing at his still-magenta face. “What if we looped in a line about how much she loved him?”

  “Yes!” I yelled, and then lowered my voice. “Yes. That’s it exactly. The sex stuff’s all funny, I get that it’s funny, but I think, for the emotional heart of the show, for us to care about Nana . . .”

  “She has to love him,” he said, completing my thought. “Which makes it even scarier when she gets kicked out of his house and has to find a way to start all over again.”

  “Right!” I bent my head. “Thank you. I’ll go . . . I’ll start writing . . . we can do the reshoots when we do the first episode . . .” The director was probably going to murder me, but never mind. Maybe I’d hire Rolph for protection. I’d bet anything he freelanced as a bodyguard. “I can’t thank you enough for this. If there’s ever anything I can do for you . . .” Oh, God, I thought, as Chauncey wiped his face again, balled up the towel, and tossed it toward a wicker basket in the corner. As if.

  “We’re good,” he said. There was a knock on the door, and the gorgeous assistant came in with a bento box set on a black lacquered tray. I looked at the food: six miniature slivers of raw pink fish, a tiny lacquered dish of edamame, a stingy scoop of seaweed salad, and a teaspoon of brown rice. Chauncey winced. “I would kill my own mother,” he announced, “for a goddamn cheeseburger.”

  “I can get you a cheeseburger,” I offered. “Have you ever been to Umami Burger? They do this one with truffle butter . . .”

  He cringed and waved me toward the door. “Happy writing!” he called. “Oh, and check in on your actors.”

  “Beg pardon?” I said—a line I’d adopted from the Daves.

  “It’s been a few weeks since you’ve seen them, right?” he asked. “Best make sure none of them went and got their faces tattooed.” He grimaced, undoubtedly remembering the
long-ago action-movie star who, between negotiating his film deal and the first day of principal photography, had gone to Australia and had a Maori tribesman do just that.

  “I’ll call them all right now,” I said, and scampered toward the elevator before he could change his mind.

  * * *

  The next morning, I met with Pete at a batting cage in Santa Monica. “Ruth!” he called, squinting at me through the sun. I felt relieved that he’d remembered my name, and that he looked fit and sane and relatively stable, free of fresh piercings and tattoos, as he whacked the balls across the field and into a green mesh net. “Everything good?” I asked him.

  “I’m being replaced, aren’t I?” he asked without looking at me, and gave the next ball an especially savage whack.

  “Huh?” I asked, startled that he’d think of it, though I knew that actors in pilots did get replaced on a regular basis. “You haven’t shot your first scene, and you’re already worried about being replaced?”

  “Everyone worries,” Pete said. This, I knew, was true, although I didn’t think Pete had much to worry about. Chauncey loved Pete, insofar as Pete represented an antidote to the quippy, reed-thin, perfectly clad, meticulously groomed metrosexuals presently populating his shows. “These guys make Chandler Bing look like John Wayne. We need manly men!” he told his underlings. The word went down to producers and writers, all of whom quickly filled their scripts with a smorgasbord of blue-collar, big-shouldered, salt-of-the-earth types: plainspoken plumbers, down-on-their-luck professional wrestlers, former football players, bus drivers, and beat cops, none of whom would know Karl Lagerfeld from Karl Malden. Pete fit the template—he was big, he was brawny, he was handsome . . . and one sensed that he did not spend his evenings with the collected works of Flaubert. “Take care of yourself,” I told him. I thought about warning him explicitly against piercings and tattoos, and then decided it would be best not to put any ideas in his head, even though there was obviously plenty of room.

  The next day, Annie Tait and I had lunch at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where we nibbled Cobb salads and people-watched. At a table by the window sat Stan Harris, a major movie star, with his sunglasses on and his shirt unbuttoned almost down to his navel, signaling to one and all that he was, indeed, Someone, and that the regular rules about things as mundane as shirt-buttoning did not apply to the likes of him. Stan had been in the news a lot lately. Three months ago, when the police came to his Bel Air estate to tell him to turn down the music, he’d gone off on what was widely assumed to be a cocaine-fueled rant, one that made reference to everything from the size of his bank account to the size of his penis (both, per Stan, substantial), and concluded with his sneeringly asking the (young female) officer if she was Jewish, and if it was true that Jewish girls hated giving head. His team had gone into full spin mode, at first denying that the actor had made such hateful remarks. When a tape surfaced on TMZ (one of Stan’s party guests had pulled out a phone and recorded the whole exchange), a crisis manager, hired special for the occasion, said that Stan was “wrestling with some demons” in the wake of his recent divorce, and would be going away to seek treatment and address them.

  Stan had dutifully done a month at a facility in Montana. Now he was back, and all of Hollywood was waiting to see what kind of impact, if any, his tantrum would have on his career. Most people’s guess was none. As long as Stan was bankable, as long as his aquiline profile and lean, muscled torso put butts in movie-theater seats, he could say whatever he wanted to young female cops. “You don’t really get in trouble until you start up with someone who’s got more money or more power than you,” said Annie.

  “Really?”

  “Sad but true. Remember Tim O’Shea?” Tim had been a sitcom star who’d struggled with a cocaine habit and what could delicately be called “anger issues” for years. He’d held a girlfriend at gunpoint, assaulted one of his wives in their car, and tried to drown a date in the hot tub after, it was whispered, she’d declined his request for anal sex. A few years ago, one of the gossip websites had obtained a frantic 911 call from a ladyfriend who’d barricaded herself in a bathroom while Tim raged outside. Nothing ever happened to him—at least, nothing permanent. He’d get arrested; his grinning mug shot would be all over the Internet the next day; and then, a week later, he’d be back at work. “You know why?” asked Annie. Before I could answer, she said, “Because the women he hurt were disposable.” She waved one elegant, manicured hand. “Escorts, porn stars, wannabe actresses just as messed up on drugs as he was. You can do whatever you want to girls like that, but when he started insulting executives . . .”

  “Ah.” I was remembering that Tim had finally lost his job, not after being jailed for assaulting a girlfriend with a pair of barbecue tongs, or being arrested when he was out on bail for threatening to throw a different girlfriend off a balcony, but for tweeting that his boss, the head of the network, wore a toupee. Which was true . . . but, evidently, saying so was a fireable offense. In a tersely worded statement, the network said that it “wished Mr. O’Shea the best in his future endeavors” but would no longer be working with him.

  Annie looked toward the corner where Stan was holding court at a table full of supporters and employees and hangers-on: a young female assistant with two BlackBerrys, an agent I recognized from the trades, and a young man in a suit and tie who sat quietly next to the star, saying nothing, doing nothing, while the agent talked and the assistant texted and Stan ate his burger, chewing with his mouth open, just to show, in case the unbuttoned shirt didn’t quite prove it, that he’d attained a level of being where the rules of civility and good behavior no longer applied.

  “Know who that is?” Annie asked, nodding at the guy in the suit.

  “Son from the first marriage?” I guessed.

  “Good try, but nope. That’s his sober friend.”

  “His what?”

  “The guy they hired to stay with him twenty-four-seven and make sure Stan doesn’t drink, or drug, or look at any porn.” She gave me a wink. “I hear that’s one of his many problems.” Annie dipped the tines of her fork in her pitcher of dressing and then speared a chunk of turkey and a lettuce leaf. “Did you know that I Love Lucy was shot where we did the pilot?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “So you know the story, right?”

  “Which one?”

  Annie gave a lascivious grin. “Okay. The way I heard it is, they’re shooting an episode, and they break for lunch. Everyone’s gone, except for one grip up in the rigging, hanging lights, and he looks down and sees Desi Arnaz getting”—she leaned in close and dropped her voice—“orally pleasured by an extra. So, he’s looking down, and Desi looks up and sees him, and there’s this moment of silence, and then . . .” Annie flapped her arms, waggling her brows, becoming, in that moment, Lucy’s beleaguered husband. “Desi looks down at the extra like he’s never seen her before in his life and says, ‘What are you DOOO-eeeng?’”

  I laughed. Annie beamed, then reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “I like you,” she said, and I said, “I like you, too,” and I smiled, thinking how putting a show together was sort of like building a family, and if you were lucky the way I’d been lucky with the Daves, at least some of the people you’d spend your days with would be people whose company you enjoyed.

  Finally, there was Cady . . . or what Maya, my casting director, had taken to calling the Cady of It All. Setting a meeting with her proved, once again, complicated. Unfortunately, said her manager, a breathy-voiced fellow named Justin, she was busy all week, not free for lunch, or breakfast, or drinks, or a late-night snack. Busy with what? I wondered for the umpteenth time, and for the umpteenth time, I restrained myself from asking. “How’s Sunday morning?” he’d asked.

  “That could possibly work,” Justin allowed. I’d actually made plans on Sunday to accompany Grandma to the county arboretum, to see if it might be suitable for her wedding, after which I would take her to her favorite
Mexican place for lunch, with hopes of thawing the chill that had grown between us since the night she’d seen the pilot, but we could reschedule. “Brunch?” I asked.

  There was a pause. “Sure!” Justin finally chirped. Given his mannerisms, the way he dressed and moved and spoke, I’d assumed he was gay after my first fifteen seconds in his company, and had been surprised to learn that he was, in fact, married to his high-school sweetheart, and that they had three kids together. “We’ll do brunch.”

  “Um,” I said, unclear on just who “we” was, and suspecting that Justin had just invited himself along. “I was hoping that Cady and I could just sit down together. You know,” I said, and attempted a giggle. “Girl talk!” The more time Cady and I had together one on one, I’d reasoned, the more chance I’d have of figuring out what made her tick, and whether she’d respond to praise or pressure when it came time for me to help craft her performance.

  “And I understand completely,” said Justin. “I just think Cady might be more comfortable if I’m there.”

  Pick your battles, I told myself. “Okay,” I said. “That will be fine.”

  * * *

  On Sunday morning, I gave myself a pep talk as I dressed for the encounter. “Stars,” I murmured. “They’re just like us!” I opened my copy of Us Weekly and looked at a picture of Jennifer Aniston feeding a parking meter as supportive evidence. Then I wrapped my scarf, blue-and-white stripes, around my neck, hiding as much of the scars there as I could, and gave my makeup one final check. Grandma had spent the night at Maurice’s again, which meant I was on my own. There was no one to tell me that I’d gotten my outfit right, to run a thumb beneath my eyes to make sure my liner hadn’t smudged, and to tell me that I didn’t need to be scared of Cady. We were both, after all, young women trying to make it in Hollywood. True, only one of us had a grammatically incorrect ankle tattoo that had been featured in People magazine, but there had to be some common ground.