Suite Scarlett

by Johnson, Maureen

  Scarlett was getting the very annoying feeling that she’d been dragged away from something that might possibly, maybe, have counted as a date with Eric to hear a story about a cigarette case…and this did not make Mrs. Amberson more endearing.

  “So how did you get it?” Scarlett asked dutifully.

  “Someone bought it for me,” she said. “That very day, to congratulate me. I’d never even told him about it. He just happened to pass the store and saw it. I don’t know how he afforded it, either…”

  “Who?”

  Best to keep this story motoring along.

  “A friend,” Mrs. Amberson said. “Funny thing is…this is the only reason I still smoke. I can’t bear to be without it. It was the first truly beautiful, special thing I’d ever owned.”

  She removed a cigarette from it, then tossed her beautiful, special thing across the bed.

  “It’s very sturdy,” she said. “The Germans build things to last.”

  She went over to the window, but instead of climbing over the desk onto her perch, she sat on the edge of it, lit the cigarette, and held it at arm’s length out the window. She exhaled smoke into the room.

  “What I’m about to tell you requires some delicacy, Scarlett,” she said. “I need to know I can trust you. Before I say any more, you have to promise me that what we talk about tonight will never leave this room. Your trust will be rewarded, I promise you.”

  She looked at her just-lit cigarette, tossed it away, and shut the window. She slipped back to the bed. This was mysterious behavior, even for her.

  “I promise,” Scarlett said.

  She snapped the case open once or twice.

  “I presume you heard a bit of the conversation I was having with Billy earlier. He mentioned a woman named Donna Spendler.”

  Even saying the name seemed to cause her discomfort.

  “There are some people who will do anything to get ahead,” she said, “no matter what the cost to other people. You find them in every walk of life. Donna Spendler falls into this category. What I’m about to propose may sound a little…unethical. But it’s really just a joke, and it’s nothing…nothing…compared to what she deserves.”

  “What is it?” Scarlett asked, nervously.

  “The fact that we’re doing Hamlet made me think of it,” she said, getting up and pacing the floor in front of the moon mirror. “Hamlet knows his uncle is guilty of murdering his father, but he can’t prove it. So when a group of traveling actors appears, he hires them to perform a play that will trigger his uncle, make him realize he’s caught, and force him to confess. Drawing from that idea, I want to stage a little play…”

  “A play?”

  “Tomorrow,” she said, “Donna goes up for the final audition for a very big Broadway role, which she may get. There is only one possible thing that could tempt her away from that room—and that’s the possibility of a television show. So tomorrow, at the crack of dawn, her agent will get a call telling her there is a casting emergency. An immediate opening for a female lead role in a new show.”

  Scarlett remained silent, unsure what to make of what she was hearing.

  “I know an out-of-work television writer who sent me some pages of a failed pilot called The Heart of the Angel,” she said. “It was originally set in LA, but a few tweaks of the lines will relocate it here, and it will be called The Heart of the Empire. Good title, huh? The main character is currently a man, but by tomorrow afternoon, it will be a woman. A woman of about Donna’s age. She becomes a cop after she turns forty to avenge her daughter’s murder. She saves kids. The actress who got the part has been horribly injured in a car accident, and someone else needs to step in, immediately. A big, golden opportunity…one that will take all of tomorrow afternoon. If she doesn’t take that bait, I’ll eat my yoga mat. Television trumps Broadway every time.”

  “Why?” was all that Scarlett could think to say.

  “Don’t think that I don’t know this is a lot to ask. I promise you, Donna Spendler deserves this and more. A lot more.”

  “She deserves not to get a part?”

  “Answer me this, O’Hara. What if someone used Spencer, took away his chance to perform? Actively killed his career?”

  “I’d be…really mad?”

  “You’d be more than mad,” Mrs. Amberson said. “That’s what I want you to imagine.”

  “Who did she do this to?”

  “That’s not important.” She sat on the dressing table, and it shifted, just a touch. “What is important is that this is someone who does not care about the careers of other actors. She will do what she has to to get ahead. And as you know, I take an active interest in promoting the careers of young actors, like I have with your brother’s theater company. Their continued success is largely in my hands right now.”

  It wasn’t precisely a threat, or a guilt trip, or blackmail. It was a statement of fact wrapped in a thin coating of warning.

  “Would this ruin her career?” Scarlett asked. “Like you’re saying she did to someone else?”

  “I could only wish! No, O’Hara. It’s just letting the air out of her tires a little. No one will be hurt. No one will even know. It’s just a little prank to get some justice for someone that was hurt a long time ago. Plus, it will be fun. What do you say? Are you in? Don’t you want to do something big this summer? Something you’ll always be able to talk about?”

  There were a few perfectly sensible reasons to walk away from this, which Scarlett felt deserved a few moments of consideration. Overriding those was the fact that Mrs. Amberson really was the person keeping Spencer’s career and dream alive at the moment.

  “We’ll keep the crew small,” she added, giving Scarlett a sly glance. “Just you, me, your brother, and Eric. I think they’ll be very enthusiastic about this proposition. We’ll make an excellent team.”

  Scarlett waited a moment before answering.

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “I knew you would do it, O’Hara!” she said, elated. “Now, to pull this off…”

  She picked up her notebook from the bed and leafed through several pages of notes.

  “…we will need the following. One, a studio. That’s done. Billy has graciously loaned me a secondary studio space of his for a few hours, no questions asked. Two, a camera. Easily purchased in the morning, I should think. Three, a small group of actors skilled in improvisation. That’s Spencer and Eric. And these…”

  She took a handful of pages from the bed, printouts of script pages with notes written over them.

  “I need you to type these up. This is our script. I’ll need five copies of it ready by noon. Do you think you can manage that? And send Spencer down.”

  Her voice had lightened to its normal, happy, command-giving tone. But there was still something there—something deeper. Respect. Affection. Or just some bond people develop when plotting fake auditions together.

  “Tomorrow,” she called out as Scarlett departed. “Great things, O’Hara!”

  Scarlett was understandably nerve-rattled when she got upstairs. Spencer’s door was open. He had his headphones on and was “cleaning,” which meant he was dumping the contents of boxes onto his bed. The one he was currently working on contained tubes and pots of well-used makeup, fake body hair and skin, and lots of crumpled script pages.

  “Trying to find a blood pack,” he explained, when he noticed Scarlett had appeared in his doorway. “Eric and I have been thinking about doing a thing where one of us stabs the other by accident during one of the scenes. We want to run it by Trevor, but it won’t look good unless I bleed. I have about seven of them in here somewhere…Marlene said you brought Eric along to some party she was at tonight.”

  He tacked that on to the end very casually while plucking three noses out of the mess and piling them on his pillow. Scarlett spoke fluent Spencer, though, and knew that this was not just a random remark.

  “Just for backup,” she said. “It was free food. At the Hard Rock
. I would have taken you, but you had gone to work.”

  “The Hard Rock?” he repeated. “Why do they always pick janky places?”

  The matter had clearly made his radar, but he said no more about it. He continued picking through the debris until he produced a small plastic bag of dark red liquid.

  “Here we go,” he said. “I’m thinking stomach. It’s really easy to puncture the bag there and get the blood all over the place.”

  He pulled up his T-shirt and started poking around his abdomen for possible locations for his wound.

  “Mrs. Amberson needs you,” she said.

  He straightened up, a little too quickly.

  “Service?” he asked. “I love to give service.”

  She narrowed her eyes.

  “What?” he asked, all innocence. He jumped up, fished a deodorant from under a stack of clothes, shoved it under his shirt, and applied it liberally. “I am a Martin. Hotel management is in my blood, and customer satisfaction is my life.”

  “Every time you flirt with her,” Scarlett said, “a puppy dies.”

  PERFORMANCE

  The Heart of the Angel (now Empire) was about as generic a cop show as you could possibly want. There was a cop with a dark past, fighting crime in the big city. The scene they had was about a teenager who’d been sexually attacked on a date and was refusing to press charges against her former boyfriend. The Donna character, formerly called “Mike Charlane” (renamed Alice by Mrs. Amberson) was screaming at this poor girl like a maniac, trying to get her to step up and “get some justice,” “fight for justice,” “speak for justice,” and (Scarlett’s personal favorite) “be the covergirl of justice.”

  Though Mrs. Amberson hadn’t asked her to, Scarlett took the liberty of improving the scene a little, going beyond the basic guy-to-girl, LA-to-New York changes that Mrs. Amberson had penciled in. Scarlett rewrote the bad speeches, tweaked the dialogue, added a bit to the end of the scene. She was surprised to see the sun coming up outside the Jazz Suite window by the time she finished. As she walked back to her room, she startled Spencer, who was on his way to take a shower.

  “Why are you up?” he asked. “Are you sick?”

  “I was working,” Scarlett mumbled.

  “Yeah…what is this thing today? I was in Amy’s room all night talking about it. I didn’t get all the details, because we got off topic. You know how it goes. Massages. Long games of I Never. Doing each other’s nails.”

  She was too tired to respond to his joke. He shook her curls as she stumbled past him.

  Scarlett was awakened a few hours later by Mrs. Amberson herself, who had admitted herself to the Orchid Suite.

  “Rise and shine, O’Hara,” she said, giving Scarlett a good shake. “You picked the wrong morning to sleep in. It’s almost ten.”

  Scarlett groaned and mumbled her way through an explanation, shoving the computer in Mrs. Amberson’s direction so that she could read the new material.

  “This is excellent, O’Hara,” she gushed. “You’ve added so much! I knew you were a talent. Now…”

  She pushed a fold of bills and a piece of paper into Scarlett’s hand.

  “…get dressed. Go and print up a few copies of this. Then take a cab and meet me at this address. Bring the computer with you. I need this all to happen fast. Within the hour. I’ll explain the details when you get there.”

  An hour later, Scarlett’s cab stopped in front of a massive building off Astor Place. There was a small lobby with no guard. The walls were covered in handwritten signs saying which auditions were in which rooms. She found Mrs. Amberson by herself in a tiny studio on the sixth floor, sitting at a table covered in black-and-white headshots of actresses, all around Donna’s age. Each one had a resume on the back.

  “Where did all of these come from?” Scarlett asked.

  “Call a few agents, tell them you’re casting, they’ll messenger over all the headshots you need before you can even put down the phone. Now, our mission today is to keep Donna here until the other audition ends. I have a spy over there who’ll tell us when they close up shop.”

  “Right,” Scarlett said, feeling queasy.

  “Oh, there’s one thing, O’Hara. It’s best that Spencer and Eric don’t know the exact reason they’re doing this. It might confuse their performance. I told Spencer I’m helping a producer work out an idea for a new reality program about a fake TV show.”

  “So, they don’t know this is a setup?”

  “They know it’s a setup,” she clarified, “they just don’t know all of the details. Imagine trying to improvise for three hours knowing this was all arranged for this one person. Trust me…this is better. And they’ll be paid a hundred dollars each for their time.”

  Before Scarlett could reply, there was a knock at the door.

  “I think our cast is here,” Mrs. Amberson said. “Let me do the talking.”

  The door opened to reveal Eric, dressed in a fine light blue dress shirt and black pants. He was actually, genuinely breathtaking.

  “Spencer is right behind me,” he said, smiling at Scarlett. “He’s locking his bike up.”

  Spencer was completely out of breath when he appeared a moment later.

  “Sorry,” he said. “So much traffic. I just got off my shift.”

  “You’re fine. And you smell like breakfast. How nice.”

  Mrs. Amberson went over the setup one more time, possibly for her benefit. Donna had been told that The Heart of the Empire had started production when the lead actress was hospitalized. It needed to be recast immediately, and the chosen actress would start work that week. Eric was playing the casting director. Spencer was the general assistant and would be reading the role of young police detective, Hank Stewart. Mrs. Amberson had acquired a video camera, which would be connected to Scarlett’s computer—the story being that everything that was filmed was being shown live to a room full of studio executives in LA. In reality, the camera didn’t have a battery and the cord didn’t even fit into any of the computer ports.

  “The goal,” Mrs. Amberson told Spencer and Eric, “is to keep her going as long as possible. We really want to give people an idea of how much actors have to go through to get a part. And you, Scarlett…”

  Scarlett looked up from her efforts to disguise the unconnected video cable with a pile of papers. “…step out into the hall with me for a moment while Spencer and Eric prepare.”

  Scarlett followed Mrs. Amberson down the hall, where she scuttled out of the low skylight and onto a concrete ledge outside. Scarlett stayed inside, leaning on the sill while Mrs. Amberson pulled out her cigarette case and lit up.

  “I have a surprise for you, O’Hara,” she said. “Guess what you’ll be doing while all of this is going on?”

  “Going with you?” Scarlett asked.

  “And miss the fun? Oh, no. You’re going to be reading the part of our young victim.”

  Scarlett was too stunned to speak. Her refusal came in the form of wide eyes and a backward stagger.

  “Half the actresses on these kinds of shows are so wooden that you could build a table out of them,” Mrs. Amberson said. “Donna won’t know the difference. Just read the lines and don’t fall over. That’s all there is to it.”

  “That’s not all there is!” Scarlett said. “They’re pretending to be casting people! They’re improvising!”

  “So?”

  “So…I’m not an actress!”

  “Who cares? All improvising means is making things up, which you can do. I’ve seen the way you and your brother bounce things off each other. You’re a natural. Spencer will help you.”

  “He can’t teach me how to act in the next fifteen minutes.”

  “Leave the work to them. Your part is to sit there and look clueless. Couldn’t be simpler.”

  “I can’t,” Scarlett said.

  Mrs. Amberson leaned back through the skylight to pluck the wayward curl from its traditional spot in Scarlett’s eye.

  “S
top worrying so much, O’Hara. I wouldn’t tell you to do it if I didn’t think you had it in you. Now get down there. I have to go before Donna arrives.”

  Scarlett walked back down the hall slowly, pausing by the elevator bank. All she had to do was hit the button and she could get away from this mess.

  Sit there and look clueless, she said to herself.

  Maybe she could play a completely clueless person. She had typed and written part of the script, so at least she sort of knew it. If she forced herself back into that room…this was a chance to impress Eric unlike any other.

  At the very least, she had to go down and let Spencer and Eric know what was going on. She let herself back into the studio, where they were discussing how to stage the scene.

  “Mrs. Amberson is leaving,” she said. “She has this stupid idea that I should play the girl, but…”

  “Why not?” Eric said. “We need another person.”

  Spencer looked less sure, and looked like he was about to say something to that effect when there was a buzz at the door.

  “Showtime,” he said, clapping her on the back. “Guess you’re in.”

  THE HEART OF THE EMPIRE

  Donna Spendler didn’t look very vicious standing there on the threshold of the studio. She looked a bit older than Mrs. Amberson. Her hair was shoulder-length, perfectly coiffed. It had long gone gray, but she had had it colored so that it was a glistening silver, with many highlights and tones.

  Spencer ushered her in, looking every inch the assistant.

  “I was surprised to get your call,” she said. “Pleasantly so. And you caught me just at the perfect time.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Eric said coolly. He stood and extended his hand. “I’m Paul, the casting director.”

  That was his agreed-upon name. Spencer (who had gleefully renamed himself Dick) extended his hand. Scarlett quickly chose the name Tara.

  “Did you get the sides we messengered over to your agent?” Spencer said.

  Sides, Scarlett reminded herself. The script pages were called sides.

  “Right here,” Donna said. “I read them in the cab on the way over, so I’m still a little green.”