“You work too hard,” Cherie chided me. “It’s late. Go home and put your feet up. Go have a drink. Go dancing. Go sleep with someone.”
“Mother!”
“I’m sorry, but you’ve been crabby for months, my dear, and I can only conclude that it’s because you’re not getting any.”
“I’m not crabby.”
“Oh, please. What’s so important at the office at this hour?”
“I’m up to my ears, Mother. Captain Absolute by King Royal launches this week. Sonny left eighteen other projects in various stages of production. If we have no sales, we have no cash.”
“You work too hard,” she said.
That’s rich, coming from a woman with fifty film deals in process at any given moment. She works eighteen hours a day, but it’s L.A. work, lubricated by Chardonnay and fueled by edamame and ahi at Malibu bistros.
I was also not telling her the whole story. There was plenty of work to be done at West 57, but I also knew that Garrett Wood would still be at his desk. He’s always there, a man like me, with no life, just work. I’d spent a lot of quality time with Garrett since Sonny’s death.
More about that later.
“I have to go, Mother,” I said.
“Nonsense, pay off Naresh or Hassim or Farouk or whoever is driving you and keep talking as you walk.”
I paid off my cab driver, who really was named Farouk, and gave him a big tip to thank him for using the streets rather than the sidewalks. It slows you down, but the tourists prefer it.
I buttoned my London Fog raincoat and tied the belt around my twenty-four-inch waist. Yes, I am small. Five feet nothing, one hundred pounds. Most of that is hair. The coat left my legs bare; I’d worn the power dress for Helmut. If you know me, by the way, you know my mother. We look like twins. Her plastic surgeon, her hair colorist, her dermatological consultant, and her yoga instructor have kept her L.A. young. You wouldn’t guess that she is twenty-five years older than me. In another twenty years, she will probably look the same, whereas I will be…mature.
I was half a block from the West 57 building as I left the cab, but I turned north instead and walked two blocks to the park. I crossed Central Park South and sat on one of the benches and smelled the wafting of dung from the carriage horses. My Bluetooth was in my ear. People stared at me, wondering if I was talking to myself. In New York, you never know who’s on the phone and who’s just crazy.
That should be the slogan in the Bluetooth ads. “Is it Bluetooth or is she nuts?”
“So what’s really going on with you, Julie?” Mother asked.
I was quiet. Then I said: “I miss him.”
Mother was quiet, too. “Yes, I miss him, too, my dear.”
“Don’t lie.”
“It’s true, Julie. Sonny and I had a lot of good years together. We were still friends.”
“The last time you were in New York, you hit him with a Jonathan Franzen novel. You nearly sent him to the hospital.”
“I can’t help it if Franzen is wordy, my dear.”
I laughed. For all their screaming matches, Cherie was sincere about how she felt. Love and hate are pretty close on the emotional scale, and Sonny’s death was as much a punch to her gut as to mine. Neither of us could imagine a world without him.
“He wouldn’t like tears, you know,” Mother added, and she was right.
“I’m not crying,” I lied.
She changed the subject. “So did you have dinner with Helmut?” she asked, drawing out his name so that it sounded like Hellllmoooot.
“I did.”
“What did he say?”
“Gernestier wants to acquire West 57.”
“You should say yes.”
“I said maybe.”
“Julie, why do you want the hassles of running a white elephant like West 57? This is your chance to get out of dreary New York and dreary publishing, and join me in Los Angeles.”
“And do what?” I asked. “Act?”
Mother laughed. It wasn’t a particularly kind laugh. “Oh, hardly, my dear. We’ve been down that road.”
That was true. As I told Helmut, I didn’t start my career in the agenting biz. No, no. I was an actress. Sort of.
Let me explain. By the time I was in college at NYU, Cherie had relocated to the farthest physical point in the continental United States away from my father. Namely, Los Angeles. There, she set up shop with a large chunk of Sonny’s money as an independent film producer. She also set about luring me to join her.
To a college girl, summer on the beaches of L.A. beats summer in New York, and I felt the lure of the camera while I was out there. With Cherie’s help, I landed a role in a shampoo commercial (long black hair is a plus) and as a waitress spilling red wine on Jennifer Aniston’s blouse on Friends. Not much, but I was hooked. I had my future planned in my head: Golden Globes, Academy Awards, Leonardo DiCaprio, Malibu estate.
It didn’t work out that way.
As Titanic was hitting the box office, my career hit the iceberg. I’m not someone who gives up easily, but I don’t wear rose-colored glasses about the future. Two years shuttling around L.A. convinced me that my body was more in demand than my acting. You can still see me naked on Netflix if you’re into that sort of thing. Just rent the movie Kiss Me, Kill Me, and look for Julie Chavan in the credits as “Hooker With Long Hair.”
There was also the little matter of my failed engagement to an up-and-coming actor named Thad Keller.
More about that later, too.
At the peak of my frustration with my acting career and my love life, Sonny proposed an alternative. He said that with my industry connections, I could be a great asset to one of the most distinguished literary publishing houses in New York. I wasn’t about to join West 57 and work under Sonny’s thumb – I’m no fool – but he was right about the value of my industry connections. As an entertainment agent, I could scout commercial properties and negotiate film tie-ins, endorsements, media placements, all the things that generate lots of money for clients and agents alike. I could do it all fully dressed, too.
So I gave up on Hollywood and joined the McNally-Brown Agency, and until last month, I was in the Flatiron Building doing deals. I grew older and wiser, if not a lot richer. I even met Leonardo DiCaprio once when I was handling a big book-to-movie deal, and although he didn’t peel Bar Rafaeli off his arm in order to kiss me, I’m sure that’s only because he didn’t want to hurt Bar’s feelings. At least that’s the version of the story I tell.
I stayed at McNally-Brown longer than any rational person would have done. The smart agents go out on their own, but not me. Not until now. God made the decision for me by taking Sonny away, and here I am. My departure from the agency is technically a leave of absence, but I’m not going back.
Not that I have a clue where I’m actually going.
“Work for me,” Mother repeated.
“I wouldn’t work for Sonny, so why would I work for you, Mother? No offense.”
“I can offer you things Sonny couldn’t.”
“Like what?”
“Sun. Ocean. Blond actors who will screw producers to get a part.”
“I live in New York. This is my home.”
She tut-tutted me. “Live? Julie, you work, you don’t live. You’re alone. You stayed in New York because of your father, and Sonny is gone. It’s time to move on.”
“Helmut offered me triple my old salary to stay on and run West 57.”
That stopped her. “Did he?”
“Yes, with a three-year contract.”
“You wouldn’t want to work for him.”
“I wouldn’t want to work for you, either, Mother.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told you. I said maybe.”
Mother was silent. I could almost hear her mind working. Cherie Chavan doesn’t like roadblocks when she is mapping a highway for her daughter’s life. “Don’t rush into anything, my dear. Keep your options open.”
&
nbsp; “I intend to. This week is crazy, anyway. King’s book is launching.”
“Good.” She added with a casualness that wasn’t convincing at all, “By the way, what are you doing tomorrow night?”
“Nothing.” I added pointedly: “Why do you ask?”
“I told an old friend to look you up.”
“Who?”
Her laugh was maniacally Machiavellian. “Oh, I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but you’ll thank me.”
“I really doubt that.”
“Now go home, Julie, forget about the office. I’m going to strip naked and jump into a hot tub.”
“Good for you. Tell me more about this old friend.”
“My lips are sealed. Ta, my dear!”
This can’t be good.
I hung up the phone. When I glanced beside me, Sonny sat on the bench. Big arms draped behind him. His legs crossed, his shoes shined. Same cloud of cigarette smoke. There was a lumpiness about his face in profile, his nose huge and rounded, his cheeks puffy. He watched the hordes of traffic come and go from the Plaza to Columbus Circle. He wore a black suit, which was taut on his beefy shoulders, and a tie as yellow as a daisy. No coat. I guess when you are dead, you don’t get cold. The rain was leaking on me, but Sonny’s black hair was dry.
“Do you remember our walks in the Park on summer Sundays?” he asked me.
“Of course.”
How could a girl forget that? I was even smaller then, and Sonny was still the same hero-sized father. Young. In his prime. Going places. We were rarely alone on those dazzling days on the Great Lawn. Sometimes Mailer joined us. Sometimes Roth. Or Korda or Hellman or Lenny or Warhol or Ginsberg or Chita. I had only the smallest idea who any of them were, but I remember the waves of people parting for us, and the whispers of recognition, and I thought: My father is somebody.
“The city was glamorous then, darling girl,” Sonny said. “They’re all dead now, and no one can take their place.”
“No.”
No one takes the place of the dead. The present is never what it was. Glamour is simply what we remember of the past through a fuzzy lens.
I got up from the bench. Sonny stayed where he was. I thought about West 57, and seeing Garrett Wood, and I knew I should go to the office and spend an hour with him and the books. The trouble is, it would be more than the two of us there. The wood of the desk would be scraped bare where Sonny used to prop his shoes. The closet would smell of Clive Christian cologne. The black-and-white photos on the wall would be scrawled with inscriptions bearing his name.
I couldn’t deal with it now.
I walked ten more blocks north, and I was home.
3
In the morning, when my alarm went off before sunrise, Katy Perry was singing about “California Gurls.” When she got to the song’s rap, it wasn’t Snoop Dogg but my mother who supplied the patter about how great it is to live in L.A. Cherie wore Snoop’s blingy sunglasses and had a goatee.
Okay, maybe I was still dreaming.
When the alarm really went off, Sinatra was on the radio, crooning about having a crush on me. Much better.
I started coffee percolating in the pot, and in the interim, I took a shower. Afterward, I stood in the steam, toweling off, pulling on a pink bra and pink bikini panties. I sat down at my dressing table and laid out my blow dryer, brush, and makeup. I have no bangs, just waves of thick, long, straight black hair, parted in the middle, down to my hips. It takes me about a week and a half to dry my hair, but blowing and brushing are my substitute for meditation.
My hair created an oval around my gold-toned, Freida Pinto face. Fifteen years ago, I looked just like her, which is a reminder that a pretty face only takes you so far in Hollywood. She found her Slumdog Millionaire role, but I never did. However, I am still vain enough to pluck, paint, buff, dust, bleach, and apply until I look almost like I did then. Almost. Anyway, I still have the high cheekbones, the flat jawline, the arching brows, the smoky eyes, the pouty lower lip, the slightly over-large smile. Thank the good Lord, I also got Cherie’s pointy little nose and not Sonny’s. Freida certainly never looked in a mirror and wished she had a potato in the middle of her face.
In the kitchen, the coffee waited in the pot. I liked my coffee black and European, the way Sonny taught me. I scooped a bowl of fruit. I turned on the television and flipped the channels to choose a perky host for the morning news. Thinking perky made me think of Kelly Jax, which reminded me of her diet book, I’m Into Well Hung. I’d left a message for my former colleagues at McNally-Brown to get those stickers off the books in the bookstore window. Technically, it wasn’t my problem, because I don’t work at the agency anymore. Even so, Kelly was my client there, and I felt bad for her.
Okay, it was still funny, but I felt bad.
On the cable news, I saw an ad for the Pierce Gorgon talk show. He was cancelled once, but now he’s back. I think it’s called America May Have Talent, But We’ve Got Pierce Gorgon. Or something like that. Ha ha, just kidding, Pierce. I love him. I especially love him this week, because he is devoting an hour-long interview to King Royal and Captain Absolute, which is the spring blockbuster for West 57.
I watched the commercial. Pierce was typically grumpy.
“Tomorrow night, my guest is author King Royal. This is the pretty boy who got four million dollars to do a Kitty Kelley tell-all about Wall Street crook Irving Wolfe. I’ll rip him to shreds. I’ll make his genitals shrivel like a raisin. Watch my show, you witless gun-loving American cretins.”
No, he didn’t say that.
However, I’m concerned that Pierce will serve up King Royal like an order of breakfast bangers and swallow him down one bite at a time. It didn’t really matter. Even bad publicity is good publicity when it comes to book sales. Besides, I couldn’t blame Pierce. I had mixed feelings myself about publishing Captain Absolute. It distressed me to make money off a book about Irving Wolfe.
You probably remember Wolfe. He conned rich New Yorkers out of hundreds of millions of dollars in a pyramid scheme big enough to stake a site in Giza. I didn’t like the fact that Captain Absolute portrayed Wolfe as dashing and romantic, but you don’t make it as a con man unless you’re part Robert Redford, part Warren Buffett. According to King Royal, who was Wolfe’s personal assistant for two years, Wolfe was utterly brazen about his crimes in private. Bragged about them. Laughed about picking pockets on the Upper East Side, even as he seduced husbands and wives. His favorite play was a nineteenth-century farce called The Rivals by Richard Sheridan. Wolfe liked to boast that he was the hero, Captain Absolute, wooing his victims like lovers behind a secret identity. Unlike the brave Captain, however, Wolfe’s mask hid a thief.
It’s a hell of a story, as memoirs go, until you remember how many people had their life savings wiped out.
I’ve never met King Royal, who wrote the book, but that will change tomorrow. Actually, like most celebrity writers, King probably never picked up a pen. Sonny hired one of his top ghost-writers to do the heavy lifting, and the writer took King’s reminiscences about Irving Wolfe and turned them into a cultural biography, like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. King was merely the public face of the book, and that was what worried me. The buzz in the media world was that King was a fragile flower, which made someone like Pierce lick his chops.
The real power behind the book was King’s London agent. She was the woman who somehow finagled Sonny into a four-million-dollar advance that West 57 could ill afford. She was a woman who’d made a career of stepping in crap and sprouting roses from her heels. A woman who was, once upon a time, my confidant, my sister, and my best friend.
She was also the woman who ruined my life.
Bree Cox.
You may know Bree, because she wrote a bestselling account of her life in the London publishing world called Paperback Bitch. It was one of those novels that (wink, wink) claims to be mostly true, with names changed to protect the innocent. For example, Paperback Bitch featured a sche
ming New York agent who was the chief rival out to steal clients from our innocent heroine, Bree.
The agent’s name? Julia Charon.
Real subtle.
Bree admitted in Paperback Bitch that she slept with “Julia’s” fiancé and broke up their engagement. That part was absolutely true, because that’s exactly what Bree did to me. Not surprisingly, she and I haven’t been best friends since then. In fact, we’ve been blood enemies.
Bree Cox. I knew she would be in New York this week, chaperoning King Royal. I knew I’d have to see her again.
I sipped my coffee and thought to myself: Focus, Julie. This week is about launching a bestseller. This week is about the future of West 57. This week is about you and the rest of your life. This week isn’t about Bree.
I took a deep breath, and I was serenely calm. I was in complete control of my emotions.
Oh, who was I kidding?
I was probably going to have to kill her.
My apartment is on the Upper West Side near 69th and Broadway. For a one-bedroom unit in that area, the rent is reasonable, which means that it’s the equivalent of buying a used car every month. Of course, I don’t own a car. I have nowhere to park it, and I don’t know how to drive. Sonny always told me to learn, but I never really saw the value in becoming expert at an activity that I would almost have never an opportunity to practice.
Sadly, I approach sex the same way.
I left for work before the sun was up. When I worked at the McNally-Brown Agency, which is fifty-odd blocks south in the Flatiron Building, I took the subway. For the past month, I’ve been able to walk. I followed Broadway through Columbus Circle back to West 57th at my typical fast pace. The night security guard was still on duty when I arrived. Lionel likes me. Sonny was an early riser, too, and I think Lionel enjoyed the morning banter with my father about the Yankees. I’m Sonny’s daughter, so he has kept up the banter with me. He sometimes brings me pumpkin bread made by his wife.
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