by A. W. Gray
As four of Dallas’s finest arrived on the scene, responding to a 911 call from within the restaurant, one of the cops activated the video camera mounted on his dashboard. The camera whirred into action; in the tape the display figures in the upper right-hand corner would clearly read 6:14 p.m. With the video recording their every move, the four officers then vaulted from their cars, dashed over the curb, and into the public eye. They slowed to a walk and approached the fallen actor, who had now begun to snore.
One cop said, grasping Spencer’s chin and turning the actor’s head for a better look, “Ain’t this sumbitch in the movies?”
A second patrolman put his hands on his knees and bent from the waist. “Fuck, I know who he is. Born on the Fourth of July. Guy lost his legs in the war.”
The official report of the incident would read: “Officers identified the distressed party as film actor David Spencer.” In the handwritten rough draft, however, the actor’s name was given as “Tom Cruise,” with Cruise’s name scratched through and Spencer’s name substituted prior to the typist’s delivery of the final version. Cruise’s publicists would issue a lengthy denial of his presence at the disturbance, widely re ported in the “People” insert in thousands of newspapers around the country, and would use the opportunity to mention in print the name of the movie which Cruise had been shooting in San Francisco at the time the policemen leaped over the Dallas curb.
The lead policeman was a veteran named Whiteside, who was known among his peers as having a Rambo complex, and who considered himself a take-charge kind of guy. He said, “Well, don’t just stand there with your fingers up your asses. Do somethin’ to help the motherfucker.”
The audio portion of the squad car videotape would become strangely distorted at that point, and Whiteside’s words would be lost in a roar of static. The printed report of the incident would state thusly: “Officers identified themselves and offered their assistance.”
A portly man wearing a Dallas Cowboys sideline jacket and a Texas Rangers batting helmet, carrying a Dallas Stars hockey puck—possibly a sports enthusiast, investigators in search of witnesses would later determine-ducked underneath the ropes and approached the officers, staggering slightly and waving a bottle of beer. “I seen the whole thing,” he said loudly. “He ‘as gonna beat the shit outta this woman, an’ this chick lowered the boom on his ass.” He pointed at the actor stretched out on the pavement.
Spencer was now awake and was having difficulty. Blood oozed from the laceration on the side of his head. He tried to rise, but couldn’t get his feet under him and fell back down. A comely young lady in the crowd called out, “He’s hurt. Oh, my God, he’s injured.” The policemen rushed to the actor’s side to offer assistance.
One officer grabbed Spencer’s elbow and tried to help him up, but the heartthrob yanked his arm away.
“Getcha fuckin’ hands offa me,” Spencer said. Officers noted that his speech was slurred and that there was a distinct odor of alcohol fumes.
“Just take it easy, pal,” Whiteside said. “We’ll get an ambulance.” He sprinted toward the squad cars to put in a call.
“Don’t need a goddamn ambulance,” Spencer mumbled. “Need my fuckin’ agent.” The cut on his head was nasty, nearly a half inch wide and almost to the bone.
“We’ll get you stitched up,” one of the policemen said.
“Fuck you will.” Spencer tried once more to rise. As he did, he fumbled in his breast pocket and pulled out a cellophane bag. His legs gave way and he fell, dropping the baggie on the ground. The bag contained an off-white crystalline powder. Spencer flopped onto his back and began to snore.
The three cops hovering over the actor looked at each other. Not being members of the Los Angeles police force, they weren’t accustomed to dealing with celebrities and weren’t sure how to proceed. The bag of powder lay in plain sight, and therefore they didn’t need a search warrant to make an arrest. Their beating victim had just become a cocaine suspect, and the policemen weren’t of a mood to pursue a pissant possession beef on a Friday night when they had plenty of other fish to fry. One of the cops placed his foot over the baggie to hide it from view.
The man in the Dallas Cowboys sideline jacket stood nearby. His mouth hung open. He turned to the crowd and waved his hockey puck. “God day-um. He’s been tootin’.”
A ripple went through the mob, which now had swelled to five hundred or more. A woman near the ropes yelled, “Any place, any time, darlin’, I’ll toot some with you.” She pulled up her sweater to reveal her naked breasts.
David Spencer continued to moan, and extended his hand toward the officer’s boot. “Gimme that. Got a straw in my pocket.”
The policemen sighed in unison. Now there were witnesses. Regretfully, one of the officers read Spencer his rights. The actor continued to grope for the baggie.
A second cop pushed Spencer’s hand away, picked up the dope, and held the baggie gingerly by one comer.
The sports fan, his eyes wide, now announced, “God day-um. They’re fixin’ to bust his ass.”
Which brought a rumble of discontent from the crowd, and caused the woman with the bared bosoms to shout, “I’ll make your bail, darlin’. Don’t you fret none, you hear?”
The policeman paused in the middle of Spencer’s Miranda warning as the actor rolled onto his side, rested his cheek on his hands, and snored even louder.
A ribbon of drying blood extended from the cut on his head down the side of his face. Officer Whiteside returned from the squad car and, unaware of the cocaine discovery, said to Spencer, “Ambulance is on its way. Try to hang on.” Spencer made a noise as if giving the raspberry to an umpire.
The policeman showed the baggie and shook his head. Then one officer grabbed Spencer’s ankles, another his arms, and with the third cop running interference, they toted Spencer toward the squad cars. Whiteside’s shoulders slumped in disappointment as he trudged along behind the other officers.
After dumping the actor into the rear seat of a squad car, the policemen manned their vehicles and left the scene. As they moved at a snail’s pace out of the West End, a cup flew from the crowd and bumped soggily against the lead car’s windshield. Crushed ice and bourbon mixed with Coke ran down the window, poured from the auto’s side, and puddled in the street as the cops drove away.
The visit to Parkland Hospital’s emergency room (where the nurse who sutured Spencer’s wound, along with five hospital employees, stood in line and asked for autographs; and where Spencer, now pumped full of hospital Demerol in addition to the cocaine and whiskey he’d administered on his own, responded to his fans by saying, “Fuck no. I want my agent”) took up more than three hours. By the time the motorcade arrived at Main Police Headquarters’ underground garage to book the actor for possession, it was nearing ten p.m. Spencer, now semi-coherent, sat in the rear of a black-and-white with his head swathed in bandages. He wasn’t handcuffed, and nastily refused the policemen’s offers of assistance as he stumbled toward the jail.
Two men wearing suits and toting briefcases waited at the booking desk. They identified themselves as lawyers with Malone and Ricks, a Dallas white-collar firm. Apparently David Spencer’s agent, through a Los Angeles attorney, had requested the local mouthpieces to come down and post bail. The police fingerprinted and photographed the defendant, then took him upstairs to an all-night magistrate. The magistrate noted the actor’s celebrity status and released him on his recognizance, after instructing Spencer to keep his attorneys aware of his whereabouts at all times. Spencer responded groggily that he’d think about it, causing the magistrate to revoke his bail, and finally gained his freedom through the intercession of one of the local attorneys. At 11:45 Spencer signed out on the police log and made his exit.
The lawyers then drove the actor to the Mansion on Turtle Creek. Spencer’s luggage, along with Darla Cowan’s, had already arrived from California and sto
od waiting in the presidential suite. With Spencer walking unsteadily between his attorneys, the trio entered the hotel lobby and obtained a key from the registration desk. The lawyers accompanied Spencer up on the elevator and bade him good night at the door to his room. They would later recall that he was coherent, and that the actor seemed to have calmed down.
3
“You being a lawyer makes me jealous,” Darla Cowan said.
Sharon had a bite of Caesar salad. “I can’t imagine anybody in the country who’d rather be me than you.”
“I’m somebody in the country, and most of the time I’d rather be you.” Darla spooned mushroom soup from a bowl.
The lighting inside the 8.0 Restaurant was cozy and dim, the clippety-clop of hooves on Fort Worth’s downtown pavement pleasant to the ears. Sharon looked up as the carriage passed the restaurant, the horse straining, the driver hunched over the reins, a couple in the passenger seat holding hands. The thirtymile trip on Interstate 30 had been Sharon’s idea; the women couldn’t have had dinner anywhere in Dallas without the celebrity watchers bugging the devil out of them. It was Darla’s brainstorm to ditch the limo, driver and all, for a rental car at Love Field, and the idea wasn’t a bad one. After all, who’d look for a movie star to arrive in a Geo? To complete the incognito bit, Darla had dug a pair of slacks and a simple beige sweater from her overnight bag and had changed in an Exxon station’s rest room. During the drive over she’d tried on sunglasses, and the two had agreed that at night she’d be less conspicuous without the damned things.
In comparison to the madhouse of Big D, downtown Fort Worth was as laid back as Bug Tussle. Men in boots and jeans and women in casual western wear roamed the sidewalks at a leisurely pace, as if they had no place to go and were in no particular hurry to get there. Whereas Dallas literally broke its neck being modern and upscale, Fort Worth had restored itself to the old-days look; Gaslights lined the curbs. 8.0’s headwaiter had recognized Darla the moment she’d stepped through the entry, but a twenty across his palm had bought his silence. The women sat at a comer table. Occasionally one of the other diners would shoot hey-who-is-that? glances in their direction, but otherwise they had their privacy. Sharon suspected that the headwaiter would place a call, and that gossip columnists in both the Dallas Morning News and Fort Worth Star-Telegram would report a celebrity sighting in the old Eight-Oh.
“Face it, you’re living the American dream,” Sharon said. “The things we used to fantasize about, you’ve got them.” Sharon kept her tone upbeat, her dialogue complimentary; she’d learned years ago that feeding Darla’s ego was a round-the-clock job. Five minutes after the limo had pulled away from Planet Hollywood, Darla had dried her tears and hadn’t mentioned the incident with David Spencer since. Which was all right with Sharon—she let Darla set the conversation’s pace and merely followed leads. Prying wasn’t necessary; sooner or later Darla would tell more about Spencer than Sharon wanted to know.
“Arguing in front of a jury is as much of a dream as being an actress,” Darla said.
“It might be unless you’re doing it. Lawyering is grunt work.”
“So’s acting.” Darla lowered her lashes, watched her lap, then looked up and said, “I see Rob some.” Sharon had known it was coming, and had mentally prepared herself. She’d made it a practice never to bad-mouth Melanie’s father to anyone. She said merely, “Oh? How’s he doing?”
“You know how he’s doing. He’s becoming America’s sex symbol. Rob’s got talent, you know.”
Sharon didn’t necessarily agree with that—she’d spent enough hours going over Rob’s lines with him in the old days, and had secretly thought that his character interpretation left a lot to be desired—but she had to admit that he had a certain charisma in his role as a tough-soft police detective. She also thought, however, that once Minions of Justice: The Streets had run its course—as all weekly television shows must do eventually—that Rob would go the way of Eric Estrada, David Soul, and countless others whose star status became history once their series was cancelled. She didn’t think Rob had the range required to make it on the big screen, but to say so now would sound like a dose of Bitter Old Flame. So she said to Darla, “A lot of people have the talent. Rob got the break as well.”
Darla showed a smile. “I was in on his break.”
Sharon had been stirring her salad around in preparation for spearing another bite, but now laid her fork aside. “Oh?”
“I was filming Fatal Instinct,” Darla said, “and Rob showed up one day at a casting call. The desk clerk part, the one where I vamp the guy in order to get into a room where I stab a couple of people. He didn’t get the part, but he and I talked. The next day I tried to get my agent to represent him, but Fatal Instinct wasn’t in release yet and I didn’t have the stroke to get Aaron’s ear.” She laughed. “Aaron Levy’s still crying in his beer over that one.”
“That’s your agent?”
Darla nodded. “Then later on, after David Spencer and I sort of … got together, I talked David into introducing Rob to his agent. David did have the proper stroke, of course, and the rest is history. Curtis Nussbaum has never stopped thanking me.”
Sharon’s jaws clenched. “Curtis Nussbaum is David Spencer’s agent?”
“He has one of the better stables. Why, do you know him?”
One of the better stables, Sharon thought, and the absolutely freaking champion stall when it came to dispensing child support. “I’ve met him,” she said.
“Talked to him on the. phone, about…Rob’s relationship to his daughter.”
“Curt Nussbaum does everything on behalf of his clients,” Darla said. “Pays their bills … screens their scripts … He’s even talked to me about doing a picture with David and optioned a novel with that in mind. Commissioned a screenwriter—God, no telling how much Curt is out of pocket, but I sort of suspect he’s trying to steal me from Aaron Levy. Missing out on Rob and then losing me to Curtis Nussbaum, I’m afraid that might do poor Aaron in.”
Sharon pictured David Spencer and Darla in steamy roles opposite each other and, considering the donnybrook she’d witnessed outside Planet Hollywood, almost laughed, out loud. She said, “I’ve seen every one of your pictures.” She was trying to change the subject without being obvious, but she didn’t feel as if she’d put the transition over very well. She didn’t want to butt in where Darla and David Spencer were concerned and Rob and his freaking agent were subjects she’d just as soon avoid.
“Oh? Which film stands out in your mind?” Darla seemed on the defensive. In the old days her career had been her favorite subject, which was the case with every writer or actor Sharon had ever met. Darla waited for an answer.
“Oh … the big ones you’ve made,” Sharon said.
“And which ones are those?”
“Wasn’t Fatal Instinct the number one box office in…”
“1994. Two years ago. What other rolls do you remember?”
“Gee, Darla, what is this? Role roles, I’ve seen a lot of them. As talented an actress as you are…”
“Lay off, will you? You don’t have to patronize me. I do a bitchin’ fuck scene, which is all anyone knows about me. It’s put a lot of money in my bank account, but that’s all it’s done. A large percentage of my fan mail comes from perverts. How would you like to open my letters every day? I’m shacked up with a boy who’s got the body of a god and the intelligence of a weed eater, not to mention the liquor-holding capacity of a thimble.” Darla looked past Sharon, and seemed ready to burst into tears.
“Lighten up, will you? You’re one of the most famous people in America.”
“So was Linda Lovelace. Ever since I got my first so-called starring role I’ve wanted to contact you, drop you a line or something. You know why I haven’t? Because I’m ashamed to. Ditto with my folks. I haven’t talked to my mother in three years.”
The ven
om in Darla’s tone was shocking. Back in New York she used to call her mom in Indianapolis every other night. Sharon toyed with her salad and didn’t say anything. Listening to this discourse was painful, but Darla had sympathized with Sharon while she made auditions carrying Melanie in her womb. My turn, Sharon thought.
“You know when the happiest time was for me?” Darla said.
“It couldn’t have been when we were all starving to death. You can keep those—”
“Oh, yes, it was,” Darla said urgently. “We were all broke and we were all friends, and what we said to each other meant something. Not like now, for God’s sake, when nobody wants to so much as split a hot dog with you unless they’ve got an angle. David and I shared a table with Rob and some bimbo just a couple of weeks ago out in Westwood, and that’s what he and I were talking about. Rob said his days with you were the best he ever spent. Mine, too. You’ll never guess how much I miss you.”
Sharon chewed romaine lettuce brushed with cheese curds and Caesar dressing, and hoped the dimness of the restaurant hid the blush in her cheeks. One thing about Darla, her compliments came straight from the heart, no holds barred. One of the most unpredictable people Sharon had ever met, but one of the most likable as well. As for Rob and the happy days in the Big Apple … well, Sharon took that pill along with several grains of salt. Darla would tell her that Rob had said something nice even if in truth he’d called her the bitch of the century. “I miss you, too, kid,” Sharon said, and meant it. “Look, if you’re not happy with the guy, why don’t you split?”
“Oh, I will. Eventually. You have to do it right in Hollywood. Just ask my agent. Move in while the spotlight’s on you, move out when it’s big news, whatever gets your name in the paper. If you have a slugfest in public the press crucifies you, but then everybody flocks to your next film. Lovely world.”
Sharon thoughtfully bit her lower lip. “That fight outside Planet Hollywood looked like the real thing to me.”