We're So Famous

by Jaime Clarke

  SWEET PEA: Does he know where he is?

  WHAT-UP-CHUCK: L.A. He’s resting before the American tour. My friend said he was at a party two nights ago and Metro was there. It was for the new Brad Pitt movie. He said Metro looked like shit and that David Geffen had him put in a limo and sent home.

  SWEET PEA: Does Metro have a place in L.A.?

  WHAT-UP-CHUCK: Sorry, didn’t ask.

  SWEET PEA: Is there any way I can call your friend and ask him some questions?

  WHAT-UP-CHUCK: No can do. If they find out he’s talking, he could get fired. There’s been some stories floating around and Metro thinks its people at his label leaking stories about him because they want to dump him.

  MAX FACTOR: There goes the pool.

  SWEET PEA: Thanks, WUC.

  WHAT-UP-CHUCK: No problem.

  Ms. Tiffani-Amber Thiessen

  3253 Wrightwood Court

  North Hollywood, CA 91604

  Dear Tiffani-Amber Thiessen,

  You recently had your photos developed at Imagistic Photo Developers. We want you to know how much we appreciate your business. Enclosed are coupons which are good on your next visit to Imagistic. We hope to continue to be your photomat of choice.

  Also, I wanted to tell you that I thought Saved by the Bell was a pretty good show, and that I liked your work on 90210, or Melrose, I can’t remember which now. Somewhere I saw a picture of you as a child, when you modeled for the Peaches and Cream Barbie doll. I saw you once in person too, out in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater. You were with what looked like your brothers (one about eighteen, the other in his mid-twenties) and you were goofing around putting your hands in the cement hands of movie stars. You look like a really nice person.

  Anyway, just supposed to be sending these coupons. Oh—and I wanted to ask you a question. You gave an interview to YM magazine last month and the interviewer asked you a question about what you liked to do with your free time and you answered that you liked to travel and the interviewer asked you a question about where you liked to go and you said Hawaii. It came out that you liked to stay at the Hilton and I don’t know if you know this but that’s where Bryan Metro stays when he goes to Hawaii (which I hear he likes to go to a lot) and I’m wondering if you were ever there when he was there. I’m a fan of his and am concerned about the rumors that are going around. I know it’s a long shot but if you can provide any information about what Bryan’s up to now, it would be appreciated.

  Yours sincerely,

  Mr. Michael Ovitz

  1357 N. Rockingham Avenue

  Los Angeles, CA 90049

  Dear Michael Ovitz,

  You recently had your photos developed at Imagistic Photo Developers. We want you to know how much we appreciate your business. Enclosed are coupons which are good on your next visit to Imagistic. We hope to continue to be your photomat of choice.

  Also, I understand that you are Bryan Metro’s new agent. I’m wondering if it’s possible for you to forward the enclosed letter to him. Bryan doesn’t know me but I am a huge fan of his and I’d like to get in touch with him. I don’t know if you have a policy against forwarding mail—some places do, I know—but I would appreciate it if you would make an exception in this case. I’m not sure how else to reach him as I’m told the president of his fan club has gone missing somewhere in Costa Rica and mail sent to the P.O. gets returned. Please, Mr. Ovitz, forward this letter to Bryan Metro.

  Yours sincerely,

  P.S. I’m also enclosing my head shot. I’m an up-and-coming actress and would love to be represented by you.

  I set my alarm to wake up at five. Craig rolls away from me as I sit on the edge of the bed. It feels like night. I am confused as to whether I’ve actually been to sleep and if so, that I’ve closed my eyes long enough to dream. I smell like the cigarette I allowed myself on the ride home, the long drive up Sunset after dropping Paque and Daisy off.

  I eat a bowl of Applejacks in the glow of the computer screen. I chew quietly but each crunch sounds like a rockslide in my head. Milk drips over the bowl and onto the magazines fanned out under the chair. Variety, People, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, Spin, Details, Maxim, GQ, Esquire, Vanity Fair—even the National Enquirer, the Star and the Globe. Nothing. No mention of Bryan Metro, not even an article in the monthlies about the canceled shows. The silence makes me suspicious.

  The agenda this morning is to check in with my dead pools, hit the Bryan Metro homepages (official and unofficial), check the online versions of Entertainment Weekly as well as the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. I’m debating whether or not to hire a clipping service as I retrieve the Los Angeles Times from outside the front door when the headline screams out: VIDEOTAPE SHOWS SEAN FEAR IN HOTEL ROOM WITH MINOR. Before it registers that Sean Fear is Craig’s best friend—it can’t be that Sean Fear, can it?—that Craig and Sean were roommates when they both first moved to Hollywood, that Sean’s fiancée, Heidi, is actually a good friend of mine, that Craig and I last saw Sean and Heidi—when? dinner at Succor on Melrose?—before any of that registers the phone rings. Dazed, I walk back into the bedroom. Craig is sitting up in bed saying, You’re fucking kidding me, right? and I offer him the paper as proof but he pushes it away without reading it and just like that we’re driving through the deserted Hollywood streets, to the Chateau Marmont, where Sean Fear, the popular actor of such films as Night Game, Renters, and Knollwood, is hiding out.

  I know from the one other time I’ve been to the Chateau—when I first moved to Hollywood I sought out bungalow 3, where they found John Belushi on his side in bed, all the blood drained from one half of his body and collected in the other—that the Chateau Marmont is not the most secure hideout in town. I know this because the one other time I was there I simply strolled through the front door, past the draped lobby and front desk and walked back to the pool without seeing a soul. This time Craig and I take the same route but the guys from Hootie & the Blowfish are playing frisbee in the narrow courtyard while a couple girls look on from the shaded patio. Inside, the lobby is lit by the early sun and the dark greens and reds and yellows of the couches and carpet make the lobby look like that room at your grandparents’ house that no one ever sits in. The place smells like someone is baking lemon pies.

  There’s no one at the front desk but Craig knows the room number so he punches the floor on the elevator and the door starts to close but a hand catches it, startling me, and the actor Christopher Walken gets in and presses his floor. Even though it’s early morning, Walken is sweating and he seems tired. He starts to lean against the elevator wall but catches himself and then stares at me. I don’t look but can feel him staring and when he exits the elevator I think how much he looks like Gerald, the waiter who plays him at the Starion.

  Craig clicks open the door to Sean’s room. Heidi has on sunglasses and is on the bed, flipping through a copy of The Paris Review. Sean comes out of the bathroom once he hears that it’s us. This is the Jim Morrison suite, Heidi says nonchalantly and starts giggling.

  Hey, Craig says to Sean.

  Sean nods. His big screen smile is gone and his eyes scan the floor.

  Hey, he says. Thanks for coming.

  We’re just standing, not saying anything. Heidi has a smile plastered on her face and she looks up from The Paris Review and says, Now you have another play for the Starion.

  Sean winces. Heidi, please don’t, he says.

  Did Jim Morrison really stay here, I ask, trying to ease the tension in the room.

  It’s the Jim Morrison suite all right, Heidi says. She lifts her sunglasses and I see that her eyes are swollen from crying. Legends only, she says.

  Sean doesn’t say anything. Craig asks about the tape and Sean recounts what he’d already confessed to Heidi, that the tape was real, that it happened in New York. She didn’t even give me a chance to buy the tape from her, Sean says, incredulous. Heidi replaces The Paris Review in the night sta
nd and pulls out a prescription bottle and dry swallows two blue tablets.

  Did you know she was underage, Craig asks.

  Sean shakes his head no. She isn’t underage anymore, he says. That much I know.

  When did you find out she sold the tape, I ask.

  I woke up to the sound of the mob of reporters outside my gate, Sean says.

  I smuggled him out in the trunk, Heidi says proudly.

  Do you know for sure it was the girl who sold the tape, I ask.

  Sean thinks. I’m assuming, he says.

  Well, Craig says. What now?

  I’m to lay low, Sean says. Stay out of sight.

  Why don’t you take a vacation, Craig suggests.

  We are, Sean says. We’re leaving tonight for Greece.

  Do you need anything while you’re gone, Craig asks. Someone to look after the house?

  Sean smiles. I think it’s well looked after as is, he says.

  I laugh and even Heidi cracks a smile.

  But there is one thing, Sean says. We left so fast this morning that Heidi forgot her purse at the house. And it has all of her identification in it.

  I can’t stand the thought of going back up there, Heidi says.

  Sean looks at us. Is there any way I can ask you to fight through the madness up there to retrieve Heidi’s purse, he asks. I’d offer you money but I know that would just insult you.

  Craig, loving the challenge, says, No problem.

  Sean gives Craig the keys to Heidi’s car and goes over how to deactivate the alarm on the house. I excuse myself and go to the bathroom. Someone has carved I LIKED MYSELF BETTER BEFORE I BECAME WHO I AM on the windowsill and I run my fingers along the smooth grooves of the letters.

  Craig and Sean were in this Saturday afternoon movie called Nimble, about two would-be thieves trying to pull off the score of a lifetime. Craig played a guy named Anderson, a beach bum whose parents were killed when he was small and Sean played Pluto, an ex-con who had relocated to California so he ‘could see the sun’ after all his time in prison. Craig has a tape of Nimble and sometimes I pop it in if I’m bored. It’s an awful movie—Sean’s studio leaves it off his official bio—but one of those awful movies that you take pleasure in watching every once in a while.

  As Craig navigates Mulholland and Sean’s house comes into sight, I’m reminded of the scene in the movie where Anderson and Pluto manage to sneak past the security guard at the gallery where the jewels they’ve been hired to steal are kept and, with trembling fingers, open the safe only to find it empty because as we ease up to Sean’s gate, there isn’t a soul around.

  How weird, Craig says.

  Once we’re through the gate Craig clicks the garage opener and the garage door opens slowly like a heavy eyelid. We pull in next to Sean’s Mercedes and the garage fills with the smell of exhaust.

  The air conditioner blasts throughout the house and I stand in the modern kitchen and hug myself. The phone rings, startling me, and I hear Sean’s voice on the answering machine. His mother leaves a worried message and when he hangs up the phone rings again and it’s Sean’s publicist, wanting to know where he is. She leaves three or four numbers where she can be reached and I scribble them down in case Sean wants to call her back before he leaves.

  Found it, Craig says. He’s got Heidi’s purse slung around his shoulder.

  Is everything in there, I ask.

  Craig opens the purse. Yep, driver’s license, credit cards, and passport.

  The phone rings again. This time it’s Sean’s sister calling from Phoenix. Craig tries to pick it up but she hangs up before he can get to the phone.

  I go to the refrigerator and swing open the double doors. The bright light hurts my eyes and I squint at a pitcher of orange juice that has an island of mold floating along the top.

  They eat out a lot, Craig says when I point it out to him. He switches on the small TV in the kitchen and scans the channels. I’ll bet it’s on CNN, he says. Let’s wait for the entertainment news and see.

  We sit at the kitchen table and listen to the drone of the newscast. It’s ten after the hour, which means we only have to wait ten minutes for the entertainment news but Craig seems to be concentrating on the little screen with the same intensity he uses to memorize lines. A memory I’ve been fighting back since I saw the paper this morning surfaces, the time Craig told me about how he felt jealous of Sean’s success. It was the first time in our relationship where he was vulnerable to me and he very honestly described his bitterness at having to do dinner theater at the Starion while Sean got roles in bigger and bigger films. Craig was confused as to why it wasn’t happening for him too, especially since they’d started out together. What makes one person go way up and not the other one, he asked me. I remember telling him I thought a great deal of it was luck. I haven’t even been in movies like Nimble, so I should be feeling the same sort of frustration, but then again there’s something hopeful about not yet having to play a down-and-out thief in a movie that wasn’t released in theaters but went straight to video.

  So when I come back from turning down the air conditioning I’m not entirely surprised to overhear Craig picking up the latest call in the kitchen.

  He’s staying at the Chateau Marmont, Craig says into the receiver. But he’s leaving tonight for Greece. Yeah, you’re welcome.

  I pause in the hall and when I walk back into the kitchen Craig is watching the TV again. Is it on yet, I ask.

  It’s coming up, he says expectantly.

  In Hollywood movies take forever to make but a good rumor can circulate as fast as it’s told so the scene back at the Chateau was, in some respects, predictable. By the time we got there, the police had been called to hold off the reporters who had been ferried by the vans lined up outside the hotel, their satellites aimed at the sky, ready to beam the first salacious tidbit anyone could dig up into homes all around the world.

  Craig and I scale along the outside of the mob—men in suits so early in the morning and on a Saturday was a curious sight—and find the back gate. The cop posted there is telling a reporter to get lost, that he is trespassing, and is about to tell the same thing to us when Craig says, We’re guests of the hotel.

  So am I, the reporter says.

  Get lost, the cop yells and the reporter backs off. He turns to us and says, I’m not in the mood for tricks, so you better be who you say you are.

  We were here earlier, Craig says. We just ran an errand and now we need to get back in.

  The cop calls out to another cop, who appears from inside the grounds and Craig and I are escorted to the front desk. We tell the woman at the desk who we are and she says, I’m sorry, but they’ve left the hotel.

  We’re really his friends, Craig says. He looks out the windows at the cops yelling at the reporters and an amused smile comes across his face. It’s okay, he tells the woman, we’re his friends.

  I’m sorry, she repeats, but they left about a half an hour before all this started.

  Did they say where they were going, I ask.

  The woman shrugs.

  Maybe they left us a note in the room, Craig suggests.

  I can’t let you in their room, the woman says as if we ought to know better.

  But we have their car, Craig says. I can’t believe they’d leave.

  The elevator opens and I’m thinking, Maybe the key to their room is on Heidi’s key ring and I’m about to pull Craig away from the desk to ask him, when I glance up at the curious figure peering out the window at the cops and crowd, a figure that seems instantly recognizable from the countless photos I’ve stared at over and over. Bryan Metro stalks over to the front desk, his hair slicked back and held in place by a pair of Ray • Bans, and asks the woman, What’s going on out there?

  ACT ONE

  Scene 1

  EXT. HIGHLAND GARDENS. NIGHT. We See STELLA quietly get out of bed, already fully dressed. She slips out of the house without waking CRAIG.

  Scene 2

  EXT. HI
GHLAND GARDENS PARKING LOT. NIGHT. STELLA pulls out into the night traffic.

  Scene 3

  EXT. CHATEAU MARMONT. NIGHT. STELLA parks along a side street.

  Scene 4

  EXT. CHATEAU MARMONT POOL. NIGHT. We see STELLA spying around a corner on BRYAN METRO, who is laid out on a chaise lounge, the pure white light coming from the pool reflected in his mirrored sunglasses, BRYAN METRO is in jeans and a T-shirt and appears to be sleeping. There is no one else around. The traffic on Sunset Boulevard can be heard, STELLA walks stealthily towards BRYAN METRO, stopping in front of his chair.

  BRYAN METRO

  (without taking off his sunglasses)

  What’s up, man? I don’t need anything.

  STELLA

  (in awe, almost whispering)

  I thought you were dead.

  BRYAN METRO

  (mildly alarmed, raises his sunglasses but then sees he’s in no danger)

  It’s L.A., man. Everyone here is dead.

  STELLA

  Are you hiding out from someone?

  BRYAN METRO

  You got a lot of questions for a cabana boy—, er, girl.

  STELLA

  I don’t work here.

  BRYAN METRO

  (pauses)

  Are you a reporter?

  STELLA sits down tentatively in the chair next to BRYAN METRO’S, as if he’s a mirage that may disappear.

  STELLA

  No.

  BRYAN METRO

  Cool, man.

  STELLA

  Why did you cancel those shows in Japan?

  BRYAN METRO

  Why do you want to know?

  STELLA

  (thinks)

  I guess it doesn’t matter now.

  BRYAN METRO

  (not really hearing her)

  Fuckin’ Chinks.

  STELLA

  I don’t think Japanese people are called Chinks. Those are the Chinese.

  BRYAN METRO

  Whatever, man. Fuckin’ Japs, then. Okay?