‘Hi, Sophie, that was quick! You’re back so soon!’
I wave at him, but don’t correct him. Denis is not as young as he once was. He was a doorman at Caesar’s Palace in the seventies. He’s seen a lot; I like to think of this job as his reward in later years for services to excessive celebrity behaviour. My life’s pretty boring: he just has to sit at the gate doing his crosswords and wave through packages and the occasional sushi takeout. No wrestling Frank Sinatra to the floor or mopping up Elvis’s girlfriend’s vomit.
As we pull up in front of the house Tina lopes onto the terrace. She is tall but her shoulders droop; the afternoon light catches her dark hair.
‘Hi, Sophie,’ she says as she opens the car door. ‘How’re you doing?’
‘I’m good, thanks,’ I say, hopping out. I stretch, looking up at the bougainvilleas and jasmine scrambling along the walls in a riot of purple and white. When I first came here to look around, all I knew was that it was Eve Noel’s old house. I didn’t expect to fall in love with it. The realtor stood by my side, like a cat ready to pounce, as I gazed round at the light, airy rooms.
‘If you knocked it down,’ she told me excitedly, ‘you could really build something beautiful here. I mean that hydrangea –’ she gestured out at the wall beside the pool, where white flowers and green foliage smothered the whitewash – ‘it’s been here like half a century.’
‘Why would you knock it down?’
She looked at me like I was crazy. ‘It’s old,’ she said.
‘That’s why I like it,’ I told her.
‘Isn’t it a beautiful day?’ I ask Tina now.
‘They say there’s a storm coming,’ she says sadly. Tina is not a positive person.
T.J. heaves out the box of scripts. ‘Can you put those in my office, T.J.?’ I look at Tina. ‘How are you?’
‘Good, good,’ Tina mumbles. Her lips are like hard chipolatas. I don’t know whether to offer to pay for it to be sorted out; I know a surgeon who could do it, but maybe she loves those lips, thinks they make her look like Nicole Kidman or something. She says awkwardly, ‘Carmen said to tell you she has lunch ready – you’re on week two of the diet already.’
‘OK, great.’ I take my sunglasses off and head into the sunny hall which smells of grapefruit, the floorboards gleaming in the midday glow. I breathe in. I love coming home. No matter how stupid the day, how cruel some studio exec has been, how spiteful some TV report about me is, being back here always makes things better. I control this environment and I feel safe here.
I decide to start on some of the scripts now: I’m so hungry, but if I hold out a while longer the lunch will go even further, though already I feel kind of faint. I’m glad I don’t have any interviews coming up. You have to munch down a burger and chips to convince the (female) journalist you love food and you’re just naturally this thin. I hate it. I wish I could just say once when someone asks, ‘Candice, no one’s naturally this thin, for fuck’s sake! I’m this thin because I eat bloody nothing!’ I know a famous actress, an A-lister, who wanted a baby but was so terrified of putting on weight that someone else had the baby for her and she wore an expanding prosthetic belly for four, five months. I don’t know how we got like this, but it’s wrong, isn’t it?
Tina follows me into my office as I sit down in the swivel chair and swirl around – I like the swivel chair for that very reason. I touch my fingers together, like when I was young and used to practise being a newsreader.
‘Any messages?’
Tina starts and frowns, glaring at her BlackBerry. A vein pulses on one caramel-coloured temple. ‘OK, well, while I remember, Sophie, Kerry from Artie’s office called about finalising the time for you to meet up with Patrick Drew. They’re thinking coffee, in a cool place in West Hollywood. He’s on board.’
‘Fine,’ I say, without any enthusiasm. I’m sure he’s going to be a massive douche. I wish I didn’t have to bother. Maybe I could get George to come along too? He is the director, after all. The thought of George makes me sit upright – a cool breeze seems to slide over my face and down my neck. George. Mm.
‘There are a couple of additional publicity days next week for The Girlfriend, you remember?’
‘Yep,’ I say. ‘What do I have to do?’
‘Ashley sent over the schedule. You’re in NYC next week, going on The View and maybe Today if we can get it to work. And you’re on Ellen in a couple weeks, I’ve sent the dates to your diary.’
I am twisting round in the chair. ‘Great. You should come then – you love Ellen, don’t you? You could meet her.’
‘OK. Sure.’ Tina looks mortified at my attempt to be friendly. She always does, so I don’t know why I bother, except I hate the fact I work with her and have no other interaction with her apart from conversations about my schedule, my diet, my photo shoots, my security.
The door bangs open and T.J. appears with the box of scripts. ‘Here?’ he says, gesturing to the floor.
‘No, on the desk, please. I’m going to start going through them now.’ I try to sound businesslike.
‘But you hate reading scripts,’ T.J. says. ‘You never look at them.’
‘Thanks, T.J.’ I shake my head and ignore him.
‘Do you have anything on tonight?’ Tina asks me.
I’m waiting for George to call. ‘I’m not sure … I might slob out in the den. There’s an Eve Noel season. Lanterns Over Mandalay’s on TNT tonight.’
‘Oh. Haven’t you seen all her films like a million times?’ asks Tina with a shy smile.
‘I don’t care,’ I say. ‘It makes me happy.’ It’s true, it does, even when I’m sitting there sobbing my heart out at the end of A Girl Named Rose or Triumph and Tragedy, which is a strange film, and Eve Noel herself is strange in it. It’s about a nurse who keeps having visions. I think they were trying to replicate the success of A Girl Named Rose but it didn’t work. It was a big flop. She disappeared afterwards, left this very house and no one knows where she went.
The thought still makes me shiver. I look up at Tina, a wave of longing for something washing over me. Lolling on a couch having silly chats and eating cheesy snacks, dissing programmes on TV – all things I don’t have any more. ‘You should stay over, watch them with me. You’d love A Girl Named Rose.’
‘I – well, I have to – sure, Sophie. Maybe.’
I say, embarrassed, ‘Or … whatever. Of course. So, anything else?’
She hesitates. ‘In fact … there’s two more things. I need to talk to you.’
‘What’s up?’
‘I’ll – no, I’ll ask you about it later.’
I put my elbows on the table. ‘I might be out later, I don’t know. Talk to me now.’
Tina puts her BlackBerry in her back pocket and twists her long, slim fingers together. ‘I need to have some time off. It’s not in my contract. You can – um, I’m gonna need two months.’
‘Two months? Why?’
She flushes and looks furiously at her hands. ‘I – medical reasons.’
I follow her gaze. She bites her nails; it’s the first time I’ve noticed. ‘Are you OK, Tina?’
‘Sure. I’m fine.’ She stares at me defiantly, her dark eyes flashing. I realise she’s quite beautiful; like the nails, I never noticed before. She always looks so downbeat, and those terrible lips … Suddenly it makes sense.
‘Are you having your lips done?’ I ask, and immediately wish I hadn’t. Tina is an unknown quantity. She worked for Byron Bay, the big action star, for several years before me and I think he was such a basket case she wanted a change. She’s been here for three years, but apart from the fact that she has a mom in Vegas and she once got an infected finger from a cactus prick, I know nothing about her. I’ve asked, believe me. I’m nosy, and a little bit lonely, plus there’s something about her I really like. She’s kind of loopy, but cool. But there’s some stuff you just shouldn’t ask. I’ve lost a level of appropriateness, living in my bubble.
‘I�
��d rather not say,’ Tina tells me firmly.
‘I’m sorry. Tina, I shouldn’t have asked.’ A wash of mortification floods over me. ‘It’s none of my business. Two months is fine – I guess we’ll have to find someone to cover you, and—’
‘I’ve already spoken to Kerry at WAM about it,’ she says. ‘In preparation. She’s talking to Artie and Tommy and I’ve contacted the agency who covered me last time. You liked that girl Janelle, didn’t you?’
‘Sure … sure …’ I’m looking at her now, wishing there was something else I could say, some way to cross the gulf between us. ‘She wasn’t as good as you, of course not, but – thanks, so …’ I sound so over-keen, it’s tragic. It’s like a scene from He’s Just Not That Into You.
‘I’ll leave you now.’ She takes a big breath and her pink tongue runs over her swollen lips. ‘Um, hey. Just one more thing. Deena’s arrived.’
My mind is still turning over the conversation, and it takes a moment before I catch up. ‘What?’
‘I warned you earlier, Sophie …’ Tina looks like she’s about to burst into tears. I wave my hand at her.
‘I know, I know. Don’t worry. Oh, jeez. Where is she?’
‘In the guest house. Unpacking. Her pickup is in the garage.’
‘She has a pickup truck?’
Tina gives the slightest suggestion of a smile. ‘It’s got three pairs of mannequin legs in the back.’
With anyone else this would be strange, not Deena. I give a small groan. ‘Listen, can you go across to the guest house and take out the laptop and the projector? Just in case.’
‘Sure,’ says Tina. ‘I’ll – leave you then.’
She closes the door and I stare at the pile of scripts but my eyes dart towards the window, in case Deena’s peering in, watching. My ghoulish godmother is here. When Mum was in London in the seventies, during her brief bid for fame as an actress, Deena was her best friend. They did everything together. Deena was always the star; my mother was dazzled by her, and still is. In the early eighties Deena moved to LA for a part in a TV soap and for a while she was doing well – Mum could boast to people she met in Woolworth’s that she knew someone in Laurel Canyon, and that she might have a guest role in next season’s Dynasty – but then she turned thirty-five and it all sort of petered out, like it does for hundreds of women here every year.
But I don’t trust her and I don’t think she’s a good influence, either. Mum behaves like a Bunny Girl when they’re together, wiggling and giggling and batting her eyelashes at everyone, and telling anyone who’ll listen that they used to ‘rule London in the seventies’. Those were her glory days, she’s always telling me. They can’t have been that glorious though. I mean, she ended up moving to the middle of nowhere and becoming the wife of a man who runs garages in the Gloucester area.
Still, Deena’s my godmother. I can’t let her sleep on the streets, can I, but I wish she wasn’t here. My shoulders slump childishly as Tina shuts the door, and I’m left alone gazing around my office at the markers of my career: the MTV movie award for Best Kiss, the magazine covers with my face on, the poster for A Cake-Shaped Mistake from Italy that looks a bloody piece of human tissue and not a wedding cake. I pull out the box of scripts, open page one of Love Me, Love My Pooch, and start to read.
CHAPTER FIVE
HALF AN HOUR later I put Love Me, Love My Pooch down and gaze around the room. I wish I had a cigarette. Or a gun. I pick some gum out of a drawer and chew three sticks in one go. Love Me, Love My Pooch is shit. Perhaps I’ve been blind all these years, just happily saying what people told me to say, but this is a new low. Sample extract:
Int. House.
SEAN IS TALKING ON THE PHONE.
SEAN (chuckling into phone):
Yeah, she’s a bitch. And those puppies of hers … man, they are cute!
MEGAN IS COMING IN FROM OUTSIDE. SHE HEARS SEAN TALKING. SHE IS DISGUSTED.
MEGAN (in hallway, standing holding mittens in hand, mouth wide open):
What kind of man am I dating! A man who calls women bitches and talks about their puppies?
SHE WALKS INTO THE KITCHEN AND TAKES HER COAT OFF. SHE BENDS OVER SEAN.
MEGAN:
I hate you, Sean Flynn! Get out of my life! You’ll never see these puppies again!
SHE SQUEEZES HER BREASTS IN HIS FACE AND LEAVES.
I keep thinking, Oh, no, this is so bad, there’ll be some pay-off, it’s setting itself up for a secondary joke, it’s not totally this one-note and crass and shit. But I’m wrong. This is the movie Artie thinks is going to take me ‘Sandy–Jen big’. Well, if Cameron and Carey Mulligan really are dying to do it, which I doubt, they’re welcome to it. No way. No freaking WAY.
Carmen brings me my lunch in the end and I spend the afternoon going methodically through the rest of the pile. Boy Meets Girl is about a boy who meets a girl. Yep, you guessed it. She seems really sweet at first but then turns out to have a wedding album full of pictures of dresses she wants, and flower arrangements, so by accident he sleeps with a stripper. From Russia with Lust is an American Pie style frat-comedy: a cute local prosecutor marries a girl he has a whirlwind romance with and she turns out to be a Russian prostitute! Pat Me Down is about a waitress who falls in love with a bodyguard after he strip-searches her at a nightclub and she takes secret stripping classes as a fun thing to do with all her girlfriends! Because being a stripper is every little girl’s dream, isn’t it? Then there’s Bride Wars 2 – seriously, who thought that was a good idea? Did they not see Bride Wars?
Not one of these girls has anything to say about anything other than boys, weddings, clothes and shoes. I mean, I like all those things, but is that all there is?
I scuff at the carpet and my toes kick something by accident. It’s the Eve Noel biography which has slid out of my bag. I frown as I remember Artie’s reaction. I know when Artie’s playing me, and most of the time I just go along with it, because I trust him and I want an easy life. But I want to make that film about her. Or rather, I want to find out what happened to her.
I Google her again – “Eve Noel where is she now”, “Eve Noel disappearance”, “Eve Noel living in England” – but I get the same results I always do whenever I cunningly use my wiles to track her down, i.e. Google her. The same old stuff. A review of the biography, which in itself doesn’t have any answers, it’s really just a retelling of what we know anyway, but even so it’s a good story. The only actual hard facts it has are that all her residuals and any monies from films are paid into a bank account by her agents in London, and they have no contact details for her, or none that they’ll say. An article in the Sunday Telegraph last year about her films, which tails off at the end and asserts, kind of limply, ‘She now lives anonymously out of the spotlight’ – yeah, thanks, crappy journalist, good one. An advertisement for a British Film Institute retrospective which says, ‘It is a mystery that Eve Noel’s whereabouts are not a greater mystery. One of the UK’s most successful and talented post-war stars, she must surely know some of the esteem in which she is now held. Yet she chooses, for whatever reasons, to remain out of the public eye. A salutary lesson for many of today’s young actresses.’ The rest of the results are stupid blog references or DVDs on eBay or people talking in discussion threads about her. The Internet is useless when you actually need to find something important. Perhaps she’s dead? Her husband’s dead, but she must have had some family? Well, maybe I should actually do some proper research. Like, call her agency and get them to give me her address. I bet they have it. I email Tina.
Can you track down Eve Noel’s British agents and say I’m interested in talking to her?
Won’t work but can do no harm, I reason, and I go back to my pile, flicking through to find something I might vaguely like. I’m relieved when I get to the bottom and see My Second-Best Bed, the Shakespeare script which I’d sort of been subconsciously hoping would be something special. As I start to read it I’m practically crossing my fingers.
And it’s no good which somehow makes me angrier than ever, because out of all of these scripts this one could be great. The girl working at Anne Hathaway’s house is OK, actually quite cool. She’s a nice character, a bit chippy, funny. Even the bits in the past aren’t too wacky, to start with – she hits her head on a low beam and passes out, and when she wakes up she’s the younger Anne Hathaway meeting Shakespeare and it almost works because you don’t know if it’s a dream or not. But then she and Shakespeare and Elizabeth I – yes, she suddenly turns up – go on a treasure hunt to find this key to take her back to the modern day, and it turns into a weirdly crappy sort of trawl through history. All these historical figures keep appearing, like Jane Austen and Lord Nelson and the ones they didn’t use in Bill & Ted, and it’s ridiculous. In the end you sort of wonder if it’s a piss-take.
It annoys me, because like I say it could be really good. Some of the scenes have a special sharp, cool charm, and I want to keep reading, no matter how ridiculous it gets. It’d be easy to whip into shape – if I had my own production company or some people on my side I’d get them to work with the girl who wrote it. But I don’t and I can’t take it back to Artie; it needs to be straight out of the ballpark good, this one.
Idly I look at the title page, wondering if there’s an email address for the writer or her agent.
My Second-Best Bed
Tammy Gutenberg
I sit up straight. I know Tammy. Maybe it’s because seeing Sara and thinking about those Venice Beach days is fresh in my head but it comes to me right away this time. She used to hang out at Jimmy Samba’s; she got a job at Castle Rock, I think, and moved on from that scene before I did. She was half English: her mother was from Bristol and she knew some of the places I knew. It’s a sign, I’m sure it is. Well. I type her an email, which I send to Tina to pass on, asking if we can have coffee some time to talk about it. I don’t know what good it’ll do but it’s a start. I’ve done something, at least.
Not Without You Page 6