The Actress: A Novel

by Amy Sohn

  As soon as the doctor left the room, Maddy began to weep. On the phone, Steven said he would get there as soon as he could. “I don’t want to lose it,” she said.

  “You’re not going to. You’re in good hands. I’ll be there soon.”

  She called Zack because she couldn’t bear to call Walter herself. He said he would let Walter know. “What about the bonding company?” she asked.

  “Let’s take it one step at a time, okay? Let’s just wait to hear what Lloyd’s has to say.”

  When Steven arrived at the hospital two days later, she embraced him and broke into tears again. Since her pregnancy had been diagnosed, she had barely been sleeping, not taking any lorazepam for fear it might harm the fetus. For the past year or so, she had been taking it three or four nights a week.

  With no respite, her mind had been alternating between worries about the baby, the film, and her inability to sleep, all of which were tied together. If she couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t gain weight, and if she couldn’t gain weight, she couldn’t get discharged, and if she couldn’t get discharged, she couldn’t work.

  In the hospital that morning, she had complained to Dr. Liddell, who had confirmed that it could cause birth defects, and had sent a doctor to see her, a psychiatrist, a woman, who specialized in reproductive issues. The psychiatrist told her that lorazepam was the safest of all benzodiazepines for pregnancy, and that she could take it for a few weeks along with Zoloft, until the Zoloft started to kick in. Then she could go off the anti-anxiety medication.

  “What if I can’t do the movie?” she asked, burying her face in Steven’s shoulder.

  “We’ll get it worked out. For now you have to focus on getting rest.”

  “But I want to work. I want to be Betty.”

  “We have to keep the baby safe,” he said. “Maybe Walter can stop the production until you get better. He’s very committed to you.”

  “This has been the strangest couple of days,” she said. “I went from not knowing I was pregnant to knowing to worrying about the baby nonstop.”

  “That’s what it means to be a mother,” he said. He said it like it was good, but she wasn’t sure she agreed.

  “I wish we’d been more careful in Venice,” she said.

  “You can’t blame yourself. There’s no perfect time for a pregnancy.”

  “I just wanted to do this film. And now everything’s ruined.”

  “Don’t you want to be a mother?”

  “I want to be a mother, but I also want to be an actress,” she said.

  “You’re going to get better,” he said.

  “I’ve been taking pills at night,” she said. She told him she had been relying on them since Husbandry, whenever things were bad between them or she had an early call, and then she told him about the psychiatrist and the antidepressant.

  “You can’t take those when you’re pregnant,” he said. “They’re not good for the baby.”

  “Are you kidding? Millions of women do and the babies are fine. And I know they’ll work. I did well on them after my father . . .”

  “I don’t want my baby to be born with medicine in his body,” Steven said.

  My baby. His body. How did he know it was a boy? As far as she knew, it wasn’t either gender yet. “Do you want your pregnant wife to be a basket case?” Maddy said. “There’s a reason they torture people with sleep deprivation. I’m telling you this because it’s your baby, too, but I’m not asking your permission. I have to help myself. And if you care about me, you’ll want me to.”

  “I’m going to do some research on it.”

  That night, on the lorazepam, she slept. Her relief in the morning outweighed her concerns. She told herself to trust the reproductive psychiatrist about the drugs. She told herself the woman probably treated pregnant patients far more unstable than Maddy.

  Steven stayed in London; after a week, she was still in the hospital room, hooked up to an IV. The vomiting had continued, and she was on the drip all day and night.

  Production on the film had been halted, and Walter was going back and forth with Lloyd’s of London about how to proceed. Steven wanted to stay longer, but she said he should go back. She didn’t like him hovering when there was nothing to do but wait. She was like a baby herself, being monitored for weight gain. She had gone from woman to patient.

  After Steven left, Zack flew out for a few days to keep her company. They played cards and she would break every hour or so to throw up. She read scripts, though it was impossible to imagine working on any film when she was lying in a hospital bed indefinitely. Zack shared Hollywood gossip. It was good for her mood, but it felt like a Band-Aid. She didn’t want to be stuck in a hospital with her agent, lying on her back, talking about deals. She wanted to be on set with her costars, doing the scenes. Doing what she was meant to.

  The morning the call came from Walter, Maddy was shaking. “Lloyd’s won’t let me postpone until after you get better,” he said. She put him on speaker so Zack could hear. “I already put in two claims for delays, and the second one was so long, it’s cost about two million dollars. I am so sorry, Madeline. You know how desperately I wanted you to do this. I am going to have to replace you.”

  “I have money of my own,” she said. “What if I reimburse Lloyd’s the cost of all further delays?”

  “If it’s about money,” Zack said, “we have options. Let’s trouble-shoot. Problem-solve.”

  “I won’t be here forever,” Maddy added. “I’m already gaining weight.”

  “You know movie sets are like jigsaw puzzles,” Walter said. “I can’t lose the other actors. I’m sorry, my darling. We’ll work together again, I promise you.”

  She looked at Zack. “I’m going to get into it with him,” he said. Hollywood-speak for fixing something. Like it was simple, an error on a contract or a difference of a few thousand dollars. “Just give me a couple of days.”

  He flew back to L.A. and called to say he had tried everything, but the insurance company wouldn’t yield. He said, “It’s out of my hands. I’m so sorry, Maddy.”

  A few days after that, he called again. “Kira is replacing you,” he said. “After it became clear that Walter wanted to recast, we got a call about her. Apparently, he’s been a fan of hers ever since he saw I Used to Know Her. She didn’t even want to go in because you’re friends, but then she read the script and . . . she changed her mind. She wanted to call to tell you, but I felt it was my responsibility.”

  Maddy believed him but was hurt anyway. Kira would be playing Betty in The Moon and the Stars. Zack would get his commission. That was what happened, you had a problem and someone else took over. Just like Clint as Dirty Harry and Newman as Butch.

  “It’s okay if you’re angry,” Zack said.

  She was numb. “I’m not. I would have done exactly the same thing if the roles were reversed.”

  Throughout Maddy’s stay at the hospital, Steven flew back and forth when he could. It made her feel loved that he was taking care of her, but she hated having him see her in the hospital. She felt inadequate for her inability to have a normal pregnancy, and in the back of her mind, she believed it was a result of the surprise. If they had planned it properly, she would be calm, and if she were calm, she would not be ill.

  After Kira arrived in London, she called Maddy. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry it worked out this way.”

  “No, you’re not,” Maddy said. “You have a job.”

  “I mean, I know how badly you wanted it.”

  “When I was in your house and you asked me for the script, were you trying to angle in on it? Tell me the truth. Did you track down a copy and read it before any of this happened?”

  “I swear to God, no. I didn’t even try. When Zack told me everything that happened, I just felt so sorry for you. But I know you’re going to be fine. Morning sickness is a sign
of a healthy pregnancy.”

  Maddy started to say it was much worse than morning sickness, but she didn’t have the energy.

  “Do you think I could come visit you one day?” Kira asked.

  “Probably not a good idea.”

  “Can’t we still be friends?”

  “If I see you, I’m only going to feel sadder, so I don’t want to see you. I’m sure you understand.”

  One day Zack called from L.A. and said, “I know it feels like you’re under house arrest, but this hospital stay could be an opportunity.”

  “For what?”

  “Well, when you’re not puking, you could set up a desk in there and get started on your screenplay.”

  Before flying to London, she had optioned the rights to the Lane Cromwell bio and bought the life rights for $200,000 from Cromwell’s daughter Jean. Only Zack, and Kelly Kennedy, the new entertainment lawyer she had retained shortly after hiring Zack, knew. In Maddy’s mind, the money came from her salary on The Hall Surprise. She was taking money she had gotten for something bad and using it to pay for something good.

  “I’m just trying to keep this fetus healthy,” Maddy said on the phone.

  “You have a lot of time on your hands. You should take advantage of it.”

  “I think my mood is too dark.”

  “That’s perfect for the script,” he said. “Think about how bleak Lane’s life was. Use everything you’re feeling, all your frustration right now. You don’t need Lloyd’s of London in order to write.”

  After she hung up, she thought about it and tried to take his words to heart. But she was anxious and distractible, and when she tried to type, it didn’t flow. To procrastinate and put less pressure on herself, she devoted her time to research. She read the biography of Lane over and over. She read memoirs of the 1930s and O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance. She read and reread Hemingway to get a feel for war. She read Syd Field’s Screenplay.

  After four more weeks, the vomiting resolved and Dr. Liddell said Maddy could be discharged. She flew home by chartered plane, and Steven stayed with her in Hancock Park a few days before flying off to his set at her insistence.

  With the frightening early weeks of the pregnancy behind her and the hyperemesis gone, she tried to enjoy her changing body—her full breasts, her big nipples, her hips and thighs. Because she couldn’t act, she focused on the screenplay. In her study, with Steven off in Providence, she began to do index cards, plotting out a structure for the film.

  Lane Cromwell had had darkness in her life and had found a way to channel it into art. Maddy was inspired by her but didn’t want to hallow her too much, to make her seem perfect or even above the troubled men she was drawn to again and again. The relationship dynamics between Lane Cromwell and Max Sandoval were not so different from modern dynamics; he had been distancing, competitive, and emotionally abusive, and Cromwell always felt he didn’t love her quite as much as she loved him.

  One day Maddy wrote a few lines, and the next day she wrote a few pages. The writing was painstaking and slow, and every few days she would lose faith in it completely, only to try again and grind out more. It was easy to keep it secret with Steven away, and when he returned near Christmas and noticed that she was often in her study, she told him she was just emailing. She didn’t want to show the script to anyone, not even Zack, until it was done, for fear she would lose faith in it.

  In January, at the five-month mark, Maddy and Steven went to her ob-gyn, Dr. Sheila Baker, for the big ultrasound. Dr. Baker looked like a Victoria’s Secret model and delivered celebrity babies mostly by elective C-section because Hollywood wives saw their vaginas as entrances, not exits. Maddy wanted a natural birth, no epidural, and felt confident that she could have one. It would be the flip side of the difficult early portion of the pregnancy: an uneventful delivery. She was descended from a long line of healthy Boston Brahmins who had birthed big broods; her mother had been one of four.

  At the ultrasound, Dr. Baker asked if they wanted to know the gender and Maddy said no, she thought it was better for it to be a surprise; Steven, perhaps sympathetic to her fraught early weeks, yielded.

  He decided they needed to build a wing for the baby, complete with live-in baby-nurse quarters. Maddy didn’t want one, remembering Irina’s prediction that they would get one.

  Steven came home with swatches of sheets and crib wood and rugs in colors that could work for either a boy or a girl because he said the whole pink-or-blue thing was stupid.

  Though Maddy was eager to maintain her sex life with Steven, he seemed increasingly disturbed by her body’s new shape as the pregnancy progressed. More often than not, sex consisted of her fellating him. She was hurt that he didn’t seem attracted to her, but he talked constantly about the baby and his excitement, and she decided his desire for family was more important than whatever issues he had with her body.

  He began work on a comedy set in a Chicago public school, and most nights he came straight home from set. He no longer talked about Ryan Costello. She asked him once if they’d had a falling-out and he said, “I finally realized he was immature. I was wrong to have thought he was a friend.”

  One morning in January, shortly after her five-month visit, she met Dan for a walk in Runyon Canyon. “You look fantastic,” he said in the parking lot when she got out of the car. “Your tits are big now.”

  “Yeah, I have actual breasts,” she said. “It’s weird. I feel like my body’s doing what it’s meant to, you know?”

  “I can’t believe you’re going to be a mother.”

  “Me, neither. It’s trippy. It’s really trippy.”

  They started on the path, Dan slowing his pace because it was harder now for Maddy to move quickly. She asked if he was dating anyone and he said no one serious. “I’m kind of in this place of wanting to learn to be on my own,” he said. “I’m just more into my work.”

  Silver Spring had been a critical and commercial success, scooping up a slew of critics’ nominations and earning a respectable return on its $500,000 budget. On its heels, Dan had scripted another small indie that would be financed entirely by his backers and still allow him final cut. His actors, as they had on Silver Spring, would get a percentage of the back end in lieu of a lot of money up front.

  He had sent the new script, still untitled, to her at the hospital in England. It was a drama about a young couple in Brooklyn and their friendship with a quirky older male neighbor who becomes entangled in both of their lives. Maddy liked it and gave him a lengthy set of notes, and they went back and forth a few times, Dan asking her for elaboration, Maddy happy to provide it.

  “How have you been keeping busy?” he asked as a Rhodesian ridgeback bounded past, the owner trailing behind. “Is it strange not working?”

  “Promise you won’t tell anyone?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m writing a script.”

  “Really? That’s fantastic. You’ve always been a good writer.”

  “Even though you wanted me to give up my rights?” she asked with a sly smile.

  “How many times are you going to make me apologize? I was a Hollywood neophyte. I would never do something like that today. So what’s your screenplay about?”

  She told him all about Lane Cromwell as they hiked, until they stopped at a lookout, where she told him more. She talked about Lane’s affairs, her career, and her mental problems. He listened intently and said it sounded like she had absorbed everything possible about this woman’s life.

  “Your first screenplay,” he said, “I mean the first one you’re writing all alone, and it’s so ambitious.”

  “Maybe no one will want to make it. But I feel like I have to finish it. I felt this need to tell her story.”

  “And you want to play her, I assume?”

  “Well, of course. But who knows if I’ll be able to make it ha
ppen?”

  “Of course you will. You’re Maddy Freed. You can do anything you want.”

  “Do you mean Steven Weller’s wife can do anything she wants?”

  “I mean Maddy Freed. You’re a star. Don’t you know that?”

  “When I had to back out of Walter’s movie, I felt like no one would want to work with me again. It was such a mess, being in the hospital and being in England. And then Kira taking over the role.”

  “Are you still speaking to her?”

  “We’re . . . cordial.” Maddy had wanted to be able to snap back into a friendship with Kira, but felt it would be painful to be near her. “All these things at once, I was losing weight and I couldn’t sleep and I was so anxious about the baby. I had to go on antidepressants. I’m on them now.” She had gone off the lorazepam while in the hospital and hadn’t needed it since.

  “You did the right thing.”

  “Steven was freaked out about it. He said he didn’t want the medicine going into the baby. Now we just don’t talk about it.”

  “He’s a fucking idiot. It’s like on the airplanes when they say you have to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you put one on your child.”

  “Exactly,” she said. He still understood her. “Anyway, I thought I would never work again. And I realized if I wrote something for myself, with a role for me to play, it might be different. When you’re an actor, you have to wait for people to hire you. When you’re a writer, you can just—write. Please don’t tell anyone about this, though.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Zack’s the only one who knows. I didn’t even tell Steven.”

  “He doesn’t know, and Zack and I do?”

  “I don’t want him to see it until it’s done. I need it to be mine for now. Like how you were with Silver Spring.”

  “Yeah.”

  They turned and started on the hiking path again. “I envy you,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re in complete control of your films.”

  “Yeah, but we did it for a tiny amount of money and a very small cast.”