Hello Hollywood

by Suzanne Corso

  “With you in it, Jenean, it’s going to be off the charts.”

  Her laughter was quick, fluid. “Thanks for the compliment, but there’s no way in hell I compare with the likes of Sarandon and De Niro.”

  “Do you know Camilla Batiste?”

  “Met her. I think she’s perfect for the role of the mother.”

  “Me, too.”

  I was trying to wrap my head around Sarandon as Grandma Ruth. I still remembered her as the young beauty in The Hunger, the movie based on the novel by Whitley Strieber. Sarandon, seduced by that stunning vampire, Catherine Deneuve; I could still see that scene. Paul hadn’t told me any of this. But maybe Paul didn’t know about De Niro and Sarandon.

  As soon as I thought that, I wondered why I was always so quick to give the men in my life the benefit of the doubt.

  Ria got the shots she wanted, and Rick had a couple more questions for the two of us. He said the article would be in the next issue. Then he added that he was hoping it would make the cover despite the fact that it wasn’t based on a true story—wink, wink.

  Those winks troubled me. I had serious doubts that Rick would keep his word.

  When they’d all left, when it was just Marvin and me in the living room, I gave him the Reader’s Digest recap of what I’d learned. He rolled his eyes. “Christ, what a jerk he is. Look, I’ll go to Isabella’s swim meet after school and drive her home. You go tell Paul the Asshole to pound sand. Hell, he probably makes huge donations to the right-wingers who vote against gay marriage.”

  I actually didn’t know anything about Paul’s politics. We didn’t talk about national politics, only about Hollywood politics. But it wouldn’t surprise me if Marvin was right. “You think I should text him?” I asked. “See if he’s free?”

  Marvin looked at me like I was nuts. “Hell no. Don’t give him any warning. Drive over to his office.”

  Confront him, put him on the spot, face-to-face, that was what Marvin was saying. Not exactly my forte. But maybe it was time to change the status quo.

  Before I left, I changed clothes. Off came the interview outfit and on went the designer jeans that hugged my hips and made me look skinnier than I was, 115 pounds on a five-foot-four frame. I wore a short-sleeved blouse, a blue print beauty with a scoop neck that showed some cleavage, and a pair of expensive sandals as black as my handbag. Let him regret what he’d done. Let him drool. Let him lust. Let him hunger for me.

  In my head, I heard Diana Ross’s “It’s My Turn.”

  • • •

  Jannis Productions was in a two-story building tucked away in the Hollywood Hills. Paul owned the building, had inherited it when his mother passed away some years back. It had been his childhood home, then his mother’s writing studio—she had been an accomplished novelist—and was one of three structures on the five-acre property. No gate, no guards, just drive on in and wing it. I liked that about him.

  But I realized that I didn’t like much else about Paul and that I’d been hiding that fact from myself for weeks.

  His assistant, his right-hand guy, Jim Flannigan, actually answered the door. Jim was an Irishman with red hair and a million freckles. “Sam!” he gushed, and hugged me hello. “What brings you into the Hills?”

  “Five minutes with Paul.”

  He slung his arm over my shoulders and walked me into the comfortable living room, a place where visitors slipped off their shoes and put them in a tidy lineup against the wall. Very Asian and hygienic.

  The floors in Paul’s house, coquina tiles with inlaid bits of shells and coral from ancient times, were spotless. A cleaning crew, I guessed. A daily cleaning crew. And servants, though not as many as there were in Downton Abbey. He wasn’t quite at that level. Or if he was, I didn’t know about it.

  Flannigan grabbed two bottles of Metromint water from a bucket of ice just inside the hallway, then showed me to a comfortable chair in the living room. Two other men were hanging around—beefy guys, bodyguards. The taller one, Donaldson, nodded hello. The other man, Olmoso, had a scar that crossed his right cheek and reminded me of some character actor in a bad movie. He didn’t acknowledge my presence in any way. It was as if I were invisible to him. Or maybe he just had a grudge against women.

  Flannigan and I settled in the living room, in opposite chairs. He crossed his legs, right foot swinging back and forth, hands laced in his lap. “You must’ve heard, right?”

  “Heard what?” I asked. Donaldson and Olmoso left the room and moved like shadows through the hallway.

  “Luke escaped the rehab place. He assaulted two guards; one of them is in the hospital.”

  Huh? A twenty-four-year-old kid was in a rehab place for his addiction to a specific game, and he suddenly became a violent criminal? Something didn’t compute here. “What the hell were they doing to him?”

  Flannigan suddenly looked uncomfortable. He leaned forward, helping himself to a pretzel from a bowl on the sculpted redwood coffee table. “That’s just the thing,” he said quietly. “That’s exactly what I said to Paul. Does this facility function like some of those gay-conversion places? Where you beat up effigies of your mother? Where you’re punished if you don’t toe the line? What the hell, right?”

  Since Flannigan was gay, I could see how this might be something of a concern for him; he, along with ­Marvin and every other gay person in Hollywood, was quite vocal against the Michele Bachmans and Rand Pauls of the world. Flannigan had been with his partner for more than a ­decade, longer than most heterosexual couples I knew. And Marvin and his former partner in New York had been ­together fifteen years before his partner left him for a younger man.

  “Paul’s ex must be freaking out,” I said.

  “So is Paul. I think he’s realizing that he wasn’t much of a father to the kid. Turns out that Luke owes the game nearly a hundred thousand that he put on fraudulent credit cards. Not good.” Flannigan shook his head and bit into another pretzel. “Not good at all.”

  “Who’s Paul with now?”

  “The owner of the rehab place. I think he’s trying to talk him out of pressing charges.”

  “Maybe I should come back . . .”

  “No, no, no,” he said quickly. “Stay put. Let me tell him you’re here. He needs to see a friendly face.”

  I wasn’t feeling too friendly. I was pissed off and ready for battle. I was primed for confrontation, an out-of-the-box thing for me. But the situation warranted it. I couldn’t have Paul calling people in Hollywood to tell them Brooklyn Story was actually a memoir. That was for me to decide.

  A few minutes later, a short, harried-looking man rushed out of Paul’s office; ten minutes after that, the door opened again and Flannigan motioned me to come in. I was relieved when Donaldson and Olmoso didn’t follow me. Relieved that it was just Paul and me, that even Flannigan didn’t stick around.

  When I saw the expression on Paul’s face, all the fight bled out of me. He grabbed my hand like a drowning man clutching a rope and pulled me against him, into that scent of aftershave and maleness, our bodies pressed together like sheets of paper. I couldn’t utter a word against him, couldn’t lash out at him. I felt like sobbing.

  Luke was like some alter ego of Paul—the venue was different; iPads hadn’t existed when Paul was his son’s age—but the issue was the same. Addiction. Paul’s addiction was power. Luke’s addiction was weird, something you’d find only out here, in the country of illusion. But the bottom line was that Paul’s son had broken out of his prison, assaulted some guards, and committed credit card fraud, and now Paul, like any good father, was trying to make it right.

  Except that I didn’t know squat about good fathers. Vito was hardly a stellar example. Alec had provided well for Isabella, and sometimes he had even engaged in her life, helping with math homework, science projects, English compositions. He hadn’t gone on class field trips. He had hugged h
er good-bye in the morning and hello in the afternoon. That was about it. If he were still alive, things might have been different. Even he had known that our daughter was truly a gift from God.

  Maybe Paul hadn’t been a good father to Luke at all. What did I know about the father-son dynamics in their relationship? Nothing. It wasn’t as if we’d lain around after making love and talked about our kids, the kids we’d had with other people. It wasn’t as if we’d ever talked to each other about anything other than the business of Hollywood.

  “Christ, Sam,” he murmured against my neck. “What the hell should I do?”

  I stepped back from him. His breath, warm against my neck, stank of booze. “Make it right, Paul. And to begin doing that, stop drinking before noon. That would help the situation.”

  He ran a hand over his bald head. “My horrible ex has called five dozen times since she heard about this.”

  “Yeah, so? It’s not about you. Or her. It’s about Luke.”

  He looked—what? Surprised? Shocked? No, he looked stunned by what I’d just said. Then a dark roiling anger poured across his face, took root in his eyes. “Who the hell are you to judge me?”

  Hanging on the wall directly behind him was the vintage movie poster for Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which was exactly what I felt right then. I put some distance between us . . . slowly. I had seen this kind of rage before in Tony, in Alec. I knew that if I moved abruptly, a clenched fist might follow.

  “Look, I’m not judging you, Paul. I’m just telling you what I see. That’s all.”

  “Well, you want to know what the hell I see in you, Sam? An ambitious broad with talent that doesn’t care what it takes to get to the top in the industry. I see . . .”

  He never finished his sentence because I snapped, “I’m done here,” and threw open the door and headed out. Really? I was sleeping my way to the top of what? With whom?

  Before I could leave the room, he lunged at me, threw his arms around my waist, and we both crashed to the floor and rolled.

  I shrieked for help, shrieked for Flannigan, beat my fists against Paul’s back, struggled to free myself. The door exploded open, and Flannigan and Donaldson and Olmoso rushed in and pulled Paul off of me. I stumbled to my feet, my heart racing, pounding, and stood there for a moment with my hands clenched, trying to draw air into my lungs.

  “Get outta here, Sam,” Flannigan said, as he and Donaldson pinned Paul to the floor, holding him against it the way a trainer holds a feral dog.

  “He’s going to bite me? He’s got rabies?” I spat.

  “Just go,” Flannigan said, his voice so thick with exhaustion that I suddenly felt sorry for him.

  The exhaustion I heard in his voice told me he dealt with this bullshit daily, that he wasn’t just Paul’s assistant—he was the man’s moral compass. Flannigan was probably the one who tucked Paul into bed when he was blasted out of his mind.

  “You tell him that if he makes another call to anyone about how Brooklyn Story is a memoir, not fiction, I’ll sue his ass and make sure he doesn’t have anything to do with the movie. Tell him that, Jim. Make sure he’s sober enough to understand it. And he and I are done. Be sure he’s clear on that. Paul, did you hear what I just told Jim? We are through, done, finished.”

  On the floor, Paul writhed and fought the men who held him down. But I knew he’d heard me.

  I marched through the door and on out into the other rooms until I was outside, moving swiftly toward my car. Before I reached it, Flannigan barreled after me, shouting, “Sam, hold up. Please.”

  I stopped. “I could file assault charges against him, Jim.”

  “Look, he’s got problems with his son, financial problems, and a major drinking problem. Please don’t compound the trouble by filing assault charges. Breaking it off is the best thing you can do.”

  “Which I just did.”

  “I guess he thinks he owns you because he discovered you.”

  “No one owns me and no one discovered me. God did all that.” I gave his hand an affectionate squeeze. “But thanks for explaining, Jim. I appreciate it. Please make sure he understands that he and I are done.”

  “Don’t worry, Sam. I’ll make that clear.”

  FIVE

  In early May, two things happened: principal photography for Brooklyn Story was delayed until May 11, and DeMarco Productions optioned its second script for fifty grand. The script Clara and Marvin had brought to my attention. It was the second book in a trilogy about spirits who have learned to seize the living so that they can enjoy the pleasures of physical life. When they seize the living, they are able to use that physical body for anything, but they are mostly interested in sex.

  Even though a love story was folded into this script, it wasn’t my kind of love story. Yet, I recognized the commercial value. With the popularity of zombies and vampires, of werewolves and shape-shifters, this script offered a new, different take on the whole idea that the dead aren’t really dead.

  Marvin and Clara were immediately on it, querying individuals at networks and cable channels. They received several requests for the script. It was my gift to them, a chance to work on something that didn’t involve Brooklyn Story and the mafia boys. But it meant that my fund for these kinds of projects was fifty grand less that it had been a day earlier. However, if shooting began according to the schedule King and Prince had set up, I would receive a nice payoff for Brooklyn Story when principal photography began.

  Then I realized that check would go directly to Paul, not to me, and that he would be paying Liza, who would take her cut and pay me. It wouldn’t surprise me if he delayed the payment to get even for what had happened at his house. But legally, our contract said that his production company had to pay within five days of the receipt of the money.

  On the twenty-first, Entertainment Weekly hit the stands, and a day later, so did People. In EW, my interview was buried in the middle of the magazine. But it was the cover story in People, with a captivating photo of Jenean and me walking across the Brooklyn Bridge—that part of it was Photoshopped. Rick had kept his word—sort of.

  Toward the end of the article, there were a few lines about how “some people involved in the film” believed Brooklyn Story was actually a memoir, not a novel, but that “the author denies it.” I figured Paul was “some people.” And at this point, did it really matter?

  Within a few hours of People hitting the stands, the office phone and my cell were ringing constantly and hundreds of emails had stacked up in my in-box. Marvin and Clara weeded out the legitimate calls and emails from the crank stuff, and by midafternoon, we had a handle on things. I realized I needed a publicist who could sift through all this and help me make smart decisions about which talk shows and interviews were worth my time. Liza, naturally, was my first choice. We agreed to meet at Blu Jam for a late lunch.

  I arrived before she did and sat at the same table where I’d first laid eyes on John Steeling. While I waited for her, I went through some of the email on my iPad and was shocked to find a note from Priti Sarma, who had been my closest friend years back, when I first met Alec.

  She had emigrated from India with her family and, during the course of our friendship, had taught me about her country’s culture and customs. She had first introduced me to Buddha and the Hindu faith and used to attend Mass with me occasionally at Our Lady of Victory back in New York City. She had gone back to India to get married, and hearing from her now, so close to the start of filming of Brooklyn Story, felt like a fortuitous gift.

  Sam! I saw the article in People! I’ll be in L.A. soon, opening a textile biz w/my hub. Let’s re-connect! I’ve so missed you!

  Her optimism and enthusiasm for life came through in that brief email, and I suddenly missed our long talks, missed everything about her. I emailed her and gave her all my phone numbers. Moments later, a text message came through:

  Am so p
roud of u!

  She said she was deeply sorry to hear about Alec’s death and hoped that Isabella was adjusting. She suggested we Skype soon and reminded me that the time difference between L.A. and India was about thirteen hours. I told her we could schedule a time when we could both talk freely.

  When I glanced up from my iPad, I thought I was hallucinating. Brian King strolled up the sidewalk with John Steeling. Neither of them had seen me yet, and it gave me a chance to really look at John. He was a beautiful man, and once again, I felt that strange familiarity, that niggling certainty that I knew him from somewhere.

  He and King wore dark cotton yoga pants, sandals, and dark T-shirts with NAMASTE written across the front in white letters. Both had yoga bags slung over their shoulders. I knew there was a yoga studio nearby and found it interesting that these two men apparently had taken a yoga class together. How much Hollywood business was conducted in yoga studios? In gyms? On jogging tracks? Maybe it was time for me to join a gym or sign up for some yoga classes. Or to start running, to become a female Jim Fixx, and run my zillion miles a week.

  Then John spotted me and moved toward me, his smile widening, those intense eyes burning into me. Once again everything around me paled and faded away. It was just him, a handsome man who seemed so familiar, slipping between tables, past customers, his eyes never leaving me.

  “Samantha,” he said. “So good to see you again.”

  My heart thudded like an old engine badly in need of repair. “Nice seeing you again, too, John. Looks like you and Brian are headed to a yoga class.”

  “Just finished it.”

  King jogged over. “Congrats on the People article, Sam. We’ve been getting calls all day about it. May we join you?”

  Oh, no, of course you can’t join me. Ha. “Sure. Liza should be along any minute.”

  Almost as soon as I’d said the words, Liza came barreling around the corner, phone pressed to her ear. She was dressed more casually than usual, so I guessed she’d been working from home today. When she saw me, I read her astonishment in her body language. She quickly ended her call and slipped her phone into her bag.