by Laura Zigman
When Julia walked into Spruce, Patricia was waiting for her at the bar. She was wearing black trousers and a black cashmere shell, and her short blond hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail. Her taut muscular arms were such a gorgeous shade of brown that Julia couldn’t stop staring.
“It’s fake,” Patricia whispered into Julia’s ear as she kissed her hello.
“What’s fake?” Julia asked.
“The tan. I get it sprayed on once a week.” She took a step back from Julia to look at her arms and admire them for herself. “It’s pretty realistic, isn’t it?”
“Very realistic.”
“It’s a total pain in the ass—you have to stand there in a bikini while they spray you—not to mention that it’s a fortune, but it’s worth it. No tan lines and no wrinkles.”
Julia could barely process the fact that she’d actually come to a place like Spruce, a restaurant that had its entire perimeter lined with potted spruce trees—wearing a monochromatic outfit that wasn’t black, let alone fathom standing around in a bikini in some Upper East Side salon getting a spray-on tan. Obsessing all the way to their table as she followed Patricia and the hostess, Julia couldn’t help explaining her choice of clothing.
“I was kind of in a rush.”
“You look great,” Patricia said, moving her eyes from sweater to pants before Julia sat down. “You look very—purple.”
“Yes, well, it’s fake,” Julia said, trying to quip. “I got it sprayed on before I left the house.”
“Funny,” Patricia said, sitting down, too.
Julia and Patricia had worked together at Creative Talent Management for four years—during most of which Julia was single just like Patricia still was. They’d always made quite a striking pair when they went out together—Julia with her long brown hair and black eyes, Patricia with her short blond hair and green eyes—and she couldn’t help getting a pang of nostalgia for the old days when they used to date with much weirdness and little success and talk about boyfriends and clients for hours on end.
“So I know you think nothing exciting ever happens in the suburbs,” Julia said, snapping her white cloth napkin onto her lap and covering up as much of her purple pants as she could. “But something really amazing happened to me today.”
Patricia’s eyes widened. “Did the Cute Butcher ask you out?”
Julia laughed out loud. “The Cute Butcher is married!” she said, referring to the guy who owned the Italian Meateria in New Rochelle and who everyone she knew referred to as the Cute Butcher. “As am I.”
Patricia laughed, too. “So?”
Ignoring her, Julia smiled and leaned forward with her fabulous secret. “I won a raffle.”
“You won a raffle?” Patricia said, her voice an octave higher. “Like from a church?”
“No—from the Container Store. A special ‘travel package raffle,’” she explained, describing the large nylon tote bag Bob said was waiting to be picked up, filled with special suitcase inserts and nylon zippered pouches and plastic shampoo and toothbrush containers and mini folding umbrellas and decks of cards. Just as she was getting to the best part—the hundred-dollar gift certificate slipped right into the tote itself!—she noticed that Patricia’s face had fallen. Then one eyebrow went up in concern like a road flare.
“Hey, Jules,” she said, with a withering look. “You really need to get out more.”
Julia felt herself redden instantly. She looked down at her napkin in her lap as if it needed something—smoothing or lint-picking or crumb-flicking—and wished she could have beamed herself home and away from Patricia, who was still staring at her with that who-have-you-become? look of horror.
Can’t ask for a job now.
“God, you’re so right,” Julia said, rolling her eyes with great exaggeration and deciding her best recovery strategy was to blame her grand mal seizure of nerdiness on Peter. “I think I have a bad case of cabin fever. Too much togetherness.”
Patricia nodded. “I mean, I love the guy, but all joking aside, it must be annoying to have him around all the time.”
“Very annoying.” Her strategy, though successful, was making her feel extremely guilty, so she tried to change the subject.
Ask for a job.
“But enough about me,” she said, right after the waiter came and they both ordered. “Give me some Juice already.”
“Juice” was shorthand for gossip, something Patricia was never short of. Even when they still worked down the hall from each other, Patricia always seemed to get more of it than Julia ever did: finding out that a certain rock star and his wife were well-known “swingers”; how a certain middle-aged comic actor insisted on having a hairdresser present at photo shoots even though he had no hair; or that one of the former Monkees had refused to get out of his solo band’s tour bus in front of a concert venue because he “didn’t want to get mobbed” by fans even though there was no one waiting outside.
Patricia shook her head. “I don’t have any Juice.”
“No Juice?” Julia couldn’t help being disappointed. She’d come all this way and was looking at a menu she couldn’t make heads or tails of—What the hell was truffle foam?—and now she wasn’t going to have anything good to tell Peter when she got home.
“Well, I did just sign a big client.”
Julia’s eyes widened. “Who?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You can’t tell me?”
“I had to sign a confidentiality agreement.”
Julia laughed. “Oh, come on.”
“I’m serious. I can’t tell anyone.”
“Not even me?”
“Not even you.”
“But I don’t know anyone anymore! Who am I going to tell?”
“Peter.”
“He doesn’t know anyone either!”
Patricia laughed. “Sorry!”
“Come on!” Julia said. She couldn’t believe she was begging like this, but she felt like her life suddenly depended on whether or not she could manage to extract something—anything—out of the Master Sphinx. “Just give me a hint. Male or female?”
“Male.”
“Film or television?”
“Film.”
“Married or single?”
“No comment.”
Julia nodded instantly. “Someone who’s getting divorced and wants you to help him look like he’s not the asshole.”
Patricia laughed again. “No comment.”
Julia nodded again. “Or someone who’s married but who’s really gay and needs you to help him continue to look straight.”
Patricia picked up the wine list and hid behind it. It shook a little because she was still laughing even though, as Julia knew, this was serious business. She remembered what it was like keeping other people’s secrets; figuring out the puzzle of a famous person’s problematic personal or professional life and finding a way to fix it. But the part of the job Julia had always perversely loved the most was the challenge of managing the most unmanageable clients: a skill that had distinguished her during her thirteen years at CTM.
She had always wondered why she was so enamored of this particular kind of ego gratification—she didn’t think it was because she enjoyed the abuse or because she had some sort of pathological low level of self-esteem which made her enjoy being shamed and ordered around and treated, generally, worse than a farm animal. It was actually the opposite, she thought. It was the excitement she craved, the adrenaline rush, the same terrifying thrill she imagined lion tamers felt when they entered the cage or when bullfighters entered the ring with just their red silk capes and tight little pants—the fact that everything could be reduced to one simple idea: eat or be eaten; kill or be killed.
Very few people seemed to have this strange counterintuitive desire to tame the beast, and in the business of celebrity public relations, Julia came to see that she had it in spades. When it was time for the toughest clients to be taken to premieres for films that already had bad word-of
-mouth, or to be walked down the red carpets of award ceremonies they weren’t nominated for or were certain not to win, or to be accompanied during difficult post-rehab interviews, it was Julia who got those difficult assignments. When the toughest clients had chewed up and spit out a long line of publicists, it was Julia who was sent in to take over. For a brief moment at the table after they’d ordered, she was surprised: there was a teeny tiny part of her that missed a teeny tiny part of the work, but it was just big enough to push her over the line of indecision.
Say it now.
“So I was going to ask you,” Julia said, starting slowly and not really finishing her sentence.
“Ask me what?”
“About a job. Peter hasn’t found anything yet and I figured maybe I could help you out with a project or two, either from home or from the office. Since he’s around now and Leo’s in preschool, it wouldn’t be a problem for me to, you know, go back to work, even temporarily.”
Patricia’s face fell for the second time that night.
“Oh God, Julia, I’d love to hire you! Really I would! But there’s nothing right now and I couldn’t bear to have you sitting up front making coffee until something opens up.”
“Of course,” Julia said, feeling completely humiliated. She waved her hand at Patricia and wished she’d never brought it up. “Just because you have your own business doesn’t mean you can give everyone a job.”
“No, wait. Let’s think for a minute. Where would be good for you?”
Julia shook her head. “No, it’s stupid. No one’s going to hire me. I haven’t worked for three years, which in this business is a lifetime. Plus, I don’t even really want to go back to work. I’d probably miss Leo too much and have to be sent home after the first day.”
Patricia stared at her. “How do you know no one will hire you? Have you tried yet?”
“No.” Not except for just now.
“I mean, you’re definitely at a disadvantage for having been out of the game so long. Not to mention the fact that jobs are tight now. But we’ll find you something.”
The waiter arrived and set their plates down on the table. Patricia looked at hers and she looked at Patricia’s.
“Yours looks really good,” Patricia said first.
“Yours looks really good, too,” Julia said back.
It was an old joke: they always ordered the same thing—tonight it was salmon—whenever they went out together.
“What about Susie Thompson?” Patricia said, slicing an asparagus spear in half. “You could give her a call.”
Julia shook her head. “I hate Susie Thompson. She always used to pretend that she had no idea who I was even though we’d been introduced about fifty times.”
“What about Doug Bradley?”
Julia shook her head again. “He’s a nice guy but I don’t know the first thing about promoting pharmaceutical companies.”
“You’d learn. Plus, it’s all the same anyway. You just pick up the phone and start lying.”
They both laughed, then Patricia put her fork down and shrugged.
“I still don’t see why you don’t just call CTM. I’m sure they’d hire you back. I mean, you left on good terms, didn’t you?”
“Sort of.” Julia winced when she remembered the face that Marjorie, her über-boss, had made when she finally told her she’d decided to make her upcoming maternity leave permanent. “I think she lost all respect for me. She’s one of those women who thinks you’re a total loser if you don’t take calls from the delivery room.”
Patricia was quiet.
“I don’t know,” Julia continued. “It would be too humiliating to beg her for a job now.” Patricia nodded as if her logic made sense, which only made Julia feel worse.
“Well,” Patricia said, “there’s always John Glom Public Relations.”
Julia recoiled. “John Glom Public Relations? The firm that handles desperate has-beens?”
“They have an incredibly high turnover rate and they’re always hiring,” Patricia pointed out. “The only problem is, the guy who runs things now is someone I worked with a long time ago and he’s kind of an idiot. His name is Jack DeMarco but we used to call him ‘Jack DeWack’ because he was so annoying.” Patricia sighed as if she wished the door to this unfortunate hellhole had never been opened, even though she was the one who’d opened it.
“Aren’t they really, really small?” Julia said, stalling for time. She thought she remembered hearing how, unlike Peter’s firm, they actually had downsized their New York office a few years ago in favor of their L.A. office, and the idea of working in a tiny sweatshop without any hustle and bustle and glamour and excitement was too depressing to contemplate.
“Let’s see,” Patricia said, counting on her tan, well-manicured fingers. “There’s Jack DeWack.”
Finger.
“His assistant.”
Finger.
“His deputy Janet who I know left recently because she just applied for a job with me and I don’t think they’ve replaced her yet.”
Finger.
“And Janet’s assistant, who stayed on.”
Finger.
A four-finger operation. Julia poked at her salmon, then glanced at her watch. Even though it was barely nine o’clock and Leo was already asleep, she couldn’t wait to get home, not only because her conversation with Patricia had taken such a grim turn but because her piece of salmon had been the size of a small child’s foot and she was already hungry again.
“Well, I guess you should e-mail me Jack DeWack’s contact information in the morning,” Julia said, not even bothering to try to hide her reluctance. “At least I’ll have an in there.”
“Okay, but when you get in touch with him, don’t mention my name,” Patricia said quickly. “The last thing I need is for him to track me down and hit me up for a job.”
3
As soon as Jack DeMarco opened his mouth a week later, Julia remembered why she had been so secretly relieved not to be a celebrity publicist all those years.
Because she hated celebrities. And people like Jack.
“We screen our senior staff very, very carefully,” Jack said that morning in mid-September when she met with him, his voice barely above a whisper as if he were a partner in the agency, which she knew he wasn’t. “Discretion. Competence. Creativity. These are the tools of our trade, the goals of our particular mission.”
She smiled politely, then stared earnestly at the yellow legal pad she’d brought with her and which, unused, was starting to feel like a prop. She kept meaning to write something down but found she simply couldn’t bear to—so much did she not want this job. This position she was interviewing for was, after all, a demotion from the last one she’d had, and if she hadn’t been so desperate for a job—any job—they both knew she would never have even been considering it.
But she did need the job. Badly. So there she was, wearing a too-tight too-short black skirt and suit jacket that she’d squeezed herself into like a sausage, trying to look as if it hadn’t been almost four years since she’d worn panty hose.
“And our particular mission is dealing with celebrities who have, in the past, been used to a certain measure of fame but who now, for whatever reasons—bad career choices, substance abuse problems, general mismanagement—find themselves below that measure of fame.”
Listening and nodding, she finally forced herself to put pen to paper:
Jack DeMarco is impressed with himself.
“Our mission is to advise them on strategies which will allow them to reclaim that level of fame and give them a new life in the public eye.”
Jack DeMarco loves to hear himself talk.
“In other words,” he said before pausing to clarify the concepts he’d just laid out and before she could make another note, “we manage celebrities in transition.”
Jack DeMarco is a year—maybe two—away from complete baldness.
She nodded, but in those few moments that she had let her mind wa
nder, she’d missed the gist of his speech.
“That’s a euphemism. A euphemism for what we specialize in.” He smiled at her and lowered his voice. “What we specialize in are has-beens.” Then he spelled the word for comic effect.
She laughed, and so did he, and after a few unexpected moments of mutual empathic eye rolling about the business they were in, she looked around his sad-sack office. It was drab with the sort of cheap faux-cherry furniture—big desk, credenza, shelving wall unit—and oversized leather “manager’s chair” that were always hallmarks of loser companies and loser executives. The rugs were gray and they smelled vaguely of old cigarette smoke and french fries, and she wondered whether Jack spent a lot of time smoking and eating french fries in his office or whether she was just having some sort of stress-induced olfactory hallucination. On the near walls hung framed and signed publicity headshots of former “has-beens” who’d had hugely successful comebacks—Burt Reynolds. John Travolta, and Cher. Smaller, dustier photos hung on the far walls.
Jack noticed Julia squinting across the room. She suspected that those were his actual clients—not the actors on the near wall.
“Kathie Lee Gifford. Justine Bateman. Billy Baldwin,” he said, squinting, too, before he looked away in disgust. “Some people just aren’t meant to come back.”
She looked back down at her pad and took her first real pretend-note of the meeting:
Some losers: losers forever.
“Certain people should never have become famous in the first place,” he added. “But that’s another story.”
Except for Justine Bateman, whom she had always loved in Family Ties and felt had great comic timing and enormous potential, she was in complete agreement. Here they were, two people—two publicists—speaking the same language. Despite herself she couldn’t remember the last time she’d met someone who truly understood how undignified and unseemly this work could be.
“They’re terminal cases, these has-beens,” he’d continued. “Former stars who have virtually no public profile, no stock in the entertainment marketplace anymore. Which is what makes it so challenging.” He pulled his chair closer to the desk, then leaned back in it—seemingly his preferred position for informing and edifying. “The American public is incredibly fickle. But there’s nothing it loves more than watching a has-been make a comeback. It’s the ultimate success story.”