Pushing away the deep down suggestion that she had somehow slipped into an alternative universe, Jennifer could only say, “I’ve never thought I lacked for confidence. But I guess I do. You ask excellent questions.”
Lena’s expression changed to one of sly calculation. “I have another for you.”
Jennifer didn’t hide her wariness. “Go ahead.”
“A cameo, half day’s work. For scale. Interested?”
She cocked her head, considering. “Who and why?”
“A film student. She has an incredible director’s eye and is aiming at a scholarship for the UCLA masters program. Talent will only take her so far. My name only takes her so far.”
“You believe in her?”
“Yes. And we need more women with connections behind the camera. You know that.”
Jennifer nodded. “I’ll do it, provided scheduling and the usual backend conditions.” She made a show of waking up her phone and sending a text to BeBe to take a scale job from Ryan Productions when they asked. “There. Done.”
“Thanks.” Lena smiled, just a little.
“That’s why you even agreed to see me, isn’t it?”
“Maybe.”
“Fair enough. I do have to go, but thank you.”
“One last question. Was it easy to walk away from me?”
“Yes,” Jennifer said honestly. She wasn’t proud of it and she wasn’t going to lie. “Yes it was.”
“I always suspected that it was.” Lena shrugged. “I could have done without the drama and—”
“Those were not my finest hours. I was lying my ass off about needing rehab which tops the list of my public stupidity. I figured if I torched everything the smoke would keep me from seeing my reflection in the mirror.”
“Can you walk away from Suzanne?”
A glib comeback was on the tip of her tongue but a sudden pain, like a long needle through her stomach, brought a shock of tears to Jennifer’s eyes. The truth was Suzanne was walking away from her and she didn’t know what she could do to change a thing.
“Well,” Lena said. “I never thought I’d live to see that.”
After a too-large swallow of coffee, Jennifer managed a weak, “I’ll have to use that in my acting.”
Lena laughed. “Sure, those feelings are an academic exercise.”
“I really don’t know how to do this.”
“Trust your feelings?”
“Love somebody more than myself.” She spread her hands on the table. “I’ve completely lost my center of gravity. How could this happen to me, of all people? Why can’t I just walk away this time?”
Lena’s chuckle was slightly sympathetic yet shaded with a dash of cynicism. “I can’t decide if you deserve it or are just getting what you deserve.”
Hours later, Lena’s words came back as turbulence kept Jennifer from dozing on the plane. It didn’t matter how comfortable first class was, jolting in midair was not something she could sleep through. Her book didn’t hold her interest and she left her phone off—she had long treasured flights as an excuse to disconnect from the web.
She didn’t know what she’d expected to learn from talking to Lena or why it had seemed so urgent. She felt as if the world was on a tilt and if she didn’t fix it now it would be broken forever. It was highly likely that it was already too late.
The next week and a half was going to be hideously hectic. At least she would be talking about a movie, about her craft. Immersing herself in her work was a cure for everything that bothered her.
At least it used to be.
Chapter Forty-Four
Manuel leaned in Suzanne’s office door, phone lifted in camera mode. “Smile!”
“What’s this for?” She had two teleconferences to juggle and a closed-door meeting with Annemarie in five minutes.
“You are going on Twitter with the hashtag What smart looks like.”
“Thank you, I’m honored, but why?”
“I am putting up a picture of every not-male identified person on this floor with that hashtag.” He rocked on his feet, looking very pleased with himself. “Chris and Nik and Rosie are already up.”
“Still confused.”
“You haven’t seen it? Some asshole movie critic said women aren’t convincing as smart people in movies. A friend of mine at Viral Media sent it over, saying he was pretty sure I worked with people who’d disagree.”
“For real?”
“For real. In the Times, no less.”
“Hashtag away. Wait. Let’s do mine again.” Suzanne quickly scrawled on two sheets of paper with a black Sharpie.
Manuel laughed. “Add arrows.”
She did as he suggested then held the pages up. Pointing at her, one read “IS SMART” and the other “AND GETS PAID FOR IT.”
He snapped the new picture and thumbed his phone. “I figure men need to take offense at this crap. The Dudebro Commentariat will swarm. And—posted. Take that, assholes.”
“Nice idea. The review was in the Times? I’ll Google it. What was the movie?”
“That Hitchcock remake. I mean, I haven’t seen it and I don’t know if Lamont is smart or not. That’s not the point. You’ll see—a total misogynistic prick review.”
Suzanne ordinarily would have paused to think how much she loved working with men who used misogynistic in sentences. Instead she was realizing she’d been sucked into something involving Jennifer. Again. As if the universe simply would not leave her alone. Seriously though, the critic had said what?
She kept Annemarie waiting long enough to scan the review. Right there, in black and white: ‘Suspension of disbelief is strained to breaking when tweedy academic Cadell transforms into a sleuth. The audience has no reason to accept that the woman has the deductive reasoning she needs for the task. The trendy overturning of gender norms continues Hollywood’s pandering to optics over substance. Lamont is lucky to have Stewart’s coattails to ride.’
The quote had been picked up along with an assertion from the film company that the script of the Hitchcock film and the new version were nearly identical. To top it off, someone had dredged up the reviewer’s blissful high marks given to the original years ago.
This critic wasn’t even saying that Jennifer’s performance didn’t match Jimmy Stewart’s, he was saying that a woman in the role was automatically, unquestionably unbelievable. Optics over substance—what an asshat.
The image of her high school science teacher came to mind. She could still see the condescending smile on his face as he told her that girls’ brains weren’t wired for science.
Taps to her Instagram and Twitter feeds showed that Manuel’s hashtag was catching on. Her display was awash with his pictures of women associated with tech. Other people were adding pictures of fictional female detectives—she paused to admire Helen Mirren for a moment, because Helen Mirren… Then photos of real female detectives and police officers in uniform flowed into the mix. She tended to agree that hashtag activism was not a way to create permanent change, but today it was glorious.
She opened her personal Twitter account, thought for a moment, then tapped out, “An actress pioneered frequency modulation = wifi, bluetooth. Hedy Lamarr & @realJenniferLamont #whatsmartlookslike.”
She looked up from her phone to find Annemarie tapping the toe of one boot. “Meeting?”
“Sorry. Someone said something stupid on the Internet and it needed fixing. I upvoted your picture.”
“I saw. You know what this means, don’t you?”
“No.”
Annemarie spread her arms in a mixture of acceptance and despair. “That woman is going to be on all the late night talk shows again.”
“You’ll survive.”
“Will you?”
She hadn’t told Annemarie that she’d sent Jennifer away earlier in the week. “Of course.”
Annemarie was scowling. “You know I do get it. I was alone with her for thirty seconds and I wanted to jump her bones, and I really, really don�
�t go for femmes. She’s got that…that sex appeal thing on steroids, or at least she did. Anyway, we’re now running late.”
For the entire duration of the meeting, and through the teleconferences that followed, Suzanne was plagued by visions of Jennifer playing over and over again in the YouTube of her mind. Not in bed. Not licking jam off her fingers. Not even as Suzanne had seen her in movies. Instead, on a repeating loop she saw Jennifer whirling across a live stage with such confidence and poise that Suzanne had forgotten it was Jennifer at all. She’d been trying to put her conversation with her father out of her head, but it kept coming back: If you want her you can’t buy her, you have to earn her.
She and Annemarie decided to have a working dinner that turned into an extended planning session complete with flow charts written on drink napkins. On the way home she had the sudden inspiration to check, and found that Rope was showing at the Metreon at midnight as an early premiere event. She only had an hour to kill.
The theater was about half full—not bad for a midnight show on a Thursday night. She crunched her popcorn and mused that going on twenty years ago she’d been sharing popcorn with Jennifer to glimpse her as an extra in a kids’ movie. Now that woman was on the screen and the focus of almost every scene in the movie.
Then she forgot it was the same woman. Swept into the taut story of two murderers who dare their former mentor to find them out, she was absorbed into the movie. Only when the screen went black and the credits began to roll did she startle out of the film’s grip.
Jennifer’s name was first. Suzanne wanted to applaud. At times she hadn’t even looked anything like the woman Suzanne had thought she’d known. Expressions she’d never seen on Jennifer’s face—distaste, horror, panic—had seemed completely natural to a tweedy academic thinking her way through the unthinkable.
This was what Jennifer had dreamed of becoming. What likely would never have happened if she’d made different choices.
What if, just a little, Jennifer had been right? That Suzanne had only been interested in Jennifer as the ultimate collectible? Had she really thought Jennifer wouldn’t be giving up all that much?
Something shifted down deep, as if true north had moved and it was going to take some time to reset her sense of direction.
Chapter Forty-Five
Jennifer was among the first people up the Jetway at JFK airport. The moment she’d powered up her phone again it had begun shaking, chirping and whistling with notifications for texts, messages and missed phone calls. She saw the words “jerk” and decided a minute or two in the ladies’ room would give her the privacy to catch up. Once she’d latched the door to the ladies’ room stall she queued up the most recent voice mail from BeBe.
“Don’t you worry about a thing, precious, the whole world is coming to your defense. It won’t hurt a thing—in fact, this will sell tons of tickets!”
There were six other voice mails from BeBe and maybe one of them explained what had happened, but she moved on to a message from the production assistant assigned to her while in New York. Even while she listened to a stammered suggestion that they meet when Jennifer reached her hotel to “go over things” she watched the counters on her email and messaging apps continue to tick upward.
Suzanne’s name flashed by and she scrolled back, trying to find it. Had someone found out about their past and waited for the release of Rope for maximum gossip impact? She tapped the wrong thing, had to close an ad, then a video that began playing automatically. She resisted the urge to throw the phone against the nearest wall.
Her hands were shaking as she fought back panic. What had happened while she’d been on the plane?
Finally, among the earliest messages, were links to a review. She took a deep breath, pushed away a number of unwelcome and distracting realizations, and read the thing, not at all sure what to expect.
A woman needs different or more lines than a man to be perceived as smart? She was riding a man’s coattails? Her hearty laugh echoed off the tile. She hoped it hadn’t startled anyone, but relief and a steely kind of glee combined to fill her with delight.
“The Internet—so helpful,” she muttered as she clicked open her Twitter feed to quickly scan over the posts from the accounts she kept on her A-list. Viral media reported #whatsmartlookslike as a national trending topic. The marketing people for Rope must be euphoric, she thought. Her TV appearances and media interviews had just become a whole lot more interesting and newsworthy. Yes, she thought, let’s talk about why leading roles requiring determination and intelligence were so rarely played by women.
A text from BeBe forewarned her that media had called to locate her and she’d given them Jennifer’s rough time of arrival. Thanks for offering me up like meat on a tray. But she didn’t mind too much—not for something like this.
By the time she reached the narrow security exit she was prepared for the sight of several reporters at the end of the hallway brandishing microrecorders and press credentials. Newbies or freelancers, she surmised, as she already had emails asking for comment from the entertainment journalists with names she recognized. She’d give them something to work with for the trouble they’d taken to come to the airport.
She was able to intersect with the driver holding the production company’s placard before the journalists reached her. She gave him her luggage claim slips. “Two large bags, both bright yellow. They’re hard to miss.”
“They warned me to expect press and said I should extract you as soon as possible.” His gaze swept over the little gathering and his dark features showed concern.
The media gurus probably thought Jennifer needed help with messaging. “This is not my first time at this rodeo.”
“I’ll take your bags to the car, and then be at the curb outside the doors.” He headed for baggage claim as she turned to face the hubbub.
“Do you have a comment?”
“What would you say to the Times?”
“Can women play smart people?”
Even though she had refreshed her makeup in the bathroom, she was glad there were no cameras. Her lack of sleep the last few nights would be apparent in the unforgiving industrial lighting. “Can women play smart people? What a ridiculous question to have to ask.”
The pallid young man with a man bun who’d asked the question visibly bristled. “I don’t like having to ask it.”
She moved slowly toward the exit doors where the driver would appear and the little cluster kept up with her. “I understand. I’m glad we can have a meaningful discussion about how failing for decades to cast women in challenging, intellectual roles means some people still think there are parts women can’t play. There’s no reason every Hitchcock movie there is couldn’t be recast with a woman in the lead. With a person of color in the lead for that matter.” It was a discussion she’d had with the director and screenwriter, and she knew that they hoped to cast a black couple as leads in a remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much. “It’s the same kind of thinking, and it limits opportunities for movies to look like the real world.”
She gave quotable comments to each of the others as well before saying, “It’s late and you all want to get to your beds more than I do. I’m still on West Coast time.”
As she walked toward the driver, the young man followed her to ask, “Are you looking forward to the premiere of the movie?”
She nearly answered sarcastically, caught herself and said instead, “Very much so. I know that my two co-stars were bone-chilling good, and I can’t wait to see what the editing and post-production team has done to make our work look even better. There will be layers of excellence in every frame.”
The driver moved in between her and the reporter in a subtle way that indicated the interview was over. Jennifer thanked him as he saw her into the back of the dark-windowed town car. “That was fun.”
“If you say so, ma’am.”
“I do,” Jennifer said. “How’s traffic?”
“The tunnel is moving fine. It’ll be abo
ut forty-five minutes to your hotel.”
She thanked him and turned her attention back to her phone. She quickly sent a text to her assigned production assistant, an easily worried young woman named Kelsey, to decline meeting tonight. “Used to rising early. Meet for breakfast at hotel 6 a.m.? Studio by 7:30.”
She got a prompt text agreeing to the arrangement. It would feel earlier than usual due to the time change, but she intended to take a sleeping pill and crash as soon as they got to the hotel. She didn’t want to take the chance that a business strategy session an hour from now would have her mind spinning for the rest of the night.
It would be a good idea to get some kind of response from her on the web. That was easy. She had to reword a couple of times to get under the character limit and finally posted, “A shame when one of the great newspapers props up caveman thinking. @Times tell me you didn’t mean it. Love, Jennifer #masculinitysofragile.”
Finally, she scrolled her way down in her notifications to the direct tag on a posting from Suzanne. “So I’m what smart looks like?” She wondered why Suzanne had taken the trouble. Don’t read more into it than what it says, she told herself. Suzanne knows how women are discounted in her world. She’s just being supportive.
The rest of the drive she spent tweeting thanks and sharing some of the postings to her personal accounts. She was touched to see one from Helen Baynor. Only when they were within a few blocks of the hotel did she answer Suzanne.
“Thanks for the props from the smartest woman I know @MasonGeekGirl. Math word problems are sexy.” She left it at that. Nothing anyone could read anything into, except maybe Suzanne.
Chapter Forty-Six
At just after eight the next morning she was live on the first morning show, with another to quickly follow after a sprint from 30 Rock to studios at Times Square. After that the conversations blended together. Because of the “controversial review” as the media had taken to calling it, new interviews were added to the schedule right up until the premiere the following evening.
Captain of Industry Page 25