Adulation

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living ordead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Text copyright © 2012 Elisa Lorello

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or byany means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express writtenpermission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Publishing

P.O. Box 400818

Las Vegas, NV 89140

ISBN-13: 9781612184241

ISBN-10: 1612184243

For Fenny

CONTENTS

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE Danny Masters

CHAPTER TWO Sunny Smith

CHAPTER THREE Danny Masters

CHAPTER FOUR Sunny Smith

CHAPTER FIVE Danny Masters

CHAPTER SIX Sunny Smith

CHAPTER SEVEN Danny Masters

CHAPTER EIGHT Sunny Smith

CHAPTER NINE Danny Masters

CHAPTER TEN Sunny Smith

CHAPTER ELEVEN Danny Masters

CHAPTER TWELVE Sunny Smith

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Danny Masters

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Sunny Smith

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Danny Masters

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Sunny Smith

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Danny Masters

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Sunny Smith

PART TWO

CHAPTER NINETEEN Danny Masters CHAPTER TWENTY Sunny Smith CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Danny Masters CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Sunny Smith CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Danny Masters CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Sunny Smith CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Danny Masters CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Sunny Smith CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Danny Masters CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Sunny Smith CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Danny Masters CHAPTER THIRTY Sunny Smith

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Danny Masters CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO Sunny Smith CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Danny Masters CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Sunny Smith CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE Danny Masters PART THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX Sunny Smith

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN Danny Masters

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Danny Masters October 11, 2010

O
F ALL THE
 
things Danny Masters was told he should be afraid of—terrorists and
 
E. coli
 
and Toyotas yetto be recalled and the so-called homosexual agenda—nothing frightened him as much as the blank screen. The first page of a new script always made his stomach churn, and the voice of insecurity started in on thepsychological warfare:
 
Those previous successes? Flukes. Save your pennies, brother, ’cause you’reabout to fuck up big time...

Today was no different. The cursor on the blank screen didn’t so much blink as
 
wink
 
at Danny,who was certain it was mocking him.

“Stop that,” he said.

The cursor continued to blink. Or wink.

When he got an idea—a spark of ingenuity, a snippet from a song, a burst of inspiration—he wasoff and running. It was
 
waiting
 
for it that drove him berserk. Because that was just the thing: He
 
couldn’t
wait for it. He couldn’t force it, had no idea when inspiration would show up at his doorstep (or usually,in his case, in his shower). Besides,  ideas were floating in and out of his mind all the time. He’d bedriving and hear bits and pieces of conversation between characters in his head, a baritone voicedelivering a monologue, a father and son arguing. But when it came time to sit down and actually
 
write
 
it,it went into hiding, scattering like cockroaches when the lights went on.

The cursor blinked.

“Go fuck yourself,” said Danny. He wasn’t sure whether he was talking to the cursor or that voiceof insecurity in his head. Probably both.

Today was Danny Masters’s birthday. Forty-five.

The cursor blinked forty-five times. He counted them.

Forty-five wasn’t so bad. He was fifteen years sober, for one thing. He still had a thick mane ofash-brown hair (with very little gray), still had his memory, and still could run two miles without keelingover. He could do everything in his forties that he’d done in his twenties; it just hurt the next morning.

Hundreds, possibly thousands, of birthday wishes and gifts had bombarded him today. The e-mails, cards, flowers, and packages crowded his in-box as well as a corner of his office. As he’d beendoing the last few years, he planned to give some of the flowers to his daughter, Ella, or his assistant, Dez, and donate the rest to a local hospital or nursing home. He would then open the gifts with Ella, whostill, at the age of fourteen, liked the act of unwrapping presents even more than she liked the presentsthemselves. She loved the disguise of the box, the pristine ribbons tied in a bow, the promise of somethinggood inside. That his fans would take the time and care to spend money on him—buying him books, raremovie  posters, bottles of champagne (which he also gave away), artwork (those that consisted of portraitsof him always creeped him out), gift certificates to restaurants, bookstores,
 
Amazon.com
, and so on—never ceased to astound him. Paul Wolf, his friend and the director of Danny’s film
 
Exposed
, had given

him one of the typewriters Robert Redford used in
 
All the President’s Men
.

And yet Danny felt horribly alone.

His office was in a renovated hotel acquired by the Kingsmen Studio Corporation in Los Angeles. Shortly after selling his first screenplay, he’d been issued the space: a receiving and waiting room where his assistant worked, and his own office—complete with a full bathroom, walkin closet, sturdy walnut desk, picture window with a view of the east lot to his left, a TV projection screen on the cream-colored wall to his right, and a black leather couch flanked by two knee-height bookcases opposite his desk. His Emmy awards for
 
Winters in Hyannis
 
were strategically placed to draw the eye upon entering. The entire space resembled a bachelor pad, and many people seemed deflated when they entered it. Someone with Danny’s success and talent surely had earned enough street cred to warrant an office in the grown-ups’ executive building, with carpet so soft one could fall asleep on it, kitchenettes and minibars, and private movie theaters. He probably stayed for sentimental reasons more than any other. It certainly wasn’t an ugly space, and it contained lots of light and comfort.

At the very least, the office was simply the place where he typed as well as conducted the business part of his career. There was a difference between
 
typing
 
and
 
writing
.  The writing happened when he took walks around the studio lot, or used the shower, or sat in the stands during a Dodgers game.

Danny took a sip of some kind of latte (he never paid attention to the flavors) from the sturdy paper Starbucks cup and made a squinching face; its contents had cooled considerably. Not surprising, since it’d been sitting there for at least an hour. However, that one sip seemed to give him the jolt he needed; he was ready to put something, anything, on the page.

He started with a setting:

INT. PUBLIC RADIO STATION – MORNING

With
 
Exposed
 
about to premiere and already getting Oscar buzz, the doctoring of two best-selling bookadaptations finished, and the legal complications involved in getting out of optioning the Harold Greymemoir after discovering that Grey had fabricated most of it, Danny was ready for something a littlelighter. It was time to get back into television, he’d decided.

He’d been kicking around the idea of doing something more comical for a while. He was good atwriting political thrillers and courtroom dramas—all the critics and his fans told him so—but he was inthe mood to look at the brighter side of life. He’d gotten the idea to do a show about a public radio stationprogram called
 
The Seven Year Itch
 
(he wanted to call the show that as well, figuring the Marilyn Monroe film of the same name had been forgotten by the ADD generation) in which the hosts were amarried couple who, as they gave out comical relationship advice,  behind the scenes revealed theabsurdities of their own relationship. And yet, of course, in their end, it was the absurdities that made saidrelationship work.