Bad Boy Boss (8 page)

I was the last one to read, and I had memorized the page, so I really didn’t need to read.

Peter was there along with Jeremy and two other people whom Jeremy introduced as Mary Patterson and Rob Carey, respectively co-producer and head writer. Rob took the other lines and we went right through it. I didn’t find it difficult, but then I didn’t know whether I did it right or not.

“You memorized it in about twenty minutes?” asked Rob.

“It wasn’t that hard, it was written so it sort of all flowed together, like the next line would be naturally what you’d say if you were Vicky.”

Rob shot a mock glare at Mary. “I get appreciation from people who come in to read and none from my producers.”

“Was I right, or was I right?” said Jeremy.

“Since it is such a rare occurrence, I guess I’ll have to admit it,” answered Mary. “She’s good and she looks right. I guess you’ll have Dillon handle her, Alex?”

“As soon as we leave here,” Peter responded easily. “ I clued him in and I have to talk to Jerry about the book anyway.”

We had to stop at an office just before the gate where I got my picture taken and put on a badge with a Warner Brothers logo, below my picture it said ‘TV Cast.’ so if I ever forgot what I was doing on the Warner Brothers lot all I had to do was read the badge. I mention this because some time later, I realized that for quite a few Warner Brothers starlets, the small notation proved extremely helpful.

The office building we drove to was very close to the studios. We parked and took a ticket, then rode up eighteen floors, which gave us a great view on what was a relatively clear LA day. The entire floor was The Aaron Michaels Agency – Representation and Management. Aaron Michaels was no longer around; his clients had been silent screen actors originally. The agency he founded, however, forged ahead into talkies, Technicolor, CGI and Digital, adding agents in literature and art to complement the thespians.

As soon as we walked up to the receptionist, she pointed at me. “You! Mr. Michaels. Room 27, middle corridor.” Then it was Peter’s turn, but he just got a look and saccharine directive. “He’s waiting for you.” It took all my willpower not to punch her out.

Mr. Michaels – actually Dillon Michaels… who preferred to be called Dillon – was middle aged, handsome without being striking, with a little gray at the temples. The pictures on the wall were mostly stars I recognized, and Peter’s dad was there.

He handed me some forms. “Fill those out and you’ll be signed up here and I’ll handle the union for you; they just take their dues as a payroll deduction. We pay you from here.”

After I filled out the forms, he passed me four pictures that had obviously been cropped from the photos Peter had been taking of me in the mountains. They were the least made up and, well, I thought I looked pretty good. On the back they read:

Artist/Graphic Arts Model Face and Body

DM Inc. Glendale, CA

Photographic Model Face and Body

Carver and Row Publishers, New York, NY

Actress

Sinclair Patterson Productions, Burbank, CA

He handed me a pencil and had me initial each photo. “As you gain more credits, they get added to the back of the photo. The name of the book will be added when it’s published and the sitcom plus your character after the airdate,” said Dillon.

“We are agents and we represent you. Alex has paid us for your contract with him, but I have to ask you to sign it for our files.” He turned it around for my signature and I signed.

Dillon continued. “Alex will be an exception and will pay you directly because we can’t expect you to drive down here every week. The contract is renewable at double the salary for another sixteen weeks, so it will be up to you to tell us what to do then.”

I was speechless, but it didn’t matter; he kept talking.

“Just two more signatures and we can get you out to lunch where you belong, there are no producers in here to ogle your legs. These are both insurance forms. You are carried on the agency’s health plan if you are not on a job with a plan, and we insure your life at our expense as a beneficiary.”

I nodded, lost by all the necessary paperwork and the fact that a few signatures could change my life. Again. If my ignorance with the ‘Hollywood scene’ showed, it didn’t faze Dillon in the least. He just kept talking.

“I will start circulating your pictures a week prior to your first appearance, and tell Alex I said to experience luncheon al fresco in Hollywood or Burbank and ignore the paparazzi. Now shoo, go show off your beautiful little self to some Hollywood moguls and make my job easy.”

Peter met me at the reception desk.

“You like Dillon?” he asked.

I shrugged, still bug-eyed at what had transpired.

“If I’d known you had the part, I’d have introduced you at the party.” Thankfully, Peter just plowed on, too. “He made the move with my dad and six other soap people. Jerry, the guy I met with is the literary agent; Mom was his first big break. He loves the new title and will handle it with the editor. This place isn’t just an agency, they manage you too, so you can really just concentrate on what you do. Dad did that. Our family has tons of money and assets and it was scattered all over. Dad got everyone together and they hired the management team here to handle the money. As soon as they heard about it, some of the actors wanted in, so basically the management company bought the talent agency and combined the two into a single operation. A lot of Hollywood people over the years have lost fortunes, been taken to the cleaners by managers. That doesn’t happen here.”

“Dillon said…”

“To eat outside, cross your legs and point them at the nearest photographer. And I’m forbidden to chase them away.”

“All except the leg part,” I said.

“Dillon didn’t make a leg comment?”

“Well he did say I should leave because there were no producers to ogle my legs in his office.”

“You had me worried for a moment. Dillon makes comments about almost any woman’s legs,” Peter explained. “Not saying something about a set of pins as spectacular as yours would probably necessitate emergency medical procedures.”

We ate lunch at Tallyrand’s on Olive in Burbank; outdoors, as commanded, and we did get snapped a few times. Peter said that he often got snapped and that his sisters did until they got married, then it tailed off a bit for them. “There needed to be a reason beyond some reasonably good-looking young man on their arm. Why don’t we help them a bit?” he said.

Then he yelled ‘Tommy’ to one of them and whoever Tommy was showed up with his camera and a smile.

“Show him your studio card, dear,” Peter commanded.

I dug into my purse and came up with the Warner Brothers card.

“She’s going to be in
Clara and Her Sisters
,” he said and told Tommy my name. “Dillon at Michael’s is her agent, so you know you’ll be seeing a lot of her pretty soon. Now take some flattering pictures and lead your brethren away so that we can have lunch in peace.”

After he’d gone I said to Peter, “Dillon specifically said you were supposed to ignore the paparazzi.”

“That one works for a supermarket tabloid. I would have ignored the rest, but people usually try to get him. I don’t because I don’t have anything to sell really, about the only thing I did have was the art shows and they aren’t really celebrity gossip material.”

“Whoa,” I said. “I’m a celebrity?”

“As soon as the next issue hits the checkout stands.”

I shook my head. “That’s sort of mind-blowing.”

“Why?”

“You’ve been one all your life; I’m just getting my cherry popped. It isn’t something you’d understand. All your life, I’ve seen these people – mostly their pictures – and they are supposed to be special, someone we all want to be. Then, all of a sudden sitting down and eating a salad, I am one. I don’t feel any different, the world doesn’t get glitter sprinkled all over it, but there I am and every housewife in the greater LA area wishes they were me. I’m not even sure I like it, and that’s mind-blowing.”

We spent the afternoon in Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and an Italian Specialty Grocery Store on Central in Glendale. We both had lists of ingredients, but about half of them coincided. About the only thing we were opposed about was the boneless chicken. He got breasts and I wanted the thighs, because I always thought that the dark meat had more taste.

When we got back to the house in Glendale, there was a note on the door.

If you get back in time, Pauley is grilling steak in the backyard, starting at six. Hope you can make it.

A

We had time to put everything away. The note was from Peter's sister, Anabelle. Pauley was her husband and the CFO at Disney. They lived next door and their house was considerably larger, though I never really saw the inside of it because we just walked from backyard to backyard.

They greeted us with a beer and Pauley took our orders for steak, both of which were rare. Then we sat down for a while.

“I assume that you are shortly going to be with the competition,” Pauley said to me.

I nodded. “Well, starting Monday, I’ll be at Warner Brothers. According to what they told me, the character will be tested in two episodes, and then written in later in the season if she tests well.”

“That’s the formula, unless you’re the producer’s girlfriend. Monday you can go in with Mom – she has a script in development there – and of course Dad will be around. I have two casting directors on my ass about that. I’m the bad guy most of the time, the bean counter, but let Dad show up and I’m everybody’s friend. If you want, come on Sunday and I’ll do a barbecue with the parents and the casting directors, a couple other power couples. Certainly couldn’t hurt.”

“Why not?” said Peter, looking over at me. “We can work Saturday.”

“Slave driver,” I said.

“So I heard that you disowned your brother in high school,” I said to Anabelle.

Annabelle laughed. “Disowned, swore I didn’t know him, and forbade anyone from mentioning his name in my presence,” she confirmed. “Both Sarah and I were decent, and I say decent, not really good in the sense Dad is, but Alex? Jeez, did he stink, I mean wooden. Monotone. There wasn’t a mistake he didn’t make. Really cringe-worthy.”

“Well, it just wasn’t my thing,” said Peter. “Just because Dad is one of the best doesn’t guarantee I have to be good at it. I didn’t want to do the play, as I remember, but heredity sealed my fate.”

“I know they pressured both Sarah and me into doing a play,” Anabelle agreed. “Sarah did two. Still, you might have at least tried.”

“He can’t,” I said. “He can’t lie in such a way that I can’t tell. The only lie he can tell is a lie of omission, with his mouth shut. And basically, what is acting? It’s a form of controlled lying. A form of being something, someone you’re not. He’s an artist, consumed with being who he is, not who he isn’t. He can’t act because it’s the antithesis of what he is.”

“I never heard it explained like that,” said Pauley. “And yet it makes perfect sense. An actor will tell you it’s assuming another persona on purpose, but basically it’s just lying. And if you can’t lie, you can’t act.”

“So how about you?” asked Anabelle, looking at me.

“Oh, I am good at it. My dad was really strict; I mean a cop and all that. If I wanted to do anything at all in high school, I had to build a whole web of lies, keep them all straight and all together or I’d get caught.”

“And you just got a job on America’s second most favorite sitcom,” said Pauley .“Sort of makes one reconsider the value of education.”

“There’s education,” I said, “and then there’s education. When you screw it up, they start calling it experience.”

I asked to have my family up before I started the show so they came up on Thursday and took my cabin; my mother, father and sixteen-year-old brother. My dad took a sick day, knowing I had to be in LA on Sunday. That night, Peter really showed off, smoking two ducks for Peking Duck.

The girl next door in Sugarloaf was luscious and my brother sort of disappeared; she was stacked and underappreciated. It was a very nice visit until Saturday afternoon.

Peter wanted to try the first of the three costumes that would finish the book, so we were coming home from the photo shoot about three and my ex, Jimmy, was leaning on his hood outside the door. I was instantly sick to my stomach.

“Hello, Lisa,” Jimmy drawled, then went right into the reason for being here. “People around me don’t leave. It creates a bad impression.” With that, he drew his nine-millimeter.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father assess the situation. He ducked back inside and came out with his pistol.

Peter looked, and then started walking confidently toward Jimmy, who responded by pointing the gun right at Peter

“Look to your right, Jimmy,” said Peter. “The man with the gun is a cop. He won’t stop shooting until his gun is empty. And he’ll do that soon, if you even look like you’ll squeeze the trigger. Go ahead, shoot. I might survive, but you won’t. The only guarantee here, Jimmy, is that you won’t survive. Hand me the gun, get in your car and drive away. Okay, we both love her; I really can’t imagine a straight man that wouldn’t. I promise to do my best by her. Now hand me the gun, Jimmy. Because if you don’t, you’ll die, and neither of us wants that. And Cash happens to be my cousin, so if you fire of your whole magisine of perfect shots, you’ll still be a corpse in the making,” Peter held out his hand.

Jimmy handed the gun to Peter, got in his black Lincoln and left.

Peter flipped the Glock around and handed it grip first, to my dad. Dad automatically popped out the clip and made sure there were no rounds in the chamber. Once satisfied, he slipped it into his waistband. Only when it was out of sight did I begin to breathe normally again.

“Process it or not,” Peter said. “The word in the Valley is that there are two murders attached to it. I rather doubt it, because Jimmy is a world class wuss. Still, I’m glad you were here. I don’t like guns, don’t own any and have no plans to buy one.”

“I looked you up on the net, you’re a known hunter,” said my Dad.

“You have your most accurate weapon here?” answered Peter.

“I only use a pistol, I don’t hunt.”

“Then come along.” He looked at me, “you’ve got dinner handled?”

He took his bow and a quiver of arrows and they left.

Of course I asked. His cabin had a fifty yard range down its side. Apparently, Peter out shot my Dad shot by shot from fifty to ten yards. Then they drove down to the Stater Brothers market and brought home a watermelon. He took his katana from his cabin and sliced the watermelon in six perfect pieces.

Okay her name was Frankie and except for glasses she was incredibly pretty, sexy and I endorsed my brother’s choice. Actually told him how to get her nipples hard.

“Will you agree that I can keep her safe?” Peter directly addressed my Dad.

“This isn’t the World we live in,” said my Dad. “Up here, yeh, you’re the Alpha Male, and you aren’t even an Alpha Male. You’re a Beta who decided to live on his own terms. You’re an artist and people like Jimmy can’t compete, she’ll be a star in L. A. It’s not as primitive as you make it. Can you do this to the Jimmys of Hollywood?”

“That’s been handled. Of course I can’t. Dillon Michaels can and he has been employed to do so.”

“How long have you been shooting a bow?” Dad asked.

“My dad started shooting when Richard Greene was Robin Hood on TV. He was seven when he got his first bow, at thirty pounds. For my seventh birthday, I was given a bow and lessons. You haven’t seen the worst of it; I have a compound that shoots an arrow at eighty pounds with less effort than the forty-nine pound bow you saw. I can down an elephant with it. The bow you saw killed a bison, the largest land animal in this hemisphere.”

“What about the sword?”

“Rich, bored, learned how.”

What was nice was that my dad and the man I loved actually liked each other.

Pauley’s barbecue was interesting and both casting directors seemed to take a bit of an interest in me. I called Dillon and told him about the barbecue so they both had my picture on the pile on their desks Friday morning. The other two couples were a producer and director; the director was actually working with Rachel developing a third remake of a novella by Eugene Manlove Rhodes called Paso Por Aqui. It was first made as a silent film in 1927. The 1948 remake was an independent film called Four Faces West, a classic Western, starring Joel McCrea and Frances Dee.

Rachel drove me into work Monday morning. I had the lines down and I was pretty sure I could do it all right, except for one small rough patch. The show,
Clara and her Sisters
was a hit; Clara was a married rich woman, her sisters were also ‘sisters’… as in nuns. One was a grade school principal; the other a high school teacher and the show revolved around half-baked schemes to raise funds for the schools or the nunnery where the sisters lived. Mother Superior was a featured character; they had tried two other characters: a janitor and a teacher, but neither caught on. My character, a ditzy novice, Sister Anne Victoria or Vicky, was the third attempt to get another character into the mix.

The problem I was having was that Vicky had a joke, I was told it was to be a running gag about the Mother Superior’s cat. The line was: “The Reverend Mother calls her pussy Jude because training it is a lost cause.” I was raised a good, little Irish Catholic girl and, though I didn’t have any problems with the line, I couldn’t prevent a blush that gave it away. When I told Harvey, the director, he had the make-up man fix me up so the blush, if it happened, wouldn’t show.

They shot three shows, and I was in two of them. Everybody seemed to like what I did, and when I saw myself, I thought I really captured the character. The question, as they explained it to me, would be whether the character had a high enough ‘Q’ score when the surveys came back after the first show. If Vicky got a high enough ‘Q’, she’d be written in as a regular cast member. Since the show ran on Wednesday night, I would only have to wait two days to find out if I was a permanent cast member.

Since we didn’t have a broadcast TV in Sugarloaf – Peter was against TVs on general principle – we were staying on in Glendale. Peter’s parents used the Glendale house as their town house, the house they used when they had to be in the LA area on business and couldn’t really commute to Santa Barbara. Rachel had to spend the week at Warner, and Harrison had two meetings with producers about roles in upcoming productions.

So we were sharing the house, and there was no way the rooms were sound proofed like in Santa Barbara. Every night, Peter really pushed all my buttons trying to get me to make some noise. I got licked from behind my knee to behind my elbow with all stops in between covered and kissed. He got his hand between my legs and was so slow and gentle about it all that I had to put a pillow over my mouth because I couldn’t help what was coming out. Of course, he had to hold it while all this was going on, so when he finally gave up and slid inside me, it was quick and pretty much a full load. Coupled with licking my nipple, I almost swallowed the damn pillow.

My TV debut was a little party. Peter cooked a platter of steak and Paul and Anabelle joined us.

“You nailed the character,” said Harrison, “but I was pretty sure you would. Dillon will get you work off this alone, whether or not they pick up the character.”

Everybody else said something nice, but when you’re in the room with an Oscar winning actor, his comments are the ones you tend to remember.

I didn’t have to wait long. Dillon called Thursday morning with the news that Vicky had just scads and buckets of ‘Q’ and I had to come in to sign a contract for the season. The ‘season’ was actually going to be shot over the next two weeks and the amount I was getting paid to do it was almost obscene. In any case, I was going to have to stay in Glendale for another two weeks and Peter and I still had three fairies to do for the book.

I signed the contract on Thursday and went to work on Friday. It would have really been hard if I had any kind of a major role, but Vicky was just being developed, so my lines were minimal. Gertrude Castor played the Mother Superior, and she was one of the best comediennes around. She helped me a bit with my timing and even told me how to steal a scene with her. It was a friendly show without any backstabbing and the scene stealing was worked out for the benefit of the show. I was the new kid, and everybody helped me out.

That weekend, we drove up the mountain and even spent a few hours working on a fairy. Basically, we wanted to bring the Mustang back so I’d have a car and he would be free while I was working. Rachel and Harrison were going back up to Santa Barbara, so once again we’d have the house to ourselves.

After dinner on Saturday, Peter slid behind me and put his arms over my stomach, kissing the back of my neck and under my ears. I put my arms over his and sort of hugged myself. It was turning me on a bit, but I wasn’t in the mood yet for it to get too hot or heavy. My cabin was open to the edge of the forest on one side, which gives it a nice view from the side of the great room. I was looking out into the forest and being held with kisses, sending thrilling little messages down between my legs. It wasn’t anything I wanted to change for a while. Things had been moving very fast lately. A month ago, I had been on the edge of eviction, broke and pretty much desperate. Now I was being held and loved by the most wonderful man in existence, and I just wanted to freeze time for a while.

I turned around and threw my arms around his neck so I could pull him down to my kisses. And eventually, he carried me into the bedroom where we stripped each other, folding into each other’s arms, kissing and touching. He moved his fingers lightly inside of my arms and I was shivering with it. It was nice to let it out, knowing that only Mickey, the squirrel, would hear me.

Monday was work. I know a lot of people don’t think acting is work; well, they’re just wrong. Just try being someone else. It’s work, it’s constant concentration and the words aren’t even yours, you have to memorize them. Just try it sometime. In a way, it’s like being an artist’s model. You have to keep concentrating on not moving and you can’t let your mind wander. An actor is the same way. I had to keep total concentration on being Vicky; there was no room for Martha in the equation, and that was exhausting.