Flavor of the Month (65 page)

He was choking. Like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who could make any kind of action shot but could rarely sink a basket from the foul line when the crowd was watching. Too much pressure. But who was watching him? Sam had found it easier to be brave when he’d had almost nothing to lose. Now he was no longer a neophyte director with a low-budget first offer. Now he was Sam Shields, the successful director of
Jack and Jill
, and instead of it bolstering his confidence, he felt that he had something to risk.

How could it be that he had never noticed the number of danger points that stood in his path to continued success? If April didn’t like the script, he was done for. If Bob LeVine didn’t green light it, he’d be done for. If they went into production and he fell behind budget, or if April didn’t like the dailies, he was done for. And if he managed to finish the script, cast the movie, get it shot on budget, and released, but the audience didn’t come to it, he was done for. So many chances to fail, and such a slim hope for success—no wonder he wasn’t sleeping.

He thought of his father’s words of advice, “Don’t fuck this up for yourself.” Well, Dad, I’m trying not to. But you and Mom didn’t seem to give me a base of confidence to work from. Couldn’t you have picked some up for me on one of your trips to the liquor store?

Sam kicked viciously at the tide of discarded paper around him. He had better clean all this up, because, worst of all, he had to put a good face on everything. This was Hollywood. Never admit that you are hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. And never, ever, admit that you’re afraid. On the evenings he saw April, he exhausted himself with fake passion and fake assurances to her that things were going well. If only he could level with her, talk through his problems and fears, he might be able to move forward, but April was no Mary Jane Moran.

Sam sighed, and thought of the days when Mary Jane would listen while he poured out all his insecurities and problems. She knew when to help with suggestions and when simply to listen and let him work things out on his own. Perhaps the work he did with her had come out so well because of her collaboration.

Collaboration? Well, that was going too far. His work belonged to him. She had merely been a good listener.

He knew what he needed. He needed the relaxation of a sexual relationship where he wasn’t always on the line. He thought of the lunch with Jahne Moore.
That
was something he’d like to try on for size. She seemed to Sam to be more than just a pretty girl. He had thought about her a lot. She seemed to draw him to her, as if her warmth were a magnet and he a mere iron filing. She seemed so young, so fresh. And she had that hunger, that actor’s need to perform, that so excited him. He felt that she would be a good listener. Well, he’d push April again to get the girl to audition.

Now he needed a good listener. He needed to throw his ideas at somebody who would neither belittle his suggestions nor cheapen them. Because Sam was saddled with a project that was, he saw now, a dog. How do you take a dated but revered classic film and update it to something relevant and real without turning off the old audience, while attracting the new?

He threw himself onto the lumpy sofa. There was a story line buried in the script that still made sense: the successful man who watches his woman surpass him as his sun sets. Themes of rivalry, jealousy, and love. But how the hell do you dramatize it?

Sam jumped up and began his pacing. There was a meeting to start on storyboards at the end of the week, and he was not going to hand in this piece of shit. With a sigh that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than his liver, Sam sat down at the desk. “Come on, get with it,” he said aloud. “Don’t fuck this up for yourself.”

They were running late tonight on the
3/4
location, and no one was in a good humor. Oddly enough, the early success of the show had not made the set more relaxed and jovial, as success usually did. Instead, it seemed ever more tense. I had heard about nothing but trouble, and I had three crew people who fed me the dirt. I was there just to get a bit of color for the
Vanity Fair
piece. Now they were trying to get a complicated Steadicam shot in the can. Some poor bastard cameraman was rigged up with this ninety-pound monster, following the three co-stars down the stairs of the building that was doubling for the scene of the Chicago convention center. It was, as they say, a tough act to follow—the three costars had such specific marks to hit that their progress down the steps was almost choreographed, while the camera operator skipped backward in front of them
.

This was the sixth take. The problem was that Lila kept hogging the shot. It reminded me of the old rumor that, during the filming of
Wizard of Oz,
both the Lion and the Tin Man kept crowding Dorothy off the yellow brick road. Poor little Judy. Now Sharleen kept blowing her lines. In addition, they were losing the light. And if that wasn’t enough, everyone—from the crafts-services staff to the Flanders Cosmetics representative—wanted to leave and go home. But Marty had to get this shot—this great, fluid shot—right
.

“Okay, let’s take it from the top,” Marty said, and tried to smile as he indicated the top of the steps. The Steadicam guy once again climbed up, slowly, with his extra burden, uncomplaining. After all, he was a specialist, paid by the hour. What did he care? Marty had thirty-five thousand dollars sunk into this sequence already—he’d have their faces, their hair, their breasts floating down the stairs, the violence of the convention behind them. Soft against hard. Two minutes on the screen. Maybe only ninety seconds. And already thirty-five thousand bucks.

Now, before he started the action, he had to straighten Lila out. He walked wearily up the stairs to her. “I already have you in the center,” he said to her. “I have you ahead of the other two. But I can’t have you alone. You are the center of the wedge, but I need you to let them be in the frame. Please, Lila!”

Lila tossed her hair. Since their aborted dinner, she’d been particularly cool to him. “I’m not cutting them out,” she huffed. “Can I help it if they can’t keep up with me?”

He sighed. She was an enormous pain sometimes, but here—at the improbable setting of the Pasadena Library, at the end of the day during the time of special light they call “magic hour”—she was breathtakingly beautiful.

He looked over to Jahne and Sharleen, both being powdered by Makeup. “You ready?” he asked. Sharleen nodded, but he could see she was rattled. He sighed again. Marty needed to get the shot tonight—he was already over budget and couldn’t afford the ungodly expensive Steadicam for another day.

“You look great, Sharleen. Now, just come down the stairs, and when you get to the bottom, turn to me and give the line. Okay?”

Sharleen nodded, silently.

Lila looked at the director with annoyance. What was he babying Sharleen for? Marty was one of
Lila’s
assets, although sometimes Marty lost his focus, gave too much camera time to Jahne or Sharleen, or too much attention. Since their dinner, Lila knew she would have to put things into balance again. Give Marty a threat or a promise of something, a jerk on the leash. Marty had been too patient with Sharleen as she flubbed her lines through the multiple takes. Lila needed to let Marty know she was someone to be dealt with. Remind him what he just might get from her in return for his…devotion? Well, attention, at least.

“How many times does the hillbilly have to blow a line before we’re allowed to go home?” Lila asked, loudly. “I have a date.” Let Marty chew on that for a while.

“Just hit your marks, okay?” Marty asked wearily, without admonishing Lila.

“Sharleen isn’t just a dumb blonde,” Lila said, emboldened. “If she dyed her hair brown, you know what they’d call it?”

The rest of the crew had gotten tired of Lila’s relentless put-downs of her costar. But the Steadicam operator, new to the set, fell for it. He looked at Lila questioningly.

“Artificial intelligence,” Lila said, and laughed.

Now that the day’s shooting was, at last, finished, Lila flounced to her car. Sharleen had, predictably, blown her line one last time; they’d lost the light and had to wrap for the day. Lila smiled. She didn’t look forward to her long drive from Pasadena to Malibu, or her date tonight. But she had to do it. She knew word of
who
she was dating would get back to Marty. This was the way to treat a man. At least, she thought it was.

Lila didn’t really like to think about it, but when she did she recognized that most of the men that she had grown up around were homosexuals. Her father was, or was bisexual—or probably omnisexual, if there was such a thing. Apparently his rule was, if it moved, fuck it. She knew about the famous statutory-rape case with the thirteen-year-old. Of course, that had been before she was born, but she’d seen Aunt Robbie’s scrapbooks, and the clippings were as complete as only a compulsive Virgo queen could make them.

Not that she’d spent much time around her father. He and the Puppet Mistress had divorced when she was a newborn. He’d shown up every now and then, but the PMS had custody, of course. Anyway, Lila hadn’t really known him, homo or not.

But she
had
known Robbie, and all those other gay men who hung around the PMS. There was her hairdresser, Jerry, and for a long time there was Theresa’s business manager, Sammy Bradkin, and then Bobby Meiser, her second business manager, and there was Ron Woodrow, her
third
business manager (the PMS had trouble with business), and Alain Something-or-Other, that totally hopeless, lisping cameraman, and the photographer whose name Lila couldn’t remember but whose idea of a hot time was to sit up all night and watch the PMS cry. And of course there had been Kevin. Disgusting, lying Kevin. He was still hanging out at her mother’s, Robbie said. Lila shuddered. Well, she was sick of them all.

But she had inherited one. Now it seemed that Robbie himself was switching his attention from Theresa to Lila. Where the action was. He was nothing but a fame junkie, totally beat, and Lila knew it. Almost as bad as Kevin, and always snooping. She could barely manage to keep him out of her shrine room. He had taken to saying “we” when talking about how Lila had gotten on the show. As if
he
had done something. Other than give her a bed, what had he done for her career? Sending her to George, for God’s sake? Humiliating her at Ara’s? What the fuck had he done? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. She had done all her own work. Aunt Robbie was getting confused.
And
getting to be a pain in her ass. If Lila weren’t sure that Robbie would go running back to the PMS the minute she sent him packing, she would have shut the door on him months ago. But she wouldn’t give the PMS the satisfaction.

So, anyway, Lila admitted, she had grown up around a bunch of queers. And all of them were “Uncle” Jerry, or “Uncle” Bobby or “Uncle” Somebody-or-Other—except, of course, for “Aunt” Robbie, who was way too much of a queen to allow himself to be called “uncle.” It wasn’t surprising that those were the men that she was most comfortable with. She supposed that’s why she said yes to Kevin: on some level, she
knew
.

Not that she approved. The thing about gays was that they were always thinking and talking about sex. It was so
boring
, for God’s sake. Sex was something she didn’t like to think about, much less talk about. Lila thought it was all mildly repulsive as well as ridiculous. Think about it: putting a flesh tube from one body into a flesh canal of another. She shuddered. Lila knew that
more
than almost anything she wanted to be sexy, but that
less
than almost anything she wanted to have sex. And with gays it seemed as if having sex was the main thing in life—like 90 percent—and they fit the rest into the 10 percent they had left over.

Of course, she realized, her perception could be a little, well,
skewed
or something, because of all the nutsiness with the PMS. And she’d been to shrinks since she was eleven, so it wasn’t as if she were
stupid
. She had hoped everything would change, once she grew up and had a place of her own. But now being on the set, in real life around heterosexual men, didn’t really seem that different from being with the gays. Well, they
acted
different, of course, but they all just wanted to fuck. It was only that now they wanted to fuck
her
.

She could see it in their eyes. Lila divided heterosexual men into two categories. One was the men like Marty and Michael McLain, who loved women so much, and wanted to be with them, and noticed everything about them. How they dressed, how they smelled, how they moved, even how they thought. That type might as well
be
homo, as far as Lila was concerned. They made her sick. Then there was the other type, the guys like Sy Ortis and that fat worm Paul Grasso, who talked about tits and beaver but really only liked making deals and hanging around with a bunch of guys. Come to think of it, that type was like homos, too. They were
all
homos.

The whole thing gave her a headache, one of those sick migraines, if she thought about it too much. So she didn’t, because all she had to know was one basic fact: men were generally useless, and she hated them. She hated the gays and the straights, she hated how they talked, how they walked. She hated how they were hairy, how they thought they owned the whole fucking world, how they blotted her out, how, even when they wanted her, they made her feel like nothing. She didn’t trust one of them. She feared them all. And she hated them all, even Robbie, even Marty.
Especially
Marty. There was no doubt in her mind: Lila hated men.

The thing was, no matter how much she hated men, Lila knew she hated women more.

Her mother most of all, of course. That went without saying. But now, on the set, Lila’s hatred had taken on a broader focus, you should excuse the pun. Working with Jahne and Sharleen had given her daily practice in woman-hating. Up until this show, Lila had never had much contact with women. Theresa wasn’t exactly what you would call a
woman’s
woman: she had no “girlfriends.” Nor was she a
man’s
woman, considering the males she surrounded herself with.