Flavor of the Month (88 page)

There aren’t any women—with the notable exception of Barbra—who can open a movie. The days of the Crawfords, the Hayworths, the Grables and Hepburns and the like are not just over, they are almost forgotten. And the women on our screens today most often play whores or victims or sluts or long-suffering secondary roles. Dehumanized, turned into a body or a stereotype, a simpleton or a cliché, the actresses are angry and sad. And none of them are bankable
.

But the saddest ones are not the ever-more-quickly fading stars. The saddest are the body doubles. The girls who are not quite good enough all over for a part, but whose breasts or stomachs or asses or legs get to star in a feature. Each time they get called in by the director for the close-up of their navel, there are a hundred technicians and movie people glorifying a piece of them and insulting their face and talent. Think about it. Would you like to play Julia Roberts’ belly in
Pretty Woman
or Jane Fonda’s breasts in
Klute?

Most body doubles are paid very little and have to sign an agreement swearing them to secrecy. After all, none of the stars want to publicly admit their bellies and breasts aren’t good enough. Spoils the illusion. The illusion that you, dear Reader, buy
.

Anyway, there’s an old adage in Hollywood: the director gets to fuck the star; the AD only gets the body double. And
Birth of a Star
would be no exception to that rule
.

A. Joel Grossman was more than eager to do what he could for Sam. But it wasn’t as easy as he had expected to curry favor on the
Birth
shoot. He’d been lucky to get the job, which so often went to the director’s sidekick or his longtime bag man. Walking into an assistant directorship on an important film like this one was sheer luck, made possible only because Sam was such a loner and had no sidekicks or pals. That was the problem now. Sam gave him little to do, barely talked to him, didn’t seem to trust him. Oh, Christ, let’s face it, Sam didn’t trust anyone.

And things weren’t going so well. In his opinion, Michael McLain was a putz, and a washed-up old has-been. Plus, the rumor was that he had been shtupping Jahne Moore, but now it looked like Sam was interested. Although the rumor was that Sam had been shtupping April Irons as well. Or perhaps that was before he was shtupping Jahne Moore. Joel sighed and shook his head. How did these men let a little thing like sex get in the way of their careers? He couldn’t understand it. Anyway, something was making the shoot go particularly slowly and be as difficult as hell. There wasn’t one take in ten with any warmth or feeling. But Sam, of course, wasn’t asking for his help, though Joel would have been happy to give it.

So, when the call came, Sam sounding so urgent about the need for a body double, Joel felt it was a godsend, his chance to do something, anything, that would give him a shot at the next job, through either Sam or the studio. Sam had asked for his help in casting the body double, something he could do. “Total security on this,” Sam had insisted. “No middlemen, no publicity. I mean it. Can you do it?” “A mere bagatelle,” he’d answered. Now he was desperately going through his messy pile of cards and torn bits of paper, looking for the girl’s name. The one that Paul Grasso had brought over that time. The one with the so-so face and the body that would melt molybdenum. He hadn’t used her, but he knew that in Hollywood she couldn’t afford to hold that against him.

There it was! Adrienne Godowski. Jesus, what a name! He picked up the telephone and stepped out onto the veranda overlooking the little sapphire-blue pool. He punched Adrienne’s number into the receiver.

“Hullo?” a voice said. Christ, it sounded like she’d just woken up. What time was it? He looked at his Oyster Rolex.

“This is Joel Grossman. Adrienne Godowski, please.”

“Who’s this?” It was a woman, but the voice was so gravelly, it was hard to tell at first. Christ, was she drunk? Or dying?

“Joel Grossman. I interviewed Adrienne once, through Paul Grasso. Is this Mrs. Godowski?”

There was a pause, then a deep cough. “Oh, yes, Mr. Grossman.” The woman’s voice sounded like it was an effort to speak. “What can I do for you?”

“I have a part in a movie, small part, no lines, and I wanted to see Adrienne for it. Can she come over right away?” He gave her the address.

“I’ll put her in a cab. I got a very bad virus or I’d bring her myself.” The woman coughed again, as if to prove the fact. “She’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she slurred.

Fifteen minutes was more like it. “My mother said you would pay the cab. She didn’t have any change,” Adrienne announced, as she stood on the front steps looking at him. Joel went out and paid the driver in the beat-up Chevy.

Adrienne was still standing outside the door when he returned. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “Got your résumé with you?”

Adrienne dug into the large, beaten-up leather bag, pulled a dog-eared sheet of paper out, and handed it to him. He looked at her résumé. Jesus. L.A. was the kind of place where an actress would put a CAT scan down as a film credit, but this was ridiculous. What the hell was “lead…
Girls in White Satin
” supposed to mean? If it was a lead role, why didn’t it have a name? He looked at the misspellings and the ragged margin.

“You need a manager,” he said.

“I got one. My mother.” Her tone was flat, affectless.

“No, I mean a professional,” he told her, though he knew it was useless.

“No one could be more loyal than a girl’s mother,” Adrienne said, but she said it in the same dead tone, as if she were merely parroting something repeated to her a million times. Was she all right in the head? She gave him the impression of being hypnotized, or mildly retarded, or both. And it gave him the oddest reaction: he could feel the boner growing against his pants.

He decided it was best to ignore both her answer and his hard-on and just get on with it. “So, we need a body double for Jahne Moore, and when the director asked me, I said you’d be perfect for it.” What the hell, build it up a little. “He had someone else in mind, but I’m pretty sure I can get it for you. I need some pictures, though.” He stopped.

“I got these,” she said, and handed over a messy pile. He rifled through them.

“No, no. I mean some special pictures. Ones where we’ll have to show all of your body. Because you’ll be a body double. You’ll do all the love scenes. And some other stuff.” He stopped, waiting for a reaction, but there was none. “So is it okay?” he asked.

“I have to ask my mother,” Adrienne told him, and walked across the room to the phone. Her legs moved so smoothly that, from behind, it was almost like watching the ocean recede. If her face and brain left something to be desired, that perfect ass, those lean, coltish legs, those incredibly slender ankles left him with nothing but desire. He licked his lips nervously. When the dick stands up, the brains go into the ground, he told himself, but his dick didn’t seem to be listening.

She was only on the phone briefly, then turned back to him. “Okay,” she said. “My mom says it’s okay.” And then she reached up and began to unbutton her shirt.

“Uh, listen. Let’s do it out on the deck,” he said. “I need the light.” And some air. And the
camera
, he reminded himself, and went into the hall closet to get it.

When he returned, she was standing in the middle of the living room, her clothes in a pile on the chair beside her. The only thing she was wearing was those cheap, scuffed white shoes, the pointed toes curling up, showing a bit of the sole. Her body was perfect, and its whiteness glowed in the center of the almost empty room. “Where do you want me?” she asked him.

“Outside,” he answered, not surprised to hear the hoarseness in his voice. She turned, and he followed that perfect ass out onto the deck. It was the contradictions of her body that created the tension he felt when he looked at her: she was lean yet curved, toned yet soft, long yet round.

He posed her on a wooden chaise longue. He had no cushions for it, but her white body against the rough wood stirred him deeply, and he figured it had to work on Sam, unless the guy was made of concrete. He shot a roll, thirty-six exposures. He had her stretch out with her arms over her head; then he asked her to hold a breast in each hand, then to sit up. He tried to keep her face out of most of the shots. “Sit at the edge of the chaise now,” he suggested. “Put both arms behind you.”

She did as she was told. He wondered how far her docility would go. She looked at him mildly, her face registering neither disapproval nor pleasure. “Hook your legs under each leg of the chaise,” he told her.

“Like this?” she asked, as she spread her knees.

“Yes,” he said, and squatted down, angling the camera up. A beaver shot. What was possessing him? He could never show
this
to Sam.

He felt as if he had been privy to a secret, a great mystery, and by exposing it to the sun, to his eyes, to his lens, he was desecrating it at the same time as he worshipped it.

“Look, I want to splash some water on you? Okay? There is a scene in the water.”

“Okay,” she agreed, “but it’s kinda cool. I don’t want to get sick, like my ma.”

“Don’t worry. We’re almost done.” He went to the hose beside the house, shut the nozzle, but turned on the faucet. He approached her, the hose dragging behind him, a long tail. He pointed the nozzle at her belly and pressed the trigger down hard.

The jet of cold water arched up into the sun and gushed down onto her flat white belly. It contracted, and the water splashed up to her perfect pointy tits, the doll-pink nipples immediately hardening, one pointing to downtown L.A., the other directly at Joel. “Oh!” she gasped, and he released his grip on the nozzle and threw it aside. He watched as the water ran down her belly, glistening on the soft brown patch of hair, wetting her between her legs. His penis pressed so hard against his zipper that he felt dizzy.

You are taking your life in your hands, he told himself, sounding like his own grandma. You French-kiss her and you may wind up with French foreign lesions. Before you put that in your mouth, do you know where it’s been?

“Come inside,” he said, against all his better instincts. “Come inside. I want to fuck you,” he groaned. As he knew she would, she stood up and began to follow him. He stumbled through the open door, through the living room into the bedroom. He walked around the unmade bed to the side table, opened the drawer. Thank God. Four condoms. He grasped at one, turned, but she wasn’t behind him. Had he misunderstood? Wasn’t she coming? He walked back out to the living room just in time to see her hanging up the phone. Christ! Had she called for a cab? Had she called the cops?

She was just hanging up the phone. She looked up at him. “My mother says as long as I got the job it’s okay,” Adrienne said, and began to walk toward him.

Jahne sat, protected from the lights both by a creme block and the white canvas umbrella, staring at the script. Her heart was pounding in her chest. Today was the first day of shooting with Michael McLain, and she was nervous. Nervous about seeing him, about April Irons’ visit today, about the script that still wasn’t working. Sy Ortis had been at least partly right. The working script for
Birth of a Star
wasn’t awful, only pedestrian, but Jahne hadn’t been prepared for the rewrites. Each day, new versions were distributed, and each one worse.

While the story hadn’t changed, the settings and style had. And now there were three—count ’em,
three
—scenes with nudity. She put her hand to her chest, as if it would do any good to cover her breasts now. Well, at least she wouldn’t be the one who had to expose herself in front of a couple of hundred strangers. Sy and her contract had seen to that. But she felt sorry for the poor, anonymous girl who would.

The San Francisco soundstage, large as an airplane hangar, was chaotic. Cables crossed the floor in a demented roadmap. Equipment of every conceivable sort was heaped about. Grips called out to one another, barely audible over the noise of hammering and rendered invisible by the shower of sparks from arc welding that fell in a bright cascade from somewhere on a catwalk overhead.

Mai had told Jahne how different movies were from television, but she couldn’t have imagined the scale without seeing it. From the lushness of her trailer to the vastness of the soundstage to the numbers of crew, the enterprise was intimidating. Jahne thought of the little band of players in St. Malachy’s basement, and of the cast of two in the original production of
Jack and Jill
. How had Sam learned to handle so much so soon? And could he handle it? Jahne had always admired him as a director, but this was too much for anyone to manage.

She made her way through the maze of workers and crates and props and lights, the little AD at her side. Jahne, always polite, remembered that his name was Joel Something. She turned to him. “Joel, who will attend this meeting?”

“Oh, Sam, April, Michael, Bob, and Samantha Reiger.”

“April Irons will be there?”

“Yeah. It’s unusual, but this is such a big-budget baby that I guess she wants to see it off on the right foot.” He flashed an ingratiating grin at her. “Not that it won’t be a huge success with you in it,” he told her. “I really admire your work.”

Jahne nearly laughed. After almost a year, she still couldn’t get used to the L.A. crowd’s talking seriously about dreck like
Three for the Road
. And sometimes it was hard to figure if they, too, knew it was dreck, in which case they were toadies, or if they actually did admire it, in which case they were subliterate. Joel, she could see, was a toady. That made it easy for her. She didn’t have to feel sorry for him or like him.

She sighed. “Tired?” he asked. Christ, the little worm was right in her face! Jahne knew the biggest job of an AD was babysitting the stars. Well, she didn’t need a sitter. What she did need was a little more confidence in her judgment and fewer butterflies in her stomach. Her fear was that Sy might—just possibly—be right: that
Birth of a Star
was nothing but a potboiler. And Sy called her every other day to remind her over and over how important her first picture was. “If this goes down the toilet, you’ll be a TV queen forever,” he had said. “Totally ABC’s
Movie of the Week
. Coming down with the newest disease or vamping through some stupid romance. Strictly Jane Seymour territory.” Involuntarily, Jahne put her hand to her stomach.