How to Save Your Own Life (28 page)

Britt nodded. “I frankly
hate
the picture business,” she said, “and one of these days, I'm just going to retire and
write....
That's what I
really
want to do. But the problem is, we don't have a hell of a lot of time. Seventy-two hours—or the deal is
no go.
And in those seventy-two hours, we've got to wrap it up here, and then go to New York and wrap it up with the tax-shelter lawyers. Also, I want to make you a real Hollywood party before you go.... In fact, I've already invited fifty people to my lawyer's house for tomorrow night-and after that I've booked us all on the Red-Eye to New York-so the best possible thing is if you sign the option now—and then we can hassle out the other stuff in New York.”

From her caramel leather bag, she extracted a tattered piece of paper, which she handed to me. It was densely printed with fly-speck-size words, but I could read the heading: UNIVERSAL OPTION FORM. And then somewhere toward the bottom of the page there occurred the chilling phrase:
World Rights in Perpetuity.

“What am I supposed to do? Sign in blood?” I quipped. (Typical of me to have exactly the right gut reaction and then disregard it completely.)

“Oh, don't pay any attention to all that lawyer talk,” Britt said, “we'll work out all the details later. The main thing is to get the project off the ground. Later on, we'll make a real deal-memo-get the lawyers, the agents—do it
right.
But for now all they need is a piece of paper to wave around so their guys know for sure they can get the property. Nobody's going to come up with six million without a piece of paper, right? So that's what we need from you—the piece of paper.”

“I really should call the agent, shouldn't I? Or a lawyer?”

“Look,” Britt said, “I want you to be fully and completely protected. I really do. And if you call the lawyers, they're going to ask for the papers and it'll take time and there'll be all that lawyer crap, and we only have seventy-two hours. But call them. Go ahead and call them. On the other hand, you could trust me as your friend—and later we'll see that you're completely protected. I've been in this business a long time, and I can tell you, you can't do anything at all without
trust.
That's why I just want to get the project off the ground. Look-you're out here now, everyone knows I'm going to do the picture, nobody else is going to make offers on the property ‘cause they know it's mine—so why should you stand in the way of our getting financing? You're just cutting off your
own
nose if you do that. And this piece of paper is
meaningless,
really meaningless. Later, we'll do it right.”

“If it's so meaningless, why do you need it? Why can't you just say I'm willing to do it if the terms are right?” I asked.

“Because you know how money-people are,” Britt said. “They're compulsive idiots. They need pieces of paper.”

Sonny shrugged, as if to sympathize with the plight of the poor flaky artist confronted with the compulsive money-people. “You gotta do business with idiots sometime,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Danny, “this is a private investment group with fifteen, maybe twenty-five people in it. We can't mobilize them without
something
in writing. But we know it really doesn't count. They just don't understand the picture business. They're private investors, see.”

“Here,” said Britt, uncapping a felt pen and passing it to me with the agreement. Sonny and Danny closed in, surrounding me. What Britt said was true. Everyone knew she had my book, whether I signed or not, so what was I going to do—peddle it on the streets? Even my own agent had said there were no other serious takers. I signed with a sinking heart.

 

At the “Hollywood party,” the next night, everyone who was anyone was there—the hosts, the parasites, and a few unclassifiable specimens-all circulating lazily in the patio of a 1920s Moorish-style Bel Air mansion built by a silent film star and now owned by Britt's lawyer. Robyn Barrow herself was there, with her saucer brown eyes and her tiny fixed nose and her hippie boyfriend from Big Sur. Robyn was said to be able to get any project off the ground—she was that “bankable.” Her agent knew it too. Deena Maltzberg was as wide as Robyn was tall, wore pink heart-shaped specs, and had long platinum fingernails. She also had a devastating sense of humor —and although she was a wicked negotiator, she never actually lied. She had a tendency to infantilize her movie-star clients though, hovering over them and calling them “baby.” I even heard her encouraging Robyn to eat.

“Honey-baby, at least eat some celery sticks so you don't pass out,” Deena said.

“Do I
have
to?” said Robyn in a baby voice.

“Yes, baby, you do—or Mommy will be very, very cross with you,” and Deena lapsed into baby talk.

“Meet
Candida,”
she said, turning to me. “Candida, meet Candida.” And she winked at me and then at Robyn. I stood looking at this living legend, not knowing what on earth to say. When someone is that famous, you know them through so many false faces in magazines and on the screen that you can hardly see the real face through the blur of multiple images.

“I loved your book,” Robyn said shyly, fingering a piece of long black hair that may (or may not) have been hers. “It must be so wonderful to be able to write.”

“It must be so wonderful to be able to sing,” I said. Or to make five million dollars a year. Or to have so much power. But actually, I didn't believe it. I knew that money never made people secure and that Robyn was probably at the mercy of her agent, her lawyer, her banker, her boyfriend, her fans. I had seen enough of fame to know that it created as many problems as it solved. And especially the sort of fame she had. She could never be invisible
any
where
.
That was what they paid her for —to be constantly visible, constantly available. In a culture in which popularity equals power, the more visible you are, the more powerful. But it's a strange sort of power because it also makes victims of its possessors. Better to be powerful the way Sonny Spinoza was—invisibly. There is a certain freedom in invisibility that no one ever believes in until they've lost it.

Robyn fidgeted and looked down diffidently. It was the familiar discomfort of the super famous—who always seem to look away, look down at their feet, or hide behind long hair or big sunglasses or deep-brimmed hats—perhaps because they feel so vulnerable, always being under surveillance by millions of eyes. Robyn was wearing a devastating gray chiffon chemise, slick with silver sequins, furred at the hem with silver fox.

“I love your dress,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, and shrugged as if she were wearing jeans. “I hate clothes like this, but Deena thinks it's good for my image.
Yucch...”
And she made the face of a tomboy whose mommy makes her wear organdy and Mary Janes.

“Do you wanna know something? I shouldn't tell you this but I'm so stoned I don't give a shit. Deena is my best friend in the world, I mean my very best friend in the world—like when you were twelve, you know—and made a pact in blood and pricked your fingers? And I really don't know if she would be my friend at all if it weren't for also being my agent. Isn't that pathetic? I mean isn't that really pathetic?” But Robyn wasn't about to wait around for my reaction. “Excuse me,” she said, “I gotta pee.”

I turned around then, feeling rather lost, and caught sight of numerous other luminaries: the famous Swedish movie star Siv Bergstrom; her elegant woman “companion,” Ninka Berna dotte (who was tall and dark and wore a black velvet blazer and silver lamé slacks); Sally Sloane, the British bird who had arrived from trendy London in 1968 and never gone home; and numerous young American stars, starlets, semistars, demi-stars, and their entourages. (Why stardom necessitates an entourage, I never really understood until fame touched me—but it became clear to me that when one totally lost invisibility, one also shed a degree of natural protective coloration which other people now had to supply. It was like being marked with a bull‘s-eye, like being a snail without its shell, a reindeer without its antlers. One needed normal, unfamous, invisible people around to lend one
their
invisibility.)

Britt stood in a tree-shaded corner of the patio, conspiring with her lawyer and snorting occasionally from her tiny vial of sugary powder. Her lawyer was perhaps the only bald man in Beverly Hills—which is, after all, some distinction in a town where hair transplants grow more plentifully than weeds. He was wearing a T-shirt with a decal that said GOOCHY. A real cutup. He could
afford
to be. In a profession so insecure that even the biggest stars can wind up too broke to pay their income taxes, the lawyers are the only members of the cast who are never out of a job and who collect fees whether their clients win or lose. Being a lawyer in Beverly Hills must be the closest thing to being a landed squire in eighteenth-century England.

The squire in question, whose name was Melvin Weston—né Weinstein?—slithered over to invite me on a grand tour of the grounds.

“Maybe you'll use it in a book someday,” he said, smirking legalistically. (Oh God, I thought, which do I hate most as a group? Lawyers or psychiatrists? A toss-up. Beware of anyone paid by the hour; they're likely to have clocks that run fast.)

But I smiled sweetly at Melvin anyway. “I'd love to tour,” I said. Britt hurried off to make time with Deena Maltzberg; Spinoza and Dante were romancing Robyn Barrow; and Josh (who was somewhat intimidated by gatherings like this) had been taken under the voluminous wing of a very bosomy, very drunken lady agent named Maxine Medoff, attractively nicknamed “Maxine the Knife.”

“Follow me,” said Melvin.

Just then a tall man with a familiar-looking face (now grayed with disuse) shambled over to us and said wryly, “Can I come too?” I looked up into his weary, mocking visage, the big sea-green eyes with circles under them, and recognized Boyd McCloud, whom I'd presumed dead—though he was hardly forty. (Why is it that when people stop appearing in the press, we assume they are no longer alive? Death by publicity—or the lack of it.) Boyd McCloud had been on the verge of becoming the new James Bond—or the new Tarzan, I forget which—ten years earlier. He was an Olympic skier, a hero to the media, a poser for cigarette ads, magazine covers, screen tests, grim and masculine “pain relief” commercials. He made one film—a turkey about an Olympic swimmer—and from there dove straight into oblivion—a victim of too much press, too little substance. Once so hot he needed three lawyers, two agents, and two publicists, he was now so cold that he was probably among those faded famous faces one sees on line at the IRS office begging for extensions.

I was surprised that Melvin had him around at all. In America in general, Hollywood in particular, failure is thought to be highly contagious—especially failure Hollywood
itself
has created. But Boyd was a client of Melvin's (in debt to him, in short, and Melvin wanted to make sure his creditors didn't skip town).

“He drives my Rolls,” Boyd said airily.

“My Rolls now,” said Melvin.

“In lieu of fees,” Boyd said informatively, knowing me for a neophyte.

“Hell—Boyd—that's just a down payment on what you owe me: your soul.”

“What soul?” said Boyd.

 

We three toured. We toured the Moorish projection room, with the huge pillows on the floor instead of seats. We toured the cavernous basement kitchens, featuring whole collections of Tiffany glass goblets, vermeil service plates, and closets full of crockery from now defunct ocean liners. We toured the cathedral-roofed, hand-leaded, art-nouveau greenhouse with a real Italian fountain in the center (and a miniature river running lazily between pots of impatiens and fragrant gardenia). We toured the swimming pool, sunken into a garden of banana palms, with large ugly cubist sculptures poised on platforms above the water. We toured the white-carpeted master bathroom with a chandelier from one
of
the suites on the
Ile de France
and a white marble Jacuzzi imbedded in the deep shag.

Each item was lovingly, covetously described by Melvin himself, with sinister, heckling accompaniment by Boyd-who intimated that every object had been acquired in lieu of fees from some creditor-client or other, including apparently the estate itself. Melvin denied this. “Come on, Melvin,” said Boyd, “you'd foreclose on your own mother in lieu of fees.”

“At least I wouldn't sue her—like some people I know,” Melvin said cryptically—and they both roared with laughter.

I was afraid to ask who-in the assembled starry throng—had sued his very own mother. I really didn't think I wanted to know.

 

“C‘mon, c'mon, kiddies,” Britt said, rounding us all up as the witching hour of nine o‘clock drew near. We were due at LAX for the Red-Eye to New York, and there were suitcases to call for and people to coordinate and good-byes to be said.

“I'll drive you to the airport,” Josh said wistfully.

We stood looking at each other, not knowing when, if ever, we'd meet again.

“Good,” said Britt. “Sonny and Danny and me go in the limo and we also gotta pick up my bags and this other writer who's going to New York with us—Shelley Granowitz-and also I'm seriously thinking of taking Cliff ...”

Cliff was a new acqnisition-acquired, in fact, not in lieu of fees but in just the time it had taken Melvin and Boyd to show me the premises. Clifford Bing was beautiful, glassy-eyed, and twenty-four. He had turquoise eyes and turquoise beads and the blondest hair you ever saw. And he never said a word. If I could have a twenty-six-year-old, Britt would go me two years younger. She was that competitive.