My Lucky Star (17 page)

I initially assumed that it was my duty as ghostwriter to capture Lily’s actual voice. I thought I did a fair job, but after
my first efforts met with complaints of inauthenticity (or, per Lily, “Un-me-ness”), I realized my error. Lily didn’t want
the voice in the book to sound the way she really did. She wanted it to sound the way she
thought
she did. She wanted the voice to be cultured and articulate, ladylike yet capable of slashing wit. She wanted, in short,
to sound like a long-lost Mitford sister. I began doing my best to write her this way.

A tape-recorded snatch of memory such as this:

Look at this picture—see how much thinner I am? What a little butterball she was! This was right after she gained all that
weight at Christmas— and this, mind you, while playing Wendy in
Peter Pan!
The part should have gone to a thinner, prettier girl like me. I’d watch her in that damn chestnut and think, “Serve her right
when that cable finally gives out. Splat!” You couldn’t have paid me to sit in the front row.

was rendered as follows:

I was a slim, delicate child, my natural energy and love of jump-rope games keeping me, as Mother used to say, “no bigger
than a minute.” I always pitied my elder sister, whose lifelong battle with avoirdupois began in girlhood. One Christmas season
she was cast as Wendy in Mr. Barrie’s evergreen
Peter Pan.
Diana gorged herself daily on Mother’s fresh-baked holiday treats with comical results. By the end of the run latecomers to
her flying scene could have been forgiven for wondering why the director had placed a nightgown on a wrecking ball.

This more genteel tone won gushing plaudits from Lily.

“It’s too perfect, Glen! It’s me to a tee! ‘Nightie on a wrecking ball’—I can’t believe I said that!”

“Because you didn’t, love,” offered Monty, buttering a brioche.

“Oh, hush. Glen’s doing a marvelous job.”

“I just put it on paper,” I demurred. “The raw material comes from you.”

“If it’s raw material you want, wait till she turns twelve.”

Between Lily’s praise and Monty’s rascally charm, I was finding it harder by the day to view them with the pitiless eye my
assignment demanded. I could see why Diana and Stephen disliked them, given their cheerful determination to leave no bean
unspilled. But sitting with them each morning and hearing their side of things one couldn’t help feeling that Diana at least
had it coming.

Diana had seldom missed a chance to belittle her sister in print. Though she’d never written a memoir, she’d recounted her
family’s history in scores of interviews, and in her version Lily and Monty appeared, when at all, in the most dim and patronizing
of lights. Did she really imagine that Lily, after decades of such queenly condescension, would not finally cry, “Enough!”,
empty her bile duct into a fountain pen, and scrawl “Chapter One”?

Even my beloved Stephen’s treatment of them had been a bit shoddy, though I ascribed this entirely to Diana’s malign influence.
Still, having been all but raised by them while Mother gallivanted about, would it have killed him to call them once in a
while or to offer Lily a small role in one of his blockbusters? Even Lily’s harshest detractors would concede that she could
have played the hysterical hostage in
Caliber Unleashed
as capably as Lainie Kazan had.

But just as I was starting to wonder if my betrayal of Lily and Monty was not, on balance, just a teensy bit indefensible,
I received a call from Stephen that stiffened, among other things, my resolve to continue.

T
HE CALL CAME PAST
midnight on the day we finally dispatched our finished treatment to Bobby. Our celebratory dinner at Orso had been accompanied
by two bottles of amarone, so it took several rings to wake me, and I knocked over my water glass reaching for the phone.

“Shit!” came my charming salutation.

“Phil?”

“Whozis?”

“It’s Stephen.”

“Stephen!”

I quickly turned on the bedside lamp, then thought better and turned it off. Why talk to Stephen Donato in a lit bedroom when
you could talk to him in a dark one?

“Sorry to call so late.” He sounded as if he’d had some wine himself.

“No, it’s okay! What’s up?”

“I just wanted to let you know I won’t be able to see you next Wednesday.”

“Oh?” I replied, crestfallen.

“I’m stuck here an extra day. But are you free Thursday?”

“Yes! Yes I am! Totally free!”

“Good. Because Sonia and my mom want you to have dinner with us at her restaurant. You know, Vici?” He referred to the trendy
Beverly Hills eatery Diana had opened some years back when restaurants were the celebrity accessory du jour.

“Yeah, I’ve been there,” I lied. “So, your mom and Sonia are coming?”

“They just want to hear more about what’s up with Lily. The pages you’ve been e-mailing are great, but it’s still all just
childhood stuff. They’re more interested in what’s coming down the line. I’ll be back in time for that. Gina too.”

I could hardly confess at this early, delicate stage of our courtship that I’d hoped our first date would be long on whispered
confidences and smoldering stares and that the presence of his wife, mother, and publicist would do much to curtail these.
So I just smothered a sigh and said, “Oh, great.”

“But I do wanna see you,” he said.

“Likewise.”

“I mean alone.”

“Oh?” I said, my fallen crest reascending.

“To talk about all this... stuff.”

“Any time!”

There was a pause and I heard the tinkling of ice cubes.

“Listen, Phil...I really like you.”

Did he just say that? Did he actually just say that?

“I like you too, Stephen.”

“I mean it. You’re a nice guy. And I want to think I can trust you. Can I?”

“Absolutely!”

He was whispering now, his tone endearingly tentative. “Good. Because what I would like is for us to have a little... arrangement.”

My God!

My Gawwwwd!

Stephen Donato’s coming on to me! Please, PLEASE don’t let this be a dream! And if it is don’t let me wake up before I finish
like last Tuesday!

For a moment all I heard was Stephen’s breathing, and his shy silence emboldened me.

“What sort of arrangement?” I aimed for a sexy throatiness but overshot, practically gargling the question.

“Lily and Monty,” he said, his voice quieter still. “The things they say about me — especially Monty — I want you to tell
all that stuff to me.
Just
me. Not my mom or Gina or Sonia. I’ll tell them anything I think they need to know. But for now let’s keep it between us,
okay?”

“Of course, Stephen. Anything you say.”

“Nobody else.”

“Your ears only!”

“Even if Sonia grills you.”

“She can break out the bamboo. Cavanaugh won’t crack.”

Though I blushed to think my failed Kathleen Turner impression might have betrayed my initial (and, let’s face it, preposterous)
assumption that he was about to propose a dalliance, I was delighted nonetheless by what he was proposing. The thought of
Stephen and I sharing his sexual secrets was an immensely agreeable one. It brought our relationship to a new and thrilling
level of closeness from whose fertile soil who knew what further intimacies might bloom?

“It’s not,” Stephen said, “that I’m
hiding
anything.”

“’Course not!”

“It’s just that some things are... y’know—”

“Private.”

“Exactly. And I’m thinking of my family too. Why get ’em all worked up over stuff they don’t need to hear? Stuff that might
not even wind up in the book?”

“Leave it to you to put family first.”

“So . . .” he said with absurd nonchalance, “what’ve they said about me?”

I paused for a brief debate with my penis. It argued cogently that though there were undeniable advantages to waiting as planned
to give Stephen the lowdown in person, the chance to masturbate while doing so was not among them. But my more romantic side
won out. I remained resolved to speak not of big-dicked tennis pros until I was gazing directly into his dreamy brown eyes.

“Sorry,” I murmured, “but you’re not even born yet at this point. They’ve certainly
hinted
there’ll be lots about you later on. Big things.”

“Fantastic,” he muttered.

“Look,” I said, inspiration having struck, “why don’t I just ask Lily what she plans to say about you? She trusts me now,
I’m sure she’ll tell me. Then when we all have dinner next Thursday, you and I can meet an hour early and I’ll report in.”

Stephen deemed this a superb plan and said he’d meet me at Vici at seven. If the bar was too crowded to afford adequate privacy,
we’d go for a drive.

“Thank you for this, Phil.”

“It’s my pleasure, Stephen.”

“I can count on you, big guy?”

“Day or night,” I replied with passionate sincerity. “I’m entirely at your service.”

To this he replied —wryly? coyly? pornographically?—“I’ll remember you said that,” then hung up.

Fans of the musical
My Fair Lady
will recall the scene where Eliza, fresh from her tango with Higgins, romps exuberantly about her bedroom, informing the
housemaids that she doesn’t want to go to bed as she couldn’t possibly sleep, her heart having taken flight. Subtract the
maids, throw in some boisterous self-abuse, and you have the scene in my boudoir after Stephen’s call. Half an hour later
I lay contentedly asleep. The same could not be said for the Showbiz Gods, who were pulling an all-nighter to debate what
laurels to crown me with next.

Having just handed in our treatment, we didn’t expect a verdict for at least a few days. But the very next morning Svetlana
phoned to ask if we’d be available for a noon conference call with Bobby, Diana, Gina, and Stephen. We alerted Claire that
the jury was in and she hastened over. We passed a fretful hour wondering if they’d find our take on the material insufficiently
mawkish, especially our decision to drastically prune the postmortem antics of wee Hans (formerly Hilda). But when the call
came our fears were immediately dispelled.

“Hey, everyone there?” asked Bobby.

“All here!” we chimed into the speakerphone.

“Are those my three geniuses?” said Diana, provoking broad smiles and pantomimed glee.

“Great job, you guys!” said Stephen. “And Claire too. We haven’t met yet. I’m Stephen.”

“Nice to meet you, Stephen,” said Claire, sounding crisply professional yet unable to subdue a goofy “I’m chatting up a movie
star!” grin. “So you liked it?”

“Liked it?” said Bobby. “We. Fucking. Loved. It.”

“It was great,” said Gina. “I liked the structure,” she added in a poignant effort to simulate intelligence.

Stephen, referring to one of Claire’s inspirations, said, “The scene where I have to kill my dad—I love the way it’s foreshadowed
now by that flashback to where he makes me shoot the fawn in the woods.”

“Yes,” said Gilbert, “I thought that might give it a bit more oomph.”

“I don’t know how you writers do it!” gushed Diana. “It’s perfectly paced, suspenseful, moving. We couldn’t be happier.”

“Well, thank you,” said Claire, shooting me a wary look. I knew what she was thinking. Though newcomers to screenwriting,
we’d met with enough theater producers to know that profuse compliments were a frequent opening gambit designed to lull us
into a praise-addled stupor in which we’d consent to make changes invariably and laughably characterized as “minor.” You can
imagine our delight when Claire’s request for notes met with a brusque laugh from Bobby.

“Notes? Here’s my note —write the damn script!”

We thanked them all again, vowing that we’d get to work the instant we hung up. We did nothing of the sort, of course, even
Claire concurring that it would be a shame to ruin our buzz by reentering the treacly world of Prudence Gamache. Our discussion
of how best to celebrate was interrupted by a call from Gilbert’s mom. Gilbert crowed at length about how the Malenfants had
loved our treatment, and Maddie, once made to understand that “treatment” in this case had no medical significance, offered
to throw an impromptu dinner in our honor that night.

T
HE WEATHER WAS UNSEASONABLY BALMY
, so we dined alfresco on the elegantly balustraded terrace of Max’s Bel-Air manse. Maddie had assembled a small but glittering
group, all of whom heartily congratulated us and expressed their certainty that the picture would be a triumph, the first
of many in the long, success-drenched careers that awaited us. The conversation was sparkling, the food superb, and the wines
all of voting age at least.

After dinner, as the guests trickled into the salon, I lingered a moment on the terrace to admire the shimmering view. Maddie,
swaying just a bit, sidled up to me.

“I can’t tell you how tickled I am that you kids are doing so great out here.”

“We’re pretty tickled ourselves.”

“I always knew you’d make good, honey. It’s like Mama used to say — the cream always rises to the top.”

I smiled in tacit assent, my superior butterfat content having been established beyond argument. I was standing on a mogul’s
terrace. I had just dined with stars (how charming Warren and Annette were), I was writing for stars, I was living in a star’s
house, and the most desired star of all had chosen me as his sexual confidante.

I chuckled inwardly to think that only weeks ago I’d been gripped by the outlandish fear that I was fated for a life of obscurity
and men’s neckwear. How absurd of me to have imagined so paltry an existence would ever be mine! Never again would I doubt
my destiny, my genius, my inherent God-given creaminess.

It was at this juncture I suppose that some Showbiz God, observing the scene below, turned and addressed a fellow Deity.

“That Cavanaugh.”

“What about him?”

“Getting a bit uppish.”

“Oh?” said his companion, gazing up distractedly from next year’s Oscar winner list. “You think so?”