The Actress: A Novel (12 page)

Maddy hurried over on her next break. “How’d you get off the film?” she asked him, pecking him on the cheek.

“I’m a very powerful person,” he said, drawing her close. “Or did you not know that?”

“You’re doing great, honey,” Bridget said. “We’re having such fun watching you.”

“Thank you,” she said, loving his hands on her, getting turned on. “But Steven, you’re causing a fuss.” She nodded toward the set, where the other actors were staring and pretending not to stare. “It’s not fair to those guys.”

“I won’t stay long,” he said. “I just want to catch a few minutes. I love to watch you work.”

His compliment made her feel like a balloon. She realized what it meant to her that he had come. Not only because it showed the cast and crew that he cared, but because he did care.

Back on set, she did her next few takes with elevated energy. Later, when she looked out to see that Bridget was alone again, she felt a twinge of disappointment.

On her lunch break, Maddy went to her trailer and ate a walnut-and-chicken salad that had been prepared by Annette. Bridget, who had come in to sit with her, said, “Your physicality is fantastic. You remind me of Jean Arthur.” Maddy and Steven had watched
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
in the screening room of his house, and it had helped her prepare. She wondered if Steven had told Bridget they’d watched it. Then she decided there was a simpler explanation: In two decades of working together, they had a common vocabulary of stars, living and dead. Steven seemed closer to Bridget than anyone else in the world.

“Honey, what is it?” Bridget said, patting her arm.

Maddy set down her fork. “Do you think I got this part because—because of him? So they could bill Maddy Freed as their special guest star? My audition was not that good. I got some of the comedic beats, but the girls in the hallway, they were
really
funny. They’d all done improv in New York.”

“Maybe it is because of Steven.”

“You say it like that’s okay. How can I know, from this moment on, whether any job I get is deserved?”

“You won’t. Everyone knows you’re Steven’s girlfriend when you
walk into an audition room. But you knew you were talented long before you met him. You have range, you can handle different kinds of material, you can use your body as an instrument. If you continue to do everything you do naturally, for most roles, it’ll come down to you and one or two others. At that point, when it’s just a few,
anything
can tip the scales. The color of your hair. The shape of your mouth. Your chemistry with a costar. If a director likes you because of Steven, that’s no different from another girl booking it because she’s curly and you’re straight. Your talent will get you ninety percent of the way. What gets you the last ten percent of the way is out of your control. Why think about it?” Bridget opened her purse and pulled out a manila folder. “While I have you, you need to sign this. The contract for
Husbandry.”
Bridget, Nancy, and Maddy’s new lawyer, Edward Rosenman (who was also Steven’s lawyer), had negotiated her a salary of $200,000, far more than Maddy had expected for her first professional feature. Maddy had agreed to full nudity with a merkin, a pubic wig. Bridget had explained that they used merkins on shoots to avoid X ratings; prosthetic hair was an R, but real hair was an X. It sounded ridiculous to put fake hair on top of real hair, but as Bridget liked to point out, that was only one of many ridiculous things about the film industry.

“I can’t believe my first big movie is going to require all this sex,” Maddy said.

“The sex is important to the character,” Bridget said, “and I’ll be there to protect you. And Steven will, too.” After Maddy signed, Bridget said, “Congratulations, my darling. You’ve just signed the contract that is going to make you a star.”

“How do you know that?”

“I knew it the moment I saw you on that horrible bus in your movie. Give me some credit. I’ve been in the industry longer than you’ve been alive.” She put the contracts back in the folder and plopped it into her handbag. “Now don’t let me keep you another second,” she said. Maddy started to say she didn’t mind the company, but Bridget was already gone.

“H
ow come you’re not ready?” Steven asked, stepping out of the walk-in they shared. “We have to leave in five minutes.” He arrived everywhere
at least twenty minutes early; he became agitated in the back of the car if there was traffic, even though Alan knew every obscure shortcut in greater Los Angeles. He and Maddy were going to a Housing Project USA house-raising in Oxnard. Steven was on the board.

“I’m almost ready,” Maddy said from in front of the Biedermeier vanity table where she was sitting naked, doing her makeup.

Steven’s mansion was intimidating, a 1920 beaux arts. He had bought it while he was still on
Briefs,
then spent five years restoring it to its original splendor. It was ten thousand square feet, with eight bedrooms, columns in front, and a wide iron gate. Maddy was hopeful that one day she could convince him to move someplace smaller, warmer, and more
heimish,
as her father would have put it.

“Don’t wear a lot of makeup,” Steven said, kissing her neck and looking at the two of them in the mirror.

“But when I go out without makeup, the photographers put me in that spread.”

“Fine, but only a little,” he said. “You hardly need it, anyway.”

A few days after she’d moved in, a tabloid had snapped a shot of her exiting Yuki Sushi with Steven, looking bedraggled. Bridget had sent over a makeup artist to give her a tutorial. But it was hard to know how “natural” to be when there would be camera crews at the event.

Aside from makeup skills, Maddy had learned other rules in the time she had been living with Steven: Don’t read tabloid magazines, don’t Google your boyfriend, and don’t Google yourself. Though she tried to adhere to them, on occasion she would be at her laptop in her study, watching a comedy clip, and begin to surf, and spot an item on the side or bottom that said “Maddy and Steven in Lover’s Tiff” or “The Shocking Truth About Weller’s Girlfriend!” Feeling sheepish, she would click and read a complete fabrication, and it would upset her so much that she’d vow never to go on again.

Bridget had also gotten Maddy a stylist who’d brought a mix of designer dresses for evening events and casual, high-end pieces for every day. Steven helped her select items, watching as she paraded around. It was clear the bill would go to him; there was no way she could afford the pieces.

If their time in Venice had been a world that consisted solely of the two of them, Los Angeles was the two of them in the world. Every night, it seemed, was a different event. And everyone wanted to be near Steven. Women ogled him openly. Gay men were no better. At a fund-raiser at the Pacific Design Center, she had seen two effeminate guys whispering to each other when they passed. If Steven noticed all of this, he hid it well. She tried to follow his lead: He let it all roll off of him, the good parts of celebrity as well as the bad. People could speculate and gossip as much as they wanted, she told herself, but she was the one who shared his bed.

From the walk-in, she selected a gray James Perse T-shirt and dark jeans and a baseball cap of Steven’s that said
GREEN BAY PACKERS
. When she emerged, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, putting on a pair of designer high-tops. He reeled her in and kissed her. “God, I love you,” he said.

Maddy’s body softened. How was she supposed to be on time for the event when she wanted to take off her clothes and make love? When she was around him, she wanted to be touching him all the time, his forearms, his hair, his ears. When he came home after a long day and she heard the beep of the alarm system, she got woozy. “I love you, too,” she said.

As Steven pushed her hair behind her ears, he realized that he never got tired of hearing her say “I love you.” With Maddy in his life, he was less pessimistic. He felt that Maddy knew him, and this made him see the world differently, made him less glum about the business and his role in it.

The most miraculous thing about his new relationship was its completeness. He liked to hear what she had to say about his scripts and was impressed by her close reading. And she was making him a better actor. On the set of
Declarations,
for a heavy scene with the actress playing his wife, he had been struggling. In the fight, he said she didn’t understand him, and he was coming off very heavy-handed. After six difficult takes, he took a break, and while he sat in a director’s chair, he remembered that Maddy had played a similar scene in her Mile’s End film. For the next take, he tried laughing maniacally in the middle. The director loved it and complimented him. It was a special thing to carry with you the person
who made you complete, to take what she gave you and bring it into your work. That was the essence of love.

So far Maddy was holding her own in her new lifestyle, with everyone from rising directors to studio execs to Beverly Hills doyennes. She had a way of bringing out genuineness in the least genuine of people. Sometimes the two of them would be out at a fund-raiser, mingling separately, and he would sense that she missed him. He would cross the room and place his hand on her back and she would sigh happily. He loved that she needed him.

Downstairs, Alan was waiting to drive Maddy and Steven to Oxnard. He was in his mid-sixties, large, and had been a bodybuilder at Gold’s Gym in the 1970s, and Maddy liked his easy, low-key manner. When they arrived at the work site, she instinctively grabbed the door handle, but Steven said, “Alan’ll do it.” Of course she had to wait. Everything had to be timed just right.

Alan opened it and she stepped out. The cameras went off, but this was all authorized press, so it wasn’t as jarring as the paparazzi. The paparazzi had been one of the scariest things about her new life in L.A. One evening she and Steven were coming out of a northern Italian place they liked on Beverly Boulevard, and she saw dozens of them outside, flashing madly. “Don’t say a word,” Steven whispered, ushering her swiftly to the car door. Later, he explained that if she said anything, even “Leave me alone” or “I don’t want to talk,” they could put it on an evil television show and make it seem like she was drunk or unstable. “Think of it as the fourth wall,” he said.

In Oxnard, Flora and a Housing Project USA publicist led Steven to a podium where folding chairs had been arranged. While Maddy sat in the front row, Steven said a few words about homelessness in Ventura County. He wasn’t reading from notes, yet he was completely eloquent. Then the organizers led them to the construction area, where they were given hard hats and aprons.

Her job was to pry nails from two-by-fours with a hammer, which disappointed her because she’d thought she would be doing real construction. Her father had taught her woodworking, and she knew her way around an electric saw. She knelt and began the work, depositing the nails in a
plastic can. They were working next to teenagers from the community, mostly Mexican, and Steven joked around with them.

While they worked, camera crews roved and interviewed the celebs. When Maddy saw a young female journalist approaching with a videographer, she got nervous. “Can you tell us a little bit about why you’re here?” the woman asked.

“Um, homelessness is a serious social ill, and I grew up in a community where there was a fair amount, in rural Vermont, and I guess the way I feel is that if you can give people houses, you can empower them in a lot of other ways. That can help them get control of their lives. Because without a home, there are so many things that you just don’t have access to. It can be hard to get a job and also—”

The journalist was striding away, her videographer trailing behind. A network-television star had arrived, and the woman was going after him to get a shot.

In horror, Maddy watched them leave. “Oh my God, I feel like such a loser,” she said.

“They never want more than a sound bite,” Steven said. “But I liked what you said. It was very heartfelt.”

“Did I just make a total fool of myself?”

“No. It takes time to learn this stuff.” But she felt humiliated. She had wanted to make him proud. “The important thing,” he added, wrenching out a nail, “is that you’re here. Making your presence known.”

After they’d been working about an hour, Maddy saw a figure coming toward them in the distance. He was burly, and when he got behind Steven, he put his hands over his eyes. Steven flipped him over and they rolled around like wrestlers, chuckling deeply and swearing.

“Maddy Freed, Terry McCarthy,” Steven said as they rose to their feet.

“The famous Terry, at last!” Maddy laughed and shook his hand. Steven’s best friend. Terry was a bearish Irish-American guy with blue eyes who had befriended Steven in the mid-’80s on the audition circuit. They had done walk-ons for the same sitcom and had been close ever since. For a brief period they had shared an apartment on Sunset Boulevard. Terry had long ago given up acting and become a top screenwriter.

Though Maddy had never met Terry, she had gone to lunch with his
wife, Ananda, a few times. Maddy liked her. Ananda was a half–African American, half-Korean former actress with high cheekbones who spent most of her time caring for their three kids. At one point Ananda had confessed that when she first started dating Terry, she was jealous of Steven, because of the rumors that their friendship was more than a friendship. “These men were so close,” Ananda said. “They lived together in this tiny place.”

“So you wondered?”

“Of course I wondered! It took me a long time to accept that straight men could have friendships as rich and rewarding as those between women.”

As Maddy worked next to Terry, she asked him about his early days as an actor and his shift to screenwriting. He told her about all the embarrassing sitcom walk-ons he had had in the 1980s, the pizza delivery boys and jocks. The men started to talk over each other, laughing and mocking.

After Steven left to do more press, Maddy said to Terry, “I have to tell you, I am such a fan of
Marginal.
I saw it when I was at Dartmouth. A whole group of us. That scene in the garage gave me nightmares.”