The Actress: A Novel (26 page)

That night he went out to dinner with Ryan and some of the other cast members, and she didn’t ask to go along. She stayed in the house and went to bed early, and when he came back, she pretended to be asleep.

In the morning Steven left early for set, and as she was drinking coffee in the kitchen, she heard her cell phone ring. She trotted upstairs to fetch it. “Ms. Freed,” the voice said.

She knew from the accent who it was. “Walter.”

“I have something to discuss with you,” he said. “I’m wondering if you can come to London.”

“When?”

“As soon as you can manage it.”

“Can you tell me anything more?”

“It involves a project. But please, do not tell Ms. Ostrow or your husband at this point. I ask only for the chance to discuss it one-on-one. Is there some way you can get here within the next week?”

She hung up but stayed at the window. You could feel stuck and then you could feel unstuck. It was as though Walter knew how depressed she had been after
The Hall Surprise
and wanted to help her.

She would stay at the Dorchester, do all the things in London that she hadn’t had time to do when she was on
Husbandry
. Go to the theater alone. Walk around and shop, maybe eat at the hotel’s new restaurant that everyone was talking about.

She wouldn’t tell Bridget or Steven the real reason for the trip. Steven still blamed Walter for his poor reviews, and if she told Bridget . . . Bridget would never keep anything secret from him.

So she told Steven she was going to London to see a New School friend in a stage production of
Harold and Maude
. He didn’t even ask the friend’s name. There was a production of
Harold and Maude
, but she didn’t know anyone in it. Maybe she would see it anyway. She hadn’t
been to the theater in a while, because there wasn’t enough good theater in L.A.

Steven said, “That’s fantastic that you’re going. It will be fun for you to get away. It might help you get out of your head.” She could tell he meant she was acting crazy again, but there was no need to argue now that she was leaving.

A
s the plane touched down in Heathrow, Maddy felt a sense of expansion. She had been off the pill less than a week but felt that she could hear more, smell more, taste more. She was looking forward to being in London in the summer again, this time alone. Out the window of the car, she scanned the faces on the street, reserved, pragmatic, some of them even grim. In L.A. everyone pretended to be happier than they were. In London no one did.

Her room at the hotel was deco, an homage to 1930s Hollywood, with a large terrace and its own dressing room. She took a bath, ordered room service, and flipped channels on the television. Then she stood on the terrace and looked out at Hyde Park.

The next day she went to Walter’s Georgian town house in West London. It was decorated in bold colors, with an Italian feel. It had been just over two years since she had seen him, at the London premiere of
Husbandry,
but he did not look any older. In fact, he seemed younger, his cheeks fresh and pink.

He ushered her to the kitchen in the back, where he had set out tea and cookies. “Thank you for agreeing to see me,” he said. “I have come across a very intriguing script. It’s set here in London, in the early ’60s. It is about a young schoolteacher who begins to suspect that her husband is leading a double life. As her mind expands, first in fear and later in shock, she begins to explore the counterculture of the time. She begins closed and becomes open. It’s called
The Moon and the Stars.
”

“When you say double life, what do you . . .”

“I’d like you to read the script. I know you have just completed an action picture, playing a siren with an alliterative name. Perhaps that is the
direction in which you wish to take your career. But consider this. That’s all I ask.”

“I don’t want to do action movies. I only did that because—because—that was just a onetime thing.”

“Maybe you’ll hate the screenplay. But I don’t think so. I have realized I work better with material that I have not written. I want to do an homage to an older kind of film. They used to call them women’s pictures. The screenwriter is Nuala Fallon. She’s written for a popular television drama here. She wanted to meet you, but I said you’d have to read the screenplay first.”

“When is it shooting?”

“October.”

“That’s in two months. You haven’t cast yet?” He shook his head. “Walter, am I your second choice?”

“Another director was attached, and it didn’t work out. He was going to cast his wife. When he backed out, she did, too. The financing is all in place, but now they want me to do it. When I came on board, I said I wanted you. Are you free?”

“I’m supposed to do this biopic,” she said, “but I think I can find a way to delay it. If I like the script, that is.” There were always out clauses, she knew, because she had gone in on other roles that other actresses couldn’t do. It was all a big chessboard. She could push the Mary Cassatt a few months. She was big enough now that Tim would reschedule in order to keep her.

At the door, they embraced. “I know we had our ups and downs on
Husbandry
,” Walter said, “and for that I apologize. There is nothing I would like more than to work with you again.” She wondered whether he was referring to their exchange in her dressing room in Woodmere, the comment about Steven not loving her. She was about to ask him when she decided against it. What was the point? She had long ago concluded that he’d been manipulating her.

She read the script in bed that night.
The Moon and the Stars
was a slow, quiet drama with an upsetting revelation: The lead character, Betty, discovers that her husband is gay and sleeping with men behind her back. When Maddy got to the part where Betty first spies on him as he enters a
gay bar, she threw her arm over her eyes.

She thought again of Walter’s words in the dressing room. But Walter had not written this script. It had come to him. From a woman writer, no less.

Even so, she did not look forward to hearing what her husband would have to say about the script. He would hate the subject matter. Beyond that, there was the Walter factor, the hostility Steven had felt for him after the reviews.

But she liked the role of Betty even better than she had liked Ellie. She began to imagine how she would do it, flipping through the pages to reread her favorite scenes. It was a dangerous thing when you began to imagine how you would play a role.

T
he next morning Maddy went out to explore London on her own. She did some window-shopping and visited the Tate, then decided to see the Victoria and Albert Museum.

She stopped in the fashion gallery to examine the dresses, particularly interested in the ones from the 1960s. Her museum program said there was a special exhibit of photographs by Lane Cromwell, a name she had never heard before, and she decided to see what it was about.

She wound up staying in the exhibit for two hours, staring at the photos and imagining the woman who had taken them. By the end she had virtually memorized Lane Cromwell’s life story.

Lane Cromwell was born Helen Cromwell in upstate New York, and her father, an amateur photographer, frequently took nude photos of her when she was a child. In her twenties, she had been plucked off a Manhattan street by a modeling agent and wound up posing for the women’s magazines of the day. One of her photographers suggested she try photography herself. He sent her off to Paris, where she changed her name from Helen to the androgynous Lane and became a fixture on the Parisian scene, taking male and female lovers.

In the early 1930s, she returned to New York to pursue a career as a photographer and fell in love with a surrealist painter named Max Sandoval. When World War II broke out, she saw opportunity. Her black-and-
white photos of men on the battlefield, many of them corpses, were stark and arresting. She went to Normandy, Paris, and Germany with the U.S. Army, even though women weren’t allowed.

But after the war ended, she lost her sense of purpose. She had thrived on the danger and excitement and was adrift without it. She returned to London with Sandoval and had two children in two years. They moved into an old farmhouse in Buckinghamshire, and she became an alcoholic. She was bored as a housewife and mother, her life devoid of excitement. She died of liver disease in the mid-’60s. Her daughter and son had no knowledge of her past until they discovered a box of her photos and gradually learned the story.

Outside the museum, Maddy sat by the fountain, flipping through a biography she had bought in the gift shop. She fished her phone out of her purse and left a message on Zack’s voice mail at Bentley Howard, knowing it was the middle of the night in L.A.

He called her back that evening when she was in her hotel room. “Have you heard of Lane Cromwell?” she asked.

“No. Tell me.”

She rattled off the details of Lane’s life. “She has an incredible story,” she said. “It’s filled with deep courage and, at the same time, intense pain. She was ahead of her time. She was a woman who thrived on danger, but when the danger ended, she couldn’t find a way to be happy. I think I might—I might want to do something with it.”

“Option it, you mean?”

“I want to find out if the life rights are available. And the rights to this biography I’m reading. Do you think you can help me?”

“Of course I can help you,” he said.

Zack’s instinct had been to keep his distance from Maddy when he moved to L.A., and he suspected it would soon pay off. If you were pushy, you didn’t get what you wanted. Your goal was to listen. Just be.

“She was kind of unbalanced. Obsessed with men. She basically cheated on anyone she ever loved, and at the same time she wanted to be a man. When she realized she couldn’t be one, she didn’t know what to do with herself. If she had lived at a different time, her story might not have been so tragic. She was such a product of her era.”

“I’ll be happy to have our lit department look into this for you.”

“Would you? And please don’t say anything to your mother. I could ask Nancy and the OTA lit department, but I don’t know, I’m just not—”

“You don’t have to explain it. It’s fine.”

He could see that Maddy needed him. Her relationship with his mother had become dysfunctional; as soon as a client began keeping secrets from her manager, it was over. She obviously had no particular loyalty to Nancy Watson-Eckstein, either, and he guessed that she had chosen her because Bridget told her to. He thought of the Frank Sinatra song “Nice ’n’ Easy.” You could learn a lot about agenting from Sinatra.

“You mean you’ll do it?” she said. “Even though I’m not a client?”

“Absolutely.”

“How come you haven’t called me since you moved to L.A.?”

“I thought you were happy with Bridget. I didn’t want to bother you.”

She thought about the night of Bridget’s party, when she’d had that long talk with Steven, and she remembered what she had seen upstairs in the room. It came back to her, how shocked she had been, how the sex had changed the way she saw Zack. “I have to tell you something. You know that dinner your mother threw in Utah? I saw something kind of weird that night.”

“My mother’s utter phoniness and ruthless championing of her own causes?”

“I saw you having sex. I couldn’t find the bathroom.”

She waited for him to apologize, or get embarrassed, but he just said, “Annabel? Too bad you didn’t get to meet her. She had a documentary in the festival on consent.”

“Why didn’t you lock the door?”

“I thought she did. I’m sorry you had to see it, but it doesn’t change anything about how I work. I still feel that I could do excellent things for your career.”

She thought back to how Bridget had encouraged her to leave Wilmington, when she could have defended her presence to Steven, made him understand why she had made the trip. Bridget was a woman but she hadn’t been on Maddy’s side. She remembered how, when she’d called to say she was uncomfortable with the idea of doing Faye, Bridget had sided
with Steven immediately. She’d said Faye was comedic, wink-wink, her lines filled with wordplay and double entendre. She’d said “entendre” with a bad French accent. Maddy had allowed Bridget to convince her, because then she could tell herself it was good for her career, could tell herself she was doing it for her own good and not Steven’s. But Bridget probably wanted Maddy only because Neil Finneran did.

She had never been convinced that Bridget cared about her career. Even at the beginning, there were signs.
Freda Jansons
. But Maddy had been moony over Bridget because of her power, and she’d believed that Bridget was doing her a favor by representing her. It had been as though she worked for Bridget and not the other way around. This feeling had continued past the point when it made any sense.

The two had never really clicked. All the period dramas, it wasn’t just that Bridget didn’t get them. She didn’t
like
them. Lately all Bridget had been was a fifteen percent bill on top of the ten percent that went to Original Talent.

When Maddy had been sitting by the fountain earlier that day, it hadn’t occurred to her to call Bridget about Lane Cromwell’s life rights, or even about her story. Maddy had known that Bridget would be bored by it. It was too highbrow, and the adaptation would be way longer than eighty-five minutes. Zack had been the person who came to mind. Almost as though he already worked for her.

“Zack?” she said on the phone.

“I’m still here,” he said.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

B
ridget was in the car when the email came through: “Dear Bridget, I have decided to seek new management. I’ve been wanting to do this for some time. I never felt you had my best interests at heart. I have already notified Nancy Watson-Eckstein as well. From now on I’ll be working with Zack at BHA. Thank you for everything you have done for me. —Maddy.”

Bridget read it at a stoplight on Avenue of the Stars and cast her device on the passenger seat. What the fuck? Maddy owed her entire career to
her. You built them up and then they forgot how it happened.