The Actress: A Novel (29 page)

One day Zack called from L.A. and said, “I know it feels like you’re under house arrest, but this hospital stay could be an opportunity.”

“For what?”

“Well, when you’re not puking, you could set up a desk in there and get started on your screenplay.”

Before flying to London, she had optioned the rights to the Lane Cromwell bio and bought the life rights for $200,000 from Cromwell’s daughter Jean. Only Zack, and Kelly Kennedy, the new entertainment lawyer she had retained shortly after hiring Zack, knew. In Maddy’s mind, the money came from her salary on
The Hall Surprise
. She was taking money she had gotten for something bad and using it to pay for something good.

“I’m just trying to keep this fetus healthy,” Maddy said on the phone.

“You have a lot of time on your hands. You should take advantage of it.”

“I think my mood is too dark.”

“That’s perfect for the script,” he said. “Think about how bleak Lane’s life was. Use everything you’re feeling, all your frustration right now. You don’t need Lloyd’s of London in order to write.”

After she hung up, she thought about it and tried to take his words to heart. But she was anxious and distractible, and when she tried to type, it didn’t flow. To procrastinate and put less pressure on herself, she devoted her time to research. She read the biography of Lane over and over. She read memoirs of the 1930s and
O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance
. She read and reread Hemingway to get a feel for war. She read Syd Field’s
Screenplay
.

After four more weeks, the vomiting resolved and Dr. Liddell said Maddy could be discharged. She flew home by chartered plane, and Steven stayed with her in Hancock Park a few days before flying off to his set at her insistence.

With the frightening early weeks of the pregnancy behind her and the hyperemesis gone, she tried to enjoy her changing body—her full breasts,
her big nipples, her hips and thighs. Because she couldn’t act, she focused on the screenplay. In her study, with Steven off in Providence, she began to do index cards, plotting out a structure for the film.

Lane Cromwell had had darkness in her life and had found a way to channel it into art. Maddy was inspired by her but didn’t want to hallow her too much, to make her seem perfect or even above the troubled men she was drawn to again and again. The relationship dynamics between Lane Cromwell and Max Sandoval were not so different from modern dynamics; he had been distancing, competitive, and emotionally abusive, and Cromwell always felt he didn’t love her quite as much as she loved him.

One day Maddy wrote a few lines, and the next day she wrote a few pages. The writing was painstaking and slow, and every few days she would lose faith in it completely, only to try again and grind out more. It was easy to keep it secret with Steven away, and when he returned near Christmas and noticed that she was often in her study, she told him she was just emailing. She didn’t want to show the script to anyone, not even Zack, until it was done, for fear she would lose faith in it.

In January, at the five-month mark, Maddy and Steven went to her ob-gyn, Dr. Sheila Baker, for the big ultrasound. Dr. Baker looked like a Victoria’s Secret model and delivered celebrity babies mostly by elective C-section because Hollywood wives saw their vaginas as entrances, not exits. Maddy wanted a natural birth, no epidural, and felt confident that she could have one. It would be the flip side of the difficult early portion of the pregnancy: an uneventful delivery. She was descended from a long line of healthy Boston Brahmins who had birthed big broods; her mother had been one of four.

At the ultrasound, Dr. Baker asked if they wanted to know the gender and Maddy said no, she thought it was better for it to be a surprise; Steven, perhaps sympathetic to her fraught early weeks, yielded.

He decided they needed to build a wing for the baby, complete with live-in baby-nurse quarters. Maddy didn’t want one, remembering Irina’s prediction that they would get one.

Steven came home with swatches of sheets and crib wood and rugs in colors that could work for either a boy or a girl because he said the whole pink-or-blue thing was stupid.

Though Maddy was eager to maintain her sex life with Steven, he seemed increasingly disturbed by her body’s new shape as the pregnancy progressed. More often than not, sex consisted of her fellating him. She was hurt that he didn’t seem attracted to her, but he talked constantly about the baby and his excitement, and she decided his desire for family was more important than whatever issues he had with her body.

He began work on a comedy set in a Chicago public school, and most nights he came straight home from set. He no longer talked about Ryan Costello. She asked him once if they’d had a falling-out and he said, “I finally realized he was immature. I was wrong to have thought he was a friend.”

One morning in January, shortly after her five-month visit, she met Dan for a walk in Runyon Canyon. “You look fantastic,” he said in the parking lot when she got out of the car. “Your tits are big now.”

“Yeah, I have actual breasts,” she said. “It’s weird. I feel like my body’s doing what it’s meant to, you know?”

“I can’t believe you’re going to be a mother.”

“Me, neither. It’s trippy. It’s really trippy.”

They started on the path, Dan slowing his pace because it was harder now for Maddy to move quickly. She asked if he was dating anyone and he said no one serious. “I’m kind of in this place of wanting to learn to be on my own,” he said. “I’m just more into my work.”

Silver Spring
had been a critical and commercial success, scooping up a slew of critics’ nominations and earning a respectable return on its $500,000 budget. On its heels, Dan had scripted another small indie that would be financed entirely by his backers and still allow him final cut. His actors, as they had on
Silver Spring,
would get a percentage of the back end in lieu of a lot of money up front.

He had sent the new script, still untitled, to her at the hospital in England. It was a drama about a young couple in Brooklyn and their friendship with a quirky older male neighbor who becomes entangled in both of their lives. Maddy liked it and gave him a lengthy set of notes, and they went back and forth a few times, Dan asking her for elaboration, Maddy happy to provide it.

“How have you been keeping busy?” he asked as a Rhodesian ridge
back bounded past, the owner trailing behind. “Is it strange not working?”

“Promise you won’t tell anyone?”

“Sure.”

“I’m writing a script.”

“Really? That’s fantastic. You’ve always been a good writer.”

“Even though you wanted me to give up my rights?” she asked with a sly smile.

“How many times are you going to make me apologize? I was a Hollywood neophyte. I would never do something like that today. So what’s your screenplay about?”

She told him all about Lane Cromwell as they hiked, until they stopped at a lookout, where she told him more. She talked about Lane’s affairs, her career, and her mental problems. He listened intently and said it sounded like she had absorbed everything possible about this woman’s life.

“Your first screenplay,” he said, “I mean the first one you’re writing all alone, and it’s so ambitious.”

“Maybe no one will want to make it. But I feel like I have to finish it. I felt this need to tell her story.”

“And you want to play her, I assume?”

“Well, of course. But who knows if I’ll be able to make it happen?”

“Of course you will. You’re Maddy Freed. You can do anything you want.”

“Do you mean Steven Weller’s wife can do anything she wants?”

“I mean Maddy Freed. You’re a star. Don’t you know that?”

“When I had to back out of Walter’s movie, I felt like no one would want to work with me again. It was such a mess, being in the hospital and being in England. And then Kira taking over the role.”

“Are you still speaking to her?”

“We’re . . . cordial.” Maddy had wanted to be able to snap back into a friendship with Kira, but felt it would be painful to be near her. “All these things at once, I was losing weight and I couldn’t sleep and I was so anxious about the baby. I had to go on antidepressants. I’m on them now.” She had gone off the lorazepam while in the hospital and hadn’t needed it since.

“You did the right thing.”

“Steven was freaked out about it. He said he didn’t want the medicine going into the baby. Now we just don’t talk about it.”

“He’s a fucking idiot. It’s like on the airplanes when they say you have to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you put one on your child.”

“Exactly,” she said. He still understood her. “Anyway, I thought I would never work again. And I realized if I wrote something for myself, with a role for me to play, it might be different. When you’re an actor, you have to wait for people to hire you. When you’re a writer, you can just—write. Please don’t tell anyone about this, though.”

“No, of course not.”

“Zack’s the only one who knows. I didn’t even tell Steven.”

“He doesn’t know, and Zack and I do?”

“I don’t want him to see it until it’s done. I need it to be mine for now. Like how you were with
Silver Spring
.”

“Yeah.”

They turned and started on the hiking path again. “I envy you,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because you’re in complete control of your films.”

“Yeah, but we did it for a tiny amount of money and a very small cast.”

“The scale doesn’t matter. You’re making your own stuff again, like you were when I met you. And it’s going well. If the next one does even a little bit of business, then they’ll give you the money to do a third and a fourth, and you can keep working like that until you’re old.”

“Or until they don’t want to finance me anymore.”

“That won’t happen. People will keep paying for you to make stuff. If you asked me for help again, I would give it to you.”

He put his arm around her for a second. “Thank you,” he said.

“It’s a good investment,” she said. “Even if I didn’t like you, I’d back you. I put in twenty-five grand and got a hundred and fifty thousand back. You’re way better than the stock market.”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

She panted a little as she climbed, and he asked if she wanted to stop, but she said she was fine. “So . . . are you excited to be a mom?” he asked. “I mean, is it real to you?”

“Now that the baby’s kicking, it is. But honestly, I’m just trying to write as much as I can, because once the baby’s born, I won’t be able to. It’s like this ticking clock inside of me. A good one. It’s motivating me.”

“Can I ask you something?” he said, picking up a stick and holding it out like a cane. “You got pregnant right after you started shooting Walter’s movie. And you were so passionate about that role. I know you weren’t expecting to get sick, but was the baby planned?”

“Of course it was planned,” she said. “Steven has wanted to be a father for a very long time. He’s going to be such a good dad. He’s not working the first six months. Anyway, yeah, so I thought I would be able to work through the pregnancy, but it didn’t happen. There’s no perfect time to have a baby.”

She glanced at him before striding ahead, and Dan saw that her face had closed. It was the Maddy Freed mask. He’d seen it on the red carpet for
I Used to Know Her
when she gave interviews and he’d seen it again when he watched those clips of her extolling her marriage on daytime, prime time, and late-night. She was a master of her craft, she knew how to appear revealing without being revealing at all. It was a skill she hadn’t had until Los Angeles.

What the real circumstances of the baby’s conception were, Dan would never know. What she truly felt about building a family with Steven Weller, who had made her so desolate two years ago, that would remain her secret, too. Whatever she felt, she was not going to share. Ahead of him, she moved up the path confidently, and from the back, she didn’t seem pregnant at all.

O
n March 15, the same premiere date as
The Hall Fixation
, Maddy and Steven attended the premiere of
The Hall Surprise
. They had both done a huge round of publicity leading up to it, magazine covers
,
dozens of junkets. In her interviews, Maddy had gushed about her turn as Faye Fontinell, a feat that took an extraordinary amount of acting. Faye had been the beginning of a string of bad luck: the unplanned pregnancy, the hyperemesis, the withdrawal from
The Moon and the Stars
.

On the press line for the premiere, Steven posed for pictures with his
hand on her belly. She wore a red strapless maternity dress with a sweetheart neckline and empire waist and four-inch heels. Reporters asked again and again about the baby’s gender and due date, and she had to decline, politely, to answer. You couldn’t even say you didn’t know the gender, Flora had trained her, because that was too personal and the tabloids would dissect the reasons. Instead, you could say you weren’t saying.

On the carpet Maddy was aware of Bridget’s presence on the side but avoided her glance. They had not seen each other since Wilmington. On the few occasions when she came by the house to get Steven, Maddy had told him Bridget was not welcome inside.

Inside the theater, she and Steven posed by the posters. There was a little lull while he did some photos on his own, and she stepped off the carpet to watch. By the time Bridget was near, there was no escape. Maddy’s hands began to shake. She felt ridiculous for being afraid. Why should she be scared of Bridget now?

“You look gorgeous tonight,” Bridget said. “You’re radiant.”

“Thank you,” Maddy said. They stood side by side, watching Steven.

“I know you had mixed feelings about doing Faye,” Bridget said, “but I think you should be proud. And I wish you all the best in all of your endeavors.”

Before Maddy could respond, Bridget had turned to the door. The CEO and chairman of Apollo, Neil Finneran, a short, bespectacled man with a buzz cut, was coming in with his younger wife.