The Actress: A Novel (35 page)

Steven was starting for the front door when she put her hand on his arm. “What are you going to tell him when he gets older?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“When he’s old enough to understand, and he asks why we split up, what are you going to say? Are you going to keep lying forever?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to tell him,” he said. “He’s not even one yet.” Then he got into the driver’s seat and slammed the door.

5

Maddy was surprised when the phone rang in early February and Steven said, “Do you want to come with me to the Oscars? For old times’ sake?”

“What?”

“I’m presenting. The editing award.” Maddy had not been nominated that year because she hadn’t worked. Kira was nominated for
The Moon and the Stars
. Which meant that she would be there, parading around, accepting accolades.

“I don’t think I could take it,” she said. “With Kira, I think it’s just too painful for me.”

“I’ve only been nominated once, and I’ve gone eight times,” he said.

“We’re different people,” she said. She was on the cordless in the garden with Jake, who was playing with his trucks. “You should probably find someone else.”

“I don’t want anyone else. I want you.”

“Why?”

“I just miss you. I still love you even though we’re divorced, you know. Even if you think I don’t. And I need a date.”

The financial and all other terms of the settlement were confidential. It had taken only ten days. She and Steven had joint custody, she didn’t fight him on that, and Steven would get Jake one-third of the time. The settlement contained a clause in which each party agreed not to speak publicly about the other’s personal life or the details of their marriage. Because they had been married four and a half years, she would get about $4.5 million. It was strange to think her worth could be quantified. But the lawyers didn’t know what she had truly done for him.

Though she could not imagine doing the red carpet with her ex-
husband, she knew she was going to have to find a way to coexist with him. She wanted her anger to fade. And he was humbling himself to invite her.

It wasn’t good for Jake to have a mother who hated his father. “Why is this so important to you?” she asked.

“I can’t tell you now. It’s a surprise.”

“I’ve had enough surprises.”

“It’s a different kind. You won’t be disappointed, and you know how good I look in a tux. Please?”

Later that day, Patti came over to consult with her about dresses, and soon Patti was sending over different possibilities. Maddy felt better physically, most of her baby weight gone, the color back in her cheeks.

She selected a strapless champagne-colored Marchesa covered in crystals, with a two-foot silky tulle train. It was like a ballerina bridal dress but form-fitting, and around the neckline were little pieces of fabric that looked like winged birds.

When Steven arrived in a limousine he had rented for the occasion, and she emerged from the house, he stepped from the car and shook his head. “You’re beautiful,” he said.

“I really hope this isn’t a stupid idea,” she said.

He came around the side of the car. “We could get married again. People have done it before.”

“Steven,” she said quietly. “I’m your date tonight, but that’s it. I’ll never attend another event with you. This is the last one.”

“I know.”

Alan opened the door and she got in first, gathering her train around her. When they pulled up to the theater, she saw it all. The pen of fans on risers. The line of celebrities walking the L-shaped carpet to the golden entrance with its golden curtains held to the side.

As they emerged, there was a roar and the fans leaped to their feet. The screaming was deafening and reminded her of Berlin. Once again she was a cog in a machine.

She had been wrong to come, wrong to cave to Steven. Now that she no longer had to.

Slowly, they made their way to the video crews, posing again and again for the gathered photographers on one side. Steven took her hand, lacing his fingers through hers. They knew exactly how to stand next to each
other, they had done it so many times. She pivoted to her left, her good side. There were shouts: “Can you turn your back, please, Maddy?” and “Maddy, look this way!” and “How about a three-quarter?” Again and again they posed, some together, some apart, so the photographers could get a full shot of the dress.

Finally, they approached one of the entertainment-news crews. Kira, in a dark green V-neck dress, was talking; when she saw Maddy behind her, she turned and embraced her, widening her eyes at Maddy’s date, and pulled them both in front of the camera. Kira kissed Steven graciously, and he congratulated her on her nomination. As Kira stepped aside to let the interviewer have his time with the couple, she whispered to Maddy, “You managed to upstage me.”

Kira moved to her next interview, and Maddy and Steven answered dumb predictable questions for the dopey young reporter. She said kind things about Kira’s performance, and the guy was good enough not to mention that she’d had to back out, even though everyone knew about it.

After they had given half a dozen interviews, they made their way toward the entrance. As they moved up the line, slowly, slowly, the ticket-taking drawn out so the fans could get their last glimpses of everyone famous on the line, Steven put his mouth to her ear. “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” he whispered. “And I don’t want to keep hiding. I want Jake to know me. All these years I told myself there was no other choice, but there was. I’m going to tell the world who I am. If I lose Tommy Hall, I don’t care.”

She was shocked. Did he mean here, tonight? The orchestra was quick to cut off people during acceptance speeches, not to mention any other kind. But he was Steven Weller, and the producers would recognize international news when they saw it.

She looked at him again, her eyes welling with pride. Her ex-husband was about to make history. And the moment would be immortalized on camera, the cameras that had been his friend all these years, the cameras that had brought him everything he had, including Maddy. Including Jake.

They made their way to the reporter waiting to talk to them. Holding
her hand, Steven walked just a few steps ahead.

I
nside the theater, they sat side by side, watching the endless ceremony, laughing appropriately at the jokes. The beginning was slow. The host, a faded comedian in his sixties, opened with a big song-and-dance number. Steven was to present the best-editing Oscar, to be given out toward the end of the first hour. When a production assistant tapped him on the shoulder during a commercial break to take him backstage, Steven squeezed Maddy’s hand. She looked up at him to see if he really meant it, if he was really going to do this thing. But he was already gone.

A
s Steven made his way up the aisle, he knew that when he walked back down, everything would be different. These were his last moments as the Steven Weller everyone knew, and tonight would be marked as the turning point. It was terrifying, and he still didn’t know exactly what he was going to say, he hadn’t wanted to memorize it, but when he was done, he would be a different person. A real father to his son. You had to be honest to be a good parent; otherwise you set a terrible example.

Everything was going to be fine. He’d been in the industry long enough that he had earning power, any producer would see that, the studios knew it, and there would be goodwill, especially from GLAAD, an organization that had surpassed the ADL in Hollywood power. He would lose the third Tommy Hall; they would put it in turnaround to “rethink” the casting, he knew that.

But he would bounce back. It might take some time, but he would bounce back. Audiences were sophisticated now, they knew gay people, it was why gay marriage was going to pass, the tide was shifting and audiences could suspend disbelief, they suspended disbelief every time they watched a straight guy play a fag for an award, a beautiful actress don a prosthetic nose.

He was nearing the back of the theater, and he saw Harry Matheson, the late-night host, sitting in the audience next to his wife. It was his red hair that caught Steven’s eye. As Steven moved down the aisle, Harry gave
him a thumbs-up.

Steven remembered Maddy going on
Harry
and discussing his sexual prowess. She had been “on” that night, herself but not herself, the perfect actress. And then she had come into the greenroom, and it was as though she had been flattened.

One night when he was on the boat with Christian, they’d had a conversation about porn titles. Christian was so young, only twenty-four, that he didn’t even know about the days when pornos had stories. Steven remembered one he had watched in the early 1990s, a takeoff of a sitcom called
Jack and Mike
. The porn title was
Jacking Mike
, and on the boat, they had laughed about it. He had felt relaxed in moments like that; those moments were why he went on
Jo
with Christian and the others before and after.

He had been taking a risk with Christian, who was out of his usual circle of agents and agents’ assistants and art directors and stylists, who were doing fine on their own and had nothing to gain from outing him. But he was a sweet kid, such an open face. They had flirted every time Steven went to the boat, and he had seen Steven with the other guys, and somehow he had weaseled his way on, though Steven had had an instinct that it was a bad idea. He had let his guard down, but for a month or two, he had gotten away with it, until he got the call from Edward.

When the story broke, he had felt trapped, he had been sure it was the end, but then Maddy had stepped up to help him out. He hadn’t even had to ask. That was how much she loved him. Now he would tell the truth, and in telling the truth, he would be outing her as a liar. They would replay her clip ad infinitum, back to back with the speech he was about to give. This was about much more than the stakes for him. It was about more than undoing a fifteen-year-old image and reversing the lengths he had gone to in order to work, in order to keep working, in order to get to the top.

There were stakes for her: She would be perceived as a dupe at best, a conniver at worst. They would mock her
Harry
appearance and the marriage. Maddy had put herself on the line for him, and while he knew she wanted him to be honest for Jake’s sake, had she really thought about it, about the repercussions for her own career, her own image?
She was talented, more talented than he was, and she would want to keep working.

He loved her, and if you loved someone, you had to put her first, as she had put him first for so many years, not only when she played Faye Fontinell and when she went on Harry’s show but before that, when she changed her clothing and makeup and learned how to give sound bites, all so she could be Mrs. Steven Weller. This was about something greater than he, and if he didn’t recognize it, if he didn’t see the sacrifices she had made, then he was selfish, and he didn’t want to be selfish, that was what had gotten him into the mess with Maddy, that was why he had lost her in the first place.

A
cameraman scurried up the aisle toward Maddy as the host spoke from the stage. Because of the divorce, the producers wanted to be ready for a reaction, she understood that, even though no one knew what Steven had planned.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the host was saying, “please welcome a man who needs no introduction, because he’s so handsome and talented that we all just want to kill him. Steven Weller.”

Maddy kept a frozen smile on her face as she clapped along with the others. And then Steven was onstage, resplendent in his tux as always, his body so strong, his skin tan. He looked cool, as though this were nothing, he would ace it, there was no sign of any struggle on his face, he would do this his own way, calm and collected but real. For the first time, real.

“I came here tonight,” he said, “to do something special.”

A hush came over the audience as they perhaps suspected that the words he was speaking were not from the TelePrompter. “And I . . . I . . .” He seemed to be looking above their heads at something behind them, above them, and beyond the walls of the theater. The silence hung there, no music cue to take it away. There was a lone cough. And then he grinned and said, “I am pleased to share with you the nominees for achievement in editing.”

6

The financing for
Pinhole
came together in the spring, a few months after Maddy was divorced. It would be an international coproduction involving four different companies and a handful of independent financiers. Maddy had chosen Deborah Berenson as the director, and after they booked the now-famous Billy Peck to play Max Sandoval, they were able to complete the financing.

They shot
Pinhole
in just forty-four days in June and July, in France, England, and Germany. Deborah hired Victor Ruiz, the director of photography on
I Used to Know Her.
The housing was low-budget and bare-bones, but Maddy didn’t care. Lucia and Jake came along because she didn’t want to be apart from him for such a long time. Zack was a producer and was on set every day.

During the shoot, she felt herself rediscovering everything she had loved as an actress, with the added thrill of having written Lane’s words. In August, Deborah began cutting the film with the editor, with a plan of submitting it to the Toronto International Film Festival, which Christine thought was a better market than Mile’s End.

It was not until after they wrapped and Maddy returned to Hancock Park that she began to think about leaving L.A. She had never liked the new house, even after Steven’s art and furniture had been removed. She had always felt like a visitor in Los Angeles, never a resident, and she wanted to move back to Brooklyn. She knew her life in New York would not be anything like what it had been before, but she wanted to raise Jake in the city. She wanted to go to the theater again, to take him to quality children’s plays and to the Met. She wanted him to have friends who weren’t children of celebrities but normal New York kids.

When she emailed Steven to tell him her plans, he was supportive. He said he would buy an apartment in Manhattan so he could spend time with Jake without having to fly him across the country. His consent came as a relief, because her lawyer had said that a lot of ex-husbands wouldn’t have allowed it.

In the fall she closed on a town house on South Elliott Place, just a few blocks from where she had lived with Dan. Jake thrived on the playgrounds and in Fort Greene Park, and Maddy found the parents low-key and friendly but not prying. There were novelists and jazz musicians on her block, actors and academics.

She began to take acting jobs again. The directors in New York were smart, the scripts complex, and the roles for women rich. She did a romantic comedy set in a sex-toy shop, and a thriller about an idiot-savant boy. Never again would she play set dressing, no matter how high the salary.

As a manager, Zack understood that she wanted to work only on projects she valued, and they went over each script carefully, discussing the merits of the roles. It was a type of collaboration she had never experienced with Bridget.

Though Laight Street Entertainment was young and had a small slate, Zack was soaring as a manager-producer.
Velvet,
starring Munro Heming as Frank McKnight, came out in March and did $20 million in its first weekend, a huge figure for a film with no big celebrities and no special effects. Critics loved it, and one of them wrote that the film’s success was “reason for confidence in the future of intelligent American cinema.”

Around the same time that
Velvet
came out, there was another buzzed-about release: a zombie picture about an ordinary father and husband who tries to save the world, called
The Undead
. The week of the film’s release, Ryan, who played the lead, gave an interview to
New York
magazine in which he spoke about zombies as a metaphor for fear. He went on to say, “I guess I’m just really opposed to prejudice and hate being dominant things in our culture. As a gay man, I’m saddened to see that narrow-mindedness and judgment can ruin lives.”

This set off a new round of think pieces about casual coming-outs. An
Entertainment Weekly
critic put him, along with Kira, on a list called “The Post-Gay Power Elite.”

Maddy read all the chatter, but it took her some time to get around to reading the original interview, which she did one warm spring day on a playground bench while watching Jake, almost two, toddle around. She called Steven from her cell. “Did you read Ryan’s thing in
New York
?” she asked.

“Of course I read it. I don’t live under a rock.” She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.

After he had returned to his seat the night of the Oscars, they hadn’t spoken about his moment on the stage. He acted as though nothing was out of the ordinary, as though he had never intended to do anything other than present. And she never asked. They hobnobbed at the
Vanity Fair
party, mingling separately.

Then Steven had gone off to Turkey to shoot
The Hall Endeavor,
and he was said to have started an affair with Taylor Yaccarino. Maddy had chuckled when she read the item, imagining that Taylor knew exactly what she was getting herself into. They were constantly photographed going to dinner and nuzzling in public.

“And what did you think of what Ryan had to say?” she asked Steven on the phone.

“It didn’t surprise me very much. He’s never married, he’s thirty-four, and he grew up in Berkeley.”

She laughed and realized it had been a long time since he had made her laugh. “I know you didn’t grow up in Berkeley,” she said, “but do you think you could ever do something like that?”

“Maddy,” he said, “I’m from a different generation.”

O
n a sweltering day in August while she was with Jake on Governors Island, Maddy got an email saying that
Pinhole
had been accepted into Toronto. When she opened it, she screamed, jumped up and down, and called Zack. She felt that her years of slaving over the script, and all her hard work as an actress, had finally paid off. Whether it won anything or not, she would be going to Toronto with a project she had generated from her own mind, out of the story of a complicated woman’s life.

Steven offered to take care of Jake in his Gramercy Park apartment so she could be completely focused during the festival. She paid for their
cast and crew to fly over, and rented a huge house near the festival headquarters so everyone could stay together.

The first screening of
Pinhole
was at eight on Friday night, a prime spot. The theater was already packed when Maddy walked in with Deborah and Zack.

Maddy took her reserved seat next to her cast and crew. Lane Cromwell’s daughter, Jean, had flown in and would be watching the film for the first time.

The lights went down.

The opening shot was a point-of-view from a 1920s camera snapping photos. The shutter closed, and the next frame was Maddy as Lane, posing for a slip ad. The flash popped again and again, and you could see by Lane’s expression that she was uncomfortable and out of her league. The photographer in the film called out directions off camera and she vamped, and then there was a freeze-frame and the screen went to black. Over a gypsy-jazz song, the credits appeared in simple, stark, white-on-black. Maddy’s title card was the last before Deborah’s. When she read the words “written by Maddy Freed,” they felt like a prediction.

T
here was a panel discussion following the screening and she trotted up to the stage along with the cast and crew. After a few questions about her writing process and discovery of Lane’s story, a heavyset bearded guy with black-framed glasses raised his hand. “This is the first film you’ve written since your divorce from Steven Weller, isn’t it, Maddy?”

“Just to clarify, it’s the first film I’ve written,” she said. “Ever. I collaborated on some things before, but this is my first solo screenplay.”

“I was thinking as I watched it that Lane kept trying to find her happiness in men, but it didn’t work. Is that something you relate to personally? Would you say this film is on some level about your anger at your ex-husband?”

There were whispers in the audience. People seemed to get that the guy was putting her on the spot, or maybe they wanted her to say something buzz-worthy and scandalous because her divorce had been all over the news.

“You know,” she said, “I would never write a script out of anger. It’s
hard enough as it is to get independent financing.” The audience laughed, and her crew did, too. She could feel the support of Deborah, Victor, and Zack around her. “Filmmaking is first and foremost about storytelling. That’s what gets people into a theater. That’s why we’re all here. To me, this film tells the story of an artist who tried to make work that was meaningful, and at the same time really struggled with her personal happiness. In part because of the sexism of her time.

“But beyond that . . .” The theater was quiet even though there were twelve hundred people in it. “I don’t regret my marriage, not in the slightest. I learned so much from Steven. I learned things I never expected to learn.” The house lights were bright, and she shaded her eyes. “I guess you could say . . . you could say that Steven Weller made me the actress I am today.”

And then someone asked a question about camera lenses, and Maddy exhaled and faced her cinematographer.