Coldheart Canyon (9 page)

“Thanks,” Todd said, giving him a twenty-buck bill. “I’ll be back out front by the time the credits roll.”

The usher thanked him for the twenty-note and left him to himself.

Todd took out a cigarette, but it never got to his lips. A wave of nausea overtook him, so powerful and so sudden that it was all he could do not to puke down his own tuxedo. Up came the scotches he’d had in the limo as he drove on down to the premiere, and the pepperoni pizza, with three cheeses and extra anchovies, he’d had to add ballast. With the first heave over (something told him there were more to come) he had the presence of mind to look around, and confirm that this nasty little scene was not being spied on, or worse, photographed. Luckily, he was alone. All he had for company back here was the detritus of premieres past; piles of CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 59

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standees and gaudy scenery pieces designed to advertise movies gone by: Mel Gibson against an eruption of lurid flame; Godzilla’s eye; the bottom half of a girl in a very short dress. He got to his feet and stumbled away from the stench of his vomit, making his way through this graveyard of old glories, heading for the darkest place he could find in which to hide his giddy head. Behind him, through the still-open door, he could hear the sound of gunfire, and the muted sound of his own voice:

“Come on out, you sonofabitch,” he was yelling to somebody. By now, if the movie had been working, the audience would have been yelling and screaming, wild with blood-lust. But despite the over-amped soundtrack, nobody was yelling, because nobody gave a damn. The movie was dying on its feet.

Another wave of nausea rose up in him. He reached out to catch hold of something so that he wouldn’t fall down and his outstretched hand knocked over a cardboard cut-out of Tom Cruise, which toppled backward and hit a cardboard
Titanic
, which in turn crashed against a cardboard
Mighty Joe Young
, and so on and so forth, like a row of candy-colored dominoes, stars falling against ships falling against monsters, all toppling back into a darkness so deep they were an indistinguishable heap.

Luckily, the noise of his vomiting was covered by the din of his own movie. He puked again, twice, until his stomach had nothing left to give up. Then he turned his back on the vomit and the toppled idols, and stepped away to find a lungful of clean air to inhale. The worst was over.

He lit his cigarette, which helped settle his stomach, and rather than returning inside, where the picture was two minutes from finishing, he walked along the side of the building until he found a patch of street-light where he could assess himself. He was lucky. His suit was unspattered.

There was a spot of vomit on his shoe, but he cleaned it off with his handkerchief (which he tossed away) and then sprayed his tongue and throat with wintergreen breath-cleanser. His hair was cropped short (that was the way it was in the movie, and he’d kept the style for public appearances), so he had no fear that it was out of place. He probably looked a little pale, but what the hell? Pale was in.

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There was a gate close to the front of the building, guarded by a security officer. She recognized Todd immediately, and unlocked the gate.

“Getting out before it gets too crazy?” she said to him. He smiled and nodded. “You want an escort to your car?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

One of the executive producers, an over-eager Englishman called George Dipper, with whom Todd had never worked before, was standing on the red carpet, his presence ignored by the press, who were standing around chatting to one another, or checking their cameras before the luminaries reappeared. George caught Todd’s eye, and hurried over, dragging on his own cigarette as though his life depended on its nicotine content.

There was scattered applause from inside, which quickly died away.

The picture was over.

“I think it played brilliantly,” George said, his eyes begging for a syllable of agreement. “They were with us all the way. Don’t you think so?”

“It was fine,” Todd said, without commitment.

“Forty million, the first weekend.”

“Don’t get your hopes up.”

“You don’t think we’ll do forty?”

“I think it’ll do fine.”

George’s face lit up. Todd Pickett, the man he’d paid twenty million dollars to (plus a sizable portion of the back-end), was declaring it
fine
.

God was in His Heaven. For a terrible moment Todd thought the man was going to weep with relief.

“At least there’s nothing big opening against it,” Todd said, “so we’ve got one weekend clear.”

“And your fans are loyal,” George said. Again, the desperation in the eyes.

Todd couldn’t bear to look at him any longer.

“I’m just goin’ to make a quick getaway,” Todd said, glancing toward the theater doors.

The first of the crowd were emerging. If the expressions on the first five faces he scanned were an omen, his instincts were right: they did not have a CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 61

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hit. He turned his back on the crowd, telling George he’d see him later.

“You
are
coming to the party?” George said, hanging on to him as he headed down the carpet.

Where was Marco?
Todd thought. Trusty Marco, who was always there when he was needed. “Yes, I’ll pop in later,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder at George to reassure him.

In the seconds since he’d turned away, the audience spilling from the theater door had jumped from five to a hundred. Half of them saw him.

In just a few seconds they’d be surrounding him, yelling his name, telling him they loved this and they hated that, touching him, pulling on him—

“
Here, boss!
”

Marco called to him from the curb. The limo door was open. God bless him! Todd raced down the carpet as people behind him started to call his name; cameras started to flash. Into the limo. Marco slammed the door.

Todd locked it. Then Marco dashed around to the driver’s seat with a remarkable turn of speed given his poundage, and got in.

“Where to?”

“Mulholland.”

Mulholland Drive winds through the city like a lazy serpent for many miles; but Marco didn’t need to know where along its length his boss wanted to be taken. There was a spot close to Coldwater Canyon, where the undulating drive offers a picture-perfect view of the San Fernando Valley, as far as the mountains. By day it can be a smog-befouled spectacle, brown and gray. But by night, especially in the summer, it is a place of particular enchantment: the cities of Burbank, North Hollywood and Pasadena laid out in a matrix of amber lights, receding to the dark wall of the mountains. And moving against the darkness, the lights of planes circling as they await their instruction to land at Burbank Airport, or the police helicopters passing over the city, spitting a beam of white light.

Often there were sightseers parked at the spot, enjoying the scene. But tonight, thank God, there were none. Marco parked the car and Todd got out, wandering to the cliff-edge to look at the scene before him.

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Marco got out too, and occupied his time with wiping the windshield of the limo. He was a big man with the bearded face of a bear recently woken from hibernation, and he possessed a curious mixture of talents: a sometime wrestler and ju-jitsu black belt, he was also a trained Cordon Bleu cook (not that Todd’s taste called for any great culinary sophistication) and a twice-divorced father of three with an encyclopedic knowledge of the works of Wagner. More important, he was Todd’s right-hand man; loyal to a fault. There was no part of Todd’s existence Marco Caputo did not have some part of. He took care of the hiring and firing of domestic staff and gardeners, the buying and the driving of cars, and of course all the security duties.

“The movie’s shit, huh?” he said matter-of-factly.

“Worse than.”

“Sorry ’bout that.”

“Not your fault. I should never have done it. Shit script. Shit movie.”

“You want to give the party a miss?”

“Nah. I gotta go. I promised Wilhemina. And George.”

“You got something going with her?”

“Wilhemina? Yeah. I got something. I just don’t know whether I want to. Plus she’s got an English boyfriend.”

“The English are all fags.”

“Yeah.”

“You want me to swing by the party and bring her back up to the house for you?”

“Suppose she says no?”

“Oh
come on
. When did any girl say no to you?”

Todd said nothing. He just stared out over the vista of lights. The wind came up out of the valley, smelling of gas fumes and Chinese food. The Santa Anas, hot off the Mojave, gusted against his face. He closed his eyes to enjoy the moment, but what came into his head was an image of himself: a still from the movie he’d fled from tonight. He studied the face in his mind’s eye for a moment.

Then he said: “I look tired.”

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T W O

Todd Pickett had made two of his three most successful pictures under the aegis of a producer by the name of Keever Smotherman. The first of them was called
Gunner
; the kind of high-concept, testosterone-marinated picture Smotherman had been renowned for making. It had made Todd—who was then an unknown from Ohio—a bona-fide movie-star, if not overnight then certainly within a matter of weeks. He hadn’t been required to turn in a performance. Smotherman didn’t make movies that required actors, only breath-taking physical specimens. And Todd was certainly that. Every time he stepped before the cameras, whether he was sharing the scene with a girl or a fighter-plane, he was all the eye wanted to watch. The camera worked some kind of alchemy upon him; and he worked the same magic on celluloid.

In life, he was good-looking, but flawed. He was a little on the short side, with broad hips; he was also conspicuously bandy. But on the screen, all these flaws disappeared. He became gleaming, studly perfection, his jaw-line heroic, his gaze crystalline, his mouth an uncommon mingling of the sensual and the severe. His particular beauty had suited the taste of the times, and by the end of that first, extraordinary summer of coming-to-fame his image, dressed in an immaculate white uniform which made poetry of his buttocks, had become an indelible piece of cinema iconog-raphy.

Over the years, other stars had risen just as high, of course, and many just as quickly. But few were quite as ready for their ascent as Todd Pickett. This was what he’d been polishing himself for since the moment CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 64

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his mother, Patricia Donna Pickett, had first taken him into a cinema in downtown Cincinnati. Looking up at the screen, watching the parade of faces pass before him, he’d known instinctively (at least so he later claimed) that he belonged up there with those stars, and that if he willed it hard enough, willed and worked for it, then it was merely a matter of time before he joined the parade.

After the success of
Gunner
, he fell effortlessly into the labors of being a movie star. In interviews he was courteous, funny and self-effacing, playing the interviewers so easily that all but the most cynical swooned. He was confident about his charms, but he wasn’t cocky; loyal to his Midwestern roots and boyishly devoted to his mother. Most attractive of all, he was honest about his shortcomings as an actor. There was a refreshing lack of pretension about the Pickett persona.

The year after
Gunner
, he made two pictures back to back. Another action blockbuster for Smotherman, called
Lightning Rod
, which was released on Independence Day and blew all former box-office records to smithereens, and then, for the Christmas market,
Life Lessons
. The latter was a sweetly sentimental slip of a story, in which Todd played opposite Sharon Campbell, a
Playboy
model–turned–actress who had been tabloid fodder at the time thanks to her recent divorce from an alcoholic and abusive husband. The pairing of Pickett and Campbell had worked like a charm, and the reviews for Todd’s performance were especially kind.

While he was still relying on his physical gifts, the critics observed, there were definitely signs that he was taking on the full responsibilities of an actor, digging deeper into himself to engage his audience. Nor was he afraid to show weakness; twice in
Life Lessons
he was required to sob like a baby, and he did so very convincingly. The picture was a huge hit, meaning that both of the big money-makers of the year had Todd’s name above the title. He was officially box-office gold.

For most of the following decade he could do no wrong. Inevitably, some of his pictures performed better than others, but even the disappointments were triumphs by comparison with the fumbling labors of most of his contemporaries.

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Of course, he wasn’t making the choice of material on his own. From the beginning he’d had a close relationship with his manager, Maxine Frizelle, a short, sharp bitch of a woman in her mid-forties who’d once been voted the Most Despised Person in Hollywood, and had asked, when the news had reached her, if the awards ceremony was full evening dress.

Though she’d been representing other clients when she first took Todd on, she’d let them all go once his career began to demand her complete attention. Thereafter she lived and breathed the Pickett business, controlling every element of his life, private and professional. The price she asked studios for his services rapidly rose to unheard-of heights, and she drove the deal home every single time. She had an opinion about everything: rewrites, casting, the hiring of directors, art-directors, costume designers and directors of photography. Her only concern was the best interests of her wonder-boy. In the language of an older but similarly feudal system, she was the power behind the throne; and everyone who worked with Todd, from the heads of studios to humble hair-stylists, had some encounter with her to relate, some scar to show.