Show Business Kills (7 page)

Tonight Ellen hurried across the quiet lot to make a quick stop at her own bungalow office, just to see if there were any
last-minute calls she needed to return from her car while she was on her way to meet Roger.

“Greens?”

“In here,” her secretary called. Ellen walked through her own spacious, high-ceilinged office, furnished with chrome and glass,
and into the pretty Italian-tiled bathroom, where Greenie was washing out coffee cups.

“You’re out of Dodge already?” he asked. Greenie never left the building until Ellen did, even though she told him that once
she went into a meeting, only “the deal gods” knew when she’d come out. He was loyal and true and he used the quiet time while
Ellen was in meetings to cover each script she’d be taking home with a typed-up synopsis, which was always astute and thoughtful.

“It’s Roger’s birthday,” she told him. She was still smarting from Bibberman’s treatment of her, and she knew if she mentioned
it to Greenie, he’d get on that kick again about how that shithead Bibberman wanted her out of there, and
now the jealous little mongrel was going to try anything he could to get her to quit, so the studio wouldn’t have to pay her
off. He’d also remind her that the way Bibberman treated her in meetings was nothing compared to the things he said about
her behind her back.

Ronald Greenberg was gay and as gorgeous as a runway model, and this was the third studio to which he’d followed Ellen. He
was, Ellen always told close friends, her “secret weapon.” He had no desire to be an executive himself because, he said, he
didn’t want the pressure, but he was Hollywood wise, understood the politics, and somehow managed to know where every body
in the industry was buried.

“Want me to walk you to the car?” he asked Ellen now, taking her briefcase out of her hand, removing obsolete drafts of scripts
and changing them for the current ones with his notes clipped to them, then handing the case back to her.

“Nahh,” she said. “I’ll be okay. I can’t imagine any mugger who could want to hurt me worse then Bibberman does.”

“He’s looking to get you crazy. So don’t you cave, my love,” Greenie said sympathically, then added, “because I can’t afford
to be out of a gig.”

“I’m hanging in tooth and nail, Greens,” she told him. “Even if, in my case, it
is
bonded tooth and acrylic nail.”

Greenie laughed. “That reminds me, you need a manicure,” he said. “I’ll get someone to come to your house late Saturday afternoon
so you can read at the same time.”

“Thanks, Greens,” she told him, and in a minute she was out the door and out of the building into the dark, full-moon night.

  
5
  

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he loved the leather smell inside her black 735i BMW, and after she slid behind the wheel, she heaved a sigh of relief and
sat back against the soft tan seat. In that room upstairs she knew the others were probably giving Bibberman “high five” for
humiliating her, and she hated the poor schmucks and pitied them at the same time. All three of them had stories flying around
about them that even if they were partly true made them really sad cases.

Like the one that Richardson’s model marriage was a front for his real sexual pleasure, adolescent boys. That Schatzman hadn’t
had an erection in his life, and his two beautiful blond children were the result of his wife’s donor insemination. And that
Bibberman’s wife of fifteen years had left him once for a woman in New York, but the woman dumped her, so Bibberman took her
back.

Who cared if they sat there trashing everyone in town, using the late meeting as an excuse not to go home to their bad marriages,
she’d be having dinner with Roger. The guard in the kiosk waved as she drove through. “Eat my dust,” Ellen said quietly through
a smile and a wave.

Making movies for audiences made up of what H. L.
Mencken called the “booboisie,” was not exactly the career Ellen Feinberg Bass had intended for herself. Once she planned
to produce plays, or work in production for a repertory company, and Marly used every opportunity to remind her that she’d
fallen off her course. In fact, tonight as she drove up Beverly Glen she remembered that at the last Girls’ Night the argument
that had ended the party too early was about that very subject.

These women had known one another so long and so well they could really push one another’s buttons, and turn an evening that
started out with a great dinner and a lot of good wine and a million laughs into a battle. So that within twenty minutes everyone
would be marching off to bed huffy and testy and insulted, or sometimes just slamming out of the party to go home.

It was amazing to Ellen the way four grown women could still fight like kids. Over the years the four of them had whoppers,
about things which in retrospect seemed so dumb. Like the night Marly came back from New York and told them she’d had dinner
with Diane Sawyer and Mike Nichols and Jan called her a star-fucker. And the night Rose told Marly she thought her problems
with Billy were a result of her parents not being affectionate enough, and Marly called her a condescending Jew.

But the last fight had been Ellen’s fault. It started right after Jan told the Maximilian Schell story for the millionth time.
They were still in the hot tub, hooting with laughter about Thanks a million, Maximilian. Rose was wearing her owlish glasses,
which were too steamed up for her to be able to see out of them, but the tears of laughter came streaming down under the frames,
onto her cheeks and into the water.
And Marly’s laugh was her usual outraged gasp that had inherent in it the words “It’s a good thing my mother’s not listening
to this.”

“You know, I think that story about Max is a great germ of an idea for the beginning of the film,” Rose said that night, and
she ran her fingers across the lenses of her glasses as if the glasses were windshields and her fingers were the windshield
wipers, until they could all see the serious expression in her big brown eyes. “About a young woman whose life is changed
because of one night with a pompous movie star. It’s wonderful and poignant. A little low-budget piece, like
Garbo Talks
. It could be all about the way one night with a man like that affects her feelings about men forever.”

“Yeah, great artsy-fartsy idea,” Ellen said re-pinning a fallen lock of her abundant auburn hair. She loved her friends, but
they didn’t have a clue about the realities of how the business worked. “Except for two small things. No studio would make
it, and nobody would pay to go and see it. Other than that… a classic!”

Rose pursed her lips and then frowned. She looked as if she were deciding whether or not to speak her mind while she took
her glasses off and laid them next to the hot tub. “You’ve been working at a studio too long, El,” Rose said, blinking rapidly.
“You’re starting to sound like one of the ‘suits.’ You
are
one of the ‘suits.’ I can’t believe a woman I’m close to is on
their
side. It’s like
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
.”

Ellen had lost it. She hated herself when she flew off the handle the way she did that night, but it was a rap she didn’t
want to take. Especially from any of these three. “It’s my fucking job, Rosie,” she said, flaring. “So let’s not confuse it
with some manifestation of my inner core or my aesthetic sensibilities. I like art as much as you do, but it doesn’t sell
tickets. Christ, where do you get off copping to the artistic sensibility bullshit? You wrote for TV, and Jan’s on fucking
daytime,” and then she turned to Marly and said, “and peddling Mylanta isn’t exactly playing Medea!”

“I think Rose is right,” Marly said, turning her pretty face away from Ellen’s tirade, the way they all were sure her very
proper mother must have with her any time she behaved inappropriately. She had that look in her eyes that always glimmered
there when she was ready to battle to the death for a cause, a challenge. “Because, unlike the rest of us who are scavenging
around for jobs, you’re in a power position, so you can make a difference. You’re the one who can push for quality and taste
in this trash-filled industry. I think the story of Jan and Max could be the beginning of an important concept. And if it
was well told, it could be turned into a feminist statement. A beautiful little piece of art.”

“The problem with a little piece of art,” Ellen said, and she tried to control the tone in her voice that meant
you stupid dipshit
, “is that the only person who goes to see it is a little guy
named
Art. That’s one ticket sold. Who’s going to buy the rest of them? Get real.
You
know what people go to see. The head of production at my studio has what he calls a kaboom chart on his wall. If someone
or something doesn’t blow up every ten minutes in your script, he already has a deal negotiated with a new writer to come
in and fix it, and you’re toast.”

There was a tsk, and a patronizing shaking of their heads that made Ellen’s blood pressure rise. She had an overwhelming
childish urge to splash the hot water right into all of their faces.

“Then I think that job is toxic and you ought to quit,” Marly said, her eyes flashing angrily and her white-blond hair glistening
in the moonlight.

“It may be,” Ellen said, and now she was really steamed. “But at the moment it’s feeding me, my unemployed son, my aging mother,
and two very hungry Persian cats.”

“And is it worth it?”

“Unlike you, Mrs. Billy Mann,” Ellen said, her voice rising defensively, “I’m not divorcing a big star, so I can’t afford
to quit that toxic job. But I promise if I ever do marry someone that rich, I’ll divorce him and get the kind of money you
have, so I can have an organic job with no pesticides, and make art the whole fucking day long. In fact, it’ll be so noncommercial
that I’ll even be able to use people with no names to star in it, like you and Jan.” She regretted the outburst instantly
but was still enraged that not one of them, people so close to her heart, got the point. That she had to make decisions that
were based on the bottom line because that was how she kept her job. That many times she wished like hell she hadn’t trapped
herself in a lifestyle that was jacked up so high that she had to keep the job to afford herself and her family.

It was painfully quiet then, and one at a time they each found reasons to get out of the hot tub and make their way to their
individual guest rooms in Marly’s giant house, and it wasn’t even midnight.

At dawn when they all stood in Marly’s kitchen having their morning coffee, all of them looked as rumpled as the
beds they’d just left, Ellen felt awful about saying all the mean things she’d said.

“I’m sorry,” she told Marly. “I love you, and I’ll still come and bail you out if they ever throw you in a Turkish prison.”
That had been their promise to one another since the night they all went to see
Midnight Express
, about a young American trapped in a jail in Turkey. They swore over coffee at Ships in Westwood that they would never be
the kiss-the-air-next-to-your-face bunch, but the real, be-there-asking-the-doctors-if-they’re-doing-everything-they-can kind
of friends.

“I love you, too,” Marly said. “And I promise I’ll still ride in the back of the ambulance when you keel over from working
too hard at that poisonous job.” They all had laughed at that, ending the morning with warm feelings. The girls, Ellen thought,
pulling the Beamer up to the valet parker at Adriano’s. She would have a blast with them on Friday night.

In Adriano’s she waved at the hostess and headed for her usual table, where Roger was already seated, and when he stood to
greet her, his astonishing good looks overwhelmed her. She still thought of him as her baby, the son she’d raised alone after
her divorce from Herb Bass the podiatrist. Herbie, as his frat brothers called him, was a spoiled brat she’d made the mistake
of marrying when he was in podiatry school at UCLA and had the good sense to divorce by his graduation. He’d never given her
or Roger a dime since he moved back east.

“Hi, Mom,” Roger said.