So 5 Minutes Ago (4 page)

“I’m hoping you can help me correct that,” he says, reaching forward to fondle Miss Sue’s ears and giving me a wry smile.

I can help little Troy Madden or I can turn the page.

I take a sip of wine and dive into my spiel—that DWP, or rather BIG-DWP, is the kind of agency that takes a personal interest in its clients, that not only do we preserve a kind of trust among our client base, some of the most venerable in Hollywood, but we maintain one of the best, even an
intimate
relationship with editors. I’m rattling along nicely, only mildly distracted by Troy’s lazy grin and the suggestive way he plys Miss Sue’s ears—when I have a sudden and awful thought. Troy expects me to sleep with him. Or at least to
want
to sleep with him.

“I like what I’m hearing,” he says, leaning forward, his smile widening.

I can feel my face flush.
Fuck.
I should never drink, even a glass of wine, when meeting a new client. “Well, I’m glad,” I say, lunging for the glass of water thank God I’d thought to ask for. “Because I know Suzanne and I—” I pause to gulp—“and of course we’ve talked to your lawyer, Tom, about this, and we’re pretty much”—I gulp again—“on the same page.”

When I finish draining the glass, I realize Troy is grinning at me. “Can we get you another, ah, water?”

Actually, he’s one step short of laughing as he turns to look for the waitress.
Oh, get a grip;
visions of my bonus disintegrating. Whenever I get rattled by an actor’s sheer physical presence—the one thing any of them has if they’re worth their salt—I just remember my years at Brown. By Hollywood’s usual yardstick I come up a loser 99.9 percent of the time. The rock-paper-scissors rule is celebrity beats an executive; an executive beats talent; and everyone beats a publicist or a journalist. But in my book, brains always beat sex appeal. They could even beat heat. Well, most of the time.

“This is what I’m talking about,” I say, suddenly dropping my voice and leaning toward him. Troy swivels back in my direction with a slightly startled look. “You’ve got all this going for you,” I say, waving vaguely, “and it’s not being put to its best use, shall we say. I mean, don’t you think people have gotten the wrong idea about you, because of things you have done? I mean, not that you did them on purpose, but just unconsciously, the way a kid might react. Instinctively.”

I pause to let this nonsense sink in.

“I mean, the movies have been their own choices—some better than others—and no one is blaming you for them,” I say, plunging on before Troy can answer. “But we’re talking about a whole that’s bigger than the sum of the parts.”

I lean back. “I want you to think of it . . . as
us—
as a partnership, overdue to say the least, but one that will, in the long run, go a long way toward rectifying all that.”

I have him. Troy has no idea what the hell I’m talking about. I don’t even need to trot out the hay-bale photo shoot idea. Glancing at my watch, always a nice touch—not even an hour—I decide to wrap it up. Take a second meeting at lunch with his manager and close it then. “Look, I don’t to want to overwhelm you, not at our first meeting,” I say, reaching for the check. “We’ll sit down next week—I’ll work it out with Peg, come up with a game plan that not only makes sense to you but includes you in a way that I’m not sure you’ve been included before.”

I give Miss Sue a farewell pat and flee. When I hit the safety of the Audi, I punch up Rachel’s number on my cell.

“He doesn’t, does he?” I say when Rachel picks up. “Expect me to sleep with him?”

“Who are we talking about? G?”

“Sorry. Troy. I just came from my meeting, which seemed more like—”

“A date?”

“If I was a call girl.”

“Hey, it’s his way of marking his territory,” Rachel says, laughing.

“This isn’t funny.”

“Think of it as his own little fraternity initiation,” she says airily. “Go out for dinner and see what happens. God knows you need him as a client. Has he tried to put the moves on you yet?”

“Unclear,” I say, trying to sound suddenly bored with the whole thing. Technically, petting his dog’s ears doesn’t count as
moves
per se. Still, I know when I’m being hustled. “But you’ll be the first to know.”

I’m about to tell Rachel about Charles—any sighting of an available heterosexual male is always noteworthy—when I think better of it. Besides, Rachel’s on a tear.

“Think of Troy as your first scalp on your BIG belt,” she says. “By the way, the word is he’s a beast who needs to be fed. Unless you happen to be twenty-six, blonde, and brainless.”

“Who? Troy?”

“G. The word from my Deep Throat is that he jumped from Sony before he was pushed. I mean, what VP leaves a studio to handle talent? He took his severance and bought his way into B-I. Now the word is that he’s on the make for a buyer for the whole company. Look, he’ll be gone in two years. Or less, depending on what happens. Just keep your head down. And, whatever you do, don’t forget his birthday.”

“His birthday?”

“Apparently it’s a national holiday. By the way, I saw Carrie Fisher buying shoes at Fred Segal.”

“Oh yeah?” I say, seriously interested, or maybe just happy to stop talking about G. That’s the thing. You represent stars, know way too much about their lives, mop up way too many spills, but you still get worked up if you see them around town. Like sightings of native wildlife. “How’d she look?”

“Like she was off drugs.”

“Legal or illegal?”

“Illegal.”

“Too bad,” I say.

“Yeah. She was pretty cute when she was thin.”

“Weren’t we all,” I say, turning west on Sunset, suddenly anxious to find Charles.

3 Just Shoot Me

                  
The Dwarf—line 2.

The Amtell rattles to life. Peering over my Starbucks latte—nonfat with an extra shot—I type back,
Que?

Things are looking up. Or I am trying to
believe
things are looking up. I’ve gotten my first look at our BIG contracts—publish or perish is right—but Suzanne is promising to run interference and give us a graduated quota. Whatever that means. We’ve also done our drive-by of the new offices and Steven is right: they
are
better. Orchids. Aeron chairs. Brand-new computers. Scented candles in the bathrooms. All the stations of the cross. Which is how I’m trying to think of G. Just another ass to kiss. Steven has already dubbed him the G-string.

I’ve also signed Troy, my first kill as a BIG-DWPer. And I haven’t even had to have sex with him. At least not yet. Actually, I’m too busy to
see
Troy. That’s the beauty part. Unless you have to serve as their walker at a junket or an award show, you never really
see
the clients or even speak to them. You just call their personal assistants.

The only bad news, and it technically isn’t
bad,
just disappointing, is that I’ve had to make and break my lunch date with Charles something like five times in two weeks. (Twice on my part, twice on his, and once when Suzanne big-footed our plans and dragged him to some award luncheon.) Other than a few chance encounters in the office hallways, I’ve logged zip quality time with him. Or HRH, as Steven has dubbed him.

“So HRH is another no-show,” Steven said, when our lunch was canceled for the second time.

“His Royal Highness?” I didn’t often miss Steven’s acronyms but he had me this time.

“The Human Resources Hunk. And don’t think you’re the only one who’s noticed.”

What was I thinking? Of course I wasn’t the only sex-starved workaholic clawing the DWP walls. Back in New York, Charles may have been just another good-looking, slightly preppy guy—B+ material—but in L.A., a WASPy heterosexual male with a sense of humor and his natural nose approached deity status. Of course, others were hot on his trail.

Actually, after our third broken lunch date, I’d resolved to put him out of my mind. Charles was just a colleague. Nothing more. Besides, he worked out of the New York office, where, presumably, he would be returning once his visit to Oz was over. Whenever that was going to be.

Besides, I really was busy with work. I was also taking Spanish lessons every other Wednesday in a belated if unchic attempt to communicate with all the Latinos who come with life in L.A. Housekeeper, gardener, pool man for the diminutive hot tub that burbled out on my patio, although technically the pool guy didn’t count since he was from Encino, a dropout from UC–Santa Barbara who showed up stoned half the time. It would take more than Spanish lessons to communicate with him. Technically, nobody in my gene pool spoke Spanish. Like nobody in my gene pool ate bread. Still, life would go so much more smoothly if I could do things like explain how to work the washing machine to my Guatemalan housekeeper.

“It’s not like you need to learn the whole language,” Steven said. “Just a few key phrases. Like, ‘Please put out that fire,’ or, ‘Can you stop the flooding?’ ”

El Dwarf . . . !
The Amtell rattles again.

I put down the latte and type back,
What fucking dwarf?!!

The Amtell is such a dinosaur. Everyone else in town has instant messaging—IM—to deal with calls, but DWP is still stuck in the Stone Age. Along with our Haitian-cotton sofas, stained Berber carpeting, and metal-framed posters of movies from the seventies—
Norma Rae
anyone?—we have the most antique communication equipment. In addition to our balky PC’s that are forever breaking down, we still use the stupid Amtells on our desks to communicate with our assistants. Like big walkie-talkies that are just up a notch from screaming. The only good thing is that they do foster their own coded language. After my meeting with Troy, Steven billed him as “succubus” on the Amtell until I pointed out that was a sexually depraved
female
demon.
Okay, “succu-boy,”
Steven had typed back, adding for good measure that Troy’s lawyer was now “succu-boy’s DA.”

“You know—the Dwarf!” Steven says, suddenly appearing in the doorway. “The one you met at the party last week? The one who said he was looking for representation?”

“Oh,
that
dwarf. Put him through.”

Dwarves were hot. You couldn’t go to a party or a premiere without running into at least a couple of them. But then L.A. has always had a thing for freaks. First it was boobs. Now it’s cheekbones and butts. Even guys aren’t immune. Not with every male in town sprouting a forelock like Elvis. Why not dwarves? At least it was a new way to make studio execs, all those tiny, intense guys with their manicures and Gucci loafers, feel like big men.

“Hi. I was hoping to hear from you,” I say, picking up. Normally I would have said something like,
What can I do for you
? But my client list is dwarfless at the moment and with my BIG new contract hanging over my head, the dwarf is an easy way to feed the beast. A former Disneyland employee (he was Donald Duck in the parade), the dwarf is a SAG member who’s had a walk-on in a Coen brothers comedy, done four episodes of
Jackass,
and gotten all the way to first callbacks on the latest
Austin Powers.
How hard could it be to drum up some coverage? Convince
Vanity Fair
to do some photo spread in their annual Hollywood issue? Put him and a few other dwarf actors in a circus setting and get Steven Meisel to shoot it? I set up lunch with the dwarf and hang up. When I finish the call, Steven sticks his head around the corner.

“Six more and we can call you Snow White.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.”

“Meanwhile, in another part of the enchanted forest, am I going to the photo shoot or are you?”

“Which shoot?”

“Troy and the Babes in TV Land.”

“It’s the day after tomorrow,” I say. “And yes, I am going. The day after tomorrow.”

“Actually,
TV Guide
’s photo editor called and they had to move it to today. Some scheduling mix-up.”

“What!” I’m seriously pissed. Two days ago Troy’s shoot was all set. Now, apparently, it’s all fucked, and I’ve spent hours on the phone with the magazine setting up the story after Troy’s manager wrangled him a guest-star stint on one of the hottest new drama series—an anorexic chick law show that I can’t bear to watch but that has become the “flash point of the postfeminist cultural zeitgeist.” Or that’s how
The New York Times
put it.

Normally TV is no-man’s-land for movie stars. But ever since Michael Douglas and Matt Damon went on
Will & Grace
and Brad Pitt carried the flag for Jen by doing an episode of
Friends,
stunt casting, as it’s known—especially for a highly promotable sweeps episode—no longer means your career is coding. So Troy is easing back into the public eye via prime time. At least it gives me something to promote until his next movie comes along. Besides, one of the series’ stars, Val Myers, an ex-Broadway chorine who plays one of the nerdier women on the show (which means she actually weighs what a five-eight, thirty-three-year-old might weigh) is already one of my clients. The shoot was to have been an easy twofer for me: Troy would have an hour or so at the same shoot for the magazine’s cover story on Val and her two costars.

“When did we find this out?” I snap, knowing I’ll have to rearrange my whole day and I
hate
baby-sitting shoots, the endless fussing with the lights and the clothes and the hair and then the catering and the music and scented candles. It’s a daylong party for those involved—or it’s supposed to
look
like a daylong party—but for publicists it’s like jury duty. You have to sit there for hours trying to look interested or at least awake. It’s even worse if the client’s manager shows up and starts throwing their weight around. Meanwhile you still have to work, return a million calls on your staticky cell. It’s just a pain.

“Unclear,” Steven says, waving a message slip. “As far as I can tell, the photo editor called either at midnight or six this morning.”

“Typical,” I say. Returning calls at god-awful hours is now a standard way to deliver unwelcome news in Hollywood.

“At least Troy already knows,” Steven says, dropping a second message slip on my desk. “Or I should say Troy’s manager knows. Peg called this morning to say he—and she—would be there by noon.”

“Noon?” I look at my watch. It’s ten-thirty. I have barely an hour to rearrange my entire day.

“Yeah, I know,” Steven says. “But if you hurry you can get there before the caterers replace the muffins with the pasta salad.”

For a second, I’m tempted to send Steven—officially you can always send your assistant to cover a shoot unless the client is Tom Cruise caliber—and get reception to pick up my calls. I have a bunch of releases to edit, and I’m expecting a call from the features editor of
Vogue,
which is the PR equivalent of getting a call from the pope. Besides, I’m wearing new mules that have already given me blisters just walking from the parking garage. The thought of standing around Smashbox is not appealing. But Troy is a new client and still a big enough star that I need to show the flag. For Val too, as long as I’m there. Besides, if Troy’s manager is tense enough to go, I have to go.

“All right, but call me later with some emergency so I can leave.”

“I’ll tell you your house is burning down—in Spanish,” Steven says. “That should do it.”

Smashbox is the Fred Segal of photo studios, a chic sexy white space with the requisitely louche employees in cargo pants and T-shirts and bored-looking stars.
InStyle, Vanity Fair, People,
they all shoot here. It’s publicists’ Ground Zero. Smashbox is so hip it even has its own makeup line.

What it doesn’t have is a big enough parking lot. By the time I pull up, the minuscule lot is already full and the valet waves me off. Great. Street parking. Not only do I have a fresh blister by the time I get to the door, but I’m sweating from walking three blocks in the blazing sun and my nice little blow-dry from the morning is shot to hell. By the time I hit the Black Box, Moby is blasting out the door. Inside it’s the usual chaos, a million cables snaking across the floor, lights blazing as the crew guys in jeans and spike haircuts hump them around the room. The photographer, Blake Hashbein, a short, balding guy who shot a lot of those hip Gap commercials, is sitting on a lipstick-red sofa in the middle of the room ignoring it all, flipping through
US Weekly,
drinking coffee, and idly tossing a ball to two dogs wrestling in the corner.

Troy and the show’s stars, of course, are nowhere to be seen. Probably still in makeup, one of the little rooms down the hall that will be lit like an airport runway and packed with its own personnel—the dewy-faced makeup artist, usually a gay guy wearing foundation, tight black jeans, and an air of fastidiousness; the hairdresser, another gay guy or an older (meaning thirty-plus) woman with great hair; and the stylist, who will already be getting an earful about the clothes. When forced to baby-sit a shoot, I usually wind up hanging with the stylist—not because stylists are always heterosexual women with great taste and good shopping tips, but because they also have little patience for actors’ whims but have to satisfy them anyway.

“Better to get this over with,” I say, taking a deep breath and picking my way across the cables toward the high-pitched chatter down the hall. As I round the corner, I pass the catering station with the requisite muffins, fruit, and coffee dispensers—regular, decaf, and latte. An ice chest holds bottles of water and sodas. That’s the other thing about shoots. Unless it’s with some nut case like Kirstie Alley who writes it into her contracts that the catering has to consist solely of unlimited trays of tuna sashimi, you just know you’re going to eat a muffin—at least the top—or a cookie. Just to keep your spirits up.

“Hi-eee . . . . !”

I’m just reaching for a muffin—pumpkin, for the beta carotene—when I hear a squeal and the clatter of high heels behind me and brace myself for impact. “Alex, thanks for coming,” Val says, flinging herself at me. “This means so much to me,” she says, shaking her blond hair off her heart-shaped face. Like a lot of actors, Val has an unnaturally large head and just now, out of the makeup chair with her exaggerated Kewpie-doll eyes and pouty, cherry-red mouth, it looks even larger than usual. I have to rear back just to keep her face in focus.

“Hey, I wouldn’t miss it.”

“I know, but my first cover, I just really want it to go well.”

I’ve been to enough shoots to know that
well
is a relative term. In fact, if there’s any rule about shoots, it’s that something will always go wrong, especially with a group shot. Although I’ve gone around and around with the photo editor over the choice of the photographer and the stylist and am praying it will all work out, I don’t have to wait long for the bad news.