Bad Boy Boss (10 page)

“Alex and I just finished a book together and that sort of forced us to become close. We’re starting on his next one-man show, and he wants me to pose for him. Wait for the show and if I show up in the nude, you’ll know something’s up.”

“So how do you like working with the old pros like Gertrude Castor?”

This time when Rob appeared, Bethany said, “Ladies and gentlemen the head writer of
Clara and her Sisters
, Rob Carey.”

Rob and I worked this approach several times. We expanded it a bit on Friday because both Gertrude and I were booked on the show. After Rob was introduced, he joined me with the host, Carson Hammer, who asked how it was to work with me. Rob pulled out a legal pad and wrote on it then handed it to me. I said, like I was reading it: “Working with Mary is a dream; she actually says the lines I write, unlike some people I could mention.”

Then Gertrude responded in her signature, slightly-gravelly voice. “If it wasn’t for my brilliant ad libs, you wouldn’t have an Emmy.” And this, of course, introduced Gertrude.

In Hollywood, generally, if you played the game as a celebrity, you could get along with minimal fuss and bother. The place was filled with celebrities, so a reporter or paparazzi could almost always find one. You only became a target if you tried to avoid them. However, by Saturday both Peter and I were tired of it and slipped back up to Sugarloaf.

My talk show appearances, however, worked against Peter’s show. We had decided that we would do three paintings of each fairy in the book as part of the show, so I was back in costume; but now posing rather than moving for the camera.

Dillon called on Tuesday.

“Can you do Thursday and Friday again? Sisters hit number one with a bullet and it’s all on you and Rob with that routine you worked up.”

“Talk to my boss,” I responded. “I’m under contract, remember?”

So I handed the phone to Peter. He put his hand up then pointed his thumb up and down and shrugged. I gave him a thumbs up, but I really didn’t want to. It had nothing to do with the change in schedule though. In LA, he never went down on me. In Sugarloaf, it was Tuesday and I was looking forward to number three on Wednesday. When I modeled, we’d both get so hot something just had to be done about it.

So Wednesday it was back into LA. Without a writer, I had nothing to say, so we made it through dinner with only a couple paparazzi. The news had been told; we were yesterday.

After Rob and I did our bit on a morning talk show on Thursday, Pauley called Peter.

The house across the street was for sale. The house at the end of the cul-de-sac – three bedrooms and two stories with an acre against the hill – was the one we stayed in. Next door was a five bedroom, three bath house owned by Pauley. Because the three bedroom was the biggest lot, three acres, it owned half the land up the hill to two houses that faced it on the upper road. The one that was for sale faced Pauley’s acre. It had an acre of its own, but built into a hill with a lower bedroom floor below the house, which sat on the road above.

Peter bought it. He didn’t ask me; in fact he already owned it the first time I saw it the day after Rob, Gertrude and I pulled off another variation on our routine on another talk show Friday.

“I can block the window with a wall, put in a skylight facing north. It’ll be perfect. It will allow me to paint the most beautiful woman in the world, perfectly,” he said, standing in something they called a ‘rumpus’ room and holding me tightly.

Well, he didn’t own it officially. He offered, the owners accepted, they filled out eighteen pages of absolute nonsense that neither party understood, Peter wired money into an account and he kissed me in the rumpus room. In fact, he reached between my legs, got inside me, flicked my G-spot into an orgasm. Then we were on the floor. Peter took off my panties and got inside me right in the middle of the ‘rumpus’ room, without closing the shades, so that anyone driving up Jackson Court Road in Glendale would have had a full view of the proceedings. We were damn lucky the media was watching the wrong damn house.

Since it was going to take two weeks to ‘close’ on the house, we went back up the mountain and back to work on the show.

I actually prefer posing in the nude… well, when Peter is the artist. In the fairy costumes, I just got hotter and hotter as the day wore on and there wasn’t much of a chance to let some of the pressure off of the boiler, if you know what I mean. Okay, a couple times it did get to the breaking point and he lifted my skirts, dropped my panties and relieved some of that pressure. On Friday, I always worked in the nude because that was the basic shape and he needed that reference to finish the under paintings. On those days he always went down on me before and after lunch. He’d start to work on my breasts first and lick and kiss me down to where he shared my clit with his tongue and his thumb. At the same time, he rubbed my pelvic bone and flicked his fingers across my G-spot.

The show remained on top in comedies, and word had gotten around that Jackson Court Road in Glendale was becoming a Baker family compound, so we were pretty well covered when we came to town to close on the house. It coincided with a downtime for sexual activity, but an up time for talk show appearances. Rob figured out a half dozen bits that we did together, and with Gertrude. Then, Peter appeared with me the second time I did
All Things Considered
and we discussed
Clap Your Hands
. Peter showed some of the photos of me ‘flying’ and one with me looking about a foot high in front of Lauren Boscombe, the nine-year old extra.

Peter’s first order of business after we closed on the house was to start remodeling the ‘rumpus’ room into a studio. I was rather unceremoniously, but nonetheless officially, appointed the interior decorator for the rest of the house and instructed that, on no occasion, for any reason whatsoever, was I to ask or solicit Peter’s opinion on anything that was being done outside of the studio.

It took almost two months to get the house together, and we spent a good deal of the time at work in the mountains. The house and studio came together just about the time the show was renewed for another block of episodes and I had to go back to work. Dillon got me a big raise over and above the already scandalous amount the former two-fifty a bout catfighter was getting for being America’s favorite ditz.

Peter worked in his new studio, I had basically posed in about all the positions he needed for the show. The ones he finished drying on the wall were pretty spectacular. The only nude was his take on Ingres’ Grande Odalisque, correcting Ingres’ anatomical distortions, and drawing on similar paintings by Titian and Giorgione, but mostly on his favorite artist, Jacques-Louis Alex. He was still working on it when I went back to work on the show. It showed my tush and a tit, neither of which do I have any reason to be ashamed of. I thought that immortalizing them in a painting was a sweet gesture on the part of a sweet man who had trouble keeping his hands off them in real life.

The show was the same grind, and Peter maintained the tradition of massaging me to sleep on weeknights with sufficiently carnal weekends to tide me over. The second Saturday night I really went a bit wild on him. I did my cat cleaning thing, tongue and paw on any and all exposed parts, rolling as we did it and we managed three times before falling asleep, followed by his usual wake me up to an orgasm morning. That Sunday I was really primed too. As soon as the fog cleared and the orgasm passed my toes, I pushed him on his back and just hopped on. I got my hands underneath him on his tush and pulled us together like I wanted to come out behind him. After which, I reminded myself that, at some point in the coming renovations, it might really be a good idea to soundproof the bedroom.

The show remained pretty much the same; it wasn’t broke and the general rule in television is that if it isn’t broke, copy it.

I did interviews with half a dozen publications, all of who seemed to know of my past in the Valley and told me that it wouldn’t be mentioned. I got along really well with Elle Fanning, who was freelancing an opportunity for Glamour. So when she told me that the Valley wouldn’t come up, I said I wasn’t ashamed of it and it didn’t need to be covered up. I added that the painting that was going to be exhibited in Peter’s one man show in the spring showed more of me than I showed in the Valley.

Well, it wasn’t really a cover up; it’s just that the publishers had learned that the public didn’t react well to such revelations. Over the last decade or so, a lot of actors crossed over. Usually the ones that did were not stars and – acting pretty much being acting – the rating was not as relevant as the number that ended up being written on the check.

Plus, I had the protection of Kelvin Gardener who had his fingers in enough pies in the publishing business that any writer bringing it up could expect freelancing opportunities to dry up for a while.

“And I just thought Cash was the worst producer and cameraman in the Valley,” I said.

“Truth be told, Cash is almost the triple X industry all by himself. The others come and go, Cash is about the only constant, well, you have to throw Ron Jeremy in there somewhere I guess,” said Elle. “Jeremy is like the crossover I mentioned before, he’s done a lot of bit parts in movies and with Troma he’s a star, yet I think he was named the top in triple X box office.”

We stayed in Glendale after the show ‘wrapped’ (as a popular TV character, I finally felt entitled to use the jargon). Dillon had me in talks with several movie producers, which meant that they wanted me to read a script and test for or accept a part in one of them. The one I really wanted to do was Rachel’s remake of Four Faces West. Harrison was slated to play Sheriff Pat Garrett. And I wanted the part of Fay Hollister, which was pretty ambitious in that it was the leading actress role and none of the roles I was being offered came close to being a leading role.

I loved the story. I had read it in high school. Basically the story is about how the old West was inter-related, how enemies became friends against the wilderness. A bank robber on the run stopped to save a family of Mexican farmers who have cholera; he nursed them back to health and caught the disease himself. Pat Garrett helped him regain his health (Fay Hollister was his nurse), took back the money from the robbery and put him on a train out of the New Mexico territory. The movie made an excuse for the robbery, and promoted a love story between the robber and the nurse. To me, the book just captured a part of what the old West must have been like. Nature was the enemy and only through interdependence did outlaws, farmers, lawmen and the rest survive.

The title of the book came from a place called Inscription Rock, near Gallup, New Mexico. A soldier with Coronado carved “Paso por aqui” (“We passed this way”) on the rock. Over more than three and a half centuries, people added their messages to the rock. In its way, it sort of crystallized the diversity and interdependence of the Old West, and that feeling is what Rhodes used to craft his story around.

Having a couple Oscar winners in your corner usually helps a lot in Tinseltown. I was the second player to sign on to the project after Harrison. I did have to do a pretty involved screen test for it though. Apparently, I played Sister Anne Victoria so well that the prospective producers found it hard to believe that I wasn’t a ditz in real life. You’d think that being that good would be a plus, but I learned that typecast ends up being real life. Most people meeting me for the first time fully expected me to be ditzy.

Only about one in five pictures “in development” actually get made, so the scripts continued to make their way through Dillon to me; a whole lot of RomCom. I wanted an actual dramatic role, and Dillon agreed with me. I didn’t want to let Sister Anne Victoria become me; if I was going to be an actress, so be it, but not an actress who makes a career of a single role. In other words, I didn’t want to be an actor like Marion Morrison, who spent his entire life playing John Wayne.

What was taking its toll on me was the fact that I was not working with Peter. I really wanted to be back up in the mountains, getting undressed every day and have someone love me with his mind, his body and his talent.

Just as Christmas was approaching, it all sort of crashed in on me one night.

We slept in the nude and while we weren’t together every night, we made love pretty much every morning; we weren’t what anybody could call celibate. At one point, I just started to cry. It was quiet and I tried to hide it, but he knew.

“What’s the matter?” he asked as he turned me over to face him.

“I miss you.”

“We live together.”

“But we don’t work together anymore and I miss that.”

“You could ask Mom about that. Sometimes she works with Dad; sometimes they go their own ways. They really like working together and try to arrange it whenever they can, but they can’t always. We aren’t done working together; we’re just finishing up some personal projects. You got paid for fifteen weeks, then for another sixteen; it’s in your account. So you actually owe me twenty-two weeks, and I solemnly promise to collect on every minute.”

He was massaging my breast as he was talking. When he finished, he licked across it and I felt the shivers. He was very slow and gentle, kissing me and gently touching all of the spots that sent thrills down between my legs. And yes, if you must know, he did pay a certain amount of attention to my tush, which I suppose is why he painted it so accurately. He kept it up until it was like a day posing nude; the pressure and the heat was rising and I was waiting to be touched. He pulled me up on my side, as he always did, holding my leg behind the knee to pull him inside me. We just lay there a while. Hot and not, really gentle; just feeling together and wanting to stay that way. He finally lowered his head to my nipple and licked just as he shot himself into every nerve ending in my body.