Show Business Kills (14 page)

Good-bye, My Baby
was a speculative script Rose had written and rewritten more times than she remembered. It was a story she’d worked on without
an assignment, because it was something she needed to get out of her system. Putting it on the page had been a painstaking
process, with the emphasis on the pain, because it was so personal, a tragedy from her own life relived each day she worked
on it, cutting into her soul and letting her blood fall all over the script.

“He wants you to come in late this afternoon, if you can, and talk about a few changes, and he has some great ideas for casting.”

Casting! Not just fix it, not just change it, not just punch it up. But Howard Bergman wanted her to come to a meeting where
they had real actors in mind. Then maybe he’d give her a green light, make a movie, not just talk about it.

Good-bye, My Baby
took her years to finish. But finally, with Andy’s encouragement, she decided if she could get it down, even a little bit
at a time, it would help her heal. Maybe it would give her some kind of closure about the death of her first husband, a man
she had loved so powerfully, still missed so much, that her dreams were full of reunion with him in some other world.

Closure, a pop psych word that meant you finally came to terms with something difficult in your life, and the coming to terms
would set you free. But before she even got to the death-bed scenes, she wrote about their powerful bond, their
recognition from the first day that they were meant to love another from past lives.

The way he’d nurtured her, adored her, brought her out of hiding and helped her to feel womanly and wise. She would sob as
she wrote about their love. And then, telling the truth about the nightmare of Allan’s last days, it was too much. She knew
there would never be any such thing for her as closure on that subject. Andy knew it, too, and he accepted it.

Some mornings while she’d worked on the script, she’d find herself curled up on the sofa with an afghan around her, sobbing
quietly, remembering Allan’s frail hand holding hers. His last good-byes and words of love. The way that two days before he
died, he looked at her with as much of a smile as he could produce and said, “I wish we’d had a child together, so you could
look at him and remember me.”

“I’ll always remember you,” she protested, holding on to him. “I’ll never stop loving you, dreaming of you, waiting to be
with you.” She remembered those last days, saying those words again and again, and the torment of losing her great love.

Scene by scene, she finally got the story down on paper. The part about the scholarly young resident who came into the room
every day to check on Allan’s well-being. A compassionate young doctor who would stop by after all the specialists and their
complicated jargon were gone, a friend who could help Rose and Allan translate all the medical reports.

Patiently he would go over the information about the treatment and the side effects of the medication. Always sidestepping
gently the news that Allan would never leave the hospital to go home with Rose, though she promised him and herself every
hour that he would. And the most important
thrust of the story, the character arc as the studios liked to call it, was the way the young wife had been forced to grow
up, to step out into the world and become independent.

“So how about that for great news?” Marty asked her now. “Can you get to Howard Bergman’s office at four?”

“Sure. I can get there. But what kind of changes is he talking about, Marty? I’m not going to let them make this if they want
to do a
Love Story
kind of death. The last producer who was interested in this asked if I couldn’t change the disease to something more attractive
than cancer. I’m not going to sanitize it. The integrity of the piece has got to lie in the way the wife takes care of her
dying husband under untoward circumstances. Real tubes, real hospital smells, and how she changes in the process. But inherent
in that has to be the realities of a fatal illness.”

“Look how you’re already defensive,” Marty said. “Don’t do a jack story. There are so few people who can say yes in this
farkaktah
business that when one of them likes your work, put on a little lipstick and go say hello to the guy. And if you want my
advice, I wouldn’t let a sale go down the toilet because of what they want to call the disease. If Howard Bergman wants to
make the husband die of carpal tunnel syndrome, I would smile and say ‘You know, Howie, that’s a great idea.’ ”

“Well, that’s where we differ, Marty. I wouldn’t say that.”

“Rose, listen carefully. Every year there are five hundred films produced. Also every year six hundred and fifty people are
killed by lightning. That means you have a better chance of being killed by a lightning bolt than of having a film produced.
In fact, in your case the odds are worse, because you
already did it once. That’s why you have to listen to me and go in and be nice to a guy who can make it happen for you again.”

As soon as Marty hung up, Rose dialed Ellen’s direct line.

  
11
  

E
llen Bass’s office.”

“Greenie? It’s Rose. Is she there?”

“Hi, Rose. She is, but she’s on the phone with Ron Meyer. Wait… she’s just winding down. Can you hold?”

“Yes.”

Ellen knew every studio executive in town and every producer. Either she’d worked for them or they’d worked for her at some
point during her relentless scramble up the shaky showbiz ladder. She’d been a gofer, a production secretary, an agent, a
producer, a network executive, a studio executive.

Once at a Girl’s Night, Marly had asked Ellen about a director who was going to be testing her for a part for a film. Ellen
squinted as if to search her memory, then nodded absently. “I may have fucked him,” she said.

“Aggh.” Jan had practically spit her wine across the table at that one. “May have?”

“Hey,” Ellen said. “That was the seventies. This is the nineties. Do you remember everyone you fucked? I’ll bet one month’s
salary you don’t.”

One month of Ellen’s salary was a colossal amount of
money. Rose always thought the story of Ellen’s rise to power was a film in itself. Once she’d been listed in a magazine with
top-earning female executives, and Rose’s father had seen it, called Rose, and asked in amazement. “Could that be our little
Ellen?”

Rose had been talking for years about writing a screenplay about the friendship among the four women. The years they’d shared,
the way they’d weathered dozens of losses, five weddings, a terrible death, joyous births, an unusual adoption. Career vicissitudes
that were like roller coasters. But every time she mentioned it, Marly’s white hair stood on end and Ellen threatened to have
her killed. Jan, naturally, loved the idea. “If you’ve forgotten any of the juicer stories about my past, call me and I’ll
remind you, Rosie,” she said.

“Think of me as the Boswell to your Johnson,” Rose tried with Marly. “The chronicler of your brilliant lives. You know it’ll
be a story filled with love and affection. A close look at aging in Hollywood. The three of you could all play the parts of
yourselves. With a sock over the lens, of course.”

“I’ll put a sock somewhere other than over the lens, if you don’t forget the idea and burn that damned file you have where
you keep scrawling notes about us. God, I’d like to do a Watergate on your office and burn every reference to me,” Marly told
her.

The file in question was one Rose had kept for years, with notes in it about the ups and downs of the four of them, and by
now there were tons of hilarious material in it. Which was what Marly was afraid of. “If you mention my relationship with
Billy, I’ll never speak to you again, and if you write one word about the twins, it’s over between us. Think about it,
Rose. Thirty years of a friendship. Are you ready to give that up?”

“Depends on who offers me more. You or Paramount,” Rose joked.

“You already used my college romance in that movie about the coed and the professor, and I forgave you. You use my parents
as characters every time you have to write WASPs. You wrote that story about the stand-up comic right after I started seeing
Billy. I’m starting to feel the way Neil Simon’s brother must feel. My life is used up.”

“Not at all. I have a lot more stories to tell about you,” Rose teased. “Thirty years’ worth.”

What Rose hadn’t told Marly or the others, though Ellen knew it from experience, was that they had nothing to fear, since
every studio exec who heard the idea told her the same thing, “Who cares?”

“It would be brilliant with Candy Bergen as Marly, Susan Sarandon as Janny, Goldie Hawn as Ellen, and Bette Midler as me,”
Rose said.

“Pass,” was one producer’s reply, accompanied by a yawn.

“Mia Farrow as Marly, Cher as Janny, Angelica Huston as Ellen, and Diana Ross as me, “ she tried, just to see if anyone in
another meeting was paying attention. No one was.

“Yeah, great, we’ll call you.”

“How about a miniseries? Farah Fawcett as Jan, JoBeth Williams as Ellen…”

No imagination. These people were dunderheads. Didn’t they know anything? Who do you have to fax to get out of here, she thought,
and laughed at the idea of using that question as a title. Maybe for an article about all the screenwriters
she knew who were leaving crime-ridden, polluted L.A. and FEDEXing the pages of their scripts to the producers who had commissioned
them. Writers who got the picture that the high-tech world of downloading computer files and sending instant fascimilies enabled
them to work in Hollywood and live anywhere they liked.

Rose wouldn’t be able to fax anyone to get out of there, even though she’d had more than enough of the business and the meetings
and the egos and the insanity. She would, unfortunately, have to stay in L.A. forever because Andy, her husband of eleven
years, had a career in a medical field that was the most forward-looking of all in this terrible brown-aired city. He was
a lung specialist.

“One more second, Rose,” Greenie said. “I hear her saying good-bye. “

Ellen didn’t say hello, she said, “Don’t tell me you’re not coming to Girl’s Night. I’m going to probably get my ass fired
because I’m leaving the second meeting this week before midnight, so you’d better make it worth it for me.”

“Of course I’m coming,” Rose said. “Andy already knows he has to come home early to be with Molly. I’m calling because I have
a meeting with Howard Bergman this afternoon, and I need the scoop on his personality.”

“He’s cold,” Ellen said. “I know a woman who was fucking him and who told me a story in order to illustrate to me what a thoughtful
guy he is. Bergman was having his annual Christmas party, and about an hour before the guests were due, his butler of twenty
years keeled over and died. Bergman didn’t want to spoil the party, so he grabbed the butler under the armpits, dragged him
into a closet, and left
him there until the guests went home. And the woman actually said to me, ‘Wasn’t that sweet of him?’ ”

“Stop,” Rose said, giggling.

“That’s who he is. Frankly, knowing Bergman, I’m shocked he didn’t prop the butler up, put a tray in his hands, and make him
serve a few last hors d’oeuvres.” They both chuckled. “That said, Rosie dear, keep in mind that he is a player and he only
meets with a writer when he’s really serious, otherwise he hands you off to a string of interchangeable D-girls, all of whom
were born post-1970. What project does he have of yours?”

“
Good-bye, My Baby
.”

“Your best work,” Ellen said. “I remember trying to get the putzes I work with to make that one over here. They wanted the
woman to be widowed and she watched her husband die by flying out the window of the exploding World Trade Center. Listen,
it’s not going to hurt you to go meet with Howard Bergman. But be prepared. It’ll be so cold in there, you could store your
furs for the winter. And Rose…”

“Yes?”

“Just to put you in the mood, here’s a joke that a writer told me today. Why is writing a screenplay like making love to a
porcupine?”