Show Business Kills (15 page)

Rose liked this joke already. “I don’t know. Why?”

“Because it’s you against a thousand pricks! Good luck with Bergman.”

“Yeah, thanks a million, Maximilian.”

Rose’s stomach ached as she drove onto her second studio lot of the day, told the guard her name and that she was meeting
with Howard Bergman, then found a parking spot.
Bergman’s enormous third-floor office was carpeted in white, with white plush sofas arranged with chairs in two seating areas
around coffee tables.

At least, Rose thought in relief, in this meeting she didn’t have to pitch, because they’d be talking about something she’d
already finished. A script that Ellen said was her best work. Marty told her Howard Bergman loved it.

“Loved it,” Howard Bergman reiterated as his cold, manicured hand took Rose’s small, damp one. When his tall, slim frame stood
near her, she had to look up to see his lined, handsome face. His smile was fawning. This was the kind of moment every seller
lived on. The buyer was mad about the product.

“Did anyone get you anything to drink?” he asked her, so solicitously it occurred to her that seduction was seduction no matter
what the hoped-for outcome. Howard Bergman was selling himself as a lover the way he kept holding her hand and the way he
moved her to a chair by putting an arm around her. Ellen was dead wrong. He wasn’t so cold, she thought.

“Ummm… no. I mean, no thanks, I don’t want anything.” She always declined drinks at these meetings after she realized that
if she drank them she couldn’t make it through a whole meeting without having to excuse herself.

“Well, why don’t we talk?” he said, and as if on cue, three young women with names Rose later remembered as Kim, Chelsea,
and Heather, came in and pulled up chairs. And since she didn’t have to pitch at this meeting and could relax, Rose settled
into an upholstered white armchair. Howard Bergman sat on one of the white sofas, his long arms stretched out across the back
of it as he spoke.

“I see this as a piece about the struggle between the life force and the triumph death ultimately has over all of us. A study
in the futility of our fight, against that over which we ultimately have no control. And I see those sides represented by
the characters in the materials as you’ve written it now.”

What the hell was this pretentious speech leading to? Rose wondered. Maybe, she mused, she should have rewritten it for Ellen’s
studio and let them blow the husband up at the World Trade Center.

“But what I want to do, want you to do now,” he said, “is to mine their souls, to play up the passion, really lean into the
hot love story, because these people represent those forces at work.”

“You mean,” Rose asked, “you want more of the flashbacks to the love story about the couple when they first met and fell for
one another and got married? Before the husband became ill?” she asked.

“No. I mean that in your story, you create a friendship between the wife and the young doctor. But what I know without question
is that they should be fucking their brains out in the empty hospital bed with the curtain pulled around them and with the
husband three feet away in a morphine stupor. The way I see it, she’s so sure the husband is dying, she figures it’s okay,
and then the husband starts to make a remarkable comeback. And the young doctor decides he’ll have to kill him. Wants her
so much he has to murder his patient.”

Rose had a cramp in her lower abdomen. The room was silent. She knew the three young underlings were watching her face carefully.
Three young women watching to see how she would handle this. If she and Allan had had children together, she could have had
daughters their age.

A morphine stupor. This would be one of those stories that, when she told it to her friends on Girls’ Night, would make them
laugh and shake their heads in disbelief. But now she had to come up with something to say to Howard Bergman, who obviously
had no idea what her script was about.

“Well… ummm… I don’t think so, Howard, “ she said, trying to stop her eyes from blinking furiously, hating her voice for sounding
so timid, and trying to get a big breath so she could support it a little more to say the next as forcefully as possible.
“You see, my woman character is in so much pain about losing her husband that she doesn’t even notice what that doctor looks
like for months, maybe even a year, after her husband’s death.”

Howard Bergman snickered. “That would never be the case,” he said.

Rose flared indignantly. “That
was
the case.”

“Irrelevant,” he said evenly. “It wouldn’t happen that way even if it did. You writers have a problem when you get bogged
down in the truth. I realize you know about your life. But your life isn’t a film, and I know about films. Nobody’s going
to believe, if I cast Tom Cruise as the doctor and Demi Moore as the widow-to-be, that she wasn’t dying to fuck him, or fucking
him already, and he wasn’t thinking of turning the croaking husband’s drugs up, high enough to take him out. That’s a story
for a hot picture. Not some vague idea that maybe the doctor and the wife learned something from the experience and maybe
some day down the line, blah, blah, blah. I mean, who gives a shit about that?”

All of that was said with a smile frozen on his face. Tom Cruise and Demi Moore. Hah. Allan would have loved that
casting, laughed himself silly over it. Andy would love it, too, the idea that goyish, handsome Tom Cruise was going to be
cast as rabbinical-looking him. But what Howard Bergman was describing wasn’t the film that Rose wrote, not the story she
wanted to tell. She wanted to deal with the way the adversity of young widowhood made her into a woman, not turn it into some
smarmy exploitive vehicle so two people could take their clothes off on screen.

Her agent Marty and her friend Ellen the studio V.P. would both tell her to take the money and run. Her supportive husband
Andy and her idealistic friend Marly would tell her to do what was in her heart. And Jan would simply tell her to be sure
that there was a great part in it for her.

Allan, she thought, wherever you are, this is our story, so tell me what to do. Look down from on high and let me know what
to say to this man. Do I tell myself that screen-writing is just my business and whoever gives me the most money gets to tell
me how to do it? Do I sell it to him and let him throw me off the project to bring in someone who will do what he asks? Or
do I tell him to shove it, and hope some other studio will want to make it the way I do?

She almost laughed when in her head she heard Allan’s voice get back to her immediately with one word. “Run.”

She stood and extended her hand. “Howard,” she said, “thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me about this, but I don’t
think we want to make the same picture. “

The minute she was on the road, she dialed Ellen’s office. Greenie put her right through.

“So?” Ellen asked, picking up. “How cold was it?”

“It was so cold,” Rose said, using a punch line from a very
old joke, “that flashers in Central Park were describing themselves.”

Ellen laughed. “You mean it was so cold his secretary had to put him in the micro and nuke him for three minutes before he
could start the meeting?”

“I mean so cold that while we were chatting the Iditarod went crashing right through his office,” Rose tried.

“Rose, hon,” Ellen assured her, “you and I both believe that good projects never die. With everything I know about this business,
I promise you that
Good-bye, My Baby
will happen. In spite of all the schlock there is in circulation, there is still a respect around here, in certain circles,
for quality work, and I swear to you it will get done.

“Sometimes I think about the book people in
Fahrenheit 451
, that scene that always makes me cry, where the people have had to memorize the books to keep the stories alive. A secret
coterie of folks who care about the written word. So hang in and you’ll prevail. Something will happen to set it moving and
get it into the hands of just the right filmmaker. I just don’t know what that something is, but I believe it’ll happen soon.”

  
12
  

S
he didn’t mean to shoot the gun. She didn’t even think she knew how to shoot the gun. She just put it in her purse before
she left home as an afterthought. Like everybody else, she’d watched all that stuff about the LA. riots on TV, and even all
this time later, she was afraid about going someplace where there was so much violence. So it just made sense to put the gun
in her purse to protect herself
.

Oh, Jesus. She’d been so nervous driving up that little winding road to Jan’s, and then when she found that funny cracker
box of a house sticking out over the valley, she thought for a minute she had the wrong place. She’d been expecting something
like that house on “Dynasty” where the Carringtons lived. She couldn’t get over that this was where a person who starred on
some TV show could live. But that was the address all right
.

When she saw the black Lexus with the tinted windows in the driveway, she knew it meant that Jan was probably home. Big deal,
she kept telling herself, big fucking deal, she’s your old college buddy. But she was nervous anyway. It didn’t matter what
she told herself, the truth was that her old college friend was a star
.

When she finally got up her nerve, she got out of her car, walked to the door, and rang the bell, and after a little while
Jan looked out one of those windows that were on both sides of the door, and she said, “Who is it
?”

When she said her name, there was a long beat while Jan looked closely at her, and then her eyes went wide with surprise and
she said, “No!” with real amazement in her voice, and then she opened the door and saw her there and said, “Hi, honeeee!”
And gave her a big hug!

Not one word about how old she looked, or how tired, or that maybe it was bad form to drop by like this without calling first
or any formal shit like that. Just nonstop talk about the days at Tech and the stuff they did at Tech, and laughing about
it. For a long time they just stood there in the front hall of her house, a hallway with toys all over it, laughing about
the old days. She didn’t tell Jan how she got her home address, and that was smart, because then Jan would have thought she
was some kind of crazo who was stalking her
.

She couldn’t believe she’d finally done it and that there was Jan O’Malley, not looking anywhere near as good as she looked
on the show, when she had makeup on and all that, but still a big soap star. And she was trying to just act like some old
buddy who happened to be stopping by. It was amazingly chatty and chummy, and they just stood there together in Jan’s little
house, a little house, not what she expected at all
.

Jan’s kid was playing upstairs, probably with the maid, and they could both hear him singing and laughing, so she said, “Aren’t
you lucky to have a son. I had kids.” Then she realized she’d said it like that, as if they weren’t hers any more. I had kids.
“I’ll show you, “ she said, and she was
going to go into her purse and pull out pictures of her kids, but while she was reaching in to get them, the strap on her
purse broke. Fucking piece-of-crap purse, and the purse turned over and everything went rolling out, magazines, papers, makeup,
hairbrush, wallet. Shit!

As if she wasn’t nervous enough, that really shook her up. Jesus, there she was picking stuff up off the floor, so embarrassed,
but Jan was really nice about it and got down on the floor to help her, and then she saw the gun
.

“
Oh, that,” she said, seeing the look on Jan’s face. “My kids moved in with my husband, and I’m living completely alone, and
that’s why I have a gun. I even brought it with me here. Just let somebody try anything with me, I’d shoot them dead.” And
she laughed and picked up the gun and put it back into her purse
.

That was when Jan got really freaked out. Her face went all tense and she said, “Look, I’m glad you stopped by, but I’m on
my way out, so I have to get ready,” and then her whole voice changed and it wasn’t very nice. “You’d better go.” Go? There
was no way she was going. She couldn’t go. That wasn’t her plan. She had what she was going to do all worked out, and she
had to make it happen. Jan wanted to get rid of her, but she couldn’t go yet. So she tried to make small talk, to keep the
light stuff going, but Jan was moving her to the door
.