Show Business Kills (44 page)

The item on the police letting the guy go was on page three, and she tried to look nonchalant as she read it, but it made
her sick. How could they let him go? What if they started a big investigation and somehow figured it was her. What if Jan
got better the way they did on those soaps and told the police to go and find her. When she looked up and saw a police car
pull up at the curb, she felt like vomiting
.

“
You on vacation here?” the waitress asked when she slid the plate with the toasted muffin in front of her. She was a soft,
pudgy woman with a round, friendly face
.

“
Yeah,” she said, trying to look like she was okay, and opening the little tin of strawberry jelly, but when she stuck a knife
in it, the jelly oozed red like blood
.

“
We got coupons that can get you on that tour across the street for less than half price,” the waitress said, as if she were
talking to a child. “If you feel like it, you could check it out. I’ve never done it, but some of my customers have, and they
say it’s a ball and a half
.”

She swiped some jelly across the muffin, but she was just doing that to avoid the woman’s expression, which was “You’re a
charity case, so I’ll be nice to you
.”

“
It’s usually thirty bucks, but I think with these coupons, it’s only about ten or twelve or something like that. Any interest
?”

The knot in her chest cleared up when she saw the cop take a newspaper out of one of those coin machines at the curb, get
back in the black-and-white, and drive away. “It’s supposed to be Hollywood at its finest,” the waitress said.
She wanted to say to her, “Lady, I should be a star at that studio, not begging for coupons to go on some tram with a bunch
of fat guys in Hawaiian shirts
.”

“
The tram rides right through the sets of the shows they’re shooting, and they point out the way they do all the stuff you
see in movies. It even goes right past the office of the hoo-has who make the movies, and the big deal commissary. One of
these days I’m gonna go over and do it myself
.”

When the waitress put the tab down in front of her, she slid a coupon along with it, and said to her with a wink, “You ought
to think about going on over there, girl. It’ll cheer you up
.”

  
34
  

W
ithin hours all of the bookshelves in Ellen’s big, airy, bungalow office at Hemisphere Studios were empty. The dozens of books
and screenplays and photographs, which until that morning had jammed the white lacquer shelves, were now almost all packed
into moving boxes, and the open boxes lined the walls of the room.

A warm breeze blew through the open window and rustled the to-do list Greenie had put on the desk, a list on which nearly
everything was crossed off. The only items left in the room, besides the furniture, were the TV and the VCR, which both belonged
to the studio. He sighed, thinking there was still the bathroom to finish, but Ellen would have to clear that room out herself
so she could decide what she wanted to save and what she wanted to toss.

“I remember the day we moved into this office with such high hopes, and now look at this exit, like Jews running from Cossacks,”
he said.

Marly, dressed in faded jeans and a black cashmere sweater, her white hair pinned up by a black barrette, had arrived from
her hospital shift to help. She insisted she had to
help Ellen make a fast exit from Hemisphere Studios. She said it was something she was good at because of her work with battered
women. “It was never in Ellen’s life myth to work for those men,” she said to Greenie as they loaded the last few boxes, “and
this is what’s supposed to happen.”

“Honey, it’s a myth to call them men,” Greenie said. “They’re mice. And this is one mean, fuckin’ town.” He was measuring
a piece of tape to the proper length and then cutting it with a scissors. “One of my friends, a woman producer, made a great
movie that bombed at the box office, and afterward she said to me ‘Gee, I don’t know why they say it’s cold in this town.
I got fifty calls from people telling me they felt awful that my movie was such a financial disaster! Wasn’t that sweet of
them?’ Sweet my adorable tush. If the picture had been a hit, not one of those jealous jerkoffs would have dialed her number.”

Marly walked from box to box, taping each one shut, while Greenie followed her and marked the box with some reference to its
contents. “They were so pissed at Ellen for her style of saying good-bye, they cut our phone lines,” Greenie said. Ellen was
outside in the parking area, but through the open window of the stucco cottage she could hear him.

“Which I guess is nothing, since one studio exec we know disagreed with the biggie and came in to find his office furniture
on the lawn. So get this,” he said. “I went over to the commissary to get an apple for myself, and I tried to call Ellen from
there to see if she wanted one, too, and when I dialed the number, the studio operator got on the line and said, “Sorry, sir,
that number is no longer in service.’ I said ‘The fuck it isn’t! You’d better put me through, you puppet
of the Armani Advantaged, or I’ll come over there and strangle you with the switchboard wires.’ ”

Marly let out a hoot of her most outraged laugh. “What’d she do?” she asked.

“She hung up on me, natch. She couldn’t defy them.”

Ellen lifted a heavy box full of scripts that fell into the category of writing she loved and which she’d tried to get the
“boys” to do, but on which they’d passed, “and pissed,” she thought as she put the box into the trunk of her car. Now maybe
she’d have a chance of seeing the projects through at another studio. She felt light with the relief of knowing that after
today, she never had to set foot on this lot again. That she was freed from the churning, stomach acid–producing anxiety she’d
felt every time she’d walked into a room with that heinous group of executives.

“They gave her less than a day to get out of here. The car lease guy is coming to her house tonight to pick up the BMW,” Greenie
said.

Ellen smiled. Greenie was as glad as she was to be getting out of this place. She’d already had a call from Jodie Foster about
a job, or at least about some projects they could do together.

“Schatzman knows that Ellen made every deal that was worth anything last year. In fact, she saved his heavily used ass a few
times, and still he let all that sexist shit go right past him, like he wasn’t even hearing it. If you ask me, they’re all
a bunch of…”

Greenie’s tirade was drowned out for Ellen by the voice of the tour guide on the approaching tram, “… brilliant studio executives
who develop and nurture the fabulous films you stand in line to see,” the guide was saying in a saccharine
voice. “Some of those executives have offices in the one-story bungalows on the left.” The sound of the tram full of tourists,
trundling by her office at regular intervals, had become such a usual part of her day, such a part of the studio’s revenue-producing
business, that Ellen rarely thought much about it.

Sometimes when she was on a long phone call, she’d look out the window and study the faces of the passing tourists, wondering
who they were and what their lives were like. But mostly she’d learned to block out the sound and the interruption the trams
full of curious tourists caused when outdoor shooting had to pause as one of them clanked noisily past a set. She’d learned
not to grit her teeth when she was in a hurry, in her car, to get somewhere on the back lot, and found herself behind one
of the noisy metal vehicles, having to inch along and overhear the same cutesy spiel repeated by the tour guide to the eager
tourists who had paid thirty bucks a head for the privilege.

Today it was Rose’s little white Mustang convertible stuck behind the tram. As the tram finally rumbled along on its way,
Rose tapped a little hello beep to Ellen, then pulled into one of the spots nearby.

“Rosie?” Ellen asked nervously. “Is it…?”

“Jan’s the same,” she said. “Maria left Joey with Billy and the twins and drove over to the hospital. She asked me if she
could sit with Jan for a while. They’ve been together for a long time, and I understood. So I came here, but…” Her eyes were
blinking furiously behind her glasses, the way they did when she was angry. “I drove up to the guard and said I was coming
to your office, and he said you no longer worked here. I said I knew you didn’t but I was coming to
help you move… and he just shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.”

“Oh, God,” Ellen said. “When Marly got here, the guard was still clearing people to come here, but now they must have been
told that I’m off limits.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe the fuckers have gotten to the guards, too.”

Rose was fuming. “I’ve known that guard for years, I’ve been here a thousand times in the last twenty-five years. I said,
Trenchie, what do I have to do to get on the lot?’ He said, ‘You have to be cleared by someone who works here, Rose.’ He was
giving me a tip. Telling me if I could get clearance from somebody else, he’d let me go by. So I pulled over to the side and
got on my car phone and called Will Staple’s office, and his secretary cleared me. What is wrong with those people?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ellen said. “It just reaffirms my resolve to get as far away from these nasty lowlifes as I can. Maybe
we can even get
Good-bye, My Baby
made, Rosie, by somebody who will understand it. I sent it over to Jodie this morning, and she already called to say she
loved it.”

Rose hugged her.

“Sure, sure, now Rose shows up, when all the work is finished,” Greenie teased through the window when he spotted her out
there. “Get in here and tote those boxes.”

Rose grinned. “I’m on my way,” she said and started for the bungalow. Ellen closed the trunk of her car just as another tram
rolled up the street. “… brilliant studio executives, who develop and nurture the fabulous films you go to see. Some of those
executives have offices in the one-story bungalows on the left.”

Ellen walked into the office and looked at the passing tram
out the window. At least they had tinted those windows, so she could look out but the tourists couldn’t see in. Good-bye Schatzman,
so long Bibberman, she thought, good-bye tours. I won’t miss you.

On the streets of the back lot, the trams moved like snails to give the tourists time to snap pictures of the famous sights
they remembered from their favorite films. But around these executive offices, since there was so little of interest for them
to see, sometimes the tram drivers had been known to put a little weight on the accelerator.

So the tram was clipping along at a pretty good pace at that moment, and Ellen wasn’t a hundred per cent sure, but for an
instant, she looked at the wistful face of a woman, a passenger on the tram who was leaning on the rail, who looked strangely
familiar to her.

A woman who was older, no, maybe not so much older, but haggard and tired-looking, with graying-at-the-temples-hair. She was
wearing a black cardigan sweater and carrying a big striped purse. She was so familiar that it gnawed at Ellen as she walked
over the threshold into the office.

The bathroom, she thought, coming back to the reality of the move. She wondered if Greenie had packed up her things from the
pretty tiled bathroom in her bungalow. When he saw her on her way in there, he called out, “I did most of it, but there are
still a few little things I wasn’t sure about, so they’re on the counter.” Absently, later she remembered it was absently,
she went into the bathroom and tossed the remaining cosmetics into the half-full moving box on which Greenie had marked
E.B. BATHROOM STUFF
.

“Thank God for Jodie Foster,” she heard him saying. “Otherwise I’d be looking in the
L.A. Times
for employment
opportunities. And I have zero skills. All I know how to do in this world is to say, ‘Sorry, she’s very busy!’ That qualifies
me to do what? Answer phones for Heidi Fleiss!” Ellen and Rose laughed at that joke. “Well now, at least we’re looking at
possible jobs.”