So 5 Minutes Ago (14 page)

“No, I ate,” I say, straightening Kelly’s sweater again. “In your kitchen, a second ago. The bacon’s on its way.”

“I hate this diet, but what can I do?” Kelly says, moving on from the sweater adjustments to fishing a Diet Coke from the cooler built into her bedside table. “I feel so fat I’m only wearing black. Or mumus. But they don’t come in black.”

Kelly snaps open the can and flops onto the bed, where a plate of peanut butter cookies—the store-bought kind with filling—lies next to her Apple laptop. With most clients, I would have brought the meeting to order by now. But Kelly is one of those celebrities who takes a while to notice that others are in the room—and that they have a reason for being there—so I tend to let her run on a bit.

There’s a knock at the bedroom door: Marta with the plate of bacon. “Time for my afternoon feeding,” Kelly says, ignoring the bacon and reaching for a cookie. Expertly, she twists the halves apart and begins licking the peanut butter filling between slurps of Coke.

“I’m eating the insides of cookies.”

“Well, who doesn’t?” I say, reaching for a cookie. I’ve noticed Kelly likes to comment on what she is doing as she is doing it. Maybe it makes everything seem more significant. Or maybe it’s just the way her brain works. The bipolar thing. Or the drugs. Or maybe it’s her genius as a comedy writer. Everything is fodder. Her conversations are just rough drafts.

The first meeting I had with her—at home because she actually doesn’t like to leave her house all that much—Kelly spent the entire time in bed, fully dressed under the hand-worked Pratesi sheets, smoking and fingering chocolate chip cookie dough from a bowl on the nightstand.

“People say this house is so Catholic,” she said, blowing smoke at an antique-looking statue of some saint perched on a ledge up near the star-painted ceiling. “But that’s original. It belonged to Fay. Or maybe George. But I have thought about converting,” she said, stubbing out the cigarette and immediately lighting another. “Catholics seem to get over things so quickly. They go to church. Sing. Confess. Or they become Madonna and go on TV and say
fuck
a million times and everyone puts their picture on T-shirts.”

It was that kind of thing. And if I hadn’t had a filing drawer full of undereducated, overpaid, overgroomed narcissists as the rest of my clients, I would have run screaming from the room. But Kelly was worth knowing. Plus, she had great parties.

“I’m eating the insides of cookies,” Kelly says again, reaching for another. “But this day is doing that to me.” She suddenly changes course and leaps up to snap off the gas fireplace that is blazing away on what is a cloudy if not actually cold day. “God, I’m hot and now I’ve got to get packed to get the flight to Vegas.”

From what I gathered from Chris in the kitchen, Lily is getting some lifetime achievement award at the MGM Grand and Kelly is to present it along with the expected witheringly-funny-but-affectionate speech. “And I don’t have that,” she says, running a hand through her fine, expensively streaked hair. “It’s all so very exciting.”

“Your hair looks great,” I say, realizing I actually mean it.

“It’s the
only
thing that looks good now. But we’re working toward something . . . ,” Kelly pauses with the kind of timing that gets her upward of $150,000 a week for rewrites. “Magical.”

I would be happy to spend the rest of the afternoon hanging out, eating cookies, and listening to Kelly riff on whatever catches her attention. Besides, I want to see if I can get her advice—or at least commentary—on Charles. But I have to get her to sign off on publicity for
Butterfly Girls,
and given that her normally fluky attention span seems even flukier today, I decide to just jump in with the requests: a
People
magazine story and photo shoot with Lily, a Q-and-A with Lily for
TV Guide,
an NPR interview with Lily, and—this was the long shot—pose for a photo with Lily and a local troupe of honor students for the
L.A. Times
“Calendar” section.

“Ugh,” she says, when I mention the two photo shoots. “I forgot there’s always this end of things. Okay to the interviews but forget the photos. I look like shit.” She brushes cookie crumbs from her pant leg. “Even in black.”

“Well, what if we did something creative?” I say, trying to think of something to save the
People
shoot at least. “We can put you guys in a car. Like Thelma and Louise. Or behind some giant South American statuary or something. Or,” I say, scanning the room, looking for something, anything big enough to hide two actresses, when I catch sight of the hot tub burbling out the bedroom window. “Or what if we went for some vintage seventies shot? Black-and-white. You and Lily in your hot tub. Like just your head and hands on the edge.”

Kelly pauses just long enough so I think she’s seriously considering the idea. “Why don’t I just put my boobs up there if we’re trying to distract people? I mean, it’s the only part of my body that isn’t fat.”

Okay, moving on. But before I can bring up Plan B, Marta appears back in the doorway, this time draped with what looks like a dozen pairs of black trousers. “Kelly, do you want me to pack the cashmere pants or do you want to wear them?” she says.

“Pack. No, wear,” Kelly says, jumping up to fetch another Diet Coke.

I forge ahead. I need to get this nailed down before Kelly’s attention fully sails away. “All right, forget the
L.A. Times,
but think about
People
because I know they can shoot around you,” I say. “You could just stand behind Lily or something. How is she, by the way?”

“I think she doesn’t notice how much better she is since that last husband left. That’s the thing about our family,” Kelly says, bored now with the publicity requests, flopping back on the bed. “We’re survivors, but the bad thing is that you keep creating things to survive. To show off your gift.”

“I don’t know. Do you think that’s you or Hollywood?” This is the good thing about Kelly: you can actually ask her stuff like this. “It seems like there’s a lot of things to survive here.”

“For me and Lily? Yes. But I think that’s pretty much true for women here in general. You have to survive Hollywood.”

“Yes, but some women do well here,” I say, suddenly trying to think of one even as I say it.

“Well,
Liz
lives well,” she says, and I know she means Liz Taylor because Kelly always says things like that.

“No, I mean some women continue to work into their sixties.”

“Name one who isn’t just doing cable films.”

“Shirley Maclaine. Meryl. Susan Sarandon. Goldie.”

“Except for Shirley, they’re in their
fifties.
You don’t get culled from the herd and killed until you’re sixty. Look, the point is, it’s hard for women in this town, and it’s almost impossible for older women.”

“I read somewhere that Joan Collins tries to make a million a year.”

“Jesus,” Kelly says, sounding genuinely nonplussed. “How does she do that?”

“I read it in
TV Guide,
” I say. “When she was doing that guest-starring role on
Will & Grace.
But look at you, you do great as a script doctor.”

“I
don’t
do all that great,” she says with such vehemence that I’m startled. “I do
some
of that, but it’s such an inflated notion that I do that a lot. It would be great if I could do more—financially, I mean, but there’s a lot of people who do that sort of thing—a lot of
guys.
I’m just one of the few who happens to be a celebrity.”

Before I took her on as a client, I knew Kelly had had some hard times. That she’d put her house on the market for a while. And then there was a jewelry line she and Lily had talked about doing—the Cohen Collection or something—and trying to sell it on QVC. But that’s a lot of actresses’ dirty little secret. Hawking something—a diet plan, a skin-care line, jewelry, clothing—on the home-shopping channels when your acting career goes south. Which it almost always does. And usually sooner rather than later. Unless they get lucky and make a lot of money, like a studio exec or like Julia Roberts or the actresses on
Friends,
and have the brains to save it or build a real business with it, like Connie Stevens did with her day spa down in West Hollywood, women never really stop looking over their shoulder.

“Yeah, and the industry has changed,” Kelly goes on, shaking her head. “It used to be a lot of people could earn a good living. Now it seems like there are the phenomenally rich and then the rest of us in this weird no-man’s-land.”

“That’s not what the rest of the country thinks. They think everyone working in Hollywood is phenomenally rich.”

Kelly snorts. “That’s because it’s in their interest to think that. And the media only encourages it. Hollywood is still our collective fantasy. Our big wet dream. We could all be rich and famous if only we had the right nose job. But the reality is, Lily can’t get a job. And it’s harder and harder for me to get jobs. It’s like being an athlete and having to retire at age thirty-five. Not because you can’t do it anymore, but because that’s just the way the business works.”

I decide to take a flyer and interject men into the equation. “Well, you could just meet the right guy and live happily ever after.”

Kelly looks at me. “Okay, stop right there, because we’re not talking about me. Not with my track record. Did you meet someone?”

Just when you think she’s totally on her own planet, she comes back to Earth. “Uhm, well, yeah. I don’t know.” I sound like I’m in third grade. “He’s a publicist. In our agency.”

“He’s a
publicist
?” she says. “Well,
that’s
your problem. Women are not only screwed professionally in Hollywood, but you can’t date any men here. Look at Lily. Look at me.”

Frankly I’d rather not, but she isn’t giving me much choice. “Well, why not?” I mew.

“It’s all food-chain rules. In a one-industry town, your social standing is always relative to others’. Someone’s up. Someone’s down. If he’s higher on the food chain than you, it’s all about him. But if he’s lower, then it’s all about him sucking up to you. Or you
think
it’s all about him sucking up to you. Either way, you can’t trust it. Because it’s never about being equals.”

“So, I should just forget it?” I say. “I should have just stayed unhappily married back in New York?”

“No, there are men you can date in L.A. You just have to know where to look.”

“Like where?”

“Plastic surgeons. They have great incomes, you get free work done, and they love hanging out with an industry crowd but aren’t competitive with it because they know eventually everyone comes crawling to them.”

“Oh great,” I say miserably. I realize I’m starting to feel worse—about Charles, about Hollywood, about all of it—not better.

“But it will get easier,” she says, smiling at me like I’m her kid although she’s not even ten years older than me. “I mean, it’s not like sex stops. Unless you’re like Joan Collins, who’s maintained a very active sex life, and you have to admire that. Sex just diminishes. It’s diminished for Lily. It’s diminished for me.”

Oh
God.
I do not want to know this. I seriously do not want to know this. Or see the world through Kelly Cohen’s eyes. Parsing out life in dollars and orgasms. Then you die. I have a sudden panicky urge to call up Charles, beg him to date me—marry me—and let’s figure it all out later, from some farm in New Hampshire, when my cell phone rings.

“Are you into the sugar or the drugs?” Steven says when I pick up.

“Yes and
no.
Actually, we’re just wrapping up. What’s up?”

“Suzanne moved that staff meeting up by an hour.”

I can’t tell if this is actual news or if Steven is just trying to provide me with an exit strategy. Whatever. “I’m on my way,” I say, giving Kelly a what-can-you-do? shrug.

“Have a cookie. For the road,” she says, offering the plate. “Or take all the bacon. It will only go to the dogs.”

I make some final noises about the publicity requests and start gathering up my stuff, when I notice a large signed photograph of Richard Nixon on Kelly’s dresser:
To Kelly Cohen, from one of her biggest fans, Richard M. Nixon.

“I never saw this before,” I say, reaching for the photo. With Kelly’s fabulously famous life, it seems strange that she should have a photo of Nixon.

“That gets a lot of attention because I’m not much of a Republican,” she says, heading into the bathroom. For a second I fear she’s not planning on shutting the door. She did that once, but that was back when she was still drinking.

“It’s a long story that started when I was a kid,” she says, her voice muffled by the door. “I didn’t want to go to the White House but my mother made me and got me a picture of him then that said, ‘To Kelly Cohen, may all your dreams come true.’ So I wanted to write him back and say, ‘I dreamt you were impeached,’ ” she says, her voice drowned out by the flushing toilet.

“But I lost that picture somehow.” Kelly opens the door and turns to the sink and begins brushing her teeth. “And I told that story to someone who happened to be doing Nixon’s book on tape and so she got me that photograph.”

Kelly wipes her mouth and examines her teeth in the mirror. “It just goes to show you.”

“What?”

“Well, he died two weeks later.”

“So?”

“So, I hated him while he was alive, but once he died, I realized I missed the bastard,” she says, giving me a tired smile. “But then, that’s what fame is all about.”

“What?” I say, suddenly anxious for one piece of workable advice. “What’s fame all about?”

“That it’s no respecter of persons.”

11 How Old Did You Say You Were?

                  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Steven tosses a square red envelope onto my desk. “I’d say open it at your peril, except I already know what it is.”

I stare at the envelope, in no mood for surprises since it’s taken weeks to get everything tamped back down to workable chaos. Troy is under wraps until his court date, whenever that is. Carla Selena is a distant—bad—memory at the agency. I’ve gotten Kelly to agree to the
People
shoot. And most important, my stay in the doghouse is over after Suzanne took me to lunch at the Grill last week and asked me to help with the Phoenix. The Phoenix, who might or might not be quitting BIG-DWP. Depending on what her astrologer says. Or maybe it’s her psychic.

We’ve even moved our offices. Finally. The one good thing about our merger with BIG. I now have a real office with a window—a view of a dying palm tree and a parking lot, but still—sisal carpeting, a new computer system, an Aeron chair, and my own orchid. With someone who comes in and waters it. Or mists it. Or maybe just talks to it. There’s even a masseuse who comes in on Fridays to give head and neck massages for those who feel the need. So far, I’ve felt the need every fucking Friday.

“Well, I know it’s not from Charles,” I say, poking the envelope suspiciously.

Charles. He’s the only unresolved issue. Ever since our disastrous date, or nondate, depending on your view, and his aborted
mea culpa
s—
culpas interruptus,
as Steven said—I’ve taken to just avoiding him. Which isn’t hard given the chaos of the office move and the fact that there are at least twenty-five other DWP publicists he’s to meet with before heading back to New York. Most days we never cross paths.

“Oh, come on,” Steven says impatiently. “It’s the invitation to G’s birthday party. All the DWP publicists got them. It’s a goodwill gesture from the Biggies. ‘Our first joint social event.’ ”

Oh God.
The
birthday party. Rachel warned me about this. “Oh, great,” I say, gingerly slipping open the envelope. No telling what might be inside given that twenty-year-olds are planning the thing. But then twenty-year-olds plan a lot of stuff in Hollywood. Sparkly glitter rains down on my desk. Oh God. I hear a choking sound that I realize is Steven. Trying not to laugh.

“Hey, he’s your boss too,” I say, shooting him a look.

“Don’t look at me. I didn’t get an invitation.”

“Well, you’re my date to this thing no matter what.”

I shake out the rest of the glitter and pull out the invitation. Engraved. Red ink. At least it’s not shaped like a heart. Or a pair of tits. I’d heard that happened one year. I scan the details.

What:
Our own Doug Graydon’s Birthday!
When:
Friday!
Who:
All of us!
Where:
The office conference room.

“Oh,
that’s
special,” I say. “They send out an engraved invitation to a party in the conference room?”

“I think it’s about the spirit of the thing,” Steven says, making another choking sound.

“You’re not helping.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, wiping his eyes. “I’ve just never seen a sorority rush before and it’s actually kind of moving.”

“Since you’re so into it, you can RSVP for both of us.” I toss the invitation aside and reach for my headset. “And find out what the deal with the gifts is. We don’t want to be left out of that.”

I hear my cell phone burble inside my bag. Against my better judgment I fish it out and answer. Probably Mom with more details about their trip out here, which I’m already regretting.

“So I hear the party is Friday.”

Rachel.

“What is this? G’s birthday is a local holiday?”

“I told you, it’s a huge deal. At Sony it was like sorority rush. You either made the cut or you didn’t. Believe me, G’s keeping score.”

“Okay, so I’ll get a big gift. A custom-made bullwhip. Or some chaps. One size too small. I’ll go to Henry Duarte, king of custom leather wear. That should make his day.”

“I’m serious. Has he laid off anybody yet?”

“You know he hasn’t,” I say with more irritation than I intend. It has taken me weeks to get the whole merger and G’s arrival, not to mention my trip to the woodshed after Troy’s little dust-up, into some kind of workable perspective where I’m not looking over my shoulder every second. Now I’m starting to get riled up again.

“Look, all I know is that at Sony, he usually found a way to dump a few people every year and he tended to do it right after his birthday,” Rachel says. “Read into that what you will.”

“I choose to read nothing into it. Not since Suzanne took me to lunch and I’m no longer officially on the agency shit list. Besides, I just don’t have the energy.”

“Well, it’s your party,” Rachel says.

“Actually, it’s G’s,” I say, anxious to bring this to a close. When Rachel is in her apocalyptic mood, it’s best to just get out of the way. “But I’ll give you a full postmortem.”

“Thanks,” she says, brightening. “You know I love hearing about other people’s misery.”

By the time Friday rolls around, I have a packed schedule. Overly packed. A conference call with the New York office at 7
A.M.
, followed by a breakfast meeting over in the Valley with some Warner publicists to go over an upcoming campaign. Then I have to spend the rest of the day baby-sitting the
People
shoot at Kelly’s that I just know, given Kelly, will become the Bermuda Triangle—the black hole from which I will never escape in time to make it back to G’s party by five.

Plus, it’s roasting and humid as all fucking get-out—the wind is off the ocean, straight up from Mexico—so I have no chance with my hair this morning. I couldn’t get it together to book a blow-dry the day of G’s party? Now, heading back from Warner’s with the car’s AC roaring, I’m already melting in my gray suit and white cashmere tank top, my hair all but exploding out of my ponytail.

“So if you’re not out of Kelly’s by four, I’m coming over to relieve you,” Steven says, when I reach him on my cell.

“Funny, that’s exactly what I was going to say,” I say, scrunching the phone up to my ear as I wiggle out of my jacket.

“By the way, what are you planning on wearing to the party?”

“What I’m wearing now. A sheen of sweat and a bad mood. Why? What are you wearing?”

“A gray suit. And a red satin bow tie.”

“You’re going for what there? Pee-wee Herman?”

“Before the arrest.”

“Oh, nice call,” I say, throwing my jacket into the backseat. I can only imagine what G will think about my Boy Wonder in full West Hollywood mode. “Look, I’ll call you later. But promise me you’ll rethink the tie.”

All in all the shoot goes about as well as these things go. Which is to say five hours of fucking around with the lights and the clothes and the hair and the setups—the endless setups—for two workable three-by-fives that Kelly and the magazine can live with. There’s a little trouble when the hammock—in which the stylist has carefully arranged Lily and Kelly over Kelly’s objections that it makes her thighs look “even fatter to be pressed together with knotted rope like two smoked hams”—gives way, dumping them to the ground. Lily thinks she might have sprained something and Kelly disappears into the house to change, or rest, or make a call, or take something.

And then there is the minor accident with a pitcher of pomegranate juice Marta brings out after Kelly announces she’s moving on from Atkins to antioxidants. “I couldn’t get rid of any fat cells, so I thought I’d try eliminating free radicals,” she says, hoisting a glass. “Plus, it sounds so seventies.”

I would be more appreciative in my laughter if half the juice hadn’t wound up all over my white tank top when Kelly’s dogs chose that same moment to make their appearance. Since Kelly owns nothing that remotely fits me, she has to go into “the archives,” as she puts it, “when I still resembled normal human form,” and emerges triumphant with an old T-shirt silk-screened with a caricature of Richard Nixon and
FUCK THE BIG DICK
scrawled below. At least it’s white. If I can bear to put my jacket back on in this heat, you won’t really be able tell it’s Nixon. Besides, none of the Biggies are old enough to know who he was.

“Hey, do I still have that old cashmere cardigan in the office that I kept there for emergencies?” I’m on my cell to Steven, speeding down Coldwater toward the office. It’s four-thirty and I have no time to swing by my house to grab something else to wear. Not if I’m going to make the party in time, and according to the tart-tongued follow-up e-mail from the Biggies, late arrivals are strictly forbidden.

“Negative. You took that to the cleaners when we moved the office,” Steven says. “Why? What happened to that uptight Kate Spade outfit you had on this morning?”

“Yeah, well, Kate had a little run-in with a glass of pomegranate juice. Now my chest is covered in a protest poster from the seventies.”

“I’m sure there are some who would find that a turn-on.”

“Well, only if you’re a Democrat and old enough to have voted in 1972.”

“No one in this office will admit to even being alive in 1972; better just keep your jacket on,” Steven says. “Besides, everyone will be looking at G, not you. He’s gone hedgehog finally.”

Maybe it’s the heat or the chaos of the day, but I have no idea what Steven’s talking about. “Hedgehog?”

“Hair transplants. You know, the Jack Nicholson–Harrison Ford overgrown brush cut where their hair stands straight up. Like new sod or the white guys’ version of Don King’s ‘do. Actually, I think it’s a sign for ‘I can no longer get it up, but at least my hair can.’ ”

A car swerves to a stop right in front of me—must have finally picked up their cell connection in the canyon—and I slam on my brakes. “Well, God knows you and not I are the expert on men getting it up,” I snap.

“And she’s already feeling sorry for herself. Good thing there’s a shitload of sugar in your future,” he says, and I can tell he’s trying to be nice. “Better hurry. I already hear singing down the hall.”

By the time I pull into the garage and take a second to check the damage in the rearview mirror, I realize I am beyond repair. The T-shirt is the least of it. After a day sweating through a photo shoot on Kelly’s sun-baked back patio, my suit is wrinkled, my face is shiny, mascara pools under my eyes, and my hair is a mess after I managed to break the only hair clip I had with me. I fumble in my bag looking for a pen or a pencil, anything to make an emergency ponytail. Nothing. I try the glove compartment. Maps of Marin County and New Orleans, a stained
Entertainment Weekly
baseball cap, Burger King napkins slightly used, and red lacquer chopsticks from some Jackie Chan press junket. Oh well, no time to quibble. I yank my hair into a knot and anchor it with one of the chopsticks, wipe the mascara from under my eyes, and blot my face with the Burger King napkins. Fresh lip gloss and a spritz of Creed to cover the smell of ketchup. It’s as good as she’s gonna get.

I don’t even bother to hit the ladies’ room when I get to the office. I looked scary enough in my rearview mirror. Hardly need a bigger view. I drop my bag in my office—Steven must already be at the party—finish buttoning my jacket so only the top of Nixon’s head is exposed, and head down the hall. Toward the high-pitched squealing.

No wonder. The conference room looks like a bridal shower. Masses of white flowers from Mark’s Garden, silver balloons, and hyper-looking blondes. Instinctively, I head for a corner. As I pass by the conference table, I see the cake. Cakes, actually. One large white one from Sweet Lady Jane with the frosting done up in black and green like a
Variety
front-page headline:
GRAYDON DOES IT ANOTHER YEAR!
with a squiggly head shot of G in black icing, although it’s unclear if that’s his new hairdo. At each end of the table are more cakes—cupcakes, actually, dozens of them decorated with tiny
G
s in silver icing and stacked on tree-shaped cake stands. At least there are what looks to be half a dozen bottles of nicely chilled albeit nonvintage Dom on the table.

“Isn’t it adorable?” I hear one of the Biggies say. “We’re going for a silver anniversary theme although we don’t actually know how old Doug is.”

Surely old enough to know better.

I scan the room. Where the hell is Steven? I hate coming stag to office events. Leaves me open to conversations with my fellow publicists, which is something I try to avoid.

“It looks like a Hostess truck exploded in here,” he suddenly hisses in my ear.

“Oh, forget the room. How do I look?” I say, trying to smooth the worst of the wrinkles from my skirt.

He gives me the once-over. “Is that a chopstick in your hair?”

“Oh, that really hurts,” I say, glancing at Steven’s skintight gray suit and red bow tie, “coming from you, Pee-wee.”

“No, I like it, it’s kind of Kate Spade–goes–Suzie Kwan,” he says, reaching over to pull open the top part of my jacket. “Tricky Dick,” he says admiringly. “You
are
a mass of messages in that outfit.”