So 5 Minutes Ago (9 page)

God knows Hollywood has plenty of gay stars. Every agency has them. But most of them are safely in the closet, at least professionally, and for one very good reason: they continue to work. Very few actors are willing to put their careers on the line for a few moments of honesty about their sexuality. Especially when it is so effortless to stay in the closet. Half of DWP’s gay client list live openly gay lives. They are seen around town, at screenings, at parties, at clubs, with their same-sex partners. And the media, with few exceptions, play along. Everyone might know you’re gay, but you are still presented to the public as the rakish bachelor, the sexy single gal. Of course, the superstars, the $20 million celebrity club, go through a bit more cloak-and-dagger nonsense. Actual marriages. Children. Some of it by contract, some of it simply a handshake deal.

But Scooby was determined to come out. And at first it looked like a smart decision. Scooby was hip, Scooby was cool. Scooby was a
hero,
just like her cartoon counterpart. And in fact, she was the rare actor who had dared call Hollywood on its liberal pieties. For the first few months, she and Scrappy basked in their new glow as the priestesses of the moral high ground. They even got invited to the White House. Well, Clinton was president.

But then, Scooby’s films began to open and die. The perception was they tanked because she was a “gay actor.” Gradually and then suddenly, the big offers quit coming. Now, two years later, Scooby is all but dead. Worse than dead: she is a lesbian with a grudge. And now it’s my job to fix it.

“Remember, nobody likes angry gays,” Steven says as I’m packing up for my day of meetings, first at BIG and then Scooby’s. “Not since the eighties, anyway. We’re all happy gays these days.”

“Just like
Will & Grace.
”

“That’s it,” Steven says, straightening the shoulders of my jacket. “Think of yourself as Grace. I already do.”

I’m feeling vaguely ready to face G and his minions when I glide into the garage on Wilshire, where I am waved to the farthest subterranean floor by the phalanx of excitable, red-vested valets. Great. Starting at the bottom although technically we’re moving up in the world—or at least east on Wilshire. I angle the Audi into one of the remaining spaces under a
RESERVED FOR BIG
sign and sidle out the good four inches I’m left after wedging between a massive BMW and a vintage Cadillac the color of a Band-Aid. At least I’ve worn a black suit and my blow-dry is holding up. No grooming mistakes on our first day of school. I punch BIG’s floor in the elevator and note, with a touch of envy, the cherry-and-brass paneling. We’re moving here because BIG’s digs are a better address than DWP’s ratty haunt down in the Fairfax district, and according to the Hollywood rule: the weak always travel to the powerful.

Plus BIG has more room. Or they will have once the workmen finish renovating the law offices next door that are to be the DWP annex. I push past the brass-and-glass doors with B-I-G sandblasted on them, and am confronted by a Ken Russell movie—acres of plastic sheeting hanging from the ceiling, the sound of saws roaring, and a porn-ready, large-breasted blonde perched behind the massive reception desk.

“Yes?” she shouts over the racket. “You’re here to see who?”

Whom,
honey.

“I’m here for the staff meeting,” I holler back just as the saws fall silent so my voice echoes way too loudly.

“Oh, you’re with DWP?” she says, her little-girl voice a mix of surprise and condescension. “Right down the hall,” she says, nodding at one of the larger plastic sheets. “Just push on through until you hit the conference room. Can’t miss it.”

My first reaction is that it’s a lot like one of my old Girl Scout meetings only with better uniforms. The room is awash with women in black Armani suits and sweater sets in Easter-egg colors topped by shiny blonde heads—most of whom I barely recall from our drive-by visit a few weeks earlier. Forget remembering anyone’s name. They’re all variations on
y,
in any event. Muffy, Buffy, Duffy, with the odd “Amanda” thrown in. It’s easier to tell the BIG agents from the DWPers by their odometers. A good ten, fifteen years separate the DWP agents from the BIG little sisters. Not one of them looks to be over thirty, and at thirty-three, I’m the ranking junior member on DWP’s team, whose median age—given that Suzanne founded the agency back in the late seventies—is somewhere in the mid-to-late forties. God love us.

I take it as a good sign that no one even glances in my direction when I slip in. There are two large coffee dispensers and a tray of fruit and muffins on a table at one end of the room. But this is no time to get liquored up on sugar and caffeine. I spy an open chair next to Miranda, one of the veteran DWP agents, and slip in next to her.

“Any sign of Suzanne or the G-man yet?” I say.

She looks at me with a mixture of annoyance and suspicion. Miranda is old-school, with twenty years’ experience and a respect for authority as impenetrable as aged hardwood that I can only marvel at. She’s a card-carrying baby boomer, probably protested the war in college, and screwed her brains out with Canada-bound draft dodgers. Now she has the hips and the pinched, disapproving look of a soccer mom. Or a bank repo officer.

“They’re in his office,” she says stiffly. “I suspect they’ll be in when they’re ready.” For more than half her life, this woman has been tending to some of Hollywood’s creakiest stars. Protecting their eggshell egos from the slings and arrows of daily life, which these days mostly means maintaining the fiction that someone somewhere is dying to dish the dirt on them. I once heard her railing at some editor from
Smithsonian
over a photo spread on Ann-Margret’s house. She is a mother to beat all mothers but her dedication has made her distrustful of almost everyone except her clients. As if the whole world lies in wait for her aging brood.

I give up on Miranda and scan the room. A clutch of Biggies is discussing the new Quentin Tarantino film in the kind of awed terms one would normally hear in the Prada store. Like anybody still thinks he’s a genius. I glance past Miranda at the other DWPers lined up along the wall. They look like patients in a gynecologist’s office: vaguely bored, nervous, and with the kind of flushed skittishness one has before being probed by a total stranger.

I’m about to head for the coffee when there’s a commotion at the door. G, looking like a Beverly Hills Mercedes salesman: well oiled and predatory. He seems even shorter than a week ago. If that’s possible. He gives the room a glance that makes me want to check my wallet, and steps to the head of the table.

“Folks, I think you’ve all heard the news about Carla Selena’s unfortunate and unexpected departure this morning,” G says, unbuttoning his jacket and flipping open a leather binder. He removes a pen from his jacket pocket and clicks it open like he’s unsheathing a scalpel. “Needless to say, in light of this setback, we have work to do.”

The meeting is more like a deposition than a flaying, a rapid-fire question-and-answer session that rolls on for more than two hours. The air is thick with contract quotas, clients’ names and publicists’ names colliding and then uncoiling into new, different patterns. It’s impossible to keep track of who is sent where and with whom. When the dust settles it’s not entirely clear who, other than G, is left with the spoils, and who is left with the dregs, although the DWP agents look, if possible, even more deflated than before. I’ve been publicly awarded Scooby and Scrappy—no surprise, right down to the patronizing smiles among the Biggies. Only once the meeting is winding down do I realize that in all the commotion, Suzanne is a glaring no-show.

I feel my pulse jump. That Suzanne is AWOL from the first official BIG-DWP staff meeting is at best surprising and at worst a very bad sign. Especially since no one, namely G, seems to be mentioning it. Or it could just be a scheduling thing due to Carla’s abrupt departure this morning. Maybe she had to rush to the studio for damage control or something. That has to be it, but I make a mental note to get Steven on this. When the room erupts into the chaos of exiting, I instinctively reach for my cell to call him, when I feel a hand on my shoulder. I look up. Another one of G’s Ken Russell extras. “Doug wants to see you before you leave. If you have a minute.”

I check my watch. A minute is about all I have before my meeting with Scooby. “Sure,” I say blandly. I’ve got time to go to the principal’s office on my first day of school.

G’s office is a symphony of leather. Eames chairs, black Moderne sofa. Right down to his white leather desk that looks like a Kelly bag on Viagra. I imagine whips in the closet. Of thick braided leather. That sting. I imagine this because I have at least ten minutes to cool my heels in Leatherworld before G rushes in, slightly out of breath and buttoning his jacket. I do not want to imagine where he’s just been.

“Ah, Alex,” he says, like he is surprised to find me here.

“I was told you wanted to see me.”

“Yes, yes. I did,” G says, moving behind his desk and nodding at me. “Have a seat.”

I can imagine whips, but I can’t imagine what G’s about to say, although I suspect it will be less “Welcome to the team” than “We’re thinking of making some changes.” Any DWP agent would have to be an idiot to think G is on our side, buyout or no buyout. As one of the newest hires, I am clearly one of the most vulnerable. Mercifully, I don’t have to wait long.

“Obviously there’s a lot of transitioning going on,” G says by way of throat clearing. “And there will be more changes to come and I can’t say that all of them will be to everyone’s liking. Even my own.”

He smiles a small, tight smile and plunges on in his droning-but-menacing way. Layoffs are coming and God knows it won’t be among the precious BIG agents, but the long-in-the-tooth DWP team. Too few clients or too much duplication or the recession or whatever, but the ax is about to fall. “But with your, shall we say, younger and more desirable client list, you, Alex, are in a slightly different category,” G adds, putting his elbows on his desk and pressing his fingertips together. From the light bouncing off his nails, I can see he’s had a manicure. Probably a pedicure.

I have no idea why I’m being given the concierge treatment or even if that’s what’s happening, but I nod my head and make appropriately conciliatory noises. More likely it’s G’s way of head-fucking. Or maybe I’m being culled from the DWP herd to be more easily slaughtered. I may be the youngest DWP publicist and my client list slightly less anemic than those of my colleagues, but still, what’s G’s game? Presumably he knew what DWP was—and wasn’t—when he bought it. So why does it feel like AOL just took over Time Warner? And why does it feel like Suzanne is being cut out of the loop already?

“So these next few months—and next few clients—will be crucial,” G adds. “I want you to feel free to come to me if you have any questions or concerns. Any at all. Are we agreed?”

Agreed?
It’s not like you don’t have all of us—even Suzanne—over a fucking barrel. You’re the new owner and you call the shots and short of quitting, there’s not much I—or any of us—can do.

“Absolutely,” I say, nodding like an idiot. I make a few more amiable noises—I hear myself say “communication,” even “trust,” God help me—until I realize I’m starting to run dangerously late for my meeting with Scooby. I try to check my watch without G noticing.

“Yes, I know you have your meeting in”— G holds up his hand and checks his watch—“less than thirty minutes. So you better get running. But why don’t you call me later and let me know how it went. We’ll find some time to sit down and discuss it in greater detail after you’ve met them. Map out a plan.”

I am out of there like a shot, down the hall, blow past the plastic sheeting, sending clouds of dust everywhere including my suit, give the porn star a nod, and head to the elevators. Plan. Must have a plan. Swaddled in cherry and brass, I push
Down.

6 Scooby and Scrappy

                  
One down, two to go. One down, two to go
. This is my mantra as I pull up in front of Scooby’s house—a sprawling old Cape Cod right out of Cheever country. Or it would be except for its location in Hancock Park, one of L.A.’s oldest and most conservative Jewish neighborhoods, that’s popular with two types of Hollywood celebs: Jews who want to carry the flag and live in a largely Orthodox or at least observant neighborhood, and non-Jews who could care less about the ethnic mix but who want an Ozzie-and-Harriet-type spread at below–Beverly Hills prices. Scooby falls into the latter category, and her house, with its sumptuous manicured lawn and acres of clapboard, just screams Old Money. Except for the concertina wire gleaming on top of the brick wall encasing the yard. That looks a little crack house. Or Dachau. Sure that was a hit with the neighbors.

I pull up to the massive wood gate with the same mix of dread and curiosity I always have when I’m about to meet a new client. Rolling down the window, I reach out to hit the buzzer. A voice squawks on the other end. Unintelligible. Or maybe Spanish. “Hi, it’s Alex Davidson—” I manage to get out before the gate begins its tortured, stately opening. I roll up the drive and park next to the black Mercedes SUV (Scooby’s), the black BMW 5 series (Scrappy’s), the faded, dented Honda Civic (the housekeeper’s) and the bright green VW Beetle (Amber, the personal assistant’s). I’m just gathering up my bag when two drooling Rottweilers and a large German shepherd bound around the corner and head for my car.

Oh, fuck. I have no choice but to wait for help. Within a minute, a small dark-haired woman comes out a side door dressed in the generic children’s clothing domestic help wear—T-shirt, baggy cotton pants, and cheap sneakers.

“I’m Maria,” she says in heavily accented English, as she wrestles with the barking pack. “Come in, they won’t hurt you. They’re waiting for you inside.”

I wonder if she’s referring to the dogs or her employers as I pry myself from the safety of the Audi and follow Maria into the kitchen.

Kitchen
isn’t exactly it. The room is more like a set for the Food Channel. Carved paneling and copper pots everywhere. Like anybody would actually cook anything in here.

“Would you like something to drink?” Maria asks, heading for the Sub-Zero that looms against one wall.

“Uhm, sure. Water,” I say automatically.

Maria hands me a dripping bottle of Evian and I take a minute to check out Scooby’s abode. Not bad for a down-on-her-luck dyke. The room is huge, unbearably tasteful, and the view out the French doors is equally impressive—a rolling back lawn and a pool, a shimmering rectangle sheathed in sea-green tiles, with a spewing fountain at one end and what looks like a child climbing out of the other. Scrappy, naked except for the bright red bikini bottom she’s wearing on her tiny, little-girl hips.

“Here comes mistress now,” Maria says behind me. There’s just enough edge to her voice that I turn to see if she’s being ironic. But she’s already fled.

“Oh, hey,” Scrappy says, letting herself in through one of the doors. She stands there dripping all over the tile floor, rubbing her black, tufted hair with a towel. “Hey,” she says again, extending a wet palm, ignoring the fact she’s virtually naked and I’m dressed for a deposition. “Sorry, I was just in the pool,” she says, nodding over her shoulder. “It’s so great to be able to swim at home. When I was growing up in Oklahoma, we never had a pool, so this really is our heaven.” Giving up on her hair she drops the towel on her shoulder and crosses her arms under her breasts.

“Yes, well, it’s beautiful—” I start to blather, making a mental note to bone up on Scrappy’s miserable, poolless childhood when she cuts me off.

“Is Maria around here?” she says, moving past me to look down a hallway. “Uhm, look,” she says, turning back. “Amber will be in in a minute, but why don’t you go into the living room and we’ll be right in.”

Right in
is a relative term in Hollywood. Actually what Scrappy means is, “We’ll be down when enough time has passed to remind you that we—and our time—are more important than you are.” I’m guessing given Scooby’s faded status but still contentious pride, I’ll have a good thirty minutes before they deign to show.

I head into Scooby’s equally sprawling living room, where I start to pull out my cell to see if Charles has called, when I catch sight of several oversized silver picture frames lining the fireplace mantel. I move in for a closer look. The family gallery. Scooby and Scrappy at the Oscars! At the White House! At an AIDS ride benefit! And a few artful black-and-white shots of Scrappy in various states of undress.

“Aren’t they great?” a childish voice pipes up behind me.

I whirl around, startled by the intrusion. The voice belongs to a twenty-something sylph, long blond hair straight as a bedsheet, dressed in a pair of tight low-rise jeans, flip-flops, and a red cotton tank top. A pager is clipped to her waist and in one hand she carries a cell phone, keys, and a pen. Amber.

“I just love that one,” she says, reaching past me to pick up one of the arty shots of Scrappy. “They took these themselves, which is just so cool.” She studies the photograph before slowly replacing it. “Hi, I’m Amber,” she says, finally turning and extending her hand. “Welcome.”

Typical. Assistants. The mini-me’s of Hollywood with their little-girl voices and assassin’s eyes.

“Oh, hi,” I say as frostily as I can. You misread assistants at your peril, but you can’t give them an inch.

“Well, I see you’re set with your water,” she says in the kind of voice you would normally use on a child. “Can I get you anything else before I go?”

Of course, she wasn’t staying. Assistants just act like they’re important. “No, really, this is fine,” I say, holding up my water like a victory wreath.

“Okay, well, I unfortunately have to be somewhere else this afternoon,” she says, giving a luxurious shake of her hair.

“We’ll miss you,” I say, aiming for a chipper but unmistakably ironic tone and hitting it with deadly accuracy.

Amber shoots me a look. “I’m sure we’ll be in touch,” she says, firing off one last shot. “They’ve really been wounded enough.”

Right. Wounded. I almost forgot.

After Amber flip-flops out of the living room, I flee to the safety of one of the sofas and punch up Steven on my cell.

“Yes, for God’s sake he finally called,” he blurts out before I can even ask.

“Did you tell him I’m out for the day and did you give him my cell number and did you get his?”

“Aye, Captain,” Steven says, launching into his Scottie impersonation from
Star Trek.
“Aye, and now I’m working on securing the missile launch.”

“Look, just because you’re having regular sex doesn’t mean you get to make fun of those of us who are, for all intents and purposes, celibate.”

“Ach, define regular sex,” he says, still in Scottie mode.

I’m just repeating the words
regular sex
when I hear footsteps behind me. I pray it’s Amber again and whip around. Nope. Scooby. Barefoot, bright red jeans, white V-neck cashmere sweater. And she’s not smiling. Why are the funny ones always so forbidding in person? Eddie Murphy was the same way. Took one meeting with him and he sat there for an hour, never removing his sunglasses, never once smiling. Like he was the head of the Crips or something.

I give Scooby a chipper little wave and vamp. “Okay,” I say to Steven in my all-business voice. “So fax those figures to the studio and leave a copy on my desk and I’ll go over them when I get back. Oh, and leave that number on my cell voice mail.”

“Don’t tell me,” Steven says, laughing. “Scooby just showed.”

“That’s correct,” I say, still in business mode.

“Hey, if there’s anything Scooby gets it’s the concept of regular sex.”

“We’ll see about that,” I say and click off.

“So,” I say, extending my hand to Scooby. Or rather I try to extend my hand but Scooby drops onto one of the other sofas and spreads one arm across the back. “Doug speaks quite highly of you,” she says, still not smiling. “Alex, isn’t it? Why don’t you tell me a little about yourself. Why you’re here.”

Why am I here?
Why am I here?
I’m tempted to scream, Do you think I’d be here for one minute if I didn’t have to be here? If my new, scary, unreadable boss hadn’t made me take you as a client?

“You have such a beautiful home,” I say, ignoring both my inner rantings and Scooby’s directive. “I only bring that up because I’m thinking it’s a great incentive for a piece in
InStyle.
Or
US.
”

“Really? And why would that be our first move?”

I’m about to think of some bland but plausible response—
I don’t know, because they’re the only magazines vapid enough to write about you at this point
—when Scrappy bounds into the room.

“Hey,” she says, all but throwing herself onto the sofa and curling up next to Scooby and pulling her hand into her lap. “What have you two been talking about?”

At least she is dressed. Sort of. She’s wearing a thin white halter top in a wool so sheer, cashmere, I’m guessing, that her nipples show through. Her tiny, pubescent breasts are in no need of a bra, but rather, apparently, constant exposure. She also has on a pair of tiny black leather shorts. On her left hand flashes an enormous diamond. Just a girl in love.

Smiling, I launch into a reprise of your-house-is-so-beautiful BS, which Scrappy is all too happy to run with. For the next fifteen minutes, she goes through the play-by-play, how they found the house, where the furniture came from, and on and on until even Scooby looks bored. “I think Alex gets the picture,” she says.

“Hey, I’m going to open a bottle of champagne,” Scrappy says brightly. “Join me?”

“Are we celebrating?” Scooby says, smiling for the first time.

“When aren’t we? I mean, I just think with Alex here, and her great ideas about the magazines and stuff, that we should drink a toast or something. To Alex. Or to us. Or to the beginnings of— what’s that line Ingrid Bergman said? ‘The start of a beautiful friendship.’ ”

I’m not keen to crawl into a glass of champagne. Nobody drinks in Hollywood. At least not while they are on duty. On the other hand, perhaps a few drops of the bubbly would loosen up Scooby. Scrappy looks pretty loose already.

“Sounds good!” I say, trying for amenable but essentially uninterested.

For the next two hours, I sit there going through my checklist of objectives and goals, never touching the crystal flute at my elbow, its merry stream of bubbles percolating like a tiny, golden lava lamp.

“Come on, Alex,” Scrappy says, shaking the nearly empty Cristal bottle like a maraca. “You’re not keeping up!”

I smile and check my watch. Almost five. Good enough for government work. I even have enough of a plan to snow G. A few articles in the mainstream press, nothing controversial. Some AIDS fund-raisers. The Matthew Shepard anniversary. Maybe even some testimony at congressional hearings or something. It could all just work. It’d better, otherwise all that’s left for these two is cable movies and hosting
Hollywood Squares.
I reach for the glass and its gorgeous nectar gilds my throat. I look around the room, deep in shadow with the late-afternoon sun falling across the floor. I’m exhausted but I’ve done what I needed to do. Broken the ice, gotten them to trust me. At least it looks that way, since Scooby is all but prone on the sofa, her arms folded under her head, with Scrappy curled at her feet like a cat.

I take another sip of champagne. Maybe Scrappy will start licking her paws.

“It’s all about perception, and the media creates that,” Scooby suddenly blurts out, struggling to sit up, accidentally kicking Scrappy in the process. “If the media decided to say, ‘Let’s put them back on top because they’re underdogs,’ I guarantee you that studios would offer us jobs. But not one magazine has gotten behind us.”

Okay,
happy hour is over. “Well, I don’t think that’s true,” I say, putting my glass down and wracking my memory for some recent article,
any
article on them that has been favorable.

“For some reason, collectively they all decided ‘Let’s not support them,’ ” Scooby goes on, her voice angry now. “I can’t even look at magazines anymore.”

I see my entire afternoon beginning to unravel. “Well, I don’t think—” I start but Scrappy cuts me off. “Certainly this town could decide as quickly as they decided the other way that ‘Hey, they’re hot,’ ” she pipes.

“It
can
change,” says Scooby gloomily. “But it’s not up to
us.
”

I have to get out of here. Any moment, they’ll turn on me and their whole fallen state of grace will be my fault. And my first assignment from G will just go south. “Yes, well, I think we’ve made some good progress this afternoon, although obviously there is a lot of work to do,” I say, scrambling to my feet.

Who am I kidding? This is going to be an uphill slog all the way. Actors are notoriously thin-skinned yet tone-deaf to the nuances of the public, but these two are in a league of their own. After making a hash of their own careers, they are still looking for someone to blame. And now I am the closest target. If G is trying to flush me from the herd, find a reason to fire me or whatever he has up his sleeve, he couldn’t have picked a better weapon than these two.