The Second Assistant (13 page)

When I finally pulled up at the visitor’s booth, I realized that the majestic marble gates were in fact concrete and that the security guard was not going to let me through without a reenactment of the Spanish Inquisition.

“No one called in a drive-on, Miss. I can’t let you in.”

“It’s an emergency. I’m needed on the set of
Wedding Massacre,
” I pleaded, glancing at the exit booth on the other side of the entrance to make sure that one of the sleek vehicles pouring under the barrier didn’t contain Jennifer. Which action only served to make me look
even shiftier and more like a deranged stalker or fundamentalist Muslim than I already did, with my knockoff Chanel sunglasses and smoking car.

“Why don’t you call Brett, the director?” I said hopefully. “And tell him that I’m Scott Wagner’s assistant and that I’ve come to lure Jennifer out of her trailer. I know that he’ll corroborate my story. Truly.”

“Hold on, and I’ll speak to the production manager,” he said, helpfully enough. Unfortunately, the security guard had probably last exercised his sense of urgency around the same time that Gloria Swanson rocked up here to film
Sunset Boulevard
in 1950, so I was forced to sit and sweat in my car until he finally came back with a proud grin and a pass for me to stick on my car.

“They’re at Sound Stage Nineteen,” he said, handing me a map and failing to point out that the studio lot was sixty-two acres in size.

One hour, two golf carts, three security guards, and five blisters on my feet later, I made it to Sound Stage 19. But the place was deserted. Except for two pretty girls—who looked like makeup artists, judging by the colorful dashes of greasepaint on the backs of their hands—who were eating sushi on the steps of a Winnebago.

“Hi, I’m looking for Jennifer’s trailer,” I wheezed when they looked up quizzically at me.

“Jennifer’s. Oh, I think it’s the one with the wind chimes outside, right?” one of the girls asked the other, who nodded into her yellowtail in a vague way.

“Thanks.” I hurried toward the trailer she’d pointed out, which was positioned at the end of a New York City street set, straining to hear Jennifer’s crying or yelling, anything that might indicate that I wasn’t
too late.
But the place seemed spookily deserted. And though I’d never been to a movie set before, I imagined there ought to be a few more people around gripping and gaffering and directing, if things were going according to plan.

“Oh, shit,” I mumbled as I limped along with bleeding feet. “Where is everyone?”

“Hey,” a male voice called out behind me. “You looking for someone?”

I turned and saw a man in a baseball cap and scruffy gray T-shirt perched alone on the steps of a mock brownstone eating his lunch.

“Er, not exactly. Well, yes, I suppose I am, but it’s okay, ’cause I
think I know where I’m going because . . . well . . . I have a map,” I finished with a flourish and a wave of the crumpled yellow piece of paper in my hand.

“Okay. Only you looked kind of lost.” He shrugged and speared a piece of tuna in the salade niçoise that he was balancing on his kneecap. Then he pushed back his baseball cap, and his brown eyes sort of smiled at me when he added, “But if you’re not lost, then that’s just great,” in what I gleaned was a southern accent.

“Well, actually, I was looking for the set of
Wedding Massacre.
It’s this movie that’s supposed to be shooting here. Terrible title, huh?” I answered his smiling-eye thing with what I thought was a cute joke.

“Horrible,” he agreed. “Well, I think that they’re over there. At least, that’s where I last heard screams coming from. Then there was an almighty bang, and it’s been dead quiet ever since.” He shrugged nonchalantly.

“Oh, no! Oh, shit! You’re not serious?” I began walking backward, stumbling to make it to the scene of the catastrophe. Could Jennifer and Brett really have killed one another in some deranged moment? Two of Scott’s biggest clients.

Then the guy winked at me and popped a cherry tomato in his mouth.

“Oh, right, yeah, ha, ha. Great joke,” I said and darted toward the trailers without looking back.

When I eventually found myself outside the door to the trailer with the wind chimes, I stood on the latticed aluminum step at the bottom and held my breath for a second before I knocked. Then I hammered in as positive a manner as I could manage.

“Hello?” I called out nervously when there was no reply. And this time I turned the handle on the door and very slowly and cautiously pushed it open.

“Hey, guys, look, it’s Lizzie,” I heard from the darkness as I put my head inside and let my eyes adjust. It was a man’s voice. As usual in this town, when the obvious was uttered, it was usually by a man. “Come on in, honey.” And there in front of me, like the Waltons gathered cozily around their kitchen table, sat Scott, Jennifer, and Brett playing Jenga.

“Oh, I’m really sorry to disturb you all. Only I thought that there was a problem, and—”

But Scott stopped me in my tracks before I could ruin all the hard work he’d clearly had to do to repair the rift between director and actress. “We are having the greatest hang, Lizzie. Just a little downtime before everyone gets back to work this afternoon. Do you play Jenga?”

“Jenga?” I asked, wondering why in hell’s name he couldn’t have let me know he was here instead of having me rush all over town having a nervous breakdown while my poor sister sat in a lonely jail cell. But relieved all the same that good relations seemed to be very much restored. Indeed, to the point where Brett had one hand up the back of Jennifer’s shirt and the other was removing a wooden stick from the Jenga tower. “No, I don’t play Jenga,” I lied. “I actually get the shakes really badly, so I’m just gonna head on back to the office.” I took a couple of steps into the doorway, hoping for a swift getaway to my desk, where I’d be sure to add diplomacy to my résumé as my greatest skill.

“Hey, look out,” I heard in my right ear as I felt two hands come to rest on my waist. I spun around, and there, behind me again, was the guy in the baseball cap from the steps.

“Oh,” I said, surprised that he’d come straight into Jennifer’s trailer without knocking.

“Luke, come in, man!” Scott yelled from the banquette.

“I’m not staying. Just wanted to make sure that this young lady found her way here okay.” He stood and looked at me closely.

“Oh, you’ve met Lizzie,” Scott said. “Yeah, she’s my second assistant. Hey, Lizzie, meet Luke Lloyd. He’s the producer of
Wedding Massacre.
” The producer? He can only have been thirty-five years old, and though he looked like he might well be a runner, this was a young industry, and it wasn’t unusual for someone of that age to run an entire studio, let alone produce a movie.

“Oh, God, no,” I said under my breath. But Luke Lloyd heard me, even above the clatter of wooden blocks and yells as the Jenga tower came crashing down behind us.

“Yeah, and you know, I was thinking that maybe the title doesn’t quite work. I was thinking that while it is what it is, it also lacks . . . I don’t know . . . maybe a little subtlety, you know?” Luke said this aloud to the trailer, but he looked very intently into my eyes while he said it. And I could just make out the pale brown freckles on the bridge of his nose.

“It’s a hit, man. Trust me,” Scott bellowed. “Do not change a thing.”

“Lizzie?” Luke Lloyd said, and I could do nothing other than contemplate his long dark eyelashes and my own suicide.

“It’s probably a grower,” I said as I tried to leave the room without further humiliation. “In fact, I like it better already.
Wedding Massacre.
Yup, it has a kind of raw, edgy quality. You’re right, it is what it is.” I finally made it past Luke Lloyd and down the steps of the trailer, leaving Scott, Jennifer, and Brett noisily rebuilding the Jenga tower. And Luke Lloyd looking down at me.

“See y’around, Lizzie.” He grinned and pulled off his cap, revealing a ruffled crop of black hair. It was only then that I recognized him as the producer I’d worked hard not to have a crush on at Daniel’s party. The one who had been talking to George and who I’d convinced myself was a supermodel-dating, sports-car-loving, dissolute bastard.

“Yeah. See you around,” I managed as I fled back toward the welcoming streets of New York, in a mad hurry to avoid trouble.

But as I walked past the brownstones that had housed every fictitious city dweller from Jerry Seinfeld to Holly Golightly, I began to drink in the strange magic of the place. This deserted movie set, with its hollow walls, doors leading to nowhere, and nonexistent rooms, was just waiting to have romance, life, and adventure imposed upon it. Because Hollywood is, after all, what you make of it. And as I sat down on the step and watched as shooting resumed on
Wedding Massacre,
with Brett behind the camera, with Jennifer acting her heart and lungs out in a screaming scene, with Scott and Luke watching with folded arms and nodding approval, I realized that in a way I did belong here. I loved the fantasy, the make-believe. And even my old egalitarian soul was satisfied by the fact that in this town anyone could make it. From the gas-pump attendants of myth to the yoga teacher in the apartment next door. Nobody was immune to the spell.

Also, the episode with Melissa’s arrest this afternoon had made me realize that I certainly didn’t belong in politics any longer. There was already too much water under the bridge. Passing through the gates of Paramount had been like crossing over into another world, leaving my past behind. Here I was among the ghosts of Hollywood. Probably sitting in the same place where Audrey Hepburn sang “Moon River.” I had to carry on: I loved Jason’s screenplay, and I wanted a chance to produce it. I loved that there would always be the vast screen of painted blue sky with puffy white clouds above the parking lot, no
matter whether it was pouring rain. I loved that my hair was a little blonder and brighter than real. And as I watched, I definitely liked the fact that Luke Lloyd existed in this world. Even though I would never be with him. He was handsome, warm, and, yes, probably horribly dissolute, but he smiled at me the way the man of my dreams was always supposed to, and I could happily pretend. Even though his southern accent might have been as fake as his concern for my whereabouts had been, it didn’t matter, because he looked the part.

And in a certain light,
I
looked the part, I imagined, as I walked back toward the parking lot. I wasn’t in the starring role, I didn’t climb into a shimmering car, and I didn’t have an invite to the big premiere tonight, but I was just starting out. I was excited and hopeful, and I figured that since I was here, I might as well give it my best shot. Just as long as that shot wasn’t a side profile, because, for what it’s worth, Jennifer and I have one thing in common—we both hate our noses from the side. Especially the left, in my case.

When I drove back out of the gates of Paramount toward the Santa Monica Freeway and home, I remembered José’s proverb:
Since there are no good men, they made my father mayor.
And I realized what it meant. In a town like this, where in the immortal words of William Goldman, “nobody knows anything,” I might, just might, have a hope at success. I might be able to take on Jason’s screenplay, help him produce it, and actually be part of the process. Certainly I thought that
Sex Addicts in Love
was one of the most incredible pieces of writing I’d ever read—barring
Crime and Punishment,
of course. I could see every moment of it in my mind’s eye. And I knew instinctively that it would make a remarkable movie. And when it came to making a dream into a reality, if José was to be believed, then I, Elizabeth Miller, had just as good a chance as anyone else.

I know that I’m full of hate and anger and frustration and I know that it’s going to take all the gold and silver and diamonds in the world to cure me.

—Caroll Baker as Sylvia West
Sylvia

I
had been thinking about bronzing products for the past half hour. Powders, lotions, sprays, shimmering liquids, big puffs that are ready to dust. In fact, I had become preoccupied by any and every method of glowing golden without seeing daylight. This was because I had been in a windowless, fluorescent-lit cell for hours now, and I knew that when I emerged, I would be tinged with the kind of unearthly pallor that would send other people clamoring for garlic and holy water and stakes to drive through my heart. I tried to remember if there were any vampire movies slated to be shot in the next few months, because if there were, I might just get myself along to an audition. Or at least if I couldn’t star, I could cash in on the inevitable vogue for translucent women when the picture came out. The likes of me and Nicole Kidman would be envied and copied. She perhaps more than me.

Copied. Copied. How many copies? Sixteen. I tapped onto the LCD screen. I was in the photocopy closet, in case I hadn’t mentioned. And it was starting to feel as if I had been born here and in all probability would die here. I’d lost any notion of a childhood, an apartment in a cheap but pleasant part of Venice, my coworkers somewhere along the corridor talking on the phones, making sense. I wasn’t
part of anything anymore, except the surging rise and fall of the machine’s noise, which even if you’ve only ever had to copy one document in your life, will be indelibly Xeroxed onto your brain in the same way as the document you duplicated.

Click. Flash of light. Click. Flutter. As the warm, inky copy lands in its chute.

And let’s face it, Xeroxing is not the easy task it pretends to be. People assume that even the village idiot could copy a screenplay sixteen times over. Well, maybe, but I don’t find it so simple. In a matter of hours, I’d lost pages, put the sheets in the wrong order, cut my wrist (Freudian, I’m prepared to admit), run out of paper, ink, toner, patience, and now, it seemed, my last shard of sanity, too. I had just begun singing a Céline Dion song that I didn’t know I knew, when the deadweight of the fire door, which had been segregating me from the rest of the human race, burst open to reveal a panting Talitha.

“Thank God you’re here! We’ve been looking everywhere for you.” Her cheeks were pink, without the helping hand of François Nars for once, and she looked stricken.

“Why? What’s happened?” I pushed the stop button so I could hear her doomy news. This scenario, by the way, is exactly what I’d spent my time in the Xerox closet anticipating. It’s part of copy-closet paranoia syndrome. You imagine all sorts of angry-boss, job-loss, deathly, terrorist, military-coup-type things happening beyond the closet. Back in the vicinity of your desk. And today, it seemed, something had actually happened. My paranoia had not been in vain.

“It’s Mia Wagner,” Talitha said, with a bulging look.

“Oh, my God, what?”

“Mia Wagner.” She nodded frantically.

“Scott’s wife. I know. What about her? What’s happened?”

“She’s in reception.” Talitha waited for my response. I waited for her to continue. Had Mia brought her Uzi? I wondered. Were we talking hostage situation? Epileptic fit on the marble? But apparently not. The bad news, it transpired, was that Mia Wagner was in reception. Period.

“And that’s it?” I asked, relieved, as I calmly shuffled my papers into a neat bundle and lacerated a cuticle at the same time.

“Elizabeth, Mia Wagner is in reception. Don’t you understand?”

“No, I don’t think I do. My boss’s wife is waiting for him. Oh, God!” I stopped and came to my senses suddenly. “He’s not in his office
screwing that cute lawyer, is he? I know he had a meeting with her earlier, but he ought to be at Warner Brothers by now . . .”

“No, Scott’s not screwing anyone. Well, not in his office. But Mia Wagner is a total nightmare. You have to come now. I refuse to deal with her. So does Courtney.”

“Okay, okay, I’m coming.” I gathered up my scripts. “Where’s Lara?”

“
Lara
won’t deal with Mia,” Talitha said to me. As though
I
were the dumb one.

“Why not?” I asked as I shuffled along the corridor back to our office carrying a cardboard box overflowing with scripts.

“Oh, Elizabeth, get with the program.” She shook her head incredulously and marched ahead, leaving me to pull in my shoulders at the last moment to stop from being knocked unconscious by the doors that swung wildly in her wake.

“Right. I see.” But I didn’t. And when I got back to my desk, I dropped the box on the floor with such a resounding thud that even Courtney looked my way.

“She’s on her way up,” Courtney said. “I suggest you go straight on in to Scott’s office. Just deal with her in there. He’s over at Warner Brothers, so he won’t be back for the rest of the day.”

“Yeah, just don’t keep her out here. It’s too upsetting,” Talitha agreed.

“Will someone tell me what’s so terrible about Mia Wagner?” I said as I got up from the floor where I’d been closing shut the box of photocopied scripts.

“Yes, why doesn’t someone tell her what’s so terrible about Mia Wagner?”

There, in front of me, was a petite, pretty redhead who didn’t look as if she would say boo to a goose. But she’d just asked a difficult question, and nobody was going to answer. Over to me.

“You’re Mia. Hi, I’m Elizabeth, Scott’s new second assistant.” I thrust out my hand and smiled.

“Elizabeth.” She shook my hand but didn’t return the smile. Instead she vacuumed me with her gaze. Every out-of-place eyelash, every button on my shirt, the scuffs on my shoes, the fact that I’d recycled my skirt from the dry-cleaning pile at home—nothing escaped Mia Wagner.

“So what can I do to help you?” I asked hastily before she could
notice that I was a frumpy suburbanite who had no business being in Hollywood in the first place.

“It’s my birthday next week, and I need to make sure that my husband buys me something that I love,” she said. And for a moment I had to think hard to remember who her husband might be. Because this immaculate, well-spoken, and brittle creature had about as much in common with my crumpled heap of a boss as she did with . . . well, me, I suppose.

Mia Wagner was wearing a red Louis Vuitton bouclé shift dress, and her hair was Pre-Raphaelite in color but post–Jennifer Aniston in style. Her arms were porcelain white and honed to perfection with something ladylike like Pilates, not a bulging muscle or shiver of flesh in sight. And while she couldn’t have been a minute older than thirty-two, she was timeless and ageless in an almost spooky way—she would always have been described as elegant but, I imagined, never as sexy. Except in a strict sort of way, which some men go for. And I wished that she wouldn’t look at me like that. I wanted to reassure her that I wasn’t sleeping with her husband, because that was clearly what was on her mind. But then again, if Immaculate Mia was his type, she ought to be able to tell that I would hardly cut it, even in the poor-substitute department.

“Shall we go into Scott’s office, where we can discuss this in private?” I suggested, remembering what the girls had said about getting her out of the way. But judging by how everyone was staring, I’d have thought they’d prefer it if we stayed, so they could watch. I wondered what they were waiting for. A tantrum? A gymnastics routine? A lightning change into Wonder Woman? I suppose whatever it was that made Mia a nightmare would be revealed in good time. Lucky me.

“No,” she said. “I thought we’d go out and choose something together.”

“Oh, well, Scott’s not in the office this afternoon,” I explained. “But I’m sure he’s got your gift all taken care of. You needn’t worry.” I made a mental note to order a devastatingly tasteful bunch of flowers and have them sent to his house, just in case he did forget.

“I didn’t mean my lame fuck of a husband,” she said disdainfully. “I meant you.”

“Oh, you want
me
to come shopping with you? Now?” I asked, stalling for time and hoping that Lara would appear and save me.

“I don’t have all day.” She glanced at her discreetly diamond-framed Patek Philippe watch and looked at me as if I were a lame fuck, too. “So why don’t you get your purse, and we can go?”

“Well, I really ought to clear it with Lara.” I tried to be polite. “She’s the other assistant, and it might be better if she were the one to go shopping with you because . . .” At this point Courtney and Talitha practically ducked under their desks with looks of astonished incredulity on their faces. Clearly they expected stilettos at dawn at the mention of Lara’s name. Thanks, guys, for telling me that there was a little
froideur
between Mrs. Wagner and Mr. Wagner’s assistant, I thought.

“I know who Lara is,” she spit venomously. “Which is why I’m asking
you.
Now, please, would you just come with me? The valet is probably smoking a cigarette in my car as we speak.”

“Okay, right, well, of course. I’ll just put the phones on voice mail,” I said reluctantly, and followed her invisible bottom and the military click of her heels along the corridor to the parking garage.

“So I’m going for something with resale value,” she said as she zooshed up the air-con and eased into fourth gear. And if I hadn’t felt a little apprehensive at being hijacked by my boss’s terrifying wife, I might actually have enjoyed the fact that I was driving away from my office in a navy blue BMW sport with the most exquisite pale calf-leather interior, by a woman who actually had on driving gloves. We drove along Wilshire past Saks Fifth Avenue and Kate Mantalini’s, through the lanes of graceless SUVs, and I felt as though I’d just stepped into a fashion spread. Everything in Mia Wagner’s world was beautiful. Right down to the Puccini aria that was drifting at a perfect volume from her stereo.

“Resale value?” I asked uncertainly.

“If they’re gifts, then he can’t get them back. So the more expensive the better. Jewels and art work best.”

“I’m sure Scott would never ask for gifts back,” I said, defending Scott’s generosity. One thing he wasn’t was cheap.

“In the event of a divorce,” she informed me. “It’s my little insurance policy.”

“Oh, I see.” I tried to sound worldly, as if I knew all about divorce laws in the state of California. Which I figured I soon would anyway.

“So let’s start at Butterfields, why don’t we?” She turned and gave
me the merest flicker of a thawing smile. “Oh, God, Elizabeth, you probably think I’m terrible, don’t you?” she asked as she pulled up in front of the auction house. “But I wasn’t always like this. That’s why I’m so determined to get as much as I can out of this marriage. Because if money can’t buy happiness, it can certainly offer a little compensation for abject misery.”

“I’ve never been to Butterfields before.” I didn’t really want to get into this right now. “Were you looking for a painting or a sculpture?”

“I was thinking of a Dalí or a Miró. Maybe not Miró. I’m a little concerned that Spanish surrealists are overinflated in the market right now. I wouldn’t want anything that would lose value,” she said as we handed the keys over to the valet and made our way into the building. “But then again, who cares? It’s not my money that I’m throwing away.”

Actually, it transpired that Mia Wagner wasn’t just a fickle little fashionhead with a fondness for pretty things. And as we wandered among the paintings on sale, me gasping and Mia taking notes in a tan Smythson ledger, I realized that she was a very smart woman. Certainly, way smarter than her poor, probably about to be poor, husband.

“I haven’t always been a cunt,” she said matter-of-factly. Clearly exhibiting the one trait that she and Scott had in common, a good grasp of Anglo-Saxon. “When I first met Scott, we had fun together. I was working at the Gagosian in New York, and he came to a private viewing with David Bowie and some movie star whose name I can’t remember. And I tried to explain to him why Damien Hirst wasn’t just about dead sheep. He tried to get me back to the Mercer where he was staying, and he was so insanely charming that I went. Even though my boyfriend was at the same party.”

“That sounds like Scott,” I said. “The charm offensive.”

“ ‘Offensive’ being the operative word,” she said, quickly remembering that we were here to screw her husband for a few million dollars, not sing his praises. “Anyway, we had an amazing courtship, and it was all very fancy with romantic breaks in Bora Bora and weekends in Rome, and it’s not as if I was a stranger to all that flash. I’d dated men before who had way more money and glamour than Scott. But he made it all fun. We’d be in Harry’s Bar in Venice, and we’d be dying laughing. Or we’d be smooching beside a fire in Aspen, and he was the sweetest,
most giving, most considerate man in the world.” She jotted down the reference number of a Mondrian in her book. “But I didn’t realize that that’s what Scott does. He gives. He is the gift that keeps on giving. Only now he gives to everyone else. He gives to every stray actress who crosses his path, he gives to Daniel Rosen—who isn’t fit to lick his boots—he gives to the valets, the busboys, the directors. And he gives to women. He can’t resist women. The ones in Range Rovers at the traffic light who roll him for his car—”

“He told you about that?” I was stunned. I’d planned on having that particular secret nailed up with me inside my coffin.