The Ayatollah's Money

by Richard Dorrance

  Chapter 45 – She Reels Him In

  Roger answered and an accented female voice said, “Bonjour, is this June Enterprises, Charleston, America?”

  Without a seconds delay he said, “Oui, Mademoiselle, je suis Roger June. Je t’aime, your voice, where are you?”

  Now there was a delay on the other end, and it wasn’t due to the distance between Charleston and Lake Como. Monique didn’t expect anyone at June Enterprises to tell her they loved her and her voice. Most of the film industry production people she’d dealt with were a bunch of cut throat barracudas, from whom, between the words of their speech, if you listened carefully, you could hear the clack clack of their large and sharp incisors. She looked at the phone, then at Clooney sitting across the porch table, and said, “Mr. June. Roger. May we speak English? I have Mr. George Clooney with me and he doesn’t speak French.” She smiled at George and said, “At least not very well. He really shouldn’t try. Is that ok?”

  Roger didn’t speak French either, not at all, and had no idea where those words had come from. He heard her voice, her accent, and the words came, Je t’aime. He said, “That’s ok. What’s your name? And I also have people with me. I’m going to put you on speaker.”

  “My name is Monique, and it’s a pleasure, and I will put our phone on speaker so Mr. Clooney can join. Can you hear?”

  Clooney said, “Roger, George Clooney here. English ok? I get so tired of listening to that accent of hers, very distracting when we’re supposed to be working. My personal assistant, you understand. Who’s with you?”

  “I have most of June Enterprises here in the office, you caught us working hard on your production. I have my wife, Gwen June, and Little Jinny Blistov, Gale (he didn’t add The Mouth, though he was tempted), Shimmey, and Laleh Khorram, who conceived the project.” They all heard the female voice on the other end say, faintly, ‘Wife, merde’, and then heard Clooney say, faintly, ‘Shusss’. “Thank you for calling, Mr. Clooney.”

  “Call me George. Listen, Steven and I saw all the crap you wrote around the world, and we talked yesterday about it, and, well, I guess it worked. Very clever, and there’s something about it, and we want to know if it’s all a scam, or what? I told Steven I’d set up a conference call, but I wanted to check you out and see if June Enterprises really exists, and what’s going on. So, what the hell is going on?”

  Gale stood up and practically shouted into the phone on the desk, “George, my god, it’s not a scam. We’re real and we’re hot and we want you and Soderberg here to do this show. It’ll be a knockout, you have no idea. We did the Stravinsky ballet with Pete Townshend, the greatest songwriter in the history of rock and roll, and we did the rock opera with McCartney and Fleming, and now we’re going to do this, this, whatever it is, with you two. When can you get your asses here?”

  Gwen looked reproachfully at Roger as if to say, ‘She’s your responsibility, and here she is blabbing right out of the gate, you should have controlled her for god’s sake’. Jinny smiled at his favorite Junie and mouthed to her, ‘rock on’, while Shim and Laleh just looked at each other.

  They heard Monique giggle on the other end, doing the French giggle thing, which is very sexy, and then George said, “I take that to be Gale, the shrinking violet of your team? Hi Gale. Anyone else want to tell me what’s going on?”

  Roger said, “Yes, George, that’s our Gale, how’d you know? I don’t know if you travel with your own bodyguard, but if you don’t, when you come here, it’ll be Jinny’s job to protect you from her. Let me say that the things she said were true. Two years ago we discovered a lost ballet score by Stravinsky, never seen by anyone but him, and we produced the premier here in Charleston, played by Townshend, choreographed by Baryshnikov, and danced by defecting members of the Mariinsky Ballet. A year ago we produced the new rock opera written by Paul McCartney and sung by Renee Fleming. We financed as well as produced, and that will be true of this production, if you agree to do it. We are well financed,” and he smiled at Laleh. “If you’re asking was the PR thing a scam, yes. But the production is not. We want you and Steven here, to do it, and we think it will be great. That’s part of our pitch.”

  There was a pause on the other end, and then, “Roger, all apologies to you and Gale, but I get pitches all the time. One of the best pitches I ever heard was the by the guy who wanted to make his first film, and titled it Convincing Clooney, and it was great, and I was tempted to help him out, obviously creative, but I just couldn’t justify it.”

  Roger took a deep breath, smiled around the table, ending with eyes twinkling at his wife, and said, “Yes, we’re aware of that situation, and we respect your schedule, and the demands on your time and talent, and those of Steven. We want to thank you for getting in touch with us. I’ll ask just one thing of you, George. Will you speak with Gwenny? She’s the producer here, and she’d like a minute or two?”

  “Hi, Gwenny. You from Charleston? You do those other two shows Roger and Gale mentioned? I love Renee Fleming, her Dark Hope CD. What a singer. Now if you had her on board, I’d think twice about this deal.”

  “I’m from Charleston, George, America’s most beautiful town. You know why it’s America’s most beautiful town? Because of the people. We still do politeness here; some of us, anyway. Some folks still say ‘Ma’am’ and ‘Sir’. Sounds a little old-fashioned, but we like it. We do our best with our bads from the past to make it better now. Not a small town, not a big city. We do some nice art, here, too. Can I tell you a story about Renee Fleming?”

  Sitting on the porch of Oleandra on Lake Como, Monique and George didn’t look at each other, the way you think they would. They stared at the cell phone on the table between them listening to Gwen speak. There was more than words coming from the phone; there was presence. George said, “Yes, Gwenny, tell me about Renee Fleming.”

  “And after Renee Fleming, George, I’ll tell you about Renee Zellweger, ok?”

  “Yes, Gwenny.”

  In the office at the back of the stage in The Hall, Roger, Gale, Jinny, Shim, and Laleh also listened to Gwen speak. Roger, Gale, Jinny, and Shim knew what was going on, the first three being familiar with the phenomenon, Shim to a lesser degree but had seen it twice, and Laleh seeing it for the first, but not the last, time. Roger listened to his wife with his eyes closed, thanking god for his marriage, Jinny and Gale smirking, knowing Clooney was toast, Laleh watching closely.

  “When Paul McCartney was here he agreed to write songs for a rock opera on one condition; that we get Renee Fleming to sing them during the performances here, in the theater we’re sitting in now.” Gwen didn’t mention that McCartney had been kidnapped in Charleston, and the kidnappers demanded that he write the songs as part of the ransom. Charlestonians are polite, but not always entirely honest and forthcoming. “We did that, George. We got Renee Fleming to come to town and sing the performances with McCartney. They did eight great shows, and they had a little fling together, and they’re friends today.”

  Even through the little cell phone speaker and across 3000 miles of the Atlantic Ocean, the magic of Gwen June’s voice touched Big George Clooney, the guy with all the babes in the world. There was a combination of power, mellifluousness, delicacy, and playfulness in it, and George likes playfulness; ask Monique. What is special about Gwen’s voice and Gwen’s presence is that it touches more than a person's emotions and more than a person's intellect; it touches people's intuition. People feel they want to be around Gwen and accommodate her in all the ways she wants, if and when she wants something from them, which isn’t that often, because she pretty much gets what she wants using regular human communication. But sometimes, like now, she resorts to this intuitional magic thing she has, and George and Monique were transfixed.

  She went on, “You know what happened after the last performance, after we shut down the production?”

  “What?”

  “Renee cancel
led her engagements for two weeks and sailed over to St. Barths with us. Hung out. We did some more music over there, some more songs, in a little studio a guy has set up. It was relaxing and creative; a little more work and a little more fun. Those songs will be on her next CD, and we know how great Dark Hope is.”

  George, Monique, Gale, Jinny, Shimmey, and Laleh all closed their eyes and imagined Renee Fleming singing the songs she’d done on St. Barths. They could hear her singing, see her standing on a stage, singing to them. Roger was the only one who didn’t close his eyes because he was used to this Gwen stuff having been exposed to it since the day he met her twenty some years earlier, and had ended up asking her to marry him because he wanted to accommodate her and she wanted him to ask her. He watched her now and listened and made sure Jinny kept breathing properly because Jinny was especially vulnerable to Gwen when she did this intuitional magic thing.

  George said, “I want to hear those songs, hear her sing.”

  “George, you did something special in those two scenes in Leatherheads. The scene in the hotel lobby and the scene on the train. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I did?”

  “Yes, you did. You and Zellweger. You did Grant and Hepburn, just like those two did a long time ago. Those movies still live today; we love Grant and Hepburn. We love Myrna Loy and William Powell. We love that romance, today, George, and we want more of it.”

  She stopped speaking and looked at Roger, doing the little kiss symbol with her mouth. Roger looked at Jinny, hoping he still had his eyes closed, because if he’d seen Gwen do this his heart would have infarcted and then Roger would have to do CPR on the little Russian gangster. Monique managed to open her eyes and look at George, who she loved in a sisterly kind of way, being too smart to get involved with him in other ways. She saw him mesmerized, with eyes closed and mouth twitching, and figured she might as well just go and start packing for Charleston.

  “If you come to Charleston and do this production, you’ll add it to the list of your credits, George. Right up there at the top. You and Grant and Powell, kings of romance and fun, comedy and entertainment. We’ll have fun doing this, making something special; something for other people to enjoy. We have the story. We have the funding. We’ll have the director when you get Soderberg on board, and we’ll have the actress, whoever that is. Maybe Zellweger, George. You and her, a team again. Killer team.”

  George said, “You, Gwenny? You around?”

  “I’m here, George. Part of the team. We’ll have fun, do something good. Charleston’s our oyster.”

  “See you soon, Gwenny.”

  Roger smiled. Laleh thought again, ‘I gotta remember that’. Monique went to pack.