My Lucky Star

by Joe Keenan

  Stephen, real tears now dampening his cheeks, thanked her as well for writing a nice juicy role for him. “But mostly,” he concluded, taking his deepest breath yet, “I want to thank her for agreeing to play the rich and complex role of Amelia herself. Lily, take a bow!”

  Lily did not need to be asked twice. She sprang immediately to her feet, a good thing, noted Gilbert, as it kept her from hearing Tarantino exclaim, “He’s shitting us, right?!” Advancing to a clearing between tables, she executed a series of elaborate curtsies while blowing kisses to her suddenly beloved nephew. The crowd applauded madly if only to drown out the wild, gossipy buzz that greeted this jaw-dropping announcement.

  His aunt?

  She’s still alive?

  Were they even on speaking terms?

  Could she ever act?

  Amelia Earhart?!

  The applause went on at length, only tapering off when it became clear that Lily would not stop bowing as long as she could hear a single pair of hands colliding. As Lily milked her ovation Stephen cast a glance at us and pointedly returned the pages to his jacket. It was a token gesture of defiance. He’d done Monty’s bidding and would not demean himself further by spouting more of his folderol. When the applause finally subsided Stephen closed with a portion of the remarks he’d originally planned. He spoke of the Healing Power of Art and Giving Back, ending with a million-dollar pledge to build an Arts Center for inner-city youth. All very laudable, of course, but not half so scintillating as his bizarre promise to costar in a period epic with his washed-up aunt.

  As Stephen stepped offstage into an ocean of hugs and handshakes, Monty rose and clapped me heartily on the shoulder.

  “Congratulations, dear! You’re back in showbiz!”

  “Thanks a lot! Jesus, Monty, have you read that script?”

  “Yes, and, if I may be frank, it needs work. The plot’s far-fetched, and the Hitler stuff’s a bit of a giggle. Still, nothing a talented fellow like you can’t set right. Lily’s happy and that’s the main thing. I’ve done my good deed.”

  Lily was a damn sight more than happy. She was wafting deliriously through the party in a spot well north of cloud nine, hobnobbing with the stars who’d been transformed by a wave of her fairy godfather’s wand into peers. When we caught up with her and Gilbert, she was accepting polite congratulations from her new pal Meryl Streep.

  “Glen! There you are! We must talk soon, Meryl, there’s a part you’d be divine for! Glen —sorry, Philip—isn’t it marvelous? Monty, you devil! Keeping it all from me like that! But what a way to find out! Everyone’s talking about it. Mr. Tarantino was full of questions. He didn’t say as much but I can tell he wants to direct. Philip, I’m so sorry Stephen forgot to say you were my coauthor. Don’t worry, though — I’m telling everyone.”

  “ No! I mean, it’s okay. It’s your script! I just did a polish!”

  “Nonsense!” tutted Lily. “You were indispensable. Why without your help who knows if—oh, look! It’s that Scorsese man. Methinks he’s learned a thing or two about striking while the iron’s hot!”

  “You know,” said Gilbert generously, “if you’d like a fresh eye to help with the rewrite—”

  “Stephen!” cried Lily, waving to where he stood receiving congratulations and no doubt a query or two from Max and Maddie. “Gracious me, we haven’t even thanked him!” she said, grabbing my arm and hastening toward her benefactor. Monty and Gilbert scampered after us, determined to witness firsthand this moment in cinematic history.

  “You darling man!” she shrieked, throwing her arms around him. “I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that you liked my little script and want to bring it to the screen! I should actually say our script since Philip here had quite a hand in it!”

  “You don’t say?” replied Stephen. His tone was flat and unsurprised, things having reached a stage where, when catastrophe struck, my involvement could safely be taken as a given.

  “Good for you, hon!” said Maddie, pinching my cheek. “Good things just keep coming your way, don’t they?”

  “Why hello, dear! You must be Moira!” said Lily to the enraged yet smiling vixen who’d just materialized at Stephen’s elbow. “How lovely to meet you,” said Lily, pumping her hand. “I’ve heard you have the most marvelous taste—and now I know it’s true! Ha-ha! I must say, Stephen, when Monty told me you’d invited us and to expect a surprise I never dreamed it would be anything so wonderful as this! I had no idea he’d even sent you the script!”

  “So, it’s a good one?” Max asked anxiously and Moira replied truthfully enough that she’d never read anything like it. Max then scrutinized Lily, his brow understandably furrowed.

  “And you play Amelia Earhart?”

  “Yes. The story takes place later in her life.”

  “Well, it would have to,” said Maddie.

  Lily clasped Stephen’s hands and gazed adoringly at him, her eyes welling up with gratitude. “Thank you so much, my dear. What a marvelous Henri you’ll make! What fun we’ll have finally working together!”

  Stephen just stared at her, speechless, and the smile he wore for the benefit of gawkers had a distinctly befuddled edge. His confusion was pardonable. Though etiquette authorities from Emily Post to Miss Manners have done their best to prepare us for every conceivable form of human interaction, none has yet addressed the question of how to behave toward a person who is ruthlessly blackmailing you but does not appear to know it.

  “Well,” he stammered at length, “I’m, uh, looking forward to it.”

  Our little group was joined by Diana and Gina. Diana managed with her customary aplomb to cloak her outrage and was betrayed only by her nostrils, which flared uncontrollably at Lily’s galling magnanimity.

  “Diana, my dear! I adore what you’re wearing! So slimming. I don’t know if Stephen’s told you but there’s a part in our picture you’d be perfect for. Not large, mind you, but terribly effective.”

  “How kind of you,” replied Diana, her pitch several ledger lines below the bass clef.

  Gina was, as usual, an open wound. “He never tells me anything!” she complained to no one in particular, and Stephen remarked that the deal had come together rather quickly.

  “Yes, very,” grinned Monty. “I asked Stephen if he wanted more time to think, but Moira counseled against it. She said, ‘When a script like this comes along, you snap it up. Don’t wait for a bidding war.’ ”

  “Most wise of you, Moira,” said Lily, citing Scorsese’s imminent offer.

  Diana announced that she had a headache and was going. Stephen, who had no stomach to face the inquisitive well-wishers pressing in from all sides, offered to see her out. The rest of us followed, Lily Velcroing herself to Stephen in the hope there’d still be press outside.

  The preshow throng had thinned but there were still plenty awaiting us, and at the sight of Stephen and Lily they went wild, furiously snapping the photos that would appear the next day in newspapers round the world. They shouted questions to Stephen, who, smiling grimly, said he had nothing to add to his speech. Lily, of course, could not shut up and burbled away about this grand opportunity to costar with the man she’d known since he was a little boy staging plays in her backyard.

  “Kept all the best parts for himself of course. Male and female. My shoes were forever going missing. Oh, before I forget, this is Philip Cavanaugh. He’s the brilliant young man who cowrote Amelia Flies Again!, though the idea for it was totally mine.”

  “Totally!”

  When Stephen’s limo pulled up he eyed it without relief, no doubt contemplating the discussions still to come with Gina and Diana, not to mention the script he’d just agreed to produce and star in, sight unseen. For now he could only imagine what horrors lurked there, but I’ll never forget his ashen expression when he received his first dark inkling of what he’d signed on for.

  “Just so I’m clear,” said Max to Lily as Stephen’s driver opened his door. “You play Amelia but the story takes pla
ce long after she disappeared in ’thirty-seven?”

  “Yes, of course! Years later! World War II! Oh, look, Philip! There’s Tom and Rita! Let’s say hello!”

  Twenty-two

  “Comeback?”

  Lily Malenfant repeats the word with a sly smile as she gazes dreamily out at the small lovely garden where she grows her award-winning roses. “I’m not sure I’d call it a comeback, dear. The truth is, I never left!” she says with a girlish laugh as she refreshes her lemonade. The multitalented actress who has wowed audiences in everything from film noir to sitcom says she’s been happy to spend her life in the shadow of her more famous sister and nephew, a guy you may know as Stephen Donato.

  “I’m not like Diana—you know, someone who’s miserable if she’s not the center of attention and having all her affairs and drunken fights written up in the papers. That’s not what acting’s about. Not to me. To me it’s all about the craft.”

  For the last thirty or so years Lily has chosen to display her craft mostly onstage, spurning all but a few of the many film offers she’s received. “It’s so much more fun acting for people, not just cameras!” she says, her ageless face aglow. “To know they’re out there and hear them all laughing, sometimes in places you never imagined they would.” Unfortunately for Lily, her cozy life in the shadows is about to come to an end. Starting this weekend audiences will thrill to her riveting performance as Miss Hepps, Drew Barrymore’s sinister landlady in the taut new thriller Guess What, I’m Not Dead. Though on-screen for less than seven minutes, Malenfant dominates the movie, creating an indelible portrait of bitterness and lunacy that reverberates long after the character’s grisly death. Lily will follow this bravura performance by costarring with her famous nephew in the historical epic Amelia Flies Again!, the screenplay for which the versatile Miss Malenfant coauthored with Frederick Kavanaugh.

  The above article, excerpted from People, was but one of scores of fawning profiles of Lily that appeared in the wake of Stephen’s announcement and the modestly successful release of Guess What, I’m Not Dead. These puff pieces, along with numerous talk show appearances, were engineered by Sonia, who’d checked out the contents of stephendonatogoesoscarwild.com and capitulated instantly to Monty’s demand that she place her vast media clout in the service of Lily’s greater glory. Favors were called in, threats made, and access to bigger stars denied to any media outlet that refused to feed the public’s nonexistent appetite for all things Lily.

  What amazed me most about Lily’s comeback was how little it amazed her. It did not strike her as remotely miraculous that the press to whom she’d long been dead should now clamor for interviews. Nor did she for a moment ascribe this sudden avalanche of attention to anything save the public’s entirely sensible, if belated, recognition of her genius. Not once during her long winter of obscurity had she doubted that her stardom would return and now it had, both as welcome and inevitable as the spring.

  “What did I tell you, Philip? Fame’s a fickle mistress but true Talent always wins out in the end. I don’t know how we’ll get a lick of work done today! I have a Vanity Fair shoot, then I have to find a dress for tonight’s museum gala. They’re screening Shame Is for Rich Girls and then I’m supposed to get up and speak. Heaven knows what I’ll think of to say!”

  On that score Lily needn’t have worried, for she was never at a loss for words. Stories, aperçus, and bracingly frank opinions came bubbling out of her in a ceaseless, sparsely punctuated torrent that leaped madly from topic to topic. It wasn’t long before Sonia no longer needed to browbeat people into covering her, so charmed was the press by Lily’s infectious delight in celebrity and remarkable candor. She was especially forthcoming about Diana, whom, despite frequent disclaimers of familial devotion, she would skewer remorselessly at the mildest prompting.

  “Monty and I were so thrilled when Stephen was born. Neither of us thought Diana could still have children since she’d had so many— well, I adore her, so I won’t say the word. We’ll call them procedures, shall we?... ‘Shame about his father dying’? No, not really, dear. Certainly not to Diana....Well, of course she says that now. She’s loved him dearly since he died, but not a moment sooner. The fights they had! Had Roberto lived poor Stephen wouldn’t have made it to three without being killed by a flying decanter!”

  STEPHEN OF COURSE IMMEDIATELY demanded a copy of Amelia Flies Again! and, on finishing it, was understandably perturbed.

  “Is this a fucking JOKE?!” he roared at me over the phone. “You expect us to MAKE this piece of shit!”

  “Stephen,” I said in the penitent whimper that had come to mark all our discourse of late, “you don’t think I know how bad it is? I barely gave the damn thing a polish. I thought, ‘Why bother, who’s going to make it?’ ”

  “I AM, THAT’S WHO! This is a total fucking disaster! The script sucks, it’ll cost a fortune, she can’t act, and she’s TWENTYFIVE YEARS TOO OLD FOR THE PART!!”

  I pointed out that there was at least one frail sunbeam poking through the clouds. Just that day Lily had decided to heed my advice and leave Stephen’s youthful liaisons out of her memoir. They were, after all, colleagues now and it seemed bad form to tattle on one’s costar.

  “Oh, gee, THANK you, Phil! I’m so RELIEVED!! That’ll be such a COMFORT to me after her brother turns me into a FUCKING GAY PORN STAR! What the hell am I supposed to do with this script? I’ve got people all over me asking to read it—Max, Gina, my agents! I can’t show them this turd and tell ’em I paid half a million for it!”

  “Half a million?” I repeated, stunned.

  “Yeah, right,” he sneered. “Like you didn’t know that!”

  “I didn’t!”

  “Half to Lily’s agent, half to yours, just like your pal Monty ordered. Enjoy your blood money, you miserable leech!” he said and hung up.

  I immediately phoned Monty to protest that his negotiations had dragooned me into the role of extortionist.

  “Nonsense,” replied Monty. “You wrote a script and he purchased it. Surely you’re entitled to compensation. It’s a pittance next to the five million he’s paying Lily to star in it.”

  “Five million! You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “Odd, that’s just what Stephen said.”

  Stephen, once he’d recovered from the sticker shock, had desperately offered to pay all requested fees, plus a million under the table to Monty, if Monty would only withdraw his demand that he make the damned movie. Monty had held firm though, vowing not to surrender his nukes till the picture had been filmed and released. Stephen could hire anyone he liked to doctor the script so long as Lily’s premise remained intact and Lily and I received at least shared credit for the screenplay.

  IT IS NO SMALL MEASURE of Stephen’s woes during what should have been his joyous reign as a Heavily Favored Nominee that Amelia was not his biggest headache. It was not even his second biggest. Those honors went to the ongoing criminal probe into Les Étoiles and Gina’s mounting suspicions, two problems that now collided with disastrous results.

  I was, of course, no longer Stephen’s late-night phone pal. What follows represents the clearest picture I can deduce from subsequent reports, gossip, and reasonable conjecture.

  Stephen and Gina were questioned by Hank Grimes, who minced no words about Stephen’s alleged escapades at the spa. Grimes also voiced his extortion theory, which had now broadened to include Lily and me as the most recent recipients of Stephen’s unlikely largesse. Though both Gina and Stephen vehemently refuted the vile slander, the allegations prompted Gina to ponder with fresh unease the events of that tumultuous day at the spa.

  She remembered how flustered Stephen had appeared when she’d interrupted his massage and how long I’d taken to answer the door. She recalled too that he’d been smoking pot, a drug she knew he favored mainly for its aphrodisiac effect. She remembered Claire peering under the table, then whisking her and Diana from the room.

  And what of Stephen’s odd remarks o
n accepting his award and still odder decision to produce Amelia? She asked him again if she could read the script. His pleas that she wait for the next draft only sharpened her suspicions and she demanded that he surrender it. By page seven it was obvious even to Gina that he’d been strong-armed into producing it. Stephen, cornered, laid bare his dilemma. He portrayed himself as a pitiable victim lured into a sexual sting by the evil Moira and us—her treacherous henchmen—who’d plied him with drugs to mar his judgment, filmed everything, and used the footage to hijack his career.

  But Gina didn’t buy it. Hadn’t the snitch claimed that not one but several men had sold their favors to Stephen? And wouldn’t such doings help explain why Stephen, who’d always insisted that such folk as trainers and masseurs pay house calls, had become such a devoted patron of a day spa? Stephen denied it but the panic in his eyes told another story and soon Gina Knew All.

  Yet she did not leave him.

  I can only imagine what combination of tears, pleas, and pledges quelled her impulse to engage the firm of Mulct & Pillage to strip-mine Stephen’s assets, leaving him only bus fare to and from the studio. If I had to guess though, I’d say that she simply liked being Mrs. Stephen Donato. She liked it a great deal. Her celebrity pre-Stephen had been minor indeed and, while her ego might have liked to believe her present luster would not be dimmed by divorce, some small core of common sense told her this would not be the case. She liked Stephen’s company. He was lovely to look at and capable, when prodded, of putting himself through the paces of heterosexual passion. God knew he was charming—and how much more charming would he be, how much sweeter and more accommodating, now that he was absolutely scared to death of her? It must have been torture for Stephen to have a blabbermouth like Gina be the custodian of his deepest secret. But for once Gina wasn’t talking and would, in time, prove just how far she would go to preserve her imperfect but picturesque marriage.