We leave the kitchen—and the twenty-first century—and push through a door into, yes, I was right, the Addams Family abode. Or Harry Potter’s dungeon. It’s so dark, I can’t make out much except for the crucifixes and swords hanging on the walls, and the mirrors with their frames in the shape of snakes. The few pieces of furniture I can make out in the gloaming look edged in gilt and covered in leopard-print velvet. What Henry VIII might have owned if he’d lived in Vegas.
“She’s upstairs,” Tracy/Stacy says, as she leads me to a curving marble staircase. We climb up, passing a giant tapestry hanging in the stairwell. I gaze up at it, trying to make out the looming female figure. Joan of Arc? Hillary Clinton? Or maybe the Phoenix herself? It’s hard to tell, it’s so dark, smoky, even.
We climb on and I start to feel dizzy. Maybe it’s the elevation. Or maybe I just have to sneeze. Finally, we hit a landing, a hallway with what looks to be a cat scuttling down the far end. If Maggie Smith suddenly leapt out at us, I wouldn’t be surprised. “Here we are,” Tracy/Stacy says, stopping in front of a large carved-wood door. She knocks, waits, then pushes it open. A blast of sandalwood and patchouli hits me.
Given all the smoke, my first reaction is that the room is on fire. But as my eyes adjust, I make out half a dozen smudge pots of incense and scented candles smoldering away. Probably a séance with the Phoenix’s dead husband. Actually ex-husband, her former-manager-turned-Christian-radio-talk-show-host who died in a freak recording accident two months ago—something to do with his microphone shorting out when he bowed his head in prayer—and who was, according to the tabs, now communicating with her from beyond the grave. Presumably telling her to have her wiring checked.
I turn back to Tracy/Stacy, but I’ve been abandoned by Charon on the banks of the Styx. Oh well. I brace myself and take a step into the perfumed murk. “Hello?” I say, feeling my way into what appears to be a huge bedroom. At least she’s consistent. Last time I met with her, she held court in her darkened bedroom from atop her leopard-print-covered bed.
“Hello,” I say again. Nothing but the guttering candles. Suddenly, I see a flash of light and, like a vision out of the mists, the Phoenix is here—the corn-silk-white hair, barefoot, gray sweats, and baggy pale blue cardigan sweater. And cradling a cat. Venus on her day off. “Hi,” she says, in her familiar foggy-brassy voice. “This is Botox. She just had her bath.”
“Really,” I say, springing into action. At least this part is familiar. Whatever they trot out, just go with it. “Oh, she’s so clean,” I say, rubbing the cat’s still-damp head.
“And that’s Lipo, her brother,” she says, nodding at a second cat who’s crept out of the shadows and is winding himself damply around my ankles. “She just loves him,” she says, bending down to put Botox on the floor. “And that’s pretty much it.”
“Okay,” I say brightly, as I try to disengage my feet from the cats.
“So Alex, right?” she says, eyeing me now.
I’m tempted to remind her that we’ve actually met and spoken on the phone several times, but think better of it. “Yes. I’m Alex. Davidson. From Suzanne’s office?” I say, trying to address her without staring at her face, its waxy perfection, astonishing on camera but even more compelling in real life.
“Right,” she says, nodding and turning toward a second door. I stand there, not sure if I should follow her. “They’re in here,” she says, turning back to me. “You need to see them, right?”
“Uhm, sure. That would be great.” I have no idea what she’s talking about, but I follow her through the doorway into a small closet. A closet of jewelry. Rows upon rows of beaded necklaces, bracelets, and earrings, like a booth at a mall.
She reaches out to finger some of the strands. “These are just a few of the ones that I’ve made over the years. Like this is an early one,” she says, handing me a necklace of tiny glass beads strung on a cord. It looks like something I made as a kid in camp.
“Stunning,” I say, taking the necklace. “Really beautiful.”
“And these are some of the more recent ones.” She reaches for larger, chunkier strands with beads of turquoise, citrine, and aquamarine. A couple have crosses dangling off them.
“Yes.” I nod. “I can see the difference. Wow.”
She hands me a few more strands. “Wow,” I say again. “I had no idea you did this.”
She looks at me quizzically. “It’s why you’re here. That’s what they told me. The magazine wants them. Which one is it, InStyle?”
Oh Christ, how could Suzanne not have warned me? Probably her bitchy little assistant who forgot, her way of fucking with me. So this is the excuse for my visit—that InStyle is doing a feature on the Phoenix’s jewelry making. Actually, it’s not a half-bad idea, given how many unemployed actresses in Hollywood string their own worry beads as a way to calm themselves down and remind themselves that they really are artists. Still, it would take Spider-Man to leap from this to “Hey-do-you-think-you-could-consider-not-firing-the-agency?” And I only have an hour.
“You know, these are great. Why don’t I take as many of them as you’re comfortable letting me have and we can get some preliminary shots out to New York and go from there?”
She shrugs. “Take your pick. I’m kind of over the whole beading thing. You know how you go through phases? Sometimes I like being a blonde. Other times not. Besides, I’m so busy with the show now, I was actually thinking of selling them on QVC or eBay—for charity, of course—and keeping the cat toys in here.”
Great, the show. At least we’re moving in the right direction, where I can bring up her agency contract without sounding like a total idiot. “Yeah, how’s that going?” I say, gathering up a few more of the necklaces. “Are you going to let them film here?”
“Oh God, no,” she says, heading for the door, bored with jewelry now. “Sharon and Ozzie might have no pride, but I would never let a TV crew in here. I bought a house down the road that we’re going to shoot in.”
She disappears back into the bedroom. By the time I put away most of the necklaces, tucking a few token strands into my bag—hey, if this is my ruse, I better make it plausible—and follow her, she’s already climbed onto the giant bed and curled up against the pillows. I look around for a place to sit, but unless I’m to crawl onto the bed as well, I have no choice but to take a seat on one of the two leopard-print chairs flanking the fireplace on the far side of the room. With all the incense smoke and the shades drawn tight against the blazing beach sun, I can barely make her out.
“So,” I say, deciding to just plunge in. “As long as I’m here, maybe we can talk a bit about your publicity campaign for the show.”
“Let’s not,” she says with a wave. “I’m still getting the house set up and dealing with the network. The rest of it will come when it comes. The earliest we’ll air is March and maybe not even until June. Meanwhile, I’m just letting my manager deal with all that.”
“Okay,” I say, trying to remember exactly who her manager is. Funny, Suzanne didn’t bring it up in our discussions. “You know, I’m sorry, who is your manager these days? I have a hard time keeping track.”
“Well, that’s probably because I just changed managers after something like twenty years. Jerry Gold.”
I’m stunned. “Jerry Gold’s your manager? As in Carla Selena’s Jerry Gold?”
“Or as in Carla Selena has my Jerry Gold. I’ve known Jerry for years, but it was just never the right time for us to work together. Until now.”
So all roads lead to Jerry Fucking Gold. The same Jerry Gold who abruptly fired Suzanne over Carla is now trying to walk off with the Phoenix? This has to be more than a coincidence. A coincidence that just happens to bolster G’s case against Suzanne. I decide to go for innocent. “So Jerry came to you with the idea for the series?”
“I had the idea for the series. MTV came to me. I hired Jerry to work out the details.”
“And has he talked about what he wants to do about the publicity
yet?”
“Not really. I mean, he mentioned we should try some new things, some new approaches, but nothing specific. But like I said, I’m not there yet.”
“So you haven’t talked to Suzanne about any of it?”
I hear her sigh. “No. Until your office called about this necklace thing, I hadn’t talked to anybody in a while. I mean, what was there to promote?”
She has a point. After her retail phase— her skin-care infomercial and QVC sales—the Phoenix kind of disappeared. Took her Oscar and her platinum albums and just faded into the woodwork. That she is back in the public eye in her fifties now armed with a $20 million TV deal is remarkable even by her standards of self-reinvention.
“You know, they used to call me The Cat when I played Vegas because I’ve done more than most people have in nine lifetimes,” she says. “I don’t go into anything with a lot of confidence, but I do have my fuck-it-all attitude. But also, money has never been my primary reason for working.”
“Well, that makes you different from about 99.9 percent of the people in this town,” I blurt out before I think better of it. My job as a publicist is to stroke the clients, reassure them, manipulate them, even lie when necessary, but never challenge them.
A laugh explodes out of the gloaming. “Well, we know that. One time I was making a fortune on the road and I quit to do a play off-Broadway. I went from making $500,000 a night to five hundred a week.”
“You’re lucky you don’t have to worry about money.”
“Don’t kid yourself. Everyone worries about money in Hollywood. Even David Geffen. I just happened to come into the business with a chip on my shoulder. It’s one reason why I’ve done what I’ve wanted to do and not what anybody else wanted me to do. I have a talent for making money, but I’m not a smart businessperson. I mean, after that infomercial, I didn’t work for years. I made a shitload off it, but it annihilated everything—the Oscar, the albums—that came before it.”
“But a lot of celebrities do businesses on the side. Quarterbacks buy car dealerships. Magic Johnson bought a movie theater chain. Look at J. Lo and Britney Spears. They opened restaurants that failed, but nobody writes them off.”
“Right. And Arnold and Bruce ran around and promoted Planet Hollywood and at the time, everyone thought that was cool too. But that’s the thing. What I did with the infomercial didn’t look cool and that was the difference. But you know, failure is very underrated. That whole experience was a good lesson for me. It taught me that it’s not how things are in our business that counts, it’s how things seem that matters.”
Maybe it’s the dark, that we can’t see each other that makes this feel so confessional. “So what do you think about your reality series? That’s cool.”
She sighs again. “It’s a shot like anything, but you never know. Look, most of the time it’s all shit. Scripts are shitty, albums are shitty, people are shitty. But every once in a while, something comes along that’s really right for you. The trick is to know yourself well enough to know that when you see it. And to take yourself not so seriously when it doesn’t work. There’s always another gig.”
“I don’t know. I think you’re one of the exceptions. I think the clock is ticking for most women in Hollywood. And when it’s over, it’s over. I don’t think there are a lot of second acts. Or even second chances.”
“Hey, I never said it was easy. I hate getting older. I hated it when I was in my forties and let me tell you, that’s a day at the beach compared to being in your fifties, when nature basically says, ‘Fuck you.’ The clock is ticking. For all of us. And there is nothing positive about it. Not in this business. You don’t get better because you get older. You get older and you get forgotten. I know that. But because I plan on being able to do all the things physically that I want to do before I die, I’m going to be out there killing myself.”
There’s a knock at the door. Tracy/Stacy with the two-minute warning. “Yeah,” I say, reaching down and fiddling with my bag, enough of a feint that she backs out. Still, better wrap this up. In the glow of the candles, I make out the Phoenix sliding off the bed.
“So you seem a little, I don’t know, out there,” she says, heading toward me. “I mean for a publicist. Usually the ones I’ve met have clipboards and agendas. You know, lists and you’re on it.”
“Oh, that’s more like studio and network people,” I say, getting to my feet. “We’re not that organized. Mostly we just say no a lot.”
“I don’t know,” she says, shaking her head, the corn silk wagging. “Do you like being a publicist? I mean, do you like coming out here for necklaces?”
I’m tempted to come clean. Tell her, of course, I hate being a publicist. Even she gets it that hiking out to Malibu for necklaces is about as demeaning as it gets—for all of us. After our confessional little conversation, she just might understand.
There’s another knock at the door. Tracy/Stacy again. Might as well be wearing a jack-in-the-box’s hat with bells.
“You know, that’s a good question,” I say, rushing now. “It’s a question I’ve been, or should be, asking myself, but actually, I really need to ask you one thing before I go.”
There it is. My line in the sand. Whatever I had intended to do or not do when I set out here this afternoon has changed. God knows, it would be easier to do what G asked. Nothing. Just say my good-byes and get the hell out of this dungeon. Let the chips, and the Phoenix, fall where they may. But the Jerry Gold thing is just too much of a coincidence. Besides, the Phoenix seems too much her own woman to just let Jerry make all her decisions. I have to take my shot.
“So here’s the deal,” I say, plunging in. “Jerry has talked to Suzanne about dropping the agency from handling you.” I pause and look up.
“What? What are you talking about?” she says. “Jerry and I haven’t even talked yet. Not about publicity. He couldn’t have talked to her.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure that’s the case, and frankly,” I pause and take a breath, “that’s the real reason for my visit here today.” I close my eyes for a second and brace for impact. “Not the necklaces.”
There’s another long pause. “What are you saying? That you lied about needing to see me?”
“No, I did need to see you. I just didn’t need to see the necklaces.”
“Tracy!”
“Okay, wait,” I say, rushing now to plug this hole in the dike. “It’s not her fault. The office told her I needed to see you for the story.”
Tracy sticks her head in the door. “Yep?”
“Will you find out what the fuck is going on?”
“Yep,” she says, nodding and backing out and then back in. “About what?”
“About why she—what did you say your name was again?—is here today. And why you let her in.”
Okay, so this is going well. At this rate, even if the Phoenix wasn’t inclined to fire DWP when I walked in here, she will surely do so now. Probably before I can even get out of here. Maybe G was right. I do have hidden talents.
“Okay, look, blame me, not her,” I say, nodding at Tracy. “But I think you owe it to yourself to know the full story.”
“I don’t need to know the full story. I am the full story,” she snaps. “And what I know is that I have wasted, what, an hour with you? Do you have any idea how many people would kill to have an hour of my time?”
Tracy looks at us like she’s watching a tennis match—a match that could go either way. “So should I—” she says, unsure whether to throw me out or just keep watching.
“I’m sure that’s true,” I say, cutting Tracy off. “What I’m trying to tell you is that it’s in your best interest to hear me out.”
The Phoenix doesn’t say anything, which I take as an opening. “Look, I’m here to ask you not to fire DWP. You’ve been well served by us in the past, and given our history, you have no reason to drop us as your publicists now.”
“You’re giving me a pretty good one.”
“Fair
enough,” I say, raising my hands. “Look, Jerry Gold just fired DWP from handling Carla. Now it looks like he’s planning on doing the same thing with you.”
“First of all, Jerry doesn’t decide these things. I do. And even if that were true—if I approved Jerry’s decision to fire you—why should I care?”
Ah, the moment of truth. Why should she—why should any of them—care about something other than her own self-interest? “Because it’s wrong,” I say. “And it will hurt people.”
“Are you serious?” she says. “This is what we do. We take our business to the highest bidder and tough luck to the losers. I say no all the time. Appearances, charities, film offers. It’s what I get to do. I get to say no.”
I look at her. Is there anybody is this town not watching their own back? “So all your proto-feminist talk about taking chances and self-empowerment, that was just, what, talk?”
I am way over the line here, but at this point I have nothing else to lose. Besides, Tracy’s hardly bouncer material.
“I think we’re done here,” she says icily.
“Fine, I’m going,” I say, reaching for my bag. “But you ought to know that if you let Jerry Gold take you out of DWP like a piece of baggage, Suzanne, your publicist and a woman your own age, will take the fall for it. I just thought you should know that. That your actions have consequences.”
I stand up and head for the door. I may have lost a client, but my integrity is intact. Which will get me exactly nowhere.
“Okay,” Tracy says, leaping to lead me out, relieved that I’m leaving of my own volition.
So 5 Minutes Ago Page 23
