You or Someone Like You

by Chandler Burr

  Haven’t you been talking to Annie Leibovitz about directing something?

  Gritted teeth: “Anne…”

  We both looked at the magazine. Turned it this way, then that.

  It is pretty, I admitted.

  “What does it say, anyway?” asked Howard.

  Oh. That.

  All right, so there I am, swimming in an ocean of my own creation. I’m all these Things, and I didn’t even know it. The trick of journalism, I now understand, and it is a trick played on the reader, is to create the illusion of a coherent whole where none actually exists. It is to take the complex, unkempt pieces of a real life and stitch them together and generate a neat sum with neatly interlocking movable parts that exists for the reader but not, actually, for the person written about. There was a quote from Nancy Meyers: “She’s one of the smartest, toughest people in town. Anne has the trick of knowing everyone while remaining, herself, unknown, which in Hollywood is an interesting choice.” (So. I have a trick, too.) Any idea why that choice? asks Margolick. “I think it’s her personality,” Nancy says. “Anne doesn’t need anyone except Howard.” There are comments from Sid Ganis on my marriage to Howard; apparently we’re a “rock solid” couple. “There’s a lot of trust there,” Margolick quotes Sid as saying.

  I could not tear my eyes from the photographs. I stared at the pages. It hadn’t started out well. I’d been planning to cut back my vibernum that afternoon; I didn’t want José doing it, because while he was an inspired gardener—well, I wanted to do it. They had put me in a gown by some designer or other and had led me into the living room, where Annie Leibovitz assessed me. I was awkwardly try ing to look at myself in a wall mirror. Annie, I said to her, I do have my own clothes. “Listen,” she said, smiling and adjusting the tripod, “it’s just dress-up.” The makeup person came at me again, and I held up a hand—I felt so uncomfortable, I explained, in that ridiculously expensive dress I was sure should be covering someone much younger and sexier than I. Some starlet, say. The makeup woman cooed and shushed me and I felt the pancake going on my skin. I stood there, looking skyward as she’d ordered, very unhappy. Annie was questioning Howard, who was walking in and out annoyingly, about the room. Was the furniture normally like this? (“Look down, please,” said the makeup woman.) Annie mesmerized me, her movements, which she noticed. “You’re so attentive,” she said mildly, bent down, squinting into her camera. I’m trying, I said, to understand why an Annie Leibovitz photo is different. She asked, “How many photographers have shot you?” I laughed. Only you, I said. Oh, and a few paparazzi. She made a vague noise of assent, focusing. Something was bothering her. And I was uncomfortable and nervous, and so to hide it I said in my strong voice, I’m sorry, but how long will this take because I really need to cut back my vibernum.

  She lifted her head. “You garden?” she said.

  It was a lovely shot, I am on my knees in the dirt. We’d stripped off the ridiculous gown, the pearls, most of the makeup, I had put on my usual things and gotten an enormous amount of work done, entirely finished the vibernum and almost completely pruned and repaired the spaliéd bouganvillea by the time she announced she had it. She said I was “a natural.” I replied I was surely the most unnatural in the world: I had had to drown myself in something that made me utterly forget the camera, clicking away. She said being able to forget it was what made me a natural.

  My favorite photo, however, turned out to be the one with Sam. You barely see him, in the living room, slightly out of focus and from the side and back, heading toward the kitchen door. The Volvo’s keys dangle like dull platinum from his index finger. Yet some how she had managed to make him the focal point of the portrait. Everything comes through, the teenage slouch, the sneakers. Howard, his arm around my shoulders about to be photographed, twists backward on the sofa to shoot Sam an order over his shoulder, and you can tell Sam is laughing as he talks back. A flash of white teeth. She had caught Howard in the act of preparing a pose but disrupted by the act of fathering. I am sitting, gazing at the camera’s lens but clearly not concentrating on it, since it was the instant before my eyebrows went up and I said, Oh, Howard, he’s been driving for six months, leave him alone!

  It’s quite brilliant, actually. I love this family portrait.

  Poor Justin. He didn’t put the phone down for four days.

  The Browning anecdote David distilled nicely, following it with one dark anonymous quote (“Her political views are seductive; I think she’s actually a crypto reactionary”) and then Jeffrey Katzenberg: “Anne’s politics are kind of a cipher,” he said (“with a grin”).

  It was a revelation to me. I was a bitch (anonymous), I was one of Hitchcock’s icy, thin, elegant, perfect blondes. (This from a pathologically insecure talent manager, who I had to admit did give a good physical description.) They were in awe of me, they loved me, they were frightened of me. I was a snob. No, I was sweet and caring “to those who really know her.” (This from someone who didn’t.) I found myself stunned by it, and fascinated. Howard has been written about hundreds of times, though never in anything close to this depth, and I startled him when he put his arm around me gently and asked, somewhat warily, was I OK? Reading what people said? People said anything, Anne, people were jealous and small.

  I wiped at my eyes, and he moved to hold me, but I said, No, no, and he moved back just a bit and was surprised to see that I was wearing an elated expression as I struggled to express what I felt. I was trying to figure out what this was exactly. I said it was such a strange pleasure.

  “How is this a pleasure?”

  We’d read, “The thing you’ve got to know about Anne is she’s married to Howard Rosenbaum, and Rosenbaum’s an exec with fearsome connections. His New York bookworld contacts make him a real exotic, yet no one plays the home game better. Without him, she’s nothing.” And someone else, who said, “I wouldn’t say she’s an opportunist, necessarily.” I was brilliant, and I was cold. Something (undefined) had made me frightened of intimacy, I kept people at a distance, everyone except Howard, whom I needed like air. I believed passionately in things, I was constantly thinking about “esoteric subjects”—they cited public school education policy. (I said to Howard, The education crisis is “esoteric”?)—you can’t spend a minute with Anne without sensing the wheels turning. And the books! She’s so goddamn well-read it’s like, you know, she’s lived a hundred lives in other places, and so sometimes you kind of think she’s not really in this one. And she can say things in ways that people read as unfeeling or cold. Though that (many of the anonymous quoters were identified as intimates of mine; I didn’t know I had so many intimates), that was just my surface, you know, and if you really knew me like they did, you understood that I wasn’t cold or unfeeling. In fact, they explained, it made me very unhappy to be perceived that way. But I didn’t know how to be otherwise. (This was in fact true.)

  How is that a pleasure? I said to Howard that it was a pleasure because here, laid before me, was what others truly thought of me. Not every one of them. There were enough silken compliments and self-promotion using my name, enough self-interested protection of me and thus, carefully, of their connections to me, that, as Machiavelli would have pointed out, their respect was crystal clear. They wanted in, and I found myself in Vanity Fair terribly powerful. Yet I was guarded against flattery by their anonymously speaking the truth they could not tell me to my face. What a luxury, Howard, what a pure, unhoped for, rare luxury: To know what others truly think of you. It was, I said to him, a pleasure at the very least to know, if others are wrong about you, how they are wrong. And it is a pleasure to find out that some people, people I liked but had never tried to become close to, that some of these people had in fact come to know me very well. And they honestly liked what they’d found.

  This was the way I appeared to the world, so much that was true, so much false, so different to each observer. It made me both sad and happy to see it, there in the magazine.

  IT WAS IN FE
BRUARY, AFTER David’s interview but before the Vanity Fair piece came out, that we discovered the emails. It happened because the proceedings of the last two book clubs—the talent managers, then the advertising executives—showed up, more or less verbatim, in a message to several hundred people at the studios, the independents, all the major talent agencies (nine recipients each at William Morris and United Talent Agency), and production companies (eight people at Imagine alone), assorted scout outposts, a selection of literary agencies in London and New York (ICM, for example), and the admin offices in Orlando. These were apparently the seventh and eighth book clubs thus résuméd, and this had been quietly going on for two months. Justin placed a copy of the email on my desk and stepped back to await my reaction.

  The operation was completely anonymous; the From address was bc (“S’gotta be ‘book club,’” said Justin) @annerosenbaum.com, and annerosenbaum, it turned out, was merely a shell on a server registered to a nameless entity, “No Information Available.” Not even the recipients knew the sender’s identity; Justin had systematically tried to trace its origins. The unifying factor, Justin explained, appeared to be youth: Everyone on the e-list was under thirty. “And heat.” Heat? “Yeah,” he said. The rising stars in the industry, the ones at the strongest outfits, with the big mentors. Pretty awesome. I should, said Justin, be flattered.

  I was still reading. He waited, silently.

  I said, They’ve misspelt a number of things.

  He had other emails, anonymous quotes from people in my book clubs about what other people in my book clubs had said about Babbitt (some idiocies, and one brilliant, sardonic observation I actually remembered Robert Sillerman making about Sinclair Lewis and Democratic fund-raising in Hollywood), gossip about who I had invited (I never invited Tori Spelling) and who I hadn’t, gossip on what people wore, lists of titles I’d assigned.

  Find out, I said to Justin, who this is.

  He looked uncomfortable. “I’ve tried,” he said.

  Keep trying.

  Then after a moment, Damnit, I exclaimed, upset, there are detailed comments Ken Ziffren made in my garden. Who is talking?

  “Everyone’s talking. Why else go to a book club?”

  To talk to each other, I replied, in private, about what they thought of the book, not to talk to the Hollywood Reporter about how so-and-so from Paramount had an opinion on—I glanced at the email—Steinbeck’s view of violence that explained why the studio was putting Allan Loeb’s latest project in turnaround.

  Judging from his face, I was missing something.

  Look at this, I said. There’s even one that forecast the books I’m going to select next. I put my reading glasses on. “So you can get a jump on The Charterhouse of Parma,” it read. (“Probability of her choosing it: 92%.”) I took the glasses off.

  “If they can’t get into the room,” he said. The sentence, to his mind, didn’t even bear finishing.

  Yes?

  So he explained it to me patiently, as to a child. “People always want in, even the ones phoning in the lunch orders. Why should you shut out the worker bees?”

  Well, I said. I hadn’t thought of it that way. I drummed my fingers on the desktop. The Charterhouse of Parma, I said.

  Justin found me working on the hyacinth. He was pleased with himself. It radiated; he was leading with his hips.

  He laid it on the garden table, stepped back to brief me. Apparently the list was being run by an assistant producer at Miramax, a young woman named Carrie Fein. She was aggressive, talented; he listed the producers who had mentored her, the films she’d worked on.

  Do you have a phone number?

  He put down another sheet of paper: phone, address, email.

  Brilliant. Well done, Justin.

  “Hello, this is Carrie,” she said when she picked up.

  Right, this is Anne Rosenbaum.

  It took several minutes for her voice to come down to its natural register. I said I was impressed by her work. I said this call was not retributive. I was perhaps a bit put out about the comments being broadcast, but I was not interested in the names of those who had passed on information, although I would be fascinated to know how she had gone about it in a general way. So why didn’t she come to dinner. How about tonight. Howard would be home around seven. Was she free at eight?

  “Oh!” she said. “Sure, I’m free.” I heard her mentally rushing to cancel appointments. “I’ll call Michael and Sarah, too,” she said.

  Who are Michael and Sarah?

  She began backpedaling.

  I assume, I said, that they run this little operation with you.

  She was relieved to have them in play. Michael Schnayer at Sony. Sarah Adler at CAA. Please invite them, I said. Do you have a pen?

  Here’s the address.

  “Oh,” she said, “I know where you live,” and then instantly: Oh, God, oh no, it made her sound like a stalker, like the Scream franchise or something, honestly—

  I’ll see you at eight, I said, smiling as I hung up. I turned around and called, Justin? Can you stay for dinner?

  They had prepared a pitch. It came not quite at the end of the salad. I found the timing slightly aggressive; they could have waited till the main course. I had mentioned Paul McMahon (they were attentive; you could see them trying to calculate my interest in him) when some invisible clock ticked over in all three of them and the plan went into action as previously agreed. Fein led, strongly, with Adler on tactical support in facts and figures and Schnayer batting cleanup (which turned out to consist of charming Howard, to Howard’s amusement, and stroking Justin, which Justin took as his due). They were well dressed and very, very smooth. Slightly mannered. They behaved, I remarked to Howard afterward, like they were in some conference room at a studio. “They were,” said Howard. They acted chummy with Sam, who guardedly gulped it down (twenty-four-year-olds who took notice of him, astonishing) and overly solicitous of Denise, who ignored them completely.

  How about if they expanded the club to a new medium? said Carrie. They wanted to put Anne Rosenbaum’s book club on the Internet. “Officially,” Justin added pointedly, and she acceded to this. But: They’d have an observer at each meeting, to be approved by me, of course, to do notes and reporting. All to be approved by me.

  Both my eyebrows were up. Howard’s look from the other end of the table made me snap them down again.

  Howard asked mildly, “Anne, will you have time for this?”

  I thought it over. Oh, by the way, I said, I had to congratulate them on the forecasting of my book choices, which was quite astute. The subject matter was perhaps overly narrow, but there was a decent literary range, and it had given me a number of ideas.

  “That’s my work,” said Adler.

  Fein shot her a very dark look. I saw Justin file this for future use.

  Fein said that the report would be distributed to their list and only to their list, and posted to the new website, “which we can build in a week.”

  What would be the name.

  They looked patient: www.annerosenbaum.com.

  Sam rolled his eyes. “What did you think it was going to be, Mom?”

  Obviously they had already taken the liberty of registering my domain name. Members would have password access and would post literary criticism, comments, thoughts. I would suggest the critical sources, they could do the research and were thinking of approaching the English departments at Harvard and Stanford and Brown (their alma maters) and (nod to Howard) UCLA of course to supplement, or guest star, as it were, tailored editorials from Stanley Fish and Harold Bloom and James Shapiro and so on. (The obvious choices.) And of course there’d be a forum for participant commentary, said Adler.

  Commentary, I said.

  “I got some terrific stuff from Lauren Shuler Donner on Merwin,” said Schnayer.

  Sam said something.

  “What, Sam?” said Howard.

  “Geoff Helprin’s older brother’s at Vertigo,” said Sam. “He’s o
n the list, and Geoff brought to class what James L. Brooks told you he hates about late Wordsworth. My English teacher had us write an essay on whether we agree with Brooks.”

  I was staring, truly openmouthed now, at Sam, who looked back as if all this were the most natural thing in the world. The unstated question—how the hell did Jim’s comments in my book club get on the list—hung there. Fein took a breath. “I was in a meeting? With Jim? And he went into it in detail. You’d just done Wordsworth.” She paused. She was anguished. “I know it seems like spying—”

  It is spying.

  “Mrs. Rosenbaum.” Adler, strongly, on my flank. “You gotta understand, Jim didn’t have any problem with—”

  How would you know.

  “He emailed us a post on your comment about Wordsworthian symbolism.”

  Ah, I said after a long moment. Then I said to Sam, Why didn’t you tell me you were doing this in school?

  He sort of shrugged. “Sorry.” Then brightened. “It makes you look really good, Mom. Brooks thinks you’re a genius.”

  “Plus,” said Adler, “when two studios start racing to put a work into production, it gets really exciting.”

  Howard looked at me. I didn’t know this?

  Know what? I was now seriously cross.

  “You said you like Bellow’s characters. Paramount and Columbia are competing to rush The Adventures of Augie March into development.”

  No, I said, I didn’t know, but I would never have picked that one. I would have chosen Humboldt’s Gift.

  “Really?” said Fein, Adler, Schnayer, Justin, and Howard simultaneously.

  IT IS EARLY MARCH. HOWARD takes Sam to LAX, arriving just after 9:00 P.M. He has proposed taking him to dinner, but Sam has said no, Dad, thanks, and so Howard drops him curbside at Departures. Before Sam hoists his backpack, Howard, with an eye on the traffic cop, jumps out, runs around the Mercedes, gives him a quick but very strong hug and says, “I’m so proud of you.” Howard is surprised (he will comment to me on this the next morning) at how emotional Sam’s leaving for Israel is for him.