by Jane Heller
“Yes, I’m thinking of keeping you around a while,” I said. “So would you please come to dinner? You’ve just got to witness the love fest that goes on between my mother and Victor. He actually calls her Cookie, and you don’t want to miss that, do you?”
“Stacey, you know I’d come if I could, but I’m under the gun with the show and I just can’t take the time. You go and tell me all about it, okay?”
Reluctantly, I let him off the hook and went to dinner with the twosome myself. Once again, we landed at Il Pastaio, and once again everybody stopped by our table to fawn over my another, tell her how much they enjoyed her, and give her the “Make no bones about it” line, imitating her nasal, crabby voice.
Victor laughed at everything she said and told her how beautiful she looked and generally behaved like a man who was smitten.
“See how they adore you, Cookie,” he said of the gawking passersby. “You’ve won their hearts as well as mine.”
Brother. I could have been invisible for all the attention they paid me, although Victor did ask about Jack, about why he couldn’t be there.
“He’s very busy with his television show,” I said. “He wanted to come, really.”
“Well, I was looking forward to seeing him,” said Victor. “He and I have so much in common.”
Not your taste in clothes, buddy. (Victor was a vision in a yellow-and-orange striped sweater and navy slacks.) “So much in common?”
He smiled. “Yes, the two Reiser women.”
“Right.”
“Yes, I was really hoping to dine with the toast of Hollywood,” he went on. “Wait. Let me amend that. The other toast of Hollywood.” He leaned over and kissed my mother. “I watch his show religiously.”
“I’ll tell him,” I said. “He can be a pretty tough critic on that show—I ought to know—but it’s all because he has a genuine love for movies and has since he was a child.”
“Since he was a child? How interesting,” said my mother.
“How did he get into television?” asked Victor. “Did he cover the movie business in print first?”
“Exactly,” I said, surprised that he had guessed Jack’s route to success. “He used to write for Variety once upon a time.”
“The Bible of the industry,” Victor mused. “I bet he knows where all the bodies are buried in this town.”
“What an odd thing to say,” my mother remarked.
He patted her hand. “Just an expression, Cookie, like talking about skeletons in the closet. No harm meant, right, Stacey?”
“Right,” I said. “I’m sure Jack does know who’s done what to whom in Hollywood. But he’s discreet. Too discreet, if you ask me. He never gossips about people in the business, and it’s so frustrating.”
We all laughed.
“Maybe Jack remembers when you were in the movie theater business,” Mom said to Vic. She turned to me to explain. “Victor owned a small chain at one time, dear. Such a mogul.”
“You owned movie theaters?” I asked him.
“I did,” he said offhandedly, “along with other businesses. I bought companies at rock-bottom prices and sold them after they reached their potential.”
“He’s a magician with money,” my mother chimed in. “I’ve been begging him to take charge of mine.”
I knocked over my wineglass. “You already have a financial advisor,” I reminded her. “You hired him right after you hired Arnold and Karen and Jeanine and Eve. Any more in the entourage and you’ll have a baseball team, Mom.”
“No one is the financial wizard that Victor is,” she said. “What’s more, no one cares about my money the way Victor does.”
That’s what I’m afraid of, I thought. “Yes, but why burden Victor with money issues when the two of you are having such fun?”
“You’re absolutely right, Stacey,” he said. “I keep telling Helen that she shouldn’t rush an important decision like that. She’s fine with the investment advisor she has.”
Well, at least he wasn’t pressuring her. Maybe he really did care about her. And maybe I still couldn’t stop obsessing about all those bath soaps he’d been buying.
After we’d finished our entries, my mother and I got up to go to the ladies’ room. While we were at the sinks, washing our hands (she’d just delivered a speech about the importance of hand washing in public rest rooms), she said, as if she were a girl with a high school crush, “Isn’t Victor wonderful?”
“He’s very nice,” I conceded.
“He is very nice, especially when you consider all that he’s been through. He could have turned into a bitter, angry man after his wife died so tragically, but he’s retained his humanity, his zest for life. He puts on his outlandish costumes every day and goes straight out into the world, saying, ‘Here I am, ready for anything.’ ”
“Wait. Wait. Wait. What do you mean his wife died tragically?”
“She was in an accident, a horrible accident.”
I tried to act as if this were merely a bit of trivia as opposed to the scary news bulletin it was. “What kind of an accident?”
“Well, she was an avid sailor. She and Victor had a boat in Marina Del Rey and they used to sail all over the place. One day they took the boat out, and a storm hit, and poor Mrs. Chellus—Elizabeth, her name was— fell overboard and drowned. Victor was devastated, naturally.”
“How awful. Did they ever find his wife’s body? I mean, did it wash up on the shore somewhere? You always hear about kids who go fishing and find these bodies—”
“I didn’t ask about her body, Stacey. There are things I simply wouldn’t broach with Victor.”
Like what? I wanted to say, perplexed by her reluctance to pry more information out of Vic. Before falling for him, there was nothing she wouldn’t ask men. She was unafraid of intimidating them or pissing them off. As an example, she had practically tortured the president of Fin’s Premium Tuna the day she met him, absolutely assaulted him with questions, but now she couldn’t confront her new boyfriend about his past? What was up with that?
“So you have no idea if they recovered the body and whether they did an autopsy on it?” I said.
She was aghast. “Don’t be a fresh mouth, young lady,” she said, hands on hips.
“I was only wondering how an avid sailor would fall overboard and drown. Aren’t you at least a tiny bit curious?”
“Of course not! This entire subject is downright ghoulish, Stacey. I don’t appreciate it and neither would Victor.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll stop.”
“Good. You see, what made Elizabeth’s death even more traumatic for him was that he had only been married to her for a matter of months. Of course, the fact that she was a wealthy woman with no family other than Victor put an additional burden on him, because he was stuck managing her estate.”
I tried not to let my eyes bug out when she said this. “You’re telling me he was a newlywed when she died and that she left him all her money?”
She nodded, oblivious to my drift. “Now can you understand why I fell in love with this man? Look at his indomitable spirit. Look at how he rebounded instead of giving up. Look at how he not only goes on with life after the terrible blow he’s been dealt, but how he relishes life. He’s such a role model for me, Stacey. There I was, a widow in Cleveland who lived only for the occasional phone call from her daughter in Los Angeles. I had given up on the idea of ever finding love again after your father died, but Victor’s changed my whole attitude. He’s changed me. You’ve noticed that, haven’t you, dear? How much I’ve changed?”
You bet I’ve noticed, I thought miserably. The old you would have run like crazy from a guy with a rich wife who died under suspicious circumstances ten seconds after she said “I do.” But now you’ve let fame and fortune make you soft in the head, and I’ve got to do something about it before it’s too late.
nineteen
“Victor Chellus? Yeah, I’ve heard the name,” said Mickey Offerman, my agent. I had gone t
o see him in hopes of strategizing about my career, as well as picking his brain about Victor. They were contemporaries and had both lived in L.A. forever, so it occurred to me that their paths might have crossed.
“What have you heard?” I said, trying to stay out of Mickey’s line of fire, breathwise. He’d eaten something with onions prior to our meeting, and the by-product was bringing tears to my eyes.
“Rumor has it he’s had business reversals.”
“Really?” And my mother had said he was whiz with money.
“Yeah, he’s been in and out of financial trouble, I think. There was a chain of movie theaters that had problems, some real estate that went sour, that sort of thing.”
The movie theaters had problems? It hadn’t sounded that way at dinner. “Well, he seems perfectly solvent now,” I said. “He’s living in the lap of luxury in Beverly Hills.”
“What’s new about that? Some people are up one minute, down the next, up again the next. He’s probably got a little gambler in him.”
“Swell. He and my mother are an item.”
“No shit.” Mickey laughed. “The Tuna Lady’s in love?”
“Apparently, and it’s not funny.”
“Why? Because Chellus took a dive or two in the market?”
“Speaking of diving, have there been rumors about his personal life? His wife drowned in a boating accident.”
“Like that’s a big deal around here. Look what happened to Natalie Wood. The thing is, everybody in L.A. is the star of their own drama, Stacey. This one’s mother threw herself out a third-story window and that one’s daughter was shot and killed by her drug-addicted boyfriend, and on and on it goes. So Chellus’s wife went overboard on their boat. Doesn’t make him an ax murderer.”
“No, I guess not. It’s just that this is my mother we’re talking about. If I find out Victor’s bad news, I’m breaking them up.”
“Isn’t it her decision whether or not to be with the guy? Why should she listen to you about it?”
“Mickey, Mickey.” I sighed. How could I explain that my mother had raised me to be a meddler and that I was only doing what she’d taught me. “Let’s move on and talk about my career.”
He shrugged. “What’s to talk about? Nothing’s cooking at the moment.”
“Nothing?”
“Nada.”
“What should I do?”
“Keep working at that store.”
“What else?”
“Ask your boyfriend Jack Rawlins to help you.”
“He has helped me. But I feel I should get jobs on my own.”
“Then have your boobs done, like I told you when you first came to see me. You’re the only one in this town without hooters, kid.”
“I already have breasts, Mickey. I just don’t have the kind that are the shape and consistency of basketballs. Besides, there are plenty of actresses who haven’t had theirs done. Meg Ryan, Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman. None of them is especially well-endowed.”
“They’re movie stars,” he said. “They don’t need hooters. You, on the other hand, are a woman who’s pushing thirty-five and still waiting for her big break.”
“Maybe if you started thinking more like an agent and less like a plastic surgeon, I wouldn’t be waiting,” I said.
“Maybe if you’d drop the I’m-so-talented-I-don’t-need-tits act, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he countered.
Dear Mickey. After I left his office, I stopped at a drugstore to buy some Advil for the headache he’d given me. I tried to pay, but the young woman behind the register was too engrossed in Variety to take my money.
“Excuse me,” I said, holding up the Advil. “Can I please pay for this?”
“Oh, sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I’m hoping to break into the business.”
“Don’t tell me: you want to be an actress,” I said, my head throbbing.
“Doesn’t every girl in this town?” she said, stating the obvious.
My mother went to New York to shoot an episode of Sex and the City. Yeah, I should have been the one appearing on that show, given that I was the thirtysomething single girl, but they wanted her to play Sarah Jessica Parker’s bitchy aunt, so off she went.
While she was gone, Victor invited Jack and me over to his house to watch a movie. Jack begged off again, saying he had too much work to do, but I accepted the invitation, figuring I could use the evening alone with Victor to learn more about him.
His house was north of Santa Monica Boulevard in a very tony area of L.A. known as the Beverly Hills flats. Set back behind tall hedges on one of the city’s prettiest and most desirable streets, it was an elegant, traditional-style estate, more reminiscent of the grand mansions of the East Coast than the mazelike contemporaries of California. It was tastefully decorated, too—like a spread straight out of Architectural Digest—with expensive antiques and solid brass fixtures and French doors everywhere you looked.
Victor must have given his interior designer a sky’s-the-limit budget, I thought, as I forced my tongue back into my mouth and tried not to compare my crummy apartment to his palace. Of course, the other thought I had was that, business reversals or not, Victor had enough money to afford one of the choicest properties in town. The question was: Did he do something illegal to get it and keep it?
And how about all the members of his staff that were bustling around? How was he paying for their services? For example, I was greeted at the door by Carlos, a strappingly handsome Latino, who welcomed me inside and offered me a beverage. He was Victor’s “manservant,” his majordomo, the guy who made sure everybody was well tended to. (It’s a status symbol in L.A. for the super-rich to have a manservant, as opposed to a butler, even though they do essentially the same job. Perception is everything here.) And then there was the similarly Spanish-accented Rosa, Victor’s personal chef, who was also Carlos’s wife. They were hired as a “package deal,” he explained to me at some point during the evening, and had been with him for many years. There was also Vincent, the beefy and always beaming chauffeur. He doubled as Victor’s “security man,” which is L.A. speak for bodyguard. And, of course, there were the housekeeper and the man who took care of the grounds and the full-time projectionist, whose domain was Victor’s fabled screening room. Such lavishness. No wonder my mother’s head was spinning. When we lived in Cleveland, she had a cleaning lady to help out once a week, but that was it in the way of “staff.” This new lifestyle to which Victor had introduced her must have made her feel like a queen. It just seemed too good to be true—all of it.
“Well, isn’t this cozy?” Victor said as we sat at opposite ends of his football field-length dining room table. Cozy it wasn’t. “If I can’t be with my Helen tonight, at least I get to dine with her baby.”
“Thanks for having me,” I said after taking my first bite of Rosa’s chicken with roasted red peppers. It was delicious, and I complimented her on it as she served me some rice. A slim, pretty woman with big dark eyes and long dark hair tied in a ponytail, she smiled and thanked me and offered to give me the recipe. As she was talking, I allowed myself a brief fantasy in which I was a huge movie star with my own personal chef—a chef and a chauffeur and, of course, a manservant, not to mention a manicurist who made house calls.
“So tell me, Victor. How do you pass the time now that you’re retired or semiretired or whatever? Are you a golfer?”
“Yes, but a very mediocre one,” he said, doing his self-deprecating number again. “And I travel quite a bit—when I’m not chasing after your mother, that is. I like to keep an eye out for possible business ventures.”
“Was it a business venture that brought you to Arnold Richter’s talent agency the day you met my mother in his waiting room?”
“Oh, that.” He chuckled. “I was there to see one of the other agents, Tony Linton, about a screenplay Vincent wrote.”
“Vincent? The man who works for you?”
“Yes. Nice fellow and honest as the day is
long. I promised him I’d show it around. Unfortunately, Tony didn’t think much of it.”
So Victor was out there peddling a script on behalf of his chauffeur/bodyguard. Well, that was pretty decent of him, wasn’t it?
“Helen offered to read it,” Victor mused, “which was very generous of her. She takes the cake, your mom.”
“She does,” I agreed. “Is she very different from the other women you’ve dated?”
“God, yes. For starters, she’s not young enough to be my daughter. I have to admit that I was on a youth kick before I met her.”
Wow. So he was being truthful about his dalliances with Maura and women her age. That made me feel a tiny bit better about him.
“And I can have an intelligent conversation with her,” he went on. “She’s well-informed about many, many issues, and isn’t shy about sharing her opinions.”
And he not only doesn’t mind that my mother is opinionated, he actually likes that about her.
“Mostly, I love how real she is,” he said. “There’s no phoniness, no attempt to be someone she isn’t. Do you know how rare that is in this town, Stacey?”
I do, I thought. But are you attempting to be someone you’re not? And if you are, how do I find out what you’re up to?
We chatted about my mother for a few more minutes before I decided to plunge in and probe the touchy subject.
“Tell me about your wife,” I said. “If it’s not too painful for you.”
“It’s not painful at all,” he said. “I relish the chance to talk about Elizabeth. She was the light of my life, and the time we spent together is a beautiful memory for me.” He paused, as if conjuring up just such a memory. “I was immediately attracted to her, to her dark beauty and her trim, athletic figure, but it was her wit that hooked me. She was lively and funny and very, very blunt, much like your mother. She also cared about her fellow man, serving on a number of charities.”
“She didn’t have a career?’
