“E-mail? I don’t even know how to check my e-mail unless you are there to set it up for me!”
“Really? Oh, darling, you are so endearingly technologically ignorant.”
“Hamilton!” Kate was rapidly losing her cool. “Where the fuck were you last night?”
“Kate, I don’t think it’s necessary for you to use that tone. I, for one, am doing my best to stay calm, even though you are clearly losing control.”
They were interrupted by a knock on the door and Sam’s voice calling, “We’re ready for you, Kate.”
“Getting dressed!” she called back, and immediately began rushing around her room, grabbing bits and pieces of her costume (which was quite literally made up of bits and pieces) and working her way into them as she tried to get some sort of straight answer from Hamilton. “Okay, Hamilton, I am calm. I hear you that you tried to reach me. I didn’t get the messages. Please tell me where you were.”
“I don’t know if this is really the time to discuss this, Kate. You have to go to work, and you clearly have some feelings that you need to work through before you can hear my news in a way that will be satisfying for me.”
“Hamilton,” said Kate, keeping her voice exaggeratedly calm and taking the time to pull him down to sit with her on the sofa, even though she absolutely, positively needed to get to set immediately. She knew she wouldn’t be able to work without getting some sort of answer from him, and she knew he wouldn’t share anything with her unless he felt he had her full, undivided attention. “I do want to hear your news. You and your news are my top priorities.”
“Well, sometimes it just doesn’t feel that way.”
Oh god, thought Kate, I don’t have time for pouting. “I’m sorry, honey—I shouldn’t have snapped at you about the phone thing. It’s my fault for not checking the e-mail.”
“Yes, exactly,” said Hamilton, brightening a little as he sensed the tide turning in his favor.
“Kate! We really need you!” Sam’s voice was developing a definite edge. Kate knew she couldn’t stall anymore.
“Right away!” she called, getting up from the couch and surrendering her dream of going into her scene free of the feeling that her entire life was falling apart. “I guess this will just have to wait until tonight, then.”
“Okay, darling,” said Hamilton, opening the door for her. “But don’t forget to say hello to your husband’s second favorite client when you pass her trailer!”
“What?”
“Sapphire has agreed to join our little management family! Isn’t that great?”
If it hadn’t been for Sam reaching up and placing a steadying hand on her elbow, Kate felt sure she would have passed out.
“Isn’t that great?” repeated Hamilton.
Knowing that Hamilton wouldn’t be happy until he got the answer he wanted, she forced out a weakly cheerful “Yeah…great” and allowed Sam to lead her down the rickety stairs.
“Oh, and honey?” Hamilton called, causing Kate to stop in her tracks and Sam to elicit an audible sigh of impatience. “You really aren’t looking well. I hate to say it, but honestly? You are looking a little bony. It is just not a good look. Make sure they do what they can to help you with the lighting. We don’t want you showing up in an article about scrawny actresses, now, do we?”
By the time Kate made it to the set, her head was spinning. Her thoughts, dominated for so long by her neurotic fear of looking fat in the scene that she was finally about to shoot, now turned to the novel fear of appearing too thin and the very real fear of losing her husband to her costar. Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself silently. Everyone knows that in Hollywood you can’t be too rich or too thin. She tried not to think about the other truism about Hollywood: you most certainly can lose your husband to your costar.
“Katie, good, you made it,” said Jimmy, the director for the current episode, walking efficiently toward her with his assistant, Pearl, fast on his heels. When he reached her, he threw an arm over her shoulder, turned abruptly to the left toward where the cameras were set up, and continued his brisk pace, with Kate now attached to his side. “I’m sorry to rush you, Katie, but this new scheduling crap is making everyone crazy around here, and I’d hate to have to send you home again without finishing this damn scene.”
“It’s no problem.”
“I knew it wouldn’t be for you. You’re a trouper. Okay, I think you know what this scene is about, don’t you, darlin’?” Jimmy had been a television star in his own right in a short-lived but popular Western drama called The Cowboys, and although he had been born and raised in Michigan, his speech was peppered with endearments from the Hollywood version of the cowboy vernacular.
“Yeah, I think so. Is there somewhere specific you need me to start?”
“Yeah, actually, start and finish. Because of the time crunch, we had to go on ahead and work this old dawg out with second team while we were waitin’ on you. I’ll call Mary over to show you what we worked out.”
“Oh, okay…but—” Before Kate could finish, Jimmy was out of earshot, moving quickly back toward where the directors’ chairs were set up, talking rapid-fire to his note-taking assistant the whole time. What Kate had intended to tell him was that she had a few ideas about how she wanted to play the scene. It was a short scene, but it was important in that her character had to make an emotional transition, which Kate had to show solely through her movement and expression. Her character, Melania, realizes that she is no longer in love with her wealthy husband (with whom she just made love) but is in fact falling for the gardener, Gunther (who the audience knows is actually an Eastern European prince in hiding from his enemies). In a previously shot scene, Melania had woken up in the bed she shared with her husband, Paul, and exited the room. Today’s scene picked up as she exited her bedroom and walked across the living room to stand at the window in the predawn light, watching Gunther as he unloaded his truck in front of her house. Knowing that in the following scene she had to be madly in love with Gunther and full of loathing for her husband, Kate had spent quite a bit of time working on ways to illustrate Melania’s state of mind: first, she envisioned herself spending a few moments looking at the stiffly posed family photos on the mantel as a way of representing the years of unhappiness with Paul; then she had seen herself moving toward the piano and briefly touching the decanter of whiskey that rested on its surface to remind the audience of the pain caused by his drinking problem; and finally she would move toward the small table next to the window where she wanted to place the book that Gunther had given her (a worn but beautiful copy of her favorite novel, Anna Karenina, that Gunther claimed to have found in one of the yards he worked on but that the audience knew was a very rare and expensive first edition). Only then would Melania look up to see her soon-to-be lover outside her window and realize her true feelings.
“Hey,” said Kate’s stand-in, Mary, as she approached. “Let me show you what he wants. Basically, you walk from the door to this mark at the window. That’s it. Pretty simple.”
“Oh,” said Kate, trying to figure out how she was going to communicate Melania’s life-altering realization in a three-yard walk. “Is there room for me to stop at the piano or go to the mantel?”
“You know, you’re gonna have to ask Jimmy, but he is super-stressed and Jerry is totally breathing down his neck about getting to the next scene before lunch, so my guess is that there’s not a lot of room for change. Knock yourself out, though.”
“Oh, bite me.”
Mary stopped and looked at Kate closely. “Hey, are you okay?”
“Yeah, I just had some ideas about the scene.”
“No, not about the scene. Are you okay? You don’t look like yourself.”
Before Kate could answer, she heard Jimmy yell, “Okay, people, we have got to go! What’s the holdup?”
“We’re good,” Mary called back, moving quickly out of the way, knowing that if her conversation with Kate was targeted as a waste of time, it would be her
head on the chopping block.
“Let’s go then, people!”
“Right!” shouted Rick, the first assistant director, through his bullhorn. “Let’s do this! Final touches!”
“Final touches” was the signal for the beauty squad to descend on Kate. Paige came rushing in, lip gloss and powder at the ready, and Gladys, the on-set costumer, followed close behind to take Kate’s robe and slippers. Primped and near naked in her lavender lingerie, Kate moved to her starting position and took some deep breaths, trying to work her way into Melania’s mind-set. She briefly debated calling Jimmy over to discuss her ideas for the scene, but he seemed so stressed—everyone seemed so stressed—that she decided to make do with the simple action the director had worked out for her. Hopefully, the audience would fill in the blanks.
“Aaaand action!” called Rick, and Kate began her slow walk across the room, trying to replace the actual reality that she was an actress in her underwear in front of hundreds (soon to be millions) of people with the imagined reality that she was a real woman having a private emotional moment in her very private home. She got about halfway across the living room set, lost in her inner monologue of lustful thoughts about Gunther and hoping that she wasn’t pushing too hard to show the audience the intensity of Melania’s feelings (she had learned from painful experience that even love can look like constipation if the actor is trying too hard to illustrate the emotion through facial expressions alone). Her intense fantasizing was interrupted by Jimmy’s voice yelling, “CUT!” followed by a sudden swell of activity as assistant directors whispered frantically into walkie-talkies and various crew members hurried over to confer with the director.
“I need wardrobe and makeup at the monitor!” Rick called out, causing a flurry of movement in the dark corner where Paige and Gladys had put their portable set chairs. Paige’s knitting and Gladys’s Treo went flying as the two women grabbed their overstuffed set bags and hurried over to find out what was going on.
Kate was left alone and confused in the middle of the set. Had she suddenly sprouted a cystic pimple that was somehow catching the light and creating a distracting shadow that fell across her face? Or—god forbid—did she have some sort of hideously humiliating wardrobe malfunction that the director was too embarrassed to tell her about? Just last week, Gladys had told her about a time she had been asked by several crew members to bring underwear to the set for an actress who liked to practice high kicks while wearing short skirts sans panties. Kate did a quick and (she hoped) subtle check of her costume, making sure that all of her delicate bits were covered. Everything seemed okay, so unless she had gotten her period (in which case she would simply kill herself right there), there was nothing to do but stand alone like the cheese in the children’s game and wait for the other kids to come and get her.
Finally, Paige and Gladys broke away from the group and walked toward her, both sporting pained smiles. Paige spoke first: “Well, the good news is that they don’t think you look too fat.”
“Okay,” said Kate, steeling herself. “I’m assuming there is also bad news.”
“Well,” said Gladys, looking to Paige for support, “bad-ish.”
“For the love of god,” said Kate, “I am standing here in my underwear. Would you please just spit it out?”
“They’re afraid you look too thin,” said Gladys.
“And tired,” added Paige.
“Are you serious?” Kate could hardly believe her ears.
“They want you to wear a robe.”
“And, apparently, take a nap,” said Paige.
“They want me to take a nap?”
“No, but they want me to make you look rested, and I can do only so much with a tube of concealer.”
Kate was staring at Paige blankly. She was simply too tired and too hungry to keep up. Too thin? A nap?
“Kate, I’m kidding,” Paige continued, bringing her out of her confusion. “Well, not about the robe part, but they would never stop production for you to take a nap.” Kate managed a small smile as Paige whipped out her magical makeup bag and Gladys walked back to the director to figure out where they would place the robe on the set so that Kate could slip it on at the beginning of the scene, creating a transition from the scene they had already shot in the bedroom, which showed her wearing just her lingerie.
Kate sat on Paige’s tiny foldout set chair and watched as the entire crew ran around trying to find a way to deal with her inadequacy. She desperately wanted to sneak back to her trailer—or even better, to her house—for just a moment of privacy in which to process her humiliation, but, as Jimmy said, she was a trouper, which meant that she would bury her own feelings for as long as was needed to get the day’s work done. She would smile gamely at the myriad crew members who passed her chair and do her best to make light of her mortifying embarrassment, because that was what everyone expected of her. They counted on her to step up and make everyone feel comfortable, no matter how unfairly she was treated or how badly she felt. They counted on her to be a good girl.
Finally, after thirty minutes of frantic activity and intense conversations involving much pointing at Kate and aggravated head shaking, it was time for Kate to play the scene. The dreaded underwear was covered by a silk robe, the bags under her eyes masked with a thick layer of concealer. When, after two takes of the scene, the director of photography was still not happy with how she looked, he resorted to blasting Kate’s face with direct light from a large handheld bulb, in an attempt to camouflage her apparently hideously tired appearance. Kate could hope only that her squinty eyes would be read as overwhelming passion.
Kate’s car limped along Sunset Boulevard, the lethargic pace of the traffic matching her mood. She looked around listlessly, vaguely taking in the seemingly endless array of fast-food restaurants. For once, her mind didn’t scroll through the menu of each restaurant in a hunger-fueled fantasy of forbidden foods. The irony of her situation hadn’t escaped her: she had been ordered by her boss—a Hollywood producer, for god’s sake—to put on weight, but she had no appetite. It was as though if she took in food she would have to take in everything else that was happening in her life, and if felt as if the pain of that could kill her. Of course, starvation would eventually kill her, too. She numbly searched her soul for the part that cared but came up empty.
The turnoff for her street arrived way too soon, and before she knew it, she was pulling into her beautifully landscaped driveway. She was surprised to see Hamilton’s Porsche there and even more surprised to see a cherry red Mercedes convertible parked next to it. Oh lovely, he was having a meeting with his new star client in Kate’s home. How…homey.
She quickly glanced into her rearview mirror and flinched. When had she aged ten years? Apparently, it had been an even longer drive than it had felt like…through the desert…with leeches sucking all of the moisture from her body while an evil facialist applied a drying clay mask. At least the red in her eyes set off the blue of her irises nicely. There was something to be said for looking so absolutely terrible, though: when there was no hope for meaningful, immediate improvement, there was no need to try. Forgoing even the standard undereye mascara–removing hand wipe, Kate grabbed her purse and, with a groan of effort, dragged her uncooperative body out of the car and through the front door of her house.
“Hello!” Kate called, surprised to see her living room empty. “Hamilton, I’m home!”
When no one answered, she began a quick sweep of the house. Kitchen: empty. Patio: empty. Screening room: empty. She made her way down the hallway and heard music coming from the bedroom—was it Prince? As she got closer, she could tell that, yes, it was definitely Prince. In fact, it was the Purple Rain sound track—otherwise known as the sexiest album ever produced. She found herself frozen at her bedroom door, her hand centimeters from the doorknob, unsure whether she wanted to see what was on the other side. She leaned into the door to see if she could hear anything over the pulsating rhythm of the music. Was that groaning? Yes, t
here was groaning—there was definitely groaning—but was it part of the song? She tried to remember that song where Prince meets a girl named Nikki—was there a lot of groan-filled sex? Nikki was a sex fiend, that much Kate remembered, but she couldn’t get clear on whether there was any actual bumping and grinding. When the song ended and the groaning did not, Kate got her answer. Well, part of her answer. She still needed to open the door to find out the rest. Taking a deep breath and saying a short prayer to the god of don’t-let-it-be-what-I-think-it-is, Kate threw open the door and turned toward the bed.
The empty bed.
Still confused, Kate heard the opening strains of “When Doves Cry” coming from the closed door to her home gym, attached to the bedroom. Images of Hamilton and Sapphire entwined on the weight bench, gyrating in sync to Kate’s favorite song, flashed through her mind, making her dizzy with dread and rage. She grabbed the doorknob, took a few steadying deep breaths, and flung the door open to reveal Hamilton, drenched in sweat, leaning over a woman who was—just like in Kate’s nightmare—lying on the weight bench. Unlike the image in her fantasy, however, this woman was lifting weights. And groaning.
Groaning from the strain of lifting weights.
Hamilton stood and turned at the sound of the door opening. So did a pink spandex–clad Sapphire Rose.
“Hey, Kate,” said Hamilton, acting as if his wife walking in on him and her costar, drenched in sweat and groaning away, was the most natural thing in the world. “You’re home early.”
“Not really,” said Kate, picking up the remote and turning down the music. “It’s six o’clock.”
“Six o’clock!” exclaimed Sapphire, sitting up and playfully slapping Hamilton with a towel. “You rascal. You told me it was five o’clock.”
“It was, the last time I checked. Is it my fault that time flies when you’re having fun?”
“Excuse me,” Kate said, interrupting their lively banter. “Hamilton, could I talk to you?”
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