The Second Assistant

by Clare Naylor

  “Oh, no. This is nurthing. This does nurthing.” He let my hair fall lankly back down. “We do the Hollywood Honey,” he declared finally after scratching his chin. And with that he waltzed off, never to be seen again—well, not by me anyway. I was duly offloaded onto a surly girl with a shaved head who proceeded to cover me in foil, disdain, and bleach.

  But lo, eventually I emerged in my new guise, a Hollywood Honey. A little generic for some people’s tastes perhaps, but I was thrilled. I was so completely alien in this town that I was prepared to take any route to Belonging. Even at a cost of six hundred dollars. Not including tax and tip, I might add. My hair was writing checks that my lowliness couldn’t honor. Though I did help myself to a very-expensive-looking French mint from the cloakroom. And as I walked out of the salon into the magic hour, that time of day that is so loved for its flatteringly pink glow by cinematographers and women over twenty-two alike, I did feel a little bit special. I felt that this was an investment in my career. And my life. Because, let’s face it, Bumblefuck Mouse, even if she were six hundred dollars richer than Hollywood Honey, was never going to get anywhere in this town. And now that I was here—now, as the traffic on Beverly was streaking past me, and now, as girls loitered outside the vintage clothing stores and sipped their organic OJ outside King’s Road Café—well, now that I was here, I might as well make the most of it. I might as well dive in, sink my teeth in, and bite off more than I could chew. I might as well get the fuck on with it, as Scott might have said in a more conservative moment.

  So after I lay there worrying for two and a half hours, the sun finally came up and I hauled myself out of bed. I had been through every party-disaster scenario in my mind. I had poisoned every one of the Hollywood glitterati with bad sushi. The rose petals that I’d ordered to be scattered in Daniel’s pool would be red and not white, and the water would look like someone had been murdered in the deep end. The hand-delivered invitations would have been misdelivered, and we’d have a slew of doormen, maids, pool boys, and nannies at the party instead of their fabulous and famous bosses. And while I would have been thrilled to sit on a lounge chair and shoot the breeze with the woman who washed George’s underpants, I doubted that Daniel and Scott would share my perverted pleasure.

  When I caught sight of my reflection in the fridge door as I went to get the milk for my cereal, I realized that the stress of the past week had taken its toll on my appearance. I looked very Dawn of the Living Dead–ish.

  Fuck, I thought, what on earth will Jake Hudson think when he sees me? Which wasn’t a terribly high-minded, work-oriented, thrusting-young-assistant thing to think, but it was the truth. I picked up my phone and called my new old friend Lara.

  “Lara?”

  “Who is this?” It was a man’s voice. And I suddenly remembered my status as the only sex-free zone in town. Everyone else had gotten some action last night. Except me.

  “It’s Elizabeth. A friend of Lara’s,” I replied. Just a bit embarrassed.

  The line went dead. I’d call back later when all of last night’s dates were back home.

  I poured the milk on my cereal and, as it curdled, realized that I couldn’t even afford a new carton, let alone the manicure–pedicure–facial wax–salt-scrub massage–new dress–and–blow-out that everyone else seemed to be having for the big night. And that was just some of the agents at The Agency. That didn’t even take into account the armpit botox shots that actresses got to ensure that they didn’t sweat on a fabulous dress or the collagen they had injected into the soles of their feet so that they could exist more comfortably in their ankle-breaking high heels. But hey, I was just an assistant, right? As Victoria, my mentor who didn’t seem to mentor me in anything other than the best place to find organic, twice-pressed prune juice in West Hollywood, had so succinctly put it yesterday.

  “Really, I wouldn’t waste your money having your hair lightened, Elizabeth,” she’d explained sweetly as I tried to escape to my hair appointment. “Or your time. Really, nobody’s going to be looking at you tomorrow night, are they, now? Not with all those beautiful, interesting women there.” And with that she smiled her disgusting, rodent-toothed smile and bade me farewell. Or fare-miserably, as she’d doubtless have preferred.

  Two minutes later Lara called back.

  “Hi,” she said briskly.

  “Oh, Lara, I’m so sorry. It didn’t occur to me to think that you might have company,” I apologized.

  “I didn’t,” she snapped. O-kay then. I moved swiftly on.

  “Well, the thing is, I was wondering if maybe you had any tips on what I ought to wear tonight. I mean, obviously I’m going to be on duty, but then I don’t want to look like a complete dork, and I was wondering what—”

  “Come over at five. We’ll figure it out. 185 Rexford. South of Santa Monica.” And she hung up. That girl would be head of a studio in no time. She was so efficient.

  And not only was she efficient, as I discovered at 5:00 P.M., she was also the owner of a closet so comprehensive that if she wasn’t moonlighting as fashion director of Marie Claire, then she had to be the secret daughter of Aristotle Onassis. There was serious wealth in that closet. And in the jewelry boxes and the legion of beauty products strewn around the place, which would have made Brigitte Bardot look twenty-five again. As Lara sat on her bed and directed me toward various dresses and wrap tops and cashmere sweaters and pairs of Jimmy Choos, I was longing to ask, How? How come the daughter of a teacher and a doctor’s receptionist from Pennsylvania had so much stuff? But Lara was busy reading a book called The Art of the Novel, so I didn’t interrupt.

  “Do you like this outfit?” I asked eventually, and turned to show her what I had cautiously unearthed from her collection.

  “Waaay too librarian.” She put down her book and stood up. “I know exactly what will work on you.”

  And quickly she had me in a satin G-string, a dress that wasn’t much bigger than the satin G-string, and then a pair of equally obscene, strappy silver heels.

  “I cannot leave the house looking like this!” I gasped as I saw my reflection, complete with teased-up new blond locks and a diamond necklace that Lara was fastening behind my neck.

  “You look great,” she proclaimed.

  “I look like a . . .” I hesitated, hoping against hope that Lara’s haberdashery wasn’t likely to be funded by the wages of sin. “I look like a hooker.”

  “Enjoy.” She smiled and hopped back onto her bed to resume her book, leaving me torn between wondering what my mother would think and what George would think.

  6

  There are certain shades of limelight that can wreck a girl’s complexion.

  —Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly

  Breakfast at Tiffany’s

  At exactly eight o’clock on the night of the party, the wrought-iron gates that led to Daniel’s Shangri-la swung open. A row of Armani-clad security guards stood in formation behind a silk rope at his front door, and an army of valets in tan jackets waited patiently for the first car to roll up the drive. As I assumed my place at the door, guest list in hand, I took a deep breath and reveled in the scent of jasmine, which drifted on the breeze with the subtlety of a chemical-warfare attack. I’d ordered eight hundred plants the previous afternoon when I realized that Manuel Canovas Fleur de Coton candles, delicious though they might smell, were actually a fire hazard. Now I was glad that I’d paid the extra twenty thousand dollars for the jasmine, because maybe it would mask the stench of white fear I was giving off like a rabid skunk. I’d actually contemplated siphoning off a couple of hundred jasmine-bound dollars in case the party was a complete disaster and I had to decamp to Mexico, but despite my experience with the shady congressman, I had sadly never learned the gentle art of embezzling.

  I cast one last look behind me at the hundred waitresses in leopard-print minidresses with silver trays and cocktails at the ready. I checked that the Crazy Girls in gold Simba costumes who were dotted around Daniel’s house a
nd garden like poorly hidden Easter eggs, each with one standard-issue diamanté-encrusted riding crop, were all in place. Then I fixed my headset on and was about to practice the breathing techniques that I’d overheard Alexa, my yoga-teacher neighbor, explaining to one of her pupils, when a high-pitched buzz pierced my right eardrum and Ryan came through loud and clear.

  “Elizabeth. Where the fuck is Tarka?”

  I hastily adjusted the volume.

  “The guests are supposed to be able to hear drifting music or something, and he’s not here. Daniel’s freaking.”

  I looked around frantically for our lost rock star when I was interrupted again. “Okay, he’s here. One of the Crazy Girls had him. Oh, and by the way, about the Crazy Girls. Daniel hasn’t clicked yet that they’re going to take their clothes off, but when they do, you’ll be fired. I can’t believe that you ordered cheap strippers to come to his party. Didn’t you know that the chairman of Universal is a woman? As is the vice chairman of Sony. Not to mention many, many more women who are coming. And you are planning to humiliate them all at Daniel’s home by bringing in strippers. Honestly, Elizabeth, I’m shocked.”

  “What?” I asked with a suddenly dry throat.

  “Glad I’m not in your cheap shoes.” Ryan laughed evilly into my ear.

  “Ryan, wait . . . you told me to order Crazy Girls,” I stammered.

  “Did I?” Ryan asked. “I must have made a mistake. Oops.” Then there was radio silence.

  I looked around in a blind panic to see what I could do to stop the strippers stripping, but George had just arrived, guests were on the grounds, and I couldn’t escape from the door. What could I do except pray that I still had Ryan’s e-mail instructions on my computer in case I was required to explain myself? I pushed the thought to the back of my mind.

  “That’s some fine ice, baby.” Nick, one of the heat-packing bouncers, winked at me as he clocked my courtesy-of-Lara necklace. I looked down, and despite the fact that my face was melting and my hair was wilting and my spirits were evaporating and I was most likely about to lose my job, I immediately felt pretty special thanks to my diamonds. Which were caressing my chest as no man ever had. I thought how impressed Jake Hudson would be when he saw me, or at least how improved I was from our last encounter, with my greasy clumps of hair and dazed expression.

  “Thanks. Not mine, of course.” I smiled at Nick. “Oh, look, here they come.” I pulled a nervous face as the first of the guests poured from the procession of cars that had begun to drift toward the house. I scoured my list for the bigwigs I’d never heard of and smiled politely as I checked them off and ushered them through. The hair, the ice, the chiffon, the haute couture. Never were so many people so plump of lip and blank of expression. It was all I could do to stop myself from elbowing Nick in the ribs with astonishment every time I saw a remarkable pièce de surgerie cosmétique, as I discreetly liked to call it.

  All this, though, was par for the course. I had anticipated the fabulousness of the guests. What I didn’t know about was the foulness of the Uninvited. Not, I hasten to add, the hundreds of people who had begun arriving at Daniel’s gate that afternoon with their sandwiches and baseball caps and cameras in hopes of catching a glimpse of an idol or two. Or the women from Mississippi with their sign that read BABES FROM BILOXI BARK TO BANG BEN. No, their screams were nothing compared to those of the professional gate-crashers.

  I have to point out here that everyone in Hollywood is desperate to be invited to parties—they differ merely in the degree of their desperation. Some well-adjusted folk will only call in a favor from a producer friend if it’s a Charlie’s Angels premiere. Others have a more pathological need to be seen at everything, and their wiles will necessarily be more drastic. They might use the name of someone they know to be on the list to get into a party, while some other desperados might date a marketing girl at Universal to ensure that they can get onto any list at any time. Because wangling an invite is a popular pastime in Los Angeles. They start young, too. A big-time producer in town was once virtually disowned by his daughter because he couldn’t get her tickets to a Harry Potter premiere. “What’s the matter, Dad, got no juice at Warner Brothers?” she said scornfully before faxing the studio head herself. And scoring, I might add.

  And now, all of a sudden, I was the girl with the golden list. Initially I hadn’t expected my duties as party planner to be quite so extensive, and Ryan was supposed to be sending someone to take over from me, but, for the time being, the tiny bit of power I wielded was beginning to amuse me. Movie stars slipped by without a hitch, and I’d become quite adept at flicking through the alphabetically ordered pages to find those I had never heard of. I was like St. Peter at the gates of heaven. Until, that is, Veronica Byng turned up on the other side of my clipboard.

  “What’s your name, please?” I hadn’t been in my position of power long enough to lose my manners just yet.

  “Veronica Byng, with a y.” I scanned my list diligently. “I’m sorry, madam, but you’re not on the list.”

  “Yes, I am. My assistant RSVP’d.”

  “Well, madam, maybe she forgot.”

  “She didn’t forget. She doesn’t forget anything. Get Daniel Rosen out here now.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”

  “Yes, you can. Use the two mediocre legs God gave you and walk them in that door and get Daniel. Do it now.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that. Perhaps if you’re such good friends with Mr. Rosen, you can call him on his cell phone,” I suggested innocently.

  She looked at me with such arctic hatred that I flinched. I couldn’t help it. And Miss Veronica Byng very savvily saw the chink in my armor. Her voice began to rise, and I involuntarily took a step back. A good instinct, as she took a swing at me. Her talons missed my left cheek by an eighth of an inch. But her stilettos set her off balance. She teetered dangerously like a house of cards, and down she went. Ass over substantial tit, right over the velvet rope smack on top of me. Luckily for Daniel and unluckily for his lawyers, I broke her fall. Miss Byng would have run up a pretty penny with a lawsuit if she’d so much as broken a nail. Moments later Nick had placed her where she definitely belonged—outside the rope.

  By the time I’d brushed myself off and stopped trembling, the crowd waiting to be let in had grown, and a lot of them, despite looking very legitimate, were not on my list. Much as I longed for them to be, because I really didn’t want a repeat of the Veronica Byng experience. There were also a slew of people waiting who weren’t on my list that I could have sworn I’d actually sent invitations to. It was only then that it dawned on me what a sneaky-ass thing Ryan had done. He’d edited the list. Deleted the names of some of the invited guests in order to create a sense of urgency on the other side of the rope. There should always be people who want to get into your party but can’t. It creates buzz and a whiff of exclusivity. Apparently.

  Not to mention hundreds of very pissed-off people yelling at me.

  “I was invited!”

  “I have my invite here!”

  “This is fucking stupid!”

  “I’m on the list!”

  “Get Scott for me!”

  “Fuck you, bitch!”

  “Esther Hartley,” a soft little voice whispered in my right ear, and I scanned my list as I wiped a stray piece of Veronica’s saliva from my left breast. I found Esther Hartley. Thank God somebody’s name was on the list. I glanced up to wave her on, but my eyes only just met the top of her red-sequined dress. I craned my neck and saw that she had the cleavage of a milkmaid, the white-blond ringlets of an ancient goddess of the moon, and a face that was so extraordinarily pretty that for a second I just chewed on my pencil and stared. It was only after I’d developed a crick in my neck that I was able to catch her emerald green eyes and nod for her to go through. It was at precisely that moment I realized that not only did Esther Hartley have enough blessings for an entire race of Honeys, she also had the man of my dreams holding her elbo
w in a proprietorial way.

  There he was. Jake Hudson. He looked even more devastating than I’d remembered. He was wearing black tie and had the air of a young Warren Beatty. He was a man with the evening at his feet. I had a palpitation or two and then smiled up at him. “Jake Hudson.” He grinned lazily and sexily at me, and I nodded at him, without checking my list. I smiled back. He smiled at me. I waited for the flash of recognition, the moment when he’d realize it was me and kiss me warmly on the cheeks at the very least. I wasn’t delusional enough to expect marriage proposals at this juncture. But after the fifth smile I gave him, he frowned in a faintly alarmed way, as though I might be a crazed fan girl, and hurried off with Esther Hartley toward the melee of guests and laughter. He hadn’t even recognized me.

  I might have collapsed into a miserable heap had one of the waitresses not chosen that moment to walk by with a tray of Malibu Mules. I hastily grabbed one, and before you could say “drunk in charge of a clipboard,” I had necked it back and let thirty people who weren’t on the list into the party. I was far too fair-minded to leave the masses out. Especially as they were the invited masses. So, as a gesture of defiance to the detestable Ryan, I just kept on letting them in. Until the room and garden behind me began to pulse with life and it began to seem like a party you might want to crash, rather than an opening at a very important but sublimely boring art gallery where you couldn’t afford anything.