by Amy Sohn
When the couple arrived in the ballroom, they found a dozen or so dinner guests, all in expensive sweaters, speaking accented English. A handsome Spanish actor was there, and a man she recognized as a Soho art dealer. A British memoirist with prematurely gray hair was talking to a 1970s-era comedian whom Maddy’s father had loved.
“Oh my God,” Dan murmured as they came in together.
“I know,” she whispered. “It’s like every subset of the creative world.”
She took in the details of the room, the incredible sparkling chandeliers (ca’rezzonico, Steven had told her they were called), the live chamber quartet—all the things she would have mentioned to her father if she could have called him.
A server offered Maddy and Dan colorful drinks. They took glasses, clinked. The drink was sweet and refreshing. “What is this?” Maddy asked.
“Venetian spreetz,” the server said. “Prosecco, Aperol, and sparkling water.”
Bridget swooped over, accompanied by a thirtysomething woman with dark eyebrows. “I wanted to introduce you to Rachel Huber,” Bridget said. “Rachel is the head of production for Worldwide Films. We’re working together on The Valentine.”
“I just saw I Used to Know Her,” Rachel said to Dan. “I loved it.”
“Thank you so much,” Dan said.
“You know, even though I work for the devil now, I actually started in indie film myself.” Rachel dropped the names of a couple of now-defunct New York–based companies.
A server was calling them inside for dinner. There was a long handcrafted table, with place cards that indicated Maddy was next to Dan. Rachel was on his other side. Steven was bracketed by a tall, glamorous Italian woman and the old comedian. Steven was in his element, his skin luminous in the candlelight.
Throughout dinner, Rachel asked Dan a lot of questions about I Used to Know Her, and several times Maddy noticed that she tapped him on the arm for emphasis. He mentioned some names of NYU classmates, and then they began gossiping about indie-film people. Dan drank Prosecco, and the Pinocchio circles began to appear. He would say something funny, and Rachel’s gray eyes would glint. Maddy felt something greater than irritation and less than jealousy.
Throughout the meal, Steven told show-business anecdotes. One was a famous story that he attributed to Gore Vidal, which required him to imitate Vidal imitating the characters. Jack Kennedy and Tennessee Williams had met at the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach in 1957. JFK was shooting a target and offered the gun to Williams. Williams took the gun with great confidence and got three bull’s-eyes in a row. “ ‘Very good,’ ” said Steven, as a Boston-accented Kennedy. “ ‘Yes,’ ” said Steven, in an exaggerated Southern drawl, as Williams. “ ‘Considering I was using my blind eye.’ ”
For after-dinner drinks, they moved to the sitting room, and Bridget, Rachel, and Dan got into a detailed discussion of how a seminal 1992 Mile’s End film had come to be acquired and distributed. Maddy was not quite bored but ignored. Steven came in and beckoned to her. With a glance at Dan, she went to him. “He seems happy here,” Steven said, eyeing Dan as he laughed at something Rachel said.
“Oh God, he’s going to be on cloud nine for weeks. Thank you for having him. I know it was unexpected.”
“Please, it’s nothing. He’s welcome in my home. As are you. I take my hosting duties very seriously.”
She saw the tall Italian woman light a cigarette, her fingers long and elegant. “Who is that?” she asked.
“A friend. Albertina. She’s a princess.”
“If you didn’t like her, why did you invite her?”
“No,” he said with a laugh. “She an actual Venetian princess.”
Maddy spotted Bridget, Rachel, and Dan stepping outside to one of the terraces. Bridget had her arm around Dan. “Come with me for a second,” Steven said. Maddy hesitated and then followed.
He led her downstairs and down a long hallway to a kitchen, where men in white aprons did dishes. Through the kitchen was another, smaller room. More men in white ate and drank. They rose as Steven entered. He said something in Italian. They were pulling out seats for them and smiling, laughing. Pointing at her, Steven said, “Permettete che vi presenti la Signorina Freed?” He said each word with a perfect Italian accent except Freed, which sounded hard and Wisconsin. “Un giorno sarà più famosa di me.” She recognized the word “famosa,” but when she asked him what the rest of it meant, he wouldn’t tell her.
One of the men, who had thick eyebrows and a handsome stubbled face, had a bottle of something dark and shimmering. Two extra glasses were produced, and Steven poured for Maddy and himself. It was some kind of wine, strong and sweet. She took another sip and her body grew pliable. She didn’t want to go upstairs and try to hold her own around all those important people. She wanted to stay down here and learn dirty jokes in Italian, smoke unfiltered cigarettes with men. “What am I drinking?” she asked.
“An old recipe. It’s Vito’s grandmother’s. He could give it to you, but then he’d have to kill you.” The men laughed again, and one of them said something in Italian she didn’t understand.
In the bedroom later that night, she was flipping pages of a coffee-table book of photography and essays called Venice Observed, by Mary McCarthy, when Dan came in. He tossed her a screenplay. “What’s this?” she asked.
“Rachel Huber asked me to read it, and I already did. But I want to know what you think.”
The title page said The Valentine. “What is this?”
“The movie Bridget’s producing in Bulgaria.”
“Why does she want you to read it if it’s already in production?”
“Can you just read it? And then I’ll tell you.”
“I’m tired,” she said. “Too many spreetzes.”
“Okay,” he said. “But read it in the morning.”
She drifted off within seconds and awakened to find sunlight streaming through the partly open drapes. She could hear Dan in the bathroom, in the tub. She picked up the screenplay.
It was awful. Each scene was engineered to produce maximum tears. A young couple in the South, the girl rich, the boy poor, separated by their families. She had finished by the time he came out of the bathroom, a towel around his waist.
“It’s horrible,” Maddy said. “Why did Rachel want you to read it? She wants a rewrite?”
“She wants me to replace the director,” he said, and began to put on his clothes with his back to her.
So this was what all the quiet talk was about the night before, out on the terrace, while she was in the kitchen with Steven and the cooks. “And what are you going to tell her?” she asked.
“I’m going to do it. I don’t think it’s that bad. There’s a lot of potential.”
“But this isn’t your brand at all. I Used to Know Her was an honest movie. This is just—schmaltz. Worse than schmaltz. Dreck.” She couldn’t understand why he was so eager to take the job, no matter how much they were offering. He had just gotten a distribution deal. The two of them were going to finish The Nest. He had a Hollywood agent sending him scripts. This was the kind of job some washed-up has-been director would take when no one else would hire him.
He put on his sweater, sat on the edge of the bed, and named the two young stars who played the leads, both on the rise. “It’s a chance to make something a lot of people will see,” he said. “You’re being a snob. You get an audition for Walter Juhasz, and all of a sudden you’re an elitist.”
“I’m not an elitist. I just know how to read. I get that you want to work, but you have a quarter of a million dollars coming to you. You don’t have to take the first offer.”
“I think you’re jealous,” he said, going toward the sitting area. “You want Hollywood success, but you don’t want me to have any.” He stared at the fireplace, though the fire had gone out the night before.
“That is not tru
e. Since I met you, all I’ve wanted was for you to be successful.”
“So you understand why I’m going to take this. Mad, I can make an entire independent feature with the money she’s offering. I won’t see most of the Apollo money for a year.”
“Slow down a little, okay?”
“You just want a fixer-upper.”
“What?”
“I was a failure when you met me. Now this good stuff is happening. I’ve been supportive of you signing with Bridget. Auditioning for Juhasz. But now that I have an opportunity, you’re being a bitch about it.”
“I only want what’s good for you!” She went to him, to touch him, but he turned his body away. “Why don’t you ask Rachel to find you something else?” she said. “I’m sure Bridget would help.”
“Because they need someone now. A huge part of working in Hollywood is getting someplace first.”
“You never used to say things like that.”
He left the room. Downstairs, she found him in the dining room eating Venetian biscuits and drinking cappuccino with Rachel Huber, Steven, and Bridget, plus the comedian and Albertina. She wondered if Albertina had spent the night in Steven’s room.
A server put a cappuccino in front of Maddy. She took one sip. It was perfect, but she couldn’t enjoy it. All the breakfast talk was about Dan and The Valentine. He had already said yes while she was upstairs. Or maybe the previous night, before she’d even read a word. Somewhere between Mile’s End and Venice, he had stopped seeing the two of them as a team.
A few hours later—after Dan, Bridget, and Rachel sped away on a boat toward the airport, and the other guests had left, too—Maddy stood on a terrace overlooking the Grand Canal. Steven came out. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I will be. It just happened so fast. He just got here, and now he’s left.” She wasn’t sure how much Steven would want to hear about her missing Dan.
“This is a good city to be in when you miss someone. Now come with me.”
“I need to prepare for my audition. I only have two more days.”
“You need to get out of your head.”
A half hour later, they were on a private boat in the canal, with a captain named Marcello. Steven said he wanted to give her a tour of the Lido. “You don’t get seasick, do you?” he asked.
“Of course not. I love boats. I grew up on a lake. We were more into canoeing, though. My dad was an old hippie.”
“There’s nothing I enjoy more than being on water. The wind. The quiet. On my boats, there’re no casting problems or production delays or infighting.”
They stood on the deck of the motorboat. She wore a cable-knit sweater he had lent her. Here she was in frigid February, in the Venice lagoon with a movie star, wearing a borrowed sweater like a girlfriend, when a month ago she had been trudging from the Atlantic Avenue stop in a hostess dress, counting the blocks till home.
The Lido was deserted and gray. Steven took the wheel, Marcello next to him, and pointed out the various hotels, including Hôtel des Bains, where Visconti had shot Death in Venice.
“You have a sailboat in L.A., right?” she asked. He was always talking about his boat in interviews.
“Yeah. When I need to get away, I take her out.”
“What’s she called?”
“Jo.”
“After Little Women?”
“After Jo Van Fleet. I saw Cool Hand Luke when I was starting out as an actor and she blew me away. She and Newman were only ten years apart and she played his mother. I got the boat after Bridget booked me my first commercial. Now I realize it’s corny to name a boat after an actress, but it’s bad luck to change it.”
He said his father had taught him to sail on Lake Michigan; his only happy memories of his dad were from the boat. His father had been a depressive auto-parts factory worker who got laid off and became a big drinker.
“Is he still alive?”
“He died when I was a teenager. Heart attack.”
“And your mom?”
“She died three years ago. She was eighty-two when she went.”
A vaporetto came at them, veering dangerously close. Marcello cursed at the other captain through the glass as he steered out of the way. “He has good instincts,” she said.
“Everyone who works for me,” Steven said, “has better instincts than I do.”
Over the next three days, Maddy and Dan communicated mostly by text, about work—her audition and his movie. He was overwhelmed with production details. He said it was a good cast, and they seemed to like him, but his days were long. When they spoke by phone, it was brief. He would begin to describe a scene in the movie, then add that he was boring her because she had hated The Valentine. “I didn’t hate it,” she said during one talk. “I just didn’t understand why you wanted to do it.”
“It’s a woman’s story, Maddy, just a different kind.” She wondered if she had been too hard on him, not understanding the toll of all those years of struggle.
Whenever Maddy wasn’t preparing her scenes, she toured Venice with Steven. He took her to Santa Maria della Salute and the Guggenheim. They walked backstreets of the city and dined in small trattorias. He translated snippets of the newspaper aloud for her, explaining that the Italian penchant for exasperation was apparent even in the construction of sentences.
At first she was uncomfortable spending so much time with him, but he was so gallant, she told herself he was merely being a good host. If she allowed herself to believe that he wanted to sleep with her, then she had to believe that the audition was somehow illegitimate. And she had to believe that it was legitimate in order to want to get it.
As she came to know him better, she realized she enjoyed being with him, as a person, not a movie star. He was witty and theatrical, observant and intelligent. At Caffè Florian, he told her a story about the Canadian actor Joe Wiseman. In the late 1950s, Wiseman had starred in Viva Zapata! on Broadway opposite Marlon Brando. “Every night the cast was mobbed for autographs,” Steven said, setting down his espresso with a smirk. “It was the hottest ticket in town. One night on the street, this boy calls out, ‘Mr. Wiseman, Mr. Wiseman!’ Joe just wants to go home, so he walks away. The kid follows him up the block. Wiseman’s walk becomes a run. He circles the block. The kid’s on his heels. Finally, he ducks into an alleyway, thinking he’s lost him, but the kid comes in. Joe’s trapped. He figures he’ll just give an autograph and get out of there. He approaches the kid. The boy says, ‘Mr. Wiseman! What’s Marlon Brando like?’ ”
She laughed. A young Italian couple walked by, and Steven murmured imagined conversation between them, a lover’s spat.
“I love this city,” he said. “The press leaves me alone here.” He told her about the many intrusions over the years. The magazine that got a shot of Cady Pearce sunbathing naked on the deck of Jo, and the one that reported Steven and a prior girlfriend were seeing a sex therapist. Once, a gay bodybuilder had told the supermarket tabloid The Weekly Report that Steven had paid him to have sex. He claimed to know Steven’s identifying characteristics. Steven had sued and settled with the magazine, which retracted the story. He had donated the settlement money, $500,000, to a children’s charity. “It’s important to send a message,” he told Maddy at the café.
Maddy had always been skeptical when she read actors’ tirades on the paparazzi. Though she had found it jolting to face the press at the Berlinale Palast, she felt that acting was a public career, and if you chose it, you had to be willing to sacrifice some privacy.
“But papers have always printed lies about famous people,” she said. “Why not just ignore it?”
“Because the lies get reprinted until they become a sort of truth,” he said, leaning intensely over the table. “They become the story. I want to tell my own story.”
“What kind of lies bother you the most?”
&n
bsp; “That I’ll never marry. That I’m a womanizer. That I can’t commit. That I’m a playboy or gay.”
She peered closely down into her own espresso as she asked, “Why do you think—why do you think they say that about you?”
“Type in any male actor’s name on the Internet, and the word ‘gay’ pops up right after. Type in any actress’s name and you get ‘divorced.’ Think about who’s doing the searching. Women are pessimists and men are optimists. Maybe it’s because I collect art, or have a strong hairline, or own property in Italy. Or because I’m divorced and haven’t remarried.”
She was watching his face, trying to figure out what he was saying. Was he denying the rumors or acknowledging them?
“Well, what do you think?” he asked.
“About what?”
“You asked about my marriage to Julia, so obviously, you’re curious. Do I seem gay to you?” His smile turned the question into a flirtation.
“It’s none of my business,” she mumbled.
“You’re being clever now,” he said.
“I’m not clever,” she said. “I’m an actress in need of a job.”
The morning of the audition, Bridget called from Bulgaria and told Maddy, “I have no doubts about you.” When she clicked off, Maddy felt a little abandoned, but she decided to take it as a sign of faith that Bridget didn’t feel the need to be there for the reading.
She ate lunch at Florian alone, and when she returned to Palazzo Mastrototaro, Steven said Juhasz had arrived and was resting. He said to meet them in the sitting room on the piano nobile at four.
At five minutes to four, she went down. She was wearing a flowing white blouse over jeans. She was as confident as she could rightly be, given the limited time she’d had to prepare. She was completely off-book, which she tried to be for every audition, because it freed her up to take direction.
The two men were standing and talking. Juhasz wore a black button-down shirt and black flat-front pants. He was short with white hair and a long nose with a dent in its tip. He had merry wrinkles around his eyes that made him appear to be laughing all the time. He kissed her on each cheek, then held her hands. “Lovely,” he said. Did he mean her or the moment?
