The Actress: A Novel

by Amy Sohn

  “You mean he would fire me, when he’s been trying to cast Ellie for a year?”

  “Bridget’s not perfect,” he said. “We’ve had our conflicts, but don’t dwell on this. She only wants the best for you.” He closed the script he was reading, a much buzzed-about drama about the 1968 New York City teachers’ strike. “One thing you have to get used to is that it’s impossible to be two places at once.”

  “That’s exactly what she said.”

  When Maddy walked into the restaurant in West Hollywood, for a moment she didn’t recognize him. The man waiting for her at the table was so tan and muscular, his hair grown out, his biceps visible in his T-shirt, that she thought he was an actor. But then he waved eagerly, and she realized it was Dan. As they hugged, she said, “You look fantastic.”

  He had called to ask her to breakfast, saying he wanted to catch up. “Thanks,” he said. “This climate’s actually good for me, despite everything I thought about L.A. before.”

  “So what have you been doing to get this buff?” she asked.

  “Well, surfing.”

  “You? Surfing?”

  “I know. I go to San Onofre. I have all these new buddies. I feel like, if I made the choice to live here, I should take advantage of the the water and get in shape.”

  She thought about her own nascent L.A. social life—Ananda McCarthy’s friends, mostly ex-models and ex-actresses. All of them had used their looks and sexuality to get money, jobs, or men. Most were housewives, with full-time nannies. Maddy felt young around them and bored by their anecdotes. She wondered if Dan’s surfing buddies were real friends.

  “You look like you’ve lost weight,” he said. “Please don’t tell me you’ve been dieting.” Through yoga and swimming, Maddy had dropped from a size ten to a size six. “Just eating better. I want to be a little smaller for Husbandry.”

  “Don’t get too small.”

  They ordered food, and before it came, he reached for her hand on the table. “Mad,” he said. “I’m sorry about those emails I sent when you were in Venice.”

  “It’s okay. It was sudden. You were angry. You don’t have to apologize.” Delicately, she moved her hand away, not wanting there to be any ambiguity. This was a friendly coffee, not a relapse date. Since Catalina, she and Steven had been making love at least once a day, even on nights when they came home late from events. She had decided that the key to her happiness was to trust him and give him his space. When she did that, he was not only warmer but hornier, which made her more confident and certain of his love.

  “I want you to know that I forgive you,” Dan said.

  “Uh-oh,” she said with a smile. “Did you join A.A.? Are you doing the steps?”

  “No, but I started therapy. I’ve been seeing a female shrink who’s helped me a lot.”

  Watching her swirl her spoon in her coffee, Dan couldn’t believe how much he had hated her once. For months he had been furious, convinced that she was a sellout. In his bleaker moments, he had told himself the online rumors were true: She had been offered a contract to become Weller’s wife and draw attention away from the fact that he was gay: $1 million a year, with a five-year minimum and a $1 million bonus for each baby.

  But even if he believed such contracts existed, he couldn’t believe that Maddy would agree to such a thing. She had too much pride. And too much craft, as she would call it. She never would take money to be a prop.

  More recently, he had come over to the less interesting, more depressing version of the story, the one that Rachel favored: Steven was straight and Maddy loved him but had subconsciously chosen him because he could help her career. Dan couldn’t blame her. On the screen, she was a natural. He had been a yutz for not casting her in one of his films before. He had told himself it would harm their relationship to collaborate—but it was mainly a cover for his fear. He had been afraid that if he put her in a movie, she would overshadow him.

  If Maddy was with Steven for her career, then she was no more cynical than most people he had met in L.A. Everyone in the entertainment industry was an opportunist; they all just had different standards for how far they would go. He was an opportunist for taking the directing job in Sofia, and for dating Rachel Huber—even though the sex was only so-so, and she was too svelte for his taste—because he felt she could get him more jobs with Worldwide Films.

  “Anyway,” Dan continued, “I spent all this time being angry with you. But now I understand that . . . we love who we love.”

  “That’s true,” she said.

  The food came—she got a spinach-and-goat-cheese omelet and he got oatmeal, both of them so healthy now—and they talked about her recent acting jobs. He said she’d been right about The Valentine being a bad script, but he expected it to do well at the box office because of its stars. He was renting in Venice Beach and doing the color correction on I Used to Know Her, and he said it was going to be really good when it came out. “But honestly,” he said, “even if all it does is earn back the advance, I’ll be fine with that. Even if it plays a couple weeks, then dies.”

  She was surprised to hear him say this. The movie had been his heart and soul, and now he didn’t care how it did? “You don’t want it to die,” she said.

  “No, I want you to get good reviews. And Kira. But I’ve moved on from it. It was a stepping-stone. Now I’m ready for studio jobs.”

  This was the opposite of the Dan Ellenberg she once knew. “You don’t want to alternate—one for you, one for them, one for you?”

  “It’s funny you should say that. I’ve been thinking about The Nest lately.”

  “Are you working on it by yourself?” She hadn’t thought about the script in months. The part of her that had written I Used to Know Her with Dan seemed so young. When she remembered writing it, she had to think about the breakup, which made her feel guilty.

  “Sort of. I showed it to this screenwriter buddy of mine. His name’s Oded Zalinsky. He wrote Hazing.” He coughed a little into his napkin. “And Butterface.”

  Maddy had not seen either one, but the posters had been enough for her. They were misogynistic screeds about idiotic horndogs. “Why would you show The Nest to Oded Zalinsky? It’s a subtle, feminist, character comedy.”

  “He was over at my place, and I mentioned the script, and he said he wanted to read it. He went crazy for it. I mean, he was so impressed by what we came up with. The idea of a girl who loves her parents more than she loves her boyfriend. So he and I were just riffing, kind of spitballing, and we reconceived it as a more adult comedy. A relationship comedy. With a male lead instead of female. He wants to collaborate with me on it, cowrite it, because he already has a vision for how he would direct it. But because you and I had started working on it together . . . um. It’s a little complicated.” He took something out of his jeans pocket and handed it to her.

  “What is this?”

  “Kind of a release. Basically, it says that for a small consideration, you’ll let me do whatever I want with The Nest.”

  “I don’t understand.” She scanned the page. She saw the phrases “all of my rights of every kind throughout the universe in and to the Work” and “sum of one dollar.” She lifted her head slowly. “You want me to give up my rights to The Nest for a dollar?”

  “Well.” He coughed again. “It sounds like you’re focusing more on acting these days, and there’s no use having those pages just sit there. I didn’t think you’d care about the money since, you know . . . Steven . . . This way Oded and I can take the grain of the story, the concept, and develop something new from it, without having to worry if you’ll—”

  “Sue you?” So this was what their friendly breakfast was all about. It was sneaky to do it here, one-on-one, instead of through her manager or lawyer. Dan had been trying to appeal to her nostalgia, her affection for him, all to get her to give up her intellectual property.

  She h
ad a copy of The Nest on her laptop but never looked at it. If he had rewritten it without consulting her and the movie had come out, she wouldn’t have sued; at least she didn’t think so. But he had played his hand. Dan had always been a terrible businessman.

  “I have to show this to my attorney,” she said.

  “Oh, sure,” he said, swallowing some water. “No problem.”

  “And I’m sure he’s going to say no way.”

  Dan nodded and chewed his lip, which he always did when he was chagrined. She’d been feeling generous toward him, like maybe he still understood her, but he’d just wanted something for nothing. For a buck.

  They were quiet, looking down into their bottomless coffees. Finally, she said, “I guess we’ve both gone totally Hollywood, huh?”

  “Why is that?”

  “We get together for the first time since we broke up, and you ask me to relinquish my rights.”

  3

  It was two weeks into the Husbandry shoot, and Maddy was removing her costume in her dressing room. It had been a long day. She had shot a difficult sex scene with Steven. She had been nervous at first, but because the sex was meant to be bad, she was able to focus on her character, so it went relatively smoothly. It turned out it was easy to play bad sex.

  Which was why she was nervous about the next day’s call sheet: good sex. She would be doing her first bedroom scene with Billy Peck, the English actor playing Paul. Bridget would be there, with the skeleton crew: Walter; Jimmy, the director of photography; and Stu, the boom operator. Wardrobe would be supplying Maddy with a nude-colored G-string, a nude bandeau, and her merkin, which had been dyed to match her own pubic hair.

  There was a knock. “Just a minute!” She hung up her dress and put on a robe.

  Walter. He came to her dressing room from time to time to talk about Ellie, and he had a playful Platonic style. He was a sharp observer, which gave her confidence that in his hands, she would give her best performance. There were times he could be difficult, though. He would stand on her mark and pantomime: “Do not scratch your nose like this. Do it like this!” But she respected his desire to have things be just so; in film, the director had to be a dictator.

  He was wearing a white linen shirt, unbuttoned farther than usual. “May I come in?” he asked, though he was already in the room. She had decorated it with photographs of her parents and postcards of Jim Jarmusch, Liz Phair, John Garfield, and Eleonora Duse, the great Italian stage actress known for blushing on cue. Even with the attempts to personalize it, the room still felt too fancy and too generic.

  Walter sat on one of the couches. “You were excellent today,” he said. She sat on the opposite couch, pulling her robe more tightly around her body. She should have dressed before she answered the door but had been expecting a wardrobe girl. “I am proud of the work you have been doing,” Walter went on. “It has great integrity. I could tell when you wept that you weren’t afraid to be ugly.”

  From anyone else, she would have taken it as an insult. From Walter, she didn’t. She was ugly when she cried; most people were. It was the chaos taking over the face. He spread his knees and leaned forward. “What’s amazing to me is that you carry yourself with no awareness. Most beautiful women know it from an early age, and it ruins them. You carry yourself like someone who doesn’t turn heads.”

  This was the longest conversation they’d had alone. “Steven has excellent taste,” Walter continued, gazing distantly toward Maddy’s picture window, the one that overlooked Woodmere’s Victorian gardens, which were often used for period films. Woodmere was the famous postwar soundstage where they were shooting the film, half an hour from London. “What a refined man. He has great appreciation for attractive things. And yet I wonder whether he appreciates you the way he should.”

  Not sure where he was going with this line of talk, she stood and walked to the window. She looked out at the gardens. “Walter, is this about the scene tomorrow?” she asked, keeping her back turned.

  “You are a young woman,” he said from the couch. “You have a promising road ahead of you professionally and personally. If you’ll forgive my playing for a moment the role of sage old man, you’ll let me give you a piece of advice. A woman’s job is to be where she’s most appreciated.”

  Be where she’s most appreciated? He was trying to get inside her skull by maligning her boyfriend. Didn’t he see how counterproductive it was? “Steven appreciates me,” she said, spinning around to face him, “if that’s what you’re trying to—”

  “Not in the way you think he does.” He stood and moved to the other side of the window so he was facing her. “You may love him,” he said, enunciating carefully, “but I can say with confidence that he does not love you.”

  He took a few steps toward her, his hands extended, and she jumped back. “Walter!”

  His face seemed to soften, and after a moment he retreated. “I am so sorry, my dear. I do not know what came over me. I feel protective of you, but sometimes I am not the best communicator.” He moved swiftly to the door, and it closed behind him without a sound.

  As she went to the town house in the chauffeured car, she kept hearing Walter’s words. The most logical explanation was that he was trying to make her vulnerable for her lovemaking scene with Billy. Nicholas Ray had famously manipulated James Dean and Sal Mineo by whispering “He hates you” to each of them on the set of Rebel.

  Or maybe Walter was just an old man who didn’t get that younger American actors worked differently from older ones, and liked their sets PC, their boundaries clear. He probably didn’t remember half the things that came out of his mouth. The entire moment could have been chalked up to senility.

  But it irritated her that Walter had known Steven longer than she had, that he had visited Palazzo Mastrototaro several times. Steven had said that he and Walter were not friends but friendly, and yet she couldn’t shake the fear that Walter knew something about him that she didn’t: There was another woman in his life. Cady. Or Albertina. Maybe the person on the phone that night; she still didn’t completely believe it was Vito. Or someone else, some English model whom he visited in the black of night while she slept. Maybe Walter knew, and like a grandfather, he had been warning her not to trust him. Just because Walter seemed crazy didn’t mean he didn’t speak the truth.

  The Regent’s Park town house rental was furnished in a sleek, luxurious style, with views of the park’s rowing pond, but because of the paparazzi, Steven and Maddy never opened the drapes. She was even less at home there than she was in Hancock Park, where at least she was beginning to build up things of her own, clothes and music and books.

  At dinner that night, Maddy picked listlessly at her paella; Annette had come with them to London for the duration of the shoot. She wanted to ask Steven what Walter might have meant by his comment, but she was afraid he’d get angry with Walter and disrupt the production. Either logical interpretation of Walter’s words was discomfiting: Walter believed Steven was unfaithful, or Walter had been trying to seduce her.

  “Are you nervous about tomorrow?” Steven asked, as though reading her mind, swirling his glass of Bordeaux. He liked red wines all year, even in summer.

  She was terrified. As a producer, Steven would be in the production office while they were shooting, but she didn’t want him to come to set, and she didn’t know how to tell him. She would be fucking another man all day. “A little. It’ll probably be the longest stretch of time I’ve ever spent naked,” she said, forcing a smile, “except for Venice, with you.”

  “I wouldn’t have wanted you in this if it were exploitative,” he said.

  That night in bed, long after he had fallen asleep beside her, she tossed and turned. He does not love you. There was someone else in Steven’s life. Walter’s eerie pronouncement was keeping her awake, the night before the most important day in the shoot.

  It was two in the morning. She went
into the bathroom to fetch her anti-anxiety pills and deposited two under her tongue.

  Before they had left L.A., Maddy had gotten a bad cough, and Ananda had recommended her general practitioner, who turned out to be a dashing Frenchman named Thierry Chataigne. (Steven didn’t trust doctors and didn’t have a general physician of his own.) Dr. Chataigne had diagnosed Maddy with bronchitis and put her on antibiotics. A few days later, after a bout of insomnia brought on by the missing Freda Jansons script, she’d made an appointment and he’d prescribed her lorazepam, the same drug that Dr. Larson Wells in Fort Greene had given her after her father’s death. She had brought the pills to London but hidden them from Steven, who would disapprove. He didn’t even take Advil for a headache. She didn’t like the idea of relying on them, either, but she had to work in the morning, and if she could not sleep, she could not deliver.

  The pills under her tongue, she went back to bed. She’d had intermittent insomnia as a child. She would become anxious for no reason, then fixate on lying awake. This would go on for two or three hours, and she would go into her father’s room and stare at him sleeping, envying him. Sometimes she’d wake him and he would take her into her room and rub her back until she drifted off. On the soft sheets in Regent’s Park, the lorazepam began to work, and she fell into a dreamless sleep.

  In the cafeteria at Woodmere, Maddy took a bowl of Irish oatmeal and milk. Usually, she ate at home, but today she wanted the extra time to get her thoughts in order. She had driven over with Steven, who had kissed her on the cheek and gone into the office.

  Walter sat next to her and asked how she was feeling. “Like I’m at the ob-gyn’s waiting room,” she said, casting her food aside.

  “We’ll get through it.”

  “Where’s Billy?”

  She heard a voice over her shoulder. “I was just having a session with my fluffer,” Billy said.