Lovers

by Judith Krantz

  “Will you phone me at the paper as soon as you know how she is?” Brady asked greedily.

  “Oh no, I can’t possibly do that. I’ve given you your story, you’re asking too much. I don’t have the authority to do that, Brady.”

  “Look, Nevsky, if you’ll phone me and tell me her exact condition, everything the doctors tell you, I’ll read you every word of my story over the phone before I file it. That’s a promise. I want to keep my scoop.”

  “Fair enough. And, Brady, if your story is honest, if it doesn’t embroider and speculate on what I’ve told you, if it runs as exactly the story you read me, and that’s a big ‘if,’ I’ll keep you on the inside. I’ll be in touch whenever anything new happens. This is a story that won’t go away, and it’s to our mutual benefit to get it right. But you tell anyone where you’re getting the information, and you’re dead with me, Brady. Here’s my direct line at the production office, you can call me any time, while the rest of the press waits for the pool announcements. If I’m on location, my secretary will get me to return your call. If I’m here at the hospital, I’ll leave word to put you through. Give me your number at home and at work. The tabloid press is so full of lying shit that it’s a relief to deal with someone who still has real journalistic values, even if you’re no romantic.”

  “How do you spell Nevsky?”

  “I told you this was off the record. Call me an ‘informed source,’ for God’s sake,” Zach said in exasperation.

  “I still need to know how to spell it. You and the producer were the first at the scene of the crime of passion, Mayerling in Montana.”

  His very first performance in the role of Deep Throat, Zachary thought as he raced back to the waiting room. He wouldn’t have been as surefooted, as clear on what he had to say to Brady—and what he had to leave out—if he hadn’t heard a dozen location catastrophe stories from that wily fox, Vito Orsini. Gigi’s father was the kind of producer who had all the true passion and reverence for film that Roger Rowan lacked, and he possessed a master hand with the media that he had developed in dealing with the suits who ran the studios. Ever since Vito had brought him out from Broadway to direct Fair Play, the film that he had saved for Vito, the film that had been Vito’s first big success after a long dry period, the film that had made him the hottest new director in Hollywood, the two of them had kept up their firm friendship.

  Still he’d only taken a first step, Zach realized, only shaped the way the story would be perceived from the beginning. Even if by some miracle Melanie was able to continue with the picture, the production had been complicated in a hundred important and unforeseen ways. Vito had faced such situations and worse over a long and bumpy career, and never compromised, never tried to put the blame on the director. Rowan showed every sign of doing both. He needed an ally here, someone who would anticipate every thought process of a Rowan or an Ackerman, Zach realized. He needed Vito Orsini.

  Another half hour passed in silence in the waiting room until the two surgeons appeared wearily from the nearby operating room.

  “She is going to be okay,” the elder of them said. “We had to give her massive transfusions, it was touch-and-go, but she’ll make it. She’s in the intensive care unit now, on the critical list.”

  “Her face,” Rowan screamed, “what about her face?”

  “Untouched, thank God,” the second surgeon said. “The bullet that tore open the artery in her wrist caused the major hemorrhage. A number of bones in her hand are broken, and there are multiple flesh wounds in her shoulder. We did what we could, but she’s going to need specialized attention and eventual rehabilitation from a hand surgeon, you’d better fly one up here tomorrow. She’s a lucky girl. If she’d arrived here ten minutes later, chances are that she would have been dead from losing that much blood. I’ve rarely seen anyone in such deep shock.”

  “When,” Rowan demanded, “can she go back to work?”

  “Work!” The younger surgeon was incredulous.

  “These are movie people, Joe, don’t be surprised,” the elder surgeon said in disgust. “I don’t know. It depends on possible complications I can’t anticipate, on her physical and emotional strength, her response to the transfusions, a million factors, but until she’s out of intensive care I can’t begin to give you an answer.”

  “Make a guess, that’s all I want,” Rowan insisted.

  “If it were me … I’d give myself at least six months to get back to normal,” the doctor said, “and then I’d find another line of work.”

  As both men left the room, Zach and Rowan headed for phone booths in the hallway, Zach to call Brady, Rowan to call his agent. Zach was soon back with Rose Greenway, waiting for Rowan to complete his call. The producer emerged at last from the phone booth and joined his wife.

  “Roger, I’d like to talk to you,” Zach said quietly. “In private. Let’s take a little walk in the hall.”

  “What is it this time?”

  “Allen Henrick, the other grip Melanie was screwing. His story cannot get out, you understand that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You should get Lou Cavona to meet us at the office as soon as possible. He’s the one to handle Allen. Also, Sid was his brother-in-law and he doesn’t know Sid’s dead.”

  “I’m going to call Ackerman before I do anything. I have a responsibility to Ackerman.”

  “Roger, you’ll have your chance to blame me for everything as soon as Ackerman wakes up. Why disturb him in the middle of the night? He won’t thank you for it. Lou Cavona is important now, while we can still try to keep this in the family.”

  “Family! This’ll be front-page news all over the world! Every radio station, every television station … it’s only a question of time. God knows what that young punk is going to print.”

  “We’d better pray that he’s a Melanie Adams fan.”

  Getting to remote Kalispell in February is not an uncomplicated matter, but, by the end of the day following Oliver Brady’s story, a story that was picked up by the wire services and immediately circled the globe, the parking area of the local airport was filled with private aircraft ranging from large studio jets to many smaller charter planes, some of them old enough to have been retired decades ago. The manager at Glacier Park International Airport, aware that this was just the beginning of the influx, had arranged for a snowplow to clear two large nearby fields, and had hired a crew to lay out spaces on which to tie down dozens of planes.

  In town, every single one of the more than a score of motels and hotels on Route 93 was busily hiring staff to clean rooms that had been shut up since the tourist season ended early last autumn with the official closing of the road into nearby Glacier National Park. Restaurant owners were on the phone trying to scrounge up supplies from wholesalers as far away as San Francisco, willing to pay inflated prices for an airlift of food, since they knew that they would be able to charge anything for a meal.

  The earliest arrivals had come in on a number of large jets; Joe Irving, the head of production for the studio, with his chief assistants and secretaries, landed within minutes of a jet bearing a dozen insurance executives. They were quickly followed by the rest of the studio contingent: almost the entire public-relations department; the head of studio security and his assistants; the business affairs chief and his assistants; a large group of studio lawyers; Melanie Adams’s agent and lawyer; Rowan’s agent and lawyer. Only Ackerman, it seemed, was left holding the fort back in Hollywood, Zach thought, as his entire production department set itself to the task of snatching the best accommodations in town for the new arrivals before the newspaper reporters and network correspondents and their crews could pitch their tents. And that imminent invasion was merely the American media. Planes bearing press from Japan, from France, from Germany, from Britain, from every country in the world where American movies played, from every country where the names of Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, and Melanie Adams were known, were on their way.

  Vito Orsini, whom Zach h
ad called in the middle of the night, had been one of the first to arrive in Kalispell, hitching a ride with the insurance people, and was now sharing Zach’s suite at the Outlaw Inn.

  “If I owned a house in Kalispell, know what I’d do?” Vito said, his eyes alive with fun. “I’d hold an auction between the Germans and the Japanese, three months’ minimum rent, and take my family, kids and all, somewhere cheap in Florida until this story goes away. I’d pay for their college education in one easy move, and they’d get a great tan. Hell, even a heated garage will go for a fortune by the time the Enquirer and the Sun get here.”

  “Glad you’re having such a good time, Vito,” Zach grinned painfully.

  “Glad it’s not my picture,” Vito retorted.

  “Morally it is,” Zach insisted. “It’s mine, and since you’re here to hold my hand, it’s yours too.”

  “Thanks for your generosity, kid. Glad it’s not my ass on which no one yet has established moral rights. So what’s the story?”

  “Lou Cavona was a gem. He said that three generations of grips in his family prided themselves on surviving hurricanes, earthquakes, epidemics, sandstorms, snakes, rogue elephants, and typhoons, to say nothing of the madness of directors, producers, and actors. They’ve seen it all, done it all, and never blinked three times. But they were all Cavonas, his side of the family. Sid White was his wife’s brother, he wasn’t genetically a grip; Lou blamed himself for getting the guy the job. He feels terrible for his wife and family, but that’s the last such favor he’ll be doing her. He understands the trouble we’re in just as well as Ackerman does.”

  “What about the other grip?”

  “Lou took care of Allen Henrick, I didn’t ask him how and I sure don’t need to know, but Henrick is on his way back to L.A. to work on another picture. Since Henrick is a married man and wants to stay that way, he’ll keep his mouth shut, probably tell his wife he had frostbite of a delicate extremity. Lou said the other grips won’t talk to press under pain of torture and getting kicked out of IA. He can deliver that.”

  “But what about the rest of the crew and staff? Shit, once the media starts digging, it’ll only take one observant waitress from Craft Services to start the rumors.”

  “I know, Vito. But they’ll only be rumors, they won’t be the story, the one everyone’s heard and absorbed by now as the truth. That’s the most we could ever have hoped for.”

  “You did good work there, kid. Mayerling in Montana! For shame!”

  “A combination of directing high-school plays and inspiration from some of the horror stories you’ve told me.”

  “I ever tell you about my Mexican dog, Slow Boat, back in 1975, almost nine years ago? No? That was one tight spot that Maggie MacGregor showed me how to get out of. The solution created her career. What’s more, the murderer is still working full time and picking up the occasional Oscar. Don’t ask! Is Maggie joining this circus?”

  “Would she miss it?”

  “Haven’t laid eyes on her since the first sneak preview of The WASP,” Vito said, remembering how Maggie MacGregor, the most powerful television journalist in the country, had left his bed without so much as a good-bye word as soon as she’d learned of the enormity of his historic disaster, a picture that had given the word “flop” a new dimension a number of years ago. He’d had three successful pictures since, but Maggie had never returned to his life.

  “Do you have any influence with her?” Zach asked hopefully.

  “Maybe yes, maybe no,” Vito answered. “It depends on whether she has a conscience or not. It’s a neat question, kid. If a woman you’ve been fucking to her heart’s content drops you dead just because you made a lousy movie, does she feel you injured her, or does she feel she injured you?”

  “I’d say that depends on how she’s justified it to herself,” Zach answered, trying not to show surprise at Vito’s revelation, since The WASP had been made while Vito was still married to Billy Ikehorn Orsini Elliott. “It could go either way.”

  “What about the local police?”

  “So far, the doctors haven’t allowed them to talk to Melanie. But she’s responded so well to the transfusions that they’ve told me they can move her out of intensive care to a private room, at which point we can’t stop the chief from questioning her.”

  “You have to coach her first. Tonight.”

  “Don’t I know it?” Zach sighed. “I’ve been trying to decide how much to ask her to say.”

  “One line should do it. You read her the important parts of Brady’s story, and then you tell her that all she needs to say is she doesn’t remember a thing. Nada. She draws a blank for that whole day. Shock. One line, ‘I don’t remember.’ Or maybe two, if she feels up to it. ‘What am I doing here?’—a classic, I always love that line. That’s it. Two foolproof lines. Now, will you just leave me alone with this script? I’ve got to read it again.”

  “Vito, even if by a miracle Melanie can be on her feet working in ten days, ten days, for Christ’s sake, she’ll be wearing a cast on her wrist and her hand’ll be in a cast and a sling. There’s no way anybody dreams she could possibly be up for it in ten days anyway. But Eastwood and Newman have stop dates that mean we’ll lose them unless she can do the proposal scene with Newman and the big fight scene with Eastwood before those ten days are up: Two major emotional scenes! We’re going to end up shutting down the picture even though the insurance never pays a hundred pennies on the dollar. Joe Irving and the rest of the production group are viewing the rough cut now and they’re going to love what they see, I guarantee it. That makes it all the worse.”

  Vito shook his head at Zach with diffused tenderness and superiority. “Look, get out of here so I can think. Okay, okay, ask me the thing you really want to know.”

  “Ah, shit, Vito.” Zach looked at him in mute appeal.

  “Gigi’s fine, kid. Career going wild, another new account, only two traffic tickets in the last month.”

  “Vito …”

  “Yeah, there’s a guy. What did you expect, you pathetic asshole?”

  “What kind of guy?”

  “Somebody she works with, that’s all I heard. Gigi hasn’t managed to have time for personal conversations since you and she broke up. I suspect she plain doesn’t want to tell me, because she knows we’re friends.” Vito shrugged. “I did gather that you don’t even know as much about handling women as I do. Welcome to the club.”

  Had Melanie Adams even understood what he’d told her yesterday, Zach wondered, as he followed the Kalispell chief of police and the doctor into her room. She hadn’t uttered a word as he’d read her sections of the newspaper article and told her what to say, but had only lain there with her eyelids closed, no expression on her pitiful, drained face. She’d been aware of his presence—she’d whispered his name when he was finally permitted his three minutes alone at her side, and she’d nodded slightly when he left her—but otherwise she’d been utterly silent and almost as white as if she were dead. How much sedation was she under? Would she remember how important it was not to talk to the chief?

  Zach leaned against the wall in the hospital room, while the head surgeon and the policeman sat in chairs on either side of her bed.

  “No more than a few minutes, Chief,” the doctor said, “and if I think it’s too much for her, I’ll have to ask you to stop.”

  “Right, Doc. Miss Adams, I’m sorry, but I have a few questions I have to ask you,” the policeman said in a hushed voice, turning on his tape recorder. Melanie turned her marvelous eyes to him in startled wonder. His mouth opened and nothing came forth. He shook himself mentally and started over.

  “Miss Adams, on the night you were shot, did Sid White say anything before he went for his gun?”

  “Sid … how is he? Where is he?” Melanie asked imploringly. Zach straightened up, the hairs on the back of his neck rising in horror. She didn’t remember yesterday.

  “He’s, well, he’s …” The policeman stopped. He didn’t want to an
nounce Sid White’s suicide to this poor woman.

  “He took his own life, Miss Adams,” the doctor said carefully.

  “No! No! Oh, my God … poor sweet Sid … poor lost Sid, I was so afraid for him,” Melanie murmured in heartbroken tones, “he was so impulsive, so tormented, he wasn’t strong enough for this world … not like … the other.”

  “ ‘The other’?”

  Zach closed his eyes and all but fainted standing upright.

  “Others, others … people in movies, officer. He was a gentle, beautiful soul and I loved him.”

  “Miss Adams, he shot you,” the policeman persisted.

  “He couldn’t have known … what he was doing,” Melanie whispered. “He could never have wanted to hurt me. He must have been insane. And now … Sid’s … gone. That proves his love … all those months … I kept telling him there was no reason to be jealous … but he never believed me … oh, Sid, if only you’d believed me …”

  “Did you tell him it was over between you? Was that the motive?” the policeman asked.

  “It had to be. What else could it have been? I should have listened to Zach … he wanted to get rid of Sid … I was a fool … I loved him so much that I listened to my heart.” Tears appeared in her eyes.

  “Chief, for Christ’s sake, leave her alone now,” the doctor said angrily.

  The chief rose hastily and left the room with a longing backward glance at the sight of greater beauty than he’d ever see again. The doctor took Melanie’s pulse, and then bent his head to listen to her heart with his stethoscope, just time enough for Melanie to look Zach full in the face and give him an all but imperceptible wink.

  “She milked it! Vito, she would have carried on for hours if the doctor hadn’t stopped her!”

  “See why I love actresses, Zach?”

  “I had a near-death experience. And she knew it. She caused it!”

  “You gotta love ’em.”

  “But this one? She’s on a whole different level of the beast. Actresses are my specialty, but I know when I’ve been slapped on the wrist and sent back to the minors.”