‘You look fabulous,’ she said.
How could she say that? Next to her, I looked pasty. She drained me. It was too cruel. Next to her fruity, slightly over-ripe sluttishness – she even had a ladder in her tights – I looked lean and sexless. Next to her snub, kittenish face my own looked pinched. My mouth seemed to have shrunk. Maybe she was thinking the same thing, because she said, ‘Barbara Hershey, she had silicone shots.’
‘What?’
‘In her lips, when she played Mary Magdalene.’ She grimaced. ‘Sounds ikky, doesn’t it?’ She peered closer at herself. ‘I’ll need some tucks soon. This guy I know, he’s divorcing his wife. I said to him, “Has she had plastic surgery?” And he said to me, “Sure, I’ve cut up all her credit cards.”’ She laughed, and turned to inspect me. ‘No, that looks really fabulous. You’re going to drive some guy nuts in that. Wear it when you get into the sack. You have someone special in London?’
I was just about to reply when she gave a little yelp, and moved closer to the mirror.’
‘Holy shit!’ she wailed. ‘Just take a look at this zit. What the fuck am I going to do?’
She started talking about her skin, and how a zit could play hell with continuity. Weight gain was even worse.
‘On Three Steps to Heaven I was involved in this destructive relationship, my personal life was falling apart, so I started eating. One scene, I opened a door weighing 120 pounds and came out the other side at 135. See, there was a month between the shots.’
With Lila, conversation was a one-way business. So I never got to reply to her question; I never told her about Trev. At the time I didn’t mind; in fact, I needed to keep a part of myself separate. Trev was my other life and I wanted to hold onto it, to stop it draining away and becoming Lila’s. Besides, she would find out that he was the author of Use Me and that would be embarrassing.
Call it chance, call it what you will. Blame it on the pimple. For if she hadn’t seen the pimple, I might have told her about Trev. None of this would have happened, and I wouldn’t be here.
Lila bought me the slip.
‘You can’t!’ I protested.
‘Don’t be a dork,’ she laughed.
She bought several things for herself. Making a purchase put her into top gear, the shopper’s high. Gathering momentum like an alcoholic after the first drink she swept through Saks, buying shoes and blouses for herself and putting them on her charge card. I followed in her slipstream, the recipient of her rhetorical questions: ‘Isn’t this just darling?’ ‘You think tartan drowns the features?’ ‘Maybe this is too goddam straight, too Mary Tyler Moore?’ ‘How about these hokey little hats?’ She never listened to my answers.
Others were swept along too. Celebrities are like the Pied Piper, a procession gathers behind them. Soon she had the floor manager, an anxious assistant, a bearded paparazzi photographer alerted by God-knows-who to her presence in the store, and a fellow customer who wanted Lila’s autograph for her sister in Pittsburg. Once you are famous all the world’s a stage, and you can never be alone. You are watched from all sides; pick your nose and it’s in Suzy’s column in the Post. Even when people don’t stare they become stagier, inspecting the racks of clothes with extra interest, a-bristle with self-consciousness.
I noticed this even more when she took me to lunch. We went to a fancy place called Chez Hortense, up on 63rd and Lex. Canopy, carpet on the sidewalk, trees in tubs, the lot.
Lila was welcomed like royalty. The maître d’s face wore the same glazed simper with which I was becoming familiar. The restaurant was packed; in fact, there was a queue for tables. As we proceeded, however, the waves parted for us as they did for Moses. The staff grovelled. Maybe some customers were flung out in the middle of their meal, because miraculously an empty table materialised. A waiter, flicking his wrists ostentatiously for our benefit, spread a new pink tablecloth, laying it with a flourish, a courtier’s bow, like Walter Raleigh laying down his cloak. There was a hush amongst the other diners, who then went on talking with heightened animation. Lila’s presence made everybody artificial. She took off her dark glasses and shook out her hair. The maître d’ came over with the menus, his face perspiring.
‘Hi, Jacques,’ she said. ‘How’re you doing?’
‘Very well, madame,’ he said. ‘It’s a pleasure to have you with us.’
As he passed me the menu he bowed, slightly; despite my low-key appearance he presumed I must be important. Glamourised by my companion, I was included in the magnetic field of fame. I felt warmer, sexier. We all warmed ourselves at the fireside.
Lila, I’d long ago realised, knew nothing about food. Diets, yes, but not food. She carelessly ordered a Caesar salad and lit a cigarette. I ordered turbot glazed with a velouté de morilles et assille. For a moment I felt the superior; sometimes our relationship shifted like this. Sometimes it was I myself who rose on the see-saw.
The place was full of rich women nibbling at their lunch and leaving most of it on their plate. They looked like Trump Tower inhabitants: the eat, drink and remarry brigade. They had lacquered blonde hair, bamboo-thin arms and the stretched, vulpine look of the face-lifted. Lila drank Diet Coke and I drank half a bottle of chilled Chardonnay. The fish was delicious. Lila told me a slanderous story about Micky Rourke and as the meal progressed we grew giggly.
‘I wish I had a sister,’ she said, sighing.
‘So do I,’ I said. ‘I’ve only got a brother and he’s a boring accountant in Hull. He’s a closet gay but he hasn’t even got the oomph to come out. He was terrified of my father, but even though my Dad’s dead now I think he’s lost the nerve. He sublimates it with DIY. He channels his emotions into grouting. My family, we’re experts on sublimation.’
‘You’re the nearest I’ve got to one,’ she said.
A sister, she meant. ‘Really?’ I asked, blushing.
‘You make me laugh. You’re a pal.’
I took out the pack of Salems I kept for her, and passed her one. The waiter pounced with a flaming lighter. He lit her Salem, and then he lit my Winston. She blew out a jet of smoke and turned to me. ‘I only had dolls. I only played pretend.’
‘So did I,’ I replied. ‘Maybe that’s why we’re actresses, we both played pretend.’
Just then, somebody came up to our table. In New York, people are bolder about interrupting. She was a bony, over-dressed woman, rattling with gold like a jailer. She asked if Lila could autograph her menu.
‘I just adore your pictures,’ she gushed. ‘Know my favourite? It’s Heads you Win, when you played the cheerleader who had that accident. When they put you in the back-brace I cried like a baby.’
How strange it was to be famous! Nobody talked normally to you; instead, they offered you information about yourself. They offered homage, they fed Lila their own versions of her, their reflections of her in a distorting mirror. Lila was given this weird, warped view of reality; no wonder she sometimes freaked out. Nobody offered their own lives, or their real opinions.
I was thinking this when the woman turned to me. ‘Hey, you guys related?’
Suddenly I put on a hick, Appalachian accent – one of the favourites in my repertoire. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Can’t you tell? I’m her kid sister, Loralee.’ Let’s play pretend. I turned to Lila. ‘We growd up together, didn’t we, sis? Our Lila, she was always the good-lookin’ one, you couldn’t get her away from that damn mirror, she was always mussin’ up her hair this way and that, and boy did she get the fellas, they was around our place like bees round the honeypot, did she play them local hillbillies along!’ I paused, for breath. Lila was staring at me, her eyes wide. She clapped her hand to her mouth, her chunky rings glinting. ‘It was poor ol’ me who had the zits,’ I said, gathering speed. ‘Poor ol’ me, her little sis. Some people, they said she was crazy, she’d get into nothin’ but trouble, I mean one day she took all my dolls and she pulled off their heads ’cause they were prettier than she was, she didn’t want no competition.’ I took a bre
ath. ‘But there was nobody in the neighbourhood prettier than our Lila, boy was I jealous!’ My voice rose. ‘Sometimes, you know somethin’? Sometimes I wanted to kill her!’
There was a silence. Startled, the woman said, ‘Well, how about that?’
When she had gone, Lila turned to me. ‘OK,’ she drawled. ‘You got the part. Now let’s fuck.’ We both collapsed with giggles.
When we left the restaurant, she linked my arm. ‘Know what?’ she said. ‘You’re really good!’
‘I know,’ I replied.
‘Loralee,’ she whispered in my ear, spluttering with laughter.
When Randy opened the door of the car he raised his eyebrows at me. ‘What you two been doing?’ he hissed. He thought she had been hitting the bottle again.
As the days passed I helped Lila more and more with her part. She and I had few moments together, but when we did I said we should work on our feelings about motherhood. Neither of us had kids; both of us wanted them. How could we perform, as mothers? (Note the we; I was involving myself in this, why not?) I had only once, briefly, played a mother: I had twin boys in a commercial for instant mashed potato, but you can’t explore a lot in thirty seconds, especially when the twins and I loathed each other on sight.
Lila adored kids and animals. In fact, I think she preferred them to men, they didn’t threaten her or mess her up. However, she only had the most vague and sentimental idea of motherhood, culled from watching too many afternoon soaps. She had guested, once, on an appallingly sickly mini-series about a couple whose kids all seemed to suffer from incurable diseases, but she hadn’t been able to do much work on her part as she was having a nervous breakdown at the time.
In Bump her screen son was played by a precocious brat called Forrest. He had just played Harrison Ford’s son in a highly successful weepie about child custody and he was bumptious as hell. He upstaged Lila, showing off to the crew; he crept into her trailer and nicked her secret supply of Fudge-Covered Oreos.
‘Explore your ambivalent feelings towards him,’ I urged her.
‘My what?’
‘Use your aggression. He might be your son but he’s making your life purgatory. Listen, Mary Lou, he’s trying to ruin your chance of being a woman, of fulfilling yourself. It’s very Oedipal. It’s not just your candy he’s stealing, it’s your chance of happiness with another man.’
Those last weeks of November we were filming in Mary Lou’s apartment on Riverside Drive. Maizin Productions had rented two adjoining flats, one for the cast and crew, the other for filming. We all mingled more easily here; the stars weren’t separated from the rest of us, out of bounds in their trailers. Lila and I had more time together, sitting in her dressing room overlooking a spectacular view of the Hudson River. I started inventing bits of business for her to do, during the scenes with her son.
‘When you’re crossing to the kitchen,’ I said, ‘and his robot toy’s lying on the floor, why not give it an irritable kick?’
When they shot the scene, that was what she did. Chuck, the director, was delighted.
When she went for a costume change she whispered to me, ‘Hey honey, what’d I do without you?’ I blushed with pleasure.
The next day I had an even better idea; it was so bold that it surprised even myself. They were going to shoot a breakfast scene between Mary Lou and her son; I had been sitting at the table as they set up the shot, and the idea came to me whilst I was staring vacuously at the cereal packet.
When they let me go I hurried across to Lila’s dressing room and knocked on the door. Irma was sitting beside Lila, going through her morning’s mail with her; Rodney was teasing Lila’s hair into the screen equivalent of a rumpled, early-morning look – in other words, it appeared as if Lila were just off to the opera.
Orson, the dog, growled at me. Irma glared at me and turned back to Lila, showing her a letter. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘they want you to open a shopping mall in Tucson.’
I leaned over to Lila and whispered in her ear, breathing the fumes of her hairspray. ‘Before they call you, I’ve got an idea.’
I met her in the corridor. When I told her, she gasped. I said I’d had the idea from the champagne incident, the one she had forgotten. I told her not to do it in rehearsal but during the first take. ‘Watch their faces then,’ I smiled, and added, ‘Think angry. Think of him stealing your Oreos.’
They rehearsed, and then they set up for a take. Down went the clapperboard and Lila began the scene as expected. She poured milk onto her son’s Cheerios whilst Forrest said his lines. They were having a conversation about her boyfriend.
Forrest said, ‘He only wants to date you because you’re rich.’
‘He doesn’t,’ replied Lila. ‘He wants to date me because I’m me.’ (It was that sort of script.) Her voice rose. ‘Will you stop standing between me and my one chance of happiness!’
And then she did it. She lifted up his bowl of Cheerios and emptied it over his head.
Forrest gasped, spluttering. He was dripping with milk. The crew froze; Chuck stared, and then frantically gestured to the cameraman to keep rolling.
Genuinely upset, Forrest struggled to his feet. ‘What the fuck are you doing, you stupid bitch!’ he shouted, close to tears. Lila just shrugged, and went into the kitchen.
‘Cut,’ said Chuck. He turned to the AD. ‘Print it. We’ll use it.’ He beamed – a rare sight. The crew let out its collective breath; someone laughed.
The table was mopped; Forrest was mopped. Lila came back from the kitchen and Chuck put his arm around her. ‘That was truly great, Lila. Beautiful. Risky, but that’s what we’re about.’
They couldn’t do another take anyway, because wardrobe would have had to launder Forrest’s clothes. Lila apologised to him, and started picking Cheerios out of his hair. He pulled away. Rodney came up to him.
‘Let’s get that hair washed,’ he said.
Forrest muttered, ‘Anybody told her she’s getting old age spots on her hands?’
Each day of shooting, like each day of school, has a different quality. Lila wouldn’t have noticed this sort of thing; she only noticed what affected her. I, however, am one of life’s observers, and my job on Bump gave me plenty of time for that. Something shocking energises a crew, it revs them up. The rest of that day’s shooting went wonderfully, there was a buzz in the air and a new feeling of respect for Lila. She was obviously a more inventive actress than they had thought. Nobody knew it had been my creation, not hers.
And it was Lila who posed for publicity stills – Lila who got all the credit. The unit publicist had made some phonecalls, and somebody arrived from the News to interview her, soon after we wrapped. I paused, listening, on my way out.
‘I’ve been exploring my ambivalent feelings,’ she said into the outstretched microphone. ‘See, Mary Lou has this dichotomy about being a mother and being a lover, and that makes her express it aggressively towards her son.’ I looked at Lila, but she didn’t see me. I genuinely think that she had forgotten the whole idea was mine. ‘I’ve been putting in some work on motherhood, I’ve gotten to understand a lot about myself, how to face up to these feelings. On the other hand, I’m very instinctive, as an actress, so I knew I had to express them the only way I knew how – violently.’
I went out, slamming the door behind me.
I felt restless and angry that night; maybe I should have analysed my own ambivalent feelings. Lila had betrayed me. Or, to be exact, she had rubbed me out. My scalp itched, from wearing that damn wig; every night I had to wash my hair. I needed to talk to Trev but, when I dialled, all I got was his voice on my answerphone. ‘It’s silent here, silent as the grave, but if you want to speak to me just leave a message –’
I slammed the receiver down on him in mid-sentence but this was only marginally satisfying. Cursing him, I wondered what he was doing. I had a horrible suspicion that this hush-hush project was female. I had been away a month – an eternity for a bloke like Trev. I had never known a man
so highly sexed. He once told me that if he swallowed a couple of tablets of speed and six pints of scrumpy he could screw non-stop for forty-eight hours. When I closed my eyes I saw him fucking a spreadeagled girl, his cock grown as long as a broom handle.
I paced around my room like a caged animal. My surroundings were utterly featureless: a blue armchair, a reproduction desk with a cigarette burn on it. They had put me in the most anonymous hotel in New York. I don’t think I could even find it again, if I looked. It was somewhere on E 39th Street. My few clothes were shut away in the cupboard. It was as if I didn’t live here, as if I didn’t exist.
I was the ghostly presence through which other lives were lived; I was like a piano tuner, toiling away unseen so that a virtuoso could play my instrument to tumultuous applause. Rage rose in my throat, choking me. I felt ridiculously hurt. I had a shower, washed my hair and dried it, dressed up in my one good suit and went out.
During the past month I had been taken out to a few places. One of the make-up girls had invited me to her birthday brunch at the Carnegie Deli; I had looked up an old friend of Rob, the guy who had played the Big Mac in Gertie, and he had taken me to a Mexican place in the Tribeca. An ex-colleague of my agent had taken me out for sushi, an experience I didn’t care to repeat. Tonight I wanted to pamper myself; after all, I had the money. So, on impulse, I hailed a cab and went to Chez Hortense.
I went into the restaurant and looked around. Fringed pink lights glowed at the tables; it looked more seductive at night. A pianist played Ain’t Misbehavin.’ It was only seven o’clock and the place was still nearly empty.
Just then the maître d’ hurried up. It took me a moment to realise that it was the same man as before; his features seemed rearranged. He glanced at me coldly.