WITH THE HOUSING SITUATION sorted out, it was time to grapple with my main conundrum, i.e., how to collaborate on two theoretically full-time projects without either Claire or Lily finding out she was sharing me. Here too the Showbiz Gods had provided a blessing in disguise by encumbering Claire and me with a doggedly hedonistic partner whose mornings were given over to restorative sleep and awkward breakfasts with young men whose names eluded recall.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said as I strolled with her through Williams-Sonoma, helping her stock her new cupboard, “we should probably try to get in a good five hours a day. What say we start at one and go till six?”
“One?” snorted Claire, who, had she been a pioneer gal, would have built several homesteads by that hour.
“If we start any earlier Gilbert won’t be there.”
She eyed me quizzically.
“And this hinders us how?”
I argued that it was a matter of principle. Gilbert was getting a third of the money and even if he were no help at all he should at least be compelled to be present. Claire disagreed, seeing Gilbert’s absence as less a drawback than a sound effciency measure. I held firm though and eventually she relented, deciding that it might be nice having mornings free for her music.
AT FIRST LILY WAS more put out at losing my afternoons than Claire had been over my mornings, an odd stance, I felt, given the effect her lunchtime lemonades had on her subsequent lucidity.
“Really, Glen,” she frowned, “I don’t see how we’ll ever finish if you can’t stay later than one!”
“I’m really sorry. It’s just that you’re not paying me till we see how things work out, so I need to keep my other job.”
“Other job? What other job?”
Not having anticipated the question, I glanced nervously at my feet, next to which lay my gym bag.
“I’m a personal trainer.”
“Well, I wish you’d said something sooner!”
“It’s just part-time. Of course,” I said, risking a bluff, “I could always quit that job if you started paying me now. But to make up the loss I’d need...oh, about eight hundred a week.”
Nothing I’d seen in Lily’s film work so poignantly exposed her limitations as an actress as the effort she now made to look as though she was actually considering paying me. She cocked her head, pursed her lips, and even, God bless her, brought a finger to them.
“Perhaps I have been a bit unreasonable, Glen. I don’t own you. We must all do what we must to make a living. Why even I have once or twice done a picture I considered less than first-rate just for the money.”
“I can’t think which ones you could mean.”
“Aren’t you a dear!”
Our schedule settled, she seated herself at the dining table, her scrapbooks and albums arrayed before her. I took the seat to her left so as to favor her good ear and began taking notes on a legal pad with a tape recorder for backup. A stickler for chronology, she began with her earliest memory, which was of Diana, “a stout child with cruel, piggy eyes,” dropping spiders into her crib.
And so the great work commenced.
WORK ALSO COMMENCED ON our adaptation of A Song for Greta, a chore that, alas, entailed rereading it. I tried without success to find any of the virtues my Stephen professed to see in it. Though I could agree with him that Miss Gamache had a good heart, I couldn’t read her book without wanting to plunge an ice pick into it while screaming, “That’s for chapter four!”
Bobby had instructed us not to begin the script until we’d submitted a “treatment” outlining our vision for it. He encouraged us to take liberties, especially if those liberties bolstered Diana’s part or spiced up the romance between Heinrich and Lisabetta, who, as rendered by Prudence, were as steamy as a pair of Hummels.
By the end of day two we’d decided, in broad strokes, what we would do. Our version did not completely expunge the book’s grotesque sentimentality—something we dared not do, given the Malenfants’ apparent weakness for schmaltz—but we felt it subdued it somewhat and that now only half the audience would race up the aisles retching into their popcorn.
And what, you may ask, was it like writing with Gilbert? I can only reply that should I ever have the pleasure, I’ll tell you all about it. Gilbert, it soon became clear, did not care a whit if he actually contributed to the script so long as he could contrive to feel that he had.
Toward this end he insisted on manning the keyboard. Claire and I balked at this until we saw what wonders plagiarism had done for his typing speed. When not tapping away he confined himself to making observations that were either uselessly vague (“This middle section— it needs something”) or screamingly obvious (“This strudel recipe doesn’t advance the plot much, does it?”). He also developed a maddening habit of instantly paraphrasing everything Claire or I said as if to imply we’d merely been intuiting what he’d been about to say. This incensed Claire, who swiftly developed counterploys. A typical exchange went something like this:
Claire: “What if we just cut —? Oh, but I see you’re ahead of me, Gilbert. Go on, dear.”
Gilbert: “No, you go ahead.”
Claire: “We could cut Snelling from the scene entirely and have Heinrich give that information to Helga in the base —”
Gilbert: “Basement scene! You totally read my mind!”
JUGGLING THE TWO JOBS was no cakewalk, but I soon fell into a manageable if grueling routine. I rose daily at seven, hit the gym, then made it to Lily and Monty’s by nine. We’d work for about four hours, then I’d dash home to meet Claire and the invariably tardy Gilbert. We’d finish at six and only then would I remove the morning’s notes from my gym bag and, to the galling accompaniment of Gilbert’s cocktail shaker, start coaxing Lily’s rambling recollections into something approaching coherence.
I initially assumed that it was my duty as ghostwriter to capture Lily’s actual voice. I thought I did a fair job, but after my first efforts met with complaints of inauthenticity (or, per Lily, “Un-me-ness”), I realized my error. Lily didn’t want the voice in the book to sound the way she really did. She wanted it to sound the way she thought she did. She wanted the voice to be cultured and articulate, ladylike yet capable of slashing wit. She wanted, in short, to sound like a long-lost Mitford sister. I began doing my best to write her this way.
A tape-recorded snatch of memory such as this:
Look at this picture—see how much thinner I am? What a little butterball she was! This was right after she gained all that weight at Christmas— and this, mind you, while playing Wendy in Peter Pan! The part should have gone to a thinner, prettier girl like me. I’d watch her in that damn chestnut and think, “Serve her right when that cable finally gives out. Splat!” You couldn’t have paid me to sit in the front row.
was rendered as follows:
I was a slim, delicate child, my natural energy and love of jump-rope games keeping me, as Mother used to say, “no bigger than a minute.” I always pitied my elder sister, whose lifelong battle with avoirdupois began in girlhood. One Christmas season she was cast as Wendy in Mr. Barrie’s evergreen Peter Pan. Diana gorged herself daily on Mother’s fresh-baked holiday treats with comical results. By the end of the run latecomers to her flying scene could have been forgiven for wondering why the director had placed a nightgown on a wrecking ball.
This more genteel tone won gushing plaudits from Lily.
“It’s too perfect, Glen! It’s me to a tee! ‘Nightie on a wrecking ball’—I can’t believe I said that!”
“Because you didn’t, love,” offered Monty, buttering a brioche.
“Oh, hush. Glen’s doing a marvelous job.”
“I just put it on paper,” I demurred. “The raw material comes from you.”
“If it’s raw material you want, wait till she turns twelve.”
Between Lily’s praise and Monty’s rascally charm, I was finding it harder by the day to view them with the pitiless eye my assignment demanded. I could see why
Diana and Stephen disliked them, given their cheerful determination to leave no bean unspilled. But sitting with them each morning and hearing their side of things one couldn’t help feeling that Diana at least had it coming.
Diana had seldom missed a chance to belittle her sister in print. Though she’d never written a memoir, she’d recounted her family’s history in scores of interviews, and in her version Lily and Monty appeared, when at all, in the most dim and patronizing of lights. Did she really imagine that Lily, after decades of such queenly condescension, would not finally cry, “Enough!”, empty her bile duct into a fountain pen, and scrawl “Chapter One”?
Even my beloved Stephen’s treatment of them had been a bit shoddy, though I ascribed this entirely to Diana’s malign influence. Still, having been all but raised by them while Mother gallivanted about, would it have killed him to call them once in a while or to offer Lily a small role in one of his blockbusters? Even Lily’s harshest detractors would concede that she could have played the hysterical hostage in Caliber Unleashed as capably as Lainie Kazan had.
But just as I was starting to wonder if my betrayal of Lily and Monty was not, on balance, just a teensy bit indefensible, I received a call from Stephen that stiffened, among other things, my resolve to continue.
THE CALL CAME PAST midnight on the day we finally dispatched our finished treatment to Bobby. Our celebratory dinner at Orso had been accompanied by two bottles of amarone, so it took several rings to wake me, and I knocked over my water glass reaching for the phone.
“Shit!” came my charming salutation.
“Phil?”
“Whozis?”
“It’s Stephen.”
“Stephen!”
I quickly turned on the bedside lamp, then thought better and turned it off. Why talk to Stephen Donato in a lit bedroom when you could talk to him in a dark one?
“Sorry to call so late.” He sounded as if he’d had some wine himself.
“No, it’s okay! What’s up?”
“I just wanted to let you know I won’t be able to see you next Wednesday.”
“Oh?” I replied, crestfallen.
“I’m stuck here an extra day. But are you free Thursday?”
“Yes! Yes I am! Totally free!”
“Good. Because Sonia and my mom want you to have dinner with us at her restaurant. You know, Vici?” He referred to the trendy Beverly Hills eatery Diana had opened some years back when restaurants were the celebrity accessory du jour.
“Yeah, I’ve been there,” I lied. “So, your mom and Sonia are coming?”
“They just want to hear more about what’s up with Lily. The pages you’ve been e-mailing are great, but it’s still all just childhood stuff. They’re more interested in what’s coming down the line. I’ll be back in time for that. Gina too.”
I could hardly confess at this early, delicate stage of our courtship that I’d hoped our first date would be long on whispered confidences and smoldering stares and that the presence of his wife, mother, and publicist would do much to curtail these. So I just smothered a sigh and said, “Oh, great.”
“But I do wanna see you,” he said.
“Likewise.”
“I mean alone.”
“Oh?” I said, my fallen crest reascending.
“To talk about all this... stuff.”
“Any time!”
There was a pause and I heard the tinkling of ice cubes.
“Listen, Phil...I really like you.”
Did he just say that? Did he actually just say that?
“I like you too, Stephen.”
“I mean it. You’re a nice guy. And I want to think I can trust you. Can I?”
“Absolutely!”
He was whispering now, his tone endearingly tentative. “Good. Because what I would like is for us to have a little... arrangement.”
My God!
My Gawwwwd!
Stephen Donato’s coming on to me! Please, PLEASE don’t let this be a dream! And if it is don’t let me wake up before I finish like last Tuesday!
For a moment all I heard was Stephen’s breathing, and his shy silence emboldened me.
“What sort of arrangement?” I aimed for a sexy throatiness but overshot, practically gargling the question.
“Lily and Monty,” he said, his voice quieter still. “The things they say about me — especially Monty — I want you to tell all that stuff to me. Just me. Not my mom or Gina or Sonia. I’ll tell them anything I think they need to know. But for now let’s keep it between us, okay?”
“Of course, Stephen. Anything you say.”
“Nobody else.”
“Your ears only!”
“Even if Sonia grills you.”
“She can break out the bamboo. Cavanaugh won’t crack.”
Though I blushed to think my failed Kathleen Turner impression might have betrayed my initial (and, let’s face it, preposterous) assumption that he was about to propose a dalliance, I was delighted nonetheless by what he was proposing. The thought of Stephen and I sharing his sexual secrets was an immensely agreeable one. It brought our relationship to a new and thrilling level of closeness from whose fertile soil who knew what further intimacies might bloom?
“It’s not,” Stephen said, “that I’m hiding anything.”
“’Course not!”
“It’s just that some things are... y’know—”
“Private.”
“Exactly. And I’m thinking of my family too. Why get ’em all worked up over stuff they don’t need to hear? Stuff that might not even wind up in the book?”
“Leave it to you to put family first.”
“So . . .” he said with absurd nonchalance, “what’ve they said about me?”
I paused for a brief debate with my penis. It argued cogently that though there were undeniable advantages to waiting as planned to give Stephen the lowdown in person, the chance to masturbate while doing so was not among them. But my more romantic side won out. I remained resolved to speak not of big-dicked tennis pros until I was gazing directly into his dreamy brown eyes.
“Sorry,” I murmured, “but you’re not even born yet at this point. They’ve certainly hinted there’ll be lots about you later on. Big things.”
“Fantastic,” he muttered.
“Look,” I said, inspiration having struck, “why don’t I just ask Lily what she plans to say about you? She trusts me now, I’m sure she’ll tell me. Then when we all have dinner next Thursday, you and I can meet an hour early and I’ll report in.”
Stephen deemed this a superb plan and said he’d meet me at Vici at seven. If the bar was too crowded to afford adequate privacy, we’d go for a drive.
“Thank you for this, Phil.”
“It’s my pleasure, Stephen.”
“I can count on you, big guy?”
“Day or night,” I replied with passionate sincerity. “I’m entirely at your service.”
To this he replied —wryly? coyly? pornographically?—“I’ll remember you said that,” then hung up.
Fans of the musical My Fair Lady will recall the scene where Eliza, fresh from her tango with Higgins, romps exuberantly about her bedroom, informing the housemaids that she doesn’t want to go to bed as she couldn’t possibly sleep, her heart having taken flight. Subtract the maids, throw in some boisterous self-abuse, and you have the scene in my boudoir after Stephen’s call. Half an hour later I lay contentedly asleep. The same could not be said for the Showbiz Gods, who were pulling an all-nighter to debate what laurels to crown me with next.
Having just handed in our treatment, we didn’t expect a verdict for at least a few days. But the very next morning Svetlana phoned to ask if we’d be available for a noon conference call with Bobby, Diana, Gina, and Stephen. We alerted Claire that the jury was in and she hastened over. We passed a fretful hour wondering if they’d find our take on the material insufficiently mawkish, especially our decision to drastically prune the postmortem antics of wee Hans (formerly Hilda)
. But when the call came our fears were immediately dispelled.
“Hey, everyone there?” asked Bobby.
“All here!” we chimed into the speakerphone.
“Are those my three geniuses?” said Diana, provoking broad smiles and pantomimed glee.
“Great job, you guys!” said Stephen. “And Claire too. We haven’t met yet. I’m Stephen.”
“Nice to meet you, Stephen,” said Claire, sounding crisply professional yet unable to subdue a goofy “I’m chatting up a movie star!” grin. “So you liked it?”
“Liked it?” said Bobby. “We. Fucking. Loved. It.”
“It was great,” said Gina. “I liked the structure,” she added in a poignant effort to simulate intelligence.
Stephen, referring to one of Claire’s inspirations, said, “The scene where I have to kill my dad—I love the way it’s foreshadowed now by that flashback to where he makes me shoot the fawn in the woods.”
“Yes,” said Gilbert, “I thought that might give it a bit more oomph.”
“I don’t know how you writers do it!” gushed Diana. “It’s perfectly paced, suspenseful, moving. We couldn’t be happier.”
“Well, thank you,” said Claire, shooting me a wary look. I knew what she was thinking. Though newcomers to screenwriting, we’d met with enough theater producers to know that profuse compliments were a frequent opening gambit designed to lull us into a praise-addled stupor in which we’d consent to make changes invariably and laughably characterized as “minor.” You can imagine our delight when Claire’s request for notes met with a brusque laugh from Bobby.
“Notes? Here’s my note —write the damn script!”
We thanked them all again, vowing that we’d get to work the instant we hung up. We did nothing of the sort, of course, even Claire concurring that it would be a shame to ruin our buzz by reentering the treacly world of Prudence Gamache. Our discussion of how best to celebrate was interrupted by a call from Gilbert’s mom. Gilbert crowed at length about how the Malenfants had loved our treatment, and Maddie, once made to understand that “treatment” in this case had no medical significance, offered to throw an impromptu dinner in our honor that night.