Amy Sohn - The Actress

Maddy couldn’t believe it. Juhasz was a famous Hungarian director who had been big in the 1970s in the States but now shot entirely in Europe. He was said to be reclusive and agoraphobic. He lived in London, and all of his films had a strange, dislocated feeling, theoretically set in America but totally un-American. His actress wife had left him in the late 1970s for a famous music producer, and Juhasz had a crack-up and flew to London, never to return to the States.

“How does Walter Juhasz even know who I am?”

“We sent him a DVD of I Used to Know Her,” Weller said. “He was bowled over by your performance.”

“The film is called Husbandry,” Bridget said.

So this was the movie that Lael and Taylor had talked about at Bridget’s dinner. She remembered Lael saying that they’d been casting for a year. Was it possible? How could Bridget, Weller, and Juhasz think she was at the same professional level as Lael?

“It’s about a woman, her husband, and his troubled younger brother,” Bridget went on. “Steven will be playing the husband. The brother will be played by Billy Peck.” Peck was a notorious English bad boy who often got into bar brawls. “The lead role, Ellie, is unlike anything I’ve seen for a woman. She’s complicated and alive. Every major actress in Hollywood has read for her, but none was right.”

“I’d love to read the script,” Maddy said. “Absolutely.” She could be face-to-face with Walter Juhasz in less than a month. Every time she felt her life could not grow stranger, something happened to make her think she had been wrong.

“I’ll try to get it to you before Berlin,” Bridget said, “but he’s doing a polish, so you may have to wait to read it until the festival.”

“It will be a useful trip,” Weller chimed in. “All the European companies will be there, and you can talk up I Used to Know Her. It’s an unusual city. The art scene is fantastic, and the youth culture. We really hope you’ll consider it.”

“Of course I’ll consider it,” Maddy said. “It’s Walter Freaking Juhasz.”

Dan and Maddy were in his rented Prius on their way to see a friend’s indie feature at the ArcLight. “I definitely think you should go,” he was saying.

“Obviously, you don’t,” Maddy responded. “What’s going on?”

Dan kept his eyes on the road, unsure whether to tell her what he really thought: that there might be something more to the offer. The girlfriend, Cady, was kaput, and a guy like Weller couldn’t stay single for long. He needed new arm candy, an attractive female for all the Berlin premieres. Maddy fit the bill: pretty, independent, young, and most important, buzz-worthy. Dan’s theory was that Weller wanted her to act like they were together but was smart enough to realize Maddy would say no if he asked her outright. So he and Bridget had come up with an “audition.” Walter Juhasz went five years between movies these days; he was not known for being prolific.

“It’s just . . . What if Steven’s looking for a date?” he said. “For the festival.”

“You think they’re inviting me as some kind of . . . whore?” He glanced at her quickly in the passenger seat. She was pouting.

“Not a whore, no. A date, for appearances. Think about it. What are the two things Weller lacks? Heterosexual legitimacy and intellectual credibility. You bring him both.”

“Jesus. You think Steven Weller needs me? I don’t even have a career yet. I’ve won one award.”

“He knows you’re going to pop. I just don’t want you to be upset if you go to Berlin and Walter Juhasz never shows up.”

“He’ll show up, okay? I heard Lael and Taylor talking about his movie. They both auditioned.”

“Well, there you go. I figured I was reading it wrong. You know I don’t have the greatest faith in the Hollywood machine. You should go.”

She put her feet up on the dashboard, wishing Dan hadn’t said what he’d just said. If he were right, it seemed a sick proposal. To be a red-carpet escort for Steven Weller—that went against everything she was about.

Maybe Dan was only pretending to think Weller was gay to convince her they were using her and give her a reason to say no, because he was jealous. She had felt it bubbling up between them after the awards ceremony. Maybe he didn’t like the idea of her landing a Walter Juhasz film on the tails of I Used to Know Her, and despite all his lip service over the years about wanting her to succeed, he wanted her to succeed only at the same pace as he did. If that was true, it meant their relationship had been built on nothing. She felt a wave of carsickness and cracked the window. It vibrated loudly on the freeway. No one opened the windows in L.A.

The hotel-room phone woke Maddy at five-thirty in the evening. Her suite at the Hotel Concorde in Berlin was clean and spare, bigger than the entire apartment in Brooklyn. She couldn’t imagine what it cost—a thousand dollars? Two? Walter Juhasz’s UK production company was picking up the tab, but the room seemed exorbitant for an unknown.

The last few weeks had been surreal. The return home from L.A., the decision to sign with Bridget and Nancy Watson-Eckstein, and the white gardenias Bridget had sent to the apartment hours later, the card reading, “To successful collaborations. —B.”

And then Steven Weller’s private plane, with its overattractive stewardess and real flatware. There had been a handful of others on board besides her, which made Maddy feel the trip was wholly aboveboard: Todd Lewitt, plus two publicists from the studio, and Flora Gerstein, Weller’s fiftyish personal publicist.

That morning Maddy had walked around one of the gallery districts, planning to look at art, but she was so exhausted, she’d headed back to the hotel. She’d managed to watch a few minutes of Juhasz’s Body Blow, from the stack of DVDs that Bridget had given her, before the jet lag caught up with her and she drifted off in the king bed.

It was Bridget on the phone. The premiere of The Widower would be that night, she explained, and they would go in two cars, Maddy, Bridget, the publicists. They would enter the theater before skipping out to have dinner while the movie played. Evidently, stars did not watch their own screenings.

Maddy dressed in a simple sheath dress she wore for hostessing, and put her hair in a sloppy bun. In the mirror, with the lavish splendor of the hotel room behind her, what had looked classy and risqué at La Cloche now looked cheap and a little slutty.

As she was starting to do her makeup, there was a knock on the door. When she opened it, a bellboy handed her a garment bag. Inside was a stunning strapless red silk dress with gold woven vines on the bodice. The label said Marchesa. The material was puffy and gathered at the bottom, and in the back was a two-foot train. The note said, “Thought this would be perfect for tonight. —B.” Along with the dress was an elegant black wool cape.

Maddy tried on the dress and admired herself in the mirror, both thrilled and ashamed to be thrilled. It was beyond classy. There was a pair of designer velvet heels that no one would see because of the train. For a brief moment she recalled her conversation with Dan in the car in L.A. He had been so skeptical about the trip, and now there was this knockout dress. But she was among Steven Weller’s friends, and she was an Ostrow Productions client; she would have to be dressed appropriately. The phone rang. “Can I help you get ready?” Bridget asked.

When Bridget saw Maddy in the dress, her fingers quivered. It wasn’t until you saw a girl properly costumed that you could imagine the potential. Her frame was hearty, but somehow Steven had picked a gown that worked for it. He’d had Marchesa send over a few samples and selected this one. Bridget had signed the card so as not to frighten her. They had to be delicate. Maddy needed to trust him in order to make the choice to collaborate.

Steven would be floored when he saw her. What made a true star was less beauty than mutability. Newman, Brando, Streep, Clayburgh all had it: the liveliness, the ability to show the slightest shift in emotion on their faces.

When Steven laid eyes on the dress, he would know she was right for the role, which required that Ellie be mousy at first but emerge into a sexually voracious adulteress with incredible will. “I knew it would be perfect,” Bridget said. “Turn around.”

Maddy twirled in the dress, barely hiding her glee. Bridget had brought along a makeup kit, noticing that Maddy favored minimal cosmetics and thinking something more intense was in order for the evening. “May I?” she asked, indicating the case.

“Of course,” Maddy said. “I hate doing makeup. That was my least favorite part of acting school.”

“Well, you seem to have done well with the costume part. You know how to walk in a train.” Bridget had seen so many freshly arrived girls stumbling in their trains at the ceremonies, year after year, past the point when they could have hired someone to teach them. “I wasn’t always a manager, you know. When I was alive, I went to acting school.” She set up two chairs by the window.

Maddy looked at her and laughed. When I was alive. “Where did you go?”

“The American Academy of Dramatic Arts. That’s what brought me to L.A. This old hag had dreams.”

“You’re not an old hag! I hope I look like you when I’m your age.”

“Oh, stop it. I’ve lost my looks because I refuse to do anything. It’s not vanity. I just don’t like people touching my face.”

“How did you go from actress to agent?”

“After grad school, I was booking a handful of things, but it had been a couple years, and nothing was catching on. At the time, my agent was Jack Keil at Original Talent. One day Jack called me into his office. He said, ‘I know this may not be what you want to hear, but you don’t have the talent to be a star. You have two choices: Find another career you’re passionate about, or take a job in the mail room and work your way up to being an agent. I have a feeling you’d make a good one.’ That Monday I started in the mail room.”

“It didn’t hurt you to hear that?” Maddy asked. She could hear the clacking of a room-service cart in the hallway.

“Only at first. I went home and thought about it all weekend and realized I was too much of a control freak to be only an actress. I never liked the aspect that requires you to be given work.”

Maddy wondered if Bridget had slept with Jack Keil. As if sensing the question, Bridget said, “Everyone thinks I fucked him. But he was a mentor. They’re very hard to find. An older man, with a young woman, who sees her as a person first, and wants to help her. There are two ways for women to move ahead in Hollywood: to mentor their way to the top or to be one of the guys. I chose the former. A lot of my friends chose the latter.”

“What was it like, being one of the only women back then? Were you getting harassed all the time?”

“The things said to me, you don’t want to know. All the men who mistook me for the secretary. I was always being asked to fetch coffee. I had to sit under the desk to cry, this little embroidery pillow over my face so no one would hear me. They still haven’t figured out a good system for women crying at work. I’ve always felt there should be a special room. The newer girls, the ones rising up now, they have no idea what it was like. Maybe that’s good. It’s changed so much. The men in your generation aren’t threatened by female success.”

“Some are,” Maddy said, thinking of Dan in the Prius.

“But the fearful ones won’t get far with strong, self-assured women. When I was dating in the ’80s, it was very difficult. I would go out with high-powered guys and tell them about deals I’d closed or stars I had signed, and their faces would just cloud over. They wanted wives. Los Angeles is a very sexist city, much more so than New York. I tried dating down, like with Zack’s father, but that poses its own challenges.”

“Who is Zack’s father, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“His name is Grant Mulaskey,” Bridget answered, lining Maddy’s eyes. “He was an actor, a client of OTA, though not my own. From Kentucky. Oh, so handsome. A goyishe. I was burned out on these movers and shakers. When I got pregnant, we tried to convince ourselves we had a future. But he was unhappy in L.A. and didn’t want to be tied down. He’s a general contractor in Arizona now. You know, Zack’s here. He’ll be coming with us tonight.”

“He’s here?” Maddy asked, surprised. She hoped it wouldn’t be uncomfortable to see him. Before she left for Berlin, she had gone in to meet with Zack and his boss, George Zeger. The George guy, though complimentary about the film, didn’t seem that passionate about Maddy. On top of that, she couldn’t shake Bridget’s warning about Zack—that he wasn’t going to be agenting in a couple more years. Maddy emailed Zack to tell him she had signed with Ostrow Productions, and he wrote back a bland two-liner wishing her well.