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Chapter 2

Todd Pickett had made two of his three most successful pictures under the aegis of a producer by the name of Keever Smotherman. The first of them was called Gunner; the kind of high concept, testosterone-marinated picture Smotherman had been renowned for making. It had made Todd – who was then an unknown from Ohio – a bona-fide movie star, if not overnight then certainly within a matter of weeks. He hadn’t been required to turn in a performance. Smotherman didn’t make movies that required actors, only breath-taking physical specimens. And Todd was certainly that. Every time he stepped before the cameras, whether he was sharing the scene with a girl or a fighter-plane, he was all the eye wanted to watch. The camera worked some kind of alchemy upon him; and he worked the same magic on celluloid.

In life, he was good-looking, but flawed. He was a little on the short side, with broad hips; he was also conspicuously bandy. But on the screen, all these flaws disappeared. He became gleaming, studly perfection, his jaw-line heroic, his gaze crystalline, his mouth an uncommon mingling of the sensual and the severe. His particular beauty had suited the taste of the times, and by the end of that first, extraordinary summer of coming-to-fame his image, dressed in an immaculate white uniform which made poetry of his buttocks, had become an indelible piece of cinema iconography.

Over the years, other stars had risen just as high, of course, and many just as quickly. But few were quite as ready for their ascent as Todd Pickett. This was what he’d been polishing himself for since the moment his mother, Patricia Donna Pickett, had first taken him into a cinema in downtown Cincinnati. Looking up at the screen, watching the parade of faces pass before him, he’d known instinctively (at least so he later claimed) that he belonged up there with those stars, and that if he willed it hard enough, willed and worked for it, then it was merely a matter of time before he joined the parade.

After the success of Gunner, he fell effortlessly into the labours of being a movie star. In interviews he was courteous, funny and self-effacing, playing the interviewers so easily that all but the most cynical swooned. He was confident about his charms, but he wasn’t cocky; loyal to his Mid-Western roots and boyishly devoted to his mother. Most attractive of all, he was honest about his shortcomings as an actor. There was a refreshing lack of pretension about the Pickett persona.

The year after Gunner, he made two pictures back to back. Another action blockbuster for Smotherman, called Lightning Rod, which was released on Independence Day and blew all former box-office records to smithereens, and then, for the Christmas market, Life Lessons. The latter was a sweetly sentimental slip of a story, in which Todd played opposite Sharon Campbell, a Playboy model turned actress who had been tabloid fodder at the time thanks to her recent divorce from an alcoholic and abusive husband. The pairing of Pickett and Campbell had worked like a charm, and the reviews for Todd’s performance were especially kind. While he was still relying on his physical gifts, the critics observed, there were definitely signs that he was taking on the full responsibilities of an actor, digging deeper into himself to engage his audience. Nor was he afraid to show weakness; twice in Life Lessons he was required to sob like a baby, and he did so very convincingly. The picture was a huge hit, meaning that both of the big money-makers of the year had Todd’s name above the title. He was officially box-office gold.

For most of the following decade he could do no wrong. Inevitably, some of his pictures performed better than others, but even the disappointments were triumphs by comparison with the fumbling labours of most of his contemporaries.

Of course, he wasn’t making the choice of material on his own. From the beginning he’d had a close relationship with his manager, Maxine Frizelle, a short, sharp bitch of a woman in her mid-forties who’d once been voted the Most Despised Person in Hollywood, and had asked, when the news had reached her, if the awards ceremony was full evening dress. Though she’d been representing other clients when she first took Todd on, she’d let them all go once his career began to demand her complete attention. Thereafter she lived and breathed the Pickett business, controlling every element of his life, private and professional. The price she asked studios for his services rapidly rose to unheard-of heights, and she drove the deal home every single time. She had an opinion about everything: rewrites, casting, the hiring of directors, art-directors, costume designers and directors of photographers. Her only concern was the best interests of her wonder-boy. In the language of an older but similarly feudal system, she was the power behind the throne; and everyone who worked with Todd, from the heads of studios to humble hair-stylists, had some encounter with her to relate, some scar to show.

Needless to say, the Pickett magic couldn’t remain unchallenged forever. There were always new stars in the ascendancy, new faces with the new smiles appearing on the screen every season, and after ten years of devotion the audience that had doted on Todd in the mid-to-late eighties began to look elsewhere for its heroes. It wasn’t that his pictures performed less well, but that others performed even better. A new definition of a blockbuster had appeared; money-machines like Independence Day and Titanic, which earned so much so quickly that pictures which would once have been called major hits were now in contrast simply modest successes.

Anxious to regain the ground he was losing, Todd decided to go back into business with Smotherman, who was just as eager to return to their glory days together. The project they’d elected to do together was a movie called Warrior: a piece of high concept junk about a street-fighter from Brooklyn who is brought through time to champion a future earth in a battle against marauding aliens. The script was a ludicrous concoction of clichés pulled from every cheesy science-fiction B-movie of the fifties, and an early budget had put the picture somewhere in the region of a hundred million dollars simply to get it on screen, but Smotherman was confident that he could persuade either Fox or Paramount to green-light it. The show had everything, he said: an easily-grasped idea (primitive fighting man outwits hyper-intelligent intergalactic empire, using cunning and brute force); a dozen action sequences which called for state-of-the-art effects, and the kind of hero Todd could perform in his sleep: an ordinary man put in an extraordinary situation. It was a no-brainer, all round. The studios would be fools not to green-light it; it had all the marks of a massive hit.

He was nothing if not persuasive. In person, Smotherman was almost a parody of a high-voltage salesman: fast-talking, short-tempered and over-sexed. There was never an absence of ‘babes’, as he still called them, in his immediate vicinity; all were promised leading roles when they’d performed adequately for Smotherman in private, and all, of course, were discarded the instant he tired of them.

Preparations for Warrior were proceeding nicely. Then the unthinkable happened. A week shy of his forty-fourth birthday, Smotherman died. He’d always been a man of legendary excess, a bottom-feeder happiest in the gamier part of any city. The circumstances of his death were perfectly consistent with this reputation: he’d died sitting at a table in a private club in New York, watching a lesbian sex show, the coronary that had felled him so massive and so sudden he had apparently been overtaken by it before he could even cry out for help. He was face down in a pile of cocaine when he was found, a drug he’d continued to consume in heroic quantities long after his contemporaries had cleaned up their acts and had their sinuses surgically reconstructed. It was one of the thirty-five illegal substances found in his system at the autopsy.

He was buried in Las Vegas, according to the instructions in his will. He’d been happiest there, he’d always said, with everything to win and everything to lose.

This remark was twice quoted at the memorial service, and hearing it, Todd felt a cold trickle of apprehension pass down his spine. What Smotherman had known, and been at peace with, was the fact that all of Tinseltown was a game – and it could be lost in a heartbeat. Smotherman had been a gambling man. He’d taken pleasure in the possibility of failure and it had sweetened his success. Todd, on the other hand, had never even played the slots, much less a game of poker or roulette. Sitting there listening to the hypocrites – most of whom had despised Smotherman – stand up and extol the dead man, he realized that Keever’s passing cast a pall over his future. The golden days were over. His place in the sun would very soon belong to others; if it didn’t already.

The day after the memorial service he poured his fears out to Maxine. She was all reassurance.

‘Smotherman was a dinosaur,’ she said as she sipped her vodka. ‘The only reason people put up with his bullshit all those years was because he made everybody a lot of money. But let’s be honest: he was a low-life. You’re a class act. You’ve got nothing to worry about.’

‘I don’t know,’ Todd said, his head throbbing from one too many drinks. ‘I look at myself sometimes …’

‘And what?’

‘I’m not the guy I was when I made Gunner.’

‘Damn right you’re not. You were nobody then. Now you’re one of the most successful actors in history.’

‘There’s others coming up.’

‘So what?’ Maxine said, waving his concerns away.

‘Don’t do that!’ Todd said, slamming his palm down on the table. ‘Don’t try and placate me! Okay? We have a problem. Smotherman was going to put me back on top, and now the son of a bitch is dead!’

‘All right. Calm down. All I’m saying is that we don’t need Smotherman. We’ll hire somebody to rework the script, if that’s what you want. Then we’ll find somebody hip to direct it. Somebody with a contemporary style. Smotherman was an old-fashioned guy. Everything had to be big. Big explosions. Big tits. Big guns. Audiences don’t care about any of that any more. You need to be part of what’s coming up, not what happened yesterday. You know, I hate to say it, but perhaps Keever’s dying is the best thing that could have happened. We need a new look for you. A new Todd Pickett.’

‘You think it’s as simple as that?’ Todd said. He wanted so much to believe that Maxine had the problem solved.

‘How difficult can it be?’ Maxine said. ‘You’re a great star. We just need to get people focussed on you again.’ She pondered for a moment. ‘You know what? We should set up a lunch with Gary Eppstadt.’

‘Oh Jesus, why? You know how I hate that ugly little fuck.’

‘An ugly little fuck he may be. But he is going to pay for Warrior. And if he’s going to put twenty million and a slice of the back-end on the table for your services to art, you can make nice with the son of a bitch for an hour.’

Chapter 3

It wasn’t simply personal antipathy that had made Todd refer to Eppstadt so unflatteringly. It was the unvarnished truth. Eppstadt was the ugliest man in Los Angeles. Charitably, his eyes might have been called reptilian, his lips unkissable. His mother, in a fit of blind affection, might have noted that he was disproportioned. All this said, the man was still a narcissist of the first rank. He hung only the most expensive suits on his unfortunate carcass: his fingernails were manicured with obsessive precision; his personal barber trimmed his dyed hair every morning, having shaved him first with a straight razor.

There had been countless prayers offered up to that razor over the years, entreating it to slip! But Eppstadt seemed to live a charmed life. He’d gone from strength to strength as he moved around the studios, claiming the paternity of every success, and blaming the failures on those who stood immediately behind him on the ladder, whom he promptly fired. It was the oldest trick in the book, but it had worked flawlessly. In an age in which corporations increasingly had the power, and studios were run by committees of business-school graduates and lawyers with an itch to have their fingers in the creative pie, Eppstadt was one of the old school. A powermonger, happiest in the company of somebody who needed his patronage, whom he could then abuse in a hundred subtle ways. That was his pleasure, and his revenge. What did he need beauty for, when he could make it tremble with a smiling maybe?

He was in a fine mood when he and Todd, with Maxine in attendance, met for lunch on Monday. Paramount had carried the weekend with a brutal revenge picture that Eppstadt had taken a hand in making, firing the director off the project after two unpromising preview screenings, and hiring somebody else to shoot a rape scene and a new ending, in which the violated woman terrorized and eventually dispatched her attacker with a hedge-cutter.

‘Thirty-two point six million dollars in three days,’ he preened. ‘In January. That’s a hit. And you know what? There’s nobody in the picture. Just a couple no-name TV stars. It was all marketing.’

‘Is the picture any good?’ Todd asked.

‘Yeah, it’s fucking Hamlet,’ Eppstadt said, without missing a beat. ‘You’re looking weary, my friend,’ he went on. ‘You need a vacation. I’ve been taking time at this monastery –’

‘Monastery?’

‘Sounds crazy, right? But you feel the peace. You feel the tranquillity. And they take Jews. Actually, I’ve seen more Jews there than at my nephew’s Bar Mitzvah. You should try it. Take a rest.’

‘I don’t want to rest. I want to work. We need to set a start-date for Warrior.’

Eppstadt’s enthusiastic expression dimmed. ‘Oh, Christ. Is that what this little lunch is all about, Maxine?’

‘Are you making it or not?’ Todd pressed. ‘Because there’s plenty of other people who will if you won’t.’

‘So maybe you should take it to one of them,’ Eppstadt said, his gaze hooded. ‘You can have it in turnaround, if that’s what you want. I’ll get business affairs on it this afternoon.’

‘So you’re really ready to let it go?’ Maxine said, putting on an air of indifference.

‘Perfectly ready, if that’s what Todd wants. I’m not going to stand in the way of you getting the picture made. You look surprised, Maxine.’

‘I am surprised. A package like that … it’s a huge summer movie for Paramount.’

‘Frankly I’m not sure this is the right time for the company to be making that kind of picture, Maxine. It’s a very hard market to read right now. And these expensive pictures. I mean, this is going to come in at well north of a hundred thirty million by the time we’ve paid for prints and advertising. I’m not sure that makes solid fiscal sense.’ He tried a smile; it was lupine. ‘Look, Todd: I want to be in business with you. Paramount wants to be in business with you. Christ, you’ve been a gold-mine for us over the years. But there’s a generation coming up – and you know the demographics as well as I do – these kids filling up the multiplexes, they don’t have any loyalty to the past.’

Eppstadt knew what effect his words were having, and he was savouring every last drop of it.

‘You see, in the good old days, the studios were able to carry stars through a weak patch. You had a star on a seven-year contract. He was being paid a weekly wage. You could afford a year or two of poor performance. But you’re expensive, Todd. You’re crucifyingly expensive. And I’ve got Viacom’s shareholders to answer to. I’m not sure they’d want to see me pay you twenty million dollars for a picture that might only gross … what did your last picture do? Forty-one domestic? And change?’

Maxine sighed, a little theatrically. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Gary.’

‘Look, Maxine, I’m sorry to be having to say it. Really I am. But numbers are numbers. If I don’t believe I can make a profit, what am I doing making the movie? You see where I’m coming from? That simply doesn’t make sense.’

Maxine got up from the table. ‘Will you excuse me a minute? I’ve got to make a call.’

Eppstadt caught the fire in Maxine’s voice.

‘No lawyers, Maxine. Please? We can do this in a civilized manner.’

Maxine didn’t reply. She simply stalked off between tables, snarling at a waiter who got in her way. Eppstadt ate a couple of mouthfuls of rare tuna, then put down his fork. ‘It’s times like this I wish I still smoked.’ He sat back in his chair and looked hard at Todd. ‘Don’t let her start a pissing competition, Todd, because if I’m cornered I’m going to have to stand up and tell it like it is. And then we’ll all have a mess on our hands.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning …’ Eppstadt looked pained; as though his proctologist was at work on him under the chair. ‘You can’t keep massaging numbers so your price looks justified when we all know it isn’t.’

‘You were saying I’d been a gold-mine for Paramount. Just two minutes ago you said that.’

‘That was then. This is now. That was Keever Smotherman, this is post-Keever Smotherman. He was the last of his breed.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘Well … let me tell you what I’m not saying,’ Eppstadt replied, his tone silky. ‘I’m not saying you don’t have a career.’

‘Well that’s nice to hear,’ Todd said sharply.

‘I want to find something we can do together. But …’

‘But?’

Eppstadt seemed to be genuinely considering his reply before he spoke. Finally, he said: ‘You’ve got talent, Todd. And you’ve obviously built a loyal fan-base over the years. What you don’t have is the drawing power you had back in the old days. It’s the same with all of you really expensive boys. Cruise. Costner. Stallone.’ He took a moment, then leaned closer to Todd, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘You want the truth? You look weary. I mean, deep down weary.’ Todd said nothing. Eppstadt’s observation was like being doused in ice-cold water. ‘Sorry to be blunt. It’s not like I’m telling you something you don’t already know.’

Todd was staring at his hand, wondering what it would feel like to make a fist and beat it against Eppstadt’s face; over and over and over.

‘Of course, you can have these things fixed,’ Gary went on chattily. ‘I know a couple of guys older than you who went to see Bruce Burrows and looked ten years younger when he was finished working on them.’

Still idly contemplating his hand, Todd said: ‘Who’s Bruce Burrows?’

‘Well, in many people’s opinion he’s the best cosmetic surgeon in the country. He’s got an office on Wilshire. Very private. Very expensive. But you can afford it. He does it all. Collagen replacements, lifts, peels, lipo-sculpture …’

‘Who went to see him?’

‘Oh, just about everybody. There’s nothing to be ashamed of: it’s a fact of life. At a certain age it’s harder to get the lovehandles to melt. You get laugh-lines, you get frown lines, you get those little grooves around your mouth.’

‘I haven’t got grooves around my mouth.’

‘Give it time,’ Eppstadt said, a touch avuncular now.

‘How long does it take?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never had any of it done. If I went in there, I’d never get out again.’

‘Too much to fix.’

‘I think it’s bad taste to jump on somebody else’s self-deprecation, Todd. But I forgive you. I know it hurts to hear this. The fact is, I don’t have to have my face out there fifty feet high. You do. That’s what they’re paying for.’ He pointed at Todd. ‘That face.’

‘If I was to get something done …’ Todd said tentatively, ‘about the lines, I mean?’

‘Yes?’

‘Would you make Warrior then?’

He had opened the door to Eppstadt’s favourite word: ‘Maybe. I don’t know. We’d have to see. But the way I look at it, you haven’t got much to lose getting the work done anyway. You’re a heart-throb. An old-fashioned heart-throb. They want to see you kick the shit out of the bad guy and get the girl. And they want their heart-throb perfect.’ He stared at Todd. ‘You need to be perfect. Burrows can do that for you. He can make you perfect again. Then you get back to being King of the Hill. Which is what you want, I presume.’

Todd admitted it with a little nod, as though it were a private vice.

‘Look, I sympathize,’ Eppstadt went on, ‘I’ve seen a lot of people just fold up when they lose their public. They come apart at the seams. You haven’t done that. At least not yet.’ He laid a hand on Todd’s arm. ‘You go have a word with Dr Burrows. See what he can do for you. Six months. Then we’ll talk again.’

Todd didn’t mention his discussion about Dr Burrows to Maxine. He didn’t want the decision process muddied by her opinion. This was something he wanted to think through for himself.

Though he didn’t remember having heard of Burrows before, he was perfectly aware he was living in the cosmetic surgery capital of the world. Noses were fixed, lips made fuller, crow’s feet erased, ears pinned back, laugh-lines smoothed, guts tucked, butts lifted, breasts enhanced. Just about any piece of the anatomy which gave its owner ego problems could be improved, sometimes out of all recognition. Traditionally of course, it had been women who were the eager and grateful recipients of such handiwork, but that had changed. One of the eighties muscle-men, who’d made a fortune parading a body of superhuman proportions some years before, but had begun to lose it to gravity, had returned to the screen last year looking more pumped than ever, his perfect abdominals and swelling pectorals – even his sculpted calf muscles – surgically implanted. The healing had taken a little while, given the extensiveness of the remodelling. He’d been out of commission for five months – hiding in Tuscany, the gossip went – while he mended. But it had worked. He’d left the screen looking like a beaten-up catcher’s mitt, and come back spanking new.

Todd began by making some very circuitous inquiries, the sort of questions which he hoped would not arouse suspicion. The word came back that the procedures were far from painless. Even legendary tough guys had ended up wishing they’d never invited the Drs to mess with them, the process had been so agonizing. And of course once you began, if you didn’t like what you saw you had to let Burrows make some more fixes; wounds on wounds, pain on pain.

But Todd wasn’t discouraged by the news. In fact in a curious way it made the idea of undergoing the procedures more palatable to him, playing as it did both into his machismo side and a deep, unexplored vein of masochism.

Besides, was there any pain on God’s green earth as agonizing as reading Daily Variety and finding that once again you weren’t in its pages? That other actors – names sometimes you’d never heard of – were getting the scripts, the parts and the deals that would once have dropped into your lap as a matter of course? There was no pain as sharp or as deep as the news of somebody else’s success. If it was an actor older than himself that was bad enough. But if it was a contemporary – or worse, somebody younger, somebody prettier – it made him so crazy he’d have to go pop a tranquillizer or three to stop himself getting morose and foul-tempered. And even the happy pills didn’t work the way they had in the old days. He’d taken too many; his body was too used to them.

So: what to do, what to do?

Should he sit on his slowly-expanding ass and start to avoid the mirror, or take the bull by the horns and get an appointment with Dr Burrows?

He remained undecided for about a week. And then one evening, sitting at home alone nursing a drink and flipping the channels of his sixty-inch TV, he came upon a segment from the telecast of last year’s Oscar ceremony. A young actor, whom he knew for a fact was not one of the smartest bunnies in town, was receiving his third Oscar of the night, for a picture he had – at least according to the credits – written, directed and starred in. The latter? Well there was no disputing that. He was in every other frame of the damn picture, back-lit and golden. He was playing a stuttering, mentally unstable poor boy from the Deep South, a role which he claimed he had based on the life of his father’s brother, who had died tragically at the hands of a lynch mob that had mistaken him for a rapist. It was all perfect Oscar-fodder: the ambitious young artist bucking the star system to tell a tale of the human spirit, rooted in his own family history.

Except that the truth was neither so moving nor so magical. Far from having been lynched, the ‘dead’ uncle was still very much alive, (or so gossip around town went) having spent twenty-two years in jail for a rape that he did not to this day contest. He had received a healthy pay-back from the studio that released the picture to stay conveniently quiet, so that his story could be told the Hollywood way, leaving the Golden Boy with his ten-thousand-watt smile to walk off with three Oscars for his mantelpiece. Todd had it on good authority that his directorial skills extended no further than knowing where his Winnebago was parked.

He wasn’t the only one aspiring to snatch Todd’s throne. There were plenty of others, chirpy little cock-suckers swarming out of the woodwork to play the King of Hollywood, when Todd had yet to vacate the role.

Well fuck ’em. He’d knock them off their stolen pedestals, the sons of bitches. He’d have the limelight back in a heartbeat – all that glory, all that love – and they’d be back on the casting couch in a week with their fannies in the air.

So what if it cost him a few weeks of discomfort? It would be worth it just to see the expressions on their pretty little faces when they realized they’d got greedy a decade too early.

Contrary to recent opinions, the King of the Heart-throbs was not dead. He was coming home, and he was going to look like a million dollars.