The First Assistant, page 13
“The bathroom is free if you’re desperate,” she said.
So she had been listening, after all. I dashed to the restroom, shut the door behind me, and quickly searched the medicine cabinet for those Ambien I’d seen her take the night before her first day of shooting. I’d had a momentary panic outside her door, imagining her in the trailer having overdosed, so I felt it best to preempt any such disaster. I saw the nail scissors and wondered if it was possible to remove all sharp objects from the trailer.
“Coming!” I yelled as I stuffed the pill bottle in my fanny pack.
When I came out Emerald hadn’t moved an inch. I couldn’t tell if she was performing or if she was truly upset. But I guessed that it was probably one and the same for her. She’d been acting since she was seven years old, and I don’t think she actually knew the difference anymore. What I was certain of was that she’d been crying. And not those fake crocodile tears I’d seen her produce on command. So I went and sat next to her and patted her gently on the arm. I didn’t know what to do. If it were my sister or a good friend I’d wrap my arms around her and give her a big hug, but she was my employer, after all, and I didn’t want to invade her personal space. But my friendly pat just seemed to make her cry harder.
“It’s just so tough, Lizzie. You don’t understand. I’m alone here.”
“You’ve got me,” I ventured. That was clearly what she needed to hear because she threw herself violently into my arms and started sobbing like her heart was breaking. I smoothed down her hair like I would a child’s.
“Just let it out,” I said in a maternal tone. I sounded like a bad self-help book, but I remember my mother saying that to me when I was kid 104
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and it just seemed appropriate. However, when she put her head in my lap, I realized just how inappropriate it all was. The boundaries were all gone and I knew that I’d live to regret this.
“You see, Ken is just so hard on me. Even when I nail a scene he never says ‘good job.’ He just yells ‘cut’ and storms off like I did something wrong.”
On the first day of shooting, when Emerald complained that Ken was unnecessarily critical of her performance, I’d just assumed she was being a neurotic, oversensitive actress. But by day three I realized that Emerald was actually being generous in her assessment of Ken. He didn’t not like her; he hated her. When he’d accused Emerald of being a pampered brat when she asked for a break on his thirtieth take of her hoeing a rice paddy in the noonday sun, it occurred to me that maybe he wanted to bump her off. And I think I was second on his list. Ken and I had had a run-in when Em was fifteen minutes late for makeup one evening. What I quickly learned was that no one yelled at the star.
They just yelled at the assistant.
“I never should have taken this movie,” Emerald moaned. “But the character of Betsy was such a great role. And it was such a departure from all those teen movies I’ve been doing. A real chance to prove my acting chops.”
“Emerald, of course you should have taken the part. I’ve been watching your performance and it’s fabulous. You can do this.” And for once I wasn’t lying. She was surprisingly talented. Emerald pulled herself up to sitting and wiped away her tears. She seemed to literally shrug off the soft, vulnerable girl who’d just had her head in my lap. And the mantle she slipped on had more sharp edges than a carving knife. She stood up and started pacing the trailer.
“Oh I know I can do it. That’s not my problem. My problem is with that cuntface Cash,” she snarled. I involuntarily flinched as all my maternal instincts went out the trailer window. “She’s fucking Ken. And that smart cow obviously was screwing him before we started filming.”
Carmen had risen from Baywatch fame to Brigitte Bardot–status in a matter of a few short years. She was the curvaceous siren in an age of string beans and she played her cards like an ace. Though she’d yet to prove her acting chops, every director wanted to cast her. Well, bed her at The First Assistant
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least. But Ken had clearly fallen hard and Carmen was to get second billing behind Emerald, which had been a contractual sticking point during the negotiations. But one of the producers had made the mistake of telling one of the PA’s who told one of the parking attendants who told his wife who did laser hair removal at the salon Emerald went to that Ken had wanted Carmen to play Betsy, Emerald’s role, in The War Fields. But apparently the studio had put their foot down and told Ken that unless Emerald was the lead there was no film. It was all about bankability. And Emerald was bankable. Carmen, though possessing a cult following, was not. Ken had stormed out quitting the project but quickly returned the next day and hired Emerald. It was a huge studio movie and even he wasn’t immune to his seven-figure salary. “So I heard this all word for word when I was in the middle of getting my art wax,” Emerald told me.
“What’s an art wax?” I made the mistake of asking.
“Oh, it’s fab!” She yanked down her shorts and underpants and displayed a Gucci symbol cut into her pubic hair. It was apparently all the rage. “See? I had to do Gucci because I have a modeling contract with them. But next time I think I may do a Mercedes emblem.” She pulled her pants back up and continued. “So after my wax I called Scott and told him to get me out of the part. I knew Ken would be a shit if he’d been forced to hire me. But I’d already signed a pay-or-play deal and Scott said there was no way out of it.”
I cast my mind back and I did remember Emerald’s contract sitting on my desk and Scott walking out of his office after he’d gotten off the phone and asking me to hand deliver the contract to the business affairs office at the studio ASAP. If Emerald only knew what that damn Gullwing had done to her life she would have set it on fire. “Scott promised to try to get me out of the contract, but in the end the studio wouldn’t budge.” Yes. Scott had tried really hard. He’d gone back into his office after I’d dispatched Amber on the errand and, instead of calling Jake at the studio, he’d called Quentin and told him all about his new car.
So the die was cast early on for a deep-seated hatred between Emerald and Carmen with nasty Ken pulling the strings. And once fully informed, it was obvious that the situation was a pressure cooker; the explosion was inevitable. You would think it would be Ken that Emerald hated, but oddly he seemed to escape relatively unscathed as she 106
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tore Carmen into pieces, blaming her for all her feelings of insecurity and general misery on set. But I’d noticed a theme in Hollywood. People with power were like Teflon. None of their bad deeds stuck. They just seemed to slide off and land on their underlings, who then spent their time covered in grease. But as I mulled over my bad analogy, I realized that maybe the little nineteen-year-old was a lot wiser than I was about this business. She couldn’t afford to hate Ken. He was going to imprint her image on celluloid that would hopefully be seen by millions of people around the world for generations to come.
“And to make matters worse, Lizzie, I’m fat. And every time Ken yells at me, I get fatter. Because the only thing that makes me feel better is chocolate.”
I tuned back in to Emerald’s rant as the word “fat” reminded me of why we were sitting in her trailer in the first place.
“Well, that’s easy to solve, Em,” I said excitedly. “You put the weight on in two weeks; you can lose it in less. I’ve read about this great green diet. I’ve gained a ton of weight, too. We can do it together.”
“Yeah. I noticed your thighs were looking really chunky. So who’s done this diet?” she asked. I gave her the finger behind her back as she walked to the fridge and grabbed a Diet Coke.
“Oh, Julia. She lost all her pregnancy weight in, like, a month,” I told her. Emerald turned back around, totally unimpressed. I had to think on my feet. “Oh, and the Olsen twins.” She was looking more interested. “And Paris. Apparently that’s how she keeps that catwalk figure.”
I grabbed the copy of Glamour off the sofa and stuffed it in my bag when she wasn’t looking.
“Great. That sounds perfect. We’ll start today. And I want a trainer.
And he needs to be flown in from LA. And you have to train with me.”
It was more of an order than a request.
“Great,” I said with as much enthusiasm I could muster. “Well then, I’d better go talk to Fred and Kathy.” I was already halfway out the door.
“Oh, and Lizzie?” she called out. I should have known. It was all feeling a bit too easy. “Tell them they have to fire Carmen Cash or I’m not coming out of my trailer ever again.” And with that she slammed the door.
Ten
Hollywood is where they shoot
too many films and not enough actors.
—Walter Winchell
When I’d first walked into the lobby of the Amanpuri Resort in Phuket, I knew I’d returned to my spiritual home. That is if I were a Thai princess in my last life. There was a sense of harmony to the open-air lobby with shining golden Buddhas discreetly tucked away in all the right places. And when I walked to the other side of the hundred-foot-high thatched bungalow, the view took my breath away. The hotel was built into the side of a lush green hill and at the bottom of a hundred winding granite steps shone the white beach and the magnificent An-daman Sea. My own bungalow was right at the bottom, just a stone’s throw from the soft sand. Every night I’d drift off to the sounds of the waves lapping against the shore and wake to the cawing of parrots more beautiful than any I’d ever seen at the zoo. Well, that’s how it should have been at least, but unfortunately we’d been shooting nights for the last couple of weeks. I knew the sea was there, but I’d only managed to go swimming once since I’d arrived. And the parrots’ noise was happily drowned out by a pair of fantastic earplugs I’d borrowed from the props guy in charge of firearms. I recognized ruefully that my sense of déjà vu was probably completely valid, but I’d gotten it a bit wrong as usual; in my last life I wasn’t the Thai princess after all; I was the Thai slave. And I was obviously still smack in the middle of my karmic circle.
Though we were in paradise, the last couple of weeks had been a living hell.
“I don’t mean to be picky, but Emerald needs the sprouts blanched.
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Not boiled. Understand?” I explained as politely as I could. Thailand’s equivalent to a Michelin star chef looked at me with such hatred I was certain I’d be served up a special dish of the Avian flu for dinner. But at the moment, a hospital bed and raging fever sounded like a much needed respite. I’d just managed to crawl into bed three hours before when the panicked hotel manager came knocking on my bungalow door.
He’d just had a plate of Brussels sprouts hurled at him by Emerald at speeds worthy of an Olympic discus thrower and was terrified to return with the dish if it wasn’t perfect. So he’d dragged me from my bed and down into the depths of the kitchen on my day off to oversee Emerald’s sprouts preparation. Not only were sprouts not native to Thailand they were impossible to locate, and I’d had to get permission from three different producers to fly them in at great cost to the production.
The good news was that both Emerald and I had lost ten pounds.
The bad news was that we both had such bad indigestion that we were too embarrassed to talk to anyone else on the production. And we were starting to get very sick of each other’s company. Emerald had returned to the set without the head of Carmen Cash on a platter thanks to the Kleins’ expert classes in negotiation at Princeton University. Peace had resumed, and for the moment Ken was behaving himself with a little help from the powers that be. Namely, Jake Hudson.
When we’d gotten back to her bungalow that night, I’d put a call through to Jake for Emerald. For some odd reason she’d asked me to stay on the phone with the pretence that we were going to roll calls. But as I’d suspected Jake was her one and only phone call that evening.
Emerald was just showing off, or perhaps giving me a bit of free education in the ways to get ahead in Hollywood. Though she was sitting in the other room, her pout could be heard all the way to LA, and Jake was surprisingly responsive. There was an unspoken camaraderie between the two that hadn’t existed at their last meeting. Well, at least not when I had been in the room. Oddly he seemed to treat her with more respect, which is what confused me the most. I’d learned years before in high school that the girls who slept around were treated with little or no regard. But obviously I was on a very different playground. Maybe it was because Jake and Emerald were both powerful in their own right so no one had the upper hand. Maybe it was because Emerald had slept The First Assistant
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with him like a man: sex with no emotion or expectation. But whatever reason, there was obviously some swingers’ conduct manual that I wasn’t privy to. And though it would be nice to call the president of a studio and get him to do your bidding, I was in no hurry to learn the secret handshake.
I’d heard the next day from Kathy and Fred that Jake had called Ken that night for a little chat. What was actually said on the call, we’ll never know, but Ken seemed to have an enormous attitude adjustment.
He kept mentioning throughout the day how much Jake admired Emerald’s talent. I couldn’t help but snicker as I was sure Emerald’s talents were extensive. But Emerald was well pleased with the groveling director, and it did seem to bring back some perspective to the entire thing as Ken only had eyes for Emerald.
I left the kitchen pinching my nose shut with one hand and holding the offending sprouts as far from my body as possible with the other. I walked down the winding path to Em’s bungalow and wondered what condition I’d find her in this morning. But if the quaking manager was any indication, it was going to be a long day. The first two weeks of the Julia diet were sprouts only. This was meant to have a unique cleansing effect, which I can now vouch for. But for Emerald the diet seemed to cleanse her body as well as expel any sense of humor or goodwill that she possessed. Hence the temper tantrums and almost unbearable mood swings, which seemed to be getting worse with every bite of cabbage.
With night shoots dominating the last ten days, I was averaging about three hours of sleep a day. I’d developed a twitch in my left eye that seemed to start every time the next day’s call sheet was slipped under my door. Shooting nights meant that Emerald’s call time was seven in the evening, hence mine was six, leaving me just enough time to get Emerald out of her massive four-bedroom villa and into her car to arrive on set in a timely manner. But by the time we returned home at three in the morning and I’d tucked Emerald into bed, dealt with all the e-mails and phone messages, and organized my to-do list for the next day, it was eight in the morning. I’d collapse into bed comatose only to be woken at eleven by Emerald or, more often than not, someone who wanted something from Emerald. The demands seemed to keep coming and I was supposed to be her Great Wall of China. It was endless: 110
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another magazine cover, publicity for her last movie, endorsements, fan mail. It seemed everyone wanted a piece of Emerald Everhart.
I was starting to understand why celebrities lost touch with reality.
The sifters, like me, were necessary to allow a star to have any kind of normal life, but that was the catch-22. By sifting out all the humdrum annoyances and realities of real life, it was nearly impossible to remain grounded no matter how hard I imagined they tried. And even worse were the sycophants. They seemed to spring up in every nook and cranny wanting to be friends with Emerald in hopes that some of her celebrity would rub off on them. And not a single one of these new friends would tell Emerald a word of truth. If she asked the wardrobe assistant, Kelly, a new friend, what she thought of a pair of shoes she owned, Kelly would first gauge how Emerald felt about them and then just confirm Emerald’s opinion. So when Emerald asked my opinion and my answer wasn’t what she wanted to hear, she’d canvass the sycophants and use them to prove me wrong. Which was incredibly infuri-ating as the ass kissing was rampant from Kathy and Fred all the way down to the PA at the production office.
I’d always thought it was pathetic that all the stars seemed to be best friends with their assistants, but the longer I worked for Emerald the more sense it made. Before you took a job for a star, you had to sign a confidentiality agreement, so no selling their story to Star Magazine.
The assistant was a safe haven in potentially shark-infested waters. I mean, even family members couldn’t be counted on. Another reason Emerald was in a bad mood this week, besides the plethora of greens, was because she’d received bad news from her lawyers. Her mother had been trying to publish a book called, My Precious Gem: Emerald Everhart’s Most Embarrassing Moments. Emerald had managed to get a temporary injunction halting the publication, but the court upheld her mother’s right to publish and the book was coming out next month.
Needless to say they no longer spoke. So it made sense to befriend your assistant if you were in Em’s position; as you were already paying them, they were legally prohibited from spilling your deepest darkest secrets, and they were with you at all times, since, as a busy actor, you spend half your life away from home. But it was certainly no walk in the park trying to navigate the minefield of being the hired best friend.
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I walked into Emerald’s villa, grabbed a plate from the kitchen, and divied up the sprouts between us both, then wandered out to the pool.
I found her lying in the sun on a chaise.
“ ’Morning, Emerald!” I tried to sound cheery, though the look on her face was anything but. She didn’t respond, just glanced up at me holding the two plates of sprouts and turned back to her copy of People. “I’ve got your sprouts, cooked just how you like them.” I put one plate next to her right hand and stood there like a drug dealer at an elementary school. “Don’t you want to even try one? You must be hungry. Look, I’m eating mine. Yum.” I stuck one in my mouth and struggled not to gag.
