Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me (5 page)

Dicky gave the gun to Jennifer, clicking off the safety and turning his back, as if she were a stranger about to get undressed.

Dicky's comment, when he was arraigned on charges of manslaughter, was, “I thought there would be more noise and less blood.” The detective in charge of the investigation wore rubbers over his tasseled loafers and was glad of it. Even the ceiling needed to be repainted.

In
Romeo's Dagger,
the first of the three movies I've managed to get off the ground, I insisted that Jennifer shoot herself off screen. We have all seen enough, I said. We have proved to ourselves and the world that the American people are unflinching. All has been told; all has been shown. I made an impassioned plea to the studio for the power of restraint. When that didn't work, I cited the shower sequence in the original
Psycho.
I got my way. Now that I have Stella, I am relieved on behalf of Jennifer Allen's mother.

Dicky maintained throughout the trial that if he and Jennifer had done anything wrong, it was in telling her parents. If Jennifer had been less conscientious, she never would have complained to her mother, and no doctors would have been involved. No medical clerks would have been involved, medical clerks who make clerical errors.

For Jennifer Allen, his Jennifer Allen, did not have hairy cell
leukemia. Her chart had been confused with that of another Jennifer Allen by Corrine Clingenpeel, a medical receptionist trying to hold down two jobs, raise her young son, and get through nursing school. It was a single-mother mistake, as the papers were fond of reporting, the mistake of a woman overwhelmed. For this Jennifer Allen, Dicky's Jennifer Allen, was the healthiest person on which an autopsy had ever been performed in the state, according to our city's chief coroner.

It made the national news, and the nation was duly outraged. An investigation into hospital filing systems was opened up. Briefly, the blame was laid at the smelly feet of a cadre of sixteen-year-old computer hackers. For several weeks the nightly news ran stories about people who had gone in for knee surgery and had their gall bladders removed instead. Dicky (“looking not unlike the young Nick Nolte”—Associated Press) wept on all three networks, plus
CNN
. He was tried, acquitted, and signed by William Morris.

I'd been rattling around the film industry for six years when Audra brought me the rights to Dicky's side of the story. In Hollywood there are always several sides for sale. I was in the art department on a feature at the time. For twelve hours a day I moved furniture on, off, and around the set. The movie was set in Victorian times and all the highboys, chiffonniers, and sideboards were made of solid oak and cherry. I wore a kidney belt and a look of perpetual self-pity. I liked movies. If I liked moving furniture I would have gotten a job with Bekins. At this time Dicky's case came to trial, and an article about Jennifer Allen's death appeared as a
Newsweek
cover story.

When Jennifer Allen's parents changed their phone number, the better to discourage all interest in their daughter's unfortunate death, Audra was besieged. For several weeks it seemed everyone who had ever entertained the notion of producing a movie wanted to buy the rights to Dicky's version of events.

But Audra Baron comes from a long line of implacable Vermont dairy farmers on one side and crafty Polish petit bourgeois
politicians on the other. She also was a devotee of
Entertainment Tonight.
In other words, she was not impressed with their urgings and entreaties, with the videotapes they overnight expressed to her as samples of their work, the trouble, time, and money they took to fly up and visit her in person.

She trusted none of them and called me, bi-weekly becoming daily becoming hourly, to make sure she was doing the right thing. I do not remember exactly how it happened, but suddenly Audra began referring people to me. “Talk to my niece Brooke. She is handling the rights.” That my only credentials for pulling off this task were my stint in the art department as a beast of burden seemed not to bother Audra. I was better than a stranger, although I practically was one. She insisted I call her Aunt.

It was a time in Hollywood when the edgy, Italian-suited, business-school-educated studio clone was on the way out, and no one knew what was on the way in. All anyone could be sure of was that the creative elite had stopped washing their hair. A-list directors began showing up for meetings looking like earnest philosophy majors. They wore sweaters with holes in the elbows and smelled.

I didn't know any of this. I didn't know anything. I didn't know enough to call myself a producer. I returned all my phone calls at the first opportunity, ate lunch at home—peanut butter and jelly on whole-wheat toast with half an apple. I was on time for my meetings, wore job-interview clothes, and never offered anything I couldn't deliver. I didn't negotiate. I said: “I've got the story of Jennifer Allen's death, from the point of view of her boyfriend. Take it or leave it.”

If they left it I went somewhere else, in my 1979 Datsun with no car phone. When I took the project elsewhere, I presumed I was really taking it elsewhere, unaware this was a negotiating tactic. When the studio I had left called back and offered more money, more control, I said: “No. I'm sorry. I'm already talking to someone else. Thank you anyway.”

No one had ever heard of such a thing. No one knew what
to make of me. I was so middle-class, so resolutely un-shrewd, un-feisty, un-iconoclastic, un-all-those-other-adjectives used to describe brash up-and-comers that I was perceived as being shrewd, feisty, and iconoclastic.

For a few weeks, everyone wanted to have a meeting with me just so they could tell their friends and associates how I never
once
said
Romeo's Dagger
was a cross between this box office smash and that critically acclaimed success; how I drank Dr. Pepper and ate club sandwiches and seemed not to be watching my weight. My brand-new agent Melissa Lee Rottock performed the necessary arm-twisting and obscenity-slinging, and together we were able to get a deal set before people got bored with my style of doing business, which was no style at all.

“In Dicky's defense, I have to say that it was a pretty heady time. For all of us. But then, you know, we made the movie and moved on. But he's never gotten over not being famous anymore. I think he even goes to a support group of other people who were also famous for something or other. There's that Olympic athlete who got shot in the groin during a domestic squabble, and a chicken rancher who landed a 747 when the pilot had a stroke. On the set, we joked—it was cruel, I have to admit—that Dicky was already planning his next career move. Trying to figure out a way to deliver a set of quintuplets in the middle of a hurricane or unwittingly discover the gene for obesity.”

“Also, of course, in the middle of a hurricane,” said Mary Rose. “Preferably the worst one in a hundred years.”

“Now you've got it.”

Mary Rose got up and turned on the tube; the game was a minute into the first quarter. We sat together in the dark on Mary Rose's sleeper sofa, a Goodwill reject of nubby brown polyester fabric whose seat yawned open, jaw like, when no one was sitting on it. Stella dozed in my lap. The furnace kicked on. Outside there was the occasional roar of sudden rain.

We watched while Ajax Green, the star of our team, missed both of his free throws.

“One guy starts missing, then they all start missing,” I said.

“They don't want one guy to feel like a loser all alone, so they all join in,” said Mary Rose.

“Here's my prescription for the off-season: group therapy in the morning, free-throw practice in the afternoon.”

“The other reason they don't make their free throws is because it's a
free
throw. They don't feel like they deserve anything that's free. They only feel happy overcoming a ten-point deficit with seven seconds left to play. They only feel happy if their situation is completely impossible,” said Mary Rose. “There's Derik Crawshaw though. He seems relatively well-adjusted.”

“Yeah, but he's new.”

We could go on like this all night, and often did. We thought we might be transverbalists: women who enjoyed not cross-dressing, but cross-talking, talking like men.

By the end of the first quarter Stella was awake and fussing, the Blazers were down by four, and Ward Baron had decided to stop by.

Stopping by was not something Mary Rose generally approved of. People who knew Mary Rose did not drop by. Whenever I waxed nostalgic about college, during which time I shared a huge old house with five other people, all of whom had issued open invitations for everyone they knew to crash whenever they wanted to, Mary Rose's pupils dilated with anxiety. Needless to say with Ward, it was a different story altogether. At least a first.

Ward and I had an odd relationship. He reminded me of Lyle: lanky, with unkempt brown curls and a deep voice that cracked with emotion at will, the compulsion to tell dumb jokes. When we were teenagers the Barons came to California to stay for a month with us in our rented beach house at Corona del Mar. Ward and I were on the verge of getting one of those cousin things going that are a familiar staple of nineteenth-century English literature, but we were both shy, and I was neither large enough nor hardy enough for his tastes. He fell for a five-foot-eleven sailing instructor instead.

So there were murky feelings swirling around our relationship even before
Romeo's Dagger.
Ward wanted me to hire him to direct. He thought, perhaps rightly so, that his mother had given me my break, so I should give him his. As savvy as Ward imagines himself to be, he thought what all people who are not in the movie business think: that a producer is like the immigrant owner of a Vietnamese restaurant who has a job for every family member who wants one. In truth, the most powerful person involved in the production is the star, in this case the cuddly cute comedian R—,who (in his first serious role) played Dicky Baron, and got to pad the crew with as many family members, chefs, and favorite kung fu instructors as he wanted. Likewise, cuddly cute R—had his pick of the litter, director-wise. But Ward was persistent. He thought, as men typically do, that I could be softened up, worn down, stone-washed, whatever. First, he tried to appeal to my cousinly instincts, sending me pictures of Audra and Big Hank vacationing in Milan along with a copy of his director's reel. When that didn't work, he came to L. A. and took me to dinner at the beach, hoping the salt air and overcooked swordfish would rekindle our romance
manqué
of twenty years earlier.

When that didn't work out, he resorted to good-natured bullying.

“You don't know how many people would sell—well, maybe not their souls, but their houses in Montana”—to work with me. Who's executive producing this thing, anyway?” he said.

“I am,” I said. It was a lie, but he was getting on my nerves. “Anyway, I've showed your reel to R— and he thinks you're too slick.”

“You mean stylized,” he said.

“I mean facile,” I said.

“Perfect, then, for your movie,” he said.

“Hiya, baby,” he said now, to Mary Rose. Ward moved closer to kiss her cheek, then made a last-minute detour and swooped down to plant a peck on her brown wool sweater in the region of her belly button. He wore one of those enormous black leather
jackets that crackled with every breath. “Oh, and hello to you too, Mary Rose.”

Ward scooted Mary Rose over, and the four of us sat squashed on the couch, like people on a lifeboat. Ward gently placed a Styrofoam take-out carton on Mary Rose's lap. “I remember you liked these.”

Mary Rose clapped her hands over her heart and sighed, “Oh.” Ward's hair curled over his collar. She reached up, almost shyly, and combed it with her fingers. He closed his eyes, let his head drop back into the palm of her hand. I watched this out of the corner of my eye—it was really very sweet—when suddenly Mary Rose yanked her hand out from under Ward's head, which snapped forward like that of a crash test dummy. The Styrofoam container slid to the floor and popped open.

“Oh, come on!” yelled Mary Rose. She gestured at the TV. “Where I come from, getting your mouth guard knocked halfway across the floor is a foul.”

“Baby, franchise players never foul,” said Ward.

“What are you talking about, sweetheart? Pippen's got two,” said Mary Rose. “Everyone else has
four.
Guys coming in off the bench get called for tucking in their shirts.”

“My point exactly, sweetie.”

Then Mary Rose spied the container on the floor, inside the square white clam was a handful of pale brown cookies. She leaned forward, peered closer. “What are those?”

“Peanut-butter cookies. Left over from the shoot. I remembered they were your favorite.”

Mary Rose cupped one long hand over the other, continued to peer down at the cookies as if they were some poisonous animal devouring its prey, interesting to watch but lethal to touch. “Not
my
favorite.”

“Since when? Is this some kind of pregnancy food thing?” Ward looked at me and rolled his eyes.

“She's allergic to peanuts,” I said.

“You are? You never told me that. Why didn't you ever tell
me that? I would never have brought these, if …” He leaned over and snapped the Styrofoam case shut, as if the mere sight of them might cause Mary Rose to go into anaphylactic shock. “I must be thinking of the ex-wife.”

“You have an ex-wife?”

Ward was silent. He popped the container open again, then snapped it shut. Open, shut, open, shut. “How can you tell your husband is dead? The sex is the same, but you get the remote.”

“You never told me you have an ex-wife.”

“You never told me you were allergic to peanuts.”

We all turned our attention to a free-throw shot. We watched, rapt, as the ball twirled around the rim. Lynne Baron! I'd forgotten about her. She and Ward were just separated when he and I had our acrimonious overcooked swordfish dinner. She did something in the movies. I remember, because he told me she was getting out of the film business and into training Seeing Eye dogs. “She wanted to get out of the blind leading the blind and into Labrador retrievers leading the blind,” he'd said. Then I remembered: She'd been a Frederick's of Hollywood lingerie model who threw in the thong to become a food designer. She was well-known in food-design circles. She did for a plate of deep-fried Cajun jumbo shrimp what the makeup artist, hair stylist, and wardrobe consultant did for the actress eating it.