My Lucky Star (6 page)

“You see?” said Maddie. “What’d I tell you? The people here are just so damned nice.”

Though I’d smirked at this assertion at the evening’s outset, the martinis and chardonnay had sharpened my insight and I saw
now how right she was. Viewed from our cozy table at BU, Hollywood really was a remarkably friendly town, a sunny Prada-clad
Mayberry with a heart as big as an IMAX screen.

Claire, ever the staunch realist, tried for a while to maintain perspective. She enjoyed the parade of ring-kissers but she
knew that spending your first night in LA at Max Mandelbaum’s table was like first glimpsing Rome from the popemobile. At
some point, though— I suspect it was after Alec Baldwin kissed her hand—she stopped fighting and surrendered to the same star-drunk
euphoria to which Gilbert and I had succumbed immediately and without struggle.

As the glamorati came and went we kept exchanging furtive glances of delight, our minds racing with the same intoxicating
thought. We were in! Arrived! Players! Not for us the hardscrabble life of the wannabe. All the things we’d pined for but
feared we’d never possess would now be ours! Careers! Recognition! Respect! Gardeners!

We contained our exhilaration through dinner, comporting ourselves with a cheery nonchalance meant to suggest that we were
(don’t ask how) accustomed to such evenings. But once we left and were whizzing home in Gilbert’s convertible we were free
at last to carry on like the drunk, giddy mooncalves we’d become.

“Gawd,” crowed Gilbert. “And to think I practically had to
beg
you to come out here!”

“All right, all right!” I laughed. “We’ll never doubt you again.”

“What a night!” said Claire.

“That back there?” sniffed Gilbert. “That was nothing! Do you have any idea how
big
we’re going to be? How much money we’re going to make?”

“None, if you don’t slow down!” said Claire.

“Millions!” he said. “Tens of millions!”

And with that he launched into an exuberant rewrite of Bernstein’s famed “New York, New York.”

“LA, LA! A wonderful town! The skies are blue and the people are brown!”

Inspiration failed him and Claire rushed in with “You waltz right in and they hand you a crown!”

We finished together, Claire providing the harmony.

“LA, LAAAAA! It’s a wonderful towwwwwn!”

I
ESCORTED
C
LAIRE TO
her room and as we entered her phone rang. Claire regarded it warily. She’d left the number on her New York machine but it
was now after two there. She answered and immediately grimaced, leaving no doubt who the caller was.

“Marco,” she said brightly. “How lovely to hear from you.”

I pointed toward the door to ask if I should leave but she shook her head, wanting an audience for this as much as I yearned
to listen.

“Glad to hear that,” she said warmly. “There’s no one I’d rather be missed by.”

“Drunk?” I whispered.

“Very.”

“Crying?”

“He will be.”

Things went back and forth for a bit, Marco offering sloppy promises and Claire asking, in the sweetest possible tone, what
species of idiot he imagined her to be. “Lunch tomorrow?” she cooed. “Well, that’s a terribly tempting offer, but as you may
in a less drunken state have gleaned from the area code and hotel operator, I’m not in town just now.”

She went on to explain that she’d accepted a commission to write a screenplay for the producer Bobby Spellman and would not
be returning to New York for at least two months, though possibly much longer, as one high-profile job did have a way of leading
to another. She wished him luck with his ceramics career and assured him that, despite his behavior toward her, she would
keep him in mind for all her earthenware needs.

“Brava!” I cried. I applauded loudly, then, feeling this was insufficient, whistled a bit.

“God, that felt good.”

“Whoo-ee,” I said in my cowboy voice, “that was some fancy knife-twistin’, ma’am.”

Claire sank onto the couch, gazed out the window at the twinkling lights of the strip, and gave a little laugh of disbelief.

“I never dreamed I’d say this but —thank God for Gilbert!”

“He certainly came through, didn’t he?”

“So it appears.”

“We always knew he would someday.”

“No, we didn’t.”

She announced her intention to order up some coffee and to read as much as she could of
A Song for Greta
before morning. I said this sounded like a sensible plan and retired to my room to do the same.

After calling down for coffee I settled into a chair with the slightly battered old paperback Gilbert had provided.

I was six pages in when I called room service to cancel my order. It was already painfully clear to me that there was no point
in consuming coffee while trying to read
A Song for Greta
late in the evening. If you’re reading it for pleasure, no amount of caffeine will stave off slumber. And if, God help you,
you’re reading it because you’ve agreed to adapt it for the screen, staying awake is not the problem.

It’s ever sleeping again.

Greta, her kind, gray, sensitive eyes puffy from the sleepless night she had passed listening to the fearsome explosions and
heartbreaking cries of sad despair that had pierced the cobblestoned serenity of her lovely, beloved, now war-ravaged city,
watched intently as General Snelling, his arrogant belly straining the buttons of his gestapo uniform, thrust his fork viciously
into the yielding surface of the rich moist
Schwarzwalder kirschtorte
she had made from the recipe handed down to her by her mother, a great beauty, now dead.

His cold black eyes glittered with hungry, rapacious greed as he brought the fork to his plump crimson lips and opened his
brutish mouth, revealing his cruel teeth. He thrust the cake into his mouth like a stoker who was stoking a furnace, a greedy
furnace that could never be too full or even satisfied. Greta watched nervously as he chewed the cake, sensually savoring
the dark sweetness of its chocolaty richness.

“It is good, Mein General?” she asked.

“You have done well, Greta,” he replied, his insatiable jowls quivering with pleasure.

“Ach,” she thought to herself, not for the first time, “you would not like my cake if you knew my secret!”

S
O BEGINS
A
S
ONG FOR
G
RETA
, the 370-page novel that one Prudence Gamache unleashed upon the world in 1955.

As this excerpt illustrates, it is set during World War II and is so badly written that had Hitler survived the war, his punishers
would have consigned him to a Spandau cell with a copy of the thing and a jackbooted thug who had ways of making him read.
Subtitled
A Tale of Hope and Heroes,
it’s one of those ruthlessly sentimental books that make you feel as though your heartstrings are being plucked with a lug
wrench. On page after page it strives to achieve uplift and, in the case of my dinner, damn near succeeded.

The plot revolves around the double life of the book’s title character, Greta Schumman, a woman so virtuous she makes Maria
von Trapp look like a Kit Kat Klub girl. Greta keeps house for the brutal gestapo general Ernst Snelling and his handsome
son Heinrich. Heinrich, raised by Greta after his mom died in childbirth, is in the gestapo too but, thanks to Greta’s tender
influence, is a kinder, gentler Nazi. As Ms. Gamache puts it, “His twinkling eyes sparkled with a gentle light and in his
heart there burned a fragile flame of goodness that not even the brackish tide of evil washing over this once green and hopeful
land could drown or otherwise extinguish.”

Greta, who’s secretly Jewish, risks all by smuggling food to her sister, who’s hiding in the basement of a bombed-out bakery
along with her four children. The children, in ascending order of grisliness, are Lisabetta, a beautiful and spirited eighteen-year-old,
Rolf, a manly little fellow of ten, and the twins, Hilda and Heidi, two revolting moppets whose every lisping utterance is
crafted to extort tears. When they’re not pretend-phoning Daddy in heaven, they’re staging puppet shows about brighter tomorrows,
and after three chapters of this I was rooting for the snipers.

The general, his suspicions inflamed by a missing roast beef, orders Heinrich to follow Greta. He obeys and discovers her
double life. He denounces her treachery to the Reich and vows to turn her in to Dad but finds, in a dinner scene staggeringly
devoid of suspense, that he cannot bring himself to do so. Before you can say “Oskar Schindler,” he’s smuggling food along
with her and falling hard for pretty Lisabetta, who’s a feisty one and takes some wooing.

Little Hilda falls gravely ill and Heinrich, who by this point is practically sporting a yarmulke, frees a Jewish doctor from
a work camp. Hilda rallies briefly before dying in a deathbed scene so excruciatingly maudlin that only the promise of her
eventual demise kept me turning the pages.

“One down, one to go!” I thought, pouring myself an altogether necessary scotch from the minibar. But I soon found that in
the world of Prudence Gamache saintly tots do not quit the stage simply because they’ve expired. No, their dear little ghosts
linger on, watching over their families, snuffing out candles when danger looms, and generally pitching in. The nadir of this
gambit comes when Hilda’s ghost blows a kiss to two Jew-sniffing Dobermans who whimper contritely and lead their masters away.
By that point I’d just about had it and only skimmed the rest to get the gist of the story.

I could at least see what had attracted Bobby to the material. Amid the schmaltz there was no shortage of action and preposterous
heroics. My question vis-à-vis Bobby was not “Why
Greta?
” It was “Why us?” The answer clearly lay with Gilbert, and I resolved to track him down come morning and, if need be, throttle
it out of him.

I
PHONED HIM THE
next morning and left a message sternly demanding he call the moment he woke. I then tried Claire’s room and, getting no
answer, dressed and went downstairs, hoping to find her in the dining room. She was there, sitting at a corner table and looking
as morose as you’d expect a girl of her taste and discernment to look on finding she’s been hired to rewrite
The Diary of Anne Frank
as an action film.

I joined her as our waiter arrived.

“Just coffee for now,” I said.

“Black,” intoned Claire. The waiter withdrew and she went on, “Black—like the black, pitch-dark heart of General Snelling,
a heart never pierced by the radiant light of love or the sunshine of kindness or even a faint tender ray of —”

“All right. You finish it?”

“Yes. I decided to just read the verbs and it flew by. Have you by chance spoken to our collaborator this morning?”

“I left a message.”

“When he calls back tell him please to swing by. And ask if he’d be so kind as to bring a garrote.”

Our coffee came and we consumed several cups as we probed the mystery of our hiring. Everyone insisted we’d been chosen on
the basis of our brilliant spec, a script Claire and I had confidently assumed to be our own
Mrs. McManus
. This now seemed decidedly less likely. Why would Bobby, seeking to adapt this brutally unfunny book, hire a team whose spec
was a lighthearted comedy? We wondered if perhaps Gilbert hadn’t been lying and the spec really
was
his, a notion we swiftly rejected as too preposterous to entertain.

Claire opined that it might just be flat-out nepotism, Max asking Bobby to hire Maddie’s son in exchange for some favor from
Max. In that scenario Bobby wouldn’t much care what the spec was and might not even have read it. I said I didn’t see what
good it did Bobby to hire writers he didn’t believe in.

“Oh, darling,” she drawled with maddening condescension, “you don’t think Bobby plans to actually
film
what we write? You know how it works out here. Nothing makes it to the screen until at least a dozen ink-stained wretches
have had a whack at it. So if we agree to actually do this—”

“‘If’?” I repeated, startled. “What do you mean ‘if’?!”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I want any part of this.”

“But you can’t quit!” I said, panic and caffeine sending my already cantering heart into a brisk gallop. The task of adapting
Greta
would be hellish enough even with Claire’s help and unimaginable with no one’s “assistance” save Gilbert’s. “I mean, I’ll
grant you it won’t be a picnic—but, God, hon, think of the money!”

“I have. I’ve thought of it a great deal. I’m just not sure if it’s worth spending the next few months writing adorable dead
moppets and, what’s-his-name, Nazi with the Laughing Eyes.”

“I am begging you!” I said, clasping her forearms. “Do not consign me to everlasting Gilbert!”

“I don’t want to, dear. I’m just not sure I have the stomach for this.”

I whined, wheedled, and cajoled but to no end. Claire insisted she’d make no decision until we’d met with Spellman and ascertained
how much of the book he was married to. I could only bow to this and pray that Bobby would not prove so insufferable as to
obliterate all hope of keeping her on board.

I tried Gilbert again and once more got his voice mail.

“I wouldn’t bother,” frowned Claire. “He’s obviously gone to ground.”

I tended to agree. Gilbert had known when he’d dropped them off just what lurked in those envelopes. He would not, as such,
care to face us again till we were seated in Bobby’s office and could smell the ink on the paycheck.

T
HE TAXI DEPOSITED
C
LAIRE
and me at the famed main gate of Pinnacle Pictures promptly at two. A guard gave us directions to Bobby Spellman’s office,
which we reached an acceptable five minutes late. Gilbert had not yet arrived.

The outer office was quite large, its walls predictably crowded with posters for Bobby’s shrill blockbusters. The absurdly
beautiful woman behind the desk informed us that her name was — what else?— Svetlana and that Bobby was finishing a call.
Would we care for something to drink? We declined and sat to wait for Gilbert, who showed up five minutes later carrying a
briefcase.