Stars (The Butterfly Trilogy) (14 page)

F
REIDA
G
OLDMAN HAD ALWAYS WANTED TO BE RICH
. N
OT JUST
wealthy or moneyed, but outrageously, obscenely, filthily rich. She had also always wanted to be one of the hottest agents in Hollywood—Superagent, womankind's answer to Swifty Lazar. And now, at long last, it was about to come true.

     When the tram finally docked near the top of the mountain, Frieda said a hasty good-bye to Carole Page and Dr. Isaacs, the two women with whom she had shared the limousine from Beverly Hills, and made her way as quickly as she could to the main building, a castle-like structure from which inviting lights beckoned. By the time she was flying up the front steps toward massive doors that looked like they belonged on Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, her teeth were chattering and she was shivering so badly she thought she would never be warm again. There was snow
everywhere.

     A bellman had met her at the tram, explaining that her cabin was some distance from the Castle and that therefore he would be driving her to it,
and he had pointed at something that looked like a golf cart. But Frieda was in too much of a hurry to bother with her room. First things first: get to a phone, find out where her client, Bunny Kowalski, was, and then get herself up to Bunny's room. She couldn't wait to see the look on the girl's face when she told her the news about the Syd Stern deal. That ought to snap Bunny out of whatever funk she'd dropped herself into.

     The main hall of the Castle slowed her down for an instant. Frieda had never seen anything like it. Designed to resemble an enormous Gothic entry hall, with stone walls, tapestries, coats of arms, and suits of armor, Star's main lobby was brilliantly lit with Christmas decorations. Fires roared hotly in three of the largest fireplaces Frieda had ever seen. The chandeliers were massive upside-down-wedding-cake affairs blazing with thousands of lights that cast glittering reflections on large blown-up photographs of Marion Star hanging on the walls. Somewhere a violinist played something romantic, reminding Frieda of the Palm Court in the Plaza Hotel in New York. A large star-splashed sign near the coat check room announced the Christmas ball, four days away.

     She found the telephones—French boudoir rococo types nestled in private booths lined in red velvet. Her hands shook as she dialed the operator; she trembled not from the cold but from excitement. She thought she was going to absolutely explode with her news.

     A busy signal.

     "Operator, would you try again, please?"

     No luck. Bunny's line was still busy.

     Well, at least it meant she was in her room, wherever that was. The switchboard wouldn't give Frieda the room number. "It's our privacy policy," the cheerful young thing at the other end explained. "But I'll be glad to put you through."

     When a third attempt got the same busy signal, Frieda decided to try again in a few minutes. In the meantime, she looked around and saw a sign pointing discreetly to the exclusive boutiques—Laise Adzer, Cartier, Bijan for Men—and decided that the first thing she was going to have to do was get some warm clothing. The rayon blouse and linen pants weren't going to cut it.

     Returning to the phones a short while later with a full-length mink over her arm, she found the four booths occupied. She waited some more, holding on to her overnight bag and attaché case, wondering if she should just go to her room and try calling from there. "A cabin," the bell-man had said. Frieda pictured something made of logs with Sergeant Preston cooling his heels out front.

     Delicious aromas were starting to fill the air as more and more guests in evening gowns and dinner jackets filed through the lobby and headed toward the dining rooms. Frieda detected roast duck and thick gravies, freshly baked bread and spiced walnuts, and had to fight her desire to sit down to a serious dinner. Her weight was up again and she was back on a liquid diet; she had remembered to pack several packets of powder into her overnight case. As she looked around the hall at the famous and should-be-famous, spotting Meryl Streep, who, all in white, looked as if she should be the angel on top of the Christmas tree, Frieda detected not an ounce of fat in the crowd. The industry was unforgiving on that score; it was almost impossible to be fat
and
successful in Hollywood. For a woman, at least.

     Finally a telephone was free and Frieda maneuvered herself, her two cases, and the newly purchased coat into the cubicle. As she sat down, the price tag popped out of the sleeve—twelve thousand dollars. Just like that, she had laid out twelve thousand dollars for a coat she would wear for maybe one whole day. But it didn't matter, because as soon as Bunny signed those contracts, Frieda could have a coat for every day of the year if she wanted.

     This time Bunny's line rang, and it was picked up after a minute with a sleepy, "Hello?"

     "Bunny! It's Frieda! I'm here at Star's."

     A pause. Then, "Frieda! Gosh, what are you doing here?"

     "Are you all right, Bunny? You sound odd."

     "I'm okay. I've had the flu and I'm just weak, that's all."

     "The flu! That's what depression does to you. You haven't been taking care of yourself. Are you sure you're all right?"

     "Frieda, what are you doing here at Star's?"

     "I came to see you, Bunny," she said, trying to control herself. She wanted to blurt the news. "What's your room number? I'm coming right up."

     "Oh...no, Frieda. Not now, not tonight. I...I really don't feel up to it. And I'm expecting the doctor any minute. The doctor that took care of me a few days ago has left Star's, and they said his replacement was due to arrive today. I'm waiting right now to see him."

     "Her," Frieda said, suddenly annoyed. "The new doctor is a her. She rode with me in the car from Beverly Hills. Listen, I
have
to come up now. I have something very important to discuss with you."

     "I'm really not up to company, but I'll be fine tomorrow. How about tomorrow night? I'm sure I'll be all better by then."

     Frieda stared at the telephone in bafflement. She had only ever known Bunny to be up-front and honest; in fact, the girl seemed to have a neurotic horror of telling a lie. Frieda suspected that it had something to do with Bunny's fear of her powerful industrialist father. And yet at the moment she had the distinct feeling that Bunny was hiding something. Frieda wanted to say, What's going on? Why have you stayed here so long? But instead she said, and it killed her to say it, "Well, I guess tomorrow night will have to do. If that's the only way."

     "Frieda, what's this all about?"

     It's about ten million dollars and turning your name into a household word. "I don't want to tell you over the phone. Get some rest, and we'll talk tomorrow night."

     "Let's make it for dinner then. I'm on the third floor in the east wing, in the most amazing room. Your eyes will pop out when you see it!"

     After she hung up, Frieda tapped her expensive acrylic fingernails on the top of her overnight case, agitated and restless. This was not what she had expected; something was definitely odd here. Was Bunny
really
sick? There had been something odd in her voice. Frieda shook her head, the iron gray page boy staying perfectly hair-sprayed in place. Bunny was simply incapable of lying. Well, tomorrow she would know.

     Now there was the problem of what to do until then. Of course, there were phone calls to be made and contracts to go over; Frieda had other clients she was working deals for. But the Syd Stern deal was foremost in her mind, and she knew it was going to be difficult to focus on anything else. She looked around the busy lobby, wondering what people did at a place like this.

     There was probably the usual entertainment: dining and dancing, maybe a nightclub act with some famous Vegas performer. Frieda had noticed a sign in the lobby informing guests of the continuous showing of Marion Star's films in the forty-seat theater on the second floor. And judging by the numbers who crowded around glass display cases filled with Marion Star's personal effects, a lot of people came here to indulge their curiosity about the legendary actress. Although the murder had taken place nearly sixty years ago, interest in it was still keen, due mainly to the fact that it involved sex and Hollywood, two delicious ingredients in any mystery. But also because, to this day, the murder of Dexter Bryant Ramsey remained unsolved.

     There were a lot of hot people here, Frieda noticed: award-winning stars, producers, and directors—the whole spectrum of Hollywood types seemed to be swirling by. She watched the way they made their entrances, the places where they chose to sit in the great stone room that looked like a set from
Robin Hood
, deferring to or steamrolling over one another, major stars cold-shouldering the minor stars, establishing just who was who. Frieda found a kind of irony in the way the sultry portraits of Marion Star, once known as the supreme sex goddess of the screen, gazed down through the decades at the new generation of Hollywood royalty with her sultry, sad, sexy eyes. Frieda wondered if the looming specter of a long dead and nearly forgotten star reminded these new gods and goddesses of their own mortality.

     Hot people, all of them, she thought again. And now, dammit, Frieda Goldman was going to be just as hot as the hottest of them. Just as soon as she got to Bunny.

     Looking at her watch as she continued to tap costly finger nails on the case she cradled in her lap, Frieda thought she was going to absolutely explode, knowing what she knew—the most sensational news since the last Oscars were announced. News, she was certain, that was going to snap Bunny out of it and send her down from this mountain hideout faster than you could say "producer's gross."

     The Oscar ceremony had, in fact, been responsible for the emotional tailspin that had driven Bunny to hide herself away at Star's. In a surprise move that had startled Hollywood, Bunny Kowalski, a relatively unknown character actress in her twenties, had received a nomination for Best
Supporting Actress for her small but notable role in
Children Again.
In the time between when the nominations were announced and the winners were revealed, Bunny had suddenly found herself the center of rather bewildering and unexpected attention. People went out to see the movie and agreed that, yes, small though her part was, she
made
the movie. And everyone started to ask who
was
this rather impish, not pretty little actress who could make you laugh or cry and see the pathos in life with just a look, a spoken word?

     For a while, Bunny Kowalski had shone.

     And then she didn't win the award. Afterward, despite the prestige of having been nominated and the notoriety it had brought to Bunny, further success remained elusive. There simply were no movie roles for her. She was too short, too elfin; no one took her seriously; she wouldn't look credible with most leading men. "Too character-type," one casting director had said. Finally, depressed and thinking that her career was over before it had started, Bunny had accepted a gift from her wealthy industrialist father: an open-ended stay at the luxurious Star's, where she could hide, nurse her anxieties, and reconsider her future in Hollywood.

     Frieda had spent the time since the awards trying to find parts, any part, for Bunny, and she too had been starting to despair when the jackpot had come along in the unexpected form of a scrawny young director named Syd Stern, Hollywood's newest wunderkind. A phone call to Frieda's office and the next day she was having lunch with Stern in the Polo Lounge.

     Syd explained over salmon mousse and Stolichnaya martinis that he had noticed a new movie trend beginning to emerge from the film industry, movies made from Cinderella stories, like the box-office biggies
Working Girl
and
Pretty Woman.
Syd told Frieda how he had studied the demographics of those audiences and had found that the financial success of such movies was due to the overwhelming attendance of the over-twenty-five-year-old female audience. While other studios were still aiming for the kid and teen markets, he had said, or for the Rambo-type action films that drew men to the theaters, sharp-eyed Syd had woken up to the fact that women between twenty-five and fifty, with money to spend and fantasies in need of fulfillment, were a box-office gold mine waiting to be tapped.

     Now here was where Frieda came in, he said, and the reason why he had called this meeting. He had a new idea—a series of adventure films involving the same heroine, loosely based on Indiana Jones—but in order for it to work, Syd said, he knew he was going to need someone special, someone fresh and different. He had been quietly looking around when he had seen Bunny Kowalski's performance in
Children Again.

     What he liked about Bunny were her impish looks. "Like Puck," he had said to Frieda, "in
Midsummer Night's Dream.
" Bunny had a lush, Kewpie-doll figure and a bewildered child's face that endeared her to female audiences. She wasn't someone they envied or hated, but someone to whom they could relate, thinking here is a woman who is awkward at love, or clumsy in aerobics, or freaked out by cellulite. She wasn't like the hundreds of slender, beautiful actresses who filled Hollywood and who all seemed to look alike, Syd had said with enthusiasm. Physically, Bunny was unique, and that was her big plus. He envisioned Bunny as a kind of new antiheroine, like the antiheroes of the sixties, the Gene Hackman and Al Pacino characters that the audiences had rooted for just because of their flaws or for being on the fringes of society. Bunny Kowalski came across like that, he had told a flab-bergasted Frieda, who had not touched her steak tartare. Bunny was going to be box-office gold.

     And so, two lunches and countless phone conversations later, the deal had been set.

     But one thing was turning Frieda into a nervous wreck on this snowy winter evening just days before Christmas. This was such a big, juicy plum that as soon as word was out, there would be a stampede to Syd Stern's office. Already, word was leaking out about his proposed series and that he was looking for the right actress. Sure, Syd said he wanted Bunny, but until he had Bunny's signature on these contracts, there were no guarantees.