This Other Eden (47 page)

Where
the rudeness gets nasty is when it is delivered on behalf of a star. This is
because of the great agent’s dilemma, the terrible cross which all agents have
to bear, that which turns young, starry-eyed enthusiasts who ‘love this
business’ into hardened, chain-smoking attack animals.

The
agent’s dilemma is this: no matter how hard they work, they can never succeed.
The success or failure of their clients only ever means failure to them. For an
agent will never be loved or appreciated by those on whose behalf they labour.
Never. Agents were born to be resented.

It
starts at the bottom. When an actor is out of work and it is three months since
they were even invited up for an audition, they become obsessed with the notion
that their agent is crap.

‘No,
seriously, I really am thinking of changing my agent,’ the actor will assure
his or her friends. ‘I mean she just hasn’t got me a thing. Not a
bloody
thing!
I mean, I wouldn’t mind but I’m actually
quite bloody good.’

A subtle
variation of this whine is the conviction that the agent is actually capable of
getting work, but for some reason does not care to do so for them. Actors
conceive this latter prejudice if anybody else on the agent’s books happens to
have landed an audition for a soap powder commercial in the previous five
years.

Sometimes,
not often, but sometimes, a glint of hope peeks into the actor’s life. After
making two hundred calls the agent lands the actor an audition and,
astonishingly, the actor gets the job. At this point there is a brief moment
when the agent may bask in a thimbleful of the actor’s affection. They will
lunch together to celebrate the start of a great career and the agent will
order good Californian chardonnay. Even as the glasses clink, however, the
actor will secretly be thinking that his or her success in getting a job was
really no thanks to the agent at all. It was, in fact, entirely due to the
brilliant way that he or she handled the audition. Anyone, after all, can make
a phone call.

If this
brief moment of glory is a one-off and the actor fails to capitalise on it, he
or she will soon return to the conviction that the agent is either crap, or
uninterested in them. However, if the actor’s career takes off and they find
themselves in demand, then the agent will have to swallow a bitter pill indeed.
For the actor will now be thinking that work is available to them anyway, so
what does the agent do? What skill, they ask themselves, does it require to
find work for somebody who everybody already wants?

‘I
really don’t know,’ the actor will tell their friends, ‘what I’m paying my ten
per cent for.’

It is
this terrible betrayal which truly leads agents to their joyless life of
rudeness. Because they become obsessed with demonstrating to their star clients
what it is that the star clients are paying their ten per cents for.

‘You
will not
believe
what the studio’s opening offer was,’ the agent will
assure the star. ‘No, I’m not even going to tell you. It was an insult and an
offence and you should not even have to hear about it but let me tell you, it
was a disgrace. I just told them to stuff it, shove it and take a hike and,
believe me, I wasn’t that restrained. Anyway, they’ve come back with a figure
which is at least located on planet Earth.’

The
agent’s job is to make themselves appear indispensable. What they are saying to
their clients is this, ‘You are too important and famous to have to deal with
any shit, anytime, anywhere. I will take the shit away from you. Trust me.
I
will be rude for you.’

The
agent creates the impression that the star is surrounded by people who are hell
bent on ripping them off, taking advantage of them, demeaning them and
generally putting shit on them (shit, which, of course, the star
does not
need right now!).
The suggestion being that without the agent endlessly
being rude on their behalf, the star would live a life no better than that of a
sewer rat.

‘You
mean they flew you on a
scheduled flight?
Booked you a suite with no
spa
bath?
Put you in worse seats than
so and so?
The car was
how many
seconds late? … I don’t believe it! This is simply unacceptable! Don’t
you worry about it, though, leave it with me. You do not need this shit! You
should not have to
deal with this shit!’

It is
not just the agents of course who act in this way. The life of a star is filled
with people making complaints and being rude on the star’s behalf, for which
they receive a percentage of the star’s earnings. If many stars turn eventually
into ego-monsters, they are certainly given plenty of encouragement.

Power
struggle.

Geraldine, having turned
her back on Judy and Rosalie, was speaking on the phone.

‘Yes,
thank you, I should like to speak to Plastic Tolstoy’s office. Yes, now! My
name is Geraldine Koch and I represent…‘

Geraldine
got no further because at that point Rosalie knocked the phone from her hand
and ground it under her heel.

‘Phone
calls can be traced, you know, Miss Koch. I thought we’d told you. Tolstoy is
trying to kill Max.’

Geraldine
could not believe what had just happened. Somebody had touched her phone! In
fact, not just touched it, destroyed it! That was a personal violation. Her
phone was the medium of her artistry. To destroy it was like taking an artist’s
brush, or breaking a musician’s instrument. Fortunately, she was carrying eight
more. Geraldine rounded on Rosalie.

‘Now
listen to me, young lady, I don’t know who the hell you are but I am Max’s
agent —‘

‘And I
am his wife!’

This
stopped Geraldine in her tracks. Wives were tricky things. They could poison
the air between agent and star or they could sweeten it. You had to keep on the
right side of wives. On the other hand, you didn’t want to get too close to
them because it left you in a very tricky position when the star dumped the
wife and married the nanny. If the new wife felt that the agent was too chummy
with the old wife, then the agent’s life would become hell until they had
ingratiated themselves with the new wife. Unfortunately, by the time they had
done this, the new wife could easily be an old wife. Wives certainly were
tricky things. In the long run, it was kids that were the determining factor in
an agent’s attitude. If there were kids, the wife had to be taken very
seriously indeed.

‘Well,
congratulations, my dear,’ said Geraldine, testing the water, ‘and may one ask
if we can expect to hear the patter of tiny feet?’

Rosalie
was a little taken aback by the question but she saw no reason to deny it.

‘Yes,
as a matter of fact, we are expecting.’

‘But my
darling
that’s
wonderful,’
said Geraldine, thinking to herself,
‘Damn, some waitress has trapped Max with a pregnancy and now we’re stuck with
the little bitch.’

‘If
there’s anything I can do. Anything at all,’ Geraldine said.

‘Well,
as a matter of fact there is,’ said Rosalie. ‘Max wants to recuperate
discreetly in Europe. So what we need is an air ambulance and four false
passports with Euro visas in them.’

Geraldine
was delighted. Nothing pleases an agent more than to sort out difficult things
for their clients’ spouses, especially if those things are slightly dodgy. It
puts the spouse in the agent’s debt. Geraldine reckoned that obtaining false
visas would provide her with a good deal of leverage with Max in the future.
Little did poor Geraldine know that there was in fact not a great deal of future
left.

Chapter
Twenty-Six

Debauchery and murder

Caligula’s
Palace.

Jurgen Thor was in the
middle of an orgy when Rosalie called him. His once pristine bedroom, which had
been so stylishly furnished with its single enormous bed and a few floor cushions,
was now a mass of naked bodies, water couches, bondage gear and various other
sexual paraphernalia. There was booze and drugs aplenty and Jurgen was a little
drunk when he picked up the phone.

‘Jurgen
Thor? It’s me, Rosalie Connolly,’ the soft Irish voice said. ‘I came to see you
a few weeks back, I was with Max Maximus. Do you remember?’

Did he
remember? Rosalie could not know it but Jurgen Thor could never forget that
night. It haunted his dreams. Scarcely a night went by now when he did not awake
in a sweat with the vision of a dead girl screaming at him from the bottom of a
deep dark chasm.

‘Yes, I
remember everything. I heard you had left us, Rosalie.’

‘Well,
I haven’t, and I need to see you again, urgently.’

Jurgen
may have been drunk, but not so much that he was immune to the memory of those
flashing green eyes and the pale skin. The beautiful voice brought it all back
to him very clearly. The earlier part of that terrible evening, the pleasanter part,
when he had still been in control and girls had still done what he told them to
without having to be murdered first. Yes, that bit had been fun in its way,
showing off to the lovely young woman,
soiling
her with the knowledge of
her compromise. That soft voice also brought a more distant night back to
Jurgen’s mind. A night when it had been just him and Rosalie, alone. Now that
had been a truly wonderful night. She had been weaker then, and he stronger.
Then she had really been his possession. But that was in a different time, when
he had still been at the height of his powers, not like now. Even so, it was
fun to look back. Yes, Jurgen had fond memories of Rosalie. How nice, he
thought in his alcoholic haze, it would be to see her again. He was wrong.

‘You
need to see me, huh, baby doll?’ Jurgen breathed into the phone, trying to
sound sexy but in fact merely giving Rosalie the impression that he had a cold.
‘Well, come on over to my place. Hey, girl! We’re having a party!’

Rosalie
put the phone down feeling a little puzzled. Jurgen had sounded strange. Could
he have been drunk? It seemed unlikely, his capacity to hold his booze had
always been legendary. Rosalie was not of course to know just how much Jurgen
Thor had been letting himself go of late. The man was slowly giving up. The
process had begun even before he had found himself forced to murder poor Scout.
He was weighed down with the knowledge of doom. The end was coming and he
wished that it would hurry up and come. He was fed up with waiting and fed up
with lying.

Scout’s
death had accelerated this process. Once she started returning each night to
interrupt his sleep, Jurgen began to sag. It was as if a ball which had been
firm and strong with tension for so long had finally been punctured. It only
takes a little hole, and all the air soon rushes out, leaving the ball looking
much the same, but useless for all that.

In an
effort to regain his former aggressive
joie de vivre,
Jurgen had started
to party, in fact, to orgy. He had jettisoned the sexual habits he had
practised for decades in favour of a wild free-for-all. No more for him the
private one-on-one seduction, of which he had been the master for so long. He
could no longer do it. Private sex reminded him of Scout, and he had enough of
Scout to contend with in his dreams without seeing her in the faces of the
women he screwed. Jurgen had never imagined that such a little murder would
affect him so. He had lived a rough life and seen and done many terrible
things, and yet he simply could not shake the death of this one innocent from
his mind. He supposed it was because she had died to protect a lie. He had
killed her to defend the indefensible, and now he was paying the price. He
could not even make love to a woman if he was alone with her, he had to have a
crowd around him. Jurgen was scared of the dark.

Late-comer.

All the lights in the
mountain home were blazing as Rosalie guided her little monocopter down through
the darkness and on to Jurgen’s rooftop heli-pad. She was surprised to see a
number of aircraft already parked, their blades folded down to make more space.
Despite this evidence that Jurgen had company, it was all strangely quiet. No
one had come up on to the roof to meet her, which was very much a break with
Jurgen Thor’s old ways. In the past he had been extremely security conscious,
never allowing people to land on his roof unchallenged.

There
was no bell to ring, none had ever been needed because the occupants of the
house always heard any approaching aircraft from miles away. Rosalie was forced
to bang and kick upon the door in an effort to attract attention. For a while
she got nowhere and began to wonder if she would ever succeed in gaining access
to Jurgen’s lair. There was music playing somewhere, but she could hear no talk
or laughter. She became alarmed. Had some terrible gas leak or something
occurred? Were they all dead?