Seven
“I DON’T CARE what the script says. That’s not how it works.”
Taylor stood in front of the lawyer’s table peering stubbornly down at Jason. They were in their tenth hour of work. She had been shocked when she checked her watch a few minutes ago and saw how late it had gotten. She supposed things would go faster if he didn’t insist on fighting her over virtually every change she suggested to the script. See, for example, their current debate.
“And
I
don’t see what difference it makes,” Jason replied defensively. He held his script in his hand, waving it at her.
“It makes a big difference,” she argued back. “While you might think you look ‘pensive’ and ‘unimpressed’ ”—she finger-quoted the words he had used just moments before—“by remaining seated during your opposing counsel’s argument, that’s not the way it works in a real courtroom. You have to stand
every time
you argue before the judge.”
Then she gestured at the script and said for the umpteenth time that day, “Didn’t anyone talk to a
real
lawyer before writing this?”
My, my, Jason observed. Apparently he wasn’t the only one who was a little cocky.
He watched as Taylor positioned herself at the corner of the jury box farthest from the witness stand. Earlier, she had gone and ruined their lovely “Shit Happens” moment by turning all serious the minute they stepped into her firm’s mock trial room. But Jason figured there had to come a point when her armor would crack again—even if just for the slightest moment. Not that he particularly minded watching her strut sassily around the courtroom for ten hours.
“Now, we were talking about the differences between direct and cross-examination,” Taylor called over from the far end of the jury box, back in teacher mode. “Unlike cross, when doing a direct examination you want to stand by the jury, so that you force the witness to look at the jurors when answering questions. That way you draw in their attention, almost as if the witness is talking directly to them.”
Jason frowned at this, peering down at one of the pages in his script.
“But if I’m all the way across the courtroom, how am I supposed to throw a book at the witness?”
Taylor whirled around, appalled at such a mocking insult to the practice of law.
“The script says you’re supposed to
throw a book
at a witness?” She stormed across the room and grabbed the script from him. She skimmed furiously, turning the pages back and forth as she searched for the offensive passage.
After a few moments, she looked up at Jason, confused. “That’s not what it says.”
He smiled. Gotcha.
Taylor folded her arms across her chest. “Very funny.”
“It’s just too easy.” He laughed. Then he braced himself for the expected stinging retort.
But instead Taylor was silent, having already turned her attention back to the script. She flipped through several pages.
“This dialogue . . .” She trailed off, as if troubled. She sat down at the table next to Jason.
He looked over and saw the particular section of the script she was focused on: the midpoint of the screenplay, where his character destroyed a key witness for the opposition with a brutal cross-examination. The scene was one of his favorites, so he was surprised she seemed bothered by it.
“What’s wrong with the dialogue?” he asked, peering over her shoulder. “I didn’t think it was bad.”
“It’s not that it’s bad,” she replied. She glanced up at him and blushed slightly, hesitating.
“Never mind. I’m being too much of a lawyer here.”
Jason gazed firmly at her. He never compromised with acting, no matter how small the details. And for whatever reason, he found he valued Taylor Donovan’s opinion quite a bit.
“No, seriously. I want to know what you think.”
Taylor took in his earnest expression. She frankly had been surprised by his attitude during their ten hours together. Blowing off their meetings for a weekend in Las Vegas certainly had, in her mind, been a good indication of his work ethic. But, quite to the contrary, she would have to admit that Vason seemed truly interested in the various trial techniques she had demonstrated and had asked her many questions throughout the day. Some of them were even good ones.
So Taylor slid the problematic script over so that they both could read from it.
“Well, for starters, this scene is supposed to be a cross-examination, right?” She pointed to the troublesome sequence.
Jason frowned. “Yes. Why?” He moved in closer to get a better look at the script.
“See—your problem is that none of these questions are leading questions.” She saw his head tilt in confusion, so she explained further. “All of these questions are open-ended. You would never ask them on cross, because cross-examination is all about controlling the witness. You force the witness to say the things
you
want, and only those things. And you certainly don’t give the witness any opportunity to explain himself.”
Taylor picked up the script to demonstrate. “Like here—your character asks: ‘So what, exactly, was your intention that evening, Mr. Robbins?’ and a few lines further down you say, ‘Then tell us exactly what you were thinking when you realized your wife was dead.’ The problem is, those questions give your witness all sorts of wiggle room. You should say something more like this—”
She faced Jason to demonstrate and began to reinvent his lines.
“And your intention that evening was to tell your wife about the affair you were having, wasn’t it?” She slipped easily into the part. “Weren’t you, in fact,
relieved
when you saw your wife’s lifeless body floating in the swimming pool, Mr. Robbins?”
As she proceeded to demonstrate—off the top of her head, no less—a modified cross-examination, there was no doubt in Jason’s mind that she had just made the scene about five times stronger. He watched, impressed, and it struck him how much he liked looking at her while she worked.
In fact, he realized, he just liked looking at her.
At that moment, Taylor seemed to notice that he was staring at her. She stopped and smiled in embarrassment.
“Sorry. I’m completely boring you with all this, aren’t I?”
That smile did the craziest things to him. Jason tried to brush this off, clearing his throat. “No, not at all,” he told her. “Please—continue.”
Taylor cocked her head, curious.
“You’re awfully serious about this, aren’t you? I mean, playing a lawyer can’t exactly be your most challenging role.”
Jason studied Taylor for a long moment, considering her question. Then he leaned in—close enough so that his arm brushed lightly against hers.
“How long have you been practicing law?” he asked, seemingly out of nowhere.
Taylor blinked, a bit surprised by the transition. “Six years. Why?”
“How many cases have you won?”
She smiled matter-of-factly. “All of them.”
“Do you prepare any less now, just because you’re more familiar with what you’re doing?”
“No, of course not.”
“Why not?”
“Because I always want to do the best possible job.”
Jason looked at her pointedly. “Ditto.”
Taylor tilted her head in concession. “Fair enough.”
Jason smiled with her, and for a moment they were just two people being themselves, without anything else mattering.
Until the ring of his cell phone shrilly interrupted the mood, that is.
With a good deal of reluctance, Jason turned his attention away from Taylor and pulled his phone out of his jacket. He checked to see who was calling, then glanced over in explanation. “Sorry—it’s my publicist, Marty. He has a fit if he can’t reach me.” He rolled his eyes in exaggeration.
Taylor smiled. Kind of like partners, she thought.
“Marty! How are you?” Jason answered his phone with affection, knowing full well that he drove the man crazy. As Jeremy liked to joke, Jason’s publicist was the busiest man in show business.
Taylor watched as he listened to whatever news his publicist conveyed. She saw that his expression turned strangely serious.
“I understand,” Jason said, sounding very disappointed. Taylor wondered if he had just lost out on some part. “I guess it was to be expected.” With a terse good-bye, he hung up the phone.
Taylor noticed that Jason stared at his cell phone for a moment longer. When his eyes looked up and found hers, she could’ve sworn he seemed angry.
“Well, Ms. Donovan. It seems we have a problem.”
TAYLOR STARED OUT the lobby windows of her office building, at the enormous mob of paparazzi that had gathered outside. Hovering like vultures and perched with their cameras, they waited in anticipation for their five-hundred-thousand-dollar shot to emerge. She saw that a few photographers had even gone so far as to climb the trees that flanked the building’s courtyard.
“It’s a madhouse out there,” she murmured in amazement, taking in the scene. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many cameras in one place.”
Jason stood behind her, not amazed in the slightest.
“Any idea how they found out I’m here?”
Mesmerized by the media circus, Taylor didn’t notice the sharp edge to his voice.
“Probably one of the secretaries, if I had to guess.”
She looked away from the windows and noticed that the office building was deserted. She had worked late many evenings since coming to Los Angeles, so she was familiar with the routine.
“They lock the other doors after seven,” Taylor said. “This is the only way out.”
“How convenient.”
Jason didn’t bother to hide his bitterness. For some reason, he felt like he’d been punched in the gut since the moment Marty had called to let him know that someone had tipped off the media to his whereabouts. Of course, he should’ve known that Taylor Donovan would inevitably use his name to make one for herself. How typical. He just couldn’t figure out why it bothered him so much this time.
She suddenly turned away from the windows and faced him. This is the part, Jason thought, where she feigns annoyance, then asks how she looks as she primps for the cameras. Ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.
And so Taylor shrugged, as if accepting the fate of their situation. “Well, I guess this is where you do your thing,” she said, gesturing to the door that was their only way out. “Have fun.” And with that, she did the unthinkable.
She walked away.
She had gone only a few steps when she glanced back at Jason, apparently with one final thought. “It’s been . . . interesting, Mr. Andrews,” she said. Then she hurried off toward the elevator bank.
Jason stood there, speechless. Funny how he seemed to be like that quite a bit whenever he was around her.
He watched for a few moments, thoroughly confused, as Taylor walked away. Then he finally managed to find his voice.
“Wait!”
She stopped abruptly when he shouted and turned around. He gestured questioningly to the door.
“Aren’t you coming, too?”
Taylor stared at him incredulously. “Are you crazy? There must be a hundred cameras out there. I’ll leave later, when everyone’s gone.”
Jason’s jaw almost hit the floor. “Let me get this straight,” he said slowly. “You
don’t
want to be seen with me?”
He then looked at Taylor with such disbelief she couldn’t help but smile. He was quite cute when utterly clueless.
“I have a trial in one week,” she told him. “I can’t risk being accused of trying to bias the jury pool by being seen in the media with a celebrity. The judge could throw me off the case for that.”
Then she looked at Jason pointedly. “Besides, my client is trying to beat sexual harassment charges. They need to look as morally upright as possible. It would border on malpractice for me to link them to you.”
Jason blinked and almost laughed. No offense taken.
And it was in that moment, at her refreshing disinterest in the publicity that constantly surrounded his life, that Jason felt the strangest sensation—a slightly panicky, breathless feeling, like riding on a roller coaster.
It was an odd feeling for him—something he couldn’t quite identify—but he knew one thing.
He didn’t want her to leave.
“But what about the film?” he blurted out, trying to think of something, anything, to keep her from walking away. “You said it yourself, there are problems with the script.” He looked at her pointedly as his words tumbled out in a rush. “And how about me? We didn’t cover all of my courtroom scenes—I need to be sure I look like I know what I’m doing.”
Taylor turned all the way around to face him. She took him in for a moment, then smiled.
“You will make a great attorney. Jason.”
It was the first time she said his name.
Then, just like that, she turned and sprinted off to the elevator bank. And before Jason could say anything further, she was gone.
He stood alone in the lobby, staring after her. Oblivious to the fact that the paparazzi were on the move, that they had caught sight of him and were beginning to descend with their cameras. They lined the windows and surrounded him, moving in as a pack. But Jason didn’t notice the bright, burning flashes that exploded all around him, because he had only one thought on his mind.
There was no way this was over.
Eight
JEREMY WAS ABSOLUTELY correct in calling Jason’s publicist the busiest man in show business. Marty Shepherd, cofounder of the Shepherd/Grillstein Company—the top publicity firm in Los Angeles—could not recall the last time he had slept more than four hours in a row.
Being the eyes, ears, and voice of most of the film industry’s top acting talent was no easy feat. Not that he had any problem representing directors or writers, but no one ever cared what they did. Ron Howard or M. Night Shyamalan could snort cocaine off the ass of the script girl in the middle of an on-set orgy, and that still would be less gossip-worthy than whether Jennifer Lopez wore her wedding band while eating lunch at the Polo Lounge.
For a de minimis 5 percent of all gross earnings, Marty’s responsibilities could be boiled down to one pithy mantra that every associate in his firm was expected to eat, sleep, and die by: make sure your client is someone whose fuckups are newsworthy, and fuck anyone that makes up news about your client.
It was the second half of Marty’s mantra that kept him in the office so late on this particular Friday evening. Rebecca, an associate whose only assignment was to assist Marty in the various issues that arose with one particularly challenging client, had just stopped by his office.
“We’ve gotten calls from
Us Weekly
,
In Touch
, and
Star
. They want to know what Jason Andrews was doing in an office building downtown,” Rebecca reported. “They claim he was with a woman, although she apparently slipped off before anyone snapped her picture.”
For a brief moment, Marty wondered how the woman—who he assumed was this Taylor Donovan person Jason insisted on working with—managed to get out of the building without being photographed. Not an easy feat when traveling with Jason Andrews.
“Tell them he was getting cash from the ATM”—Marty almost laughed at the idea himself—“and that the woman was a building employee who stopped him for an autograph.” With those instructions, Rebecca nodded and left.
And then for the next half hour, Marty sat alone in his office and contemplated just how big of a problem Taylor Donovan was going to be.
It went without saying that Jason Andrews was his top client. In fact, Jason Andrews was the top, period. The biggest name in Hollywood—a status he had held for a long, long time.
Which was precisely what worried Marty, who got paid to worry when no one else did.
God knows it wasn’t easy to get to the top. But staying there was even tougher. Jason had that rare kind of star quality that came around only once a generation: women loved him, and men wanted to be him.
Rolling Stone
magazine had hit the proverbial nail on the head: his quick wit and easy charm did indeed call to mind Cary Grant or Clark Gable. But there was something about Jason that was just that little bit more down to earth than the icons of the classic films. Marty had never been able to figure out exactly what that “something” was, although he secretly suspected it had something to do with the fact that Jason was from Missouri.
Unfortunately, Hollywood—like many of its inhabitants—had a wandering eye. There was nothing the town liked more than the “new face,” or discovering the next person who everyone would hail as “up-and-coming.”
And after sixteen years in the business, being an undisclosed “thirtysomething” years old, Jason Andrews was neither of those things.
Luckily, the end was nowhere in sight. Jason’s next movie,
Inferno
, would be released in just a few weeks and had been predicted to be the blockbuster of the summer. He would follow that tent-pole pic with the legal thriller he was about to begin filming for Paramount, a film for which Marty had high hopes of a third Oscar nomination.
In Marty’s mind, therefore, the only thing Jason needed to do was to keep doing everything
exactly
as he had for the past sixteen years. Which—from a publicity standpoint—meant wining and dining only the most famous of actresses, supermodels, pop stars, and the occasional billionaire heiress.
Taylor Donovan, however, was none of those things. As far as Marty was concerned, in terms of media exposure, the only thing worse than dating nobody was dating
a
nobody.
With
Inferno
about to be released, the public was ready for another full-fledged Jason Andrews romance. And Marty Shepherd—publicist to the stars and eighth most powerful person in Hollywood (once talent and studio heads were excluded)—was determined to give them one.
With these thoughts in mind, Marty picked up the copy of
People
magazine that Rebecca had handed him earlier that week. He flipped through “The Women of Jason Andrews!” article until he came to the last picture of Jason and the actress who’d been cast as the female lead in the legal thriller—Naomi Cross.
Marty smiled, thinking how nice Naomi looked standing next to Jason. She was an ingénue and a media darling. Even better, she was British, which meant double the UK and European exposure.
Yes, Marty mused to himself, Naomi Cross was just the answer he’d been looking for.
WAY ACROSS TOWN, in a recently purchased five-bedroom home nestled in the heart of the Hollywood Hills, someone else was looking at that very same picture of Jason Andrews and Naomi Cross.
But unlike Marty, Scott Casey was not smiling.
In fact, he was pretty damn pissed off.
His publicist had promised that
he
was going to be on the cover of that very issue of
People
, not Jason Andrews. Again.
The story—or so his publicist had said—was supposed to focus on Scott’s move from Sydney, Australia, to Los Angeles. How he had made the decision, given his recent film success, to live full time in the States.
Scott doubted there were few people in America who didn’t already know his story (not that he minded it being told over and over again in
GQ
,
Vanity Fair
,
Esquire
, and
Movieline
). The interviews all focused on the same basic facts: he had shot to fame little more than thirteen months ago after costarring in the epic fantasy-adventure,
A Viking’s Quest
. Women had gone absolutely mad for the character he played in the film. In fact, during the five months the movie ran worldwide in theaters, his name was Googled more than any other search term.
It was nothing that Scott, nor any of the people working with him during the production of
A Viking’s Quest
, had foreseen. In fact, Scott had had to fight just to audition for the role. His look was too “pretty boy” to play a Viking, the director had originally said. But his agent cajoled, pleaded, pulled strings, and got Scott the audition, which eventually led to a screen test. After much deliberation, the director and producers decided that Scott’s picture-perfect handsome face was an interesting contrast to the lead actor’s rugged, unkempt look. And to match his lean appearance, they gave Scott’s character a kick-ass bow and arrow to fight with instead of a clunky sword.
It worked. Boy, did it ever work. On screen, he was fierce and feral—yet somehow graceful at the same time. And when the camera zoomed in and held longingly on his soulful hazel eyes—his blond hair ruffling in the wind—no woman in the audience could help but be breathlessly glued to every frame.
A star was born.
After the release of the film, Scott was immediately labeled Hollywood’s “It Guy” and offered a wealth of the best parts in town. Seizing the day, he went after a role he had dreamed of playing since his high school Contemporary Lit class: the lead in the film adaptation of the novel
Outback Nights
.
Although it was one of the most sought-after parts in Hollywood, Scott believed himself to be a shoo-in. Notwithstanding the fact that he had launched onto the industry’s A-list virtually overnight, he had the added benefit of actually being Australian. So he went to lunch with the producers and even sacrificed an entire Saturday night of clubbing with his friends to have dinner with the film’s director at his ranch in Santa Barbara. Two days later, his agent called with the big news.
They had offered him the fucking
supporting
role.
The part of the sidekick, the friend who dies violently on page eighty-eight of the script, whose death spurs the protagonist—the
lead
actor—to face his adversaries and demons, save the town, and get the girl in the climatic third act.
A lead role that had been offered to Jason Andrews.
The studio had apparently gotten a copy of the script to him last minute, and Jason was interested. It was an unbelievable coup, the producers said, certain that Scott would understand. They simply couldn’t pass on a chance to land Jason Andrews. No one did.
Amidst a string of Aussie-flavored profanities, Scott told his agent in no uncertain terms that he was
done
playing supporting parts (unless of the indie, Oscar-garnering type, of course). And he certainly was no sidekick to Jason Andrews. Then he angrily took off to Cabo San Lucas to fume in a twenty-five-hundred-dollar-a-night bungalow.
It was on the second day of his trip, as he was halfway through his fourth Corona of the afternoon and getting a poolside blowjob from Chandra, a reality television “actress” who happened to be staying at the same resort, when his agent called again.
The studio’s negotiations with Jason Andrews had come to a halt over a salary dispute. They wanted Scott for the lead role.
Scott accepted, but not until after the producers, the director, his agent, and the studio had all sufficiently pacified his ego. He resented being second choice for a role that should have been his from the start. And so he resolved that he would prove something to the producers, the director, his agent, the studio, and anyone else who doubted him.
Jason Andrews was nothing special.
The time had come for the king’s reign to end.
It was a vow that Scott repeated that very Friday evening, as he flipped through the pages of
People
magazine. He sat poolside again, but this time by his own swimming pool in the new house he had purchased with the money he had earned from
A Viking’s Quest
. After finishing the 500 laps his personal trainer ordered, Scott had turned to the weekly gossip magazines his assistant dropped off every Friday morning.
Feeling a cool evening breeze cutting across the Hollywood Hills, Scott pulled on the Von Dutch T-shirt he’d left on the lounge chair. His pool overlooked an amazing view of downtown Los Angeles that should have captured his attention. But the picture of Jason Andrews sitting on the chair next to him sullied the sight on that particular evening.
Scott ripped the picture of Jason out of the magazine and crumpled it into a ball. Then he pitched it into the garbage can sitting on the edge of the deck.
This cover story would be the last thing he lost to Jason Andrews, Scott vowed. Next time, it would be
Jason
who wanted something. Something important.
And he would be there to make sure Jason didn’t get it.