The First Assistant (32 page)

“I haven’t looked at my bank balance in months. I knew I was over—

drawn. Someone put that money in my account to frame me, Scott,” I pleaded.

“Yeah, Lizzie, they went to all these efforts to blackmail someone and then they frame you. Why? Because you flirted with their boyfriend? Doesn’t add up.”

“Occam’s Razor,” Katherine said calmly. “The simplest explanation is the best one,” she said. I looked at her for a second.

“The money that was paid into your account will be withdrawn today. We found the negatives taped to the bottom of your chair so that won’t be a problem.” Scott pressed on.

“You found what negatives?” I said dumbly.

“The negatives you were blackmailing John with. Of him cheating on his wife? The ones we’d already bought off a scumbag paparazzo and kept under lock and key in this office. Don’t play dumb now. Please. We all remember your fancy degree from Georgetown. I should have guessed this is what they taught you in Washington.”

I saw Amber laugh but she stopped immediately when Katherine swung her head around and caught her eye.

“Elizabeth. We’d like you to leave the building immediately. Do not take anything from this office. Someone will pack your personal effects after making sure you haven’t stolen any other piece of Agency prop-erty,” Katherine said quickly.

“I can explain this. I don’t know how, but it’s all not true. I would never blackmail anybody. Come on, Scott, you know me?” I begged.

“Do I, Lizzie? I thought so,” he said sadly. “I thought you were fam-ily, but that’s the strange thing about this town. You make a family out of people you don’t really know very well. I’ll need you out of the guesthouse by the time I get back from Sundance. I don’t want you around my son and wife.”

I almost fell to the floor at this last blow. I couldn’t prove my innocence, so the only thing there was to do was retreat in apparent disgrace. I stood up, unable to look at either of them, and walked to my desk past Amber with my head hung low. I felt so ashamed yet I hadn’t done anything. But I knew that Amber had already told everyone in the office that I was guilty and they all probably believed it. I could just imagine all the other assistants gleefully eating popcorn as they watched the

fantastic rise and fall of Lizzie Miller. My apparent total lack of moral values was probably reassuring to them. It made them feel that the pin-nacle of success in this town, the Oscar nomination, was still sacred. It confirmed their hopes and suspicions that the only way an assistant could have been nominated for an Oscar was through foul play.

The case against me was so foolproof I almost believed it myself. It occurred to me as I grabbed my coat and purse that maybe I was Sybil and had seven different personalities. What if Lizzie just didn’t remember my alter ego’s bad deeds? As one of The Agency’s security guards searched my handbag and pockets as if I were a criminal, it occurred to me how absolutely fucking nuts this was.

I walked from the hallowed portals of The Agency in disgrace. I didn’t want to talk to anyone or even make eye contact on the way out. I took the elevator straight to the basement, too embarrassed to even see the Josés. I hoped in my heart of hearts that they’d be the lone pair who believed my innocence. They had tried to warn me, after all. But for the moment I couldn’t handle their disappointment if this wasn’t the case. I drove out of the basement into the light. Maybe it was the rapid dilation of my pupils but more likely the fatal blow that had been dealt in Scott’s office: I started to cry. I had to pull over or risk the en-tire thing looking like a suicide attempt confirming my guilt.

I sat in my car and looked out the window at the grass growing along the curbside. A fresh, warm spring breeze blew in the window and it occurred to me that Katherine wasn’t wrong. “The simplest explanation is the best one.” I had been set up. And I knew that Amber had orchestrated my demise. I wasn’t going to take this lying down. It was just a matter of time before I proved my innocence. I just had to go home, get over the shock, and mount my defense.

I dialed Lara’s number and she picked up instantly. “Sweetie. I just heard and ripped Scott a new asshole. I told him he’d have to fucking move out before you did. I know that English bitch set you up, and we’re going to prove it if I have to hire Anthony Pellicano from prison. Okay? Are you all right?”

“I don’t know.” I sniffed pathetically into the phone, so thankful to have this brilliantly strong woman as my ally. I needed all the support I could get at the moment. But where was I going to go? No matter what

Lara said, I couldn’t stay with her. I didn’t want to cause trouble in her marriage. It was a daily challenge already. “Listen, Lara. If you don’t mind, I’ll stay until Scott gets back, but then I’ll go stay with Jason un-til we figure this out, okay?”

I heard a slight sigh of relief but she protested like the good friend that she was.

After I hung up the phone, I got back on the road and marveled with horror at my life. The current highs and lows were almost too much to handle. I thought about what would have happened if I’d never left

D.C. I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking about home and the safety and predictability that life used to provide. I thought of my parents and how destroyed they’d be at the mere hint that their daughter was involved in something as sordid as this. But at least I knew the story was safe from the press. No matter how much Amber or another assistant would want to leak it, they knew better. This level of scandal was negative publicity a place like The Agency didn’t need. And then John’s affair and the pho-tos would be out of the bag and the entire thing would do them a lot more damage than it did me. As I merged into the oncoming traffic, I promised myself that if I managed to jump this hurdle I would seek out a simpler life. No more creating drama where none existed. I didn’t need to. There seemed to be plenty enough in everyday life.

Nineteen

Hollywood is like being nowhere

and talking to nobody about nothing.

—Michelangelo Antonioni

In the run up to the Oscars, I had more party invites than I’d received in my entire life, but none of the events were as high in entertainment value as the one I attended at Nathalie Cook’s apartment with the fifteen-million-dollar divorcées in Malibu. Since the day Luke was seen to publicly cheat on me, I’d become an honorary divorcée in the eyes of Nathalie and the other ladies who crunched (both settlement figures and their midriffs) in her building. And even though I’d avoided the blandishments of their book clubs and never once forwarded one of her
International Fine Woman Day—please send this to ten beautiful, intelligent, fabulous women of your acquaintance
e-mails, I must say that when the piece of card arrived requesting the pleasure of my company at

Mojitos To End Third-World Debt

I was sorely tempted. Not simply because it was impossible to resist an offer to rid the world of economic evils by sipping alcohol, but also because I really wanted to know who did the best “baby hair” in town, and Nathalie
et al.
were guaranteed to know.

Since I’d been informed by Lara that the secret to eternal beauty was to return to the hair color you were born with, I’d become horrified by my brassy highlights and could hardly exist another day without going back to my roots. I’d even got my mom to scan me a picture of me aged six months in a bid for accuracy. Though with only three hairs on my head it was hard to tell whether I ought to opt for caramel or vanilla. And

as I literally only had a few weeks left until the big night itself, when I was to show up at the Kodak Theatre and hold my own against Nicole Kidman, I really needed to get on with all that looking-good stuff.

I had six dresses hanging in my room that friends who had friends who were young designers had lent to me, but to be honest, they were all pretty weird. One of them I couldn’t work out which was the arm-hole and which was the neck, and got stuck in it when I tried it on; another was made from recycled yogurt cartons—and much as I endeavor to save the planet on a daily basis, to the point of pulling the plug out of my kettle when I go to sleep—I couldn’t imagine Grace Kelly compromising her timeless chic for fear of wantonly squandering a meter of velvet. So I figured that sometime in the next few days I was going to call Talitha and ask her to help me out with borrowing something from a more established designer. Like Coco Chanel, say, who’d been dead longer than the time it took a yogurt carton to rot.

In the meantime, though, I was going to enjoy the cachet that this Oscar nomination had bestowed on me, and Nathalie’s was a good place to start. Lara was my partner-in-crime in all this as Jason always seemed to be taking care of the business side of things. “Sweetheart, I’ll go to the press junket, you just think about your skirt.”

For some reason men didn’t seem to know the difference between a dress and a skirt, but that was fine; what wasn’t so fine was that Jason seemed to have forgotten how in the early days of the movie he was only interested in my opinion, my notes, and my determination to get the script read by as many agents and financiers as possible. He’d have gladly pushed me out of the door stark naked if he had to. But now he seemed a little too willing to relegate me to arm-candy status. “Honey, if we win best movie and you
have
to come up onstage, that’s great, just look pretty and let me make the speech, okay? I mean, I know that it’s unlikely, but if we do win you might go into shock and start speaking up there.”

“You didn’t mind me speaking when we were taking it to IEG,” I said, reminding him of a very tough meeting with a very exacting film finance company when he’d played the silent auteur in his fraying college sweater and I’d talked numbers with the formidable CEO.

“Baby, that was a long time ago,” he said as if to a five-year-old. “Just let me handle it, okay?”

“Sure,” I said. I guessed it was his movie, after all. But still it made me a little uneasy and I didn’t tell Lara because I knew she’d blow a gas-ket and never shut up about how much I’d earned my credit as producer and how Jason would be equally recompensed for his passion when it came to the Best Director nomination. And financially. So I smiled and focused on my hair instead.

Lara and I arrived at the party and were hit with a strange sense of déjà vu. “It doesn’t seem two minutes since we were here that night for that weird vaginal deodorant party and you found out about Luke’s cheating, does it?” Lara said as we pulled into a parking spot.

“Are you kidding? It seems like forever ago,” I said with relief, though during the past few weeks my mind had been flickering like cheap strip-lighting back to Luke. Now that Jason had turned into Misogynist of the Year with a nomination in the Most Selective Memory category, I couldn’t help but remember how supportive Luke had always been of what I did. Even if I’d made vaginal deodorants for a living like Nathalie, he’d have been proud of my achievements, I imagined.

“Elizabeth, Lara, come in!” Nathalie greeted us at the door with her usual manic bounce. “You’re both looking great! Congratulations, sister!” she said to me. “Do you know what you’re going to wear?” she yelled as she led us to the sitting room. See, what chance had poor Jason of thinking that women gave a shit about anything other than a skirt if a woman with an MA in Oriental studies who spoke Mandarin could think of nothing else? “Not yet,” I confessed, “but I do need to ask you about my hair.” Fuck

it, I decided, if Harvey Weinstein looked as cute as Gwyneth Paltrow when he collected one of his numerous Academy Awards, he’d be even more powerful than ever, right? So as long as I did a good job, I could worry about my hair, too.

“Ask away, but let me get you a Mojito first; remember, it’s for a good cause,” she said as she tripped over to the kitchen where a host of very handsome gay men were mincing over the mint and exchanging barbs about the amount of sugar in the perfect Mojito.

The thing is that that night Lara and I never actually got our Mojito. We stood in the room for a couple of minutes waiting for Nathalie to return, admiring the remodeling of her apartment—which was now in the style of the bathroom of the Hôtel de la Mirande in Avignon, France, apparently,

but it still looked great—when we spotted Amber on the balcony, deep in conversation with somebody more powerful than herself, so we turned the other way and began discussing “the floor,” which was black-and-white harlequin, and doubtless indistinguishable from its French counterpart.

“Who let her in?” Lara spat.

“Only one person who would,” I said as we looked in the art deco mirror in front of us and surveyed the room behind us. “And there she is, Katherine Watson,” I said. “God, that’s annoying.”

“No it’s not. You’re at the top of the heap looking down on them now,” Lara reminded me. “You’ve got what everyone in this room would give their left tit for.”

“What?” I said as I watched Amber walk toward the kitchen on her cell phone, probably hoping everyone would think that she was something way more important than an assistant.

“You’ve made it, Lizzie, whether you win on the night or not, you’ve done it.”

“No, but it’s not as if I’ve been in the business twenty-five years and made a hundred great movies,” I said sheepishly.

“This is Hollywood, you’re as big as your last movie, so go over there and capitalize,” Lara said firmly, taking my elbow and spinning me around. “Come on, let’s go.”

But no sooner had I got it into my head that I had every much of a right to circulate at this party along with the woman who’d fired me and the witch who’d orchestrated the firing, than I was reminded of what I’d left behind at The Agency.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Amber said, as Lara and I collided with her on our way to hunt down our stray Mojitos. She was looking much less plain than she used to; she’d taken to wearing expensive, ar-chitectural, high-design clothes that cleverly seemed to offset her sym-metrical face and made her look, dare I say it, stylish and very affluent. “Wow, somebody’s been buying lots of Jil Sander for her,” Lara said as she too clocked Amber’s attire as she made her way toward us in a