Tricks Of The Trade Read online

  TRICKS OF THE TRADE

  TRICKS OF THE TRADE

  BEN TYLER

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  For

  W.C.B.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing a novel is essentially a solitary endeavor. However, at least in this case, it occurred with tangible and intangible contributions from many. Most notably (but in no particular order) they are: Robin Blakely (agent extraordinaire), John Scognamiglio at Kensington, William Relling Jr., Kevin Howell, J. Randy Taraborrelli, Allen Kramer, Julia Oliver, Muriel Pollia, Ph.D., Susan Taylor Chehak, Dana Rosenfeld Gordon, David Hyde Pierce, Karen Carpenter, Eve Arden, Doris Day, Florence Henderson, Sandy Duncan, and George of the Jungle (er, Brendan Fraser).

  Hollywood. They take your soul, give you indigestion, ruin everything you ever create, and what do you get? Nothing but a lousy fortune.

  —Academy Award-winning screenwriter Frances Marion

  Question posed to Sylvia Plath: “Why are you writing a novel [The Bell Jar]?”

  Answer: “To take care of a few people.”

  Contents

  PART ONE

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  PART TWO

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Epilogue

  PART ONE

  PROLOGUE

  “You’re a vicious son of a gun, aren’t you?” said psychiatrist Dr. F. Ecle after listening to his patient, Bart Cain, read aloud from what Bart referred to as his “daily dirt diary.”

  “Well, pardon me if I’m sick and tired of Hollywood and the bullshit it takes to get ahead, survive, and somehow deal with the satanic personalities who have abused me for years. Anyone who’s ever worked for a tyrannical idiot of a boss—no matter what their occupation—would cheer my plans for vengeance.”

  By vengeance, Bart meant bringing to their knees the flotsam and jetsam that covers the putrid cesspool of the entertainment industry. Bart had filled a dozen steno books with handwritten observations chronicling, in particular, the venomous capers of his boss, Shari Draper, executive vice president of motion picture publicity at Sterling Studios. “The Gayest Place in the Universe,” as it was known throughout the cosmos—all of which the parent company, Sterling, Inc., practically owned.

  Bart worked at Sterling as a staff copywriter. For his journal, he carefully recorded many top-secret publicity-strategy meetings and telephone conversations with his nefarious boss. He transferred obstreperous telephone calls from irate actors or their managers or bombastic producers to Shari and then stayed silently on the line eavesdropping and transcribing their caustic conversations. He soaked up gutter-variety gossip about George Clooney, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Stephen Sondheim, Richard Dreyfuss, Whoopi Goldberg, Woody Harrelson, Kathy Bates, Nicolas Cage, Alec Baldwin, Bill Murray, Kevin Spacey, and Rosie O’Donnell. Some of his best material was drawn from what he overheard while sequestered in one of the men’s-room stalls. He imagined himself playing Agent 007. Sean, of course. Not Pierce, who always looked so constipated.

  “I’m merely archiving life in modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah,” Bart said, defending his creative journalistic actions. “Don’t forget, you’re the Dr. Frankenstein in this Mel Brooks-meets-Brian De Palma-meets-James Whale movie of my life. Keeping a diary was your brilliant stroke of genius. My genius is just more diabolical. There was a time when I used to just get mad, then forgive and forget. I don’t know when the change took place. But now I want to get even.”

  “But to publish this thing,” Dr. Ecle cautioned. “To expose the people who have been your family for so many years. Why? Remember what they say about biting the hand that feeds you.”

  “Family?” Bart cried, incredulous. “Listen, I sold my soul to work in Hollywood. Now I want it back. I’m a freakin’ Faust, for crying out loud! These notes, which I’ll turn into a book, are a means to an end. I’m only biting the hand that bit me first.”

  “Are you prepared for the end?” Dr. Ecle asked.

  “I think so,” Bart said. “I’ll probably be fired, but I’ll use the severance money to make a new beginning. I have enough dish to write a dozen sequels. Like Harry Potter. Only in my volumes Harry’s queer and having a true-life romp through triple-X-rated Hollywood. I always thought those stories were metaphors for the film industry, anyway. The horrible Dursleys and their abominable son Dudley live in Hollywood, particularly at Sterling.

  “By the time I’m ready to write the next installment, I’ll be somewhere far away. I imagine myself imitating Out Of Africa. ‘I had a farm in…Scotland.’” Bart was paraphrasing the opening line of the Dinesen novel and Redford/Streep movie. “And Meryl Streep can play me in the movie, ’cause she’s got all those great accents in her trunk and my voice is kinda high anyway. She can stretch. A little Victor/Victoria thing. The rest of my first line will read, ‘with a cute boy hired from the village who spent less time plowing the fields and more time plowing me!’”

  “Imaginative,” said Dr. Ecle.

  “A variation on a theme by Merchant Ivory.”

  “Something like the film Maurice.”

  “With me as the Hugh Grant character.”

  “The village boy will be a Rupert Graves type, no doubt?”

  “Now you’ve got it!”

  Dr. Ecle rolled his eyes. He wrote something in Bart’s file, then said, “I don’t usually give my clients advice, Bart.” This was Dr. Ecle’s mantra, repeated for the umpteenth time since they first began seeing each other professionally. “I merely make suggestions and point out possible courses of action, which is why I prescribed the diary. But this? This farce!”

  Bart made a face. “You suggested I make notes as a catharsis for my ‘demons.’ I’m purging, all right—and taking a few egomaniacal Hollywood fools with me.” Bart assumed a pose of self-satisfaction.

  “You make that studio sound like something out of Richard III.”

  “Exactly! Everybody at Sterling is conspiring against everybody else.”

  “And you’re the only one who doesn’t want to get ahead in the business?”

  “I just want to do my job, write this book, and get out of the glitz biz. My so-called colleagues, Hollywood publicists, are as intolerable as those television ads for new drugs. All those creamy voice-overs that seem so pleased to remind potential consumers of a few minor liabilities. ‘The drug Zentrimorphinium isn’t for everyone.’ You can just hear the snide smile in the actress’s voice,” Bart said. “‘Side effects may include dry mouth, nausea, halitosis, excessive bleeding during menstruation, high blood pressure, increased risk of stroke and heart attack, as well as uncontrollable, oily rectal discharge. Extreme cases may include, but are not limited to, death.’”

  “But your diary makes most of these people appear subhuman, like vermin,” Dr. Ecle said.

  “With their little lab rat–like brains, sniffing around film sets and premieres. Their little lab rat tails scurrying through a complicated maze, reaching toward
that elusive goal of being a Hollywood titan. That’s not an errant dab of Max Factor African makeup #2 on their respective noses.”

  “But you can’t be serious about the raging insanity? Your bosses are famous in this town! Each year they make Premiere magazine’s ‘Hot 100 List’ of the most powerful people on the planet! I can’t believe such atrocious behavior as you describe occurs in a motion-picture studio’s offices. Especially Sterling, which is supposed to be, as the ads say, ‘the Gayest Place in the Universe.’”

  “Which is bulltwonk! It’s ‘the Queerest Place in the Universe.’ And I don’t mean that as an adjective to identify the employees—although…”

  “That’s what I’d say about your notes, Bart. They’re queer. They sound like something out of Sex and the City or South Park.”

  Dr. Ecle scribbled in Bart’s file folder:

  Patient appears to be suffering from a series of systemized delusions. He projects interpersonal conflicts and ascribes such to the presumed hostility of colleagues. Threatens aggressive acts in self-defense and seems on a mission. Clearly a Don Quixote syndrome. Or Sonny Bono.

  Bart took a deep breath. He wondered how much more he should reveal to Dr. Ecle. Paranoia had become so rampant at Sterling that he suddenly didn’t trust the unspoken, yet taken-for-granted patient-thera-pist-confidentiality agreement. There was no way to know if his boss Shari was a patient of Dr. Ecle’s. Or perhaps studio chairman Cy Lupiano had a weekly session. Bart had no way of knowing whom Dr. Ecle treated.

  “It’s all true,” he said. “I’ve only written the facts. Shari’s sleeping with Cy. Cy’s sleeping with Shari and his new protégé, April. He’s rewarded whisky-voiced April by elevating her to vice president, a job she keeps fucking up. Shari thinks she and Cy together will eventually run the studio. April, with her big tits and hard nipples, thinks Cy will toss Shari into the meat grinder of working exclusively on Jerry Bruckheimer films, then give Shari’s job to April.

  “And all of them have threatened to clean house of all the gay men and lesbians, starting with Owen Lucas, president of motion-picture marketing. He’s gay. He’s out. He’s smart. He’s the only genuine human being ever to occupy that office. And he’s in their way. But I have the feeling that if it comes to a showdown, he’ll win. He’s so much brighter than those two battery-operated clones from Altman’s The Player. They’re windup dildos who go around fucking over as many people as possible. And I’ve become a pawn in their ‘hour of power’ sideshow games.”

  For the remaining half-hour of his fifty-minute consultation with his shrink, Bart continued to read aloud, sometimes haltingly, from his often illegibly scrawled notes. The material he was collecting was so inflammatory that he had locked the first ten spiral notebooks in his bank’s safe-deposit box. He carried the others in a Velcro-sealed compartment of his zippered shoulder bag.

  When he had to be away from the office for a meeting and couldn’t take his bag with him, he hid the notebooks in his desk drawer, under copies of the National Enquirer, in an envelope marked “Income Taxes.” His clandestine activities were required in case studio security or his assistant gained access to his locked desk. If that happened, with any luck they might overlook an envelope marked as something as innocuous as “Income Taxes.” He locked the drawer and wore the key around his neck as if it were a talisman or garland of garlic to keep the bloodsuckers at bay.

  The information Bart possessed was a bit embarrassing to recite to Dr. Ecle, for among the things revealed was his increasing overzealousness for sex (after years of deprivation) as well as the probability that it was only a matter of time before he was terminated from his job. It wasn’t necessarily the details in the notebooks that would get him sacked. It was the fact that he was labeled a “fairy” by Shari and Cy. And he was not a political ally or collaborator in his various superiors’ respective conspiracies against each other.

  “Think about your life and career and give serious consideration to your future here at Sterling,” Shari, the executive vice president, had said to him during a recent private meeting in her office. “You’re one of my favorites, Bart,” she practically cooed, the way a sexy wet-underpants dancer suckers a client for a bigger tip. “I’d like you to be with me and continue to be ‘Part of the Enchantment’ at Sterling for a long time.”

  But Bart knew her words were actually a threat. There would never be any love lost between Shari and Bart. She’d made it clear enough over the past two years that she’d like to be rid of “the little shit,” as she called him (and not just behind his back). There was something about Bart that she clearly mistrusted. For one thing, there was his intelligence and talent. He was as good an actor as he was a staff writer. He could convincingly don the mask of the innocent and virtuous Mary Pickford/Sandra Bullock rah, rah team player. But Shari was wary, and rightfully so. She hadn’t achieved her level of success without using her sixth sense.

  Bart told Dr. Ecle about a startling allegation that Mitch, Shari’s assistant, had made to Bart one morning. He confided that Shari had been in serious talks with the publicist who was Bart’s counterpart at Paramount Pictures to come over to Sterling. Mitch was certain that it was Shari’s intention to make life so unbearable for Bart that he would quit.

  “Better be sure the porno is off your computer,” Mitch warned. “Shari will use whatever ammo she can get her hands on to bag you and blow up your career.”

  “I’m not leaving Sterling until I’m ready to leave,” Bart charged. “And I won’t go without a lot of noise.”

  “You’re not the type to go postal.”

  “No. But there’ll be bodies in my wake. Believe me.”

  Mitch had also shown Bart a confidential memo from Shari. It contained a list of names from the department whom Shari wanted to replace. One of them was Bart. Seeing this document, Bart was filled half with anger and half with glee as he began to concoct suitable scenarios for revenge.

  “They all think I’m such a nice young man,” he said to Mitch.

  “You’re just too courtly.”

  “I get my work done on time.”

  “And everybody likes you,” said Mitch.

  “Sounds like I’m the profile of the classic serial killer whom neighbors always describe as ‘so quiet and unassuming and keeping mostly to himself.’”

  “But there’s a dark side to you, too,” Mitch said. “Which I not only admire but find very sexy.”

  Indeed, there was an aspect of Bart’s personality that few were sensitive enough to recognize. Mitch was obviously one. But so was Shari.

  Unfortunately for her, what she was completely unaware of was that Bart had ammo of his own. He had something more powerful than her machete of absolute authority. He had information chronicled in his notebooks. “Knowledge is power,” he quoted Auntie Mame, who quoted James Bacon.

  Bart concluded his session with Ecle by reading the last line of his entry in notebook number 12. “As I was waiting for Shari to review photo captions, Cy Lupiano walked into the office. He came over to her desk and grabbed her tits and simply said, ‘Hey, hot set! Why the fuck don’t you get a cute female secretary? I’m tired of men doing women’s work!’”

  “Perhaps this should conclude our therapy sessions indefinitely,” Dr. Ecle said tentatively. “There’s really nothing I can do for you except to listen.”

  “But that’s exactly what I need from you, Doctor. I need someone to listen to me! By the time I’m finished, you’ll be utterly convinced Sterling is ‘the Most Machiavellian Place in the Universe.’

  “When I turn these notes into a book,” Bart said, “Shari’ll be so destroyed she’ll be ‘voted off the island.’ She’ll be lucky if she’s hired by a dot-com company!”

  Chapter One

  “She hasn’t had her Prozac suppositories properly inserted today,” said Mitch Wood, the personal secretary to “Scary Shari” Draper.

  Mitch whispered this mercy warning to Bart, who had just been summoned to Shari’s off
ice. Bart’s sphincter tightened. He gave an appreciative roll of his eyes to Mitch before entering the high-tech, steel-and-glass inner sanctum where Shari held court, like Torquemada at the Spanish Inquisition. Shari’s office, which reflected her rusty-scalpel personality, was decorated with as much warmth as this dreary January day. The room was like a cold warehouse: concrete floor, exposed infrastructure and air ducts, a wet bar, and a big-screen television, video players, and workout equipment scattered about the cavernous room.

  “Fuck you, Hutton!” Shari was sniggering into the mouthpiece of the telephone headset she wore like a futuristic barrette. She gave a cursory glance to Bart, then ignored him as he took a seat in one of the two Mies van der Rohe chairs facing the glass table that served as her desk.

  Bart sat in silence, pretending to be oblivious to the phone conversation. Holding the pages in his hand, he reread the press release he’d just rewritten for the third time. It announced a new romantic comedy the studio would be shooting with the aging, Academy Award-winning Lothario to whom Shari was speaking.

  Costarring would be the English tart Mare Dickerson. Mare (known in the industry as “Nightmare” Dickerson) was famous for playing buxom virgins in a series of acclaimed costume dramas set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for Miramax. Last year she made the fatal publicity boo-boo of letting it slip during an interview that she was having a torrid affair with the very married Australian author of the best-selling novel The French Sick Room. The screen adaptation—which Mare had begged to star in, playing the lead role of the compassionate nurse—was the Motion Picture Academy’s forgettable Best Film several years ago. Mare was now trying to make a comeback of sorts—away from the made-for-cable-television films about bulimic prostitutes that she’d recently been forced to accept.