The first assistant, p.3
The First Assistant, page 3
“She wants to borrow you.” He shrugged.
“Me?” I didn’t think that Emerald Everhart was aware of my existence, though I had patched her through to Scott more times than I’d had hot coffees since she joined The Agency a few months ago in one of Scott’s first big signings as copresident.
Emerald was the new teen starlet in town. You know her: she’s the cheesy little comet on the cover of US Weekly every week while she’s orbiting the celestial galaxy at the speed of light until she loses her baby fat, develops a relationship with food, and her star burns up and she vanishes, leaving room for another Tara or Lindsay or Britney. She’s gum-chewing, mentally unstable, and has the unerring ability to make all the haute couture garments she borrows look like Juicy Couture.
She was born with her dark roots showing. Men love her because she looks like she’d fuck you in the bathroom right after she’s met you, and she has such an impact on the dance routines and vocabulary of eight-year-old girls that their parents want to move to Pennsylvania and become Amish.
Then I remembered my only other encounter with Emerald. Last The First Assistant
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week she’d dropped by to see Scott and was fretting over a text message she was writing to a guy she was dating.
“How do you spell ‘absolutely’?” she’d asked me as she passed my desk.
“A.B.S.—” I had barely begun when her hot pink cell phone was thrust into my hand.
“Here, you do it,” she said. So I began to repair her “asbolutely.” “It’s to this guy. He’s been really mean to me but I really don’t care because he has such a great look and I really want to fuck him so badly that—”
“Then you asbolutely can’t write this.” I smiled at her.
“What?” she had asked, alarmed that I had an opinion, let alone that I had the courage/stupidity to express it to her.
“You can’t tell him that you want to do all these things. You’ll never see him again.” I scowled. I wasn’t usually so frank, but I’d just gotten back from lunch with Lara and her plain-speaking was infectious.
“I can’t?” Emerald had transformed from a knowing starlet into an ingenuous teenager.
“Let’s try this,” I said as I tapped a much more curt, ambiguous message to the mean date. And sure enough, before she’d left the building Emerald had a text back inviting her to the Solomon Islands for the weekend.
“What do you mean, borrow me?” I was always civil to Scott, but our relationship had long since progressed beyond the needlessly polite. I was friends with his wife—he ignored me when I was visiting and he came home and found me crying in his sitting room or playing with his baby in his swimming pool—I was part of the furniture, and if I was too nice to him he would simply be suspicious. I did my job, he took me for granted. It was a functional relationship.
“She wants to take you to Thailand with her on location,” he informed me as he flipped through his call sheet on Amber’s desk. “Nice call sheet, Amber. Why can’t your call sheets look like this, Lizzie?”
“And you told her no. Right?”
“No, I told her I’d think about it.” Scott gave Amber one of his winning smiles; she flashed one back. It was like watching a dental floss commercial. “We could manage without you for three months, couldn’t we, Amber?”
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“Yeah, I think we could.” Amber grinned. “We’d get by.”
“Well, you won’t have to, I’m not going,” I said charmlessly and returned to my e-mailing.
“Emerald Everhart usually gets what she wants, you know,” Amber reminded me midafternoon when I was busy looking up naked photos of Emanuelle Saix online so I could further torture myself after my bitter night with Luke.
“Well, Emerald Everhart hasn’t crossed swords with me yet,” I said unconvincingly. Amber didn’t dignify my comment with a response. She simply clacked away on her keyboard eagerly. I was convinced that nobody could work as hard as Amber seemed to and sometimes sent myself on false missions to the bathroom or mailroom only to return a minute later in a bid to catch her slacking off and calling a friend: maybe telling them about the fabulous blow job she’d given Studio Head #1 last night. But so far the worst I’d caught her doing was sitting on the corner of Scott’s desk telling him that he would never need Ro-gaine because he was blessed with a full head of hair. She was such a kiss-ass I wanted to kill her.
“Oh, hi Emerald, I’ll put you through. I know. But have you tried bribing him? You know, offering him something that he wants?” Amber was saying when I came back from a legitimate trip to the bathroom.
“It’s worth a try.” She laughed. “Okay, I’ll just put you through.”
“What was that?” I asked when Amber hung up with Emerald.
“Oh, just Emerald,” she said and snapped shut like the clamshell she was.
“You were telling her to bribe him.” I stood defiantly looking down on her desk. Damn it, did being First Assistant count for nothing these days?
“Just making a friendly suggestion to one of our more important clients.” She managed to maintain her psychotic typing speed.
“I’m not going to Thailand,” I said petulantly.
“I hear the brothels are great.” She smiled enigmatically.
I returned to my desk and decided that I had to book a lesson with Zac the tennis coach/shrink no matter whether I could afford it or not.
Perhaps I’d even book a package of six and put them on Luke’s credit card. After all, I wasn’t exactly getting bonus points for being a selfless, unmaterialistic, self-supporting martyr, was I? I was just becoming The First Assistant
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more churlish, heading for singledom, and was probably about to be replaced in my job by someone I’d hired. There had to be a better way.
And if Zac could help me with my backhand, I’d be sure to find that higher path.
“Fucking fantastic. Fan-fucking-tastic.” Scott swung out of his office like an enthusiastic Tarzan-o-gram.
“Score a deal?” I asked in my new unchurlish way.
“Did I fucking ever!” Scott came and high-fived me. “What a juicy score, baby!”
“Five-picture deal?” I smiled.
“1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing in fire-engine red.”
“A car?”
“With red leather seats.” Scott was apoplectic. He kept punching pieces of furniture and the air. Amber remained beatific.
“For Emerald?” I squinted at him.
“For me.” He grinned.
“Great. Lucky you.” I was about to return to my work. Doubtless Lara would put paid to the dream car when she heard about it.
“And I have you to thank.” Scott spilled his upper body over my desk and gave me a clumsy hug.
“Me?” I mumbled through a mouthful of yesterday’s shirt.
“Em loves you. She thinks you’re indispensable to her life, so I’m swapping you for the Gullwing.” He beamed.
“You’re what?” I pushed Scott away so that I could make sense of his bounding Labrador behavior.
“You’re going to Thailand with Em and I get her Gullwing. Jesus, Lizzy-baby, have you ever seen a Gullwing?”
“It’s not legal, Scott.”
“Don’t give me legal, baby, I’m your boss.” Scott gave me a boyish grin. “Here, I’ll show you a picture.” He grabbed my hand and dragged me into his office, where his printer was dementedly spilling out page after page with a red car on it.
“Isn’t she a beauty? Can’t you see me growling into the garage at the Peninsula for lunch in this baby? I get a boner just thinking about it.”
“It’s a lovely car. Well, it’s not, actually, it’s kind of weird looking. But either way, you can’t swap me for it.” I was pleading now. I knew that 22
Clare Naylor & Mimi Hare
Scott could in fact do anything he wanted. This town did not seem to recognize the labor laws that governed the rest of the United States. If your Hollywood boss didn’t like you, your Hollywood boss didn’t keep you. As it is with wrinkles and double chins and fat thighs and ugly noses in this town, so it is with employees. Erase them. Forget them.
Pay to have them removed and ensure you never see them again.
“It’s only for three months. You’ll hardly notice you’re gone.” Scott dismissed my fears, then me. “Get me a latte, would you Lizzie-o?”
“Don’t worry. I’m sure you won’t have to stay in Thailand for three months, anyway,” Amber informed me when I walked out of Scott’s office in a daze.
“Why?” I asked, realizing that the bitch had well and truly screwed me when she’d suggested Emerald should bribe Scott.
“Because nobody can stand her for more than a couple of weeks. Either she works them into a nervous breakdown with her petty demands or she sexually harasses them and they sue her.”
“Well, I’m used to hard work and I’m a woman.” I picked up my purse to do the coffee run. At least the people in the Coffee Bean were friendlier than in my office.
“That you’re a woman won’t bother her one tiny bit,” Amber nonchalantly informed me. For someone who appeared to work so hard, she clearly spent more than her fair share of time reading the V Pages on Variety’s Web site.
“She’s a lesbian?” I scowled.
“She’s what my generation call bicurious.” Amber smiled. “Though the girls she’s slept with have always been really beautiful, so I wouldn’t worry.”
And the pathetic thing is that it wasn’t until I was halfway across Beverly that I realized Amber had just insulted me.
Naturally I stayed in the Coffee Bean for twenty minutes longer than it took to froth a latte, because I had to call Lara to complain. Not only about her insensitive husband who wanted to trade me for a car, but also about Amber, who had alarmingly become our most-oft-discussed topic. Something we were both aware was pathetic and made us feel like bitter, ageing crones, but nonetheless it was a habit we couldn’t seem to shake while the girl insisted on being such a prize bitch.
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“You’ll never believe what she’s done this time,” I spluttered at Lara as quietly as possible, because the place is full of, if not secret agents then certainly agents—short ones, tall ones, ones squeezed into their Zegna suits, ones yelling into cell phones about Brad—so I had to be careful because agents, like walls, have ears.
“Tell me, tell me,” Lara demanded, and I figured at least this was more stimulating for her mushy mommy brain than repeats of the OC.
“She’s trying to get Scott to send me to Thailand on location with Emerald. Do you think she’s after my job?”
“Your job and my husband,” Lara said tersely.
“Are we just being paranoid?” I asked, suddenly a little embarrassed by the fact that I was huddling in a corner telling tales on a twenty-two-year-old.
“No, we’re just being realistic,” Lara said. “I’m coming over there.
Now.” These were all the words I needed to propel me back to the office and ensure that Scott wasn’t in any sort of compromising position that might alarm Lara.
It wasn’t as if Lara wasn’t used to Scott’s appetites—in fact, not only had she been witness to them in her four years as his assistant, she’d also facilitated many of them—she’d picked up his Ritalin prescrip-tions, she’d kept his ex-wife, Mia, at bay when he was having “meet-ings” with cute young actresses that lasted considerably longer than it took to discuss a five-year plan; in fact, she’d often been the girl in tow on his “business trips” to Napa, so she knew the deceptions and excuses and was determined that they’d never happen again. Lara had pretty much turned Scott around—he hadn’t touched any substance more potent than espresso since their honeymoon at the Meadows Clinic in Arizona and even fooling around had been off his radar (until the last few days with the mysterious actress in his office). Lara was a formidable woman and having a baby and getting her man may have meant her figure had softened, but it had taken none of the angles off her character; she was still as arch and tough as they came, and I didn’t envy Amber at this moment in time as Lara eased herself behind the wheel of her SLK and hot-tailed it over from the Palisades.
“I can’t find the paperwork for Russell’s new movie,” Amber informed me immediately when I walked in the door.
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“Have you checked the file?” I dumped my purse and went to knock on Scott’s door to deliver his coffee.
“Of course, do you think I’m completely thick?” Amber said in her cut glass accent, and rolled her eyes. “Oh, and I wouldn’t go in there. I think the actress is back. She just asked if he wanted to put his head between her legs.”
“Really?” I withdrew my hand before it could make contact with Scott’s door.
“She sounds as if she’s fifteen.” Amber smiled in a self-satisfied way.
“We have to get her out of there.” I grimaced.
“Rather you than me.”
“Lara’s on her way over.” I tried to peer through Scott’s wooden blinds, but they were firmly down. Amber’s face lit up.
“Well, she is his wife. I suppose she has a right to know if he’s being unfaithful.” She smiled.
“Help me get her out or I’ll tell Scott you used a company courier to have your macrobiotic lunch biked over from Silver Lake,” I threatened.
“And I’ll tell him that you burned six months’ worth of irreplaceable paperwork on a bonfire in your wastebasket because you were too lazy to file it.”
“What are you talking about?” I said, taken aback. I couldn’t believe she’d bust me. I blinked in horror.
“There’s a burn mark on the carpet by your desk.”
“Do and I’ll kill you,” I spat, but she didn’t seem too convinced by my threat because she just carried on typing,
“Hmmm, I wonder where the paperwork is for the seventeen-million-dollar contract we’ve just done for Nic. I suppose I should ask Scott if he’s seen it.” But before I could snarl anything back at her, my phone rang. The single ring of an internal call.
“Hello,” I answered.
“Lara Wagner’s on her way up,” the receptionist sang.
“Shit.” I put down the phone and ran back to Scott’s office door. I glued my ear to it.
“Would you like me standing up?” the girl asked. And she did sound fifteen, Amber hadn’t been lying. Jesus, they were taking their time.
Was she introducing Scott to Tantric Sex?
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“Scott.” I knocked loudly. “I’ve got your coffee. And Lara’s here!” I yelled so that he’d hear me through the heavy door of a powerful man’s office.
“Wassup?” he shouted.
“Lara’s on her way up!” I repeated urgently.
“Shit!” I heard Scott shout, as something crashed to the ground. I closed my eyes and prayed that the girl would make it out of his office with a passable amount of clothes on before the elevator pinged at the end of our hallway. At least we were in the movie industry where there’s nothing too suspicious about a girl wandering around in a skirt and bra—that’s all actresses wear all the time, anyway.
“Lizzie?” Lara stood in the doorway looking circumspectly at me.
“What’s going on?”
“Oh, nothing. Nothing at all,” I said without moving from in front of Scott’s door. It wasn’t as if I was trying to protect Scott, more that I was trying to protect Lara.
“Then why don’t I go in and say hello to my husband?” she challenged calmly. I must have looked like a deer caught in headlights.
“Sure,” I said and reluctantly stepped aside as slowly as possible. But just as I did, Scott flung open his office door with a big grin on his face.
“Honey,” he said. “Come in.” Lara narrowed her eyes as she walked by me into his office. It was no use even attempting to hide anything from her. “Where’s Lachlan?” he asked.
“With the nanny. We need to talk,” she said and closed his door behind her. I waited an ultracautious thirty seconds for either Lara or the pantyless teenager to come flying out the door, but nothing happened.
Eventually I walked back to my desk, still holding my breath for some flotsam to come hurtling at me. Scott’s office was on the top floor; there was no way the girl could have left without passing us. No convenient fire escape, even. She must be stashed under his desk or behind his plasma. Still, it appeared he’d gotten away with whatever it was he was up to, which was a temporary relief.
Half an hour later Lara and Scott emerged from his office. There was an easy way about them that suggested they’d made up.
“We’re going for a cocktail, ladies,” Scott said. “I’m in a meeting with Ang Lee. Okay?”
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“Sure,” Amber and I piped in together. Lara winked at me; clearly she’d gotten her own way,
“Baby, I’ll catch up with you, I just have to give Lizzie my boxing teacher’s number,” she told her husband.
“Okeydokey.” Scott did a detour into Katherine Watson’s office.
When Katherine wasn’t busy mentoring the butter-wouldn’t-melt vampire slut on the desk next to me, she was the brains behind The Agency. It was Katherine who’d encouraged Scott to join her in a hostile takeover last year to oust the then-president Daniel Rosen from power.
She was his polar opposite, a smart, neat-freak mother-of-four—with a devastatingly attractive photographer–husband—who managed to be that most oxymoronic of things, an ethical businesswoman. “Kathy, got any juice for me?” we heard Scott ask.
“So, you’re not going to Vietnam,” Lara said loudly enough for Amber to hear.
“Thailand,” I said. “Are you sure?” I couldn’t believe that Scott would relinquish his new toy-to-be so readily.
“Positive.” She smiled. “And I didn’t even have to raise my voice.
Come to lunch on Saturday?”
“Great,” I said as she hugged me good-bye. “And thanks for sorting that Thailand thing out. I’m not sure that Luke and I would have survived the two of us being on location at the same time.”
