Amy Sohn
The Actress
for my manager
And she had loved him, she had so anxiously and yet so ardently given herself—a good deal for what she found in him, but a good deal also for what she brought him and what might enrich the gift.
—Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Act One
1
The velvet curtains parted, and Maddy watched Steven Weller step into the room, his girlfriend on his arm. Gracefully, he began to move through the crowd, laughing, clapping backs, kissing women. He was trim, though not tall, and blessed with a full and apparently natural hairline envied by millions of middle-aged men.
As she watched him glad-hand, she was surprised to feel her cheeks grow warm. In her job as a restaurant hostess in New York, she was never starstruck by the actors and baseball players who came in to eat, priding herself on being able to keep her cool. But here at the Mile’s End Film Festival, not thirty feet from Steven Weller, she felt jumpy and wowed.
“I thought the new one was Venezuelan,” said Sharoz, Maddy’s producer. “She doesn’t look Venezuelan.” The girlfriend, who had a few inches on Steven, stood just behind him, nodding faintly. She didn’t appear to be participating in the conversations so much as endorsing them.
“That was the last one,” Maddy said. “The real estate agent he met on a plane. This one is the Vegas cocktail waitress.”
“Cady Pearce,” said Maddy’s boyfriend, Dan, from her other side.
“You know her name?” Maddy said, planting a hand on his chest. An NYU film school graduate and theory nerd, he never read the trades. “Since when do you follow Hollywood gossip?”
“My barber gets People.”
“Did you guys notice that he never stays with any woman more than a year?” Sharoz asked. “And usually only from one awards season to the next. The man is so gay.”
“Just because a guy is single in his mid-forties doesn’t mean he’s gay,” Maddy said. “Maybe he just hasn’t met the right person.” For years there had been rumors of Weller’s homosexuality, but Maddy felt they were a sign of the entertainment industry’s increasing puritanism, its tendency to fetishize marriage and domesticity.
Her costar Kira was coming over, unmistakable in her white-blond buzz cut, sleeveless orange jumper, and knee-high moon boots, looking like the catalog model she was. Unlike the others, she had skipped the opening-night selection, Weller’s new vehicle The Widower, to meet an old friend for drinks. “Is that the new one?” Kira asked, tossing her head in Weller’s direction. She spoke in a hoarse voice that resulted from childhood nodules on her vocal cords. “She’s even taller than the real estate agent.”
“I heard he has a longtime boyfriend,” Sharoz said. “They’ve been together fifteen years.”
“You mean Terry McCarthy?” Maddy asked. McCarthy, an actor turned screenwriter, had been Weller’s friend since they were both struggling young actors in L.A.
“Not Terry McCarthy,” Sharoz said. “A Korean-American flight attendant for United.”
“How do you know?”
“This guy I grew up with went to Hobart with the sister of the flight attendant’s best friend,” Sharoz answered. Sharoz, a striking, long-haired girl from Tehrangeles, had been Dan’s classmate at NYU and was one of those detail-oriented people who never seemed harried even in the midst of crises, like the dozens they’d had on I Used to Know Her.
Maddy noticed Kira holding one hand in front of her eyes and squinting at Weller. “What are you doing?” Maddy asked.
“You can always tell by the mouth,” Kira said. “Yep, yep. Definite gay mouth.” She moved her hand in front of Maddy’s field of vision so it blocked Weller’s forehead and eyes.
Maddy watched his mouth move, unsure what she was looking for. He had a thin lower lip that veered slightly off to the side. “What makes a mouth gay?” she asked.
“The palsy. Gay men have slightly palsied lips.”
“I hate to disappoint you, Kira, but I think he’s straight,” Dan said. “He was married, after all.”
“And we all know why Julia Hanson left him,” Sharoz said.
A middle-aged actress who was now experiencing a mid-career comeback with a cable procedural, Hanson had been married to Weller for a few years during the 1980s. She had never spoken publicly about the marriage, but in recent months there had been chatter, in the tabloids and on the Internet, that they had divorced because he was gay.
“Even if he is . . . with men,” Maddy said, “who cares? It’s his business.”
“That is so heteronormative,” Kira said. “He has an obligation to come out. By staying in the closet, he’s doing a disservice to young gay men and women. It’s disingenuous.” Kira had become a women’s studies major at Hampshire College on the heels of a bad breakup from a Northampton Wiccan.
“Everyone in Hollywood is disingenuous,” Dan said. “They do drugs, they cheat on their spouses, they have illegitimate children. If I were him, I would never come out. He would lose all the macho roles. The guy wants to work.”
“He would work,” Kira said. “He’s successful enough that it wouldn’t hurt. His female fans would still fantasize about him.”
“Just—with another guy in bed at the same time,” Sharoz said, and the women giggled.
Across the room, Cady Pearce said something, and Steven Weller laughed so loudly that they could hear it. She was either the funniest cocktail waitress in all of Las Vegas or Steven Weller was very easily amused.
A server passed by with a tray. Not caring how it looked to anyone else, Maddy grabbed four pigs in blankets. The others clustered around, too, double-fisting food. After flying into Salt Lake City, they’d barely had time to change clothes at the condos before rushing off to The Widower. Mile’s End, the festival, was not all that different from a Mile’s End film: You were always cold, hungry, and short on time.
The party was in a private room on the third level of the Entertainer, a lodge/club on Mountain Way, and it was hosted by the studio that was distributing The Widower. Guest-list-only, it was much more intimate than the official Mile’s End–hosted, post-Widower party raging two levels below. This crowd was older, with white teeth, tan skin, and cashmere sweaters.
“How did you get us in here, anyway?” Maddy asked Sharoz. “Had to be some kind of mistake.”
“It was Ed. He owns Mile’s End.” Ed Handy was their producer’s rep, and Sharoz’s words were not hyperbole; the New York Times Arts section had recently run a front-page profile entitled “Ed Handy Owns Mile’s End.”
“Do you think those guys downstairs chasing cheddar with sponsored vodka know what they’re missing?” Maddy asked.
“Of course,” said Sharoz. “That’s what this festival is about, varying levels of access.”
Both Sharoz and Dan had been to Mile’s End once before, with a short about a gamine subway busker who falls for a conductor. Maddy, who hadn’t known Dan then, had never been. She had never even been to Utah. Ever since they got accepted, Dan had been calling her “a virgin to the festival.” She understood that his smugness was a cover for his anxiety—I Used to Know Her was about to premiere at the biggest independent festival in the country—but she still didn’t like it. She wanted to feel that they were all the same, united by what had brought them together in the first place: the desire to make good work.
“So what did you guys think of The Widower?” Kira asked.