I'm Glad About You(86)
“So what’s the story? Gordon fixed me up on a date with Lars?” Alison was endlessly on the phone with Ryan now; it was like he didn’t have a single other client. Day or night, she had the hot line.
“You are not to worry about the story,” he informed her.
“People ask, Ryan! People read that stuff and they believe it and then they ask me, did Gordon really fix you up with Lars? What am I supposed to say? You and I both know he fought tooth and nail to keep me out of this.”
“Darling, if Gordon didn’t want you in this movie, you would not be in this movie,” Ryan reminded her.
“That’s not true, Ryan! You told me yourself—”
“I told you there were reservations at the studio level—”
“Oh, bullshit, you told me that Gordon wanted a big star—”
“Alison. Alison. Alison.” She hated it when he did this, it sounded like he thought she was eight years old. She was already struggling with the fact that everyone treated her like a complete child. Whenever she was in hair and makeup, they actually sent a production assistant over to walk her to the set. Usually a total nitwit, someone fresh out of college who had a dad who pulled connections and got little Heather or Connor or Jamie a job on a movie set, where their responsibilities included fetching cappuccinos from the coffee truck and making sure the star didn’t get lost. Not that she was a star. Yet. There was always that caution. She wasn’t a star yet. She had a long way to go, and to get there, she would have to play nice.
What that meant, though, was anyone’s guess. Who was she supposed to play nice with? Lars? She had, and she did, and that situation only got more complicated. Impossibly, he was even more obsessed with every detail of her; every vowel she uttered came under excruciating and never-ending scrutiny. If the line was as simple as, “What do you want, Ben?” there were still thousands of ways to modulate it. He would put her through take after take focusing on a lift of an eyebrow. And then there were the ever-increasing demands on her time off the set. Lars wanted to have sex all the time and it was exhausting, frankly, especially on nights when she had a 4 a.m. call. Also, especially, since his potency waned even as his demands increased.
It was too much. He was tired, and she was tired, and she had to get up at least two hours before he did, to sit in a makeup trailer while they made her glorious twenty-eight-year-old face even more photogenic. What was he trying to prove? He wasn’t enjoying the sex anymore; that was perfectly clear. She certainly wasn’t enjoying it, although that didn’t seem to matter to Lars one little bit. The vigor and ingenuity of their previous lovemaking laughed at them from the corners of hotel rooms, a mocking and prurient ghost. It was never anything at all, she thought, while Lars pumped away at her. Most of the time, he had his eyes closed. Why couldn’t he even look at her? She was the living visitation of movie magic, a sex goddess in the flesh, made incarnate by his own hand. It didn’t matter. His eyes remained shut, his face slack, while he concentrated on whatever it was inside him that might entice him to come. Most nights she truly wanted to shove him off her. But the pressure was on, and she had to play nice.
The movie itself was good. An action movie, with eight hot-blooded American boys on a mission in the jungle, with a swell girl who might have been a lesbian but also looked like Ava Gardner? The peculiarity of if it crossed over into something original, weird, even magical. Alison had never actually understood what Lars was doing with his pathological control of her look, but once they were shooting, the fierce intelligence behind the peculiar filmic elements began to reveal itself. It was Day of the Locust meets The Misfits, with a few grenades tossed in. A couple of times, Alison actually was the one who got to toss the grenades. David, the DP who had worked on three other films with Lars, knew instinctively that Alison’s more classical features required a shift in the way the film itself was shot, and so he hypersaturated the colors. While the gun battles were shot like hallucinations, the love scenes drifted into haunting movie moments redolent of the heyday of the film greats. Alison actually did know how to tip her head back and look at her hero with tragic yearning.
“The young Bergman,” the second camera op muttered. Stu the grip nodded, equally impressed. They were a gang of seasoned pros who had worked with pretty much every star and starlet under the sun, and many of these young stars treated the crew like servants. But Alison’s good Midwestern manners never failed her, and the grips, the PAs, the wardrobe assistants, and the lady who helped her with her coffee at the craft service table were all treated with good-natured respect and gratitude. The crew loved her.
And as days rolled into weeks the camera recorded the possibility that Alison was in fact The Real Deal. Pretty soon, they all said, she was going to be able to do whatever she wanted. She didn’t know what that meant, but so many people said it to her so many times, it was hard to pretend that it might not actually be true. Even strangers, especially strangers, gushed and warned her gleefully of the coming tsunami of global attention. Reporters who showed up on the set hovered, watched, flirted with her. Men in suits whose names she could never remember came and watched with a reptilian bonhomie. The sequence of writers who showed up on the set invariably ended up writing extra scenes for her.
Gordon, the head of the studio, meanwhile, joined in the obsession with every detail of Alison’s hair, her makeup, her dialogue, and her close-ups. Her clothes especially were cause for brutal interference. The day Lars decided that Alison should be wearing a narrow pink silk sheath—all the better to seduce a drug lord at his birthday party—Gordon weighed in passionately. He liked the color, she could wear the pink, it was a terrific color and it looked good on her. But shouldn’t the dress be more “special”? This was often the language of their parlance: Gordon was “underwhelmed” by the dress. It needed to be “more special.” When you pressed him as to what he might mean by “more special” it turned out that what he usually meant was “sequins.”