HOWL AND THE PUSSY-KAT.5

SCANDAL ENDS THE CAREER OF DOLORES DELANO. KATHARINE KANE WILL PLAY CHARLOTTE VALE

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Chapter Three: PRE-PRODUCTION (Part Two)

DOLORES DELANO IN LESBIAN LOVE-NEST! screamed the cover of the National Enquirer, alongside a shot of Dolores stumbling out of the digital rubble of San Francisco on Harrison Ford’s arm. Ford was, presumably, unlikely to sue the Enquirer for the imputation that he was a party to her secret life – or was himself, perhaps, a closet lesbian.

Dolores’s partner in infamy was Cora Quinn, described as a ‘casting agent for extras and walk-ons.’ Her discovery of Jason Howl was not credited.

Cora, photographed in a black leather outfit Jason had never seen, couldn’t have looked any butcher if she’d been holding a meat cleaver. There was a picture of the ‘love-nest’: a beachfront bungalow on a stretch of the Palisades that last made the news during the brushfire season. Their neighbours had been unaware of the celebrity shack-up on their doorstep. Cora’s was not a well-known face, and Dolores, unmade-up, ‘looked like the maid service’, according to one neighbour (not quite the tribute Dolores was accustomed to read in the fanzines). Because they’d only been seen in pants and shirts and baseball-caps, another neighbour had thought that they were ‘a pair of fags’.

The house was rented in Cora’s name. Her husband and agency partner was not likely to have had her followed and then sold a story that was as damaging for Special Extras as it was to the career of Dolores Delano. So how is it that the Enquirer got hold of this inconvenient (for Dolores and Cora) story at such a convenient (for Hunt and Kazman and Kate Kane) time?

They’re not saying: ‘sources to protect.’

* * *

Jason, out of the US, missed the story. Desperate to find a cash cow, Isaac gave The Man from Nowhere a cinema release in Britain where Jason’s co-star Elizabeth Hurley was back in the news, filming a biopic of Princess Margaret despite strenuous efforts by a more senior Elizabeth to block production.

Movieland Britain didn’t have much of an A-list, but its B-list turned out in force for the premiere. Jason was fixed up with a 20-something soap-actress whose boobs were crying out for silicone; he had some difficulty deciphering her English. Interviewers and talk-show hosts were more interested in Eldorado and Liz’s role as the Queen’s sister than in The Man from Nowhere.

UK film critics set about trashing Ms Hurley, a national pastime. Jason was a ‘TV hunk’; his acting skills didn’t merit a mention. Early box-office returns suggested that The Man was on his way back to whence he’d come.

By the time the British tabloids picked up the scandal of his Voyager co-star, Jason had left London. He took the train to Paris and became a tourist for a few days. Rehearsals for Again, Voyager were due to start at the beginning of October. He’d already had costume fittings and a few script sessions with his old drama coach Winfried Gott. Jason’s Jerry Durrance would not actually have a Germanic accent like Paul Henreid’s, but he wanted to give him a hint of something Continental or Latino, exotic.

In pursuit of an accent he got talking to a married Frenchwoman in a bar on the Champs Elysées. She liked Americans, she said, but didn’t know who he was. Eldorado had never been big in France. Jason took her back to his hotel room, where she proved to be both game and gamey.

* * *

All movie contracts have a Morals Clause. Actors can, under certain circumstances, be sacked. Without compensation. Advances may have to be repaid.

* * *

‘Come on, Isaac. We’re not talking the Hays Code here. No way does being a dyke constitute an Act of Immorality.’ Myra Mae’s voice raspingly capitalised the last two nouns.

‘Try telling that to the congregation of the Mormon Tabernacle.’

‘Isaac, we’re in Hollywood Babylon, not in - Utah.’ Isaac sensed an expletive deleted just before she reached Utah.

Myra Mae Grant was trying to exude sweetness and light for this crucial meeting in Isaac’s increasingly dusty office. Usually power-dressed in tailored suits, today she was pretty in pink, a fluttery number that belonged in a Merchant Ivory movie. The trowelled-on make-up evoked Baby Jane Hudson.

Her client was not present. Staked out by photographers, Dolores Delano was sequestered in her Beverly Hills mansion that had once been owned – and scrubbed daily – by Joan Crawford. With her larder bare, Dolores couldn’t phone for deliveries in case the paparazzi abducted and impersonated the delivery guy; she was relying on food drops from her friends. This was not a happy bunny. Garments had been rent. The temple veil … you get the picture.

‘Myra Mae, no way can I continue with Dolores in Voyager.’ Isaac was enjoying this moment of power over two women who’d had a stranglehold on his scrotum for too many years. ‘OK, I couldn’t care less if she likes to eat pussy – who doesn’t? –’ (Myra Mae didn’t, to judge from the contortion of her gargoyle features) – ‘but if she brings that to the movie, it’ll bomb, and with Kazman halfway up my ass already you know I can’t afford another turkey.’

Myra Mae pronounced the names of three lesbian stars: one out, one outed, one the subject of heavy industry rumour. The second and third were still big at the box office, huge. The first still got work, but it was said that her fee had gone through the floorboards after she came out on national TV.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Isaac, ‘but d’you see any of them being asked to play Charlotte Vale? Or Mrs Miniver?’

Zola Gorgon had just announced a Vietnam-era remake of Mrs Miniver which had trounced Now, Voyager in 1942 and allowed Barbara Stanwyck to rob Bette Davis of her third Oscar. Madonna and Liam Neeson represented strong casting, but even with Dolores Isaac would have given Again, Voyager the edge this time around. Vietnam was dead, exorcised. Voyager was timeless. Zola might do better to re-set Mrs Miniver in Iraq or Afghanistan.

‘Isaac, don’t do this to Dolores. Don’t do this to me. After all we’ve been through.’

Seven kinds of shit, Isaac felt like replying. The meeting dragged on for a few more minutes. Myra Mae tried a good-cop/bad-cop routine Isaac had seen before. One minute she was pleading, almost getting down on her knees in front of him (where Dolores had started her own career and a good chunk of Myra Mae’s), the next she was snarling threats to boycott his studio, pull Jason Howl from Voyager.

As if she dared. With Dolores now slated for walk-ons in ER and Sex and the City, Jason Howl was practically the Grant Agency’s biggest client. Her percentage on the kid’s half-million for Voyager would buy Myra Mae quite a few cruises on the Blue Nile, her favourite holiday destination, in pursuit of well-hung ebony tribesmen caked in mud as thick as her make-up today.

‘She can keep her advance,’ he found himself saying, more to shut her up than to show what a regular guy he was. Still, it was a generous, even sentimental gesture from a man in Isaac’s situation. He had advanced Dolores $2.5 million on Voyager.

Myra Mae did not linger over a show of gratitude. ‘What about the other two point five if she’s off the movie? And the last three years of her contract?’

‘Another seventeen and a half million? Blow it out your ass, Myra Mae.’

‘You owe her for what she’s done for you.’

‘Four turkeys in a row are what she’s done for me.’

‘Is it Dolores’s fault they were turkeys?’

‘Yeah, I think she can take some of the credit.’

‘Come on, Isaac. We both know this is gonna finish her. We’re talking the end of her road here. You owe her a pension.’

‘She should have been thinking about her pension when Cora Quinn had her head up her snatch,’ he said cruelly. Then he threw her a bone:

‘Kathy Kane doesn’t have an agent yet.’

‘You think I’m desperate enough to start representing pornstars?’ she snarled.

‘Suit yourself. My understanding is she’s put all that behind her.’

‘From what I hear, putting it behind her is her specialty.’ Despite the success of Poor Nellie, Katharine Kane was still best remembered for the clASS ACTION porno series.

* * *

Out of sight was not out of reach. Dolores could still use the telephone, although she was having to change her number every two days. She skipped the pleading part. Myra Mae had been there, done that.

‘Listen, you fat filthy prick. I sucked your fat filthy prick…’ In this extreme of emotion Dolores’ command of English followed her career down the toilet. What she said sounded like ‘jew fart feelthy preek’.

‘Yeah, and I’ve paid you thirty million bucks for the privilege,’ Isaac said bitterly. ‘Did Myra Mae tell you I said you can keep your two-point-five million for Voyager?

‘Jew know what jew can do with jore two and a half meellion,’ Dolores told him. She elaborated, in what sounded like a barrage of anti-Semitism, before resorting to some gritty non-Castilian Spanish.

Isaac got in a few ‘Dolores, honey’s’ and the occasional ‘but, baby…’ and finally resorted to holding the phone away from his ear. He allowed her the inconsequential satisfaction of hanging up on him. He was enjoying the irony in terminating Dolores’ contract on the grounds of immorality and replacing her with an actress whose entire career to date had been in adult movies.

* * *

Meanwhile, in a less palatial part of Beverly Hills, Ben Burns, epicly priapic, was revising the screenplay of Again, Voyager, rewriting the part of Charlotte Vale for Katharine Kane. The muse was with him. This would be his best ever script, the acme of his talent, his apotheosis, his –

Yeah, yeah. He had a week to finish the script. Filming was scheduled to begin next month and be completed by December. Editing, dubbing, scoring and try-outs would take it through to March ahead of a spring release. Isaac wanted it to be next year’s first big picture. Or, of course, it might be next year’s first big –

Let’s not go there.

* * *

Waiting to see the script Kate had make-up and costume tests. The lighting director would have to overlight Kate to compensate for her skin-tone. The Jennifer Lopez look wouldn’t work for Again, Voyager. The only octoroons in the Hamptons were maids or hookers.

Isaac viewed the camcorder tape of Kate’s lighting test. She was also trying out the ‘look’ for Charlotte’s first scene: granny glasses and a high-necked grey frock. Minor prosthetics would be needed to make her plumper, plainer. Even with her hair scraped back and no makeup there was no disguising her beauty. The camera loved her as much in a dowdy dress as it had in the nude with her legs wide apart.

Her emergence from her ‘chrysalis’ was going to be quite a moment. If it weren’t for her history Isaac would have said he might be about to midwife the birth of a major new star. As it was … who could say?

Aaron Spuhn, Voyager’s Production Manager, got hold of a pre-release DVD of Poor Nellie. Isaac watched it with him. On his first viewing, at the premiere, Kane’s nudity had inevitably distracted from an assessment of her acting, which Isaac now conceded wasn’t bad, though plainly not in the Davis league. She and the Howl kid weren’t going to get any Nominations, but what mattered now was the survival of his studio; and Kane just might deliver that.

‘She’s gonna need some coaching,’ he told Aaron. ‘It’s lucky we’ve already got the ideal drama coach on board. This is just the kind of challenge Dotty loves. She’d probably do it pro bono, but throw her an extra ten grand.’

* * *

‘Dotty’ was Dorothy McRea, fondly known around Hollywood as ‘Mother McRea’. A veteran of British theatre, she had moved to LA in her thirties, played a dozen supporting roles, even been Oscar-nominated for one of them, and then, like many another good actress, found herself washed up in middle age.

Born and raised in England, Dotty had taken an Irish-sounding stage name after she found she could do a brilliant Irish accent, but she is best known for her assumed Scottishness. She played one of the teachers in the movie version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and even the title role in a US touring stage version and the headmistress in a London revival. She had short scenes in Braveheart and Rob Roy and longer ones in a mediocre made-for-TV Mary, Queen of Scots. She coached Al Pacino for Mrs Doubtfire.

Isaac had employed her before; he was hiring her for the role of Mrs Vale mostly because she came cheap. She could do patrician English as readily as she could do Scottish noblewoman or Gaelic peasant.

Ramrod straight with a matronly bust and as starchy as a Victorian antimacassar, Dorothy at 74 bore a superficial resemblance to Gladys Cooper and would help link Isaac’s version to Hal Wallis’s original. There were going to be few such links, Isaac knew.

To keep her bills paid Dorothy worked as a drama coach. None of your Method nonsense or Winfried Gott’s ‘connect your life vith the character’. Like Laurence Olivier she believed stagecraft and screencraft were about pretence. About acting.

She was highly amused at being asked to turn the Beaver Queen into her own spinster daughter. She’d gone to see Poor Nellie because it was British.

‘It was awfully rude,’ she told Isaac over the phone. ‘But I liked it. She’s a lovely girl. And yes, she shows a wee bit of promise.’

Even off-screen Dotty was apt to lapse into Flora Macdonald.

‘I’ve never watched a blue movie,’ she told Kate at their first meeting in Dotty’s small cluttered apartment in Inglewood.

‘I hope I never have to sit through another one,’ Kate said.

‘Or even lie down for one!’ Dotty tittered. Kate laughed and immediately liked her.

All they had was Ben’s script for Dolores. Dotty worked Kate hard, a line at a time, bullying her like a Brodie-era schoolmarm. She added to the repertoire of small gestures, movements and tics that Stephen Fry had shown Kate during their read-throughs on Poor Nellie.

They lunched in a local diner where the staff made a great fuss of the veteran actress and her pornstar protégée. Midway through the afternoon something clicked in Kate. Although Charlotte Vale’s life was even further from her own than Nell Gwynne’s, it wasn’t so difficult to breathe life into this sad ugly-ducking spinster who ached to become a swan and earn the love of a good man.

Kate was neither falsely modest nor extravagantly vain about her beauty. She was, had always been, a swan. But the love of a good man can elude even a swan.

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TRAILER for HOWL AND THE PUSSY-KAT.6

Isaac uses blackmail to get the Director he wants for Again, Voyager.