I watch Clark win his Oscar from a quote-unquote dive bar in West Hollywood, wedged into a corner trying in vain to hear his speech over the din surrounding me. I did not plan on watching the ceremony with a crowd, but the cockroaches have finally taken the upper hand in our ongoing war, and over the past week I’ve found multiple dead baby roaches scattered around the apartment, like a harbinger of something.
‘Means they’re breeding indoors,’ the exterminator told me, his face permanently half-twisted in a way that befits his profession. ‘When you see the infants.’
‘That’s bad news, right?’
‘It’s not good.’ Evidently the landlord isn’t paying him enough to even try to sugarcoat the truth. ‘Gotta bomb the whole place, then put down boric acid.’ The upshot is, I had to leave my apartment and can’t return until at least four hours have passed, at which point I have to open every window and door for ventilation. Which is how I ended up here, missing most of Clark’s words and watching Twitter to try to piece together what he’s saying, finally giving up and elbowing my way through the crowd to get right underneath the screen, craning my neck to hear.
‘There are so many people who share in this moment, so many people without whom I would never have even gotten to this room, never mind this stage,’ Clark is saying now, a little breathless, running through the requisite list of agents, managers, producers, co-stars, executives, Neil Armstrong for his extraordinary spirit and story.
‘Most of all, I have to thank my beautiful daughter Skye, my angel, whose courage and humanity is an inspiration to me every day. This one’s for you, honey.’ He raises the award high above his head as though saluting Skye, and I wonder whether she’s watching this from her wing in the canyon, smiling placidly, maybe with tears in her eyes.
Amabella is significantly absent both from his speech and from the ceremony. Rumours began to swirl over the weekend: that she wouldn’t be attending the Oscars, that she and Clark were spotted in a heated argument outside Equinox, that she’s laying low after plastic surgery that left her with unexpected bruising, that Skye hates Amabella and gave her father an ultimatum, that Clark and Carol are reuniting. All of it and none of it may be true, but I’m choosing to believe that this is the beginning of the end. Six months is far longer than he should have ever have spent with her.
Things are looking up for Clark, and for me as well. After agonizing for an entire day over the wording of my email, I finally pitched my Ben Schlattman profile to Reel, and the editor responded much more quickly than I expected asking for more details, then responded again with a yes, a deadline and a fee. I know I should negotiate the latter, but it’s already more money than I’ve made for a single piece in my life, and David, the editor, signed off his last email with another carrot: ‘FYI, we might also want to use some of this in-book for the March 4 edition.’ Meaning my profile, or some edited part of it, could be in the print magazine. A first.
As I was transcribing both parts of my interview with Schlattman, I had to focus on forgetting the actual experience of those conversations, and forgetting what happened in that room at the Montage. Nothing happened, in truth, but that’s not the way it feels, and so typing up our conversation from breakfast felt like watching myself from afar, about to walk into a trap. There’s a niggling sense in me that my first major profile for a Hollywood trade – and potentially my first ever piece in print – will always be sullied now, by something indefinable and dark and beyond my control. Schlattman only agreed to do the interview once he’d met me at the Globes afterparty, when I was a little drunk and eager to impress and wearing that dress, and now it’s clear that was an audition of sorts. ‘He’s been stonewalling us,’ David had said in his first email response to me, clearly impressed that I had persuaded Schlattman to talk, but it’s not because I made him a pitch he couldn’t refuse.
There’s been a voice in my head all along telling me hardboiled truisms, things like nobody ever got ahead in this business by having scruples, and since I know I did nothing wrong in that hotel room, over the course of this week it’s become easier to stop obsessing. Ben Schlattman’s appetites do not make him any less compelling as an industry figure, and they don’t put a dent in the pay cheque I’m going to get for this piece, nor in the prestige its publication will get me. And dissatisfied though I was with the Nest piece, it’s turned out to be a decent calling card purely by virtue of Clark’s name and unicorn status. I’ve sent out a slew of pitch emails cold to editors this week, people I’ve never met before, and they went less ignored than usual. One of them actually commissioned me, and a second said he’d be back in touch next month. Things are moving, it feels like, finally.
Idyllwilde takes Best Picture, and I slip out of the bar just as Ben Schlattman is emerging onto the stage with his fellow producers, averting my eyes and ordering a Lyft ride home. Even the roach graveyard that awaits me is preferable to watching Schlattman in HD.
But I should have waited, because now my eastward ride home coincides directly with the end of the Oscars, and with the requisite one-mile-radius of traffic hell. A maze of police perimeters and flash bulbs that stretches a full fifteen blocks, or so my driver tells me as he makes a sharp U-turn, trying to circumvent the chaos. ‘It’s like crossing the border,’ he says, ‘bomb squads, ID checks, helicopters, everything. I used to drive a limo, I worked the Oscars, the Grammys, the Globes – drove some pretty big people over the years. Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, Cuba Gooding Jr, Christina Aguilera…’
‘Really?’ I ask, trying to sound impressed. ‘Why did you give it up?’
‘Big people, bigger problems,’ he says with a shrug, and doesn’t elaborate. I wonder if he’s spent the night longing to cross that border as much as I have, or whether given enough time inside you really can become inured to it.
My phone vibrates in my hand, and I realize with a jolt that Clark has responded to the brief, breezy congratulations email I sent him barely ten minutes ago.
Hi Jessica – thanks, it’s been quite a night! Headed to a little shindig in Beverly Hills, love to see you there if you can make it.
C.C.
At the end of his email is an address.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say immediately to my driver, ‘change of plans. Can we turn around?’
I give him the most generous tip I’ve ever given, to assuage my guilt about forcing him to make a U-turn back into the mayhem. It was worth it, though, to be here. The address Clark gave me turns out to be a nondescript door on an immaculate street that looks like a loading entrance, but when I ring the bell a suited man answers. There is no line of people, no velvet rope, no bouncers with iPads, but something tells me that I’m in the right place, something about the plush interior that I can see just behind the suit’s shoulder, the single silver elevator that promises an ascent. I give him my name, certain that I’m about to be refused entry, already bracing for the rejection as he disappears, but after a moment he reopens the door and smiles and waves me in. Some indefinable string has been pulled, and I am inside.
The elevator whisks me seventeen storeys up to an outdoor rooftop, softly illuminated by gas lamps and furnished like an indoor space, with couches and ottomans and end tables. The crowd is sparse, deliberately so; there are maybe a hundred people here and most of them not recognizable faces, though I’m not paying much attention. There is only one face I’m looking for, and yet when he appears out of the half-darkness and strides towards me I’m still not prepared. All suits look alike to me, but the one Clark is wearing skims his lean silhouette, making him taller and broader and sharper, his hair tousled with flecks of silver visible through the dark, the angles of his face devastating in the firelight.
‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ he says, beaming, and pulls me into a hug, and though his grip is loose suddenly I’m breathless.
‘Me too.’
He leads me over to the bar and orders us two Old Fashioneds, because he remembers this is my drink without having to ask.
‘Where’s Amabella?’ I ask innocently, as though I’m unaware of the rumour mill. As though I have no particular interest in his relationship.
‘She’s not here.’
I suppress a smile.
‘Skye couldn’t make it either tonight, but she’d love to see you,’ he tells me when we’re settled at a high table, facing outwards towards the party. ‘She really enjoyed the other day.’
‘Really?’ I ask before I think better of it. ‘I mean, that’s great – I’m glad. I did too.’
He laughs a little, almost to himself.
‘You don’t have to be polite. I know she can be… difficult.’
‘No, no, she honestly wasn’t. I just wasn’t sure if I was doing any good, or whether she really wanted to be there.’
‘It’s often hard to tell whether she wants to be anywhere.’
He looks haunted at this, as though his own words have startled him, and there is nothing in this moment that I wouldn’t do to make him feel better.
‘I loved your speech. I bet she did, too.’ I look around then, realizing that I don’t even know what afterparty this is. ‘Are the rest of the cast here, the director?’
‘No, I made my appearance at the official thing, but it was crawling with press and I just didn’t have it in me. No offence.’
‘None taken. Journalists are the worst.’
‘Actually, it wasn’t them that bothered me so much as all the people wanting to congratulate me. Is that strange for me to say?’
‘On the night you won an Oscar? Maybe a little bit.’
‘I’m sure I’ll wake up tomorrow morning and be hungry for attention again – which, as you know, is the natural state of most actors. But somehow tonight it just felt odd to me. All these strangers and near-strangers, being so kind and so gracious and so grateful, as though I’d actually done something for them. When acting is one of the most selfish things you can possibly do with your life.’
‘I don’t know about that.’
‘Convince me otherwise.’
‘I’m not here to flatter your ego,’ I tell him. ‘I think you know acting is valuable. Fiction is valuable. Storytelling – it gives people something to rally around, and believe in, when their own lives are boring or frozen or unbearable. It’s not just escapism, it can be community.’
‘It’s true. I used to get letters a lot on Loner, back when my agency still actually sent that stuff through to me, from fans saying things like that. People who were sick, in the hospital, who said that the show got them through. I’ll never forget one woman who said that the show gave her a family. Like these characters were real to her.’
There’s so much on the tip of my tongue. I was only in the treatment centre for a month, maybe less, and so long ago that I choose to erase it as a part of my personal history. How thin I was then, how stretched, and how close I was to death, or so they claimed. I brought the first three boxsets of Loner with me and played them every night after lights out, my clunky Dell laptop whirring and overheating beneath the sheets, and never felt alone. He does not need to know this.
‘Right.’ I’m trying to stay sharp but it’s difficult now, warmed by the whiskey, my senses blurred by the reality of him. ‘There you go. So maybe stop with the existential angst and enjoy the fact that you just won an Oscar.’
There are people circling us, trying to be subtle, but even at a party this sparse and secret Clark is a hot commodity, now more than ever. It’s miraculous, now I think of it, that we’ve been left alone for this long. I can see, out of the corner of my eye, someone taking a selfie with Clark clearly positioned in the background, trying to be subtle, and failing.
‘Let’s talk about something other than me, for the love of God,’ he says, gesturing to a waiter for more drinks. ‘How’s your life? What’s the haps in Echo Park?’
‘Wow, I’m only going to tell you if you promise never to say “the haps” ever again.’
I tell him about the roaches, half-expecting his eyes to glaze over from shock because this is so far removed from his reality, but instead he lights up, starts telling me about his past.
‘God, when I first moved to Hollywood I was dead broke, sleeping on friends’ couches, and for a while I ended up in this place in Koreatown… I mean, you think that area’s bad now, you should’ve seen it in the nineties. Rats, roaches, for a while there was a pigeon problem, something to do with the roof. I woke up once without knowing why, and then realized that a rat had just run right across my pillow. Maybe across my face.’
‘How did you ever get to sleep?’ I ask. ‘The only thing I’ll say for my roaches is they’ve never come near me. They’re antisocial and I like them that way.’
‘I loved it,’ he murmurs. ‘It felt like living in the wild. That was appealing to me at the time.’
‘That was right after you dropped out of college?’
He raises an eyebrow.
‘Yes, ’89.’
‘Is it weird that I know so much about your life?’
‘Only because I know so little about yours.’
‘That’s how the relationship works.’ After a pause, I clarify. ‘I mean, between actor and viewer, or actor and adoring public. We see you every week on our TV screens, or at least every few months on a movie screen, and we get to feel like you’re a part of our lives, but you’re not. The screen doesn’t go both ways.’
‘Very profound.’
‘So, what do you want to know?’ I ask him, conscious that I’ve drunk more than I planned, conscious that I have not eaten enough today, conscious that things are blurring and loosening and I’m letting it happen.
‘I want to know why you love this stuff so much.’
‘What stuff?’
‘Television. Movies. All of it. You don’t love it like most people do – as entertainment. It’s more, for you.’
‘TV is reliable. Most characters on television don’t fundamentally change, right? And even when dramatic things happen, they happen in patterns, in narrative arcs. I’d watch the same show over and over again because you can feel things, but in a safe way. Even when someone leaves the show, they get a finale, a payoff, a few goodbye scenes. It’s comforting.’
He nods.
‘At a certain point when I was growing up, I just needed things that I could control.’
‘After your father left.’
I feel shivery, and excuse myself. As I make my way into a cavernous carpeted corridor towards the bathroom I feel eyes on me, though of course there are eyes on me. A nobody with a somebody always attracts attention, even at the discreet kind of party where no one will ask and none of this will end up in the tabloids.
When I return Clark is no longer alone, and I hover awkwardly on the fringes of his circle. A young woman with an impossibly golden blonde bob, two neat, slender men in suits, an older man who I think is Schlattman for one awful second, until he turns.
‘Who’s this?’ he asks, and Clark beckons me over, introducing me by name without explaining my presence. To say I’m a journalist would not behoove me here, and so I stay silent and smile, though I know that from this they can only draw one conclusion. Clark has to know it too.
These are industry people, important people, but for once I can’t find the energy to place their faces or to try to remember where I have seen their names in the trades. I want them to leave so that I have him to myself again, and sure enough after a few moments of polite conversation something unspoken passes through the group, and it dispels gently. This is how parties like this work, I think. You have to know the cues.
‘Armstrong should’ve got Best Picture, too,’ I tell him, sinking gratefully into a sofa beside the warmth of a roaring torch.
‘Do you really believe that?’
‘No.’ I suddenly have no desire to lie to him. Armstrong was a solid, workmanlike biopic with a sharper-than-average script and a mesmerizing lead performance from Clark, not to mention a few stunning technical scenes in space, Armstrong’s first walk on the moon included. But it’s not doing anything particularly groundbreaking, and though it’s exactly the kind of movie that gets labelled ‘Oscar bait’, Best Picture would be a stretch.
‘What did you actually think deserved to win?’
‘Obelisk, but I know it didn’t have a chance.’
‘Because of the risqué subject matter?’
‘That, and the fact it’s a tiny Sundance indie – it cost, what, $2 million or something crazy? And it’s about a woman, so that was sort of the nail in the coffin.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That Best Picture always goes to movies about men. White men, I should add.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Oh, really? When was the last time a movie with a female lead won Best Picture? I’ll wait.’
His brow furrows.
‘Yup,’ I nod. ‘Harder than you think, isn’t it?’
‘The Clint Eastwood thing,’ he exclaims finally, ‘the boxing – Million Dollar Baby!’
‘Twelve years ago? That’s your best answer? Also, that movie is more about Clint Eastwood’s character and his man pain than Hilary Swank. Her story only matters insofar as it’s filtered through his.’
‘I can’t argue with that,’ he says, ‘but she’s certainly a lead in that movie.’
‘Doesn’t count. The correct answer would be Chicago, in 2002, fourteen full years ago.’
‘Which didn’t deserve to win.’
‘No argument here, but are you seeing my point?’
‘I don’t think it’s as straightforward as that,’ he says, ‘but you are technically correct about that category.’
‘Yeah. So. I knew Obelisk didn’t stand a chance, but I love to root for the underdog.’
‘How do you know so much about Oscar history?’
‘It’s my job. And I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up,’ I say with a laugh. ‘Gives you time to get really nerdy about Hollywood trivia.’
‘I find that hard to believe.’
‘Well, I had two friends at uni who also wanted to stay up all night and watch the Oscars with me, and write out our predictions on notecards beforehand. Tom always used to win, he was ridiculously good at working out the technical categories.’
‘Who’s Tom?’
‘Just a friend from back home.’ I take a long sip, watching him out of the corner of my eye. ‘He just moved here, actually, he’s an actor.’
‘You don’t say! Anything I’d know?’
I fill him in on Tom’s history as a stage actor, his bit parts in BBC dramas, and then the pilot, the vampire thriller with an unexpectedly satirical edge. Clark chuckles out loud when I explain the notion of a blood shortage forcing vampires to develop bureaucracy.
‘I’m actually going to the set tomorrow, it’s their first day of shooting so I’m just going to observe, get some colour, maybe interview a couple of people. I can’t really do anything with it until we know if the show’s getting picked up, but Tom seems to feel good about the script, so.’
‘Well, good for him. He sounds like exactly the kind of actor we need more of over here. Theatre background, some real training, an interest in the work and not the glory that comes after the work.’
‘Yeah, he definitely did not get the role on the basis of his social media following.’
He smiles, acknowledging the reference. Our first conversation.
‘Did I come off as a completely out-of-touch fool in that rant? Old Man Yells At Cloud?’
‘No! I didn’t think so. Someone getting passed over for a role because they don’t have enough Instagram followers is bleak no matter how old you are. But we didn’t really talk for long enough that day for me to form much of a sense of who you are.’
‘Well, we have plenty of time.’
My head is spinning, my skin tingling, and I want to move closer and press myself into him, but this is something I can never take back. It can’t be me who crosses that gap, not here in public, and not anywhere. This man is not within my reach, even if he’s physically inches from me, but the whiskey and the fire and the look in his eyes are making it hard to steady myself.
‘How’s Skye?’ I blurt out. ‘Didn’t she want to come tonight?’
‘She did. But then, uh—’ He pauses, clearly struggling with whether to tell me. ‘She spoke to her mom, and it seems that call didn’t go well.’
‘Oh. Sorry.’
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with her. Carol. She’s been so… Well, you said it. Your kid tries something like this, I can’t imagine wanting to be anywhere other than by their side. But Carol never was very traditional.’ There’s a bitterness in his tone that I’ve never heard before, his usual diplomacy about his ex-wife dissipating.
‘Maybe she feels guilty for moving away. And instead of confronting that guilt, she’s just doubling down on not showing up,’ I suggest.
‘She and Sarah were always so enmeshed. From the moment Sarah was born, they were just… they came as one unit. Sarah had terrible nightmares when she was little, so Carol used to go into her bedroom and sleep with her. I got used to sleeping alone. Sarah would sort of cling to Carol, just always be at her side, and by the time Skye came along, there just wasn’t any room for her. Probably why she and I have always been close.’
‘You and Carol always seemed to have an amazing connection, though.’
But how could I possibly know this? I don’t want him to think I’m one of the gullible public who believes everything they see of a star’s persona, and yet. Clark and Carol were beloved for so long because they always seemed visibly, genuinely in love whenever they appeared in public together. They were relationship goals, they were flawless, they were the kind of couple that body-language experts were interviewed about in gossip rags, explaining why his hand on the small of her back or her angling her torso towards him demonstrated that they were built to last. I remember seeing coverage like that as recently as last summer, but who ever knows what the truth is behind the show? And it’s not as though there weren’t whispers. One persistent rumour on the internet’s less mainstream, more dubious gossip corners was that Clark and Carol’s marriage was a sham, built to cover up Clark’s affair with his male co-star in Loner. In retrospect, this story probably originated with the show’s rabid fans, many of whom wanted to see their antagonistic characters get together on-screen. But I wondered, as a teenager, and I wasn’t the only one.
‘I’ve been feeling bad about something,’ Clark says, quietly enough that I have to lean in close. ‘It’s plaguing me, actually. Something I want to tell you, but.’
He finishes there. But. As though this were a sentence.
‘You can trust me.’
‘Did Skye say anything about her mother, the other day?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t mean Carol. Her real mother.’
My mind is sluggish enough that I don’t immediately understand him.
‘Skye isn’t Carol’s. That’s what I was hinting at before, just talking around it, but there it is.’
‘You—’
‘Had an affair. When I was a young asshole who got famous too fast and then married too fast, and I was away from Carol for months on this shoot in New Zealand.’
‘With who?’
‘A young woman who worked on the set. She was lovely, but not stable, and I didn’t treat her very well. Sort of discarded her, after a while.’ There’s true revulsion in his voice, as though he’s speaking directly to the man he was then. ‘It was a terrible time. And when she told me she was pregnant, I knew I had to come clean with Carol.’
‘But wait…’ I’m trying to remember what press coverage there was of Carol’s second pregnancy. I was too young at the time to be aware, but in the course of my research for interviewing Clark I went back and looked at archival scans of magazines. Her first pregnancy, with Sarah, was covered extensively, but I can’t remember anything about her second.
‘You passed the pregnancy off as Carol’s? How?’
‘You have to remember, this was before the internet became what it is now, and before people could track your every movement. Carol was already laying low at that point, raising Sarah, so when we announced that she’d quietly given birth to a second daughter, nobody really questioned it. Back then, you didn’t have to announce everything like you do now.’
‘My God.’
I don’t know what to do with the image I’ve always had of the Conrads, now, but I should have known better than to buy in. Nothing is that golden.
‘What happened to Skye’s mum?’
He shakes his head.
‘She dropped off the map, after the adoption. I tried for months to track her down, because I wanted to try and figure something out, some kind of arrangement, but she was gone.’
‘And Carol just agreed to raise Skye as her own daughter?’
‘Carol is extraordinary. In ways that are hard to describe in words. I have never deserved her.’
I don’t know what to say to him.
‘Jessica, if this ever got out… Well, you know.’
I want to tell him that I will hold this secret like a treasure and never give it up to anyone, that his confiding in me feels like lightning in my heart. But he looks worn out and I feel unsteady, the skyline and the lamplight pulsing around us, and I should not still be here at this hour. He’s saying something, now, and I mumble in response that I just need to close my eyes for a second, sinking back on the couch. I want to sink into him, lean in and see whether he pulls me closer or stiffens, but this is not the moment, and I realize too late that I’ve said this out loud too, or some version of it.
The last thing I remember is the sprawling backseat of an unfamiliar car, dark wood and darker leather, and Clark saying my name.