finally catching up to her body.
Mimi could no longer judge Marianne for preferring Willoughby over the older and more muted Colonel Brandon, only to wind up close to feverish death; she just hoped and prayed that she wouldn’t end up a sobbing, reclusive mess by the end of it all, too.
* * *
“Mimi, how lovely you look. Let me get you some champagne.”
Monte Cartwright was an older, portly man well into his fifties. The head of the studio that had made Mimi a star, he had a preternatural knack for sizing up a young actor’s marquee value from the first screen test, then locking them into a long-term contract so punitive that they would spend at least the next decade ruing the day they had ever met him.
Mimi’s ten-year contract had three years left on it, and every time she saw Monte she mentally checked off another square on the calendar of her servitude. The out-of-house projects she was allowed to do, such as the burgeoning Sense and Sensibility adaptation with Jack, had been hard-earned over time, through contract negotiations aided by her business-lawyer brother back home in Philadelphia. At age thirty-five, Mimi shrewdly understood that her only leverage with the studio came from her box-office receipts, so she continued to take on as many promising projects as she could. Some of her fellow aging actresses were already raising families or otherwise taking “breaks” that quickly became permanent in an industry where perception and momentum were everything. But Mimi kept working at building up career capital, before the tiny lines about her eyes deepened and the first grey hair showed up.
Monte was now sitting on the matching sofa facing hers in his hotel room, staring at the hair about her brow, that famous raven-black mane, wondering when that first grey hair would show up. Mimi was finally starting to look just the tiniest bit different from before—he knew the signs well, as he was constantly on the lookout for them, as if circling his prey for any indications of injury or fatigue.
“You’re looking a little tired, Mimi, although as lovely as ever. Is Terry running you ragged on the Western shoot? Those early-morning calls out in Nevada for his goddamned sunrises—what are you now, two hours in the make-up chair?”
Mimi shifted about in her seat, losing count of the number of references to her age he could make in one single ramble.
“It’s all good, we’re all wrapped up now. Angela’s going to be a revelation in it.”
He looked at her in surprise, unable to figure out her end game in singling out her much-younger co-star for his attention. “Yeah, that kid’s a real find. What is she, twenty? Twenty-one at most? You’d never know it—smokes like a teamster and swears like one, too. Hell, she even sounds like one sometimes—we’ve been working on that. There’s husky, and then there’s just goddamned menacing.”
On some level, Mimi always enjoyed her infrequent meetings with Monte, as his love of hearing himself talk and his need to put others in their place kept him so fully occupied, she could usually just sit back and think about something else. Lately that something else had been Jack Leonard, to her complete surprise and consternation. He was indeed getting into her head—and worse still, she worried that he knew it. If he didn’t before, that kiss a few hours earlier had probably done the trick.
Meanwhile, Monte was talking about some poor “dimwit” actress, and her recent shotgun marriage, and a conflict of laws with the Dominican Republic over the equally recent divorce (Mimi had to hand it to Monte, he did know the law, at least well enough to get around it). She was half listening, sipping the second glass of Piper-Heidsieck that he had poured her, when Monte finished his Scotch, got up, and sat down uninvited next to her.
Patting her knee, he asked most solicitously, “Did he tell you, yet?”
“Did who tell me what, Monte?”
“Terry. Did he tell you about Angela?”
“Tell me what about Angela, Monte?”
“Her billing.”
“What about her billing?”
Monte smiled at her. “Well, I guess we could play this little game all day. About Angela’s billing going right next to yours, above the titles.”
Mimi forced herself to breathe. “But that’s preposterous. It’s only her second feature.”
“Yeah, but you’re both vying for Cooper and he’s the lead, so it makes sense, optically at least—or at least that’s what Terry thinks. Look, Mimi, I’m all for saying something to him—but I need to know how much