Amy Sohn - The Actress

Kira moved to her next interview, and Maddy and Steven answered dumb predictable questions for the dopey young reporter. She said kind things about Kira’s performance, and the guy was good enough not to mention that she’d had to back out, even though everyone knew about it.

After they had given half a dozen interviews, they made their way toward the entrance. As they moved up the line, slowly, slowly, the ticket-taking drawn out so the fans could get their last glimpses of everyone famous on the line, Steven put his mouth to her ear. “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” he whispered. “And I don’t want to keep hiding. I want Jake to know me. All these years I told myself there was no other choice, but there was. I’m going to tell the world who I am. If I lose Tommy Hall, I don’t care.”

She was shocked. Did he mean here, tonight? The orchestra was quick to cut off people during acceptance speeches, not to mention any other kind. But he was Steven Weller, and the producers would recognize international news when they saw it.

She looked at him again, her eyes welling with pride. Her ex-husband was about to make history. And the moment would be immortalized on camera, the cameras that had been his friend all these years, the cameras that had brought him everything he had, including Maddy. Including Jake.

They made their way to the reporter waiting to talk to them. Holding her hand, Steven walked just a few steps ahead.

Inside the theater, they sat side by side, watching the endless ceremony, laughing appropriately at the jokes. The beginning was slow. The host, a faded comedian in his sixties, opened with a big song-and-dance number. Steven was to present the best-editing Oscar, to be given out toward the end of the first hour. When a production assistant tapped him on the shoulder during a commercial break to take him backstage, Steven squeezed Maddy’s hand. She looked up at him to see if he really meant it, if he was really going to do this thing. But he was already gone.

As Steven made his way up the aisle, he knew that when he walked back down, everything would be different. These were his last moments as the Steven Weller everyone knew, and tonight would be marked as the turning point. It was terrifying, and he still didn’t know exactly what he was going to say, he hadn’t wanted to memorize it, but when he was done, he would be a different person. A real father to his son. You had to be honest to be a good parent; otherwise you set a terrible example.

Everything was going to be fine. He’d been in the industry long enough that he had earning power, any producer would see that, the studios knew it, and there would be goodwill, especially from GLAAD, an organization that had surpassed the ADL in Hollywood power. He would lose the third Tommy Hall; they would put it in turnaround to “rethink” the casting, he knew that.

But he would bounce back. It might take some time, but he would bounce back. Audiences were sophisticated now, they knew gay people, it was why gay marriage was going to pass, the tide was shifting and audiences could suspend disbelief, they suspended disbelief every time they watched a straight guy play a fag for an award, a beautiful actress don a prosthetic nose.

He was nearing the back of the theater, and he saw Harry Matheson, the late-night host, sitting in the audience next to his wife. It was his red hair that caught Steven’s eye. As Steven moved down the aisle, Harry gave him a thumbs-up.

Steven remembered Maddy going on Harry and discussing his sexual prowess. She had been “on” that night, herself but not herself, the perfect actress. And then she had come into the greenroom, and it was as though she had been flattened.

One night when he was on the boat with Christian, they’d had a conversation about porn titles. Christian was so young, only twenty-four, that he didn’t even know about the days when pornos had stories. Steven remembered one he had watched in the early 1990s, a takeoff of a sitcom called Jack and Mike . The porn title was Jacking Mike , and on the boat, they had laughed about it. He had felt relaxed in moments like that; those moments were why he went on Jo with Christian and the others before and after.

He had been taking a risk with Christian, who was out of his usual circle of agents and agents’ assistants and art directors and stylists, who were doing fine on their own and had nothing to gain from outing him. But he was a sweet kid, such an open face. They had flirted every time Steven went to the boat, and he had seen Steven with the other guys, and somehow he had weaseled his way on, though Steven had had an instinct that it was a bad idea. He had let his guard down, but for a month or two, he had gotten away with it, until he got the call from Edward.

When the story broke, he had felt trapped, he had been sure it was the end, but then Maddy had stepped up to help him out. He hadn’t even had to ask. That was how much she loved him. Now he would tell the truth, and in telling the truth, he would be outing her as a liar. They would replay her clip ad infinitum, back to back with the speech he was about to give. This was about much more than the stakes for him. It was about more than undoing a fifteen-year-old image and reversing the lengths he had gone to in order to work, in order to keep working, in order to get to the top.

There were stakes for her: She would be perceived as a dupe at best, a conniver at worst. They would mock her Harry appearance and the marriage. Maddy had put herself on the line for him, and while he knew she wanted him to be honest for Jake’s sake, had she really thought about it, about the repercussions for her own career, her own image? She was talented, more talented than he was, and she would want to keep working.

He loved her, and if you loved someone, you had to put her first, as she had put him first for so many years, not only when she played Faye Fontinell and when she went on Harry’s show but before that, when she changed her clothing and makeup and learned how to give sound bites, all so she could be Mrs. Steven Weller. This was about something greater than he, and if he didn’t recognize it, if he didn’t see the sacrifices she had made, then he was selfish, and he didn’t want to be selfish, that was what had gotten him into the mess with Maddy, that was why he had lost her in the first place.

A cameraman scurried up the aisle toward Maddy as the host spoke from the stage. Because of the divorce, the producers wanted to be ready for a reaction, she understood that, even though no one knew what Steven had planned.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the host was saying, “please welcome a man who needs no introduction, because he’s so handsome and talented that we all just want to kill him. Steven Weller.”

Maddy kept a frozen smile on her face as she clapped along with the others. And then Steven was onstage, resplendent in his tux as always, his body so strong, his skin tan. He looked cool, as though this were nothing, he would ace it, there was no sign of any struggle on his face, he would do this his own way, calm and collected but real. For the first time, real.

“I came here tonight,” he said, “to do something special.”

A hush came over the audience as they perhaps suspected that the words he was speaking were not from the TelePrompter. “And I . . . I . . .” He seemed to be looking above their heads at something behind them, above them, and beyond the walls of the theater. The silence hung there, no music cue to take it away. There was a lone cough. And then he grinned and said, “I am pleased to share with you the nominees for achievement in editing.”

The financing for Pinhole came together in the spring, a few months after Maddy was divorced. It would be an international coproduction involving four different companies and a handful of independent financiers. Maddy had chosen Deborah Berenson as the director, and after they booked the now-famous Billy Peck to play Max Sandoval, they were able to complete the financing.