Dan Wakefield - Selling Out - A Novel

“Look!” Perry exclaimed to Jane over a breakfast of Huevos Rancheros at the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset. “Here they are!”

Well, not in the flesh, of course, but in the Society page of the L.A. Times . He passed it to Jane, folding the page to the picture.

There was Pru wearing one of her basic black Bonwit dresses with the simple string of pearls, and Vaughan in his tweed sport-coat from J. Press in Cambridge, the ultimate Harvard haberdasher. They still flew back East to buy their clothes, for stubbornly maintaining their Ivy League style amid the glitzy gold-chain culture of Hollywood had become a kind of trademark with them, a sign of principle that they carried into all areas of life, up to and including the culinary. Pru’s popular New England Boiled Dinners were considered the social event of what the local press respectfully referred to as the “A List” of the Industry. No wonder then that Vaughan and Pru looked a little uncomfortably sheepish in this photograph, wearing Hawaiian-style leis around their necks—but the incongruity was explained in the headline over the picture:

VARDEMANS TO HOST LUAU FOR LEUKEMIA

The story said top directors’ agent Pru Vardeman and her producer husband, Vaughan, were generously offering their Bel Air estate for this charity event which was being backed by the top people in the industry.

Perry grinned and shook his head in affectionate amusement.

“I can’t wait to put them on about this,” he chuckled.

“You may have to wait,” Jane said. “I doubt they’ll have time for their poor country cousins.”

“Now, now, let’s be fair. They took us to Locke’s the last time they were in Boston.”

“That was before they made their millions on that vampire movie. Besides, what was the alternative? A stroll down the Freedom Trail? Hang out at Quincy Market?”

“Darling, love of my life, as a big favor to me, do you think while we’re out here you could try to just accept the Vardemans the way they are, maybe even enjoy them a little bit?”

Jane pulled down her chin, squeezed her nose with her fingers, and did an imitation of Pru Pinchel Vardeman’s Radcliffe accent.

“Oh, Lord sies, why don’t we all get ’faced and go skinny-dipping?”

“Why don’t you think of them as your very own field anthropology? Something like ‘At home with the Dippy-dos.’”

“Okay, touché. But promise me you won’t go fishing for an invitation to their cozy little mansion. I don’t want to have to plead to be invited anywhere.”

“Darling, we’re inviting them .”

“For a tuna melt at the Hamburger Hamlet?”

Perry grinned, pleased with his plan.

“I’m going to invite them to be our guests at Spoleto. We’ll take them to the hottest new restaurant in town.”

Jane pinched her nose.

“Oh Lordsies,” she said.

Archer Mellis was impressed with the ten pages Perry brought him. He said it was just what he hoped it would be—natural, fresh, charming; sad and funny at the same time.

Archer was even more impressed that Perry was such good friends with the Vees (as the Vardemans were popularly known around town) that they had agreed to go to dinner with him and Jane at Spoleto.

Archer knew them himself, of course. “If I didn’t know the Vees I might as well be living in Tulsa,” he said. He had met them around town, at screenings and parties, but he didn’t go way back with them, like Perry did. At any rate, he was more than happy to ring up Dom and make sure Perry was welcomed with honor at Spoleto and given a choice table when he hosted his important friends.

Archer said to give the Vees his best, and tell them they were welcome on his lot anytime if they wanted to see their old amigo ’s first pilot in production when it got under way.

“The Vees talking up your show won’t hurt us a bit,” Archer said with a wink.

Spoleto was all aglitter. It was, as Vaughan Vardeman observed, “ass-deep” in stars the evening he and Pru joined Perry and Jane there for dinner. All the stars stopped by their table to say hello and pay court to the Vees—and, as was only natural, meet their dear old friends Perry and Jane Moss.

It was a long way from Haviland, Vermont.

The satisfying part of it for Perry was that he was not just sitting there like an outsider, listening to the in stories of Hollywood from the Vees like some visiting hick from the sticks—hell, he was talking shop with them.

“Tell me frankly,” Perry said, sipping his Napa Valley Chardonnay, “what would you think of Renna Greaves as a bright, fairly kooky, recently married graduate student?”

Earlier that very day, when Archer Mellis had posed the same question to Perry, he had never even heard of Renna Greaves. Now he could hardly imagine not knowing she was the hottest new overnight sensation in town by virtue of raves on the Industry grapevine for her knockout performance in the new remake of “Streetcar,” which wasn’t even released yet.

The Vardemans didn’t at once respond, looking at each other with curious glances, and Perry’s heart leaped, pulsing with the wild hope that by some miraculous lapse the Vees had not yet heard of Renna Greaves. That meant he would be one up on them about the hottest new sensation in their own backyard!

Jane, evidently sensing another reason for their lack of response, quickly said, “Perry means can you see her playing the part of Laurie, the young wife in “The First Year’s the Hardest.’”

Pru finally spoke, in her heaviest, most nasal Radcliffe accent.

“You mean hypo the tically, I presume, since she surely wouldn’t actually do it?”

Perry smiled.

“I think you guys know me well enough to realize I don’t go around tooting my own horn. But I gotta tell you, this script is something special. I mean, I’m only a little more than halfway through, but I’m really excited about it. So, who knows? Maybe even Renna Greaves will go for it.”

“Oh Lordsies, I didn’t mean any reflection on your script. I’m sure it’s charming. I only meant I couldn’t imagine now that she’s hot she’d want to do television .”

Vaughan burped and shrugged.

“For big bucks, Renna Greaves would hump a horse,” he said.

Pru turned quickly to Vaughan and spoke in such a sharp, sudden manner it seemed as if she were spitting the words at him, through the slit of her thin smile.

“Since when do you know about Renna Greaves’s humping habits?”

“Oh, for shit on a stick,” Vaughan groaned, tossing his napkin up in the air.

Perry had to stifle a laugh, not of enjoyment over the Vees’ little controversy, but really from affection at how little they had changed. Vaughan was still the raunchy little cock of the walk, enjoying his farts and belches just as he did back at Cronin’s bar in Cambridge, and Pru was the stiff, horsey type, the eternal image of the Eastern socialite snob. They were an unlikely pair, physically as well as in personality, but somehow if you knew them they went together, an odd but credible combination. Perry wondered, though, if Vaughan’s being—as he no doubt would put it himself—“ass-deep” in sexy young actresses in the line of duty as a producer was really causing trouble for them.

“By the way, I think you both know Archer Mellis,” Perry said quickly, hoping to shift to neutral terrain.

“Mellis?” asked Pru. “Isn’t he the real estate lawyer who fronted for those Iranians—the ones who wanted to buy the Santa Monica Mall?”

“No, no,” Vaughan corrected her, “you’re thinking of Arnold Melman. Archer Mellis is the new boy at Paragon.”

“You must be mistaken,” Pru shot back. “Rick Stutz is the new boy at Paragon.”