She’s Dead
SHE’S DEAD
1995
“She’s dead,” said the woman’s voice on the other end of the line. “Beanie’s dead.”
Beanie Rosen, when she died at thirty-five, was the most powerful agent in Hollywood. She had summited, passing countless men and the few women who had come before her, outlasting, outwitting—at least for a moment. But by harnessing that moment, freezing it in time, she would always, at the very least, keep the title. And titles were important to Beanie. They cemented truth, even when truth was in doubt, and sustained the legend long after the legend was gone. So, while others would disappear into the ether, her impeccable timing for endings ensured that she would not.
Everything with Beanie was about timing.
“That’s how you sign the stars,” she liked to say. “You keep it short, hit the point, make them laugh—but not too much, never too much—then you end it by saying something that makes them think that you’re the missing piece to whatever the fuck they need.” Beanie Rosen signed a lot of stars. And for her services she took 10 percent of their salary and 50 percent of their heat. The more stars she signed, the hotter she was. And Beanie, for a while, was the hottest. But stars, even suns, burn out. So, the trick was to leave them before they could leave you.
“At least she died on top,” said the unknown voice on the other end of a phone that Moze Goff had answered at five in the morning after getting off a red-eye. Goff, thirty-seven, a top New York agent who was considered by many to be equally as powerful and infinitely smarter than Beanie Rosen, sat up in bed, stunned and disoriented. Holding the slim black receiver to his ear, he heard a voice telling him that Beanie Rosen had died. Was it a prank? A sick joke? Usually, his houseman would have answered, or his service, but the incessant ringing during off hours informed an urgency that circumnavigated station.
“Who the hell is this?” he asked, searching for a Gitane, his cigarette of choice, only to find that they had been replaced by a carton of Merits in some asinine attempt by his on-again, off-again lover to get him to quit. “Hellooooo?” he said, growing more annoyed.
“Yeah, sorry,” said the voice, between sobs. “It’s Ella. Gaddy. I didn’t mean to wake you, but I figured that I should call you instead of Mercedes Khan. I mean, that might be awkward.”
“Who?” he asked, trying to shake the sleep from his brain.
“Mercedes Khan. She called me. That’s how I heard. Beanie’s mother called her and asked that she notify people.” The irony somehow eluding Ella was not lost on Moze. Mercedes Khan was married to the president of the Sylvan Light Agency, and Moze hadn’t spoken to her since he worked there, and even then only rarely due to the fact that Beanie detested everything about her.
They had been roommates once—Beanie, Mercedes, and Ella—starting out, climbing the ladder three-girls-three, that kind of thing. But Mercedes had used Beanie and then tried to destroy her, at least by Moze’s recollection. So she being the messenger of Beanie’s demise seemed like some kind of cosmic joke.
But obviously not to Ella. “Mercedes is having a little gathering at the Stone Canyon house day after tomorrow, and she wanted me to ask if you’d fly out. We could all be there together. Beanie would have liked that.”
No, she wouldn’t, Moze thought, walking through his Greenwich Village apartment to his outdoor terrace, high above the city. Beanie hated Mercedes. And you hated Beanie. At least that’s what you told me yesterday. Of course, he didn’t say that aloud. Not to Ella. He wanted to stay on her good side. She was an important manager who had important clients she was going to bring to him.
Or so she’d said twenty-four hours earlier when she’d sworn to Moze that her friendship with Beanie was irrevocably broken. “I’ll never work with her again,” she had vowed, and now here she was, sobbing over the fact that she couldn’t.
He wondered momentarily if Ella had killed Beanie. She had been mad after all, and not particularly forthcoming about the details. Could she have done it out of rage or spite or perhaps envy? Of course the thought was crazy, but when everything is crazy, nothing is. That’s what Beanie used to say.
The city below was still asleep.
Jesus Christ, this makes no sense, he thought, running his hands through his short curly hair. Beanie was still so young, and while not exactly the picture of health, she was robust, he presumed, though he hadn’t seen her in almost a year. But he’d heard about her, certainly felt her presence, her imprimatur on the industry as her legend and fluctuating waistline had grown and shrunk and grown again. There were always jokes about her, inside barbs, cruel remarks. But that’s what happens when you push and pull and leverage your way into a club that never wanted you in the first place.
And now she was dead.
It was hard for him to get his head around it. Moze had loved her. Once. Or maybe he hadn’t. He wasn’t sure anymore. Perhaps he didn’t have the right to judge any of them. By force or by leverage or quite by accident Beanie Rosen had changed the rules for women, then bent them enough so Ella Gaddy and Mercedes Baxter Khan could follow. Driven by mothers who wanted more in a time when less was given, these women knew no other way. Their backgrounds were as unique as their talents, and their passion to be heard was as fierce as their rage at being silenced. Unwilling to settle for less in a world where less was expected, they stood on each other’s shoulders, craning their necks to get a better view of the well-established patriarchy that for years had barred them from entry.
Neither feminists nor activists, they just wanted in.
Theirs was a story of survival, of friendship, of betrayal; of saying fuck you instead of thank you, of standing up when they pass you by, of saying “I won’t quit” when they want you gone. And it’s also a story about how some of those women became the very monsters they had fought against.
But it had all started with Beanie.
If not for her, where would any of them be?