Bloody Red Barron
BLOODY RED BARRON
The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.
—SOCRATES
February 1984
“Why would you want to work for that asshole?” Ella asked Beanie in the bathroom a few hours after Beanie had convinced Mike Barron to give her a week to show him what a real secretary could do. It wasn’t that Ella didn’t want her to have the job; it was that no one thought she would last. But no one knew how hard Beanie had fought to get there.
For his part, Barron had said yes less because he liked the idea and more because he thought the redhead might file a complaint. Harvey Khan had already spoken to his father about the number of complaints lodged against him, saying that he worried if any of the young women filed a complaint beyond Personnel, to, say, the law, the agency might have to take disciplinary action, which they didn’t want to do for a multitude of reasons. Khan had been candid about the boy’s future, reiterating that Mike could go all the way if he stopped dipping his pen in company ink.
“He’s got a lot of fucking nerve,” Mike said to his father when he called. “Khan’s fucking his secretary when he’s not fucking the head of Personnel, and I need to watch my pen?”
His father, infuriated, spit out his words like pellets penetrating Mike’s bravado. “Until and unless you have Harvey Khan’s title, you use a pencil, and you use it off campus. Understood?” He hung up, not waiting for an answer. The conversation had put Mike into a foul mood. His father was mad at him, Khan was watching him, and some dumpy girl was sitting outside at his secretarial station, while the hot redhead was in Personnel, filing another fucking complaint. He didn’t need this. Not now. Not on top of the rumors that had begun circulating again about him being “the snitch.”
He didn’t understand how they had resurfaced. It had been over five years. Who gives a fuck? he thought, knowing that Bryan, Kevin, and probably all of Alliance did.
“Beanbag!” he called to the girl at the desk.
“It’s Beanie,” she said.
“Come in here.”
She did.
He wanted to know what the hell she thought she was going to do for him.
“Glad you asked,” she said, sitting on the obligatory black leather couch where she imagined many a woman had sat before, only her legs were closed, and her eyes were open.
Beanie, laser focused on the Mike Barron wave that rose before her, knew that this was her do-or-die moment. Poised, she would either swim through to her future, or be caught in an undertow that would dump her with the thousands of other nameless sexitaries who’d failed miserably on his desk.
But at least they had been on his desk. Beanie was still hovering somewhere above it. She took a deep breath and with articulate precision outlined her plan for their future, which included Mike becoming head of the motion picture talent department, with Beanie as a motion picture agent.
She knew that she was taking a calculated risk revealing her personal ambition, but she also knew that he’d smell bullshit if she kissed ass. Most importantly, she knew that he knew that she knew exactly who he was, and what was expected of his secretaries. Therefore, it was her job to set herself apart not only from the spinners whom he usually hired, but from any other secretary he might want to hire.
Which was why she opted to tell him about her long-range goals.
“You want to be an agent?” he asked, looking at her in amazement. “You know the rules,” he said, reciting, “Secretaries can’t be trainees, much less agents.”
Silently he thought, Especially ones that look like her.
“We don’t believe in rules,” she told him, again aligning the two of them as one, as she went on to explain that Jamie Garland would tire of the position that Mike had wanted. “So, if we play our cards right, you can have it in six months.”
He looked at her, unable to hide the incredulous grin on his face. “And how are we going to do that?” he asked. He wanted a plan.
Of course, she didn’t have a plan, because twenty minutes earlier she hadn’t known she needed one. So, she put on her dancing shoes, tapped for a future that was still forming, and explained that for Barron to become head of the motion picture talent department, he needed to first reduce the number of complaints lodged against him, which by virtue of the fact that she was now going to work for him would not only ameliorate but obfuscate anything that came before.
“I’m well liked,” she told him, not at all sure she was. “I can let it be known that you’ve changed your ways.”
Barron looked at her. “Oh, so you are going to help me?”
She nodded, ignoring the astonishment and sarcasm behind the comment. “Yes,” she said with absolute certainty. “You need someone who believes in you, and I need someone who believes in me,” she told him, doubling down that it wouldn’t hurt if he stepped it up and signed a few hot stars on his own.
Of course, she knew his client list, but most of them had been signed by Amati, so no matter how much work Barron did, he’d be the number two and Amati would always get the credit. “They can never see you shine if you’re in someone else’s shadow,” she told him. She was aware he had signed Robby Benson and a couple of the kids from Fame, but that wasn’t enough. She was talking about signing someone hot. Someone who could perhaps become as big as Scott Westman.
This loony bitch has some fucking balls, he thought.
“Who do you have in mind?” he said, sitting back in his chair, both insulted and intrigued.
“Nicolas Cage,” she told him.
It was the first person who’d popped into her head. He was the prototype, the young actor that young Hollywood admired. Everyone was talking about Nicolas Cage and Sean Penn. Penn had exploded in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Nicolas had just come out in Valley Girl, which had propelled him to the top of the hot young stars. They were both in demand. Everyone wanted to meet them, to know them, to work with them.
“How am I going to do that?” he asked.
“I’m going to introduce you,” she said matter-of-factly, “and I’ll tell him how good you are. How smart you are. You don’t just play with a catcher’s mitt like most agents,” she said, stroking his wounded ego. “You build careers. And someone like Nicolas,” she added, using his first name for familiarity, “needs an architect. We’re architects.”
Again, the we.
He looked at her. Jesus, this kid talks a lot, he thought, but still: what she was saying was intriguing, if it wasn’t bullshit.
“How do you know him?” he asked suspiciously.
Trying to stay as close to the truth as she could, Beanie explained that her stepfather’s cousin was Neiman Spitz, a famous composer who had done some work with Francis Coppola. And Nicolas was Coppola’s nephew, so…
“So?” he asked.
“So,” she explained, “that was how we met, through Neiman, and then we just became friends.”
While the first part was true, Neiman Spitz had done some work with Coppola, or so she’d heard, the second part was as big a lie as she’d ever told, but Barron bought it. She added that it was Coppola who’d gotten her into the agency. As long as she was lying, she figured she’d swing for the fences.
Before he could drill down, she stood up, reminding him that the motion picture meeting started. Handing him the casting folder, she told him that she had lots of ideas, and that they would strategize later.
Five minutes earlier he’d have tossed her on her ass just for presuming there would be a later. He’d have asked for someone with long legs and no last name, and not thought twice about this crazy loon. But Barron, an opportunist, recognized an opportunity. This dumpy girl might be exactly what he needed. Harvey Khan and, more importantly, his father would approve. He looked at Beanie, took the folder, and left, his silence signaling that she had earned the right, at least for that afternoon, to stay.
It happened so fast that Beanie hadn’t had time to process. And though Ella, Barry, Garry, and especially Moze were shocked when they’d heard that Beanie was suddenly working for a misogynist who passed his sexitaries around like loving cups, they were more shocked that she was happy to be there.
In a stunning turn of events, she had lost a desk she’d been promised for several months and taken a desk that no one had lasted on for more than a few weeks. In survival mode, she’d gone on autopilot, looking for a place to land. That it had been with the man who was most degrading to secretaries, the one she had originally hoped to work for, didn’t seem odd. It seemed somehow providential.
That night, lying on her side next to Moze, Beanie knew one thing for sure: Mike Barron was enough of a narcissist that if you were willing to devote your life to his, he’d keep you around.
Beanie Rosen was willing.
Now all she had to do was figure out how to meet Nicolas Cage.