A Strange Flu
A STRANGE FLU
Man is not what he thinks he is. He is what he hides.
—ARISTOTLE
1986
By Christmas 1985, the agency had reemerged as the powerhouse it had once been. Sheila and Sam were an unbeatable team, and Beanie, though not directly working for either, felt connected to both. It was a great way to end the year and kick off the holidays.
Ella was housesitting in Malibu for Scott Westman and invited a few friends to spend the holiday weekend at the breathtaking estate, built on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. In addition to the main house, there were three separate casitas, enough to sleep six couples comfortably. Of course, she’d invited Beanie and Moze, but Sam had come down with the flu and Moze felt he had to stay close. Barry also begged off due to work, but Garry Sampson and his new fiancée, Meghan, said they’d come, and Veronica Hamel and her boyfriend also accepted.
“You’re my date,” Ella said to Beanie, “at least until Scotti gets here.”
There was an unspoken understanding in their small circle that Ella and Westman were together. No one questioned exactly what that meant, especially since it seemed to be sanctioned by Garry Sampson. How Ella had managed that Beanie wasn’t sure, but from his former lover and current secretary she had morphed into his best friend, trusted adviser, and love barometer, even when it came to Sampson’s search for a soulmate. Ella lived a life by her own design, never giving fuel to the many raised eyebrows or whispered innuendos about her affair first with her boss and now with the biggest star in the world.
She doesn’t give a hoot what people say, Beanie thought, and that gives her immunity against them.
Beanie, who had put in for vacation time, planned to stay the whole week between Christmas and New Year’s with Ella, hoping that Moze would join on either one of the weekends, but as soon as she arrived and beeped into her answering machine she began repacking.
“Is this because Moze didn’t come?” Ella asked, hurt and a bit offended.
They’d planned this for almost a month, and she’d even given Beanie the guest room in the main house, with the new queen bed overlooking the Pacific.
“No, I swear,” Beanie said, adding that it was an urgent work matter, but she would be back on Christmas—or the day after, at the latest.
“What is it that can’t wait?” Ella asked, not settling for the oblique excuse offered. Beanie took a deep breath.
“Sheila Day was invited to Bette Midler’s house for Christmas,” Beanie told her.
“Who gives a fuck?” Ella said, her suspicions confirmed that Beanie’s abrupt departure had less to do with an emergency and more to do with kissing the ass of a woman Ella detested.
“She called me personally. I mean it was her voice on our machine, asking me to make a list of potential projects for Bette so she could try to sign her. I need to get back to the office today to access the database and prepare everything for tomorrow.” Beanie picked up her overnight bag and again reassured Ella that she’d be back as soon as she was finished.
“It’s Christmas fucking Eve,” Ella said.
“According to Sheila,” Beanie told her, “the holidays are the best time to sign. Actors get end-of-the-year jitters, and Sheila likes to take advantage of that.”
“That’s the spirit,” Ella muttered, resentful that Beanie was a party to this manipulation.
While Beanie felt bad for letting Ella down, she also felt a bit emancipated, secretly hoping that she and Moze could get together for a day, maybe two. She would deal with Ella’s disappointment later.
It took her less than an hour to drive to Beverly Hills.
She immediately went downstairs to see if Moze was in the office doing something for Sam, but he wasn’t. Given that it was Christmas Eve, the whole building was pretty empty. He’s probably at Sam’s house, she thought, leaving him a message that she, too, was working in town all weekend and maybe they could hook up.
Back in her office, she spent a few hours going through all the databases and pulling synopses of all the scripts that could be right for Bette, including those with male leads that could be switched to female. She didn’t finish until after seven, and then took the signing binder to Sheila’s home, stopping first at a pay phone and leaving another message for Moze saying that she was going home to shower, then maybe they’d grab dinner.
“Come out, come out wherever you are,” she said playfully into his machine.
And he did.
Twenty minutes later she found Moze lying on what once was Mercedes’s pastel couch in Beanie’s apartment getting deep-throated by Barry Licht. She had never seen two men having sex, oral or otherwise, and except for the fact that one of them was her current lover getting blown by her ex, she did think it was kind of hot.
For a moment they all stupidly stared, paralyzed mid-blow—or was it suck? She wasn’t sure.
Finally, she said to Moze, “I guess you should have kept working for Gil Amati after all,” and then walked out.
Moze, putting on a pair of shorts, followed, shouting for her to wait up.
“You like guys?” she said, turning on him.
“Yeah,” he told her. “What’s the big deal?”
“I mean,” she started, unsure how to answer, “you introduced me to your parents.” She was leaning against the Swinger, shaking her head laughing.
“So…?”
“Never mind,” she told him, getting into her car.
He held the door open. “What did you think was going to happen? We’d get married? Raise little agents?”
She slammed the door. “Fuck you!” she screamed.
“What don’t you get?” he shouted back, pacing in front of the car. She had never seen Moze so out of control. He shook his head and balled up his fists in utter frustration. Finally, he walked up to the car door and opened it.
“What don’t you get?” he asked again, only this time gently. “I’m not traditional,” he said.
“Yeah, I know,” she replied, starting the engine. “You told me.” She was broken-hearted, less for what she’d lost and more for the idea of what she’d lost.
Christmas and New Year’s came and went. They didn’t talk again, not really. If they saw each other in the hall at work, they’d nod or smile, but he seemed preoccupied, distant. In truth, he was.
For the first two months of 1986, Sam Lesser had been in and out of Cedars-Sinai, exhausted by a strange flu he couldn’t shake. He came back to the office in early March, but only for a few hours each day, dozens of calls left unreturned, many of them from star clients.
Moze did his best to juggle, enlisting and entrusting Garry. The two would send scripts, make appointments on Sam’s behalf, and try to handle as much as they could without sending up an alarm. But on April 15, the alarm sounded regardless: Redford sent a termination letter firing the Light Agency and returning to Alliance. He stated that he’d barely heard from Sam, and while Sheila was a lot of laughs, he’d signed with Lesser.
Trivialized and marginalized, and once again frightened that others might follow, Sheila Day never showed how hurt she was. Instead, she brushed the whole thing off. “Hubbell Gardiner, he’s not,” she’d say to anyone who asked, and focused her attention on her new client Bette Midler and her other stars that needed tending.
But acutely aware that, like it or not, Redford had been correct in his claims that Lesser had been absent, Sheila worried that something was wrong, terribly wrong. Lesser signed the superstar, then disappeared.
She asked Moze, she asked Garry, but both just said he had a strange flu.
By May, Sam Lesser stopped coming in altogether; by June, he’d stopped returning calls to the board of directors, his friends, and all but a few of his clients.
Moze Goff became the conduit to everyone in the agency and the industry, claiming that Sam was recovering from a bronchial infection. But taking Garry’s advice, Moze had confided to both the board and the senior management, including Sheila Day, that perhaps they should temporarily reassign Sam’s clients until he recovered.
Suddenly Sheila Day, Gil Amati, and Jamie Garland were handling or trying to handle the massive list of stars and filmmakers who were beginning to feel Sam’s absence. But no one other than Moze and Garry knew just how bad it was.
Together, they braced themselves for a truth neither wanted to face.
On July 25, one year to the day that Rock Hudson’s publicist had announced to the world that the matinee idol, with his gaunt appearance and slurred speech, did in fact suffer from AIDS, Sam Lesser, whose face had aged twenty years and body had withered to 147 pounds, died from the same disease.
Disgusted that Hudson’s publicist had gone public after Hudson had specifically instructed otherwise, Sam, upon learning the truth of his own diagnosis, leaned over to his companion Johnny Merritt and to Garry Sampson.
“Never tell,” he told them.
The announcement was made official July 26, 1986.
Samuel Lesser had died from complications of pneumonia… and a strange flu.