Epilogue
EPILOGUE
Ella Gaddy had a baby boy that July and named him Bernie Rosen Cowan after her friend. She was lost without Beanie and tried to honor her memory by putting all her clients with Hawkeye, under the proviso that she never share them with Sheila Day. But without Beanie driving, she began to lose passion and focus, and other than Westman, let go of her clients, devoting herself to Olive and Bernie and life in Tahoe.
In the spring of 2000, Ella, forty-three, was contacted by an attorney on behalf of a twenty-one-year-old young man named Milo Williams who’d been searching for his birth mother. She flew to Chicago that December where the two finally met. He was tall, handsome, and had a passion inside him, much like his father, Ella said, telling him truthfully that Darnell, his father, had been a married physician who had never even known she was pregnant. She’d wanted Milo dearly, she explained, and knew he would be destined for greatness, but realized sadly that her own parents were not. She showed him pictures of Olive and Bernie, and he showed her pictures of his brothers and sisters and mother and father.
She had chosen well, and that made her whole.
The following year she left Stirling Cowan, Tahoe, and even Scott Westman, taking Olive and Bernie and moving back to Kentucky to help her brother Knox, who’d had a catastrophic fall and needed someone to take over the family business. The Senator, who’d had a stroke that left him partially paralyzed, was pleased that Ella had come back into the fold. Eve Lynn had died the year before, with tributes and obituaries about the death of the last debutante, and Alice Lee, now divorced, was living in England. So, it was left to Ella to uphold the Gaddy traditions of propriety and decorum that her mother had fought so hard to protect. Determined to leave her mark, she turned over the multimillion-dollar empire to their eldest grandchild, Milo Williams, who as a doctoral student at Northwestern University and president of the black student union, was now in charge of the Gaddy legacy.
Ella had found her way back home.
Mercedes Khan stayed at the Sylvan Light Agency as the right hand of Khan until he died in 2001. She never remarried nor had children, but she did reach out to her sister, who by then was widowed and living part time in New York. The phone call was cordial, and they made plans to get together, but didn’t until 2011, at the age of sixty-one, when Mercedes visited Lucille, then seventy-five, who was suffering from early onset dementia. Mercedes introduced herself to the nurses as Lucille Goldstone’s daughter, and she sat with her daily, reminiscing when Lucille was lucid, and keeping her company when she was not.
It was a mother-and-child reunion where both finally could be each other’s patron saints.
Sheila Day never signed Tom Cruise and never got the board seat. Six months after Beanie’s funeral, Sheila Day “voluntarily” retired, entertaining twinklies at her home and showing them clips of her 60 Minutes interview, wiping away the stench of her second chapter as if it was nothing more than a footnote to an illustrious career.
When asked about Beanie Rosen, Sheila would say, “Honeeeey, we were just too fucking good for the cocksuckers,” aligning herself with Beanie’s rise and fall.
Hawkeye went on to become a super-agent, and then, later, the head of Columbia Studios. But before she left Sylvan Light, she convinced the board of directors to commission a bust of Beanie Rosen to be put in the lobby of the Sylvan Light Plaza, not too far from where they’d met when she was the receptionist and Beanie was a girl who just wanted in. Hawkeye was the first woman of color to ever be an agent at the company, and the first woman of color to run a film studio; and she credited her rise to the woman she’d worked for, with, and beside.
Beanie Rosen was the reason they named hurricanes after women. She stood on the shoulders of those who came before to reach higher than any woman had ever reached. The town mourned her in the way you do when someone dies too young, celebrating her in absentia with scholarships in her name and stories that were so much larger than the life she’d led.
They say when someone dies their life passes before their eyes in an instant. But that’s not how it was for Beanie. For Beanie, it was more like a slow-motion ballet. Once she was airborne, she was angry—who wouldn’t be? She didn’t want to die. Not now. Not when she had everything to live for. She had saved the client, her relationship with Ella would repair, Stieglitz was gone, Shipp was gone, there were no more obstacles, the world was hers; but then, when she played the record out, looking at the Doritos floating around her head, she realized that maybe this was perfect timing.
She had reached the top, the pinnacle. So, what next? She had only to look to Sheila and Jamie and all the others who’d come before, who’d fought and struggled to leave their marks, and then disappeared, as if they never were. A quick slide to oblivion. Beanie didn’t have a husband, or children, or a will, dammit. That would annoy her mother, who would dine out for the rest of her life on her daughter’s greatness, claiming it as her own, Zamboni-ing out the Doritos, diet pills, and the just-in-case hiding places filled with junk food; making up boyfriends and adventures and a mother-daughter intimacy that never was.
And so, Beanie thought as her car sailed toward the rocks below, perhaps there was a kind of divine providence to going out on top. With Miriam Spitz guiding the narrative, Beanie would always be young, she would always be beautiful, and most importantly, she would always be thin.
The shining star who represented the shining stars, Beanie Rosen was thirty-five years old when she died, and while others would disappear into the ether, her impeccable timing for endings ensured that she never would. She would always be remembered as a force, a legend. Just the way she wanted.
And Beanie always got what she wanted.
Or died trying.
THE END (ISH)