Chapter 8
In this episode, Jason sits down with a reporter on the patio of a restaurant in Encino.
Reporter is perhaps too strong a word for this schlubby-looking white man, who might have dressed differently had he known, when he left the house, that he was going to be on television.
Or maybe he would not have changed a thing—maybe he’s the type to be smug about the difference between his uncombed hair and Jason’s pomade, claims he would never waste his time on his appearance, despite working for a fairly trashy magazine.
If he’s so much more intellectual than Jason, why is that?
They sit on adjacent corners of the outdoor table so that one camera can hold both of them in view.
“Those rumors of infidelity.” Mr. Reporter lowers his voice, as if this whole thing won’t be captured by our cameras. “How do you respond?”
“All couples in the public eye will have to deal with tabloid rumors.” Jason’s espresso cup is dwarfed by his large hands. “We don’t let it bother us.”
“It must be tough,” says the reporter, “seeing stories about your wife. Her seeing stories about you.”
“We’re focused on each other,” says Jason. His eyes dart up and away from the camera, seeking someone we assume should be responsible for shutting down this line of questioning.
“Do you regret opening your marriage to the public?” By the intensity of his cold blue gaze, you’d think the reporter was asking Jason about whether he’d send troops into Iraq. Jason doesn’t take the bait. He sips his coffee, leans back in his patio chair, smiles.
“Of course not,” he says. “We’re still giddy about it. Honeymoon Stage has opened so many doors for us. I love my wife.”
“For the love of god, can we please screen these questions before Jason gets them?” Jason’s publicist, a silver-haired woman named Simone, spoke to us without looking up from her BlackBerry. Lauren gave a toothy smile.
“Absolutely,” she said. “We absolutely can.”
“Didn’t I already?” I asked Lauren once Simone was out of earshot. Together we shouldered the softbox lights and walked them toward the trunk of her car.
“Of course you did,” Lauren said. “But you don’t work for Jason.
” That was true. It wasn’t the show’s job to keep Jason comfortable, or even to tell him that his publicist was punting her responsibilities.
If anything, it behooved us to have his team incompetent, because that gave us more interesting material.
An interview in which Jason was caught off guard or forced to talk about the blind items that tied him to some dancer in Las Vegas was far more lucrative for Lauren and the network than some vanilla conversation about opportunity and gratitude.
Presumably, this was also true for me. My luck was Lauren’s luck, and her golden staircase was mine to ascend behind her.
As Lauren’s direct report, I shared a common goal with her, and in theory, I should have been as gung ho as she was to catch Maggie and Jason in various foibles.
In practice, I was still walking on eggshells trying to keep them from getting me fired for what I’d done with Gabe in their pool.
Without a union to protect Reality TV workers, people were fired all the time without cause.
Honestly, we barely had HR, the network’s cold corporate office constantly juggling any number of Hollywood creeps.
I wasn’t going to be punished by any external legal force were Maggie and Jason to pull up the footage I assumed they had of me having sex on their property.
But I would lose my job, and thus my references, and thus my dream of a TV career.
My financial safety net. Certainly my dignity.
If the incident got wide, it would be massively embarrassing for Gabe.
And so, while I did not nominally work for Jason and Maggie, in practice, I found that I did.
The day before, while hanging out in Video Village, I’d noticed a piece of spinach stuck between Maggie’s teeth.
While the rest of the crew filmed her like nothing was off, I’d sucked my own teeth and wiped at my mouth until she caught on and looked in a mirror.
My allegiance was mostly to Maggie. Even without the leverage she held, I suspect I would have tried to make things easier for her.
Underneath whatever she’d become, I still saw glimmers of that gutsy little girl in Ohio.
If I’d seen cheating rumors on a list of questions some sleazy magazine guy wanted to ask Maggie, of course I would have given her a heads-up.
I would have told her if her publicist was overworked and overpaid and leaning on the production crew in place of an assistant.
But my loyalty to Maggie over Lauren had to come at some cost, and that cost was often Jason.
After the interview, we all caravanned back to Calabasas, Rahul and Vinnie in the black car with Jason to catch any lingering emotional response or other screen-worthy moment, and Lauren driving me and the gear.
Her hair was frizzy with humidity and bleach, and I could see the mental calculations she made as we pulled onto Ventura.
“You think we could have gotten more out of him?” I asked.
After several months of good behavior, I had earned her conversation, so long as I framed it as wanting to learn from her.
And I did want to learn from her. Lauren’s mind could spin through every possibility before I’d even processed what was happening in front of me.
I wasn’t sure why she was doing this show instead of theoretical physics.
“We don’t want to lose focus with Jason,” Lauren said to me.
“We need to get him doing something romantic. Start thinking about Valentine’s Day.
” I couldn’t be sure if that was a command—Lauren telling me personally to make plans for Jason on Valentine’s Day—or just a general statement about our goals as a crew.
“You know what we should do,” Lauren continued, “is send him to a baby store. We get him holding little booties, America’s collective heart melts.
” This was how talking to Lauren usually went—I would open her a bit, and she’d start spilling.
Unlike some producers, she never seemed worried about me stealing her ideas, maybe because Dan already took so much credit.
“Find out who of their friends is having a baby.” Lauren glanced at me with that tight-lipped expression of self-appreciation that, for her, stood in for a smile.
“On it,” I said. This would be a more exciting task than photocopying and maybe slightly less manipulative than filling the Calabasas house with rose petals and claiming Jason had come up with the idea on his own.
“And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this, but don’t—”
“Tell Dan. I know.” If this was Lauren’s latest story pitch, she didn’t want Dan finding out and pretending he’d come up with it. They were always playing politics, one trying to use the other one for power or clout.
“I knew I could count on you.” Lauren looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite place, as if she was responding not to me but to my subconscious. “You remind me of myself. Very perceptive.”
Lauren didn’t give compliments—the closest she usually came was a quick jerk of the head to acknowledge that I’d done something smart. Something was up with her. She’d been especially snippy and looked wanner than usual—or was that just the change in hair color washing her out?
I didn’t want to pull too hard at her praise and thus unravel it.
Better to take this as a sign that the long hours and demeaning tasks on set were worth it.
I was, in fact, making some progress toward my goal, which was not to be Lauren but to be the person above her.
Surely, at some level, there was no intercrew competition, no one vying for your raise or your promotion.
Just a room and the whole picture, the levers you could pull, the pieces you could move across the board.
The baby thing was a good move. People were always asking Maggie and Jason when they were going to have kids.
Maggie would usually say that she still felt like one herself, and if he was in an uncharitable mood, Jason might agree with her.
Many of the things Jason complained about in his wife might have been solved by marrying someone further above the legal drinking age.
Supposedly Maggie wasn’t great at keeping track of credit cards, though as the one who regularly brought in their mail, I had never seen any bills past due.
She rarely cooked, and when she made the attempt, it did not taste like Jason’s mother’s food. She wasn’t a very good driver.
During the first season, these complaints had been lovingly made. As we moved further into the second, I sensed that when Jason said he’d rather have a good three-bean chili than orchestra seats at the Hollywood Bowl, he actually meant it.
“Vinnie has a three-year-old,” I said to Lauren.
“Too old. We need him looking at layettes, not potty training. We want people whispering about Maggie’s baby bump.”
“Maggie doesn’t have a baby bump,” I said.
“Cassidy.”
“Oh.” It dawned on me. “I got it. Find a newborn.”
I broached the topic with Brent, the hair guy, while he was prepping Maggie’s color. He touched her up every two weeks, using their private movie-theater bathroom as his personal chemistry lab.
“I’m flattered that you see me as the key to the chamber of secrets,” he said.
“But I’ve got nothing.” Testing our ENG crew also left me nothing but a look from Eli that made it clear he didn’t want to swap personal lives.
Nobody at the network was pregnant, or at least willing to disclose.
When I asked Sally Ann, she looked alarmed.
“I don’t know why you’d ask me that.” She repeatedly smoothed her hair behind her ears, a nervous tic.
“It’s for production,” I explained. Sally Ann sniffed. “Just, like, a segment they could film with Jason shopping. I’m not trying to get in your business.”
“It’s inappropriate.” She blinked at me, then stretched her neck.
Ever since the paparazzi had run her and Maggie off the road, she’d dealt with back pain.
Vinnie and I both thought there was probably a lawsuit in there somewhere, but as that was not the type of content Honeymoon Stage needed, we’d stayed out of it.
For all I knew, Maggie had brought a suit, or settled one.
Sally Ann likely had her own doctors. She didn’t need me.
Maybe it was because of the accident that Sally Ann was spending so much time at the house.
She’d always been around for Maggie’s primping, but these days I caught her by the pool when Maggie was out, hanging around waiting, when before she would have gone home.
We all siphoned something off Maggie and Jason.
Even I, the lowest on the ladder, was profiting from their notoriety.
I, too, had used that pool. I didn’t begrudge Sally Ann any of it.
“I mean, like, new babies. Not babies you’ve already had.
” I’d been inspired by Lauren to keep pushing but hadn’t learned how to finesse.
Sally Ann stared at me. Her hand rose to her locket.
No one had said anything to me about the baby sister who might not actually be a sister since Rahul had told me his suspicions several months ago.
That particular gossip had already been played out by the time I arrived.
“What are you talking about?” Sally Ann’s fist clenched around the necklace.
She must have realized she was acting weird, because she dropped her hand and put on a fake smile.
“No babies here!” Her eyes screamed at me to go away and stop talking about this, and I was happy enough to leave the whole thing alone.
It truly wasn’t my business if she had some secret life.
When I returned to Lauren to let her know I’d come up short on new babies, she sighed and said we’d just have to wait a few months.
At the time, I didn’t read much into it.
Jason was at an age when many of his cohort had children, so I assumed she must have meant one of his friends would announce and we could milk the baby shower for our show.
It would be best to stir up the gossip, get the tabloids thinking Maggie was expecting, and then finally tease an episode that would reveal all, only to show that she was buying a gift for a friend.
Disappointing, but not breaking our contract with the audience.
There was an all—it just wasn’t especially interesting.
Or we’d just lie. If we absolutely had to, we could just send them shopping. There didn’t have to be a reason, or else it could be a bullshit reason. Sure, some viewers would complain that we were staging what we called a Reality show. But there were no rules.
It’s funny now to think that I considered lying about a trip to the baby store to be the show’s ethical breach.
I was trying so hard to help make the sitcom, never noticing my real life had become a daytime soap.
When I consider all the questions I didn’t ask, all the rugs I walked across with no thought as to what people swept under them, I can’t help but laugh.
If the facade of Maggie’s gullibility was the heart of Honeymoon Stage’s situational comedy, my own was its skeleton.
Someone had to provide structure for the blood and the muscle.
Someone had to be the unconscious perpetrator, the puppet for the many puppeteers.
I had forgotten that playing oneself is still playing. I had forgotten that playing is what spiders do with their prey. I’d been living in a California dream of open-plan kitchens and five-car garages and boyfriends who’d once been on TV. I was about to wake up.