Chapter 23
23
D ashing Henry’s death, the onslaught of articles, the chats with my dad... They were all bringing it back.
It had been an evening more than two years before. I was on the set of LA Misconducts as the first script for the show with the “Written by Elena Freire Valls” credit was being shot.
I was ecstatic. I didn’t mind the late hour, the overtime, the bad food, or even the honey wagon—we were shooting a street sequence. I was pumped, happy, and proud.
We’d been shooting a sequence where Henry’s character was walking around the downtown area of Los Angeles and looking for an old acquaintance. He found him and tried to get some information out of him. It was a straightforward enough sequence. Henry had probably shot thousands similar to that one. If nothing else, LA Misconducts was a formulaic show. We were told repeatedly by the network execs that that’s what made the show work. People wanted the same rehashed recipe week after week. The predictability brought them comfort. There were enough unpredictable things in life already. And I could relate to that.
And yet, despite the familiarity of the scene, Henry was having problems delivering the dialogue. He was getting frustrated too.
After shooting the same lines over eight times and not getting a definitive take, the director was getting frustrated as well. We broke for lunch, which was technically dinner but you would call it lunch, even if it was 7 p.m., because of showbiz lingo and union regulations.
The director suggested cutting some stuff out of the script so the sequence would be similar but would have Henry go over fewer lines. I agreed. Henry suggested he and I could work it over lunch at his trailer—of course he had a trailer while everyone else was eating under a wall-less tent the production team had put up a few hours before. To be honest, I think the writers had a trailer too, but I hadn’t been able to find it.
Henry also had his own catered food, so I thought I may find something tastier there than at catering. I was wrong.
Henry was going through a hard paleo phase, and the options at his trailer were limited to almost completely raw steak with an insignificant handful of fresh berries, nuts, and arugula leaves with no dressing.
That was probably the beginning of my vegan ways. The red meat made most of the plate, and I’d never been one for beef without lots of starchy and vegetable sides. But the food wouldn’t end up being the worst part of the evening.
We went over Henry’s lines again. I even offered to run the lines with him if he wanted. He half laughed at me, half got offended. Bear in mind that I was a baby staff writer talking to a two-time Emmy veteran. I gathered that screenwriters don’t normally offer to run lines with actors—and they don’t.
I proposed to trim a couple of things that would leave the script looking almost the same. He dismissed me. That’s when I realized he hadn’t asked me there to talk shop and fix a few lines.
We were seated at the three-seat sofa in his trailer. I had the pages on my lap and only then I realized how minuscule the whole setup was. He drew nearer, sitting impossibly close to me.
“Why don’t we put this aside for a minute?” he said, grabbing the script from my hands, touching them in the process, and leaving the pages on a nearby table.
My body jolted at the contact, in a bad way. He was too close to me. His breath smelled of burnt coffee and dead cow. I could count the pores on his nose. I was paralyzed with something that still, to this day, is difficult to describe—horror, fear, shock, surprise at what was happening and how bad I was at dealing with the situation.
One of his hands was on my knee, and I knew he was not going to keep it there but would make advances toward my thigh. His face got so close that his pores were gigantic even with full TV make-up on. Wasn’t he supposed to have a good dermatologist? Some of the best skin doctors in the country practiced in Los Angeles, and Henry had enough money to employ one full time. Can you believe the idiocy of what I was thinking?
Now I realize that shock had me frozen and thinking absurdities. For months after, I just felt stupid—and guilty.
He could have gotten away with kissing me because of how much of a paralyzed gazelle in the headlights I was in that moment. He touched my hair with his free hand and that felt so intimate—and so wrong—that I finally snapped out of it.
I put a hand on his chest and pushed him away, catching him off guard. I stood quickly.
I didn’t even think and went straight for the door. I started running once I was out of the trailer and didn’t stop until I got to video village. The director and some of the camera crew were eating there, but their backs were to me and they didn’t see me arriving in a rush.
I was trembling. What would have happened if the door in Henry’s trailer hadn’t been so close? If it had been locked? If I hadn’t been able to leave so quickly?
“Elena, we haven’t finished fixing the script.”
I heard Henry’s voice behind me and winced. The hair on my arms stood on end in revulsion.
“Yes, we have,” I said, turning around, putting more distance between the two of us. I said those words with as much determination as I could muster given the circumstances.
“Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to have to call Fred and tell him you did a poor job,” Henry said. He was a powerful person who could probably have me fired, and I panicked.
Then I reminded myself that even if Henry wanted to ruin me, I wasn’t nobody. I had lots of friends and connections from college who all worked in the industry. Try me. I would find another job. Also, not in a million years was I going to go back to that creep’s trailer.
“I’m sure,” I said, and I may have even sounded smug if I hadn’t still been trembling.
“Suit yourself, but Fred won’t like hearing about it.”
Amelia got there then. She had a late call time as her character was supposed to appear only briefly in that sequence.
“Dashing, quit frightening the writers, will you?” she said in a joking tone, and I think we probably started our friendship then and there.
Amelia and I talked about this months after it happened. At the time, she didn’t suspect anything. Henry had never tried anything with her. He was smart. It wasn’t until Amelia’s then girlfriend, now wife, Brenda, who was a production assistant at the show, told her that Henry had attempted shoving her into a closet and kissing her that Amelia started putting things together about that day with me. She wondered what other things she may have missed, and she felt guilty about it too, even if she wasn’t the one to blame.
Dashing went back to his trailer after Amelia scolded him that night. I gave her a relieved smile and went to make a much-needed phone call. I called David first. But when he didn’t pick up on the third try, I remembered he was supposed to be meeting a source for a story he was doing on corruption at city hall. That article would eventually mean the beginning of the end of the former mayor.
My sister was too young to burden her with the dirty story I was carrying, so I made the next logical call: my dad.
He was on the set in twenty minutes. I’m still not sure how he managed such a speedy commute from Beverly Hills. He played the role of the entertainment lawyer overjoyed with his daughter’s career to perfection that day on set. I felt safe having him there. He’s been denying it to this day, but I know he talked to Henry at one moment or another that night. The actor never tried anything else with me. He didn’t even look my way or smile at me more than necessary. Fred never mentioned any dissatisfied call from him.
When my dad found out that David was going to get home late that night, he decided to drive me to the Freire Valls family home instead of the place I shared with David. I spent the night in my old room. Dad even arranged for someone to drive my car there.
I’m spoiled if nothing else. I get in trouble and call Dad, and he rushes in and fixes everything.
He hugged me and comforted me. But he made one request: not to tell David. My mother was going to run for mayor. I’d suspected it but nothing had been officially announced yet, not even at the family level, and apparently we couldn’t risk David trying to advance his career by writing about the next LA mayor’s daughter as the victim of Dashing Henry’s predatory practices.
And I, for some idiotic reason—basically because I was feeling unempowered and weak—promised not to tell the man I loved, the one person I didn’t have any secrets with, the one thing I most needed to get off my chest.
Insecure Elena was born that day.