The Abracadabra Girl
THE AbrACADAbrA GIRL
Look at things not as they are, but as they can be.
—ANONYMOUS
March 1984
Quirky, clever, and whip smart, Ella Gaddy was making her own life on her own terms and was forming a loyal group of friends who had become her surrogate family. Few remembered her as the long-legged strawberry blonde from Accounting, with skirts too short and hair too yellow, and blouses with polyester ruffles. Now she was the girl on Garry Sampson’s desk. The girl he deferred to, took to premieres or lunches and even signing meetings. People knew that Garry relied on Ella, but only Beanie knew that he was in love with her.
Unfortunately, it was one-sided. Ella, a free spirit, didn’t want commitment, at least not with Garry Sampson. In fact, now that she was working for him, she had started to carve boundaries, especially after hours, when she preferred to be a lone wolf with multiple options.
Shortly after becoming his secretary, Ella laid down a new set of rules and encouraged Garry, who was growing frustratingly confused, to lay down his own. Specifically with other women. “You’re a catch,” she told him, encouraging him to date. She made it clear that while her devotion to him would not wane, she wasn’t traditional, and quite clearly Garry was.
After a good amount of back and forth, they became more partners than lovers, dedicated to protecting one another and building and servicing Garry’s growing client list, most especially Scott Westman, one of the agency’s biggest clients. Scott had grown more and more reliant on Garry for his advice. And since Garry was reliant on Ella, Scott, too, began to seek her out. Ella was smart, and funny, and without an agenda, and Westman found her refreshing. He’d come by the office to hang, to chat, to schmooze, and if Garry wasn’t there, he’d spend time with Ella. They’d go into Garry’s office, throw back a scotch, order a sandwich from Salami ’N’ Cheese, turn on the TV, and shoot the shit.
Naturally, it raised eyebrows, but if Westman was happy, the agency was happy, and the eyebrows were irrelevant.
Named People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” for 1983, Scott Westman’s fame was a double-edged sword that only made him more insular. It was Ella who kept him real, and he became dependent on that reality check.
Often Beanie would come home and find Ella on the phone with Westman, laughing and talking intimately. There was a plethora of rumors about Garry Sampson’s secretary and the biggest star in Hollywood, but Beanie never addressed them, even as Ella was spending more and more time with him.
Besides, Beanie was preoccupied with trying to figure out a way to meet Nicolas Cage. She hadn’t shared the condition of her employment with Ella—or anyone. It was too embarrassing. She had made up a lie to keep a job no one else had wanted. Now she was on her own, needing to figure out how to meet Cage, befriend Cage, and then, hello, convince Cage that he needed a new agent even though his career was skyrocketing.
To make it worse, Mike Barron had announced at the motion picture meeting that he was inside-tracked to sign Cage, and every week thereafter would anxiously await news from Beanie.
The first few weeks Barron was almost nice to her, letting her make casting suggestions on projects and listen in on calls, but when after a month there was no Cage progress, he began to grow angry, calling her into his office where he would grill and shame and berate her.
“Beanbag!” he would shout, and she would go in, close the door, and listen to him call her a “fucking moron,” or a “loser” or a “retard,” all the while questioning her capabilities as a secretary and doubting the authenticity of her claim. “If Cage is a friend, how hard is it to introduce me?”
Beanie would calmly and logically explain that this wasn’t about an introduction, it was about a signing, and it needed to be finessed. “It’s all about timing,” she would say, reminding him that Nicolas’s career was on fire, and she didn’t want to waste an introduction only to get a no. Beanie’s strength, or one of them, was that she never sounded as desperate as she felt. Her advice was sanguine, and her lie, now almost two months old, had grown to enormous proportions. She didn’t know how long she could quell Barron’s suspicions or silence his questions. Beanie was not a liar by nature. She was a visionary, seeing something before it manifested, willing it into existence. Just because something wasn’t true didn’t mean it couldn’t be. Her father had called her the abracadabra girl, explaining that the magic chant translated literally to, “I will create as I speak.”
Say it. See it. Be it.
Abracadabra.
And that became Beanie’s mantra.
Get the yes. Get the yes. Or in this case, at the very least, get the fucking intro.
It wasn’t until early March, almost two months after the inciting incident, that she confessed the truth to Ella. It was after eight o’clock, and they were both home, sharing a pizza on what once was Mercedes’s pastel couch.
“What fool says they know someone they don’t just to keep a job?” Beanie said, with tears of shame and embarrassment.
“The same one who said they’d get their loser high school boyfriend an agent when they didn’t even know what an agent was,” Ella reminded her. Ella, who’d hated that Beanie had taken the job, hated it more when she beat herself up. “Let’s figure this out,” she said, getting up and pacing.
“Figure out what?” Barry asked, coming in the front door. Barry, who had become an agent and split from Marci the same week, had moved into the third bedroom, which made sense since Ella and Beanie both liked him, and Barry could afford the higher rent.
Moze thought it was a fine idea, too. Beanie, of course, had never told Moze that she and Barry had fooled around. It didn’t seem relevant.
Moze didn’t live in the past; in fact, Beanie knew little of his prior entanglements. And when she became curious, she was strongly advised by Ella not to ask. “Do not press him,” Ella had warned. “None of it matters.” Of course Ella would say that, not wanting to be pressed herself. But still, when it came to Moze, Beanie needed guidance. He was, she feared, quite suddenly out of her league.
Nine months earlier he had been a college dropout looking for a gig, and now he was on Sam Lesser’s desk with industry insiders seeking him out, relying upon him for advice and confidences. While it wasn’t lost on Beanie that she had been the architect of his meteoric career, she never flaunted it. She didn’t want Moze to resent her, or worse, reject her, as Fish had years before once he started getting jobs on his own. Moze’s rise in both the agency and the industry had been astounding, and she feared, much like Fish, his need for her might diminish. She believed this relationship was different than any relationship she’d had, and while it wasn’t traditional, it was special, and she wasn’t willing to let that go, no matter the compromise.
And there were compromises. Shortly after they’d begun sleeping together, Moze had told her that monogamy was against nature, and he didn’t believe in it. Honesty was important to him, and he didn’t want in any way to paint a picture otherwise. And with that, Beanie understood the rules which he—and she, if she chose to stay in the relationship—would have to live by.
“He fucks around,” she’d confessed to Ella at the time.
“Who doesn’t?” Ella had replied.
“Me,” said Beanie.
“Then fuck around,” Ella said cavalierly. “It’s the eighties, for God’s sakes. Sex won’t kill you.”
Ella, neither possessive nor proprietary, thought like a guy, which was probably why she was catnip to most of them. But Beanie wasn’t, and so she decided to accept the irregularity of her time with Moze and try not to focus on her time without him.
Ella caught Barry up on the whole Nicolas Cage debacle, then asked if he knew him.
“I saw him once,” Barry said, “at The Roxy when the Ramones played. That’s the best I got.”
Beanie sighed. “This is impossible.”
Ella stood up and walked to the phone. “I’m gonna ask Scotti,” she said decisively, referring to Scott Westman.
Beanie, alarmed, just about jumped out of her skin. As much as she appreciated the offer, she did not want Ella to tell anyone, much less one of the agency’s hottest clients, about the lie she was perpetuating.
Barry agreed that that would be dangerous.
“Too late,” Ella said, punching in his number on their powder-blue phone with the extra-long cord.
Beanie, nervous and embarrassed, paced.
“Chill,” Ella warned as Westman answered.
They chatted a while about the idea of him doing an adaptation of his favorite book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, before she broached the forbidden topic, simply saying that Beanie needed to reach Nicolas Cage.
Turned out, Scott didn’t know him. But he’d done a film with rising young star Adrienne Seabergh, who apparently knew him well. “She’s cool,” he told Ella, “I can call her. Maybe we can all meet for a drink at the Formosa Café later if you want.”
Beanie. Was. Floored.
Could it really be that easy?
She stared at her beautiful kooky friend with gratitude and love. Nicolas Cage had been an albatross around her neck for nine weeks, and while this date didn’t guarantee, well, anything, it put her in striking distance.
She now knew someone who knew someone who knew Nicolas Cage. And for Beanie Rosen, she was riding the wave.