Caged
CAGED
A journalist to Bette Davis: “What’s the easiest way to make it in Hollywood?”
Bette’s response: “Take Fountain.”
March 1984
Twenty minutes after that phone call, Ella and Beanie—sans Barry, who as a new agent didn’t want to get more involved in this mess—were driving her Swinger to the Formosa Café just off Santa Monica Boulevard. Truth was sometimes the best ally, and Beanie had decided to just tell it straight up, soup to nuts.
“Hell, she’ll either think you’re crazy or brilliant,” Ella said, laughing.
Turns out Adrienne thought Beanie was a little of both. But so was Adrienne.
An ambitious writer, director, and actor who was an adorable, voluptuous, petite blonde, Adrienne Seabergh was a cross between Belinda Carlisle and Blondie, with a sparkling personality and a raucous laugh.
“So, you told this asshole you knew Nickie?” Adrienne asked, ordering one more round of shots.
Beanie smiled stiffly, trying to downplay the fact that Mike Barron was an asshole.
After all, Scott Westman, one of the agency’s hottest clients, whom she’d only met in passing, was sitting across from her. A company girl all the way, Beanie didn’t want Westman to think one of his representatives was a jerk.
“You got balls, girl,” Westman told her.
“Giant ones,” Ella laughed, and then, hugging Beanie, added, “She’s my fucking hero.”
Westman, who wore a leather jacket, a CBGB T-shirt, and jeans, was huddled in the corner so people wouldn’t notice him. He smiled at Beanie. “Then you’re my hero, too.”
Adrienne slammed back a tequila, grabbed her vintage shoulder bag, got up and said, “Well let’s go… hero.”
“Where?” Beanie asked.
“Nickie’s place,” she said.
Located just off Rossmore, the El Royale apartments in Hollywood were built in 1929 by the same man who’d built the Chateau Marmont. The original apartments were large with living rooms, dining rooms, studies, and terraces. By the mid-1980s most of the apartments had been cut up and subdivided, except a few on the top floor. One of those was occupied by Nicolas Cage.
It was after eleven o’clock by the time Beanie followed Adrienne to the exclusive address. Scott Westman and Ella had stayed back at the Formosa, leaving Beanie to do the deed or die trying. It was all so surreal that she had neither time to panic nor think.
“Welcome,” Nicolas said, greeting Beanie and Adrienne in his smoking jacket and slippers. His hair, wet from a recent shower, Beanie guessed, was slicked back, and his droopy brown eyes seemed kind, she thought. Welcoming.
He swept Adrienne into his arms.
He’s so handsome, Beanie thought, like an old-time movie star.
“Look at him. He loves Bela Lugosi,” Adrienne said, laughing.
Beanie laughed too, unsure who or what Bela Lugosi was.
Nicolas and Adrienne went into the back room while Beanie waited in the vast empty living room with high ceilings crisscrossed by wooden beams.
Adrienne had told her earlier that Nickie was temporarily house-sitting at the El Royale for a friend who was hoping he might purchase the luxe penthouse that had been on the market for over eleven months. Nicolas, just twenty, was looking for a place to park his treasures; a retreat away from Hollywood and into what Beanie quickly surmised would be a world of macabre antiquities. There were mounted and framed spiders, some propped upon scripts, and others leaning against the thick white stucco walls, which she assumed belonged to the young Lothario. Otherwise, the room was sparse, with highly polished wood floors and a distant view of Los Angeles. There was an aubergine velvet couch and some side tables, but the main point of interest was a large terrarium against the back wall, ten, perhaps eleven feet long. It was filled with plants and rocks and a giant python.
The evening, already surreal, was unfolding into a triptych of the impossible, improbable, and bizarre. She waited in the empty living room, staring at the python, who had uncoiled and then recoiled, as if Beanie wasn’t worth the effort of his stretch. Other than the distant sounds of street traffic, the penthouse was so silent that she began to wonder if Nicolas and Adrienne had slipped out the back, leaving her alone with the snake and spiders, frozen in eight-legged repose. Finally, about forty-five minutes later, Nicolas, his hair still wet, and Adrienne, hers now wet too, emerged from the back.
“That’s Louise,” Nicolas said, referring to the python. “You want to hold her?”
“Less than anything in the world,” Beanie said, deadpan.
He smiled, sat down, and listened to Beanie tell him the truth about her lie.
“So, I’m the bounty here?” he said, less a question and more a strange concept he was trying on for size. It was after midnight, and they’d been talking for about half an hour.
Beanie’s goal had been twofold. In the immediate, she wanted to set a lunch, a meeting, hell, she’d take a phone call, anything to prove to Barron she knew the young star. But for the long play, she wanted Nicolas to know that Sylvan Light, a company she loved and believed in with all her heart, was a force to be reckoned with. It was the place to be. It was the place he had to be.
To her surprise, he was surprised. “They want to represent me?” he asked, reminding Beanie that movie stars, even those as hot as Cage, were still one job away from anonymity.
“More than anything,” she told him. It felt like ten minutes ago he was a no one, kicking around for bit parts, and now agents whose names he’d read about, legends like Sam Lesser and Jamie Garland, wanted to meet him.
“What do you get out of it?” he asked.
“She gets to keep her job with the douchebag,” Adrienne told him.
Beanie jumped in. “While some might call Barron a douchebag, he’s also an amazing agent. I mean, they’re not mutually exclusive,” she explained, adding that when it came to getting a client hired, he was in it to win it. “At the end of the day,” she said, “that’s who you want on your team. Someone who will stop at nothing to get you the job.”
Nicolas put an unlit pipe in his mouth, flipped it from side to side, and explained he wasn’t really looking for an agent.
Beanie told him she understood but added that it couldn’t hurt to see who was out there.
He nodded. “Would a lunch or a meeting in the office be better for you?”
She looked from Adrienne to Nicolas. Was he kidding? She hadn’t hoped for anything like an in-office meeting. But if he would, if that was possible, then everyone would see him come into the big conference room on the second floor, and people might even get wind that she was the reason. If Nicolas came into the office, it might be enough to make Mike Barron head of the motion picture talent department, and Beanie a trainee. It was one thing for Mike to have a lunch and hope that others saw him with a star, but to reel in a tuna like Nicolas Cage and walk him down the halls—that was a fucking trophy.
And it would be Beanie Rosen who baited that hook.
“Nothing would be better than you coming into the office,” she told him, quickly adding, “Except of course, if we signed you.”
He laughed. “How long before you’re an agent?”
“I’m not even a trainee,” she said.
“Call me when you are,” Nicolas said, handing her and Adrienne a flute of Dom Pérignon.
“Let’s make a toast,” Adrienne suggested.
“Abracadabra,” Beanie said, raising her glass and pinching herself. “Abracafuckingdabra.”