The Fame Game Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t do a damn thing. Daddy’s away in Atlantic City doing a Charity. The show’s taped today, but you can’t tell. I feel terrible.” She dropped into the chair on top of her fox coat.
    “May I hang up your coat?” Gerry asked.
    “No, forget it. Can you make me a martini?”
    “I’ll have a Scotch,” Lizzie said.
    Sam Leo Libra hung up the telephone. “You can all go drink at Sardi’s,” he said. “Go on, scram. Get out. Charge it to me.”
    “Nelson, you’re coming with us,” Lizzie said.
    “I can’t—I’ve got to get back to work,” said Nelson.
    “You have to eat, don’t you?” said Lizzie.
    “You can eat a sandwich at the salon,” Libra said to Nelson. “Do you want someone else to get your clients?”
    “They wouldn’t go to anyone else,” Nelson protested.
    “You want to bet? In five seconds. Five seconds . All they have to be told is that you’re out sick for the day and they have to go to whatever dinner party they’re going to with yesterday’s hair and they’ll go right to somebody else.”
    “Oh my God!” Nelson said.
    Lizzie, Elaine, and Nelson hurried out of the suite with a flurry of waving arms getting into coat sleeves and making farewell gestures. The telephone rang. The second line rang. The third line rang. The doorbell rang. Gerry was glad for the pressure. It meant she didn’t have time to think about those people who had just left and the life they represented, or her own life, which didn’t look as if it was going to be much better. It was all too depressing. She’d rather be an automaton. And please, God, she prayed, let the next client be a nice, sweet normal person I can stand .
    But this one wasn’t a client; it was a middle-aged messenger carrying a script. He rushed into the room like the nearsighted Mr. Magoo and fell over the coffee table. It didn’t appear to faze him at all, for he picked himself right up and ran into the bedroom. Gerry ran after him, turned him in the direction of the living room, and let him run back in. Libra was laughing. Gerry plucked the script out of the messenger’s hand, signed the paper he held out to her, and pointed him to the door that led to the hall. He disappeared at a dead run.
    “Messengers are getting worse all the time,” Libra said. He read the letter attached to the script. “Another horror story for Sylvia Polydor,” he said. “That’s what happens to them when they’ve had their last possible face lift and won’t play nice mothers—they have to play hatchet murderesses. They’re all doing it now; Crawford, Davis—all of them. When they’re young they castrate with their beauty, when they’re old they have to do it with an axe. I hate the idea of Sylvia, my beautiful Sylvia, doing it, but there’s money in blood … so what the hell.” He put the script on his desk. “I have to read every damn one of them,” he said. “I send on some of the dogs to the clients, along with the good ones—otherwise they wouldn’t know a good one when they saw it. Clients have infallible bad taste in scripts. Gerry, let me give you a word of advice in case you ever want to produce a play or a movie: if the client loves the script it means the script stinks and he has a big part where you have to see him every single minute.”
    Gerry smiled. The doorbell rang again and she went to the door. There was a tall woman in her late thirties, with mouse-colored hair neatly pulled back in a bun, wearing a black mink coat and white space shoes. She was carrying a doctor’s black bag.
    “Come in, Ingrid,” Libra called happily. His expression had changed completely the moment he saw her: he looked like a small boy greeting his beloved governess who is bringing toys.
    “How are you, my dear Sam?” Ingrid asked in a slight accent.
    “Ready for you,” Libra said. “This is my new assistant, Gerry Thompson—Ingrid the Lady Barber, my doctor.”
    Gerry shook hands with the woman. Doctor or barber? It was sometimes