TWISTING BY THE POOL – CONTINUED

As you might have gleaned by now, when there’s a story to tell about Hollywood, I’m inclined to change the names and mix it up a bit to protect the innocent. What follows is mostly true, except what’s not.

At the end of summer, after several restorative sessions, Ms. Todd made Mr. Bloomfield a proposition. She offered an entrée position in the film industry in exchange for a suitable period of physical, if not matrimonial devotion. When Kier replied earnestly that he usually preferred the company of men Toni countered, “One must always cultivate friendship, I’m talking about marriage, when you get older you’ll come to appreciate what I mean”.

At twenty-one, after a love affair with a dominating, tan, Lacrosse player went sour, Kier graduated from Dartmouth despondent and took a job Toni arranged assisting a British director. The opus was a comic book turned major motion picture. The director complained of being “malignantly nobbled by the studio” and sent his young assistant to fetch his laundry, market for delicacies at Irvine Ranch Market and Chalet Gourmet, tend his brick sized Motorola cell phone, drive him from club to club on his evenings off, and on one notable morning appear at his Santa Monica rental at 3:00 a.m. to catch a blue jay that was systematically flying into every window in the house in an attempt to escape. Why, the director wasn’t able to throw a towel over the bird and toss it outside himself could only be explained by the white powder clinging to his nostrils and the frenzied kibitzing he offered as Kier chased the unfortunate animal down.

After the bird incident the director found Kier indispensable. He relied on him for practically everything. He kept him by his side always. On one such occasion, with Kier in an indelicate position in the director’s trailer reading the day’s new script pages while Ian (the director) bemoaned his 100 million dollar “film fiasco” and let his sweaty forehead rest against the young man’s bare pelvis, Kier piped up with some surprisingly good script notes. Thus, his screenwriting career was born.

Delighted, Toni bought him a Lexus, then, a few years later on his 25^th birthday a condo on Wilshire in Westwood.

When he was twenty-seven Kier nursed Toni through her second face lift, a primitive affair involving an early version laser that turned her skin to strawberry jelly, and incisions under the chin, behind the ears, and in the eye orbit just below her brows. He served chilled pineapple juice with a straw and a Vicodan chaser, plumped pillows, applied antibiotic salve, and on the hour placed ice packs around her swollen face. All the while Toni’s white Persian cat, Renee, sat on Toni’s chest and stared up at her adoringly. The cat creeped Kier out, and besides, all that fur couldn’t be sanitary. But, every time he shooed Renee away Toni patted the bed and the cat flounced back into place. A week later, after he’d driven her to the surgeon to have her sutures examined the doctor puzzled over why the stitches above Toni’s eyes had disappeared. Kier had no doubt the cat had licked them out, but thought it better not to mention it to Toni who was delighted at her rejuvenation. For his devotion during her transformation back to forty Toni secured Kier representation at CAA, and finally, when he turned twenty-nine she called in his debt and they were wed.

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© Vickie Lester and Beguiling Hollywood, 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material (text) without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Vickie Lester and Beguiling Hollywood with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.