Read Online Show Business Kills by Iris Rainer Dart - Free Book Online

it,” she said, working to keep it light. She’d never trouble
     Roger with her fears about her job. “But I’m too old to have babies and too anal retentive to get married, so what’s left?
     Limos, lunches, deals. Right? That reminds me,” she said, pulling her electronic organizer out of her purse and pushing a
     few buttons, “I have to input the alarm to remindme to call an agent at nine in the morning about an auction for a screenplay.” While she typed a note into the microcomputer,
     adding a note to herself about the exact wording she wanted to use with the agent, she heard Roger say, “Mom, I’m gay.”
    She dropped the screen tapping pen and looked at him.
    “Oh, honey…”
    “I’m lying,” he said, “but I figured I’d get your attention, and now what I have to tell you will be a relief by comparison.
     I want to go to USC film school.”
    Ellen looked closely at him, hoping she’d misheard.
    “There’s no contest. I’d much rather have gay,” she said, taking his hand. “I mean, Rogie, you really do?” she asked, her
     brow furrowing as he nodded. “I’m amazed. How can you want to go to film school and be in this business after all you know
     about all the awful parts of it.”
    “How can I not? I’m a tinsel diaper baby,” he said, grinning. It was a grin that had cost her thousands of dollars in braces.
     It was true. His whole life had been spent in show business. He’d gone everywhere with her, sat under directors’ chairs playing
     with his Matchbox cars, spent weeks on locations all over the world. At four, he discussed divorce with Cher. At seven, he
     “did lunch” with John Travolta. When he was nine, Michael Keaton was directing a short film with a part in it for a young
     boy, and he’d asked Ellen if he could “borrow” Roger to star in it.
    “Rogie, the business really stinks,” she tried, already knowing it was a lost cause. “It’s mean and ugly and shitty. They
     lie, they cheat, they steal, they’re phony and immoral. They’ll screw you six ways till Sunday and then hug you and say, ‘We’re
     family.’ ”
    “Mom,” he said, squeezing a lime into his mineral water. “I don’t know how to break it to you, but to a lot of people in the
     business, you’re the ‘they’ in that story.”
    She put the organizer back in her purse and watched the fizzy mineral water as the bubbles rose in her glass. “Besides,” Roger
     said, “what else do I know? I grew up in the business. I understand grosses better than geography. Once I was in the library
     and I saw a copy of
Sophie’s Choice
and I said, ‘Oh, wow! The novelization.’ All my life I thought when kids played doctor, the doctor was supposed to be a plastic
     surgeon.”
    Ellen laughed. “Okay, enough with the Hollywood jokes,” she said. “I can see your mind is made up. Just when I thought I was
     finished paying tuition. Why couldn’t you have gone into your father’s business instead of mine?” she joked.
    “Podiatry?” he laughed, knowing she was kidding. “Somehow it doesn’t send the same excitement through my body.”
    Ellen sighed, and her only child put his hand over hers and looked into her eyes. “Hey, Mom, look at it this way. Maybe I’ll
     be among the exceptions. The one honest, uncompromising director. The one who cares more about the product than the bottom
     line.” It choked her with emotion to hear words she remembered saying herself somewhere a long time ago. But that was before
     she moved to Hollywood and her first job was as a gofer on “The Monkees,” and the idealism started slipping away.
    “Sure, honey,” she said now, “maybe you will.”
    Roger had a late date with a new girlfriend, so Ellen was home by nine-thirty. While she fed the cats, she played back her
     answering machine. She had calls from Richard Gere, Mike Ovitz, Meryl Streep, and Marly Bennet. Marly’s callwas reminding her that Girls’ Night was on Friday and that she’d better be