Lipstick Jungle

Almost immediately, her heart began pounding in excitement. She turned the first page with a shaking hand. After three pages, she turned to Shane. “This is it,” she said.

“What?” he asked.

“The movie. The one I’ve been waiting for.”

“Don’t you always say that?” he asked and yawned. He rolled over and turned out the light.

She went into the kitchen. She stayed up all night reading, seated on a stool at the butcher-block countertop.

Ragged Pilgrims was about the poignant adventures of three American nurses stationed in Europe during World War One, with female Hemingway-esque undertones. At nine a.m. she called the agent and made a deal to buy the option for $15,000, using her own savings for the purchase. It was, she thought, one of the smartest investments she’d ever made. Ragged Pilgrims could be an Oscar-winner—would be an Oscar-winner, she reminded herself—and by using her own money, she had ensured her involvement with the project. It meant that when she took it to a studio, they couldn’t take it away.

Six months later, Ragged Pilgrims went on to be a best seller, and she was offered the position as president of Parador Pictures. She brought Ragged Pilgrims to Parador, and had spent the last four years fighting for it. Fighting to get the screenplay just right (it had taken three years and six screenwriters), and then going to bat for the project, insisting it would be a hit. The problem was the budget—the locations and costumes turned the movie into a $125 million picture—the most money Parador had ever put up for a film.

Everyone at Parador was scared, except her. But that’s why she was the president and they weren’t. And until recently, until the past two weeks when they’d begun shooting, she’d been unshakable in her belief that the movie would be a hit, it would make money, and would be nominated for at least ten Oscars. And then she had seen the dailies.

The movie was, at heart, a feminist film, and she could tell by the dailies that Bob Wayburn was a man who secretly hated women. Bob Wayburn was her only blunder, but it was a big one, and she’d overplayed her hand in hiring him, thinking he would bring a balanced perspective to the material. Instead, he was clobbering it. Bob Wayburn couldn’t be trusted, and he couldn’t be left alone.

Things were going to get ugly. They were going to have to go back to the beginning and reshoot all the scenes they’d already shot, and Bob Wayburn would have a fit. But she’d dealt with arrogant, creative male type

s before, and the strategy was simple: My way or the highway, buddy. Bob would have two weeks to see things her way, and if he didn’t, she’d fire him. There was, of course, the possibility that he would quit—indeed, by the time her helicopter landed in the Romanian foothills, he might have already grandstanded with this gesture. But she was prepared for it. She’d spent the last three days constantly on the phone, secretly investigating other directors who would be interested in the job and who could actually do it, and she already had at least one lined up.

She scribbled a few notes on the shooting script, and felt a wounding stab of guilt. The inescapable fact was that she had lied to Shane, she had lied to her family, and she was about to have to lie to Dr. Vincent. There was no way she could make it home for the weekend. Getting the movie back on track would take at least ten days, and then she’d probably have to return to Romania for another ten days later on in the schedule. It was wrong to lie (maybe “fudge” was a better word), but there were times in life when you had to make difficult choices, trusting that, someday, the people who cared about you would understand.

And no one should have understood this better than Shane, she thought angrily. He’d been around the business long enough (had even been in it) to comprehend how it worked. The failure of Ragged Pilgrims simply was not an option, and she was morally committed to do everything in her power to make it a success. She would jump out of a plane if she had to; she would work twenty-four hours a day, she would cut off her right hand if that’s what was required. If she didn’t go to the location and fix it, she wouldn’t be fired—not immediately, anyway. But when the movie came out in nine months and it flopped, and Parador lost money (fifty or sixty million or more, possibly), she’d be given the boot in two seconds. If that happened, she might be able to get a less-important job at another major studio. But it would mean relocating her family to Los Angeles—ripping her children out of New York City and their schools and taking them away from their extended family. There was one major studio in New York City, and one top job as president. And she had it. From there, the only place to go was down.

And that wasn’t going to happen. Not after she’d put in over twenty years of hard labor.

Well, she wasn’t afraid to put in a few more. She worked—end of story. It was what she loved, and what she was made for.

She continued to work all night, through the darkness over the Atlantic and into the pinkening dawn over Paris. Her plane pulled up to the gate at five-twenty a.m., local Paris time. She turned on her cell phone, changing the band to the European cellular network. The phone immediately began beeping. She pressed the button for her voice mail.

“You have . . . thirty-two new messages,” the pleasant recording announced.

Chapter 9

IT WAS THE END OF MARCH AND SNOWING AGAIN, for the fifth time in about twice as many days.

There were buses and slush everywhere on the streets, and cars honking, and everyone was sick of the snow (which they hoped would be the last of the year), and inside the taxi it was hot and damp with puddles of water on the floor, so that Victory rode with her knees cranked up, the toes of her suede boots pointing into the back of the front seat so that they wouldn’t get too wet.

Why don’t you get a car and driver? Nico always asked her. She could probably have afforded it, but Victory wasn’t comfortable with needless expense. It was important to remember who you were and where you came from, no matter how successful you became. But now that it looked like she was about to get an offer from B et C to buy her company, she supposed she might get a car and driver. Maybe something really fancy—a Mercedes like the one Muffie Williams had . . .

But she mustn’t get ahead of herself. Nothing was settled . . . yet.

Pling. Her phone emitted a pleasant tone and she checked the text message.

“Remember u own this town. Good luck!” Nico.

“thnk you!”

“nervous?”

“naaaaah. piece o’ cake.”

“call me after. we’ll look at jewels.”

Victory gave the phone a wry smile. Nico, she thought, was almost more excited about her prospects than she was. Ever since Nico had found out about the first meeting, in Paris, with B et C, it was practically all they talked about, with Nico encouraging her and coaching her like a proud mother hen. “You can do this, Vic,” she kept telling her. “And on top of it, you deserve it. No one deserves to make thirty million dollars more than you do, considering how hard you’ve worked . . .”

“But it’s probably less than thirty million. And I might have to leave New York and move to Paris . . .”