Maybe I should have stayed, he thought. It had certainly been tempting, but Mike had urged him to ‘get a grip and go and sort things out at home’.
Instead he was hiding here in his dining room, the table strewn with papers and magazines, all of them boasting ‘exclusive’ takes on the story. ‘Sam and Jess Split: The Inside Story!’, ‘Why I Walked Out, Jess Speaks!’, ‘I Always Knew He Was A Cheat, Jess Tells Friend’. It was mostly speculation; thankfully Jessica had yet to speak publicly about it, although the fact that Sam was here, a thousand miles away from his ‘heartbroken’ fiancée, was a fairly large clue as to what was happening between them.
‘So I guess we all know what’s going on in the press,’ said Jim Parker, indicating the table. ‘I’ve just been scanning the satellite channels; the news media’s pretty much taking the same stance.’
Helen Pierce opened her notebook. ‘What’s the support from the industry like?’
‘Hard to tell,’ said Jim. ‘Everyone’s making the right noises: “Tell Sam we’re thinking about him”, all that crap, but the only way to judge LA is by the movie offers that are on the table.’
‘And what’s that like?’
Jim glanced at Sam, then shrugged.
‘It’s summer. It’s quiet. They’ll be in a wait-and-see position until we know box office on his next movie. But honestly . . .’ He pulled a face. ‘I think we should be worried.’
‘Oh great,’ said Sam. ‘Kick me when I’m down, why don’t you?’
‘Hey, buddy, we gotta get real,’ replied Jim. ‘You’re nothing in Tinseltown unless you’re making money, you know that. If you were making the studios half a billion a picture, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. No one would give a damn who you screwed.’
‘It’s true, look at Charlie Sheen,’ nodded Valerie. ‘He had to really really screw up before they cancelled his show.’
‘And we ain’t in Charlie’s position,’ said Jim. ‘He was the star of America’s biggest sitcom. Sam? Well, let’s be frank, his last two movies tanked.’
Sam hated his career being talked about as if he wasn’t even in the room. He found himself getting defensive.
‘Jim, you were the one who told me to do those movies.’
Jim turned his hands outwards.
‘I get the offers. You and Eli take the decisions. If you choose to make the turkeys . . .’
‘Hey, this is a team effort, Jim,’ said Eli. ‘Don’t pass the buck just because the shit’s hit the fan.’
It was no secret that Eli and Jim disliked each other, both of them fighting for the upper hand in the steerage of Sam’s career.
‘All right, gentlemen,’ said Helen firmly. ‘Let’s focus on what we can control. Sam’s next movie is premiering in a week or two, yes? So the industry is out of our hands until then. I think we should concentrate on the media. Valerie, this is your area.’
‘The weakest link in the chain is the girl Katie,’ said the PR, sweeping back her black bob. ‘We could definitely go after her. Spin it as a set-up, release the story about her trying to blackmail us.’
‘Wouldn’t that just look like Sam was trying to wriggle out of it?’ replied Helen.
‘Isn’t that what we’re trying to do here?’ snapped Jim. ‘I don’t think it’s too late to persuade people that Sam didn’t even have sex with her. She doesn’t really have much evidence, so we threaten to sue, major damages, scare her into a retraction.’
Helen looked thoughtful. ‘It’s possible, but we sho
uld have come out with denial immediately. Sam’s all but confessed.’
‘I haven’t said anything!’ he managed to splutter.
‘Yes, and that’s the problem. If you’d denied it and Jessica had stood by you, we could have weathered it, but as it is, she’s effectively kicked you out and now we have all this . . .’ Helen grabbed a copy of the Sun and held it up, showing the headline that read: ‘Kinky Sam Forced Himself On Me’.
‘But that’s just rubbish!’ said Sam.
‘Is it?’ said Helen, scanning the text. ‘Sam was a sex pest, always badgering me for sex . . . Sam wanted sex all the time, we did it five times a night.’
Sam winced. He couldn’t bear to look at it himself and it sounded even worse when someone read it out. The funny thing about show business was that you needed the toughest skin just to get your foot in the door. The auditions, the knock-backs, the humiliations, you couldn’t do it without tunnel vision and an iron will. But once you made it, that rhino hide disintegrated. Suddenly everyone was telling you how wonderful you were, how funny, how handsome, every single day of your life. And you came to expect it, your self-esteem was all wrapped up in the constant barrage of love, even if deep down you knew it was pure sycophancy. So when all that was taken away, the insults and the criticism hurt more than ever.
‘Well, is it true?’ pressed Helen.