How to Land a Movie Star novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Photograph
Hedy wakes to a photo of herself leaving a star's gate at 1 a.m., is suspended before a roomful of phones, refuses to apologize, and the cold star walks in to say she was there because he asked.
My phone had four thousand notifications when I woke up.
I had gone to bed with eleven.
The first one was from my brother, Wills.
"Hedy, call me. Do not look at anything until you call me."
I looked at everything.
The photo was on the top of every feed, taken from across a wet street under a single gate light.
A small woman with a pencil in her curls was walking out of an iron gate in a man's black hoodie.
Her face was turned toward the camera like she had heard her own name.
It was my face.
The caption said, "Casting Girl Gets the Part? Seen leaving Corin Wray's home at 1 a.m."
Under it, forty thousand strangers had already decided what I was.
I read the first hundred comments standing at my bathroom sink with my toothbrush in my mouth.
One of them said I had the face of a woman who knew what a leading man cost.
I spat, rinsed, and put on a clean cardigan, because I did not know what else a person does.
The truth was smaller than any of it.
My boss had sent me to Corin's gate with revised pages for Friday's read, because he doesn't use email and his assistant had the flu.
I had stayed seventeen minutes.
It had been raining, and he had put his hoodie on my shoulders at the gate.
I took the bus to Burbank anyway, because I had never missed a day of work in four years.
Two people on the bus held up their phones at me without bothering to hide it.
A man on Magnolia Boulevard said, "Hey, Casting Girl, am I gonna get a callback?"
His friend laughed so hard he had to hold a parking meter.
Fawcett Casting is two rooms above a dry cleaner, and I could smell the pressing steam from the sidewalk.
A dozen people crowded the stairs.
Half of them had cameras, and the rest looked like actors hoping to be photographed.
"Miss DeHaven, did you sleep with him for the part?"
"Is it true he paid for your brother's school?"
I stopped on the fourth step.
Nobody had ever asked me about Wills's school, and nobody should have known he had one.
"No comment," I said, which is the only line I had ever heard Marj give a reporter.
Marj was standing in the doorway of her office with her orange glasses pushed up into her grey hair.
She didn't look angry.
She looked like she had been awake all night, and she was chewing a piece of nicotine gum.
"Inside," she said.
The studio executive was already in my chair, a tall man in a grey vest, and he did not stand.
"Miss DeHaven, we've seen the photograph," he said.
"So has everyone in the northern hemisphere," I said.
"The studio cannot have its star's reputation associated with a staff scandal."
"I'm not a scandal," I said. "I'm an assistant who delivered pages."
He slid a single sheet across my desk.
It was a statement, already typed, with a line at the bottom for my name.
I read it standing up.
It said that I regretted any misunderstanding, that I had behaved unprofessionally, and that I would be taking an indefinite leave from Fawcett Casting.
It did not say what I had done.
"This says I'm sorry," I said.
"It says you're sensible."
"Sorry for what?"
"For the photograph."
"I didn't take the photograph."
"Hedy," Marj said quietly.
She had never used my first name in front of a client.
"They want you gone for the week. I've said no twice. They're talking about the whole Harbor slate, and the slate is half our year."
Behind the glass of her office door, eleven phones were pointed at the three of us.
I thought about my brother's bursar's receipt, folded in my sock drawer at home.
I thought about the other thing, the one I had not told Marj or anyone.
It was zipped into my canvas tote at that exact moment.
Then I picked up the statement and tore it in half.
It made a very satisfying sound.
"I delivered pages," I said. "I'll say it to anyone. I won't say I'm sorry for being photographed."
"Then you're suspended, effective now," the executive said, "and we'll find another office for the Harbor slate."
Marj took off her glasses and said nothing she could afford.
Then the front door downstairs banged open, and every camera on the staircase swung the same way.
I heard the silence before I saw him.
It climbed the stairs one step at a time, and the people in it stopped talking.
Corin Wray filled the doorway of our waiting room.
He had to duck for the lintel.
He was six foot four in a black wool coat, with a shaved head and a black beard.
His eyes were the pale grey of the inside of a shell.
In two years of casting for him, I had heard him say forty words to a crew member, and not one of them to me.
He looked at the torn statement on my desk.
He looked at the vest on the executive.
Then he looked at me, for exactly as long as it takes to read a line.
"She was at my house," he said, in a voice so low every camera on the stairs leaned in, "because I asked her to be."
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