CHAPTER 109 — Stray Cat Strut

“The drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give, / For we that live to please, must please to live.”

Samuel Johnson

Drury Lane: Prologue

NYC.

Sony Tower.

Friday, 10 October 2008.

At eleven minutes past four, Trent Davis put the BlackBerry down very gently, like a man returning a grenade to its box. He’d been thinking of switching to iPhones of late, as was the trend roving through corporate.

He looked at the notifications for a while.

Then he pressed the intercom on his desk phone. “Tell Fred to get up here.”

“Mr Curon is in the—”

“Now.”

By the time the lift opened, Davis had two glasses on the desk, with his best Scotch beside them, and he had taken his pills in advance.

His friend looked horrendously homeless in his Hermès shirt, a size too small, and baggy jeans with some kind of tattoo design. There were grease stains on the Hermès.

“Uh oh,” said Curon. “Is it that time of the month again?”

Davis growled.

“What did your niece do now?”

“She is not my—” Davis stopped, breathed, and pushed a glass across the walnut. “Sit down, Fred.”

Curon sat.

“Collins, Douglas and Elie rang me,” Davis said.

Curon shivered. The hand on the glass trembled a little. “Who are they suing? Who sampled what now? I checked everything. Twice.”

“Nobody,” Davis said.

“So an early Thanksgiving greeting?”

Davis drank. “You remember the suit against Katrisha.”

“The riff.”

“And the one against PayZEE.”

“The chorus line.” Curon’s eyes narrowed. “It’s funny how the only thing that marriage still has in common is their deposition schedule.”

“Gone,” Davis said.

“Eh?”

“Gone. As of this afternoon.” Davis put his glass down because he was so goddamn relieved. “Collins, Douglas and Elie said that from today, when those songs earn, the Estate earns alongside them. Royalty share. From today.”

“No backdating?”

“Nothing.”

“Christ.”

“I had to check my medication.” Davis slid the notepad out from under his elbow and read from it. “‘Mrs Richards considers the past to have been paid.’”

Curon looked at the air conditioning vent, as if the Richards Estate might be up there, watching their reaction.

“Wow,” he said. “They haven’t settled a case since nineteen fifty-nine.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What did you do?” Curon asked.

“I did nothing!” The pitch of his voice came out higher than Davis intended. “That is the point, Fred. What the hell? Do you know how many board meets I’ve wasted on this? We spent… six million over the last decade on legal. Fielding made a career out of it!”

They sat with it.

DING! The lift opened.

Both men turned their heads and looked at the lift, as though a small blonde figure might be standing in it, step out, and say “Ta-da!”

Instead, it was Emily, with the coffee. She left the coffee after she met their eyes and made a face that said “yikes”.

“What did she tell you?” said Davis.

“About?”

“Louisiana.”

Curon looked like a man trying to piece together a Lego Star Destroyer. “She said the food was good. Er… She talked about the gumbo. Dark as a church pew, she said. There was a bread pudding that she ate.” He scratched his stubble. “She said she and Mrs Richards got along like a house on fire.”

“That’s all?”

“She said Lucia Lancet’s working for her now.”

Davis rubbed his eyes.

He had rung the girl himself, that first Monday. He had asked how it had gone with the Witch of Sans Souci. Fine, the girl had said. Delphine apologised. Then she had asked for the car service to be attached to her for a while, and he had said okay.

Then she hung up.

Then Collins, Douglas and Elie told him, over the phone, a few days later, that Mrs Richards now owned the Master and rights to House of the Rising Sun. As per Miss Fontaine’s wishes.

“So what?” Curon shrugged. “It was never ours. It was Eppie’s.”

“It isn’t Eppie’s either.” He consulted the notepad, though he did not need to. “She recorded it with us. She’s the singer-songwriter, not A&R. Yet, she gave it away. All of it. For nothing. Collins, Douglas and Elie drew it up, Fielding went over it, and I… well, I signed.”

He waited for his friend to be appalled.

“Phew,” said Curon, sipping. “Close one! Imagine if you had said no.”

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WOULD IT KILL YOU TO BE SYMPATHETIC?

He drank again, and his face did something soft and insufferable. “So, Richards Estate, resolved for now? That’s my girl! She ended a fifty-year war over a bread pudding.”

“She didn’t tell us!”

“What, you… expect her to call you and say, ‘Hey, Uncle Davis, I am with Mrs Delphine, can I give away Sony’s intellectual property for free? THANKS! LOVE YOU!’”

“Don’t…” Davis watched the goosebumps on his hands. “Don’t you ever do that voice again.”

Curon laughed. “Well?”

“Yeah, yeah…” Davis sighed. “There’s a process to these things; this is not a good precedent. Can you speak to her?”

Curon looked resistant, and then he relented. “That… I agree, but there’s more, I assume.”

“They’ll let us use it,” Davis said. “The song. The Estate grants Sony the use of it. There is one condition.” He turned the notepad around so that Curon could see the handwriting. “‘For as long as Miss Fontaine remains a Sony artist.’”

“So?”

“She’s not a Sony artist.”

Curon almost spat out his drink.

“She isn’t a Sony artist!” Davis was on his feet. He did not remember standing. “She’s a contractor. I told her so myself when we first met.”

Curon laughed so hard that he had to put the glass down.

“So sign her,” his friend wheezed.

“To what? With what? I think she might have a net worth more than me, charity notwithstanding,” Davis growled heavily. “Do you understand the truth, beneath the truth? According to Collins, Douglas and Elie, the peace of this company with the Richards Estate now depends on the continued good mood of a sixteen-year-old. We might be settling the biggest lawsuits, but there are still dozens pending…”

“Eppie’s usually in a good mood,” his friend promised.

“She hung up on me.”

“I told you she was in a good mood.”

The migraine made Davis reach for the pills, then he remembered he had already taken them, and took the Scotch instead, Dr Earnshaw’s advice be damned.

His friend leaned back and regarded him, not unkindly.

“Maybe that’s Delphine’s gift for the song.” He raised his glass to the notion. “You have to be nice to her now. Uncle Davis.”

Davis shuddered.

Outside, the afternoon was turning the towers the colour of weak tea. Inside the Belmont Building, a dozen floors of artists dreamed of one day standing on a grand stage to make their voices heard, to have their talents known.

“There’s one more thing,” said Davis. “I need to find a voice for Rising Sun.”

For the first time that afternoon, Curon looked puzzled. “She wants to… recreate something?”

“I don’t know, you’d have to ask Euphemia.”

“Hmm…” Curon looked contemplative. “Yeah, okay. She’s right. Eppie can’t sing it.”

“Wonderful. So how are we to find this voice? They gave us nothing. No recording. No disk. No reel.”

The two men sat on the top floor of a building full of America’s top vocal talents, and pondered what might transpire if they found the voice. Or indeed, if they failed to find the voice.

“Well… let’s head down to A&R…” Curon offered.

“Call your stray cat first,” Davis sighed, too tired to walk down to A&R. He had to wash his hands of it all before he had his yearly checkup with Dr Earnshaw. “Your cat. You sort this out. I have a company to run.”

Los Angeles.

Burbank.

Monday, 20 October 2008.

The cutting room had no windows, because glare and changing lighting conditions were a distraction from the film happening on the monitors. Jack Ferroni had been stewing in the process of final creation for about five weeks now, sometimes trusting Norbert, sometimes questioning him, and at all times questioning his ability to create a feature film.

What was worse was that the time was nigh.

The film festival calendar… was about to begin.

On the left monitor, a girl stood in a corridor with a carton of milk. A half-second longer, and the milk soured. A half-second shorter, and Eppie’s enormous eyes bored into the soul.

“Park City gave us until the first week of December,” Ferroni said, the red marker in his hand circling things on a notepad. “The festival opens the third week of January. That’s six weeks.”

“Six weeks,” said Norbert, without turning round, “to do the sound, the colour and the music on a picture I haven’t finished cutting.”

“You’ll finish. When have you not?”

“Jack. I’m on reel four.”

“I have faith. Also, you’re my only editor. My number two.”

Norbert’s cardigan rose and fell. Editors were a sedentary lot. When he sighed, the chair complained.

“Fine,” he said, his back still to Ferroni. “The finish. Sound, colour, music. Six weeks of it, at December prices. We good?”

“Covered.” Ferroni capped the red marker. “Sony Pictures’ classics arm bought us out, Norb. Their cheque’s cashed. We’ll finish it properly, with change.”

“And after it’s finished?”

That was the thing Ferroni had been circling all afternoon, in red.

Sony’s little arm spent little money on the little films it bought. There would be a poster. There would be a trailer, cut by Norbert on reduced rates. There would not be a billboard on Sunset, or thirty seconds in the middle of anybody’s favourite show, or a bus with Rémy’s face on the side of it.

“After it’s finished,” he said, “Sony will have pictures of its artists standing in the snow, in Utah. They’ll play hardball. For Kel especially.”

Norbert turned his chair halfway back. “That’s it?”

“If you mean, do we have spare money left for marketing…”

Norbert swivelled closer. “You’re bringing the crew to Sundance, correct? You got money for that?”

“Just Rémy and the girl. Kel’s schedule is far beyond our ability to negotiate. Four days. The first weekend.” Ferroni tapped the January page. “They’ll be there when the lights come on. They’ll answer the questions. They’ll have their picture taken in the snow. It’s free marketing. And if Park City passes, it’s Berlin, and that’s February. If Berlin passes, it’s Austin, in March. Then Tribeca. Then Cannes.” Ferroni counted the festivals one by one as he circled February, March, April and May in red.

“Five months. Four days in every one of them. You sure they got open schedules?” Norbert asked.

“You sure we’re gonna be accepted?” Ferroni chortled.

“Well…” Norbert tapped the screen. “You and I… we’ve seen a lot of films in our lives. What would you rate this?”

“If I was being harsh? Three out of four, easy.”

“That’s what I am afraid of,” Norbert said. “You checked the competition?”

“Winter Road, Deadweight, Single-A, Heatwave, Lear II, After the Tape,” Ferroni replied confidently. “So far, anyway, it’s a thin year.”

“Because of that… Paramount’s indies are pushing Single-A with that new breakout actress, Elsia Gillian, blonde and sixteen…”

“It’ll be a battle of the blonde teens, then,” Ferroni smirked. “I’ve seen a rough cut. The girl’s good, but Eppie sweeps. I bet my house on it.”

“You already did.” Norbert rolled his eyes. “What I mean is, our film is liable to make the bigger studios nervous. No one knows Elsia Gillian. Yet, everyone knows Euphemia Fontaine. It’s a competition, after all.”

“How’s that work?”

Norbert took off his glasses and cleaned them on the cardigan. “Park City is a room full of strangers in wet boots who want to discover a starlet. They don’t want the most famous shanty-singer in the world. They’re hoping we suck, so they can sell pictures and papers, and that’s assuming Paramount isn’t setting us up to fall face first.” He put the glasses back on. “‘The Fish Stinks’, that’ll be the headline they want. Not ‘Home Run for Fontaine, First-time Actress’.”

Ferroni looked at the small white hand on the screen. Shouldn’t it be First Time for Ferroni, First-Time Director? There’s more alliteration, even.

“Too bad then,” he said. “She’ll prove them wrong.”

Norbert grunted, which meant he agreed. The chair yawned as he returned to the screen.

“Did you know she’s getting a theatre?” Ferroni said, recalling an earlier conversation with Cooper, who was also one of his red circles.

“She’s what?”

“Getting a theatre.”

Norbert turned to face him. “Like… an actual theatre?”

“Yeah… on Broadway.”

“Does that mean she’s not coming to the Festivals?”

“Oh, she will. It takes a LONG time to put up a theatre and run a successful show,” Ferroni assured his friend. “Besides, even if she has a working theatre, what are they going to put on? They have no troupe. Is she going to write her own plays? Hahaha…”

Spinning back, Norbert let the picture run.

On the monitor, the girl with the milk began to move toward the door, six weeks away from breaking hearts and wowing critics.