tinseltrash / adj / 1. a person who's achieved great wealth, fame and/or power in the field(s) of film, television and/or music, who remains unable or unwilling to improve upon the bad conduct and/or low morals imparted upon them in their youth 2. something you throw away after Christmas
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Hello, my name is Jeff Abugov. I have been a professional Hollywood writer for fourteen years -- you can check me out because my resume is all over the Internet. I've written for "Cheers," "Golden Girls," and "My Two Dads." I've written and produced "Roseanne," consulted on "Caroline in the City," executive-produced "Roc" and "Grace Under Fire." I wrote and directed an independent feature film called "The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human" which you may have never seen, and you should, but that's not the point. The point is I know what I'm talking about when it comes to show business.
So, I'd like to tell you a story about a good friend of mine, one of the nicest guys I know, who simply got a bum rap in the press. Yes, he deserved it, because he screwed us all, but as I see it, he had no choice. You can decide for yourself when you hear his story.
Today's portion of this internet soap opera is free. If you like it, chapters 2 through 5 will be free as well. After that, all I ask is a dollar a chapter because I have to make a living the same way you do. It's just a buck, for crying out loud. But don't worry about that now. Just read, and enjoy.
"TINSELTRASH" by Jeff Abugov
Chapter One
"The Invitation"
A very good friend of mine was the biggest star on TV about ten years ago. I can't tell you his real name because the story that will follow is perverse and horrible, so to protect him and his family I'll call him "Robby Rockman." I'll say Robby is six-foot tall with a slender build, blue eyes, reddish-brown hair and freckles, but I might be making that up.
Robby was the kind of guy who would pick up homeless people and then treat them to dinner at an all-night diner. With no fanfare or publicity, he'd pay their stay in a cheap motel until he found them a job, then he'd move on to his next project. Sometimes it was rescuing puppies from the pound, other times it was lending money to down-and-out actor friends, or simply coaching his little son's t-ball team. When there was a problem on his sitcom set, it was Robby who smoothed over the wounded egos and got everyone back on track. There wasn't a benefit he turned down, a charity he refused, or a secret he couldn't keep. To know this guy was to have a lifelong friend you could trust forever.
Robby received several Emmy nominations for his sitcom which I'll call "School, Sweet School," of which he won two. He received four Golden Globe nominations and won one. He should've won an Oscar because his film performance was brilliant even though the movie tanked. It deserved to tank, it wasn't good, but that's not the point.
You know who I'm talking about. If you're young, you grew up with him as a role model. If you're older, you watched him with your kids. He brilliantly played a nice guy, I'll call the character "Mr. Bell," the loveable teacher at "School, Sweet School," even though he didn't really play a teacher and it wasn't really a show about a high school. Everyone thought, including me, that the only reason Robby was so great at playing a nice guy was that he WAS such a nice guy. The truth is, he was a brilliant actor who could play a jerk as well as anyone. And that, my hopeful readers, is how he reached his legendary status. He didn't do it on the big screen or the little screen, but in the press, the tabloids, and in his best performances, on the nightly news.
This is the downfall, the comeback, and the personal destruction of the one we'll call Robby Rockman.
***
There are many places to begin Robby's story, but I'll choose the night of his agent's annual Fourth of July bash because that was the night Robby decided to alter the entire course of his life.
It had been eight years since Robby taped the final episode of "School, Sweet, School." Six years since his brilliant performance in the dull-as-hell courtroom drama movie, five years since his big budget action picture flopped, four years since he worked at all, and roughly six months since his agent returned one of his phone calls.
His agent, whom I'll call Artie Eichman, was five-foot-eight, with a muscular build due to a personal trainer and a full mane of sandy-brown hair due to cosmetic surgery. He signed Robby when both of them were nothing, and took him from good reviews in an Off-Broadway flop to the lead in "School, Sweet School." During the run of the show, Artie used the leverage from representing Robby to make himself one of the most powerful agents at his mammoth agency. Let's call it "the Mammoth Agency." Today, Artie is among those who run this town, and he wouldn't have had any of it without Robby's talent and loyalty, but he still sees no reason to return his calls.
So when Robby got Artie's invitation out of the mail, he didn't even have to open it to know that he was on his way back. Artie had been having these parties since the third year of "School, Sweet School," and he always invited only the top people in Hollywood, and only his working clients. Robby was not working but clearly he was about to, and he had a pretty good idea of what the role would be.
For weeks, Robby had been begging Artie - actually Artie's secretary because Artie wouldn't return his calls -- for an audition with a certain well-known director, let's call him Anthony dePaulo. dePaulo, you know him, too, is one of America's greatest directors. From the Spielberg-Lucas generation, his movies may never have made as much money as theirs did, but his were better. That's my opinion and nothing more, but I'd bet you agree. dePaulo had helped mediocre actors become great, and had helped great actors carve the character for which they'd be forever remembered. He had made stars out of nothing, and turned has-beens into icons. With an actor as brilliant as Robby, the sky was the limit, and everybody knew it.
Robby knew that the invitation could only mean that Artie had somehow gotten him the part in dePaulo's new film. The rest was up to him, and he knew he could pull it off. Especially with a director as brilliant as dePaulo!
Something you should know about Robby is that he always hated Hollywood parties. At the peak of his popularity, he couldn't stand the sycophants sucking up to him so they could tell the other sycophants he was their pal. Since his decline, these same sycophants ignored him like the plague, which Robby hated even more.
Robby's wife, whom we'll call Trudy Rockman, was a beautiful yet petite waif of a woman with straight, jet black hair to her mid-back and zero streaks of red. If you ask me, it would've looked better with a little bit of red, but Trudy didn't want to "go Hollywood." Trudy was just one year younger than Robby, and they had been high school sweethearts. She had stuck by Robby through the lean years in New York, the insanity of superstardom, and the dark years that followed. Everyone who knew them agreed that their marriage was as good as one could get in Hollywood.
Trudy knew how Robby felt about parties. She also knew he shouldn't go to this one because Artie never meant for him to be invited. Artie believed unemployed clients made him look bad, and Trudy could only deduce that Artie's secretary had sent out the invitation on her own. Why the secretary had done that Trudy had no idea, and I'll get to it later. Still, Trudy knew that Robby was not welcome at the party. The reason she knew this was because she was secretly having an affair with Artie.
No one was aware of it at the time of course, including me. Like I said, we all thought Robby and Trudy had the perfect marriage. But after watching her husband grow sadder and sadder with each passing day for eight years of his vanishing career, Trudy finally couldn't take it anymore. The least Artie could do is return one of her husband's calls, she felt. So, a couple of months before the bash, she got into her red Cherokee and drove to the Mammoth Agency building in Beverly Hills to confront him.
Artie greeted Trudy with warmth, humor, and friendliness. Instead of denying her accusations, he explained them away.
"I serve him better by speaking to studio heads on his behalf than using the same time to tell him that I have nothing to tell him," was one of his defenses.
"He already knows no one will hire him, but when I tell him he just gets more depressed," was another.
"I'd be nothing without Robby," he'd begin my personal favorite with total sincerity. "It pains me that you'd think I'd actually give up on him."
Trudy pointed out the fallacies of each of Artie's defenses, and Artie countered brilliantly. It wasn't that she believed anything he said, but the repartee, the give-and-take, the warmth and the smile was something she hadn't had for a very long time.
Then Nicholson called, and Artie had to go. He had been trying to steal Nicholson for months, he explained to Trudy as if it were a good thing, then told her he wanted to continue their conversation because he wanted to make sure Robby was happy. If he was making matters worse, he went on, he wanted to know how to correct it.
So he asked her out to dinner. She, naive little thing that she was, suggested it would be best if Robby didn't know about it since it would embarrass him to learn that his wife had more impact on his agent than he did. Artie made some vague comment about honesty, then quickly went along with the plan.
Their first dinner was a great success and they spent the entire time talking about Robby. No true solutions were reached, but Trudy had a wonderful time with the gregarious man, once again eating in an L.A. hotspot, once again being treated like Hollywood royalty.
So they had another dinner, and another. Conversations about Robby had long vanished, and Artie spent much of the time talking about how his first wife had taken half his money, and how his second wife was now trying to take the other half. The rest of the time he spent telling Trudy how absolutely beautiful she was.
Trudy kind of knew what Artie was after for she wasn't THAT naive. They had known each other for a very long time by then and she had seen him talk his talk with many other women, married or not. So the fact that he was now trying to woo the wife of the man to whom he owed so much may have repelled her, but it did not surprise her.
On the other hand, Artie was not an unattractive man. She had never been with a muscle-guy before, and had often secretly fantasized about being with him. Of course, she had no intention of acting on it.
Until he got her drunk.
Because she let him.
Trudy had never been with anyone other than Robby, and Artie was very well endowed. It wasn't that he was better in bed than Robby that got her to climax. It wasn't that she loved or even liked Artie. She knew Artie for the sleaze he was, and it made it all the more exciting for her. It was raw sex, it was wrong, and as the two sweated away on the rooftop veranda of Artie's Hollywood Hills home with the L.A. skyline twinkling in her half-opened eyes, she knew she would keep coming back for more. Trudy had never done a wrong thing in her life and, in her mid-thirties, the lifelong wife of her husband -- this was the only way she could see of being her own person.
The truly sad part is that for years Robby had been attracted to Artie's second wife, Adona Eichman, young, beautiful, thin with large, expensive breasts -- the trophy Artie received for representing Robby. Adona had had a crush on Robby since she was a kid, and would've given herself to him in a second. She had given him all the signals, but Robby simply wouldn't go for it. It wasn't because of Artie and it was barely because of Trudy. As far as Robby was concerned, he was a married man and that was that.
So when Robby got the invitation from Artie's assistant, Trudy knew some kind of slip-up had occurred because Artie had already told her Robby wasn't on the list. But Robby was so excited thinking that he got the part in a Tony dePaulo film that Trudy didn't know what to say.
"Be realistic, he wouldn't invite YOU," she knew she couldn't say.
"He only invites his working clients, and you haven't worked in years," she also knew was wrong. So, instead, she dropped casual hints.
"Don't you just hate these full-of-it parties?" she asked him.
"Sure, but I'm in no position to turn it down," he replied.
"I'm sure whatever Artie has going for you will hold if we don't go to this party."
"He wants me there," Robby answered. "I'm sure he has his reasons."
"Why don't you call him and find out what the reasons are? Maybe they're not as important as you think."
"Even if they're not, it doesn't matter. He wants me to come and I've always been a team player. I can't change now."
In the end, Trudy figured there wouldn't be any harm in attending. They'd have a bad time, Robby would grow more depressed, but in the end it wouldn't change anything.
She couldn't have been more wrong. It was at that party that Robby made the very conscious, calculated decision that would ultimately cause his life to spiral completely out of control! And the drugs, sex and other scandals in which he'd be involved were nothing but a by-product of that one vice-laden decision.
*** Up Next: "A Hollywood Bash" ***
The main characters in this e-novel are fictional and are not intended to portray or resemble any actual individuals, whether living or dead (except for Jeff Abugov who is a real screenwriter, director and producer.) Although certain real people and companies are mentioned in this e-novel, all of the events are fictional and are not intended to portray or resemble any actual events.
Copyright 2001 Tinseltrash, Inc.
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