"God, this is grim," Debra murmured, sotto voce.  "Grim, just like him."

 

"What, mom?" piped up the little boy at her side, her son -- his son.

 

“I was just thinking that it isn’t a very nice day for your daddy’s funeral,” she said, smiling down at him.  “No sunshine at all.  But he wouldn’t mind that, would he darling... he rather liked gloomy weather.”

 

Indeed it was a bleak, blustery, Southern California fall day, one of very few in usually sunny La-La Land, as the tabloids called Los Angeles.  Many of the Hollywood film industry’s most notable personages stood huddled against the chill -- producers, directors, writers, stars -- shoulder to shoulder around the spot where the glass coffin stood on its preposterous-looking gilded bier.

No matter that most of the Hollywood notables here today were noteworthy for yesterday’s triumphs, not today’s, and certainly not tomorrow’s; they were noteworthy still, by virtue of illustrious past accomplishments and significant contributions to the art of cinema.

 

Dinosaurs, she observed to herself, discreetly scanning the crowd, just like him.  And who the hell came up with that bloody ridiculous lucite coffin?  Even he had better taste than that, which is saying precious little, God knows.

But he was, after all, Jason’s father.  Her sweet, tow-headed ten-year-old was clinging to her now, so vulnerable, so confused, the son she had been trying for a decade to bring up as a normal youngster, with little success.  That would change now, she thought with satisfaction -- now that the sonofabitch was dead.

 

Looking toward the casket, she wondered if others could guess her thoughts.  Probably, she knew, since this was a savvy crowd, and their sordid saga had been splashed across the world press.  Standing tall, she was striking in Gaultier sun glasses, a gold-flecked black chiffon scarf wrapped loosely around tons of dark wavy hair, a very short, very tight black Thierry Mugler suit, and a pair of impossibly high heels that kept sinking into the soggy cemetery turf.

 

I am absolutely ruining these fucking shoes, she complained inwardly, glancing down at the fine black suede that was now coated with grassy, muddy ooze -- fucking four-hundred dollar shoes, but it can’t be helped, you never know where your next part is coming from, and there certainly should be at least a few  au courant movers and shakers among the mourners, wouldn’t you think?

 

She was arguably not a brilliant actress, but she had, to date, played the parts of several memorable movie ladies, largely by dint of a big personality coupled with a sculpted, exotic beauty that was rendered all the more extraordinary on screen -- the camera loved her, attested many a Director of Photography, loved those cheekbones.

Not a little eccentric, that quality translated to medium-high comedy in her performance, and even though she had really only one performance, one act, so to speak, it was an act in sufficient demand, it seemed -- that of the funny, ballsy, off-the-wall, altogether endearing and incredibly beautiful, thoroughly Americanized English rose.

 

She didn’t need to act, she just had to be herself.  She was astute enough to realize that she was no Meryl Streep, but she was doing quite well, thank you, with her own personally crafted, larger-than-life, just slightly camp act.

 

And at the moment she was performing the script that she had written for this particular affair -- playing the not-exactly-grieving-but-certainly-concerned, sexily but appropriately (for her) costumed, third ex-wife, and mother of the deceased’s only (legitimate) son, at the motherfucker’s funeral.

 

A couple of rows in front of her a man was talking, louder than was seemly.  “Jesus, he’d have hated this, don’tcha think?  I mean, what’s with the see-through coffin?  I’ve never seen one like that.  Is it supposed to be a symbol or something?  I mean, was there a famous glass coffin in one of his movies that I don’t know about?”

 

The question was posed by a formerly famous star of a formerly famous television series who had long since lost it all to booze and the horses -- his money, his looks, his family, his career.  Some say he’d even fried his brain, because he kept marrying one bimbo after another and getting hauled into court and nailed for another chunk of alimony that he couldn’t pay.  Still, he had some cachet that was kept alive by colorful stories of his colorful doings in the tabloid press, eager to record the ever downward spiral of this once magnetic leading man.

The deceased had gotten a kick out of him, and in fact had lent him plenty of money over the years, mostly at the track, money he knew he would never see again.  You could say that the director’s untimely demise took the tout off the hook, except that this wasn’t the kind of guy responsible or even sober enough to ever have considered himself on the hook.  Oh, he had always meant to pay Jack back.  He intended to pay everyone back he owed money to, when he had a windfall, a big exacta, the lottery even.  He would pay them all back, with interest -- providing he could remember who the hell they all were.

 

“No,” said the deceased’s former agent, who just happened to be standing next to the guy -- no agent would place himself next to a has-been in the business on purpose.  “I guess the glass coffin is what Janet wanted.  He looks good though, doesn’t he?”

 

“Ahhh, they shoulda buried him under his star on Hollywood Boulevard, that’s the kinda scene he’da liked.”

“You know, he never had a star,” mused the agent, who knew everything about his famous, infamous, complex, and now dead client.

 

Mind you, the agent would never have admitted to anyone that brilliant film-maker Jack Nathanson, multiple Oscar winner, did not have a star on the world-renowned Hollywood Walk of Fame -- that would be bad PR, and the deceased still had a picture coming out, from which the agency would get ten percent of his points.  Not that anybody would believe it anyway, and besides, this poor excuse for an actor standing next to him wasn’t anybody.  He used to be James McAdam, handsome, charismatic, wildly popular star of Doctor Bryce, which placed in the top ten weekly shows for most of its seven years on NBC, and didn’t do at all badly in its last two years on CBS.  Now look at him, drunk even at a morning funeral -- he wouldn’t remember it by tomorrow.

“Whaddaya mean he doesn’t have a star?  ’Course he has a star, everybody’s got a star.  Pat Sajak has a star.  Jamie Farr has a star.  I have a star for Chrissake!  Jack was one of the greatest movie-makers ever lived, of course he has a star.”

 

“Nope,” said Eugene Polo, one of the very few hugely successful agents in the business who wasn’t Jewish -- worse, he was Italian!  “No, Jack never had a star on the Boulevard.”

 

“Go-wan, Gino, he used to talk about it... used to say it was somewhere up on Ivar Street between King Vidor and Lassie.  He didn’t give a shit about a fucking star, why would he lie about it?”

 

Why indeed, thought Gino, who knew Jack Nathanson probably better than anyone, so of course he knew the answer to that question, but he certainly wasn’t going to elaborate for McAdam.