ALSO BY LAURENCE KLAVAN
The Cutting Room
While set in real places, this book is a work of fiction. The characters and events are products of the author’s imagination and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual people is unintentional. In the few instances where well-known or real names are used, the related characters, incidents, or dialogues are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict any actual people or events.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2004 by Laurence Klavan
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher upon request.
eISBN: 978-0-345-48175-7
v3.1
For my mother
And in memory of my father,
who always got the joke
Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.
—attributed to the actor Edmund Gwenn, on his deathbed
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part 1 - New York City
Part 2 - The Hamptons
Part 3 - Los Angeles
Part 4 - Amsterdam
Part 5 - Maine and Philadelphia
Part 6 - New York City
Epilogue
About the Author
PROLOGUE
THE OSCAR FOR BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS CAME DOWN ON MY HEAD.
Before I blacked out, I saw the face of the most famous child star of the 1970s. Today, she looked like a combination of Bette Davis in Baby Jane, a Bel Air trophy wife, and a dead dog.
Gratey McBride stood at the top of a staircase I was ascending. She’d emerged from the shadows of the house’s second floor like a bat flying from an attic. She’d even given a little batlike scream. Or maybe I had screamed, as she lifted then brought down the statuette she’d won for acting thirty years before.
Gratey, of course, had played an adorably cynical six-year-old grifter in the 1976 hit Macaroon Heart. Though it was rumored that her part had been dubbed by a male dwarf, she had still managed to nab an Oscar and a few more roles. Puberty ended her career, and adulthood brought her a tumultuous marriage, drug abuse, and oblivion.
To be honest, I wasn’t that surprised to see her. I’d seen all kinds of familiar, famous, and infamous faces since I’d arrived in L.A., looking for the world’s second-most coveted lost film. I, Roy Milano, had once again gone from being a passive movie sleuth to an active movie sleuth.
