"If it will make you feel better, I'll still respect you in the morning," Joshua said.

I grinned more widely. "That's the problem, you know," I said. "When I was a kid, I remember seeing this 1950s science fiction movie on channel nine. Three guys went to the moon and discovered it was populated by women. One of the Gabor sisters was the ruler. Here was humanity's first contact with life on another planet, and they all looked like fabulous dames. And of course the guys from Earth were having no problems with it at all. It would be much simpler if you looked like that."

"I don't know if I'd want to look like a Gabor sister," Joshua said. "Although it could have interesting ramifications. 'People of the Earth! Surrender now, or we will slap your policemen!'"

"Maybe not a Gabor sister," I said. "But not a blob, either. If you looked like Ralph," I motioned to the sleeping dog, "Then we'd be set. Everyone loves dogs."

"We know about this problem," Joshua said. "That's one of the reasons we came to you."

"I know. That's what I'm saying. By now I should have some idea of how to get away from this or work around it. But I'm having a hard time. I know I probably shouldn't tell that to you, but there it is. You've got me stumped at the moment."

"You'll figure it out," Joshua said. "Maybe while you're doing that, I'll take some lessons on dog behavior. As a backup. There are worse things than being a dog. Right, Ralph?"

Ralph cracked an eye open at the sound of his name.

From beside the cooler, my cellular phone rang. I sighed and picked it up. "Miranda, I'm busy with a client right now," I said. Miranda was the only person that had the number to this particular cellular phone (I had three), so I didn't worry about who it would be on the other side.

"Tom," Miranda sounded upset. "You remember Jim Van Doren?"

"Yeah," I said. During the last week Van Doren had been calling every couple of hours trying to get an interview with me. I eventually told Miranda to tell him whatever it was, I was not available for comment. "What about him?"

"Where are you?" Miranda said. "Are you in LA?"

"I'm in Glendora," I said. "It's about 45 minutes out."

"This week's edition of The Biz just came out," Miranda said. "You need to get back into LA and pick it up. You're on the cover. And you're not going to be happy with the story."

"Why?" I asked. "What's it about?"

"Here's what it says on the cover," Miranda said. "'Tom Stein is the hottest young agent in Hollywood. So why is he acting so damned weird?'"

Secretive Agent

Tom Stein is the hottest young agent in Hollywood. So why is he acting so damned weird?

By James Van Doren

At first glance, Tom Stein doesn't seem like your typical Hollywood millionaire. Maybe it's because he's lugging a five gallon bottle into his car. The bottle is filled, he says, with sulfurous waters from an out-of-the-way desert spa the agents at Lupo Associates go to whenever they're feeling a little stressed-out. The fact that Stein is hauling this into his car tells you two things: first, he's stressed out. Second, he doesn't have time to feel stressed out right now.

And who can blame him? Last week, Stein pulled the biggest coup of his young agentorial career, when he managed to pull a $12.5 million paycheck out of the hat for client Michelle Beck, for her return to the Murdered Earth series. There have been larger paychecks for an actress, but not many, and certainly not so soon: Michelle's most recent paycheck for a supporting role in the just-wrapped Scorpion's Tail, was a mere $650,000 — a twentieth of her next. Or, to put it another way, Stein's 10% is worth almost twice as much as his client's previous highest salary.

Stein's success is another example of hard-nosed Hollywood capitalism — but the question becomes: at what price? For shortly after Stein's magic trick with Michelle Beck, friends and colleagues started noticing the normally affable Stein has become more closed and secretive. And his clients are discovering the oddest behavior of all: without warning, Stein has dropped them onto a subordinate agent, whose inexperience and (some allege) incompetence could send their careers into cinematic limbo. What have they done to deserve this, they ask? And what secret is gnawing away at Tom Stein? Is his red-hot career over just as it begun?

(Continued on page 65)

The story itself would have been funny, if it had been written about anyone else. Van Doren, in the absence of reality, spun out a fascinating tale of stress and paranoia that speculated that I was suffering from everything from conflicted sexuality to drug use to a "late-blooming Oedipal conflict," with my agent father — my making my first million apparently being a way to "claim my father's crown" in my chosen field, according to the psychologist Van Doren managed to dig up.

The Biz being the pariah magazine it is, the quotes about me from colleagues and friends were unusually skimpy — the attributed quotes coming largely from high school acquaintances and college dorm-floor residents who generally described me as "friendly" and "driven," — nothing to get worked up about, since they were true, and blandly non-specific; these folks could have been describing a ski rescue dog with the same words, with equal results.

The unattributed quoters, of which there two, were not that hard to figure out. The first, the "Lupo Associates Insider", was obviously Ben Fleck. Ben, no doubt relishing a chance to take a whack at me, described me as a "shark with Brylcreme" who was "insanely secretive, to the point of forbidding his assistants to even talk with other agents." The latter I found amusing, the former, inscrutable — I don't put anything in my hair, much less Brylcreme. I suspected Ben didn't actually know what Brylcreme was. I had Miranda send him a tube with my compliments.

The second was a "strongarmed client" who described Amanda as a "shrieking virgin" and myself as a "fucking overlord of ego," and then went from there. It was pretty clear that Van Doren got more than he expected from Tea Reader, since by the end of it, even he noted that it seemed this particular client "was on her own personal vendetta against the universe, and Tom Stein happens to be the closest moving object."

Be that as it may, Van Doren took Tea's grudge against Amanda and ran with it, taking a bat to the poor girl. Van Doren dug up the Mexican soap star, who complained, through an interpreter, that Amanda had found her no work in the big Hollywood productions. The actor who revived her at the marathon described how they met, which made Amanda appear both sickly, for passing out in the first place, and then flaky, for representing the first passing jogger who happened to administer mouth-to-mouth.

Ben Fleck then reappeared in his Lupo Associates insider guise to make dismissive comments about the practice of bringing up agents from the mailroom (Ben got his job through nepotism: his step-father was a senior agent before keeling over, corned beef in hand, at Canter's Deli), and mentioned, darkly, that I had come up from the mailroom myself. Obviously we mail-room types were looking out for each other, like frat brothers or Templars.

Amanda read the story and burst into my office, flinging The Biz onto my desk and then collapsing into the chair, moody. "I want to die," she said.

"Amanda, no one reads The Biz," I said. "And those that do generally know enough to realize that it's full of shit."

"My mom reads The Biz," Amanda said.

"Well, all right, almost everyone knows it's full of shit," I said. "Don't worry about it. Next week they'll find some more naked pictures of celebrities and they'll forget all about it. Don't be so upset."