Chapter 1

It all started a few weeks back, but let’s flash-forward to the morning Jake stopped by the apartment to drop off my obituary. The piece was scheduled to appear a few days later in The Globe

I was in the shower.

He stuck his head around the corner of the tub, pulled back the curtain, and running his eyes appraisingly up and down my body, gave out a low whistle.

I leaned over and kissed him.

He moved closer but I pushed him away, saying one of my favorite lines from a dreary romantic comedy that had made tons of dough for the studio. “Let’s not start something we know we can’t finish.”

He acted deeply hurt by my rejection, put a hand over his heart, and slinked out of the bathroom, but not before I glimpsed a lopsided smile in the mirror.

“It’s on the table,” he yelled out.

I turned off the water and was toweling myself off when I heard a muffled sound of a door lock clicking shut. I grabbed my robe and ran into the dining room, making wet footmarks on the hardwood floor.

I sat down and picked up the draft. Not everyone gets to see his obit a few days before it goes to print.

Anders, Harry an actor who won popular and critical acclaim for his film debut in the 1997 romantic comedy, Holiday in the Hamptons, has died. He was 46. Anders, a leading man in film and on television, appeared most recently in the popular TV series, This Side of the Angels. Anders is survived by his husband Alec Walker. A rosary will be recited Thursday evening at 7:30 P.M. at The McConaughey Funeral Home in West Hollywood. A requiem Mass will be offered Saturday at 11 A.M. in the Chapel of the Ascension, Sacred Heart Cemetery, Culver City.

The death notice was part of the plan Jake and I had concocted at one of those all night gab sessions fueled by too much booze and too many cigarettes. The specifics, the shape and the logistics of how we’d orchestrate my demise and subsequent resurrection, came later and took time and effort to refine over several days. We had to be positive the plan would work. A lot was riding on even the smallest detail going off without a hitch; truth is, it was a crazy, hair-brained scheme two sensible people would never have considered sober.

* * * *

Despite Jake’s numerous attempts as my agent to resuscitate my acting career, we both knew it had hit a serious downswing. I’d been riding high for years. My talent had attracted award-winning directors and first-rate producers who cast me alongside A-list actors in prestigious films and television mini-series. I made a great deal of money in those days. I feasted on major parts and enjoyed being pampered and flattered by everyone on set including a host of adoring fans. I was even the critics’ darling. It seemed I could do no wrong.

Then midway through the first decade of the new millennium, something happened I couldn’t control. I became desperate. Needy. But that somethingdidn’t happen overnight. Despite Jake’s pleas to choose film projects more carefully—roles that suited my stature in the industry and talents—do interviews for the studio when a film was about to launch, or anything else the head honchos required, I refused to budge. I was a reigning star and those chores were beneath me. “Not my job,” I’d tell him

Jake also warned me to stop the partying, the excessive drinking, and to stay out of the gossip columns. Most of all, he pointed to my self-destructive STAR behavior. My tardiness on set; the complaints I lodged against co-stars who hogged the limelight or were unprepared for a day’s shoot; the rushing off to my trailer in a temper tantrum when the director refused to change a line of dialogue. “My character would never say or do that.”

I’d become tiny Alice, losing my footing and slipping then sliding deep into the land of the featured player. You know who I mean, one of those graying, middle-aged men, glimpsed in party scenes, then passed over by the leading lady as she moves on to greener pastures. Straight into the arms of the much younger leading man.

Jake made me see I was to blame for what seemed such a sudden fall from grace. I needed help. Christ, I needed a fucking miracle. I had to do something to stop the freefall. And fast.

* * * *

I met Jackson—call me Jake—Navarro while out on a casting call in the mid-1990s. I sensed the role wasn’t a big one, but I’d been in town over a year and beggars couldn’t be choosers. I’d had some luck but it was just that. Luck. Talent in my experience didn’t enter into it. Right place, right time. It was that simple.