Bad Angels Read online

  And that was where everything went so wrong.

  Brad Baker was the most successful director of action films

  Hollywood had ever had. Stocky, aggressive, with the Napoleon complex of a very short man, there was nothing Brad liked more than to orchestrate vastly expensive movie shoots, full of explosions, special effects and CGI wizardry. He was a perfect fit for the breathtakingly original action scenes that the Wonder Woman scriptwriters had imagined. Unfortunately,

  Brad was a much worse fit for a film with a strong female lead. Because Brad, famously, was a very unpleasant misogynist. Melody had heard some of the stories about Brad: the most notorious one was how he had made a roster of Victoria’s Secret models audition for the part of the female love interest in his most recent movie by coming to his house and washing his car, clad only in skimpy bikinis and a bucketful of soapy suds. The producers, however, very keen to cast a classically trained English actress, were now absolutely set on Melody playing Wonder Woman, and had instructed Brad in the strongest terms not to fuck this up by pulling any car-washing nonsense. Brad had duly behaved himself. The drawer full of bikinis had remained closed, the Aston Martin in the driveway of his Malibu beach house had been buffed by the Mexican gardener rather than Melody. He had given her iced acai berry tea on the glass terrace with its commanding view of Carbon Beach, a wide golden crescent-shaped stretch of sand that led to some of the most expensive real estate in the world. It was popularly known as Billionaire Beach: Brad had taken great pleasure in pointing out the houses of David Geffen, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Jeffrey Katzenberg of DreamWorks.

  ‘Jen’s farther down,’ he’d said nonchalantly, and Melody had realised he meant Jennifer Aniston. ‘Nice girl. But she’s kinda the exception. Actors just don’t make enough money to live here, honey. They’re in Malibu Colony, or on Broad Beach. It’s the guys behind the scenes that make the real money. You know what this house cost me, five years ago? Thirty-three mill. And I paid cash. You tell me an actor who could come up with that kind of green!’

  Brad had gone on to list the salaries he’d paid actors in his recent films. A dizzying array of famous names and eight-figure sums danced before Melody’s eyes, dazzling her even more than the California sun. It was her first visit to LA, but she was quickly learning that this was how people in LA made conversation: they dropped more names than a kid did their toys, scattering them all over the place, not letting you get a word in edgeways as they streamed out Leos and Brads and Angelinas and Gerards with compulsive abandon.

  Her LA agent had done exactly the same thing, told her a story about Roger Federer – a ‘close personal friend’ – and an umpire at Wimbledon, assuming that because she lived in London she’d be interested in a story that was set there. At first, Melody had panicked, thinking that she was supposed to have met all the people who were being named, contribute something to the conversation, but soon she’d realised that this was simply how they operated, their currency being proximity to the stars, and they were laying out their riches in front of her to impress her before they got down to business. And Brad had certainly impressed her. The extraordinary, architect-designed house, nestling on the pristine coastline, the films he had directed, the people he knew – and the attention he was paying her – were all designed to sweep a twenty-four-year-old actress off her feet. He told her she was extraordinarily beautiful, perfect to play the twin parts of Diana Prince and Wonder Woman. He’d claimed the entire credit for bringing her over to LA, saying that as soon as he had seen photos of her he’d screened Wuthering Heights in his private cinema, known that she was the one, and had pushed the producers to view it too. Melody had asked, feeling idiotic, if he actually wanted her to read for him; she’d stuffed the script, now battered and crumpled from being thumbed over so much, into her bag, and brought it to the meeting. Brad had burst out laughing and waved it away.

  ‘Oh, baby, no,’ he’d said airily. ‘Script, schmipt. I love you Brits! Always thinking about the words! I guess it’s all that Shakespeare – you read that, like, from birth, right? Well, you’re in LA now, baby. Movie Town. And guess what’s way more important over here?’ He raised his hands in front of his face, framing a shot. ‘Images. I could give a shit about the words, to be honest with you.’

  ‘But—’ Melody had started nervously. The script was what had seduced her into doing this project, leaving a furious and resentful James behind in London; without its wonderful, sparkling wit, she’d never even have agreed to meet the producers and Brad...

  Brad leant forward intently, staring at her with utter concentration.

  ‘Right now,’ he said, ‘you know what’s the most important thing in the world for me? The only thing I’m focusing on right now? You gotta know, right?’

  Melody had shaken her head, baffled.

  ‘You, baby. You. My leading lady. Because, you know why I wanna do this project? You know my work, right? Cars, bombs, explosions, guys driving trucks off cliffs to hit helicopters? Bow! Biff ! Bang!’

  Brad jumped up, pacing the flagstones of the terrace. Melody was sitting under the bronzed-steel pergola, protecting her white skin from the sun; she raised a hand to shade her eyes as she turned to watch Brad, who had reached the far side of the patio, where a floating flight of steps led down to the saltwater pool. He strode back, his short legs stumping to a strategic point where the terrace had been built out over the beach to accommodate a teak-and-steel lava-rock fire pit. Pausing dramatically, the sun directly at his back, he pointed at Melody, who was squinting now at his silhouette.

  ‘You!’ he repeated. ‘You’re why I wanna do this movie! Here’s how it went down: Millennial came to me and said, Brad, we wanna do a Wonder Woman movie and we want you to helm it, and I said, “Shit, guys, that’s a chick flick!” You know? For girls! I could give a shit about what girls wanna watch!’ He fixed her with a basilisk gaze. ‘I’m being totally frank with you – I hope you get it, that I’m being totally honest about this, because I want you to know exactly how passionate I feel about this, exactly the journey I went on to realise why Wonder Woman was such a passion project for me.’ Both his fists pounded his chest, like a gorilla demonstrating his strength. And that was exactly what Brad was doing, Melody realised. A film director, especially one who worked on Hollywood blockbusters, had to have a core of arrogance, of certainty that their vision was the best, and the ability to impose that on cast and crew. Sammy Cox, the director of Wuthering Heights, had been as gentle as Brad was aggressive; she worked by coaxing, convincing, moving you along a path of her choosing, so that you thought you were making your own decisions about the character you were playing, but in the end, watching the finished cut, you realised that Sammy had been pulling your puppet strings, getting you to give the performance that she wanted from you all along.

  Brad was a loud, boastful silverback to Sammy’s clever, persuasive fox, but that didn’t make him any less convincing.

  As he kept speaking, Melody felt herself being swept away on his sea of words, further and further away from land, and no matter how much she tried to put down an anchor, to withstand the waves of rhetoric, she couldn’t hold out.

  ‘Who is Wonder Woman?’ Brad was demanding. ‘That’s the question I asked myself! And you know what I answered?’ He was approaching the table now, and he grabbed the back of the chair he’d been sitting in, rattling it on the flagstones with considerable force: Melody shrank back a little as she said, nervously:

  ‘Diana Prince? I mean, that’s her alias...’

  ‘No!’ Brad bellowed. ‘Wonder Woman is an Amazon! She’s a goddess! A goddess come to Earth! And you know what I thought of as soon as I realised that?’

  Melody shook her head as Brad rolled on:

  ‘One Touch of Venus! Fuck, I love that film! Have you seen it? Ava Gardner as Venus, the goddess of beauty! Most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life – shit, I’m obsessed with her! And I thought: Hey, this is my chance to make an homage to one of my favourite
movies of all time! With you!’

  He pointed a stubby finger at Melody again.

  ‘You’re going to be a goddess,’ he said, his voice throbbing with conviction. ‘A modern goddess, a new Ava. Everyone is going to fucking worship you. I wanna put in way more Amazons – warrior princesses – a whole tribe of goddesses, and you’ll be, like, the queen. The empress.’

  Melody’s lips were parted now: she was gazing at Brad with awe and wonder.

  Ava Gardner? He’s comparing me to her? Ava Gardner was one of the greatest Hollywood beauties of all time: screen legend, the great love of Frank Sinatra’s life. She had been a star, rather than an actress, but it was a comparison that would have utterly dazzled any ingénue who had just been offered a huge breakout role.

  ‘I played Venus in a school play,’ she heard herself say. ‘I had to give a big speech coming down a flight of stairs wrapped in a sheet – we couldn’t afford proper costumes, it was supposed to be a toga. I was terrified it’d catch on something.’

  ‘You see!’ Brad narrowed in triumphantly on the only part of this that was relevant to him. ‘You already played Venus! You’re a goddess already!’ He pulled away the chair whose back he had been holding, sending it flying away across the terrace, reached across the table and grabbed Melody’s hands. ‘You’re a goddess! My Ava! I’m going to make you what she was – the Ava of your generation – the most beautiful woman in the world!’

  Only Ava Gardner was famous in the 1940s and ’50s,Melody thought now.

  Before plastic surgery became so common that people in LA are surprised when you haven’t had it.

  It had started very gradually. Brad had known exactly what he was doing, how to manipulate her. Melody had been put up in a suite in the Hotel Bel-Air, with her own private infinity pool with views over the Hollywood canyons. Every night, Brad had taken her out to one exclusive party after another, dazzling her with his access to the most A-list celebrities, actors, directors, producers, all of whom were flatteringly keen to meet her. Since the runaway success of Downton Abbey in the States, the interest in British actors had intensified even more than usual, and Melody had found herself the toast of Los Angeles, invited everywhere, feted and garlanded as the new British breakout star, the new Wonder Woman. Because, by that point, she had signed the contracts. It was official. Her UK agent had baulked initially, concerned that the filming schedule might clash with the Romeo and Juliet dates, and about Brad Baker’s reputation as a sexist vulgarian; her US agent had naturally been over the moon. However, the sheer amount of money they had managed to extract from Millennial had swept away even the objections of the British agency.

  It was only James, in the end, who held firm, pleaded with Melody not to do the film, told her that they didn’t need the money, that their pact to stay in London and concentrate on theatre work should be the deciding factor. But Melody couldn’t resist the lure that Brad was dangling before her eyes. She was going to be a goddess, the new Ava Gardner. She was going to incarnate an Amazon warrior, a feminist icon. And she was still committed to playing Juliet... she might have to skip a couple of weeks of the scheduled rehearsal period, but she’d work like a dog as soon as she got back to London, be word-perfect on her lines the moment she stepped off the plane...

  Only Melody never went back to London. She was plunged straight into the deep end in LA, utterly immersed in preparing for her role. Millennial sent her to boot camp to work on her muscle tone, and to a professional cowboy to learn how to spin a rope and throw a lariat, so that she could convincingly use Wonder Woman’s magic golden lasso. She wanted to do as many of her own stunts as possible, and they flew in Randy Nebel, a gymnastics coach who had trained many Hollywood stars, from New York, where he was based, to teach her back flips and somersaults. Brad called her in for test shots and expressed some concern; her nose had a slight flaw, was fractionally imperfect from the left profile, did she know that?

  No, she didn’t.

  He showed her the evidence, frowning: goddesses didn’t have slightly imperfect left profiles. Before she knew it, she was booked in for surgery. Very minor, the tiniest of corrections: they would take just a sliver of cartilage from behind her ear, whence its absence would never be noticed, and implant it onto the bridge of her nose, to make it perfectly straight. And they might put an equally tiny drop of Juvéderm into her lower lip, to make it just a little bit fuller, balance out her upper lip perfectly...

  Hmm. The surgeon had noticed that Melody’s chin wasn’t completely round; they could just tidy that up during the nose surgery, even her out. Not to worry, it was all ridiculously minor-league stuff; it wouldn’t even be visible to anyone after the bruising had faded. She would simply look like herself, but now she would be perfectly symmetrical, that was all. Melody baulked, and the surgeon showed her before-and after pictures of some of his famous patients, women who she would never have dreamed had had plastic surgery.

  Gazing in amazement at the photographs, Melody couldn’t think of a celebrity name that didn’t seem to have had work done. Men as well as women, though the latter outnumbered the former three to one.

  But she still wasn’t sure. She’d been voted Most Beautiful and Most Sexy in the UK, her looks – though obviously, as had been extensively pointed out to her by now, they weren’t completely symmetrical – had been valued highly enough to have her cast as Cathy, as Juliet, and have her summoned from London to audition for Wonder Woman. Surely she didn’t really need to have a plastic surgeon take a scalpel to her? And then Brad came down hard. He was going to make her a star, catapult her onto the A-list in one go, put her on the cover of every single magazine in the world – and all he was asking in return was a minimal amount of cosmetic surgery! To tidy up some very small imperfections! Did she realise how ungrateful she was being, how much effort he had put into burnishing her image already, how lucky she was to have been handpicked by him to be a goddess...?

  The producers took Brad’s side. Even her LA agent said that she couldn’t see why Melody was making such a fuss about such a small procedure; her agent was so Botoxed that she could barely move her face, had the tell-tale overarched eyebrows and nose wrinkles, so she wasn’t in the position to make the strongest case. Still, Melody felt overwhelmed.

  Everyone back home in London was either deeply impressed at her huge career opportunity – apart from her fellow actors, who were insanely jealous. Henry Cavill had been picked from The Tudors TV series to play Superman, and there wasn’t a male actor of his age in the UK who didn’t envy him, just as there wasn’t an actress who didn’t envy Melody.

  The only dissenting voice was James. And Melody didn’t dare to tell him, because she knew that he would be on the first plane over to insist that she come home at once and not let anyone touch her face with a knife.

  So she didn’t tell him. She had the surgeries, just as Brad wanted. And they finalised the Romeo and Juliet decision for her; she was much more sore than the doctor had promised. Much too sore and bruised to contemplate flying back to London and throwing herself straight into rehearsals. I knew earlier than I admitted that I wouldn’t do the play, she acknowledged to herself. I was so committed to the film by then – the training, the schedules. She had Skyped James to tell him, and the sight of her face, post-surgery, had upset him as much as the news that she wouldn’t be playing Juliet opposite his

  Romeo had infuriated him. She had let him down utterly, broken their pact. He had told her it was over, and though she had begged him to reconsider, she had known that he wouldn’t.

  Sir Trevor Nunn had promptly cast Priya Radia, another up-and-coming actress with a youthful face and body, as Juliet. Melody had put all her eggs in one basket. So, when Brad told her that the costume designers were very concerned that Melody wouldn’t be able to carry off the costume, that her boot camp regime and gymnastics work had slimmed her down so much that her breasts had shrunk, and that he thought she should have implants – just to take her from an A to a B cup, nothin
g vulgar or huge – she had agreed to it without too much protest.

  By then, I wasn’t even myself any more, she thought now, looking down at her newly shrunk chest.

  The surgeon had favoured Brad’s wishes over hers. Melody had woken up with a D cup, not a B: breasts that bounced, as Aniela put it, like a porno doll over the top of the corset. I was so upset I was hysterical. But I still knew the film would be good. The script was amazing, the lines were brilliant. I knew I’d be able to make all the one-liners sing, I was counting on that to keep me going...

  It hadn’t been until principal photography had started that

  Melody had realised that Brad had done a major rewrite of the script. Every single witty touch and flourish had been pruned away by his red pen, leaving a sexploitative, corny shell. Melody had cried, screamed, pleaded, tried to enlist her agent and the producers, but by then Brad had the reins firmly in his hands and no one could, or would, interfere with what he called his artistic vision. Melody had been in no way powerful enough to insist on final script approval in her contract; she was forced to stagger through months of a shoot for a film she had come to despise.

  She and Brad fought constantly on set. Things got so bad that a video, made by a key grip on his mobile phone, of Brad screaming at Melody that she was damn lucky he hadn’t made her blow him to get the part, and that she should keep her fake lips tightly shut so he didn’t change his mind, was posted on YouTube and had racked up millions of hits. Brad had got what he wanted, made Melody into a pornographic image, and now that he didn’t need to charm her any longer, he had had no hesitation in bullying her instead.

  Wonder Woman tanked in its opening week. Rotten Tomatoes gave it an 8% and described it as the worst comic-book adaptation ever made. ‘By comparison, The Green Lantern looks like Iron Man,’ it commented. Melody’s plastic-surgery enhanced face, her bouncing bosoms, were mercilessly mocked on the internet and in the press, and two film parts for which she’d auditioned before shooting Wonder Woman, and which she’d thought were locked down, went to other actresses with more natural faces. Her LA agent dropped her. Melody’s big break had left her broken.