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  It wasn’t the prospect of being in a movie that really excited Zack, it was the salary he was offered. So he got a waiver from SAG and learned to act.

  Actually, acting hadn’t been all that difficult for him. For one thing, he’d been “acting” for years before he left his grandmother’s house, pretending things didn’t matter when they did; for another, he was totally dedicated to a goal: He was determined to prove to his grandmother and everyone else in Ridgemont that he could survive on his own and prosper on a grand scale. To achieve that goal, he was prepared to do almost anything, no matter how much effort it required.

  Ridgemont was a little city, and there’d been no doubt in Zack’s mind that the details of his ignominious departure were common knowledge within hours after he left his grandmother’s house on foot. When his first two movies were released, he went through every piece of fan mail, hoping that someone he used to know would have recognized him. But if they did, they didn’t bother to write.

  For a while after that, he fantasized about returning to Ridgemont with enough money to buy Stanhope Industries and run it, but by the time he was twenty-five and had amassed enough money to buy the company, he’d also matured enough to realize that buying the whole goddamned city and everything in it wouldn’t change a thing. By then he’d already won an Oscar, gotten his degree from USC, been hailed as a prodigy, and called a “Legend in the Making.” He had his choice of starring roles, a fortune in the bank, and a future virtually guaranteed to be even more spectacular.

  He’d proven to everyone that Zachary Benedict could survive and prosper on the grandest of scales. He had nothing else to strive for, nothing left to prove, and the lack of both left him feeling strangely deflated and empty.

  Deprived of his former goals, Zack looked elsewhere for gratification. He built mansions, bought yachts, and drove race cars; he escorted beautiful women to glittering social functions, and then he took them to bed. He enjoyed their bodies and often their company, but he never took them seriously and they rarely expected it. Zack had become a sexual trophy, sought after solely for the prestige of sleeping with him and, in the case of actresses, coveted for the influence and connections he had. Like all the superstars and sex symbols before him, he was also a victim of his own success: He could not step off an elevator or eat in a restaurant without being accosted by adoring fans; women shoved hotel room keys into his hand and bribed clerks to let them into his suite. Producers’ wives invited him to their homes for weekend parties and slipped out of their husbands’ beds to climb into his.

  Although he frequently availed himself of the banquet of sexual and social opportunities spread out before him, there was a part of him—his conscience or some latent streak of conventional Yankee morality—that was revolted by the promiscuity and superficiality, the junkies and sycophants and narcissists, everything that made Hollywood seem like a human sewer, a sewer that had been sanitized and deodorized to protect the public’s sensibilities.

  He woke up one morning and suddenly couldn’t tolerate it any longer. He was tired of meaningless sex, bored with loud parties, sick of neurotic actresses and ambitious starlets, and completely disgusted with the life he’d been living.

  He started looking for a different way to fill the void in his days, for a new challenge and a better reason to exist. Acting was no longer much challenge, so he turned his thoughts to directing instead. If he failed as a director, he’d be a very public flop, but even the risk of laying his reputation on the line had a stimulating effect. The idea of directing a film, which had been hovering on the fringes of his consciousness long before that, became his new goal, and Zack pursued it with all the single-minded determination he’d devoted to achieving his others. Empire’s president, Irwin Levine, tried to talk him out of it, he pleaded and reasoned and wheedled, but in the end he capitulated, as Zack had known he would.

  The movie Levine gave him to direct was a low-budget thriller called Nightmare that had two leading roles, one for a nine-year-old child, another for a woman. For the role of the child, Empire insisted on Emily McDaniels, a former child star with Shirley Temple dimples who was almost thirteen but looked nine and was still under contract to them. Emily’s career was already on the downslide; so was the career of a glamorous blonde named Rachel Evans, who they cast in the other role. In her prior films, Rachel Evans had only minor parts, and none of them showed much acting ability.

  Zack’s studio had foisted both females off on him for the patently transparent reason that they wanted to teach him a lesson—that acting was his forte, not directing. The film was virtually guaranteed to barely earn back its investment and, the studio executives hoped, simultaneously put an end to their most famous star’s desire to waste his moneymaking potential behind the cameras.

  Zack had known all that, but it hadn’t stopped him. Before they went into production, he spent weeks looking at Rachel’s and Emily’s old films in his screening room at home, and he knew there were moments—brief moments —when Rachel Evans actually showed some genuine talent. Moments when Emily’s “cuteness,” which had faded with her adolescence, was replaced by a charming sweetness that spoke to the camera because it was genuine.

  Zack coaxed and dragged all of that and much more out of his two female leads during the eight weeks they were in production. His own determination to succeed transmitted itself to both of them, his sense of timing and lighting had helped too, but mostly it was his intuitive knack of knowing how to use Emily and Rachel to their best advantage.

  Rachel had been furious over his badgering and the endless numbers of takes he made her do for each scene, but when he showed her the first week’s rushes, she’d looked at him with awe in her wide green eyes and said softly, “Thank you, Zack. For the first time in my life, it actually looks as if I can really, really act.”

  “And it also looks as if I can really, really direct,” he’d teased, but he was relieved and he let it show.

  Rachel was amazed. “You mean you’ve had doubts about it? I thought you were totally sure of everything we’ve done!”

  “Actually, I haven’t had a peaceful night’s sleep since we started shooting,” Zack confessed. It was the first time in years he’d dared to admit to anyone that he had any misgivings about his work, but that day was special. He’d just seen proof that he had a talent for directing. Furthermore, that newly discovered talent was going to dramatically brighten the future of a winsome child named Emily McDaniels when the critics saw her superb performance in Nightmare. Zack was so fond of Emily that working with her had made him long for a child of his own. Watching the closeness and laughter she shared with her father, who stayed on the set to look after her, Zack had suddenly realized he wanted a family. That was what was missing from his life—a wife and children to share his successes, to laugh with and strive for.

  Rachel and he celebrated that night with a late dinner served by his houseboy. The mood of shared candor that had begun earlier when they’d admitted their private doubts about their individual abilities led to a relaxed intimacy that, on Zack’s part, was as unprecedented as it was therapeutic. Seated in his living room in Pacific Palisades in front of the two-story glass wall that looked out over the ocean, they talked for hours, but not about “the business,” which came as a welcome change to Zack, who’d despaired of meeting an actress who could concentrate on anything else. They ended up in his bed where they further indulged themselves with a night of highly pleasurable and inventive lovemaking. Rachel’s passion seemed genuine rather than a repayment for making her look good on film, and that pleased him, too. In fact, he was thoroughly contented with everything as they lay in his bed—the rushes, Rachel’s sensuality, her intelligence, and her wit.

  Beside him, she levered herself up on her elbows. “Zack, what do you really want from life? I mean, really want?”

  For a moment, he stayed silent, and then perhaps because he was weak from hours of intercourse or perhaps because he was sick of pretending that the life