1
Julia adored launch parties, especially when she not only starred on-screen but also played the role of hostess, entertaining dear friends and colleagues at her hillside mansion in Malibu. The mood was festive and full of anticipation that September evening, the air humming with conversation and laughter as about four dozen members of the cast and production crew, their plus-ones, and a select few members of the press mingled in her elegantly appointed great room, a paradigm of California Coastal design in warm earth tones, clean lines, and simple silhouettes. The two sets of glass doors to the broad balcony had been thrown open, the gossamer drapes gracefully drawn back, the soft ocean breezes beckoning guests outside to admire the breathtaking panoramas of the Pacific and stunning views of the Santa Monica Mountains.
Sipping champagne as she mingled among her guests, Julia graciously accepted air-kisses and congratulations and offered plenty of the same. She paused by the Steinway baby grand in the corner to murmur her thanks to the handsome young assistant from set design who had claimed the bench upon arrival and had been enchanting everyone with deft renditions of jazz classics ever since. Uniformed catering staff circulated with trays of enticing canapés, the savory aromas vying with the fragrance of lush flowers artfully arranged inthe elegant earthenware vases Julia had collected on her world travels. A few subtle yet intriguing contemporary artworks adorned the walls—oil paintings, watercolors, and one antique Prairie Rose quilt she had acquired while filming on location in Kansas the previous winter. Photos and memorabilia from her decades-long performing career were displayed on the shelves flanking the fireplace on one end of the room, but she kept her Emmys and Golden Globe out of sight on a discreet shelf in the master suite. Anyone who might visit her already knew she had won the awards. Flaunting them would suggest a desperate craving for approval that really should be beneath her.
Yet her deliberate modesty didn’t extend to her late husband’s honors. Her gaze traveled to the bespoke art nook in the archway between the great room and the foyer, where Charles’s two golden Oscars gleamed softly beneath the museum-quality lights she’d had installed a few months after his death in 1993. At the time, she had been debating whether to leave the home they had shared for most of their marriage, suddenly achingly empty without him. Now, eleven years and a few months later, she was thankful she had stayed. The sharp anguish of mourning had receded over time, and fond memories of Charles lingered in every room, bringing a smile to her lips at unexpected moments throughout the day.
“Seems to me there’s room on that shelf for your own statuettes,” a familiar, gravelly voice rumbled just behind her.
Drawn from her reverie, Julia turned to find her longtime agent at her side, his wife smiling beside him. Maury’s face had grown wizened through the years, his shoulders stooped, his nearly bald pate fringed by thin wisps of gray hair, but his eyes were as knowing and kind as ever. Belying the stereotypes of his profession, Maury was honest and straightforward rather than ruthless, one of Hollywood’s last true gentlemen. He and Evelyn had seen Julia through the bleak aftermath of Charles’s death and the two foolish, utterly regrettable, mercifully swift marriages and bitter divorces that had followed. Maury had unraveled hundreds of management snarls and eased countlessdisappointments on her behalf throughout the years. Although he had officially retired five years before, he had resumed representing Julia, his sole remaining client, after a disastrous experience with his replacement proved that she couldn’t manage without him.
“Don’t tempt me to brag about myself,” Julia scolded him playfully. “You know excessive pride is my fatal flaw.”
Evelyn, lovely with her upswept silvery hair, fine features, and effortless grace that recalled her years as a dancer and choreographer, regarded Julia fondly. “But you should be proud of yourself, tonight of all nights,” she said. “The fifth season premiere of any television series is a remarkable milestone, butA Patchwork Lifeis that elusive dream, both critically acclaimed and exceptionally popular. Enjoy your success, Julia. You’ve earned it.”
“Oh, Evelyn, stop before you make me blush.” Raising her glass, Julia inclined her head toward Maury. “You’re very kind, but we both know I owe it all to your husband.”
“Hardly,” Maury demurred.
“You broughtA Patchwork Lifeto me,” Julia pointed out. “When I rolled my eyes at the title and scoffed at the premise, you insisted I take the part anyway.”
“No, I merely urged you to read the script before you rejected the role,” said Maury. “But that script was for the movie. Need I remind you that was an utter disaster?”
Evelyn shuddered dramatically. “As if we could forget. But that wasn’t your fault, dear, nor yours, Julia. Who could have foreseen that Stephen Deneford would transform your feminist historical drama into a preposterous action flick?Prairie Vengeance, indeed.”
“You stood by me when I quit the film with no notice,” Julia reminded Maury. She had never stormed out of a director’s office like that before, but the ludicrous changes to the script and the humiliating reduction of her role had become intolerable. “You got me out of my contract with a minimum of fuss and no lasting damage to my reputation or my finances. That was no small feat.”
“Fair enough,” Maury conceded. “I did that much.”
“Everything worked out for the best,” said Julia, as Evelyn patted her husband’s arm and smiled up at him affectionately. “If the movie hadn’t failed, Ellen wouldn’t have reworked her movie script into a television series. I wouldn’t have been invited to reprise my role as Sadie Henderson, and we wouldn’t be gathering here tonight to celebrate our fifth season premiere.” Pausing to sip her champagne, Julia couldn’t resist adding, “An episode, by the way, I not only starred in but also directed.”
“All the more reason to celebrate such a tremendous achievement,” Evelyn declared, clinking her glass lightly against Julia’s.
“It certainly isn’t my achievement alone. Ellen’s writing has been consistently brilliant, and I couldn’t have asked for a better cast or crew. We’re more than colleagues. I know people say this all the time without meaning it, but I sincerely believe we’ve become a family.”
Maury and Evelyn looked so happy for her that Julia felt a catch in her throat. They had known her too long not to be well aware that she hadn’t always been so generous, sharing praise rather than claiming all the credit for herself. Once she would have hoarded every compliment, but she had learned humility from late-career disappointment, and wise friends had taught her empathy. She knew now, mere days away from her seventieth birthday, something most people learned at a much younger age: Everyone deserved respect and kindness, and she would find no joy in achievements won by clawing her way to the top and kicking those below her to keep them down.
It chagrined her, looking back, to realize how much time she had wasted in the absolute conviction that she could win only if someone else lost. This very party was a sign of how much she had changed since the Cross-Country Quilters had befriended her at Elm Creek Quilt Camp. The old Julia would have supplemented the guest list with several carefully chosen, perpetually envious frenemies, but not as an overture to reconciliation. Instead she would have wanted the doubters and the haters to see for themselves how gloriously she hadthrived after they had dismissed her as a faded, irrelevant has-been, with nothing to contribute to the industry except the occasional unflattering photo in the tabloids or the scandal of yet another failed marriage. Her rivals’ barely concealed envy would have added a deliciously exciting spice to the gathering, and oh, how she would have savored it.
But that wasn’t who she was anymore. If she had any frenemies, she couldn’t name them, and she hadn’t issued a spite invitation in years. She genuinely liked and admired every person she had welcomed into her home that evening, and she had every reason to believe the feeling was mutual. She remained a work in progress, but she had come a long way.
She sighed, momentarily wistful. Her party would be absolutely perfect if only the other Cross-Country Quilters were there. She owed so much of her recent success to her generous friends, who, five years before, had helped her learn to quilt to play Sadie Henderson, a role she’d desperately hoped would resuscitate her faltering career. She had won the lead inA Patchwork Lifeonly because Maury had implied that she was an experienced quilter, which the director insisted was essential for convincingly portraying a woman homesteader on the Kansas frontier. After the contracts were safely signed, Maury had enrolled Julia at Elm Creek Quilt Camp in rural central Pennsylvania, far from the paparazzi and gossip columnists who might have exposed her deception. The camp’s excellent faculty had taught her well, and after the surprisingly wonderful week ended, the new friends she had made had tutored her and offered long-distance encouragement through frequent letters, emails, and phone calls. Their friendship had sustained her asA Patchwork Lifemorphed intoPrairie Vengeanceand Julia found herself diligently perfecting her quilting skills for a role that no longer resembled what she had signed up for. The whole dreadful movie had fallen apart by the time the Cross-Country Quilters had reunited at quilt camp the following summer, but as Julia had told Maury and Evelyn, its failure had been a blessing in disguise.
As she raised her champagne flute to her lips in a silent toast to her absent friends, her assistant director appeared in the archway to the foyer and waved discreetly. At twenty-five, Lindsay Jorgenson was young for such an important post, but she had graduated summa cum laude from USC’s film school, she’d proven herself exceptionally capable as a production assistant in the show’s early years, and she absolutely deserved a promotion. She was also the eldest daughter of Cross-Country Quilter Donna Jorgenson, which made her all the more qualified as far as Julia was concerned. Wasn’t one of the perks of being an executive director to be empowered to make executive decisions that happened to benefit a friend’s daughter?
When Julia raised her eyebrows in a question, Lindsay smiled and nodded, her loosely braided, long blond hair slipping over one shoulder. It was time.
Julia tapped her glass with a fingernail, taking care not to damage her flawless manicure. “If I may have your attention, please, friends,” she called, projecting her voice as conversations hushed and her guests’ smiling faces turned her way. “Lindsay has the show queued up, so as soon as we take our seats, we can begin.”
“This way, everybody,” said Lindsay, beckoning. Murmuring with anticipation, the guests followed her through the archway into the hall and downstairs.
Julia gestured graciously for her friends and colleagues to precede her to the theater room, a feature that even more than the spectacular views had convinced her and Charles to purchase the house so many years before. Built deep into the cliffside foundation, windowless and cool even when the Santa Ana winds blew mercilessly, the theater could comfortably seat forty-eight people in the plush leather seats arranged before the large screen in six rows of eight, and a dozen more on the tall stools along the back wall. Julia had always been the first audience for Charles’s documentaries, aside from his cinematographers and editors, who saw dailies and rough cuts throughout production. After Charles passed, Julia had remodeled the adjacentcutting room into a yoga studio, but she hadn’t changed a thing in the theater, except to update the projector after her second husband made off with the original. After serving him with divorce papers, she had allowed him a day alone in the house to clear out his things, but he had taken other random pieces out of pure spite. Ironically, he could have well afforded to buy a new state-of-the-art projector with what he’d been paid for their honeymoon snapshots, which he’d sold to theNational Enquirerwithout her permission, setting off a chain of revelations that compelled her to divorce him less than a year after the wedding. She had taken care not to repeat that mistake when she divorced husband number three. That time she had changed the locks before the papers were served, and her assistant had kept watch during her soon-to-be-ex’s move-out.
Shoving the ugly reminiscences aside, Julia followed the last straggler into the theater and shut the door behind them. Searching for an unoccupied seat, she spied Ellen gesturing to her from the front row. After making her way down the aisle, Julia settled in between Ellen, on her left, and Nigel Crawford, her leading man, on her right. She glanced over her shoulder to smile at the two young actors who played her grandsons: Noah, age twenty, and Chance, sixteen. The young men paused long enough to flash her a pair of impressively photogenic grins, but they quickly resumed their conversation, apparently debating the merits of what sounded like a horrifically violent video game with philosophical pretensions.
Julia and Noah were the only actors from the movie version ofA Patchwork Lifewho had been offered roles in the television series. Nigel’s character hadn’t existed in the ill-fated film, and Chance had been cast only after the original actor’s agent had flatly declined the television reboot, dismissing the failed film as a “toxic train wreck” and the series as “probably cursed.” This turned out to be yet another blessing in disguise, since Chance proved himself a fine actor and an excellent addition to the company of players. In recent years he had also become something of a teen heartthrob, but with any luck hewouldn’t let the flattery go to his head, ruining his craft and turning him into a miserable Hollywood cliché. His real name was Eugene Durchdenwald, but he’d changed it when his agent warned him he’d never make it in Hollywood burdened with such a clunky moniker. So he adopted Chance for the roles he hoped casting directors would give him, and he picked Boxty after seeing it on a menu during a family trip to Ireland. By the time he realized “boxty” was not the chef’s name but a type of potato pancake, the name Chance Boxty had become so well-known that he’d had no choice but to keep it.
Turning back around, Julia fixed her gaze on the screen, heart beating a bit faster in anticipation. She and Ellen exchanged quick, reassuring smiles. They had spent hours conferring with the editor and they were very pleased with the final cut, but they wanted their colleagues, the critics, and their fans to love it as much as they did.
