LITMIR.BIZ

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do,’ said Dorian, either missing the insinuation or choosing to ignore it. ‘I like you too, Sabrina.’

      This was too much for Sabrina, especially delivered with such a straight face. She laughed so hard she choked on her drink, spraying vodka and tonic all down the front of her blouse and narrowly avoiding giving Dorian an impromptu shower.

      ‘Really?’ she spluttered, cleaning herself up with a napkin. ‘I’d love to see how you treat actresses you don’t like.’

      ‘I treat them exactly the same,’ said Dorian. ‘I’m not in the business of favouritism. If Viorel or Lizzie or Rhys had been all over The Sun this morning, I’d have yelled just as hard at them.’

      Sabrina looked at him sceptically.

      ‘It’s true. You personalize everything, Sabrina. I’m not your enemy. If it’s an enemy you’re looking for, try the mirror.’

      Sabrina opened her mouth to argue with him, but decided against it. She was too tipsy to defend herself properly, and anyway it made a nice change to be having a semi-civil conversation.

      ‘Tell me about yourself,’ said Dorian, taking a long slow sip of his whisky. It was delicious.

      ‘Tell you what?’ said Sabrina. ‘The sob story? Rags to riches? Doesn’t everybody know that already?’ She put on her best whiney, facetious voice: ‘I’m Sabrina Leon, and I’m from a bwoken home.’

      Dorian just looked at her, arms folded. Waiting.

      ‘You really wanna know? OK fine.’ Sabrina jutted out her chin defiantly. ‘My mom was a heroin addict. Dad was a petty thief and general, all-round douche bag, or so I’m told. I never met him. I first got taken into care when I was eighteen months old.’

      ‘First? You went back to your parents?’

      ‘To my mom, twice. The first time she left me with “friends”, who tried to sell me to pay off a drug debt.’

      ‘Shit.’ Dorian had heard this story from Sabrina’s agent, but had assumed it was apocryphal.

      ‘The second time the neighbours called the cops after I almost died climbing out of a second-floor window. Mom’s boyfriend was hitting her round the head with a frying pan. I thought I was gonna be next.’

      ‘How old were you then?’

      Sabrina took a sip of her drink. ‘Three.’

      Saskia’s age.

      ‘By five they made me a permanent ward of the state. Which pretty much saved my life, although after that I was constantly on the move, bouncing around from one foster home to another.’

      ‘What were they like, your foster parents?’ asked Dorian.

      Sabrina smiled. ‘Which ones? There were the Johnsons. They were nice. I lived with them for a year and a half until their older daughter got fed up with sharing her bedroom and they dumped me back on the doorstep of the children’s home like an unwanted Christmas puppy.’

      Dorian winced.

      ‘Then there were the Rodriguez family. The dad, Raoul, believed in “old-fashioned family values”. That basically meant beating me with a bamboo cane across the backs of my legs when I was late home from school, or left food on my plate.’

      ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Dorian.

      Sabrina smiled. ‘Yeah. It wasn’t the Waltons, but it was better than the next place. The Coopers.’

      ‘What happened there?’ asked Dorian.

      ‘Their son, Graham …’ Sabrina began, then broke off suddenly. ‘You know, I don’t really wanna talk about it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter ’cause I ran away and spent the next two years on the streets. Which actually wasn’t as bad as it sounds.’

      ‘How old were you then?’

      ‘Twelve,’ said Sabrina matter-of-factly. ‘I got off the streets at fourteen, but I learned a lot in those two years.’

      I’ll bet you did, thought Dorian.

      ‘Such as the fact that men are assholes who only want one thing,’ Sabrina went on. ‘Luckily, they’re also mostly idiots, so if you’re smart you can use that filthy, one-track mind of theirs to your advantage.’

      It was an unusually frank confession. Dorian could imagine just how many men in Hollywood Sabrina Leon had manipulated over the years to claw her way to the top. Now he knew where she’d learned her skills.

      ‘It was acting that really saved me,’ Sabrina continued. ‘A guy named Sammy Levine ran a youth-theatre company on the outskirts of New Jack City, where I was living at the time. I loved Sammy.’ Her eyes lit up at the memory. ‘He was passionate about theatre, passionate about kids. He was gay, and kind of flamboyant, and he could be tough as old nails when he wanted to. I remember he made me audition four times before agreeing to give me a part in West Side Story. And it was a fucking walk-on! Can you believe it? Rosalia.’

      ‘You remember the name of the character you played?’ Dorian was impressed.

      ‘Of course,’ said Sabrina, surprised. ‘I remember all my parts. They’re part of me. Anyway, I was so mad at Sammy. I thought I should have been Maria. Fuck it, I should have been Maria. I was the best.’

      ‘If you do say so yourself,’ Dorian grinned. Like everyone else in Hollywood, he knew the rest of the story. Tarik Tyler heard an NPR programme on the radio one morning about Levine’s Theatre and drove up to Fresno to take a look. He saw Sabrina, cast her, an unknown, as Lola, the lead in his first Destroyers movie. And the rest, as they say, was history.

      ‘So drama got you off the streets,’ said Dorian. ‘But what about now?’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘I mean what motivates you, today. Why do you act?’

      Sabrina shrugged. ‘Because I can, I guess.’

      ‘Oh, no no no, I’m not buying that.’ Dorian leaned forward and looked her right in the eye. ‘What do you feel, when you walk out on stage or in front of a camera?’

      Sabrina had been asked the question before. Every good director wanted to get inside her head, to find out what made her tick so they could draw it out in her performance, get the maximum emotional bang for their buck. With Dorian, however, she sensed that his desire to understand came from somewhere deeper. It wasn’t just artistic. It was personal.

      ‘I feel fear,’ she said honestly.

      ‘Of what?’

      ‘Of it ending. Of failure. Of going back to where I started.’

      Dorian asked her the million-dollar question. ‘So why did you turn on your mentor, the man who helped you more than anyone? It doesn’t make sense.’

      ‘You mean Tarik?’ said Sabrina dismissively. ‘Firstly, I didn’t turn on him. It was a throwaway remark. He turned on me. Second of all, everyone says it was Tyler who discovered me and I guess that’s true in Hollywood terms. But Sammy Levine was the one who really changed my life. Sammy showed me the magic. He showed me how to do it.’

      ‘Do what?’ asked Dorian, quietly.

      Sabrina’s answer was unequivocal.

      ‘Escape. I act for the same reason I drink. And fuck around and shoot my mouth off at airports. I act to escape.’

      It told Dorian everything he needed to know. As a kid, Sabrina was escaping from others, from the grim reality of her life. Now she was escaping from herself, from the fears that still so evidently drove her. She’s so like Cathy, he thought. Part of her wants to fit in, to be accepted and loved. But another part of her wants to escape, to be wild and passionate and free. I was right to cast her.

      ‘Come on,’ he said gently.

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