Kind Of Woman (Mirage Era: Part 1)

She Matters To You

Venice Beach, California
Sunday, November 1, 1981

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"Goddamn it, Stevie, answer the phone!"

Jimmy Iovine had never been comfortable at Stevie's house in California. He was a native New Yorker - he thrived on noise, on grit, and on making other people's music sound the best it possibly could. Stevie's enormous, sprawling home in Venice Beach, which had once belonged to silent film star Vilma Banky, was the polar opposite of what Jimmy called home, and the thing he hated most about having to sleep there in order to be with her was the telephone. It literally never stopped ringing. He would have said he wondered how she got the energy to live the five or six different lives he watched her living every day but he knew the answer to that - it was sitting in a little glass vial at her bedside next to her precious blue Tiffany lamp and her French-style phone, which had been ringing off the hook all morning while she slept like the dead.

"Stevie! Jesus Christ! Are you breathing?" All he could see from his side of the king-sized bed with too many embroidered pillows and a fur throw that made him too hot every night was a tangle of blonde curly hair and her bare back and arm sticking out from between navy blue sheets that were so rumpled he wondered what the hell she'd been dreaming about; she'd been kicking up a storm since about four when she'd finally consented to join him in bed.

"Fuuuuuuuck..." Stevie groaned as she rolled over onto her stomach and reached for the phone and held the receiver to her ear. Jimmy rolled over and pressed a navy blue pillow to his head; he wished the damn sun would get out of his eyes but the bedroom was all window. Into the phone, he heard her sounding like Elmer Fudd as she said, "Hello?"

"Stevie? Hi, honey, it's Belva." Stevie's heart stopped in that second. Belva Snyder. Robin's mother. "I'm sorry, honey; I know it's early." Stevie had no idea what time it was but she had more to think about than that.

"Hi, Belva," she said. "What's going on? Is she okay?"

"She's going to be," Belva said with a sigh that made Stevie nervous. "They had to start a round of more powerful antibiotics last night because she was still running a fever from the infection...but that's not the reason I'm calling, honey...Robin wants to know if you're coming to see her before you fly to France tonight. She'd have called herself but Kim's in there telling her to go back to sleep and she's telling him she doesn't need anymore rest or she's going to go berserk...it's a whole thing."

"Gotcha," Stevie said. She scrambled to a half-sitting position and began dumping cocaine from the vial at her bedside onto the antique mirror she kept there for that reason. She took her gold straw in her hand and did a generous line before she said, sniffling, "Of course I'm coming today. If you can get past Kim, tell her I'll be there about twelve...and I'm bringing her a present."

"I'll tell her hon. See you later, then."

"Thanks, Belva. See you later." And she hung up, letting out a loud groan.

"Some of us are trying to sleep, Stevie," Jimmy grumbled from his pillow, not turning around to face her. Stevie quickly lit a cigarette from the pack at her bedside.

"Well, some of us have a best friend who's fighting leukemia and really don't give a shit, Jimmy," Stevie said right back, lit cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth.

"Does that mean you need to wake up the whole city?"

"Does that mean you're an insensitive asshole? Jury's still out." She exhaled cigarette smoke and rose from the bed. "There's an eleven-o'clock plane to J.F.K. today, Jimmy. I would love it very much if you'd consider being on it when I leave for the hospital to see Robin so I'm not staring angrily at you tonight when I fly to Paris." She held her cigarette in her lips again as she threw on a pink silk bathroom over her naked body, suddenly feeling exposed in a way she always felt the morning after Jimmy touched her. It seemed to have been fine in New York when they were making Bella Donna, but ever since he'd followed her to California it had become different. The amount of cocaine she needed to enjoy him touching her was starting to become alarming...and expensive. Howard had no idea where her money was going, and he reminded her of that whenever he called her to tell her how out of control her spending was and that Barbara had even called him to complain and air her concerns. "Mom, I'm thirty-three" had not been enough of a deterrent for her to stop calling her daughter's business manager, apparently.