broad hips; he was also conspicuously bandy. But on the screen, all these flaws 
disappeared. He became gleaming, studly perfection, his jaw-line heroic, his gaze 
crystalline, his mouth an uncommon mingling of the sensual and the severe. His particular 
beauty had suited the taste of the times, and by the end of that first, extraordinary 
summer of coming-to-fame his image, dressed in an immaculate white uniform which made 
poetry of his buttocks, had become an indelible piece of cinema iconography.
  	Over the years, other stars had risen just as high, of course, and many just as 
quickly. But few were quite as ready for their ascent as Todd Pickett. This was what he'd 
been polishing himself for since the moment his mother, Patricia Donna Pickett, had first 
taken him into a cinema in downtown Cincinnati. Looking up at the screen, watching the 
parade of faces pass before him, he'd known instinctively (at least so he later claimed) 
that he belonged up there with those stars, and that if he willed it hard enough, willed 
and worked for it, then it was merely a matter of time before he joined the parade.
  	After the success of Gunner, he fell effortlessly into the labors of being a 
movie star. In interviews he was courteous, funny and self-effacing, playing the 
interviewers so easily that all but the most cynical swooned. He was confident about his 
charms, but he wasn't cocky; loyal to his Mid-Western roots and boyishly devoted to his 
mother. Most attractive of all, he was honest about his shortcomings as an actor. There 
was a refreshing lack of pretension about the Pickett persona.
  	The year after Gunner, he made two pictures back to back. Another action 
blockbuster for Smotherman, called Lightning Rod, which was released on Independence Day 
and blew all former box-office records to smithereens, and then, for the Christmas 
market, Life Lessons. The latter was a sweetly sentimental slip of a story, in which Todd 
played opposite Sharon Campbell, a Playboy model turned actress who had been tabloid 
fodder at the time thanks to her recent divorce from an alcoholic and abusive husband. 
The pairing of Pickett and Campbell had worked like a charm, and the reviews for Todd's 
performance were especially kind. While he was still relying on his physical gifts, the 
critics observed, there were definitely signs that he was taking on the full 
responsibilities of an actor, digging deeper into himself to engage his audience. Nor was 
he afraid to show weakness; twice in Life Lessons he was required to sob like a baby, and 
he did so very convincingly. The picture was a huge hit, meaning that both of the big 
money-makers of the year had Todd's name above the title. He was officially box-office 
gold.
  	For most of the following decade he could do no wrong. Inevitably, some of his 
pictures performed better than others, but even the disappointments were triumphs by 
comparison with the fumbling labors of most of his contemporaries.
  	Of course, he wasn't making the choice of material on his own. From the beginning 
he'd had a close relationship with his manager, Maxine Frizelle, a short, sharp bitch of 
a woman in her mid-forties who'd once been voted the Most Despised Person in Hollywood, 
and had asked, when the news had reached her, if the awards ceremony was full evening 
dress. Though she'd been representing other agents when she first took Todd on, she'd let 
them all go once his career began to demand her complete attention. Thereafter she lived 
and breathed the Pickett business, control-ring every element of his life, private and 
professional. The price she asked studios for his services rapidly rose to unheard of 
heights, and she drove the deal home every single time. She had an opinion about 
everything: rewrites, casting, the hiring of directors, art-directors, costume designers 
and directors of photographers. Her only concern were the best interests of her 
wonder-boy. In the language of an older but similarly feudal system, she was the power 
behind the throne; and everyone who worked with Todd, from the heads of studios to humble 
hair-stylists, had some encounter with her to relate, some scar to show.
  
  	Needless to say, the Pickett magic couldn't remain unchallenged forever. There 
were always new stars in the ascendancy, new faces with the new smiles appearing on the 
screen every season, and after ten years of devotion the audience that had doted on Todd 
in the mid-to-late eighties began to look elsewhere for its heroes. It wasn't that his 
pictures performed less well, but that others performed even better. A new definition of 
a blockbuster had appeared; money-machines like Independence Day and Titanic, which 
earned so much so quickly that pictures which would once have been called major hits were 
now in contrast simply modest successes.
  	Anxious to regain the ground he was losing, Todd decided to go back into business 
with Smotherman, who was just as eager to return to their glory days together. The 
project they'd elected to do together was a movie called Warrior, a piece of high concept 
junk about a street-fighter from Brooklyn who is brought through time to champion a 
future earth in a battle against marauding aliens. The script was a ludicrous concoction 
of cliches pulled from every cheesy science-fiction B-movies of the fifties, and an early 
budget had put the picture somewhere in the region of a hundred million dollars simply to 
get it on screen, but Smotherman was confident that he could persuade either Fox or 
Paramount to green-light it. The show had everything, he said: an easily-grasped idea 
(primitive fighting man outwits hyper-intelligent intergalactic empire, using cunning and 
brute force); a dozen action sequences which called for state-of-the-art effects, and the 
kind of hero Todd could perform in his sleep: an ordinary man put in an extraordinary 
situation. It was a no-brainer, all 'round. The studios would be fools not to green-light 
it; it had all the marks of a massive hit.
  	He was nothing if not persuasive. In person, Smotherman was almost a parody of a 
high-voltage salesman: fast-talking, short-tempered and over-sexed. There was never an 
absence of 'babes', as he still called them, in his immediate vicinity; all were promised 
leading roles when they'd performed adequately for Smotherman in private, and all, of 
course, were discarded the instant he tired of them.
  	Preparations for Warrior were proceeding nicely. Then the unthinkable happened. A 
week shy of his forty-fourth birthday, Smotherman died. He'd always been a man of 
legendary excess, a bottom-feeder happiest in the gamier part of any city. The 
circumstances of his death were perfectly consistent with this reputation: he'd died 
sitting at a table in a private club in New York, watching a lesbian sex show, the 
coronary that had felled him so massive and so sudden he had apparently been overtaken by 
it before he could even cry out for help. He was face down in a pile of cocaine when he 
was found, a drug he'd continued to consume in heroic quantities long after his 
contemporaries had cleaned up their acts and had their sinuses surgically reconstructed. 
It was one of the thirty-five illegal substances found in his system at the autopsy.
  	He was buried in Las Vegas, according to the instructions in his will. He's been 
happiest there, he'd always said, with everything to win and everything to lose.
  	This remark was twice quoted at the memorial service, and hearing it, Todd felt a 
cold trickle of apprehension pass down his spine. What Smotherman had known, and been at 
peace with, was the fact that all of Tinseltown was a game-and it could be lost in a 
heartbeat. Smotherman had been a gambling man. He'd taken pleasure in the possibility of 
failure and it had sweetened his success. Todd, on the other hand, had never even played 
the slots, much less a game of poker or roulette. Sitting there listening to the 
hypocrites-most of whom had despised Smotherman-stand up and extol the dead man, he 
realized that Keever's passing cast a pall over his future. The golden days were over. 
His place in the sun would very soon belong to others; if it didn't already.
  	The day after the memorial service he poured his fears out to Maxine. She was all