Prema-Rani Moon was Hollywood royalty. As is the case with real royalty, that meant a mixed bag of privilege and decadence.

Grandpa Ricardo (né Luna) had been nominated for an Oscar but didn’t win the statuette. Grandma Greta’s success rate was one for three. Uncle Maximilian’s average over a forty-year career was the best: a perfect two out of two.

Daddy Richard Jr.’s star had glittered, then sputtered, with seven forgettable pictures followed by a descent into the gummy haze of heroin addiction. Rick Moon’s final attempt at rehab was a stint at a Calcutta ashram run by a guru later proved to be a rapist. Flirtation with fringe Eastern philosophy led Moon to endow his only child with a hybrid Indian name: Prema, a Sanskrit word for “love,” and Rani, “queen” in Hindi.

By the time the little girl was five, all traces of religion in her father’s muddled consciousness had been banished and he was living in Montmartre with the little girl’s mother, a second-tier Chanel model turned semi-famous by her marriage to the handsome, tormented American film scion.

A coke-induced heart attack claimed Rick’s life at age thirty-eight. Lulu Moon claimed she’d tried to revive her husband. If so, the powder she’d crammed up her nose hampered the process. Fourteen months later, she was buried next to Rick at Père Lachaise cemetery after slashing her wrists while her daughter slept in an adjoining bedroom.

Prema, as she was now known, discovered the body. Never schooled, she couldn’t read the barely literate suicide note that belied Lulu’s claims of attending the Sorbonne.

Shipped back to Bel Air, the child was raised by her grandparents, which translated to a stream of boarding schools where she failed to fit in. The child-rearing ethos on Bellagio Road was less-than-benign neglect. Ricardo and Greta, still working occasionally in character roles, were gorgeous alcoholics and compulsive plastic surgery patients who had no interest in children—in anyone other than themselves. By the time Prema was fourteen her grandparents were pickled in Polish vodka and resembled wax figures molded by addled sculptors. Two years later, Ricardo and Greta were dead and Prema was an adolescent heiress whose considerable assets were managed by a private bank in Geneva.

With no other option, Maximilian Moon, now knighted and living in London, took on the task of serving as his niece’s guardian. That translated to a two-room suite on the third floor of Sir Max’s Belgravia mansion, Prema enduring her uncle’s abysmal piano playing and getting to know the coterie of young lithe men he labeled his “paramours.”

When Prema was sixteen, a poobah at a major modeling agency noticed the tall, slender blond girl with the scalpel-hewn cheekbones, the ripe-peach lips, and the huge indigo eyes standing in a corner at one of Max’s parties with an unlit joint in her hand. The offer of a contract was immediate.