Chapters (55)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Cast of Characters
- Part One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Part Two
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Forty-three
- Forty-four
- Forty-five
- Forty-six
- A note on the Author
The producers told me how great I looked and I told them they looked great too. They did. It’s only in fashion that the females working behind the scenes—the editors, journalists, and designers—are shockingly ugly. These women were as pretty as actresses but obviously not self-loathing enough. Even with my good face on, they saw in me the worst of what might have been if they hadn’t gotten over their prepubescent dreams of stardom.
They had me read with the actor already cast as the villain. I was auditioning to be his sister and I tried, hard as I could, to make my face more like his, but I guess they just thought I was smirking because they let me go after a couple of lines.
I visited a psychic the morning of my audition who told me, “I see a future for you involving thick kohl eyeliner.” She recognized me. She had read in the trade papers that I was up for the film. L.A. psychics watch the trade papers closely.
At the hotel bar that night, Scott picked me up and I let him because I knew, before he opened his mouth, that he would mean nothing to me. We went back to my room, where I threw up in the bathroom, and then went back in the living room and gave him head on the sofa. I didn’t brush my teeth before I did it. I was trying to poison him. Like an idiot, he rang me the next day. And the next. He rang from his office and his Porsche and the health club and the set of the film he was producing. He offered to have me cast in his next project but I wouldn’t let him. I could never have lived with myself if all those awful blow jobs were actually in exchange for something. Pretending I was poisoning him was enough for me. When I realized, too late, that he wasn’t sick or dying and seemed to be getting happier and, God forbid, more moral the more time he spent with me, I had to cut him loose.
I hacked off my hair in the bathroom, as if disguising myself at the scene of a crime. I had seen pictures of his wife. She was pretty. Clearly caught between trophy wife and career woman. She had honey highlights in her hair, but I could see she was really a brunette. Her eyes were dark as marbles. I imagined her taking them out of their sockets at night and rolling them across the floor, giggling in pink silk pajamas: “tee hee hee hee.”
I dyed my hair a lot that year. I was always escaping from the scene of a crime. Calling a cab from a pay phone outside Mel’s 24-hour drive-in, I made it to the first plane of the new day. The other passengers in first class eyed me with curiosity and disdain.