Rich Again

by Anna Maxted

  Ethan was way too cool to show his own movies, although, if you insisted (it would be rude to disappoint die-hard fans) there were screenings of Parajumper, Hit Point and Sick Day in the indoor theatre. As with every room in the house, it was exquisitely furnished with signature pieces, painstakingly sourced by the interior designers from every corner of, well, mainly Italy.

  Soft, sinkable-into Galante chairs from Armani Casa, upholstered in lustrous metallic silver, added to your viewing pleasure – or perhaps you favoured the white leather Unique chairs from Versace, butter soft and delicately stitched. The mood lighting was remote adjustable, and there were candles everywhere. Ethan liked the romance of a naked flame – softie! In fact Mark had discovered the Little Joseph candleholders by Maxim Velcovsky for Qubus: a porcelain child’s head, gloriously gothic, bald until the dripping wax christened him with hair. He, Mark, knew what Ethan liked, better than some woman with zero per cent body fat, huge white teeth and a degree in bullshit.

  The fireworks display, a big deal because of the regulations, was the final touch. The Yanks didn’t do fireworks like the English, and these were specially imported from the UK (beautiful, stunning, money to burn). At least one A-list star had left early with a bad case of the Not Got Enoughs. Actually Mark suspected mental disorientation triggered by the sight of a room of books: Shakespeare, Freud, Dickens, Tolstoy, Nigella. ‘Like, you read all these?’

  And the head of the studio had, biting his fist, sent over a minion to suggest that Mark should call his PA with the designer’s details.

  But mostly, guests had enjoyed themselves: their egos were flattered, their particular needs anticipated and met (allergy to soy, aversion to the colour yellow, phobia of clocks, fear of bald people, etc.). The music was loud and retro, and there were private corners to retire to if you were a squeaky-clean blonde starlet, daughter of Hollywood royalty, who craved a threesome with your drug-dealer boyfriend, your best girl and a vial of crystal meth. That was the sweet thing about Ethan: he wasn’t into that sort of filth, but he didn’t judge. He liked people to indulge their pleasures – at his expense, maybe, but not his reputation. Talking of which …

  Mark had cringed watching this month’s eye candy attempt to pull rank with a desperate, flamboyant show of intimacy. Ethan was too much of a gentleman to humiliate her in public, but the whole party witnessed the one-way flow of affection. Her days were numbered.

  First, she’d failed to come close to an Emmy for her excruciating sitcom Curb Your Extremism, in which she played the angst-ridden teenage daughter of a reformed terrorist dad. Second, she got jumpy if she found herself in a room without a reflective surface.

  Ethan did not do drugs, he preferred a good honest walk up Runyon Canyon, whereas this crazy bitch thought cocaine the nutritional equivalent of a celery stick. Then she’d pig out on Tootsie rolls and scoop peanut butter out of jars with a spoon, after which she’d cry and puke and spend the next four hours running in the gym, bingeing on yoga, and sobbing on the phone to her therapist: LA had chewed her up, she couldn’t take the heat. The other day she’d arrived sobbing on a bike – not a motorbike, a cycle. Duh! She was hysterical because someone in a Hummer had, quite rightly, thrown a bottle at her and shouted, ‘Get a fucking car!’

  Ethan would go back to dating French waitresses: cute girls with high self-esteem, no expectations and dignity. Ethan was twenty-seven, no longer young, and he was deadly serious about his career. You had to work at staying hot. The most hilarious thing anyone ever said about LA was that it was ‘laid back’. Ethan had plotted each move and he wasn’t ashamed of that, unlike every other megastar who lied to the papers, ‘Oh, I just fell into it!’ It took years to establish and maintain the correct image. You didn’t get to be A-list by being flimsy. Amid the endless bullshit of Hollywood, focus was everything. Ethan was busy on set filming Transmission, otherwise he would have dumped this liability by now. But Mark had prepared a stack of cuttings in a clear folder for Ethan to read back at the house, then she’d be out. Of course, Ethan would want to break up with her the old-fashioned way, but Ethan was too soft-hearted. Once he was given the green light, Mark would see her off with a text and, to soften the blow, a silver Hermès Kelly bag.

  Ethan was busy: he had no time to waste with losers. Other stars had business interests; restaurants, racehorses. Ethan’s interest was people. He did charity work, but he didn’t go on about it (unlike Angelina Jolie. Would she ever shut up?). He’d saved lives when the bomb had gone off at the Parisian hotel. He’d quietly paid for the rehabilitation of certain of the injured, but it wasn’t common knowledge and Ethan didn’t want it to be.

  Mark felt warm when he considered how thoughtful Ethan was. He put intelligence into every action and he understood people. That would be the secret of his worldwide super-stardom and his global success. Ethan was hugely powerful; he could accomplish anything, but his star was still rising, which Mark felt was the most thrilling part of all. Now he was hot, the buzz was about Ethan.

  When you were bank, when you were a household name, when you were Tom Hanks, Diet Coke, KFC, that’s when it all slowed down and got boring, that’s when you stopped doing good work and started doing rubbish, because you had arrived. Once you had arrived there was nowhere to go.

  Mark liked to think that Ethan’s success was in some small, yet significant way partly down to him.

  N. CRESCENT DRIVE, BEVERLY HILLS, JUNE 2005

  Emily

  Ah, the Platinum Triangle. But you could forgive people for having tons of money when they had no taste. She’d managed a peek in the vast kitchen and it was full of brown units and the floor was linoleum: what were they thinking? Still, the location was great, near to the Pink Palace, and not so far from the Polo Lounge if you’d had a few. The house itself was a great, gaudy mansion, a Tuscan villa Californian style; it was a pity that the interior reflected the owner’s personality. It was giddy with cream marble and paintings of trees, and the carpet on the stairs was covered in durable plastic. Not cool. She couldn’t help thinking what she could have done with a house like this, had she had twenty-eight million dollars.

  The outside, at least, was gorgeous. As you ascended the wide stone steps to the giant front door, you passed a great pond full of koi carp. When Emily touched her finger to the water, one came to the surface to be stroked, like a cat.

  The swimming pool was blue and serene and surrounded by palms and the view swept on for ever. Beyond, tables and chairs had been set out on the gently sloping lawn. It was cooler up here, in the heavens of LA, and she was glad she’d bought a wrap. You did feel charmed, sitting high above the rest of the world, with billions of dollars’ worth of movie stars and industry hotshots squeezed into such a small area – a couple of acres, but a tight fit for all those egos – and it was nice to feel entitled, if only briefly. To everyone here, she was one of them, or near enough.

  She put up a good front. In LA, at least, they had no clue that she was hanging on to her sanity by a thread. Her cash situation was precarious, and every time she thought about it, which was by the minute, her heart lurched. Since the divorce, she hadn’t made good on her promises – or threats – to Tim. She hadn’t found love, and she hadn’t made money. The perfume hadn’t sold; no woman wanted to stink of failure. She’d given an interview to the highest bidder – a right-wing tabloid – and the female hack had portrayed her as hysterical and bitter.

  Suddenly, she had the Plague.

  The worst of it was, she had two kids. She didn’t mean it like that. She had two wonderful kids and she wanted so much for them. It was fine, failing, when it was just you. When you failed with kids, it was hard to look at yourself in the mirror each day. She was terrified that George was already screwed up from the divorce. However you spun it, kids wanted Mummy and Daddy to live together, love each other: nothing else could make it right. She thought with dread how, as soon as he was able, all the sordid details would be available to him. He’d just Google Fortelyne E
mily Tim gay affair and a hundred thousand words of pain would appear.

  Little Molly she was less worried about. She was sixteen months old, and for now, Mummy and Nanny were enough. But it wore you down, not being able to afford your lifestyle. She couldn’t bear to think that the children might lack anything. She couldn’t quite believe that her parents, either one of whom could have bought this opulent hilltop estate from the interest accumulating in one of their many offshore accounts, had refused to bail her out. She was too proud to ask, and all hints were ignored.

  Her mother was happy to lavish the children with designer clothes, expensive toys and pay for George’s school fees. Despite having served at Her Majesty’s pleasure, Innocence had no idea what it was to live in reduced circumstances. Her last gift to the children had been a nineteen-thousand-dollar Victorian playhouse from Posh Tots: wraparound porch, stained-glass windows, faux-wood floors, window boxes - Emily was a breath away from getting the thing assembled and moving in herself. Actually, she wasn’t. There was no space for the stupid Victorian playhouse as Emily had no garden. Emily (under Nanny’s instruction) had sold it on eBay, and spent the proceeds on a tan at the Portofino Sun Spa in Beverly Hills, a BlackBerry, a bunch of clothes from Kitson, a Hello Kitty babygro from Kitson Kids, and a Spiderman Web Blaster.

  Beyond dumb, frivolous, useless crap, the wallet was shut tight as a clam. Innocence felt (Emily knew it) that her daughter should make it ‘on her own’, as she had. It so pissed her off because, as anyone with half a brain knew, Innocence had got to be fabulously rich by cheating, stealing, fucking, lying and treading on people’s heads. It wasn’t a legacy you should want to pass on to your daughter.

  Emily had no savings. Savings: the word reeked of poverty.

  She was renting a three-bedroom apartment in Park La Brea for $4,200 a month. It had a private patio, hardwood floors, plantation-style shutters, granite counters, and there was a concierge service, security and a gym. But she didn’t like to rent, and she didn’t like to live in an apartment.

  The worst moment had been when she had taken little George to the apartment building for the first time. He had walked into the lobby and dropped his jacket on the floor.

  ‘No,’ she’d said, snatching up the jacket, quailing with embarrassment. ‘We don’t own the whole place, just a … bit of it.’

  An apartment was basically a flat, and she couldn’t stand being squashed into a space, with strangers above you, below you, and either side of you. It was awful living in such cramped conditions – 1,800 square feet. She needed acres of land. It was what she was used to. She was slumming it and to wake up in that place every day was a slap in the face. Also, it was across the road from the Grove: all those gorgeous shops with all those gorgeous things. God, the irony!

  Emily snatched a glass of champagne off a passing tray, and tried not to down it in one. If you were seen to drink more than one unit of booze here, you had a problem and, before you knew it, there’d be an intervention and you’d be whipped off to AA. She’d seen a ‘dry’ actor casually sip a glass of red at Pane e Vino and three people on surrounding tables pick up their cells. The only plus side was that your sponsor was probably a household name.

  So she did most of her drinking at home, after the kids were in bed. Some days, it was hard to be with them. Her state of mind was not good and you couldn’t always fob them off. George was old enough to see through her frozen smile and it disturbed him. When he put a small chubby hand on hers and said, lip wobbling, ‘Mummy, is it my fault?’ she felt sick with shame and self-disgust.

  Anyway, it was her father’s fault. Jack – the coma had done nothing for his personality, which was a waste – had given her a job. She was vice president of press relations at the Bel Air Belle Époque. Vice.

  What a bastard. He was a master of fucking up his kids. No one knew how to screw with your head better than Daddy. He paid her just enough to keep Nanny on, and Isabella, although Isabella might have to go. The other day, Emily had waltzed past Isabella’s shoes (taken off at the front door) and done a double take. A pair of boat-sized Manolos! The bloody cleaner was wearing Manolos. Of course: she also cleaned for Rod Stewart and his wife had spring cleaned. All the same, it didn’t make Emily feel good. Or rather it didn’t make Emily feel better.

  Emily urgently needed to feel better.

  She fingered the company credit card. She’d only had it in her possession for three days; before then, if she’d wanted to take a client to lunch, she’d had to pay for it herself and claim back the expenses. She would have probably been better off taking a job as a sales assistant in Wal-Mart. It would have been less crippling to her self-esteem.

  Her boss, Agatha, a woman with a too-long neck and a British accent straight out of Mary Poppins (twat), had never married, nor had children, or indeed any kind of interpersonal relationship that might have interfered with her work, and Emily was certain of being despised by this creature on every level. Emily was young, she was sexy, she had kids but no money, and she was here through nepotism. It made Emily spit because she knew her father had only given her a job because he knew she’d be brilliant at it.

  On handing her the credit card, Agatha had said, in her clipped, icy tones, ‘In case you thought otherwise, we no longer lunch big in this town. People often forgo starters. And we have a perfectly good hotel dining room in La Cuisine. So don’t push it.’

  Today, this evening, was the credit card’s first outing. Her boss was supposed to have been attending, no doubt to supervise, but Agatha’s mother had selfishly suffered a heart attack that very morning, so at this very moment, Agatha was pacing the corridors of Cedars-Sinai, wishing she’d been cloned instead of born.

  Emily sipped her champagne and smiled at her lap. There was gorgeous George: tiny bit too thin, bit of wattle under the chin, maybe not quite so gorgeous. Matt Damon: my, if that boy wanted to look like a film star, he should not stand next to Brad, and yet … Matt wore you down. He was a nice boy: good-natured and cute. And Ethan Summers, oh my God, he made Johnny Depp look ugly. All the big stars had on their shiniest public smiles, although the calibre of guest meant that no one was going to jump them, or burst into tears and start kissing their feet – there were TV cameras.

  She tried not to look at Ethan, but it was hard. The only thing she had against him was that, like a true action hero, he’d rescued Tim after the bomb had gone off in Paris. He should have let him burn.

  She wondered if Ethan knew who she was.

  He must do. Entertainment Weekly had once called her ‘the thinking man’s Paris Hilton’. Fuck off! She was, like, better looking to infinity. But maybe they just meant that she was the daughter of a hotel billionaire and notorious? That wasn’t a bad thing. Ethan must know of her – she was still a Club Member … wasn’t she?

  She hated this self-doubt, when she had once been so certain.

  When you were famous, you became a member of an exclusive club, and those inside welcomed you in. The thinking was: I am famous, and you are famous, so you must be OK and we might just hang out. That said, there were very particular levels of famous. Everyone in the entertainment business was finely ranked and it didn’t do to get ideas above your station. Here, if an actress got a magazine cover before she was deemed to deserve one, she might be shunned by the industry for a while to remind her of her place. Well, if Ethan didn’t know who she was, he soon would. All these people who dressed up for a living could shove over, because tonight, she was going to be the star of the show. Spend two thousand dollars max, Agatha had said sternly, even if it was for charity, in the name of Belle Époque. She should bid for something tangible, a ‘modest artwork, nothing weird, hideous, or sexual, by a known artist, preferably local’.

  Two thousand dollars indeed! Jack had already added ‘celebrity-killer’ to his distinguished title of ‘disgraced billionaire’, did he want to be known as tight, too? In the name of great publicity, Emily was going to buy something proper and big, and she was going to
grandly, gaudily, pay top whack.

  She flicked through the auction brochure. Private yacht trip around the Greek Islands? Flights to Vegas via private jet and a night at the Wynn? A Bentley Continental Flying Spur? Yawn!

  It occurred to Emily that she hadn’t had sex in months and despite her poverty-stricken existence, no yacht trip, no private jet, no flash hotel could thrill her. She wanted a man to play with and there just wasn’t one in the brochure.

  She’d forgotten. What was tonight again? Romania? Sanitary protection? Oh yeah. Orphaned babies in the Third World.

  Lucky orphaned babies, touched by the sacred hand of Hollywood! Did those ungrateful orphaned babies know how privileged they were that all these gorgeous, famous, fabulous, powerful, special godlike beings had given up two hours of their Monday to help them? These people were about to give them cash out of their own pockets, when those babies had done nothing to earn it, except be orphaned. How fortunate, how blessed those babies were. If only someone would help Emily as they were helping those babies – her situation was almost as desperate.

  Emily knew she should network, and once she would have done: she would have kissed air and talked small with ease and grace. But she didn’t feel like making the effort. It was exhausting, finding out who did what so you knew who was worth speaking to. Anyway, she wanted to play it cool. Fox News was here and she didn’t trust their camera angles.

  So she sat, smoked, sipped her drink, hid behind her shades and admired the view (the stars on the ground – you could see the ones in the sky any time). She could have wolfed the entire tray of prawn tempura, not to mention the lobster wontons and the Kobe beef, but she briskly waved it all away. Paris might have been filmed having sex but to Emily’s knowledge she had so far avoided the humiliation of having been filmed eating.