How to be Famous

by Alison Bond

  ‘I hear they’re doing well,’ guessed Melanie.

  ‘Funny guy,’ said Jeanette. ‘Fucked on a timetable around fixtures and could only leave London in the summer. I said to him, honey, you mean no more winter breaks ever? No skiing, no sun? So he sent me off to Jamaica on my own for two weeks and that was pretty much the end of that. Like, was I really gonna spend two weeks in paradise on my own without a playmate?’

  Fabien returned with her drink and she listened to the idle gossip of the two girls next to her. By the time Davey came rushing over towards them Melanie was on her second beer and laughing so hard at the story of Jeanette getting banned from Delta for too much mile-high-club action that she was almost choking.

  ‘Melanie!’ said Davey. ‘Honey, why didn’t you tell me she was here?’

  ‘We were just having too much fun listening to Jeanette’s travel stories,’ said Mary Ann.

  ‘It’s good to see you. The film looks great,’ said Davey. He knew immediately what she was about to ask.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, well I would say that, wouldn’t I? But it honestly does look special. We’ve sold to all the major territories and Bob Rosenburg is walking around like he gave birth to the second coming, trying to hustle me into a deal that would tie me up for life. Must be pretty good.’

  ‘I’m so pleased for you,’ said Melanie.

  ‘I’m pleased for you, you’re the one everyone will be talking about. This film is going to open some doors for you, no question. Even if the public hates it they’re still going to fall in love with you.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘It’s so good to see you.’

  Melanie waited for the betraying jump of her heart as he touched her but it never came. Maybe it was because they were in public.

  By sunset the numbers had swollen to around thirty people and Melanie was having a good time. A few people were dancing. Jeanette was organizing a game of some sort in the kitchen that initially involved finding ten working pens or pencils. Melanie wandered back into the house, half looking for Davey or Mary Ann, half thinking of leaving.

  She followed the hesitant sounds of a guitar from upstairs and found Mary Ann, Fabien and a girl she didn’t know sprawled across the biggest bed she had ever seen. The bedroom was a minimalist’s dream, the immense bed covered in white linen was the only furniture in the room, and red muslin fluttered in the picture windows, kissing the bare floorboards below. Fabien was strumming the guitar as Mary Ann made vague attempts at a melody. The other girl had the ubiquitous golden blonde hair, which she lifted with her hands and watched as it fell in feathers through her fingers.

  Fabien looked up and played the opening chords of Hendrix’s ‘Foxy Lady’, moving across to make room for her.

  Melanie hesitated, she wasn’t sure how much more casual she wanted this party to get.

  Fabien reached for a ready-rolled joint from a drawer discreedy embedded in the headboard. There was a similar drawer on the other side and Melanie idly wondered if that’s where he kept his condoms. She took the joint that he offered and Mary Ann introduced her to their friend Honey. It was obvious from the introduction that if Melanie required any other illegal substances while she was in town she should give Honey a call. Melanie wasn’t naive, she was used to all sorts of people casually using recreational drugs, but this sweet-smelling cheerleader was about as far removed from her idea of a dealer as you could get. Honey chatted freely as she cut four lines of cocaine on the back of the guitar and hardly paused for breath when she bent her head down and snorted up her line with a little silver straw.

  ‘Not for me,’ said Melanie, when the others were done. She’d done her coke thing in the early nineties, just enough to rationalize that the undeniable pleasure wasn’t worth the unavoidable comedown. Nobody argued, or even commented, and Fabien deftly finished off the fourth line.

  Honey and Mary Ann made a good double act. They teased and tormented Fabien relentlessly. The subject seemed to be an ex-girlfriend, Louisa, recently treated to the traditional Fabien Stewart break-up. The girls told Melanie that Fabien had a standard handwritten letter he sent to women nearing their sell-by date, accompanied by an exquisite piece of handpicked jewellery.

  ‘Do you see?’ said Fabien. ‘I handpick the jewellery. I go to Tiffany’s or Asprey’s or some other stupid store and look at overpriced trinkets and evaluate and choose. Isn’t that worth more than words?’

  ‘About ten G more, I’d say,’ said Honey, and Mary Ann dissolved into giggles on the bed.

  ‘What does the letter say?’ asked Melanie.

  ‘He’ll never tell and neither will they,’ said Honey. ‘I even asked my friend, my very cute, intelligent friend, who was cruelly dumped last year, on Valentine’s no less, and she said it was too personal. I told her that there were a hundred other women out there clutching the same letter to their bosoms, but she wouldn’t give.’

  ‘Didn’t she say anything?’ said Melanie.

  ‘Yeah, that’s it, she said it was like a poem.’

  Fabien sat back and smiled.

  Mary Ann set upon him with a cushion, beating him over the head playfully. ‘Show me the goddamn letter!’

  ‘First you have to sleep with me, then you will fall in love with me, then you’ll know.’ Fabien grabbed Mary Ann’s butt with both hands and pulled her down so that she was astride him. ‘You wanna?’

  ‘Hmmm, baby, I don’t know. With my husband right downstairs and all this company?’ She ground her hips suggestively against him and he slapped her butt.

  Melanie felt slightly uncomfortable but Honey rolled her eyes as if she had seen it all before.

  ‘Let’s do another line,’ said Mary Ann rolling off Fabien, her eyes sparkling like sequins.

  ‘I still don’t get what you’re so afraid of,’ said Honey. ‘You can escape at any time, but if a girl’s good company why not keep her around? Like with Louisa. You were upset to see her go. It was as if she had dumped you instead of the other way around. I don’t understand why you would do that.’

  ‘It has nothing to do with fear. I’m a gentleman. I see it in their eyes, the pain to come. I finish it now, the heart breaks a little. I finish it later and the heart may never recover. It would be wrong of me to populate the world with beautiful women lacking hearts.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Honey.

  Behind her, Mary Ann made fast work of two thin lines. ‘Two thousand dollars says you’re married by the time you’re forty.’

  ‘You’re on.’

  ‘What’s going on downstairs?’ asked Mary Ann.

  ‘A game, some music,’ said Melanie.

  ‘I love games!’ said Mary Ann. ‘Let’s go. I miss my husband.’

  Fabien and Melanie were left on the bed.

  He turned towards her and gave her a lazy smile. ‘So now you know what you’re getting into, do you still want to?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Me. Me and you.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘It’s perfect. You’re from distant shores, only in town for a short while, the accent is driving me crazy and I’m wondering what those legs look like naked.’

  ‘I’m flattered.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ said Fabien, missing the irony.

  ‘There’s something you need to know.’

  ‘Unless it’s that you have a penis, it really doesn’t matter to me. I invented safe sex.’

  ‘I’m Melanie Chaplin.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Does the name mean nothing to you?’

  ‘Sorry, babe.’

  ‘We start work together soon. I’m Annabel. I’m your lover.’

  A flash of surprise crossed Fabien’s features but he didn’t miss a beat.

  ‘But this is perfect,’ he said. ‘Think about it like a rehearsal. When we face the cameras there will be no awkwardness, no shyness, it’ll be real.’

  He grabbed her round the waist, forcing her back onto the deep cushioned linen.
Melanie gasped and felt a familiar tightening in her groin. Maybe it was the beer, maybe the grass, maybe the heat, but as she felt the hard outline of him press against her she was tempted. He was a beautiful man and he couldn’t have been clearer about his intentions. A good, no-strings, safe fuck. Exactly what she needed in this strange new town. Hadn’t she wished that she could be more spontaneous? Well, spontaneity was staring her in the face and he came with a hard-on. Spontaneity had somehow managed to undo her bra without her even noticing.

  Melanie shuddered as Fabien reached beneath the black silk of her top and stroked her bare skin with strong warm fingers. Warning bells went off in her head and with some considerable effort she sat up again.

  ‘It’s not a good idea. I can’t work well with someone I’m sleeping with.’

  ‘Really?’ said Fabien, genuinely surprised. ‘It’s fun mixing work and pleasure, perk of the job. We’re both adults and you don’t look like the type of girl who’s going to hear wedding bells before I’ve even wiped up. Although I suppose you never know. I’m told I’m pretty good.’

  Melanie laughed.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Sex between consenting adults should be fun, no soul searching, no questions. Just good, clean fun.’

  And it was fun, Melanie resisted briefly and they argued some more but by then they both knew it was on. He asked her if she was sure and she said yes. When she surrendered to his relentless hands and benign kisses she was glad. Glad to sink into hungry arms that asked no questions, glad to roll on the unforgiving wooden floor boards, smiling together in the tangled sheets. Fabien was as good as his boast, never had Melanie felt so contented and confident with a new lover. His lightness of touch and mood was intoxicating and when her orgasm came she laughed with delight, her body arching in delicious tremors. This was some party.

  It was understandable, given the craziness of the last couple of months, that somewhere between Indonesia, London and Los Angeles Melanie failed to notice that she was pregnant.

  Neutralize Negative Influences

  There will be people who say that you cannot do this. There will be people who say that you should aim for something more realistic. They will say that they care about you and do not want to see you make a fool of yourself. These people do not love you. Forget them. You can prove them wrong.

  14

  The first thing she had to do was buy a car. It took forty-five minutes for Lynsey to realize that public transport was not an option. Forty-five minutes of waiting by the side of a four-lane highway for a bus that never appeared. Finally, on the edge of being late, Lynsey retraced her steps to the motel and called a cab.

  It wasn’t a great start to her first day.

  She remembered her first day back in London. She had been two hours early; the combination of excitement and discomfort had woken her at dawn on a friend’s sofa. She remembered sitting on a bench in Soho Square with a cappuccino and a banana. Trying to kill time but anxious to walk the short distance to her new life. Eventually she had decided she couldn’t wait any longer and arrived at eight thirty only to sit in reception and wait until someone from Jim’s office arrived. By the time she had started work her nerves had gone.

  The cab arrived quickly and Lynsey was grateful that she had allowed herself plenty of time to get to CMG’s Wilshire offices. Too much time it had originally seemed. Erring on the side of caution was not something that came naturally to her. If the traffic was kind she might just about make it.

  *

  The next thing she had to do was buy some clothes. Lynsey had decided to wear the same green dress she wore to meet Melanie two days ago. Melanie had complimented her on it and Lynsey was seriously contemplating making it her lucky dress. As soon as she saw what the other CMG assistants were wearing Lynsey decided she would ceremoniously burn it. People in Los Angeles dressed like they meant business. Judging from the assistants that scurried past as she sat in reception, looking like a schoolgirl, Lynsey needed to buy some trouser suits and fast. Preferably black.

  ‘Lynsey?’

  Lynsey turned round and saw a severe-looking brunette with her hair scraped back from her face. Her trouser suit was charcoal grey and looked expensive. The woman stuck out her hand.

  ‘I’m Sheridan.’

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ said Lynsey. She could feel a highly inappropriate giggle building momentum in her throat. Sheridan? Seriously?

  Lynsey followed Sheridan down the red-carpeted hallway, catching sight of familiar office chaos through half-opened doors. The churn and flash of a photocopier, the sound of ringing phones and hooked up fax lines, almost melodic in a modern jazz kind of way.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse us,’ Sheridan was saying. ‘Things are pretty up at the moment, Max isn’t here, he missed the red-eye, and it’s pilot season.’

  Lynsey nodded and tried to look as if she understood what Sheridan had just said.

  ‘This is us,’ said Sheridan.

  Max Parker’s office was at the very heart of CMG, surrounded, in an open-plan set-up, by five assistants in a horseshoe. Other offices seemed to stretch out from it like rays of the sun. Four of the five assistants’ desks were occupied. They were all on the phone.

  ‘That’s Charlie, Tom, Jerry and Kaia.’

  ‘Tom and Jerry?’ said Lynsey. She couldn’t help herself.

  Sheridan looked at her blankly.

  ‘You know,’ said Lynsey. ‘Tom and Jerry.’

  ‘Right.’

  Lynsey’s inner voice was screaming shut up, shut up, shut up. She said, ‘The cartoon?’

  ‘I get it,’ said Sheridan. She checked her watch with an almost imperceptible flick of her wrist. ‘We don’t have a desk for you so you can make yourself comfortable over there and start going through the headshots, any less than ten and put in an order for more, you’ll find the details for each shot on the front of the file next to the master copy of the résumé. Read every résumé, if there’s anything on it that you’ve heard of but haven’t seen, watch it. Okay? The tape library is on the second floor. Any questions, ask Jerry.’

  ‘Which one’s Jerry?’

  ‘The one with the big grey ears,’ said Sheridan and grinned. ‘You’ll be fine, Lynsey, it’s just crazy today.’ She pointed. ‘That one.’

  The dude in the corner with perfect hair lifted his hand and waved at Lynsey while carrying on what sounded like a very heated conversation.

  Lynsey settled herself by the filing cabinet in the corner and checked out her surroundings.

  Max’s office was painted pistachio green and one entire wall was a full-length window with views over downtown Hollywood. The other walls were crowded with posters for blockbuster movies and arthouse films. There was a widescreen TV and a large brown leather couch. She couldn’t help but wonder if she would end up sleeping on it.

  Max’s desk was a solid block of dark wood that dominated the space. He had a phone, a laptop computer and a photograph of two small children plus another that she couldn’t see. The desk was surprisingly free of paperwork. By contrast his assistants were half hidden by paper towers. Sheridan had taken her seat at the empty desk, closest to Max, and was talking on the phone while rifling through a pile. She pushed the mute button and snarled, ‘Who’s got the fucking breakdown?’

  On his line Jerry said, ‘I’m just gonna have to put you on hold for one second,’ and raced over to Sheridan with a piece of paper, the wire from his headset flapping behind him.

  She snatched it from him and said smoothly to her caller, ‘Totally loved it, yeah. Which part? Oh, she’d be perfect.’

  Jerry snapped his headset back into his telephone. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘where was I?’

  Lynsey pulled open the filing cabinet and started work.

  It was gone two o’clock in the afternoon and though she had wanted to ask her question for at least an hour she was finally forced to do so by an embarrassing rumble from her stomach.

  ‘Uh, Jerry?’

  ‘Yep?�
�� He looked up from his computer screen expectantly.

  ‘What do we do about lunch?’

  He looked at his watch. ‘It should be here by now. Give it another twenty minutes and then maybe call. They’re shit, we should change our caterer.’

  ‘We have a caterer?’

  ‘Didn’t Sheridan tell you? She should have, you need to put in a regular order or you get stuck with the ham and swiss. On white. Hey, Sheridan, you didn’t ask Lynsey what she wanted for lunch.’

  Sheridan looked across and mouthed ‘sorry’, all the time saying, ‘Yeah, uh-uh, I see,’ to whoever she was talking to. Sheridan, it seemed, lived on the phone.

  When lunch eventually arrived, Lynsey gulped down her ham and swiss in record time, gasping for breath and smacking her lips with satisfaction when she was done, but she couldn’t help noticing the rest of the assistants seemed to ignore the food.

  At about four o’clock there was a sudden lull. The phones were momentarily quiet and like synchronized swimmers the four assistants reached for their lunches and started to eat.

  ‘So,’ said Jerry. ‘How are you getting on?’

  ‘You’ve got some amazing clients,’ said Lynsey, and it was true. She had been pawing through the filing cabinet like a groupie, trying to work out which famous actors Max didn’t represent. There weren’t many. Oscar-winning stars sat next to some of her all time heroes and heroines. The filing cabinet was like a Hollywood hall of fame. She held up a picture of a young superstar. ‘Is it true he got thirty-five million for the sequel?’

  ‘Not really, that’s all percentages, they’re basing it on the grosses for the first film.’

  ‘But the sequel will do just as well?’

  ‘Probably better.’

  ‘So he’ll make more than thirty-five million?’

  ‘Maybe, eventually. But don’t forget that Max takes fifteen per cent, his lawyer will take another chunk, his manager, the IRS. He’ll see maybe seven.’