Movie Star By Lizzie Pepper

by Hilary Liftin

  “Seriously?” I said. “It’s hard for Rob Mars to meet women?”

  A long, rough-hewn table stretched out from the fireplace like the line of an exclamation point. Dinner had magically appeared on it: The Oompa Loompas at work again. Rob rematerialized at my elbow and guided me to a chair between him and Scotty. I was relieved. I hadn’t talked to Geoff’s girlfriend, Patricia, yet, but her mouth was set in a thin line and I had her pegged as an ice queen.

  Rob had told his brother about me. I knew what that meant—or thought I did at the time, because I was still operating on the standard Boy Meets Girl protocol. In that manual, Boy Tells His Brother About You translated to: Boy Has a Crush on You. I was flattered, and talking to Scotty made Rob seem more like a typical vulnerable guy looking for love, with the added complication of being The Biggest Freakin’ Movie Star in the Whole Wide World.

  On my other side, Rob was talking to Geoff about an island in French Polynesia. “Rapa is a tiny dot in the middle of the ocean,” he was saying, “three hundred miles from the closest island. The fruit I ate there was the best I’ve ever tasted. It’s out of this world.” Rob turned to me. “You don’t realize how much pressure civilization exerts until you truly escape it. God, you would love it, Elizabeth. I hope to take you there someday.”

  Rob, who could go anywhere in the world, longed for the isolation of far-off lands. This bit of knowledge might have appealed to my sense of adventure. Or at the very least caused me to consider what it meant that this man had a thing for islands. But to be honest, all I heard was the word “someday.” I made a mental note for Aurora. Rob was the opposite of my ex Johnny. Johnny couldn’t commit to seeing me later the same night, much less “someday” in the vast and unpredictable future.

  After dinner, the other guests made their excuses and turned in early. I smiled inwardly. It felt like they were conspiring. They wanted to give me and Rob a chance. Once again I got the sense I’d just passed a test that I hadn’t even known I was taking.

  The sun had dropped below the horizon, its fiery wake still blazing the sky. Rob took my hands in his. “Elizabeth, I’m having an amazing time. That boat is at our disposal. We can head back whenever you want. But I want to ask you if you’re willing to stay here with me tonight.”

  Aha! There it was. He expected me to sleep with him on our first date. He’d shown up at my apartment without calling first, transported me to a secret island without telling me where we were going, and now he thought I would just hand it over? But of course he did. Because who wouldn’t sleep with Rob Mars on the first date? I had to admit that he’d gone to a lot of trouble for a guy who could just walk into any bar in the world, snap his fingers, and have his choice of the hottest women around. Still, I wasn’t about to give in. So what if he was Rob Mars? I wasn’t anyone’s conquest.

  “Rob, this is so fantastic. You, this place, all of it. But I have to get home! I didn’t plan . . .”

  “Don’t worry,” he interrupted me. “You’ll have your own room. We’re not there yet. I’m very attracted to you, but I respect you too much to proceed with anything but caution.”

  “Do you always speak in . . . road signs?” He was just too perfect. I couldn’t buy it. I needed him to crack.

  “You want to know what I’m really thinking?” he asked, and now he was close, leaning against the wall to make himself closer to my height, his voice low and flirty.

  “I think so,” I said. Then he put his hand around my neck, pulled me toward him, and kissed me. And for every ounce of cynicism in my body, even knowing how gag-inducing these next words sound, I have to admit that an electric charge ran through me. I know, I know, but cut me some slack. There was a glorious sunset. I was alone on a balcony overlooking an island with a man who had been named Glam’s Sexiest Man of the Year more times than I knew. I was standing on my tiptoes to reach him, clean, warm, and buzzed, and that first kiss threw me completely under his spell. When we finally came up for air, I stood there, dizzy and dazzled, until Rob said, “P.S. I’m not gay.” We laughed, and all the distance between us—our ages, our Hollywood status, the fact that he was the one calling the shots, the totally ridiculously over-the-top setting—it all evaporated and we were two regular people who wanted to know each other. And that’s what the whole prolonged date was like. Moments that were normal and mundane and just like anyone else could have been experiencing, surrounded by events and situations so far outside the realm of normal experience that, after an entire day, it got hard to tell which was which. Living that way for months, or years, only made that distinction fuzzier.

  But that night, in the moment of our first kiss, the extreme and ordinary met in a flutter that brought a flush to my cheeks. I’m always too cautious. I haven’t missed a night of flossing since I got my first and only cavity in 1994. Three friends have extra sets of my keys, just in case. So what if I was going to miss my Pilates class in the morning? So what if tomorrow turned out to be the day my dream script arrived by messenger and I wasn’t the very first girl next door to read it and respond to my agent? So what if my doorman silently noted my walk of shame the next day? I was tired of being so relentlessly well behaved. All that responsibility looked good on the outside, but I secretly knew that it was just fear. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of taking risks. Fear of the unknown. I felt safe with Rob. And I wasn’t even going to sleep with the guy! It was time to be spontaneous for once in my life. This was an awesome, once-in-a-lifetime date and I wasn’t ready for it to end. “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay . . . ?”

  “Okay, I’ll stay.”

  Rob saw me to my room, and it was hard to leave him, but it was what we both wanted. I clung to the knowledge that he would be there again in the morning, because I already didn’t want us to be apart. We parted at my door. Walking back down the hallway, Rob tripped and caught his fall. Then he turned back and saw me watching him.

  “Damn,” he said. “You saw that.”

  “Aha,” I said. “You’re not perfect.”

  He swooped back toward me, took me up in his arms, and spun me around, with a deep, unforgettable kiss. “Am I a movie star again?” he asked.

  “I like the you who stumbles. The one who doesn’t get it on the first take,” I said. He put his hand to his chest, thumping it against his heart. “Get out of here, cheeseball,” I said, giving him a little push back down the hall.

  I closed the door behind him, went to the bathroom, and stood looking at myself in the mirror. My hair had dried curly and was in desperate need of product. His stubble had chapped my chin. I stuck my tongue out at myself, giggled, then hid my face in my hands like a stupid teenager. Holy smokes, this was actually happening. Then I crawled into the bed—high-thread-count, down pillows galore—and finally called Aurora.

  That trip to Century Island was and still is sacred to me. It reminds me that I fell in love with Rob for real, for who he was and how we were together. Rob played gods and romantic heroes onscreen, and there was a reason he was so good at it. He was remarkably present. When we were together, he was completely in that moment and that moment alone. We were the only two people in the world. He believed in us, and I believed in him. Anything seemed possible. Sheer joy. An unimaginable love. Eternal life while circling an unbelievably distant star.

  3

  Rob liked to say that he put the pedal to the metal in our relationship. I liked to say “Please don’t use car metaphors to describe us.” In the beginning, every day was a step forward for us as a couple. Right after we returned from Century Island, he sent me two dozen long-stemmed red roses. The note just read “Yours.” Roses have never been my favorite flower. So Hallmark-y. But they fit with Rob’s unrelenting romanticism, which was slowly dismantling my cynical resolve. What was so bad about having a man send me the type of flower most symbolizing love? I decided to let myself enjoy more, judge less.

  He called several times a day, just
to see what I was doing. He texted me: Here’s what has been going through my mind all day: Elizabeth. Elizabeth. Elizabeth. Where is Elizabeth right now? What is Elizabeth doing right now? When will I see Elizabeth again? Elizabeth. Elizabeth. Aurora joked that I was being stalked by the most famous man in the world.

  Most of my previous relationships—okay, both of them—had begun with tipsy fumbling that escalated into hot and hurried sex. Rob, on the other hand, prepared for our first night together as if it were already an anniversary. One night at my apartment we were on my couch, making out.

  He whispered in my ear, “We know this is going to happen.” We rolled off my couch onto the floor. “We know it’s going to be incredible,” he said. He paused to look at me, and every hookup I’d had told me exactly what he was going to do next—but then, to my surprise, he stood up and helped me to my feet. “So why not make it one of a kind?”

  I leaned in to him, my arms around his neck, my hips sealed to his, still in the moment. “What did you have in mind?” I whispered.

  “My plane.” Then he was gone, leaving me rumpled and alone. I looked at the clock. It was just before midnight. My Prince Charming was afraid of turning into a pumpkin.

  A week and one private jet ride later, I called Aurora. I had to tell her—our friendship history mandated a full report of every sexual encounter—but this time was different.

  “Definitely not gay,” I told her.

  She squealed. “I. Need. Every. Detail.”

  “It was great,” I said.

  “That’s it? Crap.”

  I didn’t tell her that having sex with Rob for the first time was unlike with any other lover I’d had. At first I’d had my doubts about the plane: Would the crew know? Would it be cozy and romantic, or was it stunt-sex? If people caught colds from breathing the air on commercial airlines, what would I catch having sex on a private jet? How much of my relationship with Rob Mars was destined to take place in exotic locales?

  We boarded at a private runway in Malibu. As I met the pilot and the crew, I scrutinized each of them. Did they know why I was here? How many times had he brought women on board for this very purpose? Were they secretly laughing at my naïveté? Keeping score? But they kept to their tasks, friendly, with blank military precision. One snicker and they’d be fired.

  Rob led me to a closed-off room that was outfitted like an elegant, minimalist hotel room. (Yes, there was a bed. That had been one of my unspoken requirements.) I lay back on the pillows, kind of figuring we’d get right to it.

  “Slow down there, Lizzie,” Rob said. “FAA regulations say we gotta sit in our seats for takeoff.”

  Oh. Right. There were two big white leather lounge chairs that looked funny with their regulation airplane seat belts, like those women who wear business suits and stockings, then cap off the look with sneakers for the walk to work. The pilot’s voice came on, but instead of making any formal announcements, he just said, “You guys ready?” I looked at Rob. He raised his eyebrows at me.

  “Ready?”

  I nodded, and Rob pushed a button on the arm of his chair, sending our affirmation to the pilot. We were off.

  I don’t kiss and tell, but I will say that I, Lizzie Pepper, am an official member of the Mile-High Club (though as Rob pointed out we were a lot higher than that). It didn’t escape my notice that I was joining a much more elite club at the same time: lover of Rob Mars. Maybe the grand production of the private plane took some of the pressure off him. If Rob Mars wasn’t a stud, world markets would crash. But it was only afterward when I finally appreciated where we were. In bed, still entwined, we gazed out the four oversize oval windows at a blue, blue sky. Then I saw what Rob had wanted. We were alone, suspended above reality, cradled by a miraculous machine, floating in a strange balloon of luxury and danger. We had escaped the weight of the world. This was the isolation that Rob craved. He was right; it was worth it.

  I didn’t tell Aurora the specifics of that night. I didn’t tell her about Rob saying to me, “I’ve looked down at the world from this plane hundreds of times, and every time it clears my head. But you’ve gone and made it foggy again.” And I didn’t tell her that every night since, Rob and I had fallen asleep with him wrapped around me like a blanket, and that all night long he kept his hand draped over my waist or his feet tangled in mine. In the morning when I woke up, the first thing I saw was his dark eyes, wide open, inches from my face, as if he’d been watching me sleep all night long. I most certainly didn’t tell her that he had confided in me about the gay rumors, telling me the details of his sexual past. Those stories are his, and I will always respect his privacy on that count. What was most important to me was that he was honest with me, and that he trusted me with his secrets. I kept them from Aurora, and that was a first.

  Rob had a house in Brentwood and a house in Malibu. Brentwood was a comfortable estate that Rob seemed to use as a crash pad when he had to be in L.A. for more than one day in a row and didn’t feel like commuting back to Malibu. But in those first few weeks we were mostly in Malibu, where his house was on a private beach. The entrance was at street level, and the house went six stories down from there to the shoreline—built into the rock on the street side and open to the Pacific on the other. Every morning Rob brought lattes out to the balcony and the two of us sat reading scripts, pausing to share a line or to gaze out at the ocean. Of course, the difference was that Rob rejected every script he read, while I called my agent to discuss each one: It had little to do with how much I loved a particular part. There was only one Rob Mars, but at any given moment there were at least ten Lizzie Peppers, just off their own American Dream, and I felt the dark fear of actors everywhere: Each day in which I didn’t land a part further convinced me I would never work again.

  But when I looked up, the perpetually blue sky would wash away the shadows, drawing me back into the Hollywood fantasy: strolling on the dunes, being served by a private chef, staying in bed until the sun was high enough to hit the western-facing windows, and having your choice of parts, the hottest scripts with the finest directors in the business already attached, or willing to sign on if you were on board to play the starring role.

  One of the biggest adjustments was something that at first felt like a small detail: Rob’s household staff. They tried to stay out of our way, but there were a lot of them, and they came in twos. Two drivers. Two chefs. Two gate guards and two bodyguards. It was easy to get used to not lifting a finger. What was harder was the lack of privacy. Anticipating our needs meant being available, which meant being . . . around. When I went to the bathroom, I locked the door and felt stupid about it, protecting myself from the people who kept us safe.

  After I’d been in Malibu about a week, a masseur showed up.

  “He usually comes every day I’m in residence,” Rob said. “I just wanted to update his nondisclosure before he met you.”

  Rob returned from his massage wearing a white terrycloth robe, his skin shiny with oil. “Joseph has his table set up in the spare room in the gym,” he said. “Enjoy.”

  That, at least, is what I heard him say. There was, in fact, a door in the back of the gym that I’d never noticed before, but I found it locked. I knocked, but nobody answered. When I texted Rob—too lazy to run upstairs—he clarified that the masseur worked in the spare room next to the gym. (Oh, the problems of being fantastically wealthy—how do you name all the rooms in your palace?) The locked room, Rob told me, was his private office. I remember finding it something of a relief to know that the staff didn’t have access to every nook and cranny of his life. I went next door and got the best massage of my life.

  Afterward, sipping cucumber water on the back deck, my whole body felt like Jell-O. a girl could get used to this, I texted Aurora.

  Our relationship was still a secret. I had always practiced standard celebrity discretion: baseball hat, sunglasses, nondescript clothing. I avoided paparazzi
hangouts. My agency was across the street from Barneys, a perfect crosswalk for lazy paparazzi, so for the last couple of years almost every magazine shot had me carrying a Barneys bag. Otherwise, when the cameramen did find me on the street, which happened at most once a month, I posed quickly and they left. With the glaring exception of my recent breakup with Johnny, which had plunged me into a salacious spotlight for what I hoped would be a brief hell, my encounters with the press were mundane and routine.

  But Rob lived on another plane of celebrity. I was known; he was worshipped. Where I got free designer purses, he got monthlong vacations in private châteaus. Where I had one incompetent stalker who constantly showed up at an apartment I hadn’t occupied for five years, Rob had fans of The Son who were so convinced by his performance that they showed up in droves with photos of dead loved ones, wanting Rob to confirm the status of their souls. While I was walking red carpets at movie premieres, he was at the White House, watching his latest movie with the president, at the president’s request.

  Once discovered, our romance would be big news in the gossip magazines. We’d have to go public at some point, but first we wanted some time to enjoy our privacy and, though it was unspoken, to be sure the relationship was serious enough to warrant the media onslaught. Sneaking around was fun when it meant going shopping after dinner, with his assistant calling ahead and having the boutiques open just for us. We entered restaurants—certain restaurants only—through back entrances and dined in private rooms. What was missing was spontaneity. There was no taking walks, no popping out for pizza, no window-shopping. And we couldn’t have a good old-fashioned movie date. Rob had screening rooms in both of his houses and a subscription to first-run movies. We could see anything we wanted, but only at home. Believe me, I wasn’t complaining.

  To me all the conspiring was a new adventure, but for Rob it was a normal, if inconvenient, way of life. One Sunday after we’d been together for only a couple of weeks, we had spent the day paddleboarding and sipping iced tea on the deck. After dinner I realized I needed tampons. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have mentioned it to a guy I was dating—I’m not a prude, but I can tend to my own bodily functions, thank you. At Rob’s, however, I didn’t know how to handle it.