Movie Star By Lizzie Pepper

by Hilary Liftin

  “Does Bethamy know what you want?”

  “Probably not.”

  “And who does Bethamy work for?”

  “Me, I guess, but really Rob.”

  “Does Rob know what you want?”

  “No.” I could see where she was going with this. “I get it. I’m supposed to tell Bethamy and Rob what I want. But I . . .”

  Meg interrupted me. “Let me guess. There are reasons you don’t want to talk to them. You want to be a good girl. You want to follow the rules. You don’t want to be seen as difficult. Your parents taught you to behave this way—it makes for polite and manageable kids—but if you leave your wedding in Bethamy’s hands, you’re going to pop out of your own wedding cake, and then you and Rob will parachute into a pool of champagne—”

  “Full of color-activation crystals that will turn my gown from angelic white to gold lamé!” I chimed in.

  “It’s your wedding, Lizzie.”

  I got the subtext: I, Lizzie Pepper, was a total wimp. “You’re like Rob,” I said to Meg. “You know what you want and you just go for it.”

  “I wasn’t born this way,” she said, “and, believe it or not, neither was he. We learned to access our power.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Here.” She gestured toward the buildings, where One Cell’s Practice, lectures, and classes were held.

  Meg touched a nerve. I had spent my whole childhood trying to please my father. I took on his expectations of perfection, so I got straight As; I practiced the cello, which I despised, for forty-five minutes every night; I played soccer (mediocrely, but I gave it my all). I didn’t date. I made curfew. The first time a cigarette touched my lips, I reported it to my mother (though I hid thousands after that). And when I got the role of Lucy McAlister, and the show became a massive hit, I committed to stay on the cast for its entire six-year run—four years of which I’d always assumed I’d spend in college—because my father couldn’t countenance quitting. But all of that rule following and achievement didn’t give me half the confidence that Meg and Rob had.

  I was suddenly profoundly curious. I jumped up, grabbed Meg’s hand, and dragged her inside, to the hall that led to the Main Practice Room. I stopped in front of a big bulletin board wall, covered with notices and sign-up sheets.

  “Where would I start?”

  Meg moved her finger in circles as she scanned the wall. Then her index finger landed on a sheet. It read, “Introduction to the Whole Body Practice: Accessing the First Mind.”

  “Sounds like psychobabble,” I said.

  Meg smiled. “I actually met Rob in the Intro Practice. We went through it together. It was my sixth time and his first. It basically teaches you how to figure out what you really want. Seems obvious, but you do exercises to help you move past the obstacles that other people put in your way. So you can have the wedding that you want . . . and tell your fiancé if you can’t deal with his staff! It’s the first One Cell class most people do, and Rob always says it’s the best.”

  I was signing my name to the form before she finished her sentence. Bethamy was driving me crazy, it was true, but it wasn’t only my overbearing wedding planner that led me to the Studio. It was what Meg had just told me: “Rob always says . . .” She seemed to know my fiancé better than I did.

  I wanted to connect to Rob. For a while now I’d been trying to go deeper with him, to get past his impossibly flawless exterior. Bethamy wanted to cast him as Prince Charming in our wedding, and I wanted the opposite. I wanted him to know that he could leave his work at the office. I didn’t need him to be perfectly chivalrous every minute of our lives. And suddenly, One Cell seemed like it might be the way to reach him. Rob credited the Studio with his acting prowess, which I so envied, but for a long time I’d suspected that it went much deeper than that. The Practice was core to who he was. And Meg, who’d studied alongside him, seemed to know him as a person, not just the model fiancé he was for me. Spending time on the periphery wasn’t working. Maybe getting closer to One Cell meant getting closer to Rob. I sure hoped so.

  And thus began my journey into the world of the One Cell Studio. It was that easy. I’d felt like Rob was holding me at arm’s length, and I’d been waiting for him to invite me, but all I had to do was step forward on my own. And, that, he told me later, was one of One Cell’s tenets. Nobody was to be persuaded. Everyone was expected to find their own way to the Studio.

  I bought it, hook, line, and sinker.

  And suddenly there I was, on a path to an enlightenment I’d never known I lacked.

  belly of the beast, I texted Aurora. i’m all in.

  it was nice knowing you, pepper, she wrote back.

  Introduction to the Whole Body Practice met at the Studio twice a week for two hours. The leader, Cece, had grown up with Meg. She was an elegant Brazilian woman who made the shapeless One Cell robes look like an effortless fashion statement.

  There were about ten people at the first practice. (The second week, a guided meditation titled “Truth and Consequences,” the room was maxed out at sixty people. When Meg met me afterward, she looked at the crowd flowing out of the room and said, “Well, Lizzie, you sure can fill the house.” Apparently One Cell practitioners weren’t completely immune to the lure of celebrity.)

  We gathered in a large, airy room with clean white sand on its sunken floor. A simple wooden bench circumscribed the perimeter of the room. There were posters of Teddy and Luther Dillon, the cofounders of One Cell, surrounding us. Each poster had one of Teddy’s aphorisms, like “The being is the mirror of the mind” or “Readiness doesn’t wait for tomorrow.” On the bench near me, someone had carved “The self is not limided.” I smiled inwardly. At the verry least, the self is not limited by spelling rules.

  For the first hour, we stood in a circle in the sand, barefoot, wearing our robes, in perfect silence. As the minutes passed without anyone saying a word, I grew uncomfortable, then impatient, then angry. But then something strange happened. A lightness came over me, and I stopped my restless shifting. The central issues in my life—joys, fears, hopes—floated in and around my head without demanding resolution. There they were, my little collection of unruly concerns, corralled for the first time like a motley petting zoo. I watched them from an unfamiliar remove.

  Cece broke the spell, and then we sat on the bench while she led us in a meditation. To my surprise, people were alert, with eyes open, taking notes in black-and-white composition books. I rediscovered my notebook from that class recently, with phrases like “conquer the second self” and “getting to the radiance of self-fulfillment.” I’d underlined the latter three times in bold black strokes. It would be too easy to say that I was caught up in something meaningless. The truth is that all my notebooks from high school look the same—full of nonsensical phrases that clearly meant something powerful to me at the time.

  Finally, we began the series of poses. Odd, asymmetrical poses that looked like a parody of yoga. Now, I’d always found yoga painfully slow, and I never met a Shavasana (Corpse Pose) that didn’t put me to sleep. But the Studio was on to something with their weird, airplane-crash poses. When the two-hour class was through I felt light and energized, though not remotely thinner. Alas, I’d have to keep the personal trainer.

  That night I filled Aurora in on some of what I’d learned from Cece’s talk. “She began by asking us to shout out rules of behavior we’d learned as kids. People yelled them out: ‘Do your best.’ ‘Listen when others are speaking.’ ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ I added one of my father’s favorites: ‘Never give up.’”

  “Your dad is a pit bull,” Aurora conceded.

  “Cece walked us through the values governing those rules. Love. Kindness. Forgiveness. Achievement. Then she said, ‘These are important values, but life isn’t about being a well-behaved child. You are a grown-up, a spouse, an employee, a b
oss, a friend to adult friends, a parent. Nobody ever teaches us how to play any of these roles. We’re here to address the gap between what your parents taught you and the life you’re leading today.’

  “Think about it,” I told Aurora. “My parents did a good job, no question about it. But I left home at seventeen and was instantly on American Dream. It was a great experience, but I missed out on a lot.”

  “Beer pong and midterms. Poor you,” Aurora said.

  “We float through our lives, following our parents’ plans; believing what doctors tell us about our bodies. We’re totally out of touch with our own selves. We need to take authority over our lives. I know it sounds silly, but the Practice is about being a grown-up.”

  “In that case, sign me up!” Aurora said.

  The Whole Body Practice wasn’t touchy-feely—it was pragmatic. We stripped down our life choices. Emotions, we learned, were obstacles. In class we practiced provoking our emotions, then distancing ourselves from them, observing them from afar. “Emotions are a chemical reaction,” we chanted during the meditation. The poses enabled us to change our body chemistry. We would never again let our emotions control our lives. And I suddenly understood why Meg and Rob reminded me of each other, why they both seemed so clear and direct and easygoing. They lived the message of this practice every day. I was excited. This wasn’t just a route to knowing Rob better. It might be the answer to all of life’s challenges.

  And so it was that I eventually called Bethamy and said, “I’m sorry if this disappoints you, but I’m changing the wedding. It’s not going to be in Malibu. It’s going to be in Ireland, in the town where my grandparents were born. There won’t be a theme. And I will be making the guest list myself.”

  “I’ll have to talk to Rob about this. I always do his list—he doesn’t even know who his own brand manager is!”

  “I’ve already spoken to Rob,” I said firmly. “It’s up to me. You can confirm that with him if it’s important to you. Also, the wedding’s going to be intimate. No brand managers.” I hung up, checked twice to make sure the phone was really, truly hung up, then turned to Meg and we did a little victory dance.

  The Whole Body Practice did much more than free me to fire my wedding planner. I had hoped that it might bring me and Rob closer, and the results were immediate. At dinner the night after my first practice—weeks before I even fired Bethamy—I babbled in excitement.

  “It makes so much sense,” I said. “I’ve been playing the same role—class valedictorian—for way too long.”

  Rob nodded thoughtfully. “You’re a high achiever. That’s not a bad thing.”

  “But I’ve always worked to someone else’s standards. My high school teachers, then Steve Romany and Alice Baer” (the showrunner of American Dream and its director), “and always my dad.”

  “All good people,” Rob said. “But, as your fiancé, I have to say that I trust you with yourself more than I trust any of them. I can’t wait to see what you find when you follow your own instincts.”

  “Take a look in the mirror,” I said. “I already found you, all by myself.” Rob smiled for what seemed like just a moment too long, then stood up and took my hand.

  “Come with me. I want to show you something.” Aha! I was breaking through to my hard-to-read fiancé. It was about to happen. He was finally going to take me to his private sanctum, into Bluebeard’s chamber, to reveal whatever secrets he kept from the rest of the world. This must have been what he was waiting for—a sign from me that we were in alignment.

  But no. Bluebeard’s door, off in the gym, stayed shut tight, keeping its secrets for now. Instead he led me to our shared office and opened a PowerPoint slide show on his computer. The title slide read “Studio Manhattan, Construction Launch.” Below that it read “Tomorrow, Manhattan. Next, the World.”

  I expected the slides that followed to show images of the new Studio I’d heard Rob and some of his One Cell associates talk about—a space in New York that would bring the Practice to a whole new population. But instead of marketing or architectural plans, Rob was showing me images of what looked to be the slums of the world. Families standing outside decrepit houses. Dirty children playing on the ground. Shots of Third World bathrooms. In the background, stretches of beautiful blue mountains.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “The One Cell community is something of an island,” Rob said. “Why should self-knowledge be the privilege of the rich? One Cell helps people realize their greatest dreams. Who can it better serve? We aren’t going to feed them, Elizabeth. We’re going to teach them to fish! Manhattan is just the beginning. Someday the Studio will be known as a place where people from all walks of life do the 100. A worldwide practice for self-actualization.” His eyes were shining. So this was what my husband-to-be was planning, what all those meetings at the Studio were about.

  Even then I thought his idealism was overblown, but it was sweet. I liked what it said about him. Also, to be honest, I wanted to believe that the practice I was learning at the Studio wasn’t another rich person’s dalliance, like Isle Goodwin’s solo pilgrimages with her personal guru, which basically were excuses for her to take an annual trip to his ashram in India, or Minette Stone’s monthly weekends at Malibu’s Total Purity Cleansing Center, which billed itself as rehab from the toxins of daily life but which everyone knew was the best way to lose a quick fifteen pounds. Aside from needing ammunition against Aurora’s mockery, I liked the idea that One Cell was trying to do good in the world.

  “I want to help,” I said. “This is something I could really see myself being a part of.”

  “Of course!” he said, and I could tell he was delighted—and maybe even a little relieved. “I’d love your help.”

  “You’re a good man, Rob Mars.”

  “I try,” he said.

  But seriously, that locked door was killing me.

  3

  Man of Her Dreams was premiering at the Aspen Film Festival at the end of November. It would be the first time since Rob and I had met that I’d get to be the star while he played dutiful consort. At last, I would reclaim center stage. Much as I respected my fiancé’s success, being cast as the young, innocent girl who’d been swept up in a fairy-tale romance by a powerful movie star was starting to get old. Here was my chance to remind Hollywood and the rest of the moviegoing public that I already had a respectable career, thank you very much.

  We landed in Aspen and were met by Rob’s local driver, Pete, who was straight out of a ski resort brochure, cut from the chair lift and pasted into the driver’s seat of a Range Rover. He had a skier’s tan: a reverse raccoon mask, the top half of his face pale where goggles had shielded his skin.

  While Rob and Pete talked powder depth and texture in the front seat, I watched the snow-covered peaks go by. A magpie landed on a wooden fence. The world was black and white.

  We drove up a winding country road to a huge wooden lodge. Its windows glowed. The mountain rose behind it. Even though it was nearly six o’clock and the sun had already dipped behind the mountain, the slopes were brightly lit for night skiing, and a chairlift was still running.

  “That’s Argus Lodge,” Rob said. “We ski in, ski out from there.”

  “Why isn’t there anyone on the chairlift?” I asked. At Chestnut Mountain, where I’d skied as a kid in Chicago, there was always a line for the chairlift, no matter how bitterly cold it was.

  “It’s a private mountain,” Rob said. Sure. Our own private mountain. Why not? Rob went on, “You might encounter Hunter skiing the bumps, but otherwise it’s very quiet.” That would be Hunter Dix. The Hunter Dix.

  About three minutes past the lodge we came upon a few rustic houses and stopped in front of one.

  “This is my—our—cabin!” Rob said, and he popped out of the car to open my door. The front hall opened into a great room—it must have been forty feet tall, with a d
ramatic waterfall plunging down one wall, and floor-to-ceiling windows looking out at a perfectly framed snow-capped mountain. A fire roared in the massive stone fireplace. There was a long rustic table that probably sat twenty, and a chef’s kitchen with windows all around. Multiple glass folding doors led to a deck, where the steam from the hot tub was red, tinted by colored landscape lights. Four fire pits lit the pool with orange flame.

  I got out my phone. “I’m sending a picture of this cabin to Aurora,” I told Rob, “so she can see that we know how to rough it.”

  The premiere was the following afternoon. Rob and I did our practiced red carpet routine, smiling and posing and waving, staying on message for the event. This time my refrain was “I can’t wait to see Man of Her Dreams. I haven’t seen it yet! But working with Olson Nelson was amazing.” It was a lie. I had seen the movie at our screening room in Brentwood, with my agent, manager, and publicist, right before I fired all of them, and I was not a fan. The movie had started off as a light romantic comedy, but Olson had cut almost all the jokes, and the ones that were left felt lonely and flat. He had also cut what I thought was my best work of the film: the third-act monologue where I convince Luke, my dream date, that we belong together, even if it means stepping out of reality forever. Instead, in the final cut, my costar, Matt Wilson, has the last word, telling me that having each other in our dreams is enough. If you asked me, it made for a depressing ending. And my performance was reduced to the generic cute girl of every romantic comedy—offbeat, ready for love, with the winningly humble habit of hiding her hands in her sleeves. (Ironically, my best surviving scene was the one that we shot right before my ex-boyfriend Johnny executed his spectacular film/relationship bomb. I guess I’d been having a good day up until that moment.)