Movie Star By Lizzie Pepper

by Hilary Liftin

  Also, Olson Nelson was allegedly (that’s for the lawyers) having an affair with Sandra Beakley, which might explain why the camera spent such a disproportionate amount of time lingering on the minor character of my little sister.

  So my stock statement was that it was great to work with the director, which everyone knows is industry code for I don’t like this movie, but you can’t blame me for putting my faith in a director with a good track record and reputation. Now I am being professional out of respect for those who invested in this film and to demonstrate to future filmmakers that I would never sell them out. The important thing was to be visible in the industry—to remind Hollywood that I was cast in this, and would be cast again.

  Not that it mattered. I could have ratted out the director, panned the movie, and declared frozen peas the new celebrity weight-loss secret; apparently all anyone was ever going to write about until the end of time was the endlessly fascinating love story of Lizzie Pepper and Rob Mars.

  When the photographers shouted questions at Rob (“When’s the wedding?” “How much was the ring?”) his only response was “I’m here to see Elizabeth’s movie. I’m excited and proud.” It was actually true that Rob hadn’t yet seen the movie. The fact of the matter was that he and I had never watched any of my movies together (or American Dream, for that matter). I had never seen him see me act. Now, as we settled into our seats for what I knew would be a cringe-inducing 110 minutes, I didn’t worry about the audience. I was focused on Rob. What would he think of my acting? If he didn’t think me a good actor, would he still love me?

  In anticipation of this very moment, I had made sure to warn Rob about the sex scene. Ironic as it sounds, given what happened, I didn’t want to blindside him. In the beginning of the second act, my character, Catherine, undresses and climbs into bed with Luke—the man she first met in her dreams. I was fine with doing nudity at the time. I’m not particularly modest, and I’ll pretty much do anything that feels true to my character if I believe in the movie—which I still did when we shot that scene. Now, however, I had my regrets. But I was also curious to see Rob’s reaction to my naked, strategically waxed body on the twenty-foot-tall screen.

  And so Rob watched the movie and I watched Rob. At the end of the first act, when Catherine realizes she’s (basically) alone in the world, Rob put his hand on my knee. I took that as a sign that he didn’t like to see me sad, which meant, in some way, that he bought my character’s despair.

  After that, Rob seemed intently focused on the screen, so I just sat there, trying to convince myself it was a sweet movie after all and noting that I was really skinny. (Lately Rob and I had been eating a little too well, and my hip bones were now covered by a layer of soft flesh. After the screening I would return to a carb- and dairy-free existence. Again.) My nude scene came . . . and went—with no perceivable reaction from Rob. I should have known. He was too professional to take such things personally.

  But then it happened. Third act, just as my mind was turning to what questions I should anticipate from the press outside the theater. Suddenly, there I was, up on the screen, delivering the monologue that Olson had stripped from the film.

  It was impossible! I had seen the “final” cut just one week earlier! Changes at this point were unheard of. Someone—someone very high up—must have liked my performance enough to demand that Olson reinstate it. I poked Rob and started to tell him, but he turned to me and smiled.

  “Better, isn’t it?” he whispered.

  He knew! The one who’d been blindsided was me.

  That night, after smiling through the party and posing with my costars and pretending it was perfectly fine when Celia Montbatten, who is a giraffe of a woman and has no business wearing five-inch spikes, nailed the top of my foot with her full body weight and then fake apologized by saying, “Oh, I didn’t see you,” as if I were short and insignificant, when really she didn’t see me because she stepped backward onto me. After Olson Nelson gave me the stink eye all night; after noticing how Rob tacked on a whispered “And thank you” when he congratulated Olson; after all that, in the limo heading home, I finally asked Rob what he thought about the surprise edit.

  “You did a spectacular job with that monologue and people deserved to see it.”

  “But did you have something to do with it? Did you ask them to do it?”

  He put his arm around my shoulders and grinned proudly. “Elizabeth, I didn’t ask them to do it. I told them to do it.”

  “But you can’t do that! How did you do that?”

  Rob chuckled. “Actors are powerless in this business. We make a movie, put our hearts into it, and have no control over how it turns out, how it’s promoted, whether it gets distributed or goes straight to video. We’re artists, yet we get treated like the paint on someone else’s canvas. But that’s not how I play the game anymore. And you don’t have to, either. Haven’t you learned this in the Practice? The self is not limited. We have the power. We are the power.”

  It wasn’t hard to guess how it went down. Someone gave Olson the message that Rob wanted that scene. Olson didn’t give a rat’s ass what Rob wanted. Then Olson was encouraged to include the scene and strongly reminded that the distribution company, Radian, was owned by ACE, and that all purse strings led back to Rob Mars. Fait accompli.

  Rob leaned back and crossed his arms, smiling a bit smugly. I was impressed. This was how I wanted to be. After so many years of following a script, listening to a director, and having my days arranged around call times and media appearances, a little power was very appealing. “But, hon, one thing?”

  “Anything.”

  “No more surprises.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I was still so naïve. It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would leak the change, or hold Rob accountable, but of course the piece on Movieline came out the next morning and the whole world saw my busybody fiancé leveraging his status to boost my comparatively lame career. Oh, the press loved me when I was standing next to Rob, a picture-perfect pair. They loved that we were engaged. They were so dying to hear about the wedding details that Lotus was getting offers for exclusives on the planning sessions. (Before I fired her, Bethamy was unabashedly angling for this, as she wanted to pitch her own wedding reality show.) But when it came to my work, I was perpetually relegated to Rob’s shadow.

  My father was not pleased. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said, “I think every minute you’re onscreen is brilliant. But look at the press, Elizabeth. We have to think about how these things play. Rob should know that.” It was always amazing to me how personally my father seemed to take these missteps. Like he was watching a bad play by a football team that he’d put a lot of money on.

  My father was hung up on public opinion, but Rob was thinking bigger. He was showing me how to take charge of my work. Next to Rob, my father seemed out of touch and provincial.

  When I got off the phone, Rob raised his eyebrows at me. “Everything okay?”

  “Dad’s not used to me having another man in my life,” I said.

  It didn’t pass my notice that no one—not the press, not Rob, not my father—asked me how I felt about the edit. The fact of the matter was that I wished I’d been bold enough to fight for it myself. Rob had used his powers for what he thought was good, and I loved that about him. The Studio was teaching me to do the same. The press had decided that Rob was controlling me and my career at just the moment that I was convinced he, and his organization, were teaching me to stand up for myself. The truth, which might have saved me, was coming from the source I trusted least.

  4

  My engagement to Rob had put me in the spotlight, but professionally I needed to get out of his shadow. As expected, Man of Her Dreams tanked. My phone went silent, a sorry companion, like a little sick puppy whose tail never wagged. I refused to succumb to the post-movie blues—and yet I kept finding myself in the kitchen, wolfing d
own midnight snacks of garlic bread and salted caramel gelato.

  My new agency, ACE, had yet to deliver on the big movie my father and Rob had planned for me. Cherry Simpson, my rep at ACE, said, “Honey, honey, we wanted the engagement first. Trust me, you’ll get a better deal.” Cherry was breezy and efficient. She looked like a lot of mid-fifties Beverly Hills fashionistas. She had the sinewy body and taut cheeks of a 100 percent green juice diet, blond extensions, and an upper lip that was borderline natural. The overall effect was of a very young corpse.

  In our first meeting she’d told me I was prettier in person—a backhanded compliment—and that she thought I needed to go the action route, which was also not a ringing endorsement of my acting. “You have to be patient. I’m working on Skye London: The Emerald Isle for you. It’s a franchise based on the Skye London video games. She’s a rogue cop avenging her daughter’s murder. You would be a perfect fit.” Yeah, sure, the former Lucy McAlister, America’s sweetheart, was a shoo-in as a rogue cop. Not to be paranoid, but I was pretty sure Cherry had been given a mandate: “Handle Mars’s girl. Doesn’t matter if she can act. Get her something big.”

  But so far the Mars power play had yielded nada, and all I could do was endure the waiting game that every actor knows too well. I got skin treatments: weekly facials; monthly photofacials; occasional lunchtime peels; a “baby Botox” treatment every six months (preventative); and a noninvasive nose job—just to refine the tip. In the mirror my face looked like it had been airbrushed. Since my practice at the Studio wasn’t producing the big-screen skinny body I needed (and the late-night binges weren’t helping), I took up a new exercise program called Infinite Space, which used suspended weights for three-dimensional movements, supposedly creating long, lean, dense muscles that burned a thousand extra calories a day. I supported Rob as he tended to his countless projects. I planned the wedding. I told myself to be patient, there was no rush.

  And then something happened that changed the timeline entirely.

  Cherry Simpson finally scored me the much-sought-after meeting with Danny McDaniels, who was directing Skye London, and as Cherry told me, again, “That’s what you need. An action movie, a franchise.” So I heard.

  Danny McDaniels was in his fifties. The success that had launched him was Ninjas Gone Wild, which, legend had it, he made in film school on a budget of $200,000 that he earned selling cocaine. His unique anime/torture porn had since made billions of dollars in the video market. The movies were terrible, but they made him so rich that Hollywood was forced to treat him as legit.

  Danny looked like a teenager who’d taken over his dad’s office. The walls were lined with posters of his movies, showing men with enormous guns and women with enormous tits. He was facing the wall, playing a video game, and just as his assistant led me, Meg, and Cherry into the room, his avatar died, making a sad little wilting sound. Talk about entering on an inauspicious note.

  “Motherfucker,” he said. And hello to you too. Then he spun his chair around to face us. “Lizzie Pepper! I love you! Awesome, awesome.”

  Half an hour into the meeting, Danny McDaniels had yet to bring up Skye London. Then he had a lightbulb moment. “Hey!” he said, snapping his fingers. (Apparently there really are people in this world who snap their fingers when they have, or pretend to have, an idea, and Danny McDaniels was one of them.) “God, wouldn’t it be great for you and Rob to work together? I bet you’d love that.”

  Okay, I’m slow, but it really took me until then to realize that I was going to witness that same flash of genius in every single meeting I ever had from now until forever. Sure, one day someone might want to work with me. But my fiancé was the Holy Fucking Grail.

  I didn’t have time to come up with a good response to Danny McDaniels’s brilliant idea.

  “Excuse me,” I said, bolting out the door and into the ladies’ room. Meg followed me. I ran into the nearest stall and retched until I could only dry heave. I finally emerged, apologizing. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It must be food poisoning.”

  “Or . . .” Meg said with a half-smile.

  I looked at her blankly.

  “Or you’re pregnant, dummy.”

  Suddenly it was so obvious. The midnight garlic bread binges. The salted caramel gelato. I wasn’t depressed about not having work. I was hormonal. I was pregnant. Oh my God.

  I splashed cold water on my face. This was not the plan. Rob and I wanted kids one day . . . but now? Before the wedding?

  “Do you think I have to go back into that stupid meeting?” I asked Meg. She didn’t respond. Instead she waited. As Meg knew full well, I’d completed the Introduction to the Whole Body Practice. When I asked Meg the question, my new mental reflexes sprang into action. I pushed the muddle of new emotions aside and zeroed in on my core truths. Did I want to finish the meeting? No. Did I care what Danny McDaniels thought of me? No. Was I my own being who made my own choices? Yes.

  “I want a red velvet cupcake from Sprinkles,” I said.

  Meg grinned. “Sprinkles it is.” Twenty minutes later we were in the backseat of the car, red velvet cupcakes in hand. Meg lifted hers in a toast, whispering, “To the best little secret in the world.” We took huge bites and both broke into excited giggles.

  I hadn’t returned to the meeting, and it didn’t matter. I guess Rob Mars’s fiancée can bail on a meeting without explanation whenever she wants. I landed the part anyway. I was Skye London. And I was pregnant.

  The next morning I called my gynecologist and asked to come in. Dr. Masler had been my doctor ever since I moved to L.A., but things had changed as soon as Rob and I went public. When I called to schedule my annual checkup, the nurse said, “What name do you want me to put down in the book?”

  I said, “Lizzie Pepper.”

  She said, “No, I mean, I know who you are, but usually we put VIPs under a different name.”

  Oh. Right. Thinking fast, I said, “Aurora. Aurora Janevs.” (This was before Aurora had been outed as my best friend. Later I went by Ella Mae.)

  Meg had driven me to that appointment, and I’d been surprised when she parked in a back lot and took me up the service elevator to a private entrance I’d never seen.

  “How did you know to do this?” I asked Meg.

  “I call ahead everywhere we go,” she said. Little by little, I was learning how hard Meg was working to protect me and help my life run smoothly. She anticipated my every need, and Rob’s, too. I half expected her to write my wedding vows for me. Eventually I knew the drill. Any doctor or spa treatment would make room for me last minute. No matter when I arrived, I would be taken straight to an exam room—no waiting room for me—and no waiting. The doctor always saw me immediately. No wonder I’d spent so many hours in waiting rooms when I was only an IP instead of a VIP.

  Dr. Masler confirmed the pregnancy. Although Rob and I had left the possibility open, I never imagined it would happen so quickly and easily. Rob and I had only known each other for nine months, and we’d been engaged for ten weeks. Ten weeks, it turned out, was exactly how pregnant I was. The baby was due June 8. I mechanically entered the date into my phone.

  On our way out of the office, Meg said, “Time for a new obstetrician.”

  “What?” I said. “I can’t leave Dr. Masler. He’ll be hurt. I’ve known him forever.”

  Meg nodded. “I’m sure he’s really good, but I’m afraid you’re going to need someone who’s used to handling high-profile clients—not just a top doctor, but one who can protect you.”

  “Protect me from what?”

  “The press loves a pregnancy. We need to safeguard your records, any complications, and, assuming all goes well, your hospital visit for the delivery.”

  “I’m sure Dr. Masler can—”

  “I totally saw Lizzie Pepper’s vagina!”

  Meg waited for me to give her a baffled look before she co
ntinued: “When you were seeing the doctor, I overheard one of the nurses say that to another nurse.”

  So I switched doctors.

  A stew of mixed anxiety and excitement churned in my belly—or was that the baby? A little being that was part me and part Rob. This child would bind us together. Our love was already dividing and multiplying (with one critical extra division I had yet to know about). As with the rest of this relationship—it was everything I wanted, it was just that the pieces were falling together faster than I’d anticipated. I felt a little like I was always trying to catch up with myself. We’re dating—wait, we just met. We’re engaged—wait, we’re just getting to know each other. You’re pregnant—wait, we’re not even married. I still hadn’t shaken that strange feeling of both loving Rob and feeling like we were still in the very beginning of our relationship. But if anything would bring us closer, it was a baby. And if I was going to be a mother, I wanted to be a great one.

  Had our roles been reversed, Rob would have found a big, romantic way to surprise me with the news. We’d take a boat to the middle of a lake and the pregnancy test would float down to us in its own tiny hot-air balloon. Now it was my turn to surprise him. But how?

  Aurora was the first and only person (besides Meg) whom I called with the news.

  “Pepper, this is huge. I am 100 percent happy for you slash 75 percent worried about you,” Aurora said.

  “I’m not sure that’s how percentages work . . .”

  “Oh, stop. You know math wasn’t my subject.”

  “I’m fine! This is good news. The doctor says everything looks great.”

  “No, I’m not worried that way,” Aurora said. “It’s all just so fast—”

  “I know, believe me.”

  “Have you guys even talked about—I don’t know—whatever it is that people are supposed to talk about before they have children together?”