The Year of Living Famously

by Laura Caldwell

He kissed the top of my head. “That’s Ireland.”

  Part Four

  chapter 20

  We got home from Dublin on a Tuesday night, where fifteen reporters greeted us outside our apartment.

  “Look, why don’t I go in first,” Dec said, “and we’ll have the driver take you around the block a few times until they leave.”

  I kissed him on the nose. “I’m too tired for subterfuge. I want my bed.”

  “And I want you in our bed. So let’s go.”

  We opened the car door to the sounds of cameras popping and the glare of flashes.

  The next morning we were on our way to see our new home with the real estate agent, a pert woman with a blond Dorothy Hamill cut and a bright yellow suit. Her name was Vicky and she would not shut up.

  “You’ve got complete privacy up here,” she said, swinging around from the driver’s seat of her Lincoln Navigator to beam a tense smile at me. Declan sat next to her in the passenger seat. “I mean, I know that’s what you need now. I deal with many celebrities, and this is just about one of the neatest properties I’ve seen. Not to mention the price cut. That’s just loco, and I can tell you that I’ve got a host of other clients who would have jumped on it if I gave them the chance, but Graham told me you needed something quick, and Declan, if I can call you that, I hope first names are okay, so Declan, I can tell you something you might be very interested in. William Mulholland was an Irishman who brought the water supply to Los Angeles, and this road is named after him.”

  “Is that right?” Declan said when she finally took a breath.

  “Oh, it’s true.” And she was off again.

  I tuned her out and stared out the window. I’d never been on Mulholland Drive, the windy road that split the city from the Valley. I noticed that the trees grew higher and higher as we left the city behind. Lovely, for sure, but somewhat remote compared to our old place. Where, I wondered, was the neighborhood coffee shop, the little corner grocery store?

  “Vicky,” I said, interrupting her diatribe on the concrete aqueduct that Mr. Mulholland had built. “If you live in this area, where do you get coffee in the morning? Or go grocery shopping?”

  “Oh, it’s no problem, there are a few places.”

  “Anything in walking distance?”

  “No, but hey—” she tittered nervously “—this is L. A., right?” She went back to discussing the history of the Los Angeles water supply.

  “We’re almost there,” Vicky said five minutes later. She clapped her hands.

  I felt a grip of excited nervousness in my stomach. We were about to see the house we’d bought, the house we would live in, the house we’d never seen. I was going to be living in a house worth millions! But what if it was ostentatious? What if it was a mini version of the Playboy mansion?

  Vicky finally stopped at a tall, brown iron gate with elegantly twisted posts. She punched a series of numbers into a little silver keypad, as if she was at a drive-thru ATM, and then the gates parted in the middle and swung open.

  The driveway was paved with yellow stones. “Follow the yellow brick road,” Vicky said cheerily.

  “Whoa,” Declan said as we pulled up to the house.

  “Whoa is right,” I said.

  The house soared above us, all white with rusty-red roofs. Many, many roofs. A roof over the doorway, a roof taller than that, one beyond that, a few to the right. My pulse picked up. This was ours!

  “How many floors is it?” I said.

  “It’s interesting,” Vicky said, jumping out of the car and leading us to the front door. “It was built in 1926, but different owners have added on different parts to the house, so now there are four floors and two wings.”

  Declan and I looked at each other. I shook my head. Were we ready for this?

  “It’s okay, love,” he said, squeezing my hand.

  Inside, the place was airy and bright. In the center of the house was an open space surrounded by railings where light poured through from above.

  Vicky twirled around and ran her hand over the railing. “The last owner added this sunroof and light shaft,” she said, “so that you have natural light all day. It really saves on electricity bills.”

  I grimaced momentarily. I’d been so focused on the price tag that I hadn’t even thought about the astronomical utilities or taxes.

  “Now come see the living room,” Vicky said. “You will just die.”

  She led us around the light shaft and down a few steps into the most colossal living room I’d ever seen. The ceilings were pitched and beamed. The parquet floors gleamed like an ice rink.

  “Stunning, isn’t it?” Vicky said.

  “God, it is,” I said. This was ours, I told myself again. All ours. We own this home. But some part of my brain refused to register that information. What would I fill it with? The furniture we had now in our apartment would barely fill the foyer.

  Beyond the living room, French doors led to a slate-floored sunroom that looked over the pool and the valley.

  “I know you have security concerns,” Vicky said, “but with this sunroom you can get the feel of sitting outside without worrying about photographers or intruders. There’s even a state-of-the-art air system to give the feeling of fresh air.” She flipped a switch, and a shot of lilac-scented air entered the room.

  I nodded. It was a nifty technological accoutrement, but it made me feel like a gorilla caged in a zoo.

  It took twenty minutes for Vicky to give us the rest of the tour. Declan was enamored with the media room, where a fourteen-foot screen popped out of the wall with a click of a button. We both loved the pool on the ground floor. There was a breathtaking view of the canyon and the city in the distance, and a Japanese-style waterfall where the water ran in a solid sheet down a slick marble wall, making a soothing, gurgling splash when it hit the pool.

  The kitchen was massive but friendly somehow with a terra-cotta floor and huge stainless-steel appliances. “These are restaurant quality,” Vicky said proudly, caressing the stove top.

  “Mmm,” I said appreciatively, although neither Declan nor I cooked, even a little.

  We went next to the master bedroom, which was bigger than our entire apartment in Venice. It had its own sun porch, its own living room and a bathroom that had five rooms of its own (a toilet room, a steam room, a linen room, and his and her closets that were each larger than our bedroom at the apartment).

  “How do you like your new house so far?” Vicky said.

  “It’s beautiful,” I answered.

  “Love it,” Declan said.

  “Great, great!” Vicky said. “Well, let’s go next to the south wing. I’ll show you the guest bedrooms and the one office, and then we can see the north wing.”

  I trailed behind her, trying to grasp the fact that my new house had not just rooms but wings. I have wings, I kept saying to myself. Wings.

  Graham took charge of the situation—he hired movers to pack and move us, he even dealt with the Venice Beach landlord—and so within a week or so after returning from Dublin, we were there, on Mulholland Drive, in that cavernous house.

  I’m not a prima donna when it comes to my living space. I have lived happily in three-hundred-square-foot squares with nothing but an old trunk and a matchbox closet to hold most of my belongings. It’s true I find the idea of camping absurd, and I consider the concept of going without a shop-bought coffee every day a major inconvenience, but I don’t need luxury. I don’t need an enormous amount of space. And so, when Dec and I moved into palatial luxury on Mulholland Drive, I felt uncomfortable. Logically—intellectually—I adored the house. It was a wonderful space. But it didn’t feel like me or, more importantly, like Declan and me. I tried to fake it, thinking that I’d get accustomed to the sumptuousness, the seclusion, but instead, each day, I felt more unlike myself.

  I’m making it sound as if our house was somehow empty, and although it’s true we didn’t have a hell of a lot of furniture, it was anything but empty. In fact,
our new home was entirely overcrowded—with strangers.

  The first new addition was a housekeeper.

  “You guys are too busy to maintain this whole house,” Graham said when he first raised the issue. “We’ll get you someone to come in five days a week.”

  Declan and I were in our new living room as we listened to him on speakerphone. We were laying down newspaper in the shape of chairs and couches, trying to decide where we should put the furniture we had and what else we should buy. Graham’s jazz-bar voice boomed off our blank walls.

  “We just spent way too much on the house,” I told him. “We can’t afford a housekeeper.”

  “Believe me,” Graham said, “the money you’ll spend on a housekeeper will be cheaper than spending your own time trying to clean the whole place. But hey, Declan, maybe you should ask Jerry.”

  Jerry was another horse who’d been added to Declan’s stable of “people.” Jerry was a business manager who now took care of our finances.

  “Jerry said we could swing it,” Declan said.

  “Well, there you go,” Graham said. “I’ve got a service. I’ll have them send someone over.”

  Soon, there was a woman named Trista who came every morning at eight-thirty. She was smoker-skinny and had a terrible mullet-style haircut and a sullen attitude, but she could clean like no one I’ve ever seen. She scrubbed the kitchen as if it were an operating room; she washed the wood floors by hand; she even polished my perfume bottles to a high shine. The best part was that she hated to talk. You got the feeling that Trista had experienced some decidedly crappy things in her life, but she wasn’t about to tell you that and she didn’t want to hear about the crappy portions of your life, either. So she went about her work silently. She slipped through the house like an alley cat grateful to be in from the cold.

  Declan’s assistant, Berry, was the next to arrive at our abode. She was twenty-three, with wide brown eyes, wavy brown hair and a turned-up nose that always made me imagine her in Daisy Duke shorts and a gingham top tied below her breasts. She had, in fact, been raised on a farm in southern Illinois before moving to L. A. when she was eighteen. She had never gone to college, but instead had been a personal assistant to the stunt double for Jennifer Garner and later an assistant to the star of a WB show. She was sweet and nice, but she could also get rid of unwanted callers with ease and she was a scheduling wizard, always keeping track of Declan’s many appearances, meetings, photo shoots and obligations. She worked mostly out of Declan’s office in the north wing, but it seemed she was always underfoot. “Hey!” she would yell when she used her key to come inside each morning. The front door would slam shut. Soon, she was traipsing through the house in her clickety-clack wood sandals, rooting through the fridge and shouting, “Do you guys have peanut butter in here?”

  There were others, too. Manuel, the pool guy, came once a week and worked with test tubes and powders like a chemist at a pharmaceutical company. The mysteriously named T. R., our landscaper, also arrived weekly with six Mexican men in one pickup. They fanned out and went about their respective jobs, so that if I looked out the window of the second-floor hallway, they were indistinguishable—six hunched backs clad in green T-shirts.

  Since our house was built in the 1920s, there were often other tradesmen in the house. My favorite was our plumber, Dan, who wore a yellow golf pencil behind one ear and red denim overalls. Plumber fashion. I liked it.

  To add to our growing household, I finally got a call from my design sales rep, Alicia, who squealed into the phone that not only had she sold my line to Macy’s, our target buyer, but there were six boutiques (two in L. A., three in New York, one in Chicago) who wanted the line, too. I leaped onto the bed in our master bedroom and jumped up and down like a seven-year-old.

  “Say that again!” I shouted into the phone.

  “Your line has been sold!” Alicia said. “Isn’t it fabulous? They’d all seen the photos of Kendall Gold, and they love your stuff and of course, they all know about your husband. Everyone is thrilled.”

  I let myself crumple on the bed, on my Zen-green sheets that I had thought were so “L. A.” when I moved to the city. I wanted to focus on her words, They love your stuff, but instead I kept hearing, They all know about your husband. I had finally sold a collection, and not just to one store or a catalog based out of Lincoln, Nebraska. The sales that Alicia was talking about would bring me to the point in my career I’d always dreamed of. But were the buyers wanting the line because of me and my designs, or because of Declan?

  “Kyra,” Alicia said, “why so quiet? Isn’t this amazing?”

  “It is.” I stood up again. She was right. It was amazing. I shouldn’t go looking for trouble where there wasn’t any.

  When Trista walked in a minute later, I was still jumping on the bed.

  Declan and I went to Il Cielo in Beverly Hills for a celebratory dinner that night.

  It was a small place fashioned like a sparkling Italian garden. We were seated at a table near the front and ordered a bottle of champagne.

  “To Kyra,” Declan said, a raised glass of bubbly in his hand. “Soon to be L. A.’s most famous designer.”

  “I don’t want to be famous,” I said. “I just want to be the best.”

  He cleared his throat and lifted his flute higher. “Right. Here’s to Kyra, the goddamn best designer in the world.”

  We clinked glasses. I leaned over the table to kiss him. And then I sensed it—a photographer outside who had caught our kiss on camera. It wasn’t the first time, surely, and I knew that it wouldn’t be the last, but even that one camera could color things. Eventually, the restaurant chased him away, but for the five minutes he was out there snapping shots, our dinner paled, at least for me. How can you be natural? How can you be a wife, a lover, in front of a camera, especially if you’re not an actor?

  It hadn’t been all that long since Normandy came out, but I had already learned that every mistake, every triumph, every sullen look, every expression of joy, is amplified when you are in love with someone famous.

  Soon, Alicia was also at the house every other day or so, to talk, to fill me in on details. And how could I tell her to back off? She had continued to sell my collection to others. Once Macy’s was on board, three other department stores soon jumped on as well. I had to hire my own assistant then, a slight Japanese woman named Uki.

  Tied Up, the movie that Dec had shot the past summer in Manhattan, was released early because of his notoriety. What had been the role of “Fifth Waiter in White Tie played by D. McKenna” became “Special Guest Appearance by Declan McKenna.” Declan’s publicist, Angela, a tall, excruciatingly thin and well-dressed woman with a beaklike face, stopped by the house a few times a week to discuss this PR angle and that, this promotion and that, this interview and that.

  Bobby was at our house often, too. He was courting Declan for William Morris. Bobby tried to sell Dec on “the team” that would represent him at Morris, a different agent for voice-over, for TV, for “mo pic”(Bobby’s lingo for “motion picture,” which always made me think of the Three Stooges). But Declan refused to leave his original agent, Max, who spent more and more time at our house as well. And so Bobby came for Declan and stayed for me.

  I missed Emmie terribly. She’d been impossible to get ahold of lately, because she was nearly always with MacKenzie, and whenever they were together they had no time for anyone else. Emmie seemed to be falling in love, for only the second time in her life, but I knew so little about it.

  Meanwhile, I missed Margaux, too. This newly formed desire to bear spawn had become an obsession with her, which was strange since she’d previously regarded having a child as fondly as having a colonoscopy. We were in our own, very distinct worlds right now.

  So I was grateful for Bobby. But at night, after he left, after all the others left as well, and when Declan wasn’t home for one reason or another, I was nervous in that big house. I am the type of girl who feels safer at 2:00 a.m. on Houston
Street in Manhattan than I do at 2:00 p.m. on a Main Street in rural Iowa. And at our new house on Mulholland Drive, sometimes I didn’t feel safe at all.

  I’d thought that once our address wasn’t public information, the mail would wane, but with Tied Up just released and the international premieres for Normandy coming up, Declan was only getting more well known, and his mail—now sent mostly to Max—grew by the bagful. Every few days, someone from Max’s office dropped off sacks of it.

  Declan’s assistant took over my old job of reading through the mail and sending out autographed head shots to people who requested them, but Berry was under strict orders to show us any menacing or otherwise odd correspondence.

  After we moved into the new place, there were a few strange letters from a woman in Munich, who claimed to have had sex with Declan in the back room of the Hofbrau House and was now having his baby.

  “Well, I hope I had a big draft in my hand,” Dec said.

  We sent those letters to Declan’s new entertainment lawyer, who would handle it at four hundred dollars an hour. There were other letters from people claiming to have met Declan before and wondering why he was ignoring them. There were two men who wrote frequently to say that they knew Declan was gay, and they were appalled by the way he refused to come out of the closet, when the gay movement had come so far.

  Then the letters from Amy Rose started again. She sent them to Max’s office. In the first one we received after Dublin, she said that she was sure it had been an oversight not telling her that Declan had moved. I have my bags packed, Declan, the letter said. I know how busy you are, but you’ll need to let me know our new address soon. I’ve canceled my lease, but I need that address. I love you with all my heart, Amy Rose.

  As I looked over her letters, I wondered, had this girl actually canceled her lease? Did she honestly think she would be moving in with Declan, or was it just a ploy for attention? Graham told us to ignore her. “I know it’s troubling,” he said, “but the worst thing you can do is give her any encouragement.”