Cat's Meow

by Melissa de la Cruz

  Was it Socrates who said an unexamined life is not worth living? Possibly. But as the advent of a twenty-four-hour Reality Channel (which broadcasts the minutiae of ordinary people transplanted into extraordinary circumstances, the reward of surviving their ordeal a seat on David Letterman’s couch) has proved, it’s an undocumented life that’s not worth living. If one’s every move isn’t gossip-column fodder or fan-website worthy, does one even matter in the grand scheme of things? And darlings, I wanted to matter. I wanted to matter very, very desperately. Therefore: Stephan of Westonia. My ticket out of B-list obscurity. Understand, it’s not that I really wanted to be married. Prenuptial agreements and clothing allowances just weren’t my style. Look at what four marriages did to Patricia Duff. OK. Bad example. But you know what I mean. If I were somehow able to position myself as Stephan’s bride, I would ratchet up the ranks faster than you could say Gwyneth Paltrow.

  “What do you think?”

  “You know what I’ve always thought,” India replied. “You’d be perfect for Bill Gates, if only he were divorced, or JFK Junior, if only he were still alive, or Rupert Everett, if only he weren’t gay. But since there’s no other option, I approve.”

  “But how do I meet him?” I asked. It’s not like I bumped into exiled royals at Barneys all the time.

  “What about a party? Isn’t it your birthday soon?” India asked. “I do enjoy celebrating your twenty-fifth every year.”

  Oh, of course, of course. What better way to attract New York’s most dashing bachelor than at a dazzling birthday party feted by a chorus of celebrities? I was getting thrills up and down my back just thinking of it. It was going to happen. Even if I had to bankrupt my trust fund to pay for it. I’d just explain to my accountant that it was an investment in my future.

  I would send my mother an invitation to my birthday party, but knowing her, she won’t be able to make it and would merely send along a nice card and a check for $20 for “a glass of bubbly.”

  Who I am: Cat McAllister. One of People’s fifty most beautiful people (1982).

  What I do: live in the moment.

  What this book is about: me, silly!

  2.

  plus one

  There must have been a time, long ago in Manhattan, when birthday parties were something of a private affair—maybe a corner table at Elaine’s with one’s family, and if well-wishers like Barbara Walters and Liz Smith happened to stop by, it was only because they were dining there that night. That’s not the case anymore. Everyone from Kate Moss to Jennifer Lopez to the Olsen twins has the kind of birthday party that merits national media coverage and the usual trappings of a colossal social undertaking: clipboard-wielding attack girls, VIP rooms, even corporate sponsors.

  Thanks to Heidi Gluckman, the one-woman publicity genius who made dining in supertrendy restaurants serving bad food and outrageous attitude a full-contact sport in Manhattan, I was going to host the Mercedes-Benz Cat McAllister Fourth Annual Twenty-Fifth. Heidi had all the qualifications of her profession: she was blond, incomprehensibly accented, and had all the city’s top gossip columnists on her “secret” payroll.

  Pay Heidi enough money and you, too, could be a star. On a dare, she once transformed a common shop girl into one of the city’s most visible socialites. It got to the point where the shop girl began to believe in her own tear sheets—so much so that she actually stole a bona fide socialite’s husband. So if Heidi could turn a hayseed into Holly Golightly, why not a pseudocelebrity into the real thing? This was going to be my comeback of sorts—the coronation of a new Manhattan diva!

  It’s terribly important to leverage successfully an appreciation of one’s “brand” in society. As I explained to Heidi, I wanted to position myself as the “people’s socialite.” Less tragic than Jackie Onassis, more accessible than Babe Paley, more substantial than Carolyn Roehm—able to leap large puddles in a single stiletto bound! After all, the media loved extravagance—who could forget Malcolm Forbes’s million-dollar birthday party on a private island, complete with calvary charge? Or Saul Steinberg’s, in Quogue, which included tableaux vivants of his favorite Flemish paintings? If Heidi succeeded—and she would—my birthday party would bring immortality—or at the very least a mention in the party pages of Vanity Fair—hmmm … maybe Mummy would even see it.

  Heidi’s plan for my fantabulous fete required a crew of several hundred Cater-waiter’s, a reception tent, and the services of a top society florist whose showroom spent several weeks crafting American Beauty roses out of delicate silk ribbon. The party would be the perfect setting for an introduction to the mysterious, handsome, eye-patch-wearing exiled European prince.

  The guest list was limited to five hundred of my closest friends. The party was to be held at the hottest club of the moment. The hottest club of the moment is understood to be a club that hasn’t even opened yet—to the public, at least. It’s gotten so bad that Keith McNally’s latest venture, which opened when Madonna was still in her Indian charka phase, still has an unlisted reservation number today. I briefly considered a place that was so new it was still a sweatshop! “Garmentos will love it!” the club’s publicity director promised. “Set up the bar next to the sewing machines—so Kathie Lee ironic! And don’t worry about the Chinese women—they’ll be gone by ten P.M.”

  Tempting, but I decided to pass. I thought it best to head for less edgy pastures. In the end, I decided on a fail-safe option, a club owned by a consortium that included the New Jersey Mafia, a Colombian drug lord, and a former celebrity money manager.

  But first: an outfit. The right dress is integral to any event—it sets the tone, it makes a statement—but what statement did I want to make? A demure Giorgio Armani beaded evening gown? Or a thigh-high dress with matching panties from Donatella Versace? Perhaps I could cajole my personal shopper at Gucci to send me the plunging-neckline silk jersey dress that everyone would be wearing next year. Or perhaps I could wear a little something from Alexander McQueen, it was sure to be insane. Choices, choices! Finally, I settled on an outfit that was flattering as well as politically loaded—a mini-chador, the latest rage from European runways. Plus it was just the thing to wear with Catherine Deneuve’s djellabah.

  My standard hours-long preparation involved a meditation tape, a disco nap, and practicing bons mots with my personality coach. When I was finally perfumed, moisturized, sanitized, and depressurized, I slipped into my couture chador. It was difficult to see out of the thing—much less use a cell phone. But as Debbie Harry says, true beauty involves suffering. On my way out, I called India from the car.

  “Are you just about ready? We’re here in front of your building. Do you need me to come up?” I asked. India lived two blocks down from me, but we never walked to each other’s apartment. That’s what Lincoln town cars are for! (Stretch is très gauche!)

  “Oh, do come up, darling,” she replied. “Fm just about done.”

  When her maid let me into her apartment, I was shocked. India was still in her bathrobe, her wig in electric curlers—an affectation she picked up from Andy Warhol, who used to get haircuts for that white mop of his.

  “Darling!” I squealed, agonized. “You lied! You’re not ready at all!” I started to panic. Very soon, I was expected to blow out some candles in front of a rather large and varied crowd of New York’s most unforgiving social butterflies, at a party that was sure to launch me out of TV Guide’s “Where Are They Now?” shadows and into the bold-font universe. After all, Fd paid Heidi dearly to secure Dominick Dunne. Since mine still wasn’t a name people recognized, Heidi had to wrangle in celebrities the old-fashioned way.

  She lied to them.

  She told the Miller sisters the Lauder sisters had already RSVP’d, told the Boardmans the Ronsons were definitely going to be there, and once the word got out that both Aerin and Samantha were definites, everyone else fell in line: the de Kwiatkowskis, the Hiltons, Marina Rust, Ahn Duong, Brooke de Ocampo, Eliza Reed, etc., etc., etc. She told Vogue that
Harper’s Bazaar was going to be there, told Harper’s Bazaar that Vogue was sending three of their editors. She told ’N Sync Cosmo Girl was sponsoring the party, told Cosmo Girl that ’N Sync would throw a free concert, and now the band was scheduled to serenade me at midnight! Heidi’s staff even dropped hints that Madonna was my new best friend. Thanks to her masterful machinations, the prince’s arrival was all but a lock.

  “Oh, calm down,” India soothed. “It won’t be a party without you. Really, don’t be ridiculous. We’ve got a lot of time. Now let me look at you,” she commanded.

  I twirled around in my gorgeous robes, gauging her reaction by peeking out of the eye slit.

  “Gorge!” she enthused.

  “Reverse chic!” I pronounced.

  “Fashion oppression.”

  “So low it’s high.”

  “So bad it’s good.”

  “So clean it’s … dirty!”

  “As Andy Warhol would say—Wow.”

  “You think?” I preened.

  “Simply beyond,” India declared.

  “Genius!” I agreed, pulling a Diana Vreeland. Things we like: DV, Diana Vreeland’s autobiography, Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, irrelevant references to historical fashion icons. Things we don’t like: Prozac Nation, cowboy boots, plus-size models.

  “Now, darling,” she commanded. “I’ve got a bottle of gin on my dresser. Why don’t you be a sweetie and make us drinks?”

  I checked my watch. Hmmm. We did have some time. And I did want a drink to calm down. My stomach was aflutter at the prospect of talking to Puff Daddy. I never had anything to say to him, and “Who’s suing you now?” seemed terribly rude. A few preparatory cocktails were certainly in order.

  “First, help me out of this thing. It’s rather stuffy in here. I don’t know how those models manage it,” I said, taking off my hood.

  India and I first met in Tokyo. I left Hollywood at thirteen when my sitcom was canceled, and by default—since Daddy didn’t seem to mind and Mummy was off in Monte Carlo for the season—I declared myself an Emancipated Minor just like Drew Barrymore and left for Japan to make my fortune. But I didn’t go to record bubble-gum teen pop, like Jennifer Love Hewitt. I went to model.

  Back then, India was still allowed in the men’s room (and certainly nothing stops her today). Tokyo was a relatively minor market for models in the early eighties. It was where they sent you if you weren’t tall enough to work in New York or Paris, but were pretty enough to convince the Japanese to buy car wax and Asahi beer. I lived in the Shinjuku section with several other girls in a “model apartment,” bunking with a fifteen-year-old redhead from Puerto Rico and a seventeen-year-old corn-fed blonde from Iowa. Deanna rolled her r’s and could drink anyone under the table. Staci was a Miss Iowa State Fair and determined to become a spokesmodel. By the time I arrived the two of them already had their share of yakuza boyfriends and brushes with horny French photographers. I lost my virginity during my first photo shoot, with a nineteen-year-old from Grenoble. Jean-Luc had dark hair and a way with a camera. He retouched the photos of me to make it look as if I were wearing no underwear, then sold them to a skin mag. Welcome to Tokyo.

  I spent most of my time shopping and hanging out with touring American rock bands. I’d throw druggy, five-day parties, rent motor scooters, and spend my weekends smoking pot in Bali. With Daddy’s monthly allowance checks, I was able to float this lifestyle for several years since I made almost no money from modeling for magazines like Portuguese Vogue and North Korean Cosmopolitan.

  India lived next door to us. A narrow youth of nineteen, back then she looked not unlike a Japanese animé character, with a platinum pixie haircut, bad skin, yellow teeth, and an oversize floppy head supported by a scrawny little body. I would have killed for her waistline. She professed to have only her education to thank for her androgynous appearance. India was the product of a British public school, an institution firmly entrenched in nineteenth-century ideals. Gruel, corporal punishment, and substandard heating were de rigueur, resulting in a student body of underfed, malnourished, and anorexic boys. Who needs Leptin? Just send the obese over to jolly old England! After flunking her O levels, she hightailed it to Japan, where she auditioned to become the frontman for a Japanese New Wave tribute band called Barbarella Ballet. They played Depeche Mode covers and Yaz synth-pop. The Japanese kids in her band were beside themselves. Who needed Haircut 100 or Kajagoogoo when you had India in blue eye shadow and a ruffled poet’s shirt? She was hired immediately.

  India saved my life in Tokyo. It turned out my roommates were routinely signing checks on my already overdrawn account, leaving me with an eviction notice and foreclosed on the motor scooters. I was too embarrassed to ask Daddy for help, although I did try to contact Mummy, but she was living in Iran with the Shah at the time and had her own problems. India was the one who saw me through it all—lending me enough money to buy an airline ticket back to New York and hiding me in her apartment before the Japanese police could find me and throw me into their … educational system. I was having warm, nostalgic thoughts about that time when India broke my reverie.

  “So have you thought of what you’re going to say to Stephan?” India asked as I pulled the stays of her corset tighter. Urrrgh. Scarlett O’Hara and Mr. Pearl could boast eighteen-inch waists but India surely did not.

  “What about ‘hello’?” I asked. How hard could it be? Bat eyelashes. Drop handkerchief. Find oneself at Harry Winston.

  “Darling, you’re going to have to do better than that. You know, Cat, the art of small talk is sorely underrated,” she chided.

  “It is?” I panicked. This whole seduce-and-destroy theory was getting too complicated for my liking. With Brick I hadn’t needed to do any of that. When we met I was eighteen, winsome, and his girlfriend’s best friend—a true turn-on for the ages.

  “What does he like? What turns him on? What doesn’t?” India mused. “You’re going to have to play geisha a little bit. Remember to laugh at all his jokes and to have subjects of conversation that are light, topical, and will hold his interest,” she said, sounding like a headmistress at finishing school.

  Oh, dear. I was never good at playing the enraptured coquette and as far as I was concerned, geishas belonged in Japan. Shopping was so much more gratifying than sex, anyway. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like sex. I just can’t abide mess. With Brick, I scheduled our intimate moments in between a strict regimen of enemas and meditation. Romance was an icky-smelling Ralph Lauren perfume, and I always had more fun in a Manolo Blahnik boutique than the boudoir, anyway.

  “Now, what do we know about Westonia?” India lectured.

  “Um, nothing?” I ventured.

  “Right,” India agreed. “Boot up the computer, darling. You can find everything on the Web these days.”

  Keeping my fear of carpal tunnel syndrome at bay, I logged onto India’s iMac and surfed for any information regarding the kingdom of Westonia. “There’s nothing,” I griped after several failed attempts. “And we’re getting late for the party.

  “Oh, wait, here’s something. It’s his personal home page!” I said, excited. Stephan-of-Westonia.com included hyperlinks to illustrated maps of the country, which looked like it was located somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian hinterlands near Greece, Turkey, Bosnia … and Moldavia? The map was awful fuzzy and hard to read.

  “Darling, do you think he might be related to Catherine Oxenberg?” I mused. “Isn’t she some sort of Eastern European princess?”

  India shrugged.

  I continued to click on the links. “Here’s something about his family.” There was a very small picture of grim-looking people wearing tiaras. “Apparently they were thrown out of the country in the revolution of 1918. The royal family was shepherded into some farmhouse and massacred. Only a son survived—Wilhelm the Second. And like a lot of deposed royals, he relocated to Argentina. Stephan is his great-grandson and the heir to the throne. Except there isn’t a throne anymore. There’s a
military junta. Oh, this is all so fascinating.”

  “Anything else?” India asked.

  “No.” I checked again. Apart from the map of Eastern Europe and the small picture of the doomed royal family there was nothing.

  I checked the time again. Oh, no! We were late! I put on my chador and hustled India out of the apartment. As a last-minute confirmation, I rang Heidi just to make sure everything was under way for my grand entrance.

  “Is everyone accounted for?” I demanded. “Richard Johnson? Rush and Molloy? Aileen Mehle?”

  “Oui,” Heidi said crisply.

  “Aerin Lauder? Li’l Kim? David Blaine?”

  “Ja.”

  “Stella McCartney? Plum Sykes? George Wayne?”

  “Si.”

  “And what about,” I asked breathlessly, “Stephan?”

  “Mmmm…”

  “Excuse me, I didn’t quite hear you, Heidi.”

  “Ah…”

  “Stephan?”

  “Ahhh … haf bad noose, Caf,” Heidi groaned. “Stephan ees coming. Mais, ploos on!”

  Stephan of Westonia PLUS ONE. A date! The Westonian prince had RSVP’d for my party with a date! A guest! A plus one! It was bad news indeed. It seemed the most eligible bachelor in New York was not so eligible after all.

  “Plus one!” I moaned.

  “A mere technicality,” India tut-tutted. “This is Manhattan, my dear. Every woman worth her Vuitton waiting list has her heart set on that man. The debutantes are sharpening their manicures as we speak. Surely you didn’t think this would be easy, did you?”

  “You’re right; of course you’re right.”

  I was about to follow her out, but passed a hallway mirror on the way. Aiiieeeeee!!! Who was that black shroud? Momentary panic as realization dawned, then turned into a paralyzing flash of fashion self-consciousness! Le shroud c’st moi! I mean, I’ve always dressed outrageously. When John Galliano ushered in “homeless chic” for Christian Dior I was all for it—donning a tattered newspaper dress and stringing it with empty Coke bottles. I’ve had to enter doorways sideways because of my addiction to Philip Treacy’s monumental hats. But perhaps Muslim chic was not the smartest choice for the evening? Could it be possible that instead of looking like a fantastic, gorgeous, right-off-the-runway fashion phantasm, I looked like nothing more than a Bedouin goat farmer? Eeeek. This would not do at all!