Movie Star By Lizzie Pepper (7 page)

Later I read the articles. They were worse than I’d anticipated. The tabloids had indeed decided that our relationship was all an act. A business deal. We didn’t love each other. Rob was gay. I was a status climber. Depending which “news” outlet you read, our “love” was orchestrated by One Cell Studio to prove that Rob, their best-known practitioner, was straight; or the relationship was a ploy for him to promote
Firing Squad
and for me to promote myself in general. Running alongside the ludicrous stories were the photos of us taken on La Croisette a few hours earlier. Rob looked like the tall, confident, handsome movie star that he was. I hurried two steps behind him at the end of his arm, like a child. My eyes were cast slightly downward, a dazed half-smile on my face. I looked like one of the Manson girls.

Rob didn’t care about any of it. I wished the faceless people behind the tabloids and everyone who believed their crap could see how little he cared.

“When they don’t have news, they invent it, Elizabeth. I don’t blame them. It’s a crappy job, but if they don’t do it, someone else will.”

It was a perfect response. I respected him for this attitude, but I didn’t have such thick skin. The only bad press I’d ever gotten was when Johnny and I had that fight at the ball game, and when we split up. And even then I had to admit that they’d pretty much gotten it right. He was sometimes drunk and I was always miserable. We were breaking up and, unfortunately, everyone knew it. But this was the first time I’d had to read straight-out lies about myself, lies that made me sound like someone I was not.

My father was outraged. “I thought Rob’s people were pros,” he said on the phone that night. “I thought Geoff knew how to handle this.”
Though I’d spoken to my father about my relationship with Rob, I’d never had reason to mention Geoff, the chronic mint sucker. How my dad knew that Geoff existed, much less that he might be involved in Rob’s PR, was a mystery to me. But my dad hadn’t built the biggest corporate consulting business in Chicago by twiddling his thumbs. Leave it to Dad to suss out the key relationships in my romance. No doubt he was worried that I was in over my head—and I certainly was.

My father wanted to know how we were going to spin this back down to earth. But when I asked my publicist, she just said, “There’s no point in trying. This is what you get for dating Rob Mars. Take it or leave him.”

Two weeks later, back in L.A., the press still hadn’t let up. Every time we left the house, we were photographed. The photos were accompanied by the same negative rumors. Rob didn’t care, but I felt like there was a shadow over our relationship and, for that matter, my image. I didn’t want to be seen as a fame whore. People should know that what we had was real. This was love.

So that is what brought us to the infamous “Love of My Life” serenade on top of the car. Sigh.

Everyone already knows what happened, and I realize now how it looked to the world, but if you will, please try to see it all through my eyes: Rob and I were on our way home from a charity luncheon at Geoff and Patricia’s in Beverly Hills. The paparazzi had followed us there, and now they were following us back home. Earlier that day,
Rounder
had released a particularly offensive article, listing the professional pros that being in a relationship with Rob offered me. They labeled me “career-climber Lizzie.” I was quiet on the way home, and Rob knew why.

“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean anything,” he said for the umpteenth time.

“I know. You’re right. But I still care.”

“Pull over,” Rob suddenly said to Lewis, the driver. We were on Beverly Drive, in the heart of Beverly Hills. The sidewalks were thick with pedestrians, an anonymous mix of locals and tourists. Lewis swerved sharply to the curb, and there was nearly a paparazzi pileup behind us. They slammed on their brakes, stopping in a cluster around us.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“I’m going to tell them the truth. I love you. Plain and simple.” Rob threw the car door open. The cameramen were out of their cars at once, pushing closer, an eager, confused mass.

“Rob—stop!” I said, but he was determined.

“Come,” Rob said, and took my arm, pulling me out after him. He lifted me up to sit on the hood of the car.

A crowd instantly gathered on the sidewalk, cell phones raised in salute, and the moment Rob climbed up to stand on the hood in front of me, they went wild. Like every girl who was a teenager when
Great and True
came out, I knew Rob’s “Love of My Life” scene. His serenade of Lexy Hartfield in the bed of the pickup truck was the moment preserved in the poster that Aurora had on her bedroom door, the scene that had won the hearts of girls across America. It had been replayed on entertainment TV ad nauseam when he and Lexy got married. And now it was happening to me.

Rob started crooning “Love of My Life.”

“Oh my God, stop! You ridiculous person.” I stood up next to him and rose on my toes to kiss him, not a little bit desperate to shut him up.

He put an arm around me and we faced the crowd. He said, “Let me introduce the love of my life, Elizabeth Pepper!”

And just like that, I was christened with a new, sophisticated brand. Lizzie Pepper, girl next door, was all grown up and worthy of Rob Mars. Henceforth, I was to be Elizabeth Pepper. Frankly, I had no idea people would make such a big deal about it. My real name had always been
Elizabeth. It was on all my credit cards and checkbooks. It felt a bit too formal and un-me—Aurora teased me for it—but Rob liked it, and I thought I’d get used to it. I was a woman now, even if I didn’t exactly feel like one.

Rob leaned down and whispered in my ear, “I love you.” You saw that happen on YouTube, but what you didn’t know was that it was the first time he had told me he loved me. I mean, he’d talked about his love for me, as in “I don’t mind having people see that we love each other,” but this was the first time he had said those three words, simple and direct. Leave it to Rob to save it for a dramatic moment.

We pulled apart and paused for a moment, looking into each other’s eyes. I saw my sweet Rob, willing, wanting to give me the world. He loved me with all his heart, and those grand gestures were the only way he knew to express it. Swept up in the moment, I forgot the pedestrians, the paparazzi, the slightly precarious car hood. All I wanted was to show Rob that he didn’t need to try half this hard. I took his hand and pressed it to my heart. How did I think people would respond? Well, if I’d thought about it, I would have assumed that everyone would recognize the love that connected us.

And so it was awful when the world decided that what they were seeing was the exact opposite.

So much for countering the negative response to our Cannes debut. Instead, the press was brutal. Poor Rob, he bore the brunt of it. People didn’t believe it was a spontaneous act of love. They called him a manufactured brand, a robot attempting to play the role of a man in love. The YouTube meme, the talk show sketches, the political cartoon showing the president sitting on a car while the House speaker sings to him. For the life of me, I could not see what they thought was so bizarre. Rob shrugged it off. “We can’t win,” he said. “Next week they’ll love us again.”

Needless to say, my father, who called us the very next day, was apoplectic. He raged at Rob, who stayed on the phone with him, serious and
focused, saying, “Yes, sir,” every so often until my father had exhausted himself. Not the best first impression a boyfriend’s ever given my dad, but (thanks to Johnny) far from the worst. Afterward, Rob told me that, with all due respect, my father would forget it as quickly as everyone else.

“Ha,” I said. “You don’t know my father.”

As I’ve said, Rob has pretty thick skin. But I don’t. Having people be so merciless toward us, something changed in me. One night I was sitting at the kitchen counter with my laptop, reading the comments on a particularly scathing
Glam
piece (“Lizzie Pepper Drops Name and Personality”), when Rob came up to me, closed the laptop, and took it to the study.

“Hey!” I followed him. Sure, it was a waste of time, but that didn’t mean I wanted him to confiscate my computer like I was a naughty child.

“It’s enough,” Rob said. “As soon as you let go, you’ll realize how little it matters.” He took my hand and kissed every finger. As he did, he spoke, saying one word between each kiss, “I have you. You have me. Our love is everything.”

That was the moment of decision for me. I had watched carefully as Rob rode out every aspect of the debacle with aplomb. He was so inscrutable. He seemed above it all, immune to public opinion, free of any self-doubt. At times he really did seem like the too-perfect robot the vicious press had labeled him.
Was
he for real? It was time for me to make up my mind. Would I trust this man? Would I take him at face value? Was his calm reserve an empty shell, as the media would have it, or was it really possible that this wasn’t all an act, that he was the same strong, confident prince all the way to the core?

I chose to have faith in Rob. While the rest of society was full of mean-spirited judgment, Rob just kept right on loving me. In my prior relationships, I’d been the stable one, the rational one, the decision maker. Compared to Rob, I was the inexperienced child who had so much to learn. It felt like a load off my shoulders.

His certainty anchored me, and yet he wasn’t too good to be true. Rob wasn’t a perfect lover, smooth and cinematic. He was sweaty and trembling and questioning and vulnerable. There was a deeper Rob, I needed to believe, one he still hadn’t let me fully see. I caught glimpses of it in our most intimate moments. Our bed felt like a little boat on a stormy sea, where it was us against the elements. If we had to cling to our vessel, isolating ourselves from public opinion and judgment, waiting for a change in tides, or charting a course to foreign lands, so be it.

“You’re right,” I said. “We don’t need Hollywood. We make a perfect universe of two.”

The next weekend, I moved in with Rob.

T
he only work I had managed to line up for the summer was an appearance on
Apartment 3J
. Guest-starring on such a popular sitcom was a stopgap. It was taking far too long for me to get a movie, and meanwhile the media was trashing me. A guest appearance would bolster my image in the gap before
Man of Her Dreams
was released in November.

The part wasn’t hysterically funny, but at least it had some depth. I was playing Benji’s long-lost high school girlfriend—his first love—so I essentially got to play two characters: a hopelessly-in-love teenager in his flashbacks to high school, and a current-day woman who’d outgrown puppy love. I was psyched to work with Colin Anthony (who played Benji). He carried that show, as far as I was concerned.

The first day of rehearsals went well, when we played our googly-eyed high school selves. But the next day we were working on the second act, when he tracked me down at my law firm and I had to spurn him. For some reason I wasn’t nailing the character. The director kept telling me to warm her up. “How can I ‘warm up’ rejecting him?!” I wanted to shout back, but instead I just smiled and thanked him for the thought and then kept doing it the only way that made sense to me.

That Thursday night we started shooting before a live audience, and
I still had no plan for how to fix my performance in the second act. Then, after the first-act break, I heard a buzz on the set. Rob had appeared to surprise me, a huge grin on his face. We slipped into my dressing room, and I wolfed down some craft services mac and cheese.

Rob asked me how it was going. I told him I couldn’t find the balance between outgrowing my relationship with Benji and being a cold bitch.

“Do you love me?” he asked.

“Totally,” I said.

“But what about Justin?” My
American Dream
boyfriend, both in the show and off camera, as everyone knows.

“What about him?”

“Don’t you still love him?”

“No!”

“Of course not,” he said. “You love me. But doesn’t the twenty-year-old you still love him, in some bittersweet, wistful way?”

I thought about Justin. My first kiss—first onscreen, then off—my first love. On
American Dream
we worked sixteen-hour days, but there were awkward chunks of downtime between takes, when they reset lights and we were at loose ends. Justin had been my salvation.

“Let’s explore!” he’d say. I’d resist, afraid to stray too far from the set. But he’d drag me away, into the rolling Tennessee hills if we were shooting outside, off into a corner of the former city hall that served as the family mansion, and, once, on the soundstage, up a series of ladders to a nosebleed catwalk the lighting crew used only while in safety harnesses. We smoked cigarettes until we set off the smoke alarms, then hid up in our aerie, undiscovered, until the excitement died down.

Our adventures inevitably turned romantic, and there was nothing better than sneaking off to make out in a former courtroom or coming back from a “nature walk” with leaves in my hair and a blush on my cheeks.

I thought about who I’d been with Justin: not just Lizzie Pepper, but the first-time-in-love Lizzie Pepper. A once-in-a-lifetime version of myself, glowing with the new feeling of connecting with another person. In the middle of getting notes from the director, a glance from him spread warmth through my body. His hand on the small of my back was everything to me. When I walked, my fingers twitched in the air, remembering the sensation of his skin.

Years had passed since then. I was over Justin, rationally and emotionally, as much as I ever would be, but I would always feel nostalgia for the heights of romance I had discovered with him.

“There!” Rob interrupted my reverie. “That was it. I saw it on your face. First love ends but never dies. Go there.”

When I returned to the set, we shot the scene on the first take.

That night, back home, I thanked Rob for helping me. “Is that how you connect with each of your characters? Find something from your life?”

“It’s not quite that simple. Mostly I have to credit One Cell. What practicing at the Studio has done for my acting is incredible.”

There it was.

It was so casual, so thrown away that I’d nearly missed it. But nonetheless, there it was.

In the four months that we’d been dating, Rob had only mentioned the One Cell Studio a handful of times, and only in the most dismissive, don’t-even-ask-me-about-this manner. And yet I knew how important, how present, it was in his life, not just from the tabloids and rumors, but in the many times a week he would go to the Studio to practice, in the meetings that sometimes filled his days, the private phone calls, the time he would occasionally spend inside that office he had behind the gym.

But really, all I knew about One Cell was what everyone knew, or thought they knew. It was a secretive, possibly cult-y meditation group whose practitioners wore simple burlap robes and, supposedly, used superpowerful magnets to channel their energy, or something like that. I often drove past its center of operations—a massive green marble monolith that loomed over Beverly Hills. Nobody knew what went on beyond those high, Oz-like walls. But there were an unusual number of A-list celebrities among its followers, actors whose work I deeply admired. To my mind, there was no way all of those respectable, successful people, including Rob, were brainwashed.

Aurora had half-jokingly warned me, on more than one occasion, not to get sucked into Rob’s crazy cult. That never seemed possible. In fact, I’d begun to think that maybe Rob intended, for whatever reason, to keep me separate from that part of his life indefinitely.

But now, just the tiniest sliver of an opening dangled in the air between us, inviting me—if I wanted—to ask Rob more about the Studio. One Cell, it seemed, was the key to my boyfriend’s acting talent. And—if it really was so core to his life—it could also lead to the deeper Rob I longed to access, the imperfect Rob with doubts and needs and unmet desires, the frog behind the prince.

I waited a moment longer, then dove in.

“One Cell. The cult,” I said. “What’s the real story?”

“There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” Rob said. “But I’ll let you make your own judgments. I first heard about Teddy Dillon and her brother, Luther, about twenty years ago, when they were just starting to develop the One Cell Practice. Not sure what you’d think of Teddy, but she’s a genius. She has her PhD in organic chemistry, but it wasn’t until she spent five years living in the desert with the Aborigines that she put the science and meditation together. My acting coach for
The Son
sent me to Teddy. Before I began practicing at the Studio, my acting was just . . .
seat of the pants. Through the Practice I learned to harness a range of emotions I hadn’t even experienced
in my own life
. I was so jazzed by what she was doing that I spent six months at the first Studio in Fernhills. My involvement took off from there.”

“How come I’ve never taken one of the classes? I mean, you’ve never even invited me,” I said.

“You have your own set of principles. I don’t want to inflict mine on you. I’m just glad you let Geoff steal me away a couple times a week to go to the Studio.”

“Geoff is involved?” This was news to me, but I had never tried to understand the roles of the many people who orbited around Rob.

Rob laughed. “Wow, I’m terrible aren’t I? Geoff is actually the head of PR for One Cell.”

Oh my God!
“Geoff is
Geoffrey Anciak
!” I was an idiot for not making the connection. Whenever the One Cell Studio was mentioned in the press, Geoff Anciak was the one quoted, usually making another futile effort to dispel the rumors of the day. When we’d gone on what I thought was
Geoff’s
yacht to what I thought might be
Geoff’s
island—it was all part of One Cell. No wonder my father had known who he was. Geoff was the public voice of the Studio. Naturally he would consult with its most high-profile practitioner.

Over the next couple of weeks, I watched Rob through a slightly altered lens, wondering which parts of his confidence came from the Studio, and if and when he would invite me into this part of his life.

Now that I was paying attention, I noticed that sometimes Geoff picked Rob up in his Maserati (to my credit, it never occurred to me that high-ups in an organization famous for group meditation in burlap robes would drive bright red sports cars. Only in L.A.), and, one time, he came for dinner with his girlfriend, Patricia. That night, Geoff didn’t talk much; mostly he exchanged sucking on Altoids for chewing food,
but after dinner he and Rob went out to the balcony, leaving me with Patricia. I tried to pry conversation out of that husk of a woman while she wordlessly knit a dreadful sea-foam green scarf. Finally, I just went for it.

“I know this is ridiculous, but I only recently realized your connection to the Studio. I’m so curious about that part of Rob’s life. I’d love to hear more.”

Patricia didn’t look up from her knitting, but she did finally speak. “Love and self-understanding go hand in hand. Both require a commitment to the whole, in spite of its flaws—even in your darkest moments, even if it means great sacrifice. We are imperfect without, but we can always strive for balance within. This is a challenge one must choose to undertake. Rob would no more tell you to take up our practice than he would tell you to love him.”

Wow. That was a lot from Patricia. I understood her message, or so I thought at the time: Rob was privately hoping I would join him in his practice, much as he hoped our relationship would succeed. Loving him—knowing him—meant doing this, and I resolved to try.

“I want to learn about One Cell,” I said to Rob later that night. “It’s so important to you—will you share it with me?”

“I’d love to,” Rob said, “but don’t do it for me. You have to come to it yourself.” It was just as Patricia had said. The effect of Rob’s mildness, his seeming ambivalence, was to pique my curiosity. I had to know more, to be a part of it, to be wanted. My desire for Rob and my desire for One Cell mingled, intense and inseparable.

“I’m ready,” I said.

What I didn’t think about at the time was the rest of Patricia’s cryptic comment. What were these “dark moments” of being and love? What kind of sacrifice was required? Only looking back do I see that she was trying to tell me something. Trying to warn me.

A few days later, after almost five months of dating Rob, I found myself entering the mysterious gates of the great emerald One Cell Studio on Wilshire Boulevard. Nobody knew what actually went on in there, but there were plenty of rumors. Group meditations that went on for twenty-four hours, nonstop. Brainwashed actors chanting in unison to land each other lead roles. Families that joined the Practice and seemed to disappear into a black hole. There was so much speculation about what went on inside this impenetrable fortress that it was impossible not to feel special. Those mysterious doors were about to be opened for me. I texted Aurora,
entering the studio. stand by for intervention.

dying
, she wrote back.
tell all asap.

will do
, I promised, then shut off my phone. One Cell policy.

Instead of pulling into the circular drive out front, our driver turned into an alley and dipped down into an underground garage. He dropped us off at an elevator bank in the far back corner. Finally, I was entering the exclusive retreat. I pictured doors with immense locks and secret chambers lit by candles. A bit overeager, I reached to push the elevator’s call button, but Rob grabbed my hand.

“Easy, girl. Follow me.”

He opened a door to a bare metal stairwell. I wrinkled my nose.
Really?
We were going to walk up the seedy, airless garage stairs? (Not to be a diva, but I kind of have a phobia about being trapped in a stairwell—by an earthquake, fire, a stalker fan—the standard stuff.)

“Trust me,” Rob said. He stepped around the stairs to a plain door. Nailed to it was a tiny brass letter. An “M.”

“M for Mars?”

Instead of answering, Rob put a key into the knob. The door opened silently. “M” for Mars indeed.