True Hollywood Lies (3 page)

I wasn’t
that
desperate. At least, I hoped I wasn’t.

I let loose a loud sigh. It had been an exhausting week, and I was ready for it to be over. “I don’t know, Jasper. I really don’t think I’m cut out for it. But thanks for thinking about me.” My lack of sincerity was palpable, I’m sure.

“I understand, sweetie, believe me I do. But the money is decent—six thousand a month—and it won’t be forever, just however long it takes for Leo’s estate to be straightened out. If anything, the hubbub around this kid might help you keep your mind off of it. And he’s not a bad sort—at least, not yet, anyway. You might actually enjoy yourself.” He paused. “Take a day or two to think about it. If you change your mind, call Svetlana in my office, and she’ll email over exactly what you need to know about the job. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to keep Leo’s widow at bay.”

“You’re very sweet to be concerned about me, Jasper. But don’t hold your breath.” With that, I said good-bye.

And pulled the phone out of the wall in silent protest.

Then I walked over to my telescope. Peering through the lens, I suddenly realized that I was too dizzy to be standing up, and so I stumbled off to bed.

The good news: If I was going to get wasted, at least it was on a $100 bottle of red.

The bad news: It was probably the last expensive bottle of wine I’d ever drink.

* * *

Here’s the part where you get my backstory:

Let me start off by saying that it’s not easy being a trust fund baby. First of all, everyone naturally assumes you’re lazy because you don’t have to work in order to make your rent money.

In most cases, that is
so
wrong. Of course, many of us work! It’s just that we are usually working at something that doesn’t come with a salary attached. I mean, many Hollywood TFBs are struggling actors, artists or musicians.

And a lot of us do charity stuff (in other words, those who can’t, volunteer.) We TFBs put the “junior” in Junior League, regardless of our age.

My own form of hereditary atonement is astronomy research for UCLA: I do mapping of late-type stars that are found at the center of the galaxy. And because I’m a volunteer, it’s initially assumed I’m a saint—that is, until people find out that I’m the daughter of Leo Fairchild, and then they change their minds based on a new assumption: that I’m too stupid to use my family’s connections or trade on my illustrious name to get a
real
job.

Well, they’re wrong. I’m not too stupid
.
I’m just too
stubborn
.

Maybe that’s because I’ve always felt that my birth was in fact an accident, the result of too much hashish and a defective condom shared between a man old enough to know better (Leo was forty-two at the time) and a girl young enough to be his daughter: Journey, my mother, who was all of nineteen.

I must admit, when he heard he was going to be a proud papa, he did try to do right by us. At the time, he was between wives (numbers One and Two), so why not?

But hey, it was the late ’70s, and a chant murmured in a Mount Tam redwood grove at sunrise in front of a bunch of stoned acolytes does not a union make—at least, that was the conclusion Leo reached just prior to my first birthday. So he offered Journey her freedom (“It wasn’t our karma, sweetheart”), along with generous child support for me.

He deduced, quite rightly, that my mother was not the kind to make palimony waves. She left Los Angeles for Northern California without a backward glance. In truth, she couldn’t stomach the industry. Her love beads and New Age values were out of place with the true Hollywood: lies, doublespeak and business-as-usual backstabbing.

Besides, Leo’s wandering eye hurt even more than his callous dismissal of their union.

For the first sixteen years of my life, I lived with Journey on a tiny houseboat docked along the Sausalito waterfront, a pseudo-bohemian enclave that welcomed free spirits with open arms. For a little kid, it was a virtual play land: our homes—made out of anything that could float, from tugboats to abandoned barges to hobbled-together skiffs—were anchored so closely together that we could play tag by hopping from one gangplank to another.

We appreciated that our parents were, for the most part, big kids, too: artists, musicians, writers, poets and activists who were not tied to work schedules or deadlines, laughed at conformity, and deviated from mainstream answers in favor of any and all alternatives.

There was a caveat, however: while encouraging our own sense of freedom, adventure and experimentation, they expected us to accept it all wholeheartedly from them as well.

By the time I became a teenager, I was finding this harder and harder to do. To Journey, I wasn’t merely her child, but also her soul mate, pal and confidante. I was always expected to be there: panhandling alongside her at the ferry terminal as the nine-to-five commuters were on their way to work in San Francisco’s financial district, or hawking Journey’s handicrafts—poorly made candles, painted rocks, and recycled denim made into tiny purses—at the dusty Marin City Flea Market, whenever Leo’s monthly stipend ran out, which it did all too often, particularly after one of Journey’s infamous monthly houseboat parties, where the thick pot haze did little to obscure the pairing-off of errant spouses or significant others.

When I turned thirteen and asked Journey if I could join her in a toke, she made a big deal out of my request, insisting that we throw a “joint mitzvah” to celebrate the occasion. All I remember about it was how ill I was afterward—and how Journey was too stoned to wake up and comfort me.

By my fifteenth birthday, I’d had enough of Journey’s way of life. I now had a thirst to know more about how others lived—specifically, my father, beyond what I had gleaned from his old movies, tabloid clippings and our too few daddy-daughter phone conversations and my occasional visits to his many homes in the Southland.

All my life I had been taking care of Journey. Now I wanted someone to take care of
me.

She was not all that open to my suggestion that I live with Leo until I turned eighteen. “Despite being a total shit head, he
is
your legacy. But still—”

“I know all that. But he’s also half of who
I
am. Shouldn’t I give him a chance to be something different, at least to
me
?”

Neither of us thought that there was a snowball’s chance in hell he’d agree to my scheme. I mean, who would want a goonishly tall, gawky, pimply, flat-chested Jane Austen-enthralled teenage girl with crooked teeth and terrier-like hair hanging around the house? Particularly when the average age of his current flock of busty, burnished and blond girlfriends was twenty-three: for sure legal, but still young enough to trade clothes, CDs, and secrets with his daughter.

You could have knocked both Journey and me over with a feather when, through his assistant, Tammy, I got the word to “Come on down to L.A.” Journey bought my ticket on Southwest the very next day.

The morning I flew out of Oakland was cold and foggy. An hour later I departed the plane into brilliant sunshine, my eyes blinking to adjust as I hopped into the waiting limo Leo had sent to pick me up. I felt like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.

That adjustment took three years, and Leo made it a truly eye-opening experience: Not only was I versed on how to choose fine wines, tie a tuxedo bow tie, and tell a great script from a real stinker, but I also learned how to lie with a straight face to his agent, his latest director, the press, studio heads and, most importantly, to Leo’s various and sundry girlfriends.

Leo marveled, “Honey, you’re a chip off the old block. A natural-born liar!”

Although on the surface his compliments seemed more heartfelt than backhanded,
they really weren’t.

I also learned that I, too, was not immune to Leo’s duplicity, which usually occurred when I needed him most. My 104-degree fever and strep throat couldn’t keep him from a Lakers game, although he claimed he had to “stay late on the set” and sent Tammy in his place to take me to the hospital. (There I was in my hospital bed, flipping channels with my remote, when I came upon Channel 9 as its camera panned the Lakers’ court. And there
Leo
was, in his floor seat, right next to Jack.) And on my seventeenth birthday, he missed my party because he was “on location”—in Palm Springs, I later learned, he was with the woman who would soon be his third wife, the soap star.

Then there was the time he showed up for my apartment-warming party immediately after my graduation from high school but disappeared an hour into it, claiming he had to meet his agent and a producer on the Fox lot. A couple of hours later, changing out of my bathing suit in the pool’s clubhouse, I overheard two of my so-called girlfriends comparing notes on his sexual prowess in the apartment complex’s hot tub.

After that I skeptically parsed everything he said to me. Doing so wasn’t easy on either of us: Leo wasn’t used to others so obviously calling his bluff, and I was too hurt to realize that my pointed inquisitions were only exacerbating the problem between us.

To some extent, moving out of his house helped our relationship. He was much easier to love from afar—and far more tolerable when we did
get together.

I also found another way to drown my sorrows: while I might not have been able to trust another woman to like me for
myself
as opposed to my proximity to Leo, I could always count on the fawning attentions of every sales clerk between Rodeo Drive and Melrose Avenue. Love me, love my credit card—which Leo paid in full—was my motto. We both accepted this as his grudging penance for absentee parenting.

My saving grace: astronomy, which I discovered through a UCLA extension class. Looking up into a cobalt sky at millions of tiny white dots, and grasping hold of the concept that these other worlds were millions of light-years away and far beyond our reach, put the frailty of our humanity—even Leo’s—back into perspective for me. It’s why I spend hours hunkered over a telescope in the hope of discovering something so spectacular.

Even Leo got it. Once he surprised me, tracking me down at one of the viewing platforms outside the observatory. I was so engrossed in a star shower that I hadn’t heard him come up behind me. He just stood there, silently watching me until I looked up.

It would be an understatement to say that my father had a way with words. Coming out of his mouth, the phrase “Pass the salt,” was not a simple request but a truly moving experience of passion, verve, and elocution—which was why most of the world’s renowned film directors had salivated at the chance to pay him millions of dollars to hear him say that or other phrases just as mundane.

To me, he simply said, “‘You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.’”

“That’s beautiful,” I stuttered, still surprised to see him.

“Samuel Johnson said it.” He gave me a kiss on the cheek and took a turn at the telescope.

It was the only time in my life that I felt my father totally and completely understood me.

And then he was gone, as unreachable to me as any supernova moving through the cosmos.

And there I was, alone on planet Earth, with overdue rent, a car payment to make, foreclosure eminent on my telescope, and a very big Fred Segal bill landing in my mailbox any day now.

Not to mention a lawsuit in the making.

I’d weathered Leo and survived. How bad could life be looking after Louis Trollope?

Chapter 2: Supernova


A rare celestial phenomenon, involving the explosion of most of the material in a star, resulting in an extremely bright, short-lived object that emits vast amounts of energy.

It took the court exactly two weeks to freeze Leo’s assets so that the disputed will could be reviewed some time within the next six months (God willing).

However, it took less than 24 hours for Sybilla to shuffle about a fifth of the estate—Leo’s cash stash, family jewelry and heirlooms, and various safety-deposited trinkets—into her own private Neverland, never to resurface again.

On the seventh day, I rose, came to my senses, and took Jasper up on his suggestion.

Oh well, better late than never.

At my behest, Jasper’s Svetlana set up my interview with Louis Trollope that afternoon at four-thirty sharp, then couriered over the formal job description for the personal assistant position. Enclosed with it were a trove of articles that were anything and everything ever written on Louis, as well as an old article in which my father had been interviewed. This quote was circled:

“Live is a lesson in humility.”

The reporter thought Leo was being insightful. Apparently, so did Jasper.

I know better. It was a line from one of his very first movies, in which he played James M. Barrie, the author of
Peter Pan
.

Not exactly the best role model.

A placement firm that specialized in such positions had obviously written the job description that was also enclosed. Its criteria were daunting enough to intimidate the unqualified but sufficiently covert to entice a real bootlicking go-getter. In part, it read:

“PERSONAL ASSISTANT: Seeking an exceptional candidate who can enhance our client’s lifestyle and creative objectives. Must be responsible, flexible, an excellent problem solver, have a strong work ethic, and be the model of honesty and integrity. The ability to maintain the highest level of security and confidentiality at all times is essential. You will be on call 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. Responsibilities will cover a wide range of duties, as you will be overseeing our client’s complex lifestyle issues. Thus, you must have the ability to multitask while still remaining organized and focused on the tasks at hand. If you are an excellent planner with strong problem-solving skills, and thrive in a fast-paced environment, then you may be a great asset for this creative artist. However, you must be prepared to face adversity –

What does this mean? Should I have trained with Special Ops?