The Rise, page 2
As always, he’s combining business and pleasure, taking pitch meetings for the next big reality show. He already produces three of the top five in the ratings. He chose the Beverly Wilshire because it kills two birds with one stone. If a meeting goes exceptionally well, he’s only an elevator away from a California-king-size bed.
A couple sit down for the three-o’clock slot. It’s the first interview after lunch and he’s had two glasses of Pinot Noir. In this postcode that qualifies him for AA.
She’s a supermodel; he’s an ageing rock god, best hits behind him. They pitch the show. Fly on the wall. Beauty and the Beats. Great premise, shit title. They tell Davie every network has expressed interest in this show, but they want him to produce it because he’s ‘The Man’. They’re not lying about the second part.
The meeting goes well, like every other meeting in the industry. Both sides flatter the other. Both sides claim interest. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, one side refuses to take the next call.
Davie listens. Definitely has potential. They shake hands; he tells them he’ll be in touch. He will. His secretary will call on Monday and arrange a follow-up meeting. Only the supermodel. Room 567. With the California-king-size bed.
On the ground floor of the hotel, at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant, CUT, Mirren McLean is oblivious to her childhood friend’s presence upstairs. She is at her usual table, with her husband of nineteen years, producer-director Jack Gore, and their teenage children, Chloe and Logan.
If anyone added up the value of the diners in the room, it would hit the billions. People have no problem paying $150 for a Japanese 100 per cent Wagyu steak because this place is regarded as the best. And in Beverly Hills, it’s only the best that matters.
Jack has been on location for a few weeks, so Mirren is thrilled he’s back. Even happier because both her children are there. This is what life is about – family. Right now, she’s a mum and a wife, and that’s all she wants to be. Just a mum and a wife.
Paul Bonetti, the legendary producer, approaches her table. Shakes hands. She’s polite because she has manners, but she wants him gone so she can get back to her family. She likes to keep the two separate, but in this town, there’s no forgetting about business.
Bonetti smiles, like he’s her best friend. ‘I couldn’t be more pleased for you – still number one at the box office after three weeks,’ he says, attempting jovial and sincere, achieving latent fury and crippling envy. His leading men could act; he couldn’t. ‘Just hope I’m up against you next time around – make it a fair fight.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll take the top spot next time. It must be your turn,’ she says, wide grin, while the words ‘over my dead body’ explode in her head. She makes a mental note to bring forward the release date for the next Clansman movie to ensure it clashes with whatever action killfest he has coming out. Time to put him back in his place. If he wants to play that game, she’ll take the challenge.
She’ll win. Because she’s one of the biggest and ballsiest players in Hollywood.
And everyone in the room knows it.
On the seventh floor, room 731, Zander Leith is sitting in a solid-mahogany high-back seat. He’s already refused the director-style chair left by the company who organized the press junket, as this one forces him to sit up straight. It’s all about the angles.
His new movie, the sixth in the Dunhill franchise, playing a man who is a suave, deadly cross between a Bond and a Reacher, hits the cinemas in three weeks’ time. He’s now been in this airless room for seven hours, answering the same questions from TV and print journalists who all look different but act equally inane. Cute young women asking flirtatious questions. The enthusiastic newbies who want to be his best mate. The older, jaded ones who try to catch him out and twist his words.
Very occasionally, there’s someone who has well-researched questions that actually make him think – they’re the only ones that hit the pause button on the eradication of his will to live.
Next door, his hair and make-up team, publicist and manager sit ready to pounce when they are required.
One of them is required now. The journo in front of him, wearing the shortest of skirts, is giving him a glimpse of her Victoria’s Secret underwear. He knows the brand because he slept with a model who was wearing it on the catwalk only a month before.
The interview is coming to a close. Once upon a time, he would get someone else to do his bidding. Now, he just cuts to the quick. It’s speed-dating, movie-star 101.
He leans towards her. ‘Warren Beatty Suite. Seven p.m.?’ It’s a question to which they both know the answer.
She leaves satisfied that she got everything she came for. His publicist enters the room, turns to the sound guy.
‘Make sure that last exchange is deleted?’
He nods.
Of course he does.
Because no one ever says no in Hollywood.
2
DAVIE JOHNSTON
‘Got To Give It Up’ – Marvin Gaye
A few months later…
Bel Air, Los Angeles, 2013
* * *
It never crossed Davie Johnston’s mind to wonder when he’d stopped feeling lucky.
This life he’d created had nothing to do with luck and everything to do with smarts. Skills. Talent. It wasn’t a perfect existence, but as he drove his Bugatti Veyron through the landscaped gardens to the door of his $40-million baroque mansion in the exclusive enclave of Bel Air, he knew it was pretty damn close.
Drego, the Ukrainian gardener, was hosing down the play equipment custom-built for the seven-year-old Johnston twins, Bella and Bray. In this town, his red-haired, fair-skinned twins were a rarity, and it had served them well. Since they were three years old, they’d been in the cast of the hit sitcom Family Three. A week didn’t pass without a request for a family photo shoot from the celebrity mags, and every now and then he indulged them.
Not that he, or his kids, needed the publicity. Davie got enough of that presenting American Stars. It was still number one in the ratings, sitting above America’s Got Talent, American Idol and all the other shows that just couldn’t beat them.
He’d be signing his renewal contract for this season of American Stars any day now, and that would, once again, put Ryan Seacrest in his place too. The last decade had been a tussle for supremacy between them, a battle Davie was winning. Thirty million dollars for his last American Stars contract had made sure of that, not to mention the success of the reality shows he produced. Global profit on those had put him in the financial ‘fuck off’ stratosphere. He never had to ask the price of anything. But he did. Not because he perpetuated the ridiculous myth that Scots were tight with cash – in his experience, generosity was in their cultural DNA. He asked the price because he was smart. Scots invented the telephone, television and the steam engine. Davie invented the most watched shows on the planet.
He had American Stars. He had The Dream Machine, a sentimental slushfest that made dreams come true and left no heartstring untugged. And his other baby, Liking Lana – a car-crash docu-soap featuring the fucked-up life and family of tarnished has-been Lana Delasso – had finally topped Seacrest’s baby, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, last season.
He checked his limited-edition gold Panerai Kampfschwimmer watch – the case designed and made by Panerai, the movement by Rolex. It didn’t get any better, but it did cost $1 million. Two o’clock. The kids wouldn’t be back from the set for another hour. Time for a shower and to put a couple of calls in to the East Coast.
The second-season premiere of New York Nixons, his latest scripted reality hit, starring the extended family of rock legend, Jax Nixon, was due to air next week and Sky, the wayward daughter of Jax’s first wife, Rainbow, was due to stage an overdose in the next couple of days. Cue shock, outrage, sympathy and more free headlines than even the best publicist could drum up in a week.
That was Davie’s talent. He was adaptable. Saw opportunities. Ran with them. Strategized for success. When the acting jobs dried up a few years after they won the ‘Best Original Screenplay’ Oscar for The Brutal Circle, the movie that broke out Mirren as a writer, and Davie and Zander as actors, he’d gone right back to the drawing board. That’s when he’d spotted the potential in TV and then grafted, morphed, schmoozed to make an impact there. There was a whole new dawn of talent shows just waiting to happen. They’d already stormed the UK market. Davie had sought out Simon Cowell, the man behind them, asked questions, listened, learned. Then he’d developed his own concept, American Stars, a variation on the UK theme, and taken it to the American networks. They’d commissioned it as a summer filler. To their surprise, it had rocked the country. Massive ratings. Massive buzz.
Davie had hitched a ride on that bus of wannabes and it had brought him as much fame, glory and cash as any A-list actor. And when the era of the reality shows dawned, he was in pole position again, using his own cash to bankroll pilots that became syndicated shows that added more zeros to his bank account.
As he opened the front door, he could hear Drego’s wife, Alina, singing some unintelligible song in the kitchen. A Russian force of nature, she dressed like a Kardashian and loved country music. Thankfully, she cooked like a dream, and her OCD meant every corner of the house glistened.
Ignoring the temptation of the aromas emanating from the kitchen, he headed up the left-hand side of the sweeping double marble and glass staircase. No point eating now, especially when he’d skipped a gym session and headed home early. He’d pay for it tomorrow. Clay, his trainer, was a former middleweight champion on the US Olympic boxing team who abided by the only two rules Davie had set at the outset of their partnership: don’t hit the face and don’t kill me.
Crossing the upper hallway of his palatial home, he lifted his Prada T-shirt – blue, of course – over his head in readiness for the shower. Still moving, he opened the top button of his jeans with one hand, turned the doorknob of his bedroom with the other.
The brush of the white shagpile carpet muffled the sound of the door opening, giving him a couple of seconds to take in the scene in front of him before the occupants of the room registered his presence.
The curve of her back caught his eye first. How many times had he seen his wife’s silhouette on billboards and in magazines, and how many other men had fantasized about the perfection of her breasts, her ass, or the legs that went on forever?
Or the caramel waves that flowed down over her slender frame. Or the hazel eyes, with flecks of gold that changed colour in the light.
When he’d married Jenny Rico nearly ten years ago, he sometimes found himself lying awake at night just staring, almost unable to believe that he could touch that body whenever he wanted to.
Now, from his side view, he could see every contour of her shape as she knelt on the bed, legs open, eyes closed, her head thrown back as her hands caressed her breasts.
Lying beneath her, another shape, one that would confuse the TV addicts of the nation. On the screen, in the hugely popular cable cop show Streets of Power, these two people were partners, their relationship purely platonic.
At no point in the show was his wife being teased to orgasm by her slightly older, more experienced sidekick. The combination of genetics from her Gambian mother and Dutch father, had given her flawless bone structure and a waist-length curtain of ebony hair, Darcy Jay was as exquisite as the woman she was making love to.
A sound, once familiar, escaped from his wife’s throat and he paused out of courtesy and curiosity, realizing that she was just seconds from coming.
When her gasps stopped, she fell to the side, reaching over to cradle the face that had been checking out her Brazilian grooming schedule only seconds before.
‘I love you,’ she whispered tenderly, and despite himself, Davie winced aloud.
The two heads on the bed snapped round, his wife’s face creasing into something between quiet amusement and exasperation. Her companion preferred a more vocal demonstration of feeling.
‘Jesus, Davie, have you never heard of knocking? Or were you so busy getting your rocks off you forgot your manners?,’ Darcy demanded, before switching to a gloating tease of, ‘Or were you just making a wish that you could join in again?’
Davie threw his T-shirt in the direction of the bed as he crossed to his en suite, aware that there was more than an iota of truth in there.
What man wouldn’t want a hot threesome with Jenny Rico and her co-star, Darcy Jay? Numbers one and two, respectively, on People Magazine’s Most Beautiful Women list for the last three years in succession. In public, both straight, both gorgeous, both sexy as hell.
And both left him in the dust when they changed the terms of their original arrangement.
On the opening night of Streets of Power six years earlier, the three of them had ended up drinking late into the night in a bungalow at Chateau Marmont. Too many bottles of Dom Pérignon had led to clothes on the floor and a sexual experience that came pretty close to heaven. It wasn’t the first time he and Jenny had played around with a female friend, but as the weeks passed, the two women developed a relationship that went far deeper than getting messed up and indulging in some girl-on-girl for fun. And he was no longer invited to the party.
The transition had been tough, but when it came down to a choice between accepting their relationship or divorce, he’d chosen to go with the flow. Adapt. Hustle. Just like always. It was all about perceptions. Illusions. To outsiders, he lived a charmed existence with a stunning wife, regularly socializing with her best friend and TV partner, the stellar Darcy Jay.
The world would say that a guy didn’t get much luckier than that.
So, no, as the wet dream taking place on his bed proved, life wasn’t perfect. But as he told himself every day, it was pretty damn close.
All he had to do was keep it that way.
3
MIRREN MCLEAN
‘Make You Feel My Love’ – Adele
Malibu, Los Angeles, 2013
* * *
The slam of Mirren’s glass on the marble worktop made the assembled group of PR managers and lawyers blink.
‘I was under the misapprehension that keeping my daughter out of trouble and out of jail was what I paid you for.’ Her voice had dropped in tone to somewhere between serious and deadly, masking the inherent weariness that seeped through every fibre of her being. For a fleeting moment she wished that Jack were here, someone to have her back and share the worry, but that was just the exhaustion talking. He’d be on location in Istanbul for two more weeks, shooting a spy thriller with Mercedes Dance and Charles Power, the hottest on-screen couple in Hollywood. Besides, after nineteen years of blissful marriage to Jack Gore, much of it spent separated by the demands of their careers, she could handle this. Didn’t she always?
Chloe Gore, eighteen year old wild child, Hollywood brat, Californian beauty, her daughter, the one who shunned growth and development for repeating the mistakes of many yesterdays. Not even legally old enough to drink alcohol, yet despite Mirren’s desperate interventions, her daughter still managed to fill her days and nights with drinks, drugs and trouble.
That’s why Mirren knew that this meeting and the next few hours of activity were only delaying the inevitable. She was depressingly aware that later that day she’d sit in this kitchen again, in the home these people had contaminated time after time, and the questions would start swirling around her mind.
How had she let this happen? Where had she gone wrong? Was it something she’d done? A mistake she’d made? Had she not loved Chloe enough? Did her devotion to Jack somehow shut out her kids? Was she such a terrible mother? How could one child turn out so happy and another so damaged?
It happened so often it was becoming just another normal day, one that invariably started with the same 7 a.m. call.
‘Honey, she’s locked up again. Beverly Hills. DUI. Resisting arrest.’ Mirren’s best friend, Lou Cole, editor of the Hollywood Post, a beautiful black woman who – when it came to all things celebrity – had the encyclopaedic intelligence of Einstein.
A doyenne of the gossip columns, the twenty-five-year veteran of the LA press circuit had connections in every club, hotel concierge and gutter of the city. She’d been the second person Mirren had called when she’d heard Chloe’s car roaring down the driveway after she sneaked out at 3 a.m. The first had been Mirren’s security team, but they’d been too slow to catch her and Chloe had perfected a dozen ways to elude them over the years.
‘I’m sorry, hon,’ Lou said, sadly.
Mirren knew the sympathy was sincere. The two women had been friends for two decades, and right from the start their relationship had been a sisterhood. She’d been the first and only choice to be both Chloe and Logan’s godmother and she loved them both. Sometimes Mirren thought Chloe’s bond with Lou was closer than the mother-daughter ties that had been shredded by years of disappointment and defiance.
Two hours later, the depressingly regular war cabinet was in session in her kitchen, the anxieties of the publicists and lawyers clear in every nuance of their speech and actions. Chloe Gore had made them all plenty over the years. A dozen arrests, a couple of short-term sentences and more incidents requiring damage limitation than any of them could count.
Strategy agreed, they made their way to the courtroom for a 10 a.m. appearance. Mirren thought she caught a look of empathy as Judge Leighton Hamilton took his seat, and had a vague recollection of reading about a sting involving his teenage son, a tabloid magazine and a large bag of Colombian snow.
