The Starlet Read online

  Praise for Mary McNamara and

  Oscar Season

  “Glitz, gossip, and suspense . . . cheeky, engaging . . . It’s the perfect type of read for a nonstop flight between LAX and JFK and it’s smarter and better crafted by leagues than any Jackie Collins paperback . . . you can’t help but enjoy McNamara’s pithy dialogue, fast pacing and trenchant observations . . .”

  —Samantha Dunn, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Eminently worth reading . . . a witty, well-observed piece of social satire.”

  —Daily Telegraph, UK

  “[McNamara] paints a disturbingly accurate picture of life, love and publicity during the industry’s most electric awards season.”

  —Christina Kinon, Daily News (New York)

  “In the category of ‘deliciously fun reads,’ Mary McNamara definitely gets a Best Newcomer little gold guy.”

  —Joy Tipping, The Dallas Morning News

  “A scandalous look behind the velvet rope.”

  —Martin Zimmerman, The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Agatha Christie meets Hollywood Squares in journalist McNamara’s glitzy debut . . . McNamara’s self-assured, tabloid-fueled narrative—simultaneously sexy, scandalous and suspenseful—will appeal to fans of authors like Jackie Collins and Harold Robbins. McNamara insightfully portrays life on the other side of the velvet rope . . .”

  —Publishers Weekly

  ALSO BY MARY MCNAMARA

  Oscar Season

  the Starlet

  a novel

  Mary McNamara

  Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Mary McNamara

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or

  portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address

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  Designed by Meredith Ray

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McNamara, Mary.

  The starlet : a novel / Mary McNamara.

  p. cm.

  1. Motion picture actors and actresses—Fiction. 2. Motion picture locations—

  Fiction. 3. Murder—Fiction. 4. Tuscany (Italy)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.C5859S73 2010

  813'.6—dc22

  2009051616

  ISBN 978-1-4391-4984-3

  ISBN 978-1-4391-5808-1 (ebook)

  For Danny, Fiona, and Darby,

  my very own models of excellence,

  with much love and admiration

  the Starlet

  THE STATUE AT THE center of the fountain was much higher off the ground than it looked. It was also slipperier, with far fewer footholds than a person might be led to believe. At first glance, the mottled bronze tangle of knees, hands, hips, and tails—there were a couple of mermaids involved—seemed to promise an easy climbing experience. Halfway up, however, she began to question the motivation and wisdom of her decision, not to mention the depth of the water. What was she doing here anyway? She couldn’t remember, but there had to have been a reason. A good reason. There always was. Well, usually. Most of the time.

  The girl pulled herself up another twelve inches, and became temporarily distracted by her knee, which appeared to be impaled on a trident. The pain cleared her head for a few seconds and her breath came fast and labored. She just needed to get to the top. That was it. She was climbing so she could get to the top. Simple. If she got to the top, she could really see things—clearly, for once—and then it might turn out that the past week hadn’t happened at all. Lloyd was not dead. How could he be dead? Here she was in the middle of a beautiful Italian city climbing a fountain. That was not something you did if your lover had just died.

  There, she knew there had been a reason. She would just get to the top of King Triton here and wait until enough time had passed to erase the time that had gone before, and then she would dive and obliterate its vision of Lloyd on his knees, the cord around his neck. It would be a baptism of sorts, a symbol of a life begun again. Water always meant rebirth. Characters submerged, touched death, then reemerged with a new understanding of reality. Who had told her that? Someone. People were always telling her things. Explaining why she was doing what she was doing until she wanted to scream. So why was no one here helping her get off this fucking fountain?

  Whisked numb by cocaine, her nose was icy cold even under the warm April sun and seemed to provide a wide-open passage from the sky directly to her brain. For a moment everything seemed sharper, yet somehow more distant, a world in which the cinematography was perfect but the sound guy had dozed off. For a while, the drugs and alcohol had worked in perfect harmony, had carried her down the street—several streets actually—and lifted her up this far. But now the euphoria was shredding like wet tissue paper, leaving her exposed and ridiculous. She was ridiculous. She was ridiculous, and probably bleeding. She needed another bump, another pill, another drink. She needed it all to stop. It was something she had chanted to herself every hour of every day, especially since Lloyd had died and left her alone. Please make it stop. Maybe if she got to the top of this god-awful, slippery mess of a fountain everyone would just leave her the hell alone. Maybe when she hit the water she could make things change.

  Because there they all were, below her, swarming the fountain, filling the street like a zombie plague—the cameras, all those cameras, the thousand-eyed beast that followed her wherever she went. She smiled down at it because that was what you did with the beast, you smiled at it, stroked it, kept it calm with sounds of affection, with little sugar-plum kisses, but really she was scanning the horizon for someone to tell her what to do next.

  Because this climb was not working out; her foot was slipping, her hands were frozen, and the festive clarifying force of the cocaine was surrendering to the alcohol, which lifted her up and over as if she were on a Ferris wheel. In just a few minutes she would probably black out, and who knew what would happen then.

  That could not have been the plan; blackouts were never part of the plan. Below, people were calling her name, telling her to dive, smiling and laughing and telling her to dive. Was that why she was here? She looked around at all the faces, trying to find Lloyd. Maybe he could tell her; he understood a lot more than she did about how things really worked. But Lloyd was dead, naked and dead, which made no sense at all, and around her she saw only what she always saw—cameras and strange faces calling her name. For a minute she thought she heard a voice she knew. Far away, on the other side of the beast, a woman stood up and said something, some
thing that made her look angry and worried. It was a look the girl knew very well, had seen on many faces all her life. She gave the woman an apologetic glance and did what she always did—she followed direction.

  Chapter One

  MERCY TALBOT HAD BEEN famous since she was eleven years old. Her mother had certainly made every effort to have it happen sooner. As the story went, Mercy had announced at age four that she wanted to be an actress, had clamored for auditions the way other girls demanded Barbies and kittens. That was back when the Talbots were still the Groplers and Mercy was Tiffany Dawn. The name change came with the move from Michigan to Los Angeles—Angie, Mercy’s mother, took the family’s new surname from her then-favorite store; “Mercy” came from all the hours Angie spent on her knees, offering prayers for her daughter’s success. “Have mercy,” she would murmur, lighting candles in front of various saints, “have mercy.” It seemed a natural enough transition. It would become one of Angie’s favorite stories to tell during interviews; she called it “fate” and never explained why her daughter required mercy in the first place.

  Angie was a dance instructor who had spent two years with the Joffrey before being sidelined with a knee injury. Or so she said. In Los Angeles, she enrolled Mercy in one of the hundreds of children’s acting classes designed to fan the hopes of parents in exchange for regular payment by cash or credit card. Still, there was something undeniable about Mercy, even in those ridiculous classes, even at age seven. A directness in her gaze, a natural huskiness in her voice. She had hazel eyes so light they were almost golden and an ability to transform in front of an audience that impressed even the highest rung casting agents. It also scared them to death. At seven, eight, nine, Mercy Talbot was clearly a natural-born actress, capable of playing a pint-sized Blanche DuBois should the need arise. Unfortunately, that was not what anyone was looking for. Cute, perky, smart-ass, or wide-eyed were much more desirable. No one knew what to do with those golden eyes, that sharp, vixenish chin. None of the kid shows would touch her. Mercy could not even get a juice commercial because, her mother was told, her rasping contralto made her sound like she had a cold.

  But she never gave up, or if she did, Angie refused to notice. While Don Talbot (née Gropler) sold insurance, then real estate, then opened a specialty coffee franchise, Angie and her daughter never missed an audition, even when it was a cattle call. Good thing, too, as those later profiles always made clear. Because it was while standing in line at an outdoor mall in Woodland Hills, sizzling under a ruthless early May sun, that Mercy Talbot got her big break. Not from the producer who was holding the audition, looking for an unknown to play the best friend in the next American Girl movie, but from his college buddy, an indie director who had tailed along. He was hoping to find a girl to appear in his film—a small, stylish ghost story—and he certainly could not afford to hold an audition like this. Also there was free food. But after five hours of terrible readings and bland chicken curry salad, David Neilsen gave up and made his way toward his car. As he passed the endless line of sweat-glazed, fretful girls and their grim-faced, iced-latte-swilling mothers, he saw Mercy, straight and slim, looking like she had some sort of internal air-conditioning. From the top of her white-blond head to the patient arch of her sandaled foot, here was a girl who could do some serious face time with a ghost.

  Sweetly Sleeping became an indie phenomenon, selling out of Sundance for an unheard-of $10 million. It was the number one movie for the entire month of June and picked up countless awards, including three Oscars, one for Mercy as best supporting actress. When she gave her acceptance speech she was twelve years old. Angie stopped shopping the Talbots sales and began wearing Dolce & Gabbana, and Mercy never had to go on a blind audition again. There were small films and blockbusters; an urban-girl drama created just for her ran for three years and won her two Emmys. For a good three, maybe even four years she was perhaps the most beloved star in America. Cameras followed Mercy’s every move—birthday parties, trips to Hawaii with her family, the day she got her driver’s license. She was clear-eyed and charming in every interview, never turned down a request for an autograph or a picture. The only product she would endorse (outside those associated with her movies) was milk.

  Mercy was not afraid of becoming the next burnt-out starlet, she said, because she had a normal family life and an abiding faith in God. (The Talbots were staunch Catholics until Mercy’s publicist suggested that Catholic didn’t play so well these days among the gay community, who just loved Mercy. So they became staunch Episcopalians.) Mercy smiled for the cameras, she wore clothes that were appropriate for her age, she lived with her parents in South Pasadena so she could go to public school when her schedule allowed. And she was clearly very talented. After years of searching for the next big megastar, Hollywood had found the real deal.

  Things began to change when Mercy turned sixteen. Taller now but still slim as a switch, she suddenly seemed too old for children’s parts but too young for adult roles. Angie got her breast implants and convinced her to do a provocative shoot for Vanity Fair. The half-naked cover kept the media, and middle America, buzzing for weeks; when things finally calmed down, few people noticed that Mercy had quietly had her implants removed. Puberty, kept at bay by Mercy’s strenuous work schedule, had finally struck, and now Mercy could rely on her own breasts, and deny that she had ever had implants.

  But for better or worse, Angie’s ploy had worked. Mercy was officially an ingénue, and although she worked more than ever, the paparazzi, which had once been her friend, turned predatory. The same hormones that granted her curves also gave her thighs, and Mercy’s weight became the subject of public conversation. At seventeen, she took up smoking to control her appetite and combat the between-takes boredom; images of her lighting up filled the Internet as everyone from Perez Hilton to the American Lung Association denounced her as a “poor role model.” Her parents divorced. When Angie claimed poverty, Mercy paid her father a multimillion-dollar settlement that included a privacy clause. He promptly married one of Mercy’s tutors, who just as promptly gave birth to a baby girl. Mercy severed all ties.

  She and her mother moved into the family’s Malibu beach house, where there were plenty of places for the paparazzi to hide. Soon every cigarette, every embrace, every ill-timed hitch of her skirt was instantly posted everywhere. Magazines paid bartenders for the dregs of Mercy’s drinks, then reported that Mercy, still underage, had a fondness for Jack Daniel’s. She began hooking up with other young stars, since the attention made it impossible to date, or even befriend, anyone else, and followed the time-worn pattern of breakups and occasional scandal. There was a hateful video on YouTube of one ex deriding her sexual talents. There were rumors of an abortion, of feuds with other young stars. There was a DUI, then another, there was an accident on Wilshire in which her mother was injured—she claimed Mercy had been driving erratically because she was fleeing paparazzi. Mercy lost her Malibu house to a fire, which many of the celebrity websites suggested she started herself, either for the insurance or after passing out with a cigarette. The websites chronicled her on an almost daily basis; her name entered the ranks of Britney, Paris, and Lindsay, though film critics and the mainstream press still liked to point out that her talent put her more on par with Bette, Joan, and Spence.

  Despite all the bad press, Mercy never stopped working, because she could still open a movie. Whether because of a true love of the profession or the tyranny of Angie, Mercy Talbot always delivered a performance worth remembering. If anything, the tension between her personal and professional life made her an even bigger box office draw. People came to her movies wondering if this would be the one in which the bad behavior finally caught up with her. They inevitably left in a state of baffled and exhilarated admiration when it was not. There were Golden Globe wins, multiple Oscar nominations, Team Mercy T-shirts. Every film left the public more besotted than before, and every fall in between seemed to take her closer to the brink.

  Mercy Talbo
t is twenty-three years old. She has been famous since she was eleven.

  She never stood a chance.

  So thought Juliette Greyson as she sat stirring her cappuccino in a small café in Florence. She was trying to decide if she really needed to interrupt a very pleasant afternoon of shopping to save the young woman drunkenly climbing the statue of Neptune and his daughters from the middle of a wide but not terribly deep fountain on the Piazza Cordova. She was not at all certain. As the head of public relations for the Pinnacle Hotel in Los Angeles, Juliette knew more about the inner workings of movie stars than she ever thought she would, or wanted to. She spent her days, and nights, anticipating their needs, analyzing their motives, and minimizing their crises in a way that had made the Pinnacle Hotel the Industry hotel in town. At the Pinnacle, no desire was too great, no whim too petty; the staff was there not to judge but to serve. If Juliette had been home, this particular situation would have been a no-brainer—not a single paparazzo had ever so much as taken a snap inside the Pinnacle. If she were at home, she would be summoning whatever security staff was available, pushing her way through the crowds right now, climbing up after Mercy, and carrying her to safety if necessary.

  But she was on vacation. A long and lovely and much-deserved vacation from the Pinnacle, from Los Angeles, from her life. Juliette was in Italy to figure out What To Do Next. And that did not involve rescuing troubled young starlets, not even the ones she liked. A few moments ago, when Juliette heard the metallic insectlike clatter of photographers on the move, she thought she must be hallucinating. Surrounded by slender high-shouldered buildings of russet and rose, silver-gray and cream, she had felt utterly unmoored in time, deep in a fortress of fairy-tale beauty cradled by ancient streets, each lined with flower-fringed storefronts and front stoops dappled with sun. Over her shoulder loomed a slice of the rose-colored Duomo, as if to remind the city’s citizens of their higher aspirations. There were no limos, no Hummers, no celebrity and his entourage, no television cameras, no twentysomething publicists in pointy shoes. Instead, as if conjured from a dream, a trio of nuns, in full habit and wimples, turned one corner, skimmed along the outskirts of the piazza like large lost seabirds, then disappeared through a stone-arched alley.