I Heart Hollywood

  What I couldn’t believe was how crap I felt. I couldn’t decide if it was hot-even-for-LA-heat, the chaotic cab ride over, or my quickly building fear of meeting James Jacobs, jetlagged, drunk and made up in a taxi, that was making me feel sick to my stomach. I paused for a second and dialled Alex one last time. Just talking to him for a minute, a second, would be enough, then I could go in and do whatever it was the magazine were expecting me to do. But he still wasn’t answering. As always in life, when my girlfriends were busy in the bar and I couldn’t rely on a boy, I turned to my two constants, my handbag and lip gloss. A quick slick of Mac lip gloss and I was as ready as I’d ever be.

  One quick knock and the door opened.

  ‘Hi, I’m…’ I looked up with my biggest brightest smile and lost the ability to speak. James Jacobs opened the door.

  ‘Angela Clark?’ he finished for me with a smile that put mine in the shade. ‘Hi, I’m James.’

  ‘I…I…’ I reached out, grabbing something hard, spinning away from the door and puking into some very pretty bushes just before everything went very, very dark.

  Waking up in a strange place to the sound of a strange man laughing was not something I was incredibly experienced at, and so, when I opened my eyes in a bedroom that was most definitely not my own, wearing something that was not my dress, I panicked slightly. In that I rolled off the bed, cracked my elbow on the bedside table and screamed. Before I could locate an open window and make an escape, a shadowy figure appeared in the doorway. Oh, I had seen Misery, I knew what was happening.

  ‘Hello? Can I help you?’ Since there was no time to escape from the scary stranger holding a blunt weapon and blocking my escape, why not be polite? My mother would be very proud.

  ‘Doubtful, at least not before you put your dress back on,’ A deep BBC British accent came out of the dark and then the curtains opened. From my vantage point on the floor, I could see a very tall, very handsome man holding out my beautiful new green dress and a huge glass of water. Ha, like I was about to drink his drug-laden cocktail. Unless it wasn’t a drug-laden cocktail and the very handsome man holding my dress was in fact James Jacobs. Oh, balls.

  ‘James…Jacobs?’ I pulled the hem of the T-shirt I found myself in down over my knees.

  ‘Angela Clark?’ He set down the glass and held out a hand to pull me up. ‘I hope you’re feeling better.’

  ‘Oh, erm, yes.’ This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. The six-foot-something Greek God standing in front of me holding out a freshly pressed dress with a gorgeously lopsided grin couldn’t possibly be James Jacobs. ‘I am so sorry. I just don’t know what happened.’

  ‘Food poisoning, I’m sure,’ he said smoothly, laying the dress out on the bed. ‘There’s a shower just through there and I had this cleaned so it’s puke free. When you’re done, I’ll be in the living room.’

  ‘Thank you?’ There was such a serious chance I was still dreaming that I just decided to go with it. ‘Was I sick on your shoes?’

  ‘Little bit,’ he said, luckily still smiling. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got more shoes knocking around here than a Footlocker. I’ll live.’

  A quick shower, a long session with my Touche Eclat and I was dressed, ready to face my fate. Mary was going to go insane. It was one thing for me to blow the biggest chance of my career but, mid-shower, I realized it wasn’t just me: I’d blown the magazine’s shot at a major interview. They’d told me numerous times in the last week that James Jacobs hardly ever did press and I had just thrown up on his shoes, passed out in his hotel room and, oh my God, had he undressed me? This humungous Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt certainly wasn’t what I’d arrived in. I wasn’t sure if that was supposed to go in the ticks or crosses column.

  ‘Hi.’ He stood as I sloped into the living room, all six gorgeous feet and four beautiful inches of him, clutching loose pages of something in his tanned hands.

  ‘Hi.’ I didn’t know where to look.

  Seriously, my Alex was so incredibly sexy, just the thought of him made my stomach curl up and purr, but this giant chunk of man was something else. His curly dark brown hair was longer than it had been in any of the photos I’d seen online and his blue eyes were so dark they were almost black. Even in a slightly scuzzy T-shirt, I could see broad shoulders tapering into a slender waist and, oh my, his great big thighs were just itching to get out of those jeans and into a hot tub. With me. And a bottle of baby oil.

  Bad Angela: time to be professional. Plus, even if I was interested, I had a feeling that James Jacobs didn’t go for girls that introduced themselves by vomming on his shoes. Perhaps I could give ‘friends’ a go.

  ‘You’re feeling better? I can give my assistant a ring and ask him to get us some coffee or something if you want,’ he said, gesturing for me to take a seat on the sofa. ‘I thought you were out for the count, to be honest.’

  ‘How long was I passed—asleep?’ I asked, looking around the bungalow. Anything to avoid looking directly at The Hottest Man Ever. It was all very cool, very LA Confidential, the total opposite of The Ivy.

  ‘Couple of hours. I didn’t know if there was someone I should call or anything, so I thought it was better to just let you sleep it off.’ James folded himself back into the easy chair as I took the sofa. His legs were so long. Long enough to wrap themselves around a girl with a good shin to spare. Hypothetically speaking.

  ‘The only thing is, I’m actually going to have to get off quite soon—I’ve got a meeting with a director this evening.’

  Fantastic. I had actually blown it. How lovely of him to give me a couple of seconds to check him out before dropping the bomb. ‘Oh, of course. I’m really sorry about, well, everything. It has been great to meet you. I’ll let the magazine know what happened. Sorry.’

  ‘Really? I can’t imagine they’d find it as funny as I did, to be honest. Wouldn’t you rather just crack on tomorrow and pretend this never happened?’ James put down the pages of the script he was holding and held out his hand. ‘I love your writing. Really bloody funny. Can’t wait to see how the interview is going to work out.’

  Which was when I realized it wasn’t a script that he’d been holding, they were printouts of my blog. Pages and pages from ‘The Adventures of Angela’, photocopies of articles I’d written for the US and UK editions of the The Look scattered all over the coffee table. Wow. Beautiful and prepared.

  ‘Thank you, but well, it’s difficult to take a compliment when you’ve just been sick on someone’s shoes,’ I said, eyes firmly on his bare feet. He even had sexy feet. Eyes on the carpet. ‘So you still want to do the interview?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ the voice attached to the beautiful man replied. ‘Stop stressing about it. It’ll be a great story to tell the grandkids.’

  I snorted a tiny bit of water through my nose. ‘Won’t it?’ I managed eventually. ‘Anyway, if you have a meeting, I should let you get on. What time do you want to start tomorrow?’

  ‘Ten?’ He stood up again to get the door. ‘I’ll get Blake to send a car for you. Where are you staying?’

  ‘I’m at The Hollywood,’ I said, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. ‘Uh, my friend works at The Union in New York, so we’re staying there.’

  ‘I love The Union. I haven’t stayed there yet but I, uh, visited a friend when she was staying there last year.’ James pulled out the big guns, a little shy smile with the big blue eyes peering out from behind his hair. ‘I’ll have to come and see you at The Hollywood. See if it’s as swish.’

  ‘Swish,’ I echoed. Then I actually giggled. ‘So tomorrow at ten.’

  ‘Tomorrow at ten.’ He kissed me on the cheek as I stumbled backwards out through the door. ‘Bye then.’

  As the door closed, my sanity began to trickle back. I needed a cab. I needed to call Jenny. I needed to call Alex. God, that man was good looking.

  As the cab travelled along Hollywood Boulevard, taking me further away from James Jacobs geographically,
the further away I felt from reality. Surely none of that had just happened. The only thing that was certain was that Jenny did not appreciate my turning in early again.

  ‘This is the second night in a row you’ve ditched me, Angie,’ she yelled over the row of the bar. ‘Seriously, come on. You’ve already thrown up, you may as well get back on it.’

  ‘Jenny, I really wish I could,’ I lied through my back teeth. All I wanted was my bed. ‘I have to meet James tomorrow morning and I just need to call Alex and get some sleep.’

  ‘Call Alex?’

  Apparently that was the wrong thing to say.

  ‘You’re going to go back to the hotel and call Alex instead of coming to meet me?’ Jenny wasn’t amused. ‘You get your ass out here and tell me every single thing that happened with James Jacobs.’

  ‘She’s blowing you out for a guy?’ I heard Daphne crow over her shoulder. ‘What an asshole.’

  ‘No, I…Jenny, I just need to sleep,’ I sighed. ‘Seriously. We’ll go out tomorrow.’

  ‘Yeah, whatever,’ she hiccuped. ‘Until you decide you have to stay in and wait around for a boy to call. Just don’t bother calling me in the day when Mr Movie Star stands you up again. I have plans.’

  ‘Doing what?’ I asked but she’d already hung up. Jenny was so much fun when she was drunk and grumpy. Why did I have a feeling Daphne was not going to be a good influence?

  Back at the hotel, I stripped off my new dress and pulled on the ancient Blondie T-shirt I had ‘borrowed’ from Alex before I left. It must have been washed a thousand times but it still smelt of Alex’s apartment, of home. I dialled his number again.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Alex? It’s me.’ I had never been so happy to hear his voice.

  ‘I tried to call you earlier.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry.’ OK, so we weren’t starting with ‘I love you, I miss you, I’m going mad without you’. ‘It’s been such a ridiculous day.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve been busy too. We were in the studio until—like—three this morning,’ Alex replied through a yawn. ‘Shouldn’t you be interviewing your movie star?’

  ‘That all got off to a bit of a dodgy start but it’ll be all right, I think. James is really, really nice,’ I said, smiling at the thought of Alex with his black hair all ruffled on the pillow, my head resting against his chest as he fell asleep, his fingers curled around my wrist. ‘You sound sleepy. Are you OK?’

  ‘I guess I was asleep,’ he yawned again. ‘And just how nice is this James? Should I be worried?’

  ‘No,’ I slipped into bed and set my alarm for eight a.m. ‘I think you’ll be OK. Especially since I…’

  ‘Since you?’

  ‘Since I just babbled like an idiot. I’m sure he thinks I’m the worst interviewer he’s ever met.’ I decided not to share the shoe puking until I got back to New York. It felt more like an ‘in-person’ story. ‘You should go back to bed. I don’t want to be the reason the world has to go without a new Stills album this year.’

  ‘You’re the reason there’s going to be another album at all,’ Alex said softly. I curled up against the pillows and smiled. No six-foot sex god could compete with that. ‘So, about that phone sex we talked about?’

  I was sure what he really meant to say was ‘I love you and I can’t live with you.’ But he didn’t.

  ‘Goodnight, Alex. Get some sleep.’

  ‘What are you wearing?’

  ‘Goodnight, Alex.’ I hung up and flicked off the lights.

  Boys.

  Chapter Five

  When James had said he’d send a car, I really wasn’t expecting a limo. And I really wasn’t expecting him to be inside it. Thankfully, I’d managed to prise myself out of bed at a reasonable hour and was fully prepped. Well, made-up and blow-dried. I had tried to come as far away from yesterday’s vomit incident as possible in a cute inky blue Ella Moss jersey dress, evidence of my credit card abuse in Bloomingdale’s. Nothing pukey about this little number. I just couldn’t bend over at all. Fingers crossed the superstar could be distracted enough by legs so as not to notice my lack of stellar interviewing skills…

  ‘Good morning, Miss Clark,’ James utched across the back seat of the limo, as though there wasn’t enough room in there. Or possibly because he was confused by my size 12 backside. Given most of the girls I’d seen at Chateau Marmont would struggle to tip the scales at 100 pounds, I could understand why he’d be concerned about my girth. ‘You’re looking very refreshed.’

  I took that as code for ‘not about to vomit’.

  ‘Well, thank you very much, Mr Jacobs,’ I replied with a winning smile. For God’s sake, I’d already puked in front of the man, where was the point in being star-struck?

  ‘Let me introduce my assistant, Blake.’ James gestured towards a very stressed-looking, but very cute blond sitting in the opposite corner of the limo. For shame, I hadn’t even noticed him; I was way too busy checking out James’s huge thighs in his teeny tiny workout shorts. For my interview, of course. ‘We were just running in the hills. Well, I was, Blake was reading Perez Hilton on his BlackBerry.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Blake held out his hand. ‘Sorry I missed you yesterday?’

  ‘Oh, really, don’t be. The fewer people involved in yesterday, the better,’ I said, shaking his hand and my head politely. Blake was actually very good looking, exactly how I would describe a Californian All-American Boy: rumpled blond hair, incredibly tanned and athletic looking in his workout gear. If it weren’t for the fact that he was seriously setting off my gadar, I would have been absolutely warming him up for one Miss Jenny Lopez.

  Well, if one Miss Jenny Lopez had actually made it home the night before. A quick peek in her room on the way down to meet James presented a still-made-up-from-the-morning-before bed. I looked down into my (suffering slightly from being on the floor of the toilets in The Ivy) Marc Jacobs handbag to see if she’d replied to my text. Nothing yet.

  ‘Yeah, anyway, I’m basically here to make sure you stick to the approved topics and if at any time I say stop, we stop and the interview is over, OK?’ Blake barked. ‘You did get the list of approved topics?’

  Approved topics…I tried not to pull the ‘was that one of the pieces of paper Cici gave me and I’ve left in the hotel?’ face.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  Absolutely certain it was one of the pieces of paper Cici gave me that I’d left in the hotel.

  ‘Fantastic,’ Blake continued, as though James wasn’t even in the car. I was trying to pay attention but how can anyone listen to instructions when James Jacobs is sitting just a couple of feet away and pulling a very cute ‘aren’t all these rules so silly?’ face. Concentrate. Concentrate. ‘The idea of the interview is for you to introduce your readers to “the real James Jacobs”. So really we want you to focus on his movies, his hobbies, his ambitions for the future. And you know what we don’t want to focus on.’

  ‘He’s talking about the sex, drugs and rock and roll,’ James whispered theatrically. Cue my first ridiculously loud and faintly hysterical cackle of the day.

  ‘Hilarious, James, just hilarious.’ Blake raised a well-groomed eyebrow. ‘Let’s make jokes in front of the reporter. Don’t write that down.’

  ‘Oh, really, I’m not…’ I paused, took a deep breath and started again. ‘I’m here to work with you, not to try and trip you up or anything.’ Wow. How professional did I sound?

  ‘We know, Angela,’ James reached over and took my hand. Be still my thumping, thudding heart. ‘Blake is just a little bit over-cautious. Some reporters are just out for as scandalous a story as they can get. I’m just worried that you’ll be a little bit let down—if only my life was exciting as it looks in the papers.’

  Blake smiled tensely at me and nodded to James. Hmm. It hadn’t actually occurred to me that this might be hard work. How much media training had this man had? If James wasn’t going to give me anything, then what was I going to write about?

  ‘I’m su
re it’ll be great,’ I said, pulling my all-new superstar interviewing pad, pen and Dictaphone out of my bag. ‘So, what is the plan for today?’

  ‘Terribly exciting.’ James stretched over to the mini-fridge (limos are awesome) and passed me a bottle of water before tossing one at Blake and opening a third for himself. ‘I have rehearsals at the studio this morning. I thought you might want to come and see the set, meet the rest of the cast?’

  ‘Sounds fun,’ I said casually. I was going on set! I was meeting the cast!

  ‘And then I thought maybe we’d get some lunch. I could show you some of my favourite Hollywood hang-outs.’

  ‘That would be great,’ My head heard Hollywood hang-outs but my stomach only heard lunch. I’d spent so long sorting myself out that breakfast had been completely forgotten, and since everything I’d eaten yesterday had ended up in the bushes outside James’s bungalow, I was starving. I would have given my right arm for a Jaffa Cake. ‘Really keen to see your favourite bits of town. I have to say, I’m not loving LA yet.’

  ‘You’re not?’ James looked surprised but ignored Blake’s loud tutting. ‘Haven’t been completely seduced by the sunshine? Most Brits love it out here.’

  ‘The sunshine’s great,’ I agreed, ‘but I think my expat loyalties are already spoken for. I live in New York.’ I did so enjoy saying that.

  ‘I like New York too, but LA is just fantastic,’ he insisted. ‘Where have you been so far?’