How to Sleep with a Movie Star

  “Your case will be even easier,” Dean said, his eyes gleaming. “In general, private individuals such as yourself must show only that the defendant was negligent in order to prove libel. Ms. DeSimon was not only negligent, but she obviously acted with malice and complete disregard for the truth. There isn’t an attorney in the world who could successfully defend against a case like this. If you’ll excuse the expression, Ms. Reilly, you’ve got both Ms. DeSimon and Mod magazine by the balls.”

  Dean looked up at me and smiled, his bleached teeth sparkling in the fluorescence of his office.

  “You’re going to be a very rich woman,” he said.

  As I left Dean Ryan’s office, I felt a bit better—but not as much as I had expected to. While I felt I was doing something, it didn’t help me out that much. I didn’t care much about the money. I’d already lost my job and my reputation. No amount of cash would bring that back. But I supposed that a successful lawsuit would probably mean the end of Sidra’s career too—and that, at least, gave me a bit of satisfaction.

  *

  In the next few weeks, I tried to forget Cole Brannon. I really did. It seemed like I would have enough on my mind that there wouldn’t be room to worry about him, but of course that wasn’t true. The fact that my entire life had seemed to crumble before my eyes did little to assuage the guilt I felt about embarrassing Cole.

  Wendy got a job as an assistant chef at a new upscale restaurant called Swank that was opening in the East Village, and I knew she was thrilled.

  “I don’t miss working in magazines at all,” she told me after her first week. “I can’t believe I stuck it out there as long as I did.”

  “I thought you liked the job,” I said.

  “I did,” she said. “But I didn’t love it. This, I love.”

  I had less luck as I hit the job trail, which was starting to worry me. I had enough money to cover August’s rent, and having Wendy as a roommate certainly lessened the financial burden, but I wouldn’t be able to pay September’s rent if I didn’t find something soon.

  I spent hours each day perusing the job listings on mediabistro.com, scanning the classified ads in the New York Times, and calling the major publishers, asking about openings. I sent out several résumés every day and followed up with phone calls.

  Everywhere I turned, everyone seemed to know who I was. Did anyone not read Mod? The answer was always embarrassingly the same.

  “We prefer to hire people with better reputations,” I would sometimes hear. Or, “The name Claire Reilly might carry a connotation we don’t want our magazine to have.” And those were the people who bothered to explain. I had a few people hang up when I called and gave my name. A few simply laughed me off the phone. One human resources director actually did return my call—but only to ask for the real lowdown about how Cole Brannon was in bed. I was humiliated.

  Then the editor in chief of Chic, the newest entry into the crowded women’s magazine field, called and asked me to come by her office the next day. I arrived ten minutes early and was shown in thirty minutes late.

  “So you’re Claire Reilly,” announced Maude Beauvais as her assistant shut the door behind me. She was in her late fifties and looked like she should have been wearing a housecoat and slippers rather than the tailored suit (two sizes too small) she was squeezed into. Her hair was bleached an unnatural shade of blond, and her makeup was caked on so thick that I wondered how she could move her face beneath it. She wasn’t at all what I’d expected as the figurehead of a trendy new magazine. But she said she might have an opportunity for me, so I was determined to listen with an open mind.

  “Nice to meet you, Ms. Beauvais,” I said, stepping forward and shaking her hand.

  “And you,” she said with a nod. She gestured for me to sit down, and she did the same. “Call me Maude.” I nodded, waiting for her to begin.

  “Because you’ve had several years of experience covering celebrity events, I thought we’d give you a try here at Chic,” Maude said as soon as we were both sitting down. “That is, if you’re interested.”

  “Yes, yes, of course I am,” I said. I probably sounded too eager. But I couldn’t help it. I was. Impending poverty will do that to you.

  “I understand you’re having difficulty getting hired elsewhere,” she said bluntly.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I admitted. Great. The whole journalism world knew I was a loser.

  “That’s why I’m hoping you’ll be open to my offer. I don’t have the budget to hire another staffer right now, but I need someone experienced who can cover celebrity events. You know, press conferences here and there, charity events, things like the Grammys and the MTV Movie Awards.”

  I gulped back my disappointment and nodded.

  “I’d like to hire you as a stringer, to do just that,” she said. “We’ll pay you twenty-five dollars an hour, and I can promise you at least ten hours of work per week. Most weeks, it will be closer to fifteen or twenty hours.”

  “Okay,” I said timidly. I’d never been a stringer. I’d always had a salaried job, and I knew from dealing with the freelancers I’d overseen at Mod that the life of a stringer was often difficult and the pay was spotty. But spotty pay was better than no pay. “I’ll do it,” I said. It wouldn’t be work that I loved. I liked to write insightful pieces about public figures, not silly red-carpet fluff.

  But a job was a job. And I needed one.

  “Fantastic,” Maude said. Then she leaned forward. “We need to have a little discussion before we sign anything, though.”

  “Um, okay.”

  “I don’t know what things were like at Mod,” she began. “And of course, Chic looks at Mod as a big sister in the business, a magazine that sets a lot of standards for us. But the thing is, we actually do have our own set of standards here at Chic, and those standards don’t include sleeping with celebrities.”

  I reddened. I’d heard the words often enough not to be surprised, but I couldn’t help feeling disappointed.

  “I didn’t sleep with Cole Brannon,” I mumbled. “That’s why I quit Mod. It was something they made up.” Maude smiled pityingly at me. I knew she didn’t believe me.

  “Yes,” she said dismissively, waving her hand in the air. “In any case, that won’t be acceptable behavior here at Chic. I assume you’ll understand this.”

  “Yes, yes of course,” I mumbled.

  “Fine, then,” she said. “I’ve already alerted human resources that you’ll be coming up. They’re on the thirtieth floor. Just take the elevator up and ask for Lauren Elkin. She’ll walk you through all the paperwork. Give me a call tomorrow morning, and we’ll talk about your first assignment.”

  We shook hands, and I left Maude Beauvais’s office feeling shamed. The Cole Brannon story was going to follow me everywhere and haunt me for the rest of my life. I was no longer Claire Reilly, celebrity writer. I was Claire Reilly, the girl who shagged a movie star.

  *

  After two weeks at Chic, I absolutely hated it. I didn’t have a choice, though. I continued to send out my résumé, and I continued to get rejected. Twenty-five dollars an hour from Maude Beauvais was the best I could do.

  I was sent out a few nights a week to wait patiently behind the ropes at the opening of a new restaurant, a Broadway play that Anthony Hopkins was supposed to be attending that night, a charity concert for homeless kids in Indonesia at which Angelina Jolie was supposed to make an appearance. Night after night, I shot ridiculous Chic questions at B-list stars I hardly recognized. I asked former members of boy bands whether they preferred boxers or briefs. (It was boxers, hands down.) I asked aging actors whom I recognized vaguely from the ’80s about the most romantic thing they’d ever done for someone. (“I let my girlfriend lick chocolate off my naked body,” was one particularly repulsive answer.) I asked soap actresses what their favorite books were and why. (One even responded, “I read a book once . . .” before her voice trailed off and she wandered away with a dreamy expression on her face.) r />
  I discovered completely useless information, like that Debbie Gibson could hula hoop for hours, or that Chris Kirkpatrick from *NSYNC was terrified of heights, or that Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath loved to juggle, or that Susan Lucci looked like she’d break in half if she was hit by a strong gust of wind.

  Not exactly life-changing, earth-shattering, hard-hitting news.

  I felt completely debased professionally, but at least I was getting paid. Most weeks, I worked fifteen to twenty hours, so while the paychecks that rolled in weren’t excessive, they were enough to scrape by on while I decided what to do with my life.

  The whole experience with Cole Brannon and Mod had changed everything. I loved to write, but I knew I could no longer work in a world ruled by flaky celebrity gossip as unreliable as the shallow sources who reported it. Sure, I’d always prided myself on my open, honest, ungossipy profiles of people our readers were interested in. But in the end, I was just a part of the same feeding frenzy, the same cult of celebrity worship, that had driven my own life and career into the ground. As my days with Chic dragged on from ridiculous celebrity interview to ridiculous celebrity interview, the truth became more and more clear. This wasn’t my world. It never had been.

  It was a strange feeling to wake up at age twenty-six and realize that the career I’d been working on night and day, using all my time and energy for the last four years, wasn’t the one for me. That the career I’d dreamed of since I was a little girl was no more than an illusion. I had somehow talked myself into believing that I was above the whole celebrity gossip scene, even that I helped counteract it by providing a real glimpse into the lives of the oft-gossiped-about A-listers whose careers millions of us followed. But it wasn’t true. I was just perpetuating the cycle. I felt an immense sense of sadness, loss, and shame. It was like the last four years of my life meant nothing.

  And suddenly, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. In one fell swoop, the life I had thought I knew—great boyfriend, great job, great sense of self-worth—had vanished. And to make it even worse, it was like the rose-colored glasses I hadn’t even known I was wearing had shattered, leaving me to realize that everything I’d believed was never true in the first place. I’d never had the life I thought I had.

  I had never felt so alone or so confused.

  *

  On the third Friday in August I was home alone, sitting in front of the TV, stuffing my face with Chunky Monkey ice cream, and trying to figure out how many spoonfuls it would take to add a pound of fat to my already-heavier tummy. Some people lost their appetite when they were stressed out and as a result, shed unwanted pounds. I, on the other hand, found comfort in massive quantities of ice cream and Doritos.

  Wendy had tried to set me up on some blind dates, but I just wasn’t interested. Who needed a man when I had Ben & Jerry? I was convinced that my relationship with those two was far more fulfilling than any other relationship could be.

  Work had to be my focus, despite the frivolity of my job and the fact that I was dreading the breast cancer benefit I had to cover for Chic the next night. What a lousy way it would be to spend a Saturday night, standing on the red carpet outside the Puck Building in SoHo, waiting in the August heat for an unimpressive parade of B-listers to show up and respond to my stupid questions. I’d be once again reminded of my station in life when the doors to the theater shut, leaving me on the outside looking in.

  Yep, I was pathetic. This was a far cry from the heady days of editing one of the most prestigious entertainment sections in women’s magazines.

  The eleven o’clock news had just ended and I was in the middle of trying to decide whether to sulk while watching David Letterman or Jay Leno (yes, my life has come to this), when the voice-over for the Late Show with David Letterman came on, announcing that Cole Brannon would be one of tonight’s guests.

  I choked on a particularly chunky bite of Chunky Monkey. I slowly put down the remote and stared at the screen.

  I watched, glued to the television, an unfamiliar pain stabbing at my heart, as Cole strode onto the Late Show stage twenty-five minutes later. His brown hair was tousled, as usual, and the dark Diesel jeans and tight Rolling Stones shirt he wore clung perfectly to the contours of his body. Women in the audience continued to scream for a long time after he sat down, and he grinned and politely said, “Thank you, thank you.”

  Why had my throat closed up? This wasn’t normal.

  “They seem to like you,” David Letterman said, smiling at Cole after the last scream had finally died out. Cole laughed, and his face crinkled up in the same way it had for me at Over the Moon months before. I felt sick. What was it about Cole Brannon and instant nausea?

  “Well, I like them too,” Cole said with a charming smile. The audience erupted in screams and squeals again, and Cole and Letterman laughed.

  “So I haven’t had you on the show for months. What have you been keeping busy with?” asked Letterman. I held my breath and prayed he wouldn’t mention the Mod article.

  “Just shooting some films, getting ready to promote the movie I have coming out in two weeks,” Cole said calmly. Sure. He probably hadn’t thought about me once. Why would he?

  “Forever Goodbye,” Letterman added.

  “That’s the one,” Cole said with a dimpled grin.

  “So it opens Labor Day Weekend?” Letterman asked.

  “Yeah,” Cole said. “The New York premiere is next weekend, but it’ll be in wide release the following week.”

  “Great!” Letterman said. “Can you tell us a bit about it?”

  As Cole described the plot of the film—a wartime romance in which his character’s letters home to his young wife provide a backdrop to tragedy—I watched as his lips moved. The sound of his voice did something to me. His smiles reminded me of the ones he’d given me. His tender sadness as he described the movie’s plot reminded me of the gentle way he’d looked at me that Sunday morning in my apartment, when he knew my heart was breaking over Tom. I felt terrible as I thought about how I’d repaid his kindness. With coldness. With forced nonchalance. And with a horrible article in Mod.

  The show went to commercial break, and I stared at the screen with eyes that had glazed over. I felt like a zombie. It wasn’t that I had forgotten about Cole in the previous month, but I’d been so good at forcing myself to ignore all reminders of him. And now here he was, impossible to ignore.

  Suddenly, I knew I had to get away from him. I was confused enough about my life already without trying to decipher why I felt so attracted to this man who was off-limits and who obviously detested me—for good reason. I flicked off the TV, stuck the Chunky Monkey back in the freezer (where it would be attacked again shortly), grabbed my purse, and headed out the front door before I could think about where I was going.

  I just knew I couldn’t stay in the apartment where Cole had once looked at me with those gentle eyes and that kind smile I’d been too stupid to appreciate.

  *

  I didn’t know where I was going as I walked north on Second Avenue, but I wound up at Over the Moon for the first time since I’d eaten there with Cole. In a strange twist of irony, apparently intended to make me even more miserable, the restaurant now sat in the shadow of a giant Forever Goodbye billboard. As I sipped decaf coffee and waited for my eggs, my well-done bacon, and hash browns with cheese, a thirty-foot Cole Brannon looked down on me from high above Second Avenue.

  “He’s a cutie, isn’t he?” asked my waitress. She was a plump, gray-haired woman with deep laugh lines, friendly eyes, and a name tag that read “Marge.” She nodded out the window at the billboard as she refilled my coffee.

  “Yes, he is.” I sighed miserably. It felt like so long ago that we’d sat here together.

  “He’s a sweet boy, too,” Marge said. I looked up sharply. “He comes in here a lot, you know. Can you believe it? To our restaurant?”

  “He does?” My breath caught in my throat.

  “Sure,” she said. “Especi
ally in the last few months. Although I haven’t seen him in about three weeks now.”

  “He comes here?” I asked, my voice high as I still tried to process it. The waitress smiled gently, apparently convinced that she’d come across his biggest fan.

  If only she knew.

  “He sure does,” she said, leaning forward conspiratorially. I noticed she had a Boston accent, an endearing removal of the letter r from the ends of her words. “Whenever he’s in New York. And he always asks for me. Every time.” She looked at me proudly. I just stared.

  “Does he . . . say anything . . . about, um . . .” I stammered, not sure what I was hoping for. The waitress winked at me.

  “I wish I could tell you he seems available, honey, but he’s been pining away over some girl who lives in the neighborhood.”

  My eyebrows shot up and I suddenly felt breathless.

  “What?” I croaked.

  “Some girl who lives just down the street,” Marge continued, oblivious to my reaction. “Now, can you believe that? The biggest star in Hollywood pining away over some girl who lives in the East Village.” She shook her head and smiled.

  “Where did he meet her?” I squeaked. Marge shrugged.

  “Some magazine thing, I think,” she said. I gulped. She couldn’t mean me. It was impossible.

  “But what about Kylie Dane?” I asked quickly. “I thought he was dating her. I mean, I read it somewhere.” I cleared my throat. I didn’t want to sound too eager. But the waitress seemed more than happy to gossip. I was her only customer at this late hour, and she was probably trying for a bigger tip. Believe me, I’d give her one.