MARCH 1996 #2
Amos and I had a lengthy discussion about what we were going for and how to tie it all into a showstopper.
“Are we thinking femme fatale? Innocence incarnate? Serious actress? Grunge drama school dropout?”
“I want to look like I belong,” I decided. “Like I should be at the Oscars. That I’m the sort of person the Academy Awards were created for.”
So we’d done exactly that—floor-length gold with impeccable tailoring and boning around the waist to make every line of me sharp and purposeful. The silhouette was iconic enough that if the trophy were a woman, it would have been me gilded atop its plinth.
The next week, Harper wore a near-identical outfit cut into a two-piece crop top and skirt as she was shot partying with some of her City Girls costars.
And that was how it went for those first months as we found our footing.
I was the one who took herself too seriously.
Harper was the fun one, who partied a bit too hard and kissed the wrong boys and who proved you really could have it all.
I was the snob; she was the hack. I was the star, but she was the one you were envious of.
I thought that dynamic might be where we left things.
“I don’t want to take any roles if Harper Moore is also on the ticket,” I told my agent over lunch. Being together on a set would give her too much power—I needed her at a distance, where she couldn’t step close to me, slip beneath my skin, and wind me up like her little toy.
“Do I know who that is?” Victor asked, jaded and bored. And lying—he was a very good agent and might have known more about my public perception than Ruchi did.
I picked at my salad and sighed. “Orange dress.”
Victor grinned so broadly dimples grooved in his dark brown cheeks. “Oh, yes.”
I arched a brow, and he tsked before laughing. Victor was a brilliant agent, but he was also a man in his fifties with an unfortunate predilection for puns, poor jokes, and mischievous provocation.
“Would blacklisting her across the industry help make up for the fact I remember her but not you?” he offered.
“You can do that?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want you to.” I was ready to levy some low blows, not be downright underhanded.
“Good. Just because I could doesn’t mean I would. Come on then, let’s beat her where it counts. I’ve met with some directors lately, and there are some parts I think you’d be perfect for.”
———
I took a minor role in Double Down, a Disney film where I played the evil stepmother of the protagonists—which mostly just meant I was hot, young, and after their father’s money.
I played it with plenty of Harper’s mannerisms. I knew no one else would catch it, but it thoroughly delighted me, especially every time I tossed my hair back behind a shoulder.
And clearly it enraged her from the way she kicked off in Glitz magazine about the evil-stepmother trope a month after the film premiered in ’98.
But my main role in ’96 was Maldon, which I almost didn’t try out for.
That still shocks me. I thought I’d developed a finely attuned radar for opportunity.
But I supposed there was no harm in auditioning, and when I got offered the role I considered turning it down.
The shoot would take me away from Los Angeles, and as such, away from Harper.
But her threats had turned out to be more or less idle, even as City Girls picked up steam.
She was clearly trying.
My assistant Lana and I started each day with a selection of magazines, flicking through them all for traces of whispers, or else lounging in the garden with Ruchi on speaker. Sometimes both.
Lana was older than me, though not by much, and she’d come by before dropping her toddler off at day care, and this morning routine became something precious for us both, sunning ourselves in the garden and indulging in the game of Hollywood.
(I liked her. I liked the way she hummed when she made the coffee and the way her son’s footsteps pounded on the stairs.
I liked the way the house filled with noise. I liked when it wasn’t so very quiet.)
“Oh, here’s something,” she said one summer morning, waving a copy of Hollywood Whisperer at me. She cleared her throat before she read: “Nadine Hey-would-you-look-at-that-nose?”
“What?” I choked on my laughter, hauling myself up to snatch the magazine from her.
The page was filled with blurry photos of me at college—notably not the very clear headshot I’d supplied, in which the story they were trying to tell would be demonstrably false. They compared the photos to me at events, with my whole face shadowed and shaded with makeup.
I had, so far, resisted the lure of plastic surgery.
I’d considered it, of course, but right now I was playing the “in it for the acting” role a bit too well, and any suggestion of caring about my looks too rather than accidentally tripping and stumbling into hair salons or makeup artists’ chairs would be too much.
Yet here I was, supposedly having had a nose job with pictures they’d obtained from only one possible source, given the Blood Wedding rehearsal shot included.
There were more rumors: that I was having an affair with a Kennedy (oddly beneficial), that I had chlamydia (which ended a solely for the cameras flirtation with Tex Cassidy), and that I dropped out of CADS because I’d been sleeping with one of the teachers (which was clearly a favored lie of Harper’s).
My personal favorite was that I was some sort of hippy-witch who charged crystals in her vagina for luck.
“My vagina, really?” I’d asked when Harper phoned as she did every now and then. I liked to think she couldn’t resist. Like each rumor was an effort to drive me out of the private sphere and into the public, and when I didn’t she had to find me herself.
“I know, one of my more creative suggestions. When are you going to start playing?”
“Who says I’m not?”
I wasn’t above being petty—in exchange for the crystals we’d carefully dropped that Harper used a face cream that contained fox urine.
But I had bigger plans. For now, Harper was ineffectual.
She had to play at all these small lies because no one would believe the bigger ones.
We weren’t in the same spheres. But that was going to end.
I listened to the rumors. And Victor and Ruchi had their ears to the ground too—there were directors interested in her.
If she joined me here, she could start doing real damage.
So I had to maintain my advantage. I had to win some awards.
And I cared about the films. Obviously.
“Anyway,” Harper said, a whininess to her voice like I’d ignored her a little too long. “I was just ringing to tell you to tune into MTV tomorrow. I think you’ll enjoy the show.”
I didn’t have a publicity engagement that night, which was the only real reason I ventured out in the evenings anymore.
So instead I settled into my ordinary routine: a long bath as I flicked through scripts, warming up the dinner my caterers had delivered and curling up in the back corner of the eight-seater sofa to flick on the TV.
But instead of my usual golden-age classic, I turned the channel to the promised show.
And there she was: Harper making out with Caleb Krause at a nightclub in West Hollywood. Apparently the two had confirmed they were dating.
I laughed right at the TV screen, before reaching across for my phone, curling its cord about a finger and readying to punch in Ruchi’s number so we could unpack it as we did all Harper-related drama. She’d clearly seen us flirting at the Oscars and evidently thought she was winning something.
Why waste time trying to take her down when she was tying herself up with scandals that didn’t even touch me?
So I called Victor instead. “I’ll take that job in England. When do they need me on location?”
———
Maldon was a historical drama inspired by a poem.
Braveheart but make it the marshy Essex coastline, the Saxons bravely and futilely defending the coast against the raiding Vikings.
Not many—or any—women in the poem, mind you, but they’d created some vital roles, even if I was still “wife of Byrhtnoth” until a week into filming when someone decided it might be useful to give me a name.
They settled on Hild.
Wife of Godric, to my delight, was Sasha. I hadn’t seen her in over a year, and we collided on set, slipping in the mud as we clutched each other close and squealed.
“Wow, look at you!” she cried—which was a statement I was used to, as polished and chrome as I ordinarily was.
But here I was in a coiled ginger wig, salt-crisp and windswept, layered in a simple tunic with a leather belt working overtime to compensate for the time-period-accurate unsexiness that hadn’t stopped them plucking my brows, layering mascara, and waxing every single inch of me.
(I’d vetoed nudity, of course, but there were scantier scenes they didn’t want to risk.)
Sasha looked unsurprisingly delighted—I half wondered sometimes if her first joy in acting was the opportunity to play dress-up. The earth tones complemented her, made her eyes darker and her skin brighter, and the layers exaggerated her curves in the same way they swallowed mine.
She reached a hand out to feel the plastic strands of my wig, and I caught that scent of her: pomelo and violets, and suddenly I was back on that Austrian set, caught on a breath between excited and terrified.
We spent six weeks of that rainy summer filming across the marshes, the estuary sweeping murky seawater in periodically so we’d all rush to make the most of it, while the production people exchanged wary glances that questioned why we hadn’t just opted for a studio and a more consistent green screen.
The town was quaint, a gentle hill with pubs rolling down it that we flocked to before news got out that some big movie was being filmed nearby and then we were locked into drinking on set or in our hotel bar.
I’m rambling, aren’t I? Well, my love, it’s hard, talking to you of former flames.