Chapter 2 Humiliation Is a State of Mind
Humiliation Is a State of Mind
“Blair Kellermoon and Reginald Johnston confirm split; actress and producer will divvy up real estate portfolio, pets”
Actress-producer Blair Kellermoon and megaproducer Reginald Johnston are divorcing after twenty years of marriage. Documents filed Tuesday indicate the divorce is uncontested.
Known for her starring turns in such iconic rom-coms as I Found You and Hidden Gems, Kellermoon has of late tried her hand at producing, with her shingle, Moonpics, behind such streaming hits as The Girl Behind the Door and The Swallows.
More recently, Green Light, a young adult Great Gatsby retelling that Kellermoon has called her passion project, fell apart after the departure of writer-producer Gerhard Tolhart; this on the heels of Kellermoon being famously rebuffed by novelist Jack Branksome when she tried to secure his smash-hit debut novel for her book club.
Having been tapped by Disney to direct an as-yet-untitled stand-alone installment in the “Star Wars” universe, Tolhart cited scheduling conflicts and wished Kellermoon well, though rumors abound of personality conflicts between the auteur and the actress-turned-producer.
Tolhart’s departure is the latest in a series of mishaps for the project, based on a novel by the late Angela Laredo.
Kellermoon, 39, and Johnston, 43, married in her hometown of Savannah, Georgia, and share two children, Calvin, 21, and Esme, 18. Kellermoon and Johnston are terminating their rights to spousal support.
The formerly globe-trotting couple have sold their New York apartment and Park City, Utah, chalet.
Sources close to Kellermoon tell People that she will retain a Hollywood Hills three-bedroom Tudor built in 1929 that she has owned for two decades, and that Johnston, a vintage car aficionado, will remain in the $27 million Calabasas estate the couple has called home, which features 10 bedrooms and an eight-car garage.
Blair was trying to be the kind of person who didn’t jump every time her phone dinged, but it didn’t take much these days. Her mother would have said she was a bundle of nerves. Martha, her old shrink, would have said she had an anxiety disorder.
It was a text from a number she didn’t recognize. She leaned over—she was trying this thing where she put her phone out of reach while she ate—and read the notification without putting down her fork.
I’m sorry for what I said about you in The New Yorker.
Huh?
Blair tried to think of who might talk to The New Yorker about her.
Reggie, even though she suspected him of being “sources close to Kellermoon”—why else all the stuff in that People article from a couple of weeks ago about how many fucking bedrooms everyone had?
He had ten in his McMansion/used car lot, and poor Blair only had three—didn’t have those kinds of connections.
Anyway, Blair wasn’t New Yorker material.
They reviewed her movies and TV shows sometimes, but that was the extent of it.
She entertained a momentary hope that perhaps some critic or other was writing a twenty-thousand-word manifesto about Hollywood’s inability to make something not based on existing IP and/or starring a grown man in a superhero outfit, but what good would that do her at this point? Green Light was dead as a doornail.
She blew out a breath. It was still hard to admit that. And she wasn’t, not publicly, anyway. Her official stance was that she was letting the project rest.
This is Jack Branksome, by the way.
Well. Goodness. Gracious. Blair had had her assistant pass her number on to Jack after that ill-fated Zoom call, in case he changed his mind about Books with Blair.
She stopped pretending she wasn’t a slave to her phone and picked it up. Her hands were shaking.
Blair wasn’t the kind of person who let herself be intimidated.
They—and by they she meant men—tried. She was petite and blond.
She had a Southern accent. She’d made her name starring in rom-coms. She was aware that all that added up to some people dismissing her as unserious.
She even understood. She was operating in a town that prized a certain kind of intelligence, a certain kind of persuasiveness, a certain kind of leadership.
Not to mention a certain kind of story. She and Tiffany had started their company with an agreement that they would calmly sidestep the sort of men who made those assumptions.
They would make opportunities for themselves and in turn make opportunities for other creatives, many of them women.
They would tell the stories they wanted to tell.
More to the point, Blair was no longer a teenager who could be shamed by anyone, not the men of Hollywood, not her mother, not Pastor Glen.
So she wasn’t sure why she had let—and was continuing to let, judging by her shaky hands and the pit that had opened in her stomach—Jack Branksome get to her.
Blair: What did you say about me in The New Yorker?
There. Cool. Mildly but not overly interested. Not betraying the fact that she was, even now, heading outside to see if the mail had arrived.
Jack: I made an observation that sounded reasonable when it came out of my mouth but when committed to paper and stripped of context sounded less than ideal.
No mail. Blair went back to the kitchen island to consider her next move.
She was pretty sure the reason she was letting Jack Branksome get to her was that she respected him, or at least she had before that Zoom call.
When studio dudes and billionaire tech bros in search of vanity producing credits dismissed her, she dismissed them and moved on.
When they tried to humiliate her, she didn’t let them.
Humiliation, she’d told Cal once when he was eleven and in a nail-polish phase, was not something inflicted upon you.
It was a state of mind. An attitude. Blair didn’t allow herself to be humiliated these days.
Usually.
There was a first time for everything.
She considered why she was giving Jack Branksome the power to humiliate her. She considered the pit that had opened in her stomach just now.
The other thing that had opened a pit in Blair’s stomach was Jack’s book.
She hadn’t been blowing smoke, or exaggerating, when she’d told Jack’s editor what a fan she was of In Time.
The book was, on the surface of things, about three generations of a family embarking on a holiday at an unnamed seashore in order to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the patriarch and matriarch.
But it was really about how our attempts to control each other can backfire.
Or how they can succeed, but at a cost. It was about a family coming undone.
Blair loved reading. Had since she was a kid perched in the sycamore tree on the far corner of her family’s estate.
A book was a way to pass a summer afternoon, or, tucked into a Bible, a long Sunday morning at church.
A book was a way to get out of your own head, and Blair could admit—to herself, anyway—that she needed that, more than ever these days.
And sometimes, a book was a window to the world. It could make you think about stuff. It could make you rethink stuff.
Even less often, like once every couple of years if you were lucky, a book could brush up against a truth you didn’t know was inside you. It could open a pit in your stomach, turn your guts out into the sunshine in a way that was painful but somehow, also, overdue.
That kind of stomach pit wasn’t bad, exactly. It was unsettling but also galvanizing. It had the potential to change who you were.
Jack’s book had done that. Opened that kind of pit.
And then Jack had layered a humiliation on top, dug the hole inside her a little deeper, opened the bad kind of stomach pit using a different tool, a sharper one.
She eyed his text. She wanted the last word, but she knew such a wanting was futile, with Jack Branksome at least. To say that Jack had a way with words was an understatement.
Blair wasn’t a writer. She had been told that in exactly those words by her college creative writing professor (I believe literary criticism is more your forte) and by screenwriting legend Seth Sider (Stick to acting), and while the feedback had stung at the time, she was grateful for it in retrospect.
She wouldn’t have become a producer otherwise.
Blair: Well, lucky for you I don’t read The New Yorker.
It wasn’t even a lie. She subscribed to The New Yorker, but that didn’t mean she read The New Yorker. She would need to clone herself for that to happen.
Jack: You don’t read The New Yorker?
Blair: I’m not the kind of person who reads The New Yorker.
Jack: What does that mean?
Blair: I’m a college dropout from Savannah.
Blair knew exactly what she was doing: Saying what Jack Branksome was thinking. Saying it before he could. Getting ahead of the humiliation. Was it even humiliation if you said it yourself?
Jack: Flannery O’Connor was from Savannah.
Blair: What is your point?
The bubbles that indicated he was typing floated and floated and floated. Finally, a fully formed paragraph appeared.
Jack: I accept that perhaps you do not read The New Yorker.
But I do not accept that you’re not the kind of person who reads The New Yorker.
You’re more the kind of person who falls behind in her New Yorker reading and gets stressed when too many issues accumulate and finally calls off a brunch date and dedicates a weekend morning to scanning the tables of contents, resigning herself to being relentless in her triage, and bookmarks a few articles in each issue and settles in for a marathon day of reading.
That was exactly right—though the calling-off-brunch part was not that remarkable. These days she called off brunch for a lot less than a day of reading.