Chapter 2
2
“You mean to tell me that long-necked, narrow-assed peacock gets to flounce around Europe with Miss Thing, meanwhile you have to sit back like Susie Homemaker just so you don’t end up strung out on the streets?”
“Tuh! It’s the gall for me.”
“Honey, it’s the gall. The gumption. The unmitigated audacity. Tell me where I can find some. ’Cause clearly I missed the flash sale.”
“All right, all right. How about a round of the quiet game?” I not so calmly suggest before my irritation bubbles over. We are a third of the way into my three-hour glam routine, and for all intents and purposes, I am trapped in what I’ve come to call The Chair.
Typically, this is my sacred, safe space—the place where I center myself before a live performance or a major appearance. Where I get to savor the final moments of being just me, Elladee Robinson, before I’m transformed into the well-crafted popstar persona of Ella Simone .
But at some point, we all lost the plot. It probably happened around the time the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack found its way onto my Bluetooth speaker, which shifted the mood in my Sunset Tower suite accordingly. Now, Mary J. Blige is belting about how she’s “not gon’ cry,” and my glam team is spiraling over my impending divorce from the most prolific hitmaker of the last twenty years.
At my passive-aggressive request for silence, three stares pin me in place as if to say, Check us like that again, and we’ll have you up on that Grammy stage looking a hot mess.
But then Rodney, my stylist and oldest friend, pauses from dutifully steaming the chiffon skirt of my evening gown. His eyes soften as they meet mine in the vanity mirror, and he makes a sharp intake of breath, as if suddenly noticing the fine cracks in my otherwise buffed and primed exterior.
“Oh no! We’ve gone too far.” His words are breathless and tinged with remorse, just above a whisper. Rodney’s full lips droop into a pout as he turns to his cohorts. “Ladies,” he snaps. “Maybe let’s take it down a notch?”
“Miss me with the soft shit, Rodney!” Sheryl chirps as she swivels around to glare at him. Miraculously, she doesn’t miss a beat as she deftly loops a long lock of my hair around her curl wand. “The one who needs to ‘take it down a notch’ is that triflin’ ex of hers.”
“Clock it!” Jamie chimes in, while gingerly applying moisturizer to my cheeks—the second step in her elaborate face-beat prep routine. “And you know what’s really foul?” she asks. “The way everybody expects her to keep it cute. Be the bigger person. Go high. Don’t mess with the bag. Trust and believe, I can see the logic in what that lawyer lady advised you to do.” She pauses, sucking her lips until they smack. “But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to bust a cap in a few asses right about now.”
“Mm-hmm,” Sheryl adds, pinning both me and Rodney with a pointed look. “Moral of the story, friends, is…we can keep it cute in public. But we sure as hell don’t have to behind closed doors.”
The two of them high-five as a long exhale whooshes out of me. With it, the tension in my shoulders begins to ease just slightly. As much as I’ve avoided exposing any raw feelings I have about the public disaster that has become my personal life to anyone —it’s cathartic in a way to have my closest friends express theirs on my behalf. In a way they’ve become my anger translators, and right about now it’s saving me from bursting at the seams.
These three have been my Day Ones since, well, the start of it all. Rodney and I go all the way back to my short-lived time spent studying songwriting at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Sheryl and Jamie were hired on by the label, but we instantly clicked.
So I know they mean well.
But while I am physically trapped by the ministrations currently happening to my head and face, I’m also now bound by Janet Waterman’s rules. Ones I’ve been instructed to follow religiously—lest I run afoul of her million-dollar strategy and lose my shot at future earnings from a decade’s worth of blood, sweat, tears, and life-altering music.
“Look, I get how fucked up this is, you guys, and I’m sorry for snapping. This week has just been…a lot,” I admit. “Janet says, despite whatever Elliot throws my way in the press, while we prep for the divorce negotiations, I need to keep a squeaky-clean reputation in all of this. No juicy headlines. No bad PR. And no new relationships he can claim predated our separation.”
“Okay. Now that brings me back to my original point about DJ Chlamydia and all that boppin’ around town with Thing One…or is it Two?” Sheryl says, referring back to Miss Thing—which is her actual stage name.
“She’s his artist,” I reply, exasperated. “So he’s got plausible deniability there.”
Jamie scoffs while placing an aloe patch under my left eye. “Well…his tongue was just down her throat all over—”
“It’s beside the point,” I cut in sharply, and she rears back. “The prenup didn’t stipulate cheating on his behalf…only mine.” Something I only relearned yesterday, when Janet provided me with a copy of the very long document. Heaven knows, if it had, we could light a match to the entire document at this point.
“When they go low,” Jamie mutters, shaking her head and sticking on the other eye patch, “apparently Elliot goes to hell.”
I sigh again. As if sensing the need for a lighter mood, Rodney rubs my shoulder over my silk kimono. “It’s okay, boo. One day at a time. We’ll get you through tonight…lookin’ flawless as usual. Then we’ll plot from there,” he says, before moving on to spot-checking the beading on the bodice of my gown.
Everyone falls silent as if in tacit agreement, just as Toni Braxton starts crooning about packing her tears away and letting go and letting it flow. I stare at my reflection in the vanity as the crew diligently gets back to work.
It’s a total out-of-body experience, watching them mold me into a red-carpet-ready pop star in much the same way an artist sculpts an ornate bust out of marble—the common thread being that the end result is still a product . However beautiful it may be, she’s not real.
Hoda Kotb once asked me what the most transformative step of my glam routine was, and without thinking twice, I answered that it was the hair. Whether I’m in color-treated fauxlocs, braids down my back, or have an install that’s pressed straight, I haven’t worn my own shoulder-length hair out and free for an appearance since signing with Onyx Records a decade ago.
Elliot, or “Majors” as everyone in the industry calls him, always loved having me dolled up with heavy makeup and hairpieces in public—preferring I reserve my “natural beauty” for him.
I already have to share so much of you with the world, he’d said. Let me have this.
At first, I thought it was sweet. I liked feeling like I was being kept safe by him. But later, after discovering that he was sharing all of himself with practically anybody willing, I started to find it intensely stifling and even perverse that he’d played on my emotions to assert control over my styling choices…and eventually all my choices. But by then, I had an image to uphold. One that was cosigned and underwritten by Onyx Records’ top executives, the A and R department, and perhaps most importantly, millions of fans worldwide.
When I debuted, the robust R&B/hip-hop vibes that had dominated the charts during the nineties and early aughts had funneled down to a select few artists. The ones I’d grown up admiring and even imitating in my childhood bedroom—the Ashantis, Myas, and Ameries of the world—were no longer releasing records at a steady clip. Streaming had flipped the entire industry on its head, and labels were reeling, scrambling to adapt new formulas for cultivating breakout talent. Gone were the days when you could get discovered busking on the street, at an auspicious open mic night, or from sending out demo tapes.
It was 2014, and I was a fresh dropout after my first semester at Berklee. It was a jaded adviser whom I’d apparently caught on a bad day who gave me a piece of advice that blew my mind— Don’t go into debt for a degree in something you already have what it takes to go out there and pursue. I withdrew immediately, using the dregs of that month’s student loan check to book a flight out to Los Angeles, where I’d spend the next six months crashing on Rodney’s cousin’s couch. I knew absolutely no one, and even less about the recording industry. My only game plan was to audition for The Voice .
Televised singing competitions made for great ratings, but the same couldn’t be said for promising music careers. Still, I subjected myself to the circus of it all, hoping I’d be the outlier to break the mold. Turns out, I wasn’t.
But shortly after I was sent home on week three of the competition, a YouTube video of me singing Amy Winehouse’s “Love Is a Losing Game” went viral. That’s when the needle started to move in the right direction for me. Next thing I knew, Elliot Majors was in my DMs, asking to fly me out to New York for a month of recording sessions.
You’re a star , he said on our first phone call. Right now, I’m just the only one who knows it. Soon enough, everyone will.
From there, it’s all a chaotic blur. It took us two weeks to record my first single but only one to give in to the electric chemistry that pulsed between us. I’d never had a champion like Elliot—a man who makes you feel like the shiniest object in the room when his eyes are on you. And somehow, his belief in me rubbed off on everyone at the label, too, because my contract sailed through negotiations and I was a signed artist before I could legally drink alcohol.
At only thirty, he had that much pull within the industry already. Elliot was convinced I wasn’t the next fill in the blank , but the first Ella Simone , a stage name he crafted by melding Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone—B ecause you’re an old soul, baby girl, he’d said. You stand apart.
Standing apart would be easier said than done. Beyoncé had recently released her self-titled fifth studio album, and Rihanna’s Unapologetic had come out two years prior. Needless to say, for a brand-new Black female artist like me, who straddled the lines of pop and R&B, there was little room for error in establishing and distinguishing myself.
I’m not exactly edgy, irreverent, or dripping in swag like Rih. And while I was blessed with enough of an innate sense of rhythm to find my way around a choreographed eight-count—I’d be delusional to put myself in the same category as Queen Bey when it comes to raw performance talent. But what I’ve always had in spades, since I was a little girl, was an ear for melodies and a way with words.
Rolling Stone said my first EP possessed a vibe that rang “fresh yet familiar, with sweet melodies and wrenching lyrics to remind listeners that R&B stands for rhythm and blues.” Elliot read me the review from the opposite end of a bubble bath we’d shared in the presidential suite at the Four Seasons in Manhattan. That same day, he’d gotten the word Songbird tattooed on his wrist—his nickname for me and the title of my debut album. We were perfectly, incandescently happy. And later that night after we made love, we wrote the song that would win us our first Record of the Year Grammy.
The words. The melodies. The double and triple entendres that could turn a lyric about a summer breeze into a meditation on the lingering imprint of a stolen kiss—it all came easy to us. It was the rest that he’d eventually make so hard.
Ella! Ella! Miss Simone! Over your shoulder, Ella!
On your right!
Over here, Ella!
Give us a smile!
Thank you! Can we get a smolder?!
Show us some leg!
Ella! Ella! Miss Simone! This way!
The heavy, steadying press of my bodyguard Sanders’s hand at the small of my back and the firm grip my manager, Angelo, maintains on my left elbow anchor me as we burst through the Sunset Tower Hotel’s double doors and into a sea of flashing lights. The Glam Squad brings up the rear as I’m ushered ahead on the stone walkway toward an idling black SUV.
We barrel through the chaos. A bevy of paparazzi surrounds our path, bolstered by a lively crowd of fans. I press forward as steadily as I can in six-inch platform heels, grateful as always not to be doing this alone. We reach the car, and before I’m hoisted up into my seat, I pause, giving Angelo’s hand a firm squeeze and a questioning look, which he returns with a swift nod and wink. Nonverbal communication becomes essential when you’re used to being observed in every public moment. I turn to my bodyguard and mumble quickly, “It’s okay, Sandy, I can give ’em a few snaps.”
I face the mob of flashes and deliver what they demand. Propping one foot up on a step to the SUV, I reveal a leg that’s just been slathered in shimmering body butter. I then turn over my left shoulder and offer what I calculate to be a dazzling smile. The frantic shouts and frenzied camera clicks from seconds before erupt into the kind of deafening barrage that never fails to make my face and limbs go numb. Seconds later, when Sanders shuts me in the vehicle and all goes quiet—with Angelo having slipped around and into the seat next to me—I can finally breathe, even within the tight confines of my corset.
“So, the plan for the night,” Angelo commences with business and absolutely no pleasantries. “You and Majors will do the carpet, take your seat for the opening number, then you’ll go back for a quick change into the Balmain gown. Just like in rehearsal, at the mid-show mark, you’re performing the ‘Always Be My Baby’ / ‘Fantasy’ medley with Ariana for the Mariah tribute. Then in the back quarter of the show, you’re co-presenting R&B Song of the Year with Miles Westbrook…”
“I’m sorry, with who?” I ask.
“Miles Westbrook,” Angelo repeats. Looking up from his phone, his eyes spear me like I’ve just asked him what day it is. “Starting pitcher for the LA Dodgers,” he explains.
Suddenly jittery, I adjust in my seat and start to pick at my sparkly acrylics. “I know of him,” I say, albeit a bit defensively. “But remind me why a baseball player is presenting at the Grammys? Did the Recording Academy strike some sort of deal with Major League Baseball?”
“Right on the money,” Angelo confirms. “It’s all part of a strategy to revitalize the telecast and draw in more ratings for the network. I’m told each award tonight is being presented by a recording artist and, I quote, ‘someone of note from another field.’?”
“Hmm,” I murmur, not entirely sold on the gimmick. At the same time, it tracks. Given all any of us seem to be doing in this business these days is scheming for the right kinds of attention.
Angelo continues his briefing. “Anyway. Things you need to know about Miles…other than he’s fine with a capital ‘F’—”
“Also apparently a fuckboy with a capital ‘F’…” I cut in. “But do go on.”
Angelo, who has been with me for seven years, is entirely unfazed by my interruption.
“His rookie year with the LA Dodgers was 2014, and he’s been with the team ever since. Four years ago, he became starting pitcher, leading the team to two World Series titles, which they failed to defend last year in a devastating loss,” he says, and I note the deflation in Angelo’s voice.
“Sounds like you took that personally,” I add, hoping for a rise I know I won’t get out of my unflappable manager.
“It was hard on the city,” he says gravely, like the born and bred Angeleno he is. “Anyway. When this season’s up he’ll be a free agent. Word on the street is he’s itching to jump ship to get as far away from LA as possible.”
“Oh, that’s right!” I remember aloud. “Wasn’t there some sort of drama with an ex and a teammate?”
Angelo smirks, furiously tapping out a message on his phone. “So, she’s not living under a rock after all.”
“Sports, I could not care less about,” I explain. “A real-life love triangle that ends in a brawl? Sign me up for season tickets.” I say the words, but instantly, they sour in my mouth. If living in caustic limelight for this long has taught me anything, it’s that nothing is as black-and-white as it seems in headlines or the salacious claims from the often questionable “sources” that accompany them. And if what I’ve heard of Westbrook’s past year is even close to being accurate, he’s been put through the ringer.
I do my best to avoid online gossip as much as possible. But given all my hours spent in The Chair with Rodney, Sheryl, and Jamie, inevitably I end up absorbing the latest scandals through osmosis. So I vaguely recall them talking about some big shot player’s wife getting caught in an affair with a teammate of his.
“The aftermath was catastrophic for the guy,” Angelo recalls somberly. “I mean, the LA Times , SportsCenter , and everybody else pinned the Dodgers World Series meltdown on that locker-room dustup between him and Morales right before the final.”
I grimace. “In that case, who can blame him for all the swimsuit models and actresses that came after?” I say flatly, careful to curb the edge of bitterness, and maybe even a little bit of envy I feel. It’s always pricked me how when men in the spotlight are jilted or betrayed, everybody seems to revel in their devil-may-care rebound eras, practically cheering them on to get over their exes by getting under any- and everybody they possibly can. But let a famous woman get a little too close to her trainer after her husband’s been caught with his hand down the nanny’s blouse, and suddenly she’s “spiraling,” written off as pathetic and sloppy. Worst of all, it’s not even just her reputation that suffers. If she’s not careful, her career will too. Not to mention her self-esteem.
Elliot and I haven’t slept together in a year. We haven’t lived under the same roof in months either. In that time, our marriage has been reduced to the tired cliché of a celebrity PR relationship. Which means I haven’t been touched by a man in a way that wasn’t intricately choreographed for a music video or live performance in more than three hundred sixty-five days. And if Janet Waterman has her way, this will remain the case for, at minimum, the next six months while she fights tooth and nail to nullify the restrictive clauses of our prenup and my recording contract.
Keep your side of Front Street clean. At least in the eyes of the tabloids, she said. And that should be easy enough for me, since I’ve perfected the act of keeping up appearances, even when my reality is a smoldering hot mess.