Elimination Night (6 page)

Boy King of the Bronx
was the title.

Teddy was able to move out of his uncle’s place so quickly because he got a job at Galactic Records, where he rose with similar speed to senior vice president, charged with overseeing the career of the nightclub owner/rapper/all-round hustler Bossman Toke—a.k.a. Bossy T. And it was Bossy T who introduced Teddy to Bibi: She was his girlfriend at the time, having just appeared as a thong-wearing, bare-nippled Queen Victoria in Bossy T’s music video for the multiplatinum hit “Kneel for the King.” In the extended ten-minute cut, which cost twenty-five million dollars to make, Bossy T plays a black English royal from the future who builds a time machine so he can sleep with every “smokin’ hot bitch queen since history began.” The video ends with him unzipping his fly in front of Cleopatra, allowing a solid gold asp to slither from his pants. It won Best Artistic Vision at that summer’s Cool Beatz Video Awards.

And
why
did Teddy and Bibi have so much in common? Well, Bibi had also been thrown out on the street at the age of sixteen, after refusing to accept a place at hospitality school. The Vasquezes lived in
Middle Village, Queens: Bibi’s mother, a Dominican baby nurse, had come to America to work for a wealthy family in Manhattan; her father was a French Canadian dishwasher. Bibi took her mother’s surname on the advice of her manager: “Bibi Le Poupe” just didn’t have much of a ring to it.

Bibi’s parents yearned for their daughter to become a successful, independent American woman—and hospitality was something, the
only
thing, she seemed to be any good at. Or at least, when she waited tables at the French restaurant where her father worked, she earned more tips in a week than the manager made in a month… which she found out soon enough because she married him.

It lasted nine days. And still Bibi didn’t want to go to hospitality school. No, she wanted to be a dancer, an actress, a model… a singer. So she moved into a squat on the Lower East Side and auditioned every day. Eventually she got a two-week gig as a bikini-wearing pole dancer on a late night music TV show and wound up giving an onscreen lapdance to Bossy T, who by then had been profiled in
Forbes
thanks to his unexpectedly successful diversification into the plus-size underwear market.

I didn’t even need to Google the rest of this story when I was putting together my research file: Bibi’s breakthrough casting in
Elsa,
a movie about the tragic life of the
narcocorrido
singer Elsa Melindez; her first single, “My Love Goes Bang-Bang,” which spent four months at number one largely thanks to the publicity created when Bibi, Teddy, and Bossy T got into an argument in a Chelsea ice cream parlor, during which Mr. Tiddles let off three rounds from his gun. (Bibi and Bossy T were questioned but not charged. Mr. Tiddles spent the next three months on Rikers Island, saying nothing to nobody.)

The scandal was enough to end Bibi and Bossy T’s romance—but Bibi stuck with Teddy, who became her manager, publicist, charisma coach, agent, and business partner, taking a separate percentage for each. He quickly consolidated her image as an unsmiling, imperious diva with a white fur wardrobe and a Queens-girl toughness. Every woman in
America wanted to be her. Every guy in America wanted to sleep with her. Black, white, Asian, Hispanic—it didn’t matter. The great irony being that Bibi achieved all this without even being able to sing.

That was hardly the point, of course: Bibi was a brand, an idea, an
aspiration.

I can hardly even begin to imagine how many millions Bibi and Teddy made together. They opened a chain of nail salons (Mani Bibi), launched a perfume brand (Bibi Beautiful), and created a line of personal massage wands (Bibi Naughty). As for Bibi’s personal life: She became involved with her hairdresser, Tommy Stiles, who proposed within three weeks of their first date. Teddy was both the officiant at the wedding—he sang the vows—and the best man. He even joined the couple on their honeymoon at Bibi’s villa in Italy, where the staff expressed surprise to an undercover
ShowBiz
reporter that the groom was spending more time with Teddy than he was with his bride.

When they all got back home to LA, Bibi hired two lawyers: One to annul her marriage; the other to sue Teddy. Not long after that, Bibi’s new boyfriend, Logan Deckard—Oscar-winning actor, chairman of the Hollywood Actors Union, patron of multiple cancer charities, and presumed candidate for governor of California—had his people take a look at Bibi’s books. Among the excesses uncovered: a full-time employee whose sole task was to switch on Teddy’s iPhone. (Teddy had never quite mastered technology.) Meanwhile, Bibi and Logan made inevitable plans to wed. He bought her a ten million dollar ring and a Siberian tiger in a cage. She bought him a private island and helicopter by which to get there. Then she recorded a song, “Bibi from the Hood,” the gist of the lyrics being: a) she was richer than God, and b) she was still a down-to-earth girl from Middle Village, Queens. Clearly, no one had thought to point out to her that writing a song expressing point a somewhat invalidated point b.

Then came Bibi and Logan’s first movie together,
Jinky,
which one critic summed up by praising its ability to “take the sexiest, most closely watched celebrity couple in the universe, remove all their chemistry,
and make you want to stab yourself in the neck with a rusty fork for no other reason than to relieve the boredom.”
Jinky
made $400.25 on the Friday it opened in a few dozen theaters. Its costars had called off their wedding by the following weekend.

Thus began the most recent—and troubled—stage of Bibi’s career, which this time I
did
have to Google, largely because of the press’s waning interest in her affairs.

Her nail salons filed for bankruptcy. The company that Teddy had outsourced to manufacture her branded massage wands was found to be employing six-year-old girls in China. And try as she might, she just couldn’t recover from
Jinky.
Her follow-up movies bombed. Her albums didn’t sell. Even her fashion sense was mocked: “Bibi’s acrylic bedsheet,” was how the
Style
section of the
New York Chronicle
described her eccentrically dimensioned Oscars dress that year. (Teddy had previously selected all her outfits.) Exhausted, Bibi took a break to get married, again, this time to her teenage sweetheart Edouard Julius, the actor, trapeze artist, and former Olympic show jumper. To everyone’s surprise, it lasted more than a week. They even had children together: quadruplets, in fact. Hence, Bibi became “Mama B.” But her career was in worse shape than ever. A low point was duly reached when her comeback single, “I Wanna Rock (Any Diamond Will Do),” was released with spectacular insensitivity only a week after the Great Recession began, just as millions of her fans were being laid off and/or foreclosed upon. Worse: During a performance of the song at the Cool Beatz Video Awards, Bibi climbed up on the backs of twelve oiled and loin-clothed male dancers, broke a stiletto, and fell backward onto a giant projection screen.

“NEEDY DIVA WANTS A ROCK—BUT TAKES A KNOCK!”
gloated
ShowBiz.

A handwritten note from Teddy was delivered to Bibi’s suite at the Four Seasons that same morning. (I discovered this among the exhibits in a lawsuit filed between them, along with transcripts of several emotional telephone conversations.)

It read:

B,

I am your family.

I am your best friend.

Let me adore
you.

Forever,

T.

Ten minutes later, Teddy was once again getting ten percent of everything Bibi earned (expenses not included). His first piece of advice? “Take the call from Ed at Rabbit. Be a judge on
Project Icon.
Your fans will see your humanity, your tears, your compassion. Plus, it’s a fuckload of money, with endorsements up the wazoo.”

Bibi agreed.

But Teddy didn’t go the easy route. Of course he didn’t. Instead of calling Ed Rossitto, he leaked a story to
ShowBiz
“revealing” that Bibi was in talks with Nigel Crowther to join the judging panel of
The Talent Machine.
Then he quickly issued an official denial, saying, “At this time, Bibi Vasquez is focused only on her family.” All this was enough to prompt a second call from Rossitto, who by now was wondering if things were going on at Rabbit that he didn’t even know about. An increasingly strained back-and-forth ensued, culminating in one of Teddy’s assistants finally delivering a list of “Artist Requirements” to The Lot:

• Artist to be paid sixty million dollars a year.
  
• Artist to be provided with customized, four-thousand-square-foot dressing compound to accommodate hair, make-up, and wardrobe personnel.
  
• Artist’s body to be insured with one billion dollar policy in case of injury. (Breasts/buttocks to be valued at one hundred million dollars each.)
  
• No fewer than five promotional Artist videos to be broadcast by Network.
  
• Network to offer promotional-rate advertising deal to Bibi Beautiful Cosmetics.
  
• Crew to be forbidden to make eye contact with Artist (and Manager)
  AT ALL TIMES.
  
• Artist to be provided with chauffeur-driven limo for duration of season, available 24/7. Limo to be Rolls-Royce Phantom, white. Artist to select driver (male, under twenty-five) from head/torso shots.
  

There were seventy-eight pages of this in total—the last twenty devoted entirely to the requirements of Bibi’s “dressing compound,” including a lengthy addendum to promote “a deeper understanding of the tastes/preferences of the Artist, with regard to beverages and snack items.”

When Ed Rossitto had finished reading the document, he slammed down the lid of his laptop, stabbed the case repeatedly with a letter opener, then threw it off his office balcony into the bunny-shaped lake below. (Or so I heard from Len.) Then he logged on to another computer, retrieved Teddy’s list of demands from his e-mail, and forwarded it to Chaz Chipford, the
ShowBiz
reporter. Within minutes, the entire unedited file was available on the magazine’s website as a downloadable PDF.

That afternoon, Bibi called Teddy while her assistant took notes.

“You’re an
asshole,
” she told him.

“That’s why you employ me,” he replied.

“I
don’t
employ you.”

There, the transcript ends.

Sanity Check: The Sequel

I STOOD OUTSIDE JOEY’S
dressing room in a hot panic. The run-through was so far behind schedule now, there was no conceivable way that the press conference could start on time.

This was ridiculous.

How the hell could I…
lose
the judges? They had to be around here somewhere. “Think, Sash,
think!
” I said to myself. But I could think of only one thing: Len’s face when he realized the biggest news event in
Project Icon
’s history would have to be delayed because his assistant producer couldn’t find the panel.

With no better ideas, I checked the catering area, the conference facility, the public bathrooms, the hallway that led to the parking lot, and then—in rising desperation—the janitor’s storage closet. (You never know with Joey Lovecraft.) All empty.
Shit.
So I returned to the backstage lounge area, where a couple of crew members in black T-shirts were standing around, looking confused.

“Hey—shouldn’t this thing have started by now?” asked one of them, in an accusatory tone.

I offered him my very best shut-the-fuck-up face.

He was right, of course: The judges should have been on stage two minutes ago. A few more minutes’ delay wouldn’t be so bad, I kept telling myself. Even ten minutes—well, we could just about pull that off. Any longer, however, and we’d be charged an extra half-day for the venue and crew—not to mention all that wasted bandwidth for the live streaming—which would put us into overtime rates. It could add up to a few hundred thousand dollars, easy. Len had already been hospitalized twice since returning to
Icon,
due to a peptic ulcer and a burst appendix. A bill of that size could send him right back to the ER again.

Come to think of it, though…
why hadn’t Len called me already?
It wasn’t like him. Under normal circumstances, he would have threatened me with some kind of medieval torture at least three times by now. Unless… oh God, please no…
unless he was already front of house with Sir Harold,
waiting—and waiting—for “The Reveal” to begin. I could just picture him now: cheeks ablaze, nostrils flaring, the Merm quivering with fury. And in his eyes, two words, written in flames:

KILL BILL.

Sir Harold had blown twenty million dollars on the new
Project Icon
panel—and it all came down to this moment. Indeed, Big Corp’s newlyissued “earnings guidance” for the next year depended heavily on Joey and Bibi (even JD Coolz, I suppose) keeping the show viable for one last season. Sir Harold had granted an interview to the Monster Cash Financial Network that very morning on the subject—I’d watched it with Mitch and a few others in the Roundhouse’s canteen. Jesus, what a disaster. The anchor had started out with a long, ass-kissy intro about Sir Harold’s upbringing in South Africa—all that stuff about his English merchant-banker father and Nguni housemaid mother, the national scandal of their marriage, and how the young Harry had
literally
inherited a gold mine at age seventeen, fought the apartheidera government to hold on to it, then used the profits to build the world’s largest media empire. Standard life story, basically. And then,
just as Sir Harold was beginning to relax—or grow bored (hard to tell the difference)—out came the Gotcha Question: “Wouldn’t you agree, Sir Harold:
Project Icon
without Nigel Crowther is a zombie franchise, with only three ways to go—down, down, and
down.
”

The anchor’s smug attempt at humor was a bad idea. The mogul’s great face trembled. His sun-spotted lips gathered into a sneer. Then he slapped down his hand with such force on the coffee table in front of him, it made the TV camera shake. For a few seconds, the studio looked like the deck of the
Starship Enterprise
under Klingon attack.