Secrets of the Hollywood Girls Club (3 page)

“Who’s the photographer?” Mary Anne asked.

“Some guy from London. Nathan Curtis, I think.”

“I’ve heard of him. You know he used to be paparazzi. Got his big break when he shot one of the royals coming out of a strip club.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

Why would Worldwide hire a former paparazzo to shoot one of their biggest stars? Maybe she should mention it to Ted or Lydia.

“He must have gone legit if he’s working for Worldwide.”

“Must have. Anyway, back to you and Holden,” Cici said.

“There isn’t a me and Holden.”

“But there could be.”

“Cici, you once told me that the worst thing a girl could do was to date an actor.”

“Who said anything about date? I’m just saying … Brazil, People’s Sexiest Man Alive, best sex of your life, end of seven months’ abstinence? Sounds like the perfect ingredients for a post-breakup affair.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m not suggesting anything serious. I’m merely pointing out that while you’re in South America, thousands of miles away from everyone, it might be a great opportunity to have a little fun.”

“I wish I could be more like you and Lydia when it came to sex.”

“Lydia? Not anymore. Ever since Zymar she’s monogamous and I haven’t slept with another man since Ted and I moved in together after
Seven Minutes Past Midnight
.”

Cici leaned back and closed her eyes.
Seven Minutes
had almost ended all their careers. Lydia and Jessica had secretly screened their controversial film at CTA, a bold move that saved everyone’s jobs and made Ted’s studio hundreds of millions of dollars.

“Where is Arnold, anyway?” Mary Anne asked, referring to Arnold Murphy, the former president of Worldwide Pictures who had tried to sabotage the movie and destroy Celeste, Lydia, Jessica, and Mary Anne.

“I think he’s working for a theater in New York. Ted bought out his contract at the studio and gave him an incredible severance package.”

“And Josanne?” Mary Anne asked about Arnold’s sidekick and minion.

“She moved to New York and represents filmmakers.”

“I’m surprised they’re not back in the business out here.”

“Oh, they’ll be back. I’m sure of it. Arnold has a history of scurrying away to lick his wounds and then creeping back to L.A. Where else can he go? He couldn’t actually function in any business aside from entertainment.” Celeste and Mary Anne both knew that quirks, eccentricities, and huge egos—liabilities anywhere else—were character traits rewarded in Hollywood.

“You’re from a red state. Can you imagine Arnold trying to do business in South Dakota?”

“Minnesota.”

“Whatever. My point remains the same. He can only function here. We haven’t seen the last of Arnold.”

“Bet he’s pissed at Lydia,” Mary Anne said as the manicurist uncapped Chanel’s Vamp to start polishing.

“Pissed? Oh yeah,” Celeste said. “Lydia’d better be ready, because when Arnold Murphy returns to Hollywood, he’ll be gunning for her.”

Rule 3: Never Let Them Know You’re Afraid

Lydia Albright, President of Production Worldwide Pictures

Lydia Albright disliked her job. She sat in her office atop Worldwide Pictures tower of power. A mountain of scripts threatened to topple from her desk. When did her disdain for studio films begin? She loved making movies. She had arrived on her first film set at six months old and then spent little time anywhere else. Until now. She had accepted Ted Robinoff’s offer to become the president of production at Worldwide Pictures and now she didn’t make movies as much as put out fires. She spent nearly every hour of her day dealing with people and their problems.

Since accepting the job, Lydia spent no time on set making films. Her deal with Ted had allowed her to run Worldwide Pictures while maintaining her production company at Worldwide, which made her, arguably, the most powerful woman in entertainment. But Lydia didn’t feel powerful. She felt frustrated.

She pushed her chair back from her desk and looked out the window of her corner office on the thirty-sixth floor. She caught her reflection in the glass window. Her thick chestnut hair was tousled and her brown eyes appeared weary beneath her tightly knitted brows.

Far below her, on the studio lot, she could just make out the bungalow that housed her production company, Albright Films. Unlike this swank corporate office, the little building with three tiny offices and an overstuffed couch felt like home. Down there, in that comfy office, she wouldn’t have to deal with this new problem. This very big—very distressing problem.

Lydia glanced at the letter in her hand—it was the third one. She received it that morning.

Should she tell studio security? She wanted to pretend that nothing had happened. She wanted to ignore these threatening notes. She wanted to return to her cozy little office far far below—but she couldn’t.

Lydia turned her back to the windows. Like the two letters sent before, this one was typed on handmade ecru paper. Although the rhyme was horrid, the threat contained enough hints that Lydia’s mind reeled with possibilities.

Hickory Dickory Dock, Lydia sat on top.

The star turned tricks, the director’s a dick,

Hickory Dickory Dock.

Lydia received the second letter—same paper, same typing, same horrendous take on a nursery rhyme, that time Humpty Dumpty—the night before, at her home in the Hollywood Hills. She sat alone on the back patio reading when the phone rang. The static sound of the front gate crackled over the line. Lydia went to the front of her house and peeked out the window to watch the Excalibur Messenger Service van pull onto her drive. The driver parked and skipped up the steps to the door. The envelope was the right size to contain movie scripts, but when Lydia took it from the messenger, the package felt light.

“That it?” Lydia asked. She expected four scripts from the studio.

“Yes, ma’am. Please sign here.”

Lydia dutifully signed and then shut the door. The typewritten label didn’t have a logo and there was no return address. Lydia walked toward the slate patio at the back of the house where her still-warm cup of tea sat on the wicker table. She slid her finger under the lip of the envelope and the glue gave way. She reached in and pulled out the thick, soft stationery. The note was typed, not handwritten, and the author had typed the numeral two in the top left corner of the page. Strange. Then Lydia read the rhyme:

Lydia Albright sat in a tower

Lydia Albright had all the power

All Ted’s attorneys and all of Ted’s men

Couldn’t put Worldwide back together again.

Although Lydia read plenty of horrible writing—she’d worked both as a producer and a studio head—this rhyme not only offended her literary senses but also caused her heart to drop. A sinking sensation, like watching a rock drop into a pond and descend to the darkened depths drifted through Lydia. This awful little take on Humpty Dumpty changed the evening and, potentially, her life.

Lydia glanced at the letter again, and the numeral two in the upper left corner finally registered in her mind. She realized with a jolt that this must, in fact, be the second letter … meaning that the first letter remained elsewhere, floating in the world.

Lydia stood and walked into the house. Vilma, her housekeeper, always placed Lydia’s mail in the Waterford bowl on the marble counter in the kitchen. Lydia rifled through the advertisements, requests for money, and bills. Nothing.

She picked up the phone and pressed three, speed-dialing the home number of her assistant, Toddy.

“Hello,” Toddy answered, her voice thick with sleep.

“You’re asleep?”

“Yes, Lydia, some of us do sleep at night.”

“But it’s not even eleven.”

“Can I help you? Fourteen hours a day isn’t enough?”

“Do you remember me getting a letter?” Lydia asked. Her pulse quickened with the thought of letter number one unattended in the world.

“Could you be more specific? You get approximately three hundred and ten pieces of correspondence each week. All of which, by the way, I open, sort, and file.”

“This one would go under crazy,” Lydia said. “And it might rhyme.”

“Those I usually send to Briggs Montgomery.”

An image shot through Lydia’s mind of an uptight guy, mid-forties, with graying hair and steel-gray eyes. She’d spoken to Briggs, a couple of times since starting at the studio.

“Do we keep copies?”

“No.” Toddy paused. “You know there was one letter I got the day before yesterday, and I didn’t send it down to security. It rhymed, like a poem written in couplet form? I thought it was some sort of joke and that when you read the note, you’d laugh and know who sent it.”

“Ecru paper? Heavy ecru paper? The kind you’d get from Soolip?”

“Yeah, soft, like suede.”

Lydia’s chest tightened.

“I put it on your desk,” Toddy said.

“Thanks, Toddy,” Lydia hung up the phone and reached for her keys.

A half hour later, Lydia exited the elevator onto the thirty-sixth floor of Worldwide’s executive building. Cold silence greeted Lydia. Her fingertips tingled and fear crept from the base of her spine. The nighttime lighting cast a fluorescent pall over her floor and the emptiness gave her the creeps.

She slid her keycard through the electronic lock to the outer suite door and then the main door to her office. Lights from the San Fernando Valley and the Hollywood Hills twinkled through her office windows.

File folders lay askew on her desk. She lifted a stack and set them on the floor next to a pile of scripts. A dozen letters she’d yet to read sat beneath the files. Lydia tried to maintain a twenty-four-hour turnaround time on all correspondence coming into her office. The first letter on the pile was from an independent producer begging her to reconsider financing his film. The second letter, sent by an Academy Award–winning screenwriter, thanked Lydia for her excellent notes on his script. The third was an invitation to Jennifer’s birthday party in Malibu—sure to be overrun with A-listers like herself. Finally—the sixth letter in the stack. Lydia lifted the handmade paper. The note was typed, a numeral one in the upper lefthand corner. Lydia’s eyes flew over the words:

Secrets, secrets everywhere

When in Hollywood don’t despair

Corporate heads and stars galore

Create a beautiful well-moneyed whore

The secret, much too big to keep

I think my price will make you weep.

Lydia exhaled with the memory from the night before and closed her eyes. Someone knew something. But what? She’d worked in the movie business a long time—she had secrets, as did everyone. These rhymes could be about anything—anyone. As a long-term resident of Hollywood she’d swept plenty of dirt under the proverbial rug. And as president of a studio, she had a multimillion-dollar stake in preventing that dirt from ever mucking up Worldwide’s films.

The heavy handmade paper felt soft between her thumb and forefinger. She could shred the letters and pretend she’d never seen them. Perhaps she could will the correspondence into nonexistence and bring back the world from a day before, where secrets remained secrets and no one threatened to reveal nasty tidbits from the past. The fear implanted in her gut took root and spread its tendrils through her body. She picked up the ecru paper and scanned the third letter once more. This was real. She would have to take action.

“Toddy,” Lydia yelled to her number one assistant who sat outside her office door, “get me Briggs Montgomery.”

*

Briggs Montgomery, head of Worldwide security, read the final letter. His chin rested on his chest and his brow furrowed as his steel-gray eyes traveled across the typewritten lines. Briggs kept his hair, the color of burnt charcoal, closely cropped. A white starched collar held his cobalt-blue necktie. His hard gaze locked onto Lydia once he finished the third letter.

“Do you know what they’re about?”

Lydia had a few suspicions, but none she wanted to share with Briggs.

“Not for sure.”

“But you have ideas.”

Briggs studied her face, his gaze intense as if searching for a twitch, a flinch, or a tremble. While in the military Briggs trained in psy-ops. He was analyzing her now. Watching for subtle signs that would give away any lies.

“I run a studio. There are a million possibilities.”

Briggs’s eyes released her as he glanced back down at the letters and Lydia’s lungs eased back into a normal rhythm.

“Are there copies?”

Lydia shook her head no.

“Two were delivered here and one to your home?”

“Yes. Well, not delivered. The first and the third came by mail. The second was messengered.”

“To your home,” Briggs said, his tone harder, colder. His gaze more intense.

Lydia understood Briggs’s implication. The arrival of the letter to Lydia’s Hollywood Hills doorstep violated her sanctuary from the world.

“And her?” Briggs nodded his head toward Toddy sitting at her desk on the other side of the glass partition surrounding Lydia’s office.

“Opened the first and the third,” Lydia said.

Briggs arched his eyebrow and his jaw tightened. “Do you trust her?”

Good question. She trusted Toddy with her Social Security number, her bank accounts, and the keys to her Hollywood Hills home, her cars, her vacation home, and the beach house. But with her career? Her Hollywood career? The career Lydia had spent the last twenty years bleeding and sweating to obtain, the career that defined her life? Hollywood was a cutthroat town, loyalty a priceless commodity.

“As much as I trust anyone,” Lydia said.

“That much.” Sarcasm laced his voice. Briggs understood Hollywood. Before Briggs accepted his job at Worldwide he had worked another studio gig, and before working studio security he coordinated personal security for five of the town’s biggest stars. You didn’t complete that rigorous tour of duty in the Hollywood trenches without learning when to look the other way and keep your mouth closed.