Movie Star By Lizzie Pepper (15 page)

“Dad’s not used to me having another man in my life,” I said.

It didn’t pass my notice that no one—not the press, not Rob, not my father—asked me how
I
felt about the edit. The fact of the matter was that I wished I’d been bold enough to fight for it myself. Rob had used his powers for what he thought was good, and I loved that about him. The Studio was teaching me to do the same. The press had decided that Rob was controlling me and my career at just the moment that I was convinced he, and his organization, were teaching me to stand up for myself. The truth, which might have saved me, was coming from the source I trusted least.

M
y engagement to Rob had put me in the spotlight, but professionally I needed to get out of his shadow. As expected,
Man of Her Dreams
tanked. My phone went silent, a sorry companion, like a little sick puppy whose tail never wagged. I refused to succumb to the post-movie blues—and yet I kept finding myself in the kitchen, wolfing down midnight snacks of garlic bread and salted caramel gelato.

My new agency, ACE, had yet to deliver on the big movie my father and Rob had planned for me. Cherry Simpson, my rep at ACE, said, “Honey, honey, we wanted the engagement first. Trust me, you’ll get a better deal.” Cherry was breezy and efficient. She looked like a lot of mid-fifties Beverly Hills fashionistas. She had the sinewy body and taut cheeks of a 100 percent green juice diet, blond extensions, and an upper lip that was borderline natural. The overall effect was of a very young corpse.

In our first meeting she’d told me I was prettier in person—a backhanded compliment—and that she thought I needed to go the action route, which was also not a ringing endorsement of my acting. “You have to be patient. I’m working on
Skye London: The Emerald Isle
for you. It’s a franchise based on the Skye London video games. She’s a rogue cop avenging her daughter’s murder. You would be a perfect fit.” Yeah, sure,
the former Lucy McAlister, America’s sweetheart, was a shoo-in as a rogue cop. Not to be paranoid, but I was pretty sure Cherry had been given a mandate: “Handle Mars’s girl. Doesn’t matter if she can act. Get her something big.”

But so far the Mars power play had yielded nada, and all I could do was endure the waiting game that every actor knows too well. I got skin treatments: weekly facials; monthly photofacials; occasional lunchtime peels; a “baby Botox” treatment every six months (preventative); and a noninvasive nose job—just to refine the tip. In the mirror my face looked like it had been airbrushed. Since my practice at the Studio wasn’t producing the big-screen skinny body I needed (and the late-night binges weren’t helping), I took up a new exercise program called Infinite Space, which used suspended weights for three-dimensional movements, supposedly creating long, lean, dense muscles that burned a thousand extra calories a day. I supported Rob as he tended to his countless projects. I planned the wedding. I told myself to be patient, there was no rush.

And then something happened that changed the timeline entirely.

Cherry Simpson finally scored me the much-sought-after meeting with Danny McDaniels, who was directing
Skye London
, and as Cherry told me, again, “That’s what you need. An action movie, a franchise.” So I heard.

Danny McDaniels was in his fifties. The success that had launched him was
Ninjas Gone Wild
, which, legend had it, he made in film school on a budget of $200,000 that he earned selling cocaine. His unique anime/torture porn had since made billions of dollars in the video market. The movies were terrible, but they made him so rich that Hollywood was forced to treat him as legit.

Danny looked like a teenager who’d taken over his dad’s office. The walls were lined with posters of his movies, showing men with enormous guns and women with enormous tits. He was facing the wall, playing a
video game, and just as his assistant led me, Meg, and Cherry into the room, his avatar died, making a sad little wilting sound. Talk about entering on an inauspicious note.

“Motherfucker,” he said. And hello to you too. Then he spun his chair around to face us. “Lizzie Pepper! I love you! Awesome, awesome.”

Half an hour into the meeting, Danny McDaniels had yet to bring up
Skye London
. Then he had a lightbulb moment. “Hey!” he said, snapping his fingers. (Apparently there really are people in this world who snap their fingers when they have, or pretend to have, an idea, and Danny McDaniels was one of them.) “God, wouldn’t it be great for you and Rob to work together? I bet you’d love that.”

Okay, I’m slow, but it really took me until then to realize that I was going to witness that same flash of genius in every single meeting I ever had from now until forever. Sure, one day someone might want to work with me. But my fiancé was the Holy Fucking Grail.

I didn’t have time to come up with a good response to Danny McDaniels’s brilliant idea.

“Excuse me,” I said, bolting out the door and into the ladies’ room. Meg followed me. I ran into the nearest stall and retched until I could only dry heave. I finally emerged, apologizing. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It must be food poisoning.”

“Or . . .” Meg said with a half-smile.

I looked at her blankly.

“Or you’re pregnant, dummy.”

Suddenly it was so obvious. The midnight garlic bread binges. The salted caramel gelato. I wasn’t depressed about not having work. I was hormonal. I was pregnant.
Oh my God.

I splashed cold water on my face. This was not the plan. Rob and I wanted kids one day . . . but now? Before the wedding?

“Do you think I have to go back into that stupid meeting?” I asked
Meg. She didn’t respond. Instead she waited. As Meg knew full well, I’d completed the Introduction to the Whole Body Practice. When I asked Meg the question, my new mental reflexes sprang into action. I pushed the muddle of new emotions aside and zeroed in on my core truths. Did I want to finish the meeting?
No.
Did I care what Danny McDaniels thought of me?
No.
Was I my own being who made my own choices?
Yes.

“I want a red velvet cupcake from Sprinkles,” I said.

Meg grinned. “Sprinkles it is.” Twenty minutes later we were in the backseat of the car, red velvet cupcakes in hand. Meg lifted hers in a toast, whispering, “To the best little secret in the world.” We took huge bites and both broke into excited giggles.

I hadn’t returned to the meeting, and it didn’t matter. I guess Rob Mars’s fiancée can bail on a meeting without explanation whenever she wants. I landed the part anyway. I was Skye London. And I was pregnant.

The next morning I called my gynecologist and asked to come in. Dr. Masler had been my doctor ever since I moved to L.A., but things had changed as soon as Rob and I went public. When I called to schedule my annual checkup, the nurse said, “What name do you want me to put down in the book?”

I said, “Lizzie Pepper.”

She said, “No, I mean, I know who you are, but usually we put VIPs under a different name.”

Oh. Right. Thinking fast, I said, “Aurora. Aurora Janevs.” (This was before Aurora had been outed as my best friend. Later I went by Ella Mae.)

Meg had driven me to that appointment, and I’d been surprised when she parked in a back lot and took me up the service elevator to a private entrance I’d never seen.

“How did you know to do this?” I asked Meg.

“I call ahead everywhere we go,” she said. Little by little, I was learning how hard Meg was working to protect me and help my life run smoothly. She anticipated my every need, and Rob’s, too. I half expected her to write my wedding vows for me. Eventually I knew the drill. Any doctor or spa treatment would make room for me last minute. No matter when I arrived, I would be taken straight to an exam room—no waiting room for me—and no waiting. The doctor always saw me immediately. No wonder I’d spent so many hours in waiting rooms when I was only an IP instead of a VIP.

Dr. Masler confirmed the pregnancy. Although Rob and I had left the possibility open, I never imagined it would happen so quickly and easily. Rob and I had only known each other for nine months, and we’d been engaged for ten weeks. Ten weeks, it turned out, was exactly how pregnant I was. The baby was due June 8. I mechanically entered the date into my phone.

On our way out of the office, Meg said, “Time for a new obstetrician.”

“What?” I said. “I can’t leave Dr. Masler. He’ll be hurt. I’ve known him forever.”

Meg nodded. “I’m sure he’s really good, but I’m afraid you’re going to need someone who’s used to handling high-profile clients—not just a top doctor, but one who can protect you.”

“Protect me from what?”

“The press loves a pregnancy. We need to safeguard your records, any complications, and, assuming all goes well, your hospital visit for the delivery.”

“I’m sure Dr. Masler can—”

“I totally saw Lizzie Pepper’s vagina!”

Meg waited for me to give her a baffled look before she continued: “When you were seeing the doctor, I overheard one of the nurses say that to another nurse.”

So I switched doctors.

A stew of mixed anxiety and excitement churned in my belly—or was that the baby? A little being that was part me and part Rob. This child would bind us together. Our love was already dividing and multiplying (with one critical extra division I had yet to know about). As with the rest of this relationship—it was everything I wanted, it was just that the pieces were falling together faster than I’d anticipated. I felt a little like I was always trying to catch up with myself. We’re dating—wait, we just met. We’re engaged—wait, we’re just getting to know each other. You’re pregnant—wait, we’re not even married. I still hadn’t shaken that strange feeling of both loving Rob and feeling like we were still in the very beginning of our relationship. But if anything would bring us closer, it was a baby. And if I was going to be a mother, I wanted to be a great one.

Had our roles been reversed, Rob would have found a big, romantic way to surprise me with the news. We’d take a boat to the middle of a lake and the pregnancy test would float down to us in its own tiny hot-air balloon. Now it was my turn to surprise him. But how?

Aurora was the first and only person (besides Meg) whom I called with the news.

“Pepper, this is huge. I am 100 percent happy for you slash 75 percent worried about you,” Aurora said.

“I’m not sure that’s how percentages work . . .”

“Oh, stop. You know math wasn’t my subject.”

“I’m fine! This is good news. The doctor says everything looks great.”

“No, I’m not worried
that
way,” Aurora said. “It’s all just so fast—”

“I know, believe me.”

“Have you guys even talked about—I don’t know—whatever it is that people are supposed to talk about before they have children together?”

“Probably not. But does anybody actually have those conversations?”

“Well, what about the One Cell birth plan? Are you allowed to give birth in a hospital or does it happen at the Studio, on a bed of sand?” I was beginning to regret how much I’d told Aurora about the Practice.

“Oh, please. Even if that were a thing, which it isn’t, I am a free person! Will you stop worrying and just be happy for me?”

“Fine.” Aurora relented, and we tried to brainstorm ways I could break the news to Rob.

“I could cook him a dinner of just baby things: baby corn, baby carrots . . . ?”

“Veal?” Aurora suggested.

“Put a bun in the oven and have him check on it?”

“Don’t you have a chef?”

Finally we decided that I’d put together a movie night for us. In the screening room I’d play a slide show of us together, and at the end would be a picture of the positive pregnancy test. It would require some help from a couple of trusted production friends, and it meant the news would have to wait until Rob came home from shooting a commercial in London, but he would love it.

A good enough plan, except that’s not how it went down.

I guess I should have gone into hiding—it wouldn’t have been a big stretch from my new normal. But
Skye London
was scheduled to start shooting in the summer—soon after the baby was born—and I was still operating under the delusion that I would have a post-baby career, so I thought it was important to stay visible.

Meg was my date for the premiere of Hunter Dix’s new movie,
Lady Luck
, since Rob was in London. I wore a dress from Siri Jones’s For Thieves Only line. I wasn’t showing yet, and I was working out like a demon to counter the irrepressible midnight snacking. But I was a little bloated, so the flowy bohemian silk felt like the right call.

It started the minute I climbed out of the car. The photographers
yelled, “Lizzie! Lizzie! Show us the bump! When are you due? Is it Rob’s or Johnny’s?” I was absolutely floored. I was only thirteen weeks along! How could they possibly know? Someone had to have leaked it, but who? Besides Dr. Masler’s office, Meg and Aurora were the only people who knew. I ignored the shouted questions, but I knew it was hopeless. I would top
Rounder
’s “bump alert” list. So much for my plan to surprise Rob. The press had beaten me to even this incredibly personal news. If I hadn’t been so disappointed, I would have been impressed.