Movie Star By Lizzie Pepper (33 page)

Before we’d left L.A., Pops, the paparazzo who basically lived outside our house, had pleaded for a big-selling image.

“Throw me a bone,” he said. “My wife is having a baby next month.”

Pops was married. Who knew?

“Let me think about it,” I’d said. Pops was a useful friend to have. His telephoto could see through walls. I knew I would need him, I just wasn’t yet sure for what.

Now I asked Aurora to meet Pops to have him look into the New York Studio. I couldn’t be the one to feed him private information about my husband. If that kind of violation was traced back to me . . . well, not only would the press have a field day but Rob would never forgive me. (These concerns fade after divorce, particularly when one finds out the extent of the lies. . . .)

The irony of asking Aurora to leak information to the press wasn’t lost on me. Meg had confessed that she’d set Aurora up as a press leak in order to subvert our friendship. Now Aurora was talking to a paparazzo at my behest. This is what happens when you see the world through the lens of paranoia (even be it by necessity). You bring nightmares to life.

The Venice Film Festival, from which I planned to make my escape, was three weeks away when Pops showed up in New York.

The morning he pushed in front of the other photographers waiting outside our town house, I couldn’t help smiling—he may have been a paparazzo, but he was
my
paparazzo.

I was taken aback when he scowled at me. “Thanks for nothing,” he growled. Then, seeing the bewilderment on my face, he hissed, “You may have a private jet, but coming here was a big expense for me.
A worthless goose chase
.”

“Later,” I hissed, and slid into the waiting car.

A few days later Aurora got the scoop for me. Pops had gone to the construction site. The building was in process. Construction delays were common—no story there. From the footprint he’d photographed, the project seemed to be exactly what Rob had described to me and the Studio had announced to the press.

“But check this out,” Aurora said. She handed me a piece of paper that looked like a tax filing. “Pops isn’t mad at you anymore. After he saw you, he went back and pulled the public records. One Cell raised
one hundred forty million
dollars for Studio Manhattan to date, and Pops had six different architects look at the plans. They said it can’t cost more than eighty million to build, even if they spare no expense. So where is the rest of the money?”

Sixty million dollars, unaccounted for. That was a useful tidbit. “Do you think Rob knows?”

We were in Meg’s little pad in SoHo. (When I went to meet her, I always told Cap and Leo I was going to “Aunt Christine’s apartment” in case one of them inadvertently mentioned it to Rob. If need be, it would be easy to convince Rob he’d forgotten that my mother had a sister who lived in New York.)

Now Meg, who had been doing dishes, suddenly spoke up. “If Rob has any files about the project, they’re in his office in the gym.”

Bluebeard’s chamber.
It really did hold all his secrets.

Power.
I cared about it now. If One Cell was using Studio Manhattan as a front to collect donations, and I had documents to prove it, it might help me negotiate the divorce somewhere down the line. I wanted a secret weapon. I guess I’d watched too many of Rob’s movies, but that night I flew back to L.A., ostensibly because Leo “missed Malibu.” Nobody raised an eyebrow. Apparently if Rob Mars’s son misses his beach house, it’s utterly unremarkable for him to be flown across the country to visit it.

In Bluebeard’s chamber late that night, I don’t know what I hoped to find. I opened the file cabinet, looking for anything about the New York project, anything fishy. Like a piece of paper that read, “Studio Manhattan is a fraud. We’re using it to bilk our practitioners out of millions of
dollars.” But the files were instead filled with closing documents for houses Rob no longer owned. Old tax forms that certainly weren’t worth keeping (except for a 1985 tax filing, where Rob earned a grand total of $14,000—that one was probably worth a pretty penny on eBay).

Then, just before I gave up, I realized I had what I needed. I’d had it all along.

The end was so close, I was almost defiant when I came out of Bluebeard’s chamber for the second and last time. I turned on the hallway lights on my way back to my room and practically stormed down the hallway.
It’s my house. Go ahead, tell my husband I sneaked into his private office. This ship has sailed.

R
ob was coming home to Malibu for two weeks in August, just before we would all fly to Venice for the film festival.

I thought it would be hard to keep up appearances, but it wasn’t. We still got along really well. When he came in the front door, with his handsome smile, laden with gifts for all of us, I could see why it had been so easy to fall for him. His scripts told the story of a life that worked. The boys and I had everything we could want. On the surface, there were no dangers or threats, no harsh words or uncomfortable situations. It would have been so simple to go on as we were. To pretend this was all in my head. Because, if you thought about it, it
was
all in my head—in the sense that some other woman, make that thousands of other women, would be more than glad to have my life, every bit of it, no complaints, no problemo. So what if Rob’s love was an act? Didn’t the happiest of marriages sometimes require the partners to go through the motions of love?

I hated the idea of blindsiding Rob. My reasons for leaving him were, in one sense, so bizarre and abstract. A script I’d found. A mystery man’s visit to my sister. My son’s reaction to a small cut on his hand. A photo shoot I’d learned about from a phone call with a stranger. If there was a checklist for marriage, I could check everything off. Rob took care of me
and our children. Check. He wanted us to be happy. Check. He worked hard, supported us, didn’t drink or do drugs, cheat or abuse. Check, check, check, check. He was kind. He was handsome. We never fought.

But the boys and I were prisoners. To make it work, we had to live in his world, follow his plans for Cap and Leo. We could only be the people he wanted us to be. And our fame was unbearably restrictive. My body felt trapped in that house, my spirit suffocating, my self lost. In some alternate universe we could have signed up for couples therapy, learned how to listen and respect each other, and pieced it back together. But I was the only one who had been torn into pieces. Rob was made of granite, a smooth, solid form, impenetrable and unyielding. A statue.

I’d broken up with Justin, my first love, when
American Dream
ended. We hadn’t stopped loving each other, but we couldn’t stay in Memphis for the rest of our lives (though I will forever long for the balcony of the bookstore café in the center of town, where I enjoyed my last days of anonymity). Justin was heading to New York for a run in
Rent
, and I was off to shoot
The Last Hurrah
. The wrap party was a night of weepy toasts and a clip reel that showed my character growing from a naïve girl into a confident woman. Back then, I wished I felt half as grown up as Lucy McAlister looked. She was headed to St. Lucia, leaving our make-believe town of Linville and her boyfriend, Justin’s character, to fulfill her dream of teaching needy children in a tropical paradise. I was leaving to become a movie star. Oh well.

It was such an emotional drain—all those good-byes. The next morning Justin’s flight was due to leave before mine. I woke up when he flopped down on the bed next to me, ready to go.

“Don’t leave!” I exclaimed, rolling on top of him. “I’m not letting you.”

“This isn’t the end,” he said, kissing me. “We don’t have to make a big proclamation. We can just see what happens.”

It was tempting. Separating from him was the most painful thing I’d
experienced. We could visit, talk on the phone, continue to love each other. But that was not my idea of a relationship.

“We’re breaking up,” I said. “Long-distance relationships are stupid.”

“Lizzie, you are a cold, cold woman,” he said.

“That’s why you’re better off without me,” I said, and then, without warning, I started bawling and couldn’t stop. Embarrassed, I hid my face in the blanket. And then I heard a funny sound and looked up. Justin was crying, too. I’d never seen him cry (except when his
American Dream
little sister, Sally, died of leukemia, but even then the makeup team had to supply fake tears). It was so unexpected that I was completely startled out of my own tears. I started laughing.

“What?!” he exclaimed.

“Stop,” I said. “We’re still alive. We have phones. If we miss each other, we’ll see each other. That’s all there is to it.” I stood up and helped him to his feet, and at the door we embraced for the last time, and a week later he was photographed making out with Amanda Forsythe at Bar 66 in TriBeCa. His dead-of-leukemia
American Dream
sister! He’d always denied it, but I’d known he was into her the whole fifth season. She had that pale waif look. Leukemia chic.

My good-bye with Justin may have been young and awkward, but at least we both knew what was happening. Unlike what I was about to do to Rob. The two weeks he was home in Malibu, Rob and I took walks along the water together. I rolled up my jeans and followed him to the top of the bluffs. I held his hand and kissed him back. In the early evenings, when the sun started to go down, I huddled against him for warmth. I wasn’t just playing the part. In truth, it was my way of saying good-bye.

He must have sensed something in the air, something in me, a change. One morning we had coffee out on the wide balcony. It was high tide, and the sea crashed hungrily against the rock jetty that had been hurriedly constructed to protect the houses. The beach had all but
disappeared, succumbing to erosion in spite of the tens of millions of dollars Rob and his neighbors had thrown into the ocean, begging it to yield. The press had been vicious—criticizing the wealthy beach-house owners for carting in sand to rebuild the beach. Even environmentalists recommended a “managed retreat,” letting the ocean slowly reclaim the mansions it so clearly desired.

“I love you, Elizabeth,” Rob said, taking both of my hands in his. “I’m sorry for what I said in New York about bringing the boys into the Studio. I believe what I believe, and I won’t be bullied by gossip and prejudice to change my mind. But I know how you feel about letting our sons make their own choices.”

He paused and licked his lips, an uncharacteristic uncertainty crawling across his brow. He glanced left and right, as if looking for cue cards. “I want to say . . . I just . . .” Was Rob Mars at a loss for words? Had he forgotten his lines? He leaned closer, his voice almost a whisper. “Okay, here’s what. Sometimes I think about what it would be like to leave. The industry, the Studio, all of it. We could retire, move far away, live a simple, normal life. It’s normal to fantasize about that.”

Had he gone off script? Was he improvising? Breaking character? Did he, like Meg, think about leaving the Studio? It seemed real. I almost believed him. I so wanted to believe him. Could MAK, his life scriptwriter, have read my mind? Or was this the real Rob, secretly desperate to escape it all? “What’s stopping us? What’s stopping us from living that fantasy?” I asked him.

A rush of hope stirred in me. I squeezed his hands. If only Rob would come offstage. If he would leave the Studio. Or back slowly away. Or just agree that we didn’t have to be part of it. If he would let go of his plans for Cap and Leo . . . wouldn’t that solve everything? He loved me and his sons more than the world. Surely, if I was clear enough and brave enough, he would have to consider it.

The waves beat at the seawall, relentless. You could move sand and you could build walls, but they were temporary solutions, stopgaps, cover-ups. Nothing would stop the ocean. Rob looked at me with eyes that showed hurt, and regret, and frustration at everything he was locked into being, and yet everything he still wanted. Eyes that finally gave me a glimpse into who he really was, and that convinced me that, as much as he was capable, he really had always loved me, and that part of him deep down knew that these were our last few moments alone.

“I can’t,” he said.

My husband, who could do anything, couldn’t do this for me. There was only one option: managed retreat. It broke my heart.