Fame and Wuthering Heights

‘Well, thank you, Abel. But I think you’d better go upstairs now. Your mommy looks mad.’

Doesn’t she just? thought Vio mischievously. Tish was a gorgeous girl, and sweet with it, but he knew which side his bread was buttered. Rasmirez had warned him off in so many words, and heartbroken chicks were usually more trouble than they were worth anyway. Not as much trouble as Sabrina Leon, perhaps, but then Vio had already decided he wasn’t going to screw Sabrina. As Terence Dee, the agent who discovered him, had once memorably said about the perils of sleeping with one’s co-stars: ‘Even dogs don’t shit where they eat.’ If eight weeks of celibacy proved too much, Vio would simply have to take Dorian’s advice and get his rocks off with a local girl.

Pity.

A few hours later, Tish collapsed into bed exhausted. What a day it had been! From her crack-of-dawn expedition up the Home Farm chimney and mortifying first encounter with Viorel Hudson, to Abel’s hospital trip and their near-death run-in with Sabrina Leon, the arrival of the actors seemed to have raised the stress levels at Loxley by a factor of about a hundred.

Viorel’s flirting was flattering. But Tish was a sensible girl. Men like him were in it for the chase, for the game. As soon as one slept with them, they lost interest and were off to the next girl. Even Sabrina’s arrival today had turned Hudson’s head, like a dog suddenly seeing a squirrel.

I have enough drama in my life without all that nonsense, Tish told herself, turning out her bedside lamp. Especially after Michel.

And that was when she realized.

Today was the first day in over a year when she had not thought about Dr. Michel Henri once.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Harry Greene lay back against his purple velvet pillows and scrolled down the options on the giant screen in front of him.

Lisa

Twins 1: Sandy and Dee

Twins 2: Keisha and Joanne

Clara

The list ran to over twenty, but Harry always ended up picking from the same three movies. He’d basically given up commercially produced porn. Ever since he’d started filming himself having sex, over two years ago now, he found his home-made collection infinitely more arousing. For one thing, the girls were better looking. For another, he got to direct them exactly the way he wanted: thighs wide, lips parted, eyes always open and straight to camera. Other producers had Hollywood at their feet. Harry Greene had Hollywood on its knees, sucking his dick. Clicking on Keisha and Joanne, he threw the remote onto his Chinese silk bedspread and slipped a hand under the waistband of his Turnbull & Asser pyjamas, already hard with anticipation.

At thirty-nine years old, Harry Greene truly was the man who had everything. His Fraternity movies were the most successful comedy franchise of all time. As a result, he was not only wealthy beyond his own wildest dreams – his main residence, in Beverly Hills, was a 30,000-square-foot palace that made Versailles look poky, but he kept life interesting by maintaining fully staffed mansions in every habitable continent of the globe, for the rare occasions when he felt like a change of scene – but he was also worshipped by his peers in the movie business as little less than a god. Women fell into Harry Greene’s bed like ripe apples from a never-exhausted tree. Studio executives fell over themselves to make deals with him. In Los Angeles there was no party to which Harry Greene was not invited, no club of which he was not a member, no luxury known to man of which Harry was not able to avail himself, day or night, whenever he chose.

And yet Harry Greene was not a happy man.

Born into a stable, loving, middle-class family in a swish suburb of San Diego, Harry had always been blessed. Smart, charismatic and good-looking, he was popular at school and a natural success with women. By the time he met his wife Angelica, at a valley party when he was twenty-four, he was already a relatively successful producer, with two profitable indies under his belt and a reputation as an up-and-comer in the industry. This modest success was more than enough to earn him ready access to all of Hollywood’s many temptations. Having never denied himself in the past, Harry saw no reason to do so now, simply because he had moved one woman under his roof. He loved Angelica. She was smart, stunningly beautiful, loyal and undemanding. Harry had repaid her with a five-carat diamond, a new surname and an unlimited platinum AmEx card. With these gifts, he considered his spousal duties to be fully discharged.

It was a shock, therefore, when, after five years of marriage characterized by unfettered philandering on his part, Harry’s wife left him, suing for divorce on the grounds of his adultery.

‘I don’t understand it,’ Harry complained bitterly to the business acquaintances that he mistook for friends. ‘I gave her everything she wanted. I never said no to her. Never. How could she stab me in the back like this?’

For the first year, he was so bitter about Angelica’s blatant betrayal that he refused to speak to her at all, restricting all contact to terse exchanges between their respective battalions of attorneys. But eventually, being the magnanimous soul that he was, Harry met his ex-wife for lunch at one of his ex-houses, and it was here that she’d dropped the bombshell.

‘When did I first find out? Jeez, Harry, I don’t know. I think the first time someone said something to me was at Bob Grauman’s Halloween party. Some guy dressed as Richard Nixon was gossiping about you and Farrah James. I was in a werewolf mask at the time; I don’t think he even knew who I was. Anyway, after that I did some digging … you’ve only yourself to blame you know. More Chablis, honey?’

Harry Greene did not blame himself. Nor, any longer, did he blame poor Angelica. He blamed some loose-lipped cunt in a Richard Nixon mask. That shit-stirring little fucker, whoever he was, had ruined a perfectly happy marriage. In a town where marriages were considered a success if they outlived milk, Harry Greene considered himself to have been seriously hard done by, wantonly robbed of something rare and precious, something that was his – that should have been his – for life. He did some digging of his own. And lo and behold, his nemesis had a name! A name that Harry Greene had come to loathe over the years with a passion bordering on the pathological: Dorian Rasmirez.

So stealing my scripts wasn’t enough for you, eh? Or turning my writers against me? Oh no. You have to take my wife from me too? My wife!

What stung the most was that Dorian’s own marriage remained a Hollywood paragon. Of course, everyone knew Rasmirez’s wife was a slut, a middle-aged, over-the-hill TV actress who fucked everything with a pulse under thirty in a sad attempt to keep her husband’s attention. Yet Dorian stood by her, besotted, proclaiming his cuckolded love for her from the rooftops. Harry Greene wanted to destroy Dorian Rasmirez’s marriage, to take away his wife the way that Dorian had taken away Angelica. But the Rasmirezes remained tighter than ever, a fact that ate away at Harry like a flesh-rotting virus.

He’d tried to numb the pain by hurting Dorian professionally, using his immense influence with studios, distributors and the media to damage his rival’s movies. Harry liked to think that by deliberately moving the release date of the most recent Fraternity film so that it coincided with Rasmirez’s dull and worthy war flick, he’d put the final nail in the coffin of Sixteen Nights. ‘He’ll be lucky if it runs for fourteen nights,’ Harry told a reporter from Variety, in a quote that made headlines across the industry – and turned out to be an accurate prophecy. The film bombed. But the satisfaction it gave Harry to know that Rasmirez had lost money was fleeting. Money could always be replaced. A marriage, on the other hand, once destroyed was destroyed forever.

On the screen in front of him, two girls were giving each other head. One was black, the other Asian. Both were perfect physical specimens, narrow-hipped and boyish, the way Harry liked them, but with outlandishly large, round breasts stuck to their ribs like two soccer balls. Every couple of seconds they looked up from each other’s pussies and stared into the camera, while Harry whispered obscenities at them. As always it was the look in their eyes that made him come. So desperate, so wholly under his control. Harry Greene liked things being under his control. It made him feel that life was as it should be.

Grabbing a tissue from the box by the bed, he cleaned himself up and reached for the phone. It was midnight in LA, but the person he was calling was in Europe and would have been up for at least two hours. They picked up immediately. Just hearing their voice on the line gave Harry a thrill far stronger than the orgasm he’d just finished.

‘It’s me. Harry. Listen, I need to talk to you. Uh-uh, no, in person. How soon can you be on a plane?’

He hung up two minutes later, suffused with a feeling he hadn’t experienced in years: contentment. Dorian Rasmirez was shooting his Wuthering Heights remake somewhere in England. Everyone knew that. Everyone also knew that he’d paid way over the odds for the Hudson kid and been left so broke he’d been forced to cast Sabrina Leon as his female lead. The details of the production itself were shrouded in secrecy. Some saw this as a deliberate attempt by Dorian to create mystique, to get everybody talking about his big ‘comeback’ movie. But Harry Greene saw it differently

He’s hiding from me, he thought, smugly. He’s running scared. And so he should be.

Harry Greene had a secret of his own.

He was about to blow Dorian Rasmirez out of the water.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sabrina awoke gripped with fear. A familiar fear: her bedroom door was rattling. It was him, Graham Cooper, the foster ‘brother’ who’d abused her as a kid back in Fresno, coming to ‘cuddle’ her, as he called it. Already she could smell the foul excitement on Graham’s breath, see his sallow, twenty-year-old cheeks flushing as he slipped under her bedclothes, telling her not to make a fuss, that he loved her, that she was lucky to have a roof over her head.

‘No!’ She sat up in bed, her heart thudding against her ribcage like a trapped animal. ‘Get out!’

‘Come on, Sabrina. It’s almost five. If you don’t get to wardrobe on time, Dorian’s gonna skin both of us alive.’

It took a few seconds for Viorel’s gravelly English voice to register. He wasn’t Graham Cooper. This wasn’t her childhood bedroom in Fresno. And she wasn’t a helpless, twelve-year-old nobody any more. She was Sabrina Leon, movie star, on the set of her latest film. And oh my god she was already late!

Pushing back the covers with a groan, Sabrina got up and walked to the window, opening the curtains. It was still dark outside, with only the faintest shards of dawn light pushing their way tentatively over the horizon. Sabrina’s room looked out over parkland at the rear of the house. In the half-light, she saw a family of deer sleepily getting to their feet beneath a sheltering oak, brushing against one another in the early morning mist. It looks so peaceful, Sabrina thought, with a pang. Like many people addicted to the thrills of city life, she wished she had the ability to switch off and enjoy nature without feeling so anxious all the time, as if life were somehow passing her by, leaving her behind in a trail of dust. I guess if you grew up somewhere like this, you’d learn how to do it. How to be at peace.

Tish Crewe had grown up here, of course. Maybe that was why she looked so annoyingly hearty? The girl positively radiated wholesome, rural goodness. Their paths had crossed for only a matter of minutes yesterday, but Sabrina had already taken a strong dislike to Loxley Hall’s mistress. Tish’s accent was so cut-glass it couldn’t possibly be genuine; besides which, Sabrina made it a rule never to trust a woman who didn’t wear any make-up. Look at me, they seemed to be saying, I’m so artless. Of course, Rasmirez had lapped it up. Sabrina could see at a glance how enamoured her director was of Tish Crewe, with her doe eyes and her cute kid and her whole motherly schtick. It was enough to make you want to throw up.

Dorian probably thinks she’s a lady. Unlike me.

Viorel Hudson seemed to like the girl too. Or maybe it was just the child he was interested in? Last night, when he’d shown Sabrina to her room, he’d been waxing lyrical about little Abel – how funny he was, and how smart. Sabrina’s own maternal instinct had been surgically removed years ago, along with her tonsils, but it was sexy to see a man being fatherly. At least, it was sexy when Viorel did it.

‘Are you up?’ Right on cue he stuck his head round the door. He looked revoltingly refreshed at such an early hour.

Sabrina stretched her arms into a long, cat-like yawn. ‘I’m up, I’m up,’ she sighed. ‘I’ll see you down there.’

The Wuthering Heights’ wardrobe and make-up departments consisted of two basic mobile-home-style trailers parked next to Loxley’s stable blocks. Along with the crew’s accommodation, catering vans, an editing suite and a temporary structure housing bathroom and laundry facilities, they made up what was known as the ‘Set Village’ – the hub of the production. Viorel was already in costume by the time Sabrina walked in. In a pair of high-waisted breeches, riding boots and a ruffled shirt, torn open at the chest, he ought to have looked quintessentially English. In fact, thanks to his dark colouring and three-day growth of beard, he looked more like a pirate who’d lost his cutlass.

Sabrina, by contrast, looked a thousand per cent LA in Victoria’s Secret pink pyjamas, a Juicy Couture silk puffa jacket and a pair of Ugg boots, her entire face hidden by a YSL leopard-print scarf. All that was visible above it were her eyes, puffy with tiredness and narrowed resentfully at the fact they were expected to be open at such an ungodly hour.

Viorel looked her up and down. ‘Well, well. If it isn’t Aurora, Goddess of the Dawn.’

‘Fuck off,’ said Sabrina, but Vio could see the smile in her eyes. ‘Thanks for waking me. I think I slept through, like, six alarms.’

‘My pleasure.’ After all her tantrums and standoffishness in LA, he was delighted that Sabrina seemed to have decided to cease hostilities between them. Dorian had given her such a hard time at the read-through, and again yesterday, sending her bodyguards packing, she probably needed an ally. Given that they’d be spending the next three months of their lives together, day in, day out, both here and in Romania; and that the only other female company available was the brain-dead Lizzie Bayer or the lovely-but-off-limits Tish Crewe, this was a relief.

‘Excuse me, darling.’ Maureen, the fat, motherly wardrobe mistress shooed Viorel out of the way. From the back of the trailer she dragged out a wooden folding screen.