Saturday
I need something amazing,” I said to Alicia, my stylist. I shouldn’t have waited this long to find something for the Lunch at Midnight premiere, but I’d been busy. My agent had texted me some good news, for once: Sing It, America! was going to be revived and the producers had my name down on a short list for a panel judge. They wanted me to come in early next week for a chat. “Something that turns heads. Something to be written up in the style column.”
Alicia flicked through a few wan hangers on a rolling garment rack. “These are all I could get on short notice.”
“Just these?” There were only a handful of outfits. Nothing outlandish or exquisite.
“Like I said, short notice. I called in all the favors that I could, but . . .”
I knew what Alicia wasn’t saying. I wasn’t a big name anymore. Dressing Rosy Gloss wasn’t as big of an honor as it used to be. I wasn’t about to buy my premiere outfit, either.
“Yeah, but this? I could get it at Nordstrom Rack,” I sneered, shoving aside a rayon dress. I didn’t know why I still had Alicia on my payroll; funds were tight already. It felt as though I were climbing the same ladder on which I’d struggled fifteen years ago, but now I had bad knees, figuratively speaking. “Who’s dressing Yumi?”
Yumi had dismissed all of her staff aside from her housekeeper years ago; she lived in that stuffy mansion she’d won in her divorce settlement, with no agent or stylist or anything, and barely touched her money. I doubted she would wear couture to the premiere, but Merry likely still had all of her connections.
“I don’t know. I could find out if you’d like.”
“Ugh, never mind. There’s no point. Go.”
Alicia hesitated, but I turned toward her with renewed annoyance. “I said, leave.”
She click-clacked away, and I ran my fingers over the rack again before shoving it aside. It rolled across my parquet floors and slowed at a bump near a Tiffany lamp. I lay back on my chaise and covered my face with one hand. Ever since the news about Cassidy, I’d been more irritated than usual by the incompetence of everyone around me.
“You okay?” my housemate asked.
I looked over at Viv. She’d poked her head into the room, leaning on the door’s threshold. After she’d gone through remission, Viv had been desperate to have some life experiences, and I’d paid for a few tickets around the world. But soon Viv was clamoring for something familiar—someone familiar—and had moved in with me. After all, I had more than enough rooms to spare, and she could live as though she were independent, but my staff could keep tabs on her health as well. If anything seemed unusual, we had a world-class hospital a few miles away.
Usually she was in the other wing of the house, entertaining her own guests, but she must have heard Alicia leave. Alicia was the harbinger of frustration these days, and if there was anything Viv was good at, it was placating me.
I huffed out a breath. “It’s fine. You didn’t want to go to the premiere, right?”
“I’d rather die than set foot into that nightmare,” she said, smiling. “I have some really good Masterpiece queued up for that evening.”
“Just checking.”
Viv disappeared from the doorway and I scrubbed at my eyes, ruining my mascara, then reached for my phone to call Emily. Maybe she could skim a few dresses from Merry’s offerings and share one with me.
She picked up after a few rings, sounding breathless.
“Are you at the gym or something?” I asked, curious.
“No, I’m just getting some boxes down from the attic, something for Yumi. There are like a dozen left to go.”
I got straight to the point. “Did Merry get her premiere outfit yet?”
“Yeah, Merry and Sunny both.”
“Soleil is going? Not Raul?”
I could hear her shrug. “Sunny really wants to go. Raul has a schedule conflict.”
Great. I’d have to share the carpet with a little nepotistic snot.
“Was there something you wanted?” Emily asked.
“Just wondering what they’re wearing. So, you know, we don’t match too much. We aren’t really a group anymore, right?” I said it casually. The worst part about being broke is that I couldn’t give the appearance of being desperate.
“Merry’s in Dior. Soft pink dress with pleats, green embroidery. Sunny gets a playful jumpsuit from some up-and-coming designer that she wants to partner with.”
“Anything they haven’t sent back yet? I’m thinking of firing Alicia. She doesn’t know how to dress me anymore and everything she brought to me was hideous and out of style.” I held my breath.
“I think a few have gone back already, but we still have a few pieces. Let me look.” Crunching of shoes on gravel.
I KNOW THE generic formula for maintaining fame, which is why it’s so irritating that fame has been an elusive bitch for me to grasp. For some, it comes pretty easily: their family’s in the business so they already have a leg up, they fuck the right people to stay in the spotlight, they strategize their lives for maximum impact. I do the best with what I’ve been given.
The truth is, the public wants you to stay the same as when they fell in love with you. Sure, you can “reinvent” yourself every couple of years, try on different personas. This is important for child stars to transition from adorable to being perceived as a sexual adult. Every ham-fisted kid actor on a cable television series has gone through the change, with much magazine fanfare: “Starlet acts out!” “Teen seen leaving co-star’s home in the same clothes she was photographed in yesterday!” It’s like clockwork. But the public wants you to be the same person underneath. If they feel like they don’t know you or can’t relate to you, they will turn on you.
Becoming a target for the tabloids isn’t bad, either, though it’s a lot less fun. People were already waiting for you to mess up, but now they’re gleeful about it. There’s nothing the public loves more than to tear down someone who was once their idol. Tabloids dictate the public’s opinion, and if you don’t feed the wolves, they make up their own stories. Hell, sometimes you give them the story and they print only half of it. Or none of it.
My point is this: times change and people change, but celebrities are not allowed to leave the box that we’ve been painted into. There are a few exceptions that everyone allows, like the sinner who becomes a saint—usually after having respectable children—or the sexpot who ages gracefully into a bombshell octogenarian, but for the most part, if the world says you’re a five-foot-one, petite, rosy-cheeked, lovable woman, you remain one for as long as you can.
Cassidy, she didn’t understand this. People liked her on that TV talent contest show, but they did not truly fall in love with her until she was a part of Gloss. An ironically named, shy, thin brunette who had a tragic straight relationship. Once she had her arm broken, she was frozen in time forever. The classic vulnerable woman made tragic by circumstance.
People respond to authentic celebrities—or what they perceive as authentic. They are too stupid to realize that most celebrities wear one face in public and another face at home. Merry was a home-wrecker with a heart of gold, so her multiple red-hot boyfriends were the norm. When she got pregnant and didn’t name the father, it was a much-gossiped-about scandal, but people seemed to expect it. They didn’t vilify her for long. It was like, “Oh, that Cherry Gloss, it’s just like Cherry to do something so salacious,” and then they wanted to see photos of the baby when she was born. I tried to get her to capitalize on the birth and sell photos to People magazine, but she refused. I threw my proverbial hands up into the air and had to call a select few photographers myself for her exodus from the hospital. She wouldn’t do what was needed or what the people wanted, so I had to do it for her. It was a classic case of Rosy helping Merry, as usual.
When Cassidy broke off with not so much as a warning, we were all left holding the bag. We had a new album out, were lined up to tour Asia for the first time, and the public was at peak frenzy at that point, frothing at the mouth, climbing fences, clamoring with posters and CD liners and Sharpies held out for their available skin. We had to request the topmost floors of every hotel and reserve the entire floor underneath it with security, just so that we weren’t inundated with overzealous fans. The howling of our names was rarely frightening; if I didn’t hear the din of people shouting our names from a mob outside, twenty floors below, I would turn off the air conditioner, slide back the curtain a slice, just so I could see out but they couldn’t see me, and wait. Their voices were like lullabies.
How could we tour without her? We hatched some ideas: have a body double dance her parts, rework the lighting and fog machines so that her face was perpetually in shadow. Leave the camera off the double as much as possible, except when her back was turned. Feign illness. Feign a broken leg. Feign a death in her family. Fake her own death. (That last one was my dry suggestion.) We even had the costume designer change our outfits so that we wore visors, elaborate eye makeup, silver face paint as cheek contour. Made us look like aliens, unrecognizable. We would have probably gotten away with it for a little while and not lost all of the revenue, but we had to admit that we were playing with fire. Our fans were sharp-eyed, the front rows vicious in their adulation. If they knew that Cassidy had been replaced, there would be hell to pay. All trust lost. I just thought that Cassidy was only a little upset and would rejoin the fold. We started with a lie for the Pacific leg of the world tour.
“One of our members has been admitted to the hospital for exhaustion, vocal exhaustion, and dehydration. Her doctors noticed distressed nodes and recommend an extended rest for her voice. We are excited to visit Asia but regret that it will not be under the best circumstances.” It hurt to make that announcement. We said we’d be a trio and hedged around the promise to tour Australia with our full member list.
But all of that did nothing when Cassidy was spotted nowhere near Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in the days before we were to depart for Japan. She was in her old hometown outside of a Whole Foods instead, looking awful, no makeup, and hardly recognizable, but obviously not recuperating at home in Los Angeles. Rumors swirled; we denied.
Merry was photographed tripping over her heels and scraping her knee up on the sidewalk outside of a club. Tabloids gushed that there was trouble between us: a feud, a breakup. We denied.
Yumi went on several high-profile dates with the person who became her husband, just to deflect some of the negative attention (everyone loves a love story). He was a player for the L.A. Clippers, a match made in management heaven. Of course, once the tabloids tasted a tiny hint of blood in the water, they guessed our agenda there too. We denied.
Me, I was photographed shopping at Kitson like nothing was happening. I wanted it to be as normal as possible. A story was drafted that Cassidy’s Houston appearance was a family visit during her downtime—a stress-reduction move, nothing more. We denied, we denied, we denied.
As the days slipped by, the countdown to the tour start neared, and we were nowhere closer to having Cassidy back. Merry tried to talk to her; the label execs made some ominous comments. The three of us couldn’t get in touch. I remember calling and calling, but her voice mail was full and an automated voice informed me in clipped tones that I would have to try again later. Merry reached out to Emily, recently terminated from Cassidy’s employment, who still had a spare key. Emily and Merry let themselves into Cassidy’s house to find the furniture still there, but the fridge and pantry were completely empty and there was no human presence in the house.
Merry eventually got a hold of Cassidy, and though she refused to meet with the group, someone convinced her to talk to our PR rep, Justine, and the label. In the same office conference room where we’d met her for the first time, she dropped the bomb: There was no way she could honor her commitments. She was done. Finished. Out.
She surely received a talking-to. She was probably threatened with legalese and contract-waving and a firm finger-pointing at her finances. From what I heard from Marsha’s assistant, Nancy, she just sat there. Not defiant, not exhausted, not really anything. “She just looked sad,” Nancy had said. “She wasn’t scared of them, but something else seemed to have spooked her. She said she was sorry, but she couldn’t do it anymore.” Nancy had thrown her hands up. “I have no idea what happened. I couldn’t get a read on her. She left and that was that.”
It was going to get out anyway, Marsha said. Pull off the Band-Aid. Get it over with.
We called a press conference and gathered with our manager, Peter, and Justine. We stated that while saddened by Cassidy’s decision to leave the group, it was professionally done and for medical reasons. We assured fans that we were still planning to honor our commitments—but as a permanent trio. Then we left the stage. Justine stayed on a few extra minutes to field more questions. I saw a video clip on my homepage that evening. “Gloss had to replace a member of their group once before, and they don’t intend to do it again,” she said to one query. “The girls are very excited to begin their tour after this minor setback.”
The shit hit the fan. No matter that we were still going on tour. The fans and media despaired that it was the end of Gloss forever. True, the group would not be the same without Cassidy, but it’s not like the rest of us weren’t there to pick up the pieces. We had been a group before Cassidy, and we could survive without her.
I FLICKED THROUGH Instagram while waiting for Emily to find the dresses. Someone reposted something about Lucy Bowen in my feed; Lucy was yet another woman coming forward about her mistreatment by the great Sterling Royce, who had preyed on her when she was underage. The video auto-played. “I was seventeen and thought I was in love. He was older and should have known better.” Lucy hadn’t had a hit in years; this was probably the only way for her to make her star shine again, even if Sterling was getting his due comeuppance. I kept scrolling.
Cassidy’s once-private account was now open, and I followed a trail of tags to glean any information about her life since the fall of Gloss. She’d posted her dog, a different house, a glass of wine. But nothing that told me anything personal.
Emily’s voice: “Rose? You still there? There is a gorgeous Dolce dress that would fit you, I think. If your measurements haven’t changed too much. Though it might be a touch long.”
“I’ll swing by and pick it up tomorrow. And Emily?”
“Yeah?”
Emily had known, probably; she was too well connected not to know. But she always kept secrets. Emily was an iron vault.
I cleared my throat. “I know why you want me to talk to the others. But . . .”
“Oh,” she said. “It’s okay. I shouldn’t have pushed you. You can tell them when you’re ready.”
I knew Cassidy had been upset, but it was unacceptable that she’d left without a word of warning.
And now she’d left this world with the loudest goodbye.