Glamorama Read online

  I take a shower, rub some Preparation H and Clinique Eye Fitness under my eyes and check my answering machine: Ellen Von Unwerth, Eric Stoltz, Alison Poole, Nicolas Cage, Nicollette Sheridan, Stephen Dorff and somebody ominous from TriStar. When I come out of the bathroom with a Ralph Lauren fluffy towel wrapped around my waist, Chloe is sitting on the bed looking doomed, hugging her knees to her chest. Tears fill her eyes, she shudders, takes a Xanax, wards off another anxiety attack. On the large-screen TV is a documentary about the dangers of breast implants.

  “It’s just silicone, baby,” I say, trying to soothe her. “I take Halcion, okay? I had half a bacon sandwich the other day. We smoke.”

  “Oh god, Victor.” She keeps shuddering.

  “Remember that period you chopped off all your hair and kept dyeing it different colors and all you did was cry?”

  “Victor, I was suicidal,” she sobs. “I almost overdosed.”

  “Baby, the point is you never lost a booking.”

  “Victor, I’m twenty-six. That’s a hundred and five in model years.”

  “Baby, this insecurity you’ve got has to, like, split.” I rub her shoulders. “You’re an icon, baby,” I whisper into her ear. “You are the guideline.” I kiss her neck lightly. “You personify the physical ideal of your day,” and then, “Baby, you’re not just a model. You’re a star.” Finally, cupping her face in my hands, I tell her, “Beauty is in the soul.”

  “But my soul doesn’t do twenty runway shows,” she cries out. “My soul isn’t on the cover of fucking Harper’s next month. My soul’s not negotiating a Lancôme contract.” Heaving sobs, gasps, the whole bit, the end of the world, the end of everything.

  “Baby …” I pull back. “I don’t want to wake up and find you’ve freaked out about your implants again and you’re hiding out in Hollywood at the Chateau Marmont, hanging with Kiefer and Dermot and Sly. So y’know, um, chill out, baby.”

  After ten minutes of silence or maybe two the Xanax kicks in and she concedes, “I’m feeling a little better.”

  “Baby, Andy once said that beauty is a sign of intelligence.”

  She turns slowly to look at me. “Who, Victor? Who? Andy who?” She coughs, blowing her nose. “Andy Kaufman? Andy Griffith? Who in the hell told you this? Andy Rooney?”

  “Warhol,” I say softly, hurt. “Baby …”

  She gets up off the bed and moves into the bathroom, splashes water on her face, then rubs Preparation H under her eyes. “The fashion world is dying anyway,” Chloe yawns, stretching, walking over to one of her walk-in closets, opening it. “I mean, what else can I say?”

  “Not necessarily a bad thing, baby,” I say vaguely, moving over to the television.

  “Victor—whose mortgage is this?” she cries out, waving her arms around.

  I’m looking for a copy of the Flatliners tape I left over here last week but can only find an old Arsenio that Chloe was on, two movies she was in, Party Mountain with Emery Roberts and Teen Town with Hurley Thompson, another documentary about breast-implant safety and last week’s “Melrose Place.” On the screen now, a commercial, grainy fuzz, a reproduction of a reproduction. When I turn around, Chloe is holding up a dress in front of a full-length mirror, winking at herself.

  The dress is an original Todd Oldham wraparound: not-so-basic black-slash-beige dress, strapless, Navajo-inspired and neon quilted.

  My first reaction: she stole it from Alison.

  “Um, baby …” I clear my throat. “What’s that?”

  “I’m practicing my wink for the video,” she says, winking again. “Rupert says I wasn’t doing it right.”

  “Uh-huh. Okay, I’ll take some time off and we’ll practice.” I pause, then carefully ask, “But the dress?”

  “You like it?” she asks, brightening up, turning around. “I’m wearing it tomorrow night.”

  “Um … baby?”

  “What? What is it?” She puts the dress back in the closet.

  “Oh honey,” I say, shaking my head. “I don’t know about that dress.”

  “You don’t have to wear it, Victor.”

  “But then neither do you, right?”

  “Stop. I can’t deal with—”

  “Baby, you’re gonna look like Pocahontas in that thing.”

  “Todd gave me this dress especially for the opening—”

  “How about something simpler, less multicult? Less p.c., perhaps? Something closer to Armani-ish?” I move toward the closet. “Here, let me choose something for you.”

  “Victor.” She blocks the closet door. “I’m wearing that.” She suddenly looks down at my ankles. “Are those scratches?”

  “Where?” I look down too.

  “On your ankles.” She pushes me onto the bed and inspects my ankles, then the red marks on my calves. “Those look like dogs did this. Were you around any dogs today?”

  “Oh baby, all day,” I groan, staring at the ceiling. “You don’t even know.”

  “Those are dog scratches, Victor.”

  “Oh, those?” I say, sitting up, pretending to notice them too. “Beau and JD groveling, mauling at me … Do you have any, um, Bactine?”

  “When were you around dogs?” she asks again.

  “Baby, you’ve made your point.”

  She stares at the scratches once more, passively, then silently gets into her side of the bed and reaches for a script sent to her by CAA, a miniseries set on another tropical island, which she thinks is dreadful even though “miniseries” is not a dirty word. I’m thinking of saying something along the lines of Baby, there might be something in tomorrow’s paper that might, like, upset you. On MTV one uninterrupted traveling Steadicam shot races through an underfurnished house.

  I scoot over, position myself next to her.

  “It looks like we’ve got the new space,” I say. “I’m meeting with Waverly tomorrow.”

  Chloe doesn’t say anything.

  “I could open the new place, according to Burl, within three months.” I look over at her. “You’re looking vaguely concerned, baby.”

  “I don’t know how good an idea that really is.”

  “What? Opening up my own place?”

  “It might destroy certain relationships.”

  “Not ours, I hope,” I say, reaching for her hand.

  She stares at the script.

  “What’s wrong?” I sit up. “The only thing I really want right now at this point in my life—besides Flatliners II—is my own club, my own place.”

  Chloe sighs, flips over a page she didn’t read. Finally she puts the script down. “Victor—”

  “Don’t say it, baby. I mean, is it so unreasonable to want that? Is it really asking anyone too much? Does the fact that I want to do something with my life bore the shit out of you?”

  “Victor—”

  “Baby, all my life—”

  Then, out of the blue: “Have you ever cheated on me?”

  Not too much silence before “Oh baby.” I lean over her, squeezing the fingers lying on top of the CAA logo. “Why are you asking me this?” And then I ask, but also know, “Have you?”

  “I just want to know if you’ve always been … faithful to me.” She looks back at the script and then at the TV, showcasing a lovely pink fog, whole minutes of it. “I care about that, Victor.”

  “Oh baby, always, always. Don’t underestimate me.”

  “Make love to me, Victor,” she whispers.

  I kiss her gently on the lips. She responds by pushing into me too hard and I have to pull back and whisper, “Oh baby, I’m so wiped out.” I lift my head because the new Soul Asylum video is on MTV and I want Chloe to watch it too but she has already turned over, away from me. A photo of myself, a pretty good one, taken by Herb Ritts, sits on Chloe’s nightstand, the only one I let her frame.

  “Is Herb coming tomorrow?” I ask softly.

  “I don’t think so,” she says, her voice muffled.

  “Do you know where he is?” I ask her hair, h
er neck.

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

  Arousal for Chloe: Sinead O’Connor CD, beeswax candles, my cologne, a lie. Beneath the scent of coconut her hair smells like juniper, even willow. Chloe sleeps across from me, dreaming of photographers flashing light meters inches from her face, of running naked down a freezing beach pretending it’s summer, of sitting under a palm tree full of spiders in Borneo, of getting off an overnight flight, gliding across another red carpet, paparazzi waiting, Miramax keeps calling, a dream within the dream of six hundred interview sessions melding into nightmares involving white-sand beaches in the South Pacific, a sunset over the Mediterranean, the French Alps, Milan, Paris, Tokyo, the icy waves, the pink newspapers from foreign countries, stacks of magazines with her unblemished face airbrushed to death and cropped close on the covers, and it’s hard to sleep when a sentence from a Vanity Fair profile of Chloe by Kevin Sessums refuses to leave me: “Even though we’ve never met she looks eerily familiar, as if we’ve known her forever.”

  27

  Vespa toward the club to have breakfast with Damien at 7:30, with stops at three newsstands to check the papers (nothing, no photo, small-time relief, maybe something more), and in the main dining room, which this morning looks stark and nondescript, all white walls and black velvet banquettes, my line of vision is interrupted frequently by flashes from a photographer sent by Vanity Fair wearing a Thai-rice-field-worker hat, a video of Casino Royale on some of the monitors, Downhill Racer on others, while upstairs Beau and Peyton (ahem) man the phones. At our table Damien and me and JD (sitting by my side taking notes) and the two goons from the black Jeep, both wearing black Polo shirts, finish up breakfast, today’s papers spread out everywhere with major items about tonight’s opening: Richard Johnson in the Post, George Rush in the News (a big photo of me, with the caption “It Boy of the Moment”), Michael Fleming in Variety, Michael Musto plugging it in the Voice, notices in Cindy Adams, Liz Smith, Buddy Seagull, Billy Norwich, Jeanne Williams and A. J. Benza. I finish leaving a message under the name Dagby on my agent Bill’s voice mail. Damien’s sipping a vanilla hazelnut decaf iced latte, holding a Monte Cristo cigar he keeps threatening to light but doesn’t, looking very studly in a Comme des Garçons black T-shirt under a black double-breasted jacket, a Cartier Panthere watch wrapped around a semi-hairy wrist, Giorgio Armani prescription sunglasses locked on a pretty decent head, a Motorola Stortac cell phone next to the semi-hairy wrist. Damien bought a 600SEL last week, and he and the goons just dropped Linda Evangelista off at the Cynthia Rowley show and it’s cold in the room and we’re all eating muesli and have sideburns and everything would be flat and bright and pop if it wasn’t so early.

  “So Dolph and I walk backstage at the Calvin Klein show yesterday—just two guys passing a bottle of Dewar’s between them—and Kate Moss is there, no shirt on, arms folded across her tits, and I’m thinking, Why bother? Then I drank one too many lethal martinis at Match Uptown last night. Dolph has a master’s in chemical engineering, he’s married and we’re talking wife in italics, baby, so there wasn’t a bimbo in sight even though the VIP room was filled with eurowolves but no heroin, no lesbians, no Japanese influences, no British Esquire. We hung out with Irina, the emerging Siberian-Eskimo supermodel. After my fifth lethal martini I asked Irina what it was like growing up in an igloo.” A pause. “The evening, er, ended sometime after that.” Damien lifts off the sunglasses, rubs his eyes, adjusts them for the first time this morning to light, and glances at the headlines splashed over the various papers. “Helena Christensen splitting up with Michael Hutchence? Prince dating Veronica Webb? God, the world’s a mess.”

  Suddenly Beau leans over me with the new revised guest list, whispers something unintelligible about the Gap into my ear, hands over a sample of the invitations, which Damien never bothered to look at but wants to see now, along with certain 8×10s and Polaroids of tonight’s various waitresses, stealing his two favorites—Rebecca and Pumpkin, both from Doppelganger’s.

  “Shalom Harlow sneezed on me,” Damien’s saying.

  “I’ve got chills,” I admit. “They’re multiplying.”

  I’m looking over the menu that Bongo and Bobby Flay have come up with: jalapeño-cured gravlax on dark bread, spicy arugula and mesclun greens, southwestern artichoke hearts with focaccia, porcini mushrooms and herb-roasted chicken breasts and/or grilled tuna with black peppercorns, chocolate-dipped strawberries, assorted classy granitas.

  “Did anyone read the Marky Mark interview in the Times?” Damien asks. “The underwear thing is ‘semi-haunting’ him.”

  “It’s semi-haunting me too, Damien,” I tell him. “Listen, here’s the seating arrangements.”

  Damien studies Beau suspiciously for a reaction.

  Beau notices this, points out certain elements about the menu, then carefully says, “I’m semi-haunted … too.”

  “Yesterday I wanted to fuck about twenty different strangers. Just girls, just people on the street. This one girl—the only one who hadn’t seen the 600SEL, who couldn’t tell Versace from the Gap, who didn’t even glance at the Patek Philippe—” He turns to the goons, one who keeps eyeing me in a fucked-up way. “That’s a watch you might never own. Anyway, she’s the only one who would talk to me, just some dumpy chick who came on to me in Chemical Bank, and I motioned sadly to her that I was mute, you know, tongueless, that I simply couldn’t speak, what have you. But get this—she knew sign language.”

  After Damien stares at me, I say, “Ah.”

  “I tell you, Victor,” Damien continues, “the world is full of surprises. Most of them not that interesting but surprising nonetheless. Needless to say, it was a mildly scary, humiliating moment. It actually bordered on the horrific, but I moved through it.” He sips his latte. “Could I actually not be in vogue? I panicked, man. I felt … old.”

  “Oh man, you’re only twenty-eight.” I nod to Beau, letting him know that he can slink back upstairs.

  “Twenty-eight, yeah.” Damien takes this in, but instead of dealing he just waves at the stacks of papers on the table. “Everything going as planned? Or are there any imminent disasters I should be apprised of?”

  “Here are the invites.” I hand him one. “I don’t think you ever had the time to see these.”

  “Nice, or as my friend Diane Von Furstenberg likes to say—nass.”

  “Yeah, they were printed on recycled paper with boy-based—I mean soy-based ink.” I close my eyes, shake my head, clear it. “Sorry, those little mos upstairs are getting to me.”

  “Opening this club, Victor, is tantamount to making a political statement,” Damien says. “I hope you know that.”

  I’m thinking, Spare me, but say, “Yeah, man?”

  “We’re selling myths.”

  “Mitts?”

  “No, myths. M-y-t-h-s. Like if a fag was gonna introduce you to Miss America, what would he say?”

  “Myth … America?”

  “Right on, babe.” Damien stretches, then slouches back into the booth. “I can’t help it, Victor,” he says blankly. “I sense sex when I walk around the club. I feel … compelled.”

  “Man, I’m so with you.”

  “It’s not a club, Victor. It’s an aphrodisiac.”

  “Here is the, um, seating arrangements for the dinner and then the list of press invited to the cocktail party beforehand.” I hand him a sheaf of papers, which Damien hands to one of his goons, who stares at it, like duh.

  “I just want to know who’s at my table,” Damien says vacantly.

  “Um, here …” I reach over to grab the papers back, and for an instant the goon glares at me suspiciously before gradually releasing his grip. “Um, table one is you and Alison and Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger and Tim Hutton and Uma Thurman and Jimmy and Jane Buffett and Ted Field and Christy Turlington and David Geffen and Calvin and Kelly Klein and Julian Schnabel and Ian Schrager and Russell Simmons, along with assorted dates and wives.”

  “I’m between Uma
Thurman and Christy Turlington, right?”

  “Well, Alison and Kelly—”

  “No no no no. I’m between Christy and Uma,” Damien says, pointing a finger at me.

  “I don’t know how that is going to”—I clear my throat—“fly with Alison.”

  “What’s she gonna do? Pinch me?”

  “Cool cool cool.” I nod. “JD, you know what to do.”

  “After tonight no one should get in for free. Oh yeah—except very good-looking lesbians. Anyone dressed like Garth Brooks is purged. We want a clientele that will up the class quotient.”

  “Up the class quotient. Yeah, yeah.” Suddenly I cannot tear my eyes off Damien’s head.

  “Ground Control to Major Tom,” Damien says, snapping his fingers.

  “Huh?”

  “What in the fuck are you looking at?” I hear him ask.

  “Nothing. Go ahead.”

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing. Just spacing. Go ahead.”

  After a brief, scary pause Damien continues icily. “If I see anyone and I mean anyone unhip wandering around this party tonight I will kill you.”

  “My mouth suddenly is so dry I can’t even like gulp, man.”

  Damien starts laughing and joking around, so I try to laugh and joke around too.

  “Listen, bud,” he says. “I just don’t want the city’s most bizarre bohemians or anyone who uses the term ‘fagulous’ near me or my friends.”