Fame Game 03: Infamous

by Lauren Conrad

  Madison, who had been in the middle of a juicy Vanity Fair article about the rise and fall of a certain Hollywood action star, wished she had stayed longer on her chaise longue. She couldn’t help it; she sent Trevor a text: YOUR NEW PRODUCER NEEDS TO GET HIS SHIT TOGETHER. AMATEUR!

  Luckily for Stephen, he was working with the new and improved Madison—while she wasn’t inclined to actually help the guy, at least she had no plans to cause professional trouble for him (one of her old specialties).

  “Stephen, you know I have a hard out at one, right?” Madison said impatiently over the producer’s shoulder.

  “The schedule says we have you until two. It’s almost one now. We can’t shoot an entire lunch in fifteen minutes.” Stephen turned back to the camera operator he was talking to.

  “Stephen,” Madison said a little louder. “I have an event at five, and I have to get into hair and makeup. Sorry, but it’s part of my job.” She shrugged.

  Stephen looked more than a little irritated. “Actually, Madison, this is your job. You’re free to attend as many boutique openings and fragrance launches as you want in your spare time, but when you’ve been scheduled to film, I expect you to be here. And I expect you to have a better attitude.”

  Madison seethed; no one spoke to her that way, especially not some clueless producer and in front of the whole crew. Who did he think he was? This was her show, not his. And if she felt at all like being old Madison for a moment, he’d be lucky to produce a Taco Bell commercial by the time she was done with him.

  But since fighting with him might result in the shoot going even longer, she held her tongue. For now.

  A moment later she was cleared to go, and the camera followed her through the restaurant as she met Sophie at a corner table. Madison was smiling, of course, but inside she was still angry: Stephen was a buffoon, and Trevor had insisted on this sisterly meet-up instead of filming Madison later this evening at the club they had cleared. Madison needed a better foil for her fabulousness than Sophie, or some wannabe actor that Trevor had decided looked good on camera. But how would that work? Who would it be? She’d have to ponder it.

  “Namaste,” Madison said as she got to the table—only so Sophie wouldn’t.

  “Hey, sis,” Sophie said. She stood to hug her, but Madison, almost imperceptibly, shook her head. It was fine to have lunch with her sister and play reasonably nice on camera, but there was really no need to go overboard.

  Madison sat and crossed her legs delicately at the ankle. She was wearing a white Calvin Klein sheath dress—very chic, very grown-up—and strappy gold sandals. (She’d guessed, correctly, that her sister would be in some vivid maxi-dress monstrosity, and she’d wanted to offer a contrast.)

  “Nice dress,” Sophie said. “Don’t order a Bloody Mary.”

  “Nice dress,” said Madison. “Don’t suffocate in all that polyester.”

  Then, for a moment, they merely smiled at each other. Love-hate in their eyes, with maybe a slight emphasis on the latter.

  Then Sophie reached across the table and patted Madison’s hand. “Seriously, it’s so good to see you. You were gone on vacation for so long—I thought you might never come back.”

  “It was great,” Madison said. “But of course I had business interests to attend to.”

  Sophie raised an eyebrow. “New endorsements?”

  “Oh,” Madison said breezily, “let’s not talk about work. Let’s order.” The fact was, she didn’t have any deals on the horizon, though she was pestering Nick, her agent, to come up with something (anything). Sophie probably knew this, too, and was hoping she’d get Madison to admit it on camera. (She wouldn’t.)

  The waiter appeared the moment Madison raised her index finger. “Ladies,” he said smoothly, “Good afternoon. Can I tell you about today’s specials?”

  “Two tuna tartares and two house salads,” Madison said, cutting him off. “Please.”

  “And a Cajun rib eye,” Sophie said.

  Madison shot her a look. Last she heard, Sophie didn’t eat mammals.

  “It’s for Jay,” Sophie explained. “He’ll be here any second.”

  Madison rolled her eyes and didn’t bother hiding it from the camera. “Why?” she asked.

  “Why not? I think he’s funny,” Sophie said.

  “He’s an idiot,” Madison responded. (She really hoped Trevor would keep that line.)

  “Everyone else likes him,” Sophie said.

  Madison knew she wasn’t referring to their fellow cast members; Sophie meant that the Fame Game viewers loved him. According to Trevor, they thought Jay was hilarious. They found him good-looking, too. (“Parking-lot hot,” Carmen called him—because he looked like the kind of bad boy who hung out in the high school parking lot, smoking instead of going to class.)

  No, the only people who loved Jay were the ones who didn’t have to be in the same room with him. Were The Fame Game an elimination show, Madison would have done everything in her power to get him kicked off a long time ago.

  “You should have warned me,” Madison said. “I’d have brought my . . . actually, I probably wouldn’t have showed up.”

  “I know, that’s why I didn’t tell you,” Sophie said pointedly. “Besides, it could be worse. At least I didn’t bring Dad this time.”

  Madison sucked in her breath. Even more than six months later, she could still feel the shock of seeing her father for the first time since she was nine, when Sophie hauled him along to their lunch date at Barney Greengrass. Surprise! It’s our long-lost, deadbeat dad!

  It had been a crazy few months that followed that emotional ambush, full of ups and downs that eventually landed Madison in a courtroom committing perjury. For a while, Madison had felt part of a real family. But where was Charlie Wardell now? No one knew. Madison had gotten one stupid postcard—and then nothing.

  “Look,” Sophie said, “here comes that cutie now.”

  Madison turned and saw Jay galumphing toward them, a button-down thrown over his tank top and jeans so low and baggy they barely covered his boxers. She couldn’t believe she was going to be subjected to him. He was even worse than one of her horrible Trevor-supplied dates.

  “Greetings, beautiful ladies,” he said. He gave Sophie a kiss, then leaned into Madison but she ducked it.

  “You order for me, babe?” Jay asked.

  “‘Babe’?” Madison repeated, wondering if Jay was enough of an idiot to try to date two girls on the same TV show at the same time. (Gaby had finally copped to hooking up with Jay again. “I can’t help it. I like him soooo much,” she’d said.)

  Jay laughed as he scooted his chair in toward the table. “Oh, not ‘babe’ like that,” he said. “Not my babe. Just a babe.”

  Sophie beamed at him. Madison understood that it wasn’t because Sophie found him charming, either, although Sophie might pretend otherwise. Madison knew her sister, and her sister was absolutely not that stupid. (She was, however, potentially stupid enough to make a move on that idiot Stephen Marsh. Not that Sophie had said anything, but Madison had seen the look Sophie gave him when she first arrived. . . .)

  No, Sophie was sucking up to Jay because of his audience popularity. Ever since she’d figured out that her peace-and-love trip did little to make her appealing to the fans, she’d been looking for another angle. Madison could understand that; after all, she was looking for a new angle herself.

  As far as Sophie was concerned, Madison would have advised her to lose the tent dresses and the yoga act, but hey, she wasn’t her sister’s manager.

  The waiter returned to ask Jay if he wanted a drink. “You got a Heineken, playa?” Jay asked.

  Madison’s eyes widened. He did not just call the waiter “playa,” she thought.

  But actually he had, and he called him “son” later, and finally, to cap it all off, “homes.” Madison felt like crawling under the table. Anything to be away from Jay.

  Except, of course, the cameras were rolling and she ought to stay in their lin
e of sight. (She had to keep her story line #1.)

  “So—do you remember how Kate told us she’d waited on Gemma Kline at Stecco?” Madison asked. “Well, I happened to be in a dressing room next to her the other day, and I overheard her and her assistant talking about how her assistant got, like, a flesh-eating bacteria from a bad manicure.”

  Sophie’s brow furrowed. “Is this really lunch-time conversation?” she asked.

  “Of course! So then I was looking at D-Lish and it had this picture of Gemma and her assistant—who, by the way, is totally going to pull a Kim K and bypass her former boss, you can tell—and it said: Gemma K and Annie B visit Dr. Bloom for celebrity microdermabrasion. And I’m like, Yeah, right: Try a major dose of antibiotics and the name of a personal-injury lawyer.”

  “Oh, Mad,” Sophie said. “You’re so funny. I’ve really missed you, you know.”

  Sophie looked very earnest when she said this, but Madison wasn’t buying it. “Really.”

  “Of course! I think we should hang out more. I think we should hang out all the time! We’re sisters, Mad. We share a bond that’s both earthly and spiritual—”

  “Please don’t go down the New Age wormhole,” Madison interrupted.

  “—we have to be there for each other. We have to support each other in what we want to do and how we want to live, and we have to—”

  Madison stopped listening and took a bite of her tuna tartare. She understood why Sophie wanted to “hang out more.” It was the same reason she wanted to hang out with Jay: because Trevor wouldn’t turn the camera on her unless she was with someone viewers liked better.

  If she weren’t still mad at Sophie, Madison would find her desperation endearing.

  What Sophie didn’t seem to understand was that you had to be larger than life on TV. You had to laugh louder, and frown deeper, and wear higher heels, and gossip more, and relax less. . . .

  It was acting.

  And it was the kind of acting that Madison excelled at. As Sophie talked on, and Madison nodded her head, pretending to listen, she realized that this was the sort of helpful information she could share. She wouldn’t share everything she knew, but she could divulge enough to help someone reach sidekick status. Yes, maybe this was the angle she was looking for. . . .

  Everyone knew that the lead character of the show was only as good as those who followed her around, hanging on her every word. Maybe Madison had been playing it wrong by keeping her tricks to herself. Maybe it was time to share some of the spotlight—if only to make her own star shine a little brighter.

  Not with Sophie, though, because Sophie didn’t deserve her help.

  With Kate, who Perez Hilton once called “as charismatic as a coatrack.”

  Madison had sworn not to waste time helping anyone else, but if helping Kate meant helping herself, that didn’t count as kindness, did it?

  11

  THINGS ARE ABOUT TO CHANGE

  Kate was curled up in the corner of her couch, sipping a cup of green tea and watching an episode from the first season of The Fame Game, which Madison had DVR’d. (Madison saved every show, clipped every magazine article; one of these days she was going to have to rent a storage space for her archives.)

  “Okay,” Madison said, “now watch this scene here.” For the last half hour, she’d been talking through the scenes like a football coach on the morning after a big game.

  The camera focused in on Madison and Sophia, who were sitting at a café in Beverly Hills. TV Madison said, “I think Gaby and Jay are in kind of a weird place in their relationship, but they seem happy.” Then she flipped a piece of hair over her shoulder. “But if you ask me,” she went on, “she’s drinking a lot. Sometimes I feel like things are going to . . . well, change for her. . . .”

  Real-life Madison hit pause on the remote and turned to Kate expectantly.

  “So—wait. What’s the part I’m supposed to do?” Kate asked.

  When Madison had offered to give her some reality TV pointers, Kate had eagerly agreed. She was tired of being called “boring” and “vanilla” and “ho-hum.” But so far she was having a hard time understanding why Madison was apparently so great at TV while she herself was apparently not. Besides the whole camera-hog thing, obviously; she knew Madison was better at that.

  Madison explained, “You make vague but important-sounding pronouncements. ‘I feel like things are going to change for her.’ Or ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ Or ‘Everything is going to be different this time.’ Those are good because Trevor can use them as teasers in the commercials they play all week long, and as a cliff-hanger at the end of an episode. Which means that your one sentence will get played about a hundred times.”

  “But it’s sort of an unspecific and boring sentence?” Kate said hesitatingly.

  “Unspecific, yes. But boring, no. Having your sentence be the tease puts you at the center of the drama. The one who’s either right—or spectacularly wrong. Which it is doesn’t really matter.” Madison fast-forwarded as she talked. “As you can see, as far as the Gaby prediction goes, I was correct. Things changed for her all right. She spent a month in lockdown.”

  Kate reached down and picked up Lucinda as she waited for Madison to find what she was looking for. She’d promised herself she’d practice six hours a day until the showcase, but she’d only strummed two chords before Madison whirled around.

  “Ahem. What are you doing?” Madison demanded.

  “Um, playing a guitar?”

  “Would you play a guitar in calculus class?”

  “What? No.”

  “Well, then put that thing away, because this is a lot more important than calculus. Honestly, you’re lucky I’m even taking the time to help you with this.”

  Kate did as she was told—although it wasn’t like playing guitar wasn’t important, too. She had the showcase to think about, after all. Wasn’t her musical future a bigger deal than whether or not she got the teaser line? “Should I take notes?” she asked, half jokingly.

  “Probably,” Madison said. She wasn’t joking.

  Kate searched on the coffee table for a pen and paper. Madison enjoyed bossing people around—that was clear—and Kate truly was grateful to her for it. She’d shown a real flair for reinventing people on Madison’s Makeovers, and now she was sharing her secrets. Kate ought to sit up straight and pay better attention. She would spend some quality time with Lucinda later.

  “Ready now, O pupil of mine?” Madison asked.

  Kate nodded, smiling. Ever since she realized that the off-camera Madison was nicer than the on-camera one (though she still had an acid tongue), their friendship had blossomed. Kate liked off-camera Madison’s sometimes goofy sense of humor and her relaxed sense of fashion. Tonight, for instance, she was wearing a messy ponytail, a soft, faded T-shirt, and a pair of giant fuzzy slippers. It was a side that she’d never let The Fame Game see, and it was super cute.

  “I’m totally ready,” Kate said. “Amaze me with your wisdom.” She wrote How to Be Not Boring at the top of her scrap paper.

  “All right. Note how, in group scenes, I always keep in view of the camera. I’m never lost in the crowd like some dispensable secondary character. It helps to wear bold colors too. I’m partial to red, but anything that helps you stand out is good. Also, pay close attention to the story lines for each scene. If the scene isn’t focused on you, then do everything you can to interact with whoever the producers are focusing on.”

  “Don’t you sometimes want to hide, though?” Kate asked. “Don’t you get sick of the cameras in your face?”

  Madison shook her head. “As if. Oh, something I forgot to mention about the Gaby scene: Talk about your castmates on camera. Shows like The Bachelor always do cast interviews where everyone bitches about each other. People love that. Think of your one-on-one scenes as an on-camera interview.”

  “And bitch?” Kate asked doubtfully.

  “If you can’t find it in your heart to bitch, plain old gossip is suffi
cient.”

  Gossip, Kate wrote. Make predictions. She looked up at the TV screen. Sure enough, Madison was at the center of the scene; even at a crowded party, she stood out as if she’d hired a spotlight to stay trained on her.

  Madison watched herself for a moment, nodding thoughtfully, and then turned back to Kate. “Wait a moment before answering questions. Look intent. Or thoughtful. Or whatever the scene calls for. Have the appropriate expression on your face, but say nothing for at least three solid seconds. That increases the tension while the audience waits for an answer.”

  Stare!!! Kate wrote.

  She wondered, as she doodled in the margins of a P.F. Chang’s menu, if Carmen knew this information instinctively, having grown up around cameras the way she did. Or maybe Cassandra had fed Little CC showbiz advice along with her bowl of morning Cheerios: Always smile for the cameras, dear, always let them see your brightest self.

  Certainly no one ever compared Carmen’s scenes to “watching paint dry.” (Though they’d certainly said other nasty things about her. What was the headline the other day—something about Carmen spending $10K on cellulite treatments? )

  “Look at yourself,” Madison ordered, pointing toward the TV. “See how you’re practically vanishing into the wallpaper?”

  “Thanks a lot,” Kate said.

  “You have to lean forward. You can’t let that idiot Jay block you. Remember he’s, like, three times as big as you are. And ten times as loud.” Madison stopped and looked thoughtfully at the screen. “You know . . . I’m thinking. . . .”

  Kate shot her a look. There was something about her tone that made Kate nervous. “You’re thinking what?”

  Madison turned toward her, an excited expression on her face. “One of the main rules of reality TV—and if you don’t know this one by now there’s definitely something wrong with you—is that you aren’t yourself on TV. You’re a type. A character. You either play the part, or you’re edited into it afterward.” She clapped her hands together. “God, why didn’t I think of it before? You’re being a real person on camera, Kate, when everyone knows that real people are boring.”