Twenty minutes later, my father walked over with the general manager.
“Let’s go, girls.” He was satisfied and calm.
The general manager led us into one of the elevators. A bellman followed with our trunks. My father stood tall, with a smirk on his face. “Girls, are you ready for the surprise?”
I watched as the general manager whipped out a special card and inserted it above all the elevator buttons. We watched the PH button light up in all its glory.
“Tom, you’re joking!” my mother gasped. She couldn’t believe it.
“The presidential suite,” my father boasted.
Chloe and I shrieked, and Mara even smiled. “No way, Dad.”
“Way,” he replied. My mother kneeled down to Chloe, and her eyes grew big and wide. “Guess what! We’re staying on the tippy-top floor, where Eloise lived!”
Chloe danced around in circles and hugged her waist.
The elevator doors opened, and we made our way down a private hallway. The general manager took out a gold key from his pocket and inserted it into the lock of the double doors while naming all the celebrities who’d previously slept where we were about to: “Michael Jackson, Nicole Kidman, Princess Diana.”
“Wow! Wow! Wow!” I repeated, making my father chuckle.
The bellman stopped in the foyer and asked my father where we would like each suitcase.
“Here is fine,” Dad said, and took out two $100 bills as a tip for their service.
“Thank you very much, sir,” the bellman said, tipping his hat.
“Enjoy your stay, and welcome to the Plaza,” the general manager said. “A butler will be arriving shortly to take your dinner order.”
The private dining room was already set with crystal glasses and Spode china.
“Girls, how about some lobster!” my father yelled as we trickled off to explore the suite. It was two floors with four bedrooms, each room a different color and style, with floor-to-ceiling silk drapes and a view of all Manhattan. It was now dark outside, and the city lights twinkled like millions of stars in the distance.
My mother sat down at the black grand piano in the gold-and-red-colored living room and played the ballad “Greensleeves,” allegedly composed by Henry VIII for his lover and future queen Anne Boleyn. I stood next to her, watching her fingers pound in passionate fever, concentrating on the notes, and slowing down for each high note as if it were her lullaby.
That night, we ate pounds of fresh lobsters in our nightgowns, my father in his blue flannel pajamas. We slurped on chocolate milkshakes for dessert, each one delivered on its own silver platter, with extra cherries on the side, and my father surprised us with tickets to see The Lion King the following night. It was a family slumber party in the most famous suite of the most famous hotel in America. We were on top of the world.
Maybe my father never made a reservation at the Plaza. Maybe he convinced the general manager that an employee had fallen short on the job and made a grave mistake. Maybe it was a gamble he felt worth taking. What were the odds that the presidential suite would be occupied? The thought occurred to me, but I didn’t dwell on it. I didn’t know it at the time, but the manipulating and rating of customers would serve me well in nightlife. I had been schmoozing since the age of eleven. I thought La Scala was where I first learned how to hustle, but I had no idea what hustling meant.
-11-
Michele and Arianna
I felt my mother was splitting into two different women: one I longed for but could find only in my memory, and the other, alive yet with the life in her dimmed to that of a distant stranger.
“You want to know how disgusting it was? How sick it felt being there, seeing him like that? Jesus Christ, Christina.”
I’d asked my mother what it was like visiting my father in prison. She and Chloe had gone to visit him up in Herlong. I didn’t go with them because I couldn’t afford to miss work. And when I tried to ask my sister what it was like, she quipped, “Christina, are you trying to ruin my day?” They didn’t want to talk about it. It was after this visit to the prison that my mother’s drinking escalated, and things started getting worse.
Josh’s family had invited us to the Screen Actors Guild Awards. By the end of the evening, my fantasy world of limos, photographers, and Hollywood’s most glamorous movie stars burst when I realized my mother was about to power barf three feet from the cast of Good Night and Good Luck, leaving her on her knees in the bathroom at the Shrine Auditorium in her Christian Lacroix gown—the same gown she’d worn to President Bill Clinton’s 1997 inauguration ball. Josh had to scoop her up in his arms and carry her out to the limo, with her head resting on his chest and her gown bunched up around his face, like he was cradling a sleeping toddler in a princess dress. For the next four days, she was bedridden at Josh’s parents’ house. “Bad food poisoning” is what she insisted it was when she finally woke up.
A few nights later, Chloe called me hysterical because Mom had hit the curb on the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Sunset Boulevard in her Jaguar, blowing out a tire after another night of drinking. The bank never came to repossess the car, and I presumed it was simply because they couldn’t find her. “She’s passed out in her clothes with her shoes still on, lying on top of her bed,” Chloe cried.
The $200,000 from Gary was gone.
Many years later, my mother would admit to having had a nervous breakdown. After the SAG Awards, one of her best friends flew in to take care of her for a few days. During her first marriage, Michele had been front and center in the Washington scene. After a bitter divorce battle, she remarried an investment banker and spent most of her time in Houston, far away from the A-lister, cave-dweller lifestyle, yet still wealthier than most. She and my mother remained friends through it all. And after Michele saw my mother in the state she was in—frail, glazed eyes, anxious, depressed, in debt, drinking too much—she flew her out to Colorado to stay at her country home for a week of rehabilitation.
My mother didn’t tell anyone where she was going, so when she returned, Suzanne had fired her from the stationery store. I never could get a straight answer as to why specifically she was fired, as Suzanne and my mother had been lifelong friends, but I knew there were many days when she just couldn’t get out of bed, showed up late, or not at all. My mother started taking antidepressants after that, although, she said, “They give me the shakes.” It was one of the side effects, but the pills helped her get out of bed each morning.
I tried my best to encourage her to find work with higher pay. After all, she had a degree in history from UCLA and had worked on Capitol Hill. But my mother wasn’t so optimistic. She had just turned fifty, and whenever I brought up the subject, she got confrontational with me, letting me know I was too young to understand her grave circumstances. “No one is going to hire a fifty-year-old woman who’s been out of the workforce for nearly twenty years. No one,” she said despairingly.
But when my mother returned, Arianna called. She invited us for tea at the Peninsula Hotel. Two of the few loyal friends, Nancy and John Palmer (the late NBC News journalist), reconnected us. Nancy and my father wrote to each other, and she would remain the constant thread tying me to the life I wanted back and the life I wanted to forget all at the same time. At first, I assumed that the Palmers stayed in touch with us because we were a “good story,” but through it all, they remained kind and gracious.
My parents met Arianna when her oldest daughter, Christina, and Chloe went to elementary school together. At the time, Arianna was still married to Michael Huffington after he’d defeated my mother’s old boss Bob Lagomarsino for the Republican seat. Chloe was always coming home and bragging that a manicurist had come to their house for mani-pedis, and how Arianna would create their own personal spa. I remember the first time I met Arianna. I went with my mother to pick up Chloe at her big stone house in the Wesley Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC. It was Arianna’s daughter’s birthday party, and Arianna handed me a goodie bag e
ven though I hadn’t attended the party. She was always so warm and took a liking to us because of my father’s Greek heritage. “Greek girls, like me!” she exclaimed in her famous accent. Arianna adored my father. They would flirt with each other at holiday parties, talk about being raised Greek Orthodox, and laugh about their overbearing Greek parents.
I thought that Arianna could help my mother reconnect with her political background, as Arianna had just run for governor of California. Maybe she could help her find a job. So we pulled it together and headed to the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills for tea with Arianna, Christina, and Isabella, her youngest daughter. Chloe had managed to come up with some excuse as to why she couldn’t come with us.
We pulled into the semicircular driveway of the luxury hotel. Gleaming black Mercedes and town cars were parked out front. My car was dirty, but I didn’t have the money to get it washed, and my mother asked me to drive because her car needed servicing. I wore a mock Chanel jacket, pearls, and my jean skirt, while my mother was back to her Escada blazer and Chanel ballerina flats, looking very “DC.”
We sat on blue-green silk couches and sipped English breakfast tea. Enormous fireplaces lit up either end of the tearoom, and orchids curled in every corner. Arianna was as vibrant as I remembered her, in a sleek black pantsuit, her hair short and red like my mother’s. People kept walking up to our table to say hello and kiss her on the cheek. After one man came over, Arianna leaned into the center of the table, whispered, “That was Oprah’s producer,” and winked.
I studied my mother, who remained quiet and reserved until Arianna asked about my father. “Gayle, how is Tom doing? He’s such a wonderful father,” she declared, and then, genuinely concerned, asked, “How are you and the girls holding up? Seriously.” It was evident she knew all that had happened. I wanted my mother to tell her the truth, to say we were really struggling, that she needed a steady job and steady income. But she clammed up. She got stiff, the way she does when I ask about her father. She smiled. “You know, we’re great, doing fine.” She didn’t want to ask for help. She was somewhere else. Until that moment, I’d felt maybe we still belonged; it seemed we’d taken back our past for just those few moments, until my mother refused to speak our truth. She wanted to go home. She wanted to lock herself in the bathroom or pull the covers over her head.
The rest of the afternoon, we talked about school, and what Christina’s and Isabella’s plans were for college, and whether or not Chloe liked Pacific Palisades High School, and how my auditioning was going. “Great. Everything is fine.”
Before she kissed us good-bye, Arianna told us about a website she had been working on launching, which would become the multimillion-dollar news website the Huffington Post.
When we left the hotel, we felt deflated; the balloon of potential empty and airless. There was nothing but missed opportunity and whiffs of a life to which we were no longer entitled. Maybe we never were. I saw from my mother’s response to Arianna’s question that it was still not safe to talk about money. I told myself it wasn’t because my father was a criminal but because even if we did explain it to Arianna or to anyone else—about all the debt we were in, about our family’s financial crisis—they wouldn’t understand. It was for love; it was for the family. And maybe my mother was right about women her age. Arianna’s position was rare. But I didn’t want to believe that what my mother had said was true: that it was impossible for a fifty-year-old woman to rejoin the workforce after having raised her family for the last twenty years. I was beginning to see the facade of the women I grew up around: the facade of their independence. I didn’t understand that most were being fully supported by their husbands’ money. The mothers and wives seemed so busy “working”—putting together event after event, board meeting after board meeting. As the veil of truth was lifting, I could see my mother, afraid to emancipate herself from within while learning about the barrier that keeps us unequal from men, crushing her all at the same time.
-12-
“Furlough”
“Honey!” Madeline yelled from her bedroom down the corridor. I was hanging my clothes in Josh’s closet. I’d spent all day rearranging my shabby-chic childhood bedroom furniture among Josh’s gold soccer trophies and Star Wars posters. The lease had ended at Emily’s apartment, and I was planning on living with Mara when she graduated, but there was a six-month gap where I needed a place to live. Josh had moved into an apartment at the bottom of Laurel Canyon, and we weren’t ready to move in together yet, so I figured his mother was a better choice. Besides, Madeline had that huge house all to herself; she wanted the company.
“How do I look?” she asked, removing the ice packs from her black-and-blue swollen eyes. She had arrived home from the hospital, opting for liposuction and lifting her eyelids. She opened them about halfway to look at me, propped up in her four-post California king-size bed, French doors opened to the backyard swimming pool.
“You look just like you do in the picture in the hallway,” I told her, trying not to look nauseous. The photo in the hallway was of her in her early thirties, holding Josh on the playground.
“When I woke up from the surgery, the woman told me to put on this girdle. To keep everything tight, you know?” She put her hands around her skinny thighs. “Extra small, the woman told me. And look, it even has its own pee hole!”
“You look so . . . young,” I said, sitting next to her on the silk bedspread, wanting to comfort her more but not knowing how. A few weeks earlier, in the kitchen, she had asked me about Becky, about how she was on set of The Partridge Family, and how old she was. She was only a few years older than me. Madeline cried, and I tried to remind her how beautiful she was. She told me she’d thought she and Josh’s father would grow old together; that when he retired from showbiz, she would go back to school and become a therapist, and it would be her turn to work. But now she was having to do it on her own. She had dedicated her life to this man, and for what? To be left high and dry for the old Hollywood cliché. I thought about my mother too. I could see why they had become good friends: not just because misery loves company but also because each had lost a man who would no longer take care of her, and now they were having to figure out nearly thirty years later how to become independent women. I was glad I didn’t move in with Josh. I made a promise to myself that night, despite having been fired from La Scala, that I would pull it together as best I could, that I would find a better-paying job, that I would work, and that I would never depend on a man for money or give away my life to him.
I met a girl through Emily who worked for a fashion designer. She knew everyone in nightlife. “You gotta go in for the interview looking sexy. Not like Laurie Partridge, and none of that East Coast BS. No pearls,” she warned me and then handed me a pair of YSL fuck-me pumps.
My interview was at nine at night at the most exclusive nightclub in Hollywood. Unless you were Paris Hilton, Leonardo DiCaprio, a supermodel, or a Wall Street banker willing to throw down $2,000 for a bottle of Grey Goose, you weren’t getting in.
I stood behind the red rope in my little black dress, gold hoops, and pumps trying to flag down the security guard. “Excuse me!” I kept trying to get someone’s attention until I realized I was being too polite. Fed up, I ducked under the rope and walked toward the front door until a security guard grabbed my arm. “No trespassing,” the man snapped. He was nearly seven feet tall and must have weighed about three hundred pounds. “Christina Grace. I’m here to see Anna Shapiro,” I declared and then looked at him with Do not fuck with me, I need this job eyes. He let go. “Oh, right this way.” Anna Shapiro was the prom queen of Los Angeles nightlife, the boss and woman responsible for weeding out the ugly and bringing in the beautiful.
The security guard opened the double doors, and I walked into a modern, open layout filled with white leather couches, glass tables, and disco balls. Bartenders by night and models by day were cutting fresh fruit while bottle-service girls by night and actresses by day were pulling up their
fishnets and curling their hair in the women’s bathroom. Josh liked to call them MAWs: models/actors/whatever.
A young hipster in round glasses and skinny jeans approached me, carrying a clipboard. “Are you Christina?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m Fred. Anna’s busy, so I’m going to interview you.”
We sat down on the white leather couches, and he handed me the clipboard.
“So this is the checklist you mark while collecting guests’ email addresses.” I looked down at the sheet of paper. “M is for model, S is for socialite, P/H is for pretty/handsome, A is for average, and NC is for not cute. So for each person you meet, you have to rate them. It’s very important because all of this goes into our database so we can determine who we allow or do not allow in our nightclub. Do you think you can do that?”
This kind of information collecting would, years later, turn into algorithms used to monitor the hottest nightclubs in America. Where cameras eventually replaced clipboards and paperwork, hidden in front entrances in order to take a snapshot of a face and calculate the measurements of what is considered “beauty,” and, based on how well you score, you will be either accepted or rejected. And if you’re fat, don’t even bother, because the owners look at it as taking up the space of what could potentially be two buyers instead of one, the potential difference between $1,000 or $2,000: two drinks or four.
“Yes,” I said. “I grew up in DC. I got this.” Cave dwellers, social A-list, politicians, media.
“Good,” he said. “And don’t let anyone see the list. It’s fifteen an hour. Anna wants to take a quick look at you. Come with me.” I did the math again in my head: The club is open only from ten to two. Fifteen times four is sixty, and I’ll be working only five days a week, so that’s sixty times five, which is three hundred a week times four, which is twelve hundred a month. Not enough to live.
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