Cover Girl Confidential

by Beverly Bartlett

  He grinned.

  “Not ready to shout it from the rooftops?” he said. I had no idea how to take that—a complaint? a challenge? a sarcastic joke?

  I ignored it.

  “I just think it would be better if we were discreet,” I said. I looked at my shoes, which struck me suddenly as being so six months ago. I decided on the spot to go shopping after work.

  I looked back up and he was still grinning. “Secrets are very sexy, you know,” he said.

  I grinned back. “It depends on how you wear them.”

  “Indeed,” he said. “It always does.”

  More grinning and foot watching. “Well,” he said, finally. “Back to work for me.”

  On the air that morning, we engaged in our usual friendly banter. I was shocked, frankly, at how easy it was to settle back into business as usual after the weekend we’d had. In fact, only two things about that morning’s show were memorable for me. At one point, Baxter asked Hughes if he’d had a nice weekend. And Hughes said that it was nice enough. “Uneventful really,” he said. “Not a single important thing happened.”

  And then he blinked three times.

  The other moment was when Hughes was interviewing a music critic about some new album or another and finished up the interview by saying: “I understand you’ve a book coming out this spring.”

  “Yes,” said the music expert. “It’s a critical look at sexual imagery in R-and-B music. It’s called Let’s Get It On.”

  Hughes blushed, right there on camera for anyone to see.

  I blushed as well, but I was off camera at the moment and no one saw me. Except for Baxter. He raised an eyebrow and looked at me in a questioning way, and I did the worst thing I could have done, for secret keeping. It was not yet seventy-two hours since I had spent an entire evening staring into Baxter’s eyes, but when he glanced at me just then, I immediately looked away.

  I think he knew at that moment. I thought I detected a noticeable souring of his mood.

  And he was not the only one with a worsening mood. I learned later that it was just about that same moment that the first lady of the United States/junior senator from Ohio received some disturbing news. She was informed that the National Enquirer had an incriminating photo of her husband and Addison McGhee.

  “How did they get their hands on that photo?” she said to her top aide, seething with rage. (This was widely reported later by Entertainment Weekly and other respectable news outlets.)

  “In the future,” the aide said, wearily, “if you’re going to make dramatic staffing cuts at the White House to gain publicity for your little dispute about the federal budget, here’s some advice.” He leaned toward her, as if about to whisper, then startled her by screaming: “Don’t lay off the photographer!”

  Chapter 17

  That night I went shopping, which I think threw Hughes for something of a loop. We had eaten dinner together every weeknight for the past several months—more than a year, really. Then we spent a romantic and sensual weekend together and suddenly I was begging off from evening plans, saying I had errands to run.

  I had been putting aside money every month into a special savings account—telling myself that what I saved by living in a hotel room paid for by Cal ought to go to good use at some point. But I blew it all that night on a stunning collection of new clothes, shoes, and lingerie. It’s funny to think about that now, as I sit here in prison wearing the same outfit I’ve worn every day for six months.

  I shopped frantically, then went back to the hotel and called my mom and giggled more than usual as I talked to her. I did not say anything about my weekend —obviously. I mean, she would have been shocked enough that I’d gone to a play where people rolled around half naked on the stage. Knowing that I made eyes with Baxter and made out with Hughes would have killed her.

  I hung up and noticed with disappointment that I still had no messages—I confess I had called my mother in part to pass the time quickly rather than staring at the phone and hoping for it to ring. But soon the front desk called to say a florist had a delivery for me. I told them to bring it on up and I, thankfully, checked my makeup in the mirror as I waited, because it turned out that it was Hughes himself who came to the door, his face hidden behind the bouquet of three dozen roses. I did not realize it was him until he had set the roses on the table and I had reached into my purse for tip money.

  I changed course quickly, pretending I didn’t have any money in my purse and whatever was I going to do? Hughes said we would work something out. The look he gave me at that moment . . . I’ll never forget how playful and spontaneous and, well, real it all seemed. It’s impossible for me to understand how we got from that place to the one it all came to.

  I feel a little silly writing about the rest of this. Because, well, because it’s just embarrassing first of all—and well documented in the media, second. But my marriage to Hughes is, after all, part of what Cassie told me to write about. So I guess I had better start.

  It was just a few weeks after our relationship took its sudden and somewhat unexpected turn that Cal Gupton sent us to Las Vegas. The Supreme Court of Nevada had ruled that banning gay marriage was unconstitutional and gay marriages would be performed there starting the next morning. Cal said that Las Vegas would be the news capital of America for at least a week and he thought that Hughes and I should broadcast live from there.

  Hughes and I each protested this decision with rather halfhearted passion. Putting on a three-hour live show from outside the regular studio is tougher than people realize, and hopping across time zones when you’re already sleep-deprived and off schedule is tougher still. We each said as much to Cal, but did not really push it. For one thing, we didn’t want to seem unenthusiastic about his big idea. And for another, a trip to Vegas together sounded like fun.

  “Cheap, tawdry fun,” Hughes said, as we were settling into our first-class seats. “But isn’t that the best kind?”

  And I said I supposed it was.

  But the truth was, I will now confess, that I didn’t really understand Hughes at moments like that. I could appreciate on some level that a man of his background and upbringing and pedigree did not see Vegas as a particularly glamorous destination. He’d rather be flying off to Monaco or Tuscany or Hong Kong. I knew that. But from my perspective, Las Vegas was a perfectly exciting place to visit. The girls of my high school class had voted it their number one dream honeymoon location. I don’t know if I would go that far. For one thing, I long ago had to give up the appeal of budget-priced buffet meals. (Give me a place where I can only afford the salad, please.) But still, I couldn’t quite muster the sophisticated disdain for the place that I knew Hughes expected. He thumbed through a Vegas brochure and made a crack or two about the fake Venice you can visit there. I smiled and nodded, but really I looked forward to seeing it.

  It was times like this that I wished again that someone would write an updated Miss Liberty book, one that addressed issues like this, rather than all that old stuff about calling cards and servant–employer relations. It seemed to me, while growing up in Nebraska, that Las Vegas and Wal-Mart and cruising in old cars were the essence of America. But as an adult, I was spending time with the likes of Hughes Sinclair, whose family built America, and learning that I was apparently supposed to sneer at such things. It made no sense at all to me. I read a couple of books about it—red and blue America and all that—but I still didn’t get it.

  Anyway, it didn’t matter what either of us thought of Las Vegas, because we were both going only at Cal’s insistence and had no time for a prolonged debate on its merits anyway. We were frantically reading up on the gay rights movement on the flight. I pressed my knee against Hughes’s while I read an entire New York Times article about a controversial school in Oregon that claimed to “cure” homosexual youth through a diet of brussels sprouts and onions.

  “It certainly ought to cure you of something,” Hughes quipped, looking over my shoulder once. And I giggled, though
honestly I love brussels sprouts and onions. They have hardly any calories!

  I don’t think any of our programs that week—broadcast from an all-night wedding chapel—were particularly good. Thanks to the time change, our show started each morning at 4 AM Vegas time. Not many people are getting married at 4 AM—even in Vegas. Plus, at moments like these, it became apparent how much Hughes and I played off Baxter. The more I’d defended Baxter on the boards, the more I had come to see him as instrumental to the whole show. Hughes and I were airy and flippant and fun—I say this with more shame than pride—and Baxter was the necessary grounding element. He was the one who rolled his eyes and chuckled wearily and served as sort of a Greek chorus to our little act of silliness and saltiness.

  But it was hard to provide this sort of grounding from several states away. We couldn’t even see each other and that threw the whole show off more than I would have predicted. Hughes and I became less flirty than usual. In part, I think, this was because we were even sleepier than normal—and in part because, given what was going on in our real lives, we felt uncomfortable casually flirting around wedding bells. And ultimately, I think it was Baxter’s absence that reined us in. We normally relied on him and his bemused shrugs and appalled glances to let us know when we had gone too far. Without him, we just felt unsure.

  That Friday, Hughes and I were discussing the discomfort at the hotel buffet. (I kept going back—to the spinach bowl and the vinegar bottle. Another rule of life: Kirstie Alley never would have had problems in the first place if she had stuck to spinach and vinegar.)

  I was sort of surprised that Hughes and I could discuss our on- and off-air chemistry with such professional detachment. I wondered if that said something quite good or very bad about our relationship.

  “You know,” he said, startling me by pointing his fork at me for emphasis. Utensil pointing was becoming a habit for him. “There’s only one way to avoid all this awkwardness. We should just do it.”

  I raised an eyebrow, not sure exactly what we should do that we had not already done.

  “We should just get married,” he clarified.

  I broke into a smile. (With my mouth closed—I did not want to run the risk that his memory of this moment with his new fiancée would include spinach in her teeth.) “Okay,” I said.

  Any serious accounting of my marriage to Hughes ought to include my emotional reaction to his proposal, I suppose. But when I try to replay that moment in my mind, what strikes me is that I was not nearly as surprised and blown away as I should have been. I was pleased. I was excited. More than that, I was ecstatic. At that moment, I felt and believed that the only thing I had ever wanted to do was marry Hughes.

  But I wasn’t surprised. I had, I guess, somehow thought that Hughes’s proposal was inevitable. My gut feeling had told me this long ago. The only surprising aspect was that it came at an all-you-can-eat buffet in Vegas. It’s as if I’d always known that this was where we were headed and wasn’t it nice that we were finally there?

  I don’t know why I felt that way, in particular. It’s not as if I believed that any romantic relationship would naturally end in marriage. I certainly had evidence to suggest otherwise. I read People magazine, you know. And there was the high school boyfriend and Simon Cowell. But Hughes and I were different. I believed marriage was our destiny.

  We did not go to the all-night wedding chapel, I am proud to say. No need to on a Friday afternoon, for one thing. And besides, Hughes Sinclair may have been acting uncharacteristically impulsive and romantic, but he was still Hughes Sinclair. We slipped back to his room and he worked the phones while I worked the Internet and in two scant hours we had a lovely ceremony planned in a small chapel in the Vegas suburbs. We stopped at an outlet mall—“Aren’t all malls retail outlets?” Hughes asked—and I quickly found a pale pink sundress at Coldwater Creek while Hughes picked out a new tie at, of all places, Eddie Bauer. (Looking back on it, I should have seen that as an omen. If Hughes Sinclair buys a tie at Eddie Bauer, he is clearly not himself. And if he is willing to marry someone wearing Coldwater Creek, he has lost his mind.)

  But I thought the clothes looked lovely. It was like that time Sharon Stone went to the Oscars wearing a Gap T-shirt. I made this rather immodest point to Hughes, who said that it was indeed like that. “Only less matronly,” he said. “And without the complexion issues.”

  I carried a bouquet of baby’s breath—breathtaking in its simplicity. “A blooming tumbleweed” is the way Hughes described it.

  We were both barefoot, which was much commented on, but it was perfectly simple really. I had not been able to find matching shoes and Hughes said that if I was barefoot, then he should be, too. “If we were on a beach, no one would think anything of it,” he said. “And what’s Vegas if not a beach without water?”

  Even after everything, I still smile when I see a copy of our wedding photo, the one It’s Morning Now sent out with the press release. Hughes is standing straight and tall, facing the camera. I am turned toward him, my perfectly flat belly pressed into his side, my arm reaching around his neck, my dark hand in his gray hair, and my head lying on his shoulder. I am facing the camera and my face looks, to me at least, the very picture of security and comfort, as if I’m right where I belong. Our bare feet—all four recently pedicured, of course—are touching one another in a note of whimsy and familiarity. Several people told me that if Hughes and I had been married in some fancy New York cathedral, with a huge reception and exquisite clothes and shoes, they would have been highly skeptical of the whole thing. But when they saw that photo with those bare feet—my long dark toes jumbled with his paleness—then they knew, they said, that it was “real.”

  That’s what a lot of people told me.

  Baxter wasn’t one of them.

  Chapter 18

  I kept telling myself that my sheepishness around Baxter was ridiculous. I had done nothing more than engage in a single flirtatious evening with him—most of it spent yards and yards apart. I had offered him no words of encouragement or promise. I had merely refused to look away. He had said the next move would be mine and I had not made it. What apology did I owe?

  But I dreaded going into the office on Monday. My honeymoon with Hughes was that Friday and Saturday night; we flew back to New York, as scheduled, on Sunday. I slept in his apartment near the studio Sunday night and was amazed to realize I had never been to his home before, although I was honestly somewhat relieved to know that was something I could tell my mother. (“I never even saw his apartment, Mom, until I walked in as Mrs. Hughes Sinclair.”)

  The wedding photo made the appropriate splash in the papers, magazines, and tabloids. The National Enquirer promised “more sensational Addison photos soon,” a remark that puzzled me but that I naively did not think much about.

  When I called my parents, I was surprised that they greeted the news with a sort of guarded pleasure. I had expected a more negative reaction, and the conversation with my parents made me realize two things: (1) I had severely underestimated their concern about my lack of maternal progress. (2) Marriage was really the easiest thing I could have done.

  I hope that what I’m about to say does not seem to blame my parents for my obviously ill-considered and much-too-quick marriage. But I think it must be noted that if you are wondering why an eager-to-please girl from a conservative refugee family would, with two hours’ planning, marry a man no one knew she was dating—in Las Vegas, of all places—then think about this: Which call is easier to make to a mother like mine? Would you rather call her and say that you’ve been spending nights and long, lazy weekend days with a somewhat snotty celebrity widely rumored to be gay? Or would you rather just say that you married him?

  So my conversation with my parents had gone well. Better, really, than the conversation with Hughes’s family had. Hughes’s mother was politely gracious and his father was jovially congratulatory, but they seemed stunned and a little disappointed. Hughes assured me they were just regretti
ng missing out on the big rehearsal dinner and an opportunity to show off to political cronies and former fellow dancers. “It’s nothing to do with you, Addison,” he said, giving me a quick peck on the forehead as we rode into the studio together on Monday morning.

  When we arrived, I realized I wasn’t sure how to act around Hughes in the office or on the air. And I was more nervous still about Baxter. I supposed I would have to say something, but I could not imagine quite what.

  Baxter made it easy on me, however, bursting toward me with smiling good wishes. “Congratulations!” he said. “Or is it Best Wishes? I never could remember which you’re supposed to say to who. One’s to the bride and the other the groom, isn’t it? I’m sure Hughes could straighten us out.”

  He was talking quickly but passing it off as effusive, rather than nervous. I wasn’t sure whether to be grateful or a tad disappointed.

  “Actually,” I said, “I know all about this.” (Miss Liberty’s book was full of this sort of useful etiquette information.)

  He put up a hand to stop me. “Don’t tell me now,” he said. “This will be perfect chatter for the show.” He hugged me again, a bit loosely really, and headed off down the hall repeating things like “Congrats!” and “Can’t wait to hear about the honeymoon!” as he disappeared.