"I knew Bobby wasn't faithful... He was sleeping with big models... famous socialites in good shape... the occasional guy or... underage girl-girls who attended Spence or Chapin or Sacred Heart-and if he got in trouble with their mothers he'd f**k them too... He would weigh girls... you had to be a certain weight... and mostly but not all the time a certain height... in order to f**k Bobby Hughes... If you got on that scale and passed, then he... f**ked you..."
My arms are falling asleep and I adjust my position, light another joint a crew member hands me.
"A lot of girls disappeared or... OD'd... or they 'had accidents,' and by this time I was breaking down on the Concorde when I would see the curvature of the earth and the clouds seemed hundreds of miles below us... and I'd freak out... even on large amounts of Xanax and at the height of my fame... I was responsible for the increased suicide rate among... teenage girls and young women who realized they would never look like me... I was told this in editorials... angry letters from overweight mothers... essays by women in NOW... I was told I was destroying lives... but it didn't touch me because no one we knew was real... people just seemed... fake and... Bobby liked that I felt this way... It 'helped,' he said... and anyway, in the end I was too famous for him to get rid of..."
Her voice quavers, regains its composure, then falters again and she just starts murmuring strings of words, how she moved into films, her first movie, Night of the Bottomless Pit, the arrangement of fake passports, soldiers of fortune from Thailand, Bosnia, Utah, new social security numbers, heads struck with such force they broke open as easily as soft-boiled eggs, a form of torture where the victim has to swallow a rope. "In Bombay...," and now she shudders, swallowing rapidly, eyes clamped shut, tears immediately pouring out of the slits. "In Bombay..." She refuses to follow through and then starts shrieking about a serial killer Bobby befriended in Berlin and I hop out of bed and tell the director "Hey, it's over" and while they pack up to leave Jamie writhes on the bed, sobbing hysterically, clawing at the sheets, sometimes shouting out names in Arabic.
33
Outside the building in the 8th or 16th under a hazy sheen of floating mist the film crew waits after the director and Felix the cinematographer have set up a simple establishing shot that will be of the six of us walking "gaily" to a black Citroen waiting at the curb that will take us to a party at Natacha. But this crew doesn't know that earlier this afternoon the film crew I was introduced to the other night at Hotel Costes has been let into the house by Bobby and has spent the last three hours laying cable, setting up lights, filming sequences I'm not in, including a long unresolvable argument between Tammy and Bruce, a sex scene with Jamie and Bobby, another segment with Bruce, alone, playing a guitar, strumming the old Bread song "It Don't Matter to Me," and they now move quietly around the living room-electricians and a beautiful key grip and the black-bearded director -all conferring with a cinematographer who resembles Brad Pitt in Johnny Suede and upstairs in Bentley's room the first AD keeps parting the Mary Bright blackout curtains, peering out at the other film crew in the street, offering updates over the muffled sounds of another fight between Tammy and Bruce-this one not filmed-concerning the actor playing the French premier's son and predictably doors are slammed, voices are raised, doors are slammed again.
I'm wearing a Prada suit totally unaware of who helped me put it on and I'm positioned in one of the Dialogica chairs in the living room, playing with a lime-green tie someone chose for me. On the TV screen, with the sound off, reruns of "Cheers" followed by "Home Improvement" run endlessly on a tape someone stuck into the VCR. A PA hands me a book of notes that Bobby made, I'm told, especially for me. Continents are investigated, floor plans of the Ritz have been reproduced, an outline was printed from a computer of the TWA terminal at Charles de Gaulle, diagrams of the layout of Harry's Bar in Venice, handwriting experts preoccupied with verifying signatures are interviewed, entries from a diary someone named Keith kept concerning a trip he made to Oklahoma City, pages about plastic explosives, the best wiring, the correct timer, the right container, the best detonator.
I'm reading "Semtex is made in Czechoslavakia." I'm reading "Semtex is an odorless, colorless plastic explosive." I'm reading "Libya has tons of Semtex." I'm reading "It takes 6 oz. of Semtex to blow up an airliner." I'm reading a profile on a newly manufactured plastic explosive called Remform, which is made and distributed only "underground" in the U.S. and is still unavailable in Europe. I'm reading a list of Remform's "pros and cons." I'm reading the words Bobby has scrawled on the side of a page: More useful than Semtex? and then two words that I stare at until they move me to get up out of the Dialogica chair and walk purposefully into the kitchen to make myself a drink: "... tests pending...