Wendy took the opportunity to step straight into the huge closet. In a whisper, she asked the wardrobe mistress to show her the outfits she’d planned for Lorelei’s next few public appearances. Wendy could work as hard as possible and drag Lorelei along with her, but all their efforts could easily be negated with one slipped bra cup and an unplanned nipple calling hello to the world. Judging from Lorelei’s past run-ins with the paparazzi, Wendy thought this was unlikely. Lorelei had done and said many stupid things in public, but none of them involved wardrobe malfunctions. If unseemly parts of her were showing in pictures, that’s because she’d taken the photos herself.
Lorelei’s clothes were beautifully made and edgy without being trashy. Wendy complimented the wardrobe mistress with the truth: “I’ve got my work cut out for me, as you know, but I’ve never worried about her wardrobe. You always make her look like a million bucks.” The wardrobe mistress replied with a brilliant smile and protestations that she only helped. Lorelei herself had a terrific eye.
And ear, Wendy thought, as the strum of an acoustic guitar and pitch-perfect humming meandered down the hall and into the closet. Lorelei was awake.
Replacing a gorgeous sequined skirt on the rack, Wendy slipped past the wardrobe mistress and tiptoed into the bedroom. Lorelei sat at the head of the bed, leaning back against the pillows, eyes closed, singing one of her mother’s hard-rocking classics. Lorelei was tall and thin, but that only added to the impression that she was young and hadn’t yet grown into her long limbs. The sun rendered her linen nightshirt and shorts translucent but not tawdry on her slender frame. She strummed the guitar. Her long fingers worked a complicated countermelody on the strings. Her high voice warbled half a lovely tune with nonsense words. Wendy was transfixed.
The morning sun backlit Lorelei’s messy curls and shone in a halo around her face. She wasn’t a stereotypical beauty—her eyes were narrow and wide-spaced, her nose long, and of course there were the diminutive boobies—but she was pretty enough for girls to want to be her, and not so pretty that they hated her. Wendy had always thought Loralei’s offbeat looks added to her appeal—back when she had appeal, that is.
Her song ended. She kept her eyes closed, basking in the warm sun streaming through the window, listening to her last guitar chord ring through the room. Finally she opened her eyes, saw Wendy leaning against the wall, and flared her nostrils. “No, bitch,” she said firmly. “I told you to take your weave and your cheap ass home.”
Wendy had lots of experience with West Virginia schoolgirls taunting her. And with bratty young stars who possessed all the eloquence and sophistication of those schoolgirls. In either case, Wendy’s usual response would be to let herself get angry and to dish it out just as well as she could take it.
This time she had her career to worry about. She needed to shut Lorelei down in a way that made Lorelei want to thank her for it later. Being nice was doubly difficult when Lorelei had punched her in her soft spots: insulting her hair and calling her cheap.
Reaching deep inside herself, she came up with this: “Hey, pretty girl.” She didn’t remember much about her mom, but she remembered pretty girl was what her mom had called her in a quiet, loving moment.
Lorelei stared uneasily at Wendy.
Exactly what Wendy wanted. She continued in a chipper tone, “You hired me to get you out of this little PR scrape. I’m certainly not going to let you fire me. That’s just going to get you deeper in trouble, especially when you’re accusing me of . . . what are you accusing me of, again? Having long hair?”
Lorelei let her guitar slide down to her lap and crossed her arms. “Stealing my boyfriend.”
“Colton’s not your boyfriend anymore,” Wendy said firmly. “But in any event, you don’t need to worry about me and him, because I’m with Daniel.”
Lorelei squinted at Wendy. “Who?”
“Daniel!” Wendy repeated in an exasperated tone, as if her relationship with Daniel Blackstone were the most obvious thing in the world. “He was sitting right next to me in the club last night.”
“Wait a minute!” Lorelei exclaimed, pointing at Wendy. “Isn’t he Colton’s new PR guy? No way! You’re sleeping with the enemy.”
Wendy shrugged. “I fell in love with him before he was the enemy. I promise we’ll be able to keep our personal and professional lives separate. So . . . ”
Lorelei still stared at her as if stunned. Wendy had the advantages of surprise and a confident delivery. As long as she could keep Colton off her and Daniel on her, she doubted she’d personally have any more trouble from Lorelei.
She needed to keep going, capitalizing on her momentum. But here she lost her train of thought, distracted by the fantasy that she and Daniel had fallen in love.
Forget it. She pressed on, “We need some ground rules for getting you out of this mess. First, no throwing drinks in anyone’s face.”
“But Colton called me—” Lorelei started.
“Sticks and stones,” Wendy interrupted. “Throwing anything at anybody could be construed as assault. Do you want to go to jail? Again?”
Lorelei’s slim shoulders sagged. “No.”
“No posting pictures of your lady parts online,” Wendy persisted. “Your pics from the beauty shop bar last night were adorable. They were of you and your friends and your nightlife and your fingernails. Judging from the responses, the fans seemed to love them. We need more of that. Okay?”
“Okay,” Lorelei said reluctantly.
“No calling your new PR specialist a twat.”
Lorelei looked up sharply at Wendy, suspicious again.
“You hate it when people judge you without meeting you,” Wendy pointed out, “or knowing the facts, or giving you a chance.”
“Okay,” Lorelei grumbled, looking out the bright window.
Wendy had won the battle, it seemed. Lorelei had accepted her authority. But they couldn’t win the war with an absence of negative publicity. They’d have to generate the positive, too. The sunlight glowing in Lorelei’s curls gave Wendy an idea.
“We need to get you on TV,” she burst out. Lorelei’s TV performance wouldn’t be nearly as special as the song Wendy had just witnessed, snatched from thin air. The sunlight wouldn’t stream in behind Lorelei. She would insist on wearing her usual heavy makeup. She would be wearing leather and sequins instead of soft clothes to sleep in. Belatedly Wendy realized she wanted Lorelei to look like she’d just gotten out of bed, and that was kind of perverted.
But even without these details, Lorelei’s real talent and her easygoing, sweet nature—when she didn’t feel threatened—would come through on the small screen, possibly for the first time ever.
“TV!” Lorelei drawled. “TV and I don’t agree with each other.”
“You’ll like this kind,” Wendy said. “Let’s see. You’ve got the awards show on Friday night. So at lunch on Thursday, between your rehearsals for the show, we’ll get you into a local news studio to play a few songs. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but they’ll post the video of your performance to their web page. We’ll link to it and make sure it goes viral before the awards show.”
Lorelei tilted her head, confused. “How can you make sure it goes viral?”
“We’re Stargazer PR. We have our ways,” Wendy said mysteriously. Daniel Blackstone might be able to engineer a wedding on a private island and convince megastars to maintain a fake relationship for a span of years, but Wendy could make a video go viral with a few phone calls. So there.
“Even if it does, how will that help?” Lorelei asked.
“Trust me,” Wendy said. “It will help that people see you being yourself. Except don’t tell the anchors or the audience to fuck off.”
Lorelei laughed. “I was about to say, that’s me being myself—”
“Yeah,” Wendy said. “Don’t do that. It might even be okay not to talk much. Sometimes you tell people to fuck off, or you say something else to them that seems inappropriate and too harsh in retro
spect, because you couldn’t think of anything else to say, right?”
Lorelei looked shocked.
“You’re actually kind of shy, right? And you think you can’t be shy in this business. You have to be ballsy and strong. You may be right about that when it comes to, say, contract negotiations. But when you’re a guest on somebody else’s TV show, no matter how big a star you are, maybe it’s okay, or even better, to act shy and polite, especially if that’s how you actually feel.”
Lorelei stared at her and nodded slowly.
Wendy prompted her, “Do you think you could do that?”
“Yeah.” Lorelei smiled at Wendy. “I think I could do that.”
“Another thing. Don’t talk to the reporters about your best friend the choreographer or your homie the housecleaner. If you do have relationships like that, we need to hide them as well as we can.”
“Why?” Lorelei pouted.
“The public wants to see you as larger than life. Even royals are just real people with lucky bloodlines, but commoners are sheep. They love to look up to somebody. They don’t want you consorting with them, because that makes you seem more like them. They want to hear about rock stars who are best friends with Oscar-winning actresses, and singers who are dating the governor of California.”
“You mean, I got it right with Colton, and now I’ve lost it,” Lorelei said dejectedly.
“Colton was great for your career.” Wendy thought for the millionth time that morning that she shouldn’t have turned Daniel’s offer down. But he shouldn’t have threatened her, and it was too late now. “I am not saying go back to Colton. I’m not saying fake a glamorous relationship. I’m saying hide the unglamorous ones.”
“But that’s just not how I am.” Hugging the guitar, Lorelei flopped over on the bed and lay on her side in the fluff. “I don’t think I’m better than other people. I’m not going to test each person when I meet them to see if they’re worthy of being friends with me or whatever. One of my best friends in the world is my limo driver back in L.A. I’ve spent Christmas with him and his wife and kids before, when I didn’t have my own place yet and my dad spent the holidays on his yacht in the Mediterranean with some stripper. I’m not going to drop that guy or pretend we’ve never met just because ‘my public’ doesn’t want to see that.” She let go of her guitar to make finger quotes. “ ‘My public’ can bite me.”
“I’m not telling you to lie if the TV station asks you about that,” Wendy said. “I’m telling you to withhold information and become a more private person. You can have relationships the public doesn’t know about. Just because somebody asks you a question doesn’t mean you have to answer. Especially if it comes from the paparazzi.”
“Oh.” Lorelei’s whole lithe body sank into the cloud of padding around her. “I can’t dis the paparazzi. A lot of those guys are my friends.”
And that was exactly why the public had known so much about Lorelei’s snockered coming of age. Lorelei had invited the paparazzi into her parties on occasion. Wendy was guessing that Lorelei was very lonely.
“We’ll work on this,” Wendy assured her. “It’s a process. We’re not changing you into a different person. We’re presenting a different side of you. It’ll be fun.” She hopped on Lorelei’s plush king bed like they were at a slumber party and opened her laptop.
She asked Lorelei to recite every rehearsal and appearance she’d planned for the week. Lorelei seemed to know where she was going. That was good. She remembered the events out of order, as they popped into her obviously scatterbrained head. That was bad. Wendy made a mental note to double-check the schedule with Lorelei’s wardrobe mistress and her agent.
“The biggest deal is probably the party I’m throwing Thursday night for my twenty-first-and-a-half birthday,” Lorelei said. “It’s here at the casino, but in the club on the roof, Wet Dream.”
“Good Lord,” Wendy blurted. “These club names were all made up by fourteen-year-old boys. Are you serving food? Is that even sanitary?”
Lorelei laughed, and Wendy realized she was lucky this star wasn’t as easily offended as the lead singer of Darkness Fallz. She needed to dial down. And despite the untoward name of the club, it was one of the hottest spots in Vegas right now. She wished the party weren’t so close to the awards show, but it had already been planned and she would work with it. “Will there be a cake shaped like a penis?”
“You are so funny!” Lorelei exclaimed. “Of course not. It’s a guitar.”
Lorelei sounded too cavalier for Wendy’s liking. She made a note on her laptop to check personally for penis cake. Stars ruined themselves being photographed with penis cake with almost the same frequency that they were arrested with their pants down in public parks.
Then Lorelei said, “Tonight there’s a party at the wax museum because they’re unveiling a statue of my mother.”
“What?” Wendy exclaimed, going back over what she’d already typed. Some of these shindigs had been forwarded to her by Lorelei’s agent. Not this one. “That’s a terrific public relations opportunity, but I haven’t heard a peep about it in the media.”
Wendy could picture it already. Lorelei’s kick-ass, rock star, heroin-chic mother in her ethereal and wasted blond glory standing next to her musical prodigy daughter, who, for all her faults, would look positively angelic in comparison. If Wendy didn’t keep tabs on Lorelei during the party after the unveiling of the statue, the night could go badly. The tabloids could run a drunken photo and say Lorelei was following in her mother’s staggering footsteps. But if Lorelei kept herself together, the public would see only that she’d inherited her mother’s talent and, despite a difficult childhood, had turned out okay, considering.
But it would all be for nothing if nobody showed up to the party. In fact, a tabloid report that Lorelei threw a party and nobody came would be worse PR than anything Lorelei had come up with yet.
Lorelei shrugged. “The museum said at first they were going to make a big deal out of it. I guess they decided not to, with all the shit that’s gone down.”
Wendy gripped the sides of her laptop. Any other day, she would have launched a tirade at Lorelei. The shit had not gone down, unattached to anyone, a misfortune Lorelei had unsuspectingly walked into. Lorelei and Colton had been the manufacturers of said shit.
Today Wendy did not yell. She was not that person anymore. She grimaced, swallowed, and said, “I’ll call the museum and get the announcements to the media outlets so plenty of paparazzi are there to watch you walk in. I’ll contact the publicity people for all the guests to make sure they’ll be there. I’ll fix it.” She typed a few notes on her computer, omitting the curse words she normally would have included, because Lorelei beside her on the bed might catch a glimpse of the screen. “Who’s on the guest list?”
“Oh, anybody who was going to be in Vegas. Lots more people are coming in for the awards show rehearsals today.” Bored with serious conversation, Lorelei plucked the strings of her guitar and wiggled her fingers on them to make funny noises.
“Colton?” Wendy asked.
Lorelei plucked a string so hard that Wendy thought it might break. “Yeah.”
Wendy waited for Lorelei to ask if they could have Colton taken off the list. Lorelei didn’t say a word. She went back to fingering her guitar, more thoughtfully now.
Daniel had been right about this, too. Lorelei was still interested enough in Colton that she wanted him at her party, even if they were at each other’s throats. Daniel and Wendy might well be able to get them back together. But Wendy had said no to this.
Jet lag was catching up with her. Taking a deep breath with her eyes closed, she pondered the possibility of excluding Colton from Lorelei’s party to avoid another altercation. If she called Daniel ahead of time to warn him they were blackballing Colton, Daniel might stage repercussions. If she didn’t warn him and Colton found out the hard way, standing in the street outside the wax museum while pedestrians wandered by and stared curiously, the
repercussions would be worse. The tabloids would say—and Daniel might even feed them this line—that Lorelei had invited Colton, then maliciously reneged on the invitation and humiliated him.
Bitch.
“Sit up and look at me, sweetie,” Wendy said.
Obediently Lorelei crawled toward the headboard like an overgrown toddler. She propped herself up against the pillows and held her guitar in front of her for protection, sensing she was about to be scolded.
“You can’t have another run-in with Colton tonight,” Wendy said. “Everybody understands there are hard feelings between you, but beyond that, you have to take the high road. You can’t keep posting pictures of your private parts and telling him to suck it.”
Lorelei ran one freshly manicured finger along the glowing wood grain of her guitar. “I just want to show him I don’t need him to have a good time.”
Wendy nodded. “Like you’re in middle school. Totally. Listen, pretty girl, there is more at stake here than your battle with Colton. There’s your performance on the awards show. Your concert tour. Your album. Your whole career. All of that depends on your PR, and that’s what you’re paying me to repair. Yes?”
“Yes,” Lorelei said earnestly.
“In PR, we have tools to track your ratings,” Wendy said. “We contract with companies that conduct surveys and ask people if they’ve heard of you and what they think of you. Your name recognition is extremely high, but people say you’re as likable as that executive in New York who swindled her company out of a hundred million dollars, abandoned her husband and children, and escaped with her lover to Papua New Guinea.”
“Oh,” Lorelei said dejectedly. Now she was getting it.
“We want to rebuild your image as America’s sweetheart.”
“No, wait!” Lorelei exclaimed. “Why do I have to be that? There are plenty of girls who have a badass image. Why can’t I be a badass chick that people like better than the cheater lady?”