Royce Rolls Read online

  [See linked video.]

  Further details on the arrest are unavailable at this time, but some connection to Royce’s ongoing battle with addiction is said to have been involved. (Bentley and her sister, Porsche Royce, have been attending AA meetings locally for more than a year.)

  Mulholland Hall is the fifth-ranked independent school in the country, boasting nationally competitive equestrian, golf and fencing teams, as well as a sister school in Geneva, Switzerland.

  Bentley’s brother, Maybach Royce, has reportedly fled the family drama and enrolled as a fledgling student naturalist in a highly respected, government-sponsored backpacking program in a remote area of the Italian Alps. No one in the family has issued a comment on either of the two younger Royce children.

  The youngest sister in the Royce reality television dynasty’s troubles have been well documented on the family show, Rolling with the Royces. The Lifespan Network could not be reached for comment at the time of posting.

  (Disclosure: Celebcity is a fully owned subsidiary of the Lifespan Network, which is itself a fully owned subsidiary of DiosGlobale.)

  Follow @celebcity for breaking details, or www.celebcity.com.

  * * *

  72 Per JG: The school would like a few of its Emmy-winning parent screenwriters to do a polish on this chapter before it prints. Y/N? —D

  73 Jeff is curious—who owns an aircraft-carrier-size yacht? Sting? Tom Hanks? Spielberg? —D

  74 Per JG: “Is it me?” —D

  75 Per JG: “And if it is I don’t want it, am I right?” —D

  76 Per JG: “Little!?” —D

  77 Jeff feels several liberties have been taken with the retelling of this conversation. He’d urge you to closely re-read the passage to make certain it’s accurate. And then delete it. —D

  78 If you find your way down there, Jeff recommends the totopos at Las Ventanas. —D

  Seventeen

  THE REHEARSAL DINNER

  May 2018

  Soho House, West Hollywood

  (Sunset Boulevard)

  The past sixty days had flown by.

  While the rest of the Royces prepped for the wedding, Bach left LAX a Lifespan pariah and arrived home a rock star. Jeff Grunburg was pleased with how his story line was converting, in terms of the numbers. Fans of the show had followed his (fake) eco-reports from the trail as if Mother Nature herself were starring in a global soap opera. Dirk had done an impressive job with Being Bach—even Bent had to give him that.

  Sixty days of private time, and nobody was any wiser.

  Except, hopefully, Bach.

  And Lawrence—the only person on the planet Bent would entrust her brother to—who reported that Bach was really “learning to soar,” whatever that meant. Judging by the way they had said good-bye at LAX, it seemed like it had something to do not just with the birds but also, possibly, the bees.

  Bent just wanted her brother to be happy.

  She’d insisted on picking him up at the airport herself. They didn’t stop talking from the moment he got off the plane until the moment they got to the gates of Trousdale Park.

  “Holy crap,” was all he said. There was no cultured Italian saying for the circus outside their windows. The crowd that had gathered was too large for any car to drive through. There were so many photographers and journalists and cameras and vans that if they tried to swing open the gate, somebody would be crushed. Fans, reporters, neighbors, and even the occasional stalker had begun camping out for the wedding days before.

  “Security will be down here in a minute. They’re on the monitors twenty-four seven now. I guarantee you, Mercedes is shrieking in the kitchen, yelling, ‘MY BABY IS HOME! MY BABY IS HOME!’ ” Bent slipped her arm through his.

  “Come on, Bent. I’ve only been gone sixty days, not sixty years.”

  “Sixty-two days, with travel time. I counted.” She smiled.

  “Fine. Sixty-two days is still not enough time to invent a personality transplant worthy of Mercedes Royce.”

  “I don’t know, she hasn’t been herself for what, six months now?”

  As they waited in the backseat of the black town car, they watched the zoo outside the window. This was exactly how Bent had imagined it, the chaos of Porsche’s wedding. The people and the traffic and the pileup of cars wherever they went. It wasn’t only the journalists who were trampling the landscaping and peeing in the porta-potty of the remodel across the street. The hard-core fans were out in full force, wearing their handmade Team Porsche or Team Whitey or Team Royce T-shirts (also popular: I ROLL WITH THE ROYCERS) or holding their handmade signs (MY OTHER CAR IS A ROLLING ROYCE; IT’S NOT REALITY UNLESS IT’S ON TV)79 or staking out their turf with little pup tents and fleece blankets, usually printed with Porsche’s and Whitey’s faces.

  And for every person like that, there were at least three more people wandering among them, if only to sell pizza or phone chargers or batteries or Wi-Fiservice or Duke of Ducks socks, to hand out religious tracts or chapter samplers of books based on Lifetime shows or the occasional yoga DVD.

  Now that word had leaked out that the rehearsal dinner was tonight, and the wedding itself tomorrow, nobody was going anywhere.

  Tomorrow is the wedding, she thought.

  You’re running out of time.

  It’s now or never.

  You know what you have to do.

  Bent heard a rap on her window and looked at Bach. “Are you ready for this?”

  He nodded. “I was always ready. That’s what Larry says.”

  “Larry?” Bent smiled. Go figure. Then she took a deep breath and opened her door.

  There they were, the unsmiling faces of the RWTR security team: nearly a dozen guys who had to weigh three hundred pounds each, holding black blankets over their heads. What emerged was a long black tunnel that snaked through the pedestrian door of the front gate—which would allow them through while still keeping everyone out.

  This is what it had come down to. Working this hard to find a way back into a place where they barely wanted to be—and where it didn’t feel all that much like home.

  She looked at her brother. He was tanned and happy, with a good extra ten pounds of pasta weight on him. He’d never looked less like an Angelino, and it agreed with him.

  “We’ve got this,” she said.

  “Totally,” he agreed.

  She nodded. “And just so you know, we’re not going to let that wedding happen tomorrow, B.”

  “Not a chance in hell, B.” Then he winked, and she smiled, and it almost felt like the old days. “Do we have a plan?”

  “We don’t have a plan, Maybach. We have several. We have plans within plans.”

  “Ah, yes,” Bach said, grinning. “Those are my favorite kind.”

  She looked back at the crowd outside their car. “We’d better get this over with.”

  He sat up. “You want me to go first?”

  Bent nodded. “Let’s roll, Royce.” Then she took a breath and followed him out into the light as the crowd went wild.

  The outfits were laid out on the beds like a family of invisible people. The rehearsal dinner would not be televised, but at this point it almost didn’t matter. There were so many countries live-streaming the red-carpet arrivals at Soho House—the dinner venue—that it might as well be the Oscars.

  Bach and Whitey wore Tom Ford for Gucci—separates, not suits; the stylists had gone back and forth on this for months and decided that youth was more important than tradition. Even Mercedes’s traditionally chic white tux was Gucci.

  Bent, as the wild child of the family, had the edgiest dress—one of fifteen candidates, each custom made at the expense of a great design house. She couldn’t understand how there could be so much fuss for only the rehearsal dinner, and for only the sister of the bride, but clearly she was as wrong about this as she had been about almost everything else that had happened in regard to this wedding.

  Bent soon found herself being wrapped in a series of stiff
ly starched, pleated ruffles the size of massive ceiling fans, each layered on top of the next until they created a kind of immense, deconstructed single ruffle that wound around the length of Bentley’s body like a massive paper snake. A deflated white bag dragged on the floor behind her, which one stylist claimed was a gesture to a bridal train, or a comment on origins akin to an amniotic sac, or a chrysalis.

  “Stunning,” said the first stylist, shooting Polaroids as if she knew how much they would be worth later. (She probably did.)

  “Avant-garde,” said the other, who was kicked out of the room when she tried to draw geometric eyebrows on Bent’s face.

  “A real statement piece,” agreed the second-camera wedding videographer (Oscar nominated for Dante: Retracing Exile to Inferno, which was reviewed as “arty” and “viscous to the point of opacity”).80

  Bentley stepped into the stacked white acrylic boxes that were allegedly some sort of shoe, picked up the rubber section of tire that was allegedly some sort of clutch, and waddled over to look in the mirror.

  “Don’t put your arms down—it will crease the—what are those, sleeves?”

  “More like flaps, really? Or bits of capelet, maybe?”

  “Just as long as she doesn’t sit.”

  “Ever?”

  “Of course not. Look at it.”

  “How will she get to the party?”

  “We’ve ordered a party bus with a pole, so that she can ride standing. She’ll have to cling to it and hope that she can stay upright around the curves.”

  Bentley stopped listening sometime after the stripper pole revelation.

  If this was a statement piece, the statement was some kind of joke, and possibly one that did not translate well from the original Japanese. She looked like an origami earthworm trying to wriggle out of a cocoon. (Not that earthworms had cocoons, and she wished that the designer had known that.)

  Bentley Royce was the most ridiculous thing that even she had ever seen.

  By the time she stumbled out of her room and wiggled down the stairs into the front hall, the boys were waiting.

  They did not look like origami worms.

  Tom Ford for Gucci had worked magic. Bach looked like a cover model for GQ Magazine, and Whitey looked like a cover model for—what? Hot Redneck Thug (with Great Arms) Weekly? Guns and Buns Weekly?81 Impostor Marrying Your Sister, Esquire?

  To Bach’s credit, he stopped laughing shortly before getting to the point of convulsing so hard that he threw up.

  To Whitey’s credit, he agreed to be the one to hoist Bentley up the stairs to her empty party bus stripper pole.

  As Bentley clung to the pole, she looked at the sweating groom now moving back down the stairs. She reached out and hit the button on the side of the bus—and the doors slammed shut.

  “Whoa—”

  When he looked over his shoulder, the sister of the bride just smiled sweetly.

  Twenty-five minutes later, the massive black party bus rolled up to the red carpet outside Soho House. Helicopters circled overhead, flying so low the humming noise of the chopper blades nearly drowned out the chanting crowds of #Roycers held back by just as many police.

  Bentley emerged from the bus first, holding her head high. The crowd roared at the sight of her disastrous dress, and it was only as she made her way to the door that she realized they were chanting “GA-GA! GA-GA! GA-GA!”

  At least they aren’t chanting “origami worm.”

  Bentley decided to go with it. She blew monster kisses to the crowds.

  As she entered Soho House, the bus pulled away.

  The groom was still on board, which was where he remained for forty-five minutes.

  He stopped at a 7-Eleven for a 64-pack of Donettes and a Slurpee, and then a liquor store for something to pour into it.

  The groom currently known as Whitey was just getting started.

  Jeff Grunburg stood on the curb outside Soho House as he shouted into his cell phone. It was hard to hear over the news choppers circling Sunset Boulevard.

  He raised his voice again. “I don’t care which camera it is, Pam! Just make sure it’s on me when I walk in! I don’t want to spend five more minutes with Frankenstein’s Bride and Groom than I have to—”

  Tallulah tugged at his sleeve, interrupting. “Are you coming inside?”

  He covered the phone. “Five minutes, hon. Go stand by the door. You might get yourself on Celebpretty.”

  Tallulah rolled her eyes.

  When Jeff went back to his call, Pam had already disconnected. Still, he swore into the phone a few more times before he made a big show of pretending to hang up on her. Gotta model these things for the kid. How else will she learn how to grow up and run a studio?

  “Can we go in now?” she asked.

  Jeff stared at his daughter. Tallulah wore a filmy gray minidress that he privately thought made her look like a handful of elbows wearing a wadded-up scarf—and he didn’t mean that in a negative way. “Yeah. Let’s get in and get out, all right, Lulu?”

  She studied his face before answering. “Why are you so obsessed with hating that guy, anyways?”

  Jeff sat down on the curb next to where Tallulah stood. He knew he was probably sitting in drunk vomit, but for the moment, he was too tired to care. It had been a long year. “Sometimes I forget you’re only thirteen, you know that?”

  “I figured.” She looked at him. “You’re old and I never forget that. Sorry.”

  “I figured.” Jeff sighed.

  “Answer the question,” Tallulah said. “Why do you hate Porsche’s fiancé? Are you jealous?”

  “No,” Jeff said, trying not to laugh.

  “I mean, of the attention?”

  “No,” Jeff said again. He watched the cars speed down Sunset as he considered his answer. “You know how your mom sat you down and told you all about the birds and the bees, in Urth Caffé that day? Back in fourth grade? With the book with all the pictures?”

  “Sex, Dad.” She rolled her eyes.

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “That. Well, there’s a whole other set of things people don’t tell you until you bring it up. And that talk isn’t about sex. It’s about rage and loathing and spite and fury. Jealousy. Competition. Hate. And it’s kind of like the birds and the bees—”

  “Sex.”

  “Sure. That. Because it’s irrational and instinctive and mammalian. And there are certain things, certain feelings, that you come to realize have lived on this planet a lot long longer than you ever will.”

  “But why that guy? What makes you hate that guy so much?”

  He looked at his daughter. She was still wearing a necklace with an ice-cream cone on it.

  He gave up.

  Even he didn’t really know the answer anymore.

  “You know what? Let’s go inside and see if we can pop some of those two-hundred-dollar balloons.” Jeff pulled himself back up off the curb, felt in his pocket—and pulled out a KitKat bar.

  Tallulah looked like she was going to pass out. “Are you kidding me?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t tell your mother.”

  She took his hand and let him pull her to her feet.

  Just then, a van swerved up and Whitey stumbled out. His shirt was torn, and his breath smelled of alcohol. Jeff’s face turned bright red. He could feel his veins bulging on either side of his forehead.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Jeff grabbed Whitey by the arm. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Inside?” Whitey slurred.

  Jeff stepped in front of him. “No way, not like this, buddy. I don’t know what kind of stunt you’re trying to pull here, but you have some nerve, showing up like this. Do you know how many cameras there are here tonight? You’re this close to destroying the entire show, do you realize that?”

  “Hey, man, back off a little,” Whitey said. Jeff’s face was inches from Whitey’s. He could smell the booze more strongly than his own aftershave.

  “You don’t tell me what to do, White
y Trash.” Jeff leaned even closer. “Now, listen to me—”

  In one swift, blurry moment, Whitey raised his fist and—for the second time since they’d met—drove it into Jeff’s face.

  Jeff stumbled backward, stunned.82

  Then he straightened up, smiling cruelly. “I hope you’re happy with what you just did, Mr. White,” he growled.

  “Because it’s the last thing you’ll ever do in this town.”

  “WHERE IS HE?”

  Porsche Royce was pacing inside her dressing room at the club. She had come hours early with her team—Hair, Makeup, Hair, Makeup (it was all about the layers, she maintained)—at the venue, but the joke had been on her when the groom never showed up for his cue. She had made her way alone down the red carpet to the door, only to beat a hasty retreat from the screaming crowds with no Whitey in sight.

  This was not what anyone had rehearsed.

  “I’m sure he’ll be here any second,” Bent said again, giving up on her dress and flopping down on the couch in front of her.

  “STOP SAYING THAT!” Porsche was losing her mind.

  “I’ll go call the driver again,” Bach said, taking the opportunity to disappear. (Bent had noticed that Bach now employed different strategies in response to the anxiety his family caused him. The one that seemed to be working best, at least for tonight, was not being around them at all.)

  Mercedes stuck her head into the dressing room. “Anything?”

  “Royces!” Jeff waltzed in with an almost manic air about him. “It’s team huddle time.”

  Everyone just stared at him, blinking. Jeff had never been part of a team huddle in his entire life. In fact, he’d never said those words before.

  “Nobody freak out—don’t overreact—but I think it’s time to write Whitey off the show. Cut our losses. He’s dead weight. Awful guy. He’s dragging you down. I know we have this whole wedding story line, but it’ll be fine, we’ll make the rest of the season be about Porsche finding new love—bring in a Jonas brother, or even better, a Hemsworth! Look, before you say anything—”83

  “I love it.” Mercedes clapped her hands together. “Porsche?”