Royce Rolls Page 25
“When I saw you, you had just come from meeting with Jeff Grunburg at Lifespan. Do you remember?”
“Tall?” Mr. S. guessed.
“Short.”
“Brown hair?”
“Bald, actually.”
“Friendly fellow?”
“You’re joking again, right?”
Senor S. burst out laughing. “Now you’re getting it.”
“Great.” Bentley was beginning to think he was drunk. Do old men get drunk?
“Sí, I met with Jeff and his team. They didn’t seem like much of a team, but that’s what he called them.”
“And you were pitching them about Mexican wrestling, you said. You were looking for a distributor.”
“That’s right. Luchadores.”
“That’s your business.”
“Not just a business. A passion, Bentley.”
“Got it. The thing is—going back to the whole problem of our show getting the ax—”
“That is a problem, yes.”
“I wondered if I could ask you a personal question?”
“Perhaps. Try me.”
“Did you get it? The deal? For your wrestling?”
“My monthly licensing and distribution meetings are now the answer to your ax problem?”
“Not exactly. I just wanted to know if your pitch worked. Were you able to talk Jeff Grunburg into putting your wrestlers on the air?”
“Why?”
“Because you looked older than the other suits I saw in the room that day.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
“Yes. Completely. Because if someone else could do your job, they would already be doing it, since this is Hollywood. Hollywood hates old people. Jeff Grunburg’s no different.”
The old man laughed.
Bentley went on. “Also, you were dressed up, which usually means you’re less important. So the way I see it, there you were, the oldest and least-senior guy in the room.”
“And?”
“And you were in the room! Do you know how miraculous that is? Do you know how many times I’ve been stuck in the lobby with the Dirk? You got into the room at your age, which makes me think you know what you’re doing.”
He laughed again.
This was by far the craziest phone call she had ever made, and yet somehow she could tell it was working.
She tried again. “So tell me, did you get the deal? Did your pitch work?”
The old man paused, this time for much longer than a moment.
“You’re an odd duck, Bentley Royce.”
“Please. No ducks.”
“Ah, yes.” He spoke slowly and deliberately now. “While I can’t answer your question specifically, due to the nature of my conversations with the network, I can tell you that I was very satisfied with the outcome of our meetings.”
“So, in other words, yes.”
“Just so long as those are your words and not mine.”
She took another breath. This was it—why she had called, why she had thought of him. Her last hope, and her only plan.
“So here’s the thing. The wrestling pitch. I wanted to know if you could teach me how to do it,” she said.
“To wrestle?” He sounded delighted. The guy really was some kind of wrestling fanatic, she thought.
“To pitch. My family won’t survive if I can’t make another season happen. I want to be able to walk into Jeff Grunburg’s office and pitch him something so killer, he’ll have no choice but to keep us on the air.”
“You do?”
“Yes. I want to say the magic words—whatever they are—that are going to get us renewed.”
She could almost hear his hmmmmm over the phone as he thought about it.
Finally, he answered her. “They’re not words, Bentley.”
“I just mean I want to nail the pitch.”
“It’s not about a pitch. It never is.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Three moves ahead. Just as I told you. You don’t need the words that will give you another season. You need the season that will give you the right words.”
“You mean, an idea?”
“Nobody can walk away from an idea that can’t be walked away from.”
“But the idea is just our family.”
“No, it’s not, Bentley. Think.”
“Young, Rich, and Beautiful, that’s what Jeff says. That’s the only idea.”
“But that’s not true, is it? It’s not the only thing.”
“What else is there?”
“You tell me. How about—what’s the last book you read?”
“Love in the Time of Zombie Cholera,” Bent said.
“Fine. So, we have love. How about the book before that?
“Death in the Time of Zombie Cholera.”
“All right, then. Now we have death. And the one before that?”
“Zombie Cholera Apocalypse Wars.”
The old man laughed.
Bent was embarrassed. “What? It’s a series.”
“I’m sure it is. I’ll put it on my list. But there you have it. Love, death, and conflict. That’s the season you want. All you have to do now is put that season into words. Your words. Does that make sense?”
“I think so. But what if I’m only thinking about those things because I just happened to be reading the Zombie Wars Saga?”
“If I had asked you for more books, would they all have been about zombies?”
“No. The last book before that was about Black Widow. She’s an Avenger.”
“And?”
Bent thought about it. “Love, death, conflict. Check, check, and check. All of the above. Yeah, okay, I see your point.”
“Play the game you want to play. Use the cards you have. If you don’t have them, find a way to get them. Just control the game.”
“I want to. I think I have to.”
“Of course you do. It’s your game, Bentley. Nobody is going to care about your game more than you.”
She wasn’t sure she understood exactly what he was saying, but she had enough to go on. “Thanks, Señor S. Can I call you back? To try something out?”
“Absolutely. Anytime. I’m just here at the arena today.”
“Arena?”
“Luchadores. You have to come to a match with me sometime. Talk about love, death, and conflict.” He whistled.
She smiled. “I would probably like that. But right now, I have some thinking to do.”
“Yes, you do. And then?”
“And then I want to pitch you a hot season six.”
“You do that, and I’ll try to help you find a way to get your ideas to Lifespan’s ears.”
“Deal,” Bent said.
Thirty-five minutes later, she called Yoda back.
The pitch was hotter than either one of them had imagined.
So hot, a person could get burned.
So could an entire family.
It was Tallulah who had set it all up. She knew everything that went on at Lifespan, and not just from the time she spent with her father per their joint custody arrangement.
She kept an eye on her father from a series of nanny cams that she had installed in every gift she’d ever given him—most recently figurines from Giant Robot, her favorite store in LA’s Westside Little Tokyo.
She was like a middle school version of the mafia, and she negotiated her terms just as strictly.
“Let me get this straight. I put you in front of my dad. That’s it. I just tell you where to find him, and you send a Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust pepperoni pizza to my school at lunch, every Friday for the rest of the school year?”
“That’s right,” Bentley said.
“You’re not looking for more than that? Alarm codes? Net worth? Combination to his wall safe? Because even for a very helpful person, like myself, that would require a different level of . . . commitment.”
“I hear you, Lulu.” Bent pushed away a flash of guilt; the kid even soun
ded hungry over the phone. Tallulah’s mom, Jeff’s most recent ex-wife, had demanded her daughter be raised vegan. Bentley felt like she was bargaining with Charlie Bucket while he was still standing outside the Wonka Factory.
“And?” Tallulah was holding out.
“No. Really. I just need to find a way to meet up with him in private,” Bentley said. “Though those options all sound great.”
She heard a sigh.
Then—
“Give me five.”
Her phone was ringing a second later. “Palisades Beach Club,” Tallulah said breathlessly. “Massage room B, right off the men’s locker room. He pretends to be getting a massage, but really he’s watching his Korean soaps. Every day at four.”
“Wow,” Bentley said. “Thanks, Lulu.”
“No problem. Like I said, I’m a very helpful person.”
By the time Bentley hung up, her plan was fully formed, as was her admiration for Tallulah Kyong-Grunburg.
She’d make a great studio head someday, if she could ever master that damn origami.
Stanford would be lucky to have her.
Bentley slipped into massage room B at four P.M. sharp the next day. What happened during the next forty minutes has never been detailed, not to anyone.
The only thing that we can know for certain is that Bentley Royce drove straight to TryCycle, where she did two things.
First, she engaged in a lengthy conversation with Tomme Torres, an aspiring actor/TryCyclist whose arm workout really was way too hard.
And second, she ditched her cell phone by shoving it into the seemingly endless crevasse behind the hall lockers.
It was just her luck that her brother, Bach, saw her do it.
He pocketed her phone and began to keep an eye on her, beginning the very next day.
TALK ABOUT A SPIN MASTER; TRYCYCLIST FRAUD REVEAL WHERE’S WHITEY? WHITEY WHO?
AP: Beverly Hills, California
Via Celebcity.com
BREAKING: Porsche Royce was engaged to a fraud. If this is the American dream, how delusional are we?
T. Wilson White, so-called head of the Whiteboyz music label, was never involved with the music industry, never named T. Wilson White, and had no plans to marry the oldest Royce sister—until he auditioned for the acting gig. There is, in fact, no person answering to any of White’s many aliases at any of his alleged addresses. So-called father Razz Jazzy White, who vouched for the individual known as Whitey when he first appeared on the scene, is reportedly on vacation in South America and not taking questions at this time.
The revelation came about when a devoted attendee of Tomme Torres’s TryCycling class saw a close-up photo of the impostor calling himself by the name of White. She called TryCycle late yesterday afternoon; the fitness group then contacted the authorities. As it turns out, to masquerade as “Whitey,” Tomme Torres dyed his hair from brown to blond, shaved his trademark goatee, and hid his tattoos with industrial-grade concealer.
Tomme Torres, who departed TryCycle to reportedly pursue employment as an actor, now seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Porsche Royce, White’s onetime fiancé, could not be reached for comment. No members of the Royce family, celebrity stars of what has now rebounded back to being the number one reality program in the United States, Rolling with the Royces, could be contacted at this time.
Seventeen-year-old Bentley Royce is still missing since the night she departed her sister’s wedding rehearsal dinner at Soho House, a popular Los Angeles members-only club.
(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.
Twenty-Three
BENTLEY GOES TO THE REHEARSAL DINNER
May 2018
Soho House, West Hollywood
(Sunset Boulevard, west of Doheny)
“Listen to me. You’re not thinking straight, Tomme.” Bentley, awkwardly sandwiched into her voluminous paper prison of a dress, clung to the stripper pole as if her life depended on it—which, as the party bus careened down Benedict Canyon, it possibly did.
His voice was muffled and miserable. “My name’s Whitey now.”
She wobbled in every direction as the bus rolled onward. At this point, she was holding herself up by the arms (and the pole!) alone.
She sighed. “It’s not, Tomme, and you know it’s not.”
Whitey sat on the bench across from her, his head in his hands. “What if you’re wrong? What if I am thinking straight? What if this is the first time I’ve ever been thinking straight in my whole life?”
She shook her head. “No way. This wasn’t the deal. You were never supposed to fall in love with my sister.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” He sounded desperate. “I know that’s not why you hired me. I know our wedding was supposed to be fake. Just let me go through with it.”
Bentley didn’t relent. This was Porsche she was talking about, and Porsche was her sister—no matter what else.
She deserves better.
To marry someone whose name she actually knows, and because of who they really are, not in spite of it.
He wouldn’t really have to be a music-industry mogul. But he would have to be real. From reality reality. Real reality.
Not just a figment of Bentley’s imagination.
Not a ghost named Whitey.
How long could that have even lasted? And how heartbroken would Porsche have been when she discovered the truth?
No matter how much this hurts her now, it’s for the best.
Bentley knew this was the right thing to do.
“No, Tomme. It’s too late for that. I know the plan was for the divorce to be season seven, but we’re going to have to go another way. I can’t put Porsche through it.”
“So don’t. Forget the whole divorce thing.”
“I can’t. You two can’t be together forever. You don’t even exist! I only know you because you taught my spin class.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s true! I happened to know you from TryCycle, just like the actual head of Whiteboyz happened to owe a friend of mine a favor.”
“It’s not the same,” Tomme insisted. “Razz Jazzy and I, we really hit it off.”
“It’s exactly the same, Tomme. And we both know Razz Jazzy isn’t your father. Razz Jazzy never had a son.”
Bentley sighed. On the one hand, it was hard to believe they needed to have this conversation—but on the other, everything in the Royce reality had gotten so convoluted, she didn’t exactly blame him either.
“Tomme, come on. None of this is real.”
“I know. I mean logically.” His eyes sank to the floor. “But none of this is very logical anymore.”
She stared at him. It wasn’t the answer she had been expecting.
When he looked up again, he was teary-eyed. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time now. Trying to see a way out. I figure, I’ve just got to come clean. I’ll tell her the truth about who I am, tell her that I love her. Then I’ll get back down on my hands and knees—”
“It’s just knees,” Bentley said. She tried not to smile. “You don’t have to get down on your hands.”
“Whatever. I’ll do it. And when I do, I’ll ask her to marry me, the real me, Tomme Torres.”
Bentley started to laugh. It had all gone to such a ridiculous place. But Tomme Torres, he of the killer arms and the even more killer choreography, proposing to Porsche Royce, she of the venomous tongue and drought-ravaged tear ducts—that was not something Bentley ever could have expected.
It was way, way better—and way, way worse.
“Don’t laugh.” His face was clouding over now.
“I’m sorry. I’ll stop.” But she couldn’t. She could only laugh harder and harder, until her stomach hurt and her eyes were filling with tears.
“Come on, B.”
&nbs
p; It was the nickname that shut her up. Now she wasn’t even smiling.
“You don’t get to call me that, Tomme. You are not my family. You are not marrying my sister, and this ends now. Don’t you understand? If you tell the world this has all been a farce, then the wedding is off. The endorsement deals are off. The Lippies line goes under. Rolling with the Royces gets canceled. Jeff Grunburg will sue the Manolos off my entire family.88 We will be homeless and everyone will hate you. Everyone will hate me for making it happen. You can’t tell the truth. You can never tell the truth.”89
“But . . . Porsche loves me.” Tommy refused to give up.
Bentley sighed. “Porsche doesn’t love you. She loves the head of the Whiteboyz music label. She loves a guy with a custom McLaren sports car and a Harley. She loves the attention and the talk and the toys. She loves having a fiancé and being a fiancée, not to mention the golf-ball-size rock on her finger, the one that I bought her.”
He shook his head. “But it’s also real. I can feel it. That’s why it’s so confusing. What we have is fake, and what we have is real.”
Bentley felt sorry for the guy, honestly. He wasn’t the first person Porsche had cast her spell on—he was just the most recent. “Trust me. My sister does not do real. But more than that, she does not do TryCycle instructors.”
Even now, he was plenty stubborn. She had to give him that. “We can work it out. I’ll just go to the papers and come clean.”
“No, you won’t.” Bent tried a new tack. “You want what’s best for my sister, right? I mean, at least that part is real. You love her.”
He nodded, looking more and more like one of those wild animals with their foot caught in a trap—the ones who know they’re going to have to gnaw off a limb, but who just can’t bring themselves to start biting yet.
Bentley sighed, still clutching her pole. (At least one thing in her life was steady at the moment.) “So you won’t go to the papers. You won’t end the show like that. You won’t ruin her, and you won’t humiliate her, and you won’t take away the one thing she loves more than anything else, which is being a celebrity.”
He gave up. He nodded at Bentley, and she knew by the look on his face that it was over. “What else can we do?”