True Hollywood Lies

True Hollywood Lies

Part One: Luminosity

Absolute brightness. The total energy radiated into space, per second, by a celestial object such as a star.

Chapter 1: Black Hole

When a star appreciably larger than the Sun has exhausted all of its nuclear fuel, it will collapse to form a black hole—“black” because no light escapes its intense gravity.

In the Hollywood you know, here’s how the world ends:

The ice caps melt.

A meteor hits the earth.

Aliens invade.

In the Hollywood I know, here’s how my world ended:

I buried the only man I ever loved: my father.

I discovered that my boyfriend of the past two years was a lying cheating louse.

And the money that had allowed me to pursue my one and only passion—astronomy—vaporized into thin air.

And it all happened in less than 72 hours.

I guess I should start at the beginning. And since this story takes place in the land of fairy tales, I’ll give you the fairy tale version first, courtesy of Hollywood’s official newspaper, Daily Variety:

The King Is Dead

Leo Fairchild, the most charismatic film actor of the latter part of the 20th century, has died. By most accounts, he was sixty-eight.

Fairchild succumbed to a heart attack late Thursday night at his palatial Bel-Air estate, Lion’s Den. His fourth wife, former actress Sybilla Lawson, and his daughter, Hannah, were at his side. He was pronounced dead at 1:50 A.M. at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, said his attorney, Jasper Carlton. A private memorial is planned for today.

“Leo Fairchild was a true original,” said a bereaved Jack Nicholson, a contemporary with whom Fairchild shared adjoining courtside seats at Los Angeles Lakers basketball games. “He had that special magic, that elusive alchemy that convinced audiences he was their hero, their best buddy, that noble guy we all wished we could be . . .”

Leo X. Fairchild started out as a child actor in the 1940s, working with such esteemed directors as William Wyler, John Huston, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and Billy Wilder. While the adoring spotlight fades on most child actors by the time they enter their teen years, Fairchild—tall, fair, and possessing a square-jawed handsomeness—matured seamlessly into a boyish teen heartthrob, then took on roles that seemed to mirror his personal escapades as a playboy raconteur, for which he won three Golden Globe Awards and two Academy Awards.

Fairchild’s celebrity continued to burn brightly through the 1960s cinematic auteur era—he was a favored leading man for such directors as François Truffaut, Bernardo Bertolucci, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese—and into the 21st century, as he played muse to such pop-culture-infused art house giants as Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, John Woo, and M. Night Shyamalan.

Fairchild leaves prolific credits, some of cinema’s most memorable moments, and—if the tabloids are to be believed—a string of broken hearts . . .

Truly touching.

However, not exactly accurate—at least, not the part of how Leo died. I’d like to set the record straight, here and now:

First of all, my dad, Leo Fairchild, was called to meet his Maker while he was screwing the latest love of his life—a 19-year-old starlet currently playing the eldest, ditziest daughter in a Disney Family Network sitcom—at that legendary celebrity hangout, the Chateau Marmont.

The staff there was able to convince the other hotel guests that the hysterical, high-pitched shrieks emanating from his playmate were in fact the whimpers of Kim Kardashian’s pooch Gabanna, which, they insisted, was in a nearby suite, being supervised by Hollywood’s most renowned canine midwife while giving natural birth.

Then, as a pacifier, they offered the human whiners a suite upgrade or a complimentary massage, whichever they preferred.

By doing so, Marmont staffers were guaranteed that the inquisitive guests were preoccupied while the starlet—her screeches stifled amid stiff gulps of an expertly mixed French 75—was whisked out of Leo’s suite, down the back stairwell, and into a waiting Humvee limousine. At the same time, Leo was being bagged and tagged by discreet personnel of the renowned Hollywood Forever Cemetery before taking
his
last ride in a limo. (You’ve got to hand it to the hotel’s staff: no one handles a celebrity death like those folks. Just another example of how practice makes perfect.)

Second, it
is
true that his current wife, Sybilla Lawson—a former beauty queen who considered herself an actress because of one walk-on she had in a ’90s made-for-TV movie—was at Lion’s Den, Leo’s obscenely humongous Roman-Greco palace in Bel-Air, which she insisted he build for them. Considering her usual martini-induced state of unconsciousness, however, if Leo had indeed died there, it might have been another 16 hours or so until she’d discovered him—and that is a really big maybe, given her propensity to stay in her bedroom for days on end and her assumption that any other prostrate bodies lying around were also suffering the slings and arrows of an outrageous hangover.

And, to my regret, I wasn’t at Leo’s side either. Quite frankly, he had been dodging me for the past month, PDAing lame excuses for ducking out of our weekly Thursday-night dinner dates at the Sunset Lounge. And thanks to his cell’s caller ID, he could easily ignore my many concerned texts and voice messages. I couldn’t figure out why, although I had some inkling: he didn’t know how to tell me that he’d decided to pass on the project pitched to him by my current boyfriend, Jean-Claude, a fledgling (albeit fully financed) independent producer of French-German-Swiss-Hungarian extraction.

Leo was wary of any man-boy I brought home. This made sense when I first started dating. After all, like most daughters, for the most part I chose guys who were anti-Leos. Having moved through my fair share of slackers, nerds, and pseudo-intellectuals—none of whom earned more than a derisive sigh from Leo—I took it up a notch and began dating third-rate actors: all sincere dudes and hard workers to the one, but they were still guys who were never destined to score beyond the second male lead in a made-for-TV movie, or be the nameless “Man in Video Store” or “UPS Man” in blockbuster films employing casts of thousands.

“Hannah, my darling,” Leo would sigh. “If you’re going to date someone in the industry, at least find someone who’ll earn the right to share our legacy.”

Translation: find a guy whom Leo would be proud to call his son-in-law.

I thought that was what I was doing when I started dating Jean-Claude: handsome, wealthy, European, and itching to get involved in producing small films with meaningful messages. However, Leo thought (although he didn’t say it in so many words) that Jean-Claude was just another Eurotrash hanger-on looking for a free ride; that I was playing Lisa Marie to Jean-Claude’s Nick Cage—which, once again, made Leo the King in that scenario.

Still, I denied this vehemently and clung to Jean-Claude, knowing we would someday prove Leo wrong.

Ironically, the night Leo died, it was Jean-Claude who gave me the news.

“Where are you, Hannah?” he asked tersely.

I was annoyed because he should have known the answer to that: not three hours earlier, bored listening to him and his expat buddies with obscure royal titles and dwindling bank accounts commiserate about the over-the-top bottle service and the stuck-up nude house models (specifically, the ladies ignoring their well-worn pickup lines), I quite distinctly remember telling him that I was going to head over to the Griffith Observatory with my telescope. Whenever I could get away (which, considering Jean-Claude’s predilection for barhopping, translated into every night of the week) I went planet hunting—that is, seeking out undiscovered planets circling suns in other galaxies.

My current target was the red dwarf star known as AU Microscopium—or “Mic,” as we called it—which was moving in tandem through the galaxy with its sister star, beta-Pictoris, through the constellation Saturn. For nearly a year, I had spent every spare evening glued to the eyepiece of my telescope, watching that particular patch of ebony sky and carefully measuring every wiggle or flicker emanating from Mic for proof that some yet unnamed celestial body—a new planet—was in fact shadowing it.

This “silly little hobby” (Jean-Claude’s declaration, not mine) was something he indulged me—particularly if there was enough eye candy to distract him from my absence.

His frantic call put an end to all that.

“It’s Leo,” Jean-Claude said, in a dire tone. “I think you’d better get over here as fast as possible.”

“Where? Voyeur?” I was confused. It was a wannabe’s hangout, not one of the usual watering holes that established players like Leo often frequented.

“No—uh, Lion’s Den,” he murmured distractedly. “Look, I don’t have time to explain. Please—” he choked—“just get here!” He then heaved a soft sigh into the phone, and hung up.

That was how I came to realize that my father had finally left me for good.

I didn’t jump into my car immediately but instead kept my eye on Mic. It seemed to quiver ever so slightly. At least, I thought so. Then again, through all my tears, it was hard to tell.


* * *

Leo’s memorial service was held at dusk in the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Crystal Garden. The setting sun’s soft rays, bouncing off the hotel’s pale pink stucco walls, provided a healthy glow to the complexions of the many stars in attendance.

No doubt that was greatly appreciated.

True to the claims that Leo had been “a thespian bridge between Hollywood’s Silver Screen era and that of a newer, rawer epoch in filmmaking” (not my proclamation, but that of
The Hollywood Reporter
), the turnout was a Hollywood
Who’s Who
: Barbra was there (in classic black Karan, of course), as were Nicole, Renée and Charlize (in funeral frocks provided by Prada, Lacroix, and Marc Jacobs, respectively); the two Toms (Hanks and Cruise); Nicholson, Pacino, De Niro, Scorsese, as well as the two Stevens (Spielberg and Soderbergh), and both the Coen
and
the Farrelly brothers. Also milling about was every up-and-coming actor, mobster, gangsta/rap singer-cum-actor, Playboy bunny, limo driver, bartender and waiter who had ever crossed Leo’s path.

The eulogies were touching and numerous. Everyone had a “Leo” story. Both Toms waxed poetically about being “discovered” by Leo, and how his mentorship had changed their lives, while Madonna sobbed, albeit dry-eyed, “He was like a father to me.” (Of course, this immediately gave credence to the old rumor that the two had been more than “just friends” in her romantic hiatus between Sean and Warren in the summer of ’89.) Everyone’s head nodded in unison, leaving one with the impression that the “grand-père of cinema” (
Newsweek
) had mentored, bullied or screwed his way into the heart of anyone who had ever stepped foot on a studio lot.

Having relieved the semi-comatose Sybilla from the process of planning and coordinating Leo’s funeral, I had not yet allowed myself the opportunity to acknowledge my own grief. By the time Warren and Gene began rhapsodizing on and on about some ill-fated bad boy shenanigan that the three of them had attempted during some on-location shoot in which Leo was once again the cockeyed hero, I couldn’t contain myself anymore; I let my tears fall freely along with everyone else’s.

(Well, admittedly, most of the puffy eyes in the crowd were from the many eyelifts that had been performed that week. Still, it’s the
thought
that counts.)

Long after the final guests had successfully maneuvered the paparazzi gauntlet and been whisked away via remotely-summoned limos, and after said paparazzi had finally snapped their final photos (including some of the catfight between Sybilla and the Disney Channel junior diva, which Jean-Claude was kind enough to break up), and after the waterworks display put on by Wife #3, a former soap opera diva, had finally trickled out (ironically, just seconds after the CNN cameraman had packed up his gear), I finally had the chance to collapse in anguish.

I stumbled into the private hospitality cottage that had been rented in tandem with the Crystal Garden for use by the bereaved. At first it appeared that the small but elegant space was totally empty. As it turns out, it wasn’t. Sybilla had also decided to take her consolation there. I knew this because I could hear her wailing in the cottage’s bedroom.

I sighed. In truth, I didn’t like the woman. While wooing Leo, she had been sickeningly sweet to me, hoping to inspire me to be her ally in that cause. I hadn’t obliged. I’d had my reservations about her, but I’d never shared them with Leo because he was a big boy and could make up his own mind in that matter, with or without my blessing.