Hollywood Dirt
Hollywood Dirt
Copyright © 2015 by Alessandra Torre.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN: 978-1-940941-70-7
Editor: Madison Seidler
Proofreader: Perla Calas
Front Cover Design: Hang Le
Cover Image: Shutterstock
Formatting: Erik Gevers
CONTENTS
Titlepage
Dedication
Note
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 74
CHAPTER 75
CHAPTER 76
CHAPTER 77
CHAPTER 78
CHAPTER 79
CHAPTER 80
CHAPTER 81
CHAPTER 82
CHAPTER 83
CHAPTER 84
CHAPTER 85
CHAPTER 86
CHAPTER 87
CHAPTER 88
CHAPTER 89
CHAPTER 90
CHAPTER 91
CHAPTER 92
CHAPTER 93
CHAPTER 94
CHAPTER 95
CHAPTER 96
CHAPTER 97
CHAPTER 98
CHAPTER 99
CHAPTER 100
CHAPTER 101
CHAPTER 102
CHAPTER 103
CHAPTER 104
CHAPTER 105
CHAPTER 106
CHAPTER 107
CHAPTER 108
CHAPTER 109
CHAPTER 110
CHAPTER 111
CHAPTER 112
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
OTHER BOOKS
This book is dedicated to strong Southern women everywhere, most notably the beautiful and intelligent Tricia Crouch.
Thank you for everything.
This book is set in a real town, with references to real persons. When those names are mentioned, they are used in a fictional manner and should be taken as such.
INTRODUCTION
Southern women are unique; there is no disputing that. We are women born of conflict, our pasts littered with battles and chaos, self-preservation, and protection. We’ve run plantations during wars, served Union soldiers tea before watching them burn our homes, hidden slaves from prosecution, and endured centuries of watching and learning from our men’s mistakes. It is not easy to survive life in the South. It is even more difficult to do it with a smile on your face.
We have held these states together, held our dignity and graciousness, held our head high when it was smeared with blood and soot.
We are strong. We are Southern. We have secrets and lives you will never imagine.
Welcome to Quincy.
Population: 7,800
Average Household Income: We’ll never tell.
Secrets: Plenty
The town of Quincy, Georgia was once the wealthiest town in the United States. Home to over 67 Coca-Cola millionaires, each original share is now worth ten million dollars, making this small town of Southern Belles one very lucrative place. Yet, you don’t see Bentleys and butlers as you drive through. You see a small town—its plantation mansions gracious and well-tended, keeping with the simple Southern traditions that have existed for centuries. Smile. Treat your neighbor as yourself. Be gracious. Keep your secrets close and your enemies closer.
And from the beginning, Cole Masten was my enemy.
CHAPTER 1
Hollywood doesn’t mix well with dirt roads. They don’t understand how we work. Don’t understand the intricate system of rules that we live by. They think that because we talk slowly, we are stupid. They think that the word ‘y’all’ is an indication of poor grammar. They think their Mercedes makes them a better person, when—to us—it’s just an indication of low self-esteem.
The cavalry arrived on a Sunday afternoon in August. Semis followed by limos, work trucks and buses trailed by matching sedans. Catering trucks—as if we didn’t have restaurants in Quincy. Some more semis. The scent of our camellias competed with their exhaust, the huff of diesel bringing with it the scent of pretension and importance. Brakes squealed and everyone in the tri-county area heard it. Even the pecan trees straightened in interest.
A Sunday. Only Yankees would think that was an appropriate time to thrust themselves into our lives. Sunday, the Lord’s Day. A day spent in the pews at church. Under live oaks eating brunch with our friends and families. Napping through the afternoon hours, front-porch visiting time at dusk. Evening was for quality time with your family. Sunday wasn’t a day for upheaval. Sunday wasn’t a day for work.
We were at the First Baptist Church when the word hit. A whispered stream of excitement down the long line of the table, scooting by and hopping over cornbread, dumplings, pecan pie, and broccoli casserole. Kelli Beth Barry was the one who passed the news to me, her red hair coming dangerously close to some marshmallowy sweet potato during the relay. “They’re here,” she said ominously, the excited glow in her blue eyes not matching the dark tones of her message.
I didn’t have to ask who ‘they’ were. Quincy had been waiting for this day for seven months. Ever since the first hint reached Caroline Settles, assistant to Mayor Frazier, who received a phone call on a Monday morning from Envision Entertainment. She had transferred the call to the mayor’s office, picked up her box of Red Hots, and settled into the chair outside of his door. Chewed her way through half the box before scooting to her feet and back to her desk,
her round butt hitting the seat just in time for the mayor to walk out, his chest puffed, spectacles on, a notepad in hand that she knew good and well only contained doodles.
“Caroline,” the man drawled with some level of importance, “I just got a call from some folks in California. They want to film a movie in Quincy. Now we’re just in preliminary talks but—” he looked over his spectacles with a degree of sternness and dramatics, “this needs to stay within the walls of this office.”
It was a laughable statement, Mayor Frazier knowing what would happen the minute he turned back to his office. In small towns, there are two types of secrets: the kind that we pull together as a mini-nation to protect, and the juicy. The juicy things don’t stay quiet. They aren’t meant to. They are a small town’s sole source of entertainment, the morsels of fat that keep us all healthy. Those secrets are our currency and little is as valuable as a first person, no-one-else-knows-this testimony. Within five minutes, Caroline called her sister from the mayor’s personal bathroom, settled in on a padded toilet seat where she breathlessly recounted every word she’d heard through the closed door:
“They said ‘plantation’—like Gone with the Wind…”
“I heard the name Claudia Van. Do you think the Claudia Van is coming to Quincy?”
“He mentioned August, but I don’t know if that’s this August or next.”
The gossip circle had just enough information to run wild, and speculation and false assumptions spread like the lice epidemic of ’92. Everyone thought they knew something, and every day a new piece of information was offered up like manna to our starving social lives.
I got lucky. I nabbed a front row seat to the action and became Interesting to a town that had firmly blacklisted my name three years earlier. Interesting was the first step toward Valued, something that Mama and I hadn’t been able to accomplish in our twenty-four years in Quincy. It wasn’t a status I particularly cared about, but it was something I was intelligent enough not to turn up my nose at.
The movie was the most exciting thing that had ever happened, and the town counted down to the arrival with breathless anticipation.
Hollywood. Glamour. Studios. Celebrities, the most important of whom was Cole Masten.
Cole Masten. The man women think about in the dark of night. When their husbands are snoring, or—in my case—when mothers are sleeping. Quite possibly the most beautiful man to grace Hollywood in the last decade. Tall and strong, with a build that looks perfect in a suit but reveals the muscles of his body when he strips down. Dark brown hair, enough of it to dig your hands in and grab, but short enough to look polished. Green eyes that own you the minute he smiles. A smile that causes you to forget the words out of his mouth because it draws your body into such a state of hopeless need that thought becomes irrelevant. Cole Masten was the epitome of walking sex and had every woman in town drooling over his arrival.
Every woman but me, that is. I couldn’t be. For one, he was an ass. All cocky attitude and no manners to speak of. For two, he was—for the next four months—my boss. Everyone’s boss. Cole Masten wasn’t just the star of this movie. He was sinking his own money into the production, bankrolling the entire operation. It was Cole who read the little Southern novel that no one had ever heard of. The novel about our town, the novel that exposed the plantation homes and work trucks for what they were: camouflage. The camouflage of secret billionaires.
That’s right. Our quiet town of seven thousand residents holds more than Southern manners and prize-winning fried chicken recipes. We also hold discretion, the biggest indication of which lies in our bank’s coffers and buried in our backyards’ dirt. Stacked in freezers and attic eves.
Cash. Lots and lots of it. In our small town, we have forty-five millionaires and three billionaires. That’s a rough guess, the best estimate our whispered calculations can attest to. It may be more. It all depends on how stupid or smart the generations have been with their Coca-Cola stock. That’s where it all came from. Coke. Say the word Pepsi in this town, you best watch your back on the way out.
So Cole found out Quincy’s wealthy little secret. Was fascinated by it, by our little town of such little pretense. And so he assembled a team. Hired a writer. Stayed out of the tabloids long enough to build a three-hour movie around a seventy-two page book. And now… thirteen months after Caroline Settles started the buzz, they had arrived. Hollywood. A day early. I told them to arrive on Monday, told them all of the things wrong with a Sunday arrival. I watched the madness and wondered how many other hiccups awaited us.
I followed the crowd onto the church’s lawn, watched Main Street become invaded, men hopping from buses and trucks, a swarm of shouting and pointing as everyone ran in different directions that seemed to make no sense. I smiled. I couldn’t help it. This expensive fat bully, pushing its way in on a Sunday. Thinking they were in control. Thinking that this was suddenly their town.
They had no idea what they had just walked into.
SIX MONTHS EARLIER
CHAPTER 2
My mother was a beauty queen. Miss Arkansas 1983. She had me in ‘87, the circumstances which I haven’t been privy to and haven’t really cared about. I have vague recollections of my father—a large man, one who smoked cigars and lived in a big house with shiny floors. One who yelled and hit and shook me when I cried. The day after my seventh birthday, Mama woke me up in the middle of the night and we ran. Took his car, a big sedan with leather seats and a Garth Brooks cassette tape that we listened to all the way to Georgia, the only break coming with the whirring of the rewind. Those are my last memories of my prior life. Garth Brooks, leather seats, and my mother crying. I had lain across the back seat, her coat over my body, and tried to understand her tears. Tried to understand why she was doing something if it made her so upset.
We left the car in some town along the way. Drove it ’til it shuddered, then abandoned it and walked, a magazine gripped tightly in my mother’s hand. I snuck peeks at it while we moved, tried to focus on the cover, which swung with each swing of her hand. When a man stopped, offered us a ride to the bus stop, his hands lifting me into the back seat, I got a better glimpse, my body stuffed against hers, our suitcase crowding beside us on the seat. The headline read: COCA-COLA MILLIONAIRES. And there, on the front, holding out a glass bottle of Coke, was a bald man, his smile beaming.
Eventually, I met that bald man. Johnny Quitman. He hired my mother as a teller in his bank, a position she still holds to this day. He was one of Quincy’s third generations of millionaires, a newbie who still got in early enough to hit it big, hence his enthusiastic cover grin.
For a while, when pondering our late-night escape to this tiny town and the worn magazine clutched in my mother’s grip, I thought she was looking for a new husband and hoped to move here and snag one of the rich men mentioned in the article. But she never did. Never even tried. Best I could tell, we moved to town, she settled into work, and never flirted with another man again. Maybe her love for my father was too great to overcome. Or maybe she just needed a safe haven to grow old and die. That was all she seemed to be doing. Waiting to die. A sad end for such a beautiful woman.
I sat on the porch, hot air floating under the edge of my skirt, my bare feet propped on the railing, and watched her. On her knees, a towel down to protect her light slacks, she dug at the roots of an azalea bush, the sweat on her arms glistening in the afternoon sun, a big hat shielding her face from me. She and I were alone in this house, the fireflies more active than our souls. I sat in the heat and watched her work. Contemplated offering her lemonade, though she’d already turned me down twice.
I would not be my mother. I wanted, in some way, to live my life.
CHAPTER 3
“In Hollywood a marriage is a success if it outlasts milk.”
~ Rita Rudner
Cole Masten walked slowly down the length of the car, an ice-blue Ferrari, his sunglasses tilted off his face enough to hide his features but give him uninterrupted sig
ht.
“It’s a beautiful car,” the salesman before him twittered, making an unnecessary hand gesture that encompassed the car in one pretentious gesture.
Of course it was. For three hundred thousand dollars, it should be. He tilted a head at the suit who stood to the left of the car, giving him a quick nod. Justin, his assistant, stepped forward. “He’ll take it. I can handle the paperwork and payment. If we can just give Mr. Masten the keys…?”
Cole caught the keychain mid-air and slid behind the wheel, the dealership staff scurrying to unlock the large glass doors that made up the right side of the building. Through the glass, along the street, stood the crowds of people. Of women. Of worship. He clenched his jaw and tapped an impatient beat on the gearshift, waiting. The crowd undulated, hands waving, bodies jumping, a living, breathing thing, one that could love as easily as it could hate. When the glass parted, Cole revved the engine and slowly pulled forward, his glasses back in place, nodding to the crowd and smiling that trademark smile, the one he’d perfected a decade earlier.
Smiled.
Waved.
Nodded at one girl in the front who collapsed against the arms of her friends.
Let the flashes pop. The occasion documented, his foot gentle on the gas until he completed the turn onto the asphalt and could floor it.
He’d spent twelve years in this business—should be used to it. Should be appreciative of it. The lights, the attention… it meant that he was still hot, that his publicists and agents were still doing their job. That the ever-present beast was getting fed and wanting more. That he had a little more time before he was forgotten. That didn’t mean he liked it. The invasion. The act.
He took his aggression out on the car, taking the curves of the Hollywood Hills faster than necessary, the Italian car handling the challenge, the back end only skidding a second before gripping the asphalt and tearing off. By the time he came to a stop at the gates of his compound, his heart was beating hard, his mouth stretched in a wide grin. This is what he needed. The risk. The rush. The danger. She’d like it, too. They were cut from the same cloth; one of the things that made them work. He left the car idling in front of the house, and jogged up the steps, his hands in his pockets, a trio of housekeepers passing him, their polite murmurs following up the stairs.