Tilly Bagshawe - Fame

For Viorel Rezmives

and in loving memory of Abel Teglas.

Heathcliff shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart.

Fred Allen

Epigraph

Part One

Prologue

At the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, the Eighty-Fifth Academy Awards…

Chapter One

‘I’m not asking you, Sabrina, I’m telling you. You have…

Chapter Two

‘Oh my God, Vio! Don’t stop! Please don’t stop. Oh…

Chapter Three

‘I hate you! I fucking HATE YOU, you selfish bastard,…

Chapter Four

As Dr Michel Henri lifted the child out of its crib…

Chapter Five

Striding past the waiting paparazzi, ignoring the catcalls and boos…

Chapter Six

‘Hey, Mum, guess what?’ It was the third time Abel…

Chapter Seven

Dorian Rasmirez’s production company, Dracula Pictures, had offices on the…

Chapter Eight

Tish Crewe gasped for breath as the cold water from…

Part Two

Chapter Nine

‘I’m not asking for directions again, OK? I am not…

Chapter Ten

Sabrina Leon adjusted her new Prada aviators and arranged her…

Chapter Eleven

Harry Greene lay back against his purple velvet pillows and…

Chapter Twelve

Sabrina awoke gripped with fear. A familiar fear: her bedroom…

Chapter Thirteen

Chrissie Rasmirez stretched out her lithe legs on the sun-lounger…

Chapter Fourteen

Two days after Chrissie Rasmirez’s arrival on the Wuthering Heights…

Chapter Fifteen

For the next three days, until Chrissie left for Romania,…

Chapter Sixteen

For the next ten days, Sabrina and Jago were inseparable.

Chapter Seventeen

‘Viorel, over here!’

Part Three

Chapter Eighteen

Chrissie Rasmirez arched her back and thrust her hips forward,…

Chapter Nineteen

Saskia Rasmirez rearranged the plastic Little Mermaid tea set on…

Chapter Twenty

Tish stood in the hallway at Loxley, not sure whether…

Chapter Twenty-One

The final weeks of shooting at Dorian Rasmirez’s Romanian Schloss…

Chapter Twenty-Two

‘No.’ Chrissie Rasmirez’s angular face hardened, her lips drew tighter…

Chapter Twenty-Three

Dorian Rasmirez gazed sadly out of the restaurant window and…

Chapter Twenty-Four

‘We had a deal, Mike. You shook my hand, in…

Chapter Twenty-Five

‘Give me twenty more bicycle crunches. Go!’

Chapter Twenty-Six

Sabrina sat down at the corner table at Mastro’s, aware…

Chapter Twenty-Seven

St John’s Hospital on Santa Monica and Twentieth was comprised of…

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Tish knelt down and held out her arms as the…

Chapter Twenty-Nine

For three hundred and sixty four days a year, the…

Chapter Thirty

Three thousand people gasped as one.

Chapter Thirty-One

All over Los Angeles, people were throwing lavish, glitzy parties…

Chapter Thirty-Two

Viorel stared out of the grimy taxi window at the…

Acknowledgements

Other Books by Tilly Bagshawe

Copyright

About the Publisher

At the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, the Eighty-Fifth Academy Awards were about to get under way.

In the hushed luxury of the auditorium, opposite the vast, 130-foot stage, designed by David Rockwell especially with the Oscars in mind, two men took their seats. Tonight, their bitter feud would be settled for better or worse. It would be settled in front of their peers, the three thousand of Hollywood’s chosen sons and daughters who’d been invited to tonight’s ceremony. It would be settled in front of the estimated sixty million Americans expected to tune in to the broadcast at home, as well as the hundreds more millions who would catch the Oscars around the globe. For one of the men, tonight would be a victory so sweet he knew he would still be able to taste it on his deathbed. For the other, it would be a defeat so catastrophic, he would never recover.

As the ceremony dragged on interminably – Best Live Action Short; Best Sound Mixing; Did anybody in the universe care? – both men kept their eyes fixed straight ahead, ignoring the smiles of well-wishers as totally as they ignored the pruriently intrusive television cameras constantly scanning their features for a reaction.

Disappointment.

Hope.

Humour.

Despair.

The cameras got nothing. Neither of the two men had got to where they were today by giving away their emotions. Certainly not for free.

At last, after almost three long hours of torture, the moment arrived. Martin Scorsese was standing at the podium, a crisp white envelope in his hand. He gave a short, pre-prepared speech. Neither of the men heard a word of it. Behind his diminutive Italian frame, a montage of images flashed across an enormous screen, clips from the year’s most critically acclaimed pictures. To the two men, they were nothing but shapes and colours.

I hate you, thought one.

I hope you rot in hell, thought the other.

‘And the Academy Award for Best Picture goes to …’

‘I’m not asking you, Sabrina, I’m telling you. You have to take this part.’

Sabrina Leon looked at her manager with queenly disdain. Ed Steiner was fat, balding and past his prime (if he’d ever had a prime). In cheap grey suit trousers and a white shirt with spreading sweat patches under each arm, he looked more like a used-car salesman than a Hollywood player. He also had an intensely irritating, domineering manner. Sabrina did not ‘have’ to take the part. She did not ‘have’ to do anything. I’m the fucking star here, she thought defiantly. I headlined in three Destroyers movies. Three! That’s Destroyers, the most successful action franchise of all time. You work for me, remember?

Ignoring Ed, Sabrina got to her feet and walked across the room to the French windows. Outside her room, a lush, private garden exploded with colour and scent. Bright orange, spiky ginger flowers fought for space with more traditional roses in white and yellow, and orange and lemon trees groaned with fruit beneath the perfectly blue, cloudless California sky. Then there were the views. The house was built at the top of a steep canyon, so even from the ground floor they were spectacular, across the rooftops of the exclusive Malibu Colony, home to some of Hollywood’s biggest, wealthiest stars, and beyond to the endless, shimmering blue of the Pacific Ocean. If it weren’t for the resolutely hospital-like furnishings in all the rooms – white metal beds, uncomfortable, hard-backed chairs – you could almost imagine you were in a junior suite at the Four Seasons, and not locked up like a prisoner at Revivals, the infamous $2,000-a-night rehab of choice for burned-out Young Hollywood.

It had been Ed Steiner who had forced Sabrina Leon to check herself into Revivals. Two weeks ago, Ed had driven round to his client’s mansion off Benedict Canyon at eight in the morning, packed an overnight bag while she watched, and frog-marched Sabrina into his shining new Mercedes E-Class convertible.

‘This is ridiculous, Ed,’ she’d protested. Still in her party clothes from the night before, a black leather Dolce & Gabbana minidress and sky-high Jonathan Kelsey stilettos, with heavy black eye make-up smudged around her eyes, Sabrina looked even more desirable and vixen-like than the tabloid caricatures that were wrecking her career. ‘I’m not an addict. There’s nothing wrong with me.’