Hot Mess (Chloe Gamble) - Softcover

Decter, Ed

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1416954376 ISBN 13: 9781416954378

Verlag: Simon Pulse, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

The final book in the rags-to-riches-to-rags trilogy that reads like an E! True Hollywood Story.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Ed Decter is a producer, director, and writer. Along with his writing partner John J. Strauss, Ed wrote There's Something about Mary, The Lizzie McGuire Movie, The Santa Clause 2 and The Santa Clause 3 as well as many other screenplays. During his years in show business Ed has auditioned, hired, and fired thousands of actors and actresses just like Chloe Gamble. Ed lives in Los Angeles with his family.

Laura J. Burns has written more than thirty books for teens and kids, and hopes to write at least thirty more. She lives in California with her husband and kids.

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chapter one

Police Report, July 5

Interview with Nika Mays of 8455 Fountain Ave., West Hollywood. Employed by the Virtuoso Artists Agency. Detective Matt Lopez interrogating.

Lopez: Can you describe your relationship with Chloe Gamble, please?

Mays: I’m her agent. I was, I mean.

Lopez: Were you familiar with her family … her mother, Earlene Gamble, and …

Mays: Travis, her twin brother. Yes, I knew Early and Travis.

Lopez: And the father, Lonnie Gamble?

Mays: I knew the rest of the family first. But I met Lonnie when he arrived in Los Angeles—

Lopez: From Texas?

Mays: I don’t know. We weren’t exactly making how-was-your-trip small talk. Chloe and Trav were not happy to see him. I assume he came from Texas. The Gambles were from a town called Spurlock, Texas.

Lopez: And you met Lonnie Gamble when?

Mays: I met him at Chloe and Travis’s house, the same day everyone else met him.

Lopez: Who do you mean?

Mays: We were all there trying to talk sense into Chloe. It was me, Sean Piper—he was her lawyer. Um, Amanda Pierce and Jude Morgan—those were Chloe’s friends who worked on her TV show …

Lopez: Cover Band?

Mays: Yes. Amanda did wardrobe and Jude was the set photographer. Then there was Max Tyrell, Chloe’s boyfriend. Marc Duval, her publicist. And Travis and Chloe, of course. And Early was there, too. Oh! And Sasha Powell.

Lopez: The movie star?

Mays: Yeah. But she stormed out before Lonnie showed up. She and Trav had a fight about Chloe. They were dating, you know, and Sasha thought Chloe was a bad influence on Travis—

Lopez: Let’s keep the focus on Lonnie, please. You say you were at Ms. Gamble’s house?

Mays: Yes. Chloe and Travis had just moved into this great place in the Hollywood Hills and we were supposed to be having a housewarming party. But Chloe went and accepted a role in a movie—

Lopez: I’m sorry, keep to the facts about Lonnie.

Mays: I’m getting there. We were fighting, that’s my point. Chloe was the star of the TV show Cover Band. She was under contract to the network. But Matthew Greengold offered her a role in his movie, and you know who Greengold is …

Lopez: Yes, Ms. Mays, even us cops go to the movies.

Mays: So you know he’s the biggest director on the planet. Well, Chloe was ambitious. She wanted to be in his movie and she said she’d do it. But it meant she would have to break her TV contract and that would lead to lawsuits, so we all wanted her to change her mind. It was a tense situation. When Lonnie Gamble showed up, he walked into the middle of a … well, a kind of career intervention—

Lopez: I really have to ask you to focus. I don’t want to hear about Chloe Gamble’s career. I know you Hollywood people think the world revolves around the Business, but I’m investigating a murder.

Mays: Detective, I’m not trying to be difficult. I know that even the biggest movie is not as important as the fact that a human being is dead. But if you want to understand what happened with the Gambles, you have to understand Chloe’s career. Everything—everything—was about Chloe’s career.

Nika Mays’s Manuscript Notes: Prologue

The cops never did get it. They always wanted to put each part of Chloe Gamble’s life into its own neat little box, as if that would help them solve the murder. Box one: her crappy family life. Box two: her too-mature-for-a-sixteen-year-old love life. Box three: her enemies. Box four: her fans. Box five: her bank account. Box six: Hollywood itself.

All of those things were the same to Chloe. All of them bled into one another until the only thing she knew was what she wanted. She wanted to be famous. She wanted her fans to love her. She wanted to destroy her enemies. She wanted men to desire her. She wanted to sing, to act, to earn, to conquer, to climb high above the nasty, dead-end life she had been raised to expect. Most of all, she wanted to escape from Spurlock, Texas. And from Lonnie and Earlene Gamble.

Chloe’s career—Chloe’s fame—was her fuck you to her parents, and it was also her entire reason for being. Chloe’s want… that was her true self. Way down deep, that was her whole personality. It took over her career and her family, her friends and her lovers. It was everything to her.

Maybe the police could’ve solved the murder if they understood that the way I did. Maybe that’s why I know who did it and they don’t.

Looking back, it’s clear that the day Lonnie Gamble arrived was the day it all began to go bad. At the time, he seemed like small potatoes to me, as my boss, Hal Turman, would’ve said. Chloe was being reckless—again—and she expected me to bail her out. I’d gotten the girl a starring role on a teen TV show, and it had made her famous. Then, when she broke her contract and recorded her own music instead of the show’s, I’d renegotiated the contract. Every time Chloe went and did something stupid, I found a way to fix it. But this time I couldn’t see a way out.

Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to confront Chloe. She was never a girl who would cave in to pressure. But at the time, all I could think about was how she was going to ruin it all, everything that we had built together. It wasn’t only her career at stake, it was everybody’s—mine and Hal Turman’s, because we had just sold our agency to Virtuoso, the biggest name in the Biz. If Chloe got herself sued by the Snap network for breaking her contract, then Virtuoso would be dragged into a huge lawsuit … and Hal and I would be out on our asses. It was Sean Piper’s career, because he had scored a huge promotion at Webster and White, his entertainment law firm, based on our last renegotiation of Chloe’s deal. And it was Marc the publicist’s career, and Amanda the stylist’s, and Jude the photographer’s. And even Travis’s career … would anyone really hire Chloe Gamble’s twin brother if Chloe got blacklisted? Maybe some fourth-rate cable reality show, but otherwise it was the end of Trav’s acting career too.

Chloe’s stardom was the reason we were all so successful, and we didn’t want anything to jeopardize our success. It’s strange to see that in writing. It seems so selfish. But that day in the Hollywood Hills, I thought that Chloe was the selfish one.

She’d threatened to fire me and Sean: the two people most responsible for her current big-bucks contract with the Snap network. She said she’d dump us if we didn’t find a way out of the contract. It still takes my breath away that she could be so awful, so ungrateful. So focused on getting what she wanted that she forgot everything I’d done for her. So focused on the next big thing that she was willing to sacrifice the big thing she already had.

But that was Chloe. What she had was never enough—she always, always wanted more. I’d been paying attention to myself in those days, concentrating on my relationship with Sean and on selling the Hal Turman Agency to Virtuoso. I was thinking of me, and so I forgot to think about Chloe and her need to keep climbing.

That all changed the second that Lonnie Gamble walked into the house. He had such a dark presence, such gravity. Just like Chloe did. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, except it wasn’t a good thing the way it was with Chloe. She practically glowed; all you wanted to do was stare at her. But Lonnie,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon Pulse
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1416954376
• ISBN 13: 9781416954378
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande