“Dude, I get it.”
“I know you do, dude,” I said, teasing him with a look. “That’s why I guess I’m willing to talk about it with you—because I guess you’d really get it.” I paused a moment, then two, gathering my thoughts. “My mom, I think I mentioned at some point, was—is—from a family that goes back to the earliest days of Hollywood, like from the silent film days. My great-grandfather was one of the first silent film directors, and my great-grandmother one of the first actresses. Octavius Miller and Darlene Oldfield—look them up, sometime.”
Titus chuckled. “No, I know them. Who doesn’t?”
“Right. So then my grandfather, Albert Phineas Miller, he was a writer, director, actor, producer, all that.”
“No shit. Everyone knows him. One of the greats from the Golden Era.”
I nodded. “And an insufferable bastard, truth be told. Everyone hated working with him, but he was a genius. And he married my grandmother, Amelia Loop, when she was eighteen and he was forty-nine.” I held up a finger. “There is a point to all this Hollywood history, I promise—it’s not just me being snooty and name-droppy about my ancestry. So Albert and Amelia had several kids, most notably my mother, Elise Miller. You probably know her.”
“For sure.” He gave me a grimacing grin. “I had a poster of her taped to the inside wall of our van.”
“The one from In With The New? Where she’s wearing the tiny white bikini and holding the gun? Yeah, every teenage boy of a certain age had that poster.”
“I guess I didn’t realize that was your mother. You said she was Hollywood royalty, but…”
“Yeah. She married the director of that movie, In With The New—Calum Crane—when she was twenty, and they had a son, my half brother, Davy Crane.”
“You have a half brother?”
“Had. He died of a brain tumor when I was four. I never really knew him. That broke them up, Calum and my mom. She divorced him, quit acting, moved to Paris, and studied art. By which I mean became a wino and spent my grandparents’ money.” I sighed, waving a hand. “There’s a through line in all of this that I haven’t mentioned yet. Famous parents who were children of famous parents, and so on for three generations—everything was scrutinized. Image was everything. By the time Mom moved back to LA, got back into acting, and met my dad, she’d been the subject of so much tabloid speculation, had been affiliated in some way or another with dozens of different men. Her mom, my grandmother, had been the same. And as my grandmother got older, she went to increasingly nutty lengths to stay relevant, to stay beautiful. My grandfather obviously ended up with a series of mistresses who were increasingly younger as he got older. But Grandma Amelia? She had to do crazy stuff, surgeries and crazy diets and all that to stay young and beautiful looking. She did a Playboy centerfold at fifty-eight, to prove she was still sexy. Mom did that Caligula remake a few years ago, at sixty-one, where she appeared fully nude, full-frontal, the whole thing.” I shook my head. “So what does that mean for me? Image is everything. It was drilled into my head that my value to them, to anyone, was in my appearance. My appeal—my sex appeal. Mom told me, when I was thirteen and we were having her version of the birds and the bees talk, that unless I was sexy and stayed sexy, I’d never amount to anything.”
“She said that you? That you’d never amount to anything if you weren’t sexy.”
I nodded. “Sure did. My value as a woman is in my sex appeal—that was the lesson of my life. The driving factor behind everything.” I swallowed hard. “I did do some modeling when I was young. Overseas, for European magazines.” I couldn’t believe I was telling him this. No one knew about this, since it hadn’t gotten American media publicity; if I went to Europe, however, I’d still get recognized now and then.
He eyed me. “When you say modeling. Something tells me you’re not talking about dresses.”
I laughed. “No, not dresses. Not nude, like it wasn’t some Euro version of Playboy, but I wasn’t clothed either, not all the way. I’d reached full maturity, breast-wise, by seventeen, and…I needed attention. I’m psychoanalyzing myself retrospectively, you understand. But I got an offer from an agent to do some modeling, and I figured it was obvious. My whole family did stuff like that. I’d seen Grandma Amelia’s centerfold, and most of Mom’s early roles had been scantily clad at best. So it was kind of a duh that I’d get approached to model, and it wasn’t at all surprising that they’d ask me to pose topless. Over there, nudity isn’t as big of a deal as it is here. But still, it leads into everything.”
“At seventeen?”
I nodded. “They thought I was eighteen. Or, assumed, conveniently, and didn’t bother asking for confirmation.” I considered. “I did twenty-some shoots, in varying degrees of nudity for a variety of magazines.”
“Clearly, that didn’t lead to acting or better modeling gigs.”
“Clearly. What it led to was…me feeling like that was the only way I could leverage my looks for attention. Which led to using my looks for attention and relevance in other ways, from a very young age. It’s all I’d seen, all I’d ever had modeled for me. And it worked. I was popular in school. I got invited to all the best parties, got invited on expensive vacations with famous kids of famous parents. There were no rules. I was given as much alcohol as I could drink and left to wander the streets of Milan and Paris and Prague and Rome and Athens and Lisbon and Madrid with my friends, and unlimited credit. Sounds like every teenager’s dream, right? I thought so. Like, this is the fuckin’ life, man. But you know what came with it? The men at the parties. The princes and dukes, the sons of CEOs and prime ministers, and the CEOs and prime ministers themselves more than a few times, who assumed, correctly, that they could ply me alcohol and cocaine and get me to perform for them. Take off my shirt and dance for them. Wander around the party in nothing but my underwear, carrying around a ten-thousand-dollar bottle of eighty-year-old champagne, dancing with men twice my age.” I dug my toes deeper into the wet sand. “And that meant, obviously, being taken into the bathroom and guest rooms for other performances. Willingly, but drunk and high—willingly, because these were the richest and best and most famous men on the planet. It was actors, rock stars, producers, princes, all that. I was their plaything, because I was young and sexy and nubile and had been told all my life that I had no other role and no other value in life but as the plaything of wealthy men.”
He was silent a long time. “Fuck, man.” He kicked at the sand. “You’re pointing a finger right at me, you know. I was that rock star, in those hotel rooms all over Europe, at those parties, with the girls just like you, and I took what was offered and never thought twice about it, as long as they could tell me they were willing.”
“We may have even been at some of the same parties,” I pointed out. “God knows neither of us would likely remember it if we’d met at one.”
“No shit,” he murmured. “I was blasted off my rocker for pretty much all of my twenties and thirties, up until…you know. My shit came crashing down.” He finally looked at me. “So, what changed you?”