Elimination Night

5

Bibi and the Boy King of the Bronx



THERE WAS NEVER going to be any “sanity check” with Bibi Vasquez. Hell, no. Not even so such much as a phone conversation. If the executives at Rabbit wanted her—which they did, perhaps even more than they wanted Joey—they were going to have to beg.

Or rather, they were going to have to beg her manager, Teddy Midas.

Now, as I probably don’t have to mention, Teddy isn’t exactly known for his calm, rational demeanor. He’s a hysterical narcissist. What’s more, he has nothing to fear from being exposed as an Evil Diva From Hell, because no one expects anything less. While dining recently at Amuse Bouche in West Hollywood, for example, Teddy emptied his entire meal into the pants of the head waiter, due to an innocent misunderstanding over the phrase “courgette flower beignet.” And that wasn’t the end of the incident, if you believe the report by Chaz Chipford that appeared in the following week’s ShowBiz. As Teddy left the restaurant, his bodyguard, Mr. Tiddles—seven one, four hundred pounds—“accidentally” fell on the manager, breaking his leg in three places. Teddy left a half-a-million dollar tip, so the matter never went any further.

No further than ShowBiz, anyway.

Exactly how Teddy and Bibi’s friendship developed is something of a mystery. If I had to take a guess, however, I’d say Teddy saw a lot of himself in his future client when they first met in a TV studio a decade ago. Born to Chinese immigrant parents in rust belt Indiana (they owned a Laundromat), Teddy was a musical prodigy, but ended up on the street at the age of sixteen after his father caught him in bed with the eldest son of his business partner. Teddy never spoke to his family again. Instead he went to Nashville to work for BeeBop Records as a writer of country songs, of which his biggest hit was the Christian radio favorite, “I Love Ya, Honey (But Don’t Git Between Me & Jesus).” After that, Teddy relocated a second time, to New York City, where he became a houseguest of his janitor uncle, with whom he lived for all of seventy-two hours—long enough for him to later create a TV drama series about the experience.

Boy King of the Bronx was the title.

Teddy was able to move out of his uncle’s place so quickly because he got a job at Galactic Records, where he rose with similar speed to senior vice president, charged with overseeing the career of the nightclub owner/rapper/all-round hustler Bossman Toke—a.k.a. Bossy T. And it was Bossy T who introduced Teddy to Bibi: She was his girlfriend at the time, having just appeared as a thong-wearing, bare-nippled Queen Victoria in Bossy T’s music video for the multiplatinum hit “Kneel for the King.” In the extended ten-minute cut, which cost twenty-five million dollars to make, Bossy T plays a black English royal from the future who builds a time machine so he can sleep with every “smokin’ hot bitch queen since history began.” The video ends with him unzipping his fly in front of Cleopatra, allowing a solid gold asp to slither from his pants. It won Best Artistic Vision at that summer’s Cool Beatz Video Awards.

And why did Teddy and Bibi have so much in common? Well, Bibi had also been thrown out on the street at the age of sixteen, after refusing to accept a place at hospitality school. The Vasquezes lived in Middle Village, Queens: Bibi’s mother, a Dominican baby nurse, had come to America to work for a wealthy family in Manhattan; her father was a French Canadian dishwasher. Bibi took her mother’s surname on the advice of her manager: “Bibi Le Poupe” just didn’t have much of a ring to it.

Bibi’s parents yearned for their daughter to become a successful, independent American woman—and hospitality was something, the only thing, she seemed to be any good at. Or at least, when she waited tables at the French restaurant where her father worked, she earned more tips in a week than the manager made in a month… which she found out soon enough because she married him.

It lasted nine days. And still Bibi didn’t want to go to hospitality school. No, she wanted to be a dancer, an actress, a model… a singer. So she moved into a squat on the Lower East Side and auditioned every day. Eventually she got a two-week gig as a bikini-wearing pole dancer on a late night music TV show and wound up giving an onscreen lapdance to Bossy T, who by then had been profiled in Forbes thanks to his unexpectedly successful diversification into the plus-size underwear market.

I didn’t even need to Google the rest of this story when I was putting together my research file: Bibi’s breakthrough casting in Elsa, a movie about the tragic life of the narcocorrido singer Elsa Melindez; her first single, “My Love Goes Bang-Bang,” which spent four months at number one largely thanks to the publicity created when Bibi, Teddy, and Bossy T got into an argument in a Chelsea ice cream parlor, during which Mr. Tiddles let off three rounds from his gun. (Bibi and Bossy T were questioned but not charged. Mr. Tiddles spent the next three months on Rikers Island, saying nothing to nobody.)

The scandal was enough to end Bibi and Bossy T’s romance—but Bibi stuck with Teddy, who became her manager, publicist, charisma coach, agent, and business partner, taking a separate percentage for each. He quickly consolidated her image as an unsmiling, imperious diva with a white fur wardrobe and a Queens-girl toughness. Every woman in America wanted to be her. Every guy in America wanted to sleep with her. Black, white, Asian, Hispanic—it didn’t matter. The great irony being that Bibi achieved all this without even being able to sing.

That was hardly the point, of course: Bibi was a brand, an idea, an aspiration.

I can hardly even begin to imagine how many millions Bibi and Teddy made together. They opened a chain of nail salons (Mani Bibi), launched a perfume brand (Bibi Beautiful), and created a line of personal massage wands (Bibi Naughty). As for Bibi’s personal life: She became involved with her hairdresser, Tommy Stiles, who proposed within three weeks of their first date. Teddy was both the officiant at the wedding—he sang the vows—and the best man. He even joined the couple on their honeymoon at Bibi’s villa in Italy, where the staff expressed surprise to an undercover ShowBiz reporter that the groom was spending more time with Teddy than he was with his bride.

When they all got back home to LA, Bibi hired two lawyers: One to annul her marriage; the other to sue Teddy. Not long after that, Bibi’s new boyfriend, Logan Deckard—Oscar-winning actor, chairman of the Hollywood Actors Union, patron of multiple cancer charities, and presumed candidate for governor of California—had his people take a look at Bibi’s books. Among the excesses uncovered: a full-time employee whose sole task was to switch on Teddy’s iPhone. (Teddy had never quite mastered technology.) Meanwhile, Bibi and Logan made inevitable plans to wed. He bought her a ten million dollar ring and a Siberian tiger in a cage. She bought him a private island and helicopter by which to get there. Then she recorded a song, “Bibi from the Hood,” the gist of the lyrics being: a) she was richer than God, and b) she was still a down-to-earth girl from Middle Village, Queens. Clearly, no one had thought to point out to her that writing a song expressing point a somewhat invalidated point b.

Then came Bibi and Logan’s first movie together, Jinky, which one critic summed up by praising its ability to “take the sexiest, most closely watched celebrity couple in the universe, remove all their chemistry, and make you want to stab yourself in the neck with a rusty fork for no other reason than to relieve the boredom.” Jinky made $400.25 on the Friday it opened in a few dozen theaters. Its costars had called off their wedding by the following weekend.

Thus began the most recent—and troubled—stage of Bibi’s career, which this time I did have to Google, largely because of the press’s waning interest in her affairs.

Her nail salons filed for bankruptcy. The company that Teddy had outsourced to manufacture her branded massage wands was found to be employing six-year-old girls in China. And try as she might, she just couldn’t recover from Jinky. Her follow-up movies bombed. Her albums didn’t sell. Even her fashion sense was mocked: “Bibi’s acrylic bedsheet,” was how the Style section of the New York Chronicle described her eccentrically dimensioned Oscars dress that year. (Teddy had previously selected all her outfits.) Exhausted, Bibi took a break to get married, again, this time to her teenage sweetheart Edouard Julius, the actor, trapeze artist, and former Olympic show jumper. To everyone’s surprise, it lasted more than a week. They even had children together: quadruplets, in fact. Hence, Bibi became “Mama B.” But her career was in worse shape than ever. A low point was duly reached when her comeback single, “I Wanna Rock (Any Diamond Will Do),” was released with spectacular insensitivity only a week after the Great Recession began, just as millions of her fans were being laid off and/or foreclosed upon. Worse: During a performance of the song at the Cool Beatz Video Awards, Bibi climbed up on the backs of twelve oiled and loin-clothed male dancers, broke a stiletto, and fell backward onto a giant projection screen.

“NEEDY DIVA WANTS A ROCK—BUT TAKES A KNOCK!” gloated ShowBiz.

A handwritten note from Teddy was delivered to Bibi’s suite at the Four Seasons that same morning. (I discovered this among the exhibits in a lawsuit filed between them, along with transcripts of several emotional telephone conversations.)

It read:

B,

I am your family.

I am your best friend.

Let me adore you.

Forever,

T.

Ten minutes later, Teddy was once again getting ten percent of everything Bibi earned (expenses not included). His first piece of advice? “Take the call from Ed at Rabbit. Be a judge on Project Icon. Your fans will see your humanity, your tears, your compassion. Plus, it’s a f*ckload of money, with endorsements up the wazoo.”

Bibi agreed.

But Teddy didn’t go the easy route. Of course he didn’t. Instead of calling Ed Rossitto, he leaked a story to ShowBiz “revealing” that Bibi was in talks with Nigel Crowther to join the judging panel of The Talent Machine. Then he quickly issued an official denial, saying, “At this time, Bibi Vasquez is focused only on her family.” All this was enough to prompt a second call from Rossitto, who by now was wondering if things were going on at Rabbit that he didn’t even know about. An increasingly strained back-and-forth ensued, culminating in one of Teddy’s assistants finally delivering a list of “Artist Requirements” to The Lot:





Artist to be paid sixty million dollars a year.

Artist to be provided with customized, four-thousand-square-foot dressing compound to accommodate hair, make-up, and wardrobe personnel.

Artist’s body to be insured with one billion dollar policy in case of injury. (Breasts/buttocks to be valued at one hundred million dollars each.)

No fewer than five promotional Artist videos to be broadcast by Network.

Network to offer promotional-rate advertising deal to Bibi Beautiful Cosmetics.

Crew to be forbidden to make eye contact with Artist (and Manager) AT ALL TIMES.

Artist to be provided with chauffeur-driven limo for duration of season, available 24/7. Limo to be Rolls-Royce Phantom, white. Artist to select driver (male, under twenty-five) from head/torso shots.



There were seventy-eight pages of this in total—the last twenty devoted entirely to the requirements of Bibi’s “dressing compound,” including a lengthy addendum to promote “a deeper understanding of the tastes/preferences of the Artist, with regard to beverages and snack items.”

When Ed Rossitto had finished reading the document, he slammed down the lid of his laptop, stabbed the case repeatedly with a letter opener, then threw it off his office balcony into the bunny-shaped lake below. (Or so I heard from Len.) Then he logged on to another computer, retrieved Teddy’s list of demands from his e-mail, and forwarded it to Chaz Chipford, the ShowBiz reporter. Within minutes, the entire unedited file was available on the magazine’s website as a downloadable PDF.

That afternoon, Bibi called Teddy while her assistant took notes.

“You’re an a*shole,” she told him.

“That’s why you employ me,” he replied.

“I don’t employ you.”

There, the transcript ends.