“Erica London,” I repeated.
“Davie, baby, I don’t want to sound rushed and annoyed with you, but I am rushed and annoyed with you. I’ve got a million deadlines and no time to hunt down dirt on this Erica Landry.”
“London.” I switched the cell phone to my other ear and lowered my voice, so that no one outside my dressing room door could hear me. “Listen, Russell, how about if I give you a big fish? Then would you get me the Erica London dirt?”
The typing stopped. “An A-list fish?”
That’s how I ended up giving him Mike Barker. Mike’s image was squeaky clean back then, and everybody liked him, which in Hollywood means that you’re ripe to be knocked off your pedestal. I promised Russell that if he dug, he’d find out that Mike had a pretty significant gambling addiction. And I even offered to be the “source” that knew him before he was famous. The one that claimed that Mike would bet on anything.
Not only did Russell find proof of the gambling addiction, he also discovered that Mike was in so much debt to certain casinos that he had started doing paycheck movies, or as Russell had indignantly put it in his piece, “cheating his fans, so that he could feed his addiction.”
It was another cover story, and another big check, this time accompanied by what I needed to bring Erica London down.
. . .
I never told Erica my name or why I was doing what I was doing. I just showed up at her Los Feliz condo two months before her wedding in large sunglasses and a hoodie sweatshirt that covered my Afro.
I handed her the mock-up of the article that Russell planned to do and let her read about how up-and-coming actress Erica London had actually slept with her high school principal and then blackmailed him into forcing the theater coach to give her the lead in two school plays, which would be the catalyst for her getting into NYU.
It was the kind of gossip that could only kill a career at its beginnings. The TV execs might get spooked that middle America would not want to watch a program about high schoolers that starred a real-life Lolita. I told her that I had the authority to not only make sure the story never ran, but also to replace it with a puff piece about her being an actress to watch in the upcoming fall season.
The two big conditions were that she had to dump James within the week, and that she couldn’t tell him the real reason she was calling off the wedding.
Then I walked away, ignoring all the alternative bargains of money and favors that she was yelling at my back.
The plan was shaky at best, because three things that I believed to be true had to indeed be true in order for it to work:
1. Erica, at twenty-two, had to be too young to be able to see the big picture of her life. She had to honestly believe that wildly handsome and rich men came along with proposals all the time.
2. She had to love her career more than she loved James. And
3. She had to come to the conclusion that playing along would be better for her than calling the authorities on me, since what I was doing was very illegal.
As it turned out, I was right on all counts. Russell ended up running a story on how Erica London, the next big thing, had just called off her engagement to “a millionaire hair company heir,” and she actually managed to come out looking kind in it. She told Russell that she could not give only fifty percent of herself to any endeavor, and that she was afraid she would be cheating James out of a focused and committed wife if she married him.
James was devastated. Russell told me that he refused to comment for the story. And for a couple of months afterward, I couldn’t find any event photos of James, which meant that he wasn’t attending any functions. And in his world, total seclusion equaled heartbreak.
When I finished reading the article in Celeb Weekly, I smiled. James was now suffering over Erica the way I had suffered over him back in high school, and I discovered it was true what they said about revenge: It was very, very sweet.