“I loved Ellie,” I said, cringing at the way I sounded, but I couldn’t help it. “I really wanted to look like you. I begged my mom to buy the shampoo.”
“Sugar, the shampoo wouldn’t have helped you look like me. I wasn’t entirely au naturel back then. It took a committee to make me look the way I did. But those days are behind me.” She cupped her breasts and gave them a squeeze. “I can assure you there’s nothing inside this body with a serial number now.”
Marlowe said that even her name hadn’t been real. Her birth name was Marlowe Salazar, Marlowe being her mother’s maiden name and Salazar her father’s surname. Her management company thought Salazar sounded too brown, so they poked around in the family tree until they found the name Buchanan. “I was ethnically cleansed. I never changed the name back because it’s my brand now.”
On Marlowe’s left bicep there was a message, black script on flesh, but I couldn’t read it. As she fed the baby bits of pastry, I leaned closer: women don’t want to be me, men don’t want to fuck me.
“Is that a tattoo? A permanent one?”
She laughed. “Of course.”
“But what does it mean?”
Marlowe said she would tell me the story of the tattoo, but first I went to order her another coffee.
During the break between the fourth and fifth seasons of Ellie, Marlowe traveled to Italy for an extended vacation. Her handlers and her parents were pressuring her to accept a film role, but Marlowe wanted a break. She was exhausted from the pressures of carrying her own show and wanted to spend the summer out of the spotlight and on her own. “In L.A., so many people wanted a piece of me. I needed to get away.”
Ellie was not broadcast in Italy and Marlowe could enjoy anonymity there, as much as was possible for any beautiful woman in Italy. She pinned her hair to her head and wore a ball cap and frumpy, loose-fitting clothes. Nobody on the plane recognized her. In Rome, she went sightseeing like every other tourist and ate whatever she wanted. The producers of Ellie had her on a strict diet, so Italy was like a giant all-you-can-eat buffet. “Breakfast at the hotel was bread smeared with chocolate. Did you know that’s actually a thing in Italy? I went for gelato at Giolitti’s, sampled pasta dishes at two different trattorias, ate pizza rustica while walking around the market at Campo de’ Fiori and then I took a picnic to the Villa Borghese gardens, where I ate olives and cheese and drank wine while sitting under a tree. That was Day One.” Marlowe said that the food combined with anonymity was like a narcotic.
I didn’t know what it was like to be a celebrity, but the thought of walking the streets with no one watching me, and eating whatever I wanted, was exhilarating. When she said it felt as if her feet never touched the ground, I could practically feel it myself.
One afternoon she was walking through Trastevere taking photos when she passed a barbershop filled with old men. She peeked in the window, planning to take a photo. On the counters were jars filled with blue Barbicide and black combs; the men smoked and read newspapers; a dog slept in the doorway. She put her camera away and went inside. “I decided right then and there, on what was essentially a whim, to cut off my hair. All of it. I sat down in the chair and took off my cap. My hair tumbled out. I tried to explain to the barber what I wanted, but he didn’t understand. He had probably never seen that much hair in his life.” Marlowe braided her hair, from the nape of her neck down to the ends, and then she took the barber’s scissors and cut the braid off. Her description of it was like a scene from a horror movie.
She said the men in the barbershop had gathered around to watch. She rolled the braid into a coil and put it in her backpack, then pointed to a teenage boy who was sweeping the floor. The barber understood that she wanted her hair like the boy’s. The men were aghast at what this pretty young woman was doing to herself.