THEY ENDED UP going darker with the hair and everyone had to admit that Lars’s preoccupation with the exact color was pure genius, because Alison looked devastating. Face framed by feathers of raven curls, her complexion drifted into a pure, vulnerable alabaster. Those green eyes were even more startling in their intelligence and cunning, but now there was the whisper of hurt there too, a panic which occasionally flickered to the surface before it was willed away. It wasn’t precisely Ava, or Liz either; for both of them, the black hair had a Samson-like power: Those girls knew how to snarl. Alison had something more wounded-bird going on, and the whole effect was startling. It was, in fact, that rarest of commodities, for Hollywood: It was not merely familiar; it was also new.
Unfortunately, getting the hair to that exact color wasn’t easy. Alison’s natural brunette was so dark the stylist, a fierce and competent young woman who was covered in slightly scary tattoos, explained that they would actually need to strip Alison’s natural brunette and lay in the raven, which had less red and more black in it, on top of the stripped hair. So then they needed a high-volume peroxide in order to activate the bleach and remove the color, and then they had to shampoo, remove the bleach, and do the whole thing again. The bleach had a high lift, which removed the color well enough, but a pale orange cast in the stripped hair was tenacious. After two days of this, the intimidating hairstylist—her name was Rocky, of course it was—pointed out that all this manipulation could permanently damage Alison’s follicles as well as the hair itself. In other words, if they kept this shit up, it could ruin Alison’s hair for life. Determined that when he got her to Los Angeles to meet the studio royalty she would be as close to perfection as he could make her, Lars fired Rocky and hired a second, and then a third stylist, flying them both in from London. They made all sorts of wild promises and in fact delivered one hell of a cut and color, but just when Lars finally approved a stunningly accurate deep brown-black, Alison’s own roots, with those hints of auburn, were starting to show. The second as well as the third stylist confirmed what Rocky had been fired for saying: Much more of this, and her hair would be wrecked for good. Ryan got involved, and in the end they compromised: You can touch up the roots for the screen test. After that, you’re going to have to wig her.
In the moment, the compromise was acceptable. Alison’s meeting with Gordon and Norbert and Barry and David and Ron and half a dozen other white men was set, and it proved to be a superb exercise in feminine charm. She wore a skintight pearl-colored georgette slip dress that left little of her figure to the imagination. The dress was so low-cut she was convinced that her nipples might slip out at any moment and ruin everything, but Lars had insisted it would keep the room on edge (it did), and more important, it was the kind of thing that a screen goddess would do. She’d sit there in a dress like that, acting like a perfect lady, and letting them all fantasize about fucking her on the floor.
“Yeah, but most of them are gay,” Alison pointed out to him, afterward. “They don’t want to fuck me at all. They want to fuck you.”
“They want to be you,” Lars informed her. “That’s better.”
“I don’t know, Lars,” she sighed. It seemed weird, frankly, the way these guys obsessed on her every detail, like she was their own favorite Barbie doll. Lars seemed to care more about the shade of her lipstick than what kind of car he drove. And the hair thing was totally bizarre. He wanted her to look exotic, confident, Audrey Hepburn–like in the knowledge that no matter how boyish the cut, she still knew she was a ravishing beauty. The flip side danger of a cut that short was that she would look like a lesbian. He went back and forth relentlessly about it, as apparently there was nothing in the universe less sexy to all men, gay or straight, than lesbians. But she had made it through that essential meeting with flying colors, and finally he could relax, and express approval. “You look amazing,” he told her, studying her from behind. His hands were creeping around her waist, slowly pulling up the georgette. She wondered how much of this crap Ava or Liz had to put up with and immediately regretted even asking herself the question. Her brain whispered back to her, A lot. They had to put up with this a lot.