Hollywood Girls Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

demanded he live in San Francisco during the week. It allowed her Monday through Friday to relentlessly pursue all her Hollywood ambitions—ambitions that until recently fueled her to work harder and longer hours than any other agent in town.
     
    *
     
    Immediately after law school, Jessica pushed a mail cart, assisted and finally been promoted to executive at I M FOX Productions. After a decade of work she summited as president of CTA. It was only in the last three months she’d allowed herself a view of the landscape that was her Hollywood life. Anxiousness oozed through her as she surveyed all she achieved. Although her life was shiny, she found it lacking, like a six-carat cubic zirconia. She wondered if it wasn’t her biological clock sounding some sort of evolutionary alarm.
    While her girlfriends from high school and college were off marrying, buying houses, and filling those houses with children, Jessica was working seven A.M. to midnight pursuing her Hollywood dream. Her friends in Oregon stared at her slack-jawed when they met (maybe once a year), drinking in her stories of celebrity and fame. Incredulous at her tales, perhaps on the inside bemoaning their lot in life: paunch-bellied husbands approaching middle age, carpooling in their Dodge minivans, PTA, sticky fingers, croup, spilled syrup, laundry, unmade beds. Although they were still friends (you couldn’t turn your back on the girls who held your hair while you puked your guts out after getting drunk on tequila for the first time), their lives were irrevocably different from Jessica’s. And in part it was that very difference from them and the similarity to Cici and Lydia that had begun and cemented Jessica’s entertainment friendships. Who else would understand her frustration today while sitting at the Ivy across from one of the world’s biggest stars, but another member of the Hollywood club?
    Jessica tossed her auburn curls and inhaled. Enough.
    “Okay, so the perk list is pretty much the same, with the addition of the Cristal and, of course, Viève. Great. I’ll speak with Business Affairs after lunch. I’m sure they are going to hate the private-jet miles.”
    “What is it with these studios and their private jets?” Holden asked. “Why do they have them if they don’t want their stars flying around in them?”
    “Holden, it’s not that they don’t want you to use them. It’s how you use them. Flying from Belize to Chicago at two A.M. because you want a hot dog? It doesn’t sit well with Accounting.” Jessica punctuated her pointed words with a smile—she could say anything to anyone as long as she smiled.
    That was her job: Take ten percent and smile. For now, Holden Humphrey was a star, one of Jessica’s many. There were ten stars in Hollywood who could get any movie going anywhere, and Jessica currently represented seven of them. Plus a slew of writers and directors. It was an amazing thing. She, like all the giants before her (Wasserman, Ovitz, Berg), was an uberagent.
    It was as if she’d been struck by lightning. Signing the first star had been luck. The second’s career was in the toilet when Jessica found him an amazing small character piece, an independent film for which he won a “little gold man.” The award turned his career around, and once he was on top again, the big money offers started pouring into Jessica’s office. The third was a referral from the first, and once Jessica had three, it was a party. Everyone loved a party, especially stars. The getting was easy. Signing the star, developing their career, finding them the right role, had always been easy for Jess. Keeping the star—that was tough.
    Jessica glared at Josh Dragatsis, who still stared at Holden and salivated over his chopped salad. Poaching. Always someone trying to snatch her success away from her.
    Actors, Jessica knew from experience, were mercurial creatures. Anyone craving the spotlight enough to want to see themselves twenty feet tall in