“Hi, Peter.”
He took in Jane for a second before it clicked.
“Jane! Jane Brown!” he exclaimed, quickly shifting gears into slick, impersonal collegiality. “What are you doing here? Are you working with Lauren on something?”
“No, I left the business. Now I’m a professional organizer.”
“Good for you! I remember you were very organized.” This sounded like a backhanded compliment.
“Are you working with Lauren?” Jane asked, thinking how improbable and ridiculous that would be.
“Well, not yet—we had a great meeting, she’s looking for someone to head up development for her, so—we’ll see!”
“Oh great, good luck! She’s so talented.”
“Yes, she is! Have a good one, Jane, great to see you.”
As he walked off, Jane turned to Esmé.
“I’m sorry I didn’t introduce you, but he was my boss, like, a million years ago, and he’s a raving asshole and a total misogynist.”
“Yeah, the vibe was super skeevy. I did not want to have to shake that hand.” Esmé chuckled as they walked toward the entry.
Lauren’s assistant, Kirsten (“Not Kristen!” she cheerfully chided them), greeted them at the door and offered drinks: the expected water and fresh-pressed juice options, as well as coffee with chicory, a New Orleans specialty very on brand for Lauren. Kirsten’s friendliness seemed strained; being a celebrity assistant was a high-wire balancing act over a fiery pit of fame-induced narcissism, which often afflicted even the most “grounded” celebrity.
While Esmé deliberated (so many options), Jane tried to ascertain if Kirsten was wearing one of Lauren’s branded dresses. Esmé finally decided on the coffee with chicory. Jane said ditto. She’d go with the flow.
“Awesome! Lauren loves them. She might be launching her own lines of chicory coffee, in fact, so watch her Insta.”
Jane wondered if she would ever become completely inured to this relentless world of marketing via the curation of self.
The cottage aesthetic of the exterior carried over to the inside of the house: open and bright, lots of comfy chairs and sofas, copious amounts of flowers carefully arranged to look like they’d just been cut in the garden and thrown into vases.
With their chicory coffees in hand (in homey sunflower-yellow Fiestaware mugs), Kirsten ushered Jane and Esmé to their workplace for the day: the “living space” of Lauren’s five-year-old boy, Prescott.
“Scotty is at school at the Center and won’t be home until the end of the day, so he’ll be out of your way.”
The Center for Early Education was the learning citadel for Hollywood tykes. Most of the parents were movie stars or TV stars or pop stars or studio moguls or producers or agents or lawyers. Despite its exclusivity (more than one toddler had a personal security detail, and one was known to have been helicoptered in when traffic was bad), the school was aggressively progressiveand made a point of admitting a small, assorted selection of the children of lumpen. It was in West Hollywood, quite a commute from the Palisades, but someone on Lauren’s staff could ferry her kid to school each day. Perhaps the husband.
“Lauren will drop in as soon as she can and discuss what she wants.”
“Discuss what she wants” sounded more like an issuing of edicts than a discussion. It made Jane feel like the help.
Prescott’s “living space” was a huge bedroom, the size of a generous primary bedroom suite. The centerpiece was a bed with a frame that was a cherry red race car, the scale of an actual car, replete with headlights, an upholstered headboard, racing tires with gleaming rims, and a personalized license plate that unimaginatively spelled outPRESCOTT. The shelves were laden with toys of all kinds, and Jane saw at least three iPads and two MacBooks lying around.
“So Lauren thinks of this room as Scotty’s space, and wants him to feel agency in here, also responsibility, so this isn’t what she would like you to work on. What she wants you to help with is his wardrobe, which is through here.”
They followed Kirsten into a closet the size of a small room. On one wall, dowels were loaded with clothes, and on the facing wall, cubbyholes were stuffed with shirts and pants and belts and underwear and socks and shoes.
“Scotty has a reputation for being a bit of a clotheshorse, so people have been giving him outfits since he was a toddler.”
Jane looked over at Esmé to try to gauge what she was thinking, but she was impassive. Jane hoped her poker face was as good as Esmé’s. A five-year-old clotheshorse? This was parental projection of the grossest kind.
“The thing is, he has outgrown so much of his wardrobe, andalso, a lot of it feels dated. So some of this is a fashion call, which Lauren will probably want to make. She’s very specific about style, but you can sort and winnow as you see fit—she knows how you work and is totally comfortable with it.”
Jane wondered how the staff at Buckingham Palace dealt with their distant queen every day. And if they ever hocked loogies into her afternoon tea.
Esmé said, “Well that’s great. We’ll do what we can.”
