Glamorama

"I can't tell you exactly... what I was motivated by... I can't really go into detail... It had been an unhappy period in my life... I hated my body... the way I looked... I was taking pills, I was seeing shrinks, I went to the gym because I knew no one would like me otherwise... I even thought about plastic surgery... I was twenty-three... My mother and father had just gone through a terrible divorce and my mother was having... some kind of nervous breakdown... and my dreams at night were just hours of black space... sometimes interrupted by bones and that song Bobby was whistling that night at Industria... I had just completed a failed relationship with a famous photographer and had a brief affair with a boy from an Aerosmith video... There were things I wanted... I wanted to be on the cover of more magazines... I wanted to be beautiful... I wanted to be rich, I wanted to be famous... I had been photographed by Lindbergh and Elgort and Demarchelier and... shows, I had done so many shows... but I was still mid-level... My grief seemed endless... I wanted something else... and then there was what Bobby wanted... and in our meeting I... evolved... Bobby came in and saw how limited my world was... and he motivated me... I never felt I was pretty enough and he made me feel attractive... He indulged me and I, in turn, became cheerful... He told me that physically I was perfect... and I decided then that I would follow him... anywhere... so I spent a spring with him in Los Angeles and he introduced me to his friend... 'the genius,' a man named Mr. Leisure... and Steven Meisel got involved and my career started taking off... But you've got to know, Victor, that... I was not aware of what Bobby did... I hadn't been told of his plans... All I really knew was he wasn't a morning person... and neither was I... and at an opening at MOCA... something called 'The History of the Polka Dot'... when-"

"I went to that."

"-we were standing in a corner... he was so soft-spoken... and started telling me things... and midway through... I had to ask him to stop..."

Jamie starts to cry silently. I relight the joint and hand it to her. Without sitting up she takes it, inhales, coughs a little.

"How did he recruit people?... It was only models... and famous models... He wasn't interested in anyone else... He would use the fact that as a model all you do all day is stand around and do what other people tell you to do... He preyed on that... and we listened... and it was an analogy that made sense... in the end... when he asked... things of us... and it wasn't hard to recruit people... everyone wanted to be around us... everyone wanted to be movie stars... and in the end, basically, everyone was a sociopath... and all the girls' hair was chignoned... and the Who was always playing somewhere...

"I remember very little about the beginning of that period... After I had been inducted... there were so many long gray stretches... dieting... going to the gym, which was an obsession of Bobby's... absences... giant spaces... so many things I blocked out... It was such an aimless existence... Everything we did was up-to-the-minute... the restaurants we ate in... the hotels we stayed at... the people we hung out with... In New York we joked about never staying at an address that wasn't a 10021 zip code... chartered 737s flew us to weddings... waiters never rushed us... we were allowed to smoke cigarettes anywhere we wanted... people didn't want to like us because we were young and rich and beautiful... and no one-I mean no one, Victor-was happy about my success but... that was-according to Bobby-'human nature'... but still, no one-and this is very important, Victor-no one was skeptical of us...

"And we traveled... Palm Beach... Aspen... Nigeria... Christmases in St. Bart's... a week at Armani's home in Pantelleria... and Bobby made sure I started really getting work, and then it was Cindy Crawford and Paulina Porizkova and... and Claudia Schiffer... and Yasmeen Ghauri... Karen Mulder and Chloe Byrnes and Tammy Devol and Naomi and Linda and Elaine and... and Jamie Fields... and you had to know the codes to understand how things worked in this world... it was almost like sign language... and people learned how to behave in my presence... and girls were treating me differently now that I was dating Bobby Hughes... and then the dark patterns started appearing... and when I told Bobby 'No one's being themselves, everyone's so phony,' Bobby said 'Shhh' and then whispered 'That is being themselves.'...

"Bobby would try and educate me... make me understand... what he was doing... where he was going with this whole thing and he told me 'Baby, George Washington was a terrorist' and I'd look into that face and see those eyes... those lips... and things would just start unraveling and I became educated... He would tell me that you show the world things and in showing the world you teach it what you want... He would give me E. M. Forster novels and I never understood them and for some reason... Bobby was relieved by this... He told me things like 'We are just reflections of our time' and he never really got more precise than that... I would ask him questions like 'What does fin de siecle mean?' and he would talk for an hour about the inherent evil... in rap music... and the Who was always playing in the background somewhere...