Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,60
a father.”
Self-pity? Yes, I suppose so. Even if you make twenty-five million dollars or more a year, you’re not necessarily going to be happy. What I’ll say about Renn’s son, Billy, is that he wasn’t a bad kid. He was twelve when Renn and I got together, and his sister, Anna, was a year younger. (I thought she was a sweet girl when I knew her, and she probably still is, but she didn’t return my phone calls while I was working on this book.) Anyway, if you’re twelve and your parents are getting divorced, you’re going to be mad at them and at the world. Billy was no exception, but he didn’t take out his anger on the family cat and dog (Squirt and Tuba) or hit his sister or steal cigarettes from the convenience store near his middle school. I always thought that he would become an actor too, but in high school he only tried out for a couple of plays and was cast in small roles that he apparently thought weren’t worth his time. In college he majored in economics, but I don’t think he’s put this degree to use. He’s good at math though, something his father isn’t, which is one reason why he’s been robbed by two different business managers in the course of five years (though both of them were caught—one by Lucy, the other by Renn’s investment broker—and forced to return the money).
A SHORT DETOUR: A FEW NOTES ABOUT ME, YOUR GUIDE ON THIS HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME
I was born in Cary, North Carolina, and for the first ten years of my life, I wanted to be a nurse because one of my mother’s sisters, Aunt Judy, was a nurse. She is one of my favorite people and can play the harmonica and the piano and tried to teach me both, but I couldn’t sit still for long enough to get beyond the practice scales. After that, I wanted to be a teacher, and then a radio broadcaster, either as a deejay or as a producer. After college, though, I couldn’t get a job in radio to save my life or anyone else’s, despite the increasingly short skirts I wore to interviews when I knew the interviewer would be a man. The jobs almost always went to a male candidate, a couple of whom were fired within a month, and then they’d bring me back to interview again and not offer me the job a second time. Eventually, out of fury and desperation, I took a job at an overpriced, mediocre restaurant in Century City as a prep cook before I decided to learn how to cook for real, which required more loans, for culinary school this time, and several angry promises to my father that I would pay him back, which I did, but not all I owed him until I married Renn.
Movies have always been a part of my life, as they are a part of most people’s lives, and because I lived in Los Angeles from the age of eighteen on, they became even more important to me because I would often see movie stars doing the same things that average people did—sitting in traffic jams, eating breakfast at a diner, even, in one case, checking out library books (it was Debra Winger who I saw doing this, or else she had an identical twin). When I started catering for movie studios, I was even more intimately connected to them, but I felt as if there were an invisible wall between me and the actors and more famous directors, one through which I would never be allowed to pass. It’s not like I cried myself to sleep every night thinking about how small my life was compared to the people who were getting top billing (or even middle) in the credits in each production that I catered, but I did feel this sense of isolation and hopelessness at times—my husband’s drug use certainly didn’t help matters—and when Renn noticed me and started coming by the catering van a couple of times a day to talk to me about the places I had traveled (not very many) and the books I had read, I probably would have forfeited ten years of my life to be his mistress, not to mention his wife. Girls from small towns in North Carolina (or anywhere else, for that matter) do not usually end up the wives of famous men. We are taught, tacitly or