Dear George Clooney: Please Marry My Mom (16 page)

“Okay, Violet. This shouldn’t take too long.”

I was about to pass out from boredom when Jennica finally emerged two hours later.

“Violet, I am
so
sorry. They took forever with some of the girls.”

“I’m so hungry, I’m about to gnaw off my own arm.”

“C’mon then, screw sushi. I know a great burger joint close to here.”

Being L.A., we got in the car to drive a few blocks. A parking ticket fluttered under Jennica’s windshield wiper. She cursed under her breath and shoved it into her purse. “Don’t tell your dad, okay?”

I nodded. “How’d your audition go?”

“Not great. I was in and out in no time. I think by the time I got in there, they’d already decided on someone else. One of the producers was actually talking on her cell phone during my audition.”

“What a jerk.”

She smiled at me. “Yes. She was. But you know what? It’s nothing some retail therapy won’t cure. Let’s go shopping after lunch.”

“What about our tour of the stars’ homes?” I asked, a bubble of panic rising up in my stomach.

“We’ll have time for both. Promise. C’mon, let me buy you some new clothes. Starting with a better-fitting swimsuit.”

I thought about the fight she’d had with my dad that morning about money. Then I thought about the
piles of stuff Lola and Lucy had – the clothes, the toys, the princess room, the pool.

And I said, “Sure!”

I cannot tell a lie. Retail therapy was fun. After we’d wolfed down bacon cheeseburgers and fries, Jennica drove us to one of L.A.’s coolest clothing stores in West Hollywood, Fred Segal. I couldn’t believe the prices in there, but Jennica didn’t bat an eye, so I let her buy me some new tops and a great pair of jeans. Then she took me to her favorite swimsuit store, and we actually found a one-piece that didn’t look half-bad on me.

“It’s all about the cut,” she said. “It accentuates your gorgeous legs.”

“Please. I have man-knees. My legs are hideous.”

“Are you kidding me? Women would kill for your legs, Violet. They go on forever.”

I had never thought of my legs that way before.

After we left the swimsuit store, Jennica drove us to Hollywood Boulevard, where we bought a map of the stars’ homes in a souvenir shop. “Is George Clooney’s house on here?” I asked the guy at the counter.

“Yup,” he said in a bored voice.

“You like George Clooney?” Jennica asked as we headed back to her car.

“He’s alright,” I lied. “My mom’s a huge fan. I promised her I’d take a photo of his house.”

I didn’t want her to get suspicious, so I asked her to drive us past other celebrity homes, too. We drove through some incredible neighborhoods, with names I’d heard in songs and on TV: Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Laurel Canyon, Mulholland Drive, Sunset Boulevard. You could barely see a lot of the houses from the road because they had either tall shrubs or security fences to protect them from prying eyes.

After half an hour of this, I asked if we could drive to George Clooney’s place. “I don’t want to disappoint my mom.”

Jennica studied the map for a moment, then she put the car into gear and pulled away from the curb. “I wanted to say thank you, Violet,” she said.

“For what?”

“For suggesting we spend the day together. For making an effort. I know how you must feel about me.”

I didn’t answer.

“And I think that’s why you did what you did to Lola and Lucy, right? Because I don’t believe for a moment that you’d really want to hurt them.” I could hear the doubt in her voice.

I couldn’t look at her. I just shook my head as we turned onto George’s street.

“I never thought I’d be ‘the other woman,’ you know. That wasn’t part of my life plan, let me tell you.” Jennica was saying this as much to herself as she was to me. “I guess I’m hoping that we can turn over a new leaf here, you and me –”

“This is it,” I said, cutting her off. “Stop the car.”

Jennica pulled over. I opened the door and hopped out. “Back in a flash.”

I ran across the street to George’s house. Like a lot of the others, it had high shrubs surrounding it. I slipped around the side of the house and tried to squeeze through one of the shrubs, just to see what things looked like on the other side. But beyond the shrubs was a high fence.

I made my way back to the front of the house. A wrought-iron gate blocked the driveway. I needed to get to George’s front door, so I tried to push it open. It was locked.

Suddenly someone spoke to me. “Can I help you?” It was a male voice.

I glanced around, startled, but no one was there.

“I said, can I help you?”

That’s when I saw the intercom on the fence.

“
Um,
hi,” I said, speaking into the intercom. “Is this George?”

“George who?”

“George Clooney.”

“Kid, if I was George Clooney, do you think I’d be answering my own intercom?”

“Why not? And how do you know I’m a kid?”

“Look up. Look way, way up.”

I did. A camera was perched on top of the wrought-iron fence. I smiled sheepishly and waved.

“Oh. Hi.”

“Hi.”

“So, is George home?”

“I hate to break it to you, kid. Not only is George Clooney not home, George Clooney does not even live at this address.”

“Yes, he does.”

The guy laughed. “I can assure you, he doesn’t.”

“But my star map says –”

“Kid, those star maps are a waste of money. Most of that information is years out of date.”

My heart sank. “Really?”

“Really.”

From across the street, Jennica started to beep her horn.

“That stinks,” I said.

“For you, maybe. For the stars, not so much. Imagine having people drive by your house all day and night, trying to catch a glimpse of you.”

“I guess. But I’m not trying to catch a glimpse. I have something important to ask him.”

“That’s what they all say.” He sounded tired. “Now scram, okay? You seem like an okay kid, so don’t make me have to call the police.”

I nodded. Then I waved at the video camera and walked across the road, sliding back into the passenger seat of Jennica’s car.

“What were you doing over there? You could have had us arrested!”

“I told you. I was taking a picture for my mom.”

Jennica picked up my camera from the backseat. “Some picture,” she said.

“Can we go home?” I asked. “I’m really tired all of a sudden.”

Jennica looked at me. I leaned my head against the window, completely discouraged.

“Sure thing,” she said eventually. “Let’s go home.”

When we got back, Rosie and the twins were in the family room, engaged in an elaborate game of “school.” Rosie was the teacher and therefore the boss, and she was having a great time telling Lola and Lucy what to do.

After we’d eaten dinner (prepared by Anna Maria before she left for home), Jennica put the twins to bed, and
I put Rosie to bed. Rosie insisted she didn’t need a pull-up. “I haven’t peed my pants for a week!”

When I was done reading to her, I went to the family room and turned on their enormous flat-screen TV. I couldn’t help it – I felt depressed.

Jennica came in a few minutes later. “Violet, your dad just called. He says you and I can visit him on set tomorrow. We’ll drive over there in the morning.”

My mood lifted. This was it. My best and final chance to meet George Clooney.

I couldn’t mess up.

“J
ennica Valentine and Violet Popischil. We’re visiting Ian Popischil on Lot 18,” Jennica said the next morning. We were sitting in her car outside the guard booth at Tantamount Studios.

Pulling into the studio had been pretty cool. First we’d driven under a beautiful art deco archway, with the words
Tantamount Studios
engraved right into the stone. A big fountain, carved out of the same stone, shot up plumes of water just beyond the archway. The surrounding grounds were planted with an incredible array of multicolored tropical plants and flowers. About fifty meters past the fountain, the road was blocked by a guardrail, like the kind they have in parking lots. A security booth sat next to it, and a guard had stepped out to ask who we were visiting.

He stepped back into the booth with Jennica’s identification and checked a list. Then he came out a minute later and handed her a security pass.

“And here’s a map to guide you,” he said, but Jennica waved the map away.

“It’s okay. I know my way around.”

“I’ll take the map,” I said quickly. “For a souvenir.”

We drove through the studio grounds for what felt like an eternity. The place was huge. We passed low-rise building after low-rise building, and I realized, with a bit of awe, that there was probably a TV show or a movie shooting in every single one of them. We passed an outdoor set that looked exactly like the main street of a small U.S. town and another outdoor set that looked a lot like the Wild West.

And then I saw it: Lot 9. The studio where George Clooney was shooting his movie. I tried to memorize the drive from his lot to ours, but my sense of direction wasn’t the greatest. Still, I had the map in my pocket, which would help me find my way back.

A few minutes later, Jennica pulled into a parking spot outside Lot 18. We both got out of the car. “Here we are,” she said.

A guy in his twenties was waiting for us at the studio door. He was cute in a scruffy kind of way. “I’m Ben, Ian’s assistant. Come on through. We’re between setups right now.”

He took us down a long corridor. We passed offices and dressing rooms and the hair-and-makeup room, then we stopped at a door that had a large red light over it. I knew from the few times I’d visited Mom and Dad on set when I was younger that when the light is on, it means they’re shooting and you aren’t supposed to enter. But now the light was off, and we stepped inside.

The set was incredible. It was supposed to be the inside of a high-tech spaceship, and if I didn’t look up to see all the lights hanging from the ceiling, and if I ignored the crew members who were setting up for the next scene, I could almost believe that I’d been abducted by aliens.

Then I saw my dad, standing by the snack table. He was talking to a pretty redheaded woman. Judging by her outfit, a
Star Trek
-style clingy one-piece space suit, I guessed she was one of his actresses. His hand rested casually on her arm.

I looked at Jennica. She, too, had spotted my dad.

“If I were you?” I told her. “I’d visit Dad again sometime. But next time, I’d show up unannounced.”

Jennica looked at me sharply and opened her mouth to say something. But she must have realized I’d only said it to be helpful because she didn’t say whatever she was going to say. Instead, she brushed her hand gently against my cheek. “Eyelash,” she said.

And suddenly I felt a great wave of sympathy for her because, let’s face it, if Dad could cheat on his first wife, he could cheat on his second wife, too.

“And … cut!” Dad shouted from his director’s chair behind the monitor. It was a fancy black canvas chair, with his name stitched on the back and a drink holder and everything. I sat behind him, also in a black canvas chair, but without the name or the cup holder. I wore a headset so I could hear the dialogue clearly. Jennica had disappeared to have a chat with the wardrobe lady, who’d worked on another show with her.

It had been a mildly interesting couple of hours, even though it was very repetitive, watching the same scene over and over again as it got shot from different angles. Still, it was a good scene – “The one just before the spaceship crash-lands on a strange, hostile planet,” Ben told me – and I had to admit, I felt pretty proud of my dad. From what I could tell, he was good at what he did, and the cast and crew obviously liked him.

At one point, though, a guy in a suit showed up and talked to Dad between setups, and that seemed to stress him out.

“One of the producers,” Ben explained to me. “We’re shooting a lot of overtime, and that costs money,
which means we’ve gone over budget, and your dad’s taking the heat for it.”

Now, as I sat behind him, Dad consulted with his director of photography and the script supervisor. Then he told his first assistant director, “We’re moving on.”

The first A.D. shouted out to everyone, “Moving on, folks! We’re blocking scene fifteen!”

Dad stood up and turned to me. “I need to rehearse this scene with the actors before we break for lunch, honey. I thought Ben could show you around our outdoor sets in the meantime.”

“Sure.”

Ben took me outside and ushered me toward a golf cart that was parked nearby. “Hop in.”

“Can’t we just walk?”

“We could, but we’d never make it back in time for lunch.”

Ben drove me past their outdoor sets, which were unbelievable. A huge spaceship wreck had been constructed near the studio. Beyond that were the remains of a destroyed, intergalactic city.

But while it was all very impressive, I had other things on my mind. “Where’s Lot 9 from here?” I asked as casually as I could.

“About five minutes thataway,” he said, pointing down the road.

“How long would it take to get there on foot?”

“Fifteen minutes, probably. How come?”

“Just curious.”

Ben brought me back just as the cast and crew broke for lunch. I wasn’t very hungry since I’d pigged out on the craft service snacks all morning. Dad and Jennica were sitting at a table, already eating.

“Grab some food and join us, Violet,” Dad said. “The chicken’s fantastic.”

“We’ll head home after lunch,” added Jennica.

My heart skipped a beat. “Why? I want to stay longer.”

“We can’t. Anna Maria has to leave by four today.”

“So I’ll stay with Dad.”

“No can do, hon,” he said. “I’m going to be here till at least midnight.”

“So? I’m not a baby, I can stay up till then –”

“Violet, the answer is no,” Dad said, suddenly sounding stressed. I saw why: The guy in the suit was in the doorway, motioning to my dad to join him.

“Sorry, girls, I’ll be right back.” He got up and joined the guy in the suit, who waved his hands around a lot as he talked.