The Comeback(10)

Our flight landed in the late afternoon, and a black town car was waiting to take us straight to our hotel. The production company had booked us a suite at the Four Seasons, and I knew as soon as we arrived in the perfect, marble lobby that the new pair of Reebok shoes my parents had bought me were all wrong.

Everything in the hotel was a beautiful, rich cream color with gold accents and little touches we never even knew we were missing. My mom and I ran around our suite, calling each other over to feel the luxurious bathrobes hanging on the back of the door, or to touch the embroidered cover of the book of dreams tucked in the drawer next to the bed. My dad trailed behind us, already off-balance by the whole experience. The studio had left a giant hamper filled with American sweets on my bed, and my mom and I tore through Tootsie Rolls and Twinkies as we flicked through the TV movie channels. I felt mildly guilty that Esme wasn’t there to see any of it, but it was also the most attention I’d received from my parents in a long time. I hadn’t let myself realize how much I’d missed it.

I had three auditions over the next week, and each time I read the lines I felt more connected to them, as if they were bubbling up from a place inside me I never knew existed. I didn’t even care when the adults behind the table interrupted me to order Mexican food or whisper notes to the assistant standing with a clipboard behind them. I think my parents were worried that I already wanted it too much, but it never felt like a risk to me because I had a feeling the role was already mine.

Sure enough, the night before we were due to fly back to London, we were invited to dinner at Nobu with Able Yorke and his wife, Emilia, along with Nathan and Kit, the two men who would become my agent and manager. I had been introduced to all of them at various points over the week, but at the time I had lumped them all into the same category, filed only under “adults I need to impress.” As we walked into the dark restaurant, my mom reminded me that Able Yorke was the person I needed to win over the most.

Able was beautiful in the most obvious sense of the word, but I was beautiful, too, so I didn’t dwell on it other than to clock his two perfect dimples, just like mine. His wife was easier to overlook at first, less shimmering, less glamorous, except for her hair—creamy blond and thick, unlike anything I’d seen before. I could tell she was pregnant from the soft swell of her stomach underneath her cashmere sweater, and the way she instinctively touched her bump whenever she spoke.

My dad was wearing the same black suit with shoulder pads that he wore on his wedding day, and his trousers were bunched up over his Clarks shoes. As I watched him stab at the rolls of sushi and soft-shell crab with one chopstick, he seemed to belong to a different generation than the other men at the table, even though they were all around the same age. My mom wore a tight velvet dress that she had found in a thrift shop on Melrose earlier that week, and I went from feeling so proud of her beauty to mortally embarrassed as soon as I saw Emilia’s jeans and sweater, and the looks on the other diners’ faces as they stared at us. I didn’t know why or how, but I knew that my parents had gotten it wrong, and I couldn’t understand why they didn’t realize it too.

I held my breath as Able offered me the job right there at the table, even though, for some reason, he was looking at my parents when he said it. He spoke quietly, so that they had to move closer to hear him, and after a while I realized that he appeared to be convincing my parents to let me take the role, something I had assumed was a given since we had flown across the world for it. I watched as Able assured my parents that if we moved to Los Angeles to do the trilogy, I would be completely looked after, that my education would actually improve under world-class, private tuition. He said that he wasn’t just talking about this one project—he wanted me for longer. Able had identified the inevitable road bumps in the career of any young actor and was removing the variables. He wanted Marilyn without the overdose, Winona without the shoplifting, Gwyneth without the health shit. I wouldn’t waste my time or reputation on any trashy projects because I would work solely with Able. He would be my filter, my translator and my protector all in one. I wouldn’t go looking for any trouble because I would have everything I ever wanted given to me.

My parents listened in awe as Able laid out his plan, and, perhaps noting their implicit consent, Able subtly adjusted his rhetoric from the hypothetical to the concrete. The people around the table that night would perfect everything about me—my backstory; my classic, insouciant style; even my sarcastic interview manner—before my face ever appeared on a screen. They talked about changing my surname to Turner, evoking images of two Hollywood icons, Lana Turner and Grace Kelly yes, but also to separate my two identities so that I could always return to who I had been before. I would be reborn, and the best part of it was that it was a no-risk situation. There would be so many people watching over me, people personally invested in my career, that nothing could go wrong. I would have Able and Emilia to protect me in my parents’ absence. I would never make a sex tape or shave my head or be caught drunk driving, because I was in on the act: I had never really been Grace Turner at all.

I’d like to say I didn’t understand what I was agreeing to, but I think it would be a lie—even back then I knew I was giving a part of myself away. Only, sitting there that night, watching these glossy strangers talk about me as cool, buttery sashimi slick with soy sauce melted over my tongue, it just didn’t seem like the worst choice in the world. What I couldn’t have predicted was how people would want more and more of me; I didn’t yet know how closely praise is linked to punishment, how I would never again determine my own value because I wasn’t so much a person as an idea, shaped not only by the people around the table with me that night but by the millions of people who would pay to watch my movies in the years to come.