4% Famous by Deborah Schoeneman

Author:Deborah Schoeneman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307345851
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2006-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

Manhattan magazine, “The Insider” by Blake Bradley

Academy Award–winning director Julian Joseph has optioned the rights to Literary Wunderkind Amos Stone Fallow’s best-selling political novel, Right Here Right Now, and faded television star Dylan Frye is trying to beat out Tobey Maguire for the lead role with some old-fashioned tactics. “Dylan’s been sucking up big-time to Jackie Joseph,” says a source about Frye’s recent courting of Joseph’s fashion-designer daughter, who recently hosted a party at Lush to celebrate the launch of her new denim line, which is popular with the celebrity set, including Jessica Simpson. “He’s been stopping by all her events trying to get Jackie to go on a date with him. It’s pathetic.” Frye’s publicist says the actor “has been friends with Jackie Joseph for years and would welcome any opportunity to work with her immensely talented father.”

Blake agreed to meet his father at the University Club (or, as he calls it, the U) for breakfast even though he can’t remember them ever having breakfast together, not even when he was a little kid. Now that Blake thinks about it, he can’t remember his father ever consuming anything but coffee in the morning.

“How about drinks instead?” he offered on the phone when his father called early in the morning to ask him, when Blake felt as if a large animal was squatting on his sinuses.

“No, I have to be in black tie like a fucking usher at the ungodly hour of seven P.M. for some museum dinner that’s costing me the price of a private jet to Sun Valley.”

Blake pictured his father sitting at his big wood desk, which used to seem miles long all those years ago. “Is breakfast too much to ask?” his father said. “I know you don’t need to be in the office before ten.”

Whenever Blake enters the University Club—built in 1900 by the legendary architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, which also designed his dad’s apartment building—he feels transported back to old New York, when gossip columns were glamorous, when they mattered more. Back then, there weren’t any Web sites or television stations devoted to breaking personal news about public people. I’m part of a dying breed, Blake thinks with a little pride as he walks up to the grand entrance under a navy blue awning.

He looks for his father in the soaring lobby flecked with gold leaf and old money. A man in a dark suit appears out of the marble shadows to inform Blake that his father is upstairs in the game room, and Blake thinks it’s the same guy who once threw Bethany out for wearing jeans, even though she insisted they were three-hundred-dollar Jackie Joseph jeans.

His father is sitting next to the table with the backgammon board, wearing his signature outfit—a black suit, a white shirt, and an Hermès tie—and leafing through the Wall Street Journal, looking paler and thinner than usual.

“Mark Reed got a great blow job today,” he says as Blake approaches, pointing to Justin Katz’s article in the Journal.

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