The Gossip

John Singer Sargent’s Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881)

Jessa and Cazzie’s Waymo arrives in Silver Lake. Stepping out in front of Bar Amadeo, Jessa (a spectacularly popular influencer-ingénue) pulls on Cazzie by both forearms and says, “you’re going to love, love, love Kade. He tells the best stories ever.” She then silently screams in glee. Cazzie, for her part, is nervous. Thanks to her parents, she is totally at ease among film people; novelists, however, make her anxious — especially novelists as great as Kade Williams. Under the influence of the Goncourt Brothers, Kade has singlehandedly revived the occupation of Literary Diarist, by way of delighting and terrorizing coastal elites of all stripes with his daily dispatches. Cazzie has a distinct feeling she’s about to get chewed up and spat out. Jessa and Cazzie make their way through the porch of Bar Amadeo, shaded by a canopy of marmalade bougainvillea, and enter the bar (lit warm and dim and Instagrammable). In a corner, splayed out all over a wine-red velvet snake banquette, is Kade Williams, age 36, holding a Riesling julep crowned with a bouquet of mint, whispering into a waiter’s ear. He gives out his distinctive laugh: a loud ‘Uhaauh ha!’ following by a pseudo-grimace, sucking in oxygen through clenched teeth while he surveys the air for the next opening in the conversation.

Jessa: Why, hello stranger.
Kade: Come to me, my beloved. Your black Sorel boots arouse me. I would copy Odessa A’zion too, if I were as gorgeous as you. And this must be Cazzie. I knew your father; yes, and your mother too. Unsurprisingly, you are delicious. You must tell me everything about yourself immediately. I can already tell we’ll be best friends. Come sit, let’s drink and spill tea. I’ll order for you; I already know what you want. Julian! Assist us. A julep for Jessa (she always wants what I have). And for Cazzie an Aperol spritz. Never be ashamed of an Aperol spritz, girls; we’re in Los Angeles. I picked this place out chiefly because they do a great spritz. Jessa, sip my julep while you wait; the abundance of mint has so thoroughly diffused into the drink that it’s distressing. Now, ladies, I requested gossip from you and gossip I shall have, but I may as well come clean now: I brought you here to listen to me talk about myself. And Jessa you know how much I abominate talking about myself. Things are just so awful now, and I need now to be heard. Girls, I’m in the doghouse, exiled, condemned to spend my Friday evenings at Bar Amadeo of all places. Oh! - you should see my DMs: Hunter Schafer practically ordering me to kill myself — Uhaauh ha! And for what? Telling the truth, beautifully? I was just now mulling over with Julian the merits and demerits of my making a permanent exit; but now I feel much better, being flanked by you two ethereal beauties. My present woes began (as I’m sure you know) with Margot Rainier. She’s a goddess at twenty-three, all clavicles and sex, with a décolletage built for pearls (but is instead unimaginatively dressed, due the vulgarity of our age, in Van Cleef & Arpels). Cazzie, she’s a third cousin on your father’s side, by the way. Margot came to me at nineteen desperate to learn “how to write”. I told her, “babe, that I can teach you, but have you considered trying - oh I don’t know - modeling?” — Uhaauh ha! So I sent her off with a little notebook and the number of an evil twink I know at Elite. Obviously she got swept up immediately. And look at her now: won Best Actress last year for that Yorgos Lanthimos thing, co-leading with Chalamet this year on his new project, and just this week has been added last minute to What Happens At Night. As for her writing, oh her poetry is plainly atrocious. Blank verse for bisexuals, supposedly. Doomed from the start, that, because in reality she isn’t the least bit sapphic. She wouldn’t know what to do with a pussy if one were right under her nose, uhah… Nevertheless, her ear for dialogue is superlative. She can conjure up so many voices; it’s frankly uncanny. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman pull off doing an Andy Kaufman bit — but she can. Can you even imagine that? The rhythm of a Norm Macdonald, from the lips of a Helen of Troy? It doesn’t work, but it works for her. Anyways, this all gets Margot thinking I’m just the cleverest man in Los Angeles (which is true enough — it is L.A. after all), and she starts lugging me around everywhere. Together we circumnavigate the globe, from Beverly Hills to Ojai — Uhaauh ha! And all the while I’m thinking, “but seriously, why does she need me at all?” Her father produced just about every movie since the downfall of Harvey Weinstein. I’m sure Papa Rainier could have given his baby girl his own curated list of evil twinks at Elite, so why should I be in this picture at all? A mystery… Thank you Julian. Girls, drink slowly, we’ll be here for a while. Where was I? Implausibly, Margot Rainier grew up to be that rarest of characters: a true innocent. In Milan, Tokyo, and New York, on her behalf I deflected the decrepit and respectable perverts who had designs on her young flesh; I shepherded her instead into the arms of the obsessives, the eccentrics, the Kubricks of high fashion. So she ascended unblemished, unburdened by hatred and cynicism. By day, she talked to me of Proust, of Capote, of Wodehouse, of Didion; by night, she undressed her conscience before me. She got a real kick out of this, for no one is a better, more patient, more sympathetic listener than me. From this, I learned a thousand useful things about Harvard-Westlake and Hollywood, which I diligently filed away for later use. More importantly, I learned just about everything there is to know about Margot Rainier — all of it light and lovely, for she never did anything naughty (she once bullied a girl when she was eight, but quickly grew out of that phase). I noticed, however, at the center of her prelapsarian psyche there was a great void; a hole in the shape of her mother and father. She never had anything meaty to say about either of them. To hear it from Margot, Mama Rainier spent all day playing tennis and girlbossing, and Papa Rainier was always off somewhere unfucking some labyrinthine corporate deal. I smelled in the air that these caricatures, these phantoms-in-relief, betokened some subterranean calamity, something unspeakably cruel — and I knew that this was to be my next great subject. So I had young Margot fold me into her domestic life. Picture it, girls: tucked away in Summit Drive, enveloped in sycamores, palms, and fig trees, is Chez Rainier; sixty million dollars of sterile luxury. The first time we pulled into the apex of its cresting driveway, I spotted, four stories below in a secluded tennis court, the quattrocento beauty of Hélène Rainier. A Madonna in Miu Miu; for a moment she stared straight up at us, like a reindeer in a snow globe, before returning to her backhand. That night was a dinner for eight: Michael Govan was there clumsily begging for a cash injection; that idiot Michael Ellison was there too, blathering on and on about Black Hawk engine maintenance. Papa Rainier showed up late; one look at him and I knew what he was. I turned on the charm, I weaved my stories, and I brought the cunt into that polished concrete dining room. By the end of the night I even had Hélène laughing. Before Margot and I left, Charlie Rainier leaned into his wife’s ear and whispered, “why have we never met this guy before? Invite him to everything.” And so it came to pass the following Sunday that Charlie and I luxuriated in his sauna, with me letting his hand explore the inside of my thigh. I stopped him there and said, “sorry Charles, I’ve been going in for women lately.” He was not at all offended, but still he needed me. So he got into the habit of bringing me into the bedroom and having me watch him have his way with the ladies of his roster. Eight of them in all: Ana, Samar, Koharu, Marcia, Brigitte, Zainab, Nazrin, and Vie. They were, variously, production assistants, interior decorators, yoga instructors, and the wives and girlfriends of his closest friends (he learned from Weinstein to never play with actresses). Charlie was so loyal to his girls. He made them happy. Take Ana for instance: all she wants out of life is Erewhon and tarot; to be gifted a little apartment; to wake up in Matouk sheets. Jessa, you’d adore Zainab in particular; I will have you two collide one day. Koharu and I told each other our little jokes in Japanese. All of them loved peacocking before me. Cazzie, you can read about each of the eight of them in my letters. Now, Hélène also fixated on me. Months of late night talks (oh, girls, her loneliness, her sorrow…) culminated in her slipping off her Zimmerli panties and placing them, moistened, in my hand. I told her, “girl, is that what you thought this was?” She, too, was not offended, and contented herself with making me watch her flick the bean — Uhaauh ha! Nothing could have been more innocent; it was an echo of the schoolyard, of the playdate. She just needed to be loved — simply loved. It’s astonishing how well matched (psychologically speaking) were Charlie and Hélène. They never knew how similar they were. Now, why did I deny myself to them? Both of them were gorgeous: I could have, and I would have — but I didn’t. Why? This way they gave more of themselves to me. The spectator sees more of the game. Learn to deny yourself to others, girls. Anyways, at this point one may wonder: where was young Margot in all of this? Whistling dixie, I suppose. She just couldn’t see the situation straight on. Didn’t allow herself to understand her own flesh and blood, their needs, their fears. I hope now it’s obvious why Charlie did not help his daughter as much he might have: he associated patronage with the maintenance of his harem, and he would never allow that world and his fatherly world to meet. It’s all just so sad. These three souls, never meeting… So of course, I wrote about all of them in my letters. I showed the world everything (I changed the names though, obviously). Those letters are the best I’ve ever published; ever will publish perhaps. The Rainiers and the harem girls: I gave expression to their best jokes, their charms, their superstitions, their greed, their beauty, their stupidity, their childishness, their sweetness… How could anyone be offended by it? To understand all is to forgive all. And, what did they think I was doing in their presence in the first place? I’m a writer; I write. I’m always listening. I have a little voice in my head that whispers to me the secret anxieties and fears of everyone I meet. I turn that voice down when politeness dictates, but not in my writing, never in my writing. I showed them all who they were, I immortalized them, I explained them to themselves. And what do they do with this knowledge? Samar, Marcia, and Brigitte couldn’t handle being known to the world as mere sugar babies (where do they think we think their Ferragamos come from?) — oh God, why can’t they just embrace what they are? So they got together to accuse Charlie of abusing them. Abuse! Ladies, there was no abuse. I’m an authority on the matter, I was literally in the room. Charlie could never, would never. And so Charles responds by siccing his nastiest lawyers on me, raining down scary letters talking about slander and libel. But after a week of scrutiny, Charlie folds under the pressure and blows his brains out. That was wrong of him. I would have made the world understand. Poor Hélène, she’s catatonic, and Margot… she just said I was a “selfish monster”, and then blocked me everywhere. Now my world is silence, except for the noise made by the busybodies (like that ghoul Hunter Schafer) who excoriate me on Instagram every single day. These people can’t read. Everything, everything is there on the page. People talk about betrayal, but there was no such thing. Of course my “victims” knew I was going to write about them; I saw the pleasure wax in their eyes as they watched me compose lines about them in my head. Moreover, I must be true to myself. Everything I see is also part of my memories as well. Am I supposed to let my memories wither away into nothing? And Margot — how could she think I wanted to hurt her? Cazzie, you must get to her. If necessary I’ll crawl to her on my hands and knees, all the way from Bar Amadeo to Beverly Hills. Never become writers, girls. You hold the mirror up to nature, and nature revolts. The world is filled with Calibans unwilling to be seen and loved. Anyways, girls you look hungry. Julian, come here! I’ll order for the table. Jessa, tonight you are not vegan. Let’s have the chicken liver pâté with the pretty little cherries, those oyster mushrooms over muhammara, and two plates of those sinful grilled prawns…