The Fame Game Read Online Free

like this. You look like the gutter, and the gutter is where you’ll stay. I want you all in white. White is clean, it’s respectable, it inspires trust like a doctor.’ At first he whined.”
    “You wanted me in white suede,” Nelson said. “Hair sticks to suede.”
    “So I decided that for work he would wear a white kid suit, something soft and clean and slippery. And whenever he wasn’t at work he would wear white suede, to keep up the image. Notice the haircut. He looks like the White Knight. Then I turned him on to several of my more glamorous clients, he did their hair, I sent them to parties and got them and their hair into the columns. Mr. Nelson is now a super-star.”
    “Speaking of clients,” Nelson said, “I’m now doing both of the B.P.’s. I do them both at home. Her and him. He won’t let anybody else touch his hair now.”
    “The B.P.’s,” Libra said to Gerry, “Peter and Penny Potter. The Beautiful People. You’ve read about them.”
    She certainly had. You couldn’t avoid reading about them, ad nauseam ; what they wore, where they went, how their apartment was decorated, what they served at dinner parties, what their guests wore, who they knew, how beautiful they were. They lived and entertained like forty-year-old people and she was nineteen and he was twenty-one. He was in his last year at college, but of course they lived in a ten-room duplex, paid for by their parents, and when they had a dinner party there was a liveried footman behind each guest’s chair and afterward all the Beautiful People’s beautiful young friends danced like crazy to the new hit rock group, the King James Version, also one of Libra’s clients. It certainly was turning out to be an incestuous little world.
    “How did you like her in the Dynel braids with the lollipops entwined in them?” Nelson asked.
    “Very good,” said Libra.
    “I thought so too,” Nelson said. “Especially for her, as she’s so young. I don’t like her in just hair, it’s so dull.” He gave Gerry a professional look. “I’d like to do your eyes someday.”
    “What’s wrong with them?” she said.
    “I don’t know, just fool around and see what I come up with. Who cuts your hair?”
    “I have it cut in the neighborhood.”
    “Oh, my dear child, you can’t do that. Look at those ends! You’re working for Sam Leo Libra you know; you have to have an image.”
    “If she’s good I’ll let her go to you,” Libra said. “Why don’t you go see Lizzie?”
    Nelson went to the bedroom door. “Lizzie! Oh, Lizzie, Central Casting is here!”
    Lizzie opened the bedroom door. She was wearing a white frilly eyelet bathrobe that stopped four inches above her knees, and pink ballet slippers. Her hair was loose.
    “I’m looking for a short, skinny woman, about forty-five,” Nelson said. “To play the part of a little girl.”
    “I have the perfect one,” Lizzie said. “Her name is Nelly Nelson.”
    “Up yours!” Nelson squealed in delight. “ Sideways —you shouldn’t be without a sensation.”
    They flew into each other’s arms and embraced and kissed warmly.
    “Oh, Nelson, I missed you so much! I’m so glad you’re here. I have lots of things to tell you.” She patted him all over, the shoulders, the sleeves, touching him and smoothing the nap of the white suede suit. She patted his face, but when her hand strayed to his hair he cringed and pulled away. “Isn’t he heaven?” Lizzie said. “Nelson, why aren’t you straight?”
    “If I were, you wouldn’t have a pet fruit to play with, miss .”
    “Up yours!”
    “Let me go fix your hair now, Lizzie. I hope you’re going someplace really elegant for lunch.”
    He shoved her affectionately into the bedroom and they shut the door.
    “He makes a fortune for me,” Libra said drily.
    “My,” Gerry said.
    Libra looked up at the framed painting of Sylvia Polydor over the fireplace. “We’re living in strange times,” he said, rather sadly. “You