1
THERE’S AN OLD saying about stories, and how there are always
three versions of them: yours, mine, and the truth. The guy who
first said it worked in the film business, but it holds true for
journalism too.
We’re not really supposed to take sides. We’re supposed to deal
in facts. Facts add up to truth.
Fact: Robert Evans—producer, studio exec, and actor, who coined
that catchy mantra about the truth—was married seven times.
Fact: I, Alice Scott—staff writer for The Scratch, aspiring
biographer, not much else—am not even officially the girlfriend of
the man I’ve been dating for seven months.
Fact: At five feet and nine inches tall, Robert Evans was the exact
same height as I am.
Fact: My entire life is quite possibly about to change, and instead
of sprinting up the walkway to the quaint picket fence separating me
from a lifelong dream, I’m sitting in my rental car, blasting airconditioning and reading the IMDb page of a man whose name I’d
never heard three minutes ago, because his quote about stories
popped into my head and also because I’m stalling.
I’m more excited than nervous, but there are still a great deal of
nerves vibrating through me. With one last deep breath, I turn off
the car and pop the door open.
Immediately the dense midday heat of a Georgia summer hits
me from all sides, a familiar and deeply loved sensation that’s only
improved by the salty sea breeze sweeping in off the water
surrounding Little Crescent Island.
I double-check that I have my notebook, voice recorder, and
pens, then bump the door shut and stoop to check my rapidly
dampening bangs in the side mirror.
I try to school my grin into an expression of neutrality. It’s
important that I play this cool.
Fact: I have never played it cool in my life.
I open the gate, my sandals slapping the stone walkway as I
follow its curve around a wall of foliage: black needlerush and
cabbage palm, prickly pear and glasswort, and—my favorite—live
oak.
Eleven years in Los Angeles, but every time I see a Georgian live
oak, I still think, Home.
A charming turquoise house on wooden stilts comes into view,
and I climb a handful of worn wooden steps to reach its hot-pink
front door, every inch of which has been hand-painted with white
swirls.
I’m rewarded with a suitably eccentric doorbell. I mean, it looks
like a normal doorbell, but when I hit it, it sounds like wind blowing
through chimes.
I’m still mid–preparatory breath when the door swings open and
a short, gray-haired woman in a faded flannel shirt and jeans scowls
out at me.
“Hi!” I stick my hand out. “I’m Alice. Scott.”
She stares back, her eyes pale blue and hair cropped short.
“With The Scratch?” I add, in case that jogs anything.
She doesn’t even blink.
“I mean, not with The Scratch. I’m on staff there, but I’m here
about the book?”
Her expression remains placid. For a second, I’m forced to
contemplate the possibility that all of this has been an elaborate
ruse, perhaps orchestrated by this woman’s middle-aged son, from
his computer in her basement, where he spends his days shooting
off emails and phone calls to gullible writers like me, pitching his
voice upward and adding a light shake to pass himself off as a
woman in her eighties.
It wouldn’t even be the first time.
I clear my throat and refresh my smile. “I’m sorry. Are you
Margaret?”
She doesn’t look like her, but then again, the last pictures I’ve
seen of the woman I’m supposed to be meeting are easily three
decades old. So for all I know, this could be the once-glamorous,
nearly legendary (at least to a certain subset of people, including
me) Margaret Grace Ives.
The Tabloid Princess. Known as such both because she was the
heiress to the Ives media empire and because of those years when
her own celebrity status earned her near-constant attention from the
paparazzi and gossip columnists.
The woman barks out a loud, genuine laugh and widens the
door. “I’m Jodi,” she says with the faint hint of an indeterminate
accent—German, maybe. “Come on in.”
I step into the cool foyer, the smell of lemon and mint in the air.
Jodi doesn’t pause or even slow for me, just marches straight into
the house, leaving me to pull the door shut and bound after her.
“This place is beautiful,” I chirp.
“It’s hotter than hell, and Dracula has nothing on the
mosquitoes,” she says.
I spare a thought for Robert Evans: Yours, mine, and the truth.
At the end of one narrow hallway, she turns down another, the
house an airy, bright labyrinth of whitewashed beadboard and seaglass-colored accents ending in a spacious sitting room whose walls
are seventy percent window.
“You wait here, and I’ll go grab madame for you,” Jodi says, with
a detectable edge of amusement in her voice. She unlocks one of
the glass back doors and steps into the yard, a vaster and wilder
garden than the front, with a small swimming pool set off to one
side.
I take the opportunity to make a slow lap around the room, still
buzzing and smiling big enough that my jaw has started to ache. I
set my things down on the low rattan coffee table and cross my
arms to keep myself from touching anything as I wander. Art crowds
every inch of the walls, and plants hang in clusters in front of the
windows, still more in clay pots on the floor. A thatched fan twirls
lazily overhead, and books—most of them about gardening and
horticulture—sit in messy stacks and face down with cracked spines,
covering every antique-wooden surface available.
It’s beautiful. I’m already mentally drafting how I’d describe it.
The only problem is, I’m still not convinced I’ll have a reason to
describe it.
Because so far there’s nothing to indicate this is Margaret Ives’s
house. No photos of her illustrious family. No copies, old or new, of
any of their dozens of magazines or newspapers. No framed
illustrations of the opulent “House of Ives” where she’d been raised
on the California coast, and none of her late husband’s Grammys on
the mantel either. Nothing concrete to link her to the now-collapsed
media juggernaut, or the joys and tragedies the Ives family’s
competing publications had so loved to catalog back when Margaret
was still on top of the world.
The door swings open again, and I spin to face Jodi, working
myself up to demand answers about who exactly invited me to do
eleven hours of air travel plus forty-five minutes in a rented Kia Rio
for this meeting.
But then I see the woman standing just inside.
She’s shrunk a few inches, gained some weight—much of it
muscle, I’d guess—and her once jet-black hair is now a mix of
mousy brown and silver.
She’s been scrubbed clear of any glamour, or air of money and
power, but that sly sparkle in her blue eyes is exactly the same as in
every photograph I’ve seen of her, the elusive, unnamable
something that had turned her from heiress to a newspaper fortune
to princess of the cover page.
“Well, hello there.” The warmth in Margaret’s voice surprises me,
just like it did during our few brief phone calls in the weeks leading
up to this trip. “You must be Alice.”
She shucks off her gardening gloves and tosses them across the
arm of the nearest white rattan chair as she strides barefoot toward
me, dusting her hands off on her caftan before stretching one out to
shake mine.
“You’re her,” I say. Every eloquent or even serviceable sentence
I’ve ever put together has been typed out slowly, over time. The
ones that come directly from my mouth usually sound more like this.
She laughs. “I was under the impression that was the point.”
She gives my hand a little squeeze, then drops it and gestures
for me to sit.
“No, it is.” I lower myself to the couch. She takes the chair
opposite me. “I was just trying not to get my hopes up! It didn’t
work. Never does. But I keep trying.”
“Really?” She sounds amused. “I tend to have the opposite
problem. Can’t help but expect the worst from people.” She flashes a
smile. It’s both dazzling and sad. Sazzling.
That, for example, would not make it to a typed-and-edited
sentence. But the point is, I can see it hidden back beneath those
sparkly irises of hers somewhere: the truth. The one we’ve never
heard before.
What it was like to be born into a world of silver spoons and
golden platters, of actors drunkenly swimming fully clothed through
your indoor pool and politicians making handshake agreements
across your antique dinner table.
How it felt to fall in love with rock ’n’ roll royalty, and for him to
love you back, wildly.
And, of course, about the other things. The scandal, the cult, the
trial, the accident.
And finally, twenty years ago, Margaret’s disappearance.
What happened, but also why.
And why now, after all this time, she’s open to finally telling the
story.
Behind Margaret, the door squeals open and Jodi reenters the
house, toting a bucket of lemons. “Thank you, Jodi,” Margaret calls,
without turning around.
Jodi grunts. I could not begin to guess whether the two women
are friends, romantic partners, an employer and employee, or mortal
enemies who happen to be roommates.
Margaret crosses one leg over the other. “Cute nails,” she says,
jutting her chin toward my hands in my lap.
The moment of connection makes me near giddy. “They’re pressons.” I lean forward so she can get a better look at the little
strawberry-printed designs.
“I’d bet you’re the kind of person,” she says, “who tries to find
beauty in everything.”
“Don’t you?” I ask, intrigued by the soft, sad smile that feathers
across her lips.
She gives a half-realized shrug that reads less like I don’t know
and more like I don’t like that question.
Then, like the Ives she is, she neatly reroutes the dialogue: “So
how exactly would this work? If I agreed to do it.”
I don’t let the if discourage me. I know she isn’t one hundred
percent in just yet, and I don’t blame her. “However you want it to,”
I promise.
She arches one brow. “What if I want it to work how it would
usually work?”
“Well,” I say, “I haven’t done anything exactly like this before.
Usually I’m doing features and profiles. I spend a couple days, or
weeks, with a person. And I write about my observations, crack
some jokes. It’s an ‘outsider looking in’ perspective. This would be
different.
“It’d be about getting your experience onto the page. ‘Insider
looking out.’ That would take a lot longer, months probably, just for
the first round of research to be able to write a draft and figure out
where my holes are. I’d rent a place nearby, and we’d have a
schedule, times for sit-down interviews, but also time for me to just
shadow you.”
“Shadow me,” she repeats thoughtfully.
“Follow you around in your normal life,” I clarify. “See what you
grow in your garden, who you spend your time with. Hang out with
you and Jodi, and any other friends you’ve got in town.”
Margaret’s chin juts forward, her eyes closing on her own quick,
blunt laugh. “Do me a favor and say that again when she gets back
in here.”
Mere seconds later, Jodi comes streaming into the room, carrying
two glasses of lemonade. She plops them both down on the coffee
table.
“Thanks, Jodi,” I say, determined to win her over.
She marches back out the way she came in.
“I’d die without you,” Margaret calls teasingly after her.
“Don’t I know it,” Jodi shouts, before disappearing through the
doorway.
I take a tiny sip of the lemonade, which turns into a long gulp,
because it’s amazing, fresh and crisp with torn mint leaves swirling
around along with the ice cubes.
I set the glass down and force myself to get back to business.
“Look, there are a lot more experienced writers you could pair up
with. There are hundreds of people who would push me in front of a
bus to get this job, and honestly, I’d understand it if they did.”
“Troubling,” Margaret says.
“My point is, if you’re ready to tell your story, you deserve to
have it told exactly how you want it to be. It needs to be yours, no
one else’s. And that only works if you’re doing this with someone
you completely trust. But I can promise you, if you end up wanting
to write this book together, your voice will be front and center. That’s
my top priority. Making sure it’s your story.”
Her smile fades, her face sobering. The crinkles at the corners of
her eyes and the folds at the edges of her mouth deepen, proof of
an entire life lived, not just those first thirty-three years she spent in
the public eye, but the thirty she spent as a recluse after that, and
the twenty since she vanished.
“What if,” she says slowly, “that’s not what I want?”
I shake my head. “I’m not sure I’m following.”
“What if I don’t want it to be my version of the story?” she asks.
“What if I want the whole awful truth? What if I’m done living with
my version of events, where I’m always the hero, and I want to sit
down and see things in black and white for once?”
Her question catches me off guard. If anything, I’m used to
having to reassure my subjects that I’m not there to twist everything
they say into a brutal takedown piece. That I want to see the full
picture, right down to their humanity.
Margaret’s brow arches at my hesitancy. “That a problem?”
I scoot to the edge of the couch. “It’s how you want it told,” I
repeat. “If that’s what you want, that’s what we do.”
She considers for a long moment. “One more question.”
“Anything.” She could ask for my most embarrassing sex story,
and I’d trot it out right now. I need her to understand she’s safe with
me.
Her gray eyebrow arches wickedly again. “Are you always this
perky?”
I let out a breath. This is too lengthy and important a job to kick
things off with a lie.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I am.”
Her chortle is interrupted by a sound like wind blowing through
glass chimes. Margaret glances at the driftwood clock on the
Grammy-free mantel.
“That’ll be my two o’clock.” She sweeps onto her feet. “You’ve
given me a lot to think about, Alice Scott.”
I bounce up onto mine too, grabbing my unused notebook and
recorder. “Either way,” I say, “thank you. Seriously.”
“For what?” she says, sounding genuinely baffled as she leads
me back through the maze of hallways.
“For today,” I say. “For giving me a chance.” For the fact that I
finally have something work related to tell my mom that won’t make
her eyes glaze over with disinterest.
“It’s just a chance,” Margaret reminds me as we reach the front
door. “Don’t thank me for that. Everyone deserves that much. And
I’ve still got a couple other branches to shake, see what falls out.”
“I completely understand, but—” My words drop off as she
swings the bright pink door open, and I realize how wrong I was.
I did not completely understand.
Margaret’s two o’clock is standing on the top step in slate-colored
chinos and a white T-shirt.
It’s not the outfit that makes my heart sink and all the blood
drain from my face—though the idea of wearing long pants in
weather like this certainly does give me pause.
It’s the hulking, dark-eyed, hawk-nosed man wearing it.
Hayden Anderson.
Four years ago, you might’ve said Hayden Anderson the music
journalist, and that would’ve been a fair summation. But if he were
still just a music journalist, I wouldn’t know his name, let alone what
he looked like. I have a decent memory, but I don’t make a habit of
memorizing Rolling Stone bylines.
However.
He’s no longer just Hayden Anderson the music journalist.
Now, he’s Hayden Anderson the Pulitzer Prize–winning
biographer. The one who wrote that doorstop-length gut punch
about the Americana singer with dementia.
Now he’s the Hayden Anderson that Margaret just referred to as
another branch to shake. A more successful, more well-known, more
more branch.
His dark eyes cut from me (expression blank, he doesn’t
recognize me; why would he? I am an unimpressive branch) to
Margaret (in whom he is only marginally less disinterested) as his
low rumble of a voice says, “Am I early?”
“You’re exactly on time,” Margaret says warmly. “Alice was just
going.”
I would describe the expression on Hayden’s face as a distinct
mien of who the hell is Alice, like he’s already forgotten there’s
another person standing immediately in front of him, or possibly
didn’t actually register me the first time our eyes met.
“Hi!” I recover enough grip on my organs for my heart to be
pumping blood again, my lungs to be pulling in oxygen, and my
hand to be reaching out to shake his.
He lifts his slowly, as if he’d like some more information before
he agrees to physical contact.
“I was just leaving,” I promise, and that seems to do the trick.
Finally, his very large, very warm, very dry hand folds around mine,
dips once, and drops back to his side.
“Thanks again,” I tell Margaret over my shoulder as I hurry out
onto the sidewalk.
“I’ll be in touch,” she tells me, and I force a smile, like my heart
isn’t a little bit breaking and I’m not on the verge of tears over the
dream job I’m ninety-nine percent sure I’ve just missed out on.
