“I’ll do that, Ms. Snow,” he promised.
A moment later, he was gone, left to find his own way out.
Mindy lay back on the bed, wondering if it would hurt to have just a little bit of tequila. Not enough to get hammered, but maybe enough to...
The phone began to ring. It was the one at her bedside, her private line that only a few people knew the number to. It was the same number that Jake Kingsley used to call her on back when they had been dating. She walked over and picked it up.
“This is Mindy,” she said.
“Mindy, Georgette.”
“What’s up?” Mindy asked, already not liking the tone of her agent’s voice.
“We’ve got trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
Georgette told her. She listened in growing anger as the tale was told. When she had all the information, there was only one thing she could think of to say.
“That motherfucker.”
Chapter 25: The Court of Public Opinion
The United States of America and a good portion of Canada
February 6, 1996
The American Watcher special edition hit the newsstands and grocery store checkout aisles nationwide on this morning. The headline was big and bold.
IS MINDY SNOW CARRYING
GREG OLDFELLOW’S LOVE CHILD?
Below the headline was a large, high-definition color photograph of Greg and Mindy taken from one of the stills of Us and Them. It was from the first sex scene of the film, where the two of them, Greg shirtless, Mindy in only a skimpy black bra, are staring lustfully into each other’s eyes, about to finish getting naked and start having Hollywood sex on the bed. The caption for the photograph read: Not just acting? Mindy Snow and Greg Oldfellow in a steamy scene from the blockbuster hit Us and Them. It is reported that the two A-list actors had an affair during the premier period of the film’s release and that Snow is alleging she is now pregnant from the encounter. Complete details inside!
And, as promised, there were lots of details inside. The main story of the special edition was written under the byline of Julie Brigg and told the tale relayed to her by Jake and Laura Kingsley, though they were not mentioned by name, only referred to as “anonymous sources within Celia Valdez’s close circle of friends and bandmembers”. Pauline Kingsley and John Stapleton were mentioned, however, and they were quoted as confirming the allegations that Mindy was claiming pregnancy from a one-time encounter with Greg at the Chicago premier of their film. Georgette Minden was also mentioned by name as refusing to confirm or deny the allegations on Mindy’s behalf.
In all, the main article was nearly ten thousand words in length and stretched across fourteen pages of the tabloid. It was accompanied by a dozen full-color photographs, including one that had been shot by Paul Peterson himself, just days before the breaking of the story, that showed Mindy emerging from a trendy restaurant in Hollywood. It had just been a routine shot taken by the notorious paparazzo, a shot he had hardly glanced at afterword (he had basically just stumbled across her and took the shot out of reflex) and had not been planning to try to sell until the Watcher reached out to the paparazzi community asking for any recent pictures of Snow, Valdez, or Oldfellow for an upcoming major story. And so, he sold them the shot for only $200, not realizing that it plainly showed a small swelling in Mindy’s lower stomach region—an unmistakable beginning baby bump once one knew to look for it. The Watcher’s photography editing staff published both the full shot, and a cropped, magnified shot that displayed only Mindy’s stomach with an arrow pointing to the bulge.
The narrative text of the story was about as graphic and descriptive as an article could be and still be openly sold in newspaper check stands to human beings under the age of eighteen. It rehashed how Mindy had been reported to have a crush on Greg when they reported for primary photography on the Us and Them set. From there, it described how Greg had not been attracted to her and had spurned her advances until the night of the Chicago premier when he got drunk and decided to “give her a try” because “I hadn’t been laid in a few days”. It spoke of how Mindy had reported “I’m on the pill, don’t worry” and that, despite this reassurance, Greg had elected to wear a condom anyway. Despite the affair being only a single encounter, performed with two layers of contraception, Mindy Snow had called Greg up nearly three months later and told him that she was pregnant with his child. John Stapleton was on record and quoted as saying Greg found it highly unlikely that the child could possibly be his. Johnny was further quoted as stating that if there was a bigger slut in Hollywood than Mindy Snow, he did not know who it was.
But the main article was not the only article in the special edition. In fact, most of the entire edition was dedicated to the Mindy Snow/Greg Oldfellow story. There was a secondary story that addressed the allegations that Mindy Snow was a notorious floozy. This article contained a long list of men, including Jake Kingsley, who she was known to have or was alleged to have slept with (the writer made no real distinction between these two categories). This article touched upon the allegation that Mindy also had a taste for women on occasion, but only briefly, as that subject was the focus of its own separate article in the edition.
In that article, Cynthia Rasp, one of the most experienced and well-connected Watcher celebrity reporters, had managed to track the story of Greg Oldfellow’s alleged sexual encounter during the filming of So Others May Live to Cheryl Zender herself—the makeup artist that Greg had had the brief affair with. Zender was no longer employed by the movie studio, having moved on to her own private business, and, as such, was no longer bound by the nondisclosure agreement that such employment required, nor afraid of being blackballed. She was also more than a little resentful of the way she had been thrown aside by first Greg and then Mindy. And, the free publicity for her new salon that would be garnered by the article’s publication was just an added bonus. She happily admitted her bisexuality to Rasp and confirmed that she had had sexual affairs with both Greg Oldfellow and Mindy Snow. She also anecdotally confirmed the allegation, made by Julie Brigg’s anonymous source, that Mindy was a lousy lay.
“She is a terrible lover,” Zender was quoted as proclaiming. “All she does is take, and only in the way she wants to take. She gives nothing whatsoever in return.”
She had kinder things to say about Greg Oldfellow’s skill in the sack. “He was a wonderful, generous lover, very attentive, very experienced.”
The story did not touch upon the fact that Greg and Zender had only had one sexual encounter. Either Zender had not mentioned it, or Rasp had not asked, or, more likely, the information was not considered conducive to the main theme of the article.
Yet another article in the edition tackled the subject of Greg and Celia’s relationship. This one was full of quotes from the “anonymous source” of Jake and Laura, describing Greg’s reputation as a notorious womanizer who had cheated on his beautiful musician wife regularly until it got to the point that the marriage was only chugging along. The date of their separation was mentioned again, and there was even a copy of the divorce paperwork with the dates of marriage and separation highlighted.
Before the special edition had even hit the stands on the west coast of the United States, the AP and all of the east coast based media, who had a three-hour head start thanks to the time zones, were all over the story. Pauline’s phone began to ring off the hook at 5:30 AM, with reporters from nearly every major east coast newspaper—including the Wall Street Journal—wanting to clarify details and gather their own quotes. The same thing happened to Johnny Stapleton and Georgette Minden. Pauline and Johnny answered most of their phone calls, despite being annoyed at the early hour. They confirmed that what was published in the Watcher was accurate, at least as far as what they had been quoted on. Georgette, on the other hand, took no calls at all, not even offering a “no comment”.