Last Night at Chateau Marmont
A novel from the million copy bestselling author of The Devil Wears Prada.Heartbreak, headlines and Hermes – welcome to Brooke's new world…Brooke and Julian live a happy life in New York – she's the breadwinner working two jobs and he's the struggling musician husband. Then Julian is discovered by a Sony exec and becomes an overnight success – and their life changes for ever.Soon they are moving in exclusive circles, dining at the glitziest restaurants, attending the most outrageous parties in town and jetting off to the trendiest hotspots in LA.But Julian's new-found fame means that Brooke must face the savage attentions of the ruthless paparazzi. And when a scandalous picture hits the front pages, Brooke's world is turned upside down. Can her marriage survive the events of that fateful night at Chateau Marmont? It's time for Brooke to decide if she's going to sink or swim…
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Last Night at Chateau Marmont
by Lauren Weisberger
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2010
Copyright © Lauren Weisberger 2010
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013
Lauren Weisberger asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007311002
Ebook Edition © May 2013 ISBN: 9780007365937
Version: 2016-04-27
For Dana, my sister and best friend forever
Contents
3. makes john mayer look like amateur hour
6. he could have been a doctah
7. betrayed by a bunch of tweens
8. my weak heart can’t handle another threesome
9. a bun in the oven and a drink in hand
11. knee-deep in tequila and eighteen-year-old girls
12. better or worse than the sienna pictures
16. boyfriend with a villa and a son
1
piano man
When the subway finally screeched into the Franklin Street station, Brooke was nearly sick with anxiety. She checked her watch for the tenth time in as many minutes and tried to remind herself that it wasn’t the end of the world; her best friend, Nola, would forgive her, had to forgive her, even if she was inexcusably late. She pushed her way through the rush-hour throngs of commuters toward the door, instinctively holding her breath in the midst of so many bodies, and allowed herself to be pulled toward the stairwell. On autopilot now, Brooke and her fellow riders each pulled their cell phones from their purses and jacket pockets, filed silently into a straight line and, zombielike, marched like choreographed soldiers up the right side of the cement stairs while staring blankly at the tiny screensxs in their palms.
‘Shit!’ she heard an overweight woman up ahead call out, and in just a moment she knew why. The rain hit her forcefully and without warning the instant she emerged from the stairwell. What had been a chilly but decent enough March evening only twenty minutes earlier had deteriorated into a freezing, thundering misery, where the winds whipped the rain down with driving force and made it utterly impossible to stay dry.
‘Dammit!’ she added to the cacophony of expletives people were shouting all around her as they struggled to pull umbrellas from their briefcases or arrange newspapers over their heads. Since she’d run home to change after work, Brooke had nothing but a tiny (and admittedly cute) silver clutch to shield herself from the onslaught. Good-bye, hair, she thought as she began to sprint the three blocks to the restaurant. I’ll miss you, eye makeup. Nice knowing you, gorgeous new tall suede boots that ate up half my weekly salary.
Brooke was drenched by the time she reached Sotto, the tiny, unpretentious neighborhood joint where she and Nola met two or three times a month. The pasta wasn’t the best in the city – probably not even the best on the block – and the space wasn’t anything all that special, but Sotto had other charms, more important ones: reasonably priced wine by the full carafe, a killer tiramisu, and a downright hot Italian maître d’ who, simply because they’d been coming for so long, always saved Brooke and Nola the most private table in the back.
‘Hey, Luca.’ Brooke greeted the owner as she shrugged off her wool peacoat, trying not to shake water everywhere. ‘Is she here yet?’
Luca immediately put his hand over the phone receiver and pointed with a pencil over his shoulder. ‘The usual. What’s the occasion for the sexy dress, cara mia? You want to dry off first?’
She smoothed her fitted, short-sleeved black jersey dress with both palms and prayed that Luca was right, that the dress was sexy and she looked okay. She’d come to think of that dress as her Gig Uniform; paired with either heels, sandals, or boots, depending on the weather, she wore it to nearly every one of Julian’s performances.
