Hollywood Husbands by Jackie Collins Read Free Book Online Page A

life to play it fast and dirty. When he was twelve, his mother found herself a rich American (or at least she thought he was at the time), married him, and moved to New York. Wes thought he had died and gone to heaven. He was getting laid at thirteen (all the little high school girls just loved his cockney accent), getting arrested at fifteen (shoplifting – nothing lethal), and getting out at sixteen. He did not say goodbye to his mother – she probably never even noticed he was gone. By the time he split, she had divorced her husband and returned to her old ways. Hooking suited her better than cooking.
    Wes moved in with a buxom stripper who thought he was twenty. He did a little pimping of his own, but his heart wasn’t in it, and a small amount of drug dealing led him to the fringes of the rock business, and what he thought at the time was his true love – music. He discovered he could sing, unearthing a low throaty growl which lent itself to the heavy-metal sounds popular in the seventies. After toiling as a roadie for a year with a group called In the Lewd , his chance came when the lead singer came down with an acute case of the clap. Without hesitation Wes stepped into his shoes if not his pants.
    Ecstasy followed. He was twenty-two and singing with a group. Fourteen-year-old virgins threw themselves at him. He met Mick Jagger and Etta James. He was going to be famous!
    In the Lewd disbanded after ten months. They hadn’t even gotten a record deal. Wes was pissed off, although he quite expected other groups to be lining up to sign him.
    Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. So he moved to Miami in search of the sun, and took a job as a bartender in a night club where he met a Swedish divorcee of forty-two, with money, steel thighs, and no sense of humour. She kept him for three years, which was all right with him, especially as he was making it with her maid, a well-stacked Puerto Rican girl.
    Both relationships ended when the Swedish woman decided to get married again, and the bridegroom-to-be was not him.
    Reluctantly he went back to tending bar at one of the big hotels. A suitable job for someone who couldn’t make up his mind what to do next.
    Vicki entered his life when the last thing he was looking for was a woman with no money. Vicki was twenty and perfect. There was no way they couldn’t team up. Love was a new experience for him, and it made him uneasy. Vicki was a dancer in one of the lavish hotel shows, and unfortunately she made even less money than he did. They lived together in a tiny ocean-front apartment, and before long Vicki was making ominous mumblings about marriage.
    A picket fence, unpaid bills, and babies was not the future he saw for himself, so he cheated on Vicki with her best friend, and made sure she found out. Then he left town and returned to New York, where he soon realized it was too cold for him – but not before doing a small part in a porno video for a fast thousand bucks cash.
    The money bought him a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, where he rented a two-room run-down house in Venice – on the boardwalk – and worked as an extra in a few movies. After a while he got bored hanging around film sets, and drifted back to tending bar at a variety of Hollywood hang-outs.
    One day he woke up and he was thirty-three.
    * * *
    Luckily Wes was not in his own bed, as he would have been so depressed he might have killed himself. He groped for a cigarette and looked around, while a thousand needles jabbed relentlessly at his temples. He had no idea where he was.
    A half-full glass of scotch stood on the bedside table next to a pink telephone and a frilled Kleenex holder. There was also a cheap plastic alarm clock, and an ashtray shaped like an owl, overflowing with old cigarette butts.
    Well, he obviously hadn’t hit pay dirt. For years he had been looking for another Swede. Being kept by a woman was the kind of cushy lifestyle that appealed to him.
    Yawning loudly he sat up. A stuffed