Hollywood Star by Rowan Coleman Read Free Book Online

can’t say I know her. I only have a few scenes with her. But she struck me as a very determined young lady. She used to live on a trailer park, you know, but now she and her aunt live in a great big place not far from mine. Funnily enough, her career did start out with advertising dairy products.”
    “I thought you were supposed to name stuff after actresses, not the actresses after stuff,” I said sarcastically.
    There she was again, that Ruby who was not Ruby, being really quite jealous and rude about a girl for no good reason.
    “Well, she’s a big name in TV over here and everyone relates to her story. And she’s a really hard worker.”
    “Oh,” I said, feeling rather stupid.
    Jeremy smiled at me over the top of his reading glasses. “It’s all been a bit of a whirlwind, hasn’t it?” he said. “I hope that your mum being with me doesn’t make you unhappy, Ruby?”
    I shook my head. “It doesn’t. It’s not you, Jeremy, although it is kind of odd seeing someone as famous as you hanging out with my mother. I’m not even unhappy. It just takes a bit of getting used to I suppose, all of this…” I gestured at the cream-leather interior of his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce. “And I’m sorry for how I’ve been acting.”
    “Don’t be sorry,” Jeremy said. “Be happy. You only have a few days left here, Ruby, so make the most of them, OK? Your life will be back to normal before you know it.”
    I showed Jeremy the photos in the magazine, of Sunny Dale and the rest. “I’m glad it will be because I’ll never look like that,” I said. “They are so polished and perfect and I’m…” I looked down at myself in my white jeans that had a bit of breakfast on them and my pink cardigan that had the buttons done up all wrong. “I’m me,” I said with a shrug.
    Jeremy smiled and shook his head. “Trust me, Ruby, none of those girls look like that either, not in normal life.Magazines like to do two things: find photos of normal-looking people and make them look terrible, as you and your mum both unfortunately know, or they airbrush celebrities until they become the media’s version of perfect, with no flaws or extra weight. And as for TV and film, well, you know, Ruby – it’s all about lighting and make-up.”
    I thought about Brett Summers, my former TV mother. It was true that while I was working on Kensington Heights with her, it did always take much longer to light her sets and do her make-up then anyone else. And whenever she appeared on the front of the TV guide she did always look about ten years younger.
    Suddenly, the car slowed down and I looked out of the window. We had stopped at the security gate of Wide Open Universe Studios. It looked, from the outside at least, like a giant whitewashed Arabian castle, with a line of palm trees growing along the perimeter.
    “From the 1930s to the late 1960s this place was the hub of the movie world, literally the centre of the film universe,” Jeremy told me as we were driven slowly into the complex. “Back then it was the most powerful studio in the world. It owned all the big stars and paid them a regular wage. They used to make hundreds of films here every year. It’s not like that now. Studios have to be verycareful about which projects they pick to back. They are always looking for the next big thing. They always need to see a return on their investment. It’s a tighter, more difficult industry to break into now than it has ever been, Ruby. That’s why, if this is what you really want, you have to grasp every chance that comes your way because if you let even one pass you by, it might be the moment that could have changed everything.”
    “Dream big and never let those dreams go,” I said under my breath, quoting It’s Your Life!. That’s what those other girls did; Adrienne Charles and Sunny Dale and the rest. The question was – could I do the same?
    Jeremy’s car slowed down and came to a halt outside another ornate white