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By Root 685 0

it on purpose, was a sadist who’d stood there delighting as people suffered—were actually more terrible, for La Doll, than watching the oil pour mercilessly onto the heads of her five hundred guests. Then she’d been protected by a cocoon of shock. But what followed she had to witness in a lucid state: They hated her. They were dying to get rid of her. It was as if she weren’t human, but a rat or a bug. And they succeeded. Even before she’d served her six months for criminal negligence, before the class-action suit that resulted in her entire net worth (never nearly as large as it had seemed) being distributed in small parcels to her victims, La Doll was gone. Wiped out. She emerged from jail thirty pounds heavier and fifty years older, with wild gray hair. No one recognized her, and the world where she’d thrived had shortly proceeded to vaporize—now even the rich believed they were poor. After a few gleeful headlines and photos of her new, ruined state, they forgot about her.

Dolly was left alone to ponder her miscalculations—and not just the obvious ones involving the melting temperature of plastic and the proper distribution of weight-bearing chains. Her deeper error had preceded all that: she’d overlooked a seismic shift—had conceived of an event crystallizing an era that had already passed. For a publicist, there could be no greater failure. She deserved her oblivion. Now and then, Dolly found herself wondering what sort of event or convergence would define the new world in which she found herself, as Capote’s party had, or Woodstock, or Malcolm Forbes’s seventieth birthday, or the party for Talk magazine. She had no idea. She had lost her power to judge; it would be up to Lulu and her generation to decide.

When the headlines relating to General B. had definitively softened, when several witnesses against him were shown to have received money from the opposition, Arc called again. “The general pays you each month a sum,” he said. “That is not for one idea only.”

“It was a good idea, Arc. You have to admit.”

“The general is impatient, Miss Peale,” he said, and Dolly imagined him smiling. “The hat is no longer new.”

That night, the general came to Dolly in a dream. The hat was gone, and he was meeting a pretty blonde outside a revolving door. The blonde took his arm, and they spun back inside, pressed together. Then Dolly was aware of herself in the dream, sitting in a chair watching the general and his lover, thinking what a good job they were doing playing their roles. She jolted awake as if someone had shaken her. The dream nearly escaped, but Dolly caught it, pressed it to her chest. She understood: the general should be linked to a movie star.

Dolly scrambled off the sofa bed, waxy legs flashing in the street light that leaked in through a broken blind. A movie star. Someone recognizable, appealing—what better way to humanize a man who seemed inhuman? If he’s good enough for her…that was one line of thinking. And also: The general and I have similar tastes: her. Or else: She must find that triangular head of his sexy. Or even: I wonder how the general dances? And if Dolly could get people to ask that question, the general’s image problems would be solved. It didn’t matter how many thousands he’d slaughtered—if the collective vision of him could include a dance floor, all that would be behind him.

There were scores of washed-up female stars who might work, but Dolly had a particular one in mind: Kitty Jackson, who ten years ago had debuted as a scrappy, gymnastic crime stopper in Oh, Baby, Oh. Kitty’s real fame had come a year later, when Jules Jones, the older brother of one of Dolly’s protégés, had attacked her during an interview for Details magazine. The assault and trial had enshrined Kitty in a glowing mist of martyrdom. So people were all the more spooked, when the mist burned off, to find the actress sharply altered: gone was the guileless ingénue she had been, and in her place was one of those people who “couldn’t take the bullshit.” Kitty’s ensuing bad behavior and fall from grace were relentlessly