All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [102]
When Piper learned I had a chance to compete in the competition, she offered to pay for the trip and accompany me to New York. It was a magical experience for me. We stayed at the Waldorf Towers, and visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Algonquin Hotel, where the famous Round Table originated, and the fountain at the Plaza where F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald took their drunken midnight dip. She took me to dinner at La Grenouille and Odeon. She met the man who had knocked on my door in Tennessee, telling him, as well as her New York friends, about my bright future, a future that, until those conversations, I had been unaware I even possessed. I had read Cosmopolitan and Vogue magazines and thought myself very sophisticated for a fourteen-year-old. I had almost grown to my full height of five feet seven, and I suppose I had just the right look for the agency’s talent scouts, because I won in all the categories. The prize was a paid two-month contract to model in Japan.
Two weeks after my fifteenth birthday, I walked off the plane at Tokyo’s Narita Airport. Having no chaperone assigned, I looked around the gate area for someone from the agency to meet me, but there was no one. I had no idea what to do or where to go. The signs were all in Japanese; it was the week of the emperor’s birthday and thus a big national holiday. I saw an American couple on the airport bus that I had randomly decided to take (hoping to wind up at a hotel) and tentatively explained my predicament. But my story must have sounded fishy—a kid babbling about a modeling contract and no place to stay—and they muttered something and turned away. They did not help me, and they made me feel that my predicament was my fault.
After giving up on trying to read a Japanese phone book and discovering their equivalent of 411, I finally figured out how to make a call and placed one to Piper. Always thinking, she had put some yen in my wallet before I boarded the plane in San Francisco. She told me to phone her back in a minute, and in the meantime, she booked me a room with her credit card at the only hotel she knew in Tokyo: the five-star Imperial Palace. I arrived at the posh hotel, a bewildered unaccompanied minor out of the United States for the first time, and ordered room service for two days—weird-tasting hamburgers—and wandered the Imperial Gardens while she straightened things out. The problem was my name. My passport and plane ticket were in my legal name, Ciminella. But the agency was expecting to pick up Ashley Judd, and when they didn’t see that name on the manifest, they didn’t think I was coming. It was a confusion I’d lived with for many years. Depending on which parent I was living with, I was either Ashley Judd or Ashley Ciminella. My last name was another piece of the battleground where Mom and Dad waged their wars. My school records zigzagged between the two names. As a late teen, Ken Stilts, Mom and Sister’s manager, told me I needed to legally change my name to Judd for contractual reasons, as a Judds TV special was being negotiated in which I would take part. I believed him, but I remember how when I went before the judge, he grilled me paternalistically and clearly did not like my story—and neither did I. I was allowing myself to be pushed into something rather than making a choice I felt comfortable with. I loved both my last names and the branches of my family they represented. It never felt good when one parent tried to leverage their name at the expense of the other.
An agency rep finally picked me up at the hotel, and I was popped into a single bed-sitter apartment in a little two-story building filled with other young models, male and female. I would hang around the agency, waiting for my booker to hand me a slip of paper with the details of a look-see or job on which I was being sent. I would ride the subway and take taxis, often on