Chapter 19 Frankie Goes to West Hollywood
Sometimes, like a Ritalin-deprived preschooler wired on Count Chocula, love sneaks up behind you and bites you on the ass. Or something close to love, anyway. It's not always easy to figure out what exactly that emotion is.
Cherie Jaffe lived in a gated mansion in Belair, and also in a beach house in Malibu, because everyone needs two mansions only a few miles away from each other. (The Jaffes had a house in the Hamptons, too, but lately didn't fly east all that often.) Cherie's husband Steve had a ton of money and the brains to not only keep it but make it grow. And anyway, the beach house was a deductible business expense because they did a lot of entertaining there.
Cherie (
nee
Verna Marie Peroni, a.k.a. Cherie Danish, a.k.a. Cherie Sunrise, a.k.a. Cherie Valentino, and -- in her one and only porn movie, a two-minute appearance in a naked crowd scene in
Thong of Bernadette
that not even her husband knew about, made when she was 17 and had lied about her age -- a.k.a. Jaki Swallow) had just enough talent and just enough ambition to bring her to Hollywood and a career as a D-list actress. Her primary skills were three: lying and fantasizing, which taken together could pass for "acting" on a good day in the bottom tier of thespian employment, and the third was cocksucking. Those skills plus a pretty, sharp-faced, feline appearance and a pixie haircut landed her a couple of bit parts (although mainly it was the cocksucking) and a brief five-episode story arc as an ingénue in the soap
Grover's Corners
, which eventually brought her to the attention of Steve Jaffe, a talented, workaholic real estate developer and sometime producer of movie schlock, half of whose work took place not in Hollywood proper but out in the valley's porn industry.
Steve had for a partner an equally skilled businessman, Harry Samchuk, a gay man he'd met at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Their genius in the porn industry came not from making the product, but rather from owning and renting out the dozens and dozens of studios, editing facilities, storage facilities, mailing/shipping mills and Internet shops -- the infrastructure -- that the industry needed to do its work. They also owned and leased out a major proportion of the expensive houses and estates the porn people used as sets. Thus they earned a tremendous amount of income from the porn industry without ever having actually to be "in" it. They owned warehouses and office space and leased the equipment; what other people did with it wasn't their concern, and anyway one could depreciate the hell out of the inventory. With those profits they could afford to dabble on the outskirts of the "legitimate" movie industry. The one-gay, one-straight combination worked out amazingly well for both of them; among other things, it meant they never competed for the same sex partners in their private lives, and it gave them a broader range of sensibility than some others might have had. Both realized early on how well the symbiosis of their relationship worked, and they were therefore scrupulously honest with each other in their business dealings.
Cherie initially dated Steve to advance her career, but after a few months she began to understand that being his wife might provide for a more secure future than trying to be an actress, which after all not only involved hard work, but also required more talent and more luck in being at the right place at the right time than she seemed to possess. Comparatively speaking, giving Steve frequent access to her mouth, still-tight pussy and still-taut rosebud was not only much easier and more pleasant, it had a much higher probability of the big payoff. For his part, Steve was besotted having his own worshipful sex minx hungrily gulping his joy juice a couple times a week without disrupting his busy schedule, and before he knew it he was in love, he was married, and a few months later he was an expectant father-to-be.
Cherie herself transitioned quickly from Golden Globe diva-in-waiting into a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills a decade and a half before the show ever ran. She discovered and nurtured newly acquired talents including shopping, spending Steve's money, hostessing events and business cocktail parties, and being a capo in the LA charity mafia. Best of all, she didn't have to relinquish any of her diva skills. It was win-win-win-win. As long as Steve was serviced on a regular basis, he was so absorbed in his work he paid little attention to how Cherie spent her nine-to-fives. And hell, give the man credit: he really wasn't a bad fuck at all. He really did do most things he turned his hand to very well. And he really loved his trophy wife. Sometimes that happens.
After their daughter, Clea, was old enough to go into a high-end and tony daycare center for privileged children, Cherie roamed the shops and stores of Rodeo Drive and Beverly Boulevard, the spas, the salons, and all the trendy places. Before she was thirty, she had built herself a discreet but impressive list of masseurs and cabana boys she had fucked and sucked -- often in lieu of a tip -- plus a couple of gardeners and pool maintenance men, plus one or two casting execs she blew for old times' sake and just to keep her hand in. Early in her career she'd discovered that not only did an ambitious gal need to suck a cock once in a while to get a role, in egalitarian Hollywood sometimes she had to suck a pussy instead. This opened up a new avenue of her personality and by age thirty-five gave her a select, highly talented list of masseuses, hotel maids, aroma therapists and other tradeswomen who regularly serviced her. There were three different sales girls on Rodeo Drive alone who sometimes met their monthly sales quotas in the changing rooms of their shops on their knees tongue-buffing Cherie's clit. And then there was the lovely Asian flight attendant Cherie had met on a shopping trip to Hong Kong, who whenever she landed at LAX spent her layover in Cherie's bedroom, playing with anal toys and buttfucking or being buttfucked by Cherie and her strap-on. Steve knew nothing about any of it.
Plus a line or two of blow every now and then. A little e. A little oxy. Lots of Grey Goose. Personal trainers, male and female, some fuckable, some not (by orientation; there was a gay guy who had incredible, inspired hands, but he simply wasn't interested in pussy). Parties at the beach house. Liposuction. A tuck or a tightening, a little tweaking. Once or twice a year an MFM or an FFM, not so often it got boring, just often enough to keep it interesting and a little different. Parties at the Belair house. Two trains, but only one as a participant, in Puerto Vallarta. She was only a spectator during the one in her own pool cabana.
Life was good.
Cherie added Shane to her list of multi-tasking playmates-for-hire through the somewhat unorthodox route of gay Harry Samchuk and Shane's gay prostitute friend Clive. Several months before Harvey had died, Shane went looking for Clive on Santa Monica Boulevard, and it took her three days to find him. He was struggling and not doing well, and Shane's sudden disappearance from his life hadn't helped. Shane helped him get his shit together and they kept in loose touch over the years, a fine example of Shane's very best qualities, her loyalty, her refusal to judge people, and her generally sympathetic nature. If you were Shane's friend, she would give you the shirt off her back, and in Clive's case that's almost literally what she'd had to do.
With her help Clive had cleaned up enough as a gay prostitute that he'd eventually worked his way up the food chain until he had the good fortune to be picked up by Harry Samchuk, who was enamored of Clive's cocksucking skills much the way his business partner enjoyed that same skill from the former Jaki Swallow fifteen years earlier. Hollywood and the TV and movie businesses relied upon the ability to spot talent, and cocksucking was as much an appreciated skill as set design, hairdressing, sound mixing, acting, show-running or sitcom development. Clive began to hang around the fringes of Harvey's circle, and one night brought his friend Shane to an industry party Harry threw. Harry, who liked the andro/boi look, took an immediate liking to Shane and even made a pass at her, thinking she was a guy. Shane demurred politely, though, without offending Harry or being offended, and eventually set him straight, so to speak, about her true gender and orientation. Harry took it well, and for some reason remained fascinated by her; he had even gone so far as to lend Shane the use of his yacht one day so Shane could invite all her friends over to it to have a pussy party on board. Maybe Harry just needed the tax deduction: Entertained client S. McCutcheon and posse.
And then as sometimes happens, fate played dominoes. First, Shane got picked to do Pink's faux Mohawk hairdo when she filmed her
Bitter Pill
video. That led to a one-time shot doing Madonna's hair on a location thing when Madonna's regular people couldn't make it. Madonna added her rave to Pink's. Next thing Shane knew a major studio exec named Ellie Zimmer got a recommendation from Harry (via Clive) to give Shane a try. Harry didn't like Ellie Zimmer much, but figured what the hell, if Shane did a good job, that was great and it would get Clive off his case about Shane all the time. And if Shane fucked up, well, that was on Clive and on Shane, and too fucking bad, Ellie. But Shane did a great job, and when Cherie Jaffe saw Ellie at a benefit looking better than she'd looked in decades, Cherie was impressed ... and jealous as hell.
When Cherie's favorite hairdresser finally succumbed to AIDS and flew home to Stockholm to die, Clive asked Harry to recommend Shane, as least for a tryout. Thus it was on a sunny afternoon in November 2003 that one of Steve's minions -- a minion he happened to be balling, although Cherie didn't know about it -- arrived at
Lather
, the salon where Shane worked, performing advance work for Cherie, who arrived a few minutes later for her haircut. And then it was just one of those things, just like a year later when Shane ran into Carmen in Arianna's dressing room. Kismet, chemistry, hormones, destiny: whatever. Cherie looked in the mirror at Shane, and Shane looked in the mirror at Cherie, and there was more electricity in the air than could be accounted for by the static in the comb in Shane's hand.
Shane put her in the chair, spun her around, looked in her eyes, and said, "Tell me what you want."
