Chinatown meets Real Housewives in this Hollywood "whydunit."
When former reality TV star and child actor Molly Mandrie takes her own life, her co-stars, producers, and fans' lives are all thrown into chaos. Under the thumb of the controlling Applause Network and their executive producer Guy Maker, cast members Tamara, Andrea, Fievel, and Elliot struggle to confront how their relationships contributed to Molly’s death.
Meanwhile, big-time movie star and self-proclaimed “Molly's biggest fan” Hector Espinoza uses his industry access to start asking questions. If Guy Maker was her best friend and the man who gave her a second chance at fame, why didn’t he go to her funeral?
And fifteen-year-old social media influencer Nixon Bryce, who rose to fame mimicking Molly’s drunken antics, finds her dysfunctional relationship with her mother is pulled into the fray as Applause looks to her to be their fresh new face.
In this deep-dive into the dramatic and dangerous world of reality TV, the cameras have stopped rolling and the makeup is off. Character’s stories start to intertwine as they search for the truth about Molly’s death, racing towards an emotionally crippling conclusion that will change their lives, and careers, forever.
Chinatown meets Real Housewives in this Hollywood "whydunit."
When former reality TV star and child actor Molly Mandrie takes her own life, her co-stars, producers, and fans' lives are all thrown into chaos. Under the thumb of the controlling Applause Network and their executive producer Guy Maker, cast members Tamara, Andrea, Fievel, and Elliot struggle to confront how their relationships contributed to Molly’s death.
Meanwhile, big-time movie star and self-proclaimed “Molly's biggest fan” Hector Espinoza uses his industry access to start asking questions. If Guy Maker was her best friend and the man who gave her a second chance at fame, why didn’t he go to her funeral?
And fifteen-year-old social media influencer Nixon Bryce, who rose to fame mimicking Molly’s drunken antics, finds her dysfunctional relationship with her mother is pulled into the fray as Applause looks to her to be their fresh new face.
In this deep-dive into the dramatic and dangerous world of reality TV, the cameras have stopped rolling and the makeup is off. Character’s stories start to intertwine as they search for the truth about Molly’s death, racing towards an emotionally crippling conclusion that will change their lives, and careers, forever.
The body hung at the end of the long, winding Mulholland Drive where it meets the Cahuenga Pass. There are a handful of trees there, with a few thick branches that jut out over the intersection. That’s where the world found her, just above the California 101 freeway, above the crowded passageway to success and failure. It was Thursday, June 13th 2019.
At 3:21 a.m., a car with a drunk driver heading south down the pass saw what looked like a woman take her final step from a small stool. But because of the drunkenness and his true-crime superstition, the man assumed it was some specter of ancient Hollywood lore and drove on without calling the authorities, swerving dangerously somewhere in the distance. Several other cars also passed the body, but at those early hours, traffic was mercifully light, and no one had time to let an eye lazily wander to the side of the road.
Early morning cyclists on their rides over the hill also paid the body no mind. One saw it and briefly considered calling it in, but because stopping would create an ordeal, likely making him late for work, and because the woman was so obviously dead without hope of being revived, he didn’t know what good it would do. It wasn’t until 5:33 a.m. that the fifth cyclist to make their way down the pass saw her and called 911.
Authorities arrived and took the cyclist’s statement, which was nothing more than a description of her morning ride to the gym, then to work at a vintage apparel store near the corner of La Brea and Melrose Avenues, about four miles away.
A disgruntled detective and their partner arrived, alongside an ambulance and a fire truck. Paramedics cut the woman down and placed her on a gurney, tucking her almost violently into a body bag. The police officers helped direct traffic but mostly talked among themselves about nothing, laughing periodically. Drivers at the front of the line of traffic who could not turn around had no choice but to watch the scene. On his phone, one man took pictures of the body as it was being taken down from the tree. A woman filmed it. Someone else live streamed the confusion. Though they didn’t yet know who she was, at least there was entertainment. Meanwhile the long line of cars buried deep in traffic stretched down in one direction past the Hollywood Bowl and past the In-N-Out Burger in the other. Since news of her death would not hit any media outlets for another three hours, drivers had no context as to why they were trapped. There was honking and shouting. It was a fucking outrage.
A reach into the back pocket of her loose denim jeans produced a wallet with identification: a California driver’s license.
Roseanna Margaret Mandrie.
To some, just a body hanging from a tree. But to many, Molly Mandrie, star of Molly’s Messy Life, better known to fans and viewers as MML, the former hit reality show in which she tried and failed repeatedly to get her life together after suffering drama after drama and relapse after relapse, all in the aftermath of being a successful child actor. By that point in her life, to anyone who’d gotten a good look at her, she truly was that specter of ancient Hollywood lore; a ghost of her former self, the firelight of glamor gone from her eyes long ago. Now they were set back in her skull as if pushed in by thumbs, cheeks hollow and sunken, her blonde hair thin and half gray, as if someone had stolen her soul.
Once the announcement of her death was made, rumors began. Molly had been seen drinking the night before, alone, talking loudly to herself on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. Four weeks later, a leaked toxicology report revealed there had only been alcohol in her system, but that in the second back pocket of her jeans, police had found a dime bag of heroin with a faded red stamp on it that read J2Z.
She was in no condition to drive but had done so anyway, leaving her car a few yards up Mulholland. Inside it there was no suicide note. In the remaining pockets of the jeans, no note. And after a search of her apartment, still no note. The coroner later told authorities that the stool she had used to jump from had not been high enough to break her neck. She had been strangled by the weight of her own body. And, he further pointed out, judging by the shredded, bloodied tips of her fingernails and by the fibers of rope lodged beneath them, it appeared that she had changed her mind. If she could’ve told anyone anything in any note, it would have been that, in the end, she had wanted to live.
Two weeks later, her funeral. Many former friends and costars made appearances. Although none, not even her father, appeared more grief stricken than her Molly’s Messy Life castmates. They all appeared appropriately beside themselves with grief. Luckily, most of the cameras had set up on their good sides, except for a young woman named Cyd, who unfortunately had most of the cameras set up on her bad side, which, apart from looking almost identical to her good side, was apparently hideous.
People made speeches and remembered Molly for her childhood stardom as Peggy Whistler on the popular eighties sitcom The Family That Stays Together. Friends from rehab clinics told their stories of the trials and tribulations of what it meant to be someone like Molly Mandrie, to never be seen without the emotional scars of childhood celebrity. They shed tears. One of them eventually switched places with Cyd.
The person most noticeably absent, however, was Guy Maker. Guy “the People” Maker. Guy “the Money” Maker, as he had been christened by People magazine. One of Molly’s oldest childhood friends, he was also the creator and executive producer of MML. From her show he had produced two successful spin-offs based on popular costars and friends from Molly’s life, Tamandrea and Fievel Goes East. Additionally, he produced three other shows for the same network. One a cooking competition show called Simmer Showdown; another that presented marriage counseling between overbearing women and their meek husbands as entertainment, called Hard Knock Wife; and his own, a talk show, What Happens Here, Stays! (WHH,S!). All were property of what had originally been called the Applause network, later more friendly rebranded as APLZ, which most viewers mockingly referred to as “Apples.” The ridicule did not please the network. A PR firm was fired. But the nickname stuck.
People loved to see stars from other Apples shows bicker back and forth on Guy’s show as he drew them further into the petty dramas and inconsequential intrigue of what it meant to pretend they were living out their real lives in front of the camera. Only, after so long, these produced lives had become their real ones. The petty dramas and inconsequential intrigue became dense and legitimate, and the stakes were high. Because Molly’s show had brought the initial success that had propelled the network into the world of successful reality programming and away from its origin in home-and-garden hell, to the audience she was the godmother of Apples, forever one of two women: one they loved or one they loved to hate.
It was curious that Guy was not present at the service of the woman many argued had given him his career. But his fans assumed he had his reasons.
The stars of Tamandrea were there: Tamara Collins and Andrea Bocelli, the latter having spent most of her career ham-fistedly insisting that she was not related to or involved with famed blind Italian opera singer Andrea Bocelli.
Tamara had been a celebrity dancer, choreographer and eventual co-host of the competition show Dance Battle. Each episode two stars were pitted against each other in a test of skills as they tried to learn the same moves, then a panel of judges determined who had performed it best. Her popularity as the most sought-after partner on the show also led to her marrying, and later divorcing, its requisite British judge, Winslow Philips. She had met Molly when she appeared as a guest dancer on the show and had eventually been approached by Guy to join the cast of MML.
She had initially seen the opportunity as a vehicle to move her brand away from being seen as strictly tits and ass. It was the chance to present her real life to the audience. But the offer eventually revealed its double-edged nature. When she joined MML, Tamara was the only Black cast member on an Apples show. As such, she became a diversity token that the network could cash in when it wanted to reach the coveted “urban” audience.
Despite her enormous success and her popular image as the picture of fitness and health, Tamara and Molly had bonded over empties—vodka bottles, pill bottles, eco-friendly reusable water bottles, and plenty of empty matcha cups with lipstick markings on white plastic lids. For a long time, their problems rode shotgun to their successes. Their inevitable falling out came when, seeing the faltering ratings of a circus past its prime, Guy gave Tamara her own spin-off and Apples pulled the plug on Molly’s show a season later.
The other half of the double act, Andrea, had been raised in a strict Lutheran home in Tyler, Texas, the daughter of an Italian father and Korean mother. Sheltered and celebrated for both her beauty and her chastity while growing up, she had a reputation for being overly trusting. She had not had sex until she moved to Dallas and married her first husband. He had just turned forty-five. She was twenty-two.
A personal injury attorney with a penchant for the pricey services of high-end sex workers, he managed to keep this secret for four years until Andrea discovered it and filed for divorce. That the wool could be pulled over her eyes by a man twice her age should not have been a complete surprise, but it did paint a picture of who she would become on television: an endearingly gullible gal who had to work three times as hard as anyone else to be taken seriously. The first thing she did to demand such respect was to make sure that, for as good a litigator as her husband was, she hired an even better divorce attorney. She had pursued a career in cosmetology lightly while in Texas, but when she moved to LA at twenty-six with a hefty pile of fuck-you money and an eye on becoming a makeup artist, she was free to fly.
Having now been on TV for ten years, the innocent girl from Tyler had evolved. In the pursuit of putting a stamp on the world outside of her persona on her show, she had recently published a New York Times best-selling diet, fitness, and pseudo-inspirational memoir titled, B*tch, Your Single Body Is Your Best Body!, which outlined ways to make the men in one’s life jealous. envious and possibly drive themselves stark raving mad at the notion of obtaining your hottest body and strongest sense of self post-breakup.
Sitting beside Tamara and Andrea at the funeral was Fievel Geitman, Molly’s ex-boyfriend and star of the second MML spin-off, Fievel Goes East (FGE).
During his and Molly’s time together, he had reinvented himself seven or eight—maybe seven and a half—times to fit into whatever new career it was he wanted to master. When he had decided he wanted to be an upscale art photographer, his name had been Fi, although his insistence on taking photos only on his iPhone using portrait mode put an early expiration date on that dream. When he had decided he wanted to be a life coach and the face of success and entrepreneurship for a new herbal supplement brand called You-trition, his name had been B. Well. When he’d wanted to play high-stakes poker professionally, he wore sunglasses at all times, including indoors, because he said he had to “protect his tell,” and he’d referred to himself only as Gee.
He’d also dipped his toe into the arena of amateur wrestling, concocting the persona of “Gatman,” who was a Gatling-gun-wielding, American-flag-wearing lampoon of a patriot. But when Gatman’s fans began chanting, “Gun him down!” as he prepared to crush his opponents, and some started coming to his matches with fake and even sometimes real guns, everyone knew it was time for him to stop.
His occupation at present was as a DJ named Five-El, a moniker inspired in part by Kal-El, the birth name of Superman, who Fievel said was created by two New York Jews and meant to embody the ideal image of the chosen one, come to save the world. Being Jewish himself, he hoped he might be music’s chosen one and was scheduled to make his debut the following weekend at the poolside bar of the Tropicana Las Vegas.
Next to him at Molly’s funeral sat Elliot Rossi, his best friend and costar, who had begun as his personal driver. Elliot had made a minor name for himself on MML, the way Andrea had alongside Tamara. Even though his screen time on MML had gradually increased the more producers saw how important his friendship was to Fievel, Elliot worked hard to retain his quiet, shy reputation. But every now and again he would let booze get the better of him, and the traumatic decades of being the son of an overbearing Italian Catholic mother and a physically abusive father would spill out a cupful at a time. But, by and large, he was amiable and affable.
A short fling with Andrea had thrown a wrench into seasons eight of Tamandrea and five of FGE (precipitated by a major crossover event, when two cast members from each show, Matt and Trisha, tied the knot in the appropriately titled televised wedding special, Holy Matt-Trisha-mony). The reception had been one of those rare occasions when Elliot got drunk, and Andrea had told him how she’d always thought he was cute but needed to let go of his shy-guy demeanor, in reply to which he slurred, “I’ll show you who’s not shy” and kissed her. She responded in kind, and they disappeared to the back of the limousine that was meant to take the couple to their honeymoon suite.
Most noticeably present at the funeral was the actor Hector Espinoza, one of the highest paid stars of the past decade. To most everyone in attendance, seeing him there was like witnessing the second coming of Christ. Many thought it was a poor attempt at grandstanding. Hector and Molly never had any known relationship, which caused for wild speculation.
It was rare that celebrities of his caliber crossed over into the world of shows like what Apples had to offer. There remained an intangibility to movie stars that even someone like Tamara, Andrea, or Fievel could not reach. While Hector’s fame was part of some ancient machine, everyone on Apples had been injected with a fame virus. They were often portrayed as “normal” people who did not know what to do with their fame. But Hector and his persona had been crafted by many hands, his corner of Hollywood having been built, broken, and rebuilt for over a century to gradually come to resemble a new pantheon.
Having recently been outed by an internet tabloid as bi and having worked to keep it a secret well into his forties, Hector was making fewer and fewer public appearances as he found it increasingly difficult to keep up with social media and all its criticisms. Across the world its power had transcended frivolous life updates and silly observations about grocery shopping to become a real tool for both justice and injustice. It was the only functioning paradox he knew of.
His caution had also come on the heels of the great wave of reckoning that had occurred two years prior, when centuries of truths about abuses had bled out from social posts and into the streets, marked by two words that fired like silver bullets aimed at aging toxic werewolves: “me too.”
Outside of releasing two lackluster films in the two years since, one a needless further installment in an already-too-long-running franchise, Hector had isolated himself. Many of the high-powered men he had grown accustomed to working with and hearing about were now living out their days in conscious or unconscious fear. Things he had traditionally laughed off and chalked up to the old boys’ club were now dominoes falling one by one to a female might no man had ever expected in their industry.
Not much farther south, at a home in Murrieta, California, Nixon Bryce and her mother, Samantha, watched the televised funeral. Samantha’s eyes were peeled from floor to ceiling while Nixon’s fluttered half-open, gradually being weighed down by apathy. Reruns of MML, and later Tamandrea and FGE, had been substantial building blocks of her and her mother’s relationship. Impressions of Molly were how Nixon had found a fan base and a rabid following on Instagram. She had been five when her mother started filming and posting her daughter’s comedy and impersonations to only a few hundred followers, all family and friends. Now that she was fifteen, her following had grown to more than twenty-five million across all her platforms. And she had only higher to go from there. But despite that, most of the time when any adult spotted Nixon in public, they would shout, “Do Molly! Do Molly!” And she would languidly comply with what had become one of the many catchphrases from MML she was famous for quoting: “Let’s get lit, hos!”
Though her fame had begun relatively inappropriately with her as a toddler quoting the rated-R language of an addict, everyone knew that videos of children cursing were funny. Followers loved to watch videos of the young Nixon dressed as Molly saying things like, “This bitch is out of control!” then throwing a cheeseburger at a wall. Or chugging what appeared to be a glass of rosé and burping before saying, “Life is like a fucking puzzle, and sometimes you just gotta piece that shit together.” It was not uncommon to hear the voice of Samantha just behind the camera phone laughing and urging her daughter to say something else or to throw another burger or to chug more fake wine.
Once MML had ended and the power of those cute impressions had diminished, Samantha had worked hard to turn Nixon’s budding social media stardom into a viable business empire, paying consultants and working with other top influencers to understand how best to monetize @niXMarkstheSpot. Nixon was looking at a clothing line launch, a feature film debut, and an album drop all in the span of a few short months.
Only now the great inspiration for the young girl’s career had ceased to live, her head slipped through a noose, body dangling like a carrot over those who had watched her fall apart for years. The audience had finally taken the bait. The stick on the rudimentary trap she’d set had come loose, and now that they were all trapped inside the box, the real drama could begin.
Molly Mandrie was one of the most famous child stars in recent decades. Following her days on a beloved sitcom, she starred for years in her ownreality TV show “Molly’s Messy Life.” Now, Molly is dead by her own hand. She was rich, famous, beautiful – she seemed to have everything despite her personal struggles. Following her deathco-stars, ex-lovers, producers, and fans are left wondering if they contributed to her desire to end her own life.
Fame by Misadventure took me by surprise. I try to stay far away from reality TV. While I know many people find joy, entertainment, and value in it, I have never been able to stomach the catty drama of it all. This book shines a light on the fact that, while the genre may seem despicable, those who work in it are not. They are people. Maybe they have shinier vehicles, big houses and clothes that cost more than my car, but they experience joy, pain, love, and anger just as much as anyone else. The personas they adopt on television also are not necessarily completely true to who they are when the cameras are off. Reality TV is supposed to be about “real people” living “real lives” but, a lot of the content is heavily scripted and manipulated to maximize entertainment value. Being in the spotlight can be as much, or more so, of a burden as it is a blessing.
In Fame by Misadventure we see how the shiny public lives of the characters often do not allow viewers and fans to see below the surface, where cracks are developing beneath layers of make-up and fake smiles. Hector Espinoza, one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, was one of Molly’s biggest fans. Though he only admired her from afar, Molly’ death, left him with a chance to delve into his own demons by asking questions about hers. Similarly, her co-stars Tamara and Andrea, a teenage influencer and budding star, Nixon Bryce, and her ex, Fieval and his best friend all find themselves thrown off course in the wake of Molly’s death. They are left to question if fame is worth the manipulation of wealthy, vindictive producers who ultimately are looking out for their own purses and reputations. Should they want their reputations to match what the network expects of them? Or, is it time for the status quo to change?
It took me several chapters to find a rhythm while reading Fame by Misadventure, and I found some of the characters hard to read through from a personality standpoint. There also some points where the characters looked back into the past during their narrations where it was not entirely obvious that we had gone back in time, which could be slightly disorienting. That being said, I do highly recommend the book to those looking for an introspective read that is quick, yet emotionally gritty and full of drama fitting of a reality TV show.