Free Skinnydipping by Bethenny Frankel

description. His name was Joshua Levin. He was about five foot seven, had a receding hairline, and a great sense of humor. I’d talked to him all night, thinking I was doing him a favor, and I was surprised at how charming he turned out to be. When he’d asked for my number, he’d been so embarrassed that I gave it to him, and had actually been hoping he’d call me.
    “Because the whole ugly duckling thing is a lie. All the girls are after him for the same reason you are, and he knows it. He lets youthink that he’s this great undiscovered guy, that he so appreciates that you’ve lowered yourself to date him when you’re so beautiful, but he’s secretly a player, ready to screw you and dump you for the next oblivious girl who comes along. He’s the guy who was a nerd in high school, and who now resents all the women who will have sex with him now but wouldn’t then. He hates women and he doesn’t respect them because he thinks they are only after his wallet.”
    “Wow,” I said. “Duly noted.”
    Occasionally, I went out with the irrepressible and mysterious Sandra and Babette and some of their friends, the gorgeous women from the party with all the expensive jewelry. They apparently continued to find me amusing and often introduced me to some of the richest men I’d ever met. I had high hopes of becoming a gold digger, especially of Sandra’s caliber, but I just couldn’t ever quite get myself to flirt seriously with the paunchy, balding, misogynist men, many of them foreign, whom they introduced me to, no matter how rich. I envied the girls’ Versace dresses and Gucci bags and Bulgari jewelry, but not enough to go to the lengths I suspected they went to get that stuff. I never asked the specifics, and they never offered.
    I also kept auditioning, although not as often as I probably should have. It was so frustrating because I was always just one of hundreds of hopefuls trying for some small part in a television commercial or indie film. I never seemed to be able to crack the code. Nobody ever called, and I never quite felt like I knew what I was doing. Still, I kept trying. I wanted it so badly … even though I still wasn’t entirely sure what it was. Fame? Money? Recognition? Validation?
    Once I had my first paycheck, I got the required actress headshots taken. Everybody told me that a headshot is your business card in L.A., so I spent $500 on a big stack of 8x10s of me with my hair and makeup done, smiling like I thought an actress was supposed to smile. I sent them out with a carefully constructed cover letter to a list of a hundred agents. Nothing. No response at all.
    “This was a huge waste of money,” I complained to Brooke one day, after checking the mail.
    “Just get your face out there,” Brooke told me. But what did she know? Her life was at the racetrack, not trying to get in front of the camera. I wasn’t comfortable being alone and was always looking for Mr. Right … or at least Mr. Right Now. Although living with my father kept me from ever bringing any of my dates home, I occasionally went home with them. Older married men seemed to be particularly attracted to me, and they always wanted to talk, talk, talk about their problems, dumping them all on me, maybe because I didn’t look or act like the typical Hollywood bimbo. Maybe my opinionated attitude was off-putting, so they didn’t know what else to do with me but talk. I wasn’t “wife” material. That was obvious.
    There was one older guy whose mother had produced a popular series of spy movies from the 1960s, so he’d had early success as a director, specializing in cheesy sci-fi movies. I met him at a VIP reception for the network executives. We struck up a conversation. It turned out he knew my father, so we talked about the racetrack all evening. Then I went back to his place and we made out, but it never went further than that. I found out later he was married. Typical.
    Then there was Ian McGinnis. Ian was the editor