SNAP: The World Unfolds

CHAPTER SEVEN

We had a crisis.

No one had seen or heard from Penelope DeVries.

Penelope—Pen in celeb-talk—was a Certified Celebrity.  Her photo on our cover could sell a million more copies at the check-out stand.  Her in a TV trailer could jump our Nielsen ratings.

She was spectacular.  Average height, brown hair sleeked back in a perfect chignon, no more than a size two in her Chanel dress, shoes, handbag and oversized sunglasses.  When she took the sunglasses off she became a giant.

She wasn’t the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, she had no particular talent, she didn’t model, she didn’t pose nude, she hadn’t been in rehab—at least as far as we knew and we would have been the ones to know—she was just a celebrity with a capital C.  She was at every film festival that mattered, every club and gallery opening of note, every A-list party on both coasts.  She was dressed by Paris, Milan, Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive.  Designers clawed over each other to give her clothes.  If she was photographed at dinner, the restaurant would be booked solid for the next 12 months.

I’d only seen her once.  She and Baron Kandesky had dropped in at a content meeting, leaving everyone speechless.  Amazingly, her escort was better known than she was but absolutely shunned any photos.  And Baron Stefan Johannes Kandesky knew how to dodge the paparazzi—he owned most of them.

That was then.  This was now. She hadn’t been visible for the past few weeks.  Chaz and I messaged all our contacts asking about any sightings; no one answered.  She’d slowly done a Cheshire Cat, with her seductive smile lingering in everyone’s mind.  No Pen, though.

But the Baron turned up at a planning meeting one afternoon.  No announcement, no trumpets, just a door sliding open and a sudden drop in temperature as though winter swept in.  Chaz led the response with a “Hello, Baron.  We weren’t expecting you. Please have a seat,” and he waved his arm at the head of the table where an empty chair suddenly appeared.

“Thank you, Chaz.  I won’t interrupt for too long, I just have an announcement.”  The man spoke in a low, cultured voice with a trace of an accent—some Eastern European hints.

“Penelope has decided to retire.”

Most of us sat there with our jaws on the table, but Jean-Louis just nodded.  Did he already know?  He was a newer hire than I was, what made him higher on the need-to-know list?

“Penelope has told me she wants to move to France for some peace and serenity.” the Baron’s voice was calm.  “We’ll miss her at SNAP, but want the best for her.  This will lead our coverage tomorrow, but now we have today to finish with.”  With that, the meeting continued and the Baron left.

It felt anticlimactic to just talk about what we were all planning for tonight’s show, but Chaz was right.  We’d need a day to work out the best way to cover such a bombshell.  Pen had been the anchor around which we could hang a TV show or a magazine issue, no matter what.   I jotted a note to check with Francois Sartou about how we’d handle this move.  The Baron said “France,” not specifically “Paris,” so first thing would be to find out where Pen decided to settle.  And even though the Baron had told her we’d cease our coverage, there would be local people who recognized her, maybe shoot pictures.  I didn’t want anybody, or any other media, trying to sell us a photo of Pen after this announcement.