Ritz Harper Goes to Hollywood! Read online

  “WHEN IT COMES TO KEEPING IT REAL, THERE IS NO ONE LIKE WENDY WILLIAMS.”

  —Newsweek.com

  More praise for

  WENDY WILLIAMS

  “Williams is a real-life scandalmonger…. bawdy…commanding…sassily comic.”

  —The New York Times

  “[Wendy’s] bold personality and unvarnished opinions have made her an institution.”

  —New York Daily News

  “The self-proclaimed ‘Queen of All Media.’…Wendy is witty, quick and yes, she always has the last word. The girl spares no punches and everything is fair game…. rib-breaking funny.”

  —blackstarnews.com

  “Wendy is at the top of her game.”

  —Honey magazine

  Ritz Harper Goes to HOLLYWOOD!

  OTHER TITLES BY WENDY WILLIAMS

  The Ritz Harper Chronicles, Book II:

  Is the Bitch Dead, or What?

  The Ritz Harper Chronicles, Book I:

  Drama Is Her Middle Name

  Wendy’s Got the Heat

  The Wendy Williams Experience

  Pocket Books

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  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Wendy, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-1745-3

  ISBN-10: 1-4391-1745-4

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonandSchuster.com

  To

  Little Kev, my heart

  Big Kev, my rock

  And to all my fans,

  without you none of this would be possible.

  FROM RITZ HARPER CHRONICLES, BOOK II:

  The last time Ritz Harper was in a hospital she was clinging to life, riddled with bullets. She didn’t even visit the hospital during her aunt’s last days; she hated it so much. Ritz hated the smell, she hated the nurses, she hated the whole scene. Sure, she got star treatment, the special private room with all of the amenities. But it was still a hospital.

  This occasion, however, made it bearable.

  Ritz was there doing something she never thought she would ever do—have a baby. She delivered in a room by herself, just as she wanted. There was only her doctor, a nurse, and an anesthesiologist. Yes, she was having an epidural. All of the pushing and hollering and that natural-childbirth shit was for the birds, she thought. I want this baby to slide out pain-free. But even with the epidural, Ritz swore it felt as if she were pushing an Escalade through her coochie. And she wasn’t sure, but she thought she pushed so hard that she even shit on the delivery table.

  All of the trauma and the pain and the embarrassment were erased as with amnesia because all Ritz could remember before she passed out was the doctor saying, “You did great! It’s a girl!”

  Ritz woke up in her private room. A nurse came in, holding a little bundle in a blanket, talking about feeding time. Ritz had not planned on breast-feeding, not with her implants just getting settled after one of them had been replaced following the shooting. It was bad enough that she had to mess up her figure for a few months, and God knew how long it would take before she’d be back to her diva shape. She also knew that a little nip and tuck would be in order after she fully recovered.

  “Whatever God didn’t do, I know some doctor will fix,” she said to herself, knowing she would at the very least have a tummy tuck, a butt lift, and some liposuction around her thighs.

  The nurse had no expression as she handed Ritz her baby.

  “The doctor will be in in a moment to speak with you,” said the nurse solemnly before leaving the room.

  Ritz looked puzzled. She held her baby and a serene sense of joy washed over her. Ritz was surprised. She didn’t know she would feel this way. Unconditional love? Was this what that felt like? Ritz realized that she never experienced this before in her entire life. Ritz was alone. Derek wanted to be around. He wanted to be a father, but Ritz couldn’t see herself with him. He was a drug dealer, after all. And young, too young. She had decided she would raise this baby by herself. The way Chip Fields raised Kim and Alexis. Hell, they might be clones for all we knew because those girls looked as if Chip had spit them out, and there was no daddy around and both of them turned out all right, Ritz thought. My little Madalyn will be just fine.

  Madalyn, in honor of a woman whom Ritz never got a chance to tell just how much she meant to her. Aunt Maddie, perhaps the most understanding, loving example, and the kind of woman that Ritz knew she was incapable of being but might get close to in an attempt to be a mommy. She owed that much to Little Madalyn.

  “You’re going to get the very best of everything, little girl—including me,” Ritz whispered to her baby. “I will never leave you!”

  Ritz snuggled her baby gently in her arms. She pulled back the blanket to get a better look at her Little Madalyn. It was the first time Ritz had really got to see her daughter. She stared into a face less than an hour into this world. She had a striking form. Ritz was looking into a mirror when she looked into the face of her baby girl, who had the same pretty, smooth complexion, a few shades lighter. The little girl even looked to have the beginnings of the same deep dimples that Ritz had.

  Ritz saw herself for perhaps the first time in her life. In a pure form. She saw herself in a way she’d never expected. This baby had an innocence that Ritz could hardly identify with, but it seemed to crack open a window inside Ritz. It began to melt that solid-ice-cold heart Ritz had developed over the years. Ritz knew for the first time that she had never known love until this day.

  She was madly, wildly in love with her baby.

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  1

  Six months later…

  The brass urn was positioned on a table in the bay window in the seating area of Ritz’s bedroom suite. It sat as a rare artifact, a showcase piece. It had replaced the bassinet that had held court there for so many months until her uncle Cecil begged her to get rid of it.

  “Baby, you have to move on,” he told her. “Please, Ritzy. Give it to charity. You can’t keep torturing yourself like this.”

  Yes, I can, Ritz said to herself.

  So she replaced one symbol of the only thing she ever truly loved with yet another. Ritz allowed Uncle Cecil to pack up the baby’s bed—along with the baby clothes, the Tiffany’s silver baby rattle, and the hundreds of other gifts Ritz had received from colleagues, acquaintances, and even fans. He packed it all up and sent it off to Goodwill. But
Ritz would never let go of her little girl.

  She walked over to the window, picked up the brass urn, and held it. She put it to her ear and shook it gently. It sounded like a baby’s rattle. Hard particles were among the ash. She wondered what those things were. Little bone fragments? Tiny teeth? One day, perhaps, her curiosity would get the better of her, and she would open the urn and see what was inside. She would touch what was in there, hoping to feel something again.

  She thought about her baby, who shared her face, right down to the dimples, and what she might have wanted to be. Would she have been smart, a doctor or scientist perhaps? Would she have been an actress or a model? During those months after the birth of her child, Ritz had made so many promises. She was going to be there—her career would take a backseat.

  She was going to raise her child. There would be no nanny. She was going to teach her how to count, how to read. Ritz imagined all of the mother-daughter conversations she would have with her daughter about life. She would tell her everything she needed to know, and it wouldn’t be in the old-fashioned, keeping-secrets way she was raised. There would be no secrets. But none of that was to be.

  The last six months had been tough—watching her baby girl fight daily for her life while hooked up to machines, being probed by doctors and specialists. None of them had given her more than a few weeks. It was a rare disease that no adult had survived, let alone a baby. Yet four months later, Little Madalyn Harper was still holding on—a fighter, just like her mother. But she lost her battle.

  And Ritz almost checked out with her baby. It was that last card atop a house of cards that threatened to crumble Ritz’s entire world.

  “What doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger,” Aunt Maddie had told Ritz on so many occasions that Ritz thought her aunt had created the phrase.

  Still, Ritz couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks. She was practically catatonic. And every day she remained in bed, another piece of her heart calloused over until the whole thing was just one hard shell.

  Nothing could penetrate Ritz Harper’s heart again. Nothing was left to hurt—making her more dangerous than ever. She had nothing real to live for, but got up out of that bed under a new kind of energy. It wasn’t quite revenge. Because whom would she be getting back at? God? Perhaps. But it was close. She got out of that bed with a new drive, a new determination that could not be stopped. Her career—the one she was willing to walk away from when Little Madalyn was born—would now become her baby.

  Ritz Harper would feed and clothe it, put everything she had into it. She would be back on top. And she had a lot of work to do.

  So on this night, Ritz would reveal her bold career ambitions to Chas; and if Chas wasn’t on the same page, he could keep it moving.

  2

  Chas James picks up his cell in midstroke to see who was calling. He wasn’t going to stop what he was doing; he saw it was Ritz and stopped in his tracks.

  “What’s the matter, daddy?” said the small, but well-muscled, brown-skinned man who had spent the last fifteen minutes with his face in a pillow while Chas drilled him from behind. “Why’d you stop? It was feeling so good!”

  Chas, not one for explanations, pulled out. He was rock hard, and instincts and even his body wanted him to finish what he’d started, but there was plenty of time for that. Ritz was calling and he had to call her back. He headed to the bathroom.

  “Get dressed,” he said dismissively. “I’ve got something to do. I’ll call you.”

  The small, brown man had just met Chas the night before, but something in his tone let him know he should just dress and wait for a call—one that might not ever come.

  Chas took a quick shower and dialed Ritz. He hadn’t spoken to her in six months. Ritz had disappeared. She wanted to be left alone, and Chas respected her space. At the same time, he resented being left high and dry. Ritz was his primary source of income. She was his cash cow. Her meteoric rise had helped fund his lifestyle.

  Through his salary as Ritz’s producer and the lumps of cash he pocketed for her appearances and the other freebies and perks from being in the Ritz circle, Chas was able to build his own mini-empire. He had an apartment in trendy Battery Park Village in a building with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the East River. As a kid he used to daydream about this kind of view while looking out his Bronx tenement building into an alleyway.

  Chas shared space with captains of industry, dotcom magnates, and a few people who had inherited money from wealthy parents. They called them the invisible rich because unlike the stars and the celebrities, they could walk the streets, and they rarely worried about paparazzi or autograph seekers. And many of them could buy and sell the average celebrity.

  Chas loved it. He, too, was one of the invisibles. He put his creation out front to take the limelight, the flashbulbs, and, on one occasion, the bullets. While he collected his paper and did his thing.

  His address was downtown, close enough to the Meatpacking District, the Village, and even Chelsea, where he would cruise nightly to feed his voracious appetite for sex. His sex drive was only surpassed by his drive to be wealthy and successful.

  But both seemed to be drying up. In the six months of no-Ritz, Chas had been struggling. He hustled, going back into his bag of tricks and promoting parties. But it wasn’t nearly the kind of money he was used to, and it wasn’t the kind of money that would keep him living the way he had for the last few years.

  Ritz was calling. This was good. Very good.

  3

  She wants to come back? The thought was bittersweet. Sometimes he wished she hadn’t come back that first time. Maybe things would have been better for Chas—at least he was willing to bet on it.

  As fucked-up as it was to even think, the reality was that Ritz’s death would have given Chas a clean slate. The last few years of Ritz’s rise had been messy, to say the least. Careers and lives had been ruined. Enemies were around every corner. There were few people whom Ritz hadn’t outed, ridiculed, jacked up, or messed over. Her death would have been poetic. For Chas, it would have been cleansing and a tremendous opportunity.

  Shot down in a hail of bullets on a public New York City street, wearing one of her best furs, at the top of her game—the kind of story you would only find in a book or on the big screen. It would have been perfect, thought Chas.

  He already had the public relations plan ready to go: Did gossip kill the Queen of Radio? Was freedom of speech being assassinated? Ritz would become an urban legend. Tapes from her last Ritz Harper Excursion show would become cult classics. Chas would become an overnight sensation. He’d give interviews all over the world about their last show. He would be like Puffy on the heels of Biggie’s murder.

  Chas would host the most fabulous hot-pink-and-leopard-themed public memorial. He’d wear a ribbon and become a public advocate for free speech on the airwaves. And when he grew tired of the marches and the memorials, he’d pen a tell-all book about how Ritz was playing Russian roulette with her life all along and why he’d predicted her untimely death was only a matter of time…

  But the bitch lived! And now she was calling on Chas to help her mount yet another comeback.

  Not too long ago Chas James was the most envied man in the industry. He’d groomed Ritz Harper. He was her Pygmalion, minus the eventual love story. But he’d formed her out of nothing—at least that’s the story he told himself. But just as Pygmalion’s Galatea was formed out of ivory, Ritz began as something pretty special, just in need of a little direction. Chas certainly provided the direction and the vision, but Ritz had to possess something in order to execute.

  Ritz’s lack of shame and her strange sense of self-righteousness allowed her to say the things she did on the airwaves. And her audience appreciated not just the shock value, but the honesty.

  When she cooed about a music mogul’s sex romp with one of his male rappers, Ritz did so primarily because she was sick of seeing him parade around as if he were a family man, and a ladies’ man.<
br />
  “…and that goes out to Mr. Ladies’ Man himself! Yeah right! If you want to see the truth, y’all check out my Web site. I have pictures! Oooooh, how you doin’?!”

  Most days Ruffin would sit in his office cringing while listening to the Excursion. It was the car accident he couldn’t keep from rubbernecking to see. This was not how he wanted to spend the twilight years of his career, presiding over garbage such as this. He would call Chas in weekly to discuss the direction of the show, and when Ritz would go too far, he would threaten suspension. But Ruff knew his hands were tied. Radio was a business, and one on the downturn at that, with the emergence of satellite, Internet, and iPods.

  “Chas, you better rein her in!” he would say. “If I get one more threat of a lawsuit, I’m pulling the plug!”

  But even Chas knew that Ruff didn’t have the balls to pull the plug. He may have hated the show, he may even have hated Ritz at times, but he and his station loved the revenue she generated.

  But in the last few months, Ritz wasn’t bringing home the bacon. She was home in mourning. And as Janet said, “What have you done for me lately…” Ritz’s star had faded and her queendom was under attack. It was easy for Ruff to forget what she had been because, well, Ritz was turning out to be a has-been. She couldn’t get herself out of bed, and even her fans were showing themselves to be fair-weather.

  So when Ruff got the call from Chas that Ritz was coming back, he wasn’t welcoming her with open arms. He was enjoying the break from Ritz.