“Your nose looks like a little beak, darling.”
“That’s not a compliment,” I said, kind of mad.
“No, like an eagle’s.”
“Also not a compliment!” I yelled.
“No, no,” he said, “it’s regal.”
“You really aren’t very good at this,” I said.
Then he started to trace his finger on my thigh.
“Oh, I can’t. I’m on my period.” Which wasn’t true.
Those were the magic words, though, and he was now totally not interested in pursuing sex that night. After all, you can’t have blood in the water.
The next time we talked, he called me to tell me that I had been right. There was no spot for a porn star on Celebrity Apprentice.
Okay, we’re done here, I thought.
“I told you that even you couldn’t do it,” I said, twisting the knife.
“Well, it was a personal favor to one of the executives,” he told me. His wife had such a huge problem with a porn star contestant that she threatened to leave the guy, he said. “This bitch Roma.”
“Rhona?” I said. What did his secretary have to do with this?
“Roma,” he said. I can only assume he meant Touched by an Angel star Roma Downey, the wife of Apprentice executive producer Mark Burnett.
“I’m sorry, darling,” he said, “It’s not because I couldn’t use my wild card. It’s because she was gonna have a huge problem.” He called her a bitch.
At this point, Moz and I were engaged, and this whole thing with Trump had become so tiresome. “Okay,” I said.
He called once or twice more after that, but I didn’t answer.
There was one final phone call, early on the morning of January 4, 2008. I was renting Keith’s place in Valley Village in L.A. at the time, and Trump called from New York, oblivious to the time difference. I answered with an incredibly angry voice because it was so early.
It terrified him. He was sputtering about me being mad about something and I could just make out him saying “Jenna Jameson.” I guess Tito Ortiz was a contestant and his girlfriend, Jenna, got some screen time on the show the night before. He was freaking out that I would be furious that the show had let another porn star on when he couldn’t get me on.
“She’s not very smart,” he said.
“I didn’t see it, I don’t really care.”
“You didn’t watch the show?” he asked.
“No.”
“Really?”
“Really,” I said. “Okay, I gotta go.”
“Good-bye, honey b—”
I clicked the phone off. Well, that’s done, I thought.
Life goes on. It’s easy to move on from bad sex with a billionaire and his fizzled plan to game out his reality show competition.
I didn’t think about Trump again unless I was flipping through channels and saw him on my way to a more interesting show. I had sex with that, I’d say to myself. Eech.
FIVE
It was a Saturday morning, and I was already in heels and a sexy cop costume, chasing Adam Levine through the sketchiest part of downtown L.A. This was July 7, 2007, a few weeks before Shark Week. I was hired to appear in the Maroon 5 video for “Wake Up Call,” the second single off their second album. Jonas Åkerlund was directing it as a trailer for a fake NC-17 film starring Adam as a guy covering up a murder. Jonas had already directed videos for Madonna, the Rolling Stones, U2, and Metallica, so it was pretty awesome to be on the set.
“Can I get a gun?” I asked the props guy.
“No,” he said.
“How about a Taser?” I said.
“Nope,” he said.
Thunder and Lightning would have to be intimidating enough. It was such a big video, complete with a car exploding, that the head of the label, James Diener, came to the set. A little under six feet tall, with a shaved head, James is a New Yorker and natural-born talent scout.
“Hey, you direct, right?” he asked me during a down moment.
“Yes,” I said.
“I have this really cool idea,” he said. “I have this new band I just signed, completely different vibe than Maroon 5. They’re still working on the album, but it would be pretty sensational if you directed their video.”
At that point, directing a music video was on my wish list. I had been watching everything Jonas did on set. This seemed like my way into that world.
“What’s the name of the band?” I asked.
“Hollywood Undead.”
A couple of weeks later, James emailed me the unmastered version of what would be the band’s debut album, Swan Songs. “I think the first single is going to be ‘Undead,’” he wrote. I played it, ready to start thinking of visuals. And I hated it. There was no way I was going to direct this as my first video. Fortunately, the album kept getting pushed back, all the way to September 2008, and then the date they chose to shoot the video changed to a time when I would be directing a film. By then I had married Mike Moz and realized that I needed to figure a way out of that because it just wasn’t working. He had been a great motivator in business but was a nonstarter as a husband. I know what you’re thinking: Didn’t she learn from the first marriage? Believe me, I asked myself that same question. The problem was that he was so enmeshed in my business that it would take some time for me to get out.
“I have a lot on my plate right now,” I told James.
“Well, could you be one of the girls in the video?” James asked me. They needed someone to make out with the lead singer.
“Sorry, no,” I said.
The finished album was a hit, especially with tweens. It’s rap rock, with the band members all having pseudonyms like J-Dog and wearing spooky masks. It wasn’t my style, but I just kept hearing about them, whether it was a girlfriend saying she was auditioning for one of their videos or dating one of the guys from the band. It became a running joke, and I’d roll my eyes every time I heard the band mentioned yet another time.
I was living in Tampa and I had a friend there named Kayvon Sarfehjooy, a DJ and producer. On April 9, 2009, he called me to tell me his friend’s band was playing 98Rockfest the following night at the St. Pete Times Forum, now called the Amalie Arena.
“They get in tonight, and you should come out,” she said. “They’re scene kids from Hollywood. You could direct their video.”
That got my interest. By then I had directed the “Ballad of Billy Rose” video for a band called 16 Second Stare. “What’s their name?”
“Hollywood Undead,” he said.
“What the fuck?”
“It’s a cool name,” he said.
“The universe just keeps trying to make this happen,” I said.
“Make what happen?”
“Fuck if I know,” I said.
Kayvon thought I would hit it off with Jorel Decker, the aforementioned J-Dog, but it was also a chemistry test with the band. Now that they were popular, I was interested in directing their next video. We met up at a club across the street from the arena. It was a small place, but not so small that it could hide that it was dead on a Thursday night. It was a Tampa club trying to look Miami, with clean lines and white lacquer. We got a table and the band got me a bottle of champagne. I wore a white dress, so I looked like I was doing some sort of camouflage with the white tables and couches. I could see what Kayvon meant about them being sceney. They were dressed nice for supposedly hard rockers.
Girls started arriving, and they were all over the band. I wasn’t looking to hook up with anyone—I was still looking to get rid of Moz—so that was the end of my conversation with Jorel. He got up and was talking to a blonde. So, I sat on the couch, the only one left sitting at the table because all the guys got up to hit on the women. I texted for reinforcements, and a girlfriend, Amanda, said she would come. In the meantime, I would just people-watch—take in the mating dance of rockers and hot girls.