The front door of the Mitchell house slammed shut.
Sarah Mitchell dropped her schoolbag onto the floor of the kitchen.
The whole house smelled like burnt coffee and the chemical tang of her mother's hairspray.
The mid-70s suburban landscape stretched on the window in rows of identical driveways and houses that could be seen everywhere in Cincinatti, Ohio.
She froze.
The National Enquirer sat on the kitchen table, face-up, positioned like a trap.
Her older sister had left it there.
"HOLLYWOOD'S DARKEST SECRET: CONNOR HAUSER'S MYSTERY CHILD"
Below the headline, a grainy photograph of Duke Hauser exiting a studio building with his jacket rumpled, wearing sunglasses.
Sarah's stomach dropped.
She pulled out a chair and sat down slowly.
The article was dated yesterday. She'd been too busy with her history paper to even check the newsstand.
The article detailed a "mystery mother" who was "believed to be of European royalty" and painted Duke Hauser as a "reclusive media mogul" who "jealously guards his secrets."
It even mentioned a few women that Duke Hauser had interacted and that could be the mother of his supposed kid, but thanks to Duke reclusive and prviate nature, the speculations were very wild.
Barbara Bouchet, Diane Keaton, Susan Backlinie and even Claudia Rumpling were all mentioned as possible mothers.
It also speculated about offshore bank accounts and hidden trust funds, transforming a personal matter into a conspiracy.
Sarah frowned.
She'd read the article twice by the time she reached the bottom of the page. Something about the tone bothered her.
Not just the sensationalism, that was expected from the Enquirer but the way it tried to connect the story to the Church Committee hearings still dominating the news.
The article implied that a man with Duke's background, orphan, military service, and then sudden wealth could be hiding something.
Sarah didn't buy it.
She'd been a fan of Paramount for years.
She had a signed copy of Big Fish and Love Story on her bookshelf, after she took a one person trip to Cleveland to get in the one and only signing tour Duke Hauser had ever done in the East Coast just before Jaws launched him a household name.
She'd waited in line for hours at a bookstore in Cleveland for that signature.
Her younger brother, Danny, was obsessed with Ben 10 wearing a Mattel Omnitrix toy on his wrist that he'd begged their parents for.
Sarah had been the one to take him to the local toy store to find it, enduring the screaming toddlers because she knew how much it meant to him.
The thing was, Sarah didn't believe the rumors.
She'd heard them around and on news, how the news sometimes treated his refusal to appear on television with the exception of a few times as proof he was some isolated eccentric.
She didn't care. She'd been reading his work since she was twelve, and she liked it.
She turned the page of the Enquirer, scanning past the speculation until she found a small, secondary column.
A competing daily paper had published Duke's official response to the rumors and The Enquirer had reprinted it to give its own commentary.
It wasn't a long, defensive brief crafted by lawyers. The statement was actually rather short.
"I confirm that I am the father of a young son. I ask the press for basic privacy for my family matters. No further comment will be made on this personal matter."
A smile spread across Sarah's face.
The statement fit the worldview she had mapped onto him through his stories.
After all, he didn't owe the public a confession.
Leaving the tabloid on the kitchen table, she walked upstairs.
Her bedroom door was covered in stickers, a faded Paramount logo, a peace sign, and a movie poster for Love Story that she'd bought at a flea market.
She pushed open the door. The room was small, barely big enough for a bed and a desk, but Sarah had made it her own.
The walls were filled with film stills, magazine clippings, and movie posters their edges curling from the cheap tape she'd used to hang them.
On the movie posters covering the wall above her bed, Love Story was front and center, the iconic image of Harrison Ford and Blythe Danner together, was a familiar sight.
A collection of hardcover first editions lined her wooden bookshelf. Among them her signed copy of Big Fish, Duke Hauser's signature was a messy scrawl, barely legible, but she knew it was his.
She pulled the book from the shelf and layed on her bed, cradling it in her lap.
She liked all of Duke's stories except Star Wars and Neuromancer, which she bought but decided against reading after a few chapters.
The cover was worn, the spine cracked from years of rereading.
She'd lost count of how many times she'd returned to certain passages, underlining them in pencil and scribbling notes in the margins.
She thought about her own father, who worked the night shift at the factory and came home smelling of oil.
Sarah sat by her bedroom window, looking out over the gray Ohio neighborhood.
She grabbed a spiral-bound notebook from her desk and began to jot down her thoughts on this.
She hoped, more than anything, that this didn't damage the chances of her family trip for Paramount Park opening next year.
She'd been saving up for months, setting aside babysitting money and birthday cash to buy merchandise that was not available in Ohio.
She also wanted to take Danny to check if there was a Ben 10 area.
Sarah opened the novel to the first chapter, and started wondering what would be the next book Duke would publish.
___
2000 miles away, Roger Clemens sat behind a battered metal desk in a claustrophobic trade-paper office in Los Angeles.
Roger had built his reputation trading favors with fixers, burying scandals for exclusives, and playing by the unwritten rules.
The system had been predictable and profitable for men like him until recently.
Then came the New Hollywood Wave revolution, led by a vertically integrated monster like Duke.
These new Hollywood titans owned production, distribution, and publishing.
They didn't need to trade favors with aging gossip columnists to generate buzz or sell tickets.
Roger gripped a pair of steel scissors, carefully cutting out the Enquirer piece.
He dropped the jagged clipping into a manila folder labeled simply "Hauser." A literal repository of dirt, built over years of resentment and jealousy.
He was an old, angry man who wrote daily hit-pieces for pennies. He read through Duke's statement again, and a wave of frustration boiled in his chest and slammed his fist onto the desk.
Roger had desperately wanted a messy public denial.
He had prayed for a blood-in-the-water PR war that would feed his columns for a while.
The classic playbook demanded screaming matches, lawsuits, press conferences, and leaked court documents.
Duke's lack of drama robbed Roger of an easy victory.
The calm confirmation would starve the news cycle of oxygen.
You couldn't write an exposé about a man who simply shrugged and admitted the truth.
Grabbing a fresh sheet of paper, Roger rolled it into his mechanical typewriter.
He centered the bold title at the top: "The Emperor Has No Clothes."
He hammered out a opening paragraph about moral decay and corporate hypocrisy. Trying to paint the mogul as a degenerate fraud who preached family values while hiding a bastard child.
Mid-sentence, his instinct kicked in and he stopped, staring at the black ink.
If he went too negative, he risked alienating his readership. The public loved a juicy scandal, but they hated a bully.
The public always roots for the underdog and society held a strange reverence for paternal protectiveness.
If Roger attacked a father for shielding his kid from flashbulbs, readers would turn against him out of sympathy.
He ripped the page out and crumpled it, tossing it toward an overflowing wastebasket.
He needed a shift.
He rolled a fresh sheet into the machine, deleting the blunt insults.
Roger replaced the overt rage with open-ended questions.
He typed speculative inquiries designed to plant doubt in his readers' minds.
Who is the mystery mother? Why the secrecy? Is the child a tool for tax shelters or corporate optics?
Roger finished the columnal page from the typewriter. He signed his name at the bottom with a stroke of red ink.
He filed the column in his tray, ready for the morning print run.
He leaned back in his chair and stared at the Hauser folder.
He hadn't gotten the kill shot he craved. The empire remained standing, unbothered by tremors.
But Roger hoped the rumors would fester in the hidden corners of the industry.
Hollywood was a superficial town built on perceptions.
A tiny crack in the armor, no matter how small, always invited more pressure.
Roger turned off the dim desk lamp, leaving the office for the day.
___
Far from the cynical buzz of Los Angeles, Eleanor Vance sat at a small table in a kitchen in Houston, Texas.
The modest room smelled faintly of sweet tea and old paper.
Eleanor traced the rim of her ceramic mug, her eyes resting on the Enquirer sitting next to a bowl of fresh fruit.
The trashy magazine felt out of place in her neat home.
She had bought it purely on instinct at the grocery store, her heart skipping a beat the moment she saw his name on the cover while standing in the checkout aisle.
The article casually mentioned his unorthodox background, treating his early life as a brief footnote to the current scandal.
That single phrase brought back some memories from her time working at a crowded Texas orphanage years ago.
She remembered Connor, a quiet kid who struggled to read basic words.
The other children dismissed him, assuming his silence was a marker of slow intellect, even some of the teachers though he was mentally retarded.
Someone being called mentally retarded in this era meant he was slow of mind, not the slur it would become in the future.
Eleanor remembered that while the other boys played outside, Connor would sit for hours staring at discarded comic books and trying to draw his own.
She remembered the evenings when he would sneak out of the group home.
He would march to the local cinemas, slipping past ticket takers just to watch the films, with the police usually dragging him back when he inevitably got caught.
The matrons punished him, but the boy never stopped sneaking out.
Reading his refusal to deny his son parentage brought a sense of relief.
The Hollywood machinery had not eroded the stubborn young boy she once knew.
The young man who had dropped out and gone to work at 15 still existed beneath the suits and media empire.
She had been confused when Duke got his first hit movie, and even learning about his first book becoming a huge best seller.
Problems arose on her mind as she though how different Duke looked in his Night Live shows appearance where he would look confident, spoke up and looked at people in the eyes.
Of course, she chalk it up to the war changing his way of being. Eleanor stood and walked into the adjacent living room.
She reached behind a row of encyclopedias on her bookshelf and pulled down a leather scrapbook.
The pages chronicled his rise, she had collected newspaper clippings, magazine profiles, and rare interviews over the years.
She flipped to a recent photograph of him standing on a semi-constructed park.
She opened a kitchen drawer and pulled out a fountain pen. She smoothed a paper flat, and started writing a letter.
She knew she would never actually mail the letter.
She wrote to him anyway, pouring her pride onto the page.
She gently blew on the wet ink, waiting for the letters to dry. The stories we tell both to ourselves and to others shape our reality, relationships, and personal legacy.
Letter writing was a thing that made her calm, despite most people never seeing them.
Eleanor tucked the unmailed letter between the pages of the scrapbook, pressing the cover closed.
_____
difficult chapter to write as i struggle to write other POVs.