The Brand (12 page)

A group of eight tough-looking bodyguards in
dark suits and dark sunglasses surrounded and protected him from
the menacing media people as if he was a political figure of note
as he left the police station and went to the waiting car. He sat
at the back seat of the bullet-proof Mercedes Benz S-Guard and was
extremely quiet until it reached the magnificently-built mansion at
The Hamptons. His fiancée was there, waiting for him. He was
thoroughly relieved to see her. A warm, tender feeling engulfed him
and he wept as he hugged her strongly. But after a short while she
pulled out of his arms and took a step back.

‘Get a grip on yourself, Tony. This thing
between us will never work. You know it and I know it too. I’m
sorry, but I can’t marry you.’

The New Year did not start on a good note for
Joelyn Smith, ex-Vermuelen, née Smit.

While the Hollywood party scene exploded to
full mode on New Year’s Eve, Joelyn spent the night in the quiet of
her Malibu home and would not be enticed outside. She had recently
learned, by method of a home kit, that she was pregnant. The home
pregnancy testing kit had been bought two days prior to New Year’s
Eve by one of her personal assistants, to avoid public speculation
if Joelyn did the purchase herself. For two months now, her period
had not come. It was the first time such an odd occurrence affected
her body. The home pregnancy kit had showed positive results for
pregnancy, sending Joelyn into stunned silence and a subsequent
depression. There was no doubt in her mind that Anthony Ryzor was
responsible for her present condition, but there was a considerable
amount of doubt on her part about what she would do about the
pregnancy.

On the one hand, Joelyn was not prepared to
have a baby at this time of her life. She was twenty-seven, her
film career was soaring, her music career was successful, she had
endorsement deals to honor, and she had a fashion line on the
pipeline to be released soon that depended on her public image as a
single girl for its success. In short, Brand Jo S, as she was
affectionately known by her multitude of fans, was presently hot
property and she wanted to grow the intensity of that fire to more
strength. A baby right now would put a stop to those plans. Indeed,
she was afraid that a baby at this time of her life would kill her
career in its tracks. On the other hand, Joelyn’s feminine side
thought it would be lovely to have a baby of her own creation, her
own flesh and blood she would nurture and watch growing up. Indeed,
Joelyn Smith was caught between a rock and hard place.

By the end of January 2012, Joelyn was in a
clinically unstable state of mind. She had no appetite, she was
finding it hard to sleep without the aid of sleeping pills, and was
as a consequence in a severely bad mood. Unable to fully trust her
staff with the handling of her present “situation”, Joelyn drove
herself in her brand new Aston Martin convertible, a Christmas
present she had bought for herself, to the Hollywood home of her
agent, Rebecca Lindland. Rebecca lived in exquisite opulence
because of the high fees she charged her clients. Her clients never
complained because Rebecca was exceptionally good at what she did,
and occasionally went beyond the call of duty to preserve the
dignity of her valued clients. A damaged and broken actor would
quickly become jobless, and a jobless actor was worth nothing in
her books, so Rebecca tried all she could to keep her clients out
of trouble if they so required.

On the 5
^th
of January, feeling guilty about her decision to resolve
her current crisis by terminating her pregnancy, and not informing
Raizer T about it, but strengthened to solid courage by two glasses
of Johnnie Walker Green Label whisky, Joelyn smith was picked up
from her Malibu beachfront property by a long, black Mercedes Benz
S500 with dark windows to conceal its occupants. It took her to a
private clinic in Burbank, California, owned by one Dr. Rajesh
Amla, a renowned gynecologist who had been educated at a top
medical school in India and had become a millionaire by offering
his services to wealthy Californians.

Dr. Amla’s staff were all bound by a code of
secrecy that made it libelous for them to divulge the goings-on at
the clinic to anyone, even their most intimate sexual partners, so
Joelyn’s secret was safe with the clinic. Dr. Amla performed some
tests on her and confirmed to her that her pregnancy was two months
old. Joelyn sighed and told the good doctor to remove the offending
fetus from her womb.

The most fascinating fact about Jansen
Vermuelen’s current life was that she had gone through the previous
year without winning a Grand Slam or a major WTA tournament, yet
she was recognized in America and the rest of the world as “tennis
star Jansen Vermuelen”. Now 21, she was a brand ambassador for
Peugeot, courtesy of a deal organized and finalized for her by her
sports agent. She currently drove herself around New York in a
Peugeot 308CC, a white convertible coupé with an attractive body,
that the automaker had given to her for free. After her appearances
in a network TV sitcom, her popularity in America had soared to
such levels that she made it to the top ten of
Forbes
magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of
2011.

Jansen also had a manager, and he saw to it
that she was invited to a 2011 Christmas party that showcased
America’s foremost young talent under-25, picked from various
fields such as sports, music, film, TV, gymnastics and so forth. At
the party, Jansen had attracted the eye of a smooth-talking boy of
19, who had the world’s teenagers and tweens eating out of his
hands with his songs and dance moves. Jansen and the boy excited
the American media with their fling that ensued after Christmas but
was over before the New Year came.

When 2012 came, the people managing Jansen
Vermuelen’s life and those benefitting from her existence in the
world engineered for her to host a reality TV programme that was
aired on ESPN. The programme grouped together thirty men and women
competing for a major prize of $500,000 by playing tennis. Each
week, a member of the group of thirty men and women was eliminated
from the competition using ways devised specifically for purposes
of the show. Each week, a renowned professional tennis player from
the past or modern game was featured on the programme mentoring the
competitors. Regardless of the fact that Jansen had won only the US
Open in 2010 to justify her presence as the host of a reality TV
tennis programme, and that she was still relatively inexperienced
to be in that programme anyway, the show received high ratings and
catapulted Jansen Vermuelen to higher levels of stardom. Naturally,
her presence on the show had nothing to do with her experience or
inexperience. It was because of two basic factors: she was
beautiful, and she was a growing brand.

At the end of January of the New Year, when
the show was still in its initial stages, Jansen Vermuelen signed
an endorsement deal with Maybelline, New York, to be the face of
the cosmetics giant’s beauty products. Around that time, she
appeared in a popular rock band’s music video that was receiving
widespread circulation across music channels and YouTube. Owing to
the contract held with Nike, she was also appearing on billboards
across the US, appearing in magazines and TV commercials promoting
the sportswear giant’s products.

The people of America and elsewhere loved
Jansen Vermuelen for her clean public image, her self-discipline
and her sedate lifestyle. Overall, parents thought she was a good
role model for teenage children; teenage girls wanted to be
beautiful and talented as she was, and teenage boys and young men
had pictures of her on their bedroom walls, in their phones and on
their computer screens. The media, unsatisfied with the
scandal-free lifestyle of this public personality, wanted things of
a salacious nature to connect with Jansen’s name and therefore
benefit strongly by mentioning her name in their publications.
Jansen Vermuelen was currently hot property in the entertainment
industry, and anyone with a business degree understood that.
Businesses, large and small, understood that there was a lot of
money to be made from using Jansen Vermuelen’s name, and they
wanted to make the most of it before she expired into has-been
territory, as most famous people are wont to do at one stage or
another in their fickle lives.

Because Jansen Vermuelen was a brand, and
therefore a business that made money for a lot of people, she was a
walking, talking, breathing company. And as all successful
companies have people running them, Jansen’s handlers included
lawyers, agents, managers, accountants, publicists and personal
assistants, all of them collectively termed in some quarters of
society as her “people”.

Realizing the strong connection Jansen had
with the public, especially with the younger generation, her people
again brought up the subject of Jansen singing pop songs, to which
she again flatly refused, reinforcing her earlier assertion that
she was not a good singer, and would never fool the world into
believing that she was one. In an interview with the South African
edition of
FHM
men’s
magazine, in whose pages she appeared in tasteful but sizzling
pictures and whose cover she graced, she expressed her
disgruntlement at people who had misconceptions about her job –
though, to be strictly honest, Miss Vermuelen nowadays earned money
from plenty of varied channels it was difficult to define exactly
what she did for a living – and believed that she was a magician
who couldn’t fail at anything. She affirmed her earlier assertion,
uttered in private, that although every other celebrity had delved
into music, her passion for music only stretched as far as
listening to songs made by others. She would never make a music
recording, and that was the end of that particular discussion.
Thank you.

Meanwhile, the media, perhaps out of jealousy
or just plain malice, continued trying to connect Jansen Vermuelen
with scandal. Consequently, there developed within the public fold
intensifying speculation about Jansen Vermuelen’s private life.
Considering her youth, Jansen was remarkably mature at handling
this intense public interest in her life. Of course, people have to
be forgiven, and designated as mentally unstable to be interested
in what you eat, who you sleep with, how you handle yourself in the
toilet, when you lost our virginity…etc. Still, the tabloids
persisted with their obsession over Miss Vermuelen’s life.

Meanwhile, they did not know that for three
months now, Jansen had been privately pursued by the playboy son of
a wealthy Saudi prince. The prince’s son was forty-two, looked
thirty-two, was undeniably handsome, and had been educated in the
fundamentals of business at Harvard University in Boston,
Massachusetts. He spoke English like a native New Yorker, and he
had various business interests in America, England and South
Africa. Added to that, he was also widely known to have bedded some
of the world’s most beautiful and famous women. His last quest had
been America’s newest sex symbol, Joelyn Smith, but she had
politely refused his offer of a romantic liaison. After several
attempts and plenty of rejections, the prince’s son had stopped
pursuing Ms. Smith and promptly turned his attentions to America’s
fresh-faced darling with an untainted public image, the variously
talented young thing known as Jansen Vermuelen, born in South
Africa twenty-one years previously but calling America home since
the age of nineteen.

Vindictive by nature, the prince’s son had
utilized his inexhaustible financial resources to do a thorough
research on his latest quest. He was fully aware of the severed
family ties between Jansen Vermuelen and Joelyn Smith, and their
private fall-out over their mutual connection to Byron Taylor. To
prove a point – stupid as it was – to Joelyn Smith, he relentlessly
pursued Jansen Vermuelen for over three months, sending her
expensive gifts and using his wealth to appear at parties she went
to. The Saudi playboy’s dedicated mission hit two major snags: the
first was that a beautiful, famous young woman like Jansen is
courted by virtually every man she meets, from photographers to
politicians to Hollywood stars to male models to Wall Street
tycoons, the list is endless; secondly, it is particularly
difficult to impress a wealthy woman with expensive gifts, the
reason being that she has an over-abundance of money to buy those
gifts herself if she wants them. To win her charms, her hunter must
be strictly original and thoroughly imaginative in his approach.
The prince’s son’s education at the world’s best schools had taught
him to be methodical, and his father’s guidance had taught him
patience. These qualities helped him secure a dinner date with the
elusive Miss Vermuelen sometime in the middle of February. That
dinner was the beginning of bigger things to come between them

Joelyn Smith, ex-Vermuelen, née Smit, had
arrived at the pinnacle of success. Acting jobs were coming to her
from all directions. She was at liberty to select those she wanted
and reject those she deemed as rubbish. She was being paid large
sums of money to lend her voice to other music artists’ music. She
was also nominated in five categories for the Motion Picture
Academy Awards of that year for her performance in the Chris
Woodyard-directed film.