Trophy Kid
Authors: Steve Atinsky
contents
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Marian Bodnar and Justin Rosenholtz for their helpful suggestions and encouragement after reading the first draft. Special thanks to my editor, Jodi Keller, whose magical red pen (actually it was a number two pencil) made a lot of unnecessary material disappear, and to my publisher, Beverly Horowitz, who believed I could write books for young readers.
prologue
I’m a trophy kid. You know, a status symbol. I haven’t been in the news lately, but I’d be surprised if you haven’t heard of me. My adoptive mother is America’s Sweetheart and Academy Award–winning actress Greta Powell. My adoptive father is actor turned director, turned producer, turned international crusader for human rights, turned political candidate Robert Francis. Greta and Robert won me in a bidding war with eight other high-profile power couples and a few bachelor billionaires. I still hold the record for the most expensive adoption: $3.2 million.
It was in Dubrovnik, near the end of the war in Yugoslavia. I was three years old, holding the hand of my mother, walking to my sister’s school, when several loud explosions went off around us. One of the blasts seemed to have come from where my sister’s school was located. My mother pushed me into a doorway and told me to stay still. She said she would be back in a few minutes with my sister. I saw her disappear around a corner. The next moment there was an explosion on the block she had turned onto. I ran into the street after her. The shelling continued. Something small and sharp hit me just above my right eye and I started crying. Still I kept running after my mother. A Croatian soldier came into the street and picked me up. I screamed for my mother as he carried me to safety. It was all captured on camera and broadcast on news stations around the world.
I was taken to the nearest military facility. All I could tell the soldiers was my first name, Josef. They called me Joey. There was an exhaustive search to find the parents or any relatives of the little blond boy with blue eyes and newly sewn stitches over his right eyebrow, who had wandered into the street while missiles were exploding all around him.
Soldiers took turns playing with me and distracting me with ice cream and chocolates when I cried for my mother. All the while, the cameras rolled.
One morning, two Croatian soldiers took me to the neighborhood where I had been rescued. Several camera crews tagged along. The soldiers took me door to door, asking me, “Is this where you live?”
“No,” I said over and over again—until we came to a green apartment building.
“Mommy!” I said excitedly, running up the inside stairs. At the top was our apartment. I tried to open the door, but it was locked. One of the soldiers forced it open.
I ran from room to room looking for my mother. She wasn’t there, of course. I didn’t call out for my daddy. Only a few days before I ran into the street after my mother, she had told me that my father was in heaven and wouldn’t be coming home. He had been an engineer in the army and had been killed when the Serbs blew up the bridge he was rebuilding. I’ve always liked the fact that my father was a soldier who built things rather than blew them apart.
After I’d searched every room, I started crying. One of the soldiers took my hand and led me out of the apartment. I took one look back, just in case my mother and sister had been playing hide-and-seek and were now going to surprise me by leaping out of a closet. But they didn’t.
The soldiers took me through the building, asking whoever was at home if they knew of any relatives my family might have. They shook their heads with pitiful looks in their eyes.
“Okay, Joey, we’re going back to the base,” one of the soldiers said, placing a gentle hand on my shoulder.
“Can we go to heaven first?” I asked hopefully.
That’s the line all the news broadcasts focused on. I know, because I’ve watched the tapes too many times to count.
A British politician and his wife made the first bid to adopt me. Once it got out that they’d offered the Croatian government $100,000 for me, things started getting crazy. A Saudi prince, hoping to improve his image after one of his relatives blew up an embassy, doubled their offer and threw in one of his finest Arabian horses as a symbol of good intent. A French industrialist who’d made his fortune exploiting the people and resources of a small third-world country upped the price to $400,000 and promised another half million to care for other orphans of the war. There were bids from Japan, Canada, Australia, and Germany, but the Americans were not to be outdone when it came to generosity. At least four American couples made offers to adopt me.
Greta Powell and Robert Francis had been featured in tabloid headlines for months—ever since a paparazzo’s long-distance lens had caught them together on what they thought was an isolated beach in Thailand. Their spouses weren’t too happy about it, but Greta and Robert became bigger stars than ever.
Greta and Robert had just returned from their honeymoon in Cancún when they heard about the British politician’s offer to adopt me. My soon-to-be parents set their publicity and legal teams in motion. After hundreds of phone calls to lawyers, ambassadors, ranking members of the U.S. Congress, the UN, and the Croatian government, plus an appearance on
Larry King Live,
I was placed in the custody of just-married Greta Powell and Robert Francis.
Here’s the final deal:
$600,000 to the Croatian government,
$400,000 to orphanages throughout the former Republic of Yugoslavia,
$400,000 to UNICEF,
$800,000 in legal fees,
and a commitment to produce an
Orphans of War
telethon with no fewer than fifteen A-list celebrities participating, valued at $1 million.
Total payment for one Croatian orphan: $3.2 million.
This is my true story. How it came to be told began three years ago.
one
Robert’s attorney, Lawrence Weinstein, was the one who came up with the idea for me to write this book. He suggested I tell my “incredible and inspiring” story to celebrate the tenth year of my adoption. Empire Books, a big New York publisher, agreed and put $75,000 into my trust fund. I was to get another $75,000 when I finished the book.
Robert mentioned the idea to me at dinner a few nights before I went with Uncle Larry, as he liked to be called, to New York. Robert was leaving the next day to join Greta in Kenya, where they were going to participate in a “famine awareness mobilization” event before going to Greece to shoot their latest movie,
Blood Luster III.
“You’ve got all summer to write it, so school won’t get in the way, and you’ll be earning your own money,” Robert said while carving a medium-rare steak prepared by our cook, Octavia. “And there’s going to be a writer from the
New York Times
working on the book with you, so all you really have to do is tell him your story—he’ll do the rest.”
A thought flashed through my mind. “Can I write it myself?” I asked.
My nine-year-old sister, Guava, looked up from the peas she had been arranging into neat little rows on her plate. “You can’t write a book,” she said.
“Why not?” I said.
She thought about it a minute, then shrugged. “Daddy, can I write a book, too?”
Robert ignored her question. “Why would you want to write it by yourself?” Robert asked suspiciously.
He must have been thinking that if I wrote it myself, it would turn into the sort of tell-all book kids of celebrities sometimes write, revealing all sorts of horrible things, like how their dads only spoke to them four-point-five times a month or their moms treated them as accessories instead of as children, both of which would be true in my case.
“It’ll be more fun that way,” I said, wearing the same poker face I’d seen him use when he’d appeared on
Gambling with the Stars.
“You’re thirteen years old. What do you know about writing a book? No, no, we’ll get the guy from the
Times
to be your cowriter.”
The phone rang. Perhaps it was fate, or maybe it was just coincidence, but the caller was John Handleman, the publisher of Empire Books.
“Yes, he’s totally on board. Very excited when I told him,” Robert said. “Only he has this crazy idea that he should write the book by himself.” He let out a little chuckle.
There was a long pause, and then Robert began to do a lot of nodding and repeating “Yes, yes,” over and over again. It made me think about what he always said when I didn’t do what he wanted:
You’re in big trouble, mister
.
“Your dad told me, and I think it’s a terrific idea,” John Handleman said. Larry and I sat on a sofa facing him in his large corner office in midtown Manhattan. “This will make a great story,” he continued. “A thirteen-year-old refugee writing a book on his own. Fantastic!”
“I think we just sold another fifty thousand copies,” declared Margo Reiss, the marketing director, from a chair on my right. “Oh, did your father tell you? We’re going to donate one dollar from every book sold—after cost, of course—to the International Relief Fund for Children.”
John Handleman stared at me across the coffee table, which was strewn with presents—mostly kids’ books published by Empire, but also a baseball autographed by Derek Jeter and an iPod loaded with songs from the BLAM music club, which was owned by the same company that owned the book publisher. It seemed that Empire, like me, had been adopted by a rich parent.
“Of course, we can’t
really
let you write the book by yourself,” Handleman said with a little conspiratorial laugh. “So we’ve hired a ghostwriter to help you. But it will be your book, believe me. And of course, your name will be the only one on it.”
John picked up the phone and hit a button. “Janine, is Tom Dolan here? Great, send him in.”
“You’re going to love Tom,” Handleman said. “He’s ghost-written several books for us. You know the autobiography for the band Watermelon Head? Tom wrote that. Those guys couldn’t put a sentence together between the five of them.”
“Six of them,” chimed Margo.
“Right.”
When Tom Dolan entered the room, he looked more like a baseball player than a writer. Sort of like Kevin Costner, except Tom was taller, had less hair, and wore glasses. I later learned from Margo that Tom had, in fact, played minor league baseball.
John explained how the process would work: Tom would come over to our house five mornings a week and I’d tell him my story. Simple as that.
It seemed to me that the ghostwriter setup wasn’t all that different from the cowriter one, except that it would give the
appearance
that I’d written the book by myself. And it was saving Empire Books a lot of money.
Tom said, “You chew gum?”
I nodded.
“Good. Cause I chew a lot of gum when I write, and I’m not sure I’d be comfortable chewing in front of a nonchewer. You know what I mean?”
I instantly liked Tom. Not because of the gum remark, which I thought was kind of lame, but because the look on his face seemed to be saying,
I don’t take this too seriously and neither should you.
“I like gum,” I said.
“Great.” Tom grinned. “Then I’ll take the job. If it’s all right with you, of course.”
“It’s all right with me,” I said.
Tom held out his arm and we shook hands.
“Excellent,” said John Handleman. “I’ll have Janine draw up the contracts.”
