Streets of Smoke and Secrets

When Meghan Kowalski's father read Little Red Riding Hood to his daughter, he was

amused by the illustration of the big bad wolf in the bedtime storybook the family used. This

showed a suave, smiling wolf dressed in a suit hailing Little Red Riding Hood on the way to her

grandmother's place.

"You might meet lots of wolves when you are older," said Kowalska senior, as he thought

that his Meghan might have inherited much from his mother who had been a beauty queen in her

day.

"You mean there are wolves around here?" exclaimed little Meghan.

"No, no wolves now," said her father. "I meant that you might meet them later, when you

are older."

"There are wolves, then," said Meghan, looking at the bedroom window in alarm, thinking

that there might be wolves right outside.

"No, no, no wolves around here," said Mr Kowalski, sorry he had made this adult comment.

"There are no wolves in Los Angeles." That was where the family happened to live. "None at all."

This calmed little Meghan enough to listen to the rest of the story – a sanitised version with

the grandmother locked in the closet rather than eaten – although she still found the wolf scary. As

she grew up, however, she lost her fear of wolves in dark forests, especially as there were no forests

near her up-scale LA suburb. Instead, she became absorbed in school and her friends including

Connie Leighton, who also showed promise of being able to catch men's eyes when she got older.

There were sleepovers and shared confidences which developed into confessions of secret

crushes and talk about fending off unwanted attention from boys. Then Meghan took drama and

was told that she could act. She also took singing lessons and thought she could sing. Connie took

singing lessons and was told that she could sing. She also took drama classes and thought she could

act. The two girls competed for the lead role of Blanche DuBois in the school's production of

Tennessee William's classic A Streetcar Named Desire. Meghan won and turned the play into a

triumph, much to Connie's dismay. They competed in a local singing contest which Connie won

hands down, wowing the crowd, with Meghan coming a distant fourth, mainly on her looks, much

to her dismay.

Now each other's nemesis the two girls competed for Prom Queen which, to Meghan's fury,

Connie won handily on a school-wide popular vote despite Meghan campaigning hard and having

developed into a stunning blonde who was already getting regular modelling work. She had been

discovered by a modeling agent at sixteen while at a street fair with her mother. The now not little

Megan took the defeat so personally that she even told the principal that the election must have

been fixed. This accusation enraged the Leighton family and embarrassed her father, who had to

work hard to smooth over wounded feelings. He wondered what had happened to the girl who had

to be reassured over wolves.

Both girls easily got into the American Academy of Dramatic Arts joining Connie's older

brother Ty, also a singer. Meghan dated Ty for a time, infuriating Connie who was still sore about

the vote rigging allegation, then dumped him, which infuriated her even more. She accused Megan

of deliberately breaking her brother's heart. Meghan moved on to a good looking senior with acting

talent she met during a staging of Macbeth, only for the boy to drop her in favour of dating Connie,

whom he met during the musical theatre programme. Meghan accused Connie of deliberately

stealing her boyfriend. Meanwhile, just as Mr Kowalski had warned many years before, both girls

discovered that there were plenty of male wolves.

Soon after, Connie dropped out of college and all contact with Meghan in favour of fronting

a band performing mainly covers in high schools, hotels, and bars, anywhere there was an audience

and a dance floor. That band eventually dissolved but Connie and the drummer found two guitarists

with some original material. She had an affair and a hit single with one of the guitarists before the

affair, fame and drugs tore the group apart, but not before an agent scouted her for a band to

showcase material from a rising songwriter. For Connie could sing, and that counted for something

in the music business. The first hit was helped by a video so salacious it had to be re-edited to meet

the requirements of the censors and prompted a concerned call from Connie's mother.

"It's the music business Ma," said Connie.

The video helped push that first single up the charts which was followed by another, solid

hit by the rising star who found she had a knack for spotting potential chart toppers. Suddenly

Connie Leighton was in the big time.

Meanwhile, the bank that Mr Kowalski had worked for as a senior executive hit major

trouble and the stress of picking up the pieces, plus a lung infection, brought on a latent heart

condition. His wife and two daughters, Meghan and the somewhat younger Madison, then

discovered that Mr Kowalski had put the family's fortune, plus money borrowed against the family

home, into the collapsed bank. On top of this, a long-standing family friend and financial advisor

also caught in the bank disaster responded to the crisis by stealing his client's money, including

Meghan's accumulated modelling fees, and vanishing. Meghan's father should have also warned his

daughter, and himself, about wolves in the financial world.

The Kowalskis were abruptly reduced to a miserable two-bedroom apartment and to having

to borrow from family to pay for a modest funeral. Meghan's degree was abandoned in favour of

full-time modeling work, and her mother was forced to take a sales assistant job in an antique

furniture store. A keen golfer, Mrs Kowalski also had to give up her expensive golf club

membership, declining a well-meant but humiliating offer from friends to pay her dues until she

was on her feet.

Fortunately, Meghan was a modeling natural knowing instinctively how to work with the

camera. She put off moving to the fashion industry capital of New York to see her mother and sister

through the tough time, but remaining in the movie heartland proved an advantage in that she was

handed a one-off role in a sitcom, for which she reluctantly took the name Clarise Chalmers.

"It's branding," said the agent she had at the time. "No one pays to see shows with a

Meghan Kowalski in it, but they will pay to see a Clarise Chalmers."

As acting and screen presence still counted for a lot in Hollywood, not to mention Meghanturned-Clarise's considerable beauty, the one-off appearance turned into a recurring role with one

episode featuring a shower scene so salacious that her mother expressed concern.

"It's Hollywood, mother," said Clarise-Meghan.

She auditioned for the lead in a major treasure-hunting adventure film not expecting to get it

and ended up with the unlikely minor part of a blonde barbarian queen which attracted critical

attention. After that came a role as the other woman in a straight-to-streaming-services rom-com

movie so syrupy that Clarise had trouble watching it. She acted well enough in another cheap film

for the audience to suspend disbelief that a luminously beautiful young woman was somehow a

dowdy, lonely New York café waitress.

Her mother and sister now out of poverty, Meghan finally moved to New York to do a

season on Broadway plus modeling, sharing a cheap apartment with another actress who drove her

crazy, then moved back to Los Angeles when she got her big break playing an international model

turned evil mastermind. She trained for weeks with a female fencing grandmaster for a sequence

where she duelled with the hero while in her underwear. A role as the girlfriend of a superhero led

to a major part in a heist movie. Clarise had decided to show flesh on screen, within reason, and a

steamy shower scene that raised questions about the film's classification – which she did despite

detesting her co-star - helped make it a box office smash hit.

Abruptly Meghan found that she had bypassed the long-slow grid of auditions to become a

star. Offers of all kinds – financial, promotional, romantic, sexual and for media interviews –

poured in. She fell out with her first, down-at-heel agent over accepting the lead in a remake of the

Audrey Hepburn – Peter O'Toole 60s classic How to Steal a Million. The agent thought that the

fledgling star should make another film that allowed her to show more flesh and offered more

money, meaning a larger fee for him. Meghan proved to be the better judge of projects when the

remake became a hit, and the other film bombed.

The rising star signed with a big management company that promised her the world, only for

these promises to mean the company took bigger fees, in return for sending her endless scripts

featuring empty-headed blondes that never got out of the shower. Meghan accepted that being

blonde was part of the Clarise brand, but she wanted roles with more class than simulated sex in

showers. She told this to the big agency executives who agreed, nodded vigorously and smiled then

sent her more scripts with shower scenes, along with more modelling and endorsement work than

she could possibly do.

A major distraction from these career and management issues, however, were very

handsome leading men and drugs and partying. Meghan-Clarise never had any trouble attracting

men but now they flocked around in packs howling. Hot, rich, successful, single men – at least they

said they were single – drove her in expensive sports cars to parties in chateaus, super yachts,

converted castles and plush apartments while talking of huge business deals and major movie roles.

She discovered a previously unsuspected wild streak, which a rich, handsome man – preferably a

Latin type – could bring out.

Meghan went swimming in the Seine in Paris with the cast of one film on a dare only to be

fished out and fined by bemused French police.

"The river is being cleaned up, Mademoiselle Chalmers," explained a senior Parisian police

officer in perfect English, "but there is still too much pollution to permit public swimming."

The Italian police were less tolerant of a similar incident involving the Trevi Fountain in

Rome, where Meghan happened to be on a modelling assignment, as they found small amounts of

drugs on some of the party. Fortunately, they did not find drugs on Meghan, but only because she

was already high.

"You may be a rival in beauty for Anita Ekberg, Signoria Chalmers," a senior Italian police

officer told her in perfect English, referring to the classic scene in the 1960 film La Dolce Vita

featuring that star cavorting in the fountain. "But too many tourists have been in the fountain since

then. We will have to increase the fine."