The Fame Game by Rona Jaffe Page A

slum I picked you out of, and I’m going to get four other girls who look just like you and call them the Satins. You think you can’t be replaced? You can be replaced in one minute. One minute! There are hundreds of little black slum bunnies just waiting for me to give them a chance to be the Satins. There are plenty of girls who can go ‘Ooh, ooh, ooh’ just like you’re doing now. Just watch it .”
    He didn’t say a word about replacing Silky, and it was so obvious that she was afraid they might take all their anger for Mr. Libra out on her when he was gone; but he had really scared them by yelling at them and when he got finished all the girls were crying and they didn’t look at Silky at all. She thought Mr. Libra had really gone too far. You couldn’t expect people to work and do their best when you told them they were worthless. The girls had feelings, too. Silky was really mad at him. She still liked the girls, and she hated Mr. Libra.
    “He has no right to talk like that,” she told the girls when Mr. Libra had left. “He’s the rottenest man in the world. Who does he think he is, Hitler?”
    “Hitler? Hitler?” Honey said. “Who the fuck is Hitler? Somebody from one of your books?”
    “What did you do, sleep through school?” Silky said. “Hitler was this white cat who went around killing children. He killed only about eight million people, is all. Mostly Jewish people.”
    “What the fuck has Jews got to do with them?” asked Ardra, who didn’t like Silky any more either.
    “He killed them because they were a minority and he hated them,” Silky said.
    “Yeah?” said Tamara. “When was this?”
    “Before we were born,” said Silky.
    “Yeah? Where did he live?”
    “In Germany.”
    “Well, no wonder I never heard of him,” said Honey.
    “What was his name again?” Tamara asked.
    “Hitler.”
    “Oh, yeah …” Beryl said. “I remember him. We had him in history class.”
    So they began calling Libra Hitler, and it made them feel a little better.
    They came back to New York to do the Let It All Hang Out Show, and Silky resumed with Dick. Then Dick was going to direct the Asthma Relief Telethon, and the girls would be on that. At the telethon Hitler-Libra introduced them to his new secretary, Gerry Thompson.
    Gerry was a really classy-looking girl, with straight red hair. She knew how to dress, too, Silky noticed at once. And she was pretty, and probably smart. Dick seemed to like her immediately.
    The minute Silky saw Dick looking at Gerry she got really sick to her stomach. It was one thing to imagine all the girls he took to his apartment at night when she wasn’t there, but it was another thing to see him in action. She thought she was going to choke. This Gerry was probably the kind of white girl he liked to date, and she was going to be trouble. The worst of it was she was nice, and not a bitch at all. It was obvious that Gerry didn’t dislike him but she wanted to get rid of him because she knew he belonged to Silky. There had been a sort of understanding between the two girls immediately: Silky knew Gerry liked her, and she felt friendly toward Gerry. It wasn’t Gerry’s fault that Dick liked her—she was just the kind of girl he would like—and that made it almost worse. It was as if Silky was powerless to change anything.
    But Silky knew one thing: she’d been fighting for her life as long as she could remember, and she wasn’t going to give up now. This Gerry looked soft, like a girl who’d always had things her own way and never had to fight for anything. Silky could teach her a thing or two about fighting. She wasn’t going to let Dick just drift away. She was going to make it her business to really make friends with Gerry, so the girl would feel too guilty to let Dick get anywhere. And she was going to be so sweet and cool around the house and so much a woman in bed that Gerry wouldn’t stand a chance. Dick was her whole life. What would Gerry know about a