Dirty Laundry

The Agency has one staff meeting per month, and Agency rules stipulated compulsory attendance for all staff persons working more than 10 hours per week, which was everyone. The monthly meeting made the central office extremely crowded, as the central Agency offices were never intended to house any agency of their type, let alone their size – more than 45 employees. Many Agency staff worked from home, or from their expansive, creatively-arranged office location three blocks from the central office. These staff meetings were inconvenient. But the Agency was turning 16 years old the day of this meeting. They’d easily outgrown the conditions of their birth, and were now crowding back into the home where they’d been born.

All-staff meetings were a chance for the CEO to check back in with the workers about the company mission, and the mission was always the same: to make Hannah Norman look good. Hannah Norman was the CEO of the most powerful private creative agency in the world, and she demanded perfection from her staff in exchange for their exorbitant salaries.

Her list of demands, which she typically announced at all-staff meetings, was never simple. In a typical meeting, she would berate her underlings for minor mistakes, praise herself for their best work, and rattle off incomprehensible streams of consciousness quietly while making close eye contact with some portion of the audience, expecting them to nod along in agreement with every word. But at its core, her simple demand was to be the most famous individual person on earth. She was demanding of the particulars of her celebrity, a micromanager. She engineered a vision, and her expensive creative team had a single task, revisited each month, to make her vision a reality.

At this April 1971 Agency staff meeting, Hannah Norman was celebrating her 17th birthday. Middle-managers served cake with begrudging enthusiasm.

Derek and Claire “Charlie” Norman, last heirs to the Norman fortune, had a little girl in 1954. Her name was Hannah. They’d recently seen Judy Garland in “A Star Is Born,” and decided to leave their fortune to their daughter by making her a celebrity. They identified strongly with the male lead, whose name was Norman, but he was a drunken lout. The female lead had pizzazz. She was cool.

Derek Norman was a renowned Broadway actor, whose repertoire included several of the top-grossing plays in the history of the medium. Hannah’s mother was a first-generation immigrant named Darra Hilgard who changed her name for show-business, and became an esteemed vocal coach whose clients included top talent. The man who would become her husband and the father of her child was one of her first clients, and he had talked her into a life together.

Hannah had no siblings, but she had the company of countless agents, directors, actors, makeup artists, grips, stage hands, choreographers, musicians, playwrights, and other various theatrical types to keep her company where a brother or sister may have only served to annoy.

In her youth, she’d studied dance, and made conscious efforts to learn styles unknown to her peers. After ballet and tap, she studied swing, cultural dances from Europe and Asia, ecstatic dance, and various freeform versions unidentifiable. She was graceful, and sleek, and she stayed fit by moving so often throughout her life. But she was never in the top tier of dancers internationally.

While she studied dance, her parents encouraged her to pursue other talents which they considered vital to her future: singing, public speaking, acting, comedy, music, painting, and calligraphy.

Her singing voice was average. Her public speaking coach told her once that she was “a natural,” which was a lie. Her acting was believable, in the way that a sack of potatoes labeled “onions” might very well contain onions. Her comedy was dry, lacked energy, and would occasionally elicit a pitiful laugh. Her talents on the piano and violin were refined to a point that one could almost listen, and almost appreciate, the sounds she brought forth. Her paintings were typical, often seeming unfinished. Her calligraphy was illegible. In short, she had all the makings of a child of privilege, whose parents would pay any amount to ensure that she would become a sensation.

Hannah Norman attended every arts academy, tutor, coach and special instruction imaginable before her 17th birthday. Her family insisted, and by age 17 she agreed, that she was born to be famous.

Unfortunately for Hanna Norman, the masses have a way of rejecting an individual without ever seeing them face-to-face. Sales for Hannah’s first album, released at age 14, were abysmal. She faded into, or rather remained in, obscurity soon after. She was proof that money can’t buy everything.

But it wasn’t that Hannah had failed to inherit her parents’ talents. Hannah’s parents were not in fact talented; they were expert liars. Derek Norman, legally named Derek Holder Norman, had never been in a Broadway play, though he had plenty of money and knew lots of show business people from his early life selling heroin to soon-to-fail actors. He’d convinced his widowed neighbor Darra Hilgard to marry him after doggedly pursuing her, to change her name, to share in his fortunes, and to lie about teaching people to sing. She’d immigrated to live underground, having actively supported the Nazi party in WWII, and so had no qualms about changing the nature of her lies in order to live a more comfortable life. She’d sometimes sing traditional songs from her home country of Lithuania. Nobody would ever ask her for a lesson, though she would have been happy to teach them. Darra, then Claire, then “Charlie,” taught Derek to sing her traditional songs as a part of their marriage pact, based on the lies they told together. Her nickname, Charlie, was unknown in origin to anyone but the couple. Derek joked with her one day, while concocting the imagined story of their lives, “I’m Fred Astaire, and you’re Charlie Chaplin,” in reference to a discarded plan to become “an actor” and “a comedian.” They did away with the comedy, but they kept the nickname. She’d sometimes call him Freddy when they made love. The nod to their deception would arouse him to no end.

Everyone’s parents are full of shit. Somehow, grandparents are amazing and incredible people. But our parents are all full of shit. Hannah’s parents were particularly so. They were wealthy enough to buy fame, having inherited ownership of Denver’s major industrial laundry company from Derek’s father, Grant Holder. Denver was a growing, bustling market for an industrial laundry. Several clients such as hospitals, mines, and photo-processing plants anchored the laundry to the community, and the community’s money. Norman Laundry was Denver’s gold standard for a long-standing and respectable business.

Norman Laundry was thus a perfect cover for money laundering and trafficking in illegal goods. Grant Holder also passed on to his only surviving son a sincere talent for deception and crime. His older son, Derek’s brother Merle, was killed in a drug deal. Derek picked up where his brother left off, reporting back to his father with wads of cash collected on the school yard. Derek was his father’s shining prodigy, and he helped his father grow the revenue of the family business substantially. It was a simple matter of concealing the true purpose of a given business deal. A child entering a school could serve as a perfect drug mule. A shipment of laundry from a hospital could easily disguise narcotics. The mining industry was connected closely to the rail shipping industry, which provided an avenue for illegal goods from out of state: mostly cigarettes and moonshine. Photo-processing was popular in Denver because of the local tourism industry and scenic, remote locations. Frank Gracey, the owner of the photo-processing plant, had explicit tastes, Derek learned from a big-mouthed delivery man who spoke openly about “Frank’s porno.” Norman Laundry would help Frank move pornography from the plants to the train stations, and return with money. The owner of the mining company, Red Smith, would drop off loads of his men’s clothes and pick up pallets of dirty magazines and drugs, skimming a little of everything for himself and receiving a flat rate of $50 for delivery. At the train yard, the magazines and prescriptions would earn guns, smokes, and booze, but mostly money. The shipments kept getting larger, and police occasionally seized a shipment, but the drivers were well-paid and tight-lipped – the driver who’d outed Frank ended up dead in an unsolved murder case. Norman Laundry was never suspected as the source for much of the sin and vice in the region. Their image was squeaky clean.

Hannah’s parents insisted she was entitled to fame. The Agency knew this because Derek and Charlie Norman had paid them to know it. Their little girl wanted to be a star, they insisted of the infant Hannah, and the Agency was to manufacture her stardom. She was innocent in all this for much of her childhood. Any generation of Holders, or Normans kept their innocence when they were young, before they took up the family work of robbing the American public. Hannah Norman was a tyrant of a celebrity, and the last generation in a long line of thieves, murderers and scoundrels.

Hannah needed a cab and she put it on the company account. When Hannah failed out of arts academy, her father wired her enough money each month so that her peers wouldn’t know she’d failed, and would believe she was transferring. When Hannah sold her first painting for ten dollars, having used thirty thousand dollars in gold leaf on the frame, her father did some quick math, then demanded she switch to acting, which had much greater revenue potential.

This was the eventual result of the industrial laundry building a substantial marketing department when Hannah was just one year old. That department eventually eclipsed the business’ budget. The Agency was a massive creative group which also happened to contain an industrial laundry facility. Company parties were known to involve elaborate food fights and other spectacles which an average business would fear cleaning up. This was the only indication the Agency were connected to a laundry business, let alone one so central to organized crime in Denver. Most of the creatives who worked for the Agency had no idea they were receiving funds directly from Norman Laundry.

None of the creatives could have imagined that their paychecks were made not from the publicity they generated for Hannah Norman, but from the sale of explicit imagery, weapons, and various intoxicants to various markets throughout the country.

Only an expert investigator with a background in genealogy might have been able to piece together that most of the markets where those illegal wares arrived were being run by the Holder crime family, to whom Hannah Norman was unwittingly a relative, and heiress. Her parents’ desire for her to become famous was a misguided attempt for Derek Holder to reform the family name, and to provide a front for money-laundering which wasn’t stuck in Denver, a town which he had grown to loathe.

Her 17th birthday was a remarkable one for the budding superstar. Hannah had finally, fully absorbed the sense of entitlement that her parents has sought to instill in her, via their berating of the Agency staff in front of her. “Don’t you realize who this child is? She is the daughter of Derek and Charlie Holder, two of the most talented people to ever produce a child! Her record is failing because you people aren’t working hard enough!” Countless extremely-talented artists and professionals and backing vocalists and choreographers were fired for not performing to expectations, while the untalented Hannah looked on.

Hannah had recently discovered the concept of “cool” through enjoying popular music, rather than simply listening to her own. Earlier on the day of the all-staff meeting, as she contemplated being 17, Hannah realized that the Agency, for all their press releases, media production, sloganeering, and outreach to influential people, celebrities, agents, for all their many paychecks cashed over the last 16 years of her life, they had failed at their mission. Hannah was not cool. And at the age of 17, she finally knew it.

Hannah was not talented but felt fully entitled to fame no less. She was innocent in all this, as much a victim of her parents’ vast deception as anyone who knew them. She was as innocent as any generation of Holders, or Normans when they were young, before they took up the family work of robbing the public and lost their innocence. But Hannah’s innocence by age 17 was fully giving way to her narcissism, and she herself began to advance untrue narratives about herself, which was to be the primary content and theme of her annual birthday speech. Truly, each year’s speech was documentation of her further descent into self-obsession.

“Attention, everyone. As you know, it’s my birthday,” she announced ceremoniously. Then she paused.

Senior managers recognized this pause as one Hannah would often take, where she expected affirmation. They began to applaud, and made eye contact with middle managers, who began applauding, making eye contact with supervisors, who began applauding and making eye contact with staff, who applauded momentarily before Hannah began her annual birthday speech. Hannah’s pauses created ripples of increasingly-unenthused recognition in her staff.

The speech was different than those she had given in the four years prior. At age 13, she began the tradition by demanding that everyone at the Agency – who alongside her parents were the only family she’d known – listen to her speak after they cut their cake. She prepared no remarks and rambled endlessly, mostly about how much she loves horses, though only to look at and never to touch or ride because they intimidate her. At age 14, she again demanded an audience, this time to speak at length about how teenagers are smarter and more important to society than anyone gives them credit. She demanded the agency produce a hit record for her to this effect – a record written mostly by middle-aged adults and in a style of music that most teenagers would not enjoy. The lyrics were Hannah’s creation, which a team of professional songwriters rewrote. Hannah then summarily fired the songwriting team and replaced their weeks of work with an unedited version of her original lyrics. The songs were abysmal. The song she expected to be a hit single included the verse:

I’m Hannah and I’m a teenager.

I’m Hannah and I’m a good singer.

I’m Hannah and I’m not a stranger.

You know me, you know me, I sing.

(Chorus:)

Fourteen year old best in the country

Fourteen years old best in the world

Fourteen years old everyone loves me

Fourteen year old super star girl

from “Fourteen” by Hannah Norman

The chorus repeated seven times in the four minute song. Her hastily-assembled songwriting team had dared suggest that the repetition of her name was unnecessary, that the single mention of her age was unnecessary, and that her song seemed more focused on herself than on teenagers in general. One member of the songwriting team mentioned these concerns to a senior manager, who passed them along to Hannah’s parents with the suggestion that Hannah be given less creative control over the album’s production. Hannah’s parents, offended that their born star was being questioned, gave Hannah firing authority that same day, leading to the largest round of staffing cuts in Agency history.

The staff began taking Hannah’s proclamations much more seriously after that point, particularly those made in her newly-annualized birthday speech. At age 15, her demand was for interviews in global publications on the subject of world poverty – a monumental failure of an effort at turning the recently-flopped musical act into a public intellectual. Many of the publicists with the Agency quit during that year. At age 16, she was experiencing a bout of depression, which manifested itself as a ferocious and condescending tirade against the “idiots” and “maroons” and “buffoons” and “dummies” whom the Agency employed. At one point during her barbaric display of consternation, she removed a thesaurus from her coat pocket while she ranted, turned to the entry for “stupid,” and made sure to use any of the synonyms for lacking intellect she could pronounce.

At age 17, Hannah was holding prepared remarks in her hands for the first in a five-year run of birthday speeches, which unsettled as many on staff as it relieved others. Clearing her throat, she began to read her statement. She was not a talented reader, and had written the speech herself, which was quite plain.

“I am announcing today that this will be the last year this Agency continues to fail. You have all failed. I am the most talented seventeen year old girl in the USA. I should not be as upset as I am. You have made me this upset because you have failed. So effective today you have one year to ensure that I am famous. You have a year. If by my 18th Birthday, I am not very famous and everyone does not know exactly how cool I am, I will shut the Agency down and you will all no longer have money or food or jobs and you will be poor. It is time for you to do your jobs.”

The staff was not unaccustomed to this type of speech – it was similar in tone to many of her communications with her employees. But her tone, and the finality of the phrase “one year to ensure that I am famous,” led to audible sighs of quiet desperation, as Hannah went on without pause, with no expectation of praise for her work.

“When I am 18 years old, I will win the Six Different Award, or you’re all fired.” She paused, and looked at senior management. Several of those managers stood aghast, while others unthinkingly began clapping and turned to their teams. The waves of applause and enthusiasm were more uneven than usual, but eventually every employee signaled that they wished to remain employed.

Hannah closed, her shortest birthday speech to date. She walked from the front of the room to the door to the downstairs laundry facility, paused at the reception desk near the entrance, and dialed the number for the local taxi service, which she had memorized since she was 12.

Later that night, she had her parents take her to an expensive dinner, where the three of them drank wine.

“How was the office today, sweetie?,” her father, who was never a Broadway star, asked her. “Did you tell the Agency what you wanted this year?”

“Yes dear, and do tell your father and I as well,” said her mother, who was not a vocal coach.

“The office was as boring as ever,” said the rather dull young woman. “But I told them they have one year to make sure I win the Six Different Award, or they’re fired.”

Charlie Norman dropped her fork as her daughter finished saying the word “Different,” and Derek Norman in that same instant raised his hand, snapped his fingers at a nearby sommelier, and said, “check please,” with an unusual urgency. Hannah, without knowing so, had just opened the door not only to end her own nonexistent career, but to expose her parents as frauds and the family business as a front. The two elder Normans had lost their appetites.