Flavor of the Month
Olivia Goldsmith
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 1993 by Olivia Goldsmith
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
For more information, email [email protected]
First Diversion Books edition October 2014
ISBN:978-1-62681-437-0
More from Olivia Goldsmith
Fashionably Late
Flavor of the Month
Marrying Mom
Switcheroo
The Bestseller
Young Wives
Bad Boy
Insiders
Wish Upon a Star
To Paul Eugene Smith
On land, on sea, or in the air
Acknowledgments
I would like to express very special thanks to Nancy Robinson, my secretary, critic, and friend. Without her cheerful and brilliant support, I would have surely drowned in the second revision. Not to mention the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth. Sincerest thanks also to:
Brendan Gunning for his peerless editorial assistance
Todd Harris of the William Morris Agency, who introduced me to Hollywood and taught me the maxim “the agent always gets screwed”
Dr. Michael Sachs, whose understanding of women and beauty is only matched by his brilliance as a surgeon
Dr. Richard Gulian for the time he made for me, explanations he went over, and invaluable help he gave with the technical aspects of plastic surgery
Bill and Ann Johnson for their early readings and their generous comments on the draft
Dwight Currie and Michael Kohlman for their friendship, humor, and the research help they offered
Ruth Bekker for her insights on the New York acting scene
Diana Hellinger for tireless enthusiasm and encouragement way beyond the bounds of friendship
Georgiana Francisco for her insider’s view of L.A.
Jane Scovell, who knows everyone and everything, and is my pal
Ellen Hall, who helped in so many ways, and mailed out the manuscript, time after time
Bill Hall, who finally got the job done, and beautifully!
Matilda Tucker, for her unconditional love and helpful suggestions for revamping chapter one
And, as always, Curtis Laupheimer and Justine Kryvin for everything
Lastly, special thanks to all the women in Hollywood, both actresses and those behind the scenes, who so generously shared their experiences and their pain. Your truth is stranger than my fiction. I only hope I have not betrayed your trust.
Note From the Author
“Call me Ishmael—and call me often.”
I once knew a Hollywood agent, strictly small-time, who had that printed across the bottom of his business cards. Not that most people get the joke. And not that Ishmael Reiss did much business, but it wasn’t because of the bad Melville allusion. Remember, this is the town where Bob LeVine, CEO at International Studios, once asked, “Hamlet? Isn’t that the Mel Gibson vehicle?”
Writers—Melville, Faulkner, even Shakespeare—don’t get much respect out here. You’ve heard the one about the dumb starlet? She was so stupid she slept with a writer to get a part. Of course, in the Hollywood food chain, writers are at the very bottom—the economic equivalent of career plankton.
That is, most writers—novelists, screenwriters, gag writers, or TV scriptwriters. But not all. I’m a writer, I chose to live out here, and I get respect. Well, it isn’t mother love, but it beats the hell out of scorn and abuse. They may not like me, but they respect me, because they fear me. And I earn a lot of money.
Most people know who I am, and most people will say they don’t like me. “Laura Richie, what a cat!” they say, and that’s when they’re being polite. But as long as they buy my books, I don’t care. Anyway, they don’t actually know me—I’m just a famous name to them.
I’m famous for writing about the famous—a kind of celebrity hybrid, like Robin Leach. Funny about his name, isn’t it? People call both of us leeches, but they also call me “Richie the Bitchy.” An unfortunate coincidental assonance. Hey, it could be worse—“Kitty Litter,” for example. Still, those who call names also lap the stuff up faster than I can research and write it.
It takes a lot of work. And I take pride in my work. It’s biography. It’s fact, not conjecture, not hearsay, not my opinions and my prejudices. I’ve got plenty of those, of course, but I keep them to myself, at least as much as any writer consciously can. I do a careful and complete job. I’m a plodder.
Well, I admit that as a life’s work it’s not Rheims Cathedral or even a biography of George Washington Carver, or Von Hilshimer, or Churchill. But comparatively few people are interested in the greats. Or even the near-greats. They prefer the ingrates.
So, if writers get no respect and no interest, what does?
Beauty. America is a country that worships only three things: money, youth, and beauty, and if you have the latter two, you can parlay them into the former. Beauty is youth. Beauty doesn’t die, or at least it gives that impression.
What is new is that for the first time in history, money can buy beauty. And that somebody did.
Beauty begets money, money begets power. Sometimes. And everybody wants to read about beautiful women.
I know. My first book was Marion Anderson: A Black Artist’s Struggle. It was based on my doctoral thesis. It sold 2,216 copies. I’d worked on it for five years. But hey, she wasn’t beautiful. My last book, Cher!, sold a half million copies. That’s hardback. Multiply it times twenty-two dollars (of which I get 15 percent) and then call me names, if you want to. My banker calls me “Miss Richie.” And for him I’d endorse my royalty checks “Richie the Bitchy” if it sold one extra copy. Plus, Bob LeVine and Mike Ovitz and April Irons return my calls. And invite me to their parties. It’s nice to be noticed.
And it took long enough, to get to be a known commodity. A Laura Richie book sells. Fame. It’s weird, but useful. Fifty-nine percent of Americans know who Donna Douglas is—she played Elly May Clampett in The Beverly Hillbillies—but they can’t name even one Nobel Prize winner. Think about it. Hey, I didn’t make this society, I’m only trying to live here. And I live well, and quietly. Of course, not too quietly. It wouldn’t sell the column or the books. I’ve been on Donahue, and Oprah and Geraldo and Sally Jessy and a hundred radio call-in shows. But despite that and my picture on the back of my books, I still manage a private life. Know why? Because a writer—even a famous writer—could never be famous enough to lose all privacy. Actors, yes. Entrepreneurs, models, athletes, even notorious prostitutes, royalty (no matter how minor or spurious): they become celebrities. Women usually gain celebrity by being beautiful. Men because of their wealth or achievements. Funny how that works. Then the people who struggled up out of the morass of obscurity into the celebrity sunshine gain recognition but lose their lives to the public.
Because America is also addicted to fame. Celebrity is more important to Americans than achievement, but the public’s adulation is a two-edged sword. They build you up but they’ll knock you down, too. That’s part of my job. Knockin’ ’em down. Once I started writing celebrity exposés—ones that told the whole truth—I found a market niche that can never be fil
led. Because America wants the dirt on those they worship: the stories of abuse, bankruptcy, incest, battering, addiction, and pain. The ugliness behind the beauty. A grim fairy tale. My public. The seamier it is, the better they like it.
For women, the story usually begins with looks: a beauty in search of an audience. We are what we look like. But beauty isn’t enough. For Jahne, Sharleen, and Lila, names that have now become legendary, it all started with lipstick. Well, more than a lipstick. A fight about lipstick. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
So, let me guide you through the story. Permit me to point out all the places of interest. After all, who knows celebrity or Hollywood better than I? I promise a great story and no one could tell it completely, from the beginning to the end, as I can. Because I was there. And there’s never been a Hollywood saga like it.
Laura Richie
Halfway, Wyoming
199–
Obscurity I
“The first real problem I faced in my life was that of beauty.”
—YUKIO MISHIMA
“The way I look at it is, folks, if you wake up and you’re ugly, you know what real pain is. That ain’t fun. So I don’t want to hear from ‘I think it’s real difficult to be good-looking and be an actress.’…Give me a fucking break.”
—DON SIMPSON
“If there is a defect on the soul, it cannot be corrected on the face. But if there is a defect on the face and one corrects it, it can correct a soul.”
—JEAN COCTEAU
1
New York winters are not kind to Broadway gypsies, Mary Jane Moran thought, not for the first time that day. She fought a sudden gust of biting wind to open the heavy glass door to the unemployment office. She walked into the cavernous gray room, ignoring the various direction signs hanging by wires from the ceiling, and, as she had done every week for the last six months, took her place in an already long line, this time behind a very short woman. I just hope she’s not a talker, Mary Jane thought.
Mary Jane released a deep sigh as she surveyed the familiar scene. There was the usual smattering of laid-off seasonal workers and blue-collar types, but, for the most part, she guessed that a lot of the applicants were very much like herself—young and energetic, probably talented. But in New York most talented people didn’t earn their livelihoods in the arts. They suffered instead. She thought again, as she always did at times like this, of the old showbiz joke: The guy at the circus who sweeps up the elephant shit starts feeling really sick and goes to the doctor. After dozens of tests, the doc tells him he has good news: “Nothing serious, though very rare. Seems that you’re severely allergic to elephant shit. Just avoid it and you’ll be fine.” “But I can’t!” cries the guy, and explains his job. “So, quit,” the doctor tells him. The guy is stunned. “What! And give up show business?”
Like the guy in the joke, Mary Jane couldn’t quit, despite her growing allergy to elephant shit. She usually felt compassion for the down-and-out writers, the dancers, the actors and singers, but not today. Too much elephant shit, and I’ve got my own troubles, she thought, and began rummaging in her large vinyl bag. She dug out a Mounds bar and a dog-eared paperback copy of Queenie, resigning herself to the long wait.
The woman in front of her half-turned toward Mary Jane and said, “Hi. Rotten weather, isn’t it?”
Mary Jane peered over the top of her book at the tiny woman in what looked like a child’s tan car coat, the kind with rope-and-wood closures. She looked only a step or two above a bag lady: none too clean, and a bit dazed or crazed. Mary Jane’s boyfriend, Sam, always called her a “dreck magnet,” because every kind of dullard and maniac approached her for a handout or a conversation. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to be really rude to this tiny woman. Secretly, Mary Jane identified with every old, lonely woman she saw. Fear of my future? she wondered, and shrugged. “Yeah, I hate it when it rains or snows on my reporting day. It makes the animals in their cages even more testy than usual,” she said, nodding toward the bored bureaucrats behind the counter. Well, that was enough talk. No need to encourage her. “And I’m in no mood for anyone right now.” Mary Jane went back to her book as the woman shuffled around in her oversized galoshes and faced forward, pulling herself tighter into her coat.
It was several minutes before Mary Jane realized she had been reading the same sentence over and over. Shit, she thought, I was a little harsh. The woman was just trying to pass the time. Tapping her gently on the shoulder, Mary Jane said, “Want a piece of gum?” The woman hesitated, looked at Mary Jane, then accepted and smiled. Her teeth made Mary Jane wince.
The woman unwrapped the Dentyne and popped it in her mouth. “I’m a little anxious.” Motioning with one hand, she indicated the counter, yards before them. “I’m afraid of what I’m going to hear when I get up there.”
Mary Jane laughed. “Join the club,” she said. “I think I’ve blown my wad, but I figured I’d come back today, just in case they make a mistake and give me one more check.”
The woman sighed, nodded.
“What do you do when you’re working?” Mary Jane asked.
“I’m a writer, but I was working as a word processor at a law firm until I got laid off. And you?”
“I’m an actress,” Mary Jane told her. “A currently unemployed but once-working actress. I had one big chance off-Broadway three years ago, got rave reviews, you should forgive the cliché, then nothing.”
“What was the show? The woman seemed genuinely interested.
“Jack and Jill and Compromise. I was with the show for over a year.” Mary Jane felt herself grow depressed. “I haven’t gotten any attention since then.” Well, it was worse than that, but, she reminded herself, she didn’t have to spill her guts to this complete stranger.
“Next!” they both heard at the same time. The old lady waved at Mary Jane as she shuffled off to the long counter before her. “Good luck,” she said over her shoulder.
Mary Jane shifted once again on her cold and wet feet, watching as the interviewer began flipping through her files. She watched the old woman’s face when the interviewer shook her head. Poor thing. What hole in the wall would she scuttle into? Had she really been a writer or was she just delusional?
After she watched the old lady slump and wander off, it was Mary Jane’s turn at bat, time to receive the surly warning that her benefits ended in another two weeks. Mary Jane Moran walked out of the unemployment office at Twenty-sixth Street and Sixth Avenue and pulled her dun-colored down coat tightly around her big-boned body. Two hours and forty minutes in line for a hundred and seventy-six bucks. After pausing a moment in the doorway to gather herself together, she began the long trudge up to St. Malachy’s Church on West Forty-sixth Street for the repertory-group rehearsal. Her moon boots, cheap foam covered in vinyl, squished in the icy gray slush puddles, sending new currents of wet cold darting through her feet. Then it started to snow. Great! she thought. Why not just crucify me and get it over with? She pulled the scarf that was wound around her head farther forward to help shield her exposed face from the big wet flakes. She pushed her mittened hands deep into the pockets of the worn coat and kept trudging uptown.
She was used to the cold. She felt she’d always been out in it. Mary Jane had been raised in Scuderstown, New York, by her grandmother. Her parents had been victims of a car wreck. Mary Jane could only dimly recall the argument between her drunken father and mother, the lurch of the car, the screech of the tires, the shattering glass. Then nothing. Except she clearly remembered the cold—it had been a December night—and then how she shivered in the hall of the hospital, a shaken four-year-old probably in shock, who was ignored while the medical staff clustered around her father and her mother.
Her mother had died. Her father had been severely brain-damaged and sent off, eventually, to a veterans’ hospital. But she, at four, had been reluctantly taken in by her father’s mother, her only living relative, and spent her childhood and teen years in a ramshackle farmhouse in up
state New York, the unloved, unwilling guest of the bitter old woman. It had been cold in the winters, almost as cold indoors as out, and she hated the cold then as she did now. She thought of the old lady at unemployment in her thin coat and shivered.
At Herald Square, she noticed that the Christmas decorations were still up at Macy’s. By December 1, she was sick enough of Christmas cheer but now, in January, after the holiday season she had just survived, she wished Christmas had never been invented. The looks on the people coming out of the department store supported her view. Everyone hates it, she thought. It’s just that no one will say it and stay off the bandwagon when it rolls around. I didn’t. She sighed, remembering the call from her grandmother. Another poor, unloved old woman.
“I’m sick, Mary. I think I’ve got the flu. I can hardly get out of bed. I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t have to, Mary.” Grandma only called her by her name when she wanted something. Otherwise it was simply “you.” “Could you come up for a few days and take care of me?” After all, you are a nurse. Grandma didn’t say it, but it was implied. And, despite the rage, despite every feeling that made her want to fling the receiver back onto its cradle, to get an unlisted number, to run away, change her name, and never go back, the old guilt prevailed.
So, on December 24, Mary Jane had gone by bus to the one person she wanted most not to be with. Christmas in New York would have been glum enough, with Sam going to spend it in Sarasota with his parents, but being back in the shack outside Elmira, taking care of the sick old lady was a nightmare. It somehow made Sam’s failure to invite her to join him even more hurtful. Was he ashamed to have her meet his parents? Mary Jane sighed.
Sam, wonderful as he was, was difficult. He’d been married once, when he was really young, and his wife had left him. That was his reason, he said, for hating marriage. Mary Jane didn’t mind—not really. She had him, so why need a ring? But if they’d been married, wouldn’t he have brought her to Florida? Wouldn’t she know his parents by now? Any in-laws were preferable to her outlaw grandma. It had been a miserable Christmas.
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