REVIEWERS SHOUT HOORAY FOR
HOLLYWOOD, IRIS RAINER DART, and
SHOW BUSINESS KILLS
“A WONDERFULLY FUNNY AND SOMETIMES POIGNANT STORY OF FOUR FEMALE BEST FRIENDS trying to elude the most fatal of all Hollywood conditions—middle age.”
—Book Page
“IF IRIS RAINER DART WERE A PERFORMER INSTEAD OF A WRITER, SHE’D ALMOST CERTAINLY BE BETTE MIDLER…. MIDLER’S BRASH STYLE IS DART’S FICTION MADE FLESH.”
—Chicago Tribune
“COMBINING ARMED CHASES WITH TENDER EMBRACES… HUMOR WITH CINEMATIC SENSIBILITY.… The author expertly pushes buttons.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“SMART, SASSY, AND REVEALING… Iris Rainer Dart takes us inside the real Hollywood. She brings to life the painful reality behind all the glamour: the broken promises, the sexism, the worship of youth. But she also shows how good friends—and a powerful sense of humor—make it possible to survive, even prosper, on the far side of forty.”
—Jewish Week
“DELICIOUSLY DELIGHTFUL…. The latest story from Dart is as exciting as those she wrote in the past.”
—Ocala Star-Banner
“WITTY, BITCHY.”
—TWN News Magazine
“FRIENDSHIP, INTRIGUE, MURDER, AND ROMANCE…. It’s all in fun, meant to be instructive in the ways of life and love.”
—Dayton News
Other novels by Iris Rainer Dart
THE BOYS IN THE MAILROOM
BEACHES
‘TIL THE REAL THING COMES ALONG*
I’LL BE THERE*
THE STORK CLUB*
*PUBLISHED BY
WARNER BOOKS
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The names of some real celebrities appear as characters in the book to give a sense of time and place. However, their actions and motivations are entirely fictitious, and should not in any way be considered real or factual.
WARNER BOOKS EDITION
Copyright © 1995 by Ratco, Inc.
All rights reserved.
This book was originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company.
Excerpt from “I’m Still Here” by Steven Sondheim. Copyright © 1971 by Range Road Music Inc., Quartet Music Inc., Ritling Music, Inc., and Burthen Music Co., Inc. Used by permission.
Warner Books, Inc.
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: October 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56760-2
Contents
Other novels by Iris Rainer Dart
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
This book is dedicated to my extraordinary women friends, who have carried me, taught me, supported me, propped me up during my worst times, and cheered me on during my best. I love you all and am so grateful for the love you give me in return.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Jeff Galpin, M.D., Dorothy Sivitz Jenkins, M.D., Joyce Brotman, Wendy Riche, Judith McConnell, M. E. Loree Fishmann, Shelly Glaser, Barry Adelman, Dr. Melanie Allen, Susan Schwartz, Wendy Duffy, Karen Fell, Joe Gunn, Sharleen Cooper-Cohen, the cast and crew of “General Hospital,” Elaine Markson, and Fredrica Friedman. And of course there would never be a book without Rachel, Greg, and Steve.
First you’re another
Sloe-eyed vamp.
Then someone’s mother
Then you’re camp.
Then you career from career to career.
I’m almost through my memoirs
And I’m here.
Stephen Sondheim, Follies
* * *
1
Look up, sweetheart, look up. That’s it. Now I’ll just add a little more concealer under the eyes and you’ll be all set.” Bert, the makeup man, was wearing too much Royal Lyme cologne, and Jan didn’t have the heart to tell him that, at this hour of the morning, the thick, tangy scent made her nauseous.
“As soon as I finish this, I’ll whisk a little mascara on your lashes, and then you can take the rollers out and get your hair combed.” Bert’s face was so close to her that while he patted the creamy cover-up under her lower lashes she could smell the Tic Tac he held in his mouth as an antidote to coffee breath, sometimes even while he was still drinking the coffee. But it was Bert’s constant barrage of chatter, always in the form of well-meant advice, that got to her.
“If you’d like the benefit of my personal and my professional opinion…,” he said, while he moved his hand down to Jan’s chin, raised her face up into the light, and squinted so he could get a better look at his work.
His opinion, professional or otherwise, was the last thing she wanted. In fact she’d been so lost in her own thoughts, she wasn’t even sure where his latest story had drifted. All she wanted was for him to hurry up and finish her face, so she could get back to reading the new script pages for Friday’s show. But Bert took her silence for interest and kept talking.
“As far as I’m concerned, and I know a little bit about this subject, to say the least, Frank Kamer is ‘the man,’ ” Bert announced. “He is a star in the plastic surgery firmament. When that genius gets through with you, you can’t even see a tiny scar. He did Goldie Hawn and Streisand, who both deny it, and Dolly Parton, who flaunts it, and all three of them are flawless.”
The last was punctuated with a few fast dabs of the sponge, after which Bert stepped back and sighed with satisfaction at the good job he’d done on Jan. Then he put the sponge down, picked up a mug with the words BERT WESTON GIVES GREAT FACE on the side, took a long swig, and winced from the taste of the sludgy backstage coffee.
“Of course, Steve Hoeflin’s very big these days, too,” he said, his mouth still puckered from the bad taste. “But I always think he makes the customers look like someone other than themselves. You know what I mean? He did Ivana, and if you look at her old head shots and her new ones, she looks like two different women.”
Jan smiled to signify agreement and polite dismissal, and picked up the pages for Friday’s show, hoping Bert would stop talking. But he didn’t.
“Now quite a few knowledgeable people swear by Norman Leaf, who I’ve known since he was in medical school. He’s a gem of a guy, and he did Jane Fonda and Shirley MacLaine, and I have to tell you, I’ve seen both of their faces up close and personal, and they ain’t bad, for a couple of old broads,” he said, laughing to excuse the dumb remark, and moving around behind Jan’s makeup chair to take a longer look in the mi
rror at his handiwork.
Jan put the pages back on her lap and her stomach ached. Bert’s sledgehammer of a hint was his way of trying to tell her she’d better go out and throw herself at the feet of some Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and invest twenty thousand dollars in a face-lift.
Of course she’d considered it. What woman her age, what actress at least, hadn’t stood in front of a mirror when no one else was around and gently pulled the skin on the side of her face up toward the top of her ears, just to see how it would be if that little bit of extra flesh was gone? And those fatty little pads below the eyes. While she was under, he could take those, too. But then she’d think it over and decide it wasn’t for her.
Too many friends had come out of those surgeries with their skin so tight against their bones they looked as if they were standing in front of a jet plane about to take off. She even knew an on-camera news reporter who kept her recently removed turkey wattle in a jar of formaldehyde on her mantel and told everyone it was the “Pullet Surprise.”
And then there were those scare-the-pants-off-you articles in magazines about how it was done! That they peeled the skin away from the skull the way the Indians used to scalp people. After reading a few of those, she vowed to grow old gracefully. One article said that after surgery they put staples directly into your skull! Office supplies to keep your face from falling into your soup. Hah! The idea made a nervous giggle rise in her chest.
Besides, she couldn’t imagine when the hell she’d have the luxury of time it took to recover from something like that. Her schedule on this show was so brutal, she couldn’t even make an appointment to have her teeth cleaned, because she never knew when she’d have a day off.
“Not for this girl, honey,” she said to Bert. “When they start taking you apart and sewing you back together, it smacks a little too much of taxidermy to me. I didn’t even like when they did it to Trigger and put him in that Western museum.” She laughed, putting her hand up to feel the prongs of the plastic rollers to see if they were cool. She hoped that now that Bert was almost through with her makeup, the discussion would be over. She had a costume fitting to squeeze in before she went out on the floor to shoot today’s scenes.
“You know what, doll?” Bert said. And when Jan looked into the mirror at him, her dark-with-too-much-liner eyes caught his gentle warning expression. “If I were you… I’d at least check it out.”
Jan stopped laughing and was stabbed with panic. He could be warning her that she was about to lose her job.
“Bert,” she said, turning to touch the sleeve of his long-sleeved striped shirt. Bert had been doing the makeup on “My Brightest Day” for twenty years. He’d started on the show long before she did. Every morning he saw the actors at an hour when their brains were still in a pre-coffee, partially awake state, when their tongues were still sleepily loose. If there was some plan to dump Jan because she was looking too old, Bert probably would’ve heard rumblings about it, and now he was trying to get her to do something to save herself.
“Good morning, you two.” Shannon Michaels, the twenty-two-year-old actress who played Julia, slid into the next chair sleepily, and with a slim pink-nailed hand brushed her thick flaming red hair away from her perfect face. Hair the same color Jan’s used to be naturally. A color no artificial mixture, designed to disguise gray, could ever reproduce.
“Mornin’, gorgeous,” Bert said. Then he took the mascara out of his case, opened it, and applied it to Jan at the same time he was gazing at Shannon, so the tip of the wand hit Jan’s cornea, making her flinch and her eyes water. “Sorry, doll,” Bert said to her, then he twisted the mascara closed, took another long sip of coffee, and moved on to do Shannon’s makeup.
Jan looked in the mirror at her own thickly made-up face, with one red watery eye, her head surrounded by the spiny electric rollers with their wiry clips sticking into her scalp, and it was no mystery to her why Bert thought she was a candidate for the knife. Her cheeks were taking a slow but unmistakable slide down, just like the hill behind her Hollywood Hills house did every time it rained.
She’d rationalized it away before telling herself that she wasn’t out on the street competing with young actresses for jobs. She was one of the leads on a soap, where it was supposed to be okay for actors to age with their characters. To become the senior generation of the show’s family. But Jan’s character, Maggie Flynn, had always been a glamorous seductress, and now she was afraid there was a chance the producers figured aging might not look so great on her.
Recently, as an experiment, she’d tried wearing a pair of those little stick-in-the-hairline gizmos she bought at a beauty supply store on Laurel Canyon near Riverside. Little V’s that hold your face in the “up” position. And two weeks ago, after she begged Ellen to take her along to an “A list” movie-business cocktail party, while she was in the middle of a conversation with Alec Baldwin, the left one fell into her drink. The story about how she tried to ignore it floating in her glass of wine would get a few laughs at Girls’ Night.
Thank God for the girls, she thought. On Friday night she’d get together with her three best friends and collapse. They’d all howl with laughter in that free-at-last way they did when it was just the familiar four of them. And boy did Jan need to be able to fall apart with people who had loved her long before she got the part of Maggie Flynn.
Poor Maggie. Now there was a woman who’d really been through the ringer. A travesty of womanhood who’d survived murders, mayhem, runaway lovers, vengeful children, vengeful lovers, and runaway children. “And that was just on last Thursday’s show,” Jan liked to joke. But Jan the actress was starting to show the strain on Maggie the character’s struggles. Five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, she’d tiptoe out of her house at six A.M. and drive in the dark, chilly morning to the studio, feeling lucky if her workday was over at seven or eight at night, when it was dark again.
And on Saturdays and Sundays, when she wasn’t at a children’s birthday party or Coldwater Park with her angelic son Joey, she’d be staring at a script, memorizing what could sometimes be forty or fifty pages of dialogue. There was never time to let down, to have a cold, to look back, to just flake out, and not think about the show or what she was going to wear in the publicity shots for Soap Opera Weekly.
You’d think after fifteen years of landing on her mark no matter how hysterical the scene, of spewing all the exposition no matter how badly it was written or how emotional the monologue or how real the slap she had just taken, she’d feel secure, confident, and assured of her status in the business. But the truth was that most people in the industry thought daytime acting was schlocky. A joke. Hammy, facile, overdone. In fact at a recent network affiliates luncheon the producers insisted Jan attend, a reporter from an entertainment magazine came over and asked her. “Excuse me, but do you know when the real actors are getting here?”
This morning while Shannon and Bert gabbed away, Jan pulled the spray-encrusted rollers out of her hair with her left hand, and with her right she turned the pages of the script. She already had her lines down for today and Thursday, but she wanted to read ahead to the scenes Maggie had on Friday.
MAGGIE’S OFFICE.
There she was, good old Maggie, who had kept her in food and shelter for the last fifteen years. What havoc was the nasty bitch wreaking now?
MAGGIE IS ON THE PHONE; SHE’S ANXIOUS AND TREMBLING.
MAGGIE
(QUIETLY INTO PHONE) But I must speak to Doctor Cartright immediately. I don’t care if he’s with a patient. You go in there and tell him it’s Maggie Flynn. This is an emergency.
THE DOOR BANGS OPEN AND LYDIA ENTERS, FOLLOWED BY SAMANTHA. MAGGIE GASPS.
SAMANTHA
(APOLOGETICALLY) I’m sorry, Mrs. Flynn. I tried to stop her.
LYDIA
Hang up that phone and tell me where my husband is.
MAGGIE
(HANGING UP THE PHONE) Get out or I’ll have security remove you.
Ooh, no
w this is a good scene, Jan thought. Maggie and Lydia are finally having it out. But more important, it could be a great trend in the show. If there was a big Maggie-versus-Lydia story line coming up, it could go on for ages. Jan’s current contract expired in eight weeks, so she needed a story like that. She sighed and leaned back in the big, comfortable makeup chair, thanking heaven for this good news.
She had to keep this job. She had to hang in. Forty-nine was a lousy age to be in Hollywood. Last month Marly called her, laughing so hard on the phone she could hardly get the story out about the part she just read for in a commercial. Marly Bennet, who had starred in two situation comedies and a zillion commercials beginning in the sixties when she ran down the beach in a bikini as the symbol of “The Pepsi Generation,” was up for a part in a commercial where her only line was, “My doctor told me… Mylanta.”
That one put them all away. They belly-laughed themselves stupid over it. It was the kind of story the friends swapped all the time. An incident that made them marvel over the distance they’d come together, the absurdity of the kind of work they did, the importance, as Ellen said, of “taking the business with a shit-load of salt.”
The business which had beaten them up, made them stronger, enhanced their collective sense of humor, and brought them closer even than they’d been in college, when they all lived on the same floor in the dormitory.
“We’re witnesses to one another’s history,” Rose said recently, liked the thought, took out a notebook and jotted it down.
“She thinks she said something profound.” Ellen laughed. “Tomorrow she’ll try to sell it to me as a movie.”
“Not at all,” Rose said. “I’ll try to sell it to someone classy.”
They loved getting together to exchange their stories, the old ones that were now part of the legend of the four of them, tales of their history revisited and revamped. And the new stories, too, that caught them up with the current insanity about their men, their kids, their bodies, their careers. Funny ones, terrible ones, stories of their tragedies and triumphs. Stories about the lousy things that happened to them at work.
Show Business Kills Page 1