Show Business Kills

by Iris Rainer Dart

  Last week when Marly called to invite Jan to Girls’ Night, she reminded her that next week it would be twenty-seven years since they all arrived in Hollywood and, Jesus, could it possibly be thirty-one years since they met in the drama department at Carnegie Tech. The first official Girls’ Night after they all moved west was in Jan’s tiny studio apartment, where they all smoked dope for the first time together.

  Jan remembered the way Marly, the most adept at everything, figured out how to get the Zigzag paper into the rolling machine, and just the right amount of the little leaves to shake into it to make a respectable joint. “An oxymoron if ever I heard one,” Marly said when she laughed about that night. And after she lit it, inhaled, then took a few fast little sucks and held her breath, the strange pungent odor hung in the air and the others sat glassy-eyed.

  “Wow,” Ellen said. “I can understand why people get the munchies with this stuff. It really makes you famished. Hand me that bag of cookies, will you?”

  All three of them looked over at her quizzically.

  “Um, Ellen,” Rose said, taking off her glasses and breathing on the lenses, then wiping them off on her pajama-top hem. “I think you’re supposed to smoke it first.” It was a line she would sometimes say now when Ellen jumped to conclusions, and it still made them laugh.

  “Look what’s happened to us,” Marly said last month. “Our drug of choice has become estrogen.”

  “Not me,” Rose said. “Anyone who wants to ingest the urine of a pregnant mare, say ‘Aye,’ and anyone who doesn’t, say ‘Neeeigh’!”

  That one got a chuckle from all of them. But these days the laughter they shared was a very different brand from the stoned giggle of the sixties. This was the laughter of survivors, a victorious “We’re-still-here” laugh that buoyed the four of them much higher than the marijuana of long ago. They also laughed about the idea that the jokes that made them laugh the loudest were usually about aging.

  “Let’s sing that song from South Pacific,” Marly said when they were all gathered around her piano the last time. “The one about plastic surgery.”

  “There’s a song in South Pacific about plastic surgery?” Ellen asked. “I don’t think so.”

  “There is!” Marly insisted. “It’s called ‘You Have to Be Taut.’ ”

  “Two old Jewish men are sitting on a park bench,” Rose told them. “One says, ‘So I think my wife is dead.’ The other says, ‘You think your wife is dead? Whaddya mean? How come you don’t know?’ And the first old man says, ‘Well, the sex is still the same, but the dishes are piling up!’ ”

  Jan loved the way she made them laugh with the stories she told about her jackass producer, Ed Powell. A man she described as hating women so much he made Clarence Thomas seem like Alan Alda. But it was the old ones about her days as a sexy little starlet that were by far their all-time favorites. Particularly the one they made her tell a million times, about the one-night stand she had in the sixties with Maximilian Schell.

  “Tell us again about you and Max.” It was usually Rose who would urge her, when they were about three glasses of wine into the evening. The story might have been apocryphal—Jan had a way of making things up—but they didn’t care, because true or not, it was still funny to them, all these years later.

  “Max Schell?” Jan would ask, her face actually flushing when she thought about it. “Ohhh, no. Do you really want to hear that one again?” Then she’d sigh, an “If-you-insist” kind of sigh, and she was back there. Lost in a reverie of being an aspiring twenty-one-year-old actress who went to New York when they were seniors at Tech to audition for summer stock and met and was seduced by Maximilian Schell, a dashing, sexy movie star.

  Every time she told it, she’d embellish it a little, adding a nuance or a new detail, throwing in a moment she’d somehow forgotten to mention before. How intimidated she was by his stardom, how brusque he was with her, and how sure of himself. How after he got young Jan to his hotel suite, she went into the bathroom to undress and looked at herself despairingly in the mirror that reflected the elegant fixtures in the expensive hotel bathroom and Max’s monogrammed robe hanging on a brass hook and her own frightened face as she thought, What could he possibly want with me?

  They still giggled like teenagers when she talked, in her breathy voice, remembering the night that marked the downfall of her innocence. About the zealous way she’d over-gelled the diaphragm she’d “just happened” to have with her. So that when she squeezed it together to insert it, it got away from her and flew across the room “like a leaping frog” and landed with the gooey rim splat on the floor, sticking stubbornly to the bathroom tile.

  Then she described the way after Max fell asleep, she stared at him all night long, enthralled by his snore. And always when she got to that part, she imitated the sounds of a specifically Maximilian Schell snore.

  But the unequivocally best moment in the story was how, at the break of dawn, the trembling Jan, who hadn’t slept a wink, dragged herself from under Max and pulled herself back into the fuchsia cocktail dress she’d worn the night before, and the matching spike-heeled shoes and bag, mortified to have to wear them outside in the light of the New York day.

  And just as she was about to tiptoe away, Max opened one eye, looked at her accusingly, and said “Yessss?” As if he thought she was the hotel maid intruding on his sleep. And Jan, standing in the open doorway, with as much savior faire as a terrified, guilty, star-struck twenty-one-year-old could muster, said, by way of bidding him good-bye, “Thanks a million, Maximilian.”

  That was the part that always slayed the others, made them laugh that out-of-control, over-the-top, hysterical kind of laugh Ellen always described as Sammy Davis laughter. The way Sammy Davis used to laugh when Johnny Carson said something funny. Pounding with appreciation on the side of the hot tub, kicking their feet in the water. “Thanks a million, Maximilian.” Those four words had become a standard phrase among them after that. Part of their group language. The way they’d express their gratitude to one another, forever afterward.

  Thanks a million, Maximilian. Jan laughed to herself now, thinking that one good evening with her women friends could keep her going for months afterward. Then she looked over at Shannon Michaels, in the next makeup chair, jabbering away so confidently. Noticed the way the young woman tossed her hair and joked with Bert about her date last night, and she was reminded of herself at that age. The way all beautiful young ingenues behave, never imagining the day will come when they’ll be the leading lady in the next chair so desperately worried about the future.

  MAGGIE STANDS ANGRILY.

  MAGGIE

  Did you hear me, Lydia? I don’t know how you got in here, but I want you gone.

  LYDIA

  I don’t care what you want. Just tell me where Phillip is so I can go to him.

  LYDIA PULLS OUT A GUN.

  MAGGIE

  Put that away, Lydia. Don’t be insane. Phillip means nothing to me. I swear to you…

  LYDIA SMIRKS AND COCKS THE GUN. ON MAGGIE’S FACE. WE CUT TO:

  Wow, great opening scene, Jan thought as she turned the pages looking for more scenes for Maggie, but there weren’t any more in Friday’s show. They were ending the week with Maggie’s life in jeopardy. They were going to play that scene on Friday, so she had to go home for the weekend not knowing until her pages arrived, and maybe not even then, if she was going to live or die. The paranoia crept into her mind and lodged there. She had to get herself to Ed Powell’s office and talk about it right now.

  Her hands were damp and she wiped them on the protective Kleenex Bert had stuffed in her collar. “Fight for yourself,” Ellen would say. “No agent will do it for you.” Shannon and Bert were laughing a yuck-it-up kind of laugh while Jan took the last of the now-cool rollers out of her hair, ran a brush through the stiff curls, and walked out of the makeup room and down the hall to the elevator. As it rose to the fifth floor, she thought nervously about what she ought to say when she got
to the producer’s office.

  The fifth-floor hallway was a gallery of black-and-white eleven-by-fourteen portraits of the cast. She stopped to look at the one of herself taken in the seventies, when she’d joined the show to play “the evil vixen, Maggie.” She was thirty-four that year. God, I was a vision, she thought with a mixture of pride and wonder. And when she took a step back, the light from above made the protective glass on the photo reflect her tired, nearly fifty-year-old face, over her glamorous young one.

  She sighed and turned and walked down the lushly carpeted hall, still not sure what she’d say to the producer, and feeling even less confident than she had in the elevator. Ed Powell’s secretary, Maxine, must have gone to the ladies’ room, because no one was in the reception area. Perfect, Jan thought, and she walked right past Maxine’s desk into Powell’s office. Jan had survived four producers in her fifteen years on this show. They had all either quit or been fired, and the new ones seemed to be getting younger each time.

  Last month Ed Powell celebrated a birthday which he kept referring to with dismay as “the big four-oh,” as if that number made him ancient. Ed looked up, surprised at first to see her, but then he smiled a very forced smile. “Janny Bear,” he said. The big welcome was completely phony. In his eyes she could see he was wondering, “How the fuck did she get past that pit bull Maxine?”

  “I came up so you could tell me what Lydia is going to do with the gun, Ed,” Jan said, holding up the script, knowing she sounded a little too hysterical, thinking too late that maybe it was the progesterone she was taking that was talking for her. It made her moody and blue and she always thought of it as her “bitch pill,” because it also sometimes made her paranoid and panicky. Maybe Ed would tell her what she wanted to know about Monday’s script and everything would be fine. That Lydia would never shoot Maggie.

  But Ed Powell had a suspiciously flustered look on his face that confirmed her fears. “Janny, chill out. Maggie Flynn’s a linchpin in ‘The Brighter Day’ family. She’s not going anywhere. Starting next week she’ll be in the hospital for a while and you can have a vacation. You always say you never get a chance to be with your little boy. So this little break’ll give you some time off.”

  “I’ll be delighted to stay home, but I need to know you’re telling me the truth, Ed. I was able to adopt a child as a single woman, and buy a house, because you always tell me I’m here to stay.”

  “Darling girl, you are.”

  “I told you my sister in Pennsylvania lost her job, so I have to support her now,” Jan said, suddenly afraid that she might cry.

  “Right,” Ed said. “I know all about your sister, and I sympathize.” Then he laughed and asked her, “What’s the name of that place again where you told me she lives? That funny name?”

  “Beaver Falls,” Jan said, and Ed’s face broke into a grin followed by a big toothy laugh. His face was so shiny it looked as if someone had just polished it.

  “I always laugh at that,” he said, “because it sounds as if it should be the name of a disease women get when they’re old.” He was still laughing at his own joke as Jan left his office in a more urgent panic than the one that had brought her there, and went downstairs to wardrobe.

  * * *

  2

  Linchpin, my ass,” Gladyce Colby said, talking the way she always did, with her teeth clenched around a line of straight pins. “Ed Powell told Elwin Martin that his character was a linchpin, too.” Gladyce was fitting a dark green wool-crepe suit on Jan for tomorrow’s taping. Gladyce had been doing wardrobe on the show for twenty years, and Jan trusted her. “Then Ed fucked him over royally. Last year they used to joke about Elwin in the booth. Any time he flubbed a line, Ed would turn off the mike and say, ‘Elwin, baby, you’re not dead yet… but Doctor Kevorkian is starting the car.’ ”

  Jan laughed in spite of the ugliness of the joke.

  “This suit is great on you, hon,” Gladyce said. She had watched Jan’s body “matronize,” the breasts sag, the waist thicken, and though in Jan’s early days on the show, Gladyce would dress her in clingy little silk dresses, these days she dressed her in suits with long jackets. And never with any criticism or comment.

  She was choosing shoes with lower heels to bring in for Jan, too. Not just because they were more seemly for a character of Maggie’s age, but because Jan’s feet were too tired to wear the high heels all day, the way she used to.

  “And you remember what happened to Elwin,” Gladyce said with eyebrows raised.

  Jan remembered. Elwin Martin was the actor who played Aubrey Flynn, Maggie’s husband, for ten years. Until one day, the producers decided Elwin was too dull, but they still loved the character of Aubrey. So they had the writers write Aubrey into a serious auto accident that took his Rolls-Royce into a crash-and-burn over a cliff in northern California. There was no sign of his remains.

  Six months later they had Maggie walk onto a set that was supposed to be a bar in the Virgin Islands, and suddenly, while a steel band played their song in the background, there was the new, improved Aubrey. Now he was played by Tom Patterson, a handsomer, younger-looking actor. And the truth was maybe Tom Patterson was too handsome and too young, and by comparison Jan looked too old to be Maggie.

  She worried about it while she sat on the set of Maggie’s office and ran over the lines for today’s taping with Tom. In the scene today, Aubrey confronted Maggie about his nemesis, Phillip Jenkins, a brilliant biologist who worked for Flynn Laboratories. Sitting on the plush set of Maggie’s office, Jan and Tom chatted casually while they waited for lights to be set and the boom microphones to be moved and for the prop man to fill the coffee cups they were using in the scene.

  “I saw the script for tomorrow’s show,” Tom said. “Great scene for Maggie and Lydia.” Tom was a hardworking actor, with a square jaw and a leading-man look, who had made a career of daytime TV, appearing on a few other soaps before he got to this one. He was easy to work with because he was comfortable with himself, happily married, and almost apologetic about putting his predecessor, Elwin Martin, out of a job.

  “It is a great scene,” Jan said, searching Tom’s eyes to see if he knew anything. They were speaking in the hushed tones they always used, while the prop man straightened a flower in a vase and plumped a pillow and a hairdresser was spraying and patting down a stray hair on Jan. “Unfortunately, the great scene with Lydia may turn out to be my last.”

  “I don’t think so,” Tom said. “It’s just a scare tactic from the boys upstairs. Do you have a new deal pending?” Tom asked.

  She nodded.

  “Well, there you go,” he said reassuringly. “You say no to their deal, Lydia shoots Maggie. You say yes to their deal, Maggie calms her down.” He shrugged. “You know the drill. Producers have all the options, actors are garbage. Besides, there’s always that buddy of yours who helped you get a spot on one of his networks’ prime-time series. Maybe if you leave the soap, he’ll give you a lead.”

  There was envy in his voice, envy from all the actors on the show, because two months ago when Maggie was having such bad headaches that she had to lie down for ten days, Jan had begged her way into a small but meaty part on one of Jack Solomon’s hot prime-time network shows. She’d had a horrible experience doing it, but everyone in the soap was impressed that she’d gone to college with the president of a network. Last month, at least six people asked her if she’d seen Jack’s picture on the cover of the New York Times Magazineand the article about how he was changing the face of network TV.

  “Okay, folks, let’s shoot this.” The director’s voice came over the PA from the booth, interrupting their conversation. Jan did a last-minute run-through in her mind of Maggie’s lines for this scene and what Maggie wanted from Aubrey. The lights were all on now, and one of the hairdressers was smoothing down a flyaway hair of Tom’s.

  “Aubrey.” The director’s voice came over the box, addressing the actor by the character’s name, the way he always did. “Rem
ember that the goal is to get Maggie to reassure you that she loves you. And Maggie, don’t move until he says the line, ‘All those late meetings you two were having. It made me worry.’ Then do the turn away. Okay?”

  Jan nodded and took a breath, and Hal, the potbellied, Hawaiian-shirt-clad stage manager, said, “Okay, people, quiet on the set.” He was relaying the countdown from the booth. “Here we go in five, four, three, two…”

  “You can imagine how—“

  A piercing scream from off camera interrupted Tom’s first line. Jan spun around in terror and heard someone off camera shout, “Hold it, pal! Don’t move or we’ll hurt you.” But the bright lights were in her eyes, and the space beyond the cameras was black to her

  She could see everyone on the office set standing frozen in fear. There was some loud scuffling, and shouts, and then she heard an eerie plaintive cry, “Maggeeeee, I love you.” She was shocked when the stage manager suddenly grabbed her hard by the arms and pulled her out of the chair and through the open doorway of the office set. Running with her past the jail-cell set, past the Flynn living-room set, and onto the intensive care unit set, which was the farthest away from the cameras. There was terror in Hal’s eyes and he was gasping for breath as he leaned against the bed in the mock hospital room.

  “My God! What is it?” Jan asked him. But before he could answer, she heard one of the grips holler, “It’s okay. Not to worry, folks. We got him. He’s outta here.” Hal was heaving hysterical breaths that made Jan afraid he was going to have a heart attack. Finally he fell on her in a sweaty hug.

  “It’s okay. They got him. It was that guy again, hon,” Hal said, trying to catch his breath. “That fan. I just caught sight of him lurking back there by the coffeemaker. He must have gotten past the Pinkerton security boys downstairs and wanted to say hello to you. That’s all.”