In some newspaper article she read a while back, it said that Jack Solomon gave two million dollars to some museum in New York. Imagine having a spare couple of million you could just give away. That was something. Her eyes moved down the page and stopped to read a little piece of gossip.
Mann, Marly Bennet. Marly was a key player on a long-running situation comedy, “Keeping Up with the Joneses.” You’ve also seen her in many movies of the week and miniseries. Also since her arrival in Hollywood, Marly has acted in over one hundred and fifty commercials. Marly writes whimsically to this office, “Am happy to report that I’m legally separated from Billy Mann, so all college sweethearts can contact me through the alumni association.” Marly and ex-husband, late-night-TV-star Billy Mann, have twin daughters, Jennifer and Sarah.
Oooh, separated. Maybe that’s why Marly didn’t get her letters. She’d mailed them to Marly in care of “The Billy Mann Show,” thinking Billy would bring them home. But the big TV star dumped her. Tough break, Marly, she thought. But you’ll survive. Someone with my simple tastes could probably live for a year on one month of the child support you’ll get for the twins. Now she skipped down the list, looking only at the names of the people she used to know well.
Morris, Rose. The film Faces, which starred Meryl Streep and Al Pacino, brought screenwriter Rose Morris Schiffman an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. Rose was widowed in 1982 by the death of department-of-architecture graduate (’66) Allan Bayliss. Rose and her second husband, physician Andrew Schiffman, have a ten-year-old daughter, Molly.
She thought about the day Rose Morris and Allan Bayliss got pinned in a fraternity-pinning ceremony held outside in front of the dorm. Those two loved one another big time, in an almost mystical way. They were the couple she always thought about when she learned the term soul mates. They even looked alike.
She could still picture that funny little four-eyes Rose Morris nervously running down the stairs to untie Allan from the tree where the Sigma Nu’s had tied him as part of the ritual. She had to kiss him in front of everyone and she was mortified, didn’t want to go out there alone, but none of her buddies would go with her. Brave it, or some shit like that, they told her. You can do it.
Rose was terrified. She was on her way up to her room after a dance class, and when Rose spotted her, she grabbed her. “Please just walk me out there,” she said. “I’m too afraid to do this alone.” It was no big deal to her, those fraternity jerks didn’t intimidate her. So she walked Rose down the steps and out to the tree. Stood next to her while she kissed Allan and untied him and the Sigma Nu’s sang the goopy sweetheart song, with Rose blushing flame red.
So naturally when she was sitting with her daughter in the State Theater, and Rose’s name came on the screen, she let out a yelp and embarrassed the shit out of Polly. “I know her,” she said, really loud, “I saved her ass one time,” and Polly covered her face with her hands and someone a few rows back yelled, “Shut up, lady!”
All the way home from Rose’s movie that night, she kept thinking, I could have played the part in Faces better than Meryl Streep did. I could have at least played the sister. She tried to call Rose the day after she saw the movie. She was going to remind her about the pinning. She was going to say she remembered how much she and Allan loved one another. Rose would appreciate that.
She was going to ask her for help in the business, but the information operator in Los Angeles told her, “Sorry, but that phone is unlisted.” Unlisted! Who do these people think they are? Who are they hiding from, when they don’t list their goddamn phone numbers?
Norell, Betty. Betty Norell spends summers with her family in California, but through an exchange with British Equity, she winters in repertory at Chichester, the theater started by Laurence Olivier. Writes Betty: “It’s theater just as we’d all once hoped it would be. And many of our glorious productions move on to the West End.”
She read that one over three times. Looks like good old Betty was the only one who was living up to the vow. Doing the kind of things they all swore they’d do some day. Making the rest of them seem as if they’d gone the way of the glitz. Sold themselves down the old L.A. river. Well, Betty always was the best actress in her class, and the most serious one about her work, she’d give her that.
O’Malley, Jan. Jan is now in her fifteenth year of playing the part of Maggie Flynn on the daytime drama “My Brightest Day.” In 1991, Jan, still single, adopted a baby son, Joey, and tells us in her letters, “As a result, I am finally alive.”
That one made her close the magazine and fling it across the room. A baby. They gave Jan O’Malley a baby. See what being a star can get you? I lose custody of my kids, and she gets to buy a baby! Look at these women’s lives! Look at mine! I graduated from the same school! I was the best one, and now I have nothing to show for it. And they have it all. Money, babies, their pictures in TV Guide and the paper. And the clothes. That sequined dress Jan O’Malley wore on the Daytime Emmys had to cost at least five thousand dollars.
She got up and walked over to the window of her apartment, the window with the view of the back alley and the trash cans from the building next door. I’m forty-nine years old, she thought. When do I get mine? When do I get to have a decent life? And why don’t they help me? The tears of jealousy that had been burning behind her eyes finally came and rolled down her unhappy face.
I have to get them to help me. I know they will, she thought. If only I can get them on the phone.
* * *
4
Ellen’s Donna Karan control-top panty hose were a little too controlling, and the waistband was cutting into that bulging place around her middle where her waistline used to be before she ate all those power lunches at Le Dome. She always got so pumped up at those meetings, brainstorming new projects, courting the talent, hearing their ideas, that most of the time she gobbled her lunch without thinking about what she was eating. Lost her head and devoured all the bread, ordered too much food and then ate it too fast.
Once in the middle of a story pitch, over lunch at the Ivy, she noticed the writer was frowning uncomfortably at her, and when she looked down she realized it was because her fork was spearing a roasted red potato she’d been about to remove from his plate. Usually by the time the valet brought her BMW to the curb of those restaurants, after the big goodbyes and hyped-up promises everyone made to one another, she couldn’t wait to drive away alone so she could reach back, unbutton the back of her skirt, and breathe.
Today’s meeting in the conference room had been going on for four hours, and it threatened to keep going on for a few more. She had to pee, but she didn’t dare get up and go to the bathroom again, since she’d already excused herself twice, and not one of the men had left room once.
As usual, there was more testosterone in the air than at a fraternity party on a Saturday night, and the late-adolescent arbiters of America’s taste in film were really going at it.
“Even Shakespeare couldn’t polish this turd of a script,” Bibberman said.
“He could,” Schatzman said. “But Ovitz told him he’s not available ‘til July.” A blast of a laugh from Richardson.
“He’s doing Last Action Hero Two,” he said, which got an even bigger laugh from the boys, and Ellen thought how lucky it was for her that she’d once been the room mother for the second grade, so she understood their behavior.
Why did it still amaze her what yo-yos the three of them turned into the minute the door to the conference room was closed? Why did it gall her how ruled by their maleness they became? All day long they all kissed the asses of the talent and made nice with the agents and spoke in conciliatory, unctuous tones to the lawyer. So when they finally got into the room to talk among themselves about the details and the projects, the rage they’d been holding inside finally blew, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.
After so many years in this town, during which she’d somehow managed to work for some of the legendary pigs in the business, Ellen
was sure she’d seen and heard it all. And yet now and then she still found herself embarrassed by the behavior of these three. Just that morning, Randy McVey, a gifted British director, was in a meeting with all of them, discussing a project, and he brought up his background in classical theater.
“Of course,” he said, “my first love is to work in the summer season at Chichester. If only they played all year long, I’d never leave the place.”
And behind the very elegant man’s back, for the entertainment of the others, Bibberman actually made that open fisted moving-in-and-out, jerking-off gesture the boys used to make, back when she was in elementary school. Ellen wanted to grab him by his Armani lapels and shake some sense into him. Later when the director left, Bibberman imitated McVey’s dialect and his passion for the theater, thinking he was being terribly funny. Now they were talking about one of the writers.
“How much does he want?” Bibberman asked.
“Two hundred thousand.”
“Pass,” Bibberman said. “I could shit on the page and it would be better than his first draft.”
Ellen had her usual wave of wishing she could afford to quit this job. Give up the perks and the pricks and go open a bookstore in a beach town somewhere. Or at least work at a company that was run by grown-ups. This was getting to be too much, watching the boys sitting there all day, wagging their dicks at one another.
Each of them believing with the hubris that their excessive salaries gave them that they were going to be in these heady positions of power forever. And worse yet, claiming that they actually knew how to predict what the audiences wanted to seem what would make money. All Ellen knew was that even Nostrafuckingdamus couldn’t tell how a movie would do until the popcorn was popped and the audience was either cheering, laughing, crying, or walking out in the middle.
But she chose to shut up and do what Rose told her, which was not to “rock the yacht.” Not let the “boys” win their battle to get her out of the locker room, since they were the only real downside of the job for her. Otherwise it had a lot to recommend it.
She’d grown accustomed pretty damn quick to the expense-account life, including the high-priced car that the studio transportation department not only provided, but had serviced, detailed, washed, gassed, and waiting in her personal parking spot for her every day. And since day one of the announcement in the trades that she had this job, she always got the great tables everywhere in town. At Morton’s and at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant Granita in Malibu, with Barbara Lazaroff fawning over her.
But what stoked her more than the trappings, what kept her awake at night with excitement, was the charge she got putting together the deals to make the movies. There was something incredibly heady about the alchemy of matching just the right script with a director no one else would have dreamed of using for that genre, and watching the project take off. It was a spike, the part of the job that made her as giddy as the studio secretaries when Daniel Day-Lewis walked into the commissary. That was what made it all worthwhile for her. Spending her days locked in a room from early morning to midnight, shepherding a film from its conception to its premiere.
Nothing could beat those hours of being part of the process, when the director and the writer worked to make a product that was bigger, broader, grander than the sum of its parts. To watch each idea bring forth the next one, to see the product metamorphose.
And then to be the one who could make words on a page come to life by finding the right stars, to give it what Ellen jokingly called Tina Turners, meaning not just legs, but the greatest legs in the business. That part of the job meant so much to her that she could put up with the “boys club” to have it.
Now the fucking panty hose were rolling over and sliding down her belly, goddamn it. She promised herself to have her secretary call Neiman Marcus to order a dozen pairs of panty hose without the control top. Then she could be comfortable and not care if her stomach stuck out.
Schatzman was droning on about casting the male and female leads for Out There, a hot action-adventure film the studio was eager to make. Ellen knew these casting discussions could go on forever. Each of the men had his personal favorite actors, and hated the other’s favorites, so they could fight about casting for days on end.
Names of stars were flying, careers were hanging in the balance. First they talked about the women. “You’d like to fuck her, wouldn’t you?” “Only with your cock, in case there’s something wrong with her.” “Hey, believe me, when I visit the set, I’ll bring my good dick.”
Ellen was sure they sometimes overdid the childish male shit just to fry her. To see how bad they could make it before she fell apart and said, “I quit, you infantile assholes.” Probably they were wishing she’d walk, so they wouldn’t have to have a broad around, and more important, if she left on her own, they wouldn’t have to pay her off.
Now they’d moved on to talk about casting the men, so what Bibberman called the “pussy factor” was being weighed, because they needed to lure the women audiences into the theaters. They were all ripping apart the available actors. One male star was a “wimp,” another a “wuss.”
Ellen made what she thought was a great suggestion for the role.
“No chance.” Bibberman sneered when he heard it. “He’s too high-maintenance.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I’m not interested in being the one who goes to the emergency room to pull the gerbils out of his ass.” Big laugh.
“Why gerbils?” one of them said. “Why not hamsters or mice, or maybe white rats?”
“White rats would show the dirt!”
Screams of laughter.
“White rats never ask, ‘Was it good for you?’ ” More screams.
Ellen sighed. Let them play, she thought. When they get serious, I’ll jump in. Her mind was wandering as she doodled with her Mont Blanc pen on the legal pad in front of her. She knew if she didn’t stand soon and start packing up her briefcase, she’d never get out of there. And she wasn’t going to disappoint Roger. It was his birthday, and she was meeting him at Adriano’s for dinner.
Rogie, her gorgeous son, whose father left him and Ellen and Los Angeles when Roger was less than a year old. Today her divine boy turned twenty-four, and they would celebrate and reminisce. And for a few hours she’d forget about the scripts that were stacked on her night table, piled in her briefcase, sitting on the passenger seat of her car, and being delivered in a steady stream to her office every time the mail room gofer came by her studio bungalow.
“Ellen?”
When she looked up from her doodling, she realized that all of the men were not only looking at her, they were waiting for the answer to some question Bibberman must have directed at her, which she’d been too preoccupied to hear. All of their eyes glistened with glee. He had to have guessed she hadn’t heard the first time, because now he repeated it. “I asked, which one of the men on this list makes your snatch get juicy?”
Heat burned her face. Typical Bibberman, putting her in a spot where she ought to tell him to rephrase his juvenile question or she’d go get a job somewhere where men were men, not spoiled brats trying out the provocative words on the girls in the class. Her mind ran through the possible answers, but before she could speak, Bibberman added, gleeful at his own cuteness, “Or at your age, does your snatch still get juicy?”
This wasn’t sexual harassment, this was just plain harassment. Get nasty and see if you can make the girl fall apart, lose it, be sorry she ever came into the locker room. Ellen fought to keep her stoic expression, took a deep breath, and said, “I’d go with Kevin Costner and some K-Y jelly.”
Her joke got a tepid laugh from Richardson and Schatz-man as she stood. She had to get out of here.
“Gentlemen,” she said, “and I use the term loosely, I have to go now. I have a pressing engagement.”
“Get out the K-Y jelly,” Bibberman said. “Sounds like a hot date. Forget ‘women who run with the wolves,’ we have ‘woman who sl
eeps with cats.’ ”
“It’s my son’s birthday,” Ellen said, and she realized she’d stopped herself from saying which birthday, since they all had young children.
“Again?” Richardson joked. “Didn’t your son just have a birthday last year?”
“My kids have all their birthday parties in a screening room downstairs,” Schatzman said.
“See you tomorrow,” Ellen said, walking out the door of the conference room and down the hall, where she could hear Bibberman’s laughter at Schatzman’s comments about being so devoted to the job that he never left the studio, so his family had to move their lives there in order to see him. Wait until she told them she was leaving early Friday night, too, because it was Girls’ Night.
She had to go to the bathroom so badly she knew she’d never make it out of the building and over to the bungalow to her own office, so she stopped in the employees ladies’ room near the elevator. “At your age.” Bibberman’s pointed words, the amusement dancing in his beady little eyes. Yes, she was getting to be what was perceived as old to have her job in this town, and she knew it. Most of the other women in top studio jobs, with the exception of Sherry Lansing, were in their thirties.
“Now who could this harridan be?” Ellen thought, wondering if it was the fluorescent lights that were making her face look yellow in the mirror, or the new shade of auburn, the hair color Lizanne tried on her last month. God bless Lizanne, who always fit her in when those telltale gray hairs started sneaking in. Gray hair, tired eyes. I’ve got those just-looked-in-the-mirror-and-thought-I saw-my-mother-blues, Ellen thought, looking wearily at herself.
Sometimes the young hairdresser at José Eber would stay in the salon until ten, long after the others were gone, just to fit Ellen in. Too bad she didn’t do pubic hair, too, Ellen thought, and then laughed a why-bother laugh at herself in the mirror at how dumb that thought was. No one saw her pubes anyway but the cats, and this coming Friday night in the hot tub, her buddies.
Show Business Kills Page 4