Show Business Kills

by Iris Rainer Dart

  Once at a Girls’ Night last year, while they were on God-knows-what glass of champagne, someone, probably Rose, had asked “What’s the most narcissistic thing any of you have ever done?” Ellen remembered how Janny piped right up with a giggle, and then when she could get her words out, after the stream of laughter at herself, she confessed, “Put a mirror between my legs and tweezed out all the grays.”

  “How about the time after a good mammogram,” Marly said, “when I was so relieved that after the radiologist left the room, I kissed my own breasts.”

  “If I could only reach my breasts to kiss them,” Rose said, “I never would have remarried.”

  Ellen sighed, thinking how ready she was for Friday night. Jan, who was always so elegant on “My Brightest Day,” with her great red hair and her green eyes and those gorgeous high cheekbones, would be the first one to holler, “Let’s get naked,” drop her clothes, and head for the hot tub.

  Then she’d probably have some new stories about all the shit she took from the people who worked on her show, the backstage plots, all of which were tons more interesting than the ones on that dopey daytime show. And Marly would have the latest chapter on her ex-husband Billy’s awesome ego, and Rosie would be half there and the other half of her brain would be in her current screenplay. They’d sit naked in the hot tub, where their aging bodies felt healed and light, and so did their world-weary souls.

  Christ, they’d been close for so long, they each knew who had taken the others’ virginity and the stories that accompanied the deflowering. They each knew what the other wore or didn’t wear to sleep, and what each of their bodies looked like when they were young and effortlessly hard, before gravity took its toll, in spite of the Stairmasters they’d all climbed so ferverently that if they were really ascending, by now they’d all be in heaven.

  Ellen even knew their scents by heart, probably because it was their custom every year to exchange cologne, soap, body lotion, some product of their favorite scent for Christmas. Marly wore Joy, she had since the sixties. Rose liked Opium, Jan still loved sultry Jungle Gardenia, and every year each of them gave Ellen some product from her own favorite scent, Norell. Last year she announced at their private Christmas dinner that maybe it was time to switch to another kind of gift, since she had enough Norell to last until she was a hundred.

  Tonight Ellen hurried across the quiet lot to make a quick stop at her own bungalow office, just to see if there were any last-minute calls she needed to return from her car while she was on her way to meet Roger.

  “Greens?”

  “In here,” her secretary called. Ellen walked through her own spacious, high-ceilinged office, furnished with chrome and glass, and into the pretty Italian-tiled bathroom, where Greenie was washing out coffee cups.

  “You’re out of Dodge already?” he asked. Greenie never left the building until Ellen did, even though she told him that once she went into a meeting, only “the deal gods” knew when she’d come out. He was loyal and true and he used the quiet time while Ellen was in meetings to cover each script she’d be taking home with a typed-up synopsis, which was always astute and thoughtful.

  “It’s Roger’s birthday,” she told him. She was still smarting from Bibberman’s treatment of her, and she knew if she mentioned it to Greenie, he’d get on that kick again about how that shithead Bibberman wanted her out of there, and now the jealous little mongrel was going to try anything he could to get her to quit, so the studio wouldn’t have to pay her off. He’d also remind her that the way Bibberman treated her in meetings was nothing compared to the things he said about her behind her back.

  Ronald Greenberg was gay and as gorgeous as a runway model, and this was the third studio to which he’d followed Ellen. He was, Ellen always told close friends, her “secret weapon.” He had no desire to be an executive himself because, he said, he didn’t want the pressure, but he was Hollywood wise, understood the politics, and somehow managed to know where every body in the industry was buried.

  “Want me to walk you to the car?” he asked Ellen now, taking her briefcase out of her hand, removing obsolete drafts of scripts and changing them for the current ones with his notes clipped to them, then handing the case back to her.

  “Nahh,” she said. “I’ll be okay. I can’t imagine any mugger who could want to hurt me worse then Bibberman does.”

  “He’s looking to get you crazy. So don’t you cave, my love,” Greenie said sympathically, then added, “because I can’t afford to be out of a gig.”

  “I’m hanging in tooth and nail, Greens,” she told him. “Even if, in my case, it is bonded tooth and acrylic nail.”

  Greenie laughed. “That reminds me, you need a manicure,” he said. “I’ll get someone to come to your house late Saturday afternoon so you can read at the same time.”

  “Thanks, Greens,” she told him, and in a minute she was out the door and out of the building into the dark, full-moon night.

  * * *

  5

  She loved the leather smell inside her black 735i BMW, and after she slid behind the wheel, she heaved a sigh of relief and sat back against the soft tan seat. In that room upstairs she knew the others were probably giving Bibberman “high five” for humiliating her, and she hated the poor schmucks and pitied them at the same time. All three of them had stories flying around about them that even if they were partly true made them really sad cases.

  Like the one that Richardson’s model marriage was a front for his real sexual pleasure, adolescent boys. That Schatzman hadn’t had an erection in his life, and his two beautiful blond children were the result of his wife’s donor insemination. And that Bibberman’s wife of fifteen years had left him once for a woman in New York, but the woman dumped her, so Bibberman took her back.

  Who cared if they sat there trashing everyone in town, using the late meeting as an excuse not to go home to their bad marriages, she’d be having dinner with Roger. The guard in the kiosk waved as she drove through. “Eat my dust,” Ellen said quietly through a smile and a wave.

  Making movies for audiences made up of what H. L. Mencken called the “booboisie,” was not exactly the career Ellen Feinberg Bass had intended for herself. Once she planned to produce plays, or work in production for a repertory company, and Marly used every opportunity to remind her that she’d fallen off her course. In fact, tonight as she drove up Beverly Glen she remembered that at the last Girls’ Night the argument that had ended the party too early was about that very subject.

  These women had known one another so long and so well they could really push one another’s buttons, and turn an evening that started out with a great dinner and a lot of good wine and a million laughs into a battle. So that within twenty minutes everyone would be marching off to bed huffy and testy and insulted, or sometimes just slamming out of the party to go home.

  It was amazing to Ellen the way four grown women could still fight like kids. Over the years the four of them had whoppers, about things which in retrospect seemed so dumb. Like the night Marly came back from New York and told them she’d had dinner with Diane Sawyer and Mike Nichols and Jan called her a star-fucker. And the night Rose told Marly she thought her problems with Billy were a result of her parents not being affectionate enough, and Marly called her a condescending Jew.

  But the last fight had been Ellen’s fault. It started right after Jan told the Maximilian Schell story for the millionth time. They were still in the hot tub, hooting with laughter about Thanks a million, Maximilian. Rose was wearing her owlish glasses, which were too steamed up for her to be able to see out of them, but the tears of laughter came streaming down under the frames, onto her cheeks and into the water. And Marly’s laugh was her usual outraged gasp that had inherent in it the words “It’s a good thing my mother’s not listening to this.”

  “You know, I think that story about Max is a great germ of an idea for the beginning of the film,” Rose said that night, and she ran her fingers across the lenses of her glasses as
if the glasses were windshields and her fingers were the windshield wipers, until they could all see the serious expression in her big brown eyes. “About a young woman whose life is changed because of one night with a pompous movie star. It’s wonderful and poignant. A little low-budget piece, like Garbo Talks. It could be all about the way one night with a man like that affects her feelings about men forever.”

  “Yeah, great artsy-fartsy idea,” Ellen said re-pinning a fallen lock of her abundant auburn hair. She loved her friends, but they didn’t have a clue about the realities of how the business worked. “Except for two small things. No studio would make it, and nobody would pay to go and see it. Other than that… a classic!”

  Rose pursed her lips and then frowned. She looked as if she were deciding whether or not to speak her mind while she took her glasses off and laid them next to the hot tub. “You’ve been working at a studio too long, El,” Rose said, blinking rapidly. “You’re starting to sound like one of the ‘suits.’ You are one of the ‘suits.’ I can’t believe a woman I’m close to is on their side. It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

  Ellen had lost it. She hated herself when she flew off the handle the way she did that night, but it was a rap she didn’t want to take. Especially from any of these three. “It’s my fucking job, Rosie,” she said, flaring. “So let’s not confuse it with some manifestation of my inner core or my aesthetic sensibilities. I like art as much as you do, but it doesn’t sell tickets. Christ, where do you get off copping to the artistic sensibility bullshit? You wrote for TV, and Jan’s on fucking daytime,” and then she turned to Marly and said, “and peddling Mylanta isn’t exactly playing Medea!”

  “I think Rose is right,” Marly said, turning her pretty face away from Ellen’s tirade, the way they all were sure her very proper mother must have with her any time she behaved inappropriately. She had that look in her eyes that always glimmered there when she was ready to battle to the death for a cause, a challenge. “Because, unlike the rest of us who are scavenging around for jobs, you’re in a power position, so you can make a difference. You’re the one who can push for quality and taste in this trash-filled industry. I think the story of Jan and Max could be the beginning of an important concept. And if it was well told, it could be turned into a feminist statement. A beautiful little piece of art.”

  “The problem with a little piece of art,” Ellen said, and she tried to control the tone in her voice that meant you stupid dipshit, “is that the only person who goes to see it is a little guy named Art. That’s one ticket sold. Who’s going to buy the rest of them? Get real. You know what people go to see. The head of production at my studio has what he calls a kaboom chart on his wall. If someone or something doesn’t blow up every ten minutes in your script, he already has a deal negotiated with a new writer to come in and fix it, and you’re toast.”

  There was a tsk, and a patronizing shaking of their heads that made Ellen’s blood pressure rise. She had an overwhelming childish urge to splash the hot water right into all of their faces.

  “Then I think that job is toxic and you ought to quit,” Marly said, her eyes flashing angrily and her white-blond hair glistening in the moonlight.

  “It may be,” Ellen said, and now she was really steamed. “But at the moment it’s feeding me, my unemployed son, my aging mother, and two very hungry Persian cats.”

  “And is it worth it?”

  “Unlike you, Mrs. Billy Mann,” Ellen said, her voice rising defensively, “I’m not divorcing a big star, so I can’t afford to quit that toxic job. But I promise if I ever do marry someone that rich, I’ll divorce him and get the kind of money you have, so I can have an organic job with no pesticides, and make art the whole fucking day long. In fact, it’ll be so noncommercial that I’ll even be able to use people with no names to star in it, like you and Jan.” She regretted the outburst instantly but was still enraged that not one of them, people so close to her heart, got the point. That she had to make decisions that were based on the bottom line because that was how she kept her job. That many times she wished like hell she hadn’t trapped herself in a lifestyle that was jacked up so high that she had to keep the job to afford herself and her family.

  It was painfully quiet then, and one at a time they each found reasons to get out of the hot tub and make their way to their individual guest rooms in Marly’s giant house, and it wasn’t even midnight.

  At dawn when they all stood in Marly’s kitchen having their morning coffee, all of them looked as rumpled as the beds they’d just left, Ellen felt awful about saying all the mean things she’d said.

  “I’m sorry,” she told Marly. “I love you, and I’ll still come and bail you out if they ever throw you in a Turkish prison.” That had been their promise to one another since the night they all went to see Midnight Express, about a young American trapped in a jail in Turkey. They swore over coffee at Ships in Westwood that they would never be the kiss-the-air-next-to-your-face bunch, but the real, be-there-asking-the-doctors-if-they’re-doing-everything-they-can kind of friends.

  “I love you, too,” Marly said. “And I promise I’ll still ride in the back of the ambulance when you keel over from working too hard at that poisonous job.” They all had laughed at that, ending the morning with warm feelings. The girls, Ellen thought, pulling the Beamer up to the valet parker at Adriano’s. She would have a blast with them on Friday night.

  In Adriano’s she waved at the hostess and headed for her usual table, where Roger was already seated, and when he stood to greet her, his astonishing good looks overwhelmed her. She still thought of him as her baby, the son she’d raised alone after her divorce from Herb Bass the podiatrist. Herbie, as his frat brothers called him, was a spoiled brat she’d made the mistake of marrying when he was in podiatry school at UCLA and had the good sense to divorce by his graduation. He’d never given her or Roger a dime since he moved back east.

  “Hi, Mom,” Roger said.

  There was always an instant of needing to do a reality check when she saw the man that he was now. Over six feet tall, with shoulder-length black hair and huge hazel eyes that danced with his sweet sense of humor.

  “Sorry to be late, honey,” she said, hugging him and sitting in the chair he’d pulled out for her.

  “Mom, for you fifteen minutes late is early,” he said, grinning at her.

  “Happy birthday,” she said. “I’m giving you cash.”

  “Thank you. It’s just what I always wanted.” He gestured for the waiter to bring his mother a San Pellegrino, which was what he was drinking.

  Ellen studied his handsome face. A face she knew so well she could tell a story about every funny little scar on it. The one on his chin that he got when his dirt bike hit a bump and he went flying over the handlebars. The one near his right eyebrow that happened one day at Little League when instead of catching a baseball in his glove, it hit him in the face. Ellen had a fast slide show in her head of all the emergency rooms they’d sat in playing “Go Fish.”

  Somehow they’d survived a life with no husband for her and a deadbeat father for him, a million different nutty jobs for her, and assorted homes, rented and owned, depending on her financial status at the moment. Now things were good, now she was where she’d fought to be. Now she could afford to give Roger the moon, and no Bibberman was going to get that good feeling away from her.

  “So how’s life at the top?” Roger asked.

  “Believe me, baby, if I knew how to do something else, I’d do it,” she said, working to keep it light. She’d never trouble Roger with her fears about her job. “But I’m too old to have babies and too anal retentive to get married, so what’s left? Limos, lunches, deals. Right? That reminds me,” she said, pulling her electronic organizer out of her purse and pushing a few buttons, “I have to input the alarm to remind me to call an agent at nine in the morning about an auction for a screenplay.” While she typed a note into the microcomputer, adding a note to herself about the exact wording she want
ed to use with the agent, she heard Roger say, “Mom, I’m gay.”

  She dropped the screen tapping pen and looked at him.

  “Oh, honey…”

  “I’m lying,” he said, “but I figured I’d get your attention, and now what I have to tell you will be a relief by comparison. I want to go to USC film school.”

  Ellen looked closely at him, hoping she’d misheard.

  “There’s no contest. I’d much rather have gay,” she said, taking his hand. “I mean, Rogie, you really do?” she asked, her brow furrowing as he nodded. “I’m amazed. How can you want to go to film school and be in this business after all you know about all the awful parts of it.”

  “How can I not? I’m a tinsel diaper baby,” he said, grinning. It was a grin that had cost her thousands of dollars in braces. It was true. His whole life had been spent in show business. He’d gone everywhere with her, sat under directors’ chairs playing with his Matchbox cars, spent weeks on locations all over the world. At four, he discussed divorce with Cher. At seven, he “did lunch” with John Travolta. When he was nine, Michael Keaton was directing a short film with a part in it for a young boy, and he’d asked Ellen if he could “borrow” Roger to star in it.

  “Rogie, the business really stinks,” she tried, already knowing it was a lost cause. “It’s mean and ugly and shitty. They lie, they cheat, they steal, they’re phony and immoral. They’ll screw you six ways till Sunday and then hug you and say, ‘We’re family.’ ”

  “Mom,” he said, squeezing a lime into his mineral water. “I don’t know how to break it to you, but to a lot of people in the business, you’re the ‘they’ in that story.”

  She put the organizer back in her purse and watched the fizzy mineral water as the bubbles rose in her glass. “Besides,” Roger said, “what else do I know? I grew up in the business. I understand grosses better than geography. Once I was in the library and I saw a copy of Sophie’s Choice and I said, ‘Oh, wow! The novelization.’ All my life I thought when kids played doctor, the doctor was supposed to be a plastic surgeon.”