Ellen laughed. “Okay, enough with the Hollywood jokes,” she said. “I can see your mind is made up. Just when I thought I was finished paying tuition. Why couldn’t you have gone into your father’s business instead of mine?” she joked.
“Podiatry?” he laughed, knowing she was kidding. “Somehow it doesn’t send the same excitement through my body.”
Ellen sighed, and her only child put his hand over hers and looked into her eyes. “Hey, Mom, look at it this way. Maybe I’ll be among the exceptions. The one honest, uncompromising director. The one who cares more about the product than the bottom line.” It choked her with emotion to hear words she remembered saying herself somewhere a long time ago. But that was before she moved to Hollywood and her first job was as a gofer on “The Monkees,” and the idealism started slipping away.
“Sure, honey,” she said now, “maybe you will.”
Roger had a late date with a new girlfriend, so Ellen was home by nine-thirty. While she fed the cats, she played back her answering machine. She had calls from Richard Gere, Mike Ovitz, Meryl Streep, and Marly Bennet. Marly’s call was reminding her that Girls’ Night was on Friday and that she’d better be there.
The wine she had with dinner was making her a little woozy, and she thought she’d fall asleep immediately, but after she took off her makeup, flossed and brushed her teeth, and shooed the cats away so she could slide into her bed, she picked up the stack of scripts from her night table and sorted through them.
One of them was an action-adventure piece that interested her because she saw on the title page that it was written by two women. Maybe that would mean there would be some heart in it. Maybe if it had emotions along with the explosions and she really liked it, she could bring in a woman to direct it, too. Wouldn’t those kaboom films benefit by a human touch that made the characters more accessible, so that the audience actually felt something for the people involved?
Yes, maybe she’d just look this one over. Even though she felt worn out, she kept reading. Good opening, she thought, after the first four pages. And after a few more pages the story was starting to intrigue her. By the time she was on page forty, she had grabbed a pen and a pad and was feverishly making notes. Hurriedly writing down what she knew were wonderful ideas to make this project work. People she could put together. The people who would make it happen. She could even imagine the kind of musical background it should have.
When she’d finished the script, she put it and her pad of notes on the table next to the bed and turned off the light. Ah, Bibberman, you son of a bitch, she thought. There’s life in this old girl yet, and I am not going to let you get to me. I’ll hang in and get some good work done, even if I have to be known as the menopausal mogul. Then she slid into sleep with a smile on her tired face.
* * *
6
She wasn’t even sure if her rattletrap clunker of a car would make it all the way to L.A. She couldn’t afford to have it serviced. Couldn’t afford to do anything. She had one credit card that wasn’t maxed out, so she’d use that to fill the tank and get the oil checked. Of course once she got down there and one of them gave her a job, things would be different.
After she decided on the plan, it was so easy she wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before. Well, not easy, it took some nerve, but hell, she was an actress. She could sound as if she were somebody important. She took a deep breath and dialed the alumni office in Pittsburgh.
“CMU Alumni Office. This is Dee Dee. How may I help you?”
“Oh, hi, Dee Dee. This is Rose Schiffman. I was Rose Morris when I was at school there,” she said, and then she took a beat to hear if Dee Dee would make some remark to let her know she didn’t sound like Rose Schiffman, or if Dee Dee knew Rose Schiffman, but she didn’t seem to notice that anything was weird. It was a great idea because since Rose Schiffman was a writer, most people didn’t know what her voice sounded like.
She said she was part of the West Coast Drama Alumni Clan, and she wanted to do some personal solicitations for the new building fund, to write a personal letter reminding all of the entertainment-business alums that the drama department had been responsible for their success and that now it was time for them to “give back “ Boy was that the right thing to say. The very friendly Dee Dee flipped.
She said, “Oh, Mrs. Schiffman, I loved the movie you wrote, Faces. I cried so much when I watched it. My husband and I just rented the video again the other night, and I cried again as if I’d never seen it before. I know a personal letter from you to some of the alums would mean so much. I mean there’s such a lot of money in the entertainment industry, and who better to give it to than us. Right?”
“My sentiments exactly,” she said, thinking what idiots people made of themselves over celebs.
“Why don’t I fax you a list of the people we’re trying to get involved in the new fund-raising campaign?” the girl asked her.
“Great,” she said. “Home phones and addresses, too, Dee Dee. And I’ll get right on the case. But I’m out of town, so if you don’t mind, I’ll give you a local fax number where you can reach me.”
“No problem,” said Dee Dee.
She gave her the fax number of a drugstore outside of town, and by the time she got there, the pages were waiting for her. Names and phone numbers and home addresses of the big-time West Coast drama department alums. Yes! That night she sat and read the fawning cover letter that came from the alumni office to Rose Schiffman. Then she went over and over the list of names and home addresses, trying to picture the houses that went with those addresses.
She circled the names of the people who would remember her and who would be nice to her. Trying to decide which of them might have a job for her. Then next to their names she wrote ideas for what the jobs might be. That way when she went to see them, she wouldn’t be wasting their time. She could go right in and ask for what she wanted. That night in bed she copied all the addresses into her own little address book by hand. Put them in their alphabetical locations, as if they’d been in there all these years. They should have been. She could have stayed in touch. That’s what she’d tell them when she saw them.
Early in the morning, she packed a few things in her little duffel bag, the only piece of luggage she owned. Then she called in to her boss and told him, in a voice she knew would be convincing, that she was deathly ill. “You sound awful,” he said. Hah! She thought, at least all those years of acting training didn’t go totally to waste,
When she was ready to leave, she checked her purse to be sure she had the little remote control for her answering machine with her in case she needed to call home for messages from LA. Then she went into the kitchen to turn on the answering machine she’d had for a million years. When she caught sight of her face in the oven door of her murky little kitchen, she laughed a pained laugh.
It was the face of Marterio looking back at her, the character she played in The House of Bernardo Alba at Tech. She had coveted the part of the beautiful young Adela, the starring role, but when the casting went up on the call board, the part of Adela had gone to Jan O’Malley. And instead she had been cast as Marterio, the dried up, jealous sister.
Poor Marterio, she thought, looking critically at herself, and poor me. She remembered sitting in the dressing room in 1966, putting mauve shadows under her eyes and lines across her forehead, drawing more lines from her nose to her mouth. Then pulling her long orange silky hair back and spraying it with a black-colored spray, except for the temples, which she powered gray. And when she heard her cue, she’d charged out on that stage and given the best performance the school had ever seen.
The little theater shook when Marterio said to Adela, “I have a heart full of a force so evil that, without my wanting to be, I’m drowned by it.” Now the not-so-funny joke was that she looked like Marterio without the makeup. The lines and bags and gray hair were there on their own. Pushing fifty. How did it all go by so fast?
Of course, not one of the others prob
ably looked this bad. In fact on the rare days when she was home from work, she watched Jan on “My Brightest Day” and couldn’t get over how gorgeous she still looked. Once when she was still married to Lou, he came home for lunch one day while she was watching Jan in a scene and said, “You went to school with that woman? She looks twenty years younger than you do.” Even though she thought so, too, it hurt to hear the derision in his voice when he said it.
She should have told him, “Of course she does. Because she never had the pleasure of being married to you.” And the truth was that the good life made a big difference in how you held it together. Money didn’t just talk. It sang and danced and paid for fancy skin products with secret ingredients from Switzerland. Not to mention little nips and tucks in the face, and boob jobs that made your knockers stand straight up, even when you were pushing fifty.
Every one of those people on that alumni list probably had a job they could give her. Rose Schiffman was a writer. A writer must need a proofreader or something like that, she thought, noting that on her list. And Ellen Bass. She probably wanted to get rid of that jerk who answered her phones and get someone in there who would say, “Ellen Bass’s office,” in a deep, rich voice, and then be nice to the people who called, instead of rude the way her overprotective male secretary was. Receptionist would be a great foot-in-the-door job for her.
And how about Jan O’Malley, who had her plate full with a full-time job on that soap opera and a little boy. She probably needed someone who was good with kids to help her with him. I’d be great with that little boy Jan adopted, she thought. He’d be better off with me, his mother’s old college friend, than some non-English-speaking illegal alien, which is what she probably has now. People who got babies, then didn’t stay home to take care of them themselves, should all be shot.
Now that was a good idea. Nanny. For a while anyway. Taking care of a little kid was something she had experience doing. She’d go over there to Jan’s house and casually befriend the kid, and then hit Jan up for the job. Jan would be so glad to have someone of her caliber around her little boy, she’d jump at the idea.
According to the faxed list, Jan lived in Hollywood. She found the street right away on the Thomas Guide. She would go and see Jan first when she got there on Friday afternoon, and then maybe that white-haired witch Marly Bennet.
* * *
7
Marly Bennet believed that any ailment in the world could be cured by a chiropractic adjustment. That if her estranged husband had only had his spine cracked back into alignment, their marriage would have been saved. She was a passionate devotee of New Age practices who was waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with what she’d known for years about nutrition and meditation and breathing through the spine and high colonies.
She could convulse the others with stories about all the practioners with whom she did business, like the woman in Malibu whose counsel she sought who channeled Marilyn Monroe and dispensed Marilyn’s insights about show business and men. Or the herbalist who sold her a poultice to hang around her neck that would retard aging. But their most recent favorite was the story about the therapist who was helping her cure an inconvenient physical malady.
“I’ve finally stopped having urinary tract problems. Doctor Brotman got me to use my active imagination, to personify my bladder and talk to it,” she announced last month.
Ellen moaned and rolled her eyes. “Here we fucking go,” she said. “You know you’re in L.A. when you start having confrontations with your internal organs. Can you imagine telling someone in Kansas, ‘I took a meeting with my bladder’? They’d have you tarred and feathered.”
“So what happened?” Jan asked.
“Well, she had me put two chairs across from one another and sit in one of them. First she told me to ask my bladder the questions as me, and then to move to the chair and play the part of my bladder. It was remarkably telling. I said, ‘Bladder, what seems to be the trouble? There is no apparent physical reason for my problem with you, and yet you persist in being irritable. Can you tell me why?’ ”
“You kept a straight face for that?” Ellen asked. She could never understand how the otherwise sensible Marly could put herself into the hands of yet another nutty quasi shrink with yet another wacko technique.
“Shh, you cretin, it’s Gestalt therapy. Read Fritz Perls,” Rose said, elbowing Ellen. “Go ahead, Mars. Then you moved to the other chair, and the bladder said…”
“The bladder said, ‘Marly, I’m weeping for the loss of your youth.’ ” Marly looked around at all of them. “Isn’t that fascinating?” she asked, narrowing her green almond-shaped eyes thoughtfully, as if she’d discovered something profound.
“You paid money for a session where you played Edgar Bergen to your urinary tract?” Ellen said irritably. “I was right, we are definitely in southern California. I think we all have to move. You three especially, because you have young kids. To make sure they don’t grow up thinking this is the real world. Rose, see if you can get Andy to move his practice the hell out of here.”
“Are you kidding?” Rose said. “I’m not moving. I’m putting in a call to my ovaries to see if they’ll do lunch.”
Marly’s New Age material always had them laughing for hours. But as funny as it was, they all agreed that her A material was in the stories she told about Billy Mann, her soon to be ex-husband. A man she’d married when he was an out-of-work stand-up comic and she was the star of a long-running television series. Now she was out of work and he was a giant star. “The King of Late Night Television.”
She told the others that the reason she started calling him that was because one day, a few years ago, they were having a conversation, or rather, she was talking and he Was off in the ether and answering her questions by rote, so she said, “Billy? What is it?” And in a faraway voice, probably brought on by the stunning news that his 11:30 P.M show was in first place, he said in amazement, “My God. I’m the king of late night television.”
“Billy’s such a narcissist,” Marly joked, “that in the heat of passion, he yells out his own name!” Everyone agreed that her jokes were a hell of a lot funnier than the dumb ones Billy did in the opening monologue of his show every night. Unfortunately, to Jennifer and Sarah, their twin daughters, none of it was even a little bit funny.
They were the ones who since the separation were always waiting for their father to pick them up to spend the weekend at his house, and waiting and waiting until Marly looked at the clock and realized he’d flaked out on them again. Then her heart broke when she watched them unpack their little ballerina bags and cry themselves to sleep. It was an awful situation.
And all the while Marly kept telling the twins, “He loves you, he just doesn’t know how to show it.” Many nights she sat in the bedroom with the two canopied beds, soothing them, singing to them, until finally their breathing told her they were asleep. Then she went into her own room and cried herself to sleep, too.
GET IN BED WITH BILLY is what the billboards everywhere said. Billy’s new show was about to premiere, and the advertising blitz to promote it forced Billy into America’s bloodstream. Marly said she’d like to climb up onto one of those billboards with a can of red paint and write her addendum, YOU MIGHT AS WELL! EVERYONE ELSE HAS.
How Billy could ever want anybody but Marly was a mystery to anyone who knew her. She was a startling beauty, tall, with white skin and hair that had turned Harlow white prematurely when she was in her twenties. She had poodleish curls cascading all around a chiseled face and a smile of perfectly white teeth. In fact, everything about her was blindingly white. She drove a white car and dressed in white and had a white dog.
One night, in the middle of a screaming fight just before he moved out, Billy harangued her about just that. “I’m going blind from all the white! It makes me want to run around outside through the mud and then come in and dance on the carpets and the sofa, on the fucking duvet cover, and mess it up. I’m sick of white.”
Billy had laughed at that. She could always make him laugh. But he searched her eyes to see if there was any truth in that.
“You’re not seeing Arsenio, are you? I mean, that would be a mistake! He’s not even on the air any more.”
He knew she might not be kidding because she was a flaming liberal, which was another thing that drove him crazy. The way she fought the bleeding-heart fight for every injustice anyone could name. She was always on a tear about some liberal cause or other. Fighting for gun control or against oil rigs, against animal testing or for bicycle helmets. She was on top of every controversial issue. Always at some shopping mall or other, passing out pertinent leaflets.
And when her dazzling persona strolled through the Galleria, where she was speaking out on one issue or another that week, dressed in white jeans and a white cashmere sweater and white cowboy boots, pretty Marly Bennet still turned heads. The fans all remembered her from “Keeping Up with the Joneses,” a television situation comedy on which she played Ali Jones for seven years. The character was the outspoken mother of seven children, and Marly’s comedy timing, together with an intellect behind the eyes, had reviewers comparing her to greats like Eve Arden.
The show had been off the air for two years, and the acting jobs for women her age were rare, with only a TV movie now and then and a commercial once a year or so. But that wasn’t enough, and she was worried. She went on interviews but did so reluctantly, hating the humiliation inherent in the process. Now and then she considered going into politics but decided there would be even worse humiliation in Washington.
Show Business Kills Page 6