Show Business Kills

by Iris Rainer Dart

  Rose knew a back way in to the underground parking at Cedars. It was an entrance she’d discovered in the months when Allan was sick and she was practically living in the hospital. Tonight after she drove up to the ticket machine and pulled out the ticket, she automatically steered her car into a parking space right near the elevator, and then remembered that this had been her regular parking spot. The one she pulled into on those mornings when she brought Allan a shopping bag full of goodies she hoped would cheer him.

  Tonight when she turned off the engine, she sighed and sat wishing she was anywhere in the world but at that hospital. She could hear the whine of an ambulance in the distance, and she tried to get herself ready to face whatever was happening with Jan.

  Maybe she’d get up to the seventh floor to find that Jan didn’t make it through the surgery alive. Maybe she’d be alive but close to death in the coma Andy described, and the friends would sit by her bed for weeks or months waiting, the way Rose had with Allan. Watching a myriad of doctors moving in and out of the room, shrugging their shoulders and saying what they had said to her so many times, “There’s not a whole lot more we can do.”

  Rose was afraid she couldn’t handle another hospital deathwatch. Marly, Jan, and Ellen were all stronger than she was when it came to emergencies. They had practically carried her through those last weeks when she was saying her good-byes to Allan. Sometimes Marly would come and sit in the waiting room on the seventh floor, where Allan’s room was, not wanting to intrude on Rose and Allan’s last precious hours. When Rose eventually came out to take a breath that wasn’t fetid with death, Marly would be there.

  Together the two friends would walk up and down the echoing hospital halls, down to the twenty-four-hour cafeteria with its own heavy, greasy odor, to the gift shop in the lobby with its too-cheerful volunteer salesladies hovering.

  And on the days Marly could get Rose to leave the building for a while, they’d stroll down La Cienega Boulevard to the Beverly Center, where the flashy stores would be a bright, distracting show as they walked. Sometimes they’d move side by side silently, sometimes Marly would jabber away in small talk invented to amuse Rose.

  Ellen’s visits to Allan were always early in the morning, on her way to what was then her low-level studio job, to bring him pirated videos of films that hadn’t been released yet. Allan was a big movie buff, and during the long night when he thrashed in pain and needed diversion, he loved to watch the previews of films on a VCR Rose brought in.

  Jan worked all day on the soap, but she came to the hospital at night to check in on Allan and Rose, joking that she was really coming so that maybe she’d get lucky and “meet somebody.” On the nights when all three friends showed up, after Allan fell asleep and Rose came out of the room, not wanting to go home in case he awakened and needed her, Marly, Jan, and Ellen would sit the deathwatch with her in the waiting room, able to make her laugh with their stories.

  The levity the friends’ visits brought to Rose, who was so bloated with grief she was sure she’d never laugh or love or work again, felt like a magic drug that momentarily blurred her pain. Even though the giggles soon segued into tears and then became sobs that seized and shook her. And each of her friends took turns holding on to her, hugging her silently, helping her let Allan go. How would she have ever made it through this life without them?

  Thanks a million, Maximilian. Maybe that was the first time Jan told it, when Allan was dying. Rose remembered the way the other people in the waiting room had looked over at them disapprovingly when the four friends laughed at Jan’s best story. Now she took a deep breath as she got on the elevator and pushed the button for seven. The elevator hissed up one floor from the underground parking, and at the lobby the doors opened for someone to get on. But no one did.

  Rose spotted a group of paparazzi milling around outside the front entrance to the hospital. Probably hospital security wouldn’t let them in. They must be waiting for some of the stars from “My Brightest Day” to show up, so they could snap some shots of the actors’ concerned faces as they came to check on Jan. SOAP OPERA ACTRESS SHOT BY UNKNOWN ASSAILANT would make a great story for all the sleaze gazettes.

  She saw one of the photographers glance through the glass door at the elevator and look at her appraisingly, not recognize her, then turn back to keep watch for somebody with a recognizable face to shoot, so he could sell the pictures to the tabloids. The elevator doors closed and Rose realized when it stopped again on the second floor that in this hospital, for the benefit of the orthodox Jews who were not allowed to press a button on Shabbat, the elevator stopped on every floor.

  The continuous stops created an odd visual for her. In a script it would have said DOORS OPEN, ROSE’S POINT OF VIEW: orderlies on their break, chatting, CLOSE, DOORS OPEN, ROSE’S POINT OF VIEW: two doctors in suits, consulting, CLOSE, DOORS OPEN, nobody: just a piece of strange modern art on the wall, CLOSE.

  Andy was waiting for her on the seventh floor in the surgical ICU waiting room. Rose was sure those were the same orange, peach, and silk flowers that had been sitting on that same Formica table when she sat here after Allan’s last surgery. She remembered thinking then how tacky silk flowers were. Now Allan was long dead and the silk flowers were still there and poor Jan might be dead soon, too, and the silk flowers would outlive her.

  Andy pulled her close against him, and she could feel his sweet furry face against her forehead. “I know how you feel about this place, and I guess I didn’t think about it when we were on the phone, but on my way over here…”

  “How is she?” Rose asked. She had to be able to tough it out, try to put the past out of her mind, to be there for Jan, didn’t she? Maybe not. Maybe there were only so many hospital days one had to serve in this life, and she had done her time. She imagined someone stopping her on her way in to see Jan, saying “You don’t have to do this, Mrs. Schiffman. You have a Ph.D. in hospital crisis.”

  “She’s in recovery, she’s still unconscious. She either fell or had a blow to the head. She has a subdural hematoma, so they not only had to remove the bullet but the blow caused the blood vessels under her skull to rupture, so they also have to deal with a collection of blood under her skull. The edema in her head is what’s causing the coma.”

  Rose leaned into her husband and put her face against him, and after a minute or two she felt Marly’s arms and recognized the scent of Joy, and then Ellen’s scent of Norell, and now they all stood in a circle with Andy, too, holding on to one another as Andy told the others what he’d just told Rose.

  “Poor Maria and little Joey. I went to pick them up and take them to my house,” Marly said. “The police were there. Maria told me that she was about to bathe Joey and she heard a man’s voice downstairs talking to Jan and Jan and the man seemed to be fighting. She said the bath was running when they heard a loud noise, but she thought it was just the front door slamming. When Joey had his pajamas on, she sent him down to be with Jan, and he was the one who found her.”

  “Oh, no,” Rose said. “That poor baby.”

  “Do they have any idea who did it?” Ellen asked.

  “The police I talked to when I went up to the house said that they’re pretty sure it was some fan who broke onto the set the other day. Jan was shot with a thirty-eight-caliber gun, and that fan has one registered to him. They figured he probably followed her home and staked her out for a few days, and then today he got up his nerve and rang the bell,” Marly said.

  “Do they have him in custody?” Andy asked.

  “Not yet, but they think he’ll be easy to find,” Marly answered.

  “On the radio they said they thought Jan let the man in,” Rose said.

  “Oh, you know Jan. She probably thought she could reason with him and get him to leave her alone,” Marly said.

  “Never. She wouldn’t let someone like that in. She was much too protective of Joey.” Ellen shook her head in certainty.

  “How could anyone hurt her?” Marly wondered o
ut loud.

  “If life was fair,” Ellen said, “the guy would have gone over to my studio and mowed down the schmucks I work for.”

  Everyone laughed a little laugh and Marly said, “Or to Billy’s,” and then everyone laughed another pained laugh.

  “Did you see the people out front?” Ellen asked Rose.

  “What people? I came in the back way.”

  “The fans,” Marly said, moving Rose toward one of the giant windows that overlooked the courtyard between the north and south towers of the hospital. “My God, there are already twice as many as there were when I drove in,” Marly said, and Rose could see more than a hundred people milling in the now dark night, holding flickering candles.

  “They have signs that say, ‘WE LOVE YOU, MAGGIE FLYNN,’ ” Marly told her.

  “It’s so eerie,” Rose said, shivering.

  “What can we do, Andy?” Marly asked.

  “Nothing but wait,” he said. “I’ll try to make sure we’re updated on anything that happens. I know she doesn’t have any parents left, but eventually one of us should call her sister and tell her how serious this is, in case she wants to come in from Pennsylvania.” They all stood quietly, Andy with his hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels. They all knew that calling Jan’s sister would mean Jan was about to die.

  “They’ll bring her to surgical ICU after recovery. It’s right down the hall, but if they let you in to see her, it’ll only be for a very few minutes, so I’m not even sure you three should stay here.”

  “Are you crazy? We’re not moving an inch,” Marly said, and Rose was sure those were the same words she’d heard her say in that same voice that time long ago when they stood together outside an abortion clinic, and the police warned them that the militant right-to-lifers were on their way. Andy knew Marly well enough not to argue.

  “I’ll be back in a little while,” he said to all of them, then gave Rose a little hug before he moved with a brisk doctorly walk down the hall. The waiting area was grouped into sections. In one there was an older man reading the newspaper and a woman doing needlepoint. In another section a boy of about eighteen sat engrossed in whatever was being pumped into his ears from a Walkman, his big high-topped basketball-shod feet on the little coffee table.

  The three women sat on the hard blue armchairs with uncomfortable curved wooden arms. The same chairs they sat in years before when Allan was dying. Ellen took off her cashmere Escada blazer and put it over her to serve as a blanket. Rose sighed and shuffled through some of the magazines on the table, and Marly somehow managed to get her legs up into a lotus position, which she sat in serenely with her eyes closed.

  “Not exactly what we had in mind for Girls’ Night,” Ellen said.

  “Not exactly,” Marly said, opening her eyes. “Let’s all hold hands right now and send Jan healing energy. Let’s send white light to her injuries and put the idea out there in the universe that she’s going to heal and be well.” It was the kind of Marly statement that usually made Ellen roll her eyes at Rose, as if to say “Cut me a break. She’s at it again.” But tonight they were all united in their need to bring Jan back. So she took Marly’s hand and Rose’s, and they put their heads down for a long time. After a while they looked helplessly at one another.

  “Janny was worried about her new contract,” Marly told them, “And what she’d do if they didn’t pick her up. I remember she said to me one night, ‘Look what happens when we get to be this age. We’re as disposable as yesterday’s newspaper,’ and I said ‘Worse. At least yesterday’s newspaper can be recycled.’ ”

  “Gee, you knew how to cheer her right up,” Ellen said.

  “Believe me, I regretted it the minute I said it, and I thought about it all the way over here. I guess I was stressing about the aging myself because it’s been hitting me hard at every interview, too, so it’s on my mind.” She wasn’t ready to tell them the story about her reading for the part of the grandmother. For a while they were all silent, Marly’s cold hand still holding Rose’s sweaty one.

  “Remember Tennessee William’s play Sweet Bird of Youth?” Marly asked. “How, when we were at Tech, we did scenes from it and I played Heavenly Finley, the ingenue? Tennessee Williams sure knew how to write great neurotic women. I keep thinking about the words of that character Alexandre Del Lago. The actress who ran away from Hollywood because she couldn’t handle aging.

  “She talks about getting old in the business, and she says, ‘The screen’s a very clear mirror. There’s a thing called a close-up. The camera advances, and you stand still, and your head, your face, is caught in the frame of the picture, with a light blazing on it, and all your terrible history screams while you smile.’ ‘Your terrible history,’ isn’t that brilliant?” Marly said.

  “I remember when you played Heavenly,” Rose said. “And Alexandre was played by Betty Norell. Remember?”

  “I do,” Marly said. “Even then she was an incredible actress. She did that part so perfectly, and then she was one of the sisters in the García Lorca play, and she just mopped the stage with the rest of us.”

  “What’s she doing these days?” Ellen asked.

  “She’s in England. It says in the alumni magazine that she spends the winters at the rep company Olivier started. I heard or read there was some kind of swap with American Actors’ Equity so she could work over there,” Rose said.

  “I remember how at Tech we’d all get up there and fake our voices and try to make them fill the theater, but her big, booming voice just naturally did. And we’d work hard to create a character, using some tacked-on dialect or inappropriate walk. And Betty Norell would somehow become the character without all of that. When I watched her, all I could think was, how did they ever let me into the same drama department where someone like Betty Norell is my classmate? I’m the dope who played Carrie in the high school production of Carousel, and she’s a star. She was so much better than all the rest of us,” Marly said.

  “How is it no one ever discovered her?” Rose asked. “I mean like Emma Thompson or…”

  Ellen tsked and patted Rose’s arm. “Little Rosie, I always want to ask you when you fell off the back of the turnip truck. You know being talented doesn’t mean a damn thing in this business. It’s so much about luck and timing and tenacity and trends. I see people every day who are brilliant and can’t get arrested, and others who are knocking them dead all over the place, who are as dull as dog shit.”

  Marly shook her head as if she were trying to shake off what Ellen just said. “Janny always was afraid that she was one of those dull ones. She never felt secure about her work. She always joked that it was her body that got her into Tech, and after what just happened to her with Jack Solomon a few weeks ago, she was convinced she was right.”

  “Jack ‘Mr. Television’ Solomon?” Ellen said. “What happened with him?”

  “Didn’t she tell you?” Marly asked. “Maybe she was too embarrassed.”

  Ellen tried to remember if Jan had mentioned anything about Jack Solomon during one of those times when she let Jan ramble on on the phone to her. Sometimes she cleaned her desk or made notes and half listened. But she probably would have paid attention if it was something about that asshole Jack Solomon. Just because he was the man they all loved to hate.

  “She didn’t tell me, either,” Rose said, pulling her legs under her to get warm in the overly air-conditioned hospital waiting room. Ellen kicked off her black suede Ferragamo loafers and put her black-stockinged feet on the coffee table in front of her.

  “Oh, God, she was heartbroken by it,” Marly began, and as she did, each of them thought how odd it was that in this unlikely venue, under these desperate, dreadful circumstances, an odd version of Girls’ Night had officially begun. After all, the location was never really what mattered. What was important was that they were together, telling one another their stories.

  * * *

  14

  The Man WhoWould Be King

 
Jan’s a Pisces and her number is a three, so I knew right away when I met her that because she was a water sign she was going to be sensitive, with no confidence in herself. And I was right. For example, she always thought the letter they sent her accepting her to the drama department was a clerical error. That some day she’d be walking along the campus and someone would walk up, tap her on the shoulder, and say, “I’m terribly sorry, but you’ll have to go.”

  She was so instinctual as an actress that she hated all the academic tearing apart of the characters they were teaching us. Once she came to my room in the dorm in tears, threw herself on my bed, and wailed, “Why do they keep asking us what the play is about? We’re actors. We don’t have to know what the play’s about!”

  I remember laughing at that. But in a way she was right. Some of the best acting I’ve seen is from actors whose work is the emotional seat-of-the-pants kind that comes from their gut. Jan has a great gut. She used to cut those acting classes where we had to be an animal or an inanimate object. I’d see her leaving the dorms with some guy, and she’d tell me, “I’m not going to be a banana today, Mars. I’m going out for a beer.”

  Most of all she hated the times we had to sit in the costume room until four-thirty A.M., doing some tedious job like sewing pearls on Desdemona’s sleeves for the seniors’ production of Othello. Or those nights when we’d sit in that freezing-cold cinderblock studio-theater, rehearsing some absurdist play until our minds were so blown out by exhaustion, it actually started making sense to us.

  But it was Jack Solomon who always got us through those times. Remember how funny he was and how he could do imitations that would make us all die with laughter? We’d already be in that hysterical, heady state that my mother used to call “overtired.” But Jack would make us fall apart because he was sincerely hilarious. He’d do this rewritten version of the absurdist play we were doing, out of the teacher’s earshot, in gibberish or a Yiddish dialect, and we all broke up until we couldn’t say the real lines anymore.