Jack’s a Gemini. Talented, and sweet, but his greatest asset was that he wasn’t threatening, even though at one point or another he’d made a grab for every one of us, but especially Jan. There was something so soft and vulnerable about Jan, and remember how angelic-looking she was? He used to love to corner her and ask her his favorite question, “When are you going to show me your tits?”
Of course that was in the days before anybody talked about sexual harassment. And Jan did what we all did with those kinds of things, she cringed inside, gave him a hug, and shrugged it off, because he was a buddy. The one she used to let climb in the window of her dorm room, because it was okay for him to see us in our pajamas. She never really took him seriously.
I mean, she loved him. We all did. But never the way he wanted us to. Jan told me how insulted he got that one night when he managed to hang out in her room after the rest of us went to bed. She told me the next day how he’d pleaded with her for just a little kiss, which he probably hoped would inflame her.
She said when she opened the window and told him to go back out the way he came in, he told her she’d given him blue balls. Jan said unless he wanted them to be black and blue, he’d better get them and his ass out of her room.
But by the next day he didn’t seem to be holding a grudge, and they were still really close friends. She even fixed him up a few times with some girls in the dorms she thought he’d like, but nothing ever came of it. Anyway, he made a really serious pass at her one more time at a party in our senior year. She said he was a little stoned that night, which was why he was so courageous. She just arrived at the party, and Jack cornered her in the room where she went to drop her coat. Remember that great black Dynel coat she had? It was so good-looking she hated to take it off.
Well, after she was sure everyone at the party had seen it, she walked in to put it on the bed in that apartment, and Jack followed her into the bedroom and closed the door. He put his arms around her and started doing his Marlon Brando playing Stanley Kowalski imitation, which always broke her up. She was laughing and hugging him back like a pal, and then he said that line that Stanley says in the play when he picks Blanche up and takes her off to bed. You know. “Tiger, tiger, put the bottle down. We’ve had this date for a long, long time.”
Jan confessed to me back at the dorm that night, that there was a moment there when Jack Solomon could have had her. She wasn’t drinking, and none of us had started smoking grass yet, so she couldn’t blame it on some altered state of consciousness, but on that particular night, she looked at Jack Solomon and he looked sexy to her, really sexy, and she let him kiss her.
I remember the surprise on her face when she said, “That little Jew can really kiss. Not too slushy, kind of teasing, but very hot and knowing,” and she said for that instant she felt a burning desire for him. We laughed so much that night, because she thought a little about the burning desire she’d felt, she said to me, “You know, Mar, maybe it was just heartburn.”
He was just starting to get his hand under her blouse, mumbling all the time how he wanted to see her tits, and she was going to let him see more than that, when something happened, I can’t remember what it was she told me. Maybe somebody opened the door to the room, or somebody hollered dinner was served, and you know how Jan loves a good meal, so her mind came back into focus and she thought, Am I crazy? I was about to do God-knows-what with Jack Solomon. And she managed to stop the forward motion and rehook her bra and insist they go out to join the others.
So now you’ve got the picture. Well, as they say in the movies, fade out, fade in thirty years later. Thirty long, bloody years of all of us pushing, driving, going through hell to work in this business. Both Jack Solomon and Jan have worked hard. But she’s an aging soap diva with thirteen-week contracts in which the producers have all the options. And Jack is a giant in the television business. You saw the New York Times article. There isn’t anyone in the TV industry who has the kind of stardom he’s achieved. He’s better known than some of the actors on his shows.
So surely you’d have to believe that the rejection in the coatroom has to be a thing of the past. Right? And yet a few times, over the years, Jan has seen him and dropped hints about how she’d love to work on any of his shows, but he’s never picked up on them.
He was the stage manager when she played Serafina in The Rose Tattoo at Tech, and she got a standing ovation every night. When we did The House of Bernarda Alba, and we all had to draw lines on our faces so we could look the age we are now, she played the ingenue and he was waiting backstage with flowers for her. Now if Jack wanted to, he could move her career up by light years just by getting some producer on one of his hit shows to give her a continuing role. And it wouldn’t be charity. Jan’s a terrific actress, and she’s really been right for many of the parts.
I bump into Jack socially all the time and Jan did many times too, and afterward she’d call and tell me that he was so friendly. He’d kiss her and say, “You have to come over and see our new place.” He asks about little Joey and how he’s doing. Remembers her son’s name and everything. She says he looks at her so lovingly it’s as if they were right back in those days. Before he was big.
And she says all she can think of when she sees him is how that kind of bigness is bad for people. How people who have become that big start believing that they’re really worth those ridiculously inflated fees they’re collecting. And that their newly acquired celebrity friends really care about them. I see it all the time. With Billy, of course, all of us have seen what success has done to him. But with other people, too. There’s even a paranoia associated with it that everyone’s out to take advantage of you, which is only partly paranoia, because everyone is.
But it’s easy to see why people are willing to pay the price of the paranoia, because of the power. Billy can have any woman he wants, and he has a staff of people who tell him he’s great no matter what he does. Jack Solomon’s shows are talked about everywhere you go. The articles about him in newspapers and magazines rattle on and on about the controversy around his outrageously brilliant shows. The way he’s fearless about putting raw and real subjects on the air.
I always look at those photos of him in the paper, with that perfectly clipped mustache and those suspenders he wears now and looks so cool in, and I think, can this elegant-looking man possibly be that boy who climbed in the window of Jan’s room in the dormitory almost every night for four years? And thirty years later he’s snubbing her phone calls? I mean, it’s hard to believe at his level he could still be holding a grudge about blue balls.
Well, for a long time it really didn’t matter to Jan because things were going so well on, the soap for her, and she was making a nice living, but then she watched them replace the actor who played her husband with a younger actor on the soap, and it made her nervous.
So she decided to drop Jack a note. Just a funny little note with references in it to the old days, not the blue balls incident, but the times he sat in her room, and the dorm mother would check up on her, and Jack would hide in her closet and after the dorm mother left, just to make Jan laugh, Jack would come out wearing Jan’s robe and one of her hats.
She mentioned things she thought he’d get a laugh over. And she also mentioned that she didn’t know how much longer she’d be on the soap, so that if there were any walk-ons on any of his shows, he should call her. Of course she was kidding about a walk-on. She’d heard that on one of the hospital shows that was on his network they were writing in some new characters, and she thought maybe there would be a woman doctor or something she could play. But she never heard a word.
Then a few weeks ago, just when she had some time off from the soap and was despairing, she got a call from one of her agents. The guy who covers all the shows on Jack Solomon’s network. Don’t you love that we always call it that? Jack Solomon’s network. As if the call letters were JSN. Anyway, the agent was a real sleazoid, if that’s not redundant, and he said to Janny, “Guess what,
baby! I think I got you a part on ‘Doctors On Call.’ Do you know the show?”
He tried to make it sound as if he was the one who had convinced them to hire her. You know how actors’ agents always do that? They try to be heroes when the truth is, they don’t do a thing. Jan didn’t tell him that the president of the network was practically her brother in college. That he had obviously helped her get the part because of the letter she wrote, and that he was doing it through her agent to make it legit. She just said, “Great. What’s the part?”
And the agent said, “It isn’t a big part, but it’s a really juicy one. You play a nurse who’s seducing some old rich guy. They know your work, you don’t have to read for it. I’ll send over a script.”
Well, you know Jan. She was too nice to say, “No shit, honey, they know my work. The network honcho who’s so big you can’t even get in to see him used to wear my bathrobe, for God’s sake.” She just said, “Oh thank you so much.”
So the script came to her house late that day. The character was described as “On the senior nursing staff, fortyish, sexy.” The older man she was seducing in the scene was supposed to be a philanthropist with millions who’s in the hospital, and she’s hoping he’ll fall for her.
It was a very hot scene and when she told me about it, I was delighted they were still writing parts like that, showing a woman our age with sex appeal. She ate like a saint all week so she’d look great on camera, she had her highlights done, her skin looked great, and the night before the shoot, the show sent over some new pages.
In the scene as written, the nurse was alone in the room with the man, and while they were talking, she unbuttoned the top two buttons of her uniform. Now everyone knows that this particular show, “Doctors On Call,” is famous for its shock value. The kind of show that Jack Solomon champions and that makes his network number one. But Jan never thought the scene was going to go any further than that. So then she looked at the new pages, and it said, RENEE RIPS THE TOP OF HER UNIFORM AND AS BUTTONS POP OFF, SHE FLASHES HER NAKED BREASTS AT MR. MARKHAM. In the story the rich guy was old and sick, and he had a heart attack when he got a look at her naked breasts.
But it didn’t say, AS RENEE RIPS HER TOP OPEN WE CUT TO MR. MARKHAM’S FACE. It said, she flashes her naked breasts. Well, she called me that night in a panic. She said, “This is television, so there’s no way they can show bare breasts, right?” And I remember thinking, well, if they can, it’ll be on Jack Solomon’s network. And then Jan said what I was thinking, which was, “Why would America want to see the naked tits of a forty-nine-year-old woman anyway?”
It was too late for her to reach anyone that night, so I told her to go in in the morning and talk about it with the director. Her call was at six-thirty in makeup, but she was up at five, as nervous as if this was her first part. She needed it to be good so badly.
She went into her kitchen and took Lipton tea bags and put them in ice water and then laid them on her eyes for a while, so by the time she went into the studio any puffiness would be gone. She knew she was supposed to go into makeup with a clean face, but she put on a little foundation and some blusher, because she figured maybe Jack would come down to the set to visit before she was made up, and she wanted him to think she still looked good.
Well, she got to the studio with such high hopes. At last Jack was going to do all the things for her career that he was able. Though he hadn’t called her, and this had all been handled by third parties, she was sure he was about to surprise her with the long-overdue display of friendship.
But when she arrived, there wasn’t even a dressing room for her, just some little nothing of a trailer, with a piece of masking tape on the door with her name written on it in grease pencil. For a minute that hurt her, but she’d seen her shrink the day before, and they spent a lot of time talking about expectations and how they can really do you in. So she tried to release all those scenarios she’d had in her head, that Jack would send her flowers with a card saying “Old friend, welcome to my network.”
While she was in makeup, one of the ADs came in, and she told him that she really needed to talk to the director, and the guy said, “Yeah, okay,” but nobody came by to talk to her. In fact, after her makeup was on and her hair was done, she sat backstage thinking, Jesus Christ, here I am, an actress who’s been on a soap opera for fifteen years, earning a six-figure salary, and these people are walking by me as if I’m some extra.
She went back and sat in that little doghouse of a trailer for a long time. There was a phone in there, and she called me. I was meditating, and I heard the phone and something told me to answer it, and she told me what had happened so far that morning.
She said, “I’m feeling as if I’m Blanche Dubois. That everything good about my life is in the past. That I’m relying on the kindness of not exactly strangers, but some old school chum to give me a part. And I’m not even sure about how I’m going to play the damn thing. I mean for sure I’m not going to take my top off. And the director isn’t breaking his neck to come in and work on it with me, or tell me if there’s a body double or what.”
While we were talking, the AD came to her trailer and knocked and said that the director was ready for her, so she said good-bye to me, and out she marched. The director was in his fifties, and she felt comfortable enough with him to make light of her concerns about the scene. You know, doing jokes about flashing.
She said he was very gentle and very soft-spoken and, as it turned out, a real method kind of guy. Usually television doesn’t like that kind of director, because he spends too much time talking to actors and wastes money. She was afraid. She’d been out of the loop for fifteen years. When you work on a soap for that long, you’re out of touch with the realities of the business. You never go on auditions, never have to know what projects are happening.
Besides, there was always that great naïveté Jan always had about the world. For example, she went crazy when she saw Demi Moore naked on a magazine cover. And she called me after I told her to go and see The Crying Game, shrieking, “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe they let some guy play a woman, and then all of a sudden he takes off his clothes and you see his actual penis hanging there. How could you tell me to go and see that?”
Well, the director on “Doctors On Call” turned out to be really good. He talked to her about being in the moment, all the great Stanislavski talk. About the given circumstances of her character, about what Renee’s objective was in the scene, and how she would go after getting it. He had his arm around her and they walked over to the bed, and the actor who was playing Markham ran some lines with her, but it was all really low-key, and she was feeling good.
And the next thing she knew, it was quiet on the set, and the lights were on, and the director who she was starting to think she’d like to take home with her because he was very sensual, suddenly said “Action.” They were shooting MARKHAM’S POV, which was camera on Jan all the way, and the actor was feeding her the lines from behind the camera. And she was really into it.
She felt great. As young and slinky and hot as a Cosmo cover girl, and when she got to the part where Renee rips open the uniform, she said she never even gave it a thought, just ripped it open. She told me, “I stuck my naked chest right out there, and I heard that actor gasp a death gasp and the director yelled ‘Cut, and print!’ ” People on the set were applauding, and everyone was coming over and congratulating her while they changed the camera angle, and the hair lady came over to comb her, and she said it was really powerful and that she got hot just watching.
They shot all the angles and it went very quickly, and when they finished, she asked a few people if Jack had been on the set, because she figured even if he was there, he’d probably lay back so she wouldn’t be nervous if she saw him. But everyone told her he pretty much stayed away on shooting days because after all he had a whole network to run, but they assured her he always came over and watched the dailies and would be there to see her scenes when the producer saw
them.
So she went home feeling very strong and up and positive. She never sounded better. She told me she was on one of those today-is-the-first-day-of-the-rest-of-your-life kind of highs. She was even trying to think of ways to break her deal with the soap and go out and do freelance acting, figuring after people saw her in that scene, they’d be calling her left and right.
In the morning, when a huge bouquet of flowers arrived, she was still so turned on, she ripped open the card. It said, I SAW THE DAILIES AND YOU WERE UNBELIEVABLE, LOVE, JACK. And it was on his own business card, written in his own handwriting, not by the florist. Naturally her mind was racing. Maybe Renee would become a running character, maybe she’d finally made the leap to prime time TV.
She put the card down and was trying to decide if she should put the flowers on the coffee table where Joey might be able to get at them or if they’d be better on the dining room table, when she realized she’d put the card face down, and there was something more written on the back of it. So she picked it up and looked at the other side.
You know, how, like the rest of us, she has to hold anything at arm’s length to read it these days? I always tell the twins, “Don’t even show me that book, I am much too old to try to find Waldo.” Anyway, Jan held the card at arm’s length and looked at the back of it, where Jack had written, P.S. THANKS FOR FINALLY SHOWING ME YOUR TITS. And her whole body went cold.
She couldn’t believe she’d gone to him, her hat in her hand, her heart on her sleeve, you know all those expressions that have to do with being humble. To her, that note was like one kid saying to another, na, na, na, na, na, na! I can make anybody do anything I want. Shoving his power down her throat.
She felt as if she’d been completely set up by this power happy man, who knew she was groveling when she sent him that note, who knew she was at a low point, and who had to use his show to humiliate her.
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