Show Business Kills

by Iris Rainer Dart

  “Because when I come in, I’m making a clean sweep,” he said. “Cutting back the chaff and really running a tight ship.” I decided that the mixed metaphors were probably a symptom of his disease, too.

  “What are you talking about, Norman?”

  “Didn’t I tell you that I’m going to be running that studio by the first of next month?” he asked me. “I sent back the contracts this morning.” His voice was more animated than I’d ever heard it. All I could think was whatever those drugs were, I wanted some, too.

  “Norman, that’s great,” I said. “I’m so happy for you.” Meanwhile I was thinking, boy oh boy, this must really be hard for his mother, even though I already mentioned, hard and his mother, in my experience with him, seemed to be mutually exclusive.

  When we got off the phone, I sat at my desk, staring, for a long time. Joel was right, this man was a poor son of a bitch. But I couldn’t worry about it anymore. I was a single woman supporting a child, my mother, and some felines who turned up their noses at ordinary cat food and got too snarled to be groomed at home. Maybe I’d better figure out if I could be an independent producer, start looking for projects, come up with ideas, and of course, pray hard that I’d hear from somebody at Worldwide about my meeting with Harvey Springer.

  My mother called from Miami Beach a few times to see if I was okay, and I knew she was worried. I remember how the three of you took me out to dinner and kept calling me, too. Marly even brought over a few bags of groceries one day. Then one morning Sheppy Cherbak called to see if I wanted to meet for lunch. Sheppy’s a wonderful writer, and someone I’ve been close to for years.

  Now and then we meet and complain about the business or romances or just life in general. But I was so depressed by then, I didn’t want to get out of my sweat clothes and make myself look human to go out.

  “I don’t think so, Shep,” I said.

  “In the Valley,” Sheppy tried, meaning it could be casual. “For a hot dog.” I’ve known Sheppy since I first arrived in Hollywood. He’s funny and we always laugh together, and over the years he’s seen me looking worse than I looked that day. I really needed to be cheered up, and I knew it would be fun to laugh with him, so I said okay, and we agreed to meet at one o’clock at the hot dog place next to the newsstand at the corner of Ventura and Van Nuys.

  I got there a little bit early, on purpose, so I’d have time to browse through the colorful rows of assorted magazines, which has always been a favorite pastime of mine. I love the flashy covers and the eye-catching headlines. I stood there for a while picking and choosing which of the tempting ones I would buy, excited by the number of choices.

  When I was holding a few favorites and was walking over to the guy who wears the change belt so I could pay for them, my eye caught the headline of Variety and for a minute, all the traffic on Van Nuys Boulevard stopped, and so did the people walking by on Ventura Boulevard, and so did my heart. I had a giddy, dizzy feeling that I was losing my grip on reality when I read: BRAVERMAN MOVING TO TOP WORLDWIDE POST, MAKING CLEAN SWEEP. “Norman Braver- man, former actor’s rep, announced today that he would bring deals with Robert Redford and Paul Newman with him when he helms studio pic exec post next week.”

  When Sheppy got to the corner, he came over and stood next to me and wanted to know why I was sitting on the curb looking pale. I told him it must just be because I was hungry.

  * * *

  17

  Good God.” Marly was laughing at Ellen’s story. “It’s true. The inmates really are running the asylum. That’s unbelievable.”

  “But absolutely true,” Ellen said. “Which is why now when I deal with the jerkoffs at my studio, I remember that at any given time, they may have had a visit to the booby hatch, and then everything they do makes sense to me.”

  Rose nodded knowingly. “Can’t you see the board of directors, looking over the résumés of all the people who applied for the job of studio boss, and finally one of them says, ‘Eureka! This guy’s perfect. He’ll understand the way we think! He’s been locked up for being a paranoid schizophrenic.’”

  “Jan’s coming out of recovery,” they heard Andy call to them. They turned to see him standing at the end of the hall gesturing for them to come with him. Ellen put her shoes on, and they all hurried to follow Andy along the long hospital corridor.

  Just as they stopped at the double door to the recovery room, it opened, and two hospital orderlies wheeled out a gurney, which moved forward with a clanging bump over the metal sill and into the corridor. As it came closer, they could see that Jan was on it.

  She was unconscious, with a tube down her throat, and a nurse with a bellows was squeezing breath into her. Her head was bandaged, and her face was purple with bruises. She was hooked up to IV fluid that hung from rolling poles on wheels, which the two men wearing green surgical scrub suits moved forward next to the bed. The friends stood at fearful attention watching her go by.

  Rose felt a weakness in her thighs, and she was sure her knees were about to give out under her; Marly’s arm went around her waist, as if Marly knew she would need steadying. Then Ellen moved closer to her, too. They held tightly to one another, watching the odd float bearing their comatose friend as the men moved it through the door to the surgical ICU.

  When the door closed behind Jan’s gurney, Andy took one of Marly’s hands in his, and Ellen’s hand in the other, while Rose stood with her back leaning against him in their small circle, and he spoke quietly.

  “The bullet damaged her lung, but that seems to be functioning normally with the tube in place. That nurse with the bellows will hook her up to the ventilator and she’ll breathe on that for a while. There was also a collection of blood underneath her skull that they were able to suction out. And her head is bandaged because they had to go in and cut through her skull to get the blood out.

  “She’s still unconscious, and it’ll be a matter of time before they know whether or not there was damage to her brain underneath the pool of blood. There might be inflammation to the spinal cord where the bullet hit her. She hasn’t been moving her legs, and there’s no way to know now if she’ll regain normal function. But they seem to be hopeful that she’ll be conscious within the next few days.”

  “When can we go in?” Marly asked.

  “The nurses need to become familiar with her and stabilize her,” Andy said, “so I’d say it’ll be at least an hour until they’ll let anybody in.”

  “Is she going to survive this?” Rose asked. “What are they saying about her chances?”

  Andy shook his head slightly. “In cases like this, it’s impossible to say.”

  Marly couldn’t listen to any more. She had to walk away, hugging herself as she looked down the hospital corridor, her trembling face struggling to hold in the tears of anger and sadness. She remembered when Jan’s sister, Julie, had tried talking Jan out of adopting a baby at age forty-five because she was too old. She laughed about the way Jan had dismissed the warnings.

  “Julie,” Jan said sweetly, “even if this little baby grows up and gets married as old as thirty, I’ll still be only seventy-five. Young enough to dance at his wedding.” Now Janny might not dance at Joey’s wedding, or even walk down the aisle.

  Maybe she wouldn’t even live until the morning, and then what would happen to the sweet little boy? Surely Jan had made some kind of will, assigning Joey’s guardianship if anything happened to her. Marly tried to put the thought out of her mind that there was even a small chance the custody of that angelic boy could go to her. She had wanted another baby so much when the twins were still small, but the rise of Billy’s mammoth career and the dissolution of her marriage had made that unrealistic.

  Besides, Jan would have specified that everything she left behind, including Joey, go to her sister in Pennsylvania, Marly thought. The sister who told her not to adopt the baby in the first place. She shivered when she realized she was already writing Jan’s death sentence with those thoughts.

  �
��Shouldn’t somebody be calling Julie?” she asked, turning back to the others.

  “I have Julie’s number,” Rose said, paging through her Filofax, muttering to herself as pieces of paper flew out of it onto the floor. “I know I had it here someplace, because last summer when Jan went back to see her, I talked to her a few times, when she called to get medical advice from Andy, so I have the number… somewhere. Damn, I’m such a goddamned flake. I have to find the number so I can call Julie and tell her. Oh, here it is. I’m going to call her.”

  Andy put his hand on her arm. “Honey, I think you should probably wait a few hours. We’ll definitely know a lot more about Janny’s condition by then. Why don’t you three go down and get something to eat?”

  “He’s right,” Ellen said, “let’s try to get something downstairs.”

  Rose felt too queasy to eat, but she hoped maybe food would calm the gnawing acid hole in her middle she was attributing to terror. “I guess,” she said, and led the others to the elevators, which seemed to be taking forever to arrive, so she pushed open the door to the stairwell, and Marly and Ellen followed. They walked single file, seven flights down the metal steps.

  “I should have brought along the dinner I made for Girls’ Night,” Marly said when they opened the door to the basement floor and the greasy smell of the hospital cafeteria enveloped them. In the low-ceilinged basement cafeteria there were only two other diners, some women at the far end who were chattering loudly to one another, who were dressed up and bedecked with jewelry as if they were going to a party.

  Rose was the first to take a plastic tray from a pile and slide it along the metal shelf that ran the length of the sparsely stocked buffet. She chose a sticky-looking pasta salad under Saran Wrap, and a Diet Coke, hoping the caffeine would zap away the sleepy feeling that often tugged at her when she felt afraid. She fought a yawn as she put the can on her tray.

  Ellen put a tuna salad sandwich on her tray. Marly took a banana and some yogurt, then reached into the glass case where the desserts were lined up and put her hand on a bowl of red Jell-O. “I think we all should have some of this,” she said, putting a bowl of the shivering red cubes on each of their trays. “My treat. Maybe the taste of it will take me back to my childhood.” But when they got to the table, she looked at the bowl on her tray and changed her mind. “I just remembered,” she said. “I had a lousy childhood.”

  They sat at the end of a long table, unwrapping and then picking at the barely edible food. The two women at the end of the room seemed to be looking over at them now and gesturing and whispering, and Rose, who noticed their behavior, decided it had to be because they recognized Marly. They were carrying their trays of dirty dishes to the conveyor belt now, and they couldn’t resist stopping to stare. Then they approached the table with a tentative yet adoring look.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” one of them said to Marly. “But I really wanted to tell you just how much we loved you in every episode of ‘Keeping Up with the Joneses.’ ”

  Marly smiled. “Thank you so much,” she said.

  “You are such a gifted comedienne. There hasn’t been anyone like you except for maybe Lucille Ball.”

  Marly warmed to the lavish praise. “Oh, how nice of you to say that.”

  “And we know it must not be easy to be so funny, under the circumstances of your life.” Marly stiffened. “We know you’re getting divorced, but we want you to know we think it’s for the best. You got rid of him before he turned into a real pervert.”

  “Poor you,” the other one said. “And your poor daughters. I saw the Enquirer today, and I am sure he’s guilty as sin, and I’m glad you’re not a part of his sick life anymore.”

  Marly’s face was now frozen, and Rose could see she was trying to decide how to react.

  “I wish I had something with me for you to sign,” the first woman said. “My daughter would be so thrilled to have your autograph. You don’t by any chance have anything with you that you could give her with your name on it?”

  “I don’t have anything,” Marly managed to say through clenched teeth.

  The women exchanged a glance that said they didn’t believe her. “Yeah, well it would have been nice,” one of them said. “Too bad.” And then both of the women turned to walk away, and as they did, one said in a confidential voice all of them could hear, “She could have given you a deposit slip, a napkin, anything. But they think they’re too good to take the time with you. Meanwhile, she hasn’t had a good part since that Jones show went off the air.”

  Marly stood, and in the voice Rose remembered her using when she played Portia at Tech, she said to the exiting backs of the two women, “I’m in this hospital because one of my best friends is near death. I’m hurting and frightened and trying very hard to be polite, so it’s my fondest hope that you’ll do the same and turn around and apologize for your rudeness,” she said. Ellen and Rose exchanged looks. Not knowing whether to stop her, to tell her to ignore the women’s obnoxious behavior, or to laugh.

  Both of the women turned, with scowls on their faces, and one said, “Apologize? Who do you think you are? You’re as bad as that jerk you married.”

  Rose remembered later that Marly had a smile on her face as she picked up a bowl of Jello-O from Rose’s tray, took a cube and threw it at one of the women, and then another and another until she had to move on to the second bowl. It took the women a few seconds to understand what was happening, then they looked down at their rhinestoned outfits with red blobs melting and sliding down the front, and when they did, one of them got the Jello-O right in her hair. In horror she put her hand up to her head and shrieked at Marly, “I hope you and your sex-maniac husband go to jail!”

  “You Hollywood slut,” the other one shrieked as they both turned and ran out of the cafeteria, and Marly kept throwing with the same good arm she used when she coached the twins’ softball games, until the last cube of Jell-O was gone.

  “Way to go, Mrs. Jones,” one of the black food attendants hollered out to Marly, and in return she saluted him with a victorious fist in the air. Ellen and Rose were still laughing when Marly wiped her hands off on a paper napkin. Rose took her own napkin and cleaned up some of the Jell-O from the floor.

  “Jan always says I’m too combative,” Marly said, helping her.

  “How observant of Jan,” Ellen said.

  “But what can I do? People like that think my life is their business, and it drives me wild. The plumber who comes to fix my shower asks me about Billy’s girlfriends, and the dry cleaner wants to know how much I’m getting in the divorce settlement. Women have stopped me on the street and said, ‘How could you let that adorable Billy go? He’s such a doll, I’ll take him any day.’

  “One day I actually shrieked at one of them who said that, ‘Oh, really? Well, when he wakes up in the middle of the night and has to watch his own videotapes to make sure he’s alive, and other women mail him their recently worn underwear, which he so sweetly shows you, and he sometimes sends his bodyguards when he’s too busy to pick up the kids… enjoy, baby!’

  “They don’t know that he’s what Jung calls a puer aeternus, an eternal boy. Wearing his penis on his sleeve. No, I’ll bet even boys have a greater sense of responsibility, don’t they? Didn’t Roger when he was a kid?” she asked Ellen. But before Ellen could answer, she laughed out loud at herself. “I am over the top,” she said. “I haven’t thrown food at anyone since summer camp,” and she laughed a laugh that was a breath away from tears.

  “It’s good for you to let it all out,” Rose said.

  “Her? Are you kidding?” Ellen said. “She lets it all out more than anyone I know. You and I are supposed to be the emotional Jews, and she’s the one who’s always venting her rage.”

  “You’re right,” Marly said. “I think I’ve been letting too much out. Always too big, too much, a complete reversal to the pent-up good girl my parents tried to get me to be. Billy used to call me the unWASP. He said my temper was one of t
he things that hurt our marriage. And I’m worried. Not only because of Billy, but two things happened within the last few months to make me think I may have hurt what’s left of my career, too.”

  * * *

  18

  To Have andHave Not

  I always thought as I got older that fiery anger that sometimes grabs me unexpectedly would level off. That eventually I’d become a nice mellow old lady. But even though the old lady part is coming true, I feel as if I’m more full of rage than ever. And this isn’t just a little umbrage over some political issue, this is outrage at everything that crosses my path. Maybe it’s hormones, maybe it’s living in L.A.

  For a while I thought it had to do with my abandonment issues around Billy moving out of the house. But I decided that was too facile an explanation. On closer examination, I think it has to do with my inability to face aging and all the implications that come with it. Like the idea that I’m no longer eligible to create babies, and that maybe I should have had many more after the twins were toddling around.

  I also can’t bear the idea that unless someone has a part for me in some show or film or even a commercial, I can’t create artistically, either. That I’m at the mercy of a business that wants me to be obsolete. It all makes me feel so out of control, and that’s the way I find myself behaving. Also, the twins are at the age where they’re very independent, they mostly need me to drive them from point A to point B, and pretty soon they won’t need me for that, either. So I feel obsolete as a caretaker, too.