Show Business Kills

by Iris Rainer Dart

  “Everyone envied Jan,” Marly said. “She was beautiful and warm, and even though on the show she was a ‘bad girl,’ the fans loved her. TV Guide recently called her a ‘soap diva,’ but not because she was temperamental, God knows. She was anything but that, but because her character had grown into such a powerful figure on daytime TV.”

  “There were lots of weirdos around that show,” Ellen said. “Even one of the women writers, who didn’t like her, and a wacko who sat outside the studio every day and told the guard he was going to marry Jan someday.”

  “Yeah, I know about him,” Rita said. “We’re looking for a guy right now who broke into the studio and onto the set this week. He might be harmless. On the other hand, we have to check it out. Any of you ever argue with her?”

  “We all argued with one another,” Ellen said, “but not in any dangerous or threatening way.”

  “And I’m sure you can each account for where you were at four o’clock this afternoon.”

  “I was in a meeting at a movie studio in Culver City with the producer and three of his staff,” Rose said.

  “I was in an executive meeting at a studio in Burbank with my colleagues,” Ellen said.

  “I was in Gelson’s Market in Pacific Palisades tearing up copies of the National Enquirer that had photos of my children’s father on the cover,” Marly said, thinking after she did how that event seemed to have taken place weeks ago, and that Billy making love to her… dear God, could it have only been this morning?

  The police officer thought about what each of them had just told her and looked at them with what seemed to be admiration, or maybe she was mocking them. “You three are some high-powered ladies,” she said.

  “Believe me, Rita,” Marly said, sighing, “like everything else in this town, it’s all an illusion.”

  “You telling me?” Rita said. “I’ve worked this precinct for twelve years, and I’ve seen it all. Brought people into this hospital in conditions you wouldn’t believe, with God knows what stuck into every orifice of their poor beat-up bodies. And most of the time there’s some press agent outside the emergency room, trying to tell not only the photographers, but us, the police department, who saw it all, that it never happened. You have to love it,” she said, stubbing out what remained of the cigarette on the bottom of her shoe, blowing on the butt and putting it into the little cellophane holder she’d made.

  “I was in a lawyer’s office in Beverly Hills once a few years back,” Rose said, “going over one of my contracts, and while I was waiting for him to finish on a phone call, I walked around his office and found myself looking out the window and had a great view of the Beverly Hills streets and shops. And all of a sudden I saw ten police cars pull up outside of Van Cleef and Arpels. And within seconds I saw a roadblock go up, and uniformed cops with guns out were surrounding the place. All of this while the lawyer was talking away. I remember watching it all very calmly, waiting to see the director rise up on a crane to get a long shot, and to hear the word ‘Cut!’

  “I was sure I was seeing some studio filming a movie on the streets of Beverly Hills, because we’re so used to seeing that around there every day. And then the lawyer got off the phone and we got down to business, so I stopped thinking about it. Well, the next morning I opened the L.A. Times, and there was an article on the front page about Van Cleef being robbed, while I watched. And I thought, there’s so much pretend around here, I just figured the robbery was pretend, too.”

  The policewoman laughed. “Yep, I was there that day. The guy had twelve hostages in the jewelry store. But we finally got him out.” She shook her head and laughed, as if remembering a fun time.

  “I have to ask you this question,” Ellen said, “because I’ve got a project in development about a young woman who wants to be a cop, and I’m curious to round out her character. What is it that makes a woman pick a career in law enforcement?”

  Rita Connelly frowned, thought about her answer, and then smiled. “I guess I thought it was going to be sexy. That it offered excitement, drama, meeting bigger-than-life people, having thrilling experiences.”

  “And now?” Ellen asked.

  “Now I know it’s full of men who are so worried about the size of their genitals, they take it out on everyone who crosses their path. Not to mention corruption, graft, dishonesty, backstabbing, and fear. But by now it’s too late because it’s all I was trained to do, and I’m supporting a few people and some pets, too.”

  “Jesus,” Ellen said. “Did you just say those words or did I? That sounds just like my experience with show business.”

  “It’s about as bad, except you get the big car and the fancy salary.” All four of the women laughed. “So did Jan O’Malley have any serious boyfriend? I mean could this have been about a romance that went bad?”

  “No,” Marly said.

  “Absolutely not,” Ellen said. “She hadn’t been seeing anyone in a long time.”

  “She was completely focused on her son,” Marly said.

  Rose felt nervous. This was a question only she could answer, and if she did she’d be revealing a secret Jan had been keeping from the others. But what if the secret had something to do with the shooting?

  “The answer to that is yes,” she said quietly. “Jan was seeing someone.”

  Marly and Ellen looked at her in surprise.

  “She was?” Marly asked.

  “Tell me about it,” the police woman said to Rose as she pulled a small spiral notebook out of her purse.

  * * *

  20

  An Affair toRemember

  Andy always tells me that one of the reasons I’m a writer, a person who lives in the world of her own fantasies, is that even at my age I’m still a romantic schmuck. To give you an example that he likes to use to prove that, he reminds me that in nineteen-whatever-it-was when Jan was so crazy for Terry Penn, and she told me he was going to leave his wife to marry her, I believed it. Okay, so I was already chopping liver and deviling eggs for the wedding. I really wanted Jan to be happy.

  I was at her house one night when Terry called her, and my temperature went up just overhearing Jan’s side of the phone call. “Oh, honey, me too. Oh, God, I want that, too,” I heard her say a million times. And I’ve got to tell you, when she walked into the den where I was sitting fanning myself with a book, she was as glassy-eyed and lovesick as if they’d just been having at it in the next room.

  “Oh, Rose, we can’t live without one another any more,” she said to me, and I immediately asked about Susan, because everyone knew that Susan and Terry Penn had what was perceived as the perfect family. Terry was a handsome actor turned producer and then studio executive. Susan wasn’t a beautiful woman, but because of all that money and all those homes, she had her picture in the paper all the time. And she had that status that wives of men with that kind of power are granted. Like Candy Spelling and Patsy Tisch before the divorce.

  “Does he ever talk about his marriage?” I asked her. I never had a married man, except the ones who were married to me, so what did I know about how they behaved?

  “Oh believe me, Rose, it’s no marriage,” Jan said, hugging a throw pillow to her chest as if she were a teenager at a pajama party talking about her steady. “I mean, it is what it is. He likes the way they look together in Town and Country magazine.”

  That was her way of telling me that Terry and Susan Penn’s marriage only existed for practical reasons, like homes and money and appearances, but not for the important thing, which was wild passion, intimacy, and romantic love, and that’s what he had with Jan and couldn’t live without in his day-to-day life for one more day. According to Jan. She told me that’s what he told her all the time.

  Jan was the first “other woman” I’d ever known in person. Andy says I have yet to learn that every one of them, without exception, believes exactly what Jan just said. I told him I don’t want to know how he knows that. Okay, Janny may have been kidding herself, I mean all of us are guil
ty of that in some way or other. But I love her so much and always have for a million reasons. And one is because she always has such a funny take on everything.

  For example, we both hate to exercise, but we’d go together to those sweaty, music-pounding aerobic classes and work out, and I’d look in the mirror at Jan in the row behind me and she’d make these tortured faces at me, and then one day in the locker room at the health club she said to me, “Rose, I’ve definitely decided, I’m not doing the aerobics anymore. I’ll do the Nautilus machines and build up my muscles, but I’m not going to get myself all sweaty.”

  “That’s a mistake,” I told her. “Andy’s a doctor and he always says no matter what, you have to do the aerobics. They’re crucial for your heart.”

  Janny looked over my shoulder at herself in the mirror, sucked in her stomach, and said, “Who cares? Nobody can see your heart.” We laughed over that for weeks.

  “Terry Penn will never marry her,” Andy told me again. I remember it was when Molly was very little and we were sitting at the beach in Santa Monica, watching her play in the sand. I had just told him about the beach house Terry rented for Jan in the Malibu Colony for the upcoming summer months, but he shook his head, and I hated his certainty.

  “He will. He loves her.”

  “He won’t.”

  “He might,” I said, backpedaling.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Let’s set an outside time. You can even pick the date. And if Terry Penn doesn’t leave his wife by X date, you’ll treat me to the vacation of my choice. And if he does, I’ll take you anywhere you like.”

  I couldn’t understand how my husband, who loves my friends, could bet against Jan’s happiness and not believe that Terry Penn would do what he’d been promising Jan for more than a year. To tell his Town and Country wife he was leaving her for my passionate friend, explain gently to his kids, who would understand and would want to come with him to live in the big house where he was moving Jan, and where soon the two of them would have a family together.

  Isn’t it awful that I was so ready to see Terry and Susan fall apart? But you know how I get when it comes to my friends? I didn’t know Susan Penn, and I was very worried about Jan’s survival. I could just picture her on the grounds of some grand estate. Finally taking a breath from the years of taking care of herself and her sister. I guess I believed the fairy tale that some handsome rich prince was going to save her, just the way she still believed it in those days.

  “Six months?” Andy asked me. I counted off the months on my fingers. Six months would make it October, a great time to go to Hawaii. That’s where I would make him take me when I won the bet about Jan and Terry, who at that moment I was picturing making love in the beachfront bedroom of the Malibu house. I imagined Terry swearing to her that soon they’d be out in the open, swearing on something sacred, which I found myself hoping wasn’t his children’s lives, in case Andy was right.

  In the second week of October, Andy and I went to the Heritage House in Mendocino, and I paid for it all. The rooms, the meals, and the good red wine. Terry was still stalling and Jan was still letting him, and that was how Andy and I had those two glorious days in Mendocino on my VISA card, and by the way, it’s beautiful up there at that time of year.

  Andy wasn’t exactly gloating, but the lesson he was trying to teach me was that men know men, which was how he knew that a man like Terry Penn was not about to give up what he had with Susan Penn just because he liked to get laid.

  In November I had a big rewrite to do on a screenplay, and Andy suggested I take a few days at The Oaks at Ojai and he’d get his mother to come and stay with Molly, so I could get my work out of the way. I love The Oaks, it’s one of my favorite places to hide away, so I did, checking in by phone once a day at home. One day when I called home my mother-in-law told me that Jan had called twice, so I called her back.

  She really just wanted to chat about her romance with Terry, but when she heard I was in Ojai, she decided that getting Terry away from Los Angeles for an afternoon and up to Ojai would be a great idea.

  “We’ll drive up and take you to lunch,” she offered.

  I was on the spa plan, seven hundred and fifty calories a day, and starving to death. A lunch date sounded like heaven to me, so I agreed. I was nervous about it. I’d never met Terry Penn, but I’d read the articles about him in Time and Vanity Fair.

  I was waiting for them at a restaurant in Ojai, feeling like an escapee from the spa, when they walked in. The minute I saw Terry Penn, I understood viscerally why Jan couldn’t let him go. It wasn’t just Terry’s breathtaking good looks. There was something about his presence that was magnetic.

  I’ve met many movie stars, and always they seemed so much less than I’d imagined they would be. Terry Penn was more. Dramatically handsome. And boy did he flash a heartbreaking smile at Jan’s friend, whom he’d come here to impress with the fact that he was taking a day off from running an entire studio to meet me. Didn’t that mean he’d eventually leave his wife?

  And he obviously loved Jan. I could see it by the way he held on to her, looked at her. I cursed myself for not making the time on the bet with Andy twelve months instead of six, because now that I was meeting Terry Penn in person, his devotion to my friend was obvious. By Christmas, maybe just after Christmas to avoid a painful holiday season for his kids, I knew he would leave Susan and marry Janny.

  When Jan left the table to go to the ladies’ room, Terry Penn put his tanned, manicured hand on my pale, ink-stained one and looked deeply into my eyes. It was like locking eyes with the snake in The Jungle Book, Molly’s favorite video. He captured me with those eyes. I fell into them so easily that if things had been a little less otherwise, meaning if I hadn’t been so happily married, and Jan wasn’t my beloved friend, I probably would have just left with him myself before she came back. He said, “I love her. I’m going to marry her.”

  Those eyes were his secret. I imagined him in meetings with big stars and famous directors, catching their eyes in the same way and saying, “I’m going to make this picture. I’ll commit forty million dollars to it right now.” And they were stupid enough to believe him, too.

  Well, now we’re up to about four years ago in this story. Terry finally separated from Susan Penn, a moment that made Jan and me at lunch one day, if you can imagine, in the middle of the day at Bistro Garden, order a bottle of champagne, and toast, of all things, true love. He was now taking Jan out in public, to screenings, to cocktail parties. You remember, because we were all worrying that he might actually marry her and then what would she do?

  Jan was feeling so good that she couldn’t wait until that night to see him so she could tell him the news about the adoption lawyer who had called her to say that he had a baby who would be available to her right away. But that night when she told him, Terry laughed in her face. He told her she had to be, and I quote, out of her “stupid fucking mind.”

  “Oh, you have a problem with that?” she said, trying not to back down since it had taken her so long to get up the nerve to call the lawyer in the first place. “Well then, why don’t you make me pregnant?” she asked him, clenching her back teeth and waiting to see if he’d take the challenge. And when he laughed and told her that they were both a little long in the tooth for that, she lost it, maybe because she knew he was right, at least about her, and she felt hurt and stung and old and as if she’d wasted her life. They had a giant fight, and he walked out. Remember the Girls’ Night right before she went to pick up the baby? She was a basket case, but she was determined not to stop her life, so she adopted Joey and you know the rest.

  When I told Andy what happened, he asked me if I knew how the weather was in Hawaii that time of year and if I cared to put any money on anything. I hated him and Terry Penn and all men. But a few weeks went by, and Janny called to tell me that Terry had called and come over apologetically with a big teddy bear for the baby and was now visiting regularly and kitchy-cooing little Joey.r />
  They were back to dating, and she even joked that she told him, “No sex until after the baby’s six weeks old.” She also said in Terry’s behalf, knowing there wasn’t a whole lot to say for him, that on the nights they went out and her housekeeper, Maria, couldn’t sit with Joey, Terry paid the baby-sitter.

  Anyway, one night they went to a big awards event at the Beverly Hilton. It was a dinner dance. Jan was at his side while all the sycophants came over to kiss Terry Penn’s behind. Now we all know how someone like Terry Penn can change the life of anyone in the creative community. So everyone scrapes and bows and tries to get in his good graces, hoping the way they hope for the winning lottery number that he’ll say, “You get the part,” “You do that picture.”

  Jan told me how he sucked in the attention, took sustenance from it, kissed the women and hugged the men and laughed with them, and as they walked away, he’d still be wearing the big smile on his face and making derogatory remarks to her about every one of them.

  She told me afterward that as she stood in that ballroom next to him that particular night, she felt in her stomach that something was really wrong. As if someone had opened a window and let in a frozen blast of wind, because she was suddenly blown away by what a dishonest person he was, or to use her term, “a lying sack of shit.”

  She said she knew he had lied to Susan about where he went on those nights and days when he was sneaking off to meet her, but that was different. This was lying to everyone, about everything. “You look so great. Your picture was the best. Your script knocked me on my ass.” And it alarmed her to see those people walk away with their feet off the ground thinking Terry Penn loved their writing or their film or them. Just the way she thought he loved her.

  “Let’s dance, honey,” she kept saying to him, feeling weak and nauseous and suddenly dowdy among this glittering crowd where Marvin Davis’s wife was wearing a ring the diamond of which covered her entire finger. She told me she thought maybe if they danced, and Terry felt her body close to his, he would remember who they were together.