“In a minute,” he promised Jan, just as Jane Fonda threw her perfect arms around his neck.
Jan went to the ladies’ room and splashed cold water on her face. He had to marry her. She called me that night from the pay phone in the ladies’ room at the Beverly Hilton. Andy must have been at the hospital. I was half asleep, but I grabbed the receiver, and I knew as soon as I heard her teary voice it was going to be about Terry Penn.
“Rose, what am I going to do?” she asked, trying to talk softly so the glitzy women moving in and out of the ladies’ room would think maybe she was just checking in with her answering machine or calling her baby-sitter.
“You have to set boundaries,” I told her. “He’ll push you to the wall. He has pushed you to the wall. As Ellen would say, ‘Tell him to shit or get off the pot,’ ” and as I said that, my instructions were punctuated by the sound of two toilets flushing in the ladies’ room. Poor Jan, that poor girl was crying softly into the phone.
“You’re right,” she said. “I know you’re right. And I’m going to do it. On the way home tonight. I’ll tell him this is it. We’re engaged or it’s over.”
“Janny,” I said, “that’s not enough.”
“Right. As soon as his divorce is final, we’re married.”
“You got it,” I told her. There was another flush. “Call me in the morning and tell me it worked.” I couldn’t get back to sleep. I pictured Jan and Terry in his limo as it sped over Laurel Canyon. I knew she’d be strong. I was positive Terry would agree to marry her. Dr. Andy Schiffman, my beloved, would be shocked.
Love conquers all. I still believed it, and so did Jan, until she got back to the table and Terry wasn’t there, and when she looked around the room she felt close to death when she saw him on the dance floor with the gorgeous star of one of his upcoming movies. A woman whose looks are so perfect you think they can’t be real when you see them in photos. But every feature, hair, skin, body, is just what you always wished yours was from the day you opened your first magazine. Jan sat at the table where the other two remaining people were male studio accountant types in a heated discussion about grosses.
She wanted to go home, but she was afraid to leave. She didn’t want to look at Terry and the young actress, but couldn’t stop her eyes from going to them, seeing their bodies pressed tightly together, the flirtatious looks passing between them as they laughed and talked, and then didn’t his lips brush away that thick lock of hair from her forehead?
When the song was over, Jan steeled herself for Terry’s return to the table. He’d tell her that dancing with that actress was just business. She would insist that it was time to leave. Make him come home with her. In the car she would tell him, “No more.” Set boundaries. But she knew by the expression on his face when he was on his way back to the table, greeting his fans as he moved, that it was too late for that.
“I think we should go,” she tried softly.
“What?” Terry was on, he was hot and high on his own racing blood, and Jan was full of that fear you have when you know they’re slipping away and there’s nothing you can do about it.
“Go, leave, have to pay the baby sitter…” was what came out, though she knew as she was saying those words she should be taking another tack. That fancy uptown man didn’t give a damn about baby-sitters or her son. He was out to snare a new woman into his bed, and Jan was what her mother used to call “corned beef hash.” Which means what you do with yesterday’s meat.
Terry pulled some cash out of his pocket, because he was the one who at his insistence always paid her baby-sitters. “Here. You go ahead. I’ve got business to take care of. Take the car, honey. And I’ll call you in the morning.” As in beat it, you bimbo.
Of course he didn’t call Jan in the morning. A week later when she bumped into him in the studio commissary, he said, “Angel face, we almost made it work, didn’t we?” And walked away. Three months later, as soon as his divorce was final, he became engaged to the actress he danced with at the party. It was all over the papers. On the Sunday of their wedding, Molly and I picked Jan and Joey up at her house in Laurel Canyon, and the four of us went to the Santa Monica pier so the kids could go on the rides. While Molly took Joey on the bumper boats, Jan and I sat on a bench and she wept.
“It’s not going to be a marriage, Rose. I mean it is what it is. He likes the way they look together in the couples section of People magazine. I mean, she’s too dumb for him,” she said. I ached for Jan. I remembered that day in Ojai how, like the bumpkin Andy always says I am, I truly believed it when that man told me he would marry her.
For a while after that she dated Larry Hodgens. Remember him? He was a darling guy. A civilian, meaning he wasn’t in show business. A few people mentioned the odd fact that Larry looked a lot like Terry Penn. “He’s like Terry Penn with character,” someone said at a party. But I guess that didn’t work, because very soon after that she got bored with him and stopped seeing him.
I watched the articles in the magazines about Terry Penn and his new wife, and watched them have one kid and then two, and the wife’s career kind of fizzled out after a few bad movies. Once I saw them at a screening, and that formerly gorgeous young woman now had a frazzled, beaten look, and she was wearing a dress you shouldn’t wear if you’re chunky, which she had become.
Anyway, about a month ago, I was in my car coming from a meeting, and I realized I had Joey’s birthday gift in the trunk of my car and I was right near Jan’s, so I stopped over, and we had coffee and I got to see Joey and watch him do all the latest cute things he had learned.
When the phone rang and Jan had to take the call, I went into the powder room to make a stop before my long ride home, and after I washed my hands and was about to go back out into the kitchen, I couldn’t believe it when I heard Jan saying into the phone, “Oh, honey. Oh, God. Me too. I want that, too.” It was suddenly as if I’d been thrown back all those years, and I knew with a sick feeling that she had been, too.
I looked at my face in the powder room mirror and tried to compose it into the expression of someone who hadn’t overheard those words, and I waited until I heard Janny hang up the phone before I came out of the bathroom.
“Well,” I said, feigning innocence, “I guess I’d better hurry on home.” But when I looked at Jan’s flushed cheeks and she looked at my lying face, we both knew what was happening.
“Terry and I have been back together for a year,” she confessed to me.
“But isn’t Terry still married to that actress?” I blurted out.
“Oh, Rose,” she said, before I finished my question. “It is what it is. It’s not a marriage. And he’s going to leave her. I’d say within the next few months he and Joey and I will start looking for a house.”
I drove home, feeling that sad about-to-cry feeling in my face, but no tears came. And then I remembered what Jan said to me that day so long ago at the gym about the aerobics, and I realized she was wrong. Anyone who looked could definitely see her heart.
* * *
21
She was seeing Terry Penn again,” Marly said sadly, as if she’d just heard that someone she loved had gone back to drugs after rehab. “A few times I asked her if she ever ran into him. We called him the Prince of Power. But she always changed the subject. Now I know why.”
“Because she knew you’d tell her she was choosing to be a victim and creating futility to avoid commitment,” Rose said.
“And as usual, I would have been right,” Marly said. “Besides, it takes one to know one.”
“Why hasn’t Terry come to the hospital?” Rose asked. “By now the shooting has to be all over the news.”
“Because he’d have to explain it to the second wife he’s been fucking over,” Ellen said.
“You can’t possibly think that Terry and Jan had a fight and he was the one who shot her?” Marly asked Rose, but the policewoman answered the question.
“Doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who would soil his
hands. Naturally we’ll check him out, though,” she said.
“What if it was Terry Penn’s wife who shot Jan?” Ellen asked. “Like in Presumed Innocent.”
“I think you’ve been producing too many movies,” Rose said, and the others laughed. The moment was interrupted by a shrill beeping sound. The detective unbuttoned her blazer to reveal not only her beeper, but a gun in a shoulder holster. She stood.
“I have to call in. Where do they keep the phones around here?”
“I just realized I have one with me,” Ellen said, opening the zipper on her black Prada purse and pulling out her cellular flip phone.
“Cool,” Rita Connelly said as Ellen handed it to her.
“Not as intimidating as the paraphernalia you’re packing,” Marly said.
Rita punched some numbers into the small, flat telephone. “Connelly,” she said, followed by a few “Uh-huhs.” Then she pushed END and handed the phone back to Ellen.
“They brought in that guy who broke onto the set of ‘My Brightest Day,’ ” she told them. “He has a gun registered to him that’s the same kind that was used to shoot your friend. He says he can’t remember where it is. Sounds like he could have found his way over to her house. I’m out of here, ladies. Here’s my card if you need any more advice on the movie about that woman cop.”
Then she stopped and looked at the three of them and said, “I have three kids, and I know how tough it’s going to be on that little boy if he loses her.” She put her thumb up. “I’ll hold a good thought,” she said, and then she hurried down the hall and out of sight.
There were just hospital sounds for a long time. Elevator doors whooshing, a floor waxer in the distance, an ambulance outside with the sound of the siren getting closer.
“Isn’t it interesting,” Ellen said, “that despite appearances, which nobody knows better than we do how they can always be deceiving… that that woman is one of us.”
“I think there’s a film in it,” Rose said, smiling, “a small unpretentious film about how what we are inside doesn’t always reflect—“
“Hey, Rose. Let me tell you what to do with your small unpretentious film,” Ellen said and gave her a playful punch on the arm.
“Why in God’s name if that fan showed up at Jan’s house, would she ever let him in?” Rose asked them, her glasses catching the strange fluorescent lights. “That’s the odd part.”
“Let’s go down there and be with her,” Marly said and they all stood and moved back down the hall to surgical ICU. Ellen pushed the buzzer on the white plastic box next to the door.
“Yes?” A woman’s voice replied to the buzz.
“I’m Ellen Bass,” Ellen said to the box. “Jan O’Malley’s friend. If she’s stablized, we want to come in and be with her.”
“I’ll be right out.”
After a minute, the nurse opened the door. She was a blonde in her sixties, with very black mascara caked on her lashes. One at a time she looked at Ellen, then at Rose, and when she got to Marly, she smiled. “I know you,” she said excitedly. “I loved every episode of ‘Keeping Up with the Joneses,’ and that other show you were on about the bar. I’m genuinely sorry about your friend.”
“Thank you,” Marly said.
“I always watch ‘My Brightest Day’ too. She’s so beautiful and talented.” Under all the hard eye makeup the nurse had a warmth in her eyes. “She’s stable, but she’s still in what they’re calling a light coma. Doctor Schiffman mentioned that you’d want to come in together, and I think it would be a good idea for her friends to be with her and to keep talking to her.”
“So do we,” Ellen said, moving past the nurse into the ICU, where ten equipment-filled rooms opened onto a monitoring desk, above which hung ten computer screens, one for each patient. Two other nurses sat at the desk chatting. Five of the rooms had patients in them, hooked up to inexplicable machines and tubes.
“I know you don’t particularly like a group in these room,” Marly said to the nurse, “but we really are her extended family, and I think if what you’re saying is true, our being with her is going to mean a lot to her recovery.”
The nurse patted Marly on the arm in a motherly way, then said, “If I were you, I’d talk as if she was being included in your conversation. Because hearing is the last sense to go, and I’ve known people to come out of comas and describe conversations they heard in the room around them from family members who figured they were too out of it to hear. But before you go in, could I just trouble you for an autograph for my daughter, Miss Bennet? Her name is Jessica.” Marly smiled an assent, and the nurse produced a pad and a pen. She wrote a message and her signature for the nurse’s daughter.
“I’m Nancy,” the woman said. “And this is Sheila, and Kari,” she said, gesturing to the two nurses at the desk.
“This is Rose Schiffman and Ellen Bass,” Marly said, and the nurses smiled a polite hello.
“Ellen Bass? Ellen Bass is out there?” They heard a man’s voice call out weakly. “Nurse, do me a favor. Get her in here.”
The nurse looked behind her toward the cubicle from which the voice had come, then back at Ellen. “That’s Mr. Zavitz, Fred Zavitz, do you know him?”
“Does she know me?” the man’s voice said. “We’re family!”
“He just had a lung removed and he’s in very delicate condition, but I guess it’s okay if you go in and see him.” The nurse smiled and shrugged.
Fred Zavitz was an old-time producer. When Ellen was a gofer at Screen Gems, he had a deal at Columbia Pictures, where he produced half a dozen movies. And he was always nice to the kids who worked on the lot. In the days when Ellen worked on “The Monkees,” next door at Screen Gems, she liked to creep onto the sets at Columbia and watch them shooting the feature films. Katharine Hepburn and Sidney Poitier filming Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, or Gregory Peck filming McKenna’s Gold. And Fred Zavitz would tell his secretary Libby to make sure to get Ellen a pass or to give her a bogus delivery to make to the set so she could get in the door and watch them shooting.
The thing in the bed was skeletonlike, but somewhere in and among his features, Ellen recognized Fred Zavitz.
“Hiya, Freddy,” Ellen said in as jovial a voice as she could muster.
“Ellen, darling, why are you here?” he asked, as if he was hoping the answer was that she’d come to see him.
“One of my good friends is in here, Fred.”
“I’m sorry to hear it, dear, but listen, while I’ve got you here, take a minute. I have a great story to tell you.”
Ellen leaned against the wall of Fred Zavitz’s cubicle and tried to look interested. It was the least she could do for a man who’d just had a lung removed.
“My son and I haven’t spoken in twelve years,” Zavitz said, stopping to lick his dry lips, then going on. “So now I’m dying, I mean let’s not mince words here, I’m basically on borrowed time. So who do you think is the specialist in the field of medicine that I need the most? You got it! So unbeknownst to me, my doctor calls him in to consult on my case, and we’re reunited. Now that’s a movie. I could put a writer on that thing and have it ready in a month’s time after I get out of here. Provided, of course, that I get out of here. It’s got irony, it’s got pathos, it’s got big, juicy parts. I see Paul Newman as me and Sam Shepard as my son. Hey, listen, if she wanted to, Joanne Woodward could play my wife.”
The nurse, who was back in the room now taking Fred Zavitz’s pulse, looked at Ellen as if to urge her to indulge him, but Ellen didn’t need her cue.
“Newman and Woodward would be great, Freddy,” Ellen said. “They haven’t had a good vehicle together in a while.”
“Am I right?” the pale, bony man in the bed asked, then winced.
“Shall I get you something for the pain?” the nurse asked.
“Not now,” Fred Zavitz told her. “I’m in a meeting.”
“I like it, Fred. You call me when you get on your feet, and if I can’t use it, I’ll make
sure you get it to somebody who can.”
“You’re a doll,” Fred Zavitz said. “A regular doll. Say, listen, I hope your friend is feeling better. What did she have?”
“We’re not sure. But it might have been a fan who loved her too much,” Ellen said, and went to join Marly and Rose, who were standing next to Jan’s bed. Rose was trying not to recoil as she looked at Jan’s bandaged head and her corpselike face. Marly was holding Jan’s hand and talking to her inert body.
“Janny, everything is okay. Joey’s at my house and he’s just fine. The twins will hug him and kiss him and play with him as if he were a doll, and tomorrow morning when he wakes up, I’m going to promise him that you’ll be back soon, because you will. We’re sending you wellness vibrations and the white light of our love.”
“Janny, you realize you fucked up Girls’ Night,” Ellen said, “so I wish like hell you’d wake up and tell us about Maximilian Schell. I can use the laugh.”
“Me too,” Marly said.
“This is like a scene from ‘My Brightest Day,’ ” Rose said. “If I’m not mistaken, they even have a permanent ICU set on their stage because so many people on the show find themselves in comas. Janny, Maggie Flynn would not tolerate this. She’d throw off the bandages, be wearing a shocking pink nightgown and marabou mules, and tell them all she was on her way to Paris.”
“Janny,” Ellen said, “a police officer told us they think they may have the man in custody who did this to you. They took him in for questioning. They think that guy who broke onto the lot was the one.” There was a sudden spasm from Jan, and they all held their breath, hoping it was signaling her awakening, but then she settled into the same placid state she’d been in before.
Show Business Kills Page 20