None of them spoke as he moved past them and looked into the room where Jan still lay motionless, and then closed his eyes. “Oh, Christ,” he said. Marly made a shushing gesture and ushered all of them away a few yards to the heavy door that separated the ICU from the hall. Rose and Ellen followed.
“We think she can hear us,” Marly said softly.
“What can I do for her? I’ll pay for specialists. I’ll hire a private eye to find the guy that did it. I’ve got private eyes on the payroll of two of my shows. I’ll call one at home right now,” he said, pulling a phone out of the pocket of the tux jacket.
“Put that goddamned phone away,” Ellen said. “You narcissistic putz. No one wants your help. I heard you fucked Jan over so royally she couldn’t even say your name without bursting into tears. What’s with you, you power-happy schmuck?”
Jack Solomon did a comedy take, looking back over each of his shoulders as if he were looking behind him to see who Ellen could possibly be accusing of doing something to hurt Jan.
“Pardon me? I did something bad to her? What in the hell did I do to her? This I have to hear. I had the producer of my highest-rated show bring her in to do a plum part that I handpicked out of one of the best scripts because I knew it was a part that had a chance of going into a major story line. I knew she could chew the scenery with it, and she did. We tested that episode, and that scene went through the frigging roof. I sent her flowers afterward and told her so. You people are out of your fucking minds calling me power-happy.”
“But you got her the part with no ulterior motives, right?” Ellen asked. “No old grudges. No power trips to get even for the fact that you couldn’t have her back when we were at Tech?”
Jack’s face fell, and he shook his head and clucked his tongue. “You’ve been hanging around with those lowlifes at Hemisphere too long, Feinberg. They may do things like that. I sure as hell never would.”
“Then what about the card?” Ellen asked him as if she were a prosecutor in a courtroom. “The card you sent with the flowers?”
Jack frowned and thought about it, as if he didn’t know what card she meant. Rose couldn’t stop looking closely at him, marveling at the fact that he was aging so well. His mustache had strips of gray in it, but the rest of him had never looked better. He’d become a great-looking middle-aged man.
“You mean because of the P.S. about finally seeing her tits?” he asked.
“Her breasts were used as a joke,” Marly said.
“Not at all. As an integral part of the story line.”
“Yeah, sure. That show and some of the rest of the shows on your network exploit women like crazy,” Ellen said.
“And you used them on the gag reel,” Rose said.
“I don’t make the gag reel, the editors of the shows do that,” he said, his brow furrowed with annoyance that she might think that he had something to do with a job so menial. “I just show up at the party. And the joke I made to Janny about seeing her tits was the exact same joke I made to her thirty years ago, when she always patted me on the head and laughed it off. But now I make that joke and I’m bum-rapped as sexually abusive? We’re allowed to be sexy on television now, and why shouldn’t we be? Sex is part of life. This isn’t the fifties. No one wants to watch ‘Beat the Clock’ any more. So I just dropped the B and the L.”
Marly emitted an outraged sound at his joke. “Get out of here, Jack. Go back to your party at Chasen’s, and leave Jan with people who care about her.” Jack ignored her and turned his anger on Ellen.
“Besides, Feinberg, my network’s known for nice juicy hot passion. Your studio makes movies that have guys’ brains blowing out their ears. Why are you better than me?” Ellen was silent. “Listen, ladies… I’m not going to get into a pissing contest with you three. I’m a good guy. I give money to the UJA, I support my parents. Remember Betty Norell? I even sat on the phone with her daughter, who called my office in such a panic they put her through to me because the girl can’t locate her mother and she thought maybe Betty was in L.A. Like I would know, or give a shit, where Betty Norell, who I haven’t seen in thirty years, would be. But did I say I can’t take the call? No. I sat on the phone with the kid because I’m a good guy.”
“Shh,” Marly said, because at that instant she thought she caught sight of Jan seeming to have another one of those spasms, a restless tossing movement that might signal her awakening. They all hurried to the door and waited to see if there was any sign of her becoming conscious, but now only the blipping machines were active. Jan continued to lie still.
“Sometimes,” Jack said then, in a voice that sounded as if it might crack any second, “in my office during the day, I turn on that soap of Jan’s and lock the door, and sit there with a boner just like I used to get when I sat in the dorms staring at her. Because my whole life, Jan O’Malley was for me like that blonde in the white Thunderbird was for Richard Dreyfuss in American Graffiti. The wet dream who always haunts your life. I loved her, I still love her. I watched those dailies of her flashing her boobs in ‘Doctors On Call,’ and it was all I could do to keep from doing a Pee-wee Herman imitation in my own screening room.”
“Mr. Class,” Ellen said, but Jack ignored her. Now he had one arm draped around Marly’s neck and another around Rose’s.
“I used to love those nights in the girls’ dorm on More-wood Avenue. It was Morewood Gardens, but remember how the boys used to call it ‘The Cherry Orchard?’ And you four were gorgeous. You should have worn signs on your chests freshman year that said ‘We’re Virgins, We’re Pretty, and We Know It.’ Hey, I’ll bet you ten million bucks I can describe the pajamas every one of you wore, and it’s thirty years ago, for Christ’s sake.”
“We can’t handle that bet, Jack,” Ellen said. “You’re the one who makes the big bucks in this group.” Jack was still looking into the room at Jan, deeply into his reverie of their youth.
“Janny had those slinky see-through pink baby dolls, and then when I wanted to grab her after I looked through them and saw that killer body under there, she’d slap my hand. And Rose Morris, always a sex symbol, you had those green-and-black checked flannel pajamas, and old Marly the WASP. Hah! You had the long-sleeved, high-neck Lanz nightgown. And Feinberg, what in the hell did you have?” He thought for a minute, then lit up. “A Tech sweatshirt. Didn’t you always sleep in an extra-large Tech sweatshirt?”
“I still do,” Ellen said. “Which may be why I’m still single.”
Marly was openmouthed. “My God. You were right about every one of our pajamas,” she said. It was obvious he had melted her by recalling those details. Marly was a sucker for sentimentality. They all knew that, including Jack, who turned to her now to play his vulnerable scene to the hilt.
His eyes filled, and he nodded a nod that said, And you thought I was heartless, as he put his hand on Marly’s face. “You see, Mar,” he said, “you’re the ones who pin the idea of a power trip on me. You give it that spin because you have some fantasy about my life that isn’t true. Because we all know that if I wanted to, in my position, I can see all the tits, excuse me, ladies, breasts, in Hollywood all day and all night. So why would I ever humiliate someone I love? And you know what else? Something really important?”
“What?” Marly asked, falling for it hook, line, and sinker.
“I hate hospitals, and I think I’m gonna vomit.”
Rose laughed out loud. “You do? Two of your shows take place mostly in hospitals.”
“I know, and it’s why I stay in the office instead of being on the sets of any of those shows. I get sick to my stomach. I think I’m gonna go accept my award, and have one of you call my office tomorrow and leave a message about how Jan is coming along.”
“What’s the award for, Jackie?” Ellen asked. “Sincerity?”
“Humanitarianism,” Jack Solomon said, then turned to her. “You ought to try it some time.”
“Thanks for stopping by, Jack,” Rose said as he walked toward the oute
r door.
“Hey, Morris,” he said, pointing at Rose. “You’re a good little writer. I’ll give you a job on any of my shows any time.” He smiled his best and warmest smile before the door to the hall closed behind him, and the three friends stood near the nurses’ station looking at one another.
“He’s a piece of garbage,” Ellen said.
“Shh,” Marly said, “don’t forget that hearing is the last sense to go. Besides, maybe he means it. I had no idea he loved Janny that much.”
“Neither did he, it was all an act,” Ellen said.
Rose sighed as they settled back into what were becoming the familiar plastic-and-metal chairs crammed into the cubicle around the bed where Jan lay.
“If he lies and treats people badly, it will come back to him,” Marly said. “I really believe it. I think there’s a balance out there, and you get what you give. Maybe not right away, but it happens.”
“I think about that all the time,” Rose said. “I did something awful once that I’m sure is coming back to haunt me now. And I dream about it and worry about it, and I know I’ve never told any of you the story, because I was too ashamed.”
“I hope Marlon Brando’s in it,” Ellen said. “And I hope this time you actually had him.”
“Marlon Brando is not in this story… but close. This one is about Manny Birnbaum.”
* * *
25
The InvisibleMan
Right after graduation, I went back to Cleveland to pack up my things and move here, and before I left, everyone told me that the first thing I should do when I was settled was to call Manny Birnbaum. Manny was the best writer in television, with a list of credits that would make your mouth hang open. And in the forties, when I was a toddler, he was a close friend of my Dad’s from their high school days. I remember hearing all the stories about how Manny moved to New York to “seek his fortune,” and when he made it big, all the friends at home were as proud as if they’d done it themselves.
He wrote “The Garry Moore Show,” and “The Jack Paar Show,” and “The Dick Cavett Show.” My father, who in those days had a little hardware store and appliance repair, and drudged away there making keys and taking apart toasters, felt touched by the glamour every time Manny’s name went by on the television screen.
He would always call me in to watch the credits on a Manny-written show and say, “Here it comes! Manny Birnbaum. There it goes! Did you see it, Rose?” My father liked to brag that he could tell which shows Manny worked on without even seeing Manny’s name at the end, because he could recognize Manny’s slam-bang sense of humor anywhere just by hearing it.
Eventually Manny found his way from New York to Hollywood, and of course, much later, I did, too. When we all first got out here in sixty-six, Manny was already a veteran writer, and his career was blazing. I was intimidated and afraid to call him, but my father kept sending me notes telling me I was crazy not to, so finally, after I’d been in town for a few weeks, I nervously dialed Manny’s home phone number, hoping he wouldn’t be there. But he was.
When he heard it was Harry Morris’s daughter calling, “little Roselah,” he invited me out to what was to be the first of our traditional monthly lunches, at Jerry’s Deli in Studio City. In those days I think he was working on “The Andy Williams Show.”
He was a cute little round man with a cloud of black hair around the edges of a bald head, and he had a great nice-uncle sweetness to him. I jabbered about my life, and what I wanted to do with it, and I remember before we parted that day, Manny said for the first time something he was to tell me at least a hundred more times, which was: “A writer is a person on whom nothing is lost.”
Over the years he attributed that quote to Robert Frost, Edna Ferber, James Thurber, Roy Gerber, and maybe even Thomas Jefferson. “And you, maidelah,” he always added, “are going to be a good one. Just from talking to you, I can tell that you see stories everywhere.”
He encouraged me and helped me as patiently as a saint, reading my first feeble pages while we waited for our orders to come, and he and I both munched on the crunchy kosher “new” pickles Jerry’s Deli always had sitting in plastic bowls on every table. Sometimes he’d still be reading over the soup and bagel chips, and I had trouble eating because my stomach was flipping around nervously while I watched his face for a reaction to my work.
Eventually he’d put the papers down on the table and gently tell me, first of all, the things that were good about what he read; and even more gently, not what was bad, but how I could make it better. Then he’d bring a little comedy relief to the moment, by dazzling me with the funny material he was working on for George Burns or Bob Hope.
And I felt so lucky that he was taking the time. I knew what a genius he was. In a writing class I was taking at UCLA Extension, my teacher was talking about some television show and spoke in awed tones about a certain quirky brand of comedy scene he referred to as “a perfect Birnbaum.” Manny was a legend in television comedy.
In nineteen sixty-eight, when I married Allan, Manny and his wife were at the wedding. Remember? He was the one who stood up and made that hilarious toast that everyone was quoting for months afterwards. Manny is one of those people who can be funny about anything. He can pick up the telephone book and improvise a hunk of material for twenty minutes that will have you gasping for breath and wiping away tears of laughter from your eyes. He’s what a producer I once worked for called “a comic entity.”
As you know, I’m not a comic entity. I write drama, stories about human frailty, stories about pain. And there weren’t a lot of jobs for twenty-two-year-old women in television in those days, not on the writing staffs. So I took a lot of writing classes, and while Allan was going to graduate school, I worked as a hostess at the International House of Pancakes while I wrote at night. Finally after a million false starts and a number of years, I sold an episode of a television show called “Cimarron Strip.”
Which was pretty funny, considering my only experience with anything Western before that was when I was five, and some guy with a flea-bitten pony came around to my neighborhood and took pictures of the kids, wearing the photographer’s sweaty cowboy hat, sitting on the pony. Then he sold the pictures to our parents for too much money. Which is to say, I was not exactly Louis L’Amour.
My dad still has the picture of me on that pony on the wall. Anyway, that episode got me more jobs in television, and then you remember I got an assignment to write a feature film for Universal, and my name was in the trades all the time. I had enough money of my own so that once I made the mistake of trying to pick up the check when I went to lunch with Manny, who gave me a little slap on the hand and said, “Don’t insult me.”
By now it was the early seventies, and Manny was skinny from working out at Gold’s Gym, which he had started doing at the advice of his doctor, after he had what he called a “squeezing” in his chest that scared him into getting into shape. And the cloud of hair had not only turned white, but now it was down to his shoulders, and he wore it in a ponytail, which he pulled through a hole in the back of a cap with the words Writers’ Guild on it. But these days, instead of regaling me with the funny stories, Manny was complaining a lot.
I remember coming home one day and telling Allan how I figured Manny’s curmudgeonly attitude probably was due to old age. He was, after all, in his sixties. But Manny said it was because he was feeling victimized by the prejudice he was starting to feel in the business, which he couldn’t name.
He told me there had been a noticeable shift in the way people were treating him, a disrespect for what he’d brought to the television business, for his writing style. That he was somehow being perceived as too old-fashioned to be a part of what was happening in the business at that moment.
I didn’t know what to say. The complaining made me uncomfortable. By the end of the lunch, just because he was Manny, and being funny was what he did best, he was making jokes about it, and I was relieved. I didn’t want to sit around w
ith some kvetchy old guy over pickles if it was going to be depressing.
I had a lot of work to do and didn’t want to interrupt a writing day to hear about how stupid the network executives were. That was a given. In fact it seems to me, I was so busy with my own assignments that I had to cancel what Manny called “our constitutional” once or twice. So the next time I saw him was a few months later. I was pulling my Mustang into the parking lot at Jerry’s, and Manny was waiting for me, sitting on the hood of the old Cadillac he drove.
“Hey, kid,” he said every time I pulled into the parking lot of Jerry’s Deli. That day there was something distracted about the look in his eye. In fact, I remember as he stepped forward to meet me, he was almost hit by a woman in a Mercedes who was backing out of the space next to the one I was pulling into.
I knew from a few phone conversations we’d had that recently Manny had been doing something very tough for him, which was calling up comics he’d worked for in the past, and if he got them on the phone, saying, “Listen to this joke.” Then he’d try the joke out on them, in the hope that they’d like it and buy it from him.
Most of the time they did like it, and bought it, because Manny’s jokes are topical and very funny. And when someone tells you how witty some of those big stars are, it’s usually because Manny told them, or should I say sold them, what to say. But you can’t really make a living or a life out of selling jokes door to door, and that’s why Manny was more depressed than the last time.
“So what’s new?” I always asked, hoping that today he’d light up and say, “I sold a pilot idea to NBC, and I’m starting to write it.” But instead, that day he fogged up and said he was going to tell me something, but I couldn’t tell a soul. I promised, but he still didn’t tell me what the secret was, until we were at our usual table, which is outside on the sidewalk, where, at no extra charge, as you eat your soup, you can inhale the fumes from the buses that go by on Ventura Boulevard.
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