Show Business Kills

by Iris Rainer Dart

  “I’m working the night shift at Kinko’s,” he told me. I was sure it was a joke, since comedy writers love using words with the letter K in them, because for some reason the sound of the letter K is supposed to be funny, ergo his choice of Kinko’s, which is the name of a chain of copy and printing stores. “I have to do it if I want to eat,” he said. “So far, I’ve added a little humor to a couple of guys’ business reports. But that’s as good as it gets.”

  When I realized he wasn’t kidding, the enormity of what he was saying hit me. Not that there’s anything wrong with working at Kinko’s. All of the people who have helped me there, to get a manuscript Xeroxed, are sweet and nice and courteous. But for Manny Birnbaum to be working there, to support himself, was like Walter Cronkite selling freeway flowers.

  “Why Kinko’s?” I asked.

  “Because after all the pages I’ve Xeroxed for myself, I know how to do it real well for other people,” he said. Then he added, as if to reassure me, “I’m on the midnight-to-six shift at the one in Reseda, because I don’t know anyone in Reseda, and there’s very little chance that at that hour, in that location, Brandon Tartikoff is gonna walk in there and spot me.” There was no disguising the shame Manny was feeling, and instead of being the selfish little brat I’d been the last time, it occurred to me that I had to hear him out and help him because I owed him in spades.

  “What can I do to help you?” I asked him, thinking it felt like such a short time ago when I stood in my family living room, looking at the black-and-white screen, when the television was still an exciting new toy for our family, thrilling to the sight of Manny Birnbaum’s name. But it really had been a long time, and instead of being venerated and consulted and revered by an industry he’d helped to make successful, Manny was out on his ass.

  “Nothing, maidelah,” he said. “But thanks for asking.”

  The next day I got on the phone and called John DiMaggio. John was a writer I knew from when we were both on the Writers’ Guild show committee. He was a sweet, funny man who had a hit comedy series that had been on television for five years.

  We chatted for a while, and I knew he knew I wasn’t just calling him to shoot the breeze. Pretty soon I could tell if I didn’t get to the reason I called, he was going to hang up, so I said, “Listen, I’m calling to tell you that if you need someone really strong on your writing staff, you’ll never guess who’s available. Manny Birnbaum!”

  John was quiet for a little while, and then he said, “No kidding? Boy, was I a fan of his. Remember that routine he wrote for Tim Conway and Carol Burnett about the fat couple? A classic.”

  “I’m telling you,” I said hopefully. “He’s the greatest.”

  “Yeah,” he said and then sighed. “Thanks for the tip, Rose. You’re nice to call,” and I thought maybe I’d pulled it off. Made John DiMaggio think I was offering him a hot property, and that maybe he had a job for Manny. I was about to give him Manny’s phone number, when he said, “Because I remember you telling me that he’s an old friend of your dad’s. Gotta hop,” and he hung up.

  Meanwhile, you know how fickle the business is. Well, things were starting to slow down for me, too. I was falling into some tough times myself, and though I’d been going around to a lot of meetings, I wasn’t getting any assignments. I had a meeting one day with some producer who was looking for a writer to adapt a novel, and before the meeting, I took the novel apart and made a zillion notes on how I’d do it, and after my big enthusiastic pitch, the producer shot down every idea I had.

  Now I remember that day as if it was yesterday, feeling down about that meeting as if it was the most important thing in the world. Driving home over Mulholland thinking I had to get a job soon or my eligibility for Writers’ Guild health insurance would be threatened. And when I got home, I saw Allan’s car in the driveway, and I wondered with this very odd foreboding why he wasn’t in the office. Somehow I knew with a sinking feeling that the reason he was at home was going to be something terrible.

  My father, I figured it had to be about my father. That my father was dead, and someone had reached Allan at his office, and he had come home and was waiting to tell me the news. It was something awful like that. I knew it. I hurried into the house and I looked at Allan’s beautiful face, and there was, without a doubt, doom in his eyes.

  He said, “Baby, sit down. I have to talk to you about something important,” and I could feel my heart in my throat because I knew it was going to be very bad. But I couldn’t imagine how bad, until he told me the doctor thought he had cancer, and he was going in for surgery the next morning.

  Everything else fell away after that. For the longest time nothing mattered but the results of Allan’s surgery, the bad news about how aggressive the disease was, bringing him home for a few weeks, then taking him for more tests, more treatments, more surgeries. And somehow making it through those days with the horrifying realization that our love story was ending.

  One day when I had a quiet moment, I looked at our financial picture and it was pretty bleak. So while Allan slept, I tried to write, tried to come up with ideas to pitch, and had some halfhearted meetings in which I knew before I opened my mouth to pitch them that my ideas were dull.

  It was a few months after the first surgery, and I was getting into my car after a bad meeting at Warner’s one day, needing to hurry home and make lunch for Allan, though he was hardly eating anything by then, when across the parking lot I saw Manny Birnbaum.

  I waved, and he came over and hugged me a big fatherly bear hug, and I cried in his arms. From exhaustion, from pain, from frustration. He said it was ironic that he was bumping into me that day, because he’d been entertaining an idea that he wanted to try out on me. He said there was a new comedy show coming on, on ABC, that was “staffing up.” They were looking for writing teams, and maybe he and I should go in and try to get the job together.

  “We’re perfect for the show because it’s about a young married woman who lives with her father, so we bring both characters’ points of view to the party.” When I didn’t answer, he sold a little harder. “Listen, with your characters and my jokes, maidelah, we could be a hit.”

  He was so sweet and so hopeful to a dishrag of a person whose husband was dying and who thought she’d never have another creative notion for the rest of her life. Write a show with Manny. A comedy. Obviously he needed me to average out the age problem he was having at the network. And I needed him, because I was sure the right side of my brain was gone forever.

  “Yeah?” I joked, and where I found humor at that moment I’ll never know. “But what if it ends up having your characters and my jokes?”

  “Then we’re dead in the water,” he said, grinning.

  “Manny,” I said, wiping my eyes, thinking what an angel he was, and how he didn’t need the additional burden of someone as crazy as I was then. “You don’t want me as a partner. I’m in the worst emotional shape I’ve ever been in. I cry at the drop of a hat, I can barely think straight most days.”

  But Manny dismissed my excuses with a wave of his hand, and soon we were meeting at my house during the hours when Allan napped. And mostly the meetings were about Manny getting me up to speed so that if we could get a meeting for that ABC show, I’d appear to be “a comic entity,” or in the worst case, they wouldn’t think I was a complete moron.

  We read the pilot, and a breakdown of the characters, and talked them and worked them for days. We knew we were ready for the meeting when we had what we thought were ten strong story ideas. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the lion’s share of the work was Manny’s. His genius came shining through. He had heart and warmth and trickery, and on top of that he could find something funny about everything.

  The truth is, though I contributed a little, I knew that essentially I was Manny’s front. Like Woody Allen in the movie with Zero Mostel. Manny could write the script in his sleep, and he didn’t really need anything from me but my presence in the meeting. It was a th
ought that ordinarily would have awakened me in the middle of the night, feeling awful, but in those days I was awake all night anyway. Putting the blanket back over Allan, crooning to him to get him back to sleep as he lay in a hospital bed in our bedroom.

  You can imagine how comedic I felt on the day of the meeting when I tell you that I knew a few hours later I was taking Allan into the hospital for what I suspected was going to be his last visit there, or anywhere.

  “We killed ‘em,” Manny said, giving me five when we got into the elevator after the meeting. And I guess he was right, because the three jerky producers of the show laughed at everything we said in our very rehearsed, highly controlled, created-by-Manny pitch. “Those little stiffs were pishing in their jeans,” he said happily. “And you were a trooper,” he said, realizing my attention was only halfway there, and pulling back a little on the high.

  That night Allan was admitted to Cedars, and I stayed with him until midnight, then went home to get some sleep, and at nine in the morning when the phone rang, it woke me. I jumped to grab it with fear that Allan had taken a bad turn during the night. It was my agent. “They want you,” he said, “but they don’t want him.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said. “He’s the one. He’s the brains, the talent, the ideas. I’m completely incapable of doing that show without him. It’s a comedy.”

  “They say they want rich characters, which they can get from you, and they can fill the jokes in later.”

  “That’s not how it works. The jokes and characters have to be written by the same person, otherwise they’re not organic,” I said, knowing I was quoting Manny. “Why don’t they want him?”

  “Because he’s old, his ideas are old, his jokes are old-school shticky. They don’t understand him, Rose.”

  “They’re incompetent dunderheads,” I said, enraged.

  “You want to hear what they’re offering you?” my agent asked.

  At the foot of the double bed where Allan and I had slept locked in one another’s arms for so many years was the as yet unreturned hospital bed, with the IV pole next to it, a cold, awful reminder of the past months, and what I had yet to face. Not just the expense, but the head-ringing, hospital-sitting nightmare that might last for the next six months. At least if I had a project, something not only to do, but that could bring in some income…

  “What are they offering?” I said, hating myself for asking.

  The number was ludicrously high, as so many television salaries were in those days. “But more than that,” my agent said, “I told them your situation, and they told me you don’t even have to come in, you can work wherever you want and send it over to them.”

  The hospital. I could stay near Allan, be where he needed me to be, and still have a writing job, a high-paying writing job, and extend my health insurance benefits for a long time to come. A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost, so you can bet the irony of what was happening, if I let it, was not lost on me.

  When Allan came out of surgery that afternoon and was “resting comfortably,” I called Manny and asked him if he could meet me at Jerry’s Deli at four o’clock. I saw by the look on his face when I drove in that he knew why I wanted to talk. I got out of my car, and he stepped forward and took my hand.

  “You know what?” he said. “It’s too late in the day for soup. I think maybe I’ll just have a bagel and some iced tea.”

  I had a speech rehearsed, and I was going to make it as soon as the Ventura Boulevard bus went by, but I never got to say anything but, “Manny…”

  “Maidelah,” Manny interrupted, but he didn’t look at me, he looked at the pickles. “The business is changing. It’s not what it used to be, and younger people are taking over who have ideas I don’t understand. So if you want to know what I think, I think you should grab that job, because you’ll be wonderful for the show. And the show will be wonderful for you.”

  “What did you do?” Ellen asked her as Rose leaned back now in the hard hospital chair.

  “I took the job. Somehow I rationalized that I could do it without him, though I knew I wouldn’t be brilliant at it, or even good, but adequate. Which is what I was, and the show was canceled a few months later. Probably because they were too stupid to hire the writer who could have saved it.”

  “And Manny? What happened to him?”

  “He died a few years ago. In fact, the funeral was in Cleveland because he wanted to be buried near the rest of his family. My Dad went to it, and afterward he and some of the old friends went back to pay their respects at the home of some of Manny’s cousins. My father called me later, and he was stunned.

  “He said Manny died broke, but worse than that he died brokenhearted. He hadn’t written a word in years, he had a will, but all that was in it was his old Olivetti typewriter and some manuscripts he was donating to the UCLA archives. And some instructions for his funeral and burial. On his tombstone he wanted it to say three words, ‘But seriously, folks…’”

  “This business…” Ellen said sadly. “This fucking killer business.”

  * * *

  26

  Some of the people in the crowd outside the hospital saw her coming out the door, and one of them, a woman in a quilted parka with the hood up, said, “Hey, don’t feel bad None of us could get in, either.”

  She was amazed when she looked around at the ranks of fans that they had camp stools and coolers and warm clothes, as if they were prepared for the Rose Bowl parade or something. It made her think they must have done this kind of thing before.

  That fat guy even had a Watchman, one of those little portable TVs that work on batteries, and he was tuned in to some newsbreak and then announcing what he heard to the other people. All of them were standing the vigil for Maggie Flynn. Not Jan O’Malley. Not one of them even mentioned the name Jan O’Malley. They were all talking about Maggie Flynn.

  “They think they got the guy who shot Maggie,” the fat guy said, and several of the others moved in closer to him. “They just said he’s been arrested for questioning. Some nut who broke onto the set the other day looking for her.”

  Hah, she thought. As if this guy wasn’t a nut himself, standing in the damp night, outside a hospital holding a candle because he was worried about some fictional character.

  “I can tell you one thing for sure,” the fat guy said. “That man is lucky it was the cops that found him and not me, ‘cause I’da killed him with my bare hands, no questions asked. Anyone who hurts Maggie deserves to be dead.”

  She could hear on his television that the network had now cut away from the newsbreak, and back to some sit-com where the audience was laughing that fake canned laughter every few seconds. The blue shadow of the TV cast a flickering light on the fat guy’s big, round, double-chinned face.

  Two women who looked as if they were probably a mother and daughter, both with big dark circles under their eyes, stood with their arms around one another’s waists. They were both holding those big, thick, twenty-four-hour candles and looking forlornly up at the towering hospital building. “I think they owe it to us to come out and tell us if Maggie’s okay,” the younger one said in a choked-up voice.

  “Are you nuts? They don’t care about us,” the fat guy said, with a sneer of disdain at the girl’s naïveté. “Pretty soon they’ll send a cop out here to bust us for trespassing or loitering or some shit like that. You watch. I’m at all these things. That’s what they did to us when we went up on Sunset to that shrine for River Phoenix.”

  “Maggie deserves to die,” a bony woman with glasses said. “She’s been stepping out on Aubrey, and if this guy didn’t shoot her, I’ll bet Lydia would have killed her anyway. Everyone knows Maggie was having sexual relations right at Flynn Laboratories with Phillip Jenkins.”

  “Shut up, Lois,” a man who was apparently the woman’s husband said, poking her in the side. “She’s not dying. She’s going to be okay.”

  These people were too strange. They actually thought the person who wa
s in the hospital was Maggie Flynn. Didn’t they know it was Jan, her friend from college? They were insane to talk about the people on the show as if they were real.

  “What if she dies, Mom?” the girl with the raccoon eyes asked.

  “Oh, it’ll be okay. Remember what happened to Aubrey? If she dies, she’ll probably show up in the Caribbean or someplace like that.”

  Why was she standing out here? She wasn’t one of these little weirdo fans. She told Jan that, too. She was a better actress than Jan had ever been. And those letters she sent to Jan in care of the show got shoved into the same bag as the letters these kooks wrote to her. She was Jan’s old friend, and they wouldn’t even let her go up to see who else was visiting her. They let Jack Solomon go up. Probably right now he was chatting away with Ellen Bass, that cunt, who never wrote a note back to say she got the audition tape. She wished now that she’d shot that bitch, too.

  “You know sometimes they die on those shows, and they come back, and sometimes they’re gone forever. My guess is, they’ll just find someone else to be Maggie.”

  For an instant the idea slammed through her that if Jan died, the show would be needing to recast the part of Maggie, and she could play it. But then she knew that was absurd. I’m not glamorous enough, she thought. And the old feelings of envy were like hot lava in her chest. Even in critical condition in a hospital, Jan O’Malley was bigger than she’d ever be. She was nobody, just like the rest of these people on the sidewalk.

  “What did I tell you?” the fat guy said as a police car driving down the street pulled up beside the curb just where they were gathered, and two officers got out.

  “Time to go home now, folks. This is hospital property and they don’t want you out here disturbing the peace,” the tall bulky one said, in a patronizing voice that sounded like he was talking to a bunch of dogs. The crowd was dispersing. People were blowing out their candles and moving off down the street.