Show Business Kills

by Iris Rainer Dart

  “I don’t know. I came home and found it like that.”

  “Carnegie Mellon University Alumni Office. This is Dee Dee, how may I help you?” The voice from the speaker-phone filled the room.

  “Dee Dee, this is Rose Schiffman, the real Rose Schiff-man, I’m here with Officer Connelly of the L.A.P.D. She told me she spoke to you earlier. We’re trying to find out who really called you last week and asked for the West Coast alumni addresses.”

  “Mrs. Schiffman, I’m so sorry about what happened to Jan O’Malley. Of all people. I’m the biggest fan of ‘My Brightest Day.’ I even bring a little TV to work so I can watch it. And if you’re the real Mrs. Schiffman, your voice sure fits a lot better with what I imagined after I saw you on the Oscars the year Faces was nominated. I mean, I remember paying attention because I knew you graduated from here, and when they had that shot of you sitting next to your husband, wear- ing glasses and all, and looking so timid. I never would have thought you’d have such a big voice.”

  “The caller had a particularly big voice?” Rita Connelly asked.

  “She did. I mean it was that deep, foggy kind of voice. Of course Suzanne Pleshette is tiny, too, isn’t she? And she has a voice like that, but anyway, the woman who called here and said she was Mrs. Schiffman sounded a lot like her. You know the one who played Bob Newhart’s wife on his show? And I think she was on ‘The Rockford Files,’ too.

  “I’m really sorry, Mrs. Schiffman, I take all the blame for this. As I’m sure you know, we really try hard to maintain the privacy of our graduates, but it seemed like such a good idea for someone with your connections to send out a letter to solicit funds for the new theater, which is what the woman I talked to said she was going to do, so I got overly enthusiastic and gave out that private information. I hope it was okay.”

  Rose sank into the chair that faced her messy desk. “It wasn’t okay. It was anything but okay,” she said, and pushed the button to disconnect the phone. When Rita Connelly left, Rose called Ellen in the office, and when she wasn’t there, Greenie suggested she try the car.

  “Guess who was the person who received the fax with the alum names on it,” she said when Ellen answered.

  “Who?” Ellen asked.

  “Me.”

  “What?”

  “Somebody with a deep voice called the school and said she was me.”

  “Maybe it was Harvey Fierstein. When he’s in drag, he looks a little like you.”

  “Funny. The cop actually came to my house because they let the stalker go for no evidence, so they’re probably desperate to pin this on someone.”

  “Do you think anyone would believe that I saw Alex Bibberman leaving Jan’s house on Friday?” Ellen asked.

  “Maybe.” Rose laughed.

  “Shit, there’s an accident up ahead,” Ellen said. “I’m going to be late for the frigging meeting. Call you later.”

  She was in the far-left lane of the 405 freeway, unable to budge because there was an accident up ahead. She dialed her direct line at the studio.

  “Ellen Bass’s office,” Greenie answered.

  “I’m going to be late for the meeting.”

  “I don’t even know why you’re coming to the meeting. You’re going through a big trauma, El. The meeting can happen another day.”

  “I want to get it over with,” she said.

  “Do you need me to come and get you?”

  “You’d have to have a helicopter to get me out of here. I’m in the far-left lane on the 405 and there’s a serious fender bender about a half a mile up.”

  “Bibberman will say you didn’t leave early enough.”

  “I left at seven-thirty. It usually takes me twenty minutes. I was planning to be in an hour early to go over some notes for the meeting. I’m trying very hard not to cry.”

  “I’m not. I’m going to cry my eyes out. Hold on. There’s your other line.”

  Ellen looked at the rows of unmoving cars, wishing that instead of laughing about yoga every time Marly mentioned it to her, she’d taken a few classes. Classes that would have taught her how to breathe through her spine or some other bullshit that Marly said helped her to relax. She couldn’t remember ever relaxing a day in her life. Marly was right, the job was toxic.

  Click, Greenie was back on the line.

  “It may not feel like it today, but you’re a lucky woman,” he said.

  “Yeah? How so?”

  “That was Bibberman’s secretary. Jodie must be on the 405, too, she says she won’t be here ‘til ten.”

  “Oh, Greenie, thank God.”

  The freeway traffic didn’t let up for nearly an hour, and by the time Ellen arrived at the lot it was two minutes before ten. There was no time to stop at her own office, so she headed straight for Schatzman’s office. She was running, when she heard a woman’s voice call her name.

  “Ellen?” She turned.

  “Jodie.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m… okay.”

  She wished she looked as cool and collected as Jodie Foster, who now moved down the hall to catch up with her. Ellen wore a black straight skirt, a black silk sweater, stockings, and an Escada blazer, and Jodie was wearing a brown denim skirt, an oversized white T-shirt, and sandals. You had to be young to have the confidence to wear that to a meeting. Jodie Foster would be brilliant in Rose’s Good-bye, My Baby, Ellen thought.

  As they walked down the hall together, Ellen remembered Jodie’s subtle performance in Silence of the Lambs. She was a complex and thoughtful actress who loved intelligent women characters. None of the women she played were ever dippy or gratuitously sexual. Wouldn’t it be perfect for her to star in and direct Good-bye, My Baby.

  But Schatzman called it romantic drivel, and Bibberman called it a woman’s sob story, so Ellen had given up ever having it done there.

  “Isn’t Jan O’Malley a friend of yours?” Jodie asked Ellen.

  “She is. One of my closest.”

  “I thought I remembered that. I’ve been following it on the news. I’m so sorry.”

  Ellen sighed. “Thank you.” They were nearly at Schatz-man’s office.

  “Do they know who shot her? Was it a fan?”

  “There was a fan stalking her, and they arrested him, but they released him this morning for lack of evidence. And there was always a doubt in my mind about him being the one anyway.”

  There were in Schatzman’s reception area now, and the secretary waved a little wave to Ellen to indicate that they ought to go in. “Because Jan’s housekeeper said she heard the doorbell ring and that then Jan let the person in.”

  Ellen and Jodie were still looking at one another, but Ellen could feel the four men trembling with excitement as they all stood wearing their we’re-great-guys smiles on their faces. “That sounds odd to me,” Jodie said, and then she and Ellen looked at the men. And Bibberman, so eager to be the first to say something, to be amusing, to tell a joke even if it was a bad one, blurted out, “Maybe she let the guy in for a quick shtup.”

  Both Ellen and Jodie froze. Ellen looked at the nervous eyes of Schatzman and Richardson, and she could tell they both thought it was an idiotic blunder for a million reasons. Ellen felt as stunned as if Bibberman had kicked her in the face. She was shaking with anger and the need to speak her mind. But she took an instant to consider what it could do to her career.

  Roger’s tuition. Her mother’s rent. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t hold it back. “Bibberman, do you ever listen to yourself?” she asked. Her voice sounded vexed, but she wasn’t shouting. She was glad she hadn’t screamed at him the way she wanted to. The skin on her face burned hot. She could feel Jodie standing coolly next to her. “I’ve seen you do some dumb things, but this one truly wins the dumbshit-of-the-year award. This is even better than that quote I read in Esquire where Katzenberg said about Molly Ringwald that he wouldn’t know her if she sat on his face. You’re not just a misogynist, Bib, that would be bad enough. You’re rude, though
tless, perverse…”

  “Ellen, this can wait…” Schatzman tried to interrupt her, but now she couldn’t control the avalanche of rage.

  “No. It can’t. Because this poor schmuck has finally accomplished what he’s been trying to do, and I want him to know it. I want him to get that his idiotic language, his attempts at exclusion, his bullying that defies the Crips and the Bloods, and the abject humiliation he does so well, have finally made me able to say those two words he’s been waiting to hear. I quit. I quit because I can’t spend another day at a company with a colleague who would do shtup-the-stalker material not just to me about one of my best friends who is dying, maybe due to that stalker, but irony of hilarious ironies, in a room with, of all people, Jodie Foster!

  “It’s almost too idiotic to be true! It’s one of those aren’t-people-in-the-business-idiots stories we can all tell for years to come. And now you’ll probably want me to take her aside and tell her how sensitive you are.”

  What she just said made her laugh. She was so beaten up, so wrung out, so stressed in every way, she couldn’t stop her own giggles. “Bibberman, it’s so awful, it’s brilliant. And the only thing I can do about it is to quit. You win, I quit. I am longing to get out of here, to run away and do anything in the world but have to see your nasty little face one more morning. And Jodie, if you’re as smart as I think you are, you’ll leave, too.”

  Then she turned and walked down the hall and out of the building to her bungalow to pack her things, alternately laughing and crying.

  * * *

  33

  When she walked up to the drive-on gate at Hemisphere studios, the guard in the booth was talking to a guy in a yellow Rolls-Royce whom he waved by. Then he leaned out to talk to her.

  “Hi,” she said, “I’m a friend of Ellen Bass.”

  The guard smiled. “Lucky you,” he said.

  “I’m going to run by her office and say hi,” she tried, thinking if she could get past the guard, once she was on the lot she could ask someone where Ellen’s office was.

  “And your name?” the guard asked, picking up a clipboard.

  “My name?”

  “Is she expecting you? If she is, her office left us your name.”

  “And if she doesn’t know? I mean, I was just in the neighborhood and…”

  “I’ll call her office and clear you.”

  Her name would just draw a blank or, worse yet, bring a sneer from that snotty secretary of hers. “I want to surprise her,” she said.

  “Lady,” the guard said to her, “over at Universal there was a guy who showed up not long ago and wanted to surprise everyone in the executive office building with an Uzi. Not that I think you look dangerous, but I like this job, and the rule is, I have to have you cleared or you go away, even if you’re Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone. That’s the rule.”

  A tram full of tourists passed by just behind the guard, and she could hear the young woman in the red jacket who sat at the front of the tram speaking into a microphone, saying something about “the office buildings where all of the important decisions are made, just on your left, and behind it, the studio commissary. And further along you’ll see a group of bungalows where a select group of executives have their…”

  “I’ve known Ellen Bass for thirty years,” she said quietly.

  “Doesn’t matter,” the guard said.

  “I guess not,” she said, then turned and walked back toward the motel. She’d go in and have a cup of coffee and then pack her car and hit the road. She had nothing left. She had to go home. Back to that dumpy apartment and gray life in San Diego. Her money was almost gone, and she couldn’t get to any of her old friends, couldn’t get near them. People here spent their lives trying to get these big jobs and careers so they could be famous and in the public’s face, and then once they made it, they had guards at gates.

  Maybe she should try to get a regular job, a waitress job, just for now, until she could communicate with Ellen and convince her to hire her. Goddamn Ellen was right across the street, and she couldn’t get to her. There had to be a way. In the motel coffee shop she sat at the counter, where there were no other customers, and ordered a toasted English muffin and some coffee, and when the waitress handed her somebody’s used L.A. Times, she knew the woman recognized a kindred down-on-her-luck spirit.

  The item on the police letting the guy go was on page three, and she tried to look nonchalant as she read it, but it made her sick. How could they let him go? What if they started a big investigation and somehow figured it was her. What if Jan got better the way they did on those soaps and told the police to go and find her. When she looked up and saw a police car pull up at the curb, she felt like vomiting.

  “You on vacation here?” the waitress asked when she slid the plate with the toasted muffin in front of her. She was a soft, pudgy woman with a round, friendly face.

  “Yeah,” she said, trying to look like she was okay, and opening the little tin of strawberry jelly, but when she stuck a knife in it, the jelly oozed red like blood.

  “We got coupons that can get you on that tour across the street for less than half price,” the waitress said, as if she were talking to a child. “If you feel like it, you could check it out. I’ve never done it, but some of my customers have, and they say it’s a ball and a half.”

  She swiped some jelly across the muffin, but she was just doing that to avoid the woman’s expression, which was “You’re a charity case, so I’ll be nice to you.”

  “It’s usually thirty bucks, but I think with these coupons, it’s only about ten or twelve or something like that. Any interest?”

  The knot in her chest cleared up when she saw the cop take a newspaper out of one of those coin machines at the curb, get back in the black-and-white, and drive away. “It’s supposed to be Hollywood at its finest,” the waitress said. She wanted to say to her, “Lady, I should be a star at that studio, not begging for coupons to go on some tram with a bunch of fat guys in Hawaiian shirts.”

  “The tram rides right through the sets of the shows they’re shooting, and they point out the way they do all the stuff you see in movies. It even goes right past the office of the hoo-has who make the movies, and the big deal commissary. One of these days I’m gonna go over and do it myself.”

  When the waitress put the tab down in front of her, she slid a coupon along with it, and said to her with a wink, “You ought to think about going on over there, girl. It’ll cheer you up.”

  * * *

  34

  Within hours all of the bookshelves in Ellen’s big, airy, bungalow office at Hemisphere Studios were empty. The dozens of books and screenplays and photographs, which until that morning had jammed the white lacquer shelves, were now almost all packed into moving boxes, and the open boxes lined the walls of the room.

  A warm breeze blew through the open window and rustled the to-do list Greenie had put on the desk, a list on which nearly everything was crossed off. The only items left in the room, besides the furniture, were the TV and the VCR, which both belonged to the studio. He sighed, thinking there was still the bathroom to finish, but Ellen would have to clear that room out herself so she could decide what she wanted to save and what she wanted to toss.

  “I remember the day we moved into this office with such high hopes, and now look at this exit, like Jews running from Cossacks,” he said.

  Marly, dressed in faded jeans and a black cashmere sweater, her white hair pinned up by a black barrette, had arrived from her hospital shift to help. She insisted she had to help Ellen make a fast exit from Hemisphere Studios. She said it was something she was good at because of her work with battered women. “It was never in Ellen’s life myth to work for those men,” she said to Greenie as they loaded the last few boxes, “and this is what’s supposed to happen.”

  “Honey, it’s a myth to call them men,” Greenie said. “They’re mice. And this is one mean, fuckin’ town.” He was measuring a piece of tape to the prope
r length and then cutting it with a scissors. “One of my friends, a woman producer, made a great movie that bombed at the box office, and afterward she said to me ‘Gee, I don’t know why they say it’s cold in this town. I got fifty calls from people telling me they felt awful that my movie was such a financial disaster! Wasn’t that sweet of them?’ Sweet my adorable tush. If the picture had been a hit, not one of those jealous jerkoffs would have dialed her number.”

  Marly walked from box to box, taping each one shut, while Greenie followed her and marked the box with some reference to its contents. “They were so pissed at Ellen for her style of saying good-bye, they cut our phone lines,” Greenie said. Ellen was outside in the parking area, but through the open window of the stucco cottage she could hear him.

  “Which I guess is nothing, since one studio exec we know disagreed with the biggie and came in to find his office furniture on the lawn. So get this,” he said. “I went over to the commissary to get an apple for myself, and I tried to call Ellen from there to see if she wanted one, too, and when I dialed the number, the studio operator got on the line and said, “Sorry, sir, that number is no longer in service.’ I said ‘The fuck it isn’t! You’d better put me through, you puppet of the Armani Advantaged, or I’ll come over there and strangle you with the switchboard wires.’ ”

  Marly let out a hoot of her most outraged laugh. “What’d she do?” she asked.

  “She hung up on me, natch. She couldn’t defy them.”

  Ellen lifted a heavy box full of scripts that fell into the category of writing she loved and which she’d tried to get the “boys” to do, but on which they’d passed, “and pissed,” she thought as she put the box into the trunk of her car. Now maybe she’d have a chance of seeing the projects through at another studio. She felt light with the relief of knowing that after today, she never had to set foot on this lot again. That she was freed from the churning, stomach acid–producing anxiety she’d felt every time she’d walked into a room with that heinous group of executives.