I'll Be There

by Iris Rainer Dart

  She could hear Nina and Hal in the kitchen making Hal’s mother’s roast chicken recipe for dinner, while she sat on her chintz-flowered sofa across from Tim Weiss. He was very attractive looking and smelled of some lime aftershave she recognized as the same scent one of her long-ago lovers had worn but she wasn’t sure which one, and his attitude was apologetic and kind.

  “Cee Cee, I came here for two reasons. The first is to say that I understand from a very emotional and personal point of view about your leaving the show to be with your dying friend. A few years ago, my own friend was dying too, in Europe, but by the time I had the guts to tell Flaherty that I needed to take some time off so I could get to him, I had missed him, by an hour. I only wish I had had the last few months of his life to do what you did for and with your best friend.”

  Cee Cee was stonefaced as Tim went on. “I also want you to know that I wish I’d been able to say what I just did in front of Flaherty at our meeting in his office, but frankly, I was afraid. He was volatile and irrational and I would have been fired on the spot. Now he’s gone. I don’t have his job, Michelle Kleier does, but she and I are very close, and I know she feels as I do that we want to give you a show.”

  Cee Cee felt weak with relief and buzzing with joy. Every meeting

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  she’d had with producers had come up dry, and even though there were a few products for which she agreed to do commercials, finally none of the clients wanted her.

  “Not just a special, but a series if you’d do it. We’ll work out the guarantees with Larry Gold, and your company can produce it. Both Michelle and I saw you a few weeks ago on The Tonight Show, and Michelle called me afterwards and said, ‘There’s no one like her.’ And it’s true. But you’re so unorthodox it took us a while to sell the concept of a series to the powers that be. Now we’ve done it and we think we can pull it all together, and that’s why I’m here.” He bit the inside of his lower lip now that his speech was over, and sat waiting for a reply.

  “I’d want my accompanist Hal Lieberman to be my musical director,” she said quietly, not certain she had better put any belief in this turn of events.

  “I know Hal and he’s very gifted. I’m sure we can work that out.”

  “And I have to have a schedule that’s not so killing that I can’t spend time with my kid.”

  “I understand,” Tim said.

  “I’ll talk to Larry Gold tonight and we’ll call you in the morning,” Cee Cee found the voice to say.

  Tim nodded and she walked with him to the front door where she shook his hand. “I’m sorry about your friend,” she said.

  “And I’m sorry about yours,” he said, and when he left, she watched him through the sidelight windows of the front door as he got into his two-seater Mercedes convertible and drove away, then she walked into the kitchen. It was a mess. Garlic and onion and fresh spices and dirty pans and chopped breadcrumbs were everywhere. And then there were the sweet expectant faces of the apron-clad Hal and Nina looking at her.

  “I’ve got good news,” she said. “I got a job so we won’t have to eat the dog.”

  “We don’t have a dog,” Nina said.

  “Well, then, that means it’s better news than I thought,” Cee Cee said.

  “What kind of job?” Hal asked.

  “Nothing much,” she told him, pulling an apron from a hook and tying it around her waist. “Just my own show. It was a brief but satisfying retirement, but La Bloom is definitely back in la show busi

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  hess,” she said doing a little dance step of joy, carrying the dirty pans to the sink and turning on the hot water.

  “Oh, and Harold,” she said as the steam rose around her. “I forgot to mention that if you want one,. you’ve got a new job too, as my musical director.”

  “()oh, I think I could put up with that,” Hal said. Then he walked over and opened the oven door to look proudly at the crisp, bubbly chicken, whose aroma filled the entire room.

  “Now that,” he said, “is what I call entertainment.”

  VANITYFAIR

  March 1984

  “Why doesn’t somebody bring back the old-fashioned variety show?” That’s been the question since we bid a fond adieu to our favorite ones like Carol Burnett and The Smothers Brothers and Sonny and Cher. But it seemed as if the versatile talent who could pull off the jokes, the songs, and the hosting of guests with the sophistication of the eighties didn’t seem to be around. In her many years in the business, Cee Cee Bloom has starred on Broadway and in films, recorded hit singles and albums, has survived as many ups and downs as Wylie Coyote. So this year, when to the supreme delight of her fans, she picked up the variety show gauntlet, by not only starring in one of her very own but by producing it as well, all of us crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. Well, good news. Variety is once again the spice of life!

  Cee Cee’s talented, she’s funny, you can’t stop looking at her, and somehow, even though we’ve known her for so long, she’s in a package which works for the eighties! In her first season she’s done every funny turn imaginable, from Camille to Clarabel the Clown, and as if that wasn’t enough, with her newly worked-out and very voluptuous body poured into a sequined dress, she sings so soulfully it can make you cry. In addition to which she has a roster of guests (Michael Jackson, Paul McCartney, Mister T) that would make any rival counterprogrammer shudder.

  And as smashing and surprise-filled as the first several shows were, up-and-coming entries promise to be even more exciting (Bruce Springsteen’s already on tape). Isn’t it good to know Cee Cee Bloom, who seems to have more lives than any cat we’ve ever heard of, is back on top again. And so, thank heaven, is variety!

  VARIETY

  1985

  The William Morris Agency congratulates their client CEE CEE BLOOM on her Emmy nominations

  Variety, Music, or Comedy Series THE CEE CEE BLOOM SHOW

  Variety, Music, or Comedy Special —

  THE BEST OF THE CEE CEE BLOOM SHOW

  Individual Performance — Variety or Musical Program CEE CEE BLOOM: THE CEE CEE BLOOM SHOW

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  Dear Aunt Neetie,

  Cee Cee and I are living in Malibu in a house she told me she is busting her ass to keep. I go out on the beach on the weekends and play with Larry Hagman who is J.R. on Dallas. Remember when he got shot? Also I go to school. The first school I went to was in Santa Cruz but I heard Cee Cee tell the headmistress where she could put the five thousand dollars, and we came back here. The co-op school wouldn’t take us because of Cee Cee being unacceptibel and now I’m in the school I wanted which is where my best friend goes who is crippled.

  I have met lots of people who are famis, like Michael Jackson and also Richard Pryor who set himself on fire once while he was taking drugs, but he’s okay now. It’s pretty good to live with someone who has her own television show which I guess you know Cee Cee does now, because we get to go everyplace in limosines and the fan magazine guys can’t see into the black windows and that’s important because last year one of them got into our house and took pictures of us in our pajamas.

  It’s really lies what they print in those papers. Don Johnson and Cee Cee are not lovers and she did not go with Bruce Willis to Spago. Cee Cee told me those pictures are called paste-ups, a picture of her and one of Don Johnson, and the newspaper puts them together and makes it look like they are what she calls an item, only it’s a lot of bull you-know-what. So far it’s pretty much okay here, except for how much I miss my morn which is so much that some nights I dream she is alive and wake up crying because she’s not.

  Love, Nina

  I’LL BE THERE

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  Michael Barron

  c/o Barron, Malamud and Stern 1600 Golden Triangle Way

  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213

  Dear Michael,

  This is a very informal requ
est from me to you just to ask if there might be a chance for you to spend even one hour with your daughter Nina. I will fly her to you anywhere in the world if you’ll just say you’ll meet her and say hello.

  Thank you,

  Cee Cee

  LOS ANGELES,, CALIFORNIA

  August 1990

  FROM THE BACK of a limousine parked at the airport curb, Cee Cee sat looking out of the black-tinted windows watching the people hurry in and out of the automatic doors. The couples, the families, the business types, some of them squinting hard when they looked at her car windows curiously, as if squinting would help them penetrate the one-way glass to see who was inside. When she saw Richie Charles emerge through the doors surrounded by his usual entourage of bodyguards, moving with that famous swagger of his toward his waiting limo, which was parked in front of hers, she threw her door open and called out to him.

  “Richieee.” She hoped he would hear her over the bus that was pulling away with a smelly gray puff of exhaust. When Richie turned in her direction, he was wearing a patronizing look she’d seen him give to fans. His new late-night talk show was such a hit, the press was calling him “the black Johnny Carson.” Now when he realized the person who had called out to him was Cee Cee, the stiff smile changed to his real one, and he moved toward her, his arms out to embrace her.

  “Gimme one of them big titty hugs,” he said and pulled her close. He was lean and muscular and smelled of some exotic men’s cologne. When she backed up to take a better look, she had to smile at the Armani suit and the sockless Italian loafers he now wore as a testament to his success.

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d make it,” she said.

  “Get outta here. And miss this? Who are you talking to? I’ve got to stop at my office and then I’ll see you on over there.”

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  “Thank you, Richie. Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” Cee Cee said. Richie held her close again and she knew the facade had slipped and he was straining to hold back emotions he liked to pretend he didn’t have. Dozens of airport passersby hurried along the sidewalk, and every now and then one of them, noticing suddenly who they were seeing there, stopped for a moment to gawk.

  “Cee Cee,” Richie whispered into her hair after they’d been clinging on to one another for a long time, “I just realized I’d better get out of here fast.”

  “Why is that?” she asked, looking concerned.

  “Because darlin’.., you and I are standing in the White Zone.” Cee Cee chuckled as Richie squeezed her hand and gave her his reassurance that he’d see her in a matter of hours, then fell easily into his waiting limousine, which pulled away from the curb and moved slowly into the Los Angeles day.

  ATLANTIC CITY, NEW JERSEY

  1985

  IIUN THE BOARDWALK in Atlantic City, we will walk in a dream. On the boardwalk in Atlantic City, life will be peaches and cream.” Leona used to start singing that song the minute the bus pulled out of the Port Authority, and keep singing it all the way onto the Garden State Parkway until Cee Cee, who always felt sick on buses anyway, wanted to scream at her to stop. And if Leona’s singing and the stinky odor of the bus fuel weren’t bad enough, those Hebrew National salami sandwiches Leona always packed for the trip and unwrapped and devoured, and occasionally pushed into her daughter’s face to offer her a bite, would eventually make Cee Cee green with nausea.

  This time she was in Atlantic City to play Caesars Palace. Not exactly Carnegie Hall, but the money was great and after her business manager heard how high the offer was, he told her to grab it.

  “You want me to take a nightclub act to Atlantic City? Now? When my show’s a big hit? Wayne, it’s my time off and I’m going to go sit on a beach somewhere.”

  “Atlantic City is a beach somewhere. During the day when you’re

  not onstage, you’ll sit on it. Take the kid, she’ll love it there.”

  “No shot.”

  “Cee Cee, you people in your business,” he began, and she knew he was about to launch into his voice-of-doom speech, “you make a mistake when you live your lives and plan the rest of your lives based on how much you make in your best year. And the truth is, if you live like that even with a hit show, you’ll run out of money.”

  No matter how much money Cee Cee had, and she was never sure

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  exactly how much that was, she always worried about it. She had never been able to forget the scenes from her childhood of Leona sitting over a dining-room table covered with bills every month, frantically trying to decide which ones she could get away with not paying for a little while longer, all the while muttering, “The poorhouse. Pretty soon they’ll be sending my mail to the poorhouse.”

  And all those times in Wayne’s office when Cee Cee sat across the desk from the furrowed-browed “accountant who got lucky” as Hal called him and Wavne tried to explain why she had to incorporate and become a production company, or whatever the hell else he told her, like what he was going to do about her tax problems, she didn’t understand a word of it. Sometimes he sounded as if he was talking to a two-year-old, and finally, still in the dark but wanting to end the dizzying confrontation with the sheets of numbers, she would say, “Look, here’s our deal, I’ll make the money, you take care of it.”

  Bertie used to tell her she was being infantile by evading the issue of her own finances and that an artist had to be a businesswoman too, and Cee Cee knew that was probably true. Because when you put your money into somebody else’s hands, you ran a risk they could lose it or steal it or, as the song went, “run Venezuela,” but she decided she’d take that chance instead of clogging up her brain with the problems.

  “Cee Cee,” Wayne urged, and when he urged he always made it sound as if it was for her good and never his commission, “do yourself a favor. For a lousy two weeks in New Jersey, you’ll make a shitload of dough, and then if your television show gets canned, you’ll have a cushion.” Mister Tact.

  “My show is number three in the country. Why would it get canceled?” she asked, hearing the panic in her voice because she immediately suspected he knew something she didn’t.

  “Hey, no reason. I’m just saying that plenty of people in your position who started out as big stars died without a pot to piss in.” “There’s a happy thought.”

  That night she had walked from room to room trying to decide how much of a comedown it would be when people in the business found out she was playing Atlantic City, the armpit by the sea. Why would she do that to herself? She didn’t even like playing the place when she was a kid and she had no other choice. At the moment she

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  was a big television star, and eventually she’d make movies again. Or maybe not. Maybe she’d die without a pot to piss in.

  Probably it was hearing that her two allies at the network, Tim Weiss and Michelle Kleier, were both leaving their jobs that finally made her call Larry Gold and tell him she was willing to do the gig in Atlantic City. Michelle was leaving the network job because she was pregnant again and this time she didn’t want to have to leave a baby and rush back to work, and Cee Cee hadn’t heard anything about where Tim was planning to go, but he was definitely out of there, and he had been her strongest champion.

  She could remember so many of the people at the networks and the studios whose names had reverberated, through the showbusiness community at one point or another because of their power positions, and who were now nowhere to be seen or heard from again. The turnover was almost comical. And of course, the new people liked to come up with new projects of their own and not inherit shows from somebody else’s regime. Cee Cee had known from the start how both Tim and Michelle fought to get her show on the air, then defensively changed the format, the time slot, the promotion techniques to keep it on top. And each time the show would do great and their belief in her would be lauded. But if neither of them wer
e there, she wasn’t sure what would happen.

  The day after she talked with Larry she sat down at the kitchen table and on the long thin pad the housekeeper used to make shopping lists, she made a list of the best writers of special material and jokes, choreographers and boy dancers, lighting and costume designers, and then started worrying again so she called Hal in New York. After two seasons as the musical director of her show, he had taken his original musical to a small theater off-Broad,,ay. Now a move to Broadway was in the works, and he was up to his ears trying to make the show bigger to fit the bigger venue.

  “I have to put an act together to take to Caesars Palace in Atlantic City,” she told him.

  “Why? Who’d you murder?”

  “Funny. But Wayne says the offer’s too big to turn down. And there’s always the threat my series may get canceled, so I may as well have an act ready to take on the road.”

  Hal sighed. The timing couldn’t be worse for me. I’m over

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  whelmed with work,” he told her in an apologetic voice, and she knew

  he didn’t have a minute to spare to help her with some nightclub act. “I understand,” she said.

  “But I’ll send you some ideas, and I’ll call some people I think you can use, and come to think of it, I do have an idea or two in my trunk you may like.”

  “Thank you, Harold,” she said gratefully. She was about to go on and tell him who she’d put on her own list to call when he said, “Cee Cee?”

  “Yeah?”

  ‘I’ll fly in for a couple of days and help get you started.”

  Within ten days of Hal’s arrival in Los Angeles, the act was complete. Between his contacts in the creative community and Cee Cee’s, they put together a team of unbeatable talent, and rehearsals began. There were ballads and blues and soft shoe numbers and funky get down rock numbers, and Cee Cee’s tribute to the saucy sexy ladies, Belle Barth, Mae West, Totie Fields, was funny and original. The act was drop-dead great and showed a versatile Cee Cee no small screen production overseen by a Standards and Practices censor could ever possibly produce.