“Listen, for us it’s another honeymoon. From here wego on to Sa Diego,” Nathan said, arad Cee Cee recognized that sexy little twinkle in his eyes she had seemn there only fleetingly years ago.Jake loaded their bags into the trunl.k of the limo and Cee Cee made e introductions to Hal.
“Not bad for two old-lzl kokkers, right?” Harriet asked Iql as she slid onto one of the rumble seats across from Nathan. “I hate say it, but the only time I was in . a limousine before this was to y late husband’s, may he rest in peace, funeral. Pooh, pooh, pooh. io life is full of surprises.”
“It sure is,” Hal said-f], sitting close to Cee Cee and ptting her on the leg.
Jake got into the driiiiver’s seat, pulled the rearview ricror down,
and looked at all of the in the backseat.
“All in?” he asked.
“Only one more StOlO, Jakie,” Cee Cee said.
“You got it,” Jake tolld her, and they were on their wa.
CABO SAN LUCAS
1987
THE INCIDENT in Cabo San Lucas came right on the heels of Nina’s dancing school recital, which was probably what made Cee Cee handle it the way she did. Still, it was inexcusable and it wasn’t until she looked back on it that she realized the way she behaved was a page torn from the worst part of her life with Leona. Only this time instead of Leona, it was Cee Cee standing out there during Nina’s rehearsal in the auditorium at the Elks Club, mouthing the words of the song and poking her fingers into the corners of her own lips, pushing them up to make a smile so that when Nina glanced out there she would see her and be reminded to smile at the audience. Now that was life with Leona to a frigging “T.”
As if it was yesterday Cee Cee remembered the way her fat, unhappy mother used to sit in a chair by the wall during all of Cee Cee’s sweaty tap and ballet and jazz classes. And while the other mothers went outside to have a cigarette and gossip, Leona would listen to every word the dance teacher said to the kids, and write the names of the steps in the dance routine into a little spiral notebook that she would pull out later at home, so she could drill Cee Cee relentlessly. In fact, all these years later when Cee Cee was rehearsing a tap number for her show, in the back of her head she could still hear Leona’s voice calling the steps out to her. Step shuffle ball change, step shuffle ball change, step brush hop, step brush hop.
Today she had canceled some meetings after Nina asked her to please come to a rehearsal of the recital because, she confided to Cee Cee, she was afraid at the performance she would be so nervous she
15 8
IRIS RA INER DA R T
might “mess up,” and she wanted Cee Cee to see her dance while she was relatively calm. All year long the dance classes had been closed, so Cee Cee had never been able to come and watch, and now when the girls came running out on the stage to the blasting music, what Cee Cee had imagined would be an amateurish exercise looked surprisingly professional. But the most extraordinary surprise of all was the way Nina, ordinarily so low-key in the presentation of herself, now pushed back her shoulders and held her chin high and danced with a confident presence Cee Cee had never seen in her.
The girls were performing to a recording of Irene Cara singing “Fame,” and their little voices belted out the lyrics along with the record as they moved across the stage at the Elks Club, as Cee Cee found herself covered with goose bumps while she watched, wondering if it was seeing Nina so transformed or the message of the song that was getting to her.
I’m gonna live forever
I’m gonna learn to fly high I feel it comin’ together People will see me and die.
When Nina looked out into the semidarkness at Cee Cee, it was with an expression hungry for approval. Cee Cee knew it instantly and lifted a hand with thumb and forefinger circled as a high sign, the same one Leona had given her at every recital, and when Nina saw the gesture, her pretty little chin rose and her eyes flashed.
I’m gonna make it to heaven Light up the sky like a flame I’m gonna live forever
Baby, remember my name.
The sentiment in those lyrics! How that feeling had burned in Cee Cee every day of her life, stronger than any other need, until it compelled her to spend all of her energy moving toward the single-minded goal of success in her career. The success she now had. Once, years ago, during the long hungry times when she was getting nowhere as a performer, she had walked onto the location of a film on a New York street where they were casting extras.
I’LL BE THERE
15 9
“Please,” she begged the second assistant director, “just let me walk by in a crowd.”
“We’re not casting uglies today, honey,” the guy had said, and turned away to talk to someone else, and the rejection had burned into Cee Cee’s chest, but still she pressed him, going after him and tugging on his arm.
“Hey, listen, I’ll wear a hat with a veil. Nobody will see what I look like. Please let me get a movie credit on my r6sum6.”
“Get lost,” the son-of-a-bitch, rude with his own little piece of power, said without even looking at her.
Stung and hot-faced with rage, Cee Cee stood on that New York street, ringing with unyielding resolve, and just as the director was about to shoot a scene, in fact they were already on a bell and rolling, she shouted at the top of her lungs, “One of these days you assholes are gonna be beggin’ me for a job.” A few people on the set had laughed, and the irate director had yelled, “Cut,” and had to get everybody settled down again while two burly guys on a signal from the A.D. picked Cee Cee up by the elbows and walked her a block away.
She had long ago forgotten who that director was and what the picture was they were making on the New York street, but just a few weeks ago a woman who was an extra on Cee Cee’s show in the French Caffi sketch told her she had been in New York working on that shoot and had never forgotten that determined little girl. “I guess,” the woman, who was a professional extra, said, “that’s the kind of belief you have to have in yourself in order to survive in this fucking business.”
And the woman was right. The day after Nina’s recital Cee Cee and Nina would fly down to Cabo San Lucas, where Cee Cee was starring in a new picture. It was her first feature film in years. It had taken all those seasons of slaving away on television to become so hot again that the movie studios finally believed in her renewed potential to sell tickets. She was looking forward to it. Martin Kane, the director, was good at getting strong emotional work out of actors, and she knew he would lean on her to get her best. And she’d managed to wangle the job of unit still photographer for her latest flame, Scott Becker, the young, adorable guy she’d met at Goldie Hawn’s party.
160
IRIS RAINER DART
So he was a few years younger, like seven or eight, maybe nine, but he was a hot little honey, and she needed that now.
Nina’s dance teacher was rehearsing the curtain call, and she was having a hard time getting everybody lined up on the stage. The girls fussed and took forever coming from one side of the wings, where they’d been crowded, since the Elks Club wasn’t exactly the Hollywood Bowl, waiting for a turn to enter and take an individual bow. Each time the teacher tried to get them out onstage it was an endless struggle with bad timing, giggles, improper spacing, so she’d stop the music and send them off to try their entrances again from the beginning. Cee Cee looked at her watch. It was five o’clock. She was supposed to have a conference call with Martin Kane and the producer of the new film at six. If the rehearsal kept going like this, she’d never make it. Maybe she could help move things along here so they could all go home.
“Excuse me,” she said, walking down to the front row of folding chairs and tapping the dance teacher on the shoulder. The teacher turned quickly and Cee Cee could tell by the woman’s expression that she was harassed and tense. She now had the entire cast, thirty girls
between the ages of ten and fourteen, up on the stage.
“Yes?” she said to Cee Cee.
“Well, I wanted to tell you that I know a little bit about this kind of thing and maybe if I could just explain how we did…”
The teacher’s look stopped her. She was a long-necked longwaisted, regal-looking woman in her fifties with white hair pulled back in a severe bun. She was wearing a long-sleeved black leotard under a rehearsal skirt, which made her look like one of those modern dancers in an old Jules Feiffer cartoon who leap and dance to poetry.
“Mothers in the back row, or wait in the car, please,” she said tensejawed to Cee Cee.
This woman’s got to be kidding, Cee Cee thought. She obviously has no idea who she’s talking to. “Hey,” she said, “I understand you’re under pressure, but I’ve been in a lot of Broadway musicals. I’ve worked with every choreographer from Jerome Robbins to Jeffrey Hornaday and I’m telling you if you start with half of the girls on one side and the other half on the other, you’re going to move them faster and get the feel of a bigger production number.” There, she thought, that ought to do it.
I’LL BE THERE
161
The teacher’s face was stone. “I never have them enter from both sides,” she said in measured tones.
“Yeah, well maybe not, but if you try it you’re gonna see that it takes half the time.”
“Will you please sit down?” the teacher said. Obviously she wasn’t understanding Cee Cee’s point.
“Actually you could have the two groups cross one another. That’s how we did it in the revival of tligh Button Shoes.”
Miss Olivia snapped her head away from Cee Cee, looked at the girls on the stage, and said loudly to them, “All right, one more time. Clear the stage.” Some of the girls straggled slowly in the direction of the wings, a few didn’t move. This woman is crazy, Cee Cee thought. Here I am offering her the highest-priced help around for free. About to teach her and the girls Jerome Robbins’s choreography, and she’s ignoring me? Oh | get it! She probably thinks I’m one of the regular women who come here all the time. Those mothers who have nothing else to do but sit and drive her crazy all year round. She figures I’m one of them. Doesn’t know who I am. Of course once I explain, she’ll know it’s a matter of one professional talking to another,
“Uh… Miss Olivia,” Cee Cee said, and the teacher turned to her with narrowed eyes. “You realize of course who I —”
But before Cee Cee could tell her exactly which credentials she had that gave her the right to interrupt the rehearsal, the teacher leaned toward her and spoke so close into her face Cee Cee could smell the Dynamint she had in her mouth. “In this room,” she said, “you are Nina’s mother.” Without looking, Cee Cee could feel that the girls who had been standing upstage and the ones who had started to walk away were now all in one clump downstage listening to the exchange between the two women.
She could hear the rustling of the net tutus as they brushed against one another and the whirr of the overworked air conditioner while she looked into the huge Keane painting eyes of the stonefaced Miss Olivia and realized there was no getting around the fact that this woman, who had knocked herself out all year to get these girls this far, was ten thousand percent right, and Cee Cee had been a total jackass to intrude.
In fact, not only did she know that, but so did every kid on that stage, including Nina at whom Cee Cee couldn’t look, because she
162
IRIS RAINER DART
was afraid to see one of those expressions the kid had been giving her lately, expressions that according to the books were just what to expect from kids her age.
Children in this stage of their lives crave a lot of attention, but on the other hand they don’t want to stand out from the crowd. Nothing is more devastating than to be singled out for punishment or even praise in the classroom, or to be considered different in any way. If mother has the nerve to appear at school, daughter is mortified for days afterwards.
Nina had invited her to the rehearsal, but she hadn’t counted on Cee Cee behaving like an egomaniac in front of the entire dancing class. Now Cee Cee felt so dumb she thought that if life was fair, the ceiling would fall in on her head and everyone would feel so sorry for her they’d forget what a schmuck she’d been. And now they all were
waiting in this eternity of a moment for her to say something.
“I hear you,” she said to the teacher, “and I’m sorry.”
“What was that?” Miss Olivia asked, with the clear implication that she wanted Cee Cee to repeat her apology loud enough for the benefit of the girls.
“I said,” Cee Cee said, obligingly louder, “I’m sorry, Miss Olivia,” and as the rehearsal resumed, she moved to the back row where she sat for a long time trying to calm her feelings of despising herself, and eventually she became so caught up in watching the girls that she forgot all about the conference call she was expecting at home. In fact, by the end of the rehearsal she had to admit grudgingly the finale looked great, and so did every other number in the show.
Nina seemed actually to have talent, and her budding beauty was so mesmerizing that half the battle was won the minute she appeared onstage because you didn’t want to look at anyone else. At least Cee Cee didn’t. She sat watching her as dopey with admiration as any stage mother alive. So maybe the kid wasn’t a fireball, crazed and driven and needy for the audience’s love the way Cee Cee had always been, but there was a genuine spark there. Cee Cee wasn’t making it up, and it wasn’t just because Nina was hers that she thought that either. The kid was really good. Which was why she let what happened in Cabo San Lucas happen, and that was a mistake she wished she could erase.
I’LL BE THERE
16 3
The night the plane landed bringing the two of them to the Los Cabos location, it was pouring rain. The airplane stood on the field far away from the terminal until finally around the building through the teeming rain came the lights of a car. After the pilot opened an umbrella and walked Cee Cee and Nina down the steps of the studio’s private jet and the driver made sure they were safe in the backseat of the limo, Nina settled comfortably into the seat and wanted to know all about the movie Cee Cee was here to make.
Over the last few years she had spent a great deal of time on the set of Cee Cee’s television show, but this would be her first time on location for a film, and the idea of spending a few weeks in a pretty place she’d seen in the brochures seemed to please her. They would be staying and shooting at the Palmilla Hotel. As the car moved along on the bumpy dark road toward the hotel, Cee Cee told her the story of the film, which was about a family who was vacationing together as the marriage of the parents was falling apart.
“You mean there’re kids in this?” Nina asked.
“Two kids,” Cee Cee told her. “Stacy and Sammy are the names of the characters, the dau.ghter and the son. Chelsea Bain plays Stacy. You’ll like her. She’s an amazing little actress.”
In the morning, in the dining room of the hotel, Nina was introduced to dozens of people involved with the production — the hairdresser, the makeup man, the assistant directors — and all of them fussed over her, and then looked at Cee Cee and said things like, “She’s so beautiful,” as if Nina wasn’t even sitting there, and Cee Cee would say, “Thank you,” as if she had something to do with it.
When Chelsea Bain and her mother walked into the beam-ceilinged, tile-floored room and Nina spotted her, her heart pounded and she felt a feeling in her throat she didn’t want to admit to herself was jealousy. And when the child actress who had obviously been chosen because of her close resemblance to Cee Cee was introduced to Cee Cee and told her, “You’re my idol,” and Cee Cee answered, “Aren’t you a doll!” Nina wanted to leave the table. And Chelsea was from New York, so she even had that little New York toughness in her speech that Cee Cee had. As the two of them talked about the script for the film, Nina definitely felt wounded, left out, more than she ever did when Cee Cee paid attention to other adults.
While Chelsea’s mother took a seat at a distant table and Cee C
ee
164
IRIS RAINER DART
moved to another table to talk to the producer, Chelsea remained, looking Nine. over, sizing her up, then said, “You’re her daughter? Are you kidding? I look more like her than you do! Oh, yeah. That’s ‘cause
you’re not her real daughter. Right?”
Nina didn’t answer.
“My mom told me about you and her, and your real mom is dead. Right?”
Nina nodded.
“Tough break,” Chelsea said, only it wasn’t at all sympathetic, and then she walked away and Nina hated her. And she hated her even more when Cee Cee came back to the table and after ordering breakfast for them in her version of Spanish, which sounded to Nina like Speedy Gonzalez talking to Daffy Duck, she told Nina, with a gesture toward the table where Chelsea and her mother sat, “I saw that kid’s screen test. She was so good she jumped right off the screen. Wait till you see her work.” She also told Nina for the hundredth time to drink only the bottled water.
The atmosphere on the set was loud and friendly, and Nina couldn’t decide which member of the crew was the cutest. All of the men were handsome and flirted with her, and when they were together buzzing around the set, the abundance of maleness made her think of the way she imagined a band of pirates to behave, muscular and sweaty and sexy. But the process of making a movie was so slow and painstaking, that after a few days she realized that watching it was extraordinarily dull.
The amount of time it took so many people to move so many cables so few feet seemed ridiculously long to her, and finally she dropped out and spent most of her time under a beach umbrella near the water reading. At night she would have dinner with Cee Cee and the cast and crew from a big Mexican buffet and watch Scott, the young still photographer, flirt with Cee Cee and Cee Cee flirt back. And she suspected that when she was asleep Cee Cee was probably slipping away to be alone with him.
I'll Be There Page 19