You’ve heard all these “being discovered” stories before, so you know what happened next. Later that week, I showed up at an audition for a small part on ER, the role of Dr. Benton-Vance, a nymphomaniac neurologist who also happened to be Dr. Benton’s long-lost third cousin. I walked into the audition room and saw the Oklahoma guy flipping through the script in a distracted way. He glanced up and our eyes met. He laughed. And the next thing you know, George Clooney and I were making out on a gurney.
Sports Illustrated tried to enforce a fine-print clause in my employment contract, which I had signed stupidly without reading. It’s a waitressing contract, I had thought. What could it possibly say? Quite a lot, as it turned out. Among other things, it gave the magazine/restaurant a substantial portion of any proceeds from acting or modeling work generated from contacts made while taking orders. The ER attorneys successfully got the contract voided, but only by offering a compromise that required me to pose—for free!—on that year’s cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition. I wore that utterly ridiculous and much-too-quickly-put-together bikini made of surgical gauze, a nod to my new ER fame.
It made quite the splash at the time. (In the world of pop culture, I mean. There was no way you could swim in it.) But the whole thing was an unpleasant ordeal. The gauze was itchy and the sun was hot and the photographer kept smiling at me in a manner that I can only describe as being the perfect advertisement for teeth whitener.
The day the magazine hit the stands, Cowell called. Soon we were being photographed at all the best resorts and parties. I snagged the lead role in that over-the-top movie starring Jim Carrey (terrible kisser) and got some critical acclaim for my smaller role in an art film directed by Quentin Tarantino. (I played a cave woman sucked through a time warp to become a trained assassin.) I had nine lines in Tom Cruise’s submarine flick—not much, but since I was the only woman in the movie it did, at least, get me on the poster and billed as a “star.” (It also got me invited to Katie’s baby shower, which was just as creepy as you’d expect.) I played a sassy and very mysterious barmaid on a much-hyped episode of Will & Grace. I portrayed Sawyer’s girlfriend in a flashback scene of Lost. I had a minor role as a visiting grand duchess of “vaguely East Indian origin”—the casting director’s words—in one of the Princess Diary sequels. I drew a royal flush on Celebrity Poker Showdown.
People magazine called me the “new it girl” and the “international Nicole Kidman,” which I hear burns Nic up to this day. “I’m the international Nicole Kidman,” she purportedly says.
President Samson Briarwood, a former Kansas governor, apparently thought I represented the Midwest well. He sent me a congratulatory letter about the Sports Illustrated cover, noting that I “put the heart in the heartland.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, really. But my agent thought it was quite impressive. He said that I was on the “cusp of real stardom.”
“You’re about to take off, baby,” he said.
But I didn’t.
Not then. Things sort of sputtered. My stint on ER did last several episodes longer than it was supposed to—the better part of two seasons, ultimately. But Dr. Benton-Vance was always considered a secondary character and never appeared in the show’s opening credits. Then I was killed by a terrorist who had been brought to the hospital with food poisoning. (A bad batch of hummus—horrible stereotype, got all kinds of great ratings and bad press coverage.) Meanwhile, neither the Jim Carrey nor the Quentin Tarantino movie opened as well as the buzz had projected.
Cowell started ignoring me at parties to talk to the likes of Judge Judy and then stopped returning my calls altogether.
And before I could say “flash in the pan,” my publicist actually relayed a date request from the staff of Steve Burns, whom you may know (but probably don’t) as the original lead actor, indeed the only original nonanimated character, on the television show Blue’s Clues.
I confess I was not entirely displeased with this date request. I was honestly flattered. Steve does have a disarming boyish cuteness. I noticed this when babysitting Alex Kingston’s daughter on the ER set. (And yes, in retrospect, being assigned to babysit another star’s child during a shoot should have been a sign my stock was falling on the show.)
But Hollywood dates are not about “disarming boyish cuteness.” They’re about press. My agent was the one who taught me that. He had been very put out with me once for agreeing too quickly to date one of the producers of Coldplay’s new album. “You’re not going to get anywhere by dating producers,” he had said.
My publicist let the Steve Burns matter drop, but he did not seem pleased. Didn’t he want me to play hard-to-get on these arranged dates? Had the rules changed?
About that time, I taped my second episode of Celebrity Poker, which had been filmed on location in a dive bar in a seedier neighborhood of LA. Fans stood on the sidewalk outside, waiting for the celebrities to be escorted out.
I hate those sorts of situations. People hand me napkins, maps, backs of candy wrappers to sign. Most of those items are not really suited for writing. I scratch and retrace because most pens are unable to penetrate the wax lining. Alternatively, I tear right through the cheap (and often damp) napkins. And the maps? Don’t get me started. It’s almost impossible, without a Sharpie, to write darkly enough to be read over the printed jumble of highway numbers, river names, and tourist attractions. Needless to say, fans never have a Sharpie. It’s more likely a fragment of eyeliner pencil or a broken crayon, dusty from the bottom of some mother’s purse.
I spent a lot of time apologizing during that encounter, and others like it. I was sincere in my apology. At moments like that, I always felt that if I were a better celebrity, if I were deserving of my fame, I would have stashed in my elegantly minuscule purse a stack of glossy eight-by-tens and a suitable writing instrument with which to personalize them. That’s what Sandra Bullock does. She is grace personified.
On my best days, I go through this routine of scratching and apologizing with charm and panache and a seemingly endless supply of patience. This is my public, after all. And I love each and every one of them. I owe them everything, really. Almost everything at least.
That was one of my better days, so I patiently eked out messages of good cheer and glad tidings to everyone with a stub of something to write with and a scrap of something to write on.
And then it happened. A young man read my signature aloud to his girlfriend as they walked away.
“Addison McGhee,” he said.
And his girlfriend clapped her hands together. “Oh, that’s right,” she said. “I think she used to be somebody.”
And the guy said, “Yeah, I think she did.”
I gasped. I had been off ER for less than six months. Could it be over so quickly?
I had breakfast with my agent the next day, and he said we needed to “ramp it up.” We were supposed to “brainstorm,” but mostly I sat in stunned silence listening to a storm of bad ideas come from his brain. This was the man who, mere months earlier, had urged me not to go shopping with Jessica Simpson. He said she wasn’t good enough for me. Now he wanted me to go to a David Schwimmer premiere? “No way,” I said finally. “I still have some standards. I will not compete in The New Celebrity Mole. I’m not dating Matt Damon. He’s married. Keep up!”
I clapped my hands impatiently at that point. My agent cringed, but didn’t speak.
“And I’m certainly not farming myself out as an ‘ethnicity expert’ for a Biography piece on Michael Jackson.”
I crossed my arms dramatically and was sure I sounded quite authoritative. My agent had always urged me to be more fierce in defending my status as a star. Perhaps this was just a test to see how well I could do. I was shaking inside, but I decided to go for a big finish.
“I don’t want to hear the words Hollywood Squares again,” I said. My brother had made fun of the celebrities on Hollywood Squares ever since we were children. “Who is this Jack Cassidy?” he would say. “And how does
he represent Hollywood?” It’s one thing to be considered a has-been by random Celebrity Poker fans. I couldn’t bear for my own brother to see me that way.
My agent glanced at his watch and sighed dramatically. I wasn’t sure if he had even heard what I said about Hollywood Squares. It occurred to me that this might be the best example yet of my knack for always behaving in exactly the wrong way. Earlier in my career, I had acted humbly when I should have been snooty. Now I was being snooty when it was time to be humble.
“So,” he said, finally. “Back to Loveland?”
I looked at him suspiciously. Was he making some sort of point? I had, in fact, recently purchased a showy-from-the-outside, one-bedroom log cabin condo in Loveland, Colorado. I felt it to be a prudent move, financially. LA real estate was expensive, and I had, rather foolishly, used some of my ER windfall to start a scholarship for refugee children. When money started getting tighter, I thought selling my place in LA and buying what I could describe as a “Rockies ranch” was a clever way to stretch my resources, and my accountant had agreed—rather too enthusiastically, I’d thought at the time.
“Yes,” I said, bristling a little. “I’m headed back to the Rockies. My ranch needs checking on. Besides, I feel like Victoria Barkley out there.”
“Ah,” my agent said, raising his coffee cup in a toast of sorts. “Well, you’d better get driving.”
I fumed about that comment for one long interstate mile after another. What had he been getting at, exactly? It’s not as if I couldn’t afford a plane ticket. I just needed my car, you know, on the ranch. How would it look if I hadn’t driven? He always told me I needed to be concerned with how things look. “Not just your clothes,” he used to say. “But everything.”
People don’t want their celebrities to appear too ordinary. They say they do. But they don’t. People want us to live exotic private lives on expanses of expensive real estate. I could fly. But I was trying to project the image of a shrewd and sophisticated steward of the valuable American landscape, someone who was spending her money and her celebrity promoting a vanishing part of American life.
Besides, a nice long drive can be relaxing. It’s like yoga or, well, hypnosis. I had thought this all out, in case I was ever asked about it by some enterprising entertainment reporter. Nothing beats a day on the highway to detox your mind and uplift your spirit, I planned to say if asked. But entertainment reporters were not, at that particular point in my career, calling much.
When I got to Loveland, it was dark and snowing. The lock on the door of my log cabin condo had frozen shut. I called the manager and stood around in ankle-deep snow in slinky sandals, shivering, until he finally let me in.
I thanked him, popped a Lean Cuisine into the microwave, and logged onto my somewhat out-of-date computer. By the time the “Asian-style” chicken was ready, I was poking around television discussion boards, trolling, I suppose, for a compliment. I went to an ER forum, saw that there were discussions of plot lines, writers, episodes, and characters. I clicked on “Characters.”
I then had a choice of “Current Cast” or “Former Cast.”
Sigh. I clicked on “Former.”
I then had a choice of “Moved to Another Hospital” or “Died.”
“Died.”
Then, “Natural Causes” or “Violent Death.”
And there in “Violent Death,” between Lucy and Dr. Gant, two spaces up from Doug Ross’s father and with only a quarter of the traffic of the ancient Dr. Romano discussion, there was a thread about my character—Dr. Benton-Vance.
Only two posts had been added in the past ninety days. Someone calling himself ERfanatic wrote: “Man, did Madison McGhee suck as an actress or what?”
And someone called Ilovedocs had responded: “I thought her name was Allison.”
I chewed my chicken and stared at those two posts.
I was, by that time, ready for a nice hot bath, so I took some scripts—well, okay, one script—into my cramped bathroom so that I could read over it while I soaked. But when I dipped my foot into the water, I was so shocked that I dropped the script into the icy bath, ruining it. The water heater was out, again.
The next morning I called Home Depot and priced water heaters. The next afternoon, I called my agent. He chuckled with satisfaction.
“Circle,” he said with a laugh. “Circle gets the square.”
Chapter 4
It was probably my imagination, but I thought Whoopi gave me a sad and knowing look when I showed up for the taping. Maybe it was my brother’s bias about the show affecting my judgment, but I thought I read in her eyes a certain ruined longing, a miscarried hope. So, I imagined her saying, you’ve come to this, too.
My up-by-my-bootstraps, hardscrabble story of immigrant suffering had made me the darling of the liberal Hollywood establishment during those heady ER days. I’m sure that Whoopi had expected better from me.
Violating the never-admit-you’re-scraping-bottom rule, I decided I might as well address the issue directly. Why beat around the bush? All of us in the greenroom were in the same situation, after all. May as well admit it.
“Is this where you get on the Love Boat?” I quipped. I thought I’d get a nervous laugh, or at least an awkward smile. But the other “stars” cringed, looked away from me. Nancy Kerrigan sipped a diet soda and didn’t meet my eyes. Liza was doing some sort of stretching exercise. Carrot Top was balancing his checkbook. I wondered if that was as tough for him as it was for me. Well, he did make those phone company commercials. That probably helped.
In a chair in the corner, Kermit and Miss Piggy sat in a crumpled and tangled mess. That’s so sad, I thought. And they don’t even get their own squares.
“You know Emilio Estevez was with us a few years back,” said a woman with red hair. She raised her chin and looked at me defiantly. She said it again, emphasizing each syllable: “E-mi-li-o Es-te-vez.”
I could imagine my brother saying: Yes, exactly. But I made a pleased look and said something vaguely nice about The Mighty Ducks.
“And last season, we got some of the latest castaways from Survivor,” she added.
“Really?” I said, genuinely surprised. “That cute guy who won?”
“Well, no,” the redheaded woman said.
“Oh.”
“But we got the woman who caught the shingles and quit,” she offered up slowly.
“Oh,” I said, giving what I considered an encouraging smile. I lowered my voice and tried to sound like Jeff Probst. “The shingles have spoken.” I switched back to my own voice and added: “That was a good episode.”
“Yes,” the redhead said, then nodded.
I touched up my makeup and, while looking in the mirror, discreetly stared at the redheaded woman. I didn’t know who she was and wondered if I should. I thought about asking, but I could see on her folder that she was designated for the top center square. I was in the bottom left, meaning that she outshined my star power, at least in the eyes of the show’s producers. I was afraid that asking who she was would seem catty, under the circumstances.
So I just smiled, picked a banana out of the fruit basket, and took a (small) bite. She smiled at me, and I asked if she had any pointers. “You know,” I said, “for the show.”
“Depends,” she said. “Do you want to look good or make friends?”
Is that a serious question? I wondered. I’m a former “new it girl” forced into making an appearance on Hollywood Squares by a bum water heater. Obviously, I want to look good. I looked at her intently, searching for a clue that she was joking. No hint. I decided to play it safe.
“Some of both, I guess,” I said, giving her my most sincere smile.
“Miss questions on purpose,” she whispered.
This was perhaps the most obvious advice you could give a celebrity guest on Hollywood Squares, a game tragically flawed not only by its lack of real stars but by its very rules. The host asks a question, the celebrity gives an answer, and the contestant agree
s or disagrees.
No one wants a smart celebrity in this situation. If the question is “Who was the first US president born in the presence of a doctor?” a smart celebrity might say Lincoln or Taft or Coolidge or Kennedy. Who knows?
But a dumb celebrity will say Jed Bartlet—you know, from The West Wing. That’s easy! Disagree!
(That is, unbelievably, the answer Emilio Estevez—of all people—actually gave to that question. I know, because the Hollywood Squares regulars are still talking about it. Did he think his father really lived in the West Wing? Did he not understand that it was, you know, a role?)
Telling a celebrity to miss questions on purpose in this game is like telling people to try not to run out of money in Monopoly.
I looked at my not-quite-recognizable redheaded adviser and thought: No duh.
I said: “I’ll try.”
About then, a fan burst into the dressing room—not tight security on this set—and handed the redhead a book with a homey-looking general store on the cover. He asked her to sign it and said she was like a cross between Fannie Flagg and Charo.
I had once had the displeasure of witnessing Jennifer Lopez being compared to Charo. Tears! There were so many tears! So I was quite sure the redhead would be upset. I grabbed a tissue and tried to hand it to her, but she was beaming! She said “Thank you” again and again as she signed several of the fan’s books.
“I don’t know how you have the time to combine your career on the regional theater circuit with your writing,” the fan said. “You know Match Game never would have been the same without Fannie.”
“And Love Boat,” she said, “never would have been the same without Charo.”
Just then, the fan turned and looked at me in what seemed to be a sheepish, embarrassed way. I thought, for a moment, that he was about to identify himself as a fan of mine as well, that he was about to admit—as men had done very recently—that he entertained wild fantasies or at least embarrassing dreams about me. I thought he was probably going to ask for my autograph.
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