“Thanks for your concern,” I said, a bit briskly. I hung up and noticed the other line bleeping. The caller ID said: JESSE JACKSON.
And in what was either my shrewdest or most idiotic move, I didn’t answer.
If you want to make a case for shrewd, then this is it. In the entire tortured series of events that followed, much was made of almost everything, but Al Sharpton was wrong—not a whole lot was made of race. Perhaps it ran in undercurrents throughout the whole thing—as I said, I’m not well tuned to such matters. But if it did, it at least did not dominate the conversation.
On the other hand, if you want to make the case for idiotic, then this is it. Here I am, sitting in prison. And tomorrow, I very well may be deported.
Chapter 25
Our ratings skyrocketed. They were already higher than usual as people tuned in to get a glimpse of our train wreck of a marriage. It was all so delightfully surreal. A show built on the flirtation of its hosts suddenly sees, in the course of a couple of months, the two get married, then unmarried against their will, and then the whole thing falls apart into an awkward spectacle. And then I knocked him out and gave everyone what they wanted. The video clip was posted all over the Web and was, later that year, named by People magazine as the “only frequently viewed Internet video of a clothed couple.”
You can’t buy that kind of publicity. I tried to make that point to Cal once, and his response was, “I wouldn’t want to.”
He believed the whole thing had ruined his show. “My show, my show,” he said, laying his head on his desk in a dramatic way. “My favorite show.”
He threatened to put me on the channel’s new late-night (and so far poorly rated) competitive gardening show, Iron Thumb. I didn’t believe him for a second. Cal might love his “favorite show,” but he loved his favorite show’s ratings even more.
All those new viewers were sorely disappointed, though. Hughes and I gamely and professionally carried on. It was stilted, but never overtly hostile. There was one awkward moment when Hughes stumbled over the word falafel a few times and then said: “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, it’s like I’ve been knocked in the head or something.” I gulped and looked embarrassed. Hughes twisted his face in a pained and sheepish way. Baxter leapt in and started babbling about low-pressure systems.
I turned toward Baxter, listening to him babble, and I thought, really, it was the sweetest thing I’d ever seen and I realized that after everything that had happened, he still stood as the only person who had asked me how I felt about it all.
Baxter’s a dear, I thought. I think his agent is quite wrong about needing bow ties. The “Shaggy Doo” look he demonstrated at the theater that night could be a very popular weatherman image.
We went to commercial break and Cal, who was hanging out on the set all the time now, put his head in his hands and moaned loudly. “Knocked in the head? Did you really freakin’ say ‘knocked in the head’?”
“It’s a common phrase, Cal,” Hughes said testily.
“That’s it.” Cal put up his hand to stop Hughes, as you might a whining child. “We’ve got to do something.” He turned to his producers. “I want Hughes and Addison apart tomorrow. Do you hear me? Tomorrow! Addison is going to have to broadcast from the Pella, Iowa, Tulip Festival or the National Cornhusking Championships in Missouri or I-Forty Days in Amarillo, Texas, or something. Give me anything. What the hell is going on tomorrow?”
The producer gulped and looked down at his notes for the next day, which as usual had nothing of the festival variety. But the producer was from Louisville, Kentucky, and so he knew one thing that no one else in the room did. It was Kentucky Derby Week.
“There’s always the Kentucky Derby,” he said.
“Horse racing?” I said, a bit haughtily. I didn’t see why I was the one being sent off someplace when it was Hughes who had put his foot in his mouth. “I don’t think so. My parents would freak out. Gambling? On horses?”
Cal met my eyes. He looked mean and serious. “Oh, but assaulting your husband on TV—this is okay?”
I blanched. I had tried to put the nearly killed line out of my head, but now Cal was using the word assault? I said simply: “He’s not my husband.”
“Ten seconds to air,” called the producer, tapping his watch.
There was silence for five long seconds. Then Baxter said, “Oh come on, Ada. It’ll be fun. I’ll go, too.”
I looked at him, then Cal, then Baxter again.
“Okay,” I said.
“One second . . . air,” said the producer.
Hughes looked into the camera and said, “And we haven’t even told people about your big trip, Addison.”
“We basically just found out,” I said, with an exaggerated shrug. I looked over at Baxter, smiled in what I fancied to be my most winning way. “Didn’t we, Baxter? It’s the Kentucky Derby for us.”
“Go Smarty Jones!” Baxter said, pumping his fist in the air in a goofy and endearing manner.
“I think Smarty retired,” Hughes said, but he laughed when he said it.
“Baxter and I are going to learn all about this horse stuff,” I said. “We’ll be broadcasting live from there starting . . .” I hesitated, but then saw Cal mouth from off stage, To-mor-row.
“Starting tomorrow!” I said, in an excited and breathless way. I could always fake it when I had to.
“I suppose I have to hold down the fort here,” Hughes said, with obviously feigned glumness. “I’m going to be lonely and jealous.”
Baxter wasn’t in the camera shot at that moment and it was a good thing, because I could see him from my place on the sofa and he definitely rolled his eyes.
Chapter 26
The flight was still boarding, but Baxter and I—seated in the back of first class—were already sorting through the files of newspaper and magazine clippings that our producers had put together to educate us about the Derby. I was looking at an interesting clip called HOLLYWOOD SOUTH—LOUISVILLE’S WEEK AS A CELEBRITY MECCA. Baxter was reading about the actual horse race.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a slightly overweight woman wearing sweatpants and a TALK DERBY TO ME T-shirt coming down the aisle, seemingly carrying more baggage than the law allowed and making more noise than she ought to. She had an efficient haircut and a friendly smile and she looked to me like the motherly sort that was prepared for anything.
Suddenly the woman stopped. “Oh my word!” she said excitedly. She dropped her large shoulder bag, the better to wave her arms about. “I can’t believe this! I’m your biggest fan!” She was jumping up and down and pointing at Baxter.
He smiled at her, murmured, “Thank you.”
“I watch you every day,” she said. “Especially, you know, when there is a hurricane or something.”
“Oh,” Baxter said. “Do you live on the coast?”
“Well, no,” she said. “But I like to stay informed on the weather.”
Baxter smiled. “As do I,” he said.
“Are you going to the Derby?” she asked.
“Yes, yes,” Baxter said. I noticed that Baxter had mastered the same technique for fan small talk that I had. Answer in the most concise way possible, in order to give them little to elaborate on. But repeat the answer often, so it seems longer and more polite.
“Yes,” he said again, glancing pointedly at the long line that was forming behind her. But she did not seem to notice. She smiled at me. “Are you his wife?”
Baxter chuckled softly and looked at his feet.
I hesitated. The word wife was a painful one for me at that particular moment. Besides, was this woman joking? She was Baxter’s biggest fan and she didn’t even know that he wasn’t married?
“No,” I said, turning back to my magazine. “No, no.”
“Well, you ought to be,” the woman said and nudged Baxter. “You’re so cute together.” She pronounced cute in a cutesy way, overemphasizing the t.
“Well,” Baxter said. He looked dow
n at his paper awkwardly. “Well, well.”
A man holding a large suitcase cleared his throat, and Baxter’s fan finally moved on down the aisle.
Baxter looked at me then, raised an eyebrow, and shrugged. “Does she really watch the show?” he asked. “Or, you know, anything at all?”
I was, I confess, grateful for the acknowledgment that failing to recognize me was awkward—and not just because I was the star of the program she professed to watch daily. My marital problems were big news. I was on Fox News those days more than I was on my own show—in clips, I mean; I did not give interviews on the matter. And if you saw any of that coverage at all, it would be quite clear to you that I was not, as a matter of law, married at all, and certainly not to Baxter.
I gave him one of those charming, self-deprecating waves and said: “Weather is the most highly rated segment of the show, Baxter. You know that. There’s got to be tons of people who know you, but not Hughes or me.”
He made a skeptical expression, then seemed to think seriously for a moment. “I think it’s more likely that she was thrown off by your hair”—he made a gesture toward my hair band. We’d had to race from the studio to make the afternoon flight, and I had few hairstyling options at that point. I could never stand to leave the studio with my hair so totally encrusted with hair spray, but I didn’t have time to restyle it. So I snagged a hair band from the cosmetics office and hoped it would look “trendsetting.”
“You don’t wear it that way on the air,” said Baxter. “It’s different and, you know, ‘cute.’?”
He pronounced it the same cutesy way the fan had.
I grimaced. “Cute is a different look for me?” I said, in what I can confess now was a pathetic play for a compliment.
“Oh, Ada,” Baxter said, exasperated. “You know better than that.” He leaned toward me. “Sometimes it looks beautiful, sometimes it looks striking, sometimes it looks simply luxurious. Cute is not the opposite of how it normally looks, but only a particular sort of attractive that it happens to look today.”
I leaned back—as far back as I could lean in the crowded confines of the plane. I gave him an appraising look. Written down like this, the words sound flirtatious. But they were delivered in an agitated, irritated way—so I wasn’t sure.
“You’re a smooth talker,” I said, finally.
Baxter snapped his finger and looked back at his clippings.
“Darn,” he said. “Here I’m doing my best to be gritty and you call me ‘smooth.’”
Chapter 27
The Derby puts the D in D list, I’m afraid. My agent told me that years ago, and I was a little disappointed to find out he was right. I had thought he was being harsh, but there are some unlikely “stars” who turn out for this thing. The “Hollywood South” article touted Donald Trump’s cousin, and Lynda Carter, and Mary Ann Mobley. (A former Miss America, she appeared often on Love Boat, Fantasy Island, and Love, American Style, and if you don’t remember that last show, well, join the crowd.)
I loved Wonder Woman as much as anyone. And Donald Trump’s cousin is, legitimately, related to a celebrity. But all in all, even I had to admit it was sort of unimpressive.
Not to belittle the event. It draws more stars in a weekend than most midcontinent cities do in a year. Omaha certainly doesn’t attract this kind of crowd. I don’t think Mary Ann Mobley has been there once.
And the Derby does sometimes lure a real star. Ed Harris has shown up on occasion. Jack Nicholson did once. Pamela Anderson counts, I suppose. And when Louisville gets real stars, Louisville remembers. The residents talk about it for years afterward. And at that particular moment in history, with my face all over the tabloids and our ratings higher than ever, Baxter and I counted as real celebrities.
My star-crossed and controversial wedding had made me a household name, and my plight as a ditched wife had made me popular with just about everyone. Liberal observers thought my plight mirrored that of gay would-be spouses everywhere; conservatives thought I was a good wholesome girl who just wanted to get married and have children and would have happily done so if my husband had not been led astray by the “gay agenda.”
I was the victim in all versions of events. And for those few days, even the “assault” had not hurt me. It would take the first lady another day or two to work with that. At the moment I was arriving in Louisville, people were watching the video of me chucking that thing at Hughes and saying, “Yes, well, but . . . think what she’s been through.”
I was at the height of my fame and celebrity. I had the nation’s sympathy. But the TALK DERBY lady recognized Baxter and not me—that pretty much sums up my career, I suppose.
At any rate, Baxter and I rather enjoyed the Derby, enjoyed being the hot young stars. The local newspaper was all abuzz with the news of our last-minute arrival, and the hottest “celebrity events” in town—the big parade, the diabetes fund- raiser—were clamoring for our attention.
The mayor of Louisville even intervened on our behalf, giving up the suite that she normally reserved for her father-in-law, so that we could stay at the prestigious and otherwise booked-up Seelbach hotel in downtown Louisville. Baxter and I were swept into the two-bedroom suite with great fanfare. Although really, I thought even that was a bit awkward. People like Baxter and me do not share hotel rooms, even two-bedroom suites. I mean, come on. Even if you did not realize the way we had shamelessly flirted once at a play—and of course they didn’t—you might realize that two co-workers of the opposite sex would like a door with a lock between the two of them at night. But people don’t think of Baxter and Hughes and me as co-workers. That’s what’s so strange. They see us work together every day, but they don’t realize it’s work and we may not be as buddy-buddy as we seem on television.
Still, we could hardly complain when they were treating us with such fanfare as they whisked us around to all the pre-Derby activities. Even the cabdrivers gave us pointers on what horse to bet on. And a local boutique owner was summoned to bring me all her best Derby suits and hats, so that I could choose among them without troubling my celebrity self to leave the hotel. I told the owner that I wasn’t sure about the headgear. “I’m not a hat person,” I said. She told me that everyone says that at first. And I found, actually, that I looked rather nice in a hat. All the other women did, too. And it was great fun. I wore one every day on the air and it always matched Baxter’s bow tie. We were just adorable. Everyone said so.
Each morning we sat elegantly on the side of the track not open to the general public—it was, we soon learned, called the backside. We had all sorts of fun with that. “We’ve got our backsides perched here on the backside,” Baxter said once. And we both giggled a little, in our lovely finery, as beautiful thoroughbreds performed their workouts behind us.
(I learned later that Hughes complained to Cal about this, asking who’d decided that Baxter would suddenly be chipper. “I’m supposed to be chipper,” Hughes said. “He’s supposed to be sullen.”)
But Cal said nothing to Baxter and me, who were each rather taken with the whole Derby spectacle and gushed about it on the air in a way that pleased the locals and shifted our show’s cosmic energy from New York to Louisville. Baxter and I were suddenly the stars of the show and Hughes a dutiful handyman, helping us out with news tidbits we’d been too busy to read about.
Baxter got so blasé about things that he even seemed to forget he was the weatherman. At one point, we were going on and on about the beautiful spring when Hughes broke in from the New York studio to ask Baxter if it were safe to assume that a snowstorm so late in the year would not accumulate much. And Baxter was unable to hide his surprise.
“It’s snowing?” he said. “In May?”
He laughed a little, then added: “Where?”
“Here,” Hughes said, impatiently. “In New York!”
Baxter replied, in what sounded like a slight Kentucky accent, “Well, I’ll be.”
I grabbed his arm, in a panicky gesture. “
It’s not going to snow here, is it?” I asked. “That could totally change what I’ve planned to wear to the race!” And Baxter, who normally couldn’t tear his nose out of a weather map, shrugged.
“I have no earthly idea,” he said. “But I’ll surely find out.”
“Oh good,” I said. “I really need to know. I was going to wear my new Prada sandals. I don’t want my little toes to get cold.”
“No, no,” Baxter said. “Not your little toes. I’ll check during the next commercial break.”
“You do that,” Hughes broke in, obviously irritated. “And if you could find out about the forecast in the rest of the country, that would be nice, too.”
Cal was not happy about that whole exchange, and he gave Baxter a serious talking-to later. Baxter nodded seriously and made apologetic sounds on the phone even as he watched some of the horses working out, nudging me at a particularly fast one.
Baxter and I fed off each other’s irreverence. One morning on the air, Hughes was blabbering on, trying to be a part of his own show by telling me his personal picks for the big race, and I put my hand to my ear and said breezily, “I guess we’re having technical problems, Hughes, I can’t hear a thing you’re saying. So we’ll just skip you for now and go to Baxter.”
At the next break, Baxter asked if I needed my earpiece replaced; he could hear Hughes perfectly. I smiled in my most mischievous way and said, “Yeah, I could, too.”
Friday was our last show before the Saturday race, and Cal casually suggested on the phone that we just come on back after the morning broadcast. “You must be kidding,” Baxter said. “There would probably be a riot. We’re huge here!”
He handed me the phone, and I picked up the argument.
“Besides,” I said, “we can’t go on and on about this for four days on the air and then not even be able to tell people on Monday how it all turned out.”
Cover Girl Confidential Page 17