For the next forty minutes, we stood in a loosely formed cattle line, set up between tall chain-link fences. We were pressed in from all sides as we shuffled toward the buses. At one point, he reached back and took my hand as the crowd turned a tight corner, but when the line straightened, he dropped it again.
When we finally climbed aboard the bus, it, too, was jammed and hot. We were among the last ones on and so we were standing, I just in front of Baxter. I could feel his breath on my neck. Each time the bus stopped, he lurched into me. And each time it started again, I fell back into him. The first few times, we apologized, but then we stopped.
People began getting off; by the time we reached our hotel, there were plenty of empty seats and we were the only two left standing. We had turned now so that we were facing each other, each holding on to the pole, giggling a little when the bus’s movements knocked us, particularly me in the stiletto heels, off kilter. The driver was messing around with the bus’s interior lights, which went off for a second. In the darkness, I leaned toward Baxter and said: “Do you know, in the whole mess of my life, you’re the only person who ever asked how I feel?”
He nodded. “Do you know you never answered me?”
“I feel like this,” I said. I leaned forward and kissed him. Then the lights came back on.
Chapter 30
I’ll never know what, if anything, would have happened that night in the suite Baxter and I shared. We were cut off at the lobby. We were pulling up to our stop near the hotel and Baxter was saying there was something he needed to tell me and I was thinking of all sorts of romantic things he might be needing to say, when we noticed the live television trucks parked up and down the street. There had been media outside the hotel all week, what with all the “celebrities” going in and out. But this seemed a bit excessive. I wondered in a vague way if someone big had shown up at the last minute. There had been a rumor all week that Teri Hatcher was going to drop in. She had been to the Derby once before. “But that,” our bellhop had explained to us, “was back when she was still washed up.”
As soon as we stepped off the bus, Baxter and I realized that we were the celebrities the crowd of cameras were looking for. “There they are,” a cameraman yelled. “She’s wearing red!” All the lights turned toward us, and the reporters all started talking at once. I couldn’t understand what they were actually saying, but the vibe suggested this was not the friendly who’d-you-bet-on sort of questioning that we had grown accustomed to. There were scowls and shouting and some of the more aggressive ones pushed toward us. I saw Bob Costas in the crowd and realized that he’d been pulled off the post-Derby coverage for this. That was pretty impressive, given that I wasn’t even sure what “this” was. It seemed to be about me getting off a bus.
Then I heard a voice say: “Addison McGhee! What’s your reaction to this criminal charge?” And I heard a man say: “Ever been to the track with a fugitive before, Baxter?”
I crinkled my nose, not consciously, but it was evident in the tapes when I watched them back later. I used my hand to shield my eyes from the camera lights. “I don’t know what . . .” I was going to say that I didn’t know what they were talking about. But Baxter grabbed my arm and dragged me inside while a friendly bellhop shooed the cameras away from the door. We stepped into a coatroom—another friendly bellhop— and Baxter called Cal on his cell phone.
Cal asked to speak to me, and that’s how I heard that I’d been indicted for felonious assault.
“Felonious assault?” I asked incredulously. “Why? Because I threw that thing at Hughes?”
Cal sighed. “Well, I certainly hope so. You haven’t assaulted anyone else, have you?”
I didn’t answer.
“The prosecutor has the studio surrounded and your room at the Ritz staked out, and he’s calling me every fifteen minutes to see if I’ve heard from you.” Cal was breathless. “I said, ‘Look, she’s not on the lam, for heaven’s sake. She’s at the Kentucky Derby.’
“But he seemed to think it was very suspicious that all at once you ‘up and go to a horse race.’?”
I sighed.
Cal continued. “I told him that I thought it was suspicious that there are fifty zillion unsolved murders in the city and he’s got four SWAT teams looking for a woman who chucked a glorified tape measure at a guy. A woman with good reason, truth be told.”
I suddenly flushed with pleasure. Cal was on my side? I had not realized!
“Hell, I want to throw things at Hughes and I wasn’t even married to him!” Cal continued. “So I told the prosecutor that just because the junior senator from Ohio is from the same political party as he is and controls the national committee funding, that doesn’t mean he has to do every stupid thing she gets into her head. We know what this is about! Margaret Clemons-Briarwood wishes she could knock the president in the head with something and she can’t, so she’s taking it out on you.”
“Cal,” I said, “I’m flattered! I never knew you’d stick up for me like this.”
“They’re messing with my show, Addison,” he said. “This is going to be the death of my show.”
“Oh,” I said, a little disappointed. And then added: “Surely not. It will be okay, Cal.”
I was comforting him.
“Look, Addison, I promised him you’d be here by midnight. I’ve got a plane waiting for you at the airport. Can you and Baxter come right now?”
I looked at Baxter, handsome and composed, worried and supportive. “Sure, Cal,” I said. “Whatever you say. I appreciate you handling all this.”
It was a long ride back in the plane. Baxter and I looked out the window at the changing patterns made by the lights on the ground. Neither of us said much. “It’ll blow over, Ada,” he said. “You’ll laugh about this someday.”
But I thought I detected a weariness in him that had not been there before. I decided to address this directly. At least, you know, directly for me.
“My life is a mess, Baxter,” I said. “Being my friend is a thankless task right now. I’ve screwed it all up. Every bit of it. You’d have to be a fool to get involved in my life.”
He looked out the window for a moment longer, then took another sip of coffee. “This stuff is horrid,” he said with a sigh. “You’d think a guy with Cal’s money would stock some decent coffee on his plane.”
“Yeah, well.” I had started picking at my nails. “If you sleep at night, like he does, coffee’s not so important. We’re the ones who have to become connoisseurs.”
We sat in silence for a moment. I finally said, nervously, that he had been about to tell me something on the bus. And he said it was no longer important.
“It seems so unfair,” I said quietly, to no one in particular. It was the only time in the whole ordeal that I allowed myself a small degree of public self-pity.
Baxter did not commiserate. “What can I say?” he told me. “You married a jerk.”
We sat opposite each other and leaned back, away from each other, and pretended to sleep for the rest of the flight. Perhaps he was sleeping. I was definitely pretending. What I was really thinking was that I had just said that anyone would be a fool to get involved with me, and Baxter had not argued.
Chapter 31
I was arrested at the airport in New York. I still had my Derby finery on and I insisted on wearing my Derby hat, which was much mocked later and eventually listed by Joan Rivers as one of the fashion mistakes of the year. Please. I had been wearing that hat all day. If I had taken it off, people would still be talking about the hat head. Sometimes, Joan, you have to go with the lesser of two evils.
Cal said he would get a lawyer for me and Baxter offered to call my parents, a gesture that touched me. When I was finally alone in my jail cell, I cried and cried and cried. It all came out then—my anguish over my failed marriage, my wrenching heartbreak, my bubbling anger, my resentments, my regrets, my fear. I really wanted to log onto the boards and see what the people there were saying, but I couldn
’t. And that made me cry some more.
By the time my attorney, a grizzled old guy Cal went to college with, arrived, I was a blubbery mess.
If I had allowed Al Sharpton to help me out, he would have undoubtedly found a committed, self-righteous attorney who would have fought my case to the bitter end and would not have been deterred from doing so by any force of nature—not exhaustion, not public opinion, not even an internal sense of decency. Al Sharpton’s attorney, I am sure, would have fought until I was free, if he had to embarrass me, himself, and everyone else in the process. Al Sharpton’s attorney would not have taken anything for granted, least of all the photographic evidence, the live footage of my chucking a sharp implement. “What is the definition of sharp?” Al’s attorney would have asked. “Can we really believe what we see on that video?”
But the lawyer Cal called had a less aggressive defensive posture. Clem Fuget just handed me a tissue and recommended that I plead guilty.
Even in my defeated state, I balked for a moment. “Assault?” I said. “You want me to plead guilty to assault? A felony? Can’t I plead guilty to disturbing the peace or . . .” I struggled for another legal term. “Or setting a bad example or, you know, excessive rowdiness?”
Clem Fuget smirked.
“I didn’t think I’d actually hit him,” I continued. “My old PE teacher can testify! I have terrible aim!”
Clem Fuget waved me off as if not wanting to touch my silliness. “Oh sure,” he said, “we could quibble about this for weeks, months. Is that what you want? Drag this thing into next year? You knocked the guy out. Permanently scarred him. Pure and simple. I saw it myself on television, turned to the missus and said: Did you see that?
“I guarantee you,” Clem Fuget continued, “if the situation had been reversed, he would have been charged before nightfall. A man hits a woman on TV, that’s a felony. A woman hits a man and everyone’s all concerned about how she’s doing? Bah!”
I was taken aback. This was my legal representation? I’m not a lawyer, but I was under the impression that they were supposed to try to put things in a positive light for their client. What was Cal thinking, getting this guy? Was Cal intentionally setting me up? But the sad truth is that when Cal said he would find me an attorney I’d used my one call to telephonically cry on my brother’s shoulder.
I looked at Clem Fuget. “What kind of sentence will I get?”
“No guarantees,” he said. “But under the circumstances? For a chance to put this thing behind them quickly? I think we can get you eighteen months with work release.”
“Eighteen months!” I said. “In prison?”
“With work release!” he said. “Hell, you’re at that dumb studio all night. This way, you’ll sleep in the prison all day. What will you be missing, really? It’s not like you’ve got a husband waiting for you at home.”
I did not like this man at all. But the truth is the truth. So I signed some papers that Clem Fuget gave me and when I appeared in court later that day, I stunned the world by pleading guilty. And the judge stunned the legal community by going along with my lawyer’s request to sentence me on the spot. It was unprecedented and it was eighteen months in prison, with work release.
I thought it was terrible, but I also thought it was over.
It wasn’t.
Those papers I signed, the ones I didn’t read, turned out to be rather important. Cassie tells me that, among other things, I was swearing that I had been counseled about the potential consequences of this plea on my immigration status. This time, it would take more than a gauze bikini to fix the mess I made by signing something without reading it.
Chapter 32
All the legal experts interviewed on CNN and Fox thought that Clem had led me terribly astray. While I had undoubtedly hurt Hughes and while it was probably criminal and possibly even technically a felony, it was so out of the realm of what is normally prosecuted anywhere in the country, and particularly in New York City, that I surely could have pleaded to a lesser charge. Failing that, I could have taken my chances with a jury, which likely would have been sympathetic to me and my broken heart and might have acquitted me outright.
Even if they had ultimately convicted me of a felony anyway, it’s hard to imagine that I would have ended up with more than eighteen months in prison. “Do murderers get eighteen months in prison?” Howard Stern memorably asked, and one of his callers said that he thought not.
What the experts did not say is that whatever the outcome, the spectacle of the trial would have, in and of itself, served the unstated purpose of the charges against me. Even if the outcome of the trial had been the same, it would have, at least, satisfied the first lady by providing my thorough humiliation. (I thought I had been humiliated enough, but the catastrophic nature of the arrest photo was lost on the first lady, who wouldn’t know a fashion faux pas if it knocked her in the head. So to speak.)
She would have, perhaps, gotten bored by the whole thing, or at least distracted by the president’s continuing habits. After the trial, she may have been able to move on.
Furthermore, the media itself would have been tired of the story and would have exercised their subtle pressure against further legal actions by beginning to talk about vendettas and so forth. But with me arrested a few minutes before midnight on Saturday and pleading guilty before noon on Monday—well, they hadn’t gotten to sink their teeth into it at all. They were still quite hungry. They wanted more. I knew this. I could see it in their eyes.
What I did not know, as I was being booked into the Bayview Correctional Facility in West Chelsea, was that they would get more. I thought I would commute from prison to the GUP studios every workday for eighteen months, that Leno and Letterman would have great fun at my expense, and then it would be over.
I was unaware that a bureaucratic process had begun. The wheels of government turn slowly, but they do turn. In a matter of weeks, the Bayview authorities notified the Department of Homeland Security that a noncitizen was serving time in prison.
The notification sat on the desk of a lawyer in a department that I now know is called ICE for another week or two before he finally picked it up and read it. The first thing he did was notify the White House that a celebrity had popped up on the list of potentially dangerous immigrants. I suppose he thought there was a chance that there would be political pressure to look the other way. He was wrong. The first lady, in fact, publicly lobbied for my quick “removal” from the country.
“We can’t be giving sanctuary to criminals from sinister countries,” she said, rather famously. It may be the only sentence ever uttered that managed to simultaneously insult my father’s homeland, my mother’s homeland, and Turkey to boot.
I was sitting on the set of It’s Morning Now when this news came over the wire. Hughes and I were laughing it up about the latest voting scandal on American Idol.
(Hughes had been extraordinarily friendly on the set—the only place we were allowed to talk under the terms of my work release. But I thought he gave me several meaningful looks during the days and weeks immediately after I pled guilty, something I mentioned to the makeup artist. I also mentioned that I saw him blink three times after telling Larry King that he was “relieved and grateful” that I pled guilty. That was a sign he was lying, I explained. Hughes was not really grateful or relieved. The makeup artist displayed her usual sensitivity by laughing at me, muttering something that sounded like the word delusional, and then saying, “Everyone blinks, Addison.” I don’t know why I had bothered attempting to explain it to her. I never liked the woman. She had some sort of contract with Chanel and insisted that if I wanted her to apply Amber Glow foundation—the only foundation that truly matched my skin—I had to pour it from my tiny CoverGirl bottles into her empty Chanel bottles. You cannot imagine what a tedious exercise that was.)
Anyway, there Hughes and I were, laughing it up about the voting scandal on American Idol, when I noticed the producers gathered around a computer screen off t
o my right. One of them whistled in a wow, this is terrible sort of way. Another one grabbed something off the printer and went running for Cal’s office.
Hughes tossed to Baxter for a weather update, which meant that the camera was turned away from us. I could watch Cal’s office with undisguised interest. Cal was throwing his hands about in an animated way, and the producer was nodding. Cal picked up the piece of paper and tossed it across the room. It was one of those gestures of rage that never works when I try it. I can’t get enough muscle behind the light paper to create any impressive velocity. But Cal’s picked up a current from the air duct and got bullied about the room in a dramatic way. Then Cal sat down and put his head on his desk and began to weep, which was more dramatic still.
He was not crying for me. I can see that now. I understand with the passage of time that for all Cal’s good-natured friendliness, he never cared one way or another what happened to me, where I lived out my remaining years, whether I found happiness. Whether I was safe.
If I had been hit by a bus, instead of being killed off symbolically by a slow fizzle of a public relations disaster, Cal probably would have worked up some almost genuine sorrow for a co-worker lost in her prime. But even then, he would have been thinking about how to replace me on the way home from the funeral—if not sooner. I see that now. And this demise, being neither quick, nor sudden, nor blameless on my part? He had no sympathy at all.
At the time I was sitting there watching him though, I did not even know what the paper he threw across the room said. Someone came over and whispered in Hughes’s ear and he looked startled and then glanced at me, then the floor. Baxter, obliviously doing the weather, finished up with a report about flooding in Missouri and tossed back to me and I tossed to a commercial. “Up next,” I said, “a new study shows that mouthwash maybe does replace flossing.”
I turned to Hughes. “You know they said it did, then it didn’t, and now maybe it does again.”
Cover Girl Confidential Page 19