The Fame Game

by Rona Jaffe

  “If you don’t know now you’ll know soon,” Libra said. “He’s got this afternoon kids’ show on television that the teen-agers have picked up on. He’s turned into their love idol. I’m getting the show changed to a night-time slot, probably midnight, next month. I’ll know for sure in a day or two. Then everybody in the country will know him.”

  “A kiddie show at midnight?”

  “Why not? Did you ever hear of one before?”

  “No, I hadn’t,” Gerry said, embarrassed. There was something about this man that made her feel defensive, as if the idea of a children’s television show at midnight was perfectly plausible, if not a stroke of genius, and it was only her stupidity that prevented her from realizing it.

  Libra looked at his Cartier wristwatch. “Before the people start coming in I’ll fill you in a little about what I do. You can’t expect to learn it all at once, but you can try to keep up or you’ll be no use to me. Do you want some coffee?”

  “Thanks.”

  To her surprise, he rushed over to the table and poured the coffee for her. “Cream and sugar?”

  “Black, please.”

  “Danish?”

  She was starving, but she was afraid it would stick in her throat. “Maybe later, thanks.”

  He handed her the coffee and a napkin. “Sit down. Now, at three thirty we’ll watch the Mad Daddy Show and you’ll see what he’s all about. His wife Elaine will be here to pick up Lizzie for lunch. Mad Daddy’s Christian name, would you believe Jewish, is Moishe—Moishe Fellin. When you meet him in a day or two, call him Daddy. If you call him Moishe he’ll have a coronary occlusion on the spot and I’ll lose a client. I already lost one that way three days ago.”

  “I know. I read it in the papers.”

  “Damn shame,” Libra said. “He was a grand old man and a great talent. You don’t see many like him these days. Today they’re mostly schmucks, which is where I come in, trying to find the few good ones and see that they get the success they deserve. You may not realize it, but you soon will—I perform a public service. With all the talent in the world, many of them would never get there at all if it weren’t for me. Now, as I’m sure you know, I always have twelve clients, no more, no less. I like to think of them as my Dirty Dozen.” He smiled. “I give each of them a one-year contract, which keeps them insecure. It’s very important in this business to keep the talent insecure. Otherwise they begin to believe the lies I tell about them and they think they’re too good for the man who created them in the first place through his toil and sweat—that’s me. If they’re good and it works out, I renew the contract.”

  “May I ask you a question?” Gerry said.

  “Please do. As many as you want.”

  “Well, if they do get big, as you say, then what’s to prevent them from going to someone else after the contract is up?”

  Libra smiled like the Cheshire Cat. “Insecurity. That’s why I tear them down. You’ll see. You may sometimes think I’m cruel, but it’s good for them, because I’m the best person for them and this is where they should stay no matter who else woos them once they make it. There are always managers and publicists waiting to woo clients who are already famous, but who takes the chances I do on semi-unknowns? Why should somebody else with less imagination and talent than I have reap the rewards of what I planted and cared for, huh?”

  “You’re right,” Gerry said.

  “Of course I’m right. There’s something else you ought to know. A celebrity, no matter how big he gets, thinks it’s all going to be taken away from him tomorrow. Even when he’s gotten up to the top of Mount Everest he thinks he’s going to fall right off. And I never let them forget that. Because do you know something? They’re right.”

  “I’m not sure I agree with you,” Gerry said. “I mean, a Judy Garland, for example; everybody loves her even when she comes out on the stage hoarse.”

  His eyes narrowed with genuine anger. “Listen, you, I can send you right back to that employment agency where I found you and that’ll be the end of you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You can be replaced in five minutes. I only have to pick up this phone. Then you can go right back to your schlock publicity job with some jerk movie company. Do you want to do that?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then what do you say?”

  “I’m sorry. I guess I’ll just have to learn.” She felt like a fool. She should never have mentioned Judy Garland; he was probably jealous because he didn’t have her for a client. She didn’t even know this man and he was yelling at her as if she was a cretin. She knew her face was getting red.

  “I only took you on because I like to give young people a chance. You’re really too young for this job. And I wanted someone less attractive. You don’t look serious.”

  “I am serious!”

  “Then what do you say?”

  “I’m sorry. I said I was sorry.”

  “Say: ‘Please let me stay, I’ll be good.’” His eyes stared into hers like that game she used to play when she was a kid: Whoever blinks first loses. She could feel tears of rage and frustration beginning to spill over and she blinked. She put down the coffee cup, carefully so not to break it because what she really wanted to do was hurl it across the room, and went for her coat.

  Libra didn’t say anything, he just watched her. She took her coat out of the closet and put it on. “Good-bye, Mr. Libra,” she said pleasantly.

  Her hand was on the doorknob when she heard him laughing. “Red hair and a temper,” he said. “How trite.”

  “You should know,” she said with revolting sweetness.

  “Take off your coat, you asshole, and sit down.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “You’re not fired.”

  “I know. I’m quitting.”

  He strode over to her and took her by the shoulders. “Sit down … come on, I love you. Sit down. I wouldn’t have an ugly girl around here. They depress me. Come on.”

  “You’re like somebody in brainwashing school,” Gerry said. To her horror she realized she was beginning to cry in earnest. She was glad she had not eaten any breakfast or she might have thrown up.

  “That’s the whole point,” Libra said sweetly. He helped her off with her coat and handed her his monogrammed handkerchief. “I just wanted to show you how I treat my clients to keep them insecure. You see now how well it works. The only reason you were ready to leave is that this job isn’t your whole life like their success is theirs. But I want you to know what I do because you’re going to be very important to me. Your job will be to be sweet and cuddly and pick up the pieces I break. It’s a perfect balance and everybody will be happy. Now sit down.”

  “I have one stipulation,” Gerry said.

  He looked at her with the pleasant superiority of a teacher humoring a first-grader who has just thrown a tantrum. “All right.”

  “You are never, never, repeat, never, to call me asshole again, or any name remotely like it.”

  “All right,” he said, amused.

  Oh my God, he’s won, she thought. He’s won, and I never hated anybody so much in my life. He’s made it seem as if I was ridiculous to mind what he called me. He’s managed to make me feel humorless and square and I don’t even know how it happened. But in a funny way, she admired him. He obviously had many insecurities of his own—that was an understatement—look at him, Lady Macbeth, scrubbing everything and calling his clients the Dirty Dozen: if that wasn’t Freudian, what was? He probably hated everything about himself. She felt almost sorry for him. He seemed to need something in her that she had to give; perhaps her clarity as an outsider. At any rate he was certainly the most interesting man she had ever met. Perhaps she could win him over … perhaps they could even become friends.

  The doorbell rang. Libra looked at her. She fought back a smile and went to the door and opened it.

  There stood a six-foot vision in white suede. He was smiling with capped white Chiclets, and
his dark hair was neatly cut in a Prince Valiant fringe above navy blue eyes. He was wearing an immaculate white suede suit with a Mao collar, and white alligator loafers. He had a white attaché case in his hand.

  “I’m here to see the vicious Libran,” the white-suede vision said. “Tell him Mr. Nelson is here, as in Rockefeller.”

  “Hello, Nelson,” Libra said. “Come on in. This is my new baby sitter, Gerry Thompson. She’ll take care of all your needs when I’m not here. Gerry, this is Mr. Nelson, the society hairdresser, my client.”

  “My, she’s pretty,” Nelson said, as if she were not there. “Where’s Lizzie?”

  “In the bedroom,” Libra said.

  “I came to see you, of course, but as long as she’s here I’ll do her hair. I want to welcome you to New York. We’re all so glad you’ll be among the living again.”

  “Not all the time,” Libra said. “I’m keeping the old office too.”

  Nelson clucked. “The Sam Leo Libra Doll—you wind it up and it flies back and forth to California.”

  “Nelson is my personal creation,” Sam Leo Libra said. “You don’t mind if I tell Gerry, do you?”

  “I don’t mind. I owe everything to you.”

  “When Nelson came to me he was just struggling along, with a lot of talent but no way to sell it. He used to wear a black leather jacket with a fur lining with fleas in it.”

  “I never had fleas …!”

  “And he rode around on a big black motorcycle. He was burning hair in a dump in the Village where they played rock ’n’ roll all day and the clients danced when they weren’t having their hair set. I took one look at him in that black leather and I told him: ‘Nelson, you’ll never get anywhere like this. You look like the gutter, and the gutter is where you’ll stay. I want you all in white. White is clean, it’s respectable, it inspires trust like a doctor.’ At first he whined.”

  “You wanted me in white suede,” Nelson said. “Hair sticks to suede.”

  “So I decided that for work he would wear a white kid suit, something soft and clean and slippery. And whenever he wasn’t at work he would wear white suede, to keep up the image. Notice the haircut. He looks like the White Knight. Then I turned him on to several of my more glamorous clients, he did their hair, I sent them to parties and got them and their hair into the columns. Mr. Nelson is now a super-star.”

  “Speaking of clients,” Nelson said, “I’m now doing both of the B.P.’s. I do them both at home. Her and him. He won’t let anybody else touch his hair now.”

  “The B.P.’s,” Libra said to Gerry, “Peter and Penny Potter. The Beautiful People. You’ve read about them.”

  She certainly had. You couldn’t avoid reading about them, ad nauseam; what they wore, where they went, how their apartment was decorated, what they served at dinner parties, what their guests wore, who they knew, how beautiful they were. They lived and entertained like forty-year-old people and she was nineteen and he was twenty-one. He was in his last year at college, but of course they lived in a ten-room duplex, paid for by their parents, and when they had a dinner party there was a liveried footman behind each guest’s chair and afterward all the Beautiful People’s beautiful young friends danced like crazy to the new hit rock group, the King James Version, also one of Libra’s clients. It certainly was turning out to be an incestuous little world.

  “How did you like her in the Dynel braids with the lollipops entwined in them?” Nelson asked.

  “Very good,” said Libra.

  “I thought so too,” Nelson said. “Especially for her, as she’s so young. I don’t like her in just hair, it’s so dull.” He gave Gerry a professional look. “I’d like to do your eyes someday.”

  “What’s wrong with them?” she said.

  “I don’t know, just fool around and see what I come up with. Who cuts your hair?”

  “I have it cut in the neighborhood.”

  “Oh, my dear child, you can’t do that. Look at those ends! You’re working for Sam Leo Libra you know; you have to have an image.”

  “If she’s good I’ll let her go to you,” Libra said. “Why don’t you go see Lizzie?”

  Nelson went to the bedroom door. “Lizzie! Oh, Lizzie, Central Casting is here!”

  Lizzie opened the bedroom door. She was wearing a white frilly eyelet bathrobe that stopped four inches above her knees, and pink ballet slippers. Her hair was loose.

  “I’m looking for a short, skinny woman, about forty-five,” Nelson said. “To play the part of a little girl.”

  “I have the perfect one,” Lizzie said. “Her name is Nelly Nelson.”

  “Up yours!” Nelson squealed in delight. “Sideways—you shouldn’t be without a sensation.”

  They flew into each other’s arms and embraced and kissed warmly.

  “Oh, Nelson, I missed you so much! I’m so glad you’re here. I have lots of things to tell you.” She patted him all over, the shoulders, the sleeves, touching him and smoothing the nap of the white suede suit. She patted his face, but when her hand strayed to his hair he cringed and pulled away. “Isn’t he heaven?” Lizzie said. “Nelson, why aren’t you straight?”

  “If I were, you wouldn’t have a pet fruit to play with, miss.”

  “Up yours!”

  “Let me go fix your hair now, Lizzie. I hope you’re going someplace really elegant for lunch.”

  He shoved her affectionately into the bedroom and they shut the door.

  “He makes a fortune for me,” Libra said drily.

  “My,” Gerry said.

  Libra looked up at the framed painting of Sylvia Polydor over the fireplace. “We’re living in strange times,” he said, rather sadly. “You won’t see anybody like Sylvia any more. She was, and still is, the greatest, larger than life. The kids just don’t have that today; they’re just electrically amplified midgets. Sylvia was a publicist’s dream come true. All I had to do was follow her and cover up the more sensational things she did so they didn’t get into the papers. She even married right—every time.” He looked at his watch. “Let me fill you in for a few more minutes and then you can call the operator and tell her to take the stop off the calls and collect my messages. Let’s see … you met Nelson … the B.P.’s, who you’ll have the chance to meet later in the week, are perhaps the two dullest people who were ever born. I like to refer to them as Clients Number Eleven and Eleven-and-a-Half. I handle two musical groups: the King James Version, a rock group that’s coming up very fast, and a singing group called Silky and the Satins, five colored girls from Philadelphia. The main reason I’m interested in them is because of the lead singer, Silky Morgan. The other four are nothing special, they just sing background. They’re two sets of sisters, actually, and Silky is a kid they found in school. They’re all from eighteen to twenty years old. The four of them hate Silky’s guts and she hates theirs. Eventually I’m going to take her out as a single; I think she could get to Broadway. They suspect it, of course, so there’s no love lost. But we present them as full of love, practically a family. I hope you’re free tonight.”

  “Yes, I could be.”

  “Good. We’re going over to the Asthma Relief telethon. Silky and the Satins are going to be singing, and I handle the TV director, too, a new young guy who’s making quite a name for himself with visual effects. His name is Dick Devere, better known to those who know and love him as Dick Devoid. You’ll probably fall in love with him. Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a guy?”

  “Nobody special,” Gerry said. “I’ve been away for two years.”

  “And they all got married while you were gone, huh?”

  “No,” Gerry said. “It’s a funny thing, but none of the men I was ever seriously involved with have ever married anybody. They wouldn’t marry me, either, so it’s not such a compliment.”

  “Who gets married today anyway?” Libra said. “I love Lizzie, but I’ll tell you the truth: if I wasn’t married to her I wouldn’t marry an
ybody, including her. I met her in college—we’ve been married almost twenty years. Twenty years ago I was an insecure, homely kid who wanted to get laid and couldn’t make out; all the girls were either professional virgins or went for the handsome guys. Lizzie had a million boyfriends and she liked me. She liked my mind or something. So I grabbed her. It’s been okay, you know, ups and downs, but we never had any kids and I think, what’s it all for? Now I can get any girl to lay; they all want me because I’m older, I know how to talk to a girl, and most of them think I can make them famous. And wouldn’t you know—now I’m married. It doesn’t stop me any, but it makes it uncomfortable.”

  She wondered how he reconciled jumping into bed with all those girls with his love of cleanliness, but she supposed he washed them first with Lysol, too. He certainly didn’t appeal to her as a possible lover, and his personal revelations so soon in their relationship (or whatever it was) made her uncomfortable.

  “I don’t think Lizzie knows,” he went on. “She must guess, but she’s not quite sure. She doesn’t want to know, so she doesn’t let herself wonder about it. Anyway, I’m just telling you this because you’re going to become friends with her and I want you to know that anything you see and hear in this office is your business, not hers, or anyone else’s.”

  “Naturally,” Gerry said.

  “And I won’t tell anybody what you do,” he teased.

  “There’s no one to tell,” she said, smiling.

  “No family?”

  “They live in Bucks County, and they’ll come to my wedding. If I ever get married.”

  “Oh, you’ll get married,” he said. “Tell them to put the calls through now, and get my messages. And put in a call for me to Arnie Gurney in Las Vegas, at the Caesar’s Palace. He’s a client I really like: he works all year round, I never see him. You’ve heard of him—Mr. Las Vegas?”

  “Sure,” Gerry said. “I’ve heard of most of your clients—who hasn’t?”

  He looked pleased. “Maybe I’ll take you to Vegas with me one time if I can’t get out of going. Arnie Gurney, believe me, you can live without … in fact, I think I’ll get pneumonia and stay home. He’s just the same offstage as he is on: he says hello and tells you five jokes.”