It was clear to both of them that the duration of the affair would be the length of the shoot. Six weeks. And it was. It barely outlasted the wrap party. He flew to Vancouver to cut the movie, and she never saw him again. Or the movie, which, thankfully, was never released.
But he left with her the desire to rediscover men—and the conviction to dump Neil. When she told him she wanted out, he became nasty. If she wanted a divorce, she could pay for it. They had been married for six years with no children, and the only asset of any value was the small two-bedroom house they had bought, with her money, in Silver Lake. It had gone up in value during their marriage, and he wanted not only half of it, but a piece of her SAG pension, and an alimony payment until he “got back on his feet.”
He had hired a lawyer and was threatening to take her to court. She couldn’t fucking believe it. During their six-year marriage, he had earned next to nothing, and now he was claiming that he “took care of her needs, sacrificing his own career for hers.”
The divorce dragged on for almost a year, with the lawyers milking it for all it was worth—which wasn’t a whole lot, but more than what they had been fighting over in the first place. Marcy got to keep the house and the Fiat Spider with the bad rings, but she had to give him half the SAG pension accumulated during their marriage, and fifty thousand dollars “to get him back on his feet.”
So Marcy found herself skidding into her forties unattached, undiscovered, and unloved by anyone but a series of rescue dogs she adopted and showered inordinate amounts of love on. She had good friends, mostly fellow struggling actors, with whom she shared the ups and downs of the bumpy road of a film career. She continued to take classes, perfecting her technique, rejoicing in brief interludes of glory when she got to do some marvelous scene in class, and became, for those fifteen minutes, Anne Bancroft, Shirley MacLaine, Meryl Streep, or the occasional Equity Waiver play in a ninety-nine-seat theater in East Hollywood, where she got to play damaged women of a somewhat higher pedigree—Lady Macbeth or Blanche DuBois.
And she continued to hope that there would be a man with her name on him, someone she could love the way a woman was supposed to love a man—fully, madly, deeply. But as she climbed into her late forties, the opportunities began to narrow. Men her age were able to trade down, scooping up women in their thirties and younger. What was left were divorced guys—bitter neurotics like Neil—or men in their fifties or sixties, who were ignoring women their own age to trawl among the recently dumped women in their forties.
As far as she was concerned, it was bottom-feeding, and she wasn’t interested. Instead, she indulged in flings with below-the-line crew guys and struggling young directors, boozy weekends in Baja or Vegas, where she would wake up on Sunday mornings and long to be lying next to some warm and witty man who cherished her, instead of some semi-literate grip who just wanted to fuck her.
Through it all, she continued to work, playing older damaged women, auditioning for medication commercials—middle-aged women with dry skin, arthritis, insomnia. She drew the line at laxatives. And now and then, there was a role with a little meat on it, and for a week or two she felt like an artist and not merely a caricature of a type that she could barely relate to.
At heart, she was Madeleine Greenspan, a nice Jewish girl from the Valley, and not Marcy Gray, the damaged soul she had made a living playing. She could have been very happy, she sometimes thought, with a lawyer or orthodontist, children, a nice house, and maybe a job teaching acting or decorating houses, or whatever.
But, for one reason or another, it hadn’t worked out that way. Instead she had spent the last twenty years watching the ship drift out of the harbor without her. And now she was, as the French say, “a woman of a certain age,” living in narrowed circumstances in Palm Springs with a spoiled dachshund.
The truth was that she wasn’t entirely sure just how old she really was. She had lied so often about her birth date, had written various numbers on various work forms, that the only way to find out the truth would be to send for a copy of her birth certificate. This she assiduously avoided doing. She couldn’t face seeing the actual number in the glaring California sunlight.
At sixty, or some approximation of that age, she had gone under the knife. Twenty-five grand to a top-of-the-line Bedford Drive plastic surgeon, who had done such a good job that you couldn’t really tell. Or so she allowed herself to think. There wasn’t a working actress in her age range who hadn’t gotten work done. It was self-defense, she told herself. Eat or be eaten.
The surgery didn’t do much for her career, which continued to dissolve by imperceptible degrees. Every six months, when she got her SAG dues form, the numbers stared her in the face. She had moved from damaged girls, to damaged mothers, to damaged mothers with teenage children. There weren’t a lot of roles for damaged grandmothers. Casting directors continued to call her in for oddball roles, but she booked maybe one in ten, and that one was rarely more than a day’s work.
It was time to move on to Plan B. Which involved selling the house in Silver Lake and getting a condo somewhere she could afford. The options were narrow. She couldn’t face living in the Valley, north of the Boulevard, in some six-unit, one-bedroom place with a postage-stamp pool and cottage-cheese ceilings, surrounded by out-of-work actors and laid-off aerospace engineers.
An actor-realtor friend told her she could get a decent place for her money in Palm Springs. It was only a ninety-minute drive from LA, had a great climate (in the winter at least), and was full of aging gay couples who would be more convivial neighbors than those she’d find in Canoga Park.
It took her a while to give up the ghost and admit to herself that it was time to leave Hollywood. Her therapist told her that she was in an abusive relationship with the business. It didn’t value her, or nourish her. It just beat her up.
“Would you put up with this shit from a man?” Janet Costanza, a no-nonsense, transactional type, asked her, before SAG cut down on the mental health benefits and she couldn’t afford to see her regularly.
Marcy sat in Janet’s big overstuffed armchair next to the tissue box, tears in her eyes, makeup running.
“What else am I going to do?”
“Live your life. Face it: you’re a woman in a bad marriage. So do you hang around and put up with the abuse, or do you get out and make a fresh start?”
“I’ve never done anything else but act.”
“Yes, you have. You’ve lived your life. Acting is just a way of making a living.”
So she sold the house in Silver Lake and moved to Palm Springs. She enrolled in yoga classes, painting classes, cooking classes, and real estate classes, and she tried not to look at the phone. Unable to make a complete break, she didn’t tell her agent that she was out of the business—just that she was in Palm Springs and would only come up to audition for real jobs.
“What’s a real job?” Artie Reman, her agent of twenty years, asked her over lunch at a sushi place on Santa Monica Boulevard.
“One that has a little meat on it.”
“You mean, the stuff that Meryl turns down?”
Artie Reman cut to the chase with a ruthless economy of words. He would call her and say, “You’re not getting the job.” Or, “They think you’re too old.” Or, “They wrote the role out.”
And this time he was no gentler. “Look, I got women fifteen years younger than you who can’t get arrested. Actresses have a shelf life, and yours is past due.”
“Jesus, Artie, do you have to compare me to a container of milk?”
“Delicacy is not my strong suit.”
She sat there eating her raw vegetables, hoping for at least a lifeline to be tossed her way. And though he was indelicate, Artie Reman was not without feeling. Or at least nostalgia.
“I’ll keep my ear to the ground for something right for you. If I can get you in, you’ll drive up from the desert and read. Okay?”
So off she went, her belongings in a small truck driven by moonlighting, out-of-
work actors who moved things by night so as not to be unavailable for auditions. Marcy took with her cartons of headshots, old scripts, videos of her performances, photos of her at the craft-services table with actors people might recognize. She’d had one line in Cat Ballou—“You look like a man who could use some company”—in which she played a damaged saloon hussy putting the moves on Lee Marvin, and the actor had graciously signed the on-set photographer’s still of them. Love ya, Lee.
She had chosen Paradise Gardens from all the other condominium complexes in Palm Springs because the ground-floor units each had a little patio. Her resolution to take up gardening, however, didn’t last longer than one summer, during which everything she had planted died an agonizing death. If there was an Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Plants, she would have been outed, her very funny, very gay neighbor, Stanley, told her.
Stanley Hochberg was a retired choreographer who had worked on several of the big production musicals of the fifties and sixties. Stanley being both gay and Jewish, they bonded. They drank wine, cooked for each other, watched old movies on television. He told her she was gorgeous, and that if he’d had an ounce of hetero blood in him, he’d be all over her.
He constantly cracked her up. Waiting for the light to change, some delicious young man would walk in front of them in tight jeans, and Stanley would say, “Be still, my beating dick.” Or his description of Chris and Edie, the middle-aged swingers of Paradise Gardens, as “Sonny and Cher on Quaaludes.” It was Stanley who coined the phrase “Purgatory Gardens” to describe the thirty-unit complex on Paradise Road they lived in. It’s not quite up to the standards of hell.
And it was to Stanley that she had confided that she felt her life, at that point, was mostly about damage control. She needed to circle the wagons and figure out a way to get through the years in front of her.
“I’m a single, childless woman, living in genteel poverty. A couple of bad breaks, and I could be a bag lady,” she told him.
“Don’t be a drama queen, sweetheart.”
“Seriously. Who’s going to take care of me in my old age?”
“I will,” he’d said, and meant it. And she was convinced he had meant it, until he got ill and died of stomach cancer. She had nursed him as much as he would let her, fighting back tears as he went not so gently into the night. Why the fuck couldn’t it have been AIDS? I would at least have had some decent memories . . .
Without Stanley, she felt that there was no human presence to keep her from winding up with a cardboard sign at a freeway on ramp. WILL ACT FOR MONEY. Or give head, for that matter, but that would be a hard sell in this market. In her day, she had been proficient at that particular craft. If only she had sucked the right cocks. The thought made her laugh until she cried, and she missed Stanley even more.
The strategy was clear: find someone to take care of her. He didn’t have to be Mr. Right, just not Mr. Wrong. Surely there was someone around, some decent-looking man her age, or maybe just a little older, who didn’t have pee stains on his underwear and drove at night. And she wouldn’t mind a little sex now and then, just enough to remind her that she was still a woman.
She had narrowed it down to two candidates—both, conveniently, residents of Paradise Gardens. For once, they would be auditioning for her, though they didn’t know it. It wasn’t a cattle call. She was already at callbacks, having scouted the available talent and come up with the only two men who were presentable and straight.
The safer choice was a retired cement company owner named Sammy Dee, who had hit on her while she was on the StairMaster in the exercise room. He was on the short side—five-nine, maybe five-ten in shoes with heels—and could lose a few pounds, but he had a rich head of undyed hair and nice skin.
Sammy Dee was from somewhere on Long Island, and had just enough of the East Coast accent to attract her. His nails were impeccably manicured—the sign of a man who took care of himself—and he was rarely more than a few hours away from his last shave. In the right light, he reminded her of Lino Ventura (in Lelouch’s Happy New Year).
Sammy was soft-spoken and polite. She liked the way he listened with full attention, never interrupting, keeping his eyes focused. And he had old-world manners. He opened car doors, pulled chairs out, got up when she entered a room.
There was something about him, however, that didn’t quite add up. Apparently he had no family, or at least none that he was close to. He told her he’d never married, was an only child, and his parents were long dead. He’d left home at seventeen to work in construction, and owned his own business by the time he was thirty. For the last ten years, he’d been an independent investor.
What to make of a straight guy pushing seventy who had never married? There had to be some skeletons in his closet. Long-term relationships, girlfriends, women who left him or were left by him? Judging by the lump in his gym shorts, she was convinced he was playing for the right team.
More importantly, if he had owned his own business for all those years, why wasn’t he living in Boca Raton or Beverly Hills?
Google was no help. Did you mean Sandra Dee?
On the surface, at least, he seemed to be comfortable. His wardrobe was expensive, he drove a new Lexus, and he had some serious jewelry—a gold ring, a neck chain, and a Philippe Patek.
But she had no idea what he had in the bank. If anything. The last thing she needed in her life, at this point, was another dependent. Klaus was bad enough. The dachshund had a series of chronic ailments that caused her to drop serious change at the vet’s.
She knew even less about the second candidate, the African who lived in a two-bedroom unit, the second bedroom used as an office for his import/export business. Didier Onyekachukwu was from Ivory Coast—a place that, to her, was just a colorful name somewhere on the map of Africa.
He was tall, heavy-set, and wore mother-of-pearl reading glasses on a chain around his neck. On one of his cheeks was a scar that he told her was a tribal marking, which she found, for some reason, sexy. He spoke English erratically, but with a perfectly charming French accent. English was his third language—before French, there had been a tribal language that he had spoken until he was ten, when he’d been shipped off to a missionary school.
There was a sing-song quality to his speech, an exotic cadence. He called her Mar-cee and smiled through a set of incredibly white teeth. He moved gracefully for his size and liked to dance. A major plus, in her book—and an area in which Sammy Dee couldn’t compete. I don’t dance—don’t ask me. Marcy had yet to find a straight man who could dance.
Didier called her ma petite and ma belle and had a lovely, rich, full-bodied laugh that filled the space around him. It was hard to dislike him. Even Tuuli and Majda, the Finnish lesbians who didn’t like anybody, would allow smiles to leak from their icy Scandinavian features when he joked with them. He called them Inga and Binga, to their faces, and managed to sell them a mahogany statue of a tribal princess with a large pointed headdress that, he assured them, was used as a sex toy by Sapphic Fulani women.
Now that she had narrowed her suitors down to the final two, she missed Stanley’s perspective. He would have guided her, helped her formulate a strategy, spotted things about the two men that she could be missing. He would have been her consultant, her coach, her confidant.
Chris and Edie had no doubt cruised them, interviewing them as possible additions to their swinging parties. Edie had approached Marcy one day at the pool and suggested that she show up with one of the new guys for a couple of Mai Tais and a little you-know-what. Marcy passed, explaining that she didn’t indulge publicly in you-know-what.
“You don’t what you’re missing.”
“I’m afraid I do.”
The night of the mold meeting, the contestants came face to face. It was obvious to her, and probably to them, that they were in competition. Didier was cordial, jovial, diplomatic, but Sammy looked like he wanted to put his rival through a wall. Frankly, she wasn’t sure which of the two at
titudes was more attractive. Stanley Kowalski, even with Brando playing him, didn’t race her motor. But, then, a touch of the Neanderthal wasn’t entirely unappealing either. Though Marcy considered herself a feminist—what woman who supports herself isn’t?—she wasn’t above being titillated by the thought of a man throwing her over his shoulder and dragging her off into a cave.
When Didier had proposed French lessons, Sammy had invited himself along. It was clear that Sammy was more interested in preventing her from spending quality time with the African than in learning French. It was almost like high school—boys competing to drive her home. She loved it.
The French lesson didn’t turn out well. The lunch she prepared for the three of them had been an awkward affair, the two of them going out of their way to belittle the other as if they were peeing on trees to claim their territory. She threw both of them out after an hour and took her nap with Klaus.
There was a third man who interested her (professionally, not romantically) at Paradise Gardens, a movie producer named Charlie Berns. The man had flown in under her radar. She knew of him vaguely, the way everyone in show business knows everyone else, and had been surprised to learn that he was a neighbor.
She knocked on his door one evening, and he invited her in for a cup of coffee. His unit looked like it was occupied by transients. The decor consisted of cheaply framed one-sheets of movies he had done, low-budget genre films without notable actors or directors. And it was dreadfully hot, even at night. He told her that he was allergic to air conditioning.
The man had a scattered, vacant manner to him, an expression on his face that seemed to indicate that nothing you could tell him would in any way disconcert him. Producing movies taught one to roll with the punches, and Charlie Berns looked as if he had been down for the count a number of times and yet still managed to get up off the canvas.
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