Probably I should have been alarmed by his odd transformation. But when it began, I didn’t see anything terribly amiss. To be entirely candid, I was just happy Neil had found something other than orthodontics that really interested him. I now suspect that I was also subconsciously afraid that if I began probing much into the mystery behind Neil’s new Filthy Rich! obsession, I might not like what I found.
What deep inner hunger was it that had Neil so upended? Was it simply monetary greed? A secret yearning for a big career change? Or was it the chance for momentary fame that intrigued him? In future years, cultural experts who study the societal impact of Filthy Rich! may come up with a definitive answer. While they’re at it, I suppose, they may also tell us whether Certs is really a breath mint or a candy.
Personally, I can’t wait.
* * *
After playing Richie Cunningham’s mom on Happy Days, actress Marion Ross perfected a Yiddish accent to convincingly portray a Jewish grandmother on another weekly take on the 1950s, the much-acclaimed Brooklyn Bridge. What was the grandmother’s name?
a. Sophie Berger
b. Molly Goldberg
c. Golda Levine
d. Selma Silverman
See correct answer on back….
* * *
* * *
ANSWER
a. Sophie Berger
* * *
Five
I was awakened by the dulcet tones of Frank, the morning doorman, alternately yelling my name, ringing my doorbell, and pounding on my apartment door.
“Ms. Mallowitz, Ms. Mallowitz, are you okay?” he shouted.
“Yeah, I guess so,” I replied, still lying in bed, and in the process of trying to prop open my right eyelid with an index finger.
“What’s that? Is that you, Ms. Mallowitz?”
“Yes, Frank. It’s me, unfortunately. You can stop banging.”
I threw on a terry bathrobe and plodded to the door in a bleary state located somewhere between dead and don’t bother to resuscitate.
“Some rough night,” Frank blurted out when he saw me, which I took to be as much a commentary on my disheveled appearance as the dire doings on Filthy Rich! “Your mom was getting worried because your phone was shut off, so she called downstairs and asked me to check on you. She says she left a message on your machine you should play back right away.”
“Tell me, Frank, what time is it?”
“Almost ten o’clock.”
For my mother, the early bird, waiting until 10 A.M. showed remarkable restraint. She thinks nothing of calling at 6 or 7 A.M. when she has one of her brainstorms, as if saying she didn’t mean to wake me makes waking me okay.
“If she calls again, Frank, do me a favor and lie. Tell her you saw me and I looked just fine.”
“Sure thing,” he said. “Oh, and I almost forgot. These flowers came for you. Two gigantic arrangements. Almost identical. From the same fancy Upper East Side florist. I took them up with me on the service elevator. Wait, I’ll fetch them.”
An enormous feeling of relief came over me. Of course, I assumed the flowers were from Neil. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d resorted to sending flowers when he wanted to apologize for something and couldn’t think of an appropriate dental item.
Frank carried the mega-floral offerings to my kitchen counter and departed. I saw a little white card Scotch-taped to one of them, and I snatched it, fully expecting it to contain one of Neil’s schmaltzy messages, telling me, as he did once last year, that “Our fight last night left a cavity-size hole in my heart” or something equivalently gruesome. We’d get back together, and life would go on as before. At least that’s what I hoped would happen, or thought I hoped.
But never mind the speculation. The card was not from Neil, and there was no mention of a cavity-size anything. It was from Barbara Walters. She’d seen my Filthy Rich! gig and wanted me for an exclusive interview.
I’ll say that again in case you weren’t paying attention: BARBARA WALTERS! The legendary ABC newswoman who interviewed Monica Lewinsky, and no shortage of other major and mini-celebrities, wanted to talk to me.
“Dear Marcy,” her card said, “Admired your fortitude on Filthy Rich! You have a story to share with American women, and I’d like to help you do it. Feel free to call me at home, 555-5094. Your friend, Barbara Walters.”
The second group of flowers was from Barbara’s arch competitor at ABC, Diane Sawyer.
My God, I thought, DIANE SAWYER! Among her many other journalistic coups, she did the big interview with Darva Conger. That was the exclusive where Darva, the big phony, somberly lamented her loss of privacy and credibility shortly after she married a stranger for money on live TV, and just before she agreed to pose nude for Playboy. “The pictures,” Darva later explained, “have a feeling of innocence.” Yeah, sure.
Diane Sawyer’s friendly note gave me her home phone number, offered two passes to the opening of a new movie the next month by her director husband, Mike Nichols, and invited me and a guest to sit at their table at the opening-night party.
My first reaction was to feel flattered by the attention from these two famous television journalists. After all, I’m only human. But within an hour, the initial excitement wore off, and I was feeling even more depressed than before. In my one appearance on national television, I had managed to make a fool of myself and lose the man I thought I’d marry. I had no desire to stage a television return in order to share more of my personal travails with the motley group of strangers who comprise the viewing public. This fame thing is vastly overrated. Besides, I couldn’t get past the question of who I would bring as a guest to Diane Sawyer’s soiree since Neil was no longer a possibility.
My quiet but secure existence as an obscure Personal Life Coach attached to a boring orthodontist with a monster-size ego was over. The looming challenge was coming to terms with that fact.
I pressed the playback button on my answering machine.
“Marcy, it’s your mother.”
Who else would I think it was?
“Everybody’s kvelling,” she said, obviously recovered from the demeaning events of the previous night. “You made the front page of the New York Post. You have to see it. You’re throwing the ring at that bastard Neil, and you look fabulous. That outfit we picked up at the Saks sale does wonders for your figure.”
I had reached rock bottom, my life was falling apart to such a degree that I felt as if I might never leave my apartment again, and all my mother seemed to care about was how thin I looked in the pictures.
That’s Mom. I could be arrested for crimes against humanity and her only comment would be how good I looked in the mug shot. A case of misplaced values or simple maternal loyalty? You make the call.
“And, dear, you’ll love the headline: ‘Marcy to Neil: Drop Dead.’ It’s all over TV, too. You know Matt Lauer, the adorable young man on the Today show? He talked about you today with the weatherman. You know, that big guy with the earmuffs who’s always out there in the cold with the tourists, whatsisname, Al Roker. He said Neil’s a nerd and it’s not your fault you missed the Sonny and Cher question. Who’d want to be friends with someone who keeps track of Teri Garr’s comings and goings? Listen carefully to me, Marcy, that Matt Lauer, I know he’s married. But maybe he has a brother. Get one of your well-connected friends to find out. Tell her it’s okay even if he’s a couple of years younger. Why be a stickler? Call me later.”
Click.
The next message was from my friend Norma, just returned from a whirlwind national book tour promoting her trail-blazing new collection of essays on current feminist issues, Raging Hormones and Other Outrages.
“Sorry, Marcy,” she said. “But I told you so.”
* * *
What was the name of Rhoda Morgenstern’s heard-but-never-seen doorman on the Mary Tyler Moore Show spinoff Rhoda?
a. Bradley
b. Charles
c. Carlton
d. Fred
* * *
* * *
ANSWER
c. Carlton
* * *
Six
The flowers from Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer were just the beginning. By four o’clock of The Day After, poor Frank and his afternoon counterpart, hunky Jonathan, heartthrob of the building’s over-sixty set, had made at least a dozen deliveries to my apartment—all gifts from prominent people I’d never met trying to ingratiate themselves with Marcy now that she’d been rejected by her obnoxious orthodontist.
Think about that for a moment. People who less than a day before wouldn’t have bothered to give me the right, or even the wrong, time of day, for that matter, were now plying me with choice items charged to their expense accounts all because another person they knew only by his unappealing television performance decided he was too good for me. Bizarre, no?
But even more bizarre from my standpoint was the odd, floating sensation all of this largesse induced in me. I can’t remember all of the gifts, which I sincerely regret because I really should have appreciated the care that went into each and every card and present. But I do recall the giant Godiva assortments sent by Katie Couric, Bryant Gumbel, Maury Povich, and Larry King as bribes to try to get me to agree to an interview. I remember them mainly because I ended up eating every precious morsel the boxes contained, breaking my personal record for chocolate consumption—part of a sickening three-day binge that did nothing to restore the self-esteem badly damaged by Neil’s bad behavior, but did succeed in adding seven unsightly pounds of pure flab to what the Daily News had previously described as my “compact but not pudgy athletic frame.”
Montel’s shipment of giant hand-dipped strawberries from Dean & Deluca also hit the spot, but endeavoring to trick my fat cells, I overlooked their thick bittersweet-chocolate coating and counted them as fruit.
The generous gift basket of assorted gourmet salamis and cheeses from Balducci’s, the fancy Village food shop, didn’t do any wonders for my waistline either. It came with a lovely card from Tina Brown, the powerhouse editor whose trendy magazine, Talk, has tons of financing from Harvey Weinstein at Miramax, and is the source for fascinating scoops about his films. “Marcy, you were riveting,” she scribbled hastily, possibly on her way to one of those gaudy celebrity shindigs she’s always tossing on a yacht. “Can you do lunch next week, just the two of us and Gwyneth? I’m thinking our next cover with a movie tie-in. Have to run, Tina.”
Gwyneth Paltrow might play me in the movies? Does that mean I get to meet Ben Affleck? I wondered. Then I got worried. They better not cast him as Neil. He’d be too sympathetic.
Tom Brokaw sent no salamis. But he did send me a handwritten letter tendering an invitation to his Montana ranch if I’d appear on his NBC Nightly News broadcast. There was also an autographed boxing glove from Geraldo, inscribed “Round One to Marcy,” Hostess Ding Dongs, Twinkies, and an incredibly soft and comfortable jogging suit in pale pink from Rosie O’Donnell, and a large canvas public television tote bag from Charlie Rose filled with videotapes of opera highlights from This Evening at the Met. I confess I don’t like opera, but the fact that Charlie Rose believed I was sufficiently highbrow to like opera won him my loyalty forever. As for Rosie’s jogging suit with the tastefully small imprint of her smiling likeness for its logo, I put it on the moment it arrived and didn’t take it off for my entire binge period.
But probably the most thoughtful gift came from—who else?—Oprah Winfrey. It was as if she’d seen me in Rosie’s sweats and knew my depression had me eating for fifteen. Oprah’s care package included several low-fat dinners prepared by her personal chef and flash-frozen for my dining pleasure, a basket of fruit and other low-fat snacks, two motivational audiotapes made especially for me by Oprah’s Life Coaching guru, Dr. Phil, and, as if that weren’t enough, a copy of every book she had ever recommended for “Oprah’s Book Club.” “Let’s talk,” her note said simply. A handwritten P.S. provided her phone number.
I was deeply touched. But at that particular moment, I had no intention of granting interviews or appearing on anyone’s TV show, not even my new pal Oprah’s. My immediate objective was to ease the pain and embarrassment of the televised breakup by gorging my way into oblivion. And, just to be certain this strategy succeeded in defeating any hope of reinvigorating my social life, I had defiantly draped my rapidly expanding body in my Rosie sweats and foresworn civilized standards of personal hygiene.
My other best friend, perky Lois Torno (affectionately dubbed “the White Tornado” years ago by Norma), stopped by around six to try to cheer me up on her way to yet another soft-money fund-raiser she’d helped organize for the Democrats. Lois, who roomed with Norma and me all through Barnard, was always being stopped on the street for her uncanny resemblance to Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing, before the bad nose job. She couldn’t care less about politics. But no dope, Lois had discovered a few years ago that hitting up rich donors for campaigns was a great way to meet eligible, or at least semi-eligible men of means. She’d hitched her welcome wagon to the Democrats, figuring the more socially progressive Dems would be less likely to be frightened off by her two failed marriages (no children, thank goodness). Lois claimed that at one of her political soirees last year, she was propositioned by President Clinton but turned down his invitation to “do it” on Air Force One. I believe the first part, but I’ve known Lois too long to believe the second.
Lois, the lucky girl, doesn’t have to hold down a real, paying job because a few years back, Husband Number Two handed her a bundle in exchange for her agreeing to seek an annulment from the Vatican on the hazy grounds that their marriage was a case of mistaken identity. The annulment was granted, which makes you wonder how the Pope got to be Pope given that he believed the tripe Lois served up to erase the union from whatever official scorebook it is they keep in Rome. In any event, the annulment allowed the son of a bitch—the husband, not the Pope—to drop Lois for an MIT-trained programming expert at his fabulously successful dot.com company without breaking the heart of his eighty-three-year-old Italian mama, who adored Lois and taught my friend, a descendant of the only Italian mother who can’t boil pasta, how to make great lasagna.
I should probably add that political fund-raising is but the latest creative strategy Lois has deployed in her never-ending quest to meet guys. I remember back in our junior year, she joined a knitting class at the 92nd Street Y to cultivate a softer image that might be more appealing to men than that of a Seven Sisters intellectual. Much to her credit, however, Lois quit in the middle of the second class when the woman seated next to her went into serious math panic counting stitches. She’s man crazy, but she’s no bimbo.
“What’s going on?” asked Lois, eyeing my incredible haul for the day, which was now lined up along the walls of my vestibule, piled on my large oak dining table, and distributed to numerous sites around the living room, transforming my humdrum quarters into a festive explosion of multicolored cellophane wrapping. But the first thing that struck her was that Neil’s horrendous dental chair was gone. “You didn’t lose a man, Marcy,” she commented, “you lost an eyesore.”
“Apple?” I said, offering her an impressively polished McIntosh from Oprah’s basket of goodies. “It’s organic. Oprah sent it.”
“Right, your friend Oprah.”
I handed her the card. “See for yourself.”
“This is crazy,” she said.
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said. “Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, and Brokaw also sent stuff. And please, let’s not forget Geraldo’s boxing glove.”
“It’s a nice color for the room,” Lois commented, fingering the glove’s soft red leather and then returning it to the center of the coffee table by the sofa, where I’d previously placed it as a conversation piece. “Very thoughtful.”
“And Charlie Rose sent this tote,” I said, lifting his canvas offering from its nearby resting place on the r
ug, and taking its full measure. “It looks cheap,” I told Lois, “but in fairness, it’s Public Television. After last night, suddenly everyone wants me to be on their show. In show-biz lingo, I’m hot. You know Mrs. Schwartz downstairs? The one whose dog has a bad bladder problem? She caught me coming in last night and asked for my autograph.”
“Impressive. I guess that means Norma and I will have to stop claiming Neil never gave you anything—apart from that cheap ring and those tacky spritzers, I mean,” Lois said before turning serious. “It’s your due, Marcy, after all your time with that schmuck. Enjoy the ride. Which will it be, Diane or Barbara?”
“Neither,” I said, matter-of-factly.
“Geraldo would be a gas,” Norma continued, ignoring my response. “I hear he may be dating again. Maybe you could introduce us. I bet he’d love to go out with a gorgeous, independently wealthy Mediterranean with a fabulous body. Also a fabulous mind, of course.”
“Stop showing off, Lois,” I kidded back, and then pointed at her slinky black dress. “It’s a Lawrence Steele, right? I saw it in Vogue and thought for two thousand dollars, he should throw in a little more fabric on top. It’s so low-cut your boobs could fall out. Then again, I suppose nothing’s too good for the Democrats.”
Filthy Rich Page 5