Filthy Rich

by Dorothy Samuels

  “Very funny, Marcy. Now I’ll be self-conscious.”

  “And, Lois, who did your hair? It looks great.”

  “Your Giovanni, of course. Adding the subtle blond streaks was his idea. Also putting it up. He said it would make me look in my twenties.”

  “Maybe even younger,” I replied, still bitter over his broken promise to accentuate my cheekbones. “What did you have to do to get him to stop yapping on the cell phone and pay attention, sleep with him?”

  “Well, you’re in some great mood I see,” Lois replied. “I don’t take it personally. But you know in your heart I’m right about the TV offers. You’d be a fool to blow them off. I’m sure Norma will tell you the same thing.”

  Lois picked out a large green grape from Oprah’s fruit basket and placed it in her mouth, careful not to touch her meticulously applied red lip gloss. As she slowly chewed it, she looked me over. “I can’t believe the hideous getup you’re in,” she said after a swallow. “I’ll be in charge of your wardrobe and makeup.”

  “I’m not doing any shows,” I announced. “This may come as a shock, Lois, but I don’t want to make a career of being America’s most famous and pathetic dumpee, even if it’s only a short career, which I’m sure it would be. And for your information, Rosie sent this outfit. I like it.”

  “Don’t get all insulted, sweetie,” Lois said, reclaiming the elegant black beaded evening bag she’d nonchalantly tossed on a chair while checking out my loot. “I have nothing against Rosie. All I’m saying is, you should do her show, and some of the others, too. Live it up. Find yourself an agent who can pocket you some endorsement money before this all disappears. Neil would die seeing you on TV being treated like a star.”

  Lois plucked another grape from Oprah’s fruit offering. “And what’s this drivel about you being ‘pathetic’?” she continued after consuming it. “Have you forgotten Episode Twenty? The famous one where Marcia gets braces?”

  I knew immediately where she was heading. Lois was slipping back into our old Brady Bunch mode. Back in college, the two of us spent endless fun hours debating the deeper meaning of Brady plot lines, and trying to decide which of the 116 half-hour episodes most fit whatever pressing dilemma we found ourselves facing—the underlying assumption being, of course, that the show’s five seasons of inane stories, dialogue, and costumes pretty thoroughly encompassed Life in all of its many complicated variations. This little game used to drive Norma nuts, not just because to her the show epitomized the worst of mass culture, or because Lois and I should have been studying, but because she suspected that to some indefinable degree, we weren’t joking.

  Come to think of it, Norma’s distaste for The Brady Bunch and its supposed effect on me wasn’t that much different from my mother’s, except, unlike Mom, Norma never tried to bolster her case by talking up the comparative virtues of The Lucy Show.

  “The braces episode,” Lois prodded when I didn’t answer immediately. “It’s quintessential Brady, to use a favorite Q word I learned for the SATs.”

  “Yeah, it’s a quintessential episode,” I agreed. “But I’m not sure I’m up for the Bradys today. They’re too upbeat. Besides, I fail to see how rehashing Marcia’s orthodontic problem is supposed to help me forget my jerky orthodontist boyfriend. After last night, I’m taking a mental-health break from all things orthodontic. The way I’m feeling right now, I may even boycott my next dental cleaning.”

  “Marcy, think about it,” Lois insisted. “You’re saying you’re too pathetic to go on TV is exactly the same as Marcia Brady obsessing that her braces made her too ugly to keep her date for the school dance. Remember the ending? Her date turned out to have braces, too. So you see, she didn’t have to worry. She wound up going to the dance and having a great time. Just like you should. Anyway, you can’t sit home ad infinitum.”

  “Lois, it’s been less than twenty-four hours,” I said. “I have no immediate plans to leave this apartment, but to say ‘ad infinitum’ is a tad premature, don’t you think?”

  “I know just the thing,” she said. “Why don’t you get out of those yucky duds and come with me? Maybe we can find you a rich Democrat.”

  “Thanks, Lois. But if I go out, I’ll just be followed by swarms of reporters and photographers. It will be exactly like Monica. I won’t be able to enjoy the hors d’oeuvres in peace. They’ll catch me reaching for a pig in a blanket and the next day’s tabloids will be full of unflattering snapshots with captions playing off the word ‘pig,’ and lots of expert speculation about the amount of calories I consumed, and whether the breakup with Neil, the creep, is sapping my dietary willpower, which I can tell you with confidence, it surely is.” To emphasize the point, I picked up a Godiva chocolate from Bryant Gumbel’s box and tossed it into my wide-open mouth. “My current plan is to lie low for a while. I’ll let you know if it changes.”

  “Marcy, your turning down Oprah and all the rest is either the most noble thing I’ve ever heard, or the most self-destructive,” Lois said, giving me a quick hug as she headed out the door. “I don’t have time right now to figure out which. I’m supposed to be at the event early to greet arriving VIPs. There’s a cute state senator coming in from Oswego who looks promising. Call you later.”

  Lois did call later. The state senator from Oswego, she reported, turned out to be gay.

  “I didn’t know they allowed gay people in upstate New York,” I said. “But maybe that explains why he left upstate to come to the party.”

  “Not funny, Marcy,” Lois said. “Man-wise, the night was a bust. The good news is, I have at least one friend who’s not above giving TV interviews. I forgot to tell you. Norma’s on Ted Koppel tonight to plug her new book.”

  Ted Koppel. Good for him, I thought, and not for having the foresight to book Norma Ruckenhaus, well-known feminist intellectual. I was thinking instead of the notable absence of the host of Nightline among the media biggies plying me with flowers and candy to get me to bare my soul, such as it is, on their program.

  Flipping the channels to find Norma, my timing coincided with the end of the local news shows. Lucky me. I landed on channel 5 just as Liz Smith was launching into a review of my humiliating introduction to the viewing public, reading text off the TelePrompTer I gathered she was recycling from her syndicated column. “It was a long, rough night for Marcy Lee Mallowitz, but I confess I enjoyed every minute,” gushed the veteran gossip czarina, her tone unduly chipper, I thought, considering it was my life she was talking about. “Like a lot of what transpires these days under the nouvelle heading of ‘reality TV,’ Marcy’s blowup with her beau on Filthy Rich! was at once tasteless and transfixing—sort of like munching popcorn at a train wreck.”

  I then had the eerie experience of watching different stations play the same humiliating video clip of the previous night’s Filthy Rich! fracas. Fortunately, I had the foresight to put the sound on mute, so I was able to avoid any snide remarks by the blow-dried anchors.

  The part they kept playing is where Neil calls me a bitch, starts screaming “Comedy Hour, Comedy Hour, Comedy Hour,” and I respond by yelling back and throwing the ring. In the playback, Neil seemed even angrier than I remembered, his body language even more menacing. Also, I had to give my mother credit. I looked pretty good in that Saks number we picked out for the show. Even on sale, it cost a lot of dead roaches, as my dad would say. But they were dead roaches well spent.

  After playing the clip, channel 9 announced the results of a brand-new poll. Americans, according to the survey, were so impressed by the way I stood up to Neil that they now rated me among the world’s most admired women—behind Eleanor Roosevelt and Mother Teresa, to be sure, but before another woman with man problems, Hillary Clinton. Don’t get a swelled head, I told myself. A week from now, probably only a few die-hard Filthy Rich! fans will remember your name. Adding insult, I thought, by then I’ll probably be replaced on the list by the latest contestant to be ejected from the phony island paradise where they shoot T
he Plank.

  The Plank, I needn’t tell you, is the hot new “reality show,” which at that moment was threatening to equal, or even surpass, the phenomenal success of Filthy Rich!, notwithstanding its cheesy production values and a ludicrous format that lends credence to my theory that someone—perhaps visiting Russian spies piqued by the long lines at Disneyland—has slipped a mild hallucinogenic into the bottled water consumed by the TV big shots charged with deciding which programs America gets to see. Each week on the The Plank, in case you haven’t seen it, network executives dressed in elaborate pirate costumes drive around environmentally sensitive beach areas in flashy BMW convertibles, sometimes getting stuck in the sand. But the real drama comes at the end of the hour when the “pirates” capture the scantily clad contestant who registered the lowest likability with viewers in the Q rating the week before, and force him or her to walk a specially constructed plank to an awaiting rowboat, thereby tossing the person off the island and the show. The plank is decorated with the show’s logo of a winking pirate done in blue-and-gold glitter, so it stands out in the aerial shots that open and close the program.

  Although it looks like all this action is taking place on a remote tropical island, The Plank is actually filmed on a back lot in Burbank. The rats and bugs the pirates/executives devour in dining scenes are actually filet mignon, unless, of course, they requested chicken a few days in advance to help keep down their cholesterol. To maintain the show’s authenticity, the contestants are fed real rats and bugs.

  I tried to watch The Plank once to see what all the hoopla was about on a night my worthless former roomie was working late—catching up on making molds of patients’ teeth, he said. I was deep in snoozeland after about ten minutes, and I wasn’t even tired. I just couldn’t stand the tedium anymore, and I was too lazy to get up from the sofa to search for the remote, which Neil, the scuzzy piece of dentifrice, had stored somewhere without informing me of the location for about the trillionth time. The only thing more distasteful than the show itself, in my book (other than Neil), is the mean-spirited Miller Lite commercial, where a half dozen professional football players chase a short, chubby, bearded guy out of a bar yelling, “Go back to the island, weirdo,” when they figure out he’s Brad Thatcher, the cunning cross-dressing plumber from outside Hartford who, by virtue of his victory in The Plank’s first survival test, is now a world-famous celebrity. I fail to see the humor in any kind of bigotry, although I surmise that Thatcher is laughing all the way to the bank.

  The last thing I remember before dozing off for the night was hearing Norma accuse the nation’s leading male fashion designers of a conscious plot to subjugate women by raising hemlines.

  “Ted,” she said, trying to stir controversy and book sales, “we’re talking about men who want to exploit women, but don’t really like them. I ask: Why else expose their knees?”

  I thought Norma made a good point. It’s a lot harder to take someone seriously around the office if her skirt crawls up to her gizzard each time she sits down. But the eversensible moderator wasn’t buying my friend’s antifeminist conspiracy theory. “Come now, Ms. Ruckenhaus,” Koppel said, “surely there’s more to fashion than a desire to keep women down. I daresay Calvin Klein and the others have prospered precisely because women are more liberated, not the other way around. And pardon me for saying this, but I detect a tinge of sexism in your implicit assumption that women will go along like sheep with whatever these gentlemen say is fashion. And what about the female designers? I don’t see them complaining.”

  Koppel promised Norma a chance to respond after a commercial break. But by then, I was already fast asleep, dreaming I was being chased by a giant toothbrush.

  * * *

  A recurring comedy sketch on what popular show featured a character, Laverne, sharing dirt about men with her friend at the Laundromat?

  a. The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour

  b. The Joan Rivers Show

  c. The Carol Burnett Show

  d. Saturday Night Live

  See correct answer on back….

  * * *

  * * *

  ANSWER

  a. The Sonny and Cher

  Comedy Hour

  * * *

  Seven

  Oops. In the depressing aftermath of my network television debut, and distracted by the likes of Barbara Walters wooing me for a tell-all chat, I’d forgotten all about my clients. My subconscious sent me a flash about this dereliction of duty around 6 A.M., causing me to awake with a start.

  I felt truly awful, and not just because I’m the sort of gal who deeply resents rising with the roosters. Barely thirty-six hours ago, in a pitifully public trauma, I’d lost the man I thought I was going to marry. Now, it seemed, I was on a fast track to pissing away my fulfilling career as the Personal Life Coach to a churning assemblage of striving, well-to-do ladies.

  I thought of poor Dolores Smithers, the forty-three-year-old financial wizard, whose scheduled two o’clock session the previous afternoon had completely slipped my mind. Dolores, having already banked a small fortune, no longer saw her future in pork bellies. Instead, she was counting on my coaching assistance to realize her long-standing dream of becoming the proud proprietor/artistic director of a crafts shop specializing in delicate macramé items with a nautical motif. Yesterday, I recalled glumly, we were supposed to go to a big yarn store together. I hoped that my no-show wouldn’t dampen her resolve to make the break from the pressured job and lifestyle she had grown to hate.

  By the way, the field trip to the yarn store is an example of a useful technique I call “strategic realization.” Getting Dolores to see and smell the wool she yearned to commune with on a full-time basis would, I felt, move her a critical step closer to finding the courage to pursue her true passion in the wonderful world of macramé miniatures. It took seven hour-long sessions to persuade Dolores to take an afternoon off from work to make the woolly journey. Now, I feared, it would probably take seven more just to persuade her not to fire me and find a new Personal Life Coach.

  I played back my messages. There was one from my mother, natch, this time to announce that if she didn’t hear from me in an hour she was assuming I didn’t mind her giving People magazine some “nice” pictures of her newly (in)famous daughter.

  “Can you imagine, Marcy,” Mom said, “you’re going to be in People. The neighbors are so excited they practically have shpilkes.”

  “Shpilkes” is a great Yiddish word meaning “ants in your pants.” I didn’t know about the neighbors, but the idea of my mother blathering about my private life to a reporter from People was enough to give me a serious case.

  “The reporter asked about you and Neil,” continued her message. “I told her I never liked him. He’s an orthodontist who won’t treat children, for God’s sake. What kind of father is that for my grandchildren?”

  Good work, Mom, I thought. That will teach me not to answer my phone or message machine in a timely manner. The Marcy Lee Mallowitz story was now going to get the People treatment whether I wanted it or not. I just hoped my mother would have the good sense not to share my baby bath photos or, even worse, high school prom pictures of me wearing big, teased hair the friendly trainee at the local beauty shop managed to elevate by spraying tons of sticky hair spray that kept me sneezing all night, with my dorky date, Eugene from next door, at my side. Not to dwell on the excessive hair spray, but I’m certain scientists one day will confirm that the reduction in the ozone layer caused by my prom preparations is the real reason for global warming.

  Before Mom could hang up, my dad grabbed the phone to remind me, much as he always did when I was going through a rough spot, that I was still his “favorite,” and that the job offer with the family exterminating company still stood. “You say aquamarine trucks, Marcy, we’ll do aquamarine,” he signed off. “But will you think about navy? It hides the dirt.” By now this was a set routine, not unlike Dad’s dead-roach count. But it always made me smile.

&n
bsp; His message was followed by one from my friend Lois. She had concocted a creative scheme for me to meet “smart, sensitive guys,” and couldn’t wait to share it. “We’ll enroll you in the ‘Holocaust Studies’ course for adult singles at the Ethical Culture Society,” she said. “New York magazine this week calls it ‘the hip, new Dating Central.’ Call back right away. Maybe I’ll do it with you.”

  Crazy Lois, I thought. After all those rubber-chicken dinners with Democratic fat cats, I think she’s finally lost it. I wasn’t going to use Hitler to meet a new man, even if the price of the course did include complimentary free drinks. I was not that desperate. Yet.

  In addition to Mom, Dad, and Lois, and follow-up calls from the gift-bearing media bigs, there was a long message from NBC’s Tim Russert. He apologized for not sending anything (he pleaded that he’d been “out of town”) and invited me to appear on a special segment of Meet the Press, which, of course, he moderates.

  I had the strangest reaction. Instead of being flattered by Russert’s attention, or offended by the relaxation of standards that led him to think I was Meet the Press worthy, I felt mildly insulted by his delay in contacting me, not to mention his lame excuse—“I was out of town.” Yeah, right. Hadn’t he ever heard of Harry & David? And HELLO THERE, what about 1-800-Flowers? This is the new millennium. You don’t have to be in town to send a fruit basket or a nourishing gift box of Terra chips with assorted salsas. I made a mental note that if I ever did decide to break my public silence, it would not be on Meet the Press.

  Farewell to the old, self-aware Marcy Mallowitz who only the night before was mentally praising Ted Koppel for ignoring her. Literally overnight, a new, not necessarily improved Marcy began to emerge—call her “Marcy, the Media Babe.” I was still lying low at home in my comfy pink sweatsuit from Rosie O’Donnell. But there was no disguising my change in outlook. Where at first I saw all of the gifts and attention coming my way as a humiliating reminder of Neil’s dumping me on Filthy Rich!—a pretty sad claim to fame when you think about it—I now viewed them as an entitlement. It’s an unattractive transformation but one that’s hard to avoid. Just ask the two former Mrs. Donald Trumps, Marla and Ivana, or for that matter any of those much-sought-after rejects from The Plank.