Filthy Rich

by Dorothy Samuels

  Fortunately, we had better luck with my clothes. Rummaging through my closet and drawers, we found a perfect informal outfit for a morning show: a straight khaki skirt with a simple periwinkle-blue collared shirt that would show up well on television—both Banana Republic. There was a nervous moment when I tried to put the skirt on and found, after three days of bingeing, that I couldn’t button it, but Norma eventually saved the day, successfully pulling up the front zipper and closing the snap while Lois pressed my stomach in and I held my breath. We spontaneously broke out in giggles and exchanged enthusiastic high fives. Miraculously, my skirt stayed buttoned during this activity, but I maturely decided not to tempt Fate by eating one of Lois’s cookies before the show.

  Next my makeup. Diane Sawyer wasn’t scheduled to arrive for another hour and a half. But Lois and Norma thought it best to get an early start, given the daunting beauty challenge posed by the flaking, dry skin and criss-crossing fine lines wrought by my emotional turmoil, plus the pitch-black rings under my eyes that brought to mind the dalmatians who tormented Glenn Close.

  Beginning this beautification project, I was reminded of Rule Number Four on Marcy’s Magnificent Seven: “Moisturize.” By including “Moisturize” on my short list, by the way, my intention was to emphasize the importance of moist skin for a vibrant, healthy appearance and to slow the aging process. I did not mean to minimize the crucial need to exfoliate your skin prior to applying your moisturizer—preferably a light, creamy formula made with only natural ingredients, though you needn’t spend a fortune on highpriced brands like La Mer. One interesting historical note. Originally Rule Number Four had two parts, “Moisturize” and “Avoid wearing horizontal stripes.” But Norma found this offensive. She complained bitterly that offering what amounted to eight rules as my Magnificent Seven would further societal stereotypes about women being bad at math. So I foreswore commenting about the stripes, with the disconcerting result that I have several clients who still run around town looking like humongous mobile flags.

  Around 5 A.M., just as my makeup job was nearing completion and I was almost looking human, there was an unexpected knock. It was my morning doorman, Frank, who was just beginning his shift. He said some neighbors had called downstairs to complain about noise coming from my apartment, so he’d come up to check.

  “Everything okay, Miss Mallowitz?” he said, looking around.

  “Fine, Frank. You can assure the neighbors there’ll be no more late-night vacuuming or dance parties.” I explained that the noisy cleanup owed only to Diane Sawyer’s imminent arrival.

  “Diane Sawyer?” Frank said. “When?”

  I checked my watch. “We’re at T minus fifty-five minutes and counting.”

  “Almost a full hour, then. Good,” said Frank, barging right past me and into the apartment. “That still gives us time to do something about the furniture.”

  “The furniture?” said Lois, emerging from her cookie duty in the kitchen, a red-checkered apron tied over her designer gown. “What’s wrong with the furniture? Some of it she got from me when I upgraded after my divorce.”

  “It’s out of harmony,” said my doorman.

  It turned out Frank was taking a New School class in feng shui—the ancient Chinese science of arranging furniture and color schemes in alignment with nature—and I was to be the first beneficiary. I knew little about feng shui other than that it was all the rage among interior decorators serving the spiritual Upper East Side and the quaint if crowded Long Island towns comprising what I think of as the Greater Hamptons Region. But I was open-minded.

  The same cannot be said of Lois. Still peeved about the implied slur on her former furniture, she only half-kiddingly bombarded Frank with cynical questions about his credentials. “How do we know you’re a qualified feng shui person?” she teased Frank. “Is it like karate? Do you get a black belt or anything?”

  “Ignore Lois,” I told Frank. “I don’t want to be out of harmony when I meet Diane Sawyer.”

  “No bother, I’m used to skeptics,” said Frank. “My own mother glued down her furniture to keep me from touching anything.”

  As this exchange was transpiring, Frank was purposefully moving about the living room, fluffing pillows and changing the angle of the sofa in relation to the windows and the comfy, if bulky-looking dark green velvet sitting chair from Lois that I liked to curl up in for reading. It was just a small change. But even Lois had to admit it was an improvement, having the effect of making the room seem bigger and more open.

  “Cookie?” she said to Frank, tendering a sample from her Toll House project in a gesture of friendship.

  “Delicious,” said Frank, taking a bite. “It would make sense feng shui-wise to have them out when Diane Sawyer is doing the interview.”

  “Exactly what I told Marcy,” said Lois. “Maybe there is something to this feng shui stuff.” She pronounced it feng sooey.

  “That’s shway, Lois, with an h,” corrected Norma. “One syllable. Rhymes with ‘hay.’” Then to Frank: “What else? There’s not much time left.”

  “You sure you want to hear?” said Frank.

  “Frank, we’re grown-ups. We can take it,” said Norma.

  “Okay, then,” Frank said. “But you’re not going to like it.”

  His bottom line was that my living room chair was too dark and heavy. It had to go. “We’ve got to find another,” he said.

  “Furniture shopping at this hour?” I said. “The corner deli has a good salad bar, but I don’t think it delivers living room chairs yet.”

  “No problem. I know just the thing,” Frank said. “It’s in Mrs. Schwartz’s apartment. We can go get it.”

  I was confused. “Since when has my cranky neighbor gone into the all-night furniture business?” I said.

  Mrs. Schwartz was away, Frank explained. She’d flown down to Boca Raton with her sister to join Richard Simmons for a special weight-and-fitness program for people over sixty-five, called “Rolling with the Oldies” by the weird fitness guru to distinguish it from the more active “Rolling to the Oldies” you’ve seen advertised in late-night infomercials. The mention of Richard Simmons caused Lois to chime in with a savvy if irrelevant observation I was pretty sure she didn’t pick up on The Brady Bunch.

  “Hairy men shouldn’t wear tank tops,” she said.

  “Why just tell us?” said Norma. “You should write one of your letters, Lois. I’m sure Richard Simmons would be very interested. Not to mention the whole tank-top industry.”

  But back to the story. Before going away, Mrs. Schwartz had put Frank in charge of feeding, walking, and otherwise entertaining her poorly potty-trained schnauzer, Bruno, a job that called for him to carry a copy of her key.

  “She has an antique wooden captain’s chair with open arms that would be perfect for Diane Sawyer,” said Frank. “It has a classic design and simplicity that would help maximize the energy flow in the room. Also, it has a red cushion, which is very good.”

  Red, according to traditional feng shui interpretation, symbolizes intelligence and clarity.

  “It’s the space-time balance we’re looking for,” said Frank.

  “I thought we were looking for harmony,” said Lois.

  “Don’t quibble,” said Norma.

  “But, Frank, we can’t just go in and take the chair,” I said, which then led me to carefully review for the benefit of all the would-be participants in this heist, Rule Number Seven on Marcy’s Magnificent Seven: “Be bold! But don’t take unnecessary risks!” I noted that the criminal code has a name for such behavior. It’s called breaking and entering, and it carries a minimum of six years in New York State. No time off for good behavior.

  “This isn’t worth getting locked up for,” I urged. “I don’t care if prison stripes are vertical.”

  “I’m the dog-sitter, remember?” said Frank, our very own Johnnie Cochran supplying the defense for burglary. I could practically hear his summation to the jury: “Because I sit, you must acq
uit.”

  “Besides,” Frank continued, “she’ll never know. We’ll put the chair back when Diane Sawyer leaves.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said, my ethics and caution worn down by Frank’s persuasive presentation.

  Next thing I knew, Norma, Lois, and I were bickering in whispers, straining under the load of my heavy green living room chair as we slowly made headway to Mrs. Schwartz’s apartment. Frank walked ahead of us, keeping on the lookout for nosy neighbors.

  We dropped my big chair in Mrs. Schwartz’s foyer, and were about to abscond with her elegant wooden one when Lois spotted Bruno, the great watchdog, sleeping soundly on the sofa in the next room. It gave her an inspired idea.

  “Let’s take him,” said Lois.

  “Take the dog?” I said, certain I must have heard wrong.

  But, alas, I’d heard correctly. On top of offering cookies, Lois thought it would add just the right touch of warmth for me to have Bruno on my lap during the interview.

  “Every few minutes, you can pet him,” said Lois. “It will be great.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “For one thing, I’m allergic to dogs.”

  But Norma and Frank agreed with Lois, and I was too sleep deprived to argue.

  Frank awakened Bruno gently, offering him a little doggie treat from Mrs. Schwartz’s kitchen. He then scooped up the drowsy schnauzer and carried him back to my apartment. I trailed behind schlepping Mrs. Schwartz’s chair, my nose itching from being around dog hairs.

  This entire caper took about half an hour. At about 5:45 A.M., once Frank had carefully positioned the stolen chair for maximum karma, all of us collapsed—including Bruno. We each grabbed a nearby piece of floor or sofa and immediately fell sound asleep.

  About fifteen minutes later, however, our naps abruptly ended with heavy knocking at my door. Disoriented, I thought at first it must be my neighbor, miniature Mrs. Schwartz, refreshed after the Richard Simmons workout and looking for her missing furniture and dog. But instead, of course, it was Diane Sawyer and her crew. They were right on time. With Frank absent from his post in the lobby, they had come up unannounced.

  People who saw the interview are always coming up to me, wanting to know, “What is Diane Sawyer really like?” I’ll tell you what I tell them: Much as I try, I have nothing bad to say about her. In person, Diane Sawyer is even blonder and nicer than she seems on television. She is also very tall, which is hard to tell from TV, because a lot of times, she’s sitting behind a desk. The one thing I didn’t like was her lipstick, which was too dark and too glossy for my taste. In sum, too Monica Lewinsky.

  As for the interview itself, the less said the better. It began well enough, in the bathroom of all places, with me showing off Neil’s “His” and “Hers” spritzers and pointing to the hole in the plaster where Neil’s prized antique Water Pik once stood on a glass shelf.

  We then moved to my feng shuied living room, where I pointed out the deep indentation in the rug where Neil’s ghastly old dental chair used to be. The grand tour completed, Diane Sawyer settled in Mrs. Schwartz’s chair, and I plopped myself across from her on the sofa, right next to Bruno, whom I then slid onto my lap, much as Lois had instructed.

  The questions were mainly puffballs about how I felt after getting dumped by Neil on Filthy Rich! and my decision to return to the show as a contestant in just three weeks. I fielded these deftly, mostly by repeating answers drilled into my head by Norma. Even as it was happening, I couldn’t believe some of militant things tripping off my tongue, but it was just as well because I was too exhausted to have any clear thoughts of my own. At one point, I dutifully held up a copy of Norma’s newest book, Raging Hormones, and Other Outrages, and urged everyone within the sound of my voice to race out to the bookstore to buy a copy. I felt like a brainwashing victim, but at least things were moving along more or less on an even keel.

  It was then that Diane Sawyer turned to the gripping topic of my sex life. Things went rapidly downhill from there.

  “I apologize for asking this, but as a serious journalist, I feel I must,” she said. “There’s been speculation that you and Neil were having trouble in bed, and that was the real reason for your breakup. Is there any truth to that rumor? And, in retrospect, how do you assess Neil as a lover?”

  I was startled. Kingman Fenimore hadn’t warned me that our deal included me being interrogated about my sex life on national TV at seven-thirty in the morning. I needed time to think. So I reached for Lois’s plate of homemade cookies.

  “Cookie?” I said. “They’re fresh-baked.”

  “No thank you,” said Diane Sawyer. “It’s a bit early for me.”

  Of course, it was also a bit early to be discussing my sex life. If I answered honestly, my guess was it would have people wretching up their breakfasts all over America. But Diane Sawyer did not get to where she is today by shying away from prying questions.

  “But back to your sex life with Neil,” she persisted. “Any problems there?”

  “Well, you know about Neil’s obsession with dentistry,” I found myself saying. “In bed, he tended to forget I wasn’t just another tooth he was drilling.”

  I regretted those words as soon as I blurted them out. To this day, I kick myself for not answering, “None of your business,” and leaving it at that. When you know the camera is running, in theory your instinct should be to carefully censor yourself. But, in fact, the opposite reaction occurs, and you find yourself revealing intensely personal things you haven’t even told your girlfriends. You’re so concerned with being an interesting “personality” that you forget about everything else. That doesn’t excuse my indiscreet answer. But it does help explain why Bill Clinton answered that impertinent question about his taste in underwear early in his presidency, setting a low MTV tone that would permeate two terms. It also explains why “reality TV” bears so little resemblance to reality.

  Before Diane Sawyer could serve up a follow-up question, the proceeding was momentarily interrupted by a loud pounding noise. My immediate thought was, Oh no, Mrs. Schwartz is back. But no such luck. It was my mother. Plainly unaware that the whole nation was now privy to her wacky behavior, she was determined to gain entry to her only child’s apartment. Right Now!

  “It’s your mother,” she was screaming loud enough to be picked up on camera. “Let me in. Did you see what that schmuck Neil said about us on Letterman? I’ve retained a lawyer. A nephew of a friend of your uncle Mel. Not a genius like that Alan Dershowitz, but he went to law school near Harvard and he’s giving us his family discount rate. We’ll go to the Supreme Court if we have to. I know you’re not sleeping, Marcy. Let me in.”

  Finally, after letting my mother go on like that for a while, a bemused Diane Sawyer signaled some stagehands to open the door. Mom swept in right past them only to stop dead in her tracks when she saw the famous newswoman.

  “Diane Sawyer!” she said, primping her short silver hair and obviously grateful she had remembered to remove the rollers before leaving her house. “Interviewing my Marcy. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “No interruption. We’re glad you came,” said Diane Sawyer. “Please join us.”

  Words are inadequate to convey how much I wished at that moment it had been Mrs. Schwartz at the door instead.

  “I watch your show every day,” Mom said, joining me on the sofa. “Hi, Charley.” She was waving now to Ms. Sawyer’s cohost back in the studio, Charles Gibbons.

  That was harmless enough. Unfortunately, at some point she stopped waving and turned her attention to me.

  “What’s this, a dog?” she said, referring to Bruno, who was now growling ever so faintly at this strange woman who had just plunked herself down next to us. “You don’t have a dog. You’re allergic.”

  “I do so, Mom,” I said, sneezing. “You must have forgotten.” I now addressed myself to Diane Sawyer. “You know, if she doesn’t take her gingko—”

  “And what about that,” my mother said, p
ointing to Mrs. Schwartz’s chair. “Where did that thing come from? I like your big green chair. Where did it go?”

  Trying to stay calm, I took a big breath in and then exhaled, setting off an unfortunate chain reaction that ended the interview. The button on my skirt popped so loudly that it scared poor Bruno half to death. The little schnauzer then hopped off my lap, onto the floor, where he promptly peed on Diane Sawyer’s open-toed Manolo Blahniks, apparently mistaking them for the lobby’s oriental rug.

  * * *

  The favorite hangout on Laverne & Shirley was an establishment owned by Laverne’s father, Frank. What was it called?

  a. Frank’s Italian Eatery

  b. The Greasy Spoon

  c. Frank’s Bar and Grill

  d. Pizza Bowl

  See correct answer on back….

  * * *

  * * *

  ANSWER

  d. Pizza Bowl

  * * *

  Thirteen

  “You were great with Diane Sawyer. Just great. You’re a natural, kid.”

  It was Kingman Fenimore speaking, and the occasion for sharing this enthusiastic review was a crowded news conference and photo op his people had organized at network headquarters uptown. I was whisked there immediately following my mortifying stint on Good Morning America by a hideous white stretch limo with a vinyl leopard-skin roof that looked as if it was borrowed from a pimp. Our chat occurred as Kingman and I posed together atop a hastily erected platform with a giant mock-up of the Filthy Rich! logo behind us. Kingman was holding up a much-enlarged $1.75 million check as I looked on approvingly with a big, greedy grin on my face. Time and Newsweek ran almost identical versions on their covers, only in the superior Newsweek version, the dark rings under my eyes were miraculously airbrushed away—a highly appreciated compromise of journalistic ethics that lessened the humiliation of my drab overall appearance.