I didn’t have time to change, but my unreliable skirt button was now supplemented by a safety pin for insurance, and a white Filthy Rich! T-shirt covered my blue blouse. The shirt had a picture of Kingman on the front, and underneath, his signature phrase was plastered in big red letters: “Absolute Answer?”
“Are we talking about the same show, Kingman?” I said. “Me, my meshuga mother, and the dog with a weak bladder?”
“Yeah, I loved it. Especially the bit with the dog.”
I’ll have to tell Lois, I thought. Inviting Bruno was her idea. If Kingman liked it, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.
“And your remark about Neil’s drilling technique,” Kingman continued, “you must have been up all night thinking of that one. It was inspired.”
“Ya think? I thought it was pretty embarrassing,” I said. “‘Frisky sex vixen’ is not the image I’m going for. I’m a Barnard girl.”
“You lack perspective,” said Kingman. “Being on TV is never having to say you’re sorry. Believe me, a few days from now, all people will remember is that they saw you on TV, and they liked you. That’s the key in this business. Positive buzz.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” I said. “Positive buzz.”
We took just fifteen minutes of questions, which turned out to be fourteen minutes too many, as nearly all the queries sought elaboration on three subjects I didn’t wish to discuss: my now-defunct sex life; the name of my secret restaurant companion; and the thorny, still unresolved matter of who I planned to anoint as my Lifeline. I just smiled benignly and kept coming up with creative new ways to say, “No comment.” I had exhausted my prepackaged answers from Norma, and I was determined not to run at the mouth like I had with Diane Sawyer. By this time, I’d been up far more than twenty-four hours, and, based on past performance, I had good reason to worry about regrettable things falling from my lips if I let myself get started. Finally, Kingman stepped in and kiddingly lambasted the reporters for showing so little interest in him. “What am I,” he asked, feigning insult, “gefilte fish?”
As these festivities were breaking up, Kingman got corraled by a young on-the-make reporter from the New York Observer, who was trying to peddle his idea for a new sitcom. The kid looked no more than twenty-three or twenty-four, and sported a J. Press navy blazer and horn-rimmed glasses befitting his air of earnest arrogance and what I surmised was a recent Yale degree.
“I hope you’ll consider it, Mr. Fenimore,” he said, handing Kingman a large manila envelope. “I’ve sketched out a few episodes. It’s about a big-time game-show host who also does a morning talk show. It could be really funny. And not a big stretch for you acting-wise.”
Kingman accepted the envelope and tucked it under his right arm. “A game-show host who also does a morning show,” he repeated, politely wending his way around to a gentle rejection that succeeded in deflecting the immediate request without being abrupt or dismissive.
“It has real potential, I think,” said Kingman. “Very original. I’ll have my agent look at it but, to be realistic, I just don’t see having the time. If I were you, I’d change it to the sitcom adventures of a cross-dressing plumber from Hartford, and offer it to that chunky, bearded guy from The Plank. He’s hot right now, and it would just take some minor retooling. Good luck with it.”
“Why were you so nice to that preppy twit?” I asked Kingman once the kid departed.
“He was a preppy twit, wasn’t he? But he may outgrow it. Who knows, he could turn out to be a TV genius, another Seinfeld. His idea was terrible, I admit, but not so out of line with the crap that sells these days. Maybe when I’m feeble and forgotten, in another two hundred years or so, he’ll give me a guest shot.”
“I don’t see it,” I said. “I think you just wasted some of your legendary niceness on the wrong guy.”
“‘The wrong guy’?” teased Kingman. “Well, maybe I should listen, then. You have plenty of expertise when it comes to picking the wrong guy.”
As we started walking out together, Kingman took a quick look at his $2,500 Raymond Weil watch. I wasn’t sure my father’s dead-roach count even went that high.
“Well, it’s about my lunchtime,” Kingman announced. Then he turned to me. “How about it, Marcy?” he said. “Have you eaten?”
“Not today, yet, but for the past three days, Kingman, thanks to your game show, I’ve done nothing but eat,” I said. “It’s why I have a safety pin holding my skirt together.”
“Marcy Lee,” Kingman said with mock exasperation, “I said I was hungry. I didn’t mean to open up a conversation about your safety pin. It’s not enough that Tracy Ellen took up most of the morning show sharing the ups and downs of her ongoing zits problem? A man can take only so much.”
“My safety pin and I apologize,” I said.
“Good. Now how about grabbing some lunch? I’m under strict orders from my wife to eat before going home. She says our thirty-two-year marriage won’t survive if I insist on being underfoot the entire day.”
“Sure,” I said, flattered by the invitation from one of the nation’s most popular TV personalities. “Where to?”
“Leave it to me,” said Kingman.
Put aside thoughts of a celebrity hangout like the Russian Tea Room, or even an ordinary coffee shop with tables, chairs, and central heating. Our first stop after leaving the news conference was Gray’s Papaya, the tiny hot-dog emporium at Broadway and Seventy-second Street, which many frankfurter devotees, including Kingman Fenimore, consider a holy shrine—a veritable Lourdes, if you will, for those whose spiritual desires run to fatty smoked sausage, flavorfully seasoned and grilled to perfection with a crisp outside and then unceremoniously plopped in a soft, white bun.
At least that’s how Kingman described the religious experience called Gray’s Papaya as we waited in his Town Car while his driver picked up a half dozen of its nitrate marvels for the surprise lunch-hour “picnic” Kingman sprang on me.
“You’re in for a real treat,” he promised, as we watched with heavy anticipation through the Town Car window as his driver paid the cashier for the hot dogs, all of which were smeared with mustard and buried under a heavy blanket of sauerkraut and spicy cooked onions, as per Kingman’s instructions, before getting packed inside little Styrofoam boxes to keep them warm. The order came with two huge cups of sugary orange drink, which Kingman and I sipped as we headed in lighter than usual midday traffic toward the next stop—the New York Waterway terminal at Thirty-eighth Street and the Hudson River.
We arrived just in time to board the nearly empty noon ferry to Weehawken, something Kingman explained he tries to do at least once a week to get a break from the day-today pressures of show business and his own newly ballooned celebrity.
“Isn’t this great?” he enthused as we planted ourselves at a little round table inside the small vessel’s glassed-in cabin. “There are hardly any passengers this time of day, and they generally leave me alone. No one screams, ‘Is that your absolute answer,’ every time I yawn, as if I’d never heard the joke before. The crew lets me stay onboard for a few round-trips without debarking, so I always leave feeling refreshed, like I just took a mini-vacation cruise on one of those fancy ocean liners Tracy Ellen gets paid a bundle to endorse.”
The view crossing was incredible, stretching from the George Washington Bridge to the Statue of Liberty and beyond, and taking in Manhattan’s glistening midtown skyline, New Jersey’s Hudson waterfront, and the southern end of the Palisades.
“I lived my first ten years in Weehawken,” Kingman reminisced between bites of hot dog and sips of orange drink, “so when the ferry heads in this direction, I feel as if I’m returning to my roots. My father was a bricklayer. Not a bricklayer like you see today. He was a real artist, and he loved his work. We had a house in the little Irish-Italian neighborhood that preceded that giant high-rise over there. For my father, it had to be a brick house, but since he didn’t build it himself, he was always finding faults in the
workmanship. My mother always said he would have been a lot happier with wood shingles, and she was right. When I was eleven, my parents decided they wanted to raise their five kids in the country. So they sold the Weehawken place and bought a nearly identical house in a nearly identical ethnic neighborhood in Queens, which, believe it or not, still had farmland left. But we hardly ever got near it, since the so-called country was miles from the place my parents went to all that trouble to relocate us to. Go figure.”
By now, Kingman had wolfed down two frankfurters and was plowing through his third. “Ready for your second yet, Marcy?”
“Nope, I think I’m set,” I said. “My stomach is still in rebellion over the first. I think it may secede later.”
In all, we did three round-trips across the river, a forty-five-minute-plus respite that proved every bit as enjoyable as Kingman had promised, although not because of the hot dogs, which I could have done without, or even the striking views from the water of both shorelines. What made it special was getting to spend time with Kingman, who in person turned out to be pretty much the same charming and funny eccentric viewers see on TV, only more endearing.
“See way up there,” Kingman said, pointing to a high cliff as we departed Weehawken for our third and final time. “There’s a little green up there where Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton had their famous duel. The outcome wasn’t pretty, and Mr. Hamilton, one of the country’s great statesmen, ended up losing his life. But I give both men this much: They were acting as gentlemen, which is more than I can say about your ex-boyfriend Neil.”
At that Kingman turned his head from Weehawken and looked directly at me.
“Marcy, whatever happens in the next three weeks, whether you end up winning our jackpot or not,” he said, “I want you to know that you’re already a Filthy Rich! winner in my book. Maybe the biggest. Just for getting rid of that guy. Try to remember that.”
I thanked Kingman, and told him he sounded a lot like my exterminator father. “‘It’s crazy,’ Dad told my mother when she got home from the show. ‘I spend my whole life killing roaches, and my daughter would have ended up marrying one if it wasn’t for Filthy Rich!’”
The one remaining thing on my schedule following the ferry ride was a drop-in at the midtown studio of a competing network to make a cameo appearance on the long-running soap opera Days of Our Lives. I was assigned to play a dedicated psychiatrist, Dr. Doris Lundgren. The specially written part called for me to don hospital whites and offer uplifting spiritual counsel to a young woman rendered suicidal by the news that her boyfriend blew the big cash prize on a major nighttime quiz show, and they would not be millionaires after all.
I had only two lines. Or just one line, depending on how you count these things. “Don’t worry,” I solemnly intoned, reading the pithy dialogue off cue cards. “There will be other quiz shows.”
Leaving the studio, I asked one of the young scriptwriters why they opted to have my Dr. Lundgren character serve as an enabler, encouraging her patient’s unhealthy game-show fantasy instead of helping her realize that money isn’t everything. “It’s not believable,” he said, plainly taken aback by my inquiry. “We try to keep it real.”
At this point, I was not traveling alone. From the news conference forward, I was shadowed by two burly private security officers, Abdoul and Waldo, who were hired by the Filthy Rich! production office to keep away overly enthusiastic fans and to make sure I adhered to the daily schedule of appearances dictated by the show’s chief publicist, a seasoned pro named Maxine Ferris, who generally arrived at events before I did to coordinate any press interviews and otherwise help make things run smoothly.
My two bodyguards were very big, and their dark, shiny suits gave them a slightly menacing Sopranos look that made them appear even bigger. Disappointingly, their bigness didn’t extend to being big conversationalists; their combined daily word output wouldn’t fill a whole minute on The View. Also, Abdoul was married, and Waldo had a girlfriend, which was sort of a downer for Lois.
Kingman was genuinely fond of me, I felt. But I knew the decision to sic Abdoul and Waldo on me for protection was nothing personal. I was valuable property, and this was an inexpensive investment to make sure I arrived at the Filthy Rich! showdown properly promoted and in one piece.
After returning home from my soap-opera debut, I laid down on the sofa and dozed for a while. I would have been much more comfortable in my bed, and likely would have slept right through the night. Instead, I woke up a little before 7 P.M., sneezing from Bruno’s leftover dog hairs and with a painful crick in my neck owing to a bad combination of tension and the sofa’s lack of any real support, which is not to disparage Lois’s generosity in giving it to me.
Hungry, I called up and ordered a small pizza, taking pains to explain that I wanted just sauce on the pie—no cheese. I wasn’t sure if, technically, what I ordered should even be called a “pizza,” as cheese would seem a defining ingredient, but I was impressed by my returning dietary restraint. Marcy’s Magnificent Seven were definitely back in play. I was proud to be shunning fattening foods (Rule Number Two), and I almost couldn’t wait for bedtime, when I would take care to floss (Rule Number One), and moisturize (Rule Number Four).
While waiting for my dinner delivery, I instinctively turned on the TV, happening to hit E! News Daily just as the influential cable entertainment show was beginning a report on the results of a new national poll, taken in the immediate aftermath of my talk with Diane Sawyer. It showed me pulling even with Eleanor Roosevelt on the list of women Americans most admire, and actually besting FDR’s wife among women ages thirty-five and under. Wow! I thought, this is what Kingman was talking about—the power of positive buzz. But I still had enough self-awareness to know that, unlike Mrs. Roosevelt, I had done nothing whatsoever to merit my new popularity. After all, the former First Lady served as her husband’s eyes and legs, visiting the coal miners and troops overseas. I don’t think I ever met a real coal miner, and the only troops I have contact with are the Girl Scouts who sell me cookies each year, which I promptly give to my doorman Frank lest I end up single-handedly devouring all dozen boxes of those addictive Thin Mints.
In fact, the more I compared my résumé with Mrs. Roosevelt’s, the more I came up short. She stood up against bigotry, for goodness sake, resigning her membership in the DAR when it barred the great black contralto Marian Anderson from singing in Constitution Hall. She wrote a widely read daily newspaper column, and, in her later years, helped found the United Nations. Getting dumped by your boyfriend on TV seemed a puny achievement alongside that. Still, I think The New York Times editorial page went too far a few days later when it railed that my high standing in the national poll was “a sad embodiment of a downward cultural slide.”
That Howell Raines, who runs the editorial page, is “one smart cookie,” according to my mother, the discussion leader a few years back when her ladies’ reading club took up the recipes included in his book on fly-fishing. Recalling her admiration for his fish stew only made the pummeling feel worse.
Flipping channels from Eleanor and me, I landed on Entertainment Tonight, which was beginning its report on the ongoing real-life drama they were still calling Marcygate. Since last I’d watched, a mere two nights before, they had created a special logo to introduce their Marcygate stories, using an angry picture of me throwing the ring at Neil. The ever-pert Mary Hart seemed almost gleeful in having a whole litany of “new developments” to share regarding yours truly. She began, unsurprisingly, with my loose-lipped revelation about Neil’s approach to lovemaking, in due course segueing to the Post’s scoop about my Chinese lunch with an “unidentified” male companion, and then to clips of my news conference with Kingman, and reaction to the announcement that I would soon be appearing as a Filthy Rich! contestant. Confirming how big this whole thing was becoming, the president’s press secretary indicated that the nation’s chief executive might postpone a foreign trip to tune in. I assumed he was joking.
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Here I got up to go to the john, figuring I had survived this episode of Marcygate more or less intact. However, I was stopped dead in my tracks by the picture suddenly flashed on the screen.
“And Marcy’s not the only one stepping out with someone new,” Mary Hart informed viewers. “This photo, taken exclusively for Entertainment Tonight at a benefit last night for the NYU dental school, shows Marcy’s ex, Neil Postit, whispering in the ear of the new mystery woman he escorted to the fashionable soiree.”
That’s no “mystery woman,” I said to myself. That’s the Burger Queen/Bandanna Lady—my soon-to-be-former client Jane McDee. In the photo, she wasn’t wearing any head wear and you could clearly see her dark roots poking through her phony blondness. But she looked a lot happier than I was feeling at that particular moment. Neil may be quirky, even odd. But as the photo reminded me, my six-foot ex is also a pretty attractive guy, especially in a tux. I took off my right slipper and threw it at the screen. Hard.
Knowledge is supposed to be power. But seeing this visual evidence of Neil’s apparent two-timing was a decidedly mixed blessing. From a purely professional standpoint, I was glad to finally have an explanation as to why it was taking so long to treat Jane McDee’s buck teeth. But obtaining that explanation caused me to relapse into depression. Romance-wise, Neil seemed in great shape, especially if your taste runs to dumb heiresses with bad hair. No looking back for him. Me, I was waxing nostalgic over the good times with Neil—and yes, to be honest, there were good times—and waiting for Cliff Jentzen to get off his lazy butt and give me a call.
I immediately reached for the phone, but it wasn’t to call Norma to concede that she’d been right all along about Neil. Nor was it to call my “mystery man,” Cliff.
No, I picked up the phone to call the pizza place.
“The Mallowitz order hasn’t gone out yet? Great,” I said. “Remember the small pizza I ordered, hold the cheese? I was just kidding. Change that to a large pie with extra cheese. And could you toss on some sausage while you’re at it?”
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