Filthy Rich

by Dorothy Samuels

  * * *

  Which of these TV celebrities has yet to make an exercise or diet video?

  a. Heather Locklear

  b. Matt Lauer

  c. Suzanne Somers

  d. Regis Philbin

  See correct answer on back….

  * * *

  * * *

  ANSWER

  b. Matt Lauer

  * * *

  Fourteen

  I had a vivid dream that Oprah Winfrey was beating me with a large, empty pizza box. Crumbs were bouncing onto the blanket, and she was yelling at me to get out of bed, and stop the pigging out already.

  In all candor, this was not the first dream I’d had like this. In the Old Days—meaning my pre—Filthy Rich! days—I often had such dreams. I never saw a doctor about them. I just chalked them up as God’s little punishment for my skipping kick-boxing class to go out to lunch with Lois or Norma.

  This time, however, it was no guilt-induced hallucination. This time, it really was Oprah. In my bedroom. In person.

  When I finally opened my eyes, America’s talk-show goddess was standing over me. She stepped back when she saw I was awake. The clock on my night table said 6:00 A.M.

  “Oprah?” I said, reaching out to touch her arm. “This isn’t a dream this time, is it?”

  “No, Marcy,” said Oprah. “This is no dream. And look who I brought.”

  I no longer had a boyfriend, but my bedroom was hardly empty.

  Standing just to Oprah’s right was her Personal Life Coaching guru, Dr. Phil, whom she had wisely brought along to work on my sagging motivation.

  “Hi, Marcy,” he said, wasting no time. “We’re all here to help you. But first you’ve got to want to help yourself. Are you ready to do that now, or are you just going to keep wallowing in late-night sausage pizzas? It’s your decision.”

  “I’m ready,” I said, exuding impressive confidence for someone newly roused from a deep slumber and feeling cold and overexposed in skimpy pj’s. That Dr. Phil, I thought, he’s awesome. I’d eaten the whole pie. How could he know it was a sausage pizza?

  Standing to Oprah’s other side were Lois and Norma, seeming uncommonly peppy for the early hour, especially considering our recent all-night cleanup for Diane Sawyer. The two were jogging in place, adorned in fancy exercise outfits from Oprah that called to mind fruit smoothie hour at the Equinox juice bar—especially the sweat bands, which were carefully dyed to match the stripe on their skintight Lycra warm-up pants. I was impressed. Somehow Lois and Norma managed to smile and wave at me without breaking stride.

  Beyond this grouping, I now noticed, were two large television cameras capturing this heartwarming tableau on videotape.

  “Cut,” said Oprah, calling for a halt in the filming.

  Oprah explained that she planned to devote a segment of her show each day to an up-close-and-personal report on my progress getting ready for my Filthy Rich! showdown.

  “Like a mini-documentary,” I said.

  “Think of it as your own daily ‘reality’ show,” said Oprah.

  “Like The Plank?” I said.

  “Better than The Plank,” said Oprah. “You get to sleep at home, and you don’t have to eat rats.”

  “Kingman says the rats are from Spago.”

  “Gourmet rats,” said Oprah, bemused. “Maybe I should include them in my next healthy-living cookbook. We’ll call it ‘gourmet vermin’ so it sounds like a French dish.”

  The conversation turned to Oprah’s thick new glossy magazine, O. Maybe it was a tad presumptuous on my part, but I couldn’t resist saying I thought the eighteen pictures of her in the last issue weren’t nearly enough. I also told her I thought she should consider giving Dr. Phil’s column more prominence, and that O’s recent profile of a young Manhattan woman who sold her extensive designer shoe collection to pay for her mother’s fiftieth-birthday spiritual pilgrimage to Tibet was so moving, it made me cry.

  Oprah excused herself to consult with Dr. Phil and a harried young woman around my age who later introduced herself as Oprah’s producer. She soon returned to brief me. “We’ll open the first segment with the bedroom scene we just shot,” she said. “After you get dressed, Marcy, I want to follow with a shot of me leading you and your friends on a jog around a park. What’s nearby?”

  “Washington Square Park is only three blocks down,” I said. “It’s usually pretty deserted this time of day. We can run around the perimeter.” I warned that we might be joined by a few of the drug dealers who continue to own the park’s southeast corner.

  “I love it,” said Oprah, tossing me a new jogging suit similar to the exotic numbers my friends were already wearing. “There’s nothing like urban flavor.”

  So off we trotted. In the beginning, our group consisted of Oprah, followed just a few steps behind by Norma and me, with Lois and my hulking dark-suited bodyguards, Abdoul and Waldo, dragging up the rear. But by the end of two laps, our pack had grown to several dozen, as people recognized Oprah, and then me, and decided they wanted to be part of history in the making. The action was captured by Oprah’s camera crew from the rear of a small flatbed truck, which rolled along inconspicuously slightly ahead of us. When Oprah aired the tape on her show, she added the music from Chariots of Fire, and played the last few minutes in slow motion. An inspired touch, I thought.

  After our jog, Oprah took me to a park bench to fire me up for the task ahead. We were joined by Dr. Phil, who had somehow managed to get exempted from our little run.

  “What is it now, almost three weeks until the show?” Oprah said. “The pressure is going to be incredible, Marcy, and you need to be prepared, mentally, physically, and spiritually. I’m going back to Chicago, but we’ll be checking on your progress every day on my show. I want to see you and your friends out here jogging first thing every morning. We need your endorphins flowing.”

  “Oprah’s right on,” added Dr. Phil. “We’re here because we believe in you, Marcy. But what counts is, you’ve got to believe in yourself. Have some self-respect. You call yourself a Personal Life Coach? You want others to respect you? Stop behaving like a loser and show us your stuff.”

  “Cut,” ordered Oprah.

  The visit by Oprah and Dr. Phil was a real wake-up call. The whole nation was watching. I needed to shape up—and quickly.

  Life is strange, I thought. A week ago who could have predicted the biggest challenge of my Personal Life Coaching career would turn out to be me?

  * * *

  In one hilarious I Love Lucy episode, Lucy comes up with the “million-dollar idea” of making a TV commercial with Ethel touting the virtues of what product?

  a. Aunt Martha’s Salad Dressing

  b. Ricky Ricardo’s new album

  c. Vitameatavegamin

  d. Fresh eggs from Lucy’s chickens in Connecticut

  See correct answer on back….

  * * *

  * * *

  ANSWER

  a. Aunt Martha’s Salad Dressing

  * * *

  Fifteen

  The next weeks passed by in a blur. As followers of her show can attest, the intervention by Oprah and Dr. Phil brought immediate and dramatic results. I morphed into a model of discipline, getting to bed by nine each evening and awakening around five each morning to the sound of my little novelty alarm clock playing reveille. After five minutes of stretching exercises, I would dutifully down the vile protein shake Oprah insisted would be my salvation, along with a bulging cellophane packet containing what I imagined to be every vitamin and mineral known to man. The combination induced an uncomfortable sensation of nausea that lasted much of the morning, but it was worth it. When I wasn’t feeling sick to my stomach, it gave me a special feeling of confidence to know I had met or exceeded the daily minimum requirement in every vital category.

  I get a lot of letters from people asking, “What’s your secret, Marcy? How did you maintain your superhuman level of motivation for the whole three weeks preceding your retu
rn to Filthy Rich!? My New Year’s resolutions seem to fade by New Year’s Day brunch.”

  It’s a good question, and thanks for sharing. First of all, I drew a lot on my personal faith. I’m a big believer that every painful experience contains an important opportunity for personal growth, and not just in the sense of larding on unneeded pounds searching for emotional solace in a dozen boxes of chocolate-covered Mallomars, which, of course, I’ve done, too. Also remember, unlike most of you slackers, I went into my Filthy Rich! training with years of experience as a Personal Life Coach, which allowed me to draw on techniques I’ve seen work well for my coaching clients.

  Take my motivational signs, for example. Like many women, I have a tendency to lapse into depression when little things in life go wrong, like the man you thought you’d marry dumps you like so much smelly garbage on national TV. To help keep me energized and positive, I printed motivational messages on rectangular pieces of cardboard using a blue Flair pen, and hung them all over my apartment. My doorman Frank obtained the cardboard for me by raiding the building’s returning shirt packages from the dry cleaners. But if your home doesn’t have a doorman, or you feel you can’t ask a favor since you chintzed on the last Christmas gift, regular sheets of paper will also do just fine. Until you try this method yourself, you can have no idea how heartening it was to see a “Go, Marcy, Go!” sign first thing as I stepped out of the shower. Another useful sign, which I Scotch-taped to the back of my apartment door, listed Marcy’s Magnificent Seven, and provided room to check off which of its wise rules I’d lived up to each day. Framed and autographed by yours truly, the completed chart fetched $3,000 when it was auctioned off recently to benefit that children’s project in the Bronx that Ellewina and I visited together just before she died.

  I’m such a sucker for signs, I even taped one to my bedroom ceiling, which turned out to be a big mistake because the message I chose—that dependable old fave, “Quitters Never Win, Winners Never Quit”—was a misfit. It was good for waking up in the morning, but not for helping someone running on twenty tons of mystery supplements calm down enough to fall asleep.

  But sleep deprived or not, promptly at six each morning, I’d meet Lois and Norma downstairs in my lobby for our daily jog. As Filthy Rich! loomed closer, the crowd running with us continued to grow, and so did our route. Instead of simply circling the small park twice, and jogging back to my apartment building at Tenth Street and Fifth Avenue, we’d circle three times, and then run past my building, venturing a few blocks farther up Fifth Avenue each day. In addition to Abdoul and Waldo, the mayor assigned me a police escort, which came in handy to control the traffic as we moved up the avenue en masse, accompanied by innumerable camera vans beyond the one for Oprah’s Marcy Lee Mallowitz reality project, some with huge satellites mounted on top.

  This amazing display of support had me pumped. But some mornings, as I glanced behind at our pack of joggers, I couldn’t help but feel a little embarrassed by all the populist energy being expended for a cause no greater than my pursuit of Kingman Fenimore’s $1.75 million prize. I silently vowed to myself that if I won the money, I would give a sizable portion to charity. Cynical media types may question my sincerity. I can live with that. It grates less than Joan Rivers’s likening my thighs to “two colliding tugboats caught in a Jell-O spill,” as she did on her much-touted cable fashion special dedicated to reviewing our jogging suits. To think I used to count myself a big fan of Joan’s almost single-handed effort to elevate Hollywood couture.

  And speaking of jogging suits, Lois and Norma stuck by my side the whole way, putting their own social and professional lives on hold to help me meet my Filthy Rich! challenge. I only hope it was as positive an experience for my friends as it was for me, despite Joan’s bitchiness about our fabulous outfits.

  Another question I get a lot concerns my stamina. I’ve received lots of letters from people who are amazed I could do the jogging, and all the other publicity things piled on my plate the week before my Big Broadcast, and still manage to prepare for Kingman’s questions. “Marcy, are you superwoman, or what?” they want to know.

  I’m no superwoman, but the reason it sometimes appears that way has to do with my super powers in one area: I’m a fantastic organizer, having started my Life Coaching career in the closet-renewal game. The key was to make good use of odd corners of the day, just as I taught clients to make good use of odd corners of their closets.

  Once back at my apartment after jogging, Lois, Norma, and I would take turns in the shower. After getting dressed, we’d get down to the important business of studying, with my two school chums tossing questions at me in rapid-fire order, drawn from the vast array of magazines, world almanacs and atlases, science texts, and movie books we amassed in short order in my living room—a veritable library of arcane trivia and useless factoids. It was like the old days when the three of us would prepare together for finals, only in college, you more or less knew the subject matter of the test you were studying for. Not so on Filthy Rich!, where questions skidded unpredictably across the whole range of human knowledge. We figured the best we could do was to stuff my brain indiscriminately until it was near bursting, and then hope and pray the people who think up the questions would go light on geography, math, and anything having to do with weight lifting, wrestling, or my well-known nemesis, TV variety shows.

  So intense was this quest for knowledge, my friends persisted in prodding me with questions even during lunch.

  “First American woman in space,” Lois would say, grabbing for some kosher pickle slices to top off her turkey on whole wheat.

  “Sally Field,” I’d answer between bites of my tuna salad with celery and fat-free mayo.

  “Wrong Sally, but close. She’s the flying nun,” Norma would correct me between slugs of Diet Coke.

  I’d try again. “Sally Hemings.”

  “You’re getting colder. She slept with Thomas Jefferson and she wasn’t even airborne. Our Sally rhymes with lied, as in ‘Neil lied to you about being faithful.’”

  “Sally Ride.” Having finally gotten it right, there’d be high fives all around, but no pause in the questioning.

  “Best picture, 1995?”

  “Who says?”

  “The Academy.”

  “Easy, Braveheart. But Ed Wood was robbed. I’d take Johnny Depp over Mel Gibson any day.” We high-fived with gusto on that one.

  These sessions would go on like this for hours, although sometimes we had to conduct them crammed into the backseat of a limo on the way to one of my many media appearances. One of the most gratifying was my star turn on Rosie O’Donnell’s morning show. I went on dressed in the pink sweatsuit she had sent me, freshly washed, and was able to tell “the Queen of Nice” in person how comforting it was to wear it during the first dark days post-Neil Postit. I also thanked her for the Ding Dongs, while explaining that I was back on the wagon where fattening junk food was concerned, and grew misty-eyed imploring her to renew her contract to do the show when it runs out in 2002. “America needs you, Rosie,” I said.

  Rosie loves Broadway, and so do I, so she had the two of us sing a song from Fiddler on the Roof, with its lyrics slightly altered to fit my situation. “If I were a rich girl,” the two of us warbled. I thought we sounded pretty good.

  Another high point was the filming of my first paid television commercial. I resent it when celebrities lend their endorsement to worthless products they know are crappy and overpriced, and would never allow into their own home. But I felt proud to be the one chosen to introduce viewers to Fritzies, an exciting breakthrough in fat-free snack crackers, tasty enough to be named “The Official Snack Cracker of the 2002 Olympics.”

  One good thing about my busy schedule was that it didn’t allow me much time to dwell on Neil’s departure, or the apparent disappearance of my promising new hopeful, Cliff Jentzen. It had been refreshing talking to a straight, single guy who actually seemed to be interested in what I was thinking and feeling. Well, pr
obably not that interested, I decided on second thought, since he hadn’t bothered to call.

  Never far from my thinking, meanwhile, was the still-unresolved issue of who I would choose for my Lifeline. My first choice would have been Kingman, but he was off-limits for obvious reasons. Someone suggested Florida’s Republican secretary of state, Katherine Harris. I don’t know her personally. But she obviously has solid Lifeline experience, having served in that capacity for George W. Bush when she prematurely certified her state’s presidential election results. Rosie volunteered to be my Lifeline when I appeared on her show, and I was tempted to accept. She’s a big Filthy Rich! fan. But a tiny voice inside me—Ellewina’s, I imagine—told me, “Not so fast. Your Lifeline Destiny lies elsewhere.”

  Truth is, I had secretly decided I would draft my mother as my Lifeline if no more obvious choice emerged by the night before my triumphant return to Filthy Rich! when I was scheduled to appear on Larry King Live. As Lifelines go, I could do a lot worse. Mom’s no great intellectual. But she’s a charter subscriber to People who’s read everything by Mary Higgins Clark and never misses the “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” feature in Ladies’ Home Journal. And if Kingman tossed out any kugel questions, I figured I’d be set.

  Up until the very last minute, it looked like Mom would be It. But then, sitting there with Larry King, something startling happened to change my mind. Toward the end of the program, when my host opened the phone lines for questions, the first caller turned out to be someone I knew very well—my ex, Neil. That’s right, lousy, lying, strangely compelling Neil Postit, D.D.S. He said he wanted me back, and to prove it, he was volunteering to be my Lifeline.