Shadow of the Dolls

by Jacqueline Susann

  “Could be better. I almost had a great commercial, but then they canceled the campaign.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish.”

  “Well, something else will come along. Hey, I have an idea. I know about this great job.”

  “Neely, you don’t have to. A deal’s a deal.” Anne noticed how quickly Neely went through the champagne. “Happy thirtieth birthday, kiddo.”

  “Yeah, right. Listen. I know a guy in cable, he’s auditioning for someone to host a women’s lifestyle show. Cooking, gardening, decorating, like that. Want me to put in a word?”

  “That’s okay.”

  “What, an old friend can’t do you a favor?”

  “I don’t need your help.”

  “Fine, whatever,” Neely said. “You know, make a point if you want to, but you know who you’re really hurting? That ten-year-old kid upstairs. Anyway. Never keep the photographers waiting,” she said, chugging the last of her champagne.

  Fifteen minutes later a fat man with thick gray hair came in, holding a freshly lit cigar.

  “Are you Anne Welles? What am I saying. Of course you are. You haven’t changed a bit.” He held out his hand. “Jamie Walters.”

  “Hello. I’m sorry, I can’t quite place you.”

  “Neely sent me in here to meet you. She said you might be interested in a little cable project I’m working on.” He gave her his business card. “Can you call me on Monday? What am I saying. Of course you can call me on Monday.” He left without waiting for her answer.

  After the plates were cleared, after the band went home, after the final cup of coffee was served and the last few guests wandered down the long driveway, after Gretchen carried a dozing Jenn piggyback to her car, after Neely and Dave went upstairs and the staff packed up, Anne went outside to find Curtis smoking a cigarette and looking through one of the telescopes.

  “What a beautiful night,” he said. “Have a peek.”

  Anne took a look. “I don’t know what anything is,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Anne walked to her car through the damp grass. It was a half-hour ride home. Trees arched over the road like a canopy. Van Morrison was on the radio, a song she had heard a hundred times without really listening to it. She turned up the volume and it felt as though he were singing directly to her, in a wise, clear voice full of sadness and hope and magic.

  She had been down this road a hundred times, too, more than a hundred times, but it looked different to her now, as if every little thing—the street lamps twinkling between the trees, a white balloon caught on a traffic signal, a bouquet of roses abandoned on the hood of a parked car—had a special message for her. I never noticed anything when I was with Lyon, she thought, and here it all is, here it all is.

  She was home by three. Jenn and Gretchen were eating blueberry pie straight from the tin.

  “We can’t sleep, Mom,” Jenn said. “So we’re going to stay up all night.”

  “I tried,” Gretchen said.

  “That’s okay. Give me a fork,” Anne said.

  Gretchen could not stop talking about all the famous people she had seen, what they had worn and said and how much they had drunk. A rock-and-roll singer had given her his autograph on the back of a menu card … a soap opera actress had told her she had pretty eyes … had Anne noticed that the radio talk-show host was wearing a toupee? …

  “I would have worked for free,” Gretchen said.

  “Don’t tell Curtis that.”

  “And I got a tip!” she said, taking a hundred-dollar bill out of her pocket.

  Jenn was all sugared up and giggling. She described everything in Judd’s room: his computer, his collection of CDs, his science-fiction posters. “And he gave me this shirt!”

  It was an old plaid-flannel shirt, coming apart at the elbows.

  “I guess he must have liked you,” Anne said.

  “It’s called Black Watch,” Jenn said. “He’s almost sixteen, but I still beat him at Monopoly two times.”

  The sky was beginning to brighten. They had nearly finished a second pie.

  “When does the sun come up, Mom?”

  “Soon, sweetie.” When was the last time she had seen the sun come up? She thought back: months ago, the night she left Lyon. A beautiful thing happened every day, a million beautiful things; you only had to go looking for them.

  “Let’s get the sleeping bags and go outside to watch,” Anne said. They made cocoa and dragged the deck chairs out onto the lawn.

  “We have to whisper,” Jenn said. “Everyone is sleeping.”

  “But we’re wide awake,” Gretchen said.

  Anne pulled her sleeping bag just up to her eyes. Underneath the soft down, she was smiling. So: this is my life. So: this is my family. It wasn’t very much, but right now it seemed like more than enough. Right now it seemed perfect.

  1989.

  Neely closed the script and tossed it on the floor. There was no point in finishing it—it was like all the other movie scripts she was getting these days, junk that everyone else had already turned down. Mothers, mob wives, and hookers. Like she was going to play the mother of some twenty-three-year-old brat with two pictures under his belt!

  She stretched her legs under the covers and took another sip of herbal tea. It was already eleven in the morning, but she still hadn’t gotten dressed or checked her telephone messages. What was the point? There was nothing to do in Los Angeles during the day except have lunch and shop. She didn’t want to eat with anyone; the Oscars were in three weeks and she really needed to lose five pounds. And she didn’t feel like shopping—not until she was back down to her target weight.

  She had turned off the ringer on the telephone, but she could hear the little click of someone leaving a message. Probably just Gordon, good old Gordon. He had booked her for three weeks in Las Vegas at the end of May, and it was the best contract she had ever gotten.

  At least someone was out there working for her. Her new film agency wasn’t doing anything except sending her lousy scripts, as far as she could tell. Neely didn’t like these new guys, even if everyone said they were the best. Their office gave her the creeps—it was all pale colors and polished surfaces and Abstract art on the walls. It was like visiting a law firm. She missed the good old days, the autographed pictures and the men in bad toupees who offered you hugs and dirty jokes. The new guys wore thousand-dollar suits and two-hundred-dollar sunglasses, and behind the glasses their eyes were cold and expressionless. They were like the FBI, but with better haircuts.

  And it was costing her a fortune, even if she didn’t shoot a single frame. Dave had made her set up her own production company—that was the way it worked, everyone did it, you had to get a piece of the pie. So now she paid some girl three minutes out of film school a ridiculously high salary to sit in an office all day and do God knew what. It seemed to Neely that she was basically paying someone to sit around reading magazines. Liza wore little black eyeglasses and size 38 Armani jackets. When Neely visited the office, all she could think about was how much those jackets cost and where the money had come from. Plus the secretary, plus the expense account, plus the fresh flowers, plus the rent. It drove her crazy, so now she went by only once or twice a month. It was just a very expensive place to go for a pee if you were driving around and needed a place to stop.

  She felt as though she were stalled in bad traffic on a hot summer day: angry and impatient, with nowhere to go.

  “Take it easy,” Dave had told her. “You have plenty of work and plenty of money and two great kids. And me. Life is to be enjoyed.”

  “Maybe you’re exactly where you want to be, but I want more,” she told him. “There’ll be plenty of time to stop and smell the roses when I’m old and fat and my voice is gone. I remember what it used to be like. I want to make movies again. I want another Oscar.”

  “Be patient. It’ll happen.”

  “Not if I don’t make it happen. Cher got a fuckin
g Oscar. Cher! That part shoulda been mine.”

  “Come on, Neely.”

  “Someone should have sent me that script.”

  “Neely, the movie took place in Little Italy. Not Little Ireland.”

  “Well, Cher isn’t Italian. She’s Albanian.”

  “Armenian.”

  “Stop correcting me, you’re always correcting me. Pardon me if I didn’t go to college, I was too busy making two hit records and winning an Oscar and, oh yeah, having a couple of babies.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Yes, you did. You never let me forget it. You and your fancy friends. Looking down your noses at me because maybe I had to work my way up to get where I am, it wasn’t just handed to me on a silver platter.”

  “Neely, come on. Everyone loves you just the way you are.”

  What amazed her was this: Dave actually seemed to mean it. No matter how crazy she got, Dave would just ride it out until her temper tantrum passed. He seemed to be able to laugh off her moods without ever making her feel that he was laughing at her.

  Neely had always been attracted to men who were older than she, who took care of her and gave her advice and looked after her every need. After a while, the more they did for her, the less respect she had for them. She stopped looking up to them. And one thing she knew: guys like that would always be able to find another woman—someone who didn’t know them as well as the woman they were with—to look up to them. Neely never actually had to dump a guy. What she did instead was drive them away. That’s what her shrink told her. Dr. Mitchell called it passive-aggressive behavior.

  So Dave had the occasional little fling; that was just how men were. So he was fifty-two, and more than a little overweight, and no superstar in the kip. He was appealing in a sort of big Jewish teddy-bear kind of way, and he looked after her, and he was wonderful with the twins, and no matter what she did he kept on loving her. He was also the first man whose success was entirely independent of her own—he had never tried to make a single nickel off her talent.

  Neely realized that there was always going to be a better man out there … someone more attractive … someone richer … someone more powerful … she would always be able to talk herself into waiting until the perfect man came along. She didn’t want to end up like Helen Lawson, dying alone in her suite at the Pierre with nothing but a shelf of awards and four Persian cats to keep her company.

  Neely wanted to get married; Dave didn’t.

  “Why ruin a good thing?” he said. “Marriage changes everything.”

  But Neely was sick of the magazine captions that described Dave as her “steady”—it was so undignified! She hated all the little phrases they had to use when they traveled together (“my friend” … “my guest” … “the lady will have”) because they couldn’t say “my husband,” “my wife.” Most of all, she was tired of going out with friends and being the only woman at the table who wasn’t wearing a ring. She swore she would find a way to get Dave to propose to her. Maybe in June. He was taking her to Greece, a little vacation on a romantic island that Neely kept forgetting the name of. It would be fun to get engaged before the summer, to show off her diamond at all those parties in the Hamptons. And then a Thanksgiving wedding: perfect.

  Neely turned on the television and flipped around. There was Anne, arranging flowers and talking about the history of Holland’s obsession with the tulip. The set for A Woman’s Touch was a huge kitchen with a wide pine table in the center. Guests sat on high stools and drank coffee out of enormous mugs and talked to Anne about cooking and gardening and how to construct fabulous window treatments out of department-store bedsheets. As if Anne had ever had to lift a finger herself. Still, Neely had to admit that Anne looked pretty good on camera.

  She went downstairs to make a fresh cup of tea; two more cups of tea and she’d be able to get through the morning without eating. A stack of newspapers and mail was piled up on the counter. Invitations to parties … another manila envelope from Liza … some magazines that Dave had picked out for her.… She grabbed the New York dailies and got back into bed, turning past the news to the gossip columns.

  Vanity Fair’s profile of actress Helen Lawson, scheduled to hit newsstands next week, has made its way into the hands of several film producers. Lawson died last November at age 62, just two days after taking the final curtain call for her wildly successful revival of Hit the Sky. If you ask us, there’s enough material in this great lady’s life for six movies; they don’t make dames like Helen anymore.…

  A movie based on the life of Helen Lawson! As if anyone still cared about that dried-out has-been bitch. At the end, her voice had been a mere quivering ghost of its former self, full of vibrato and whispery high notes. Much of the score of Hit the Sky had been reorchestrated because Helen’s vocal range was about half of what it once was. In two of her big numbers, she had even been reduced to talk-singing her way through the more difficult verses. Still, she had performed to a sold-out house every night.

  The fags always did love Helen, Neely thought, and then, I wonder if there will be a character based on me? Neely had gotten her first big break in one of Helen Lawson’s shows, back when she was a pudgy teenager fresh off the summer-stock circuit. Neely tried to imagine who could possibly play her. They would have to get an unknown, a young girl who would steal the movie, like Judy Garland singing “Dear Mr. Gable” in Broadway Melody of 1938. Even in death, Helen would be upstaged!

  The microwave buzzed; her hot water was ready. Poor Helen, she thought, smiling a little, poor old Helen.

  June came and went without a ring. Neely was spending the summer in New York, working on songs for a new album. On Thursday afternoons, Dave picked her up and they drove out to East Hampton, with a cooler full of cheese on the backseat. Dave had stopped smoking cigars and was now into various kinds of imported cheese that could be gotten only in the city. After dinner he would bring out the cheese and discuss each one with their guests. Neely was on a new diet that didn’t allow her to eat any dairy, so she would just sit and smile and nibble at a plate of grapes. Some nights the cheese smelled even worse than the cigars.

  Tonight they were going over to George and Sandy Dunbar’s house for a small informal dinner party. Just eight people! Neely was wearing a V-neck purple T-shirt, blue jeans, and a pair of black leather sandals with thin straps that buckled around her ankle. She wrapped a navy-blue sweatshirt around her shoulders for when it got cooler. A pair of large gold hoops was her only jewelry, a little bit of mascara and a soft mauve lipstick her only makeup.

  She wished the whole world could see her, going over the Dunbars wearing nothing special, because she had learned, over the last two years, that was the way to do it: the less effort you put into your clothing, the more it showed how close you were to your hosts. But that was the problem with these small get-togethers: no one ever saw you—no press, no photographers, no one to make jealous. It would be just like one of those interviews in People, the ones where someone famous, someone with all the money in the world, keeps telling the reporter that what they really like to do is stay home with a few close friends. And now, because of Dave, Neely was one of those friends.

  And Sandy would even be cooking! Though Neely had learned what that meant, too. It meant she would be expected to help carry things and possibly even chop a vegetable. Well, that was how these people did it. The ones with the most money were the ones who were allowed to act as if they didn’t have any money at all.

  They were the first to arrive. George thanked them for the two bottles of Merlot and the wheel of Roquefort that Dave had picked out for after dinner. Sandy hugged Dave and offered her right cheek to Neely for the briefest hello kiss.

  “Come into the kitchen,” Sandy said after the first glasses of wine were poured. “You can help me with the salad.” The kitchen smelled of onions and garlic. Dinner was some sort of Spanish dish that Neely had never heard of. Fish stew was what it looked like. Stew! That was the other thin
g she had noticed about these rich women: they loved to make stew. And out on the deck, covered with plastic, was an enormous gas grill, top of the line, perfect for steaks.

  “So, how’s everything?” Sandy asked.

  “Well, my boys are coming next week, so we’re getting the house ready for them.”

  “How old are they now? Seventeen?”

  “Sixteen,” Neely said. “Beverly Hills sixteen, if you know what I mean. Ted gives them everything they ask for.” Ted was doing production design now and often worked late into the night. As far as Neely could tell, the boys were pretty much raising themselves.

  “Time to start thinking about college,” Sandy said.

  “Judd’s already taking college courses. He’s this total computer genius, and he’s been in this special program since ninth grade. I don’t know where he gets it from, Ted and I are both lousy with numbers. And he’s just the sweetest kid.”

  “And—I’m sorry, I’m so bad with names.”

  “Dylan.”

  “Dylan. Of course. That’s a beautiful name.”

  “Well, actually his name is Theodore, after Ted, and we always used to call him Buddy, but when he turned twelve he started insisting everyone call him Dylan. Dylan Casablanca, can you imagine? The girls just eat him up. He’s my wild one.”

  “Well, that’s what sixteen is all about. Ashley is fourteen, and I keep telling George, Watch out, you have no idea what’s about to happen.” Like other second wives Neely had met, Sandy had bred quickly and often to secure her position. She and George had five children, each less than two years apart.

  “Yeah, well, if you ask me, Ted gets a little kick out of Dylan’s bad-boy behavior. Not that he would ever admit it.”

  “They never do,” Sandy said. “Here, help me with this pepper.”

  Neely stared at the bell pepper, unsure of what to do. Wash it? Carve out the stem? She sliced it around the middle and stared at the seeds, what looked like hundreds and hundreds of seeds. She began picking them out with her fingers.