Show Business Kills (2 page)

Besides, she couldn’t imagine when the hell she’d have the luxury of time it took to recover from something like that. Her
schedule on this show was so brutal, she couldn’t
even make an appointment to have her teeth cleaned, because she never knew when she’d have a day off.

“Not for this girl, honey,” she said to Bert. “When they start taking you apart and sewing you back together, it smacks a
little too much of taxidermy to me. I didn’t even like when they did it to Trigger and put him in that Western museum.” She
laughed, putting her hand up to feel the prongs of the plastic rollers to see if they were cool. She hoped that now that Bert
was almost through with her makeup, the discussion would be over. She had a costume fitting to squeeze in before she went
out on the floor to shoot today’s scenes.

“You know what, doll?” Bert said. And when Jan looked into the mirror at him, her dark-with-too-much-liner eyes caught his
gentle warning expression. “If I were you… I’d at least check it out.”

Jan stopped laughing and was stabbed with panic. He could be warning her that she was about to lose her job.

“Bert,” she said, turning to touch the sleeve of his long-sleeved striped shirt. Bert had been doing the makeup on “My Brightest
Day” for twenty years. He’d started on the show long before she did. Every morning he saw the actors at an hour when their
brains were still in a pre-coffee, partially awake state, when their tongues were still sleepily loose. If there was some
plan to dump Jan because she was looking too old, Bert probably would’ve heard rumblings about it, and now he was trying to
get her to do something to save herself.

“Good morning, you two.” Shannon Michaels, the twenty-two-year-old actress who played Julia, slid into the next chair sleepily,
and with a slim pink-nailed hand brushed her thick flaming red hair away from her perfect face. Hair the
same color Jan’s used to be naturally. A color no artificial mixture, designed to disguise gray, could ever reproduce.

“Mornin’, gorgeous,” Bert said. Then he took the mascara out of his case, opened it, and applied it to Jan at the same time
he was gazing at Shannon, so the tip of the wand hit Jan’s cornea, making her flinch and her eyes water. “Sorry, doll,” Bert
said to her, then he twisted the mascara closed, took another long sip of coffee, and moved on to do Shannon’s makeup.

Jan looked in the mirror at her own thickly made-up face, with one red watery eye, her head surrounded by the spiny electric
rollers with their wiry clips sticking into her scalp, and it was no mystery to her why Bert thought she was a candidate for
the knife. Her cheeks were taking a slow but unmistakable slide down, just like the hill behind her Hollywood Hills house
did every time it rained.

She’d rationalized it away before telling herself that she wasn’t out on the street competing with young actresses for jobs.
She was one of the leads on a soap, where it was supposed to be okay for actors to age with their characters. To become the
senior generation of the show’s family. But Jan’s character, Maggie Flynn, had always been a glamorous seductress, and now
she was afraid there was a chance the producers figured aging might not look so great on her.

Recently, as an experiment, she’d tried wearing a pair of those little stick-in-the-hairline gizmos she bought at a beauty
supply store on Laurel Canyon near Riverside. Little V’s that hold your face in the “up” position. And two weeks ago, after
she begged Ellen to take her along to an “A list” movie-business cocktail party, while she was in the middle of a conversation
with Alec Baldwin, the left one fell into
her drink. The story about how she tried to ignore it floating in her glass of wine would get a few laughs at Girls’ Night.

Thank God for the girls, she thought. On Friday night she’d get together with her three best friends and collapse. They’d
all howl with laughter in that free-at-last way they did when it was just the familiar four of them. And boy did Jan need
to be able to fall apart with people who had loved her long before she got the part of Maggie Flynn.

Poor Maggie. Now there was a woman who’d really been through the ringer. A travesty of womanhood who’d survived murders, mayhem,
runaway lovers, vengeful children, vengeful lovers, and runaway children. “And that was just on last Thursday’s show,” Jan
liked to joke. But Jan the actress was starting to show the strain on Maggie the character’s struggles. Five days a week,
fifty-two weeks a year, she’d tiptoe out of her house at six
A.M.
and drive in the dark, chilly morning to the studio, feeling lucky if her workday was over at seven or eight at night, when
it was dark again.

And on Saturdays and Sundays, when she wasn’t at a children’s birthday party or Coldwater Park with her angelic son Joey,
she’d be staring at a script, memorizing what could sometimes be forty or fifty pages of dialogue. There was never time to
let down, to have a cold, to look back, to just flake out, and not think about the show or what she was going to wear in the
publicity shots for
Soap Opera Weekly
.

You’d think after fifteen years of landing on her mark no matter how hysterical the scene, of spewing all the exposition no
matter how badly it was written or how emotional the monologue or how real the slap she had just taken, she’d feel secure,
confident, and assured of her status in the business. But the truth was that most people in the industry thought
daytime acting was schlocky. A joke. Hammy, facile, overdone. In fact at a recent network affiliates luncheon the producers
insisted Jan attend, a reporter from an entertainment magazine came over and asked her. “Excuse me, but do you know when the
real
actors are getting here?”

This morning while Shannon and Bert gabbed away, Jan pulled the spray-encrusted rollers out of her hair with her left hand,
and with her right she turned the pages of the script. She already had her lines down for today and Thursday, but she wanted
to read ahead to the scenes Maggie had on Friday.

MAGGIE’S OFFICE.

There she was, good old Maggie, who had kept her in food and shelter for the last fifteen years. What havoc was the nasty
bitch wreaking now?

MAGGIE IS ON THE PHONE; SHE’S ANXIOUS AND TREMBLING.

MAGGIE

(QUIETLY INTO PHONE) But I must speak to Doctor Cartright immediately. I don’t care if he’s with a patient. You go in there
and tell him it’s Maggie Flynn. This is an emergency.

THE DOOR BANGS OPEN AND LYDIA ENTERS, FOLLOWED BY SAMANTHA. MAGGIE GASPS.

SAMANTHA

(APOLOGETICALLY) I’m sorry, Mrs. Flynn. I tried to stop her.

LYDIA

Hang up that phone and tell me where my husband is.

MAGGIE

(HANGING UP THE PHONE) Get out or I’ll have security remove you.

Ooh, now this is a good scene, Jan thought. Maggie and Lydia are finally having it out. But more important, it could be a
great trend in the show. If there was a big Maggie-versus-Lydia story line coming up, it could go on for ages. Jan’s current
contract expired in eight weeks, so she needed a story like that. She sighed and leaned back in the big, comfortable makeup
chair, thanking heaven for this good news.

She had to keep this job. She had to hang in. Forty-nine was a lousy age to be in Hollywood. Last month Marly called her,
laughing so hard on the phone she could hardly get the story out about the part she just read for in a commercial. Marly Bennet,
who had starred in two situation comedies and a zillion commercials beginning in the sixties when she ran down the beach in
a bikini as the symbol of “The Pepsi Generation,” was up for a part in a commercial where her only line was, “My doctor told
me… Mylanta.”

That one put them all away. They belly-laughed themselves stupid over it. It was the kind of story the friends
swapped all the time. An incident that made them marvel over the distance they’d come together, the absurdity of the kind
of work they did, the importance, as Ellen said, of “taking the business with a shit-load of salt.”

The business which had beaten them up, made them stronger, enhanced their collective sense of humor, and brought them closer
even than they’d been in college, when they all lived on the same floor in the dormitory.

“We’re witnesses to one another’s history,” Rose said recently, liked the thought, took out a notebook and jotted it down.

“She thinks she said something profound.” Ellen laughed. “Tomorrow she’ll try to sell it to me as a movie.”

“Not at all,” Rose said. “I’ll try to sell it to someone classy.”

They loved getting together to exchange their stories, the old ones that were now part of the legend of the four of them,
tales of their history revisited and revamped. And the new stories, too, that caught them up with the current insanity about
their men, their kids, their bodies, their careers. Funny ones, terrible ones, stories of their tragedies and triumphs. Stories
about the lousy things that happened to them at work.

Last week when Marly called to invite Jan to Girls’ Night, she reminded her that next week it would be twenty-seven years
since they all arrived in Hollywood and, Jesus, could it possibly be thirty-one years since they met in the drama department
at Carnegie Tech. The first official Girls’ Night after they all moved west was in Jan’s tiny studio apartment, where they
all smoked dope for the first time together.

Jan remembered the way Marly, the most adept at everything, figured out how to get the Zigzag paper into the rolling machine,
and just the right amount of the little leaves
to shake into it to make a respectable joint. “An oxymoron if ever I heard one,” Marly said when she laughed about that night.
And after she lit it, inhaled, then took a few fast little sucks and held her breath, the strange pungent odor hung in the
air and the others sat glassy-eyed.

“Wow,” Ellen said. “I can understand why people get the munchies with this stuff. It really makes you famished. Hand me that
bag of cookies, will you?”

All three of them looked over at her quizzically.

“Um, Ellen,” Rose said, taking off her glasses and breathing on the lenses, then wiping them off on her pajama-top hem. “I
think you’re supposed to smoke it first.” It was a line she would sometimes say now when Ellen jumped to conclusions, and
it still made them laugh.

“Look what’s happened to us,” Marly said last month. “Our drug of choice has become estrogen.”

“Not me,” Rose said. “Anyone who wants to ingest the urine of a pregnant mare, say ‘Aye,’ and anyone who doesn’t, say ‘Neeeigh’!”

That one got a chuckle from all of them. But these days the laughter they shared was a very different brand from the stoned
giggle of the sixties. This was the laughter of survivors, a victorious “We’re-still-here” laugh that buoyed the four of them
much higher than the marijuana of long ago. They also laughed about the idea that the jokes that made them laugh the loudest
were usually about aging.

“Let’s sing that song from
South Pacific
,” Marly said when they were all gathered around her piano the last time. “The one about plastic surgery.”

“There’s a song in
South Pacific
about plastic surgery?” Ellen asked. “I don’t think so.”

“There is!” Marly insisted. “It’s called ‘You Have to Be Taut.’ ”

“Two old Jewish men are sitting on a park bench,” Rose told them. “One says, ‘So I think my wife is dead.’ The other says,
‘You
think
your wife is dead? Whaddya mean? How come you don’t know?’ And the first old man says, ‘Well, the sex is still the same,
but the dishes are piling up!’ ”

Jan loved the way she made them laugh with the stories she told about her jackass producer, Ed Powell. A man she described
as hating women so much he made Clarence Thomas seem like Alan Alda. But it was the old ones about her days as a sexy little
starlet that were by far their all-time favorites. Particularly the one they made her tell a million times, about the one-night
stand she had in the sixties with Maximilian Schell.

“Tell us again about you and Max.” It was usually Rose who would urge her, when they were about three glasses of wine into
the evening. The story might have been apocryphal—Jan had a way of making things up—but they didn’t care, because true or
not, it was still funny to them, all these years later.

“Max Schell?” Jan would ask, her face actually flushing when she thought about it. “Ohhh, no. Do you really want to hear that
one again?” Then she’d sigh, an “If-you-insist” kind of sigh, and she was back there. Lost in a reverie of being an aspiring
twenty-one-year-old actress who went to New York when they were seniors at Tech to audition for summer stock and met and was
seduced by Maximilian Schell, a dashing, sexy movie star.

Every time she told it, she’d embellish it a little, adding a nuance or a new detail, throwing in a moment she’d somehow forgotten
to mention before. How intimidated she was
by his stardom, how brusque he was with her, and how sure of himself. How after he got young Jan to his hotel suite, she went
into the bathroom to undress and looked at herself despairingly in the mirror that reflected the elegant fixtures in the expensive
hotel bathroom and Max’s monogrammed robe hanging on a brass hook and her own frightened face as she thought, What could he
possibly want with me?

They still giggled like teenagers when she talked, in her breathy voice, remembering the night that marked the downfall of
her innocence. About the zealous way she’d over-gelled the diaphragm she’d “just happened” to have with her. So that when
she squeezed it together to insert it, it got away from her and flew across the room “like a leaping frog” and landed with
the gooey rim splat on the floor, sticking stubbornly to the bathroom tile.

Then she described the way after Max fell asleep, she stared at him all night long, enthralled by his snore. And always when
she got to that part, she imitated the sounds of a specifically Maximilian Schell snore.

But the unequivocally best moment in the story was how, at the break of dawn, the trembling Jan, who hadn’t slept a wink,
dragged herself from under Max and pulled herself back into the fuchsia cocktail dress she’d worn the night before, and the
matching spike-heeled shoes and bag, mortified to have to wear them outside in the light of the New York day.