Filthy Rich (6 page)

“Marcy, your turning down Oprah and all the rest is either the most noble thing I’ve ever heard, or the most self-
destructive,” Lois said, giving me a quick hug as she headed out the door. “I don’t have time right now to figure out which. I’m supposed to be at the event early to greet arriving VIPs. There’s a cute state senator coming in from Oswego who looks promising. Call you later.”

Lois did call later. The state senator from Oswego, she reported, turned out to be gay.

“I didn’t know they allowed gay people in upstate New York,” I said. “But maybe that explains why he left upstate to come to the party.”

“Not funny, Marcy,” Lois said. “Man-wise, the night was a bust. The good news is, I have at least one friend who’s not above giving TV interviews. I forgot to tell you. Norma’s on Ted Koppel tonight to plug her new book.”

Ted Koppel. Good for him, I thought, and not for having the foresight to book Norma Ruckenhaus, well-known feminist intellectual. I was thinking instead of the notable absence of the host of
Nightline
among the media biggies plying me with flowers and candy to get me to bare my soul, such as it is, on their program.

Flipping the channels to find Norma, my timing coincided with the end of the local news shows. Lucky me. I landed on channel 5 just as Liz Smith was launching into a review of my humiliating introduction to the viewing public, reading text off the TelePrompTer I gathered she was recycling from her syndicated column. “It was a long, rough
night for Marcy Lee Mallowitz, but I confess I enjoyed every minute,” gushed the veteran gossip czarina, her tone unduly chipper, I thought, considering it was my life she was talking about. “Like a lot of what transpires these days under the nouvelle heading of ‘reality TV,’ Marcy’s blowup with her beau on
Filthy Rich!
was at once tasteless and transfixing—sort of like munching popcorn at a train wreck.”

I then had the eerie experience of watching different stations play the same humiliating video clip of the previous night’s
Filthy Rich!
fracas. Fortunately, I had the foresight to put the sound on mute, so I was able to avoid any snide remarks by the blow-dried anchors.

The part they kept playing is where Neil calls me a bitch, starts screaming “
Comedy Hour, Comedy Hour, Comedy Hour
,” and I respond by yelling back and throwing the ring. In the playback, Neil seemed even angrier than I remembered, his body language even more menacing. Also, I had to give my mother credit. I looked pretty good in that Saks number we picked out for the show. Even on sale, it cost a lot of dead roaches, as my dad would say. But they were dead roaches well spent.

After playing the clip, channel 9 announced the results of a brand-new poll. Americans, according to the survey, were so impressed by the way I stood up to Neil that they now rated me among the world’s most admired women—behind Eleanor Roosevelt and Mother Teresa, to be sure, but before another woman with man problems, Hillary Clinton. Don’t get a swelled head, I told myself. A week from now, proba
bly only a few die-hard
Filthy Rich!
fans will remember your name. Adding insult, I thought, by then I’ll probably be replaced on the list by the latest contestant to be ejected from the phony island paradise where they shoot
The Plank
.

The Plank
, I needn’t tell you, is the hot new “reality show,” which at that moment was threatening to equal, or even surpass, the phenomenal success of
Filthy Rich!
, notwithstanding its cheesy production values and a ludicrous format that lends credence to my theory that someone—perhaps visiting Russian spies piqued by the long lines at Disneyland—has slipped a mild hallucinogenic into the bottled water consumed by the TV big shots charged with deciding which programs America gets to see. Each week on the
The Plank
, in case you haven’t seen it, network executives dressed in elaborate pirate costumes drive around environmentally sensitive beach areas in flashy BMW convertibles, sometimes getting stuck in the sand. But the real drama comes at the end of the hour when the “pirates” capture the scantily clad contestant who registered the lowest likability with viewers in the Q rating the week before, and force him or her to walk a specially constructed plank to an awaiting rowboat, thereby tossing the person off the island and the show. The plank is decorated with the show’s logo of a winking pirate done in blue-and-gold glitter, so it stands out in the aerial shots that open and close the program.

Although it looks like all this action is taking place on a remote tropical island,
The Plank
is actually filmed on a back
lot in Burbank. The rats and bugs the pirates/executives devour in dining scenes are actually filet mignon, unless, of course, they requested chicken a few days in advance to help keep down their cholesterol. To maintain the show’s authenticity, the contestants are fed real rats and bugs.

I tried to watch
The Plank
once to see what all the hoopla was about on a night my worthless former roomie was working late—catching up on making molds of patients’ teeth, he said. I was deep in snoozeland after about ten minutes, and I wasn’t even tired. I just couldn’t stand the tedium anymore, and I was too lazy to get up from the sofa to search for the remote, which Neil, the scuzzy piece of dentifrice, had stored somewhere without informing me of the location for about the trillionth time. The only thing more distasteful than the show itself, in my book (other than Neil), is the mean-spirited Miller Lite commercial, where a half dozen professional football players chase a short, chubby, bearded guy out of a bar yelling, “Go back to the island, weirdo,” when they figure out he’s Brad Thatcher, the cunning cross-dressing plumber from outside Hartford who, by virtue of his victory in
The Plank’
s first survival test, is now a world-famous celebrity. I fail to see the humor in any kind of bigotry, although I surmise that Thatcher is laughing all the way to the bank.

The last thing I remember before dozing off for the night was hearing Norma accuse the nation’s leading male fashion designers of a conscious plot to subjugate women by raising hemlines.

“Ted,” she said, trying to stir controversy and book sales, “we’re talking about men who want to exploit women, but don’t really like them. I ask: Why else expose their knees?”

I thought Norma made a good point. It’s a lot harder to take someone seriously around the office if her skirt crawls up to her gizzard each time she sits down. But the eversensible moderator wasn’t buying my friend’s antifeminist conspiracy theory. “Come now, Ms. Ruckenhaus,” Koppel said, “surely there’s more to fashion than a desire to keep women down. I daresay Calvin Klein and the others have prospered precisely because women are more liberated, not the other way around. And pardon me for saying this, but I detect a tinge of sexism in your implicit assumption that women will go along like sheep with whatever these gentlemen say is fashion. And what about the female designers? I don’t see them complaining.”

Koppel promised Norma a chance to respond after a commercial break. But by then, I was already fast asleep, dreaming I was being chased by a giant toothbrush.

Oops. In the
depressing aftermath of my network television debut, and distracted by the likes of Barbara Walters wooing me for a tell-all chat, I’d forgotten all about my clients. My subconscious sent me a flash about this dereliction of duty around 6
A.M.
, causing me to awake with a start.

I felt truly awful, and not just because I’m the sort of gal who deeply resents rising with the roosters. Barely thirty-six hours ago, in a pitifully public trauma, I’d lost the man I thought I was going to marry. Now, it seemed, I was on a fast track to pissing away my fulfilling career as the Personal Life Coach to a churning assemblage of striving, well-to-do ladies.

I thought of poor Dolores Smithers, the forty-three-year-old financial wizard, whose scheduled two o’clock session the previous afternoon had completely slipped my mind. Dolores, having already banked a small fortune, no longer saw her future in pork bellies. Instead, she was counting on my coaching assistance to realize her long-standing dream
of becoming the proud proprietor/artistic director of a crafts shop specializing in delicate macramé items with a nautical motif. Yesterday, I recalled glumly, we were supposed to go to a big yarn store together. I hoped that my no-show wouldn’t dampen her resolve to make the break from the pressured job and lifestyle she had grown to hate.

By the way, the field trip to the yarn store is an example of a useful technique I call “strategic realization.” Getting Dolores to see and smell the wool she yearned to commune with on a full-time basis would, I felt, move her a critical step closer to finding the courage to pursue her true passion in the wonderful world of macramé miniatures. It took seven hour-long sessions to persuade Dolores to take an afternoon off from work to make the woolly journey. Now, I feared, it would probably take seven more just to persuade her not to fire me and find a new Personal Life Coach.

I played back my messages. There was one from my mother, natch, this time to announce that if she didn’t hear from me in an hour she was assuming I didn’t mind her giving
People
magazine some “nice” pictures of her newly (in)famous daughter.

“Can you imagine, Marcy,” Mom said, “you’re going to be in
People
. The neighbors are so excited they practically have
shpilkes
.”

“
Shpilkes
” is a great Yiddish word meaning “ants in your pants.” I didn’t know about the neighbors, but the idea of my mother blathering about my private life to a reporter from
People
was enough to give me a serious case.

“The reporter asked about you and Neil,” continued her message. “I told her I never liked him. He’s an orthodontist who won’t treat children, for God’s sake. What kind of father is that for my grandchildren?”

Good work, Mom, I thought. That will teach me not to answer my phone or message machine in a timely manner. The Marcy Lee Mallowitz story was now going to get the
People
treatment whether I wanted it or not. I just hoped my mother would have the good sense not to share my baby bath photos or, even worse, high school prom pictures of me wearing big, teased hair the friendly trainee at the local beauty shop managed to elevate by spraying tons of sticky hair spray that kept me sneezing all night, with my dorky date, Eugene from next door, at my side. Not to dwell on the excessive hair spray, but I’m certain scientists one day will confirm that the reduction in the ozone layer caused by my prom preparations is the real reason for global warming.

Before Mom could hang up, my dad grabbed the phone to remind me, much as he always did when I was going through a rough spot, that I was still his “favorite,” and that the job offer with the family exterminating company still stood. “You say aquamarine trucks, Marcy, we’ll do aquamarine,” he signed off. “But will you think about navy? It hides the dirt.” By now this was a set routine, not unlike Dad’s dead-roach count. But it always made me smile.

His message was followed by one from my friend Lois. She had concocted a creative scheme for me to meet “smart, sensitive guys,” and couldn’t wait to share it. “We’ll
enroll you in the ‘Holocaust Studies’ course for adult singles at the Ethical Culture Society,” she said. “
New York
magazine this week calls it ‘the hip, new Dating Central.’ Call back right away. Maybe I’ll do it with you.”

Crazy Lois, I thought. After all those rubber-chicken dinners with Democratic fat cats, I think she’s finally lost it. I wasn’t going to use Hitler to meet a new man, even if the price of the course did include complimentary free drinks. I was not that desperate. Yet.

In addition to Mom, Dad, and Lois, and follow-up calls from the gift-bearing media bigs, there was a long message from NBC’s Tim Russert. He apologized for not sending anything (he pleaded that he’d been “out of town”) and invited me to appear on a special segment of
Meet the Press
, which, of course, he moderates.

I had the strangest reaction. Instead of being flattered by Russert’s attention, or offended by the relaxation of standards that led him to think I was
Meet the Press
worthy, I felt mildly insulted by his delay in contacting me, not to mention his lame excuse—“I was out of town.” Yeah, right. Hadn’t he ever heard of Harry & David? And HELLO THERE, what about 1-800-Flowers? This is the new millennium. You don’t have to be in town to send a fruit basket or a nourishing gift box of Terra chips with assorted salsas. I made a mental note that if I ever did decide to break my public silence, it would not be on
Meet the Press
.

Farewell to the old, self-aware Marcy Mallowitz who only the night before was mentally praising Ted Koppel for
ignoring her. Literally overnight, a new, not necessarily improved Marcy began to emerge—call her “Marcy, the Media Babe.” I was still lying low at home in my comfy pink sweatsuit from Rosie O’Donnell. But there was no disguising my change in outlook. Where at first I saw all of the gifts and attention coming my way as a humiliating reminder of Neil’s dumping me on
Filthy Rich!
—a pretty sad claim to fame when you think about it—I now viewed them as an entitlement. It’s an unattractive transformation but one that’s hard to avoid. Just ask the two former Mrs. Donald Trumps, Marla and Ivana, or for that matter any of those much-sought-after rejects from
The Plank
.

Beyond my mother, Lois, and Tim Russert, the tape also contained a pile of messages from publishing houses and advertising honchos wanting to explore various commercial opportunities that might prove mutually beneficial. The most remunerative, though not necessarily the most appealing, was an offer to become the official spokeswoman for that exciting dietary breakthrough, kosher Baco Bits. I was honored by my selection, of course, and thought the exceptional minds who run this prestige outfit made a savvy choice. But that didn’t mean I intended to return the call. Or any of the other calls. I was a Personal Life Coach. More accurately, by that point, I suppose, a Personal Life Coach with Attitude. In any case, I still had no intention of boot-strapping my one catastrophic appearance on
Filthy Rich!
into drive-by guest gigs on
Meet the Press
and tons of shows lower on the food chain. Nor did I intend to exploit my
accidental turn in the spotlight by pitching sacrilegious food products meant to enhance the salad-eating experience.

Oh, I almost forgot. There was also a message from Dolores. I must be blocking because at the time it was a very big deal. Instead of expressing anger at my standing her up at the yarn store, she sounded sympathetic. She said she “totally understood,” given how upset I must be. She also said I could call her any hour of the day if I wanted to talk to her about “the things that were troubling” me. She even suggested that I hop on an exercise bike and ride ten miles to reduce my stress and “restore that sense of calm equilibrium everybody needs to function properly.”

Hey, I thought, I’m the Personal Life Coach. She’s supposed to be the client. But thanks to the blowup on
Filthy Rich!
our roles were now reversed. Dolores was trying to coach me, using the same reliable lines of wisdom and encouragement I’d used on her maybe hundreds of times over.

I had to face facts. You can’t be an effective Personal Life Coach when your own life is so visibly pathetic that even your highly self-absorbed clients are moved to focus on some other person’s problems, not their own—and
you
are that other person. The distance and respect that are prerequisites for my profession were gone, just as good old Neil was gone.

Uh-oh, I said to myself, struggling not very successfully to fend off the sad feelings starting to wash over me, along with an overpowering, and not altogether pleasant, sense of déjà vu. For the second time in my life, I was entering the
dicey economic and emotional terrain I call “Gap Country”: a period of professional uncertainty and turmoil that finds you clinging for comfort to the notion that if your career doesn’t start looking up, and soon, you could always find work at a nearby Gap clothing store. Indeed, the very ubiquity of the Gap’s outlets for vending its strangely appealing generic preppy wear, which just yesterday you condemned as urban blight, suddenly becomes your major source of security and hope.

My first experience in this scary realm dates back nearly eight years. I had just left Santa Monica Spaces, and it wasn’t yet clear whether I’d succeed in building a sufficiently large roster of well-paying clients to make a successful transition from closet consulting to my newly chosen profession of Personal Life Coach. The one thing that
was
certain from my standpoint was that I wasn’t going to go back to closets, or back to Brooklyn to take up the giant bug sprayer my sweet dad kept calling to say he had all filled and waiting for me. Becoming a Gap employee, or “Gapster,” as I prefer to call this exclusive club, was at least something different. On the bright side, moreover, it wasn’t lost on me that directing inquiring Gap customers to the location of the store’s sales racks can be considered
a helping profession
, in its way.

There were nearly two months when practically every waking hour I wasn’t seeing my few existing clients, or massaging the contacts I hoped would lead to new ones, was spent skulking amid the meticulously stacked piles of new clothing displayed on the selling floor of the Gap store near
est my home, boning up just in case. Originally I worried that my mediocre folding skills, which I never found to be a real impediment in redesigning people’s closets, might disqualify me for a job whose central responsibility involves arranging garments into incredibly neat stacks. But that was before I learned the secret behind the Gap’s superhuman stacking. That secret is the utilization of ingenious plastic forms, which make precision folding pretty foolproof even for people like me whose attempts to master hospital corners have always ended in humiliation. The feeling of relief when I spotted a young female employee casually using such a form to straighten a pile of children’s sweaters one night just before closing is indescribable.

Recalling that sweet moment of revelation somehow supplied me with the courage to confront what needed doing if I were to have any chance of preserving my hardwon Life Coaching career. Yes, Marcy, I thought, in a pinch there’s always the Gap.

At precisely 9
A.M.
, still wearing Rosie’s sweatsuit and munching one of the talk-show queen’s Twinkies for breakfast, I began dialing my clients, including Dolores, to cancel all appointments for the next few weeks. By then, I figured, wiping away a tiny dollop of white Twinkie cream that had fallen onto the pink sweatshirt, either something good would happen to put my life back on track again, or my clients, who have a notably short attention span when it comes to
other
folks’ problems, would forget that their Life Coach was such a well-known mess.

I was waiting for the message tape to rewind, wondering how I was going to finance my self-imposed layoff, when my doorman Frank arrived with yet more floral and candy bribes from Leeza, Queen Latifah, and the gang. Easily the day’s most unusual offering came from Marcia Clark, the exassistant Los Angeles district attorney who parlayed her bungling of O. J. Simpson’s prosecution into a $4.2 million book deal, an image-enhancing beauty makeover, and a glitzy new career as a TV legal commentator and talk-show host: a pair of fine leather gloves from Bergdorf’s that recalled the most famous piece of evidence from the televised trial that launched her as a celebrity. Except for the absence of blood, of course. “I’ll be subbing for Geraldo next week,” she wrote on the card. “Would love you as a guest.”

The fresh supply of expensive loot confirmed that memories of my
Filthy Rich!
appearance had yet to fade.

Through no fault of my own, I’d become the starring player in a made-for-television melodrama whose ending was not yet in sight. Americans were still standing around office watercoolers and in supermarket checkout lines debating whether it’s ever okay to serve as your boyfriend’s Lifeline, and whether I acted hastily in tossing the ring at Neil instead of trying to patch things up by docilely apologizing for my costly confusion over Teri Garr’s curriculum vitae. In other words, celebrity, if I really wanted it, was still out there waiting for me.

When I tried to put everything in perspective—and apart from snacking and thinking about the Gap, it was mostly what I did—I just got more confused. Whoopi Goldberg was offering me my own box on
Hollywood Squares
. I was perfectly aware I’d done nothing to earn the honor other than to make a dangerous projectile of Neil’s crummy ring. But like I’ve said, I was getting less humble by the minute. I was feeling entitled. Hell, I figured, why shouldn’t Whoopi invite me? I can be more entertaining than Jim Nabors.

Yet that swagger notwithstanding, the odds that I would actually say yes to assuming one of the august squares remained slim, and not just because I wanted to avoid having to list “square” as my profession on the next Barnard alumnae questionnaire. Unlike Lucy Ricardo and most everyone else I know, I never really had show-biz aspirations. If you check out the high school play program my mother has squirreled away in her extensive Marcy Memorabilia Collection, you’ll see that my only real entertainment credit prior to Neil Night on
Filthy Rich!
was a small footnote thanking me and about ten other students listed in alphabetical order for our help painting sets for the junior-class production of
Storybook Theater
. Avidly following the travails of my favorite celebrities in the gossip pages, as I have for years, has provided me with a daily dose of vicarious excitement and glamour, but without instilling any real ambition to become one myself.