I'll Be There (13 page)

“Cee Cee,” Richie whispered into her hair after they’d been clinging on to one another for a long time, “I just realized I’d better get out of here fast.”

“Why is that?” she asked, looking concerned.

“Because darlin’.., you and I are standing in the White Zone.” Cee Cee chuckled as Richie squeezed her hand and gave her his reassurance that he’d see her in a matter of hours, then fell easily into his waiting limousine, which pulled away from the curb and moved slowly into the Los Angeles day.

ATLANTIC CITY, NEW JERSEY

1985

IIUN THE BOARDWALK in Atlantic City, we will walk in a dream. On the boardwalk in Atlantic City, life will be peaches and cream.” Leona used to start singing that song the minute the bus pulled out of the Port Authority, and keep singing it all the way onto the Garden State Parkway until Cee Cee, who always felt sick on buses anyway, wanted to scream at her to stop. And if Leona’s singing and the stinky odor of the bus fuel weren’t bad enough, those Hebrew National salami sandwiches Leona always packed for the trip and unwrapped and devoured, and occasionally pushed into her daughter’s face to offer her a bite, would eventually make Cee Cee green with nausea.

This time she was in Atlantic City to play Caesars Palace. Not exactly Carnegie Hall, but the money was great and after her business manager heard how high the offer was, he told her to grab it.

“You want me to take a nightclub act to Atlantic City? Now? When my show’s a big hit? Wayne, it’s my time off and I’m going to go sit on a beach somewhere.”

“Atlantic City is a beach somewhere. During the day when you’re

not onstage, you’ll sit on it. Take the kid, she’ll love it there.”

“No shot.”

“Cee Cee, you people in your business,” he began, and she knew he was about to launch into his voice-of-doom speech, “you make a mistake when you live your lives and plan the rest of your lives based on how much you make in your best year. And the truth is, if you live like that even with a hit show, you’ll run out of money.”

No matter how much money Cee Cee had, and she was never sure

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exactly how much that was, she always worried about it. She had never been able to forget the scenes from her childhood of Leona sitting over a dining-room table covered with bills every month, frantically trying to decide which ones she could get away with not paying for a little while longer, all the while muttering, “The poorhouse. Pretty soon they’ll be sending my mail to the poorhouse.”

And all those times in Wayne’s office when Cee Cee sat across the desk from the furrowed-browed “accountant who got lucky” as Hal called him and Wavne tried to explain why she had to incorporate and become a production company, or whatever the hell else he told her, like what he was going to do about her tax problems, she didn’t understand a word of it. Sometimes he sounded as if he was talking to a two-year-old, and finally, still in the dark but wanting to end the dizzying confrontation with the sheets of numbers, she would say, “Look, here’s our deal, I’ll make the money, you take care of it.”

Bertie used to tell her she was being infantile by evading the issue of her own finances and that an artist had to be a businesswoman too, and Cee Cee knew that was probably true. Because when you put your money into somebody else’s hands, you ran a risk they could lose it or steal it or, as the song went, “run Venezuela,” but she decided she’d take that chance instead of clogging up her brain with the problems.

“Cee Cee,” Wayne urged, and when he urged he always made it sound as if it was for her good and never his commission, “do yourself a favor. For a lousy two weeks in New Jersey, you’ll make a shitload of dough, and then if your television show gets canned, you’ll have a cushion.” Mister Tact.

“My show is number three in the country. Why would it get canceled?” she asked, hearing the panic in her voice because she immediately suspected he knew something she didn’t.

“Hey, no reason. I’m just saying that plenty of people in your position who started out as big stars died without a pot to piss in.” “There’s a happy thought.”

That night she had walked from room to room trying to decide how much of a comedown it would be when people in the business found out she was playing Atlantic City, the armpit by the sea. Why would she do that to herself? She didn’t even like playing the place when she was a kid and she had no other choice. At the moment she

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was a big television star, and eventually she’d make movies again. Or maybe not. Maybe she’d die without a pot to piss in.

Probably it was hearing that her two allies at the network, Tim Weiss and Michelle Kleier, were both leaving their jobs that finally made her call Larry Gold and tell him she was willing to do the gig in Atlantic City. Michelle was leaving the network job because she was pregnant again and this time she didn’t want to have to leave a baby and rush back to work, and Cee Cee hadn’t heard anything about where Tim was planning to go, but he was definitely out of there, and he had been her strongest champion.

She could remember so many of the people at the networks and the studios whose names had reverberated, through the showbusiness community at one point or another because of their power positions, and who were now nowhere to be seen or heard from again. The turnover was almost comical. And of course, the new people liked to come up with new projects of their own and not inherit shows from somebody else’s regime. Cee Cee had known from the start how both Tim and Michelle fought to get her show on the air, then defensively changed the format, the time slot, the promotion techniques to keep it on top. And each time the show would do great and their belief in her would be lauded. But if neither of them were there, she wasn’t sure what would happen.

The day after she talked with Larry she sat down at the kitchen table and on the long thin pad the housekeeper used to make shopping lists, she made a list of the best writers of special material and jokes, choreographers and boy dancers, lighting and costume designers, and then started worrying again so she called Hal in New York. After two seasons as the musical director of her show, he had taken his original musical to a small theater off-Broad,,ay. Now a move to Broadway was in the works, and he was up to his ears trying to make the show bigger to fit the bigger venue.

“I have to put an act together to take to Caesars Palace in Atlantic City,” she told him.

“Why? Who’d you murder?”

“Funny. But Wayne says the offer’s too big to turn down. And there’s always the threat my series may get canceled, so I may as well have an act ready to take on the road.”

Hal sighed. The timing couldn’t be worse for me. I’m over

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whelmed with work,” he told her in an apologetic voice, and she knew

he didn’t have a minute to spare to help her with some nightclub act. “I understand,” she said.

“But I’ll send you some ideas, and I’ll call some people I think you can use, and come to think of it, I do have an idea or two in my trunk you may like.”

“Thank you, Harold,” she said gratefully. She was about to go on and tell him who she’d put on her own list to call when he said, “Cee Cee?”

“Yeah?”

‘I’ll fly in for a couple of days and help get you started.”

Within ten days of Hal’s arrival in Los Angeles, the act was complete. Between his contacts in the creative community and Cee Cee’s, they put together a team of unbeatable talent, and rehearsals began. There were ballads and blues and soft shoe numbers and funky get down rock numbers, and Cee Cee’s tribute to the saucy sexy ladies, Belle Barth, Mae West, Totie Fields, was funny and original. The act was drop-dead great and showed a versatile Cee Cee no small screen production overseen by a Standards and Practices censor could ever possibly produce.

But even after the long flight from L.A. to Kennedy Airport and the limo ride from New York, she couldn’t sleep at all. At first she thought it was because she was nervous about the opening tomorrow night. But that was impossible. She knew the act backward and inside out, to the point where every gag sounded like an ad-lib and every haughty toss of the head was a guaranteed laugh. No, the fact that the opening was hours away wasn’t what had kept her awake. It was knowing that for the first time in almost thirty-five years, she was back in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and she was feeling an unexpected tug of sentimentality about the old days she’d spent here.

This was the place where all of it had started for her. Onstage at the Steel Pier in the Jerry Grey Kiddie Show, a show in which she had first appeared when she was five years old, and from which she had retired at age ten. And it was in those shows where suddenly she had felt her power as a performer and had known that if nothing else in the world ever worked for her, when she stood on a stage and sang a song, even in the light of a bare lightbulb, for that moment people loved her, or thought they did anyway, and for years that

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brand of love had almost made up for the fact that she wasn’t pretty, and her mother was fat, and boys didn’t exactly fall all over her. Atlantic City was where she had first met Bertie. Bertie who was already gone for two whole years. How could it be?

And just forty miles north of Atlantic City on Long Beach Island was the place where she had met and married the only husband she would probably ever have. John Perry. She had been nineteen and he was thirty-one, the owner of the theater where she was working. The one who had predicted the eventuality of the success she was having now. And one night, aching with a girlish crush on him, she’d gone to his house on the beach, wanting him, begging him to make love to her, and instead he told her she was fabulous and brilliant and how famous she would be some day, then patted her on the ass and sent her on her way.

Of course later that summer, almost as a vote of confidence in her future fame, he had asked her to marry him, swept her off her feet, managed her career until she started actually to approach the fame he’d predicted, and then he left her. Not because he didn’t love her, but because he said he couldn’t handle what he knew would become her superstardom. Told her one heartbreaking night, the memory of which still hurt, that he wanted a woman, needed a woman who would bask in his glory.

Now it was six-fifteen in the morning of her opening night at Caesars, and she knew she ought to turn over and try to catch at least a few hours of sleep or tonight on stage she’d be a dishrag, but she was too wide awake, thinking about the old days, and soon she was on her feet, padding around trying to find some sweat clothes to throw on so she could go out for a little walk on the boardwalk. Last night, by the time she and Nina had arrived it was late and they were both too tired from the trip to feel like going out to explore. They had ordered dinner to be sent up to the suite, and when Richie Charles called to say he had arrived that afternoon, they invited him to join them. Richie was in Atlantic City to be Cee Cee’s opening act, and Nina had taken an immediate liking to the funny black man, who after dinner taught the kid three new card games before Cee Cee told them to break it up, and sent Nina to bed.

For a minute Cee Cee thought it might be a bad idea to let Nina and Richie become friends, because the comic’s outrageous, X-rated,

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foulmouthed behavior was well known, but then she decided it was mostly the character he played onstage who was whacky and not so much the quiet, lonely, brilliant comic she had known for years as they both had worked their way up. Onstage Richie did a lot of jokes about using drugs and getting laid. He had even been reputed to drop. his pants and “moon” the audience, or unzip his fly, as the women n the audience shrieked and he did some material about “the truth about black men.” But the offstage Richie was gentle and thoughtful and as childlike as Nina herself.

This morning as Cee Cee opened the door from her bedroom and stepped into the living room of the garish suite, she remembered that she didn’t have to tiptoe out, because last night Nina and Richie had made a plan to wake up early, rent bikes, and go for a long ride on the boardwalk at sunrise, and Nina had probably met Richie in the lobby before six so that by now the two of them were well on their

way.

;l’he jangling sounds of the casino jarred the early-morning hum in Cee Cee’s brain, and she passed through quickly, amazed as she’d always been in Las Vegas that even at this hour there were rows of whit-haircd ladies holding plastic cups filled with coins, and pulling at the slot machine handles. Some of them even sat on folding lawn chairs they’d brought from home and parked in front of a favorite slot machine. Now she was out the door onto the boardwalk, where she stopped for a long nostalgic time to breathe in the salty fishy smell and watch the sun coming up over the ocean and the waves rolling in to an empty beach.

For an instant she closed her eyes to take herself back, to pretend that no time had passed at all since the days she’d spent there as a kid, sure that she could still smell the unchanging carnival smell that must be wafting from Fralinger’s Salt Water Taffy, down a few blocks, which someone in New York had promised her was one of the institutions still standing.

I can’t believe I’m actually getting a thrill out of being in Atlantic City, New Jersey, she thought, and turned left because some vague memory told her it was in that direction where everything would be that she wanted to see. A group of bike riders moved breezily past her and set a flock of pigeons fluttering, and she was excited to be on the boardwalk, passing chintzy little souvenir shops crowded with

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schlocky merchandise, where she used to rush every summer just before she went back to the Bronx so that she could buy her father a tin ashtray. She remembered how painstaking the decision was over which ashtray it should be, and how she would carefully count out the change Leona had given her with the warning not to spend it on “chazerai,” nothing junky or worthless, which was why she bought ashtrays, because they were useful.