Is My Bow Too Big? How I Went From Saturday Night Live to the Tea Party (4 page)

Huh? Is she a hooker? What do they call it in this tax bracket?

Though I was the only virgin at the Playboy Mansion, I did have my shame. In the mirror-walled bathrooms, sometimes I’d force myself to vomit after binging on too many of Hef’s free M&Ms and cashews. This was a diet technique called “purging” that I had learned as a gymnast. I was so hungry all the time, but I just couldn’t seem to get thin enough for the competition of gymnastics
or
the competition of Hollywood. So much pressure. I’d starve myself and end up chewing gum all day, which led to a lot of dental work.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.

-George Orwell

I first heard about purging in a restroom stall at a teenage gymnastic meet. It felt deviant, and I was guilt ridden.

It was one of my many desperate attempts to transform from an
endomorph
to a
mesomorph
or
ectomorph
. Working out for five hours a day wasn’t enough.

I wondered if maybe Hef had cameras behind the mirrors. Maybe when he dies, and they unlock his vaults, interspersed among the reels of film showing Lingerie Attire Only Midsummer Night’s Eve parties, and gorgeous, naughty playmates giggling in the powder room, there will be Victoria Jackson vomiting. Kind of appropriate. No wonder the butler looked at me so mean when he brought my fourth sundae on a silver tray into the game room.

The Mansion was much more fascinating than sitting in my retirement hotel room, and my goals were achieved: I got an agent and a
SAG
card. You see, the catch-22 in Hollywood is that you can’t get an acting role if you’re not in the Screen Actor’s Guild, but you can’t get into the Screen Actor’s Guild unless you get an acting role. This makes it impossible for someone to become an actor. And this is exactly what they’re trying to do—whoever “they” are. They are weeding out the “I-must-be-an-actor-or-I’ll-die” people from the “acting-seems-fun” people. You need determination, patience, and a miracle. Or a loophole. Actor and producer Michael Callan offered me one. After doing handstands everywhere, on chairs, and vases, and waterfalls to get attention from someone, Michael casually sauntered over to me one night at Hef’s and asked, “Do you want to be in my movie?”

“What do I do?” I asked suspiciously.

“You do a handstand on a car and then say something.”

“
What
do I say?”

“What would
you
say?”

“Uh, ‘My dad taught me that.’”

Thus, I got my
SAG
card. Thank you, Michael. I don’t know if there were naked women in the movie—I never watched it. So I guess it is not only “who you know,” but also what you do, and who you are
.

I liked to wander the grounds of the Playboy Mansion and pretend it was mine. I suspect lots of the guests do that. I’d go in the phone room and doodle on the Playboy letterhead notepad. I’d try to think of someone to call from there. I’d wander through the garden and look at the animals.
I probably shouldn’t be at the Playboy Mansion
, I thought. “Avoid the appearance of evil” is a Bible verse. Even if I weren’t a Christian, I wouldn’t approve of Playboy. It’s porn!

But the Mansion wasn’t porn. It was a pretty house with some nice people in it. I’d wander outside and hang out with the security guard, nicknamed “Chief.” The employees were kind and they’d all worked there forever. After two years of me coming up with Johnny every weekend, they felt like family to me. Mary, the secretary, would hug me like we’d known each other our whole lives. I didn’t watch many movies on movie night because I only liked romantic comedies. Hef always had the latest release and everyone would assemble in the movie room and watch it with him. I’d hang out at the bar with Rob, the bartender. He was very tall. He told me jokes for hours while I experimented with alcohol. I’d sip a Margarita for the first time and say, “How can you remember so many jokes? You’ve told me, like, a hundred already!” I’d say, “Do you ever get used to seeing so many pretty women?” I’d push him the unfinished Margarita in exchange for a Pina Colada. He’d say, “You don’t even notice after a while. I’ve been here twenty years.” I’d then exchange my Pina Colada for a White Russian and stroll over to the game room alone.

I never liked pinball machines, so I’d flip through the magazines proudly displayed everywhere.
Well
, I thought,
the Bible says to be “in the world, but not of the world.” Also, Jesus hung out with prostitutes. So, it’s probably not a sin to be here if I’m not sinning. I shouldn’t be drinking. But I’m not drunk, and Jesus did turn water into wine. It was his first miracle.
It’s amazing how people can justify things that they want to keep doing.

I came into a room where everything—the walls, the floor, the ceiling—were all padded, and wondered what its purpose was. It must be sexual. I thought it would make a good gym. You could try new tricks and not get hurt. I’d examine Miss January’s centerfold. How did I stand a chance of getting a husband with competition like this? I’d heard about the airbrushing, but then the centerfold would walk into the room (she was clothed), and I would be even more astounded at her beauty. She’d leave the room and I’d wonder how God could create such a beautiful woman. Then I’d wonder how she could pose nude and act so unashamed.

That’s the thing: I always thought they were “acting.” When I looked deep into their eyes, they looked ashamed and afraid.

Use Me

The actress cries out from her lonely apartment

“Use Me, Use Me!”

The abandoned wife in her curlers and nightgown says

“Use Me, please Use Me!”

The man in the sombrero hat at the bar, he slurs,

“Use Me, Hey, Use This!”

Silently, everyone desperately wants to be used.

Amused, I see my calico cat

straining her neck near my knee,

Silently purring,

“Meow, Use Me! Meow, Use Me!”

Bums on the street and cops on the beat cry out

“Use Me, Use Me!”

Silently, everyone desperately wants to be used.

Isn’t it funny just how we were made?

When we are used, we feel jaded

When we are needed, we cry out for help:

“Leave me alone, I’m not at home,

I won’t answer my phone.”

Isn’t it funny how everyone thinks they’re being used?

The whore on the corner of Sunset and Vine, she says

“Use Me, hey baby, Use Me!”

The film star who’s fading, who’s tired of waiting says

“Use Me, Take a chance, Use Me.”

The man drinking coffee near the messy-haired girl,

they harmonize,

“Use Me, Use Me…”

Isn’t it funny how everyone thinks they’re being used?

When I found out that Kahlua was loaded with calories, but that white wine only had a hundred per glass, I switched to wine and stayed there. Hef didn’t know he was paying for my Master’s Degree in alcoholism.

I met my first agent at the Playboy Mansion: Betty from the William Morris Agency. I was talking to a group of people one night, regaling them with my latest adventures in the life of a starving young artist; they were all comfortably wealthy and enjoying my tales when Johnny prodded me, “Tell them about your commercial. She got a commercial, and she doesn’t even have an agent!”

“Well,” I began. “I was doing this play at the Variety Arts Center (for free), where I play Queen Gertrude in
Hamlet
, but with a Brooklyn accent. John Barrymore III plays my son, and I had to kiss him, and his sister Drew Barrymore was there, she’s, like, three years old and so cute, and this toothless, wild haired, barefoot bum was in my dressing room, and I was scared, but I found out it was John’s dad, John Barrymore II, and he was spouting Shakespeare, kind of incoherently. He’s famous, and after the show, this person in the audience asked me if I wanted to be in a GAP commercial. So I shot it yesterday. I had to wear really tight jeans and do a flip-flop. And they let me keep the jeans.”

This woman, Betty, said, “I’d like to represent you. I’m with the commercial department at William Morris.”

I thanked her profusely. I asked her when I would meet Mr. Morris.

“He’s dead.”

Everyone laughed.

Success in Hollywood is based on an invisible substance— perception. If people perceive you are hot, you can get millions for your movie role when only two years before, with your same talent and face, you got nothing. If your agent perceives you are hot, they might get you a meeting, or hang out with you. Otherwise, all they do is answer the phone if someone wants to hire you, take ten percent whether they’ve found you a job or not, and if you run into them on the street you apologize for breathing their air. Agents have attitude.

I always felt a bit uncomfortable at Hef’s place (being as we have opposite moral worldviews and all), but my discomfort increased as the years went by. I exchanged Christmas cards with him through the years. His always had a beautiful scantily clad blonde on it; mine had a Bible verse. Recently, I found myself back there. I hadn’t visited in ten years or more. I was standing alone at the bar, older and wiser, but fatter, chatting with tall Rob the bartender. No one else was around. Suddenly Hef appeared in his pajamas and stood next to me. A photographer appeared out of nowhere and took our picture. Then, explaining my appearance, I said, “I just came by to relive my youth.”

“That’s why we’re all here, darlin’,” said Hef.

Dating Famous Men

Dating famous men can help your career. It can get your picture in magazines and make your circle of friends include the movers and the shakers. I had a date with Arthur Godfrey. I think my agent, Betty, felt sorry for me, and was trying to help me out by setting up this date with Godfrey, who was both rich and close to death! She never explicitly encouraged me to be a gold-digger, but she did mention that a friend of hers had just cashed in on a geriatric marriage. Anyway, I saw it as a free dinner—and he was a legend: my hometown, Miami, had named a causeway after him. I thought I could cheer up the old man because I played the ukulele like he did. My Grandma Dorothy was so impressed that I was going to meet him! She told me to ask him how he did his particular “strum”!

Arthur was living at the Bel-Air Hotel. He shuffled very slowly to his white Cadillac, and drove us to a restaurant on Benedict Canyon Road. He was eighty years old. I was twenty-one. He didn’t eat one bite. We miraculously made it back to his hotel room without an accident. I took my ukulele out of the case. He was very grumpy. We sat at a table in his living room.

“Do you have any questions to ask me?” He asked. “I’ve done everything, so I could probably help you.”

“Well, I do have an oral fixation that I can’t get rid of,” I replied innocently. “I used to suck on hard candy and bite my nails all the time, then I started binging and purging, and now I’m drinking and smoking. Every time I quit one bad habit I just seem to replace it with another. I know I have to stop this downward spiral, but I don’t know how.”

I knew it sounded a bit flirtatious (the oral thing), but I was serious, and he
was
eighty years old.

“Well, that’s easy,” Arthur Godfrey said. “You need to have more sex. You’re not getting enough sex!”

“I’m not getting any sex at all. I’m a Baptist virgin.”