Lucky Stars (9 page)

e
leven

T
h
e night before the Fin’s commercial was scheduled to be shot, I called my mother and asked, for the third time that week, if she wanted me to drive her to the studio.

“I know how nervous you are about the freeways here,” I said.

“That’s sweet of you, dear,” she said, “but, as I’ve already told you, the age
ncy is sending a car and driver
to pick me up.”

“Right,” I said. “But why don’t I come along for moral support? This is the first time you’ll be acting in a commercial and, let me tell you from experience, your stomach will be tied up in knots. I remember the first time I shot—”

“Both my agent and my manager will be there, remember?” She cut me off, the way I used to cut her off.

“And the agency people have promised me they’ll do everything they can to provide me with a safe environment, so I can get in touch with my creativity. Besides, they explained how I can use my fear to tap into my inner realness.”

I held the phone away from my ear and stared at it. Was this
my
mother speaking? Safe environment? Creativity? Inner realness? I mean, sure, okay. The acting thing was a novelty for her, and it was only natural that she’d start parroting the way everyone in the business talked. But to not want me along on her very first shoot? Perhaps she didn’t understand how daunting it is to have a director fire commands at you—where you should stand and how you should move and, most crucially, how you should deliver your lines. Perhaps she didn’t understand that lecturing a bunch of suits in a conference room is a far cry from performing in front of a camera. Yes, I should insist that I go with her, I thought.

“I’ll ride in the car with you, Mom,” I said. “You’re new to the business and you don’t realize how brutal it can be.”

“I won’t hear another word about it, Stacey. You’ve been telling me for years how you’re too busy to take a whole day off to spend with me, and now I finally understand. So listen to your mother: Go to work at your store or run off to your auditions, and don’t worry about
me.
”

Well, there was no point in arguing about it. “Fine, but I’ll have both my cell phone and my pager with me, so if you want some advice or words of encouragement, call me. Okay, Mom?”

“Yes, yes. I will,” she said. “And now I’d better go to bed. They told me to get a good night’s sleep because tomorrow is bound to be exhausting for me.”

“I was about to suggest the same thing,” I said. “Oh, and here’s a tip: you might want to lay off the dairy products in the morning. Skip the cereal and milk and have some toast and tea instead. Dairy can cause phlegm buildup in the throat, and your voice has to be perfectly clear tomorrow.”

“Actually, dear, the director already told me that. I haven’t had dairy for the past week.”

“I see. Did he tell you about the voice exercises? To limber up your vocal cords?”

“You mean,
‘ahhhh’
and
‘eeeee
’
and
‘ooooo’?”

“Yes.” Gee, I couldn’t tell her anything she didn’t know. “And be careful when you get into makeup. Sometimes they use the same brushes on everybody and you can pick up bacteria, especially when it comes to mascara. Maura is the expert in that area, so if you want, I can have her call you tonight and—”

“What I want is to hang up and go to sleep, dear,” said my mother, the person who never—I mean, never— used to let me off the phone. It was I who had to invent stories (the UPS man is at the door, the water on the stove is boiling, the police have to question me about the robbery down the street) to extricate myself from our conversations, and now she was in a hurry to get off with me?

“Okay. Sleep tight,” I said, trying to adjust to this role reversal. “I’ll be thinking about you all day tomorrow, wishing you good luck. I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, too, Stacey. Nighty night.”

M
y mother did not call me the day of the shoot, because she did not need advice or words of encouragement or anything of the sort. When I finally reached her later that night, she explained that the shoot went without a hitch
and that everyone involved was pleased with her performance.

“
Tell me, tell me,” I said excitedly. “What did they have you do?”

“Basically, it was a problem-solution type of ad, just as they’d planned in the storyboard. I sat at a kitchen table wearing one of my nice dresses—the dark green one with the bow under the collar—and I looked straight into the camera and told the public what happened with the bone.”

“You’re kidding. I never thought they’d really go with that.”

“Oh, they went with it. They told me to be myself, so I was myself. I said how shocked I was about finding the bone. I lashed out at companies that don’t take their quality control seriously. I spoke up for all us faceless consumers, mothers in particular. But then I recounted how Fin’s invited me to inspect their cannery and how I met their employees and how I was so impressed with their operation that I agreed to come and work for them. The commercial ends with a close-up on me saying, ‘Fin’s is the name you can trust—for taste, for freshness, for
honesty.’
And then I wag my finger at the camera and say, ‘And if they slip up, they’ll have
me
to answer to. Make no bones about it!
’
”

“Hey, that sounds very cute,” I enthused, remembering what Maura had said—that the commercial would probably air during times of the day when no one would see it and that life would return to normal. My mother would go back to being my mother, and I would go back to being the actress in the family.

“Cute? It’s a possible award-winner, according to Peter at W and W. Everybody’s so thrilled with it that they’re considering putting me in a whole series of commercials. They’re waiting for the focus groups to weigh in, then for the commercial to run. If there’s a big bump in sales, your mother could become a household name, Stacey. What do you think of that?”

“I think you shouldn’t get your hopes up,” I said gently. “I’m a veteran of this business, Mom. One day you’re hot. The next day you can’t get arrested. That’s just how it is.”

She laughed. “Such a pessimist, my daughter.”

Wait.
She
was always the pessimist.
I
was always the one who said anyone could be a star if they were persistent enough. “I’m only trying to protect you,” I said, as further evidence of how we appeared to have traded places.

T
he feedback on the commercial was overwhelmingly positive, according to my mother. Focus groups said they loved her authenticity, her credibility, her
realness.
They said she was a refreshing change from all the phonies on television. They even remarked about her Cleveland accent, how her wide vowels made her seem more trustworthy. They also responded to her age—that she wasn’t a kid but a straight-talking sixtysomething, nor was she a model on loan from a cosmetics commercial. And they got a kick out of the fact that she was grumpy. “Helen Reiser is Everywoman,” one of them wrote on her comment card. “Helen Reiser is Everymother,” wrote another. “Helen Reiser speaks for me,” wrote a third, who also wrote that she thought my mother should run for Congress.

The commercial aired in prime time as well as in day time, and the reaction was sensational. Sales of Fin’s Premium Tuna increased by some ridiculously high percentage, and W&W promptly ordered up three more spots starring my mother.

How did I feel about that? Proud, truly I did. After all, it’s not everyone’s mother who becomes a successful pitchwoman for a tuna fish company, right? Besides, I had pretty much come to terms with the jealousy I’d felt in the beginning, made peace with the fact that she had landed a terrific gig on television. It wasn’t as if we’d ever be competing for the same job, so what was the big deal, I decided.

And then it became a big deal. A huge deal. A monster deal that sent me running to Maura’s house on a Friday night—without calling first. Yup, I just showed up without an invitation, which was not the sort of thing I’d ever done before but was the sort of thing my mother used to do all the time. Without meaning to, I was turning into the very person whose behavior had driven me crazy.

“Oh. Stacey,” said Maura, looking startled. She was wearing a bathrobe and clutching it tightly around her, her cranberry hair sticking up in all directions, her lipstick smeared across her left cheek. Clearly, I had interrupted something.

“Whoops. You’re not alone,” I said. “I’ll go.”

“No, you will not.” She grabbed my arm and pulled me inside. “It’s just Rick. You know. The actor who plays Donald on
Days.
We see each other every once in a while.”

“But, Maura. That guy’s old enough to be your—”

“Shhh. He’s in the bedroom sleeping. One roll in the hay and it’s lights out for the Rickster.”

Whatever works, I thought. If she liked them old, that was her business, as long as they didn’t traumatize her
by dying in the saddle. “You sure you don’t want me to leave?”

“Positive. Tell me why you’re so upset.”

We sat on her sofa. After I apologized over and over for barging in on her and Rick, I unburdened myself.

“It was one thing for her to invade my personal space by moving here,” I said, referring to my mother. “It was another for her to invade my professional space by acting in commercials. But now there’s a new plot twist. Apparently, Corbin Beasley, the PR director at Fin’s, isn’t the ineffectual doofus I
thought he was when I met him at the cannery. Based on the favorable response to the commercial, he’s sending my mother on a publicity tour. Are you ready for this? He’s booked her on Leno. He’s booked her on Regis. He’s even booked her on— brace yourself—
Oprah
.
”

Maura gasped, finally comprehending the enormity of what I was telling her. “Oprah?”

I nodded.

“But she only does segments about lifting your spirit.”

“Apparently, my mother is going to lift everyone’s spirit by chronicling her rise from obscurity to celebrity, thereby assuring women of all ages that they can ‘make it.’ ”

“But once she appears on Oprah, she’ll be insufferable.”

“She’s always been insufferable, Maura. Now she’ll be impossible.”

A
nd she was. On Leno, she sat on the couch next to the band members of U2, barking at Bono to get a haircut and grilling him about being nice to his mother. On Regis, she was asked to mug for the camera, wag her finger
at the audience, and say the last line from her commercial, the one that ended “make no bones about it,” because, according to Reeege, it was becoming the popular culture equivalent of “Wassuuuup!” And on Oprah, while she shared the spotlight with other women who found success late in life (her fellow guests included novelist Belva Plain and Missouri Senator Jean Carnahan), she was heralded as someone who ventured into a world in which she never imagined she’d find herself and discovered she was more than up to the challenge. She talked about my father and how much she missed him; about me and how my leaving the nest took its toll on her; and about her newfound visibility as an actress and consumer advocate and how she felt productive for the first time in years. By the end of the show, there wasn’t a dry eye in the audience, including mine.

It was the power of those television appearances that put the name Helen Reiser on everyone’s lips. She had leapt into the public consciousness, become the flavor of the month. School-age kids were “doing” her, imitating her grouchy fine “Make no bones about it.” Magazines were knocking themselves out to interview her, even those with demographics more appropriate for an interview with, say, me. And—this was the final straw—the movie people were calling.

“Woody wants me for his next picture,” she said one night at Chadwick’s, the Beverly Hills eatery owned by Harrison Ford’s son Ben. The place was much too pricey for me, but Mom was treating. She was a big spender now and enjoyed frequenting all the celebrity hangouts, enjoyed soaking up the attention. Cameron Diaz stopped by her table one night and Robert Wagner stopped by her table the next night and Shaquille O’Neal stopped by her table the night after that (she didn’t know who
he was, but she was thrilled when he bent down and kissed her hand). She took to being fawned over in a way I’d never anticipated. For years she’d branded Hollywood as the land of moral turpitude, but now she was clearly in its thrall.

“Woody Allen wants you to be in his movie?” I said, trying not to choke on my lamb shanks. It had always been my dream to be in one of his movies. I know, I was supposed to get over myself and be happy for her. The stumbling block was the suddenness of her stardom, the randomness of it On one hand, it gave me hope that if she could become a hit so easily, I could, too; that if she could go from complaining about a tuna fish bone to winning the hearts of Americans, anything was possible for me. On the other hand, it confirmed how unlikely it was that I’d ever go further in the business; that success in Hollywood was all about being the new face in town (even if the new face was sixty-six) and not about having talent. I couldn’t remember ever feeling so confused about my path, so conflicted about my goal. Was it realistic for me to continue to plug away at my chosen profession? Or was my mother’s overnight success a wake-up call telling me to find a new career?