Remains to Be Scene (4 page)

Polly continued her advance into the room. When she reached the desk and got a closer look at the swarthy, beard-stubbled face of the young man she thought,
J. J. and Tim have the same taste in sweets
. “Honey,” she smiled, veering off toward the frosted glass doors that led to the executive offices, “Don’t bother to announce me. I know my way. I’ll just tippy-toe in and surprise J. J. It’s his birthday.” She lied.

“Wait!” the receptionist said, and stood up from his chair.

Polly stopped. “Not to worry,” she said, evading her rival’s obligation to keep the unwanted within the quarantinelike confines of the closed-circuit-TV–monitored reception area. “I know how much J. J. hates to make a fuss about these things. But this is a big one. Guess the number that precedes the zero! It’s too horrid!” She winked conspiratorially. “You can score major kiss-ass points by bringing him a cruller with a single candle when you get his mocha frappuccino. Oh, and darling, since it’s a special occasion, and God knows we all have to fake liking the boss, have the Starbucks counter man add coconut syrup, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce. Don’t forget the little coconut flakes sprinkled on top! J. J. can worry about his diabetes tomorrow. So shush. Not a word about me. I adore surprises. Don’t you?”

Polly switched her famous smile up from Sylvania fluorescent to Times Square neon, then turned and continued to walk toward the doors. “Just buzz me in, dear heart,” she called over her shoulder as she reached for the handle.

“But you…!” she heard the sergeant at Checkpoint Charley cry, which again stopped Polly in her tracks. With her back to the receptionist, she rolled her eyes and pursed her lips, preparing for a verbal spar. “Not to worry,” she sang out, still holding on to the door handle and trying hard not to turn around and pummel the kid. “If ol’ J. J.’s not in I’ll just leave his little prezy on his chair.”

“You’re not…,” the young man started to speak but Polly interrupted him.

“…Exactly expected?” Polly said completing his sentence. “I know, sweetums, but this is a special occasion. My little diversion will only take a sec. Be a love and push the little buzzer thingee to unlatch the door,” she said, an edge creeping into her voice.

“…Polly Pepper?” the receptionist finished his own sentence. It was more a statement of open-mouthed wonder than a question.

Suddenly Polly felt as if Homeland Security had just cleared her through Customs despite finding a Ziploc bag filled with enriched uranium in her purse. She straightened her posture, turned around, and for the first time since Placenta had handed her the script for
Detention Rules!
” she produced a genuine smile. “I’m so ashamed,” she said. “I should have properly introduced myself.” Polly walked back to the receptionist. “Don’t you just hate it when living legends think we’re above common manners?” She reached out her hand. “I’m Polly Pepper. Of course. And you are?”

“Michael,” the young man said. He was grinning with excitement, as he accepted Polly’s hand and gave it a quick shake.

Polly recognized a fan when she met one. But, she thought,
Michael is too young to have seen the original broadcasts of my shows.
She also suspected that anyone bright enough to know her name must, by virtue of a gene reserved for her favorite ten percent of the planet’s population, sing in the choir with Tim.

“We studied you in college,” Michael said with pride.

“An anthropology major?” Polly joked, trying not to appear irritated that she was suddenly being made to feel like something viewed under the magnified lens of a microscope.

“We examined your complete oeuvre,” Michael said.

Polly blinked. “Only my gynecologist is supposed to have that much fun,” she laughed.

Michael looked askance at Polly, not getting her joke. He recovered. “You were a required subject,” he said, trying to explain. “‘Icons: Critical Thinking and the Myth of the Value of Celebrity in Global Society.’ AFI.”

“Myth?” Polly repeated, awkwardly.

“I got so hooked on you and your work that I even bought bootleg 16 mm prints of the horror movies you made in Mexico. You were the best in
Crawling Eyeball II: The Vision Returns!
”

Polly emitted a giggle of self-satisfaction. “Mary Kay Place and I had a scream making that one,” she said. Polly was so completely charmed by Michael’s attention that she temporarily forgot the reason for her visit to her agent’s office. “Film school,” she said, finally making the connection to the AFI. “Perhaps your thesis script—you did have to write one, didn’t you—has a role that requires my talents?” she cooed. “I’m not one of those horrid golden calves who only accepts material submitted through my agent.”

“J. J. would fire me. We’re not even supposed to talk to clients,” Michael said, looking around to ensure that no one was watching. “But I guess it’s not like you’re Diana Ross, or someone.”

“Or someone,” Polly repeated. “Oh, screw J. J. And Diana,” she declared. “Until this morning, he hasn’t sent me anything to read in over a year!” Polly caught herself slipping into J. J. bashing mode. “I mean, there’s so little material out there for a star of a certain age.”

“For a star with a certain comic brilliance, you mean,” Michael corrected.

“You’re such a transparent toady,” Polly said with a lascivious smile. “You’ll go far.” She wanted to wrap her arms around his youthful body and physically express her appreciation for his obvious intelligence and sophisticated taste. Then Polly looked at Michael and pouted. “How can a young man of your elevated sensibilities be working as a mere receptionist?” she said.

“A college degree doesn’t mean anything in Hollywood,” Michael said. “Here it’s all about nepotism, and who you put out for. But you know all that.”

“There are exceptions,” Polly said, eliminating herself from Michael’s generalization.

“I’m paying my dues,” Michael added. “J. J.’s promised to give me a hand.”

Polly stopped herself from making the obvious comment.

“By the way,” Michael added, “I think you would have been awesome in
Detention Rules!
”

Polly continued smiling for an awkward moment. “Would have been? I haven’t exactly made up my mind yet about the role,” she said, suddenly feeling uneasy. “Perhaps with a bit of a rewrite,” she said. “But I’m such a wuss. And J. J.’ll probably talk me into doing the damn thing before I have a chance to discuss changes with the producer.”

Michael stepped backward several paces to the desk and blindly reached behind himself until his fingers connected with the morning’s edition of
Daily Variety
. He brought forth the paper, and without saying a word he held it up for Polly to examine.

STONE GETS DETENTION

Polly squinted at the banner headline. The words meant nothing to her. “Stone gets Detention,” she read aloud. “So? Stone gets…
Detention
,” she read again. Then, as if finally getting the punchline to a joke, Polly snatched the paper out of Michael’s hand and looked more closely at the article. One name, repeated several times, jumped off the page: Sedra Stone. Sedra Stone. Sedra Stone.

“Sedra Stone got
my
role? I’ll kill her!” Polly said. As her anger set in, her wrath poured out and was reflected in the escalating volume of her voice. “I swear I’ll absolutely slap that minor talent, scene-stealing, home-wrecking, wicked bitch of the west into an early grave. And where the hell is that lousy J. J.?” she snarled.

The last thing that Polly remembered before driving down Sunset Boulevard was the security guard from the building’s lobby forcibly dragging her out of the reception area of J. J. Norton and Associates Talent Agency.

P
olly’s Rolls-Royce slowly glided along serpentine Stone Canyon Road until it reached the ornate monogrammed black wrought-iron dual swing gates that secured Pepper Plantation. Reaching for her electronic door opener clipped to the sun visor of the front passenger seat, Polly pressed the button and waited for the entryway to clear. She then languidly drove onto her estate and gradually made her way down the cobblestone lane. She rolled the car under the shelter of the front portico, where, between the pillars and porch, she parked, turned off the ignition—and sat in dazed silence.

For a few numb minutes Polly replayed in her head the scene of hysteria that had unfolded in J. J.’s reception area. She felt embarrassed and stupid for allowing Sedra Stone to once again trump her life and make her feel inadequate. Then, with great effort, Polly opened the car door and stepped into the warm afternoon.

Although there were only two granite steps up to her front entrance doors, Polly ascended them as slowly as if she had exhausted all her energy running a marathon while simultaneously fighting the bird flu. When she reached the massive Gothic double doors, she pushed the keypad on the security alarm system and waited for the release sound made by the deadbolt disengaging. With a torpid nudge, she urged the left door open.

Stepping into the foyer and lethargically closing the door with her hip, she leaned her back against one massive panel to rest for a moment. Polly heaved a heavy sigh, grateful to be home at last. She was safely away from the harsh world of professionally impotent Hollywood agents, duplicitous has-been TV icons, and inordinately young and inexperienced film stars who wouldn’t recognize a decent script if it were written by Dorothy Parker, typed by Robert Benchley, and handed to them by Nancy Meyers.

At Pepper Plantation, cocktail carts stocked with a variety of liquor bottles were in nearly every room. But for the good stuff, the Bombay Sapphire London Dry, Polly had to raid the kitchen freezer. She automatically headed in that direction. Prescription meds, however, were stored in her bedroom suite. As this inconvenience occurred to her Polly changed course and moved instead toward what was affectionately referred to as the “Scarlett O’Hara Memorial Staircase.” She decided that a couple of antidepressants and a champagne chaser would be the best temporary antidote for her misery. With as much exertion as she employed entering the house, she now depended on the banister to help her tired body ascend to the second floor of the mansion.

At last on the landing, Polly stepped out of her high-heel shoes and abandoned them in the corridor. She felt a vague sense of guilt that Placenta would have to pick up her mess, but her contrition was fleeting. “‘Maid’ is your job description,” she heard herself say, as she slogged barefoot down the long carpeted hallway toward her room in the east wing of the house.

Along the way she began to pass a gallery of framed oil portraits and memorabilia. They were mostly visual images of herself, and represented various phases of her career, and particularly memorable characters she played on her television show. Although the art had been hanging in the same location for years, Polly seldom paid any attention to the artifacts unless there was a houseguest (especially her mother) with a nose she wanted to rub into the sweet smell of her international success; however, today she was drawn to review the displays.

She stopped in front of a large, ornately framed illustration of herself dressed in a white, starched nurse’s uniform, and wearing a cap emblazoned with a red cross that was dripping blood. “Bedpan Bertha,” she said to herself, remembering the countless times she practically killed her audiences when she played the role of the klutzy R.N. The artist had depicted her with a goofy freckle-face buck-toothed grin, Marty Feldman bug eyes, and stretching a latex glove over an exaggeratedly large hand.

In every Bedpan Bertha sketch, nitwit Bertha confused doctors’ orders on a patient’s chart. The unprepared and unlucky sick person (played by such guest stars as Burt Reynolds, Liberace, and Gavin MacLeod) endured extensive body examination procedures that should only be performed by master plumbers on hair clogged drains. The AMA blamed the “Bedpan Bertha” sketches for a sharp decrease in elective surgeries, whereas the network rewarded her ratings with a bigger promotional budget for the show.

Polly stared at herself as Bertha for a long moment, and then glanced to the right and found another classic character captured on canvas. “Madame Zody,” she whispered and couldn’t prevent a small smile from spreading across her lips.

Dressed in a colorful caftan that was embedded with rhinestones and beads in patterns of stars, crescent moons, hexagrams, and dollar signs, Polly, as Madame Zody, wore the same maniacal grin as Bertha, and had a distorted Picasso-like third eye smudged in the middle of her forehead. In the palm of one hand she clutched a cracked crystal ball. In her other hand she held a Ouija board.

Polly’s memory reached back twenty years and fused together a dozen episodes of her show starring such popular guests as Roddy McDowall, Bill Bixby, Anne Francis, and the Muppets. At one time or another during the run of “The Polly Pepper Playhouse” every star of the day had entered Madame’s fortune-telling emporium. The predictable scenarios of each “Madame Zody” sketch found the guest star terror-stricken as he received the dire warning of a long journey—to the sand dunes of the Gobi desert where he would be stalked by something ominously called the Mongolian Death Worm. Another seeker of things yet to pass was destined to be snatched up by Hydralike aliens. In the worst of all fates, however, a predicted hell was to be stuck for eternity in an elevator with Paul Anka singing “You’re Having My Baby.”

Polly began to look at the other cherished images along the wall of the long corridor. Among the Hershfeld caricatures, the photos from state dinners at the White House autographed by several presidents (for whom she hadn’t voted, but wouldn’t say
no
to a party), she discovered a forgotten treasure. Half hidden behind a floral arrangement centered on a hall table was a framed handwritten note from Lucille Ball. Polly gently pushed aside the petals of a Casablanca Lily and read the fading message. “What’s good for Polly is good for the planet. L.B.”

Polly stared at the message for a long moment, recalling how frightened and excited she had been the day when her idol, the week’s special guest, arrived for rehearsal. She remembered that during lunch break, Lucy had pulled her aside and offered words of advice. “If a sketch like this one isn’t working, make the writers work all night to change it,” she had said, “Grab their cojones and squeeze ’em tight, sweetie!”

Polly took Lucy’s advice. She delegated to her then producer/husband, Tim senior, the nasty business of torturing her writers until they came up with the famous “Miss Midas” sketch. In that popular series of routines, Polly portrayed the bored wife of a billionaire who thinks it might be a hoot to switch places for a day with her servants. The role reversals all end with dire yet comical consequences for Miss Midas, of course. But those with whom she traded places realized their own potential and ended up accomplishing something that made them rich, too.

Now, all these years later, Polly thought about Lucy’s counsel and the handwritten note she’d received from Miss Ball following the taping of the show. Polly suddenly realized that although she no longer had the equivalent of a bad cop/husband to do her bidding she still didn’t have to take crap from anybody, especially her agent.

“Damn right, ‘What’s good for Polly is good for the planet,’” she quoted aloud, and then turned and walked with renewed purpose to her bedroom. There, she removed her clothes, drew a hot bubble bath, turned on a CD with the calm voice of Deepak Chopra telling her that she had the power to fulfill her desires, and withdrew a bottle of Verve from her bedroom wine cooler. She popped the cork, poured a flute, checked out her still slim and supple body in the bathroom mirror and raised her glass. “To Lucy!” she said. “To Trixie, too! But most of all to Polly Pepper!” she declared. “You guys are gone, but I’m still here!”

Polly took a long slug of champagne and savored the cold effervescence as it frothed over her tongue. She forgot about the Xanax as she stepped into her bath, glass in hand, and submerged herself up to her neck in lilac scented suds. She took a deep breath, sighed in blissful satisfaction and made another toast. “To Sedra Stone,” she said. “Break a leg, honey. Or a hip. While you’re stuck in a few frames of a film that’ll have Roger Ebert sharpening his tongue for new ways to slash a bad performance, Madame Zody foresees a more important career change—for Polly Pepper—somewhere.”

Polly drained her glass and placed it on the bath caddy that held her seaweed therapy oils, moisturizing syrups, and other bottles of antioxidant products, the labels of which boasted ancient secrets for maintaining soft virginal skin. She laid her head back on the built-in cushioned headrest of the tub and let the alcohol flow through her bloodstream. As her anxiety poured out into the warm, womblike bath, her eyelids became heavy and she fell asleep.

At precisely five o’clock, Tim and Placenta looked up from the television and their heated argument over who murdered the publishing heiress in the evening’s old rerun episode of “Matlock,” as Polly, dressed in bright red drawstring pants and a kaleidoscopic floral silk jacket with cuff sleeves, shoulder pads, and a belt tied in front, made an elegant entrance into the Great Room of Pepper Plantation. “The romance writer did it,” Polly said without seeing more than a few frames from the show. Time for champys,” she sang out, striding toward the ice bucket.

“Miss Punctual,” Tim said as he turned off the television and happily poured a flute of bubbly and handed it to his mother. “Sit down and tell us every little detail,” he insisted, like a best girlfriend sharing secrets during a sleep-over. “Dish about the flick! When do you start shooting? Need me to approve your wardrobe? Saw some divine Dolce at Neiman’s. Ferretti and Cavalli, too,” he teased.

Polly ignored her son’s questions as she accepted the glass from him. She cleared her throat and said, “I have an announcement. I’m throwing a party!”

Tim and Placenta looked at each other and nodded mutual approval.

After a small sip of her Verve, Polly continued. “Timmy, my most precious and brilliant party planner slash co-host, it must be bigger and splashier and more decadent than the Nuclear Winter theme you did so brilliantly for the second Bush inauguration party we gave for all our friends on Homeland Security’s list of enemy combatants.”

“Mass extinction of humankind is sorta hard to top,” Tim smiled hesitantly, suspicious of Polly’s sudden interest in entertaining.

With a nod and an earnest look, Polly said, “But maybe this time we do something like….” She thought for a moment. “…Like extraterrestrial colonization of Hollywood and enslavement of petty vain stars, egomaniacal non-entity B celebrities, agents, managers, and publicists.”

Stone-faced, Placenta said, “You didn’t get the job.”

Polly leaned down to Placenta and gave her a peck on the cheek. She then turned to Tim and offered the same expression of affection. “I know how supportive you’ve both been about me taking over Trixie’s role, but I’ve decided against accepting the part,” Polly said. “J. J. and I had a mind-altering exchange this morning. It occurred to me that another actress of a certain age would be more appropriate for the role. Somebody like Kathy Bates—she doesn’t show up on screen much these days. Or, Swoozie Kurtz. There’s a goodie. I also suggested Sedra Stone.”

“Sedra Stone?” Tim repeated. “Why would you be magnanimous to the woman who keeps ruining your life?”

Polly became defensive. “I’m not being in the least bit charitable; not by any stretch.” She feigned indignance. “Catharine’s a crappy part in a crappy movie and Sedra will be crappy playing her. It’s perfect. Anyway, it was practically your idea,” she added. “You accused me of wanting something vile to happen to Sedra, which I didn’t, and don’t—and now it has. She has to work with those two opportunistic Hollywood whores.”

Placenta eyed Polly suspiciously. “Why a party?” she asked. “You’re celebrating what, the fact that you can’t get a job?”

“As a matter of fact,” Polly said, “that’s exactly what I’m doing. When you’re out of work, throw a party! Invite everybody in the biz. It reminds them that you’re still alive. Some of my best gigs have come after a fabulous soiree.” She turned to Tim. “That’s why you’ve got to pull all the stops out for this one, hon!”

Tim nodded his head. “Show the world that you don’t need to work, and that’s when more work comes along, eh? I’ll start brainstorming,” Tim said, sinking comfortably into the sofa next to Placenta. “What’s our time frame?”

Polly raised her glass high above her head. “Yesterday,” she said. “Not a moment to waste. I want to invite the entire cast and crew of
Detention Rules!
before they resume shooting next week!”

“Whoa!” Tim shot back. “Impossible! I couldn’t even get decent cater waiters without at least two weeks’ notice. Remember how long it took to plan our
Titanic
party? That chunk of glacier in the swimming pool didn’t just slide out of Ann Coulter’s veins. It took three months to arrange shipment from Alaska! And don’t forget the penguins.”

“Those damned penguins,” Polly said testily. “They were guaranteed to be alive on arrival. I’m still mortified about having to explain to PETA what their stiff little bodies were doing in the deep freezer chest under the frozen pizzas.”