Rocking the Pink (6 page)

As I drove the car toward the front of the club, there he was, standing on the curb, chatting with his pretty date.

Lucky girl,
I thought about Robert's beautiful companion. And, my God, she really
was
beautiful.

I pulled the car up to the curb, and Robert came over to the driver's side door. Just as I reached out to open the door, Robert opened it for me with a dramatic flourish, as if I were a star arriving at a movie premiere.

Robert, in the role of Valet Parker, held out his hand to me, Young Starlet—and, with a broad smile, I slid my hand into his.

Warmth spread throughout my body as he pulled me out of his car and up to a standing position, close to him.

And then there I was—gushing, smiling, blushing, beaming—
standing face-to-face with Robert Downey Jr.
He kissed the top of my hand and said, “My lady.” And then he twirled me and dropped me into an elegant dip, instantly transforming my red valet-parker jacket and black slacks into a feathery gown.

When I came back up, flushed and speechless, he bowed deeply and formally to me, to which I responded with something like, “
Grf.”

Robert smiled his dazzling, warm smile and gestured to the small crowd on the curb for applause (which, of course, he received). He then handed me a $20 bill as a tip, got into his sparkling black Porsche (with that sparkling woman sitting right beside him), and sped away into the night, taking a tiny piece of my heart with him into eternity.

I stood for a long moment, watching Robert Downey Jr.'s red taillights speeding away.

Lucky girl,
I thought again. But this time, that lucky girl was me.

Oh, how Robert Downey Jr.'s random act of kindness that night put a spring in my step! Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, he had walked into mine. My goose bumps didn't subside for
weeks.

And on top of that, the man was a great tipper! Twenty dollars was a helluva lotta clams for a young girl like me, particularly since
I
would have paid
him
one hundred times that amount to play Ginger Rogers to his Fred Astaire, just for that fleeting, fairytale moment.

But the truth was, although Robert's big tip was much appreciated, it was not unusual for me. I raked in the dough as a valet parker. For one thing, I was bubbly and vivacious and obviously having an epically good time. I was thrilled down to the tips of my toes every time I caught even a glimpse of a movie star. And I was giddy with excitement each time I got behind the wheel of a Lamborghini, Porsche, or Ferrari—if only to drive it to a parking garage one hundred yards away. I'm sure my benefactors got a kick out of my unabashed exuberance for valet parking.

But let's be honest: The real reason for my customers' largesse was that I was the only female parker in the entire company (not to mention the only English-speaking parker on any given team). It was like taking candy from a baby. Man, oh man,
I worked it!
I chatted and charmed and laughed and smiled. And I'm pretty sure I hair-flipped a time or two (or thirty) as well. Money just fell out of the sky and into my grateful hands like gum drops raining down in Candy Land.

At the end of each shift, my fellow valet parkers and I threw our tips into a common pool and then split everything equally. My first three or four shifts, I contributed fives, tens, and twenties to the collective pot, while the other poor saps put in dollar bills. It didn't take too long before I wised up and started bringing a wad of singles with me to the job. From that point on, I threw dummy tips into the pot after each shift, having furtively stuffed my bonanza of real tips into my bra.

Sadly, when the white-haired, fiftysomething-year-old manager of the valet parking company asked me to join him for a weekend trade show in Las Vegas—just him and me—it was time to quit the job, though I loved it so.

Still in need of some extra cash, I got a job at a Beverly Hills rare-coin store, even though I didn't know the first thing about coins. If a customer had a question about a particular coin, I'd smile politely and say, “Just a moment, please,” and then I'd find the store owner, who slaved away (at who knows what) in an office in the back.

On my lunch breaks, I walked up and down Rodeo Drive, window shopping at the fancy stores and gawking at supernaturally beautiful women as they click-clacked past me in their stiletto heels and
designer dresses. I was always, always, on the lookout for a movie star on a shopping spree, but to no avail.

And then one afternoon, the little bell over the front door jingled and in walked one of my all-time favorites, the regal and beautiful Anne Bancroft.

“Hello,” Anne Bancroft greeted me. She handed me a gold coin. “Can you please tell me the value of this?”

That voice! I recognized that voice! I could hear it asking a young Dustin Hoffman, “Do you want me to seduce you?”

And that face! That gorgeous face, conveying earthiness and elegance all at once. This was a woman of
substance.

I could not speak, I was so enthralled.

I nodded, smiled a goofy smile, and took the coin from her outstretched hand.

With my eyes glued to her iconic face, I turned to walk to the back of the store. I was so starstruck, however, that I smacked into the wall behind me, banging my forehead with a loud
thud.

When I turned sheepishly back around, touching the already rising lump on my forehead, Anne Bancroft flashed me a loving, maternal smile.

I gratefully returned her smile, a bit embarrassed, and made my way gingerly to the back of the store.

“Anne Bancroft's out there!” I stage-whispered to the store owner, holding out the coin. “Mrs. Robinson!”

With a loud exhale, he leaped up from his desk, plucked the coin from my hand, and bustled away, murmuring, “Stay here!”

I stayed behind, as instructed, but I watched the festivities through a crack in his office door: Mrs. Robinson listened intently to the store owner's pontifications, her head cocked and her eyebrows questioning; Mrs. Robinson took the coin back with a polite “thank you”; Mrs. Robinson walked out of the store, apparently not satisfied with whatever the store owner had said.

And that's when it hit me: This was no coincidence. Anne Bancroft hadn't randomly wandered into my rare-coin store!

No, Anne Bancroft was a sign from the universe, an answer to my rain dance—a glimpse into my glorious future.

Anne Bancroft was a harbinger of my destiny.

It had finally sunk in: I had triple negative breast cancer. I was going to have to fight for my life. Like Debra Winger in
Terms of Endearment.
Except wait—she died in that movie. Scrap that.

Just a few weeks before, I'd
finally
resumed dancing and singing my way down the Yellow Brick Road toward Judy-dom—a
lawyer
had signed a midlife record deal?!—and now, after one disorienting phone call, I had been swept up by a flying monkey and secreted away in the Wicked Witch's tower, with nary a yellow brick in sight.

My brain wasn't functioning normally, and my body felt dragged down by fifty-pound weights. Just taking air into my lungs and then expelling it required a massive effort. Making a grilled cheese sandwich for Chloe was a Herculean feat.

I cried easily and often.

My face felt heavy. Numb. I was sinking, sinking, sinking into darkness.

And Brad wasn't faring any better.

Brad had never been a crier; I could remember only a handful of times I'd seen him cry in the twenty-three years I'd known him. And yet now he could not contain his despair. While I put on a brave face to watch a movie with the girls, Brad skulked off to our bedroom to cry in private, and then, when I could no longer maintain my stiff upper lip, we'd switch places. At night, after the girls had gone to sleep, we lay in bed together, relieved to be able to break down together in the privacy of our bedroom. Every night, we clutched each other like rock climbers clinging to a boulder.

The closest I'd ever come to feeling this way was when my beloved childhood dog, Darrow, died in his old age during my senior year of high school. Back when I was five, my parents came home from a weekend away with a black-and-white terrier mix from the pound. Almost hyperventilating with joy, I stormed outside, into the middle of the street, and shouted at the tippy-top of my lungs, “We got a puppy!”

At this, children swarmed out of neighboring houses and into our back yard, eventually huddling tightly around the main attraction. Amidst our shouting and cooing, that poor, overwhelmed puppy yakked, and then, on wobbly legs, teetered, with hardly a splash, right into the swimming pool. Like a superhero, Dad scooped the soggy ball of fur out of the water with our blue pool net and plopped him back onto the patio.

“What should we name him?” Dad asked later, when the commotion had died down.

“Lemon Drop,” Sharon suggested.

“Fruity,” I proffered.

But Dad, a Stanford-educated attorney and the man I loved most in the whole world, dismissed our suggestions with a wave of his hand. “We'll call him Darrow,” he declared with full authority, “after the famous trial lawyer Clarence Darrow.”

And thus Dad foretold, or perhaps even charted, my future.

When Darrow died as an old dog, I lovingly laid every single photo of him ever taken on my bed, creating a makeshift shrine, and then reclined facedown right on top of them, my heart disintegrating like plastic wrap in a microwave, my grief a bottomless well. For three days, I wailed my lungs out on top of those photos, not knowing how to climb out of my dark hole.

I'd adored Darrow's hangdog eyes and tear-sopping fur—and his pragmatic advice through the travails of my childhood had always been right on the money. No matter how much I had pestered him—trying repeatedly but in vain to perform the
Lady and the Tramp
spaghetti trick with him, or forcing him to emulate the closet scene from
E.T.
by peeking his head out of my stuffed-animal collection
—
he had offered unwavering and uncomplicated companionship.

On the third day of my grief at losing my little four-legged attorney, Brad came over, kissed my swollen eyelids, and said, “Baby, you've got to pull yourself together now.” And so I did.

But this—this horrific diagnosis, this looming death sentence of mine—was exponentially more excruciating than losing my beloved Darrow, though I'd have jumped in front of a moving train for him.

And this time, Brad was in no condition to stitch up the gaping
hole in my heart. He was falling apart, too. At night, as we lay in bed, clutching each other, he whispered, “I can't live without you” over and over, and tightened his grip on my body as if he could prevent me, by sheer force of will, from slipping away.

The thought that Brad could not survive without me—perhaps literally—terrified me, since, I figured, he might not have a choice in the matter. But that wasn't what I told him on those nights as we lay, just the two of us, holding each other in the dark.

“I'm gonna be fine,” I reassured him, stroking his tear-stained cheeks. I was amazed at how calm and assured my voice sounded.

“Do you promise?” His voice was shaky.

“Yes, Buddy. I promise.”

If that promise turned out to be a lie, I reasoned, and if survival just wasn't in the cards for me after all, Brad would simply have to forgive me.

When we'd both graduated from college, Brad moved to L.A. to live with me while I pursued my big Hollywood dreams, even though he didn't fully understand them.

“You're so smart,” he said. “You should be inventing the cure for cancer.”

But I didn't want to invent the cure for cancer. I wanted to be a
star.

We got an airy apartment that allowed pets, for Crazy Buster. Our next-door neighbor was a perpetually harried woman with six snorting pugs, and the guy upstairs had a loud (goddamned) bird. Brad got a job in the copy department of a law firm while he figured out his next move. And I, presumably, set out to “make it.”

I managed to book an audition with a reputable talent agent in the Valley. A successful audition could be a life-changing opportunity. A theater friend of mine named Rob agreed to perform a dramatic scene
with me, and we rehearsed and rehearsed. Finally, the big day arrived and we performed our scene for the agent in his Burbank office.

“Compelling,” he complimented Rob first. “You're understated and believable.”

And then he turned to me. “You're good,” he said. “But . . . we've already got one of you.”

Before I could ask him what “having one of me” meant, he elaborated: “We already represent Martha Plimpton.”

What? I was the poor man's Martha Plimpton?

Surely, someone out there would be able to appreciate my special Laura-ness. I was unique! Unlike anyone else! I was not some shoddy Martha Plimpton mimeograph, thank you very much.

I got a head shot made, and I mailed it out to every reputable talent agent in the greater Los Angeles area. I'd show that guy!

And then, by God, I waited . . . and waited.

But I didn't get a single response to my head shot mailings.

“I think I'll go to law school,” Brad declared eight weeks later, having long since abandoned all inquiries about the progress of my talent-agency mailing.

And I, the former star of
The Doors,
the girl once destined to become the next Judy Garland, the purveyor of a unique brand of Laura-ness not heretofore seen anywhere else in the world, shrugged my deflated shoulders and said, “Me, too.”