Show Business Kills (11 page)

And people coming to the table when he was buttering his roll, or worse yet, making a toast to his wonderful wife, strangers
thrusting their napkin and a pen at him for an autograph. And asking him personal questions and telling him which of his shows
they hated and loved. Of course there was no way they couldn’t love Billy.

It drove the twins crazy. Once they had to leave Disneyland because Billy couldn’t go two feet without being mobbed. The twins
were nine or ten then, and Marly remembered their, “Oh noooos,” as each time Billy signed the autographs and amused the group
who approached him. And just as he felt able to extricate himself and move his family away, another group of fans would move
in on him.

“I’ll call Eisner,” Marly remembered him saying as they got back into the limo that brought them to the park, the big, long
stretch limo that drove back on the freeway toward home before they even had a chance to go on one ride. The twins were both
sobbing in disappointment. “I made a mistake thinking I could do this without advancing it,” Billy said. “I should have called
Eisner a month ago and just asked him to close the park for us,” he said, looking guiltily out the window of the limo.

“I hate you, Daddy,” Sarah said. “I want a real person for a father. Not you!”

Marly shook her head, remembering that sad ride home as she found a parking place down the road from the casting office. She
took a deep breath and steeled herself for today’s interview. A painkiller, she thought, pulling her rearview mirror down
to take a last satisfied look at herself. “I’m
ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille,” she said to her reflection and got out of the car.

In the reception area of the casting office there were a lot of women, chatting in that guarded, friendly way they did in
these situations. Women who under other circumstances might have let their hair down with one another, in this room where
they knew a big job was at stake, were tense and phonily sweet. Marly looked at them all and had an urge to stand up and say,
“I just had the best sex in the world with the sexiest man alive. My husband, and he still loves me.” But instead she floated
along with her lovely inner grin.

She looked around at the different types, trying to figure out what the casting people were looking for. In this group there
were the folky-looking plaid-flannel-shirt types and a few perfect-hair types, and there was one very glamorous woman with
black curly hair who was dressed in Chanel. And they were all up for the same part. She sighed and took a seat, waiting to
go in. One actress emerged, looked flustered, and announced to everyone in the room after the door closed behind her, “It’s
an ice-cold reading, and they give you about a minute to look at the words,” then flounced tearfully out of the waiting room.

Cold readings. Marly was good at those. Instead of giving you a long time to look at the script, they handed it to you, gave
you a few minutes to look it over, and then you took your best shot, reading with one of the casting people. When it was Marly’s
turn to go in, she felt confident. She had always aced cold readings. And this would be for a one-minute commercial. In the
past she’d read cold for miniseries, for heaven’s sake. This would be nothing.

When the casting director saw it was Marly coming in, she
stood and walked over to welcome her. “Marly Bennet, how are you?” she asked, and there was a reverence to the greeting that
made Marly feel okay about being seen this way, as one of a group. After all, she told herself as part of the litany she always
went through to make her feel more comfortable, her television career over the years had been substantial.

The only reason she was doing this was that at her age good parts for actresses were hard to come by. At least commercials
were something to do, a way to feel you were working, still in the business, in front of the camera.

And this was the unfortunate way they cast the damn things. Unless, of course, you were a big name. Like Lindsay Wagner, doing
commercials for Ford. Not what they called a semi-name, in the middle class of the business, which was where Marly’s career
fell.

“This is Marly Bennet,” the casting director said, introducing her to the assembled group, a few men in suits, a good-looking
young man in shirt sleeves. Marly smiled her best smile. This would be a breeze, she would look at the dialogue, give her
usual A plus reading, and get the job. She was head and shoulders above the caliber of actress she’d seen in the waiting room.

“She was Mrs. Jones in ‘Keeping Up with the Joneses’,” the casting director told the men, whose eyes were blank. “And before
that she was Josie on ‘The Corner Bar.’ ” Nothing. “And she’s Billy Mann’s wife,” the casting director said, and then, as
if someone had just plugged in the Christmas lights, suddenly all of their faces shone brightly in her direction. Marly felt
her rage rise and her confidence fall, and she had to make a strong effort not to turn around and leave.

She was the one who had studied classical theater, she was
the one who was working long before Billy ever stood on the stage at the Comedy Store. Why did everyone persist in introducing
her as Billy’s wife? But the casting director was handing her the script and she wanted a job, and what point was there in
being childish about the way she’d been introduced?

“Look it over,” the young woman said, and Marly had a flash of remembering when this young woman who was running the casting
office was the intern to the now retired founder of the casting company. She was the kid who used to bring in boxes of take-out
coffee and doughnuts. “I’ll be reading with you, and when you’re ready to go, tell me,” she said to Marly. Dumb, that’s all
it was. To introduce her as Billy’s wife.

Marly sat on a bentwood chair near a glass-topped table covered with résumés and photos of the actresses who were her competition
and looked at the dialogue for the commercial. She didn’t want to put on her reading glasses, so she held the script at arms
length.

Later she’d rationalize away the whole incident by saying that her brain was only partially with it when she was looking at
the script. She was thinking about her morning with Billy and the possibility that he might be coming home. The parts in the
script were Suzy, Jane, and Grandmother. Marly felt as if she had a general idea about the dialogue and was ready to read.
She looked up at the casting director.

“All set,” she told her.

“Great. Let’s go for it,” the casting director said.

Marly waited for the casting director to give her a cue, but nothing happened. After a minute she looked over at the young
woman, who looked at her questioningly and said, “Are you sure you’re ready?”

“I’m sure,” Marly said, then looked back down at the script. But the grandmother had the first line of dialogue. Good God,
Marly realized, and then she almost burst into laughter as she saw what she hadn’t before in her quick look at the material.
The part of Suzy was for a toddler, Jane was the daughter in her twenties, who wanted her mother to take care of her baby,
and they’d brought Marly in to read for Jane’s mother. The grandmother.

If it hadn’t been so funny, she would have wept. “Ahh, yes. Sorry,” she said. “Let’s start again.” And then she read the grandmother’s
lines. Granted it was a very young grandmother who couldn’t run after the little child to play because of arthritis, but a
grandmother nevertheless. A good-looking Hollywood version of a grandmother, she would tell the girls tonight, and they’d
die laughing.

Her audition was completely stilted and forced because while she read the lines, she was holding in a giggle. But later she
thought that maybe it wasn’t a giggle at all that had strangled her. “Thank you,” someone said in that dismissive voice that
means, “You’ve just wasted our time and yours.” And Marly left, hurrying blindly through the room of waiting actresses, to
pick the twins up at school.

Marly watched the twins approach her car. They were slim, with wild blond hair like Billy’s. They love him, she thought as
she watched them say a pleasant good-bye to some of their friends and then start an argument with one another as they walked.
They’d be ecstatic when she told them he wanted to come home.

Maybe she’d stop at Gelson’s to get the rest of the groceries she needed to make dinner for tomorrow night. Girls’
Night, which for the first many years had rotated from one of their homes to another, had been headquartered at Marly’s since
Billy officially moved out, which was now nearly two years. It was the house that she and Billy bought after he started getting
successful. Rose said it looked a little like Tara before the war, with a pretty white colonial exterior and a rolling lawn
so green it made Marly very apologetic and defensive during the drought.

But the lawn wasn’t healthy because of excessive watering. Its apparent health was due to the kind of care Marly, a perfectionist,
gave everything in her life, and the irrigation set-up she had put in called a “drip system.” Ellen said she was familiar
with that system because it had provided all the dates she’d ever had.

There was a flower garden, a pool and cabana, and a very private hot tub where the four friends felt good about being naked,
if that was possible at their age. The other reason the party was always at her house was that she was the best cook among
them, so each time they came she made a glorious meal. Spent hours chopping away, and told them that when she did, she was
healing her “inner Julia Child.”

Tomorrow she would make a beautiful primavera sauce. As the twins’ argument got louder, she ran over her grocery list in her
head. And when she got to Gelson’s Market on Sunset, the two of them came in with her, still bickering.

While they were waiting in line at the checkout, she saw Sara’s face turn pale and her eyes get wide, and she said, “Mom,
look!” She was pointing to the end of the counter where they hang the magazines and the tabloids. And on the front page, the
cover, in one of those full-page color shots they publish, was Billy. He was walking with his arm affectionately
around some very young girl, who had to be no more than fourteen, and the headlines said
PARENTS ACCUSE BILLY MANN OF MOLESTING THEIR CHILD
.

Marly walked over, and with a giant yank she wrenched the rack out of its holder and threw it on the ground. Then she went
to the next counter and the next, pulling out the entire rack and throwing it over her shoulder so it hit the floor with a
loud clang. And when the metal prongs wouldn’t yield to her angry tugging, she ripped all of the copies of the tabloid out
of the basket and threw them all around the market in a frantic gesture.

Soon the manager was trying to stop her, but she was hellbent on making her point, and she even knocked down a rack of Danielle
Steel’s latest paperback because it was in her line of fire.

“I bring children into this store,” she shouted. “How can you allow this filth in here?” Later she told her friends that while
she was going berserk in Gelson’s, in the back of her head she could hear the voice of her ultra-proper grandmother, who once
told her, “Men only want one thing, and that is to put their peters inside you.” Marly had been horrified to hear that as
a young girl. But now, all these years later, she was thinking how right on the money the old girl really was.

“Mrs. Mann,” the store manager was saying. He knew her name because despite its vast size, Gelson’s prided itself on being
a friendly neighborhood market. “I’m so sorry. Maybe we can revamp the system and put the tabloids somewhere where children
won’t be privy to them. Mrs. Mann, please.”

Marly was shredding copies of the
Enquirer
, then handing the shreds to the open-mouthed manager.

“Mom, please. Let’s go home.” The twins were mortified. They hadn’t been old enough to understand when their mother stood
on soap boxes to beg for support for the ERA, nor had they been in the courtroom when she fought the neighborhood in the valley
that didn’t want the shelter for battered women on one of their streets.

When the entire front of Gelson’s in Pacific Palisades was trashed, Marly put her groceries in the ecologically responsible
string bag she always carried to do her marketing, took each of the twins by a hand, and left to go home.

When she got there, she went upstairs to her bathroom and locked the door, sat down on the floor, and cried. That bastard
Billy probably knew this news was breaking today, and he needed her and the girls back in his life so he’d look to the world
like a family man who had been wrongly accused. Some lawyer probably told him, “Quick, go make a pass at your estranged wife
and see if you can get her back.” And she fell for it. Unfortunately she hadn’t been to one practitioner who had an aphorism
to cover this one.

  
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