Show Business Kills (19 page)

And she says all she can think of when she sees him is how that kind of bigness is bad for people. How people who have become
that big start believing that they’re really worth
those ridiculously inflated fees they’re collecting. And that their newly acquired celebrity friends really care about them.
I see it all the time. With Billy, of course, all of us have seen what success has done to him. But with other people, too.
There’s even a paranoia associated with it that everyone’s out to take advantage of you, which is only partly paranoia, because
everyone is.

But it’s easy to see why people are willing to pay the price of the paranoia, because of the power. Billy can have any woman
he wants, and he has a staff of people who tell him he’s great no matter what he does. Jack Solomon’s shows are talked about
everywhere you go. The articles about him in newspapers and magazines rattle on and on about the controversy around his outrageously
brilliant shows. The way he’s fearless about putting raw and real subjects on the air.

I always look at those photos of him in the paper, with that perfectly clipped mustache and those suspenders he wears now
and looks so cool in, and I think, can this elegant-looking man possibly be that boy who climbed in the window of Jan’s room
in the dormitory almost every night for four years? And thirty years later he’s snubbing her phone calls? I mean, it’s hard
to believe at his level he could still be holding a grudge about blue balls.

Well, for a long time it really didn’t matter to Jan because things were going so well on, the soap for her, and she was making
a nice living, but then she watched them replace the actor who played her husband with a younger actor on the soap, and it
made her nervous.

So she decided to drop Jack a note. Just a funny little note with references in it to the old days, not the blue balls incident,
but the times he sat in her room, and the dorm mother
would check up on her, and Jack would hide in her closet and after the dorm mother left, just to make Jan laugh, Jack would
come out wearing Jan’s robe and one of her hats.

She mentioned things she thought he’d get a laugh over. And she also mentioned that she didn’t know how much longer she’d
be on the soap, so that if there were any walk-ons on any of his shows, he should call her. Of course she was kidding about
a walk-on. She’d heard that on one of the hospital shows that was on his network they were writing in some new characters,
and she thought maybe there would be a woman doctor or something she could play. But she never heard a word.

Then a few weeks ago, just when she had some time off from the soap and was despairing, she got a call from one of her agents.
The guy who covers all the shows on Jack Solomon’s network. Don’t you love that we always call it that? Jack Solomon’s network.
As if the call letters were JSN. Anyway, the agent was a real sleazoid, if that’s not redundant, and he said to Janny, “Guess
what, baby! I think I got you a part on ‘Doctors On Call.’ Do you know the show?”

He tried to make it sound as if
he
was the one who had convinced them to hire her. You know how actors’ agents always do that? They try to be heroes when the
truth is, they don’t do a thing. Jan didn’t tell him that the president of the network was practically her brother in college.
That he had obviously helped her get the part because of the letter she wrote, and that he was doing it through her agent
to make it legit. She just said, “Great. What’s the part?”

And the agent said, “It isn’t a big part, but it’s a really juicy one. You play a nurse who’s seducing some old rich
guy. They know your work, you don’t have to read for it. I’ll send over a script.”

Well, you know Jan. She was too nice to say, “No shit, honey, they know my work. The network honcho who’s so big you can’t
even get in to see him used to wear my bathrobe, for God’s sake.” She just said, “Oh thank you so much.”

So the script came to her house late that day. The character was described as “On the senior nursing staff, fortyish, sexy.”
The older man she was seducing in the scene was supposed to be a philanthropist with millions who’s in the hospital, and she’s
hoping he’ll fall for her.

It was a very hot scene and when she told me about it, I was delighted they were still writing parts like that, showing a
woman our age with sex appeal. She ate like a saint all week so she’d look great on camera, she had her highlights done, her
skin looked great, and the night before the shoot, the show sent over some new pages.

In the scene as written, the nurse was alone in the room with the man, and while they were talking, she unbuttoned the top
two buttons of her uniform. Now everyone knows that this particular show, “Doctors On Call,” is famous for its shock value.
The kind of show that Jack Solomon champions and that makes his network number one. But Jan never thought the scene was going
to go any further than that. So then she looked at the new pages, and it said,
RENEE RIPS THE TOP OF HER UNIFORM AND AS BUTTONS POP OFF, SHE FLASHES HER NAKED BREASTS AT MR. MARKHAM
. In the story the rich guy was old and sick, and he had a heart attack when he got a look at her naked breasts.

But it didn’t say,
AS RENEE RIPS HER TOP OPEN WE CUT TO MR. MARKHAM’S FACE
. It said, she flashes her naked breasts.
Well, she called me that night in a panic. She said, “This is television, so there’s no way they can show bare breasts, right?”
And I remember thinking, well, if they can, it’ll be on Jack Solomon’s network. And then Jan said what I was thinking, which
was, “Why would America want to see the naked tits of a forty-nine-year-old woman anyway?”

It was too late for her to reach anyone that night, so I told her to go in in the morning and talk about it with the director.
Her call was at six-thirty in makeup, but she was up at five, as nervous as if this was her first part. She needed it to be
good so badly.

She went into her kitchen and took Lipton tea bags and put them in ice water and then laid them on her eyes for a while, so
by the time she went into the studio any puffiness would be gone. She knew she was supposed to go into makeup with a clean
face, but she put on a little foundation and some blusher, because she figured maybe Jack would come down to the set to visit
before she was made up, and she wanted him to think she still looked good.

Well, she got to the studio with such high hopes. At last Jack was going to do all the things for her career that he was able.
Though he hadn’t called her, and this had all been handled by third parties, she was sure he was about to surprise her with
the long-overdue display of friendship.

But when she arrived, there wasn’t even a dressing room for her, just some little nothing of a trailer, with a piece of masking
tape on the door with her name written on it in grease pencil. For a minute that hurt her, but she’d seen her shrink the day
before, and they spent a lot of time talking about expectations and how they can really do you in. So she tried to release
all those scenarios she’d had in her head, that
Jack would send her flowers with a card saying “Old friend, welcome to my network.”

While she was in makeup, one of the ADs came in, and she told him that she really needed to talk to the director, and the
guy said, “Yeah, okay,” but nobody came by to talk to her. In fact, after her makeup was on and her hair was done, she sat
backstage thinking, Jesus Christ, here I am, an actress who’s been on a soap opera for fifteen years, earning a six-figure
salary, and these people are walking by me as if I’m some extra.

She went back and sat in that little doghouse of a trailer for a long time. There was a phone in there, and she called me.
I was meditating, and I heard the phone and something told me to answer it, and she told me what had happened so far that
morning.

She said, “I’m feeling as if I’m Blanche Dubois. That everything good about my life is in the past. That I’m relying on the
kindness of not exactly strangers, but some old school chum to give me a part. And I’m not even sure about how I’m going to
play the damn thing. I mean for sure I’m not going to take my top off. And the director isn’t breaking his neck to come in
and work on it with me, or tell me if there’s a body double or what.”

While we were talking, the AD came to her trailer and knocked and said that the director was ready for her, so she said good-bye
to me, and out she marched. The director was in his fifties, and she felt comfortable enough with him to make light of her
concerns about the scene. You know, doing jokes about flashing.

She said he was very gentle and very soft-spoken and, as it turned out, a real method kind of guy. Usually television
doesn’t like that kind of director, because he spends too much time talking to actors and wastes money. She was afraid. She’d
been out of the loop for fifteen years. When you work on a soap for that long, you’re out of touch with the realities of the
business. You never go on auditions, never have to know what projects are happening.

Besides, there was always that great naïveté Jan always had about the world. For example, she went crazy when she saw Demi
Moore naked on a magazine cover. And she called me after I told her to go and see
The Crying Game
, shrieking, “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe they let some guy play a woman, and then all of a sudden he takes off his
clothes and you see his actual penis hanging there. How could you tell me to go and see that?”

Well, the director on “Doctors On Call” turned out to be really good. He talked to her about being in the moment, all the
great Stanislavski talk. About the given circumstances of her character, about what Renee’s objective was in the scene, and
how she would go after getting it. He had his arm around her and they walked over to the bed, and the actor who was playing
Markham ran some lines with her, but it was all really low-key, and she was feeling good.

And the next thing she knew, it was quiet on the set, and the lights were on, and the director who she was starting to think
she’d like to take home with her because he was very sensual, suddenly said “Action.” They were shooting
MARKHAM’S POV
, which was camera on Jan all the way, and the actor was feeding her the lines from behind the camera. And she was really
into it.

She felt great. As young and slinky and hot as a
Cosmo
cover girl, and when she got to the part where Renee rips
open the uniform, she said she never even gave it a thought, just ripped it open. She told me, “I stuck my naked chest right
out there, and I heard that actor gasp a death gasp and the director yelled ‘Cut, and print!’ ” People on the set were applauding,
and everyone was coming over and congratulating her while they changed the camera angle, and the hair lady came over to comb
her, and she said it was really powerful and that she got hot just watching.

They shot all the angles and it went very quickly, and when they finished, she asked a few people if Jack had been on the
set, because she figured even if he was there, he’d probably lay back so she wouldn’t be nervous if she saw him. But everyone
told her he pretty much stayed away on shooting days because after all he had a whole network to run, but they assured her
he always came over and watched the dailies and would be there to see her scenes when the producer saw them.

So she went home feeling very strong and up and positive. She never sounded better. She told me she was on one of those today-is-the-first-day-of-the-rest-of-your-life
kind of highs. She was even trying to think of ways to break her deal with the soap and go out and do freelance acting, figuring
after people saw her in that scene, they’d be calling her left and right.

In the morning, when a huge bouquet of flowers arrived, she was still so turned on, she ripped open the card. It said, I
SAW THE DAILIES AND YOU WERE UNBELIEVABLE, LOVE, JACK
. And it was on his own business card, written in his own handwriting, not by the florist. Naturally her mind was racing.
Maybe Renee would become a running character, maybe she’d finally made the leap to prime time TV.

She put the card down and was trying to decide if she should put the flowers on the coffee table where Joey might be able
to get at them or if they’d be better on the dining room table, when she realized she’d put the card face down, and there
was something more written on the back of it. So she picked it up and looked at the other side.

You know, how, like the rest of us, she has to hold anything at arm’s length to read it these days? I always tell the twins,
“Don’t even show me that book, I am much too old to try to find Waldo.” Anyway, Jan held the card at arm’s length and looked
at the back of it, where Jack had written,
P.S. THANKS FOR FINALLY SHOWING ME YOUR TITS
. And her whole body went cold.

She couldn’t believe she’d gone to him, her hat in her hand, her heart on her sleeve, you know all those expressions that
have to do with being humble. To her, that note was like one kid saying to another, na, na, na, na, na, na! I can make anybody
do anything I want. Shoving his power down her throat.

She felt as if she’d been completely set up by this power happy man, who knew she was groveling when she sent him that note,
who knew she was at a low point, and who had to use his show to humiliate her.

“Maybe that’s not what it was,” Rose said. “Maybe he just thought it was a hot part that would get her some attention.”

“No,” Marly said. “It was the last show of the season, and somebody Jan knew went to the wrap party, where they sometimes
do a gag reel, you know, of out-takes, of goofs people make, and things that go wrong. And the person told her that the last
shot on the gag reel was a close-up of her
breasts, and then over it they supered the words
SPECIAL THANKS TO JACK SOLOMON
. Apparently it got a big laugh. She called to tell me that, and after she did, she cried so hard she had to hang up.”

  
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