Show Business Kills (20 page)

E
llen shook her head in angry disbelief. “So thirty years later, Jack Solomon gets to see the tits he missed out on in college.
The lowlife. This is a man who could get on the phone and call any casting director and within ten minutes have a hundred
young, beautiful women parade naked through his office. But he did that? The lousy bastard.” She picked up her loafer with
her toe and dangled it there, watching it and shaking her head in disgust.

“Well, not that I’d ever want to defend him,” Rose said, “but Jan could have refused to go in once she saw those pages in
the script.”

“Yes, if she’d been thinking clearly,” Marly said. “But her clash with Jack Solomon was an interaction of their neuroses.
The healthy behavior for Jan would have been for her to call him on the phone, or better yet, to go in his office and say,
‘I need this, Jack. Please do it for me if you can.’ And the healthy behavior for Jack would have been to call her when he
got her note, not to have his people call her people.

“But they were both inextricably linked in the myth of who they were in college, still carrying the baggage of thirty years
ago, so neither one of them could confront the other.
She was the girl he couldn’t get, and he was the boy she feels guilty and stupid about rejecting every time she sees his name
in the paper, because now he has more power than anybody in the television business. By being afraid of him, she was in league
with him on this.”

“You’re exactly right,” Ellen said.

“I know. Isn’t it remarkable how sane and lucid I can be about other people’s lives, and a blithering idiot about my own?”
Marly said through a laugh.

“Pretty shitty,” Ellen said, and she stood and stretched.

“But you can understand why she was afraid. We have that groove in our brains now, because it gets proven to us again and
again that the people in those positions are rude and greedy and unfeeling,” Marly said pointedly.

“Watch it,” Ellen said.

“If the Ferragamo fits, honey…” Marly said.

“I’m not going to get into that same fight with you again,” Ellen said, collapsing back on the chair. “I’m sorry to be the
one who has to always remind you that when Ethel Merman sang the song, the lyrics were ‘There’s no business like show business,’
not show creativity, or show warm and friendly.”

“I know, I get it, it’s all about money,” Marly said. “But remember the days when we all used to believe that ‘talent will
out’? And we slaved away, studying and working because we thought our technique would get us the jobs, not the fact that we
knew the guy who produced the show?”

“Yeah, and we also thought Rock Hudson was macho, and Werner Erhard had the secret to life, and what about sexual harassment?”
Ellen said. “We should have only known it was called that.”

“True,” Rose said. “I was so naive I thought Long Dong
Silver was the name of the flatware pattern I registered for when I got engaged.”

That made the others laugh a loud peal of laughter that made the man and woman across the large waiting area look over uncomfortably.
The boy with the Walkman was sound asleep with his head back.

“Now, that’s naive,” Marly laughed just as she noticed the two men who turned the corner on their way to the elevators. Marly
recognized one of them as Ed Powell, the producer of Jan’s show. Every time she’d seen him before, at a party or when she
went to visit Jan on the set, he was nattily dressed in some expensive-looking suit. Tonight he was dressed in a rumpled sweatshirt
and sweatpants, and his hair was askew as if he’d jumped out of bed and hurried over to the hospital. He was with another
man in his fifties who wore a tweed blazer and dark glasses.

“Hello, Ed,” Marly said, standing. Ed Powell looked over at her, his eyes narrowing, probably as he tried to remember her
name, and then gave her a nod of semirecognition. “Oh, yeah, hi there. I’m real sorry about Janny. I know she’s your close
friend, and I’m real sorry,” he said uncomfortably. “I just talked to one of the docs, and he told me she’s out of surgery
and they’re going to be moving her into recovery any time now. But she’s in a coma.”

Then his eyes looked faraway; and he thought out loud. “I think that’s what we’ll tell the papers. In a coma, don’t you think?”
He asked turning to the other man. “I’ve got the press downstairs crawling up my ass for some buzz about her,” he said to
Marly, then turned back to the man. “I think for now, just your basic coma ought to do it. Get them to print that it looks
really bad and that she’s probably dying. Then if…”

“I’m Hank Brand,” the man with the sunglasses said as he extended his hand to Marly in a tone that implied, “We both know
Ed Powell’s a boor not to have introduced us.”

“Oh, Christ, I’m sorry,” Ed Powell said. “Hank Brand is the publicist for my show and this is… uh, Billy Mann’s wife.”

“I’m Marly Bennet,” Marly said coolly, and she shook the publicist’s hand.

Ed Powell’s body English said he didn’t want Marly in the conversation any more. He turned his back to her, edging the publicist
away to talk privately, but Marly wanted to hear what they were saying, so she followed closely behind them.

“Then if we make it sound as bad as possible,” Ed Powell said, furrowing his brow, “and she pulls though, it’s a full-out
miracle, and we really go through the roof the day she comes back. We bring her on during sweeps week, in a wheelchair, and
we do a whole big…”

Marly couldn’t stop herself. She put her hand on Ed Powell’s arm. “Excuse me, Ed. Are you saying you’re going to exploit this
disaster to promote your television show?” Both men looked at her with the same kind of light annoyance they would have if
she’d been a waitress at the Beverly Hills Hotel who just spilled water on their table. “That’s a mistake. It’s irresponsible
for you to put harmful ions out there which could have an adverse effect on Jan’s recovery.”

Ed Powell looked long at Marly, then smiled at his colleague. “Harmful ions? That’s a classic. I’ll have to remember that
for one of the characters on my show.” Then he looked back at Marly with a patronizing smile and added, “One of the crazy
ones.” Then he gestured with his head down the hall toward the elevator, said, “Let’s hit it, Hank,” and moved off.

Marly’s first instinct was to run after him and pummel
him. To tell him he was killing Jan, to tell him if Jan died it would be on his conscience forever, but she knew he didn’t
have a conscience, so she took a chance that maybe she could get to the press agent instead.

“Hank, wait. I know we’ve just met, but I need you to hear me. This is very important to Jan. Life-or-death important. Because
we all know ideas are what kill people. Surely you’ve read Deepak Chopra or Louise Hay? You understand that the way we perceive
the world is the way we make it, don’t you? That’s why you have to tell the press that Jan is doing well. Those messages are
transformed into molecules that reach her cells.”

She heard the begging in her voice, but worse than that, she knew how ridiculous she must seem, trying to explain those ideas
to this particular man. Knew that in a year she and the girls would laugh about this, but at this moment she was certain it
was the most urgent cause in the world.

Ellen and Rose walked over to where she and the press agent were standing. Hank Brand didn’t acknowledge them. He had an expression
on his face that looked as if he were trying hard to hold in a laugh. Probably he couldn’t wait to regale the other vultures
he worked with by telling them his story about this dippy woman.

“Mrs. Mann,” he said, “the company I work for represents ‘My Brightest Day,’ and that means Ed Powell is my employer. If he
says Jan O’Malley’s dying… what can I say? As far as I’m concerned… she’s dying.” Then he smiled a tight smile and he moved
off down the hall.

“I’d like to kill him,” Marly said.

“I’d like to hire him,” Ellen said. “Anyone who’s that blindly loyal…”

Marly leaned against the wall. “When I think of all those times I defended the press, and the First Amendment, and the right
to print stories that drove other people mad,” she said. “And now I’d like to take the assault weapon I’ve fought so hard
to have banned, and mow them all down.”

“Mar,” Rose said, “remember what Lenny Bruce said. The word isn’t the thing. Let people say what they want. When the time
comes, we’ll all go in and be with Jan and tell her she’s okay. And she will be.”

“Who knows better than we do that they print lies every day?” Ellen said. “I’ve seen articles about myself in the trade papers
saying I was getting jobs I never even heard about, buying projects that never cross my desk, dating men I’ve never even met.
But I laugh it off because I know the lies don’t affect reality.” Marly wasn’t looking at her. “I know you know that, too,”
Ellen said.

Marly slowly turned to look at Ellen with painful eyes. “Are you trying to tell me you’ve seen this week’s
Enquirer
?”

“I am,” Ellen said, “this morning at the newsstand at the commissary.”

“I saw it too,” Rose said.

“And?”

“And I think Billy was probably talking to some young fan, and an overzealous photographer thought he’d make something out
of it. Period. Billy’s a loon, but he’s not a child molester,” Ellen said.

“We don’t believe it for a second. And nobody else will, either. Ignore it,” Rose said. “Those papers are garbage. One of
my friends was in the market with her six-year-old daughter a
few weeks ago waiting at the check-out line, and the child tugged at her and asked, ‘Mommy, what does Oprah mean?’ ”

Marly laughed. “You’re right,” she said. “But it’s awful. For me, and for the twins. And Billy. He’s already under a lot of
pressure. There’s been such a buildup about the new show and how great it’s supposed to be, and he’s competing with all of
those other late-night shows and he’s panicked about that. I looked out the upstairs window at the top of his head and noticed
a little bald spot, and I’m sure he’s worried about that, too.”

That made them laugh. “Do you think he worries about aging?” Rose asked. “With men in show business it’s probably called ‘The
Dick Clark syndrome.’ ”

“Only without the ‘Clark,’ ” Ellen said, and the three friends laughed.

“All men in this business are crazy. Do you think maybe there’s something in the ink in
Variety
that goes directly to their brains?” Marly asked as they moved back to the chairs.

“No. I think it’s men in general. In Molly’s class, the girls have a poem they’ve been saying since kindergarten: ‘Girls go
to Mars to get more candy bars/Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider,’ ” Rose said and they laughed.

“How do those little girls already know the battle lines are drawn?” Ellen asked.

“Andy seems so sane. I want a man like that,” Marly said. “But I guess our relationships mirror us, and that’s why I’ve spent
so much time clinging to the idea of Billy. Because something in me required the drama that’s a part of his package. And that
was why the two of us got stuck at some impenetrable contact boundary that I couldn’t transcend.”

“What in the hell does that mean?” Ellen said.

“To put it in that psychological jargon of which she’s so fond,” Rose said, “it means Billy’s a schmuck.”

Marly laughed, but her body remembered the thrill of Billy inside her that morning. She wanted everything he’d said to her
to be true, for there to be some explanation about the tabloid picture.

“Jan used to tell me if she could give up smoking, I could give up Billy. She used to tell me I just had to detox my system
of him and I’d be fine.”

Rose didn’t mention that she knew Jan went back to smoking after quitting for three months, or that Jan was still seeing a
man she’d been hooked on for more than ten years. Or that Marly just talked about her in the past tense, as if she were already
dead.

“I even went to one of those Coda meetings. It’s a twelve-step group where you work on letting go of co-dependent relationships.”

“What was that like?” Rose asked. “Is there a movie in it?”

“Only if you’re co-dependent on Julia Roberts,” Ellen said, and Marly snickered.

“I sat there listening to everyone’s story and thought, I don’t
want
to learn how not to be co-dependent. I like being co-dependent. I just need to find the right man to do it with. Someone
who wants to be co-dependent with me as we co-depend into the sunset together.”

“God, if what you said is true and our relationships mirror us, then I’m a vampire,” Ellen said. “I haven’t had one in so
long I don’t even know how to talk to anyone who doesn’t reply ‘Meow.’ Of course I did have a few beauties in my life, which
may have scared me off forever. And I’m sure you both recall them.”

“We do,” Marly said.

“You even had one in the lockup ward,” Rose said.

“Thanks for remembering,” Ellen said, “not to mention a few who should have been.”

“She did? You did? I don’t remember that,” Marly said.

“Yes you do,” Rose reminded her. “That weird Norman Braverman. The tall one with all the wavy black hair she was with for
a while.”

“Oh yes,” Marly said “… but the lockup ward? I didn’t know he was put away. Tell me.”

Ellen, remembering with a smile, told them the story of Norman Braverman.

  
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