Show Business Kills (27 page)

“I was in a lawyer’s office in Beverly Hills once a few years back,” Rose said, “going over one of my contracts, and while
I was waiting for him to finish on a phone call, I walked around his office and found myself looking out the window and had
a great view of the Beverly Hills streets and shops. And all of a sudden I saw ten police cars pull up outside of Van Cleef
and Arpels. And within seconds I saw a roadblock go up, and uniformed cops with guns out were surrounding the place. All of
this while the lawyer was talking away. I remember watching it all very calmly, waiting to see the director rise up on a crane
to get a long shot, and to hear the word ‘Cut!’

“I was sure I was seeing some studio filming a movie on the streets of Beverly Hills, because we’re so used to seeing that
around there every day. And then the lawyer got off the phone and we got down to business, so I stopped thinking about it.
Well, the next morning I opened the L.A.
Times
, and
there was an article on the front page about Van Cleef being robbed, while I watched. And I thought, there’s so much pretend
around here, I just figured the robbery was pretend, too.”

The policewoman laughed. “Yep, I was there that day. The guy had twelve hostages in the jewelry store. But we finally got
him out.” She shook her head and laughed, as if remembering a fun time.

“I have to ask you this question,” Ellen said, “because I’ve got a project in development about a young woman who wants to
be a cop, and I’m curious to round out her character. What is it that makes a woman pick a career in law enforcement?”

Rita Connelly frowned, thought about her answer, and then smiled. “I guess I thought it was going to be sexy. That it offered
excitement, drama, meeting bigger-than-life people, having thrilling experiences.”

“And now?” Ellen asked.

“Now I know it’s full of men who are so worried about the size of their genitals, they take it out on everyone who crosses
their path. Not to mention corruption, graft, dishonesty, backstabbing, and fear. But by now it’s too late because it’s all
I was trained to do, and I’m supporting a few people and some pets, too.”

“Jesus,” Ellen said. “Did you just say those words or did I? That sounds just like my experience with show business.”

“It’s about as bad, except
you
get the big car and the fancy salary.” All four of the women laughed. “So did Jan O’Malley have any serious boyfriend? I
mean could this have been about a romance that went bad?”

“No,” Marly said.

“Absolutely not,” Ellen said. “She hadn’t been seeing anyone in a long time.”

“She was completely focused on her son,” Marly said.

Rose felt nervous. This was a question only she could answer, and if she did she’d be revealing a secret Jan had been keeping
from the others. But what if the secret had something to do with the shooting?

“The answer to that is yes,” she said quietly. “Jan was seeing someone.”

Marly and Ellen looked at her in surprise.

“She was?” Marly asked.

“Tell me about it,” the police woman said to Rose as she pulled a small spiral notebook out of her purse.

  
20
  

An Affair to
Remember

A
ndy always tells me that one of the reasons I’m a writer, a person who lives in the world of her own fantasies, is that even
at my age I’m still a romantic schmuck. To give you an example that he likes to use to prove that, he reminds me that in nineteen-whatever-it-was
when Jan was so crazy for Terry Penn, and she told me he was going to leave his wife to marry her, I believed it. Okay, so
I was already chopping liver and deviling eggs for the wedding. I really wanted Jan to be happy.

I was at her house one night when Terry called her, and my temperature went up just overhearing Jan’s side of the phone call.
“Oh, honey, me too. Oh, God, I want that, too,” I heard her say a million times. And I’ve got to tell you, when she walked
into the den where I was sitting fanning myself with a book, she was as glassy-eyed and lovesick as if they’d just been having
at it in the next room.

“Oh, Rose, we can’t live without one another any more,” she said to me, and I immediately asked about Susan, because everyone
knew that Susan and Terry Penn had what was perceived as the perfect family. Terry was a handsome actor turned producer and
then studio executive. Susan
wasn’t a beautiful woman, but because of all that money and all those homes, she had her picture in the paper all the time.
And she had that status that wives of men with that kind of power are granted. Like Candy Spelling and Patsy Tisch before
the divorce.

“Does he ever talk about his marriage?” I asked her. I never had a married man, except the ones who were married to me, so
what did I know about how they behaved?

“Oh believe me, Rose, it’s no marriage,” Jan said, hugging a throw pillow to her chest as if she were a teenager at a pajama
party talking about her steady. “I mean, it is what it is. He likes the way they look together in
Town and Country
magazine.”

That was her way of telling me that Terry and Susan Penn’s marriage only existed for practical reasons, like homes and money
and appearances, but not for the important thing, which was wild passion, intimacy, and romantic love, and that’s what he
had with Jan and couldn’t live without in his day-to-day life for one more day. According to Jan. She told me that’s what
he told her all the time.

Jan was the first “other woman” I’d ever known in person. Andy says I have yet to learn that every one of them, without exception,
believes exactly what Jan just said. I told him I don’t want to know how he knows that. Okay, Janny may have been kidding
herself, I mean all of us are guilty of that in some way or other. But I love her so much and always have for a million reasons.
And one is because she always has such a funny take on everything.

For example, we both hate to exercise, but we’d go together to those sweaty, music-pounding aerobic classes and work out,
and I’d look in the mirror at Jan in the row behind
me and she’d make these tortured faces at me, and then one day in the locker room at the health club she said to me, “Rose,
I’ve definitely decided, I’m not doing the aerobics anymore. I’ll do the Nautilus machines and build up my muscles, but I’m
not going to get myself all sweaty.”

“That’s a mistake,” I told her. “Andy’s a doctor and he always says no matter what, you have to do the aerobics. They’re crucial
for your heart.”

Janny looked over my shoulder at herself in the mirror, sucked in her stomach, and said, “Who cares? Nobody can
see
your heart.” We laughed over that for weeks.

“Terry Penn will never marry her,” Andy told me again. I remember it was when Molly was very little and we were sitting at
the beach in Santa Monica, watching her play in the sand. I had just told him about the beach house Terry rented for Jan in
the Malibu Colony for the upcoming summer months, but he shook his head, and I hated his certainty.

“He will. He loves her.”

“He won’t.”

“He might,” I said, backpedaling.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Let’s set an outside time. You can even pick the date. And if Terry Penn doesn’t leave his
wife by X date, you’ll treat me to the vacation of my choice. And if he does, I’ll take you anywhere you like.”

I couldn’t understand how my husband, who loves my friends, could bet against Jan’s happiness and not believe that Terry Penn
would do what he’d been promising Jan for more than a year. To tell his
Town and Country
wife he was leaving her for my passionate friend, explain gently to his kids, who would understand and would want to come
with
him to live in the big house where he was moving Jan, and where soon the two of them would have a family together.

Isn’t it awful that I was so ready to see Terry and Susan fall apart? But you know how I get when it comes to my friends?
I didn’t know Susan Penn, and I was very worried about Jan’s survival. I could just picture her on the grounds of some grand
estate. Finally taking a breath from the years of taking care of herself and her sister. I guess I believed the fairy tale
that some handsome rich prince was going to save her, just the way she still believed it in those days.

“Six months?” Andy asked me. I counted off the months on my fingers. Six months would make it October, a great time to go
to Hawaii. That’s where I would make him take me when I won the bet about Jan and Terry, who at that moment I was picturing
making love in the beachfront bedroom of the Malibu house. I imagined Terry swearing to her that soon they’d be out in the
open, swearing on something sacred, which I found myself hoping wasn’t his children’s lives, in case Andy was right.

In the second week of October, Andy and I went to the Heritage House in Mendocino, and I paid for it all. The rooms, the meals,
and the good red wine. Terry was still stalling and Jan was still letting him, and that was how Andy and I had those two glorious
days in Mendocino on my VISA card, and by the way, it’s beautiful up there at that time of year.

Andy wasn’t exactly gloating, but the lesson he was trying to teach me was that men know men, which was how he knew that a
man like Terry Penn was not about to give up what he had with Susan Penn just because he liked to get laid.

In November I had a big rewrite to do on a screenplay, and Andy suggested I take a few days at The Oaks at Ojai and he’d get
his mother to come and stay with Molly, so I could get my work out of the way. I love The Oaks, it’s one of my favorite places
to hide away, so I did, checking in by phone once a day at home. One day when I called home my mother-in-law told me that
Jan had called twice, so I called her back.

She really just wanted to chat about her romance with Terry, but when she heard I was in Ojai, she decided that getting Terry
away from Los Angeles for an afternoon and up to Ojai would be a great idea.

“We’ll drive up and take you to lunch,” she offered.

I was on the spa plan, seven hundred and fifty calories a day, and starving to death. A lunch date sounded like heaven to
me, so I agreed. I was nervous about it. I’d never met Terry Penn, but I’d read the articles about him in
Time
and
Vanity Fair
.

I was waiting for them at a restaurant in Ojai, feeling like an escapee from the spa, when they walked in. The minute I saw
Terry Penn, I understood viscerally why Jan couldn’t let him go. It wasn’t just Terry’s breathtaking good looks. There was
something about his presence that was magnetic.

I’ve met many movie stars, and always they seemed so much less than I’d imagined they would be. Terry Penn was more. Dramatically
handsome. And boy did he flash a heartbreaking smile at Jan’s friend, whom he’d come here to impress with the fact that he
was taking a day off from running an entire studio to meet me. Didn’t that mean he’d eventually leave his wife?

And he obviously loved Jan. I could see it by the way he
held on to her, looked at her. I cursed myself for not making the time on the bet with Andy twelve months instead of six,
because now that I was meeting Terry Penn in person, his devotion to my friend was obvious. By Christmas, maybe just after
Christmas to avoid a painful holiday season for his kids, I knew he would leave Susan and marry Janny.

When Jan left the table to go to the ladies’ room, Terry Penn put his tanned, manicured hand on my pale, ink-stained one and
looked deeply into my eyes. It was like locking eyes with the snake in
The Jungle Book
, Molly’s favorite video. He captured me with those eyes. I fell into them so easily that if things had been a little less
otherwise, meaning if I hadn’t been so happily married, and Jan wasn’t my beloved friend, I probably would have just left
with him myself before she came back. He said, “I love her. I’m going to marry her.”

Those eyes were his secret. I imagined him in meetings with big stars and famous directors, catching their eyes in the same
way and saying, “I’m going to make this picture. I’ll commit forty million dollars to it right now.” And they were stupid
enough to believe him, too.