Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences (14 page)

I called Jane and left messages wanting to know what happened; she didn’t return my calls.

I never spoke to her again.

Jane would go on to superstardom, marry a hunky guy, win several awards. I, on the other hand, would sputter along, stopping
and starting, sometimes playing along with the game, sometimes recoiling in ambivalence. But what ever I did in the years
that followed our friendship, I was never without a Mason Pearson brush, and I always had
great hair
.

A few years ago, when Jane went through a nasty and very tabloidy divorce—her husband having left her for a younger woman—people
would call me up all the time, asking if I was experiencing a spectacular episode of schadenfreude. The answer was no. Maybe
it’s natural for people to assume that her misfortunes would somehow be satisfying to me, but here is the truth. Whenever
she comes up, I can only think of Jane as I knew her: a sweet, hopelessly insecure girl who yearned for her dad, wanted above
all to make herself pretty, pretty, pretty, and was willing to sacrifice pieces of herself to do so. She was someone I liked
knowing, someone with whom I had a great deal in common and, at the same time, nothing at all. Nevertheless, we shared a period
of time, had some fun, and helped each other just a little in the best way we knew how. She was someone I considered a true
friend, and no matter how hard I try, I can never, ever forget that. So, when I think of Jane, I just feel sad.

I once read an interview with Jane where she said that if her career hadn’t worked out, she’d have been happy just serving
people burgers at the joint she worked at all those years ago when she was shacking up with me. She said she got joy out of
just giving people fries and milk shakes and getting tips. It felt honest to her, and somehow, she felt as though she forged
friendships with the customers that were very deep. I know what she meant. There are those connections you have with people
that on the surface seem fleeting, ephemeral, inexplicable, but that you nonetheless feel certain are important and terribly
profound and very real, until one day when you look back on it and you think to yourself . . . maybe not. Anyway, I would
imagine that deep down Jane knows—as I do—that even if it were that simple, sometimes being a friend is just not enough. And
that is one of the suckiest things in life.

8. I Am What I Am

No one is
immune to the lure of stardom. Even when you think you know yourself—and that you’re happy with your little life in the shadows—if
met with the unexpected prospect of fame and overnight success, you see things very differently. That’s what happened to my
friend T.J. T.J. was just a regular schmo working two jobs: one as the personal assistant to “Mama” Michelle Phillips of the
Mamas and the Papas, and the other as the maître d’/wine captain at Morton’s steak house on La Cienega. The Mama Michelle
gig was surprisingly great; Michelle was cool and generous, a rare celebrity who, though well aware of her fabulousness, never
expected her employees or anyone else to revel in her impudence. Of course, Michelle was stoned all day long, which may have
accounted for her loveliness in part, as well as the fact that she cooked some seriously badass Mexican food.

Once, when I was over at her place visiting T.J., he got a call from a ladies’ magazine that wanted Michelle to describe her
“beauty regimen.”

“Are you serious?” she asked T.J., fixing her luminous blue eyes on him. She was still in her white robe with her hair wrapped
in a towel from her morning shower, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and rolling a joint.

“That’s what they wanna know,” T.J. continued, pen poised on his notepad.

“Tell them that when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is weigh myself. If I’m an ounce over 122, I pop a Dexie.
Then I get stoned and have a vodka. Later I get stoned some more. Then I make some fish tacos at around five, have some more
vodka until I pass out. That’s about it. Oh, and I sleep with a plastic surgeon . . .”

Because the Mama Michelle gig wasn’t regular, T.J. also had to take the Morton’s job. It paid well enough, but unlike at Michelle’s,
where anything went, at Morton’s there were all sorts of stuffy rules and protocols. Everyone had to have their apron on just
so, the right shoes, the flawless ability to appear in a flash and then vanish. Servers were required to memorize the entire
menu and recite it with dramatic reverence and swooping crescendos, while wielding bloody porterhouse props. I called these
mini-productions “Cirque du Soleil: The Monologue.” The obsequious pyrotechnics expected of the Morton’s staffers made sense,
since the restaurant catered to the peevish, tight-faced denizens of Beverly Hills and scores of bratty, overindulged celebrities.
The waiters didn’t mind it; they all wanted to be actors, and this was their time to perform. But not T.J. T.J. didn’t want
to be an actor at all. His dream was to be a theater producer. All through our years at NYU, he produced student shows. His
posters bore a trademark that became legendary: T.J.’s name in bold, followed by an even bolder “PRESENTS.” I’m not sure how
many people actually saw his shows, but everyone knew those posters. People even started referring to him as Presents, his
nickname to this day. But after a postgraduation attempt to bring a revival of
Hair
back to the New York stage went seriously awry, T.J. ran away to Key West. For seven years, he worked in a hotel bar and lived
in a seaside efficiency flat, drowning his producing dreams in the salty surf and his sorrows in Tanqueray. Eventually, our
friend Matthew coaxed T.J. out to Los Angeles, where he got a job working as the assistant to a talent agent and rented a
sweetly shabby six-hundred-dollar apartment in back of the Scientology Center. Though soot and exhaust piled up on his windowsills
daily—the price of living beneath the Hollywood freeway—it was home.

Soon after T.J. arrived, the talent agent came under investigation for allegedly cashing in his client’s paychecks, the agency
shut its doors, and T.J. was, once again, out of a job. But Mama Michelle came to the rescue, the Morton’s job came through,
and finally, it looked as though T.J. was on the up-and-up. All he wanted was to get on his feet, make his car payments and
rent, buy fresh flowers occasionally, have friends to dinner—the trappings of a nice, quiet life.

One night at Morton’s, several months after he was hired, T.J. was waiting on a party of six celebrating a birthday.

“The reservation was under the name Nikki Haskell,” T.J. said when he called me later. “She was in position one, and the gentleman
whose birthday it was, was in position two,” he explained, using restaurant parlance to describe who was sitting where at
the table. “So, they’re done, and out comes the dessert with a candle, and of course, we’re all singing ‘Happy Birthday.’
When we finish, Miss Haskell starts shrieking,
‘OH COME
ON! THAT’S THE BEST YOU CAN DO? IT’S ALLAN
CARR, FOR CHRISSAKES!’ ”

“No way,” I said, laughing. “Allan Carr?”

This was a huge deal. T.J. really admired Allan Carr: he was a tremendously successful producer and talent manager. Short,
stout, stomach-stapled, with a face resembling that of a benign sea monster, Allan Carr epitomized the excess of Celebrity,
with his fabulously flamboyant lifestyle replete with billowy caftans, floor-length furs, and lavish theme parties thrown
in his Egyptian-style home disco.

Surrounded by famous friends and young lovers, Allan Carr lived a charmed life; the world was his deep-fried oyster. It
was
, anyway, until the end of the eighties, when Carr was asked to produce the Oscars, the one where Rob Lowe sang “Proud Mary”
to Snow White. While I actually thought this Debbie Allen–choreographed smorgasbord bordered on genius, the rest of the world
disagreed: it was universally derided as an unmitigated disaster and the tackiest Academy Awards in history, quite a feat,
given the level of taste for which the Oscars are usually known. After that, Carr’s career was over; he never worked in Hollywood
again.

But T.J. didn’t care. To him, Allan Carr would always be the guy who cast Olivia Newton-John opposite John Travolta in
Grease
; the guy who knew Broadway audiences would embrace the gay couple in
La Cage aux Folles
; the guy who discovered Steve Guttenberg. So what if Carr was, by this point, just another washed-up queen relegated to overpaying
for strip steak and baked potato? To T.J., it didn’t matter a whit. He knew Hollywood was a cruel place, but he also knew
it was a place where you could have a second act. A place where you could reinvent yourself. T.J. felt a kinship with Carr
and wanted him to know it was OK: he might be down-and-out, but surely, some day soon, he’d have a comeback. In T.J.’s eyes,
Allan Carr was still a hero. So, with nary a moment’s hesitation, T.J. began to sing the eleven o’clock number from
La Cage
:

I am what I am, I am my own special creation

So come take a look, give me the hook or the ovation

It’s my world that I want to have a little pride in

My world and it’s not a place I have to hide in

Life’s not worth a damn ’til you can say, hey world
I am what

I am . . .

The entire restaurant stopped to watch what was, according to one of the waiters who witnessed it, a purely spontaneous yet
riveting performance. When it was over, as T.J. held the last note and exited with a graceful flourish through the swinging
doors of the Morton’s kitchen, the restaurant patrons erupted in frenzied applause.

“It was incredible,” T.J. said. “They were hooting and hollering, whistling and carrying on.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Allan Carr was crying . . .”

“Wow,” I repeated.

“So then, Nikki Haskell pulls me aside and says, ‘What you did over there was just amazing. Allan was so moved.’ So I said,
‘Well, goodness, thank you, Miss Haskell. You know, I’m quite a fan of Allan’s—and of yours as well.’ ”

“Is he kidding?” I thought. “
Nikki Haskell?
That diet pill lady with the eighties fright hair whose mug looms over Sunset Boulevard?”

“So then,” T.J. said, “she asked me to come to Allan’s official birthday luncheon, next week at Le Dome. She wants me to re-create
the per formance I did tonight, only this time in drag.”

“Oh. My. God. What did you say?”

“Nothing. I was floored. Then she says, ‘I’ve got an accompanist, and I can pay you one hundred dollars, but really, this
shouldn’t be about money. This is a
big deal
for you: Allan Carr can make you a
star
. It’s as simple as that. There are going to be MAJOR, MAJOR celebrities there, and, well, this is a
life-changing
thing for you, really.’ ”

“Wow.”

“Can you believe it, Nancy?” he asked, sounding on the verge of either laughing or crying. “Tonight, I was
discovered
.”

That Nikki Haskell’s blandishments really meant anything to him beyond chatter I found completely shocking, but T.J. seemed
to be really taking this thing to heart. More curiously, T.J. wasn’t even an actor. I’d had no idea that he harbored dreams
of performing, let alone stardom. It wasn’t that I didn’t think T.J. was lovable; he had a certain spark and boyish charm
that I always found irresistible. Who was to say others wouldn’t see the same thing? Maybe they already had. Still, I was
amazed by how quickly he had gotten the star bug.

“Anyway,” T.J. continued, “I said yes, of course. I mean—what else could I say? Which is, by the way, why I’m calling you
at this ungodly hour: are you gonna get over here and help me or what? I’m completely freaking out . . .”

After throwing on some clothes, I headed to T.J.’s apartment in my marginally running Rabbit convertible. I wanted to feel
nothing but delight for T.J.; maybe fate had smiled on him—finally—bringing his run of bad luck to an end, the Carr episode
heralding the dawn of an exhilarating epoch. But as I imagined the pages turning to a new chapter for T.J., an unfamiliar
feeling arose, a feeling I had previously believed myself to be immune to:
envy.
I had always been glad for people—especially friends—when they got the things they wanted. “No need to covet; there is enough
for everyone” was always my mantra. Pollyannaish, maybe—perhaps even delusional—but it was how I felt.

But so much had changed. I was in that terrible place an actor gets to in L.A. where you’ve been out there for a year or so
and, after an initial slew of work, everything seems to have dried up. You’re not getting cast, you’re not being seen for
this project or that, and you’re constantly in fear of your agent dropping you. Maybe you’ve put on a bit of weight, which
makes you even nuttier. You are desperate and bored, languishing away with resentment and paranoia that the whole Hollywood
thing is a lie. Because you bought the swampland. Everybody else’s win is your loss. You’re rotting away drinking Vanilla
Blendeds by day and dirty martinis by night, talking bitterly about what you “deserve.”

Driving up Highland, toward the Hollywood hinterlands, I found myself all of a sudden doing the second most common activity
I did on a daily basis besides driving: crying. And more and more, I was doing these acts concurrently. Two years had passed
since I’d been fired from my friend Jane’s hit TV show, and unbelievably, I still had not fully recovered from the pain and
humiliation. I still had trouble believing the story that she had instigated my release, but regardless, I had lost my mojo
entirely, stopped getting work, and fallen into a deep, unshakable depression. To pay my rent, I would participate in bogus
focus groups with other out-of-work actors, pretending to advertising executives and their clients hidden behind two-way mirrors
that I adored a gin I had never even tried, and when I wasn’t doing that, I was blow-drying other actresses’ hair in my kitchen
for twenty dollars a pop, using the techniques Jane had taught me all those years before. Occasionally, I booked commercial
voice-overs where I would sit in a booth extolling the virtues of cereal or kitty litter or twenty-four-hour Mormon banks,
then afterward drive around on broad, dusk-illuminated Los Angeles streets named for flowers and saints and swamps, crying
and driving, driving and crying, thinking, rationalizing, searching. Nowhere was the clarity of those early L.A. days of promise,
the ones when I could see all the way down the hills. Now I lived in the flats: there was nothing to see. And even if there
were, clarity, I would come to find out, was anomalous: most days a dull film etched a stark silhouette against the sky, hovering
over the whole city, nowhere to go.
Smog
, everyone said it was
smog
. Pretty soon, however, I came to think that what got trapped in that vast Los Angeles basin wasn’t smog at all, but the psychic
haze of collective despair. And now, some of it was mine.

Pulling onto T.J.’s street, I thought about how, more than anyone else in my life during those dog days, T.J. was there for
me, making me laugh with his diversionary antics, his adorable grin, and his general craziness, all of which made me feel
not so all alone. I loved T.J.; I wanted him to shine, to succeed, to have everything he ever dreamed of. These sickening
green-eyed pangs had nothing to do with him, I told myself, and everything to do with how terrible I felt about myself.

When I got to T.J.’s apartment, I found him sitting on his corduroy sofa—still in his Morton’s tux—drinking a beer. He was
listening to the sound track to
La Cage
on a boom box. I sat next to him and took a sip of the beer. We sat listening for a few minutes, not speaking, until finally
T.J. got up and clicked off the boom box.

“I need you to direct me,” he said. “I need you to help me recreate what I did tonight.”

“Sure,” I told him. T.J. seemed shaken, somehow. As though his new life as a superstar was already a burden for him.

“I’ll split the hundred bucks with you, OK?”

“Sure.”

T.J. was wandering around in circles now.

“I need a beer,” he said absently.

“Whatsa matter with that one?” I asked, gesturing toward the half-full bottle in his hand.

“Huh?” He looked down at his beer. “I guess I’m just kind of scared,” he shrugged. “What if I can’t do it again? What if it
was just a fluke?”