Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences (18 page)

There were many days when I would watch her puttering around her tiny living room in her silk kimono, phone in the crook of
her neck, cigarette ablaze, chattering away to this friend or that. Hers was a life, it seemed, lived on a perpetual call-waiting,
clicking on and off, on and off. “Soon,” she’d purr as her sign-off, not ’bye, or ciao, or later, but “soon,” because it was
so optimistic, so much more future-looking. Sitting there, marveling at the choreography it took to be this stunning creature,
I would wonder how different this day, this scene, looked from virtually every other day of her life over the past ten years.
Winter looked essentially no different from summer in L.A., so if you really wanted to, you could convince yourself you had
only just arrived. I could never fathom how Gigi kept going, what tricks she used on herself, what mantras she repeated. As
much as I admired and adored her, envied her talent, her wit, her style, her magical aura, at the same time my biggest nightmare
was that I would one day become her: still struggling, acting less and less, and ignoring that reality more and more. I could
think of no worse fate, nothing scarier. Like my very own Dorian Gray, come to life, out of the attic, thrust under my nose.
Watching her rationalizing, plotting, dragging her car with the fucked carburetor for the umpteenth time to the mechanic in
Hollywood (the one who always gave down-on-their-luck actresses a break, charging them little or nothing at all, depending
on how low their resources or cleavage-revealing necklines), agonizing over credit card debt brought on by a terrifying Barneys
bender—I would become bitter
for
her, asking myself, “When, when does one know it’s time to stop?”

* * *

Gigi finally made the decision to switch coasts during my
rainy first winter living in the Hollywood Hills. We kept in touch on the phone and occasionally through wacky cards we’d
stuff with a single dollar bill and the encouragement via PS to “buy something pretty!”

A year or so later, my own career at an impasse, I was lying deflated one morning in my Fairfax apartment staring blankly
at the cottage cheese ceiling. I was late with the rent; there was an eviction notice on my door, and I was resorting to selling
my clothes for cash with my friend Kate on the sidewalk in front of my building later that day. The phone rang, and I let
the machine pick it up.

“I got a job,” Gigi choked through tears. “On Broadway . . .”

I immediately picked up the phone, and as she recounted the story of landing what would be her Broadway debut at the age of
forty-five, I wept along with her.

“Oh my god, Gigi,” I cried. “You did it. You really, really did it!”

“I know,” she whispered. “I know.”

She got great reviews; there was talk of London, a movie. But then the job ended and . . . nothing. It didn’t change a thing.
Gigi went back to the shit job she had at some store and sat stunned in front of the register each day, from eleven to seven,
like a bird who’s flown into a window but doesn’t die.

Eventually, she made her way back to L.A. Her old landlord gave her back her old pad; her old boss gave her back her old gig
at the high-end dress shop. It was almost as though she had never left at all. In fact, the only thing that reflected the
truth—that time had not simply stood still—was Gigi’s face. It wasn’t lines, though she had a few of those, around her eyes
mostly, a few around her mouth vaguely discernible when she fired up one of her fancy smokes. It was far more dramatic: her
face had begun to droop since the last major disappointment, and though still as bewitching and glamorous as ever, her mask
bore the unmistakable weight of a life’s worth of chagrin. Like a soufflé perturbed by a loud sound or an overanxious cook,
Gigi’s face had fallen from the disquiet her cheerful personality could no longer disguise.

Shortly after she arrived back in town, I had dinner one night with Gigi, whose car was once again in the shop. Dropped off
at the restaurant by another friend, she arrived, as usual, in a puff of drama and perfume.

“I had a dream last night,” she told me after we were settled and had started in on some pinot from the Rus sian River. “The
strangest dream. I was riding in a parade, a ticker tape parade . . .”

She paused to think about this for a moment, pulling one of her black cigs from her gold case.

“I don’t remember what happened first, you know, before that part. I only remember the ticker tape part and that I was riding
through it, sitting on the back of a convertible . . .”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, so I’m riding on the back of this convertible. Everyone’s smiling, waving, yelling, ‘
Gi-gi! Gi-gi!
,’ and I’m waving back at them, so of course, in my mind, I figure I’m in a movie, you know, I’m shooting a scene in a movie.”

Gigi leaned forward, her eyes widening incredulously.

“But after a while, it begins to dawn on me: This ain’t no movie. This is real! And not only that, this whole damn thing is
for me!” She laughed, lighting her cigarette.

“Wow—”

“Right?”

“So positive—”

“Isn’t it? And
powerful
?”

“Like a flying dream—”

“It was
so
fabulous . . .”

We cracked up, taking in this image, sipping our wine for a few moments. Gigi’s cheeks began to flush, and at first I thought
it was the pinot, but then I saw it: her eyes welling with tears.

“What is it?” I asked, reaching for her hand.

“I don’t know,” she said, carefully dabbing her napkin around the corners of her eyes, trying in vain to find her reflection
in her fish knife to make sure there were no delinquent mascara streaks. “It’s just that . . .”

“What?”

“It was
so beautiful
, the ticker tape, you know? I—I just never noticed that before. So beautiful and . . . fun and . . . messy—” Gigi grabbed
her napkin and started dabbing again, this time at fully formed tears. She composed herself for a moment, checked her makeup
once again in her flatware, then smiled.

“I don’t know what it was about that ticker tape,” she said finally. “It seemed so hopeful, yet something about it makes me
feel so sad.”

“Were you happy in the dream?”

“I think so,” Gigi began slowly, then stopped to think. “I was. I know I was,” she decided finally. “I guess I just wasn’t
able to fully embrace it because by the time I realized it was real and for me, it was over.”

“Isn’t it always that way?”

“And that’s what feels so sad. By the time I figured it out, it was over.”

After dinner, I gave Gigi a lift home. Sunset was, as usual, a nightmare.

“Swing down to Fountain,” she said. “It’s always a breeze.”

But Fountain, too, was a snarled, trafficky mess.

I looked ahead into the midnight blue, dotted with headlights and the occasional red glow of brakes, and thought back to that
Beachwood party and my first conversation with Gigi, when she so blithely tossed off the “Take Fountain” suggestion. It was
a joke, of course; she was just repeating some Bette Davis shtick for the benefit of the film queens she was in the company
of, but I would soon come to see that she also meant it in earnest. How many times had I heard her say—to me and to other
friends—“Oh, take Fountain. It’ll be a breeze”? And the thing is, it
never was
. It was always just as bad as any other street in L.A. Maybe back in the days when people like Bette Davis roamed the earth,
a street like Fountain was clear and open, a fabulous little shortcut that could make you feel like you were in on some secret.
But now, Fountain Avenue was just another byway, crowded with hopefuls desperate to get somewhere in a jiffy, only instead
idling bumper to bumper, waiting, spilling oil in a holding pattern along with everyone else who thought they held the key
to getting places in a hurry in L.A.

“See,” Gigi said after a few minutes, “much better.”

“Fountain sucks,” I said. “It’s always jammed.”

“Is it?” Gigi asked. “Strange . . . I never noticed that.”

But I didn’t believe her. I think she did notice; she just never let it get to her. As with the ticker tape in her dream,
or her career for that matter, Gigi noticed what she needed to notice in order to keep going. She had none of the cynicism
or anger that came naturally to someone like me. For so long, Gigi had seemed to me such a sad—even delusional—figure, washed
up and not dealing with it, like so many other wannabes. But as I drove her home that night, it dawned on me that maybe I
had been wrong: maybe Gigi in fact had the right temperament to be an actor, a working actor, slogging along, with nary a
negative thought, just trying to make sure to get SAG insurance for another year and maybe—maybe—get a hit here or there.
Looking at her life, with all the bills, the car crap, the money issues, the bad boyfriends, the call-waiting, waiting, waiting,
it was hard not to want to scream at the injustice that this woman, this enormously talented, vivacious woman, was not a huge
star, rich and famous and beloved by throngs of fans unknown to her.

Maybe her definition of success was less complicated than mine, less rigid and less dependent upon conventional thought. Maybe
it was enough that she was able to do what she loved, whether it brought her fame and wealth or not. Sure, she would have
liked to be making her living this way, but at the least she got to do it at all, and maybe, for her, this was enough. She
wasn’t, after all, miserable on a daily basis—I was.

I felt terrible for how I had judged her—my friend, whom I genuinely thought the world of—how I had often shuddered lying
awake at night, terrified of “becoming Gigi.” It was not Gigi who needed to accept the truth of her situation, but me.

We hugged for a long time when we reached her apartment; both of us seemed to be hanging on to something more than just each
other: the moment, perhaps, or maybe the memory of other moments we’d never really felt the need to say good-bye to. Wanting,
I suppose, to bestow upon her some advice of my own, I offered this tidbit:

“You know, I’ve found that if you
really
want to get across town faster, you take Sixth. We should change the expression.”

Gigi smiled and smoothed my hair.

“True,” she said, getting out of the car. “But it doesn’t sound as good.”

11. Hero-Goal-Obstacle

For the most
part, the men I dated after the Jazz Musician generally veered between the bizarre and the abusive. There was Larry, a lawyer/wannabe
actor who had failed his bar exam three times and whose mother, with whom he still lived, hated me so nakedly that whenever
I arrived at his house, her eyes would glaze into limpid pools of despair. Larry was very dumb—dumbest guy I have ever dated,
and also notable for being the dumbest Jewish guy I had ever known. We once got into a knockdown, drag-out fight because he
refused to believe he had an unconscious.

After Larry, I went out with a stuntman I met at spinning class, who each day, from the moment we met, would bring beautiful,
sweet-smelling roses from his garden and present them to me before we mounted our fake bikes. He was one of those ultra-rugged
guys who made scads of money driving erratically through the Arizona desert for car commercials. It seemed apropos, then,
that he should take me on my first car date in years. He picked me up one night and, after handing me a huge bouquet of homegrown
dusty pink roses, whisked me off in his white, O.J.-style Bronco to dinner at Yamashiro, where we had a lovely time sharing
sushi and looking at the spectacular view. I had an eight A.M. call time the next morning, so I needed to make it an early
night, but after dinner, the Stuntman drove me not home but rather to his all-white modern abode in deepest Laurel Canyon.
I had no idea where I was; I had thought he was taking me to my place. When I refused to leave his garage and enter the house,
he finally agreed to take me home, but not before telling me that all women were skanks, opportunists, and thieves.

Then there was Neil. I met Neil at a Passover dinner at a friend’s apartment in Beverly Hills. The only guy there, Neil spoke
a smattering of Hebrew, so he ended up in the “dad” position, presiding over the seder for the eve ning, and by the time he
was instructing us girls to dip our bitter herbs in the salty-tears water, I was ready to sleep with him. Neil was an actor
and loitered away on episodic television, playing roles typically given to swarthy, hirsute ethnic guys: surgeons, defense
lawyers, rapists—men who lived large and loved to laugh. In fact, Neil did a lot of laughing on TV. He had a big, booming
laugh he could bust out at the drop of a hat, over and over when the scene required it; he was to laughing what Meryl Streep
was to weeping. But in life, Neil didn’t laugh much at all, especially if you were a woman. Divorced, fucked over too many
times by too many broads, including (especially?) his mother, Neil thought women were the most unfunny creatures on the planet.
Any of my attempts to be funny—even just lighthearted banter—were viewed with scorn and contempt. A scowl would wash across
his stubbly face; he would defiantly cross his arms as if to say, “Go ahead. Just
try
.” Comedy, Nautilus machines—these were for people with penises as far as Neil was concerned. The only female he was really
compatible with was his large, brindled pit bull, Brenda. One day, I just stopped calling Neil back; I briefly went back to
New York for a wedding, and when I returned, I just didn’t call him. Soon after, I went to Adray’s, this discount electronics
place on Wilshire, to buy a scale and ran into Neil in the line where they check your receipts to make sure you’re not stealing.

“THERE YOU ARE!” he screamed in front of dowager-humped old people buying toaster ovens and hipsters with eyebrow rings buying
fans. “YOU THINK IT’S OK TO JUST NOT FUCKING CALL ME EVER AGAIN? HUH? YOU THINK THAT’S
FUNNY
? YOU’RE A ROTTEN LITTLE BITCH. FUCK YOU. FUUUUUCK YOOOOU!”

He wasn’t the worst, though. That distinction goes to the Springsteen freak who told me that I reminded him of “Thunder Road”
because of the lyric “You ain’t a beauty but hey, you’re alright, oh, and that’s alright with me.” Despite the aforementioned
(and the fact that he was terrible—and I mean
terrible
—in bed), I slept with him for six months. And there were others, many others. I point to this mortifying stretch of my dating
history merely as a way of illustrating how hideously low my self-esteem had sunk during this time. I stayed in things and
with people so far past their expiration dates that I didn’t notice the taste of curdle anymore because, for whatever reason,
I felt inside like I deserved it. And it was so insidious, this motif of self-penalization, that it metastasized to every
area of my life, including my seemingly innocuous first writing class, a sitcom-writing workshop taught by a curmudgeonly
old-school TV writer.

The Curmudgeon was very well regarded; he had written and produced countless episodes of classic sixties and seventies sitcoms,
and everyone raved about him. I knew a few people and had heard of others who were staffed onto big shows immediately after
completing his twelve-week session. I wasn’t sure I wanted to write for sitcoms—I wasn’t sure I wanted to
act
on them either—but I had been wanting to take a writing class of some sort for years and thought maybe this would be a good
way to get my feet wet.

The class met at the Curmudgeon’s homestead, nestled into a rustic canyon in West L.A. Twelve of us—as well as the Curmudgeon
and his three halitosis-hampered setter-type dogs—would sit around a conference table in the Curmudgeon’s living room. The
Curmudgeon had a whiteboard, onto which he had Magic Markered the words “Hero-Goal-Obstacle.” This, according to the Curmudgeon,
was really all you needed to know to write basically anything.

“The hero always has a goal, which is made known to us at the top,” the Curmudgeon croaked, pointing to his whiteboard.

“The plot is made up of the obstacles we put in the hero’s way to give
dramatic tension
while he pursues his goal. And that’s it. If you don’t have these things, you can forget it.”

The Curmudgeon would give us scene assignments each week—all taken from his TV-writing files amassed thirty years before—which
we were to complete, bring in, pass out to everyone, and cast. We were not allowed to read our own stuff; the Curmudgeon just
wanted us to listen when our work was being read. The assignments always involved a very dopey premise. I remember one involved
an anthropologist couple who, after having endured a lengthy work-related separation, are insanely horny for each other and
desperate to fuck (Hero-Goal). The woman has schlepped a large gorilla back from the African jungle as a gift for the husband.
The gorilla, as it happens, is very jealous and keeps interfering every time the husband tries to put the moves on (Obstacle).

Each time I heard one of these assignments, my first thought was “This is really stupid.” But then I would get into it; I
thought maybe the Curmudgeon’s point was to warm us up with insipid exercises, and if we could make those funny, well, we
could do anything—and then he would pull out the
actually
funny stuff that we might get hired to do. It took me several weeks to realize that . . . this was it. There was no graduating
to better assignments. The Curmudgeon was adamant that if the material didn’t work, it was our fault; there were no bad setups,
only bad writers. Period. If you were working the Hero-Goal-Obstacle concept, there should be no issue. At first, I liked
the class and the Curmudgeon, though I did feel uncomfortable that he was always very flirty with me.

“Well, hullo there, you sexy dame!” he hollered from the conference table when I walked in for the second session of the workshop.
“Why dontcha come sit right next to me so I can fondle you while we listen to some screamingly funny scenes?”

In the past, I didn’t take too kindly to overt displays of sexual hostility. Once, when I was in the Catskills for a season
of summer theater, a guy in a pickup truck yelled something lewd to me as he passed me walking on a rickety bridge. “Fuck
you, asshole!” I screamed, hurling a can of Diet Coke at his door. He screeched to a halt and vowed to slit my throat; my
bucolic respite was poised to become a scene from
Deliverance
. But I was too enraged to concern myself with matters of safety; recklessness be damned. When similarly propositioned by
catcalling construction workers on New York City streets, I would stop dead and scream, “Wild horses couldn’t drag me anywhere
near you, motherfuckers!” My blood boiled at how cheap their jeers made me feel and what I perceived as their unchecked sense
of macho entitlement.

But here, not wanting, I suppose, to seem like I had no sense of humor in a comedy-writing class, I merely glanced awkwardly
toward the other writers at the conference table, whose faces evinced indifference. Averting my eyes, I looked for a seat,
only to discover that the only chair available was right next to the Curmudgeon. This seating configuration was almost always
the same, no matter how early or late I arrived. But I will never forget that first time: queasily sinking into my chair,
the Curmudgeon grabbing my right knee, a stinky dog’s snout resting on the left one, while the other two brethren lay comatose,
having whimpering doggie nightmares on my feet.

A week or so later, I told my friend Gabe, who was writing for television, about the Curmudgeon’s unbridled bellowing and
wandering fingers, and he was fairly dry-eyed.

“Get used to it,” he told me. “That kinda stuff goes on all day in the writers’ room. It’s a boy’s club.”

“Really? What about sexual harassment?”

“What about it? Television isn’t the corporate world.”

“I know, I know,” I sighed. “It’s Hollywood . . .”

“Worse; it’s Burbank.”

Gabe went on to say that if anyone could stomach these types of shenanigans—any “chick,” that is—it was me. Historically,
this had been true: rednecks and construction workers aside, it wasn’t unusual for me to be cool with a little harmless objectification.
I generally fared well with male rough-and-tumble, in-your-face aggressiveness; they dished it, I took it and relished throwing
it right back in their faces. In the past, I had viewed it as a feather in my cap that unlike some women whose wan dispositions
precluded rolling with the punches, I was a “tough cookie”; I knew how to take a joke. Besides, I had always craved male friendship,
needed their attention (even if it was more of a punch than a caress). Like Anybodys in
West
Side Story
, I was always desperate to be included in the gang. But by the time I enrolled in the Curmudgeon’s class, things had changed;
I felt different. Perhaps it was turning thirty, or because, more often than not, the camaraderie I thought I had with men
came to disappointing conclusions, leaving me confused and hurt, face-to-face with the sham these bonds were really based
on. Or perhaps I was just really tired of always having to “take a joke” when it involved me as the sex object.

My discomfort with the Curmudgeon and my knee, however, didn’t stop me from feeling enthusiastic about writing. I attacked
my assignments each week with a zeal theretofore unobserved, save for the time I wrote the short one-act in David Mamet’s
master class back at NYU. I hadn’t seen Mamet in five years at that point; the last time was at a dinner in Vermont when a
friend and I were passing through. Mamet had a new house and a new wife and soon after our arrival ran around ebulliently
explaining how to use the new rotisserie he had just installed in his kitchen.

“You take this pole, stick it up the chicken’s fucking asshole, then it rotates on this thing. It is delicious and I am in
awe . . .”

He was madly in love, discovering yoga, reclaiming his Jewish roots, and genuinely happy and at peace in a way I had never
experienced him before.

“Are you writing?” he asked me later, after we cleared the plates.

“Not really,” I told him. “I start things; I just don’t finish them. Maybe I need to take a class or something.”

He shook his head.

“How do you learn to swim?”

I shrugged.

“You get in the water.”

I didn’t keep in touch with Mamet after that; I felt embarrassed that I had gone to L.A. the following year with all the “whores,”
and more shamefaced that I had never written anything really substantial after that long-ago one-act. But he sometimes paid
me visits during my L.A. years, courtesy of my imagination, as he did when I was taking the Curmudgeon’s class. He would pop
into the seat across from me at the kitchen table of my apartment off Fairfax, waxing reflective, phlegmatically quoting others
about the perils of Hollywood, pestering me as I labored over my inane exercises.

“Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.”

“Behind the phony tinsel of Hollywood lies the real tinsel.”

Sometimes I would even conjure up Mamet on my long rides west on Sunset Boulevard to the Curmudgeon’s class. He would sit
stoically in his baseball cap, smoking a cigar, his foot on the dash of the beat-up Volkswagen convertible I had bought used
in Hermosa Beach, repeating the maxims of other men.

“Hollywood is like a trip through a sewer in a glass-bottom boat.”

One day about halfway through the Curmudgeon’s twelve-week session, I arrived with a scene I wanted to have read. The Curmudgeon
suggested I cast another woman he flirted openly with, a very attractive commercial actor. I immediately agreed. It was always
great if you could use a real actor to read scenes, and most of the people in the class were just writers. No sooner did the
woman start reading, however, than I realized something was wrong. She was mangling the lines: dropping words, adding words,
reading haltingly, devoid of any rhythm whatsoever.

“Whoops,” she giggled, looking up momentarily. “Sorry, I’m
dyslexic
. . .”

After the scene died a slow, miserable death, the Curmudgeon started to give me notes, pointing out lines for their terribleness,
which hadn’t actually been lines I’d written; they were lines delivered by the actor in her dyslexic befuddlement. Normally,
we were prohibited from responding to his comments, but seeing as how he was commenting on lines I had, in fact, not written,
I thought it best to explain.