B00C4I7LJE EBOK (23 page)

 I snatched the checkbook from the petty-cash purse and with clenched teeth wrote the check for somewhere north of $6,000. Signing “Phyllis Diller” with a flourish, I tore it out of the checkbook and with a tight smile, handed it over to the store owner.

I wanted to say something, but it would have been a long swim back to California.

* * *

My dream of spending days lolling on the beach had been quashed, not only by the drastic curtailment of my free time, but also by the fact that the balmy tropical breezes, which made the palm trees sway so prettily, also blew sand everywhere. Between the wind and the humidity, those lovely looking Caribbean beaches were decidedly unpleasant. Besides that, there were the rats. Yes, big rats. They hung out at night by the pool—I’d pointed them out to Phyllis as we made our way backstage, and after that we did a pretty good imitation of a race-walk across the pool area on our way to the showroom.

“I’ve never seen rats like that,” I said.

“Oh, I have. Some of them even had four legs!”

The wind killed my interest in lying on the beach. And lounging by the pool, knowing there were rats lurking in the landscaping? No, thank you! So, I used the hour or two in the morning to work before Phyllis got up. During the afternoon, or whenever we had an idle moment, I coached Phyllis on her lines for the play she would be doing at Pheasant Run Theater the next month. After
Forty Carats
closed with Warde and Stephanie, Phyllis would star in a play—
Composition in Black and Blue
—that had been written expressly for her by one of her comedy writers, Jules Tasca. It was his first play, and Phyllis had been looking for ways to branch out into other fields of show business. The play seemed to be the perfect opportunity for them both. We didn’t run lines as often as we should have, but Pheasant Run was still almost a month away, and there were two weeks in Hot Springs, Arkansas, yet to come. Why worry?

Phyllis felt perfectly free to make changes in the script just as she sometimes rewrote the jokes she bought. The play was a horse of a somewhat different color, I thought, but it didn’t stop Phyllis from crossing out a line or changing the wording to something she considered funnier.

We’d been in San Juan nearly a week when Mr. B called from nearby St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, where he had a winter house.

“Why don’t you come over for a visit?” he asked Phyllis.

The idea appealed to her, and he assured us that flights took only a few minutes and left regularly. Phyllis agreed that on Monday, her day off, we’d fly over for the day. I was relieved that Phyllis declined his offer to stay overnight, not only because it would have involved packing, but I never was comfortable staying in other people’s houses, especially people I didn’t know well.

On Monday morning, we took a taxi to the harbor, where the pilot of a little seaplane prepared for departure. The aircraft was small, holding only ten or twelve, with one seat on each side of the aisle. We took our places in the front and a young couple sat behind us. They held hands across the aisle.

Phyllis looked at them. “Are you newlyweds?”

“No,” he answered. “We’ve been married six months.”

Phyllis laughed. “You’re newlyweds.”

The plane took off and was too noisy for further conversation. After we disembarked in St. Thomas, Phyllis turned around and said, “I hope you have a long and happy life together.”

I don’t know if they recognized her, but they smiled at her and each other. I hope her wish for them came true.

Mr. B, dressed in shorts and sandals, met us at dockside. His wife was with him and chattered brightly on the drive out to their house. She went a long way toward making him seem human. The house was small and sparsely furnished with rattan furniture. A typical beach house.        

I changed into the bathing suit I’d stuffed into my recently purchased horse-blanket beach bag and headed down the stairs to the sand. I concluded we were on the leeward side of the island since the breeze was distinctly less than at the Caribe Hilton, and the water was the brilliant blue that I’d always seen on postcards. I pulled a large beach towel from my bag and stretched out on the smooth, white sand. With a sigh of relief, I closed my eyes and let the warm Caribbean sun do its magic. I felt my muscles relaxing as my brain slid into neutral.
Heaven!

I must have dozed because the next thing I knew I heard voices. Mr. B’s wife and a neighbor were trotting down the stairs, each holding a wicker basket.

“We thought you might be hungry,” Mrs. B said and opened her basket to bring out a tray of sandwiches and a jug of iced tea. The neighbor spread a bright tablecloth on the sand and produced a plate of tropical fruit. We ate and chatted, but I was no longer relaxed. Anything I said would be repeated, so I had to parry as diplomatically as possible the neighbor’s natural but probing questions about life with Phyllis Diller. I tried to talk about the Virgin Islands, but inevitably the conversation came back to Phyllis.

Suddenly Mrs. B said, “It’s time to go in!” and they both jumped up and started gathering the remains of the picnic lunch.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“No-see-ums,” Mrs. B answered cryptically.

I looked from one to the other.

“They’re little biting midges that come late in the afternoon,” the neighbor explained. “You can barely see ’em, but they’ll bite the hell out of you.”

 We trudged up the stairs and when we reached the house, Phyllis told me we’d be leaving for dinner shortly.

I changed back into the summer dress and sandals I’d worn on the plane and joined them in the living room for drinks. “Seven-Up, if you have it,” I told Mrs. B when she asked what I’d like. Phyllis was drinking a martini. A little while later, Mr. B suggested we head to the restaurant.

Four others joined us on a lovely terrace overlooking the harbor. I never enjoyed socializing with Phyllis or her friends, and with her attorney along, I felt like I was on trial. It was not a time to kick back. A waiter opened wine and poured all around. When he reached me, I declined.

“Don’t you drink?” one of the men asked me.

“Sometimes.”

“Excellent wine,” he commented as he nodded toward the bottle.

“No, thank you,” I answered in what probably sounded like a very prim voice. I was keeping an eye on the time, because we were catching the last flight back to San Juan. The way the drinks were being thrown back, I had a hunch I might be the only person there who cared whether we made that flight or not.

Dinner was delicious, as I’d expected. Nobody noticed or cared that I didn’t take part in the conversation. Phyllis was there and obviously the center of attention.

We had after-dinner coffee and more drinks. Once again I politely refused.

“Come on, have a drink,” one of the guests urged.

I smiled and bit back the snarl that simmered just below the surface. This whole afternoon and evening, being with strangers who acted like friends, was wearing on me.

“You didn’t even have a glass of wine with dinner,” she pointed out. “One little drink won’t hurt.”

I was still casting about for a suitable but polite rejoinder when Mrs. B mercifully came to my rescue. “You don’t understand,” she said sweetly. “Robin is working.”

I could have hugged her. At least there was one person who didn’t think that just because I was wearing a sundress and eating a gourmet dinner in the Caribbean meant I was on vacation. I hadn’t realized until then how tired I got from never, ever being able to relax. I always had to be on guard, be alert, have the next day’s schedule in mind, be pleasant, be polite but firm, and become invisible when I was no longer necessary. I very seldom had time to myself. Phyllis called it “star sitting,” and that summed it up nicely.

That night in bed I started analyzing my job and my life and my future. One thing for certain, I wasn’t being paid nearly enough.

The second week in Puerto Rico Phyllis wanted to do something every day or every night. Several nights after her second performance, we went to a small club to catch the 2:00 A.M. show. Phyllis knew people from the old Bob Hope days when she’d done those films with him. After the show, they talked and drank. During the show, too, for that matter. Of course, I had no part in this. Her friends were polite, but really all I could do was sit off to the side and keep paying for the drinks. We usually didn’t get home before dawn. Thank goodness our next engagement was in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where there would be no nightclubs, and the only thing Phyllis would have to do would be to work on that script for the play at Pheasant Run.

29

P
hyllis finished her two weeks in Puerto Rico on Sunday night and we left at noon on Monday for The Vapors Club in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The Caribe Hilton limo drove us to the airport in style, even though the limo was stuffed from stem to stern with suitcases. A far cry from our arrival in a VW minivan driven by a man I still thought of as a pig farmer. At the airport in Hot Springs, the rental car awaited, just as Roy had arranged. Our flight got in at 6:30 P.M. after two plane changes.

The Taylor-Rosamund Motel, where we would be staying, was just across the street from The Vapors Club, so a limo wasn’t practical. I would be the chauffer for the next two weeks. I didn’t mind because I anticipated—correctly as it turned out—that Phyllis would be amenable to my going off by myself once in a while.

The Vapors would not be a demanding engagement. Being the only show in town, literally, it sold out every night, with no promotions or public appearances necessary. Phyllis had two shows each night, with an hour in between.

Some nights we’d have dinner delivered to the dressing room. Other nights Phyllis cooked dinner before we went over. She was a “hit-or-miss” cook. She never used a recipe and made things up as she went along. Sometimes the results were quite good; other times I could hardly choke them down. She loved making “garbage soup,” a compilation of leftovers. She claimed to put everything in except lettuce and Jell-O. The leftovers came from our dressing room dinners, but even on past occasions when I’d had dinner with her in a restaurant, she was never shy about getting a doggie bag.

“After all,” she pointed out, “they’re just going to throw it away.”

So I never knew what I’d be eating on any given night.
All part of the adventure
, I told myself.

Each night we drove the two-tenths of a mile from the top of the parking lot across the street to the stage door at the back of the club.

“I have an idea,” Phyllis said one night. “How about if we drive over there and then back up coming home and see if the odometer goes back down.” We laughed about the idea of turning the car in after ten days with less than ten miles on it. It didn’t work.

“Oh, well,” Phyllis said. “It was a fun idea.”

Or maybe not,
I thought, because backing the car back up the steep driveway at the motel in the dark seemed like an invitation for disaster.

Hot Springs sits on the edge of a national forest, and one day I asked Phyllis if I could take the car and get out for a couple of hours. “I just want to go for a drive through the forest,” I told her. “Would you like to get out, too?”

Surprisingly, she liked the idea. Surprising because Phyllis did not like to be idle. If she wasn’t with friends or family, or getting ready for a trip or performance, she used her free time working on her act, talking to her manager or agent, or doing something productive. Just driving around in a car was not her idea of a good time. Nevertheless, we drove through the hills and the trees and enjoyed chatting. We talked about Puerto Rico.

“I couldn’t believe the wind in San Juan. That one day I went to the beach, the sand stuck to my suntan lotion and the wind blew my hair into my eyes,” I told her.

“You might consider a wig,” she said.

“I have a wig. It’s long, dark hair. What would happen if we got it mixed up and you went onstage in a long, dark wig?”

“They’d think I was Cher!” She had a snappy comeback for everything. Phyllis always could see the humor.

As we drove back through the town, I told her I wanted to stop at the drugstore.

“I’ll come in with you,” she said.

I was apprehensive, but nobody bothered us. We walked through the store like everyone else. I even found some perfume I’d used years ago that I thought was out of production. It probably was an old bottle, but I bought it anyway. Phyllis picked up a few little things for the girls—some nail polish for Susie, bubble bath for Stephanie, and a little stuffed panda to send to Sally. Just like any parent who goes on a trip, she liked to bring presents home for her children.

I enjoyed the respite from the hectic lifestyle in San Juan. Phyllis had planned to put those two weeks in Hot Springs to good use, memorizing her lines for the coming play. However, rather than study the script, she spent a great deal of time on the phone with Warde and Stephanie. The days slipped by quickly, and as nearly as I could tell, Phyllis was no better prepared than she had been four weeks earlier.

Two days before we left, I spent an entire afternoon repacking our luggage. Phyllis told me that Stephanie had agreed to take some of it with her back to L.A. I didn’t know if Steph would take as many as twenty suitcases—I doubted it—but at least she could take the wig boxes and costume bags. I hoped she’d take Phyllis’s summer clothes, too.

On our last day in Hot Springs, Phyllis and I sorted everything, tying little ribbons on the suitcases that I wanted Stephanie to take. For the play, Phyllis would be wearing her own street clothes, so as far as I was concerned, we could’ve gotten rid of most of the luggage. I figured Stephanie would balk at more than half-a-dozen, but I would try. (Actually, she was a good sport, taking ten bags, so we were down to thirty, but then had to add in Warde’s, so back up to thirty-four. Still, that was an improvement.)

In the morning, I settled the bill for our two rooms, piled everything into the car, and we headed to the airport. We were finally on the last lap of that marathon jaunt. Our flight made a connection through Memphis, and I fervently hoped that when we landed in Chicago there would be a limo waiting. Not only was the limo waiting, but Warde was there, too, and literally swooped Phyllis off her feet in a rather touching reunion.