Everything and More (63 page)

RAIN FAIRBURN SHOW SNAGS LOCAL EMMY

—Variety,
March 2, 1970

RAIN FAIRBURN
schedule: Penny Crate, exercise expert; Jim Henson of the Muppets; Jacqueline Briskin, author of
California Generation.

—TV Guide,
April 1, 1970

FOUR STUDENTS SHOT BY NATIONAL GUARD AT KENT STATE

President Nixon Calls College Protesters Bums.

—Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
April 5, 1970

For those Winter Palace evenings of high romance, Patricia’s sees you in Ungaro’s black chiffon.

—
Copy for full-page advertisement in
Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Town and Country,
August 1970

The Coyne New York Bank has prospered under the presidency of Archibald Coyne, grandson of its founder, Grover T. Coyne, but financial circles speculate whether or not the millionaire sportsman, now 57, will keep to his expressed wish to retire at 60. The bank has always been headed by a member of the Coyne family.

—Fortune,
August 1970

  
58
  

Marylin, in her Channel 5 dressing room, leaned back against the leather padding of the swivel chair. Sharply aromatic odors escaped from the makeup man’s vial as he carefully applied adhesive behind her left earlobe, then affixed a narrow flesh-colored rubberized string. He followed the same procedure on the right side, securing the strings an inch behind Marylin’s well-defined widow’s peak, erasing that near-invisible hint of relaxation below her jawline.

“There you go, gorgeous,” he said. “Thirty, I swear, not a day more.”

“Yesterday you said twenty-five.” At the moment her luminous smile felt comfortable, but if the strapping remained more than an hour her skin would be plagued by tautness.

Marylin shrank in dismay from the knife of youth—that cruel look to the mouth, that taut skin, those subsequent wrinkles aligning in unnatural directions—yet she was also cognizant that each slight droop or fine line is magnified by the cruel eye of the television camera.

This month, March of 1970, marked the eighth anniversary of
The Rain Fairburn Show,
now syndicated in forty-three markets and aired in Los Angeles from eleven to twelve noon Monday through Friday. Marylin conducted interviews with actors and actresses hustling new films, writers hustling their latest books, wide-smiling politicians hustling for reelection, sad-eyed, overwrought comedians hustling for a job in Vegas—whoever lolled on the beige-upholstered chairs and couch of
The Rain Fairburn Show
’s set was selling himself or
herself. The mercenary fact was so softened by the hostess’s ravishing smile and angora-voiced questions that the women into whose homes her image was beamed considered Rain Fairburn a friend, a beautiful, gentle close friend who was introducing
her
friends. The show’s consistently high Nielsen ratings were bolstered by Marylin’s dazzling array of dressy sportswear: the credits flashed “Miss Fairburn’s clothes courtesy of Patricia’s,” a form of free advertising for Roy. (The shop had become far less staid under her ownership.)

When Marylin weighed her two careers, the scales tilted deeply in favor of acting. She missed bringing life to a role, she missed her craft’s total immersion. For her, though, emoting on the big screen was an irrevocably departed luxury. Film actresses, unlike their masculine counterparts, are seldom permitted mature love. Her age aside, though, there was the financial aspect. TV sets had multiplied, begetting color, threatening extinction to the neighborhood movie theater. Studios had become torpid dinosaurs ailing in their individual swamps. To make a film involved months, even years, spent in a slushy, unpaid quagmire of deals and counterdeals.

No money coming in.

And the Fernaulds were in dire need of a huge secure income.

In 1962 Paramount had not renegotiated Joshua’s contract. Like many another forcibly retired bigshot, he called himself an independent producer, entering into the search for a hot property that (he repeatedly boomed at Marylin) would make very big bucks. In the meantime he brought in nothing. Always a big-handed giver, he overcompensated with ferocious generosity. No matter how the business manager cajoled, Joshua
would
buy Porsches for Billy and Sari and BJ’s children, Van Cleef jewelry for Marylin, book passage for the entire family on the
Lurline
to Hawaii. He continued to keep extravagant court in the big Mandeville Canyon place that they had purchased many years earlier. He was forever putting option money down on plays or novels.

When the concept of
The Rain Fairburn Show
had come along, there had been no choice for Marylin. She had signed the contract.

The hairdresser stepped forward to cover the rubberized strings with a crimson velvet ribbon, recombing her gleaming pageboy, which was longer at the sides, around the headband—a much-copied style that had become known as “a Rain Fairburn.”

Marylin stepped behind the louvered screen, slipping off her nylon makeup smock to don Roy’s wardrobe contribution, a soft crimson blouse and matching midiskirt.

The door burst open.

“Boss lady, hey hey. I see you back there,” Billy called, grinning.

Her son was one of
The Rain Fairburn Show
’s three writers, but nobody whispered the word nepotism. Billy, when he was eighteen, had started out at the top, working the Carson show. After a couple of years, seemingly without rhyme or reason, he had quit—but then, Billy’s swift moves were always inexplicable. On his return to Los Angeles, Marylin’s producers exultantly snagged him.

Billy lacked his father’s (and half brother’s) height. He was a scant five-ten of wiry, nervous motion, forever fidgeting, gesturing, readjusting his glasses on his hereditary beak. He had grown from a movie brat into a witty, highly intelligent, neurotic, somehow endearing man. Other than the nose, he had nothing of his father about him—he did, however, bear a passing resemblance to Woody Allen, whom he knew and idolized.

Marylin stepped from behind the screen. Still buttoning her blouse, she tiptoed to press a fond kiss on Billy’s cheek, wondering not for the first time what a psychiatrist would make of her trinity of men, married to the father, still in love with the son, a doting mother to another son.

“You smell adorable and look delicious,” Billy said. “Too good for today’s crowd.”

“You’ve already been in the green room, then?”

“Does it show?” He clapped his hand to his T-shirted shoulder. “Has the tension in there caused a giveaway attack of dandruff? Hey, think terminal dandruff changes your status to 4-F?”

For a moment, Marylin’s throat caught so she could scarcely breathe. Like the other mothers in America, she worried about her son’s draft status. Billy had no college deferment, his long-ago concussion appeared to have left no damage. All that kept him out of Vietnam was a mercifully high draft number.

Billy was saying, “I met your anti-porn lady and I’ve hacked out one remark for you to work in with her. When she goes into her number that humanity is being debased by the repetition of four-letter words, ask her which ones she means.”

“Billy, be serious.”

He scratched the back of his neck. “Would
The Rain Fairburn Show
write me a major paycheck if I were?”

The hairdresser and makeup man were laughing, and so was Marylin as she did up the final button.

“Now you’re decent,” Billy said, “I’d like you to meet a new buddy.”

She pretended dismay.
“Another
comedy writer?”

“No. Carlo Firelli—the living one, not the legend. He calls himself plain, regal Charles.”

Marylin shivered as if her hand had unexpectedly contacted something damp and cold.

Althea’s son. . . .

She had never been able to accept Roy’s renewed friendship with Althea Cunningham Firelli Wimborne Stoltz. How could Roy bear to be near the woman who had without conscience wrecked her marriage and then destroyed her husband? Yet Roy—incorrigibly steadfast Roy!—saw Althea whenever geographically plausible and the pair talked by telephone almost every Sunday. Althea had endowed the Gerrold Horak Gallery at UCLA. And, tit for tat, when Althea’s third marriage, to Nicholas Stoltz, had gone on the rocks, Roy had taken off, her first vacation since buying Patricia’s, spending a month bolstering the new divorcée’s spirits in the lavish confines of a borrowed Coyne château near Aizy-le-Rideau.

Billy opened the dressing room door wider. “Hey, Charles, it’s okay. Come on in.”

Charles Firelli had inherited his mother’s height and attenuated elegance. The length of his lean, hard legs was not disguised by his gray slacks; his wide shoulders were bony beneath a rather shabby, magnificently tailored navy blazer. He had Althea’s ash-blond hair—though without the pellucid streaking—her long, handsome face. His broader, higher cheekbones gave him masculine strength.

He moved toward Marylin with inflexible dignity, seeming to anticipate respect. Ice water in his veins, just like his mother, Marylin thought as Billy introduced them.

“Mrs. Fernauld, it’s wonderful to meet you in person,” Charles said with courteous ease. “I’ve admired your films, especially
Island.”

“Charles, buddy, it doesn’t take discrimination to admire a classic. Now let’s hear it for her performance in
Lost Lovers of Tahiti.”

“That bomb,” Marylin said, smiling at her son. “Are you out here to visit your grandparents, Charles?”

Charles’s eyes went flat, as if he preferred not to share his emotions. “In an unfortunate way, yes,” he said. “Mother and I are here because my grandfather is having surgery tomorrow morning.”

“I am sorry to hear that,” Marylin said. “Is it . . . serious?”

“He’s had four other operations,” Charles said in a remote tone. “Our doctors don’t hold much hope. This is all that’s left.”

“Will you give your mother and grandparents my best?” said Marylin, ticking herself off for hating Althea while Althea was beset by tragedy.

“I certainly will, Mrs. Fernauld. And I hope I see you again, soon.”

“Tonight,” Billy said. “I’m bringing you to dinner.”

Briefly Marylin put her hand on her son’s arm, an involuntary cautioning gesture, then asked herself why her dislike and fear of Althea should spill over onto this tall, good-looking, unemotional young man.

Billy pulled a disreputably crumpled sheet of paper from the pocket of his cords. “Here you go, Rain Fairburn,” he said. “The latest from the salt mines.”

“Thank you, dear.”

“Come on, Charles, let me guide you through more of the glamour of televisionland.” Billy did a soft-shoe routine to the door. Contrasted with the self-possessed Charles, he seemed more frenetic—and adorable.

After the two young men left, Marylin rehearsed the lines that Billy had patterned to fit her mild, nonmalicious humor, little jokes that she could feed to the day’s guests.

The program was shot live in front of an audience of about fifty people on wooden bleachers. Marylin skillfully guided her sweating visitors through their hustles.

By one o’clock she was in her car, driving herself home—Percy and Coraleen had retired, replaced by Elena and Juan from El Salvador, and Juan was a rotten driver.

Depleted by her performance, Marylin often succumbed, as she did now on this forty minutes along Sunset from the studio to Mandeville Canyon, to thoughts of Linc. She had neither seen nor communicated with him since she had made her long-distance renunciatory speech so many years ago, but from BJ she knew a good deal about him, including his marriage to “that Norwegian girl,” and his subsequent divorce from her.

He lived in Rome in a book-jammed flat on the third floor of an amber-colored building. His services were respected by producers and authors in search of authentic and accurate historical detail—“Research! What a criminal waste of a Pulitzer Prize!” BJ would cry. He skied in Arosa and Davos. He had kept his shape and his thick, graying hair. BJ would show Marylin snapshots, bragging with a tinge of envy, “Come on, wouldn’t you guess he’s my younger brother? It’s because he’s kept away from the Beverly Hills rat race, the sweetie.”