Jacqueline Susann's Shadow of the Dolls (2 page)

“I’ll ask around.”

“I’m serious, Gordo,” Neely said, her voice dropping to a kittenish whisper. “I got to hook up with one of these candidates. I got to get taken seriously again.”

“Neely, you are well on your way to record earnings. You are entirely out of debt for the first time in five years. You are one of the most popular performers on the planet.”

“I am, amn’t I.” Neely sighed. “I guess I should try on the dress, just to be nice.”

Five minutes later she returned from the bedroom. The dress fit perfectly. The top was made of cherry-red satin, cut like a tuxedo, with swirls of beading all along the lapels. The bottom was sheer red chiffon covered in red sequins.

Gordon clapped his hands.

Neely ran her hands across her chest. “Not bad for thirty-three,” she said.

“Not bad for
twenty-three
,” Gordon said. “Neely, the hotel wants to book you for four weeks next Christmas.”

“No way.”

“I can get you a higher percentage. Do the arithmetic, Neely. We can’t say no to money like this.”

“Gordon, you’re not listening to me. I’m doing Vegas instead of a classy theater in New York because I haven’t had a hit song in over four years. I haven’t had a hit song because the top writers don’t send me their top material anymore. The top writers don’t send me their top material because they want someone classy, like Barbra Streisand is classy.

“And it’s not fair! I’ve got a better voice than her! And a better face! And I’m ten years younger than her! But she’s the one with the movie-star boyfriends and all the political connections. I know way more about politics than she does!”

“Neely, you don’t even read the newspaper. What do you know about politics?”

“I’m Irish, I could learn in ten minutes. I need a mentor. A senator would be perfect. Or maybe one of those movie moguls. Preferably one of those faggot movie moguls.”

Gordon raised his eyebrows.

“I’m thirty-three. On stage I might look twenty-three, but my knees feel more like fifty-three. So, you gonna make some phone calls for me or what?”

Gordon sighed.

“I’m thinking about next Christmas,” Neely said. “I’m thinking it doesn’t sound so bad. I’m thinking maybe I’ll think about it a little more.” Neely did the arithmetic. If she was getting a higher percentage, so was Gordon. He knew all kinds of people who knew all kinds of people. He was Jewish, and his brother was a fancy criminal lawyer in Los Angeles, so Neely figured he knew how to make this happen.

“And get me a subscription to one of the Washington papers.”

“The
Post
.”

“Yeah, that one. Have it delivered to my dressing room, I can read it between sets,” she said. “Man, I am beat. Gimme some ginseng, will ya?”

There were at least thirty dark brown bottles on Neely’s dressing table. Vitamin C, vitamin E, vitamin A, six different B supplements, calcium supplements, iron supplements, a multivitamin for the morning, another one for the evening, lecithin, echinacea, vitamins to fight stress, herbs for energy, L-tryptophan for sleep, and at least a dozen things Gordon had never heard of.

Neely had hired a nutritionist she had read about in
Vogue
, and after a forty-minute consultation Neely had ordered up three thousand dollars’ worth of pills and powders. The nutritionist had given Neely a chart of what she was supposed to take when, but Neely liked to improvise or, as she called it, “listen to what my body has to say.”

This morning Neely’s body was telling her she needed about a week’s worth of a very special kind of herb that was grown only in Asia.

Gordon handed her the pills. She closed her eyes and washed them down with bottled water. It occurred to Gordon that the very act of taking the pill—hearing the reassuring shake of a half-full bottle, feeling the soft tickle as the capsules fell into her waiting palm, readying her throat with a preliminary sip of water, running the pills up from her palm to her fingers, dropping them into the crease of her tongue, swallowing, swallowing again, feeling them go down, opening her eyes and seeing she was still surrounded by bottles, that there were always more pills—was satisfying to Neely, that she loved pills, any kind of pills, the way other women loved chocolate or expensive Italian shoes.

“I killed them last night, didn’t I,” Neely said.

“You killed them.”

The assistant to Neely’s personal assistant came in, waving a copy of
People
magazine over his head.

“We’re in it, we’re in it!”

Neely’s eyes widened. “Let me see that.” She grabbed the magazine and flipped the pages in a rush, front to back, back to front. There she was, a tiny photograph no more than two inches high, on a page with at least ten other people.

“I’m supposed to be happy about this?” she asked. “Gordon, did you know about this?”

“I had no idea,” Gordon lied. He had spent two hours that morning buying up every copy of
People
that Neely might run across, covering every gift shop and newsstand in their hotel and the next four hotels down the strip.

“Look at me! I look like a big joke! I can’t believe they got a picture of me in that ridiculous headdress!”

It was a photograph from the Judy Garland medley that closed the first section of Neely’s show. The number opened with “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which showed off what great shape Neely’s voice was in. It segued through a few bouncy show tunes,
then through a few torch songs, and ended with the chorus line joining Neely for the last two songs. They reenacted the makeover scene from
The Wizard of Oz
, turning Neely from a cabaret singer wearing a simple black pantsuit into a Las Vegas showgirl in four-inch heels, black fishnet stockings, a gold lamé bathing suit, a vast glittering cape, and a towering headdress piled with plastic fruit and peacock feathers.

It was the campiest number in the show, and every night the crowd went crazy. It was like a big wink at the audience—Okay, I’m in Vegas, you’re in Vegas, but don’t I look great and don’t I sound great and aren’t we having fun?—and some nights Neely even got a standing ovation right in the middle of the set.

She hated wearing the chorus-girl outfit; it was uncomfortable, and the boning in the bathing suit left big red marks across her stomach, and the headdress was so heavy that she felt as though her neck would break. But she couldn’t argue with the applause. And she had to wear the headdress only for maybe ten seconds tops, right at the very end.

Who knew that would be the ten seconds that ended up in
People
?

“I mean, look at this, Gordo. You know the costume is a joke and I know the costume is a joke and everyone in the audience knows the costume is a joke, but the way they printed it here, it looks like Neely O’Hara has turned into a showgirl!”

“Neely, any publicity is good publicity.”

“The show doesn’t need any publicity, it’s sold out, remember? I want them to print a retraction.”

“There’s no such thing as a retraction for photographs.”

“Well, I want them to make it up to me. Why can’t they just run a nice interview with me, like the ones they do with everyone else? You know, I could hang out in my kitchen and flip waffles or something.”

“Pancakes. You flip pancakes, not waffles.”

“
People
hasn’t done me since I got out of rehab, what was that, more than five years ago.”

“The publicist calls them once a month, Neely. There has to be some kind of story. They’re happy to run a story about you, but first there has to
be
a story.”

“Like what? Like the rest of the losers they’re always writing about? Like I have to be drinking, or drugging, or getting arrested for shoplifting tampons, or what? I have to be banging some guy twenty years younger than me, or saving the whales, or be diagnosed with some horrible disease so everyone can feel sorry for me?”

When the show was over, Neely went home to Los Angeles and wrote two dozen checks, each for one thousand dollars, to twenty-four different political campaigns. Within two weeks the invitations started pouring in: to fund-raising lunches in Beverly Hills, to dinners in New York and Washington, to parties in Chicago and Miami.

She spent three days on Rodeo Drive getting made over. She bought four beige Armani suits with matching shoes. She got a new, sleek haircut and learned to use a lighter hand with her eye makeup. She kept the red lipstick and most of the jewelry, but the overall transformation was startling. She looked like the kind of woman who was married to a studio head, though when she opened her mouth, she was still pure Neely O’Hara.

She had a part to play. She wanted Madison Square Garden, not Las Vegas hotel theaters. She wanted her own hit songs, not covers of someone else’s standards. She wanted a man who could take her to all the respectable A-list parties, not some gay set designer who cared only about the hottest new restaurant. She wanted the kind of guy who had real power. Who would make people sit up and notice: Look who’s in love with Neely O’Hara now. Who had been
to the best schools and knew all the best people. Who picked up the check.

The rules had changed. Broadway was over, movie musicals were over, one-night stands were over, even cocaine was almost over. Show business was full of lawyers and bankers and people with fancy business-school degrees. It was a different game now, but it was still a game.

And Neely would learn how to play it. She was going to get back on top again! She would show those fucking idiots at
People
just how classy she could be. They’d be begging to take her picture, to come to her house and take pictures of her bedroom, her garden, her newly redecorated formal living room with the French furniture and the Christmas tree in the corner. She would get what she wanted, because she always did. But first she had to find the right man.

A
nne could feel herself beginning to shine. It was only seven blocks from her apartment on Fifth Avenue in the Seventies to the doctor’s office on Park in the Eighties, but the day was unseasonably hot. It was the middle of May, just before eleven in the morning, and already the temperature hovered at eighty degrees.

Anne resisted the impulse to get out her compact and apply a thin layer of sheer powder. No makeup, the nurse had told her. No moisturizer, no powder, no eye cream, no sunscreen, and please go light on the salt and go light on the alcohol for at least forty-eight hours before the appointment. It had all been pretty easy, except for the alcohol. Last night Lyon had asked her to come along for a business dinner with a client who was in from Los Angeles.

“Booze-ness dinners” is what Lyon called them. He always ordered a few bottles of wine, and by the end of the dinner everyone was happy, and telling their best stories, and feeling like best
friends, and pretty much agreeing to whatever plan Lyon had unveiled sometime between when the main course was cleared and the coffee arrived. Anne could never manage to get through these dinners without at least one glass of Scotch and two or three glasses of wine. Invariably, she was the lightweight at the table.

The doctor’s office had a Park Avenue address, but its entrance was on a leafy side street, around the corner from the wide dark blue awning where residents came and went. There was a small brass nameplate and buzzer that turned like a large metal key.

Inside, the walls were covered with excellent copies of obscure paintings by famous Impressionists. Anne sat on a leather sofa and filled out the usual forms.

“My grandmother used to own that one,” said the woman sitting next to her. Her ash-blond hair was pulled back into a chignon, and on her ears were enormous square sapphires.

Anne looked up. “The original? I love Monet.”

“That
is
the original. Nonny had to sell it after the crash in ’twenty-nine.”

Anne gasped. “That’s a real Monet?”

“Everything here is real. With his kind of fees, the doctor can certainly afford it, don’t you think? Everything here is real except them,” the woman said, pointing to the two nurses standing at the reception desks.

The nurses were dressed in identical tight white shirtdresses, belted to reveal their tiny waists and narrow hips and opened an extra button or two to show a few inches of spectacular cleavage. Both had perfectly proportioned jawlines and elegant noses and flawless skin and the kind of wide cheekbones that made photographers swoon. Their legs, bare of stockings, were smooth and tanned and unmarked by age or experience.

The woman gave Anne a stage wink. “They get all the work they want, at no charge. Free advertising for the doctor, if you know
what I mean. By the way, he did a gorgeous job on you. You don’t look a day over thirty-six.”

Anne folded her hands over her medical questionnaire, hiding her name, address, and age, which was thirty-four years and seven months. “Well, actually …”

The nurse called the woman’s name and she stood up, tucking her hair behind her ears. “He’s a genius, isn’t he? Not a scar on you.”

Anne sat alone, staring at the painting that was so perfect and so beautiful, she had just assumed it was a fake. All the scars are on the inside, she thought.

The nurse handed her a green cotton robe and insisted Anne strip down to her underpants, even though she was here only for a consultation about a little bit of face work.

“You never know,” said the nurse, lifting her eyebrows.

I used to look ten times better than you do, and the only plastic surgeon I had was named Mother Nature
, thought Anne.

The doctor looked like a casting agent’s idea of a kindhearted country doctor, except for his watch, which was French and worth at least three thousand dollars.

“So,” he said, pushing gently at the skin on her neck. “How does your husband feel about all of this?”

“He doesn’t know I’m here.”

“Is he encouraging you to have a little work done?”

“We haven’t ever talked about it. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, sometimes the husband puts pressure on the wife, makes comments about how her body is changing, that sort of thing, and even though the woman isn’t crazy about surgery she might come to see me just to make him happy.”