Show Business Kills (18 page)

“Janny was worried about her new contract,” Marly told them, “And what she’d do if they didn’t pick her up. I remember she
said to me one night, ‘Look what happens when we get to be this age. We’re as disposable as yesterday’s newspaper,’ and I
said ‘Worse. At least yesterday’s newspaper can be recycled.’ ”

“Gee, you knew how to cheer her right up,” Ellen said.

“Believe me, I regretted it the minute I said it, and I
thought about it all the way over here. I guess I was stressing about the aging myself because it’s been hitting me hard at
every interview, too, so it’s on my mind.” She wasn’t ready to tell them the story about her reading for the part of the grandmother.
For a while they were all silent, Marly’s cold hand still holding Rose’s sweaty one.

“Remember Tennessee William’s play
Sweet Bird of Youth
?” Marly asked. “How, when we were at Tech, we did scenes from it and I played Heavenly Finley, the ingenue? Tennessee Williams
sure knew how to write great neurotic women. I keep thinking about the words of that character Alexandre Del Lago. The actress
who ran away from Hollywood because she couldn’t handle aging.

“She talks about getting old in the business, and she says, ‘The screen’s a very clear mirror. There’s a thing called a close-up.
The camera advances, and you stand still, and your head, your face, is caught in the frame of the picture, with a light blazing
on it, and all your terrible history screams while you smile.’ ‘Your terrible history,’ isn’t that brilliant?” Marly said.

“I remember when you played Heavenly,” Rose said. “And Alexandre was played by Betty Norell. Remember?”

“I do,” Marly said. “Even then she was an incredible actress. She did that part so perfectly, and then she was one of the
sisters in the García Lorca play, and she just mopped the stage with the rest of us.”

“What’s she doing these days?” Ellen asked.

“She’s in England. It says in the alumni magazine that she spends the winters at the rep company Olivier started. I heard
or read there was some kind of swap with American Actors’ Equity so she could work over there,” Rose said.

“I remember how at Tech we’d all get up there and fake our voices and try to make them fill the theater, but her big, booming
voice just naturally did. And we’d work hard to create a character, using some tacked-on dialect or inappropriate walk. And
Betty Norell would somehow become the character without all of that. When I watched her, all I could think was, how did they
ever let me into the same drama department where someone like Betty Norell is my classmate? I’m the dope who played Carrie
in the high school production of
Carousel
, and she’s a star. She was so much better than all the rest of us,” Marly said.

“How is it no one ever discovered her?” Rose asked. “I mean like Emma Thompson or…”

Ellen tsked and patted Rose’s arm. “Little Rosie, I always want to ask you when you fell off the back of the turnip truck.
You know being talented doesn’t mean a damn thing in this business. It’s so much about luck and timing and tenacity and trends.
I see people every day who are brilliant and can’t get arrested, and others who are knocking them dead all over the place,
who are as dull as dog shit.”

Marly shook her head as if she were trying to shake off what Ellen just said. “Janny always was afraid that she was one of
those dull ones. She never felt secure about her work. She always joked that it was her body that got her into Tech, and after
what just happened to her with Jack Solomon a few weeks ago, she was convinced she was right.”

“Jack ‘Mr. Television’ Solomon?” Ellen said. “What happened with him?”

“Didn’t she tell you?” Marly asked. “Maybe she was too embarrassed.”

Ellen tried to remember if Jan had mentioned anything
about Jack Solomon during one of those times when she let Jan ramble on on the phone to her. Sometimes she cleaned her desk
or made notes and half listened. But she probably would have paid attention if it was something about that asshole Jack Solomon.
Just because he was the man they all loved to hate.

“She didn’t tell me, either,” Rose said, pulling her legs under her to get warm in the overly air-conditioned hospital waiting
room. Ellen kicked off her black suede Ferragamo loafers and put her black-stockinged feet on the coffee table in front of
her.

“Oh, God, she was heartbroken by it,” Marly began, and as she did, each of them thought how odd it was that in this unlikely
venue, under these desperate, dreadful circumstances, an odd version of Girls’ Night had officially begun. After all, the
location was never really what mattered. What was important was that they were together, telling one another their stories.

  
14
  

The Man Who
Would Be King

J
an’s a Pisces and her number is a three, so I knew right away when I met her that because she was a water sign she was going
to be sensitive, with no confidence in herself. And I was right. For example, she always thought the letter they sent her
accepting her to the drama department was a clerical error. That some day she’d be walking along the campus and someone would
walk up, tap her on the shoulder, and say, “I’m terribly sorry, but you’ll have to go.”

She was so instinctual as an actress that she hated all the academic tearing apart of the characters they were teaching us.
Once she came to my room in the dorm in tears, threw herself on my bed, and wailed, “Why do they keep asking us what the play
is about? We’re actors. We don’t have to know what the play’s about!”

I remember laughing at that. But in a way she was right. Some of the best acting I’ve seen is from actors whose work is the
emotional seat-of-the-pants kind that comes from their gut. Jan has a great gut. She used to cut those acting classes where
we had to be an animal or an inanimate object. I’d see her leaving the dorms with some guy, and she’d tell me, “I’m
not going to be a banana today, Mars. I’m going out for a beer.”

Most of all she hated the times we had to sit in the costume room until four-thirty A.M., doing some tedious job like sewing
pearls on Desdemona’s sleeves for the seniors’ production of
Othello
. Or those nights when we’d sit in that freezing-cold cinderblock studio-theater, rehearsing some absurdist play until our
minds were so blown out by exhaustion, it actually started making sense to us.

But it was Jack Solomon who always got us through those times. Remember how funny he was and how he could do imitations that
would make us all die with laughter? We’d already be in that hysterical, heady state that my mother used to call “overtired.”
But Jack would make us fall apart because he was sincerely hilarious. He’d do this rewritten version of the absurdist play
we were doing, out of the teacher’s earshot, in gibberish or a Yiddish dialect, and we all broke up until we couldn’t say
the real lines anymore.

Jack’s a Gemini. Talented, and sweet, but his greatest asset was that he wasn’t threatening, even though at one point or another
he’d made a grab for every one of us, but especially Jan. There was something so soft and vulnerable about Jan, and remember
how angelic-looking she was? He used to love to corner her and ask her his favorite question, “When are you going to show
me your tits?”

Of course that was in the days before anybody talked about sexual harassment. And Jan did what we all did with those kinds
of things, she cringed inside, gave him a hug, and shrugged it off, because he was a buddy. The one she used to let climb
in the window of her dorm room, because it
was okay for him to see us in our pajamas. She never really took him seriously.

I mean, she loved him. We all did. But never the way he wanted us to. Jan told me how insulted he got that one night when
he managed to hang out in her room after the rest of us went to bed. She told me the next day how he’d pleaded with her for
just a little kiss, which he probably hoped would inflame her.

She said when she opened the window and told him to go back out the way he came in, he told her she’d given him blue balls.
Jan said unless he wanted them to be black
and
blue, he’d better get them and his ass out of her room.

But by the next day he didn’t seem to be holding a grudge, and they were still really close friends. She even fixed him up
a few times with some girls in the dorms she thought he’d like, but nothing ever came of it. Anyway, he made a really serious
pass at her one more time at a party in our senior year. She said he was a little stoned that night, which was why he was
so courageous. She just arrived at the party, and Jack cornered her in the room where she went to drop her coat. Remember
that great black Dynel coat she had? It was so good-looking she hated to take it off.

Well, after she was sure everyone at the party had seen it, she walked in to put it on the bed in that apartment, and Jack
followed her into the bedroom and closed the door. He put his arms around her and started doing his Marlon Brando playing
Stanley Kowalski imitation, which always broke her up. She was laughing and hugging him back like a pal, and then he said
that line that Stanley says in the play when he picks Blanche up and takes her off to bed. You know.
“Tiger, tiger, put the bottle down. We’ve had this date for a long, long time.”

Jan confessed to me back at the dorm that night, that there was a moment there when Jack Solomon could have had her. She wasn’t
drinking, and none of us had started smoking grass yet, so she couldn’t blame it on some altered state of consciousness, but
on that particular night, she looked at Jack Solomon and he looked sexy to her, really sexy, and she let him kiss her.

I remember the surprise on her face when she said, “That little Jew can really kiss. Not too slushy, kind of teasing, but
very hot and knowing,” and she said for that instant she felt a burning desire for him. We laughed so much that night, because
she thought a little about the burning desire she’d felt, she said to me, “You know, Mar, maybe it was just heartburn.”

He was just starting to get his hand under her blouse, mumbling all the time how he wanted to see her tits, and she was going
to let him see more than that, when something happened, I can’t remember what it was she told me. Maybe somebody opened the
door to the room, or somebody hollered dinner was served, and you know how Jan loves a good meal, so her mind came back into
focus and she thought, Am I crazy? I was about to do God-knows-what with Jack Solomon. And she managed to stop the forward
motion and rehook her bra and insist they go out to join the others.

So now you’ve got the picture. Well, as they say in the movies, fade out, fade in thirty years later. Thirty long, bloody
years of all of us pushing, driving, going through hell to work in this business. Both Jack Solomon and Jan have
worked hard. But she’s an aging soap diva with thirteen-week contracts in which the producers have all the options. And Jack
is a giant in the television business. You saw the
New York Times
article. There isn’t anyone in the TV industry who has the kind of stardom he’s achieved. He’s better known than some of
the actors on his shows.

So surely you’d have to believe that the rejection in the coatroom has to be a thing of the past. Right? And yet a few times,
over the years, Jan has seen him and dropped hints about how she’d love to work on any of his shows, but he’s never picked
up on them.

He was the stage manager when she played Serafina in
The Rose Tattoo
at Tech, and she got a standing ovation every night. When we did
The House of Bernarda Alba
, and we all had to draw lines on our faces so we could look the age we are now, she played the ingenue and he was waiting
backstage with flowers for her. Now if Jack wanted to, he could move her career up by light years just by getting some producer
on one of his hit shows to give her a continuing role. And it wouldn’t be charity. Jan’s a terrific actress, and she’s really
been right for many of the parts.

I bump into Jack socially all the time and Jan did many times too, and afterward she’d call and tell me that he was so friendly.
He’d kiss her and say, “You have to come over and see our new place.” He asks about little Joey and how he’s doing. Remembers
her son’s name and everything. She says he looks at her so lovingly it’s as if they were right back in those days. Before
he was big.