Show Business Kills (28 page)

Well, now we’re up to about four years ago in this story. Terry finally separated from Susan Penn, a moment that made Jan
and me at lunch one day, if you can imagine, in the middle of the day at Bistro Garden, order a bottle of champagne, and toast,
of all things, true love. He was now taking Jan out in public, to screenings, to cocktail parties. You remember, because we
were all worrying that he might actually marry her and then what would she do?

Jan was feeling so good that she couldn’t wait until that night to see him so she could tell him the news about the
adoption lawyer who had called her to say that he had a baby who would be available to her right away. But that night when
she told him, Terry laughed in her face. He told her she had to be, and I quote, out of her “stupid fucking mind.”

“Oh, you have a problem with that?” she said, trying not to back down since it had taken her so long to get up the nerve to
call the lawyer in the first place. “Well then, why don’t you make me pregnant?” she asked him, clenching her back teeth and
waiting to see if he’d take the challenge. And when he laughed and told her that they were both a little long in the tooth
for that, she lost it, maybe because she knew he was right, at least about her, and she felt hurt and stung and old and as
if she’d wasted her life. They had a giant fight, and he walked out. Remember the Girls’ Night right before she went to pick
up the baby? She was a basket case, but she was determined not to stop her life, so she adopted Joey and you know the rest.

When I told Andy what happened, he asked me if I knew how the weather was in Hawaii that time of year and if I cared to put
any money on anything. I hated him and Terry Penn and all men. But a few weeks went by, and Janny called to tell me that Terry
had called and come over apologetically with a big teddy bear for the baby and was now visiting regularly and kitchy-cooing
little Joey.

They were back to dating, and she even joked that she told him, “No sex until after the baby’s six weeks old.” She also said
in Terry’s behalf, knowing there wasn’t a whole lot to say for him, that on the nights they went out and her housekeeper,
Maria, couldn’t sit with Joey, Terry paid the baby-sitter.

Anyway, one night they went to a big awards event at the
Beverly Hilton. It was a dinner dance. Jan was at his side while all the sycophants came over to kiss Terry Penn’s behind.
Now we all know how someone like Terry Penn can change the life of anyone in the creative community. So everyone scrapes and
bows and tries to get in his good graces, hoping the way they hope for the winning lottery number that he’ll say, “You get
the part,” “You do that picture.”

Jan told me how he sucked in the attention, took sustenance from it, kissed the women and hugged the men and laughed with
them, and as they walked away, he’d still be wearing the big smile on his face and making derogatory remarks to her about
every one of them.

She told me afterward that as she stood in that ballroom next to him that particular night, she felt in her stomach that something
was really wrong. As if someone had opened a window and let in a frozen blast of wind, because she was suddenly blown away
by what a dishonest person he was, or to use her term, “a lying sack of shit.”

She said she knew he had lied to Susan about where he went on those nights and days when he was sneaking off to meet her,
but that was different. This was lying to everyone, about everything. “You look so great. Your picture was the best. Your
script knocked me on my ass.” And it alarmed her to see those people walk away with their feet off the ground thinking Terry
Penn loved their writing or their film or them. Just the way she thought he loved her.

“Let’s dance, honey,” she kept saying to him, feeling weak and nauseous and suddenly dowdy among this glittering crowd where
Marvin Davis’s wife was wearing a ring the diamond of which covered her entire finger. She told me she
thought maybe if they danced, and Terry felt her body close to his, he would remember who they were together.

“In a minute,” he promised Jan, just as Jane Fonda threw her perfect arms around his neck.

Jan went to the ladies’ room and splashed cold water on her face. He had to marry her. She called me that night from the pay
phone in the ladies’ room at the Beverly Hilton. Andy must have been at the hospital. I was half asleep, but I grabbed the
receiver, and I knew as soon as I heard her teary voice it was going to be about Terry Penn.

“Rose, what am I going to do?” she asked, trying to talk softly so the glitzy women moving in and out of the ladies’ room
would think maybe she was just checking in with her answering machine or calling her baby-sitter.

“You have to set boundaries,” I told her. “He’ll push you to the wall. He
has
pushed you to the wall. As Ellen would say, ‘Tell him to shit or get off the pot,’ ” and as I said that, my instructions
were punctuated by the sound of two toilets flushing in the ladies’ room. Poor Jan, that poor girl was crying softly into
the phone.

“You’re right,” she said. “I know you’re right. And I’m going to do it. On the way home tonight. I’ll tell him this is it.
We’re engaged or it’s over.”

“Janny,” I said, “that’s not enough.”

“Right. As soon as his divorce is final, we’re married.”

“You got it,” I told her. There was another flush. “Call me in the morning and tell me it worked.” I couldn’t get back to
sleep. I pictured Jan and Terry in his limo as it sped over Laurel Canyon. I knew she’d be strong. I was positive Terry would
agree to marry her. Dr. Andy Schiffman, my beloved, would be shocked.

Love conquers all. I still believed it, and so did Jan, until she got back to the table and Terry wasn’t there, and when she
looked around the room she felt close to death when she saw him on the dance floor with the gorgeous star of one of his upcoming
movies. A woman whose looks are so perfect you think they can’t be real when you see them in photos. But every feature, hair,
skin, body, is just what you always wished yours was from the day you opened your first magazine. Jan sat at the table where
the other two remaining people were male studio accountant types in a heated discussion about grosses.

She wanted to go home, but she was afraid to leave. She didn’t want to look at Terry and the young actress, but couldn’t stop
her eyes from going to them, seeing their bodies pressed tightly together, the flirtatious looks passing between them as they
laughed and talked, and then didn’t his lips brush away that thick lock of hair from her forehead?

When the song was over, Jan steeled herself for Terry’s return to the table. He’d tell her that dancing with that actress
was just business. She would insist that it was time to leave. Make him come home with her. In the car she would tell him,
“No more.” Set boundaries. But she knew by the expression on his face when he was on his way back to the table, greeting his
fans as he moved, that it was too late for that.

“I think we should go,” she tried softly.

“What?” Terry was on, he was hot and high on his own racing blood, and Jan was full of that fear you have when you know they’re
slipping away and there’s nothing you can do about it.

“Go, leave, have to pay the baby sitter…” was what
came out, though she knew as she was saying those words she should be taking another tack. That fancy uptown man didn’t give
a damn about baby-sitters or her son. He was out to snare a new woman into his bed, and Jan was what her mother used to call
“corned beef hash.” Which means what you do with yesterday’s meat.

Terry pulled some cash out of his pocket, because he was the one who at his insistence always paid her baby-sitters. “Here.
You go ahead. I’ve got business to take care of. Take the car, honey. And I’ll call you in the morning.” As in beat it, you
bimbo.

Of course he didn’t call Jan in the morning. A week later when she bumped into him in the studio commissary, he said, “Angel
face, we almost made it work, didn’t we?” And walked away. Three months later, as soon as his divorce was final, he became
engaged to the actress he danced with at the party. It was all over the papers. On the Sunday of their wedding, Molly and
I picked Jan and Joey up at her house in Laurel Canyon, and the four of us went to the Santa Monica pier so the kids could
go on the rides. While Molly took Joey on the bumper boats, Jan and I sat on a bench and she wept.

“It’s not going to be a marriage, Rose. I mean it is what it is. He likes the way they look together in the couples section
of
People
magazine. I mean, she’s too dumb for him,” she said. I ached for Jan. I remembered that day in Ojai how, like the bumpkin
Andy always says I am, I truly believed it when that man told me he would marry her.

For a while after that she dated Larry Hodgens. Remember him? He was a darling guy. A civilian, meaning he wasn’t in show
business. A few people mentioned the odd fact that Larry looked a lot like Terry Penn. “He’s like Terry Penn
with character,” someone said at a party. But I guess that didn’t work, because very soon after that she got bored with him
and stopped seeing him.

I watched the articles in the magazines about Terry Penn and his new wife, and watched them have one kid and then two, and
the wife’s career kind of fizzled out after a few bad movies. Once I saw them at a screening, and that formerly gorgeous young
woman now had a frazzled, beaten look, and she was wearing a dress you shouldn’t wear if you’re chunky, which she had become.

Anyway, about a month ago, I was in my car coming from a meeting, and I realized I had Joey’s birthday gift in the trunk of
my car and I was right near Jan’s, so I stopped over, and we had coffee and I got to see Joey and watch him do all the latest
cute things he had learned.

When the phone rang and Jan had to take the call, I went into the powder room to make a stop before my long ride home, and
after I washed my hands and was about to go back out into the kitchen, I couldn’t believe it when I heard Jan saying into
the phone, “Oh, honey. Oh, God. Me too. I want that, too.” It was suddenly as if I’d been thrown back all those years, and
I knew with a sick feeling that she had been, too.

I looked at my face in the powder room mirror and tried to compose it into the expression of someone who hadn’t overheard
those words, and I waited until I heard Janny hang up the phone before I came out of the bathroom.

“Well,” I said, feigning innocence, “I guess I’d better hurry on home.” But when I looked at Jan’s flushed cheeks and she
looked at my lying face, we both knew what was happening.

“Terry and I have been back together for a year,” she confessed to me.

“But isn’t Terry still married to that actress?” I blurted out.

“Oh, Rose,” she said, before I finished my question. “It is what it is. It’s not a marriage. And he’s going to leave her.
I’d say within the next few months he and Joey and I will start looking for a house.”

I drove home, feeling that sad about-to-cry feeling in my face, but no tears came. And then I remembered what Jan said to
me that day so long ago at the gym about the aerobics, and I realized she was wrong. Anyone who looked could definitely see
her heart.

  
21
  

S
he was seeing Terry Penn again,” Marly said sadly, as if she’d just heard that someone she loved had gone back to drugs after
rehab. “A few times I asked her if she ever ran into him. We called him the Prince of Power. But she always changed the subject.
Now I know why.”

“Because she knew you’d tell her she was choosing to be a victim and creating futility to avoid commitment,” Rose said.

“And as usual, I would have been right,” Marly said. “Besides, it takes one to know one.”

“Why hasn’t Terry come to the hospital?” Rose asked. “By now the shooting has to be all over the news.”

“Because he’d have to explain it to the second wife he’s been fucking over,” Ellen said.

“You can’t possibly think that Terry and Jan had a fight and he was the one who shot her?” Marly asked Rose, but the policewoman
answered the question.