Show Business Kills (37 page)

Rose just sighed.

Marly looked at them both. “I want to believe him, but I’m afraid in a few months he’ll change his mind again, and I’ll be
kicking myself for being a pushover.”

The ventilator sucked in and breathed out, in and out.

“Happens to the best of us,” Ellen said.

“It’d probably be a hell of a few months, though,” Rose mused.

“True,” Marly said. “Full of apology, good behavior. I see it with the battered wives who take their men back. All the hopefulness,
the unreality that comes with new beginnings, but it’s a Band-Aid, and pretty soon it falls apart. And I can’t do it to the
girls. It’s one thing for me to be sucked in by it, but I think kids have enough to go through without having to be dragged
through their parents’ problems, too. You were always so protective about Roger when you were getting
your divorce, when you were dating. How did you do it?” she asked Ellen, who shook her head.

“Are you kidding? I fucked up all the time. Colossal fuck-ups. I made mistakes with that kid that we still laugh about. Life
lessons were botched left and right. In fact there was one story that still gives me a guilty stomachache. I mean, now it’s
funny because we survived, at least it’s funny to Roger. He brings it up and laughs. But talk about doing things you’re ashamed
of. This has got to be my entry.”

Marly was back on the floor in her lotus position, and Rose put away the steno pad so Ellen could tell them what happened.

  
28
  

Little Caesar

D
uring most of the seventies, my life was a complete disaster. After I gave the podiatrist the toe, he managed to make it out
of the marriage and California without giving me anything for our son. Not only that, but he took everything that was worth
anything in our cute little house with him, so in one week I went from being
très
Pierre Deux to very Pier One. And all I wanted was to be the best mother and the best provider in the world to make up for
the fact that I knew Herb Bass would never be there for Roger.

I was desperate to make a good life for Rogie and me, so I took any and every job I could get to support us. And some of the
situations were pretty scrungy. I started out on “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour,” where Glen may have been having a good
time, but I was not. I was the coffee girl, the receptionist, and the runner.

I got picked on by the writers and the producers, hit on by the guests, and Glen called me Arlene for the whole two years.
“Paper Moon” was a better experience, in fact it was where I first got to know Jodie Foster, because she played the Tatum
O’Neal role in the series. Another was the second go-round of “Sonny and Cher,” which I should have known wasn’t going
to last when she was on TV with her ex-husband and pregnant with Greg Allman’s baby. That great big demographic known as Middle
America just didn’t cotton to it.

So when the ex-Bonos went off the air, and I couldn’t find another job, somebody told me there was an opening working for
Ziggy Marsh. I laughed when they first said it, because if anybody represented the scourge of show business, that little reptile
was it.

Remember Ziggy? He’s still around. I see him at the studio now and then, and he hasn’t changed one bit since those days. He’s
still a caricature of what an agent’s supposed to be. Short enough to buy his clothes in the boys’ department. Once, years
ago, I bumped into him at the May Company when I was shopping for Roger, and Ziggy was trying on kid-size jeans. He also has
the yapping temper of a dog who was bred down to teacup size and whose nerves got all out of whack in the process.

The part that always amazed me about him was that he somehow managed to get his own name in the paper more than the stars
he represented. Usually it was for cocaine arrests or being rushed to a hospital because he was one breath short of OD’ing,
or because he’d just beat the shit out of his wife. But somehow he managed to weasel his way into the careers of a lot of
top stars, who I guess figured maybe it was good that he was a snake in the grass, since he was
their
snake in their grass, so that made it okay.

I mean, I understand the theory, because I always tell people who ask my advice about agents, “Don’t ever be represented by
one you want to sit with at a dinner table. You want someone who’s an obnoxious killer.” Well, Ziggy qualified in spades for
that.

Anyway, I guess the little lizard liked my résumé, or more likely he’d probably gotten laid that morning, but he was in a
rare good mood the day I came in for my interview, and he hired me on the spot as a kind of assistant and sub agent. Roger
was nine years old, and I was in dire need of money, so I jumped in with both feet, figuring if I paid a lot of attention
to how the agent business worked, maybe I’d grow up to be Sue Mengers, a lady agent who I always thought was cute in her aggressive
way.

Well, the way things worked in the Ziggy Marsh office was that anything was okay, as long as it got you where you wanted to
go. You know Ziggy’s wife is Andrea Caldwell, right? Andrea Caldwell, who’s about as gifted an actress as my ugly Aunt Sadie,
only my ugly Aunt Sadie is prettier. So if somebody wanted one of Ziggy’s big clients for a project, they knew that the price
was that they had to put Andrea in a small part in the same film. That was a given.

And he was always on the take. People were shmearing him all the time with free trips and cars and drugs, trying to get him
to push his clients to take their deals or show up at their charity events, and if they didn’t give him a little something
sweet on the side, he ignored them. He was the lowest.

When people asked me where I was working, I was so embarrassed, I’d say the Ziggy Marsh Agency so fast and so slurred, that
I know a lot of people thought I was saying the William Morris Agency. Not that that would be something to brag about either,
but at least it wasn’t scumbag city.

I stayed because the pay helped me put my kid, who was very smart, in a private school, and barely make the tuition. Also,
I was getting the residue of the shmears. I sold the motor bike someone gave Ziggy and he gave me, and I used
the money to take my son to Florida to see my mother one winter. And I still have the treadmill someone gave Ziggy, who already
had one.

Anyway, there was one client Ziggy always wanted but couldn’t get near, and the client was John Travolta. It was right around
the time of
Saturday Night Fever
, and Travolta was blazing hot. Guys at Pips were wearing white suits and pointing their finger to the sky when they danced,
and everyone was whistling “Bein’ Alive.” Ziggy tried getting Travolta on the phone, going to Santa Barbara to see him, having
Andrea invite him to a party, but Travolta wasn’t interested.

Meanwhile I’m packing lunches, driving car pool, rushing in to the office, working all day, and paying a sitter to pick Roger
up at school. And by the end of the day I’m always exhausted, so when I get home from work and I’m cooking dinner and Roger
asks me, “Hey, Mah, want to buy some raffles so I can have lunch with the guy from
Saturday Night Fever
?” I don’t even think about it. I say “Sure,” and give him ten dollars, and he gives me two raffles, and I fill them out and
then I do the dishes.

In the morning, on the way to school I have four nine-year-olds in the back of my wagon, Roger and his friends Bobby and Tommy
and Richie, and I half listen to their conversation because I’m worried about whether or not I reminded Ziggy that he’s having
lunch that day with Tony Orlando and Dawn. But when I tune in, I realize that the kids are saying that Ed Milstein, Richie’s
father, is John Travolta’s business manager or something like that, and John Travolta has agreed to have lunch with the kid
at our school who sells the most raffles.

I couldn’t get over how sweet it was of a big star to da something like that. When I got out of my station wagon to take Roger’s
Indian Village out of the back, because I wanted to help him carry it into the classroom, since it took us three weeks to
make it and I would die if it fell apart, I saw Esther Milstein. Apparently she was the one who balls-out called up Travolta
and asked him to do a favor for the school, and she was really strutting.

It was, without a doubt, a coup. I congratulated her, and she told me that we were printing three thousand raffles, a thousand
more than last year, and that her daughter Debbie was already in the lead in sales, even though Debbie had already met Travolta
a few times in her Dad’s office.

The race to sell the raffle tickets was always hot and heavy, but this year it was the biggest. The phone in the tiny school
office rang off the hook and Olga, the seventy-year-old receptionist, joked that she was now answering the phone by saying,
“John Travolta Elementary.”

A week or so later, I was at Ziggy’s office in the middle of ten different things, and Roger called me from school to say
he was sick, and the sitter wasn’t due to pick him up for three hours, and I couldn’t get ahold of her to get her to go pick
him up early, so I had to run up to the school.

I remember what he had. It was one of those kid things, where it wasn’t contagious, but he felt too lousy to stay in class,
which meant I obviously couldn’t leave him there. But I had to go finish my work, so I took him to the office with me, and
I made sure he had crayons and paper, and that he was quiet while I got my stuff finished.

I was on the phone, and then in the Xerox room, and lost in thought, when all of a sudden I was passing Ziggy’s office
and I heard Ziggy saying to somebody, “So, uh, let me get this straight. It’s the guy with the white suit from
Saturday Night Fever
who comin’ to the school?” And then I heard my son’s voice say, “Yep, he’s coming.”

“To have lunch with the kid who sells the most raffle tickets?”

“Yep.”

“So, like what if that child wants to bring someone along to the lunch?” I heard Ziggy ask Roger, who must have somehow wandered
into his office, while I was making copies of a contract. “Is that part of the deal?”

“You mean a friend?”

“I mean his uncle. Me. I mean if you win, can I come, too?”

“Oh, I’m not gonna win. There are some kids who already sold fifty tickets. I only sold two to my mother.”

My stomach was sinking because I knew what was coming. I knew Ziggy Marsh could and would write a check for all three thousand
five-dollar tickets if he felt like it, call it a business write-off, and it would still be less than he and Andrea paid for
the hors d’oeuvres they served every year at their fancy Christmas party.

“Yeah, well, hows about I make you a deal?” I heard this asshole say to a nine-year-old boy.

“Okay,” my baby answered.

“I’ll buy a thousand tickets from you, this minute, and that’ll probably guarantee that you’ll be the winner.”

“Aaarigght!” Roger said.

“If,” Ziggy that little schmuck, says to him, “you take me to that lunch with the guy from the movie.”

“Sure!” I hear Roger saying as I walk into the office.

“I’m doin’ business here,” Ziggy says to me with a cutesy smile on his face and his little size-seven feet on the desk.

“Yeah, Mom. Business,” Roger says. “I’m gonna win the prize.”

I felt sick. I don’t know why. I mean, the truth was, the five thousand dollars was going to go to the school. It would finance
scholarships to kids who were in need. Why did I care that it came from this vulture, who was using a kid’s contest to try
to feather his nest?

“I mean, this is okay with your mom. Isn’t it, Mom?” Ziggy asked me, grinning, because he knew I knew exactly what he was
doing, and that I, his toady, was in a vulnerable place.

“I guess,” I said. “Why not?”

“Then it’s a done deal. You get the tickets and give them to your mom, she can fill them out for me, and I’ll write a check
to your nice school for five grand.”

“Five hundred dollars?” my innocent little Roger says, his eyes wide with shock.

“Five thousand dollars,” Ziggy says, his face flushed with pride that he’s just suckered in some nine-year-old.