Show Business Kills (9 page)

The little theater shook when Marterio said to Adela, “I have a heart full of a force so evil that, without my wanting to
be, I’m drowned by it.” Now the not-so-funny joke was that she looked like Marterio without the makeup. The lines and bags
and gray hair were there on their own. Pushing fifty. How did it all go by so fast
?

Of course, not one of the others probably looked this bad. In fact on the rare days when she was home from work, she watched
Jan on “My Brightest Day” and couldn’t get over how gorgeous she still looked. Once when she was still married to Lou, he
came home for lunch one day while she was watching Jan in a scene and said, “You went to school with that woman? She looks
twenty years younger than you do.” Even though she thought so, too, it hurt to hear the derision in his voice when he said
it
.

She should have told him, “Of course she does. Because she never had the pleasure of being married to you.” And the truth
was that the good life made a big difference in how you held it together. Money didn’t just talk. It sang and danced and paid
for fancy skin products with secret ingredients from
Switzerland. Not to mention little nips and tucks in the face, and boob jobs that made your knockers stand straight up, even
when you were pushing fifty
.

Every one of those people on that alumni list probably had a job they could give her. Rose Schiffman was a writer. A writer
must need a proofreader or something like that, she thought, noting that on her list. And Ellen Bass. She probably wanted
to get rid of that jerk who answered her phones and get someone in there who would say, “Ellen Bass’s office,” in a deep,
rich voice, and then be nice to the people who called, instead of rude the way her overprotective male secretary was. Receptionist
would be a great foot-in-the-door job for her
.

And how about Jan O’Malley, who had her plate full with a full-time job on that soap opera and a little boy. She probably
needed someone who was good with kids to help her with him. I’d be great with that little boy Jan adopted, she thought. He’d
be better off with me, his mother’s old college friend, than some non-English-speaking illegal alien, which is what she probably
has now. People who got babies, then didn’t stay home to take care of them themselves, should all be shot
.

Now that was a good idea. Nanny. For a while anyway. Taking care of a little kid was something she had experience doing. She’d
go over there to Jan’s house and casually befriend the kid, and then hit Jan up for the job. Jan would be so glad to have
someone of her caliber around her little boy, she’d jump at the idea
.

According to the faxed list, Jan lived in Hollywood. She found the street right away on the
Thomas Guide.
She would go and see Jan first when she got there on Friday afternoon, and then maybe that white-haired witch Marly Bennet
.

  
7
  

M
arly Bennet believed that any ailment in the world could be cured by a chiropractic adjustment. That if her estranged husband
had only had his spine cracked back into alignment, their marriage would have been saved. She was a passionate devotee of
New Age practices who was waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with what she’d known for years about nutrition and
meditation and breathing through the spine and high colonies.

She could convulse the others with stories about all the practioners with whom she did business, like the woman in Malibu
whose counsel she sought who channeled Marilyn Monroe and dispensed Marilyn’s insights about show business and men. Or the
herbalist who sold her a poultice to hang around her neck that would retard aging. But their most recent favorite was the
story about the therapist who was helping her cure an inconvenient physical malady.

“I’ve finally stopped having urinary tract problems. Doctor Brotman got me to use my active imagination, to personify my bladder
and talk to it,” she announced last month.

Ellen moaned and rolled her eyes. “Here we fucking go,” she said. “You know you’re in L.A. when you start having
confrontations with your internal organs. Can you imagine telling someone in Kansas, ‘I took a meeting with my bladder’? They’d
have you tarred and feathered.”

“So what happened?” Jan asked.

“Well, she had me put two chairs across from one another and sit in one of them. First she told me to ask my bladder the questions
as me, and then to move to the chair and play the part of my bladder. It was remarkably telling. I said, ‘Bladder, what seems
to be the trouble? There is no apparent physical reason for my problem with you, and yet you persist in being irritable. Can
you tell me why?’ ”

“You kept a straight face for that?” Ellen asked. She could never understand how the otherwise sensible Marly could put herself
into the hands of yet another nutty quasi shrink with yet another wacko technique.

“Shh, you cretin, it’s Gestalt therapy. Read Fritz Perls,” Rose said, elbowing Ellen. “Go ahead, Mars. Then you moved to the
other chair, and the bladder said…”

“The bladder said, ‘Marly, I’m weeping for the loss of your youth.’ ” Marly looked around at all of them. “Isn’t that fascinating?”
she asked, narrowing her green almond-shaped eyes thoughtfully, as if she’d discovered something profound.

“You paid money for a session where you played Edgar Bergen to your urinary tract?” Ellen said irritably. “I was right, we
are definitely in southern California. I think we all have to move. You three especially, because you have young kids. To
make sure they don’t grow up thinking this is the real world. Rose, see if you can get Andy to move his practice the hell
out of here.”

“Are you kidding?” Rose said. “I’m not moving. I’m putting in a call to my ovaries to see if they’ll do lunch.”

Marly’s New Age material always had them laughing for hours. But as funny as it was, they all agreed that her A material was
in the stories she told about Billy Mann, her soon to be ex-husband. A man she’d married when he was an out-of-work stand-up
comic and she was the star of a long-running television series. Now she was out of work and he was a giant star. “The King
of Late Night Television.”

She told the others that the reason she started calling him that was because one day, a few years ago, they were having a
conversation, or rather, she was talking and he Was off in the ether and answering her questions by rote, so she said, “Billy?
What is it?” And in a faraway voice, probably brought on by the stunning news that his 11:30
P.M
show was in first place, he said in amazement, “My God. I’m the king of late night television.”

“Billy’s such a narcissist,” Marly joked, “that in the heat of passion, he yells out his own name!” Everyone agreed that her
jokes were a hell of a lot funnier than the dumb ones Billy did in the opening monologue of his show every night. Unfortunately,
to Jennifer and Sarah, their twin daughters, none of it was even a little bit funny.

They were the ones who since the separation were always waiting for their father to pick them up to spend the weekend at his
house, and waiting and waiting until Marly looked at the clock and realized he’d flaked out on them again. Then her heart
broke when she watched them unpack their little ballerina bags and cry themselves to sleep. It was an awful situation.

And all the while Marly kept telling the twins, “He loves
you, he just doesn’t know how to show it.” Many nights she sat in the bedroom with the two canopied beds, soothing them, singing
to them, until finally their breathing told her they were asleep. Then she went into her own room and cried herself to sleep,
too.

GET IN BED WITH BILLY
is what the billboards everywhere said. Billy’s new show was about to premiere, and the advertising blitz to promote it forced
Billy into America’s bloodstream. Marly said she’d like to climb up onto one of those billboards with a can of red paint and
write her addendum, YOU MIGHT AS WELL! EVERYONE ELSE HAS.

How Billy could ever want anybody but Marly was a mystery to anyone who knew her. She was a startling beauty, tall, with white
skin and hair that had turned Harlow white prematurely when she was in her twenties. She had poodleish curls cascading all
around a chiseled face and a smile of perfectly white teeth. In fact, everything about her was blindingly white. She drove
a white car and dressed in white and had a white dog.

One night, in the middle of a screaming fight just before he moved out, Billy harangued her about just that. “I’m going blind
from all the white! It makes me want to run around outside through the mud and then come in and dance on the carpets and the
sofa, on the fucking duvet cover, and mess it up. I’m sick of white.”

“Don’t fret, sweetheart,” she told him with the implacable ironic deadpan she used so well in her comedy performing. “As soon
as you leave, the man I move in here will be black.”

Billy had laughed at that. She could always make him
laugh. But he searched her eyes to see if there was any truth in that.

“You’re not seeing Arsenio, are you? I mean, that would be a mistake! He’s not even on the air any more.”

He knew she might not be kidding because she was a flaming liberal, which was another thing that drove him crazy. The way
she fought the bleeding-heart fight for every injustice anyone could name. She was always on a tear about some liberal cause
or other. Fighting for gun control or against oil rigs, against animal testing or for bicycle helmets. She was on top of every
controversial issue. Always at some shopping mall or other, passing out pertinent leaflets.

And when her dazzling persona strolled through the Galleria, where she was speaking out on one issue or another that week,
dressed in white jeans and a white cashmere sweater and white cowboy boots, pretty Marly Bennet still turned heads. The fans
all remembered her from “Keeping Up with the Joneses,” a television situation comedy on which she played Ali Jones for seven
years. The character was the outspoken mother of seven children, and Marly’s comedy timing, together with an intellect behind
the eyes, had reviewers comparing her to greats like Eve Arden.

The show had been off the air for two years, and the acting jobs for women her age were rare, with only a TV movie now and
then and a commercial once a year or so. But that wasn’t enough, and she was worried. She went on interviews but did so reluctantly,
hating the humiliation inherent in the process. Now and then she considered going into politics but decided there would be
even worse humiliation in Washington.

This morning, after she dropped the twins at school, she
came home and spent an hour on the Nordic Trac in the home gym she and Billy had built, then took a bath. She was sitting
at her dressing table putting moisturizer on her long white legs, trying to decide what to wear on a commercial interview
that afternoon, when she heard the unmistakable
voom-bah
of a Ferrari pulling into her driveway. Billy.

From the bedroom window she saw him hop out of the car, watched the top of his head, balding a little in the middle of the
blond curly hair. As he moved toward the front door, she felt her panic rise. What in the world did he want at her house in
the middle of the day? She threw open her closet and tried to decide if she should change out of her robe and into something
decent.

Ellen would tell her, “It doesn’t matter how you look. He doesn’t see you anyway, he only sees himself.” Rose would tell her
she should ignore the bell and pretend to be out. Of course her car was in the driveway, so she couldn’t do that. And Jan,
the only one of them who always believed there was still hope for Marly and Billy to get back together, would say, “Gussy
up, honey. Make him eat his heart out.”

Oh hell. She ran down the stairs through the large marble foyer and pulled the door open. Billy, still six inches shorter
than she was, stood leaning on the door jamb, and she hated the way seeing him there made her melt. That wild blond hair and
little-boy look of his made every woman in America want to pull him to her bosom and still did her in.