A View From a Broad (2 page)

As my maid, the unflappable Aretha, began to vacuum around me, I made one or two unsuccessful attempts to rise out of the debris. I was just about to despair of ever walking again when suddenly the knocking stopped and I heard a key turn in the lock. Only one person had a key to my house. I wish I could say it was a lover or even a close and dear friend. But no, it was my manager, a man of direct action and some girth, whose emotional response to any given event was generally the exact opposite of mine. One look at his smiling face and I
knew
I was in trouble.

“Little did I know what challenges I was to face—or how soon . . .”

“Here,” I said holding up one of my ex-Buddha’s ears, “it’s yours. I’ve decided to become a Taoist. I go into retreat tomorrow.”

Without even the slightest acknowledgment of my offering or my bruises, the heartless man pulled a thick purple folder from his pocket and threw it a few feet from where I lay collapsed on the floor.

“Read that!” he commanded in a tone most often used by major generals and some minor household gods.

Brushing away the hair from my eyes and the evil thoughts from my heart, I crawled through the litter of broken mirror and porcelain limbs towards the mysterious folder.

“Itinerary!” he said proudly as I retrieved it.

“You what?” I began, then stopped short, dumbstruck, as I stared open-mouthed at the very first page:

I couldn’t believe my eyes! It was truly an astonishment of nations. I looked up at my manager, then back to the purple folder, flipping frantically towards the middle, where the entire project was fully outlined in all its fearsome detail:

I didn’t know what to do, what to say. Once again a questionable consortium of managers, agents, lawyers and record promoters had concocted a plan for me that would force me out of my cozy existence and into a maelstrom of madness. Once again, just when visions of breakfast in bed and phones off the hook promised to become reality, I would have to go back to work.

It wasn’t that I didn’t
want
to work. I enjoy working, tremendously. But I had just finished making my very first movie,
The Rose
—if you are kind enough not to consider my celluloid interpretation of Mary, Mother of God, which I did for seventy bucks one afternoon in Detroit to pay for a phone call to my mom in Honolulu—and the experience had left me exhilarated but worn to a shadow. There were so many new things to contend with— like getting up at 6 A.M., getting to know what a gaffer was and, most important, getting thin. Of course, there were some initial difficulties when the director first told me the disappointing news that if the film was to have any semblance of reality at all there would have to be moments when other people were onscreen at the same time I was. My despair over this turn of events was, however, somewhat ameliorated by the fact that the person
I most often had to share the screen with turned out to be Alan Bates, whose unforgettable fig-sucking scene in
Women in Love
literally changed my life. Actually, I found I liked film acting quite a lot, although not half as much as I liked my trailer, which is exactly the kind of home I hope to have someday.

So it was not just having to work again that bothered me. I was pained to think that I would have to leave my beloved Los Angeles, with all its attendant glory, and travel to places whose names I had never even heard and, upon hearing, could scarcely pronounce. I knew so little of the world, really. Slander, not geography, has always been my strongest suit. The closest thing I had ever had to a foreign experience was Ahmet Ertegun, record executive and Turk. Oh, I was truly in a dither.

“. . . I liked film acting quite a lot, although not half as much as I liked my trailer . . .”

With a flair for the dramatic that annoys almost everyone around me, I flung open an exquisite set of priceless French doors and looked out at the Greater Los Angeles Basin, twitching below me in the dying August sun. On the other side of the Freeway, hundreds of hummingbirds were gathering in the twilight, preparing to ravage my bougainvillea. How could I leave this throbbing center of vitality and delight, this modern Athens, this garbanzo in the salad of human achievement, and travel to places where the plumbing was uncertain and where there might not be even one Chinese restaurant?

My exercises, which usually have such a calming effect on me, failed me completely, and I flew into a tantrum of panic and despair so titanic that even my longtime companion and wardrobe mistress, the very proper Miss Frann Frank, born, bred and even beaned once in Boston at a Red Sox game, became fearful —not so much for me as for her new issue of
Watchtower,
which I had ripped out of her hands and was about to gobble down, admonitions and all.

Fortunately, good sense and a slap across the face were to prevail. In fact, after several hours of pouting and pacing and just the teeniest nip or two of Courvoisier, going around the world began to have its appeal.

First of all, my manager’s incessant yapping in my ear about International Launching Pads and Smart Career Moves made me so furious I would have gone anywhere to get away from him. Even Lund. Wherever that was.

Secondly, I felt that my mind, unquenchable in its thirst for cultural enrichment and cheap thrills, might benefit from such a world-girdling juggernaut. So, in fact, might my jugs, which, despite my strict adherence to Dr. D . . .’s routines, were beginning to turn to mush in the soft California air.

But beyond all that, the fact was that I had always had a burning desire to see the world. When I was a little girl in Honolulu, all my friends and neighbors, everyone I went to school with, had their roots in some romantic place or other—China, Japan, Malaya, the Philippines—while my folks hailed from New Jersey. My father had moved out to Hawaii during the Depression, not so much to find work as to find a proper setting for my mother, whom he always thought too beautiful and delicate for prosaic Passaic.

But growing up in Paradise was difficult for me. I always felt so boring next to the people around me, so colorless. In such exotic company, I was a hopelessly mundane transplant, a common, worthless dandelion lost in a garden of orchids. Just hearing my teacher call out the names of the kids in my class— Akamatsu, Yick Lung, Tuituila, In’nopu—would set me off on the wildest kind of daydreaming.

As I looked through the purple folder again, those old luscious waves of Longing and Romance crested and crashed upon the shores of my very being. For a moment, I felt ten again, and I realized that even though I had never done it before, going around the world would be, for me, a kind of a sentimental journey. And the only thing I put above Sentiment is Revenge.

And so it was that as the sun set somewhere in the middle of August, I gathered up the broken shards of my Buddha and my life and committed myself. The Bette Midler World Tour was on. I would pick up the gauntlet my manager had thrown down and touch the whole earth with my Divinity.

Dizzy with exhilaration and dread, I took my favorite Paper Mate in hand and began to do what I always do in a situation that demands bold and forthright action: I made lists.