B00C4I7LJE EBOK (11 page)

So not only did I have to parade through the Riviera, I had to repeat the process at the International. At least there the staff saw the humor in the situation and smiled as we wended our way the length of the entire casino to the stage door. I felt safe enough leaving the chair with the stage manager, and my faith was justified when photographs were delivered about an hour later showing Totie Fields, who turned out to be a very short woman, perched regally on the chair, her feet dangling several inches above the floor.

Phyllis was delighted with her prank; Totie was thrilled with the chair; and I was relieved that the episode was finished.

Las Vegas turned out to be a lot of fun, as Karen had predicted. She and I settled into a pleasant routine of getting up about 10:00 A.M. and meeting for breakfast in the coffee shop. After breakfast we would check the mail, then go lie out by the pool until about 2:00 P.M., when I returned to my room to check in with Phyllis. If she wasn’t in the mood to dictate or go through her mail, I spent the afternoon typing letters and making phone calls. At 7:30 P.M., Karen and I would meet Phyllis backstage, except on evenings when Warde wasn’t around, in which case we’d go up to the suite and escort Phyllis through the kitchen to the dressing room. Warde particularly enjoyed Las Vegas when his friends visited. They would go out, sometimes not returning until just before show time when he had to make the announcement.

I loved John Davidson’s act, and as soon as the orchestra began tuning up, I’d scamper downstairs to watch. Phyllis would have looked through the mail and as a rule she didn’t need me to hang around. Helping her dress, doing her wig and getting her ready to go onstage was Karen’s job.

John Davidson opened his act with “Joy to the World” (not the Christmas carol), and to this day every time I hear that song, I’m magically transported backstage to the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, smelling that wonderful smell of musty curtain and perspiration and perfume and marveling again at how the stage lights blind you to anything past the second row of the audience. If they didn’t laugh or applaud, you wouldn’t know there was anyone out there.

Between shows, Karen and I had dinner in the coffee shop while Phyllis and Warde ordered room service, either backstage or in their suite. At the end of the first week, Phyllis invited Karen and me to dinner with the two of them at a nearby Italian restaurant. I was ill at ease since we had an undefined relationship in social situations. I mean, were we still supposed to be working, or was this purely personal? Afterward we would be going back to work, so I didn’t think we’d all be relaxed and happy. However, it turned out to be quite pleasant. Several people stopped by to greet Phyllis, but for the most part she was left in peace. We had a delicious dinner, and I enjoyed the change from eating in the hotel. Warde didn’t say much, and the atmosphere in the dressing room before the second show was almost convivial.

During the second week, I was lying by the pool when I heard someone mention “the earthquake in California this morning.” As a native of the San Fernando Valley, I was used to quakes, which occurred from time to time, so I thought nothing of it until I passed the newsstand on the way to my room.

“Major California Quake!” a headline screamed, followed by “Freeway Collapses!” on the second line.
Newspapers always exaggerate.
I just smiled when I overheard a couple exclaiming over the paper.
Obviously not westerners.
After I showered and dressed, I switched on the television as I sorted through the afternoon mail. The on-screen images featured ambulances with screaming sirens.
Yeah, yeah, must be a slow news day.
It did not perturb me until the announcer said, “The phone company has asked that you not try to call your friends in the San Fernando Valley. The phone lines are down.”

I stared at the screen for a moment as his words sank in, then lunged for the phone to call my parents. I dialed several times but only got a fast busy signal indicating trouble on the line. I tried to tell myself that the press was just playing it up as they always do.

Then the phone rang. My parents. They wanted to reassure me. The quake was nowhere near them, nothing was broken, no one was hurt. Of course, I’d known it all along, I told them, as I felt my breathing return to normal.

That weekend, Las Vegas got especially busy—a lot of people decided to put a few hundred miles between themselves and the San Andreas Fault.

15

W
e’d been back from Las Vegas only two days when I answered a call from Phyllis’s agent. “Ask Phyllis if she’ll fill in for Debbie Reynolds at the Desert Inn,” he said without preamble. “Debbie’s sick and needs a couple of nights off.”

I was reluctant to buzz Phyllis. She might still be asleep. I did it anyway and she answered immediately.

“Mr. Moch wants to know if you’ll go back to Vegas. He’s on line two.” In less than a minute, her voice came over the intercom.

“We’re going to Vegas. Make reservations for the four of us.”

It was the middle of the week, so there were plenty of open flights. Karen and I went home and packed, and agreed to meet at the airport at 3:30. Perry would drive Phyllis and Warde.

As I left the office, I picked up a handful of incoming mail, including pages of jokes that people had sent to Phyllis in hopes of selling them, and stuffed it all into my briefcase. Phyllis wrote about half of her material. The rest she bought from writers who sent in pages of one-liners. Phyllis read through them and circled any she wanted. She paid $5.00 a gag. Maria wrote the check and typed the gag on a 3x5 index card. Ingrid then filed it in Phyllis’s huge card file. Comics are very possessive of their material. Once Phyllis bought a gag, she would be angry if she heard another comedian using it. That happened only a couple of times, and who knew whether it was an unscrupulous writer selling the same gag over again, or someone had simply appropriated her material for their own. Once she used a gag on television or it appeared in the newspaper, she took it out of her stage act.

“It’s not fair to make people pay to hear jokes they already know,” she said. She also tried to be very careful about which lines she used in interviews with writers who would quote her.

As we boarded the plane, I asked Phyllis, “What’s wrong with Debbie, do you know?”

“Vegas Throat,” she said.

It was the bane of singers in Las Vegas, caused by a combination of the arid climate, air conditioning, and smoke-filled showrooms. Put that together with two shows a night for two weeks with no nights off, and it was enough to push a singer who had been on the go for a long time right over the edge. The only cure was rest.

The limo from the Desert Inn met us at the airport for the brief drive to the hotel. Karen took the costumes and wig boxes directly to the dressing room while I checked us into our hotel rooms. Phyllis and Warde had already been escorted to their room by the hotel manager and, once again, my checking in was only a matter of form. I was pleased to find that Karen and I were in an entirely different wing from Phyllis and Warde.

I left our bags in our respective rooms and found my way backstage. Karen already had laid out Phyllis’s makeup on one end of the dressing table and hung the costumes in the closet. Although we still had over an hour before the first show, we decided to wait for dinner until afterward. Between shows, Phyllis and Warde decided to have something in the dressing room, while Karen and I adjourned to the coffee shop. Service was slow, so by the time we were finished, we went straight backstage once again and got there just as the stage manager was calling “half hour.”

We found Phyllis looking through the pages of submitted gags; she had circled several. She had also autographed cards that people sent and they were ready to be mailed. Phyllis was conscientious about that. Serious autograph collectors would send a pair of index cards and a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Some celebrities had their secretaries or someone else sign the cards, but Phyllis never did.

The dressing room felt claustrophobic with four people in it. I picked up the mail. “I’m going to drop these off,” I told them as I left.

I dawdled through the beautiful casino, admiring the chandeliers and watching the elegant patrons playing at the gaming tables. When I returned, Phyllis had gone onstage, and Karen was absolutely livid, her face red and her voice shaking. She was one cool customer and I’d never seen her like this. Obviously something had gone very wrong.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“You just won’t believe it.”

“What?”

“There was a call for Phyllis, and Warde actually put her on the line.”

“And?”

“It was a threat.”

“Oh, no.” I felt sick. The call to the radio station in Pittsburgh leapt to mind.

“It was someone saying they’ve kidnapped Stephanie.”

“Her daughter Stephanie?” I was horrified.

Karen nodded.

“What did they want? What did Phyllis say?”

“It was just before she went on. She almost fainted.” Karen glanced at her watch for the tenth time. “C’mon, we need to be there when she comes off.”

“Did you call the police?” I asked as we headed for the wings. Luckily the audience was laughing so much I could talk without being heard out front.

“Police?” Karen almost shouted at me. “No, I didn’t call the police. I called Stephanie.”

“And?”

“She was asleep.”

“She’s okay?”

“Of course she’s okay. It was a hoax.”

By that time Phyllis was saying “good night, I love you” to the laughing, shrieking audience as the orchestra struck up her jaunty play-off music. I couldn’t hear what Karen said.

As soon as Phyllis got out of sight of the audience, she shouted over the noise of the orchestra. “Stephanie?”

 “She’s fine,” Karen shouted back.

Even with her makeup on, I could see that the color had drained from Phyllis’s face. “I want to talk to her,” Phyllis said and began running toward the dressing room. In spite of the zany costume and red circus-pony feather sticking out of her hair, there was nothing comical about her at that moment.

I dialed the number while Karen undid Phyllis’s costume. As soon as Stephanie answered, I handed the phone over.

“Stephy?” The relief in Phyllis’s voice went right to my heart. “Honey, are you okay?”

I heard Warde outside and as the door opened, Karen picked up her purse. “Let’s get out of here,” she growled as she brushed past me. I was right on her heels.

I couldn’t believe someone would intentionally do something so horrible. I wondered if the person was sitting in the audience so he could watch Phyllis’s reaction. I began to think being famous wasn’t all that great.

The next afternoon, Karen and I went shopping at J. Magnin, the only department store on the Strip—conveniently located next door to the Desert Inn. I’d already discovered the monotony of being on the road, and it didn’t often happen that there was anywhere to go outside the hotel. At the store I found a terrific white muslin caftan with black embroidery that I figured would be a perfect bathing suit cover-up. It was on sale at a bargain-basement price, and I snatched it up. Once we’d combed the store from front to back and side to side, killing as much time as we could, we strolled back to the hotel to figure out what to do for the rest of the day. I’d already abandoned the idea of going out to the swimming pool; the temperature was only in the 60s. What a shame—I was eager to wear my new caftan. The show didn’t start for another four hours, I didn’t want to gamble, and there wasn’t any work to be done, so when I heard myself paged, I cheered up.

“Madam wants to talk to you,” Warde said after I answered the page. Somehow he always made it sound like a threat.

“Robin,” Phyllis said after he handed her the phone, “Debbie says she’s better and she’s going to do her show tonight. I want you and Karen to get my things from the dressing room.”

“Do I need to make plane reservations?” I asked.

“No, I think I’ll stay over. She feels okay at the moment, but I’d hate to leave and then have her get sick again. They’d have to close the showroom.”

It was only the second time I’d been in Las Vegas, but I already realized the importance of the shows. The showroom served as a conduit to draw people into the casino. Hotels didn’t want their showroom dark for even one performance. Not only that, the shows were precisely timed so that when the show let out, the casino had its full complement of black-jack dealers and roulette and craps croupiers at the tables, ready for the crowd. A show that ran over by even a few minutes could lose the casino gambling revenue, so the entertainers were held to a strict schedule.

I found Karen at a slot machine and told her what Phyllis had said, so she cashed out her three dollars in winnings and we went backstage to pack up. By the time we got the bags to Karen’s room, we had killed only an hour.

“What now?” I asked, but she didn’t have any ideas, either. A boring afternoon and monotonous night loomed before us.

“Do you suppose I should make plane reservations in case she wants to leave after the second show?” I asked.

“Nah, we won’t have any problem if she wants to leave tonight. There’s never a problem getting
out
of Las Vegas on the weekend.”

We sat in Karen’s room with a pack of cards from American Airlines and played gin rummy. We always had a deck of cards with us. Karen liked to play and was a demon at cards. She beat me, as she always did. After we got tired of cards we decided to have dinner.

“We’d better check in with Phyllis one more time,” Karen said.

I called Phyllis’s room. Warde answered and told me that Debbie was still planning to do the show, but Phyllis had promised to stand by, just in case. I told him we’d be in the coffee shop. The restaurants were enticing, but too expensive for our $10 per diem.

As we sat down, I told Karen, “I don’t care how much it costs, I’m going to have a steak.” I glanced at the menu and ordered the New York strip with baked potato, veggies, and a side salad. The price was more than double the per diem, but it would be even more than that in the steak house, where the price covered the service, the atmosphere, and the ambiance. The food came from the same kitchen, and that was all I cared about.