Flavor of the Month (2 page)

So, let me guide you through the story. Permit me to point out all the places of interest. After all, who knows celebrity or Hollywood better than I? I promise a great story and no one could tell it completely, from the beginning to the end, as I can. Because I was there. And there’s never been a Hollywood saga like it
.

Laura Richie

Halfway, Wyoming

199–

“The first real problem I faced in my life was that of beauty.”

—
YUKIO MISHIMA

“The way I look at it is, folks, if you wake up and you’re ugly, you know what real pain is. That ain’t fun. So I don’t want to hear from ‘I think it’s real difficult to be good-looking and be an actress.’…Give me a fucking break.”

—
DON SIMPSON

“If there is a defect on the soul, it cannot be corrected on the face. But if there is a defect on the face and one corrects it, it can correct a soul.”

—
JEAN COCTEAU

New York winters are not kind to Broadway gypsies, Mary Jane Moran thought, not for the first time that day. She fought a sudden gust of biting wind to open the heavy glass door to the unemployment office. She walked into the cavernous gray room, ignoring the various direction signs hanging by wires from the ceiling, and, as she had done every week for the last six months, took her place in an already long line, this time behind a very short woman. I just hope she’s not a talker, Mary Jane thought.

Mary Jane released a deep sigh as she surveyed the familiar scene. There was the usual smattering of laid-off seasonal workers and blue-collar types, but, for the most part, she guessed that a lot of the applicants were very much like herself—young and energetic, probably talented. But in New York most talented people didn’t earn their livelihoods in the arts. They suffered instead. She thought again, as she always did at times like this, of the old showbiz joke: The guy at the circus who sweeps up the elephant shit starts feeling really sick and goes to the doctor. After dozens of tests, the doc tells him he has good news: “Nothing serious, though very rare. Seems that you’re severely allergic to elephant shit. Just avoid it and you’ll be fine.” “But I can’t!” cries the guy, and explains his job. “So, quit,” the doctor tells him. The guy is stunned. “What! And give up show business?”

Like the guy in the joke, Mary Jane couldn’t quit, despite her growing allergy to elephant shit. She usually felt compassion for the down-and-out writers, the dancers, the actors and singers, but not today. Too much elephant shit, and I’ve got my own troubles, she thought, and began rummaging in her large vinyl bag. She dug out a Mounds bar and a dog-eared paperback copy of
Queenie
, resigning herself to the long wait.

The woman in front of her half-turned toward Mary Jane and said, “Hi. Rotten weather, isn’t it?”

Mary Jane peered over the top of her book at the tiny woman in what looked like a child’s tan car coat, the kind with rope-and-wood closures. She looked only a step or two above a bag lady: none too clean, and a bit dazed or crazed. Mary Jane’s boyfriend, Sam, always called her a “dreck magnet,” because every kind of dullard and maniac approached her for a handout or a conversation. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to be really rude to this tiny woman. Secretly, Mary Jane identified with every old, lonely woman she saw. Fear of my future? she wondered, and shrugged. “Yeah, I hate it when it rains or snows on my reporting day. It makes the animals in their cages even more testy than usual,” she said, nodding toward the bored bureaucrats behind the counter. Well, that was enough talk. No need to encourage her. “And I’m in no mood for anyone right now.” Mary Jane went back to her book as the woman shuffled around in her oversized galoshes and faced forward, pulling herself tighter into her coat.

It was several minutes before Mary Jane realized she had been reading the same sentence over and over. Shit, she thought, I was a little harsh. The woman was just trying to pass the time. Tapping her gently on the shoulder, Mary Jane said, “Want a piece of gum?” The woman hesitated, looked at Mary Jane, then accepted and smiled. Her teeth made Mary Jane wince.

The woman unwrapped the Dentyne and popped it in her mouth. “I’m a little anxious.” Motioning with one hand, she indicated the counter, yards before them. “I’m afraid of what I’m going to hear when I get up there.”

Mary Jane laughed. “Join the club,” she said. “I think I’ve blown my wad, but I figured I’d come back today, just in case they make a mistake and give me one more check.”

The woman sighed, nodded.

“What do you do when you’re working?” Mary Jane asked.

“I’m a writer, but I was working as a word processor at a law firm until I got laid off. And you?”

“I’m an actress,” Mary Jane told her. “A currently unemployed but once-working actress. I had one big chance off-Broadway three years ago, got rave reviews, you should forgive the cliché, then nothing.”

“What was the show? The woman seemed genuinely interested.

“
Jack and Jill and Compromise
. I was with the show for over a year.” Mary Jane felt herself grow depressed. “I haven’t gotten any attention since then.” Well, it was worse than that, but, she reminded herself, she didn’t have to spill her guts to this complete stranger.

“Next!” they both heard at the same time. The old lady waved at Mary Jane as she shuffled off to the long counter before her. “Good luck,” she said over her shoulder.

Mary Jane shifted once again on her cold and wet feet, watching as the interviewer began flipping through her files. She watched the old woman’s face when the interviewer shook her head. Poor thing. What hole in the wall would she scuttle into? Had she really been a writer or was she just delusional?

After she watched the old lady slump and wander off, it was Mary Jane’s turn at bat, time to receive the surly warning that her benefits ended in another two weeks. Mary Jane Moran walked out of the unemployment office at Twenty-sixth Street and Sixth Avenue and pulled her dun-colored down coat tightly around her big-boned body. Two hours and forty minutes in line for a hundred and seventy-six bucks. After pausing a moment in the doorway to gather herself together, she began the long trudge up to St. Malachy’s Church on West Forty-sixth Street for the repertory-group rehearsal. Her moon boots, cheap foam covered in vinyl, squished in the icy gray slush puddles, sending new currents of wet cold darting through her feet. Then it started to snow. Great! she thought. Why not just crucify me and get it over with? She pulled the scarf that was wound around her head farther forward to help shield her exposed face from the big wet flakes. She pushed her mittened hands deep into the pockets of the worn coat and kept trudging uptown.

She was used to the cold. She felt she’d always been out in it. Mary Jane had been raised in Scuderstown, New York, by her grandmother. Her parents had been victims of a car wreck. Mary Jane could only dimly recall the argument between her drunken father and mother, the lurch of the car, the screech of the tires, the shattering glass. Then nothing. Except she clearly remembered the cold—it had been a December night—and then how she shivered in the hall of the hospital, a shaken four-year-old probably in shock, who was ignored while the medical staff clustered around her father and her mother.

Her mother had died. Her father had been severely brain-damaged and sent off, eventually, to a veterans’ hospital. But she, at four, had been reluctantly taken in by her father’s mother, her only living relative, and spent her childhood and teen years in a ramshackle farmhouse in upstate New York, the unloved, unwilling guest of the bitter old woman. It had been cold in the winters, almost as cold indoors as out, and she hated the cold then as she did now. She thought of the old lady at unemployment in her thin coat and shivered.

At Herald Square, she noticed that the Christmas decorations were still up at Macy’s. By December 1, she was sick enough of Christmas cheer but now, in January, after the holiday season she had just survived, she wished Christmas had never been invented. The looks on the people coming out of the department store supported her view. Everyone hates it, she thought. It’s just that no one will say it and stay off the bandwagon when it rolls around. I didn’t. She sighed, remembering the call from her grandmother. Another poor, unloved old woman.

“I’m sick, Mary. I think I’ve got the flu. I can hardly get out of bed. I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t have to, Mary.” Grandma only called her by her name when she wanted something. Otherwise it was simply “you.” “Could you come up for a few days and take care of me?”
After all, you are a nurse
. Grandma didn’t say it, but it was implied. And, despite the rage, despite every feeling that made her want to fling the receiver back onto its cradle, to get an unlisted number, to run away, change her name, and never go back, the old guilt prevailed.

So, on December 24, Mary Jane had gone by bus to the one person she wanted most
not
to be with. Christmas in New York would have been glum enough, with Sam going to spend it in Sarasota with his parents, but being back in the shack outside Elmira, taking care of the sick old lady was a nightmare. It somehow made Sam’s failure to invite her to join him even more hurtful. Was he ashamed to have her meet his parents? Mary Jane sighed.

Sam, wonderful as he was, was difficult. He’d been married once, when he was really young, and his wife had left him. That was his reason, he said, for hating marriage. Mary Jane didn’t mind—not really. She had him, so why need a ring? But if they’d been married, wouldn’t he have brought her to Florida? Wouldn’t she know his parents by now? Any in-laws were preferable to her outlaw grandma. It had been a miserable Christmas.

And it wasn’t as if Grandma had been grateful. She never was. Instead, she alternately coughed up phlegm and carped. “You’ve gained weight, I think. Look at me, skin and bone, but you, you’ve always been fleshy. On my food, on my pension, on my food stamps and Social Security, you got fleshy. Fleshy and conceited. Thought you were better than other people. Scuderstown not good enough for you. Nursing not good enough for you. Couldn’t be a practical nurse. Had to get that useless R.N., then you don’t even use it. Miss Actress. Got any jobs lately? Haven’t seen
you
on TV or nothing. What happened to that show you was in?” It went on and on, unbearably, ceasing only when enough bourbon and Nyquil put her grandma out for the night. It had been almost more than Mary Jane could bear.

I should be grateful for being healthy, she told herself. I should be grateful that I’m smart. Not everyone is. For some reason, she thought of a high school classmate, Margery Heimann, who hadn’t been able to name the capital of New York State, even though Scuderstown was only forty miles from Albany. That was dumb.

But, then, Margery was one of the prettiest girls in Scuderstown Regional High, and Mary Jane could imagine and did what it might be like to have all the boys follow you with their eyes and fight to sit next to you on the school bus.

That had always been part of Mary Jane’s problem, she figured: her imagination was too good. As a teenager she couldn’t just sit there in the back of the gym at the pep rallies like the other lumpy farm girls, who seemed contented as cows. Mary Jane watched the cheerleaders, Margery Heimann among them, and could imagine what it would feel like to cavort in front of the crowd in those cute little skirts, and she was sure she would like the feeling. She also imagined, even then, how Lady Macbeth felt as she walked into the dark bedroom to commit murder, how Anna Karenina felt when she heard the train coming, and how Alice Adams felt when everyone ignored her at the dance. Oh, yes, even back then she could imagine
that
easily.

But
that
, she reminded herself wryly, didn’t take very much imagination, since everyone at school had ignored Mary Jane. She had walked through the halls, a clumping ghost as far as all the boys and the popular girls were concerned. She was plain. Big nose. Beetle brow. Thick, lank hair. Thin lips. She decided then that there would be no easy way for her, no helping hand.

She’d have to do it herself. Boys wouldn’t help her, her grandma wouldn’t help her. She’d have to do it all herself.

And she had. Nursing school, on scholarship, to get out of Scuderstown. And then acting classes, and the almost hopeless round of agents, auditions, day jobs, cattle calls, small parts, and rejections. It had taken so many, many years to prove herself, but at last she’d had a hit, been recognized, been accepted, been paid to do the work she loved. And she’d even been loved by a man who was both brilliant and handsome. Yet somehow it seemed she was losing it all, that it was turning to elephant shit.

An icy wind blew down Broadway, forcing Mary Jane into a doorway, where she tried to get her breath and a moment’s rest. Standing there watching people catching cabs, she once again asked herself that question, the one she knew the answer to, the same answer every time she asked. What am I doing this for? Give it up, the voice inside her, her grandmother’s voice, said. You don’t even have bus fare, your boots are leaking, your coat is five years old and coming apart at the seams, and you’re walking through a snowstorm to get to your acting group, which doesn’t pay anything but demands fifty hours a week from you. You must be crazy.

But she knew she wasn’t. She was doing what she had always wanted to do. As a kid back in Scuderstown, acting had saved her life. She was in all the school plays, always in the character parts—Regina in
Little Foxes
, Mrs. Webb in
Our Town
—and she’d been good. Hell, she’d been better than good. She’d been
real
. It had showed her the real way out—out of Scuderstown and Elmira, out of her unbearable life. She knew her grandmother wouldn’t pay for college or acting school, and she had no money, and no way of earning a living. She had been forced into nursing school, but she had hated it. It was acting she loved, had always loved. It was in acting that she lost herself, found friends, gained herself. But now, once again, she would be forced to nurse just to earn some money.