I'll Be There (10 page)

Cee Cee took a seat in a chair on the other side of the desk, and after a while when the woman continued to talk on the phone, she felt awkward sitting there listening, so she opened her purse and rifled through it, just to have something to do. I’m so relieved we found the school for us, she thought. After she had yanked Nina out of that school in Santa Cruz, and would really get shit from Bertie’s lawyers once they discovered she had, she’d better get the kid’s education on the ball already. This school seemed to be the best choice so far.

Barbara Gilbert laughed a nervous laugh in response to the person on the phone then said, “I have to hop, Katie. I have a parent interview. Talk to you later.”

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A parent interview. Cee Cee sat up straighter. She thought she was stopping by to get some information and say hello but clearly this was an audition.

“I’m Barbara Gilbert.”

“I’m Cee Cee BI—”

“Oh, believe me, 1 know who you are.”

“V;e|l, Nina and 1 really like the school,” Cee Cee said.

“Isn’t that nice?” Barbara Gilbert said. “And you met Sandy Lowe? She’s a love.” Cee Cee forced a smile. “We couldn’t survive without her. The kids love her, and she’s so guileless and unthreatening and childlike herself.”

Oh brother, Cee Cee thought. I may not know how you make rain, but I’ve been around long enough to already know by the way she said that, that this broad has it in for the director and isn’t too sure about me in the bargain.

“Cee Cee. How can I put this in a way that won’t insult you?” What did I tell you? Cee Cee said to herself. “Gee,” she said out loud, “when you start like that, I can hardly wait to hear the rest. Insult away.” Barbara Gilbert laughed a shrill laugh. She was edgy and tense, as if she’d just had a lot of caffeine. More than you get in just one Diet Coke.

“I personally feel that you’re not the kind of mother who will be happy in our parent program.”

Cee Cee felt weak. This didn’t sound so hot. It was definitely a rejection. Not now, after all the schools they’d looked at, and finally they’d found this one, the one she thought felt right and Nina seemed to like too, this woman was saying no.

“How can you possibly know what kind of mother I am? I just walked in here. Not to mention the fact that I’ve only been a mother for less than a month to begin with, so I don’t even know what kind of mother I am,” Cee Cee said, her anger all over her face.

“I mean you work, Cee Cee, and even though many of our mothers do, they work in jobs which give them the freedom to come here regularly and get deeply involved in our program, because that’s what we require.”

“Well, at the moment I’m out of work,” Cee Cee said, in a voice she hoped didn’t sound like it was begging. “So I have tons of time,

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and besides I want to be involved. I’m interested in this school because I’ve looked .t others and I knew that if Nina went to school here I’d have to take a few hours out of my week to be around as if I was…” She stopped herself from saying the words a real mother.

Barbara Gilbert had a little smile on her face, which looked more

like

a smirk. “Let’s be realistic,” she said. “You’re a famous star with a

schedule I’m sure isn’t going to leave you the kind of time Elmhurst demands from its families.” No, she was telling Cee Cee no. Because

“Have you looked at Buena Vista?” she asked.

“We have,” Cee Cee said, and the sinking feeling in her stomach

felt familiar. She was amazed that her hands were as clammy now as they had been in the network meeting the other day. “And we didn’t think it was right for us. It would be so good for Nina to come here,” she said, trying to keep her voice sounding even. “I want to do this for her, because she needs to be in a place where there are a lot of family things going on. So she can see how real families operate and support one another. She never had a father, and her mother…”

“I know the story,” Barbara Gilbert said, cutting her off. “I read it

on your admissions application, not to mention in all the newspapers. But frankly, I don’t think you have any idea what it is you’d be getting into. The families in our school run the school. And that means work. We have a mothers’ committee that comes in twice a week and makes hot lunches. Certain mothers come in and straighten up every day. Every other Friday morning all the mothers and some of the fathers come in and we clean the building ourselves, we repair things that go wrong on our own, we do all the dirty work, if you will, and we do it ourselves.” Her face was tense with self-righteousness. “We’ve had some families with working mothers who have asked if they could send their housekeepers in to do the work for them, but that is not allowed. It’s missing the point of why we exist at all.”

“Yeah? So?” Cee Cee said, “I understand, and Friday mornings are

good for me. Hey, believe me, I can clean as good as anybody else. I wasn’t born a star, you know. I grew up in the South Bronx in a sixthfloor walk-up. When my father’s dry cleaning store was in trouble, I had to teach tap dancing to little kids so I could get my own lessons free. And after I practiced my tap on the linoleum kitchen floor, my

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mother used to make me scrub it with a toothbrush. Don’t be prejudiced against me ‘cause I’m famous. I swear I’ll work ten times as hard as anybody.”

Barbara Gilbert looked down with a sigh. This was not what she wanted to hear. Clearly, she had hoped to scare Cee Cee off. Was sure that by now she’d be seeing her to the door, sorry she’d ever thought of putting the little girl in a co-op. When she looked Cee Cee in the eve now, it was with an expression which meant, Now I’m going to drive my point all the way home.

“Besides our group responsibilities, each family has to have a job. Cleaning the animal cages, scrubbing the floors, buying supplies in bulk, delivering them to the school and putting them away, fund-raising, organizing and refurbishing the library.” She rattled off the list with raised eyebrows then asked, “Which job in those I listed do you think you would want to do?” as if it was a trick question.

Cee Cee’s mind raced. She was afraid if she gave the wrong answer Barbara Gilbert would suddenly pull a lever that would release the floor beneath her feet and she’d find herself standing outside in the parking lot. “How about fund-raising?” she tried. “I’ve got lots of good ideas for that. I could maybe get donations from the studios, or how about after I do my next picture we could have a special premiere of it and charge a high ticket price and every cent could go to the school. I could probably help the school make some dough. So much, that

maybe you could afford to hire a janitor!”

Barbara Gilbert looked up sharply.

“A joke,” Cee Cee said apologetically. Very apologetically. “That was just a joke.”

Barbara Gilbert thought about it for a while, then Cee Cee saw the moment when it turned, saw in her face that she realized maybe the idea of having Cee Cee Bloom at the school might not be as terrible as she’d imagined. There was something to be said for the ability of someone like Cee Cee to help bring in some badly needed money.

“Look, I’ll be flank with you,” she said, “there are many schools in Los Angeles which cater to children of people in show business, allowing the students to go off on locations with their parents at any time and that sort of thing. We’re not one of them. Also there’s no

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doubt in my mind that you are not co-op material. But since you’re so insistent and | feel very sorry about the child’s situation, let me speak to the others and get back to you.”

Relief. Cee Cee wanted to pinch Barbara Gilbert’s little birdlike face. She was right in a way. The old Cee Cec wouldn’t have been coop material. She was obsessed with her work, fixated on her career, had let too many important things fall by the wayside because of her work. But that was not who she was now, or at least who she wanted to be. She wanted to have her priorities in order, and Nina was at the top of her list. Now Barbara Gilbert pursed her lips and Cee Cee thought of Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz saying, ‘I’ll get you, dearie, and your little dog, too,” only instead she was saying, “I’ll let you know.”

“Maybe I won’t send her to school,” Cee Cee said to Hal that night. “Maybe I’ll just keep her home and teach her everything I know.”

“That sounds great,” he said, “but what’s she going to do the next day?”

“Funny,” she said, poking him in the side as she sat down next to him on the piano bench.

“Why don’t you just put her into the neighborhood public school?” he asked.

“Now you sound like her,” Cee Cee said. “Because her life situation is special and she needs a special place. And I picked a co-op so I could be around her a lot and we could bond.”

“Yeah, right. I know that’s the big word in child-raising these days. Bond. When I was growing up it’s what everyone gave you as a gift for your bar mitzvah. When did your mother ever come to school?”

That was a funny thought. Cee Cee knew Leona only cared about her show business career, and didn’t ever give a damn about what was going on with her in school. Once when she was a teenager, she and some other kids had cut school and gone into town to see a Vincent Price movie, and when she got home at dinnertime to eat with Leona because as usual Nathan was working late, Leona asked her, “So what did you learn today?” Cee Cee, who knew her mother wasn’t listening anyway, had answered, “I learned that if you’re gonna have your molecules teleported, you better make sure there’s not a fly in the other

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booth, ‘cause if there is, you’re gonna come out looking very weird and so is the fly.” And without skipping a beat, Leona had said back, “Well, isn’t that interesting?” Then pushed a bowl filled with a mountain of buttered mashed potatoes in front of Cee Cee, spooned half the mountain on Cee Cee’s plate, and it wasn’t the first time she got the message that her mother never listened to a word she said. No, she would never be that kind of parent. The co-op would be the perfect place for Nina and for her.

But days went by and Barbara Gilbert didn’t return any of Cee Cee’s many calls to her, and neither for that matter did Larry Gold, and every time Cee Cee called his office the secretary told her he was in a meeting or on the other line or in New York or still at lunch, and he wasn’t rushing to call her back either. One day she got past his secretary and as far as his agent-in-training, Mel.

“Oh yeah. Hiya, Cee Cee. Listen, it’s a zoo here, and Larry’s been really snowed under, so is there something I can handle for you?”

You’ve got to be kidding, she thought. I’m not only getting the cold shoulder from this asshole, but now he’s passing me down to the kindergarten? “Yeah, there’s something you can do. Tell my agent I want to know what’s going on in my career.” I should hang up. I’m talking to a twelve-year-old here, she thought.

“Oh, hey. Not to worry. Because I know he’s got a whole long list on you right here. And you’re up for tons of stuff.”

“Like what?” The lying little cuff-snapping sack of shit.

“Let’s see, let me look. Ummm…”

She felt belittled and stupid. Here she was, waiting like a hungry

dog for some kid, fresh from the mail room, to throw her a bone. “There’s an offer out for you to do ‘Zone.’”

Zone. A movie. An offer to do a movie. Real interesting. The title

sounded as if it was science fiction.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“A feminine hygiene product,” Mel said, and Cee Cee laughed out loud, but while she was laughing she realized he wasn’t kidding. “But I think Larry told them you don’t do commercials. And then there’s a possible Love Boat, and they want you to be a presenter at the Daytime Emmys, and there’s a possible running part on Dallas… but I think they may be going a little younger.”

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Without saying another word she hung up. At eight o’clock that night Larry Gold called her.

“Cee Cee … don’t get crazy. The kid made a mistake,” he said after she had shouted at him so angrily it threw her into a coughing fit. “He got mixed up. He’s a young kid. HeR Garry Marshall’s nephew, so I gave him a break. He must have gotten you confused with Juliet Prowsc and read you her list. Big deal. Believe me. You’re not up for any commercials.”

“What do you have for me?” she asked.

“I’m working on it,” he told her. “I’m working on it,” which in agent language means I hope you have some dough stashed away, because there isn’t a job in sight. And she’d better go back to her list of schools because the bitch from Elmhurst wasn’t exactly busting her ass to call her back either.

Ironically, for someone who couldn’t get a job, she was still in the tabloids all the time — “Who’s the father of Cee Cee’s love child?” “Cee Cee begs judge, ‘Don’t take my kid away’” — and the paparazzi continued to lurk everywhere she and Nina went. The nosy snooping sons-of-bitches snapped their cameras in her face and Nina’s while they called out to Nina by name to try to get her to look at them. But within weeks Nina had learned how to affect the glazed-over look right-through-them expression Cee Cee always assumed when she spotted them. Sometimes they would even be so brazen as to camp outside the gates to the Malibu Colony waiting for Cee Cee’s car to emerge. And they always seemed to be waiting at the front door of a restaurant when Cee Cee, Nina, and sometimes Hal with them, made their exit. Finally one evening Cee Cee decided they should just stay in, and she ordered out for a pizza.

She didn’t count on the photographer who stopped the pizza delivery boy before he turned the corner at Webb Way heading toward the Malibu Colony gates, and offered him fifty bucks to reveal where he was going and another hundred bucks to let the photographer stand in and deliver the pizza. And when the photographer with the pizza got into the house, acting deferential and delivery-boyish in a way he couldn’t wait to describe to his colleagues, while the unknowing Cee Cee and Nina searched for cash to pay for the pizza in their purses on the hall table, he quietly took the oppor