Let Me Be Your Star (4 page)

If I could answer these questions definitively, it doesn’t
matter that I need a calculator to figure out the tip on a restaurant check, I
would have gotten into MIT, no questions asked, just like Will Smith.

As soon as I finished the feverish typing and hit send, I
would stagger off to bed for a few fitful hours of sleep. When I awoke, often I
would have no memory of what I had written at all, until a smattering of “oh
gurl” tweets and perhaps a Tumblr quote or two would start to trickle over the
various feeds that let us know, Ed Koch-style, how we’re doing.

But soon, a higher power than even social media sent two signs
that it was in fact listening, and it was, in fact, extremely interested in
drowsy speculation about Elaine Stritch’s possible bladder issues.

The first came via certified mail. It was a letter, typed on
creamy business stationery, from a fancy white shoe law firm. It advised me to
cease and desist all publishing activity, past or present, on my upcoming book,
Chicken Soup for the Immortal Anjelica Huston’s Soul.
Failure to do so
would result in immediate legal action on behalf of their client Chicken Soup,
the little brother from
Really Rosie.

(No, I’m kidding. As I was writing this, it suddenly
occurred to me that for my own protection, perhaps I’d better not mention their
client exactly by name. But I bet you can hazard a guess.)

Faced with such an intimidating threat, I did what anyone in
my position would do: I took the letter and read it out loud at a stand-up
comedy open mike night. A few days later, the lawyer sent me another, somehow
more strongly worded, missive advising me in the strongest possible terms to
respond “in writing” at my earliest possible convenience.

I am a child of the future, so I emailed: “I have no fucking
idea what you are talking about.” (Although this being a piece of business
correspondence, the “fucking” was invisible.)

He responded by directing me to my “New York Magazine blog
of March 6, 2012” in which I had written the following offending paragraph:

Anjelica Huston doesn’t need much from her assistants, as a
rule. If immortality teaches you anything, it’s not to sweat the small stuff.
Living through plagues and genocides, seeing the first flicker of wonder in the
eyes of primeval man as he realized this newfangled invention called “fire”
could cook his meat, warm his heart, and consign into ashes those with whom he
had religious or political disagreements makes you realize that it doesn’t
matter what temperature your latte is, it’s that you have a latte at all. (My
new book,
Chicken Soup for the Immortal Anjelica
Huston’s Soul
, will be at print-on-demand kiosks in bookstores
everywhere in April.)

I replied that this was something called a “joke” and I
had no intention of publishing any such book. He wrote back saying that even if
this was true, my “joke” was still a violation of his client’s valuable
franchise, and that the offending post would have to be removed immediately, or
else, at which time I drafted an email reading, “You know what, I wasn’t
planning to write a book with this title, but now that you’ve told me of the
millions and millions of dollars your client had made peddling this crap,
you’ve convinced me. Please find attached, for your approval, the entire text
of my opus,
Chicken Soup for the Immortal Anjelica Huston’s Soul.

“1. Get a chicken.
“2. Cut head off chicken.
“3. Pour blood from chicken’s still-warm body into soup bowl.
“4. Eat blood with soup spoon while gazing pensively into middle distance,
thinking of those you have loved and lost but mostly loved as waves crash
against the shore next to your Martha’s Vineyard beach cottage.”

But then I opened my bank statement right before I
pressed send and immediately came to my senses. Instead, I forward the entirety
of our correspondence to my editor at
New York Magazine
and never heard
about any of it again. Bitch don’t play that shit.

So that was the first sign from the universe (even though
I’m not really the kind of person who believes in cosmic signifiers, unless
they’re the kind coming out of the young Linda Lavin’s mouth in
Pythia
Schwartzbaum,
the infamous 1966 Broadway flop I just made up about the
awkward daughter of an unassuming Jewish dry-cleaner who is unexpectedly chosen
as the new Oracle of the fictional suburb of Delphi, New Jersey).

The second was an email from Marc Shaiman.

The
Marc Shaiman. Emperor of the Oscar-night parody
medley (something extremely dear to my heart); composer of my favorite movie
score of all time (
City Slickers
); with his partner, Scott Wittman, the
Tony-Award winning writer of
Hairspray,
and more pertinently, of
Bombshell,
Smash’s
musical-within-a-musical about Marilyn Monroe. Oh, and a personal
hero of mine, with seems to deserve better than a semicolon.

Marc and Scott were enjoying my recaps. “Thanks for the
laughs,” they said.

Immediately, I emailed back to thank him, telling him I was
insanely flattered, a huge fan, your humble servant, etc., etc., expecting that
to be the end of it. To my surprise, Marc emailed me back
again,
so I
emailed
him
back, and pretty soon, we were having a full-on virtual
conversation about the fate of the crimping iron Barbra Streisand had used in
preparation for the 1992 Academy Awards (
Prince of Tides
year). Now I am
become Internet, destroyer of boundaries.

I admit, I did wonder slightly if I was violating some sort
of journalistic ethics by corresponding with Marc. But I wasn’t a critic, in a
technical sense. We weren’t talking about the show. And I had been a member — albeit
a peripheral one — of the theatrical community since before Karen Cartwright
was a twinkle in Stephen Spielberg’s eye, a community that, to a chorus boy,
Smash
was keeping in paychecks and intermittent health insurance. It was the
closest thing we much-maligned children of the Reagan era might ever have to
the WPA. If I were supposed to uphold total isolation from it for the duration
of my recapping, I would have to recuse myself from virtually everyone I knew,
just as I actually had something to talk to them about again. And I’m sorry,
but I don’t work for
The
New York Times.

Besides, the circle of people I “knew” (or whatever that
means in our social-media age, the constant maintenance of which sometimes
feels like a vast conspiracy engineered by all the third-grade teachers in
America as revenge for your failing to keep up with your pen-pal project) was
growing every day. Marc’s email seemed to have opened the floodgates, and as it
became clear that
Smash
was not exactly the awards-season juggernaut/restorative
jewel in NBC’s tarnished crown that the network had intended to be, it seemed
like everybody who had ever hoarded a few old Playbills wanted to talk to me
about Ellis’s many-gendered make-out scenes or Debra Messing’s bizarre costuming
choices that made her look like a Buddhist nun who had mistakenly wandered into
a Renaissance Faire or the way the eating and/or preparation of salad always
seemed to presage a terrible betrayal, much like the presence of oranges in the
Godfather
movies. I suddenly had twice as many Twitter followers and a
whole slew of new Facebook friends, some of who eventually turned into
real
friends. Young, three-named musical theater luminaries — Lin-Manuel Miranda,
Celia Keenan-Bolger, Jason Robert Brown — started hitting me up on Twitter. (If
it sounds like I’m name-dropping, it’s because I am. Finally.) FunnyorDie.com
asked me to write a
Smash-
themed video short for them to promote the
second season (although sadly, we didn’t get to make it for reasons too
complicated — and litigious — to list here; after all, I had just gotten the
fucking chicken soup people off my back). Joanna Gleason,
AKA the original
Baker’s Wife in the original Into the Woods
sent me a Facebook message
asking if she could take me out to lunch, making me seriously wonder if I was
dying and concerned friends had secretly enrolled me in some sort of adult
Make-A-Wish program. Frank Rich had been sending my recaps around to people, I
was told, and I heard more than one whisper that Sondheim himself was, if not
reading them, vaguely aware of them. (I have since chosen to disbelieve this,
for my own sanity.) Every day it seemed there was another little Facebook poke,
another little mention from some name of names. The people I had dreamed of
from afar suddenly knew who I was. It was a whole new world. I felt like the
part of the movie where the newspapers start spinning and you see me, in
clothing of increasing elegance, going from burlesque to vaudeville to the
Ziegfeld Follies, and then at the end I’m famous and can finally live the
ultimate show biz dream of drinking myself to death in a giant art deco
penthouse high in the twinkling sky of the Manhattan night.

Except that I was sobbing on the bathroom floor of a public
restroom in Central Park, because Tony Kushner had spoken to me, and cementing forever
my inescapable identity as the Elizabeth Gilbert of the Marie’s Crisis set. At
least it’s a lot cleaner than it used to be. (The Central Park bathroom, that
is. Not Marie’s Crisis. I’m trying to make it through another year hepatitis
free.)

I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and this why I
think I was crying that night. Some of it was from being overwhelmed by the
fact that a person I admired more than almost anyone else in the world thought
I had done something good, or at least, something amusing. But it was also
because my recognition had come from someone else’s misfortune. I was the
figure skater that won the gold medal because someone else had fallen on her
ass at the Olympics.

* * *

Here is a compilation of everything I called Karen Cartwright,
the character who played everyone’s second-favorite McPhactress (the first is
Jack MacFarlane, even though it’s spelled with an “F”) over the course of two
seasons. Are you ready?

Karen Cartwright.

A Joseph Cornell box absent
any hint of psychosexual tension. A “Looks 10, Dance 3” kind of situation… like
she’s trying to do the Balanchine infinite line thing but just winds up looking
like Charles Nelson Reilly. Incontrovertible proof that the know-nothings have
at last succeeded in completely subverting the American empirical experiment. Dead
below the waist. Mamie van Doren. Friends with your roommate freshman year,
until she decided to transfer to the University of Colorado, where people were
“real” instead of “fake” like you, you self-involved bitch. Inspector Javert of
the Forever 21 set. Limp little Kleenex wad of a person. The human equivalent
of an abandoned doggie chew toy you have to bribe your toddler with Mr. Softee
to keep from putting in his mouth. Obnoxious and disliked, you know that, sir. Going
to be America’s first post-racial sweetheart (besides Michelle Obama, that is)
if it kills you and me and every other person in North America who has ever so
much as uttered the words “Laura Benanti.” A dried out little shred of fruit cocktail.
That little puddle of soap scum that somehow always collects around the rim of
the fancy decorative dispenser you started put the dish detergent in because
that’s how far you’ve come and you don’t live like the girls in
Girls
anymore
but it gets your hands sticky every time you touch it and how can
soap
make you feel dirty
. One of those grocery store
peaches that looks like a Cezanne but tastes like the inside of a mattress. A
stupid, stupid, curdled little Dannon yogurt person. The least attentive waitress
at Café Orlin. A wan little Lego person. Depressive Pixie Dream Girl. Damp Scrabble
rack of only I and U’s. Crumpled little Duane Reade receipt you stuck your
gum in and then forgot you stuffed back into your purse until it was too late. Not the reincarnation
of Estelle Getty. The anthropomorphized cluster of hair follicles and
air-conditioning condensation. Narcoleptic. Jimmy’s own flaccid penis wearing
an ombré wig. A passive little fruit sticker. Sad little clump of acrylic yarn
that someone has put a statement blouse on. Sad
little half empty bag of dried
out baby carrots that are technically still edible and there’s no other food in
the fridge. An unfinished airline magazine crossword puzzle who is unconvincingly
successfully masquerading as a human being. The semi-animate embodiment of a plastic container of fruit salad from
which someone has already picked out all the grapes and pineapple, leaving only
a few sodden cubes of honeydew melon. A crumpled Duane Reade bag that somehow got stuck to
her shoe in Times Square, and who NBC is now building a Cagney and Lacey-style
procedural around in a not at all doomed attempt to re-brand Katharine McPhee
as a butt-kicking Michelle Monaghan-type action star, but don’t worry, McPhans,
she’ll still sing. A limp sheet of already-popped bubble wrap that
scientists at the University of Indiana have managed to fit with a partially
working artificial larynx. Your American Idol.

There. I think that’s all of them. If I’m missing any
that you can name, you can email me through my website to let me know, and
also, we can make arrangements for you to return the empty lipstick tubes and
used tampon applicators you stole out of my trash as “souvenirs.”

I know this wasn’t nice, and subsequently, I took a lot of
shit — or should I say, McPheces — from the McPhans, a loosely organized
McPhederation of deeply devoted McPhollowers, who use a variety of
quasi-McPhacist tactics to intimidate all those who dare to write something
less than McPhlattering about their McPhantasy woman. (And I wasn’t the only
one. As my colleague Kate Aurthur, a reporter at BuzzFeed who has covered the
Smash
beat, tweeted after one of her stories ran: “I’m trying to think if there’s
a funnier thing that happened to me in 2013 than being called a bitch by
members of KatharineMcPhee.org.”
Dot. Org
.)