Alexandra Waring (17 page)

She had to stop herself because she had a very bad habit of wanting to try and make Alexandra Waring live Cassy Cochran’s life over again, but make it come out the way it was supposed to. Alexandra hadn’t had a neurotic mother who screamed at her night and day that her beauty was a curse and that if she ever used it instead of her brain she’d be dead by forty—and so Alexandra just went out in front of the cameras, a place Cassy had looked at longingly but had refused to go, certain that the camera would become to her what the mirror had become to the witch in
Snow White
—or worse, what it had become to her mother. Alexandra had not gotten married right out of school because she was too scared to be alone and too uptight to live with a man without being married to him. Alexandra had not had a baby because she needed something, someone she could trust to love her. Alexandra had not—

There was a quiet knock on the door and then it opened. It was Chi Chi. “Sorry,” she whispered, “but Langley just called. He says Jessica Wright’s turned up and he thinks she’s brought something important.”

Cassy was on her feet in an instant and instantly she felt better. Because this was the arena in which she had always known how to live, where she had always been able to think clearly, make decisions and effortlessly move to carry them out. This was work. This was where she had always been okay.

10
Jessica Wright

Until that fateful St. Patrick’s Day night in 1981, Jessica Wright had figured that her life would proceed like a lot of Eastern girls’ lives did who fled their upbringings to schools like the University of Arizona: she’d have a suntan for four straight years, return home with a bachelor’s degree, jazz up her resume, polish up her suburban savoir faire , let her mother buy her some interview outfits, let her father buy her a commuter ticket and land an entry-level job somewhere “with it,” like Condé Nast, Random House or CBS.

She’d marry some boring banker type (the kind that tended to be wildly attracted to Eastern girls who fled their upbringings to schools like the University of Arizona), because she would need a nice place to live in Manhattan and somewhere near the ocean to go to on summer weekends, and unless there was going to be some sort of untimely death in the family,
somebody
was going to have to support her tennis, skiing, traveling and clothes habit if she were to take such a low-paying job in the interest of remaining interesting and interested.

Or, she had thought, she might be able to only live with the boring banker until she found someone she
really
wanted to marry (the kind that tended not to be wildly attracted to Eastern girls who fled their upbringings to schools like the University of Arizona because they themselves had fled their upbringings to schools like the University of Colorado, and who wanted to be interesting and interested too, and therefore needed a boring banker type of their own or, better yet, some young thing who
had
had an untimely death in the family).

Well, after all this serious contemplation, Jessica never even got out of Tucson.

On that fateful St. Patrick’s Day evening in 1981, Jessica—the twenty-one-year-old junior majoring in journalism that she had been—was in the Blue Flamingo Bar near campus, dancing a jig in her green kilt for the benefit of a photographer from the
Daily Wildcat
, when a fellow she knew from one of her classes, Denny Ladler, came in. Denny had come to pick up the host of “Our Town Tucson,” a public affairs TV talk show Denny worked on, but was told that the host had already been picked up by the Tucson police, busted by a narc for snorting cocaine and Mexican heroin in the men’s room.

Thinking fast, Denny pulled Jessica off the dance floor (“Listen, you’re the best bullshitter I know,”) and asked her if she could come with him—right now—and be the substitute host on “Our Town Tucson.” Jessica said sure she could. Jessica thought she could do anything that night, which was very often the case when she was in the Blue Flamingo Bar.)

“Okay, everybody,” Jessica said to the camera that night on “Our Town Tucson,” then delivering the line for which she would later become famous: “No snoozing out there while I’m on the air!” And then she flung her hand across the small stage at the man sitting in the other deck chair. “Our guest tonight is Mr. Pipo Remodoza, the city superintendent who wishes to tell us all about the Wet Garbage/Dry Trash project.”

“Thank you, hello,” Mr. Remodoza said enthusiastically, smiling and nodding into the wrong camera.

Jessica actually played the interview pretty straight—until Mr. Remodoza started droning on and on about how viewers could tell the difference between wet garbage and dry trash. “If it looks damp
…
” he was saying.

“Pipo Remodoza,” Jessica said, interrupting him. “Why does that name sound so familiar to me? Did you used to know President Nixon?”

“I don’t think so,” Mr. Remodoza said.

“Oh,” Jessica said, recrossing her legs and hiking her kilt (prompting a whistle from somebody, which the microphone picked up). After she finished winking (at whoever that somebody was), she turned back to her guest and asked, “So where are you really from, anyway?”

“From?” Mr. Remodoza said.

“From,” Jessica repeated.
“¿Donde estaban?”

Mr. Remodoza shook his head.

“Where—are—you—from?” Jessica said a little impatiently, hitting the arm of her chair with her fist.

Mr. Remodoza’s eyes widened a little in alarm. “I’m from Queens, I’m originally from Queens,” he said quickly.

“How originally?”

“Jessica!” Denny hissed, which her mike picked up.

“What?” Mr. Remodoza said, leaning over to look at Denny under the camera.

“I mean, Mr. Remodoza,” Jessica said, now sounding very nice indeed, “how long have you lived here in Tucson?”

“Almost two years,” he said, settling back in his chair.

“Oh, I see, another longtime resident,” Jessica said, leaning back in her chair (making the entire crew strain in the opposite direction, holding their breath as she teetered on the brink of disaster, one chair leg right on the edge of the stage). “I’m from Essex Fells, New Jersey, myself,” she added, thumping her chair back down (and prompting a collective sigh of relief). “So what did you do in good old Queens?”

Before Mr. Remodoza had a chance to answer, Jessica leaned forward to stick her hand in front of his face and said to the camera, “For viewers who don’t know, Queens is the borough of New York City where Forest Hills is—the place where the U. S. Open used to be held and still should be held today but isn’t.” She lowered her hand and said to Mr. Remodoza, “The racket where the Open is now is beyond belief.”

“Ha-ha, that’s very funny,” Mr. Remodoza said.

“What is?”

“The racket—”

“Oh, right,” Jessica said, smiling, “if you’re from Queens, then you must know all about rackets. So what was yours?”

“Excuse me?”

“Job,” Jessica said. “Did you have a job there? In Queens?”

“Yes,” Mr. Remodoza said. “I was a government official.”

“Golly,” Jessica said, snapping her fingers, “now how did I know you were going to say that? So does anyone know you moved to Arizona, or do they just forward your paychecks?”

“What?”

“Jessica!” Denny was heard to hiss again.

“Oh, all right!” she yelled at Denny. “But don’t you think it’s a little weird that a Queens government official was appointed a city superintendent in Tucson? I do.”

She was a hit from the beginning. Because of the havoc the mountains and desert around Tucson played on broadcast signals, the city had been wired for cable for years and so even UHF Channel 62 that “Our Town Tucson” was on came into most homes clear as a bell. All over town, in bars and college dorms in particular, groups of people turned to “Our Town Tucson” at eleven o’clock to see Jessica interview everyone from a doctor about sexually transmitted diseases to some lady who collected cacti that she saw faces in. (“See, if you look at it this way, you can see—” “Curly of the Three Stooges!” “No, dear, this is Senator Joe McCarthy.”)

In six months Group K Productions offered to take her commercial, and Jessica gleefully quit school, took Denny as her producer and jumped from Channel 62 to 6 with “The Jessica Wright Show.” She didn’t then—nor would she ever—have a set format for the show, choosing instead to let each topic or guest lineup dictate it. Some nights the shows were oddly affecting, like the night Jessica had on three people over seventy whose brilliant careers—as an actress, a teacher and an attorney—had been utterly destroyed by scandal when they were young. Some nights Jessica was straight-faced outrageous, like the night she interviewed the dorm mothers of the all-women university halls about what constituted ladylike behavior. Some nights they had music, featuring local bands. Sometimes they had studio audiences and sometimes they had closed sets. There were serious shows—like the teenage gang show (when Jessica got knocked right out of her chair as a fight broke out)—and there were some very risqué shows, like the time Jessica interviewed four truckers (with bags over their heads) about their best truck-stop sex experiences on Route 10.

Group K offered a syndication package on “The Jessica Wright Show” and, as the scope of her guests and subject matter expanded, so did her markets. In the hustle and bustle Jessica acquired a husband, Gary, a marriage which did not add much stability to her already tumultuous and chaotic life as
the
talk show hostess in ascension, particularly when Gary was fired from his advertising job and he announced he would be her full-time business manager. By 1985 she was seen in twenty-one markets and, after David Bowie did a show with her that fall, L.A. and New York publicists began to call. Her demographics were fabulous—capturing that elusive eighteen-to-thirty-four market but good—and her fame in the region continued to spread and, as it did, even the critics started to like her. As the
Albuquerque Times
wrote:

Miss Wright’s greatest appeal lies in her ability to change her personality at the drop of a hat. She readily admits that she does and explains, “It’s my job to give each guest whatever he or she needs to open up. Maybe my bookers have an agenda in mind with each guest, but I don’t. I merely want to get at whatever it is that makes that guest special, that makes them stand out from our neighbors. And if one stands out because she raised more for the March of Dimes than anyone else and the other blasted her husband through the head with his shotgun, I can hardly behave the same way with both. Some need a strong personality to react to, while others need for me to stay quiet and out of their way. And, you know, some people need kindness and”—Miss Wright laughs a low, wicked laugh—”some need a little drama onstage to reveal themselves.”

Jessica’s personal life, at this point, had taken a very bad turn for the worse, but, ironically, the more suicidal she felt off the air, the more her on—air work seemed to improve. The Tulsa
Sentinel
called her show, “The best chronicle of our times,” and the Dallas
Telegram
wrote:

Ms. Wright embodies the confusion of an entire generation that learned its morality from television. Why is it, Ms. Wright is apt to wonder, that families are “so weird” instead of like the Andersons on “Father Knows Best”? Why is it we see thugs gracing the society pages instead of being put away by Elliot Ness? Why do real people seem so ridiculous to us and people putting on an act seem so real? Or, as Ms. Wright so appropriately wailed to a panel of social psychologists the other night, “Somebody,
please
, just tell me why we are all so lonely in America?”

But then the problems and insanity of her life began to creep onto the show with her. Her mood swings sometimes shocked even herself; her behavior off screen had been shocking to herself for over a year; and Jessica sobbed, alone, when the San Diego Star wrote:

What will Jessica be like tonight? Will she be the gentle young woman of sympathetic murmurings or the guffawing Minnie Pearl of Country Western TV? The straitlaced Eastern dilettante or the screaming fishwife who seems to be appearing with increasing frequency of late? Well, regardless of whatever difficulties the twenty-five-year-old may have in controlling herself these days, there is one question burning brightly in the heart of every red-blooded American male who was watching the other night:
When will Jessica wear that dress again?

The dress in question was one Jessica had borrowed from a waitress in the El Pueblo restaurant next door fifteen minutes before air time one night. Jessica had spent the day with some man in Sabino Canyon and, although her head had been quite messed up, she hadn’t been so out of it as not to know that she shouldn’t show up at the studio in a torn halter top, clay-stained shorts, hiking boots and anti-snakebite socks. The dress had fit very well everywhere except in the bust, where Jessica’s considerable endowment had stretched and strained the whole upper part of the dress into rather indecent proportions.

But Jessica went on, running and running, cracking clever remarks anywhere, everywhere—on the show, to the bank teller, to the ceiling, she just couldn’t turn it off—and she razzled and dazzled and grew more outrageous on her show, pushing her ratings higher, promising herself that if she didn’t feel better soon she would simply kill herself. And she nearly did one night—the night her husband Gary slapped her across the face so hard at a party at Denny’s that she fell backward off the patio stairs, cracking her head on the cement by the pool—only Denny broke down the bathroom door and stopped her from hacking her wrists (oh, God, a safety razor—wouldn’t you know that was what he would have?).

The following dawn, sitting on a rock at Gate’s Pass, watching the sun come up, Jessica decided she had had enough. She could die now, at twenty-six, or she could try to make some changes in her life.

And so she made some changes.

She quit cocaine, threw out her pot; she quit Gary and threw him out too (
and
his cocaine
and
his pot
and
his pills), went into therapy and felt quite a bit better.

The show would never be as manic as it had been up to that point, but then it did get more understandable again. Her eighteen-to-thirty-four audience remained loyal, but she started to pick up—of all things—senior citizens too. (Sun City, a retirement community, gave her an award as “Outstanding Young Person on Television.”) She was able, at long last, to take the show on the road once in a while and it was on such a trip last year, to L.A., just after she and Denny had been talking about how much they needed a change, that they met Jackson Darenbrook. DBS seemed to them both to be the exact kind of change and challenge they needed and negotiations had begun.