Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences (17 page)

“Wow,” T.J. said.

“That totally blows,” I concurred, trying to be a good hag for T.J., who was clearly in the throes of new love.

“Mahalo,” effused the Cowboy, winking at T.J. Then turning to me, he asked, “You seem like yur a
salty sister
. Are ya?”

“She’s salty, all right,” T.J. said, chortling. “You should have heard her swearing at the Atkins lady in D.C.!”

The Cowboy looked confused, but nothing was going to ruin his good vibrations.

“Most excellent!” he settled on finally.

We hung out with the Cowboy for a while, hearing stories about gnarly waves and tubular sunsets, and pretty soon he and T.J.
were giving each other loving back rubs. An announcement came over the PA: a
Family Feud–
type contest was about to begin for a cash prize of five hundred dollars, the exact amount T.J. had lost so far. Three contestants
were needed to make up the other “family.”

“It’s a sign!” T.J. said.

“
Rad sweet
, dudes!
Ka-ching
!” the Cowboy said.

“Why not?” I said.

T.J., the Cowboy, and I went up against three other random cowboys, and we almost won, until the final, fatal round. The category
was “Songs about Suicide.” I honestly thought we had this thing in the bag. We had “Stoney End” and “Fire and Rain” and just
needed one more.

“ ‘It Never Rains in Southern California!’ ” I said, jumping up and down in our “family conference.” “It’s a slam dunk, you
guys!”

“Naw, let’s go with ‘Midnight Train to Georgia,’ ” the Cowboy drawled. “It’s a much better one.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I demanded. “How the fuck is ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’ about suicide, huh?”

“Isn’t it just that he wasn’t doing so well in L.A. so he moved back to Georgia?” T.J. asked distractedly; he was more interested
in playing with the Cowboy’s shirt buttons.

“ ‘L.A., proved too much for the man,’ ” the Cowboy started singing and slow dancing with T.J., who in full-blown Pip mode
added the rejoinder “too much for the man.”

“Yes. I realize it was
too much for him.
But he didn’t kill himself,” I insisted. “He just bought a one-way ticket back to the life he once knew!”

“Get it?” the Cowboy said. “
One-way ticket?
”

“It’s a euphemism?” T.J. asked, scrunching up his nose.

“Of course it’s not!” I screamed. “Are you an idiot?!”

“Hey!” The Cowboy was not pleased. “Maybe yur a
swamp
donkey
after all!”

Our time was up, and the Cowboy answered with what was surely the dumbest answer in the history of dumb answers; the other
team offered up “Theme from M*A*S*H” and won.

“I can’t believe you let him give that cockamamie answer,” I said as we drove back to our hotel.

T.J. just shrugged. “You didn’t have to be so nasty to him.”

“What kind of dope thinks ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’ is about suicide?”

“Well, you didn’t have to be such a bitch. You’ve been acting just terribly since you started all this dieting.”

It was true; I felt crazy.

“Well, I’m sorry,” I said, petulantly. “I mean . . . I mean . . . oh, I don’t know what I mean!” I screamed. “I am so fucking
sick of this! Sick to death! I can’t take it anymore!”

“What is the matter? Calm down!” T.J. pulled over as my hysteria mounted.

“I’m a mess, T.J. A booze-swilling, pill-popping, overweight, out-of-work mess with carb face.”

I rolled down the window and lit a cig.

“I don’t even know what I’m doing here, you know?”

“You mean—in Vegas?”

“Yes. No, I mean in L.A. I mean, seriously, what am I doing with my life? I don’t even know anymore. I mean, I was trying
to do ‘art,’ you know? Trying to do ‘art,’ what ever the fuck that is, and somehow I got stuck on this wild-goose chase where
I’m, like, willing to do all this crazy crap, ’cause then, THEN, I can go back to New York, and I’ll suddenly be allowed to
do ‘art.’ But it’s just absurd because I honestly don’t see how doing shit turns into ‘art,’ and who knows, maybe ‘art’ is
actually shit, too, and I’m just so fucked up now, T.J.! All I ever wanted—ever—was to be an actor. My whole life. What the
hell happened, huh? You know, when I was little, you know, I fucking
loooved
TV, loved it like a best friend. I mean,
Match Game
? Like, where would I even be if I couldn’t get that fuzzy feeling all over watching Brett Somers and Charles Nelson Reilly
and . . . you know? Was that not ‘art’? In some way? I mean, I felt something, you know?
I felt
. What the hell is ‘art,’ anyway? Who makes the decisions, huh? Who? I got all turned around, T.J., all fucked up. I’m out
here, trying to get TV work, but do I even
want
to be on TV? Maybe I do! Maybe that’s the whole problem. Maybe, you know, if I get real, real honest, I did kind of deep down
want to be one of those women: Lucy or Rhoda or Mary or Marilu Henner or Bonnie Franklin or Linda Lavin. Well, maybe not Bonnie
Franklin or Linda Lavin, ’cause those two always bugged me—you can totally tell they’re just nightmares, too—but, you know,
Valerie Bertinelli or Joyce DeWitt—”

“Gawd. Remember how Joyce DeWitt came back in season two newly svelte with all the eyeliner and Liza hair?” T.J. said, grinning.

“. . . or Donna Pescow! Maybe I wanted to be Donna Pescow!” I cried.

“Oh, god,” T.J. said. “You mean . . . ‘Angie’?”

I nodded.

“And her boyfriend was that dreamy Robert Hays . . .”

“Have my own show, you know? With a catchy opening montage, like the old ones, where the camera pans over blah-di-blue city,
zooming in on the various tourist spots, the places that make you go, aha, it’s Houston, or, well, clearly this is San Francisco—”

“Or Baltimore. I’d love it if you were from Baltimore—”

“And I’d be a waitress, of course.”

“Of course.”

“And in that same opening, there’d be glimpses of the high jinks in store, the most hilarious of which would be when I have
that ubiquitous mishap with the whipped cream dispenser, and it sprays everywhere—”

“Because that happens all the time!”

“Just like in
Angie
, remember? But you know the thing about
Angie
?” I asked, finally seeing the light at the end of the tantrum.

“That it had a dynamite theme song?”

“No. That Donna Pescow, if she was trying to be on TV today, would be considered too fat and too ugly. She’d have to lose
weight and do her nose and then maybe,
maybe
. . . but even then I doubt it. There could be no
Angie
today, T.J. And what does that say?”

I started crying again. T.J. put his arm around me, gently rubbing my arm. The sky was cotton candy pink with streaks of butterscotch;
Easter Sunday’s dawn was erupting, and the twinkly lights of Vegas looked like neon-colored sprinkles, momentarily washing
away the seediness, making Sin City look young, almost innocent.

“Well,” T.J. said finally, “you’re not Angie and you’re not Donna. You’re Nancy. And you’re here because, well . . . you’re
here just to . . .” T.J. searched for the right word.

“Just to try,” he said finally. “Just to try and, you know, do the best you can.”

“Oh, god. My father used to say ‘Just do the best you can’ before I took tests, but I always felt that meant that he knew
I was too stupid to get an A, so he was preparing me—and I guess himself—for the worst.”

“Well, I meant it less literally, Nahn-cee.”

“You’re right. I know, you’re right,” I said, fishing for a Kleenex in my bag. “I just don’t know how I got so far away from
who I thought I was.”

T.J. sighed deeply and thought for a minute. “ ‘Funny how your feet in dreams never touch the earth.’ ”

“Beautiful,” I said softly, blowing my nose. “Is that Tennyson?”

“No, Nahn-cee. It’s Heart.”

“Oh, god, of course! I love Heart!”

“Who doesn’t? And I think it’s fair to say that what we
need
is more Heart in this world. Less heartache, and much, much more Heart.”

I nodded in emphatic agreement.

“I love you, T.J.,” I said, pulling him close.

“I love you too, Nahn-cee.” T.J. held my face in his hands so that our noses were touching. “And you’re gonna be OK. I promise.
We both are.” He kissed me on the forehead, then started up the car. “Come on, it’s Easter. New beginnings . . .”

Back at our hotel, we indulged in our free Easter breakfast (Denver omelets with extra cheese; bacon and sausage; NO HOMEFRIES,
NO TOAST, NO OJ, YES, WE’LL HAVE THE CHAMPAGNE—WHAT THE HELL, IT’S EASTER!). I lent T.J. a hundred dollars to play roulette
and went upstairs to our room to check my pee. It was still more or less beige, but like the morning sky, it had a vague pinkish
tint to it. I knew I couldn’t keep this up, and almost didn’t care anymore, but I was lonely and decided to call an Atkins
Specialist. This one was situated in New York City, a lady on the Upper East Side. Didn’t she have anything better to do on
Easter Sunday, I wondered, than to talk to some dumb eating-disordered actor in her fleabag hotel room in Vegas? She rattled
off an erudite explanation about my pee, the details of which I can’t remember. Sliding down between the twin beds in our
hotel room onto the faded wall-to-wall carpet, listening to her talk, I imagined flying through the phone into Upper East
Side Lady’s apartment. I imagined her in some comfortable postwar place off Third Avenue in the seventies, the kind of place
that had gone co-op in the late sixties, and she had gotten an insider price on it. Maybe it was a ju nior four with a small
dining alcove done in pleasant shades of cream and robin’s egg blue. I imagined that she had a small dog—a pug or possibly
a Boston terrier—something not too terribly yappy but a good companion in the lonely city. After her conversation with me,
she might have a walk in the park, then catch the tail end of the Easter Parade before heading over to some friends’ place
for a festive lamb dinner. There would be mint jelly; there would be asparagus. There would be fake grass and too much to
drink and laughter.

I engaged her for a good half hour asking questions I either knew the answers to or didn’t care about just so I could keep
her there. As UES Lady’s words spun together like slot machine lemons, I conducted an imaginary conversation with her in the
spaces between my fake queries.

Should I cut my losses and move back to New York?

Dieting is exhausting; I think I had more energy when I just
used to starve myself.

There is a lyric in Lisa Loeb’s song “Stay (I Missed You)”
that goes, “Some of us hover when we weep for the other who
was dying since the day they were born.” What, exactly, does
this mean?

What’s your take on Donna Pescow?

What is art?

“Lay off the nuts,” she told me finally as I came out of my reverie. “The road to hell is paved with ’em.” She was talking
about the diet, of course. Or was she? I thanked UES Lady for her time, bade her a Happy Easter, and fell asleep for a long
nap. When I woke, it was night and T.J. was sitting on the edge of his bed, removing his white bucks.

“Well, I lost,” he said, then flopped back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.

“I’m sorry, T.J.”

There we were, T.J. and I, as we had been so many times before: in limbo.

We were hungry and opted for the more upscale restaurant on the premises in order to partake of the Two for One Surf ’n’ Turf
offer.

“Dontcha need to check your pee?” T.J. asked before we left the room.

“No,” I said, picking the pee sticks up off the basin and tossing them in the toilet. “I’m all peed out.”

The Surf N’ Turf was excellent (EXTRA DRAWN BUTTER; HOLD THE COCKTAIL SAUCE, PLEASE!). After dinner, we took our movable feast
to the casino, where I sat at the blackjack table and had a remarkable winning streak, bringing my grand total to $640. I
would leave a winner.

We left Vegas the next morning and spent the long drive back listening to Sammy Davis Jr. and plotting our mutual resurrections.
The moment I got home, I stepped on the scale. I had gained three pounds. I decided to simply starve myself from now on; it
was easier, not to mention cheaper.

T.J. called later that eve ning. He had some good news.

“That Atkins stuff gets pretty fast action,” he told me. “I just stepped off the scale. Would you believe I lost five pounds
since Friday?”

Of course I believed it. T.J. and I both got to leave Vegas as winners, and why not? After all that we’d been through, we
deserved at least that. Anyway, it’s not whether you win or lose; it’s how you play the game. And it helps, of course, to
have a whole lotta Heart.

10. Take Fountain

There was an
actor I was close to during my years in L.A., a smart, funny, sexy, cool, wildly entertaining “blond bombshell” named Gigi.
She was a total throwback to a time when women were women: big hips, real tits, and unapologetically complicated. In an era
like the forties, Gigi easily would have been a star, playing cynical noir sexpots like Veronica Lake in
This
Gun for Hire
, or Bacall-ish heroines who needed only lower a chin or arch a brow to relay a monologue’s worth of innuendo. The rub, of
course, was that it wasn’t the forties (it wasn’t even the seventies, when the forties were “in”). It was the grunge-infested,
slacker-strewn nineties, when everything, it seemed, reeked of “teen spirit,” a time when heroines weren’t chic,
heroin
was, and frankly, the only thing even remotely fortyish was Gigi.

We met at a party in Beachwood Canyon right about the time I made the decision to give the whole L.A. thing a go. I was with
my friend Monty, who had left New York a few years before and was now happily living in one of those sweet, turreted apartments
off Melrose that Charlie Chaplin had built at the dawn of Hollywood for his assorted chippies. Monty and I had spent the early
part of the afternoon concocting a theory we would come to rehash for years: that it was virtually impossible to find eggs
Benedict made properly (i.e., poached egg, En glish muffin, Canadian bacon, hollandaise sauce) anywhere in Los Angeles. We
had been to four different places in the span of three and a half hours, ordering in each establishment what purported to
be “eggs Benedict,” and not a single one came out assembled properly. Either they did something weird like using prosciutto
instead of Canadian bacon, or they fucked with the bread component, forgoing the English muffin in favor of something fancy,
like a brioche or a croissant. Our servers always inquired if we would prefer our hollandaise “on the side.”

New to town, I was dumbfounded. Monty tried to explain.

“It’s insecurity,” he hypothesized. “Out here, the baroque is fetishized, and so even breakfast is ruined.”

Reeling from both our smug East Coast elitism and a woefully misbegotten bread-to-protein ratio, we decided to cool our heels
and stop at a house party, a late-afternoon affair hosted by a girl we had known back in New York in the eighties when we
all used to work in nightclubs. The house—one of those glorious 1920s Spanish hacienda types with a terra-cotta roof and sweeping
archways—was perched on a cliff near the Hollywood sign. Billie Holiday wailed lazily, silvery curls of Nag Champa perfumed
the air, and diaphanous buttercup yellow curtains billowed in and out of the three Moorish archways leading to the back loggia,
where the party was in full swing. The mood was festive; everyone was imbibing either a tequila-champagne cocktail called
a Hotel California, a whey protein shake made with organic bananas and magic mushrooms, or both.

I was standing in the living room talking to the hostess for a few minutes when, as if on cue, the curtains blew open to reveal
Gigi, sitting at a round table of revelers beneath a sun umbrella. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and deep red lipstick
and chain-smoked black cigarettes, which she pulled from a gold case, then lit with a Zippo, flipping it open and closed fatale-ishly.
Gigi was one of those women who had
props
. Nothing—in her home or her handbag—was arbitrary. In this group, mostly latter-day hippies, she seemed a bit out of place:
anachronistic, but not uncomfortably so. Like Kit Moresby in
The Sheltering
Sky
, she was not a tourist but a traveler; home was wherever she was. I found myself inexplicably drawn to Gigi, as though I
had met her a long time ago. She regarded me warily at first, but something in her jade, feline eyes told me she knew me too.

“Any advice for a new actor in town?” I asked after we were introduced.

Quoting Bette Davis, who had once been queried similarly, she replied, jokingly, “Yes: take Fountain,” referring to the more
easily traversed avenue that runs parallel to Sunset Boulevard.

There was a hint of expectancy tinged with neediness in how quickly Gigi’s gaze morphed from vague contempt to utter helplessness,
as though in spite of herself and her preconceptions, she wanted to know if I had any answers. In time, it would be revealed
that she had just been through a crushing breakup with a man she adored who had traded her in for a younger model. The Beachwood
Canyon party had been Gigi’s first venture out in weeks. Still, breakup misery aside, I wondered about the momentary death-stare
she had shot me and asked her about it months later, after our friendship was on firm footing.

“I thought you might be
her
,” she said, referring to the girl she’d been dumped for. “You look like her.” Then, after a beat, she sighed heavily, exhaling
the smoke from one of her fancy cigarettes.

“Well, actually, she looked like
me
, if I was fifteen years younger, which is to say, she looks like
you
.”

This wasn’t exactly true; Gigi and I didn’t really resemble each other at all. But I knew what she meant; it was more of a
tribal similarity than anything in actuality, and perhaps a cosmic alignment that we shared as Librans, constantly in search
of balance.

There hadn’t been a great deal of balance in Gigi’s life, which was perhaps why she pursued it so doggedly. As she approached
her fortieth birthday, it became clear that hers was a life of extremes, with nothing turning out as expected. For one thing,
the major acting career her instructors in drama school had predicted had evaded her. She arrived in New York immediately
after graduation and snagged a big, juicy role in a Joe Papp production at the Public that everyone thought would move to
Broadway, as
A Chorus Line
had done the previous year. The reviews were mixed, but Gigi’s debut was called “incendiary,” and thus buoyed, she signed
a lease on a West Village flat where Edna St. Vincent Millay had supposedly once lived, and she set about buying the latest
luxe-boho Talitha Getty–style frocks. Then the show closed early, never making it to Broadway; Gigi had to break her lease
and sell the Talitha Getty stuff to her sister-in-law in Westchester. She became a squatter—one of six—in a walk-up loft in
skeevy, ungentrified SoHo and took a job in the coat check of the Rus sian Tea Room. There were other acting jobs: a regional
thing that looked like it might come into town but then didn’t, a workshop of a new play with Mike Nichols “attached” that
never went anywhere. Gigi chugged along like this for several years, excited and exhilarated by the prospect of the “big break”
and then momentarily crushed when it all went inevitably up in smoke. One night while coat-checking at the Tea Room, she met
a movie star’s wife who took a shine to her and suggested to her husband that he help Gigi out: Wasn’t there a small role
in his next thing? Could he put in a word, etc.? Sure enough, a week later, Gigi was on a plane headed for L.A. and her first
part in a movie.

“I wanted to make it to Hollywood before I was thirty,” she told me. “And I did—barely, but still . . .”

She finished shooting her one scene on her thirtieth birthday and thought this was an omen that she was well on her way. The
movie star set her up with a meeting with his agent, and after Gigi agreed to lose twenty pounds, the agent agreed to send
her out on a trial basis. Gigi wasn’t much of a dieter: she loved whole milk in her cereal and coffee; she adored slathering
butter on thick pieces of homemade bread; she thought salad was divine, but only if it was a prelude to a steaming bowl of
spaghetti car-bonara or a juicy duck à l’orange. But while she might have been hungry for those delicacies, she was hungrier
to realize her acting dream, so she starved herself, subsisting on espresso, sashimi, vodka, and cigarettes until she lost
twenty-five pounds. But then the agent told her that her thinner face made her nose look enormous—she’d have to “do something”
about it if he was to make any headway—and as if that wasn’t bad enough, he announced that her scene in the movie had been
cut. Gigi was shattered, but couldn’t bring herself to visit the surgeon whose card the agent had pressed into her hand before
sending her on her way. Soon, the agent stopped taking her calls, and then soon after that, he dropped her. Determined more
than ever to succeed, Gigi called the movie star, who in turn made some calls on her behalf. She got another agent and joined
a small theater company by the beach, with whom she performed classics to half-full houses four nights a week. Everyone who
ever saw her in anything thought she was brilliant; everyone was positive that it was only a matter of time.

“That was ten years ago,” Gigi smiled mirthlessly.

In the interim, Gigi went back to butter and whole milk (“At least I got my boobs back!”), got a job in a high-end dress shop,
and had two long-term relationships with men end badly, for which she blamed herself, despite the fact that both men were
horrible cads and emotionally abusive. Peppered throughout was the occasional meaty acting gig that carried with it great
hope, only to slow-fade into the next scene, where the wait would begin anew.

Gigi kept the starkness of her reality, however, at arm’s length. To some degree, all actors make a silent pact with themselves
to never look too-too closely at their progress (or lack thereof), because if they did, they would spontaneously combust.
But Gigi simply refused to examine her career at all.

Aside from my relating to Gigi’s early promise and the subsequent disappointing “almosts,” there was another place where we
met up spiritually: in the realm of men who had left us. Whatever their unavailability or shortcomings, we felt largely responsible
for their departures, as though it were owing to some inherent weakness or flaw of ours that we were left, as though these
desertions were something preordained that we deserved, no matter what. Both of us had subjugated ourselves in our major romantic
relationships, so much so that there was almost a sense that, like junkies out using, we had lost whole chunks of time putting
ourselves and our careers on hold as we ministered to the particulars of these unions. When our men walked away, there would
be great mourning periods, followed by fruitless attempts to “figure it all out,” until ultimately we would return to the
business of the careers we had been so passionate about until love had entered our lives. When Gigi and I met, we would have
endless conversations over oolong tea on her tiny porch with the lopsided rattan furniture about our shared pathology, and
why it was that two seemingly independent, sisters-doing-it-for-themselves types like ourselves could blow it all off for
the sake of companionship and a good lay. We would sit smoking cigs, drinking our tea, and musing until Gigi would say, brightening,
“Well, as Viola says in
Twelfth Night
, ‘tis too hard a knot for me t’untie.’ ”

The pain etched into Gigi’s face belied the flippancy and swiftness with which she could dispatch these sobering conversations,
and I wondered if the theme of “undeserving” that coursed through her psyche relationship-wise extended to her stagnated career.
I also always marveled at how
grand
she was, how fabulous and magnetic. She must have had a bazillion friends all over the world; she was one of those people
one wanted not only to be with but
to be
. She had an uncanny ability to nutshell anyone else’s issues, and for someone given to so little self-reflection, she could
be remarkably insightful.

“Someone must have once told you to ‘be nice,’ ” she said to me. “And I think you took it far too literally.”

With the opposite sex, I generally found her to be strangely old-fashioned—mawkish, even. She always used the expression “so-and-so
married well,” which completely grossed me out, yet abhorrent though they were, there was always a kernel of truth in her
pronouncements, some of which I would gnaw on for years.

“Men always reveal themselves,” she told me the morning after I ended yet another terrible relationship. “They will always
tell you what their
thing
is—the
thing
that will make the relationship impossible—and they’ll do it on the very first date.” As she paused for a second to light
another cigarette, six emotions flickered across her face: innocence, rapture, wanton desire, sorrow, resignation, and grit.
It was like watching the life of a woman in a time lapse.

“So,” she said, exhaling smoke, “we must make an oath, you and me: we have to pay attention. Imagine all the time we’d save
if we did?”

At the time I met Gigi, she was contemplating a move to New York. L.A. was losing its luster now that her work prospects seemed
to be drying up. Dumped by her man, considered by Hollywood to be just another zaftig dame, over the hill by two decades,
Gigi was being pushed to the mat. Her friends knew it, her family knew it, even her dry cleaner knew the reality that was
chasing Gigi, as ferociously as a pack of hounds pursuing a fox: her career wasn’t working out. The parade had most likely
passed her by. But Gigi didn’t “go there.” Maybe after one too many vodka gimlets over at Hal’s in Venice she’d get depressed
for a minute; it would occur to her that everyone she was friends with either was ridiculously famous or had moved on, out
of the business, to other careers and houses and families. Only then, as she made her impaired way back to her tiny Sil-verlake
apartment, would the regret and sorrow sink in. And as Tom Petty’s ode to casual cruelty, “Free Fallin’,” washed over her
from her beyond-her-means car stereo, only then could she weep for all that she wasn’t. But it was only a smidgen of grief
and only for a moment; the next day, Gigi would brush herself off, throw back the curtains, and face the day once more. She
could never imagine throwing in the towel even if it appeared to others to be a lost cause, because always, just as suddenly
as the wave of wretchedness would rise, the call would come: a job, out of nowhere, the flicker of potential that invariably
made her stay at the fair. Yes, it was always something small—so small you could blink and miss it—but it was
something
: something to say when asked the inevitable “What are you up to these days?,” something that Gigi could dine out on for weeks.
“You see,” she would say, wiping a relieved tear away from her eye, to her concerned but undermine-y sister, who had called
from her suburban hell to plead with Gigi yet again to have the baby before it was too late, “I’m still in it.”