Living in a Foreign Language Read Free

afterward—in the media room—we’d have a séance with the Son of God.
    â€œBring questions!” she’d reminded us.
    Well, yeah.
    The Friday night party turned out to be a religious experience in its own right. It’s the event that NBC annually lavishes on its station managers from all over the country—a week of boozing and schmoozing and informational meetingswhere NBC gets the chance to trot out its plans for the new season. The party is a peak event where all the network stars come out to play and rub shoulders for a couple of hours with the “flyover people”—a charming Hollywood term for everyone who doesn’t live in New York or L.A.
    We’d been doing this gig for eight years and had the drill down pat. Our limo pulled up to the Beverly Hilton at six-thirty—a little early to be stylishly late but not bad. We were glowing, like the stars we had become—tanned, coifed, ready to shoot the gauntlet of photographers, reporters,
Entertainment Tonight
and E! network interviewers, tossing off bon mots as we moved briskly toward the bar.
    â€œAh, Mike and Jill, the wittiest couple in Hollywood” they’d all probably say.
    But as we disembarked our limo, there were no photographers to snap us, no gauntlet to run and no reporters shouting our names. A small drop of sweat trickled down the inside of my Valentino shirt. Could it be the wrong night? Or the wrong hotel? Was it the Beverly Wilshire? Or worse, the Sheraton Universal, all the way over on the other side of the hill?
    The lobby was empty, too. Of celebrities, that is. There were other people—regular people—but you can’t imagine how easy it is to tell the difference. I looked back at the curb but the limo had already pulled away—to go to that place where limos go when they, too, are empty of celebrities. Then we saw a face we recognized—a girl from the network publicity department whom we’d worked with many times.
    â€œWhy are you guys here?” she asked with genuine alarm. “The party starts at eight! The affiliates are all in a meeting in the other ballroom that doesn’t break for at least another hour.”
    Eight? Oh, Christ. There was little hope we could bestylishly late unless we somehow found our limo and went back home for a while. We stood there in the lobby and tried to pinpoint the blame for this debacle. Was it her department or our publicist who’d gotten it wrong? Probably our guy—he’d been phoning it in ever since we turned down the cover for the
Good Housekeeping
sweater issue.
    Blame aside, we didn’t want to go back to the house. Once you’ve got your look together, it’s depressing to watch your kids eat Chinese takeout. It takes the glow away.
    â€œYou know, we’ve got a little pressroom—God knows it’s not very fancy, but that’s where we’re all hanging out until the party starts. At least you can relax for a while, have a glass of wine.”
    Wine. Okay. I was trying to maintain a balance between the huffy, put-out star and the down-to-earth good guy that I had become famous for, but it wasn’t easy. She led us off to a room that had been set up with tables and chairs, phones and a few TV monitors that carried the meeting from the other ballroom on closed circuit. We sat at our own little table, and all the other people in the room—PR folk, network flunkies, reporters waiting for a tidbit, photographers cooling their heels until the big stars arrived—made a space around us as if we were an alien species.
    I downed my wine and started on Jill’s. I wasn’t feeling comfortable in this room. These were the very same people who would have been fawning over us—calling out our names, begging us to pose for photos, reminding us how wonderful and unique we were—if we had just come an hour later and made a proper star’s entrance. Now, they were eyeing us from