Show Business Kills Read Free

Pacific
,” Marly said when they were all gathered around her piano the last time. “The one about plastic surgery.”
    “There’s a song in
South Pacific
about plastic surgery?” Ellen asked. “I don’t think so.”
    “There is!” Marly insisted. “It’s called ‘You Have to Be Taut.’ ”
    “Two old Jewish men are sitting on a park bench,” Rose told them. “One says, ‘So I think my wife is dead.’ The other says,
     ‘You
think
your wife is dead? Whaddya mean? How come you don’t know?’ And the first old man says, ‘Well, the sex is still the same,
     but the dishes are piling up!’ ”
    Jan loved the way she made them laugh with the stories she told about her jackass producer, Ed Powell. A man she described
     as hating women so much he made Clarence Thomas seem like Alan Alda. But it was the old ones about her days as a sexy little
     starlet that were by far their all-time favorites. Particularly the one they made her tell a million times, about the one-night
     stand she had in the sixties with Maximilian Schell.
    “Tell us again about you and Max.” It was usually Rose who would urge her, when they were about three glasses of wine into
     the evening. The story might have been apocryphal—Jan had a way of making things up—but they didn’t care, because true or
     not, it was still funny to them, all these years later.
    “Max Schell?” Jan would ask, her face actually flushing when she thought about it. “Ohhh, no. Do you really want to hear that
     one again?” Then she’d sigh, an “If-you-insist” kind of sigh, and she was back there. Lost in a reverie of being an aspiring
     twenty-one-year-old actress who went to New York when they were seniors at Tech to audition for summer stock and met and was
     seduced by Maximilian Schell, a dashing, sexy movie star.
    Every time she told it, she’d embellish it a little, adding a nuance or a new detail, throwing in a moment she’d somehow forgotten
     to mention before. How intimidated she wasby his stardom, how brusque he was with her, and how sure of himself. How after he got young Jan to his hotel suite, she went
     into the bathroom to undress and looked at herself despairingly in the mirror that reflected the elegant fixtures in the expensive
     hotel bathroom and Max’s monogrammed robe hanging on a brass hook and her own frightened face as she thought, What could he
     possibly want with me?
    They still giggled like teenagers when she talked, in her breathy voice, remembering the night that marked the downfall of
     her innocence. About the zealous way she’d over-gelled the diaphragm she’d “just happened” to have with her. So that when
     she squeezed it together to insert it, it got away from her and flew across the room “like a leaping frog” and landed with
     the gooey rim splat on the floor, sticking stubbornly to the bathroom tile.
    Then she described the way after Max fell asleep, she stared at him all night long, enthralled by his snore. And always when
     she got to that part, she imitated the sounds of a specifically Maximilian Schell snore.
    But the unequivocally best moment in the story was how, at the break of dawn, the trembling Jan, who hadn’t slept a wink,
     dragged herself from under Max and pulled herself back into the fuchsia cocktail dress she’d worn the night before, and the
     matching spike-heeled shoes and bag, mortified to have to wear them outside in the light of the New York day.
    And just as she was about to tiptoe away, Max opened one eye, looked at her accusingly, and said “Yessss?” As if he thought
     she was the hotel maid intruding on his sleep. And Jan, standing in the open doorway, with as much savior faire as a terrified,
     guilty, star-struck twenty-one-year-old couldmuster, said, by way of bidding him good-bye, “Thanks a million, Maximilian.”
    That was the part that always slayed the others, made them laugh that out-of-control, over-the-top, hysterical kind of laugh
     Ellen always