The rest fell into that same category, though they were less graphic, and she could almost picture Vincent’s look of disgust as he read the posts. She was about to delete that whole shebang summarily when she saw a familiar name. Have_Mercy had resurfaced from whatever slime pit he inhabited.
She wanted to dismiss that one too, but damned if the guy didn’t sound sincere, in a psycho kind of way. So she sent a message of her own to the Listserv:
Of course Vincent would be shocked when he saw the post. He was the kind who wanted his idols sealed from the world, perhaps in giant versions of the Mylar bags he used to protect his comic books.
Tilda rather liked the idea of Mercy as a femme fatale. Why couldn’t the quirky girl get the guy for a change, or even several guys? Admittedly, she’d prefer to find that Mercy had worn out her mattresses for love or recreation and not for career advancement, but either version would spice up her article nicely.
With the post sent, she shut down the laptop and reached for the TV control to play her favorite hotel game: how many clicks would it take to find an episode of Law & Order in one of its incarnations? She caught a classic Jerry Orbach / Chris Noth episode in three clicks, a respectable showing though not a record, and happily watched it until the last chung-chung. By then she was more than ready to get some sleep.
Chapter 10
Episode 60: Homecoming Dance of the Seven Veils
Sherri gets into a fight with her boyfriend, Hank, and though
she assumes they’ll make up in time for homecoming, instead
he asks Mercy to the dance. Furious, Sherri sabotages Mercy’s
shampoo with green food coloring so her cousin will cancel,
leaving Hank up for grabs. But Mercy makes a veiled hat to
match her gown, and starts a fashion sensation.
—FANBOY’S ONLINE KISSING COUSINS EPISODE GUIDE, BY VINCENT PETERS
IT was overcast as Tilda set off for the corner of Central Park where Jasmine Fisher was working a television commercial shoot. Not that it made much difference, really. The constant press of buildings and sidewalk businesses in Manhattan made Tilda feel as if she were always inside. Even Central Park, as enormous as it was, felt more like a backyard than the great outdoors. It wasn’t that Tilda considered herself an outdoorsy person, having never earned a single merit badge during her disastrous three months as a Brownie, but New York still seemed to be missing something.
That something was definitely not traffic. There was plenty of that, complete with honking horns and festive hand gestures. Tilda was glad she’d decided to walk.
The shoot was easy enough to find, set up just past the Alice in Wonderland statue. There were a few people making token attempts to keep passersby out of the way, but Tilda walked past them with the gait of somebody who knew where she was going. It usually worked, and that day was no exception.
There were three makeup stations set up, each with a chair, mirror, and table overflowing with compacts, jars, tubes, sponges, brushes for hair and makeup, hairspray, and all the other gear it took to make actors look natural. Apparently the trio of makeup artists were temporarily off duty, because their chairs were empty and they were sucking down some of the river of coffee that flowed through every shoot Tilda had ever seen.
One of the artists was male, another female, and Tilda wasn’t completely sure about the third. Just in case, she walked up and said, “Jasmine?” in the direction of all three.
The more obviously female one, who was also the oldest, looked up. “Yes?”
“I’m Tilda Harper. We spoke earlier today.”
“Right, my reporter.” She turned to her androgynous co-worker. “You owe me lunch, Terry—I told you I was getting interviewed.”
Terry scowled and started rearranging his or her supplies. Unfortunately, the name hadn’t settled the question.
“Have a seat,” Jasmine said, gesturing to a chair aimed at the bank of mirrors. When Tilda hesitated, she added, “If I leave the area, they’ll dock my pay, so we have to stay here, and you may as well be comfortable.”
“Won’t I be in the way if you have to make somebody up?”
The three makeup artists snickered. “None of us have anything to do,” Terry explained. “It’s background shots today—scenery—not even extras. Somebody screwed up and scheduled us, so now they have to pay us, but the flip side is that we have to stay on call.”
Tilda had heard too many similar stories of cost management in the industry not to believe it, so she sat. It was odd watching the subject of an interview in a mirror, but she was willing to give it a try. She knew Jasmine had to be at least fifty to have worked on Kissing Cousins, but she didn’t look it. Her bobbed hair was convincingly dark, and her complexion looked firm without the uncomfortable tightness that plastic surgery can cause. Knowing the tricks to keep one’s appearance young must be one of the perks of her line of work.
Tilda pulled out her Palm and said, “As I explained on the phone, I’m looking for background on Mercy Ashford. I understand you used to do makeup for her when she was in Kissing Cousins.”
“All three seasons,” Jasmine confirmed, “plus some outside work, but I haven’t heard from her in years. Where did she end up?”
Tilda stifled a sigh. “I was hoping you could tell me. Nobody seems to know.”
“Really? I hope she’s okay. We were pretty tight. We used to gab the whole time I was working on her.”
“What did you two talk about?”
“The usual. Guys, the show, family, the other people on the show, guys, clothes, how crazy the business is. Guys.”
“You mentioned family. Did Mercy say much about hers?” Tilda’s research hadn’t pulled up any family connections, but she could have missed something.
“Actually, it was more about my family than hers,” Jasmine said. “She was an orphan—no brothers or sisters either. Really sad. I’d be complaining about something my mother had done, and she’d listen, but then I’d remember she had nobody to complain about.”
“What about the show? Was she happy working on it?”
“She adored it. Irv Munch never had an original thought in his life, but he wasn’t bad to work for. He hired good people, and if he’d just left them alone, they could have kept the show going longer. But he kept writing these shows with sappy endings, and they just didn’t work.”
Tilda nodded, remembering that her least favorite episodes were the ones Munch had written. “How about the rest of the cast? Did Mercy get along with them?”
“Absolutely. Not buddy-buddy friends-for-life, but they worked well together, and could have a few laughs afterward. Mercy made an effort to be nice to the younger ones too, kind of kept an eye on them.”
“What about men? Was Mercy seeing anybody seriously?” Tilda asked, thinking of Have_Mercy and his claims. The stories in Teen Fave had insisted that Mercy was still looking for the right guy, somebody down-to-earth and regular. Of course, all of the stars interviewed in Teen Fave were looking for somebody down-to-earth and regular—in other words, the Teen Fave reader, whose fantasy life would have been trampled by the knowledge that his or her fave was making the two-backed beast with everybody in LA.
“You mean on the show? Jim Bonnier tried to put the moves on her, but that didn’t fly.”
“What about outside of work?”
“Well . . .” Jasmine started to say, then switched to, “Are those your real eyes, or are you wearing contacts?”
Tilda was tempted to point out that even if she’d been wearing contacts, they would still be her real eyes, but she settled for, �
�Natural eye color.”
“Nice. What color mascara do you use?”
“Black.”
“Good, stick with it. But you need to get yourself a gel eyeliner in plum—”
“A dark plum,” Terry put in, coming over to cast a professional eye at Tilda’s face.
“Right, a dark plum. Then use a plum eye shadow for the crease in the eyelid. Man, your eyes would just pop.”
“Oh yeah,” Terry breathed. “They’d just pop.”
“Thanks, I’ll remember that,” Tilda said, taking notes. She saw no reason to turn down free expert advice. “Anyway, we were talking about Mercy’s love life.”
“Right, I got off track. You know, she really didn’t date much.”
“She did like men, didn’t she?”
“As far as I know. She did date a few guys, but never seemed serious about any of them. When you’re starring in a show, it’s hard to find somebody who cares about who you are and not what you do.”
“I can understand that,” Tilda said.
“Besides, Mercy was very ambitious. She really wanted to move on and up in the business.”
“Was she ruthless?”
“No, nothing like that. She was the kind who’d go out of her way to make it a better place to work. That gal who played the cheerleader, Holly something, she was a little bit of a diva at first. She was insecure about her looks—and you’d be surprised how many gorgeous people are—and she took it out on me. ‘I don’t like that eye shadow. It makes me look cheap.’ ‘That’s too much blush. It makes me look old on camera.’ ‘Hurry up! I’ve got a big scene coming up!’ These days, when I’m so much older than the people I’m working on, that kind of thing just rolls off my back.”
“Either that, or you play games with their makeup,” Terry put in.
Jasmine grinned. “Maybe I make a nose look a little crooked once in a while, but mostly I ignore it. But back then, it really got to me. I didn’t want to say anything, not when she was a star and I was replaceable, but I was thinking about quitting. Then one day, Holly showed up with a bunch of flowers and apologized. She said she hadn’t realized what a bitch she’d been—that’s the word she used too. She never gave me a bit of trouble after that.”
“That’s impressive,” Tilda said. “Most stars never admit being wrong.”
“Don’t I know it. Truth is, I don’t think it was Holly’s idea. I think Mercy took her aside and explained it to her.”
“Really?”
“I never knew for sure, but I wouldn’t have been surprised.”
“That’s even more impressive.” Tilda was enjoying hearing Mercy praised, but she wasn’t getting much for her Kissing Cousins article, so she decided to start slanting her questions toward the makeup artist article she was hoping to sell. “Were there any particular challenges with the makeup on the show?”
“Mostly it was beauty makeup, but simple, because they were kids. We did do a couple of Halloween shows, which were fun, and in one show Felicia dreamt they’d all turned old overnight. That was interesting.” Jasmine went on to describe some of the techniques she’d used to transform young, attractive girls into crones. “The hardest makeup I ever had to do on that show didn’t even show on camera—that’s how I knew I’d done a good job.” Jasmine paused for effect.
Tilda was willing to play along. “Oh? That sounds intriguing.”
“It was during the third season,” Jasmine said. “We were starting a new episode that day, and Mercy showed up on set with a black eye, a real shiner. They had to rewrite the episode on the fly to work around it, not to mention the costume guy having to come up with something she could wear to hide it.”
“Are you talking about ‘Homecoming Dance of the Seven Veils?’ ” Tilda asked. “Sherri spikes Mercy’s shampoo with green food coloring, which gets all over her hair and her face?”
“That’s the one. I had to disguise the black eye and put the streaks of color on top of that, which helped fool the eye.”
“I’ve watched that show a dozen times and never noticed,” Tilda said. “You did a terrific job.”
“Thanks,” Jasmine said. “I was damned proud of that makeup.”
“How did she get the black eye?”
“She said she tripped and hit herself on the corner of the kitchen cabinet.”
“Ow! That must have hurt.”
“It took a while to heal too. I had to layer on the makeup to hide it for the next few weeks, and I know it must have hurt her to have me slopping on foundation, but she never said a word. A real trouper. I considered her a friend too, but I guess I was wrong.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, she was signed for a feature right before Kissing Cousins was canceled, and at the series wrap party, she told me she was going to try to get me a job on the movie. But that’s the last I ever heard from her.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Promises are cheap in this business.”
“Mercy never made it to features,” Tilda said, feeling protective. “She started on that one picture, but didn’t finish.”
“I thought I heard something about that,” Jasmine admitted. “Still, even if she couldn’t get me work, I’d have thought she’d call once in a while.”
Then Terry cleared her or his throat, and Jasmine hissed, “Shit!” She grabbed up a tube of makeup, squeezed a dollop onto her hand, and dabbed it on Tilda’s face.
“What are you doing?” Tilda asked.
“It’s the PA,” she whispered. “The pissant has it in for us. He’s the one who scheduled us by mistake, and he’s dying for an excuse to send us home early to get back in the director’s good graces. Just go with it.”
The production assistant in question, a grumpy-looking guy with wrinkled khakis and a Starbucks cup, came over. “Who’s she?” he demanded, looking at his clipboard. “We’re not using any talent today.”
“The director told me to get my face done—he’s thinking of using me later on in the shoot,” Tilda said. “If there’s a problem, I’ll be glad to go with you and confirm.”
The magic word director was all that was needed. Tilda had never heard of a commercial or movie shoot where the rumor of a director saying frog wouldn’t get the PAs practicing their long jumps.
“No problem,” the PA said, and walked away quickly, staring at his clipboard as if it would tell him how to get a better job than PA.
The three makeup artists waited until the guy was out of earshot before hilarity ensued, with high fives all around.
“That was brilliant,” Jasmine said. “He’ll leave us alone for the rest of the day now. We might even make it into overtime.”
“Glad to help,” Tilda said. The guy had reminded her of Nicole, which was reason enough to put the fear of God, or at least of the director, into him.
After that, Tilda and the trio were pals. Not only did the other two makeup artists join in to dish about every shoot they’d worked—giving Tilda enough for a nice feature on what it was like to work with the rich and famous, and, even more salable, the rich and spoiled—but they combined efforts to give her the best makeover she’d ever had, complete with samples of foundation and dark-plum gel eyeliner so she could take a stab at re-creating the effect.
As she stopped to admire herself in the window of a store on the way back to her hotel, Tilda was calculating how much money she’d have to make to be able to afford a regular makeup artist of her very own.
Chapter 11
Back in the early eighties, 16 came out with this promotional
T-shirt that said, “Keeps Me On Top Of The Stars.” Gloria
Stavers told me about it over lunch one day—she’d left the
magazine by then, of course—and we laughed so hard we wet
our pants!
—SOPHIA VAUGHN, QUOTED IN “CURSE OF THE KISSING COUSINS,” ENTERTAIN ME!
STILL looking marvelous, Tilda spent the rest of the day at the American Museum of Natural History, which never ceased to entertain her,
even though there was a near zero chance that she’d scrape a story out of the visit. Even freelancers had to relax sometime, she told herself.
It was evening by the time she headed back to the Kimberly. She was walking into the lobby, trying to decide if room service was more appealing than trying to find a restaurant where she wouldn’t be bored eating alone, when she heard a voice say, “Tilda? Tilda Harper?”
Curse of the Kissing Cousins Page 11
