I opened the check and looked it over. It was for $5,200 all right, but it was a personal check from his account, raising my suspicions.
“I’m confused,” I said. “I thought the ring sold on eBay. Why your personal check?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll get the money back. But the eBay payment could take a few days. I thought it would make you happy to get the money now. I thought you could probably use a lift.”
“You’re right about that,” I said, folding the check back in half and hunting for a sweatpants pocket to store it in.
Zip. Bam. End of transaction, I figured.
Happily, I was wrong.
“Much as I love laundry rooms,” Cliff said, “how about continuing this conversation elsewhere—say, lunch?”
“Lunch?” I said dumbly, as if totally unfamiliar with the concept of a midday meal.
“Yeah, lunch,” he said, “It’s almost noon, and giving away big checks makes me hungry. How about it?”
The only trouble, I explained, was that I hadn’t been outside once since the show. I wanted things to die down. “This publicity stuff is not my thing,” I said.
“I gather,” he said. “And I think it’s great the way you’re holding out. The media sharks circling around you don’t deserve the time of day. The kind of fame they’re peddling is a pile of crap, as far as I’m concerned. Real life is too important to sell out to ratings and reality TV. On the other hand, just because your ex-boyfriend makes a fool of himself in front of the whole country is no reason your life should totally stop. He’s the one who should feel embarrassed.”
“Thanks for that positive spin. Everyone else is saying I’m nuts not to go for the gold. I’m a little confused at this point.”
“That’s just your body saying you need fresh air,” he said. “I know the press can be pesky, so I brought this just in case.” He pulled a wrinkled, deep-purple bandanna from his back pants pocket and waved it like a flag. “Ta-da.”
Instantly, I thought of my Life Coaching client Jane McDee, the hamburger heiress with the bad dye job and the buck teeth it seemed Neil had been working on forever. She had a lot of bandannas in her collection, but not this particular shade of purple.
“Put it on,” Cliff instructed, handing me the bandanna. “We’ll add my sunglasses, and you’ll just look like another weird New Yorker.”
He had our escape planned. “We can slip out the building’s service exit, and no one will know you’re gone. My car’s parked right outside. I know a great Chinese place in Astoria. It’s a real melting-pot neighborhood—full of new immigrants who speak every conceivable language except English. Barbara Walters and her friends will never find you. Promise.”
The invitation was even more irresistible than the baskets of fattening edibles upstairs. “It’s worth a try,” I said, tying on the scarf.
Just as we were departing the laundry room, my doorman Frank appeared. I’d forgotten he was watching our meeting unfold on the lobby’s security monitors. This provoked an instantaneous flicker of recognition. Just like contestants on that sick shiver-me-timbers show, The Plank, forget about the cameras watching their every move, I realized.
“That you, Ms. Mallowitz?” Frank said, plainly puzzled by the bandanna and dark Ray-Bans I was sporting. “Everything okay?”
“Fine, Frank,” I said. “Everything is fine.”
I know what you’re thinking. Her judgment sucks. Has she never heard the phrase “decent interval”? Besides, she got the same positive vibes when she first met Neil, and look what a self-centered meanie he turned out to be. She doesn’t even know yet what the man does for a living, and she’s getting in an automobile with him to go eat Chinese in some colorful ethnic neighborhood in Queens? That’s not lunch. That’s a DATE!
We think alike. These same thoughts occurred to me as I was trying to scrunch into the front seat of his ’91 Corolla without cracking any of the plastic disc boxes messily lining the floor. Given my background, I recoiled at this clue of what his closets at home must look like. A momentary panic set in. But then I said to myself: Marcy Lee, you knew from the start that Neil was a great orthodontist, and very neat, and where did that get you? Insulted and abandoned on prime-time network television three years later, that’s where.
I know my track record in the man department does not inspire confidence. But trust me on this one. Besides, as I kept trying to reassure myself during the half-hour ride to Astoria: This wasn’t a date. We were just having lunch.
A long lunch, as it turned out.
The restaurant was a small, unpretentious jewel only recently discovered by Zagat. We arrived a little after twelve-thirty and stayed until around four, by which time some of the other tables were occupied by seniors there to take advantage of the early-bird dinner specials.
Here is what I found out about my companion, apart from his weakness for extra-spicy Kung Pao Chicken. Cliff was raised in Plainview, Long Island, which I wouldn’t have guessed, since he retained as little of his Long Island accent as I retain of Brooklynese. He was a big sports guy in high school, which led to a track scholarship to Cornell, where he graduated (barely, he claimed) a couple of years before I finished Barnard. Since then, best as I could piece together, he’d held different jobs. Lately, he told me, he’d been working “in production,” which I took to mean that he was some kind of packaged-goods middle manager. Not much glamour to it, I supposed, but a lot of free samples.
He wasn’t a doctor, which would disappoint my mom. But, if we ended up going out, at least I could tell her he wasn’t some out-of-work bum.
Somehow I never did find out what Cliff was doing at Filthy Rich! But he said it was “spunky” the way I threw the ring at Neil and gave him what for. “Unlike Lou Grant,” he explained, drawing a contrast to the gruff but lovable newsroom boss on The Mary Tyler Moore Show that bespoke a certain sitcom savvy, “I like spunk. Actually, I like it a lot.” He made it clear he wasn’t just being a Good Samaritan picking up the ring and selling it for me; he wanted an excuse to meet me.
Oh, and this is important: Cliff said that while he had come close to marriage a couple of times, he had never tied the knot. He broke up with his last steady girlfriend, a veterinarian specializing in exotic birds, he explained, because he began to get the feeling she cared for her feathered patients more than she cared for him. Cliff said that was more than a year ago.
Mostly, however, we didn’t talk about Cliff. Mostly, we talked about me, which I wasn’t exactly used to after three years of Neil’s steady blathering about his amazing break-throughs in orthodontics. Cliff just kept peppering me with questions, even to the point of exploring my close but complicated relationship with my mother, which, I realized while talking it over, had become even more complicated in the aftermath of Filthy Rich!
For my mother, I explained, the whole idea of being in People was a dream come true. It’s not really that she’s shallow. It’s just she can blot out the humiliating reason People was interested. She’s like the rest of America, which sees celebrity as a laudable achievement in and of itself.
“So what makes you different?” Cliff wanted to know. “You obviously grew up loving television. Classic comedies at least, though not Sonny and Cher.”
“That was a variety show,” I reminded him. It was still a sore point. But thinking about it, my resistance to being celebritized was probably a form of delayed rebellion. I have one friend who was dragged to Loehmann’s by her mother so much as a kid, she now refuses to buy anything on sale. Me, I didn’t want to be famous for being dumped by my boyfriend on a game show, even if it was in prime time. I’d gotten some interesting offers, though. I told Cliff about the one from kosher Baco Bits.
Cliff paid the check, and I was tying on the bandanna again, getting ready to leave, when our server, a silver-haired Chinese lady who didn’t speak any English, returned to the table and started waving her order pad in my face. She kept repeating something in Chinese, and the more we tried to tell h
er we didn’t understand, the more agitated she seemed to become. Finally, her son, the restaurant’s owner, came over.
“Please excuse Mother,” he said. “She saw you on TV, that Filthy Rich! She wants your autograph.”
Cliff and I looked at each other and laughed. Then, naturally, I obliged this new fan. “Best wishes,” I wrote, “Marcy Lee Mallowitz.” Next to my name, I drew a smiley face, something I intentionally omitted when I signed for the unlikable Mrs. Schwartz from my building. I also posed for a picture with the owner. If I ever return to the place, I thought, I fully expect to find it hanging on the wall by the tiny coatroom in the front of the restaurant, along with pictures of the governor, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Tony Bennett, and the owner’s other famous diners.
* * *
On Gilligan’s Island, Jim Backus played the blustery millionaire Thurston Howell III. What was the name of his flighty society wife?
a. Muffy
b. Lovey
c. Mimsey
d. Lulu
See correct answer on back….
* * *
* * *
ANSWER
b. Lovey
* * *
Nine
It occurs to me that I haven’t told you yet about Ellewina Nash Goldberg, my all-time favorite Personal Life Coaching client. Ellewina, as readers of the society pages may already know, was the daughter of Aldous Nash, the rabid right-wing industrialist and mortal enemy of Franklin Roosevelt. Her rebellion against her family took the form of marrying a Jewish socialist from Queens, Myron Goldberg, whom she met at a Norman Thomas rally in the thirties. Their marriage, which lasted half a century and produced three daughters, all of whom live in big mansions in Greenwich, ended when Myron quite unexpectedly ran off with the nubile eighteen-year-old waitress who served him fruit cocktail at a buffet fund-raising dinner he attended with Ellewina at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach.
Well, to say Myron “ran off” is actually something of a misnomer, as by then the cad was in the early stage of Parkinson’s disease and got around using a walker. But, of course, that made the situation no less painful for poor Ellewina.
By the time Ellewina reached out to me for coaching, her father was long gone, and she herself was a widow. Myron, not long after dashing off with his young cutie, had expired from a heart attack brought on by the mysterious Chinese herbs he’d taken to boost his libido. Well into her seventies, Ellewina was hampered by poor eyesight and slowed by advancing arthritis in her joints, but was otherwise in decent health.
Moreover, unlike a lot of oldsters, Ellewina did not have to worry about money. As her father grew older, he became quite fond of Myron and put Ellewina back in his will. Indeed, near his death at the age of ninety-two, old Mr. Nash wrote a much-admired op-ed piece for The New York Times in which he expressed regret at his previous anti-Semitism and publicly resigned his membership in several exclusive clubs, all as a prelude to explaining his recent decision to convert to Judaism.
Anyway, Ellewina sought my help to get rid of the terrible depression she’d fallen into as a result of hanging out with people her own age.
“All they do is sit around and complain about their latest ailment,” she said. “Isn’t it possible anymore to have a friendly conversation where no one uses the words bowel or bladder? I can’t listen anymore. I know it sounds silly at my advanced age, but I need to change my life.”
My strategy was to get Ellewina actively engaged in the various charitable causes she supported instead of simply handing the money to the New York Community Trust to dole out.
The going wasn’t always smooth. There was the time, for example, when Ellewina threw a party at her vast seaside estate in Southampton to raise money for impoverished Native Americans out west. “We must help our Indians” was her mantra as she greeted each new arrival, most of whom came clad in elaborate beaded outfits, thinking the soiree was a costume party. But the event probably wouldn’t have generated so much bad press had it not been for the decision to hand out fuzzy dice in authentic Native American hues as the party favor. What can I say? I was young, and just starting out in the Personal Coaching game. I take the blame, totally.
But I more than made up for that travesty by my next move. I persuaded Ellewina to endow a new charity for inner-city youth, the Groucho Foundation, she called it. She came up with that name, she told me, having read that Oprah Winfrey called her company Harpo Productions. I explained that Harpo is only Oprah spelled backward. I suggested instead the Ellewina Nash Goldberg Foundation. But there was no moving Ellewina when her mind was already made up. “Groucho was my favorite of the brothers,” she said.
What matters is that the Groucho Foundation has helped a lot of kids. It also helped Ellewina by giving her a new sense of purpose, as well as a dandy excuse to eschew her crabby contemporaries and hang out with the energetic young staff members we hired for the program.
She frequently thanked me for getting her off her “lazy duff.” But after those first few productive sessions together, it was never clear to me which of us was the coach, and who was being helped more. We had become friends.
One day, I accompanied Ellewina when she visited a daycare center, supported almost entirely by her foundation, in a poor section of the Bronx. By now her charitable activities had made her a well-recognized New York icon, and she always made it a point not to “dress down” when she went on one of these inspection tours, so as “not to disappoint.” For this occasion, she wore a turquoise-and-gold brocade number that was elegant in an Old World sort of way, and could have passed for drapes.
The staff of the center, who greeted her like a movie star, had obviously gone to a lot of trouble to prepare a special lunch: inexpensive packaged bologna and other choice cold cuts on Wonder bread. When the platter was presented to her, I didn’t know what to expect. Honestly, I wasn’t sure whether she’d ever seen white bread with crust before. She could easily have declined the fare, pleading another engagement, or that she had already eaten. Instead the spunky doyenne surveyed the jars of mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise proudly arrayed on a drab metal table, and then took a little of each before biting enthusiastically into her bologna and American cheese sandwich. “My,” she said, her mouth still full of cheap processed meat, “what lovely sauces.”
I remember thinking at the time, I wish I could be like Ellewina and see “lovely sauces” in crummy store-brand jars of condiments.
Ellewina died peacefully in her sleep shortly after that trip, her demise totally unrelated to eating the sandwich. Back alone in my apartment and nervously popping chocolates after my pleasant, unexpected outing with Cliff Jentzen, I had a vivid flashback of that day with Ellewina. She would have liked him, I thought, even though he had ended an otherwise swell afternoon on a crummy note of vagueness by mumbling the three most dreaded words in the male vocabulary: “I’ll call you.”
I casually flipped on the TV, catching the tail end of Entertainment Tonight. I was just in time to hear perky Mary Hart pose a disconcerting question—“Where’s Marcy?” As the screen showed the well-worn tape of me angrily throwing the ring at Neil the other night, she provided viewers with this gripping status report:
“Offers of television deals and commercial endorsements keep pouring in for Marcy Lee Mallowitz, the thirty-four-year-old Personal Life Coach whose feisty response to getting ditched by her orthodontist boyfriend on So You Want to Be Filthy Rich! the other night won the nation’s hearts and admiration. But in a puzzling first that is said to have even close friends scratching their heads, this television natural seems reluctant to step into the spotlight, choosing, at least for now, to remain holed up incommunicado in her Greenwich Village apartment. Mental health experts consulted by ET were divided on whether her aberrant behavior indicates a pathologically weak or strong sense of self. Among the many offers and invitations awaiting her response is one to appear at a star-studded cocktail fund-raising reception in Los Angeles next month for BIG TV�
�s NOW, a charitable group working to bridge the nation’s entertainment divide by selling name-brand projection television sets on a discount basis to poor families whose present TV is more than two years old and has a screen size under thirty-six inches. Tomorrow, in an ET exclusive, we will examine this new phenomenon of reality-show fame, and delve into the history and implications of the ongoing story some leading media critics are now calling ‘Marcygate.’”
Marcygate? I said to myself as I reached for the remote and pressed the off button in disgust.
Watergate and Monicagate I get. But what did I ever do to deserve Marcygate? I’ve never taken part in a burglary or abused people’s civil liberties. Nor have I ever had sex with a president inside the Oval Office. Ditto outside the Oval Office. Of course, I don’t claim to speak for my good friend Lois.
* * *
All but one of these talented comics was featured on the ill-fated Mary Tyler Moore variety show, Mary, that was canceled after only three airings. Who avoided the fiasco?
a. David Letterman
b. David Brenner
c. Dick Shawn
d. Michael Keaton
See correct answer on back….
* * *
* * *
ANSWER
b. David Brenner
* * *
Ten
When I got up the next day, it was already well past noon. My delay in rising let me enjoy a vivid dream that I was back on Filthy Rich! with Neil, the creep, and everything was unfolding just as it really had. I still messed up on Teri Garr, only instead of harmlessly throwing the piddling ring, I threw Kingman’s bulky game monitor, which Kingman ripped off its base and kindly handed to me, saying, “I don’t like that guy.” In my dream, I effortlessly hurled the monitor at Neil’s rotten head, instantly causing him to drop to the ground, dying, as the audience stood in unison wildly applauding my bold gesture.
Filthy Rich Page 8
