Show Business Kills (21 page)

The Snake Pit

S
ix weeks after Norman Braverman dumped me because he couldn’t make a commitment, he was committed to a nuthouse in New England.
I liked to tell myself that the little putz’s incarceration was a direct result of realizing he’d walked out on the greatest
woman he’d ever known. That one morning he woke up screaming my name, knew he’d lost me forever, and in torment and despair
turned in all his sharp instruments, checked out of Hollywood and into a bin.

But the truth was, nutsy Normie’s trip to the farm of funniness had nothing to do with me. This was a man who was certifiable
long before we met. Unfortunately, in my own needy state of mind I neglected to notice the clues. And there were a lot of
them. Number one, he was the only man I ever knew who faked orgasms. He’d put himself inside me, and within seconds I’d feel
him get soft.

I tried not to take it personally while I watched him writhe around on top of me making moaning noises so I would think he’d
lost his tumescence due to an explosion of passion. But anyone who’s been around, even a little bit, knows for certain that
after passionate explosions there has to be
evidence of the same. After a Norman Braverman explosion, despite the sound effects, there wasn’t so much as a drop.

Number two, crazy fucking Norman couldn’t decide if he had a life wish or a death wish. For example, he ate bran by the box
and exercised seven days a week for at least two hours a day no matter what the weather or his condition. But he also smoked
more than a pack of cigarettes a day, then drank himself to sleep every night.

Number three. The guy was neat, no, not neat, a better word would be compulsive. As in when he left the bathroom, he folded
the end of the toilet paper into an origami triangle, the way maids do in hotels to let you know they’ve been there to clean
up. In fact, Norman’s mother, who frequently came out to dinner with us, liked to tell a story about just how neat Norman
was when he was growing up.

“He ate all of his food symmetrically,” she bragged to me one night. “Normsie wouldn’t take a bite out of one side of a potato
chip unless he could take a bite of equal size out of the other side.” Now I happen to have a son myself, and I knew the behavior
she was describing was so nuts that if my kid had it, I’d take him by ambulance to the nearest shrink. But this was a woman
who thought everything her forty-year-old bachelor son did was genius. And she called him on the phone several times a day
to tell him so.

Which leads us headlong into symptom number four. A few of those calls happened to come in on a Saturday night when I had
a baby-sitter at my house taking care of Roger, and Norman and I were at his house, in bed. Trying to make love. But when
he heard his mother’s voice on the answering machine saying, “Hi, darling…,” he pulled himself away from me, shushed me as
if he was about to take an urgent
business call, and left me lying there while he chatted and dished with her.

You’re probably asking yourself why I stayed with him. Maybe because I was a single mother desperately trying to find a father
for my son. Maybe because I’m shallow and he was very good-looking. Tall and lean with thick black wavy hair and turquoise
eyes. Or more probably, I was hooked into him, because there’s something about people who walk the thin line between sanity
and bananas that’s charismatic.

But even more to the point, there was something in my own bottomless need that understood Norman’s. Both of us were in a trough
period in our careers that year. Norman had lost three big clients, and a fourth was threatening to walk out on him. I had
just been fired from Fox and didn’t have a prospect in sight. One month I’d been mentioned in
Los Angeles Magazine
in a column about female studio execs who were called “Movers and Shakers in The Biz,” and the next month I was counting
the cans in my pantry to see if there was enough Chunky vegetable soup to last until I got another job.

Actually, the embarrassing true reason I allowed Norman Braverman’s nutsy behavior to roll off me with about as much interest
as he did, and continued to have this so-called romance with him, was that I was on the rebound from another relationship
when I met him and desperately needed someone, anyone, to cling to. So I went on pretending he was the man for me, closing
my eyes to the fact that he wasn’t the man for anyone, particularly himself.

But the writing was on the wall, in this case a padded wall back east, in a lock-up building where Norman had been held for
a long time before I even heard about it. It was at a
brunch at the home of Joel and Sally, the couple who introduced me to Norman, that I got the news. I’d already decided that
I wasn’t going to go to the brunch, and I left the invitation sitting on my desk for weeks before I called to R.S.V.P. because
I was afraid Norman was invited, too, and I’d have to see him there and face the discomfort.

He had handled our breakup in such a cavalier way that even though I’d wished for months to somehow get the nerve to do it
myself, when Norman did it first, I was devastated. We were at his house one morning, it was summer, and Rogie was at sleep-away
camp, so I got to be at what Norman jokingly called “grown-up sleep-away camp.”

We’d had a so-so night before, and Norman was blowing his hair dry while I put on makeup at the bathroom counter next to him.
And out of nowhere, with the dryer’s screaming noise filling the air around us, Norman said, without ever taking his eyes
from his own reflection, “Ellen, I’ve been thinking a lot about the two of us, and I’ve decided I’m going to have to pass.”

“Pardon?” I said, dropping my Fabulash mascara wand, and noticing in horror when I grabbed it up from the ecru sisal bathroom
rug that it had left a little line of dark brown fibers next to my foot.

“I mean, we can still go to dinner tonight, but as far as the future goes, I’m giving it the Marty Robbins,” he said.

“Who?” I asked, putting my foot on the mascara spot so Norman wouldn’t see it, probably forcing the makeup so deep into the
pile that it would never come out.

“Marty Robbins,” he said, “Get it? El Paso.”

I didn’t get it until I was driving home. Giving it the Marty Robbins? Marty Robbins sang “El Paso.” Pass. He was passing
on having a relationship with me. The cleverness made me want to throw up. Made me sick that I’d ever spoken to a putz like
Norman Braverman, let alone been intimate with a man who ends a relationship by telling you he’s giving you the Marty Robbins.

Sally swore to me when I finally called to R.S.V.P. that there was no chance that Norman Braverman would show up at the brunch,
so while Roger went to a movie with a few of his friends, I went to the brunch. Who knew that the reason Norman wouldn’t be
there was that he was in occupational therapy, making a trivet out of popsicle sticks? That news came later.

It was a pretty, sunny Sunday morning at Sally and Joel’s, and I was chatting with some of the other guests over the poached
salmon, which I hadn’t touched because I was certain it had to be going bad in the sun. When the ice in my glass of Evian
melted, I went inside to get some more. Just as I was heading back outside, I saw Joel hurry down from upstairs. When he spotted
me, he walked purposefully over and pulled me into a corner of the living room.

“I guess you’ve heard about Norman?” he asked.

Heard about Norman. Oh no, I thought. By the look on Joel’s face I could tell that he was about to break some real bad news.
He’s going to tell me Norman’s getting married to someone else, was my first neurotic thought. That some other woman had accomplished
what I couldn’t.

“He’s in a hospital,” Joel told me confidentially. In a hospital, I thought. Well, that’s good news! Great news for me because
it means he’s definitely not coming to this party. I guess he’s giving it the old Marty Robbins. Ha, ha! The schmuck.

“And it’s very serious,” Joel said. His face was pale. Oh, God, I thought, my elation busted. Very serious is ominous, and
now terror tightened my throat. Very serious had to mean Norman had a communicable disease, which because of our close association,
I was about to learn that I had, too.

“Mental ward,” Joel said, putting a smile on his face, in spite of the chilling words he was offering, so that the couple
walking by us, an agent from CAA and his actress client, wouldn’t guess that Joel was telling me something horrifying about
someone those two people both knew. Of course, at that moment, to me, Joel’s last two words felt like the best ones I’d ever
heard, because they meant that whatever Norman had wasn’t contagious.

“The poor son of a bitch,” Joel said, and I had to laugh to myself that “poor son of a bitch” was a long way from the description
of a man who, only a brief few months before, in the days when Joel and Sally wanted to fix me up with him, was described
as “a real upstanding fabulous guy. A great catch!”

“He calls me every few days from the pay phone in that place,” Joel said with sadness in his eyes, and for a fleeting instant,
I was sure a joke was going to come next. That I was the dummy who had fallen for the old mental-ward set-up, and that any
minute I’d have to laugh at myself over it. But then Joel pointed to a telephone in the living room, where the hold light
was blinking. “He called me a few minutes ago, and while we were talking I mentioned that we were having a party today, and
that you were here and, Ellen… he wants to talk to you very much.”

“He does?” I said. And I was really flattered. “Really?” Now the important question here should be, why did it thrill
me to hear that a lunatic wanted to talk to me from the pay phone at the fruitcake factory? Why was my heart pounding as if
I’d just been informed I’d won the Oscar for my last picture? Why was I panicked about what I was going to say to the little
bozo who had dumped me in such a shitty way?

“You can take it upstairs,” Joel said, walking me to the bottom of the steps.

I walked slowly up the stairs, and when I arrived at the top I scouted around for a place where I could sit and talk to Norman
privately. I picked Joel and Sally’s cool white bedroom, an idyllic-looking spot with one of those damask duvet covers on
a big marshmallowy-looking comforter, and what seemed like a dozen huge white square pillows across the head of the bed.

I was having performance anxiety worse than I ever have when I go in to meet with the biggest stars, or talk story with the
biggest writers. So I sat down and tried to collect myself while I stared at the flickering light on the hold button calling
to me from the phone on the glass bedside table.

What does it look like at the other end of this call? I wondered. Is Norman in a straitjacket, while a big impatient male
orderly who looks like Lurch on “The Addams Family” holds the receiver of a pay phone to his ear? I glanced around the room
at the photos of Joel and Sally and their three daughters. Family pictures of the kind of family I actually thought for one
desperate moment I might have when my son gave me away to Norman Braverman. Which might have worked if I could have kept Norman
hard and/or off the phone with his mother. The phone.

I put my hand nervously on this one, then picked up the receiver, harboring the hope that maybe crazy Norman had
only been allowed three minutes per call, and because I’d walked upstairs too slowly, he was now being dragged back to his
room by the orderly, who would not be dissuaded by the offer Norman was probably making to represent him and get him a part
in a major motion picture. “A second lead,” I imagined Norman shrieking, “with your name above the title.”

“Hello?” I said.

“Hello, gorgeous,” Norman said back. And you want to know who’s really crazy? When he said that, I had an inexplicable rush
of feeling. A sorrow that made me instantly lose all memory of the passionless sex, the smoking, the drinking, and did I already
mention his mother? Somehow at that moment, which must have been a very lonely and low one for me, I could only remember every
good thing about him. The sweet way he kissed, the gentle way he dealt with his temperamental clients, the funny stories he
used to like to sit and tell me at the end of his long work days. The way he promised he’d be a great father for Roger.

“I hope I’m not spoiling the party for you,” he said. “It’s just that when Joel told me you were there, I realized how much
I wanted to hear your voice and tell you, probably too late, how sorry I am if I hurt you.”

“Well, thank you for that, Norman,” I said, wondering if he knew that I knew where he was calling from, or if Joel was supposed
to have kept that part a secret. I was trying to decide if I should tell him that I knew he was in the cracker mill or not,
when he said, “I guess you know where I am,” putting an end to that dilemma.

“I do.”

“Did Joel tell you that I’m in James Taylor’s old room?”
he asked, in what had to be the ultimate in Hollywood kitsch. Name-dropping the guy who inhabited the room in the booby hatch
before you did. I think I countered with, “How nice. And how long will you be staying?” in the same way the desk clerk at
Brown’s Hotel asked me last summer when I checked in.

“Hard to say, gorgeous, hard to say,” Norman answered in a sweet, sorrowful voice. “I could be in here for a long, long time.
I’m in real bad shape. If I wasn’t, do you think I could have ever walked out on a gem of a girl like you?”

Well, if you didn’t notice before what a fool I am, this ought to clinch it, because the minute Norman said that, I forgave
him not only for giving me the Marty Robbins, but for every injustice during our romance. I actually felt better about everything
that had happened between us, even though I suspected that only minutes earlier, this same person probably told his therapy
group that he was Louis the fucking Fourteenth. The flattery made me feel so okay about everything that when he asked me the
next question, I immediately said, “Of course.”

“Would it be all right if I called you from here now and then? When you’re at home? So we can really talk? Maybe I can explain
away some of the awful things I did to you, and if you’ll let me, I’d like to talk to Roger. I loved Roger, and I know I must
have hurt him, too, when I broke up with you.”