Show Business Kills (30 page)

  
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The Power and
the Glory

I
t’s taken me nearly fifty years of existing on this planet to become reasonably conscious. You all lived through it with me,
and you know my philosophy has always been “Any road up the mountain,” and you’ve watched me try them all. I’ve been ested
and Rolfed and T.M.’d, not to mention the fact that I know Marianne Williamson personally and once sat at Werner Erhard’s
dinner table. I’m constantly seeking the word, the teacher, the teachings, the way to heal the planet and myself in the bargain.
And through it all I have finally evolved a theory about human behavior, and here it is.

If you listen carefully to what somebody says about themselves during the first fifteen minutes after you make their acquaintance,
they’ll tell you everything you need to know about them forever. In fact, the seeds of why your relationship with that person
will succeed or fail can always be found if you look back at those minutes.

Example. A few years before I met Billy, there was that man Ronny Bates, who I met at a wrap party of some show over at MTM.
He was very good-looking and very bright and while we were standing at a buffet table that the caterer had
decorated with baskets of vegetables, Ronny picked up a whole red cabbage and joked, “I’ll do anything to get a head in this
business.” Instead of realizing his truth was coming out in jest, I thought that was funny, and when he asked me out, I said
yes.

Ronny was struggling to get anything produced, and his company was foundering. I knew he liked the idea that I had a big part
on a hit television series at the time. Meaning I guess he liked the cachet of having me as his date at events he had to go
to in the business.

I was wanting to be in love so much that I kept trying to be in love with Ronny, but the chemistry just wasn’t there, and
I always had nagging doubts about his character, so I pounded it into a friendship, and for a long time if either Ronny or
I had an event to attend and no date, we’d each call the other. He’s very attractive, a good dancer, very gregarious, so it
worked out well. But I’ll get back to him.

Then I met the illustrious Billy Mann, and speaking of telling you everything you need to know in the first fifteen minutes,
on the fateful night I met Billy at the Improv, where he was a struggling young comic doing stand-up for no pay, he told me
proudly, “Television is my life!” Have I made my point about the first fifteen minutes telling all? I mean, didn’t
that
turn out to be the awful truth?

After we married, and Billy’s career took off, people came out of the woodwork. After that first night that Billy guest hosted
“The Tonight Show” and scored so big, there was no doubt that he was going to have his own show and own the town, and everyone
was after him.

But some people were too intimidated to call him, so instead they called me. Can you get him to appear at our charity
event? they’d ask me. Can you get him to do a guest spot on our show? Can you get him to endorse this product? People I hadn’t
seen since high school were calling as if it were yesterday. First they’d reminisce about old days I barely remembered, and
eventually, and I always knew it was coming, they’d hit me for one thing or another about Billy.

Coincidentally, although I believe it was Werner Erhard who always said “There are no coincidences,” I bumped into Ronny Bates
again on the lot at Fox one day, just after Billy and I separated. I was feeling very blue and I was out of work and I had
just come out of an interview where I knew I gave a lousy reading. And on my way to my car, I bumped into some woman who was
at Tech when we were there, I forget her name, but now she’s writing self-help books.

She said, “Wow! Marly Bennet! I read in
TV Guide
that you’re married to Billy Mann.” I was feeling very sorry for myself, and I said, “Well, we’re living apart now,” hoping
for a shred of sympathy, hoping that maybe a woman who wrote those books might offer me some great insight into how to recover
from a broken heart.

“Is it amicable?” she asked.

“Well, kind of,” I told her. “I mean, we have children together, so we’re trying to be as civil as possible.” And then she
said, “Well, is it civil enough for you to call him and ask him to put me on his show? I have to promote my book, and it’s
very important for me to get publicity.”

You know me, I was so enraged I was just about to rip her face off when Ronny Bates walked up. “I mean, we are old school
chums,” she was saying, “so maybe you could just use your influence to get me a five-minute spot?”

“Billy doesn’t decide who’s on the show,” Ronny said to
the woman very firmly, and I wanted to kiss him, he was like the cavalry rushing in to save me. “The producers and the talent
coordinators make those decisions, so Marly can’t help you.”

The woman introduced herself to Ronny, but when she found out he was just an out-of-work producer, she quickly decided she
had better places to be and left. When she walked away, he said to me, “Can’t people be insensitive assholes? Let’s go get
a cup of coffee and bad-mouth everyone in town.”

It was the perfect thing to say to me that day, and we went to the commissary and dished and had a great time. I was so lonely
and he seemed so interested in me that all of a sudden I was having these pictures in my mind of how some day, down the road,
we’d laugh and ask ourselves why I’d wasted all those years of being married to Billy, when Ronny and I should have been together
all along. About what a nice stepfather he’d be to the twins. And so what if he wasn’t a big hit in the business? Billy was
a big hit, and look what a miserable human being he was.

Anyway, finally Ronny got around to admitting that he had an agenda, too, but that it had nothing to do with Billy. What I
mean is, while we were sitting in the commissary and I was already as far down the road in my fantasy as whether or not the
twins would accept him, he got around to the fact that he needed something, and that his bumping into me that day wasn’t an
accident. But what he needed wasn’t from Billy. It was from me.

Ronny wanted to produce a “Movie of the Week” about battered women, and he knew I was very involved in the setting up and
funding of a shelter for them, and he asked if I
could help him get into the shelter to see what it was like, so he could talk to some of the women and really get a feel for
it. I told him that would probably be impossible, because the most crucial element of the shelters was their privacy.

I told him there were secret locations for the shelters, and special codes for entering, because the whole point of the shelters
is the safety and security of the women and children who stay in them. He said he knew that, and that he felt a profound responsibility,
and those were the words he used, profound responsibility, to make his movie honest, and that the only way it would be technically
correct and accountable to the seriousness of the problem was if he really got to know the situation from the inside.

How many years will I have to live here, work here, and have the rug pulled out from under me to know how people lie? I think
I was so flattered in the hailstorm of Billy’s popularity to feel that someone wanted something just from me that I forgot
to think about the awful material Ronny Bates had been connected with in the past. I also submit this as one of the worst
things I’ve ever done, because I wanted Ronny back in my life, needed someone so much, that though my intuition told me not
to be his entree into a world that was so fragile, I did it to keep him interested in me.

I said I’d help him, and that night when I got home I called around to some of the friends I’d made, caseworkers, and volunteers
who helped staff the houses. I gave them Ronny’s rap about how they could help him represent the shelters in a responsible
way by meeting with him.

It still amazes me that no matter how sophisticated people are, and no matter how protective they are of their privacy, there’s
this little bug that gets under their skin, that makes
them think, “Wow, show business. Maybe my aunt in Cincinnati will see this, and know I had something to do with it.” So they
agree to do things that they don’t necessarily think through.

I know I didn’t think it through, and pretty soon there was Ronny Bates, thanks to me, suddenly in everyone’s face at the
shelter, very intrusively asking them questions they didn’t even want to answer to themselves, let alone to this show-business
jackass. A real Hollywood kind of guy wearing what I noticed for the first time in the tiny living room of the shelter, because
it stood out so much in that environment, was too much gold jewelry.

I knew I had made a grave mistake, right after he sat next to one of the women and said, “Okay if I tape this, hon?” Battering
of yet another sort, and I was the accessory. So after he left that day, I asked all of the women if they felt in any way
violated by him, and they all said, “Oh, no. It’s important to get the word out to women everywhere that these shelters are
havens, places where they can come without feeling the kind of intimidation they live with in their lives, and Ron told us
that by talking with him, we were helping those other women. So we’re cool about it. We want to know when it’s going to be
on TV.”

I didn’t have the heart to explain the development process to them, and how Ronny Bates didn’t even have a deal on the material
anywhere, and what the network system was like. In fact I’m sure a lot of the people I deal with at these places don’t even
know I’m an actress, let alone Billy’s estranged wife.

Well, pretty soon Ronny Bates was at the shelter more than I was. One night he popped in and dropped off the leftovers
from a big luncheon he’d just had at his house. I mean I know it was a nice gesture, but he dropped off caviar at a shelter
for women who can’t afford to buy themselves tuna fish, because if it stayed in his refrigerator, he was afraid he’d eat it,
and it’s very high in cholesterol.

These are women who jump at any sound, who fear that any minute there’ll be a knock at the door, and it’ll be their estranged
husband showing up to blow their faces off with a gun, and this little hustler was stressing over his HDL to LDL ratio in
front of them, while he unpacked the Beluga. Isn’t it remarkable how I fall for every crumb bum on the earth?

When he finally had a story and a writer for the project, he asked if I would please read the script for authenticity, and
he told me he’d like to give me a producing credit on it for doing that. Well, you know how few and far between the acting
jobs can be? So I figured for a second that maybe this was the beginning of something new for me, and I told him to send the
first draft over as soon as it was ready.

A few days later it arrived, and I was feeling very pleased with myself in my new role as producer. I remember sitting down
at my desk that morning with a mug of coffee, feeling every inch an executive, thinking what I’d buy myself to wear to the
set the first day the movie was shooting. Maybe a black wool crepe suit.

And then I read the script, and as I turned each page, I felt more and more nauseous. The part of the woman who was the overseer
of the shelter was a dominatrix. She hated the women and treated them like whores and slaves. She conspired with the husbands,
lied to the wives, fed them swill, and took advantage of them sexually. I actually had a physical reaction. I felt chilled
and sick and sure he must have sent
me the wrong script. So I dialed Ronny’s house. But his machine answered.

I remember leaving a flustered message. Something like “Ronny, this can’t be the script we talked about, the responsible message
about battered women. They’ll think they’re going from the frying pan into the fire if we show them this point of view of
shelters. That’s no good. I mean, to begin with, none of it’s true. And it really is irresponsible to depict it this way.
So as your colleague and the technical adviser on this project I have to tell you, you can’t sell it this way. Because you
can’t let people see it in this terrible light.”