Soap Opera Slaughters Read online

  I followed her into the hall and to the closest flight of stairs. “Doesn’t anyone around here ever take the elevators?” I grumbled, my legs still stiff from climbing to the top floor with Florence.

  “Only the kids. The older cast members don’t trust the damn things, they’re too slow and decrepit. Last year, I—” She caught herself. “One of the actors got stuck between floors and held up taping for hours. It cost Ames a fortune in overtime and ever since, he’s had it in for...for that person.”

  “I suppose it’s no use asking who it was.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to be a gossip. The incident had nothing to do with Ed’s death.”

  Wardrobe was two floors below Makeup. A big room with two tiers of motorized racks for hanging garments, it resembled a large dry cleaning store. No one else was there, but a sewing machine stuttered furiously in a small adjacent chamber.

  Calling a greeting to the invisible tailor next door, Joanne rummaged through a rack of hangers. Each costume had a cardboard tag attached bearing the name of the character it was meant for scrawled upon it in red letters. I recognized many smart outfits I’d seen Joanne’s character, Eloise Savage, wear on the show. But the one she removed was a simple white hospital gown.

  “Fetching little number, isn’t it?” she said, her lips screwed into a rueful moue as she rooted some more through her personal costuming till she found a plain blouse and skirt I hadn’t seen her wear on the show for a long while. Draping them over her arm, she grimaced again at the skimpy bedgown. “God, I hope they let Eloise out of the hospital soon. Nobody looks any good in one of these damn things.”

  “Eloise is sick?” I blurted it out like an adolescent, immediately feeling foolish.

  “I plus three. We’re taping three weeks ahead of today’s episode.” Joanne laughed at my red. “It’s all right, I won’t think any the less of you.”

  “Well, as long as I’m exposed as a fan, what happened to her?”

  “Eloise is fine,” the actress confided. “She’s faking the symptoms of an obscure ailment so Matt will worry and fuss over her. Flaying on his weakness for protecting vulnerable dames, you know?”

  “Uh-huh.” A familiar tendency. It was odd hearing her talk about her character in third person, especially now that Umberto turned her into Eloise Savage (all but the hair still in rollers, which Eloise never would have allowed any man to see). I was also amused—and dismayed—at the childish pleasure I felt in picking up a scrap of “Riverday” plot not yet revealed to the general viewership. The trouble was, I didn’t know anyone I could tell it to, and what good is privileged information if you can’t leak it?

  Leaving the wardrobe depot, we descended one more flight and passed along another nondescript corridor that would not have been out of place in Cocteau’s drab impersonal vision of the underworld.

  Presently, we came to a door with a key protruding from its lock. Joanne said it was her dressing room. I reminded her of the security bulletin urging actors not to do so with the key, but she shrugged it off.

  “Haven’t you noticed most of these doors have no numbers? It’s hell when you’re hurrying to make a change and can’t even find your own room.”

  “But aren’t you afraid somebody’ll steal your things?”

  “If they want my clothes that bad, they’re welcome to them. That’s all they’ll get. I only carry a few dollars in my jeans, and nothing but odds and ends in my purse. No credit cards or checks. The only time I lock it is when I change.”

  She opened the door and nodded for me to go in. I stepped inside a tiny windowless chamber, carpeted and neat but much smaller and plainer than Florence’s dressing room. Joanne hadn’t exaggerated; there really was nothing of value. The makeup table held a box of tissues, a cold cream jar and a paperback novel, nothing else. Her battered brown purse sat on top of a bureau. The only other furniture was a chair, a cot and a clothes tree.

  She hung the garments she was carrying over the latter piece of furniture, then, turning to me, asked if I would mind closing the dressing room door. The redhead then took hold of the bottom of her orange T-shirt and began pulling it over her head. As she did, she turned her back to me. I noticed no evidence on that smooth expanse of a brassiere strap.

  Other performers I’ve known are quite casual about who sees them undraped, so long as it’s onstage. The first time I met Harry Whelan, for instance, he was rehearsing Hamlet in the nude. But Joanne wasn’t performing in front of a camera at the moment, and she might just as easily have asked me to wait in the hall. The fact that she did not want the door open indicated she was at least a little concerned about her modesty, but why would she object to a passerby glimpsing her when the close-hand presence of a virtual stranger seemed of no consequence to her at all? Was it her alter ego, Eloise Savage, coming to the fore? Eloise would derive covert pleasure from a situation that was slightly naughty.

  I pushed the portal shut and would have remained facing in that direction, but there was no point, the inside of the door was fitted with a full-view mirror. As I noted it, Eloise half-turned and our eyes met in the surface of the glass. Her T-shirt was halfway up. She looked at me and there was the briefest of hesitations before she pulled it up over her breasts, turning at the same instant so I saw her back again. Was I wrong or had there been the merest trace of a mischievous smile playing at the corners of her mouth?

  “I don’t like to go outside in old clothes once I’m Eloise,” she said. “We sex symbols have to preserve our mystique. Oh, damn! I’m stuck. Can you help me?”

  Her T-shirt was suddenly tangled in hair rollers. I stepped behind to assist. Joanne rested gently against me as I worked carefully to unfetter the garment without undoing Umberto’s handiwork.

  Spartan discipline has its limits. As she rested the length of her warm body against mine, I fumbled with the recalcitrant garment. She made no effort to prevent my eyes from wandering, and wander they did. Neither her baggy T-shirt, nor the TV cameras did her figure real justice. I forced myself to breathe slowly, but it was complicated by the fact that her chest rose and fell in unison with mine. It would be easy to succumb to the irrelevant attraction of the moment, and I didn’t think she’d much object, but my life had no need of further romantic complications, so I made a great effort to concentrate and succeeded to the extent of finally extricating the T-shirt from her coiffure.

  “There,” I said, quickly retiring to a neutral corner, “you’re free now.”

  “Thank you,” Joanne said, demurely holding her hands in front of her bosom as she turned to bestow another enigmatic smile on me. She then tossed the shirt over a chair, turned her back on me again and proceeded to strip off her jeans. Wearing nothing now but panty hose and briefs, she selected a silk scarf from her bureau and tied it about her head.

  I made no more pretense of looking away. Except for her surprisingly ample bosom, I saw she was slim almost to the point of boyishness. Not an extra ounce anywhere. She began to don the blouse and skirt she got from Wardrobe.

  All the while I watched, I wondered who I was really looking at.

  “We’re not supposed to wear our costumes outside,” Joanne said, “so we won’t use the front door.” She opened an emergency fire exit, ignoring the security bulletin attached to it. I stepped through onto the Fifty-third Street sidewalk some distance west of the main entrance.

  Turning, I saw Joanne close the door carefully so it wouldn’t latch. “No wonder the bulletins I read use so many capital letters,” I chided her. “You know you really shouldn’t do that.”

  “I know, Gene, I know, but everybody does. This door’s closer to the sound stage than the front entrance.”

  “And does everyone leave it unlatched?”

  “I guess. If I go to lunch and slam it, chances are it’ll be open, anyway, when I get back.”

  “I see. Speaking of security infractions, did you ever go sunbathing on the roof?”

  I never got an answer. Mentioning the
roof reminded her that Niven landed somewhere on West Fifty-third. Joanne’s wide hazel eyes turned upwards. Color fled from her cheeks.

  “Gene...do you know exactly where he fell?”

  I pointed west towards Twelfth Avenue, which was, fortunately, the opposite direction from the way we were headed.

  “Good.” She smiled wanly. “I just didn’t want to...didn’t want to walk past...you know?”

  “Yes.”

  She was a good actress. She’d been pretending ever since I’d met her in the Colson-Ames office.

  On the way to Tenth Avenue, we talked about Ed Niven. Joanne said she hadn’t been close to him in so long that she had no idea whether he was or wasn’t seeing another woman behind Florence’s back, but she fervently hoped so. I asked her what she was doing Saturday when he fell, and she gave me the same answer Florence did: studying lines alone at home, no witnesses.

  “An occupational hazard,” she told me. “That’s how anybody with a leading role on a soap spends most of her time.”

  I asked where she lived, and she named an address some twenty minutes’ walk from WBS.

  Turning south on Tenth, she took me to a small pharmacy a few doors in. The druggist on duty at the back of the store looked up and, as soon as he saw her, creased his into an enormous smile.

  “Oh! Oh! Joannele, you were such a bad girl Friday! You should look ashamed!”

  Joanne laughingly introduced us. “Gene, meet my guardian angel, Manny Melnick. Manny, Gene.”

  The rotund young man shook my hand and bestowed a broad wink. “A shayna maidele, Gene. You’re dating?” “Manny,” she interposed, “I’ve already got a mother.” “So? Till she comes to New York, I’m her surrogate.” “Manny, dear, this is a friend. Don’t scare him off.” “Friends don’t scare off, only boyfriends.” He peered at me over his spectacles. “You hear what she says, hah? What she means is a whole different story. So now have I scared you off, or are you really her friend?”

  Before I could answer, she affectionately reproved him. “Maybe, Mister Melnick, you could spare five minutes away from matchmaking to fill a prescription?”

  “You can always tell an actor,” he declared, winking at me again. Two minutes, and she starts to talk like whoever she’s with.” He took the empty medicine container from her, snapped his heels together and saluted. “Madam commands, Manny obeys.”

  He quickstepped his way to the drug department as Joanne began browsing through various cosmetics and personal care items. “He’s got a crush on me, I think,” she confided, picking up a tube of toothpaste and a bottle of shampoo. “If he were only single...

  “That’s refreshing,” I remarked. “You’re one of the few beautiful women I’ve ever met not simply looking for a matching ornament.”

  “Listen, I’ve gone the pinup photo route, and got just what I deserved. Cardboard. At my age, a woman gets a little hysterical about never having a home and kids. I thought it was easy to give them up for a career, but now, I don’t know. It could be very easy to lean on a man like Manny.”

  “You realize that statement could be construed as unfashionably unliberated?”

  “Oh, hell, Gene! I was liberated ten years before it turned into a cliché. Most actresses were way ahead of the carnival. I’m just about sick and tired of always hearing commitment equated with loss of identity.” She regarded me pensively. “Sometimes I wonder if this so-called ‘independence’ isn’t just a fancy contemporary term for being afraid to trust in anyone’s enduring interest in what or who you try to become.”

  “Don’t get mad at me, I was only testing to see how you’d react.”

  “Uh-huh. Wondering whether I’d hoist myself by the popular petard. Who were you comparing me to?”

  That stung. I felt ashamed that I’d been measuring her in my mind against Hilary without giving a single thought to the woman I’d spent the night with.

  Just then, the pharmacist returned with her refill. He put it on the counter and wrote up her order on a charge-a-plate. When Manny came to the shampoo, he stopped.

  “Better not buy this brand.”

  “Why not? It’s new. I want to give it a try.”

  He pointed silently to the label. She looked where he indicated and suddenly burst out laughing.

  “Migod, Manny, just because it’s got beer in it, I’m not going to drink it!”

  “Shah... He jerked his thumb at me.

  “Manny, it’s not something I’m ashamed to admit. I’m an alcoholic, Gene.”

  Which told me what she was having refilled.

  Antabuse is used in rehabilitative therapy for alcoholism. The effect of disulfiram (the generic name for the drug) is to trigger off a severe bout of sickness in a drinker who goes off the wagon to any degree whatsoever. Antabuse is powerful enough to incapacitate a patient who sneaks a sip days or even weeks after ingesting the tablets. The drug is prescribed cautiously, since some people suffer worse attacks than others. In rare cases, mixing Antabuse with alcohol might even be fatal.

  “Joannele,” Manny said, clasping her hands in his, “one of my other customers on disulfiram developed a bad rash from an alcohol rubdown. You want maybe your scalp should turn red for the color cameras?”

  “See how he takes care of me?” Joanne kissed his forehead.

  “Did she leave lipstick?” he asked. When I told him there was indeed a smear, he beamed. “I’ll never wash my again!”

  Blowing him another kiss, Joanne returned the shampoo to the shelf she got it from and chose another brand.

  On the way back to the studio, I brought up the subject of the animosity between her and Florence McKinley.

  “No mystery there,” she said, stepping into the street to circle around a truck blocking off the sidewalk. “The Dragon Lady resents me because I was once close to Ed, and now that he’s gone, you can bet she’s going to use her influence with Joe Ames to have me written out.”

  “Did she really take Ed away from you?”

  “She told you that?” Her eyes blazed briefly, but the fire quickly died. ‘I’m sure that’s what she’d like to have everyone believe, but it’s not true. It’s my own fault the relationship ended.”

  “How? Why? It’s obvious you’ve never stopped loving him.”

  “But not half so much as I adored myself in those dim, dark prehistoric times. Ed wanted the marriage shtick, kids and all Smartass little Joanne thought her precious career came first. So I had an abortion without even telling Ed I was carrying his child. He found out, and that ended us. Eventually, he settled for the Dragon Queen, God knows why. I went out and bought a dog I could pretend is my kid, and here I am, stuck with one mutt and Numero Uno.” A bitter smile. “Who says life ain’t a soap opera?”

  We crossed Eleventh in silence. The main entrance of WBS now was cluttered with five or six fans of both sexes armed with cameras and autograph books. The fat guy Lara and I posed for in the early A.M. was gone; I’d seen him trailing behind me and Joanne on the way over to Manny’s pharmacy, but he wasn’t around now, so I guessed he got all the autographs he’d come for. In the midst of the present knot of “Riverday” admirers I noticed an elderly bespectacled man in expensive, though slightly garish sportswear. As he shoved his way up the steps and into the front lobby, I asked Joanne whether she knew who he was.

  “Yes. I almost didn’t recognize him. His name’s Woody. Why?”

  Before I could reply, the fans converged. Joanne signed the proffered pages politely, pleasantly. One motherly woman in her sixties shyly asked if there was any chance “Martha” would be out?

  “I don’t know whether Ms. McKinley is involved in today’s episode,” Joanne lied, “but if you give me your name and address, I’ll see to it that she sends you an autographed picture.”

  Effusive thanks. The woman jotted the information on a diary page and tore it out for Joanne to take with her.

  On the way to the side door we’d come out of, Joanne grumped about Florence’s aversion towar
d the fans.

  “You’re supposed to sign autographs, it’s part of the job. We’re symbols, that’s what keeps us working. We’ve got a responsibility to the viewers.”

  “But are you personally going to force Florence to mail that woman a picture?”

  “Are you kidding? Forging the Dragon Lady’s scrawl is Micki Lipscomb’s job.”

  The barrier behind which lay the sound stage was painted with big white letters: DO NOT OPEN DOOR WHEN RED LIGHT IS ON. The light was off.

  “I have to run upstairs and get the hospital shmatah I’m supposed to wear,” Joanne said, “but I’ll go in and check where they are first. If your clearance came through, I‘ll let you know.”

  “Thanks. I’ll wait here.”

  She began to open the thick padded door, but stopped with her hand on the knob. “Gene, did I tell you everything you need to know?”

  “Well, I may think of something else later.”

  “I hope you do.” The smile she gave me was pure Eloise Savage.

  She disappeared behind the door, and I was stuck once more on the unwonderful side of the looking-glass.

  I WAITED A WHILE, but nobody came out of the sound stage door. Lack of sleep was catching up with me, and I began to nod on my feet, but a sudden sharp voice at my elbow brought me awake.

  “Well, well, how all occasions do inform...

  No mistaking that tart timbre. I turned and saw Hilary standing near me in the hall, hair tied behind in that tight knot which was generally a signal that she was in a no-nonsense mood. The lines of her light gray suit were as severe as her expression.

  “Well, well, how all occasions do inform...

  “Maybe.”

  “My God,” she muttered, “you sure work fast.”

  “Look,” I told her, unwilling to involve myself in our customary verbal fisticuffs, “I’m going to pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  An angelic smile. “How traditional, Gene.”

  I counted silently before responding. “Hilary, the only reason I’m here is to investigate Ed Niven’s death.” It was not without calculation; it reminded her who had the license.