Don't You Forget About Me Read online

  contents

  title page

  Join us for our “Totally Awesome” 20-year Reunion of Bethel…

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter seventeen

  chapter eighteen

  chapter nineteen

  chapter twenty

  chapter twenty-one

  chapter twenty-two

  chapter twenty-three

  chapter twenty-four

  chapter twenty-five

  chapter twenty-six

  chapter twenty-seven

  chapter twenty-eight

  chapter twenty-nine

  chapter thirty

  chapter thirty-one

  chapter thirty-two

  chapter thirty-three

  about the author

  also by jancee dunn

  copyright

  * * *

  Join us for our “Totally Awesome” 20-year Reunion of Bethel Memorial High School Class of 1988!!!! (Now it’s James J. Florio High School, but it’ll always be Bethel to us!!! Right, gang?)

  Where: the Hamilton Park Hotel & Conference Center

  When: November 28–29. Business/Festive attire. For those who are arriving on Friday night, there is an informal get-together at Playmaker’s Bar & Grille starting at 5:30 p.m. Although not an “official reunion event,” we agreed that it might be fun.

  Saturday’s Schedule: Bethel Rams homecoming game, Welcome Cocktail Hour, 5:00. Buffet dinner at 7:00. Activities at 8:00: Door prizes, slide show. Music provided by DJ Noyz—lots of 80s tunes!!!! And to our “missing” classmates who have signed on to our website—Thanks, guys!!! But we are still having trouble locating 31 classmates, so please let Patti Choi (now Patricia C. Bradford) know if you have a way to contact them.

  Wanted: photos for our slide show and pics of your kids for our special Family Bulletin Board! E-mail Randy “Flem” Fleming at [email protected]. This night should prove to be unforgettable. SEE YOU THERE!

  * * *

  chapter one

  “Lillian!” Vi caroled from her dressing room. “Can you come in here? We need your opinion.”

  “Coming,” I called. I already knew what I was going to see. The same scene replayed itself every week or so.

  Vi stood in the middle of the room, hands on hips. She was wearing one of her usual ensembles: a mint-green pantsuit in what she called a “fine-grain” polyester, a red and green scarf knotted at her throat, colossal red glasses, and shiny white enamel earrings the size of half-dollars. Vi’s wardrobe assistant, Keysha, threw me a pleading glance.

  “Keysha says this suit makes me look old,” Vi said with mock anger.

  Keysha sighed. “Mint green is not a good look on anyone. Not on hospital workers, and not on you.” She adjusted Vi’s lapels. “Could you just break it up with a different pair of pants?”

  “It’s pistachio, not mint green, first of all.” Vi turned and regarded me. “Lillian, does this make me look old?” Whenever Vi showed me an outfit, she thrust her foot forward in a ninety-degree angle, like a fifties fashion model.

  It was probably not the time to remind her that she was seventy-four. I took in the entire getup and found myself smiling. I loved Vi’s cheery fruit-salad outfits, even when they were slightly demented, but then I always preferred the “before” entry in makeover shows. What was so wrong with piling on accessories and wearing colors not found in nature?

  “You look terrific,” I said. Terrific was one of Vi’s favorite words. I had adopted it over the years, along with marvelous, nifty, and spectacular. If any particular day was not spectacular, Vi would will it into being so.

  Keysha sighed in defeat. “Tell makeup to put a little more rouge on you, at least, so your skin doesn’t look green,” she told Vi. Rouge was another word that we all had picked up.

  I followed Vi into the makeup room to go over the day’s schedule. Usually she had two guests on Tell Me Everything! With Vi Barbour, but this morning she had landed one of the fifties’ biggest names, Gene Murphy, so he had the full hour. Of course, in his heyday, Gene would never have deigned to appear on a minor network chat show with an autumn-years demographic, but these days he was happy to guest on a program where he’d never have to explain who he was to a blank-faced twenty-two-year-old production assistant. On Tell Me Everything!, Vi would announce grandly that a man like Gene Murphy needed no introduction.

  “Gene will be arriving in fifteen minutes,” I said. “His only request is that he wants to talk about a cable documentary he’s featured in about the studio system in the forties. Oh, and he says he has a ‘cute story’ about a contest the studio ran that involved a date with him, so be sure and ask about that.”

  Vi nodded. “Check, and check,” she said. Vi retained everything. Never once did she require notes or a cue card. She grabbed my arm. “And did you find those books that Monte wanted?”

  “I sent them yesterday.” I had ceased being a mere producer years ago. I was social secretary, shrink, stylist. To my husband Adam’s eternal irritation, the phone started ringing at dawn, when Vi awoke to do her “calisthenics,” basically a series of swishing movements. Her constant consulting with me maintained a reassuringly bustling level of activity in her life.

  A production assistant rushed in. “He’s here,” she said, panting.

  I looked at my watch. Gene was ten minutes early. I had friends who worked at other talk shows in New York—hair splitters would say “more popular prime-time talk shows with millions of viewers”—who exchanged war stories of agonizing waits for rap stars or hungover starlets who insouciantly rolled in thirty seconds before they were due onstage. This was never a problem with guests from the Greatest Generation, who would tell me repeatedly that had they ever been late at MGM, Louis B. Mayer would have thrown them right out the door.

  “Where’s my girl?” Gene boomed from outside the makeup room door.

  “In here, Gene!” Vi trilled. She leapt from the makeup chair as he burst in. No one gave a more enthusiastic welcome than Vi, who told him that he looked spectacular and proclaimed to the younger staffers that they were in the presence of a living legend.

  Gene, tall, trim, and straight-backed, was matinée-idol casual in a safari jacket and brown ascot, his wavy toupee perfectly arranged. After giving Vi a kiss on both cheeks, he sat in the makeup chair and crossed his long legs. “Hello, Maria, my dear,” he said to our makeup artist. As a repeat guest, he loved being on a first-name basis with all of Vi’s staff members. Maria gingerly dabbed foundation on his forehead with a cosmetic sponge. She was famously tactful and discreet, for no one is more insecure than a star in his Lifetime Achievement years. Maria had been with Tell Me Everything! since its inception a decade ago, and during that time she had navigated countless cravats, turbans, hairpieces, and hats. She knew to stock a constant supply of Brylcreem and tangerine lipstick. Without changing expression or breaking her easy patter, she took requests to yank up the creased sides of faces and tape them behind ears to achieve temporary tautness, apply hemorrhoid cream to diminish eye bags, pencil in patchy eyebrows, camouflage liver spots, and spackle various crevices. She was not fazed when a famous R&B producerinhisseventiesaskedthatsheuseeyebrowpenciltopainstakingly draw curls on his balding head while he chatted on his cell phone.

 
Gene turned to me. “Hello, Lillian, darling. Still married?”

  I smiled. “Still married.”

  He snapped his fingers. “Drat. Well, you know I’ll always be here, waiting, when you come to your senses.”

  “You rascal, Gene,” I said stiltedly. I had zero flirting skills.

  He looked at me approvingly. “You know, you really do look a little like Elizabeth Taylor,” he said. “Slimmer, especially around the bustline—I don’t offend, do I? But you do have the same dark hair, same eyes—a double row of eyelashes, just like she does. I dated her once, you know.”

  I knew, because Gene dropped it into every conversation. He was soon hustled onto Vi’s small stage, which held two fatigued mauve armchairs and a little table. I watched the monitor, my arms folded, but I wasn’t worried. Usually each show proceeded soothingly apace. If we featured slapstick comedians, a little controlled wackiness might break out—maybe one would turn the table over or dump his glass of water over his head—but otherwise the hour was filled with G-rated tales of USO tours or the tantrums of a long-dead director.

  “Gene, I understand you have a marvelous story for our viewers about working for MGM,” Vi began.

  He leaned expansively back in his chair. “Well. When I was making pictures in the early fifties, the studio would send me all over the country on tour, you know, to get my name out there.” He twinkled at Vi as if to say, Do you believe my name once needed to get “out there”? “And I remember one magazine, I think it was Movie Mirror, ran a contest to win a whole day with Gene Murphy. So this really lovely housewife in Boise, Idaho, wrote a terrific letter about how she and her kids watched my films together and they felt that I was the sixth member of their family. So what do you know, I get sent to Boise. I had certainly never been there before. The closest I had come was probably Salt Lake City, where I filmed parts of My Teepee or Yours? in 1950.”

  I caught the amused gaze of Frank, my assistant producer, and he rolled his eyes. All our guests acted as if they’d never stepped a velvet-loafered foot outside of Beverly Hills. Gene Murphy, formerly Herman Ehrstrom of Kansas City.

  “I can’t tell you how much fun we had on My Teepee or Yours?, but that’s another story.” He raised a suggestive eyebrow as Vi chuckled. Clearly he still thought the film, in which white actors wore feather headdresses and made jokes about selling squaws for wampum, was the height of comedy.

  “So off I go to Boise, and Betty, that was her name, was so welcoming, a really, really nice lady. She told me that the second-place prize was a Frigidaire.” He waited a practiced beat. “Do you know that she confessed to me that what she really wanted was the Frigidaire?”

  Vi howled to let him know how outrageous that was.

  “Imagine,” he continued. “But she and her whole family made me feel wonderful.”

  After he dusted off a few more stories (“Did you know my first date was with Elizabeth Taylor? I was an extra in National Velvet, and…”), I cued Vi to wrap it up, bundled Gene into his limo, and sat with her in the makeup room as Maria touched up her face. When a show wraps, most people in front of the camera can’t wait to tissue off the pancake makeup, but not Vi. Having been in the limelight for half a century, she felt that she owed it to her fans to look put together at all times.

  In New York City, she was still recognized at least a few times a day. Her career began in film, where she was usually cast as the wisecracking best friend and, later, the stern but secretly vulnerable Lady Boss, after which she took a turn on Broadway, most notably in the groundbreaking musical Mrs. President (“I know it sounds funny to think about, but it was a completely radical idea at the time”). Then, of course, she became the popular host of the long-running fifties talk show Let’s Chat, for which she had recently collected an honorary Emmy.

  “Give my eyebrows another swipe, won’t you, Maria?” she said. Vi was horrified at the sight of young celebrities who slopped around in flip-flops when they were out in public.

  From Vi’s 1959 autobiography, It Wasn’t Easy:

  I think that looking groomed is a sign of respect to others. My first activity of the day is to put on my “face,” even if I’m home alone. If my fans got a gander of me without my “war paint” on, they would faint dead away! So even if I am running out to purchase a quart of milk, I make sure that my outfit and makeup flatter my complexion, and that my hairdo is smooth and up-to-date.

  Needless to say, the best way to enhance your looks is to have an upbeat attitude. How many times have you had a friend telephone you and say, “I don’t feel well today” or “Isn’t this weather terrible?” Well, I don’t believe in inflicting your troubles on other people. I always say that Vi is short for vibrant! I keep my telephone voice cheerful and stimulating, and as a result, my phone is ringing off the hook!

  Aside from It Wasn’t Easy, Vi’s prodigious literary output included a bestselling 1965 cookbook, Lights, Camera, Cook! Vi Barbour Shares Fifty Mouthwatering Recipes from the World’s Most Glamorous Gals That Will Make You the Leading Lady of Your Next Dinner Party! and a beauty book (Is That Really Me?) before tapering off in the mid-eighties with the follow-up to her memoir, Who Says There Are No Second Acts?

  Vi, always percolating with new projects and schemes, was probably on her fifth or sixth act. Meanwhile, I was sliding toward thirty-eight, and I was easily more staid than Vi and her geriatric pals.

  chapter two

  “Thank you, Maria, dear,” said Vi, rising to leave. “Until tomorrow, Lillian.” She gave me a good-bye hug and clicked out the door, trailing a faint scent of face powder and Youth-Dew perfume. I took Vi’s tape to the production room, then stopped by my office to check my messages. There was one from the ancient publicist, Sy Rosen, informing me in his gravelly voice of some new senior vitamin supplements that his client Mitzi Taylor was pushing. Mitzi had been a panelist with Vi on a long-running game show in the sixties called You’ll Never Guess, so Sy knew he could call in a favor. Vi was extremely loyal.

  “Oh, why not?” I said aloud. “Let’s book her.”

  Next was a message from my mother, her second of the day. They always caught me by surprise. When I was growing up, my mother used the phone strictly for brief exchanges of important information, but since she and my father retired, she had begun to call me with bewildering frequency, often simply to relay various “thoughts.” “Hi, honey,” she’d begin. “Listen, I had a thought…” A simple drive to Wal-Mart could bring forth dozens, sometimes hundreds of thoughts. Hi, honey, had a thought. I feel like I should save the frog that swims in our pool, because he’s slowly turning white from the chlorine and that can’t possibly be good for him. But then where do I put him? Hi there. Real quick: You do know that you’re supposed to throw out your spices after six months, right? I saw it on the Today show. After a few months, they not only lose their flavor but they might be dangerous! Hi, listen, darnedest thing: Your father and I switched to oatmeal for breakfast, and now we don’t have our midmorning snack anymore. It’s that filling! You should try it, but just make sure it’s not the instant kind.

  I never used to return those calls, assuming that once the Thought had been registered, she moved on, but then I would receive anxious follow-up messages. Did you get my call about throwing out the cotton that comes with aspirin because it might contain bacteria? I had learned to phone back right away and supply a satisfying reaction. So the cotton might contain bacteria? Well. That cannot be good. Then she could provide the additional information that she had been saving for the postmortem: That’s not the half of it. I’ve read that if the aspirin happens to be expired, it can cause serious irritation of the stomach lining. Mix bacteria in with that stomach trouble, and you’ve got a major problem. A major problem.

  Today’s Thought was I may do a class on composting this year. It really seems like compost is a hot topic nowadays. After she retired from her job designing landscapes at office parks all over New Jersey, my mother started teaching weekend gardening classes at
County College of Morris. I made a note to phone her back and say, Oh, composting is huge, so she could drop whatever bomb she had been harboring (Do you believe that you can compost dryer lint?).

  I phoned Adam to check in.

  “Hey,” he said. “How was Gene? Did he hit on you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Same old Gene,” he said absently. His voice took on the ghostly tone that meant he was studying his computer. I knew he was scrolling through property listings, which he checked obsessively when he wasn’t showing apartments. He made a great pretense of being busy, but he actually wasn’t a very successful real estate agent because of his fatal impulse to be truthful. Within five minutes of showing a potential client an apartment, he was sheepishly telling them about the noisy trucks at 5 A.M. and the upstairs neighbor with the flourishing home taxidermy business. I would argue with him: Why rob legions of New Yorkers of the time-honored tradition of finding out an apartment is horrible two weeks after signing the papers? If you didn’t have nightmare neighbors and crumbling ceilings, what were you supposed to talk about at cocktail parties?

  “How’s work?” I asked.

  “Mm. Busy today, which is good. In fact, I think I have to go. The boss is heading my way.”

  “Okay. See you tonight. I’m in a pizza mood.”

  I phoned him every afternoon to plan dinner. Pizza at home with Adam was my idea of a perfect evening. Adam was more social than I and went out a few nights a week to concerts and parties and basketball games, while my rare nighttime engagements festered on my calendar, looming like annual pelvic exams. I ran from crowds. I flinched at loud noises. I preferred gentle daytime activities: museums that chronicled life in a traveling circus in the 1920s, a botanical garden with an extensive rose collection, a visit to a hat store, afternoon tea at a grand hotel. Adam often said that I was a cross between an old lady and the campier strain of Gay Man.