Soap Opera Slaughters (3 page)

Sipping at her Kirin beer, Hilary told me she got a phone call from Lara several weeks after I took a job at Buder’s Djinn Investigations in Philadelphia. “The two of us got together and talked over ancient history. I agreed to handle Lara’s PR, but that wasn’t till after I helped get her work on ‘Riverday.’”

“How’d you manage that?” I asked, amazed. Soap casting is very much of a closed-shop affair.

“Do you remember Abel Harrison?”

Trim-Tram Toys? Sure.”

“He left Trim-Tram and formed his own ad agency. Recently he diversified into talent.”

Harrison was a wispy nebbish who kept his tenure at the toy firm because he was the president’s brother-in-law. Otherwise, he was a family thorn, a genius at botching every assignment. But then Hilary got mixed up in a small problem of industrial thievery at the company, and by the time she unraveled things, Harrison inherited the ad department He surprised everyone, himself included, by showing remarkable eptness for the field.

“Harrison Talent,” Hilary continued, “is the new name of Maggert-Axel, which Abel bought out. Now he supplies extras for a lot of East Coast films and does all the casting for ‘Riverday.’ I called in an old debt and got Lara her part”

I suppressed an urge to ask whether she also helped Harry onto the show.

The press room door opened. A dapper man entered. Trim, dark, with close-cropped curly brown hair and a narrow nose supporting black spectacles, he was, according to Hilary, Barry Clover, publicity coordinator for, and partner in CloverLeaf Shows, the major producer of soap festivals throughout the country—specializing in anything from ticketed bruncheons accommodating perhaps a hundred hard-core fans to free monster rallies like the one I was attending. The latter events, I was told later, draw anywhere from six thousand to ten thousand people in a single day.

Clover stepped to the floor mike, gently tapped it to make sure it was live,” then said, The one o’clock show begins in ten minutes. I’ll lead anyone who wants to see it to the reserved press section in front. Those of you in the middle of interviews don’t have to rush if you don’t want to. The press room’s open all day, the food’ll keep coming and the bar won’t run dry.”

An audible sigh from the working press.

Hilary finished her beer and stood. “I have to watch the show. Want to see how Lara does?”

I nodded, though my feelings were mixed. I would have liked to be alone with Hilary. But I wanted to meet my dream girl too, preferably without Hilary hanging over me. That, of course, was now impossible. As Lara’s PR agent, Hilary would be right at my elbow. It also occurred to me that Hilary wouldn’t much like it if she knew my reason for coming to the mall. She’d assumed my fortuitous arrival to be nothing more than a geographical coincidence. She has the typical New Yorker’s Lilliputian concept of the size of Philadelphia.

Clover led us to the parking lot and beyond to the far end of the mall, where we came upon some enormous bleachers set up in front of a bunting-draped platform. The seats were jam-packed. Clover turned us over to the ushers, who took us to a reserved
VIP
section down front. As I sat, I felt the hostile glares of the
VIP
s
directly behind me.

The platform was empty except for a long table bearing name cards that corresponded to the six as-yet-unseen celebrities. The second sign from center stage read
LARA WELLS
.

A fortyish woman with just enough weight on her hips to render her Kewpie-doll squeezable climbed onto the platform, smiled nervously at the audience and crossed to the down-right microphone, audibly clearing her throat. She wore a simple floral-print frock, had frosted blond hair and deep dimples and clutched a seed-pearl purse beneath her left arm. She looked like an elementary school librarian browbeaten into addressing a mothers’ workshop on her day off.

Speaking with a vaguely midwestern twang, she introduced herself as Honey Leaf, hostess of the festival.

“Some actress herself,
n’est-ce pas? »
Hilary whispered.

I nodded. I’d met Mrs. Clover briefly in the press room: a highstrung articulate woman, smartly dressed and without a trace of accent. The person onstage looked dowdy and thoroughly ingenuous, a comfortable interlocutor that the women in the audience could identify with, and perhaps feel slightly superior to.

Honey (actually Helen) welcomed everyone and explained that the tickets they received upon entry were their chances “for a real special bunch o’ door prizes!” Then she began her first introduction. “Ladies, y’all seen his rugged good looks for a couple seasons on ‘The Edge of Night’ and lots o’ commercials, but today he’s better known as Dr. Ellis Peters on ‘Brighter Morrow’—Alan Emoryl”

Thunderous applause. Cheers, whistles. Women screamed. Before the ushers could stop her, a young girl in jeans ran forward and scattered rose petals in the air. A trim, tall man with wavy light brown hair stepped onstage and acknowledged the ovation with an ease that showed he fully expected and deserved such adulation. He said hello in a voice that none of his fans loved half so much as himself. More ecstatic squeals.

As he sat, Hilary murmured a line of Dickens, “‘As for bowing down in body and spirit, nothing was left for Heaven.’”

I didn’t comment. I was listening to the second introduction.

“—exciting new daytime star, an adorable little lady who brings special glamour to Women’s lib with her portrayal of Roberta Jennett on ‘Riverday’—Ms. Lara Wells!”

Another round of applause, less overwhelming than the first, chiefly due to the absence of distaff histrionics, though Lara garnered her share of wolf whistles.
La belle dame
of my dreams appeared. Her resemblance to Hilary really was remarkable: the same light silken hair, the same sky-blue eyes, similarly petite but amply curved figure. Lara wore a sedate green tweed suit, a scratchy material I’ve never seen the use of, but on her it looked good, it clung.

Four other soap stars were subsequently introduced, but I didn’t pay much attention to them, I was too busy glancing back and forth between Lara and Hilary.

“Yes, I know,” Hilary said with sardonic amusement, “but turn around, you’re not at a tennis match.”

So I focused on Lara, which was no hardship. It was easy to get lost in the depths of her wide, gentle eyes. There was a quality about her, a vulnerability that Hilary fought to cover up in herself. As Honey Leaf asked warmup questions of the celebrities, Lara fielded hers ably, but with a diffidence that was a pleasing contrast to the forthright manner of the part she played on “Riverday.” Hilary perfected: the charm without the emasculatory instinct.

Honey turned the probing over to the audience. Ushers took up posts in the bleachers, each equipped with handheld mikes which they directed at spectators waving hands in the air.

Some of the things they asked were rather personal, but the stars remained affable, probably afraid of the press they’d get if they allowed themselves to be flapped by the prying. But most of the questions were of the harmless “slambook” variety: “What’s your favorite color/song/
TV
show/movie/food/sport/ etc.?”

A handful of queries were more sophisticated. One woman wanted to find out how far ahead the actors know what’s going to happen on their respective programs.

Alan Emory, next to Lara, said, “About three weeks. That’s the usual taping schedule, right?” The rest of the panel agreed. “The head writer, the producer, and maybe the sponsor, if there’s one powerful enough, work up a projected storyline, or ‘Bible’ for the next six months or a year. It’s top secret, the actors don’t get to see it”

“It’s better that we don’t,” Lara put in.

“Right,” he nodded. “Our job is to make it look as if things are taking place for the first time. With the crazy work schedules we have, that’s almost how it works out, too. Anyway, what happens is the head writer is in charge of the ‘Bible’ storyline, which he breaks down, week after week, into daily synopses which episode writers turn into the actual shooting scripts. The producer’s staff stats these and passes them out to the cast.”

“If you play a major role,” Lara added, “you have to learn so many lines nearly every night that you don’t find time to read anything but the scenes you’re in. That’s why we often don’t know what’s happening to other characters in the story. It’s a lot like life.”

The Q-A session lasted most of the hour. At ten of two, the drawing was held for merchandise donated by various mall shops, but the prizes proved of secondary importance—for as the guest stars fished the lucky numbers from a big bowl, the winners bustled onstage and collected, along with their loot, a romantic embrace from whichever celebrity he or she preferred. It struck me as odd that a kiss could be so important to one person and nothing more than a public relations gesture to the other partner.

The jerk who hugged Lara too close looked a little like Harry Whelan.

Back upstairs in the press room, the questions flung at the performers were more incisive. I stood behind Lara and listened with Hilary as the actress wound up an interview with a reporter from
Grit.

“There’s an enormous difference,” she told him, “between our viewers’ fantasies of the world we move in, and the actuality. There’s not much day-to-day glamour in acting on a soap.”

The reporter skeptically asked her to expand on her remark.

Lara brushed a strand of blond hair from her forehead. “I have to be in the studio by seven
A.M
. to start on my makeup. By eight or eight-thirty, we’re in the greenroom rehearsing, after which we go downstairs for camera blocking. I get my hair done for the dress rehearsal, and then we tape. Late lunch, I stop in the office for the next day’s script, which averages forty or fifty pages of lines to learn on a heavy day. I go home and study, eat dinner and go to bed no later than nine-thirty because I’ve got to get up at five
A.M
. to be ready for the studio limo. Sound glamorous?”

The reporter allowed it seemed pretty grim. He wondered why anyone would want such a life.

Lara shrugged. “Security. If I worked every week of the year on Broadway at Equity scale, I’d barely be able to survive. Soaps pay well, and they’re steady work.”

“Except when they decide to kill off a character, right?”

She wrinkled her nose. That’s a subject I’d rather not think about.”

If you had to do something other than ‘Riverday,’ what would it be?”

A smirk. “Skydiving. The risks are similar.”

Before the next interview, Hilary introduced me to her cousin. Lara rose, clasped both my hands and stared at me, amazed, as if I’d just materialized from insubstantial air.

“Gene?
The
Gene? You actually exist?”

“Lainie,” murmured Hilary, “behave...

Her cousin ignored her. “Gene, it’s really
you?”

“Last time I looked.” I didn’t know what she was getting at, but it was the kind of arch teasing I generally dislike. I didn’t mind it as much, though, coming from Lara.

“You see,” she said, “I thought you were a figment of Hilary’s imagination.”

“Sometimes I am,” I admitted, nodding at Hilary, who granted me a frosty twitch of the lips. It was strange standing between them, like talking to both images in a looking-glass. They could have been mirror twins.

“Hilary constantly chatters about you, Gene—”

Lara ignored the nudge in her ribs.

“—but after all these months, I couldn’t decide whether she made you up, or just wanted to keep us apart I steal all her boyfriends, you know.”

A harder nudge. Paying no attention, Lara gave me a peck on the cheek. “Welcome to the family, Gene.” That did it. Hilary pivoted on her heel and walked away. Lara smiled at her retreating back. “I never could resist.”

“She can’t handle teasing on personal subjects like men.”

“Never could.” Lara regarded me appraisingly. “Underneath the thin ice, though, Hilary’s honest and decent and has a lot of love.” A shrug. “She’s damned special. I hope you know what you’ve got.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “I’m not aware I have anything. Especially lately. And she’ll be the first to say she’s not a possession.”

“That, love, is only the lady’s press handout.”

Listening to Lara, I felt disoriented. For the moment, she was one hundred and eighty degrees removed from the woman I couldn’t stop watching on “Riverday.” She was Hilary’s cousin, that’s all. Though I
was
fascinated by her lips, they formed her words so carefully, shaping every vowel with machined precision, crisply shearing off the consonants. She also had impeccable placement. There was a velvet texture to her voice, a caress of sound that came from her diaphragm, curving to the back of her throat before lips and tongue and teeth gentled it into words. Her technique was smooth enough to seem artless, the effortlessness of endless years of practice.

“I think,” she was saying, “that you still have a few things to learn about Hilary.”

“And vice versa.”

“Very likely.” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “And I imagine Hilary told you all sorts of salacious stories about me?”

“Your name
has
come up. But I never connected you with Cousin Lainie.”

“Hm?”

“With Lara Wells.”

She eyed me curiously. “You’ve seen me act?”

“Every afternoon, five days a week.”

A peal of merry laughter, followed by an impulsive squeeze of my arm. “Gene, I’m sorry! It’s just that you don’t strike me as a typical soap opera addict”

“I’m not, I’m a Lara Wells addict”

“Sweet blarney, love.” She puckered her lips into a kiss. “But you only say that because I look like Hilary.”

“Well, not so much up close.” It was true. Subtle telltales distinguished her. Lara’s cheeks were flatter, hinting at an elongation that the years would probably accentuate. Her eyes were more heavily lidded than Hilary’s, they lent her an aura of mystery, of imperfectly suppressed sensuality. Unlike her cousin’s refractive gaze, Lara looked at me frankly, sizing me up and ultimately accepting me without any hint she might prefer me some other way. An important difference.