know where he’s in the car with Tony Roberts who’s got on this space-age, silver Mylar jumpsuit? Roberts zips up the hood that just about engulfs his entire head, like he’s going to be launched to Mars, and Woody turns to him, deadpan, and asks, ‘Are we driving through plutonium?’” Tex almost doubles over with his loud, roaring laughter. I give him a small tolerant smile.
“Yeah, the clothes, the cars, you can’t walk anywhere,” I say, “except for the treadmill in your home gym. And then there’s the Freeway. What an oxymoron. The Freeway, where you sit in traffic, looking at the guy in the next lane. How did he get that car? What does he have that you don’t? The car and the phone, the phone and the car, that’s their whole shtick. I think they all have phones jammed up their asses, I swear. What a disgusting way of life!”
“Maybe you’ll get into it, who knows?”
I look at Tex and wonder. What if he got a call from, say, someone like Gwyneth Paltrow or Kim Basinger asking him, in a breathy voice, if he could tutor her for an upcoming role as a newspaper editor? Would he go? I can only imagine his reply. “Let ’em try.”
“So,” he says, slapping his hand on the table, “how about we go to that Italian bakery on Third Avenue for tiramisu?”
We walk across town and up Madison Avenue. The trees in front of the Giorgio Armani shop are laced with tiny sapphire Christmas lights, arboretum couture, while window-lit mannequins wear strapless gowns and tuxedos of tissue-thin silks and crepes, and high-heeled sling-backs encrusted with ruby crystals. We pass candlelit restaurants where dark-haired men with romantic eyes face blondes in white wool suits with minks draped over the backs of their chairs, while just outside on frosty street corners open to the sharp wind lie vagrants with unkempt hair under cardboard shelters offering bent paper cups for spare change. The fragmented New York mosaic.
For all its opulence, and all its shortcomings, the city tapestry seduces me. Why would I want to leave it for L.A.? Who wants to spend half a day flying out to a place where nobody thought about anything but competing for parts and coveting awards for pretending that you were someone you weren’t? They were all bent out of shape, pretentious. The whole damn place was pretentious.
We walk to Third Avenue, passing the Tower East movie theater and a Victoria’s Secret. The long expanse of windows is devoted to sherbet-colored Miracle Bras that can incrementally ratchet up your cleavage, a “have it your way” for bras instead of burgers. They’re paired with matching thongs as sheer as snowflakes. I’m watching Tex.
“So what was the name of the movie anyway?” he says, raking a hand through his dark, curly hair as he finally turns from a blond mannequin in a sea-green thong.
“What movie?”
He shakes his head in disbelief. “The one they asked you to help on, darlin’.”
“Oh…. I forgot…. Hmmm…dangerous, dangerous something…oh…I think Dangerous Ways, Dangerous Lies. That was it.”
“Gossip’s doing an item on it tomorrow,” he says offhandedly, and snorts. “The sleazy jerk who’s starring in it has this global fan club that issues daily reports on ‘sightings,’” he says. “Get this. Never mind that he was busted once for drunk driving, and likes coke, Hollywood doesn’t hold that against him. They paid him twenty mil for his last movie. And you know what he tells Cindy?”
I shake my head.
“‘Money doesn’t mean that much to me. It doesn’t buy spiritual fulfillment. It’s something that you barter with. It has no intrinsic worth.’” He laughs out loud. “I’m going to use that on my landlord when he asks for the rent,” he says, deadpan. “‘It has no intrinsic worth.’”
For some reason my skin is starting to prickle. “Exactly who are you talking about?”
“The guy from that TV show…that hustler astronaut from The High Life.”
I slow my pace. “What?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Gelled hair, what’s his name?”
“Mike Taylor?”
“Yeah.”
I’ve fallen out of step with him now, dragging my feet. “Would you mind if I took a rain check on dessert?”
“You okay? You’re lookin’ a little pale.”
“I’m fine…it’s just been a really long day, and suddenly it’s all hitting me.”
Later on, I sit back and go over my phone messages. Shortly after I started the column, my phone started ringing with offers to do TV. Initially, I ducked them. How would it feel to be in front of the TV camera? I had this frightening scenario in my head: I was in an electronics store and everywhere I looked I saw my full face on all the screens of the demo models. Twenty different Maggies, starting with a ten-inch screen, graduating up to one the size of the eight-story Sony Imax screen, all in different gradations of harsh, artificial color. A too-red me, a pink-and-fuchsia me, a yellow-green me, a harsh black-and-white version, all color leached out. A flat-screened Maggie, a fat-screened Maggie. A United Nations of Maggie O’Learys. A fun-house house of horror come to life. Halloween. The vision makes me cringe.
Then there’s the business of speaking my mind without the safety net of print. Would I start to stutter and stammer? Could happen. There was no delete key on a live TV show, and I wasn’t used to expressing myself in sound bites. It was safe to work behind a computer screen. But ultimately, what it came down to was that I was never one to retreat in the face of a challenge…so…
First stop on the AM with Susie show is makeup. They redden my cheeks, add more lipstick to return the color that the lights wash out, then dust me with a giant powder brush to cut the shine. I’m ushered into the studio, and seated in front of the audience. The camera rolls up, the eyes of America are on me, and I feel as though the spotlight will imbue my words with greater meaning. I envision viewers alone in their kitchens or bedrooms, sipping coffee and eating coffee cake. They stop in the middle of paying bills or maybe cleaning the sink, hoping to come away with some moral or inspiration that will elevate them from the state of feeling disembodied, alienated, in perpetual despair about their weight and their lot in life. The effect I can have on TV dwarfs anything I can offer in print.
Susie cross-examines me. In a nice way.
“As America’s antidieting guru, Maggie, tell us a little about your own struggle. Was being overweight an issue for you all your life?”
“Well, I got my workouts in the family bakery in Prospect Park, instead of the playground, as a child,” I say, evoking sympathetic smiles from the audience. “I blame my weight problems as a kid on after-school snacks of hot cross buns, crullers and scones instead of carrot sticks and celery. And then, rather than climbing monkey bars and getting real exercise, I rolled dough in my parents’ bakery. Arts and crafts was decorating cookies with colored frosting and rainbow sprinkles, then gobbling up my jewels.”
“Didn’t your parents see what was happening?”
“In those days, feeding your kids was a way of showing you could love and provide.”
“So they were blind to what food had become to you?”
I weigh that for a moment. “Let’s say their gift was disproportionate. When you take a vitamin
