Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [86]
“Yes, he’ll be at the Fontainebleau Hotel on January 1st through the 13th,” the agent said.
“Do you know what room he’ll be staying in?” asked Jimmy. (This was the code for how much money he’d be paid.)
“Yes, he’s in room 750,” the agent said.
“Wait!” said Jimmy. “I thought he was supposed to be in room 1500.” To which the agent replied:
“Tell him he’s lucky he’s not in room 500 . . .”
Chapter 42
Growing a Feminist
Where’s she gonna go?”
That’s what my uncles (all eight of them) would say whenever they had an argument with their wives. And no matter how angry those women might get with their husbands, the bottom line was: Where’s she gonna go?
Was it then? Sometimes I think it was then that I became a different kind of female from all the women in my family. As a girl growing up, I witnessed sixteen marriages—nine on Dad’s side, four on Mom’s, two sets of long-married grandparents, Italian and Lebanese. And, of course, my parents’ marriage. And in every one of them, the husband was numero uno. There wasn’t any abuse or that kind of thing. Just the everyday drip, drip of dissolving self-esteem.
I made up my mind somewhere in the middle of all this that the whole domestic scene was not for me. I had things I wanted to do and didn’t want to do.
I knew I didn’t want to give up my dreams for love and miss them for the rest of my life, like my mother.
I knew I didn’t want to be dominated by another person.
And, most important, I knew I always wanted to have a place to go. That above all. No one would ever say about me, “Where’s she gonna go?”
So when I told my mother I had fallen in love with a divorced man who lived with his four young sons, she said, “Oh, what a joke on you!” A below-the-belt punch line if there ever was one, but it still made me laugh. My mom knew a good set-up when she heard one, and my life had been the perfect set-up for that line.
Not only had I always had a fight-and-flee response to commitment and marriage, I was also the girl who had a stockpile of sassy remarks, like “Marriage is like living with a jailer you have to please.” And “Marriage is like a vacuum cleaner—you stick it to your ear and it sucks out all your energy and ambition.”
I was “pinned” in college, but that was the fun, romantic thing to do. And romance I liked. I also liked men—their soft, fuzzy necks, their strong legs, their firm behinds. And in the morning there was something about a man in a terry-cloth robe—I always had a strong genetic urge to start squeezing orange juice. But still . . .
My eyes were on the horizon, not on the hearth. And I actually felt betrayed by my best girlfriends as they dreamily walked down the aisle.
Hey, what about that swell loft we were gonna get together?
How ’bout that great trip to the Far East we had planned?
One by one they deserted me. Sometimes I wondered if I was the only girl in the world who felt like I did. Then I read The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. And I knew I wasn’t.
Around this time, I was screen-tested for a TV pilot for ABC called Two’s Company. I was thrilled when I got the part, and the pilot was terrific. It didn’t sell. No big news—most pilots don’t sell. But the show brought me to the attention of Edgar Scherick, the head of programming for ABC. Scherick told me that he and the people from Clairol, one of the network’s prime sponsors, thought I could be a television star, and he described a few ideas they had for a show for me. In all of the shows, I’d be playing the wife of someone, or the secretary of someone, or the daughter of someone.
I hesitated for a moment, then charged ahead.
“Mr. Scherick, did you ever think about doing a show where the girl is ‘the someone’?” I asked. “You know, a girl like me—graduated from college, doesn’t want to get married and has a dream of her own.”
Scherick looked at me like I was speaking in Swahili.
“Would anyone watch a show like that?” he said. I asked him to read The Feminine Mystique—which he did. He was a one-of-a-kind executive. He called me after he finished the book