Free Show Business Kills by Iris Rainer Dart

a big difference in how you held it together. Money didn’t just talk. It sang and danced and paid
     for fancy skin products with secret ingredients fromSwitzerland. Not to mention little nips and tucks in the face, and boob jobs that made your knockers stand straight up, even
     when you were pushing fifty
.
    Every one of those people on that alumni list probably had a job they could give her. Rose Schiffman was a writer. A writer
     must need a proofreader or something like that, she thought, noting that on her list. And Ellen Bass. She probably wanted
     to get rid of that jerk who answered her phones and get someone in there who would say, “Ellen Bass’s office,” in a deep,
     rich voice, and then be nice to the people who called, instead of rude the way her overprotective male secretary was. Receptionist
     would be a great foot-in-the-door job for her
.
    And how about Jan O’Malley, who had her plate full with a full-time job on that soap opera and a little boy. She probably
     needed someone who was good with kids to help her with him. I’d be great with that little boy Jan adopted, she thought. He’d
     be better off with me, his mother’s old college friend, than some non-English-speaking illegal alien, which is what she probably
     has now. People who got babies, then didn’t stay home to take care of them themselves, should all be shot
.
    Now that was a good idea. Nanny. For a while anyway. Taking care of a little kid was something she had experience doing. She’d
     go over there to Jan’s house and casually befriend the kid, and then hit Jan up for the job. Jan would be so glad to have
     someone of her caliber around her little boy, she’d jump at the idea
.
    According to the faxed list, Jan lived in Hollywood. She found the street right away on the
Thomas Guide.
She would go and see Jan first when she got there on Friday afternoon, and then maybe that white-haired witch Marly Bennet
.

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   7   
    M arly Bennet believed that any ailment in the world could be cured by a chiropractic adjustment. That if her estranged husband
     had only had his spine cracked back into alignment, their marriage would have been saved. She was a passionate devotee of
     New Age practices who was waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with what she’d known for years about nutrition and
     meditation and breathing through the spine and high colonies.
    She could convulse the others with stories about all the practioners with whom she did business, like the woman in Malibu
     whose counsel she sought who channeled Marilyn Monroe and dispensed Marilyn’s insights about show business and men. Or the
     herbalist who sold her a poultice to hang around her neck that would retard aging. But their most recent favorite was the
     story about the therapist who was helping her cure an inconvenient physical malady.
    “I’ve finally stopped having urinary tract problems. Doctor Brotman got me to use my active imagination, to personify my bladder
     and talk to it,” she announced last month.
    Ellen moaned and rolled her eyes. “Here we fucking go,” she said. “You know you’re in L.A. when you start havingconfrontations with your internal organs. Can you imagine telling someone in Kansas, ‘I took a meeting with my bladder’? They’d
     have you tarred and feathered.”
    “So what happened?” Jan asked.
    “Well, she had me put two chairs across from one another and sit in one of them. First she told me to ask my bladder the questions
     as me, and then to move to the chair and play the part of my bladder. It was remarkably telling. I said, ‘Bladder, what seems
     to be the trouble? There is no apparent physical reason for my problem with you, and yet you persist in being irritable. Can
     you tell me why?’ ”
    “You kept a straight face for that?” Ellen asked. She could never understand how the otherwise sensible Marly could put herself
     into the hands of yet another nutty quasi shrink with yet another wacko