Free Night Night, Sleep Tight by Hallie Ephron Page B

at this for weeks, culling the trivial from the memorable from the valuable and setting aside items that signified her father’s literary life.
    Deirdre went out onto the landing and retrieved the black plastic bag. She sank down on the floor beside it and started sifting through the items that Henry said their father would have wanted him to throw away. Newspaper and magazine clippings, a restaurant review for a Chinese restaurant on Beverly Drive dated 1978, empty Cuban cigar boxes. All of it: toss .
    Next she pulled out six Motion Picture Academy Players Directories, the annual compendium that listed every Hollywood actor. She’d spent hours and hours poring over directories like these when she was stuck home recuperating after the accident. In it were pages and pages of head shots of actors, most of whom could have strolled down Rodeo Drive and not turned a single head. And yet they were all members of the Screen Actors Guild. It just brought home the formidable odds against becoming a celebrity.
    These were a straight run from 1963 to 1968. Deirdre opened the 1963 directory, flipped through until she found someone she recognized—sexy, sultry Edie Adams who sang the Muriel Cigar TV commercial. That ad had ended with a sly wink and the suggestive, Why don’t you pick one up and smoke it sometime, delivered with a sensual subtlety that Madonna never could have managed. A few pages on, there was Donna Douglas, all wide-eyed with her Elly May blond curls tamed. Annette Funicello, Deirdre’s favorite Mouseketeer, looking grown-up and bland.
    Tucked between two pages, Deirdre came across a snapshot. She recognized the white rippled edges as an early Polaroid. She was five years old the Christmas her father got their first instant camera. He’d snapped a picture of Deirdre with her new Tiny Tears doll, Henry, and their mother, still in their bathrobes and seated on the white “snow” carpet around their tinselly tree. Deirdre had watched breathless for what seemed like forever until the second hand on her father’s watch went all the way around and he opened the camera’s trapdoor. Like magic, he peeled away the film and an image bloomed.
    But the person in this faded snapshot wasn’t Deirdre or Henry or their mother, and there was no Christmas tree. Instead it showed an attractive young woman, her collared blouse unbuttoned halfway, kneeling on the floor beside an end table and gazing at the camera with wide, kohl-rimmed eyes worthy of Keane. A mirror in the background reflected a window with a bamboo shade, and in front of it the photographer with the camera held to his face.
    Deirdre realized with a jolt that the woman was kneeling in precisely the spot where she was sitting now. She turned the picture over. On the back, in red pen, were five asterisks.
    The same girl’s picture, much clearer and crisper, was in the Players Directory on the page where the snapshot had been tucked in. Second row from the top. Melanie Hart, the kind of white-bread, feel-good name—like Judy Garland or Hope Lange—that studios selected for young hopefuls.
    Poor Melanie Hart. If she’d harbored any illusions that this photo session would lead to her big break, she’d been disappointed. Flipping the pages of the Players Directory, Deirdre found more faded Polaroid photographs, each with asterisks on the back. Her father favored buxom blondes and redheads, each of them photographed the same way, in the same spot.
    Deirdre felt sick to her stomach. Her father had been taking advantage of young women who were desperate to break out in the film business. She stacked the photographs on the floor. They conjured the smell of My Sin and soiled sheets. At least her father had realized these needed to be destroyed. Burn. A pile she hadn’t yet started.
    Deirdre heard footsteps on the stairs and a moment later Henry loomed in the doorway. He had on a black leather bomber’s jacket and badass cowboy boots. A motorcycle helmet—ice blue with