Monthly Archives: February 2022

Thick skin required: The Hollywood episode

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For a brief time in the 1990’s, I lived and worked in Los Angeles in film & television production. How I ended up there was a textbook example of someone running toward a new adventure after a bad breakup. At the time, I was 28 years old which is practically ancient in the minds of whoever I was going to try to convince to hire me. I spent many hours on the phone from Boston, cold calling anyone I’d ever met who might know anyone in the entertainment industry who could help me land an interview for some kind of job. It was the only way I could think of to prepare since my love of movies wasn’t going to be much of a help. By the time I finally headed west in my Honda Accord packed with only the bare essentials, I wasn’t yet focusing on how I’d survive when I got to Los Angeles. I was more excited about my pit stops at Graceland, the Grand Canyon and Vegas.

Nine days later, I arrived at a dear college friend’s house in the San Fernando Valley where I set up camp in her toddler’s room for 2 weeks. Luckily, the cold calling & networking paid off and within a week I had talked my way into a job with a successful writing/directing/producing duo who had a deal with Touchstone Pictures on the Walt Disney Studio lot in Burbank. Our offices overlooked the Team Disney building which was home to the top studio executives. Carved into the facade are giant figures of the Seven Dwarfs positioned like columns along the top of the building. No recognition of Snow White anywhere, but that was par for the course. Do a little digging into the man himself, Walt Disney, and you’ll find some not-so-flattering words about his thoughts on women and other groups.

After promising my new bosses that I’d be a quick study to learn the “Who’s Who” in the industry, I spent the next week memorizing a list of agents & their clients, studio heads, producers and the names of all of the gatekeeper assistants through whom one has to go in order to get their bosses on the phone line. I was now one of those gatekeepers. Fortunately, I worked for people who were in demand, so I could usually get the other bigwig on the phone. However, I was quickly initiated into this weird dynamic where no assistant wanted to get his boss on the phone first and make him wait for the other person’s boss to pick up. Forcing someone else to “Hold” was a total power play. It was both entertaining and completely ridiculous.

Luckily, and for whatever reason, I’ve never been starstruck by working with “movie stars”. That turned out to be a good thing because the bulk of my time that first year was working with Julia Roberts & Nick Nolte. Only one famous person ever made me nervous – Steve Martin. I wasn’t starstruck, but I did have an enormous crush on him. He was and still is a genius and a true Renaissance Man. We met when when I was working on location in Chicago, based out of a large suite at the Ritz Carlton. While Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte were there meeting with us one day, Steve Martin stopped by to visit my bosses with whom he was friends and had previously worked on a film. He was in town staging “Picasso at the Lapin Agile”, a play he had written. I was sitting in a chair on which his coat was draped and he’d left his glasses in the pocket of the coat. As he excused himself to reach around me for the glasses, we ended up in one of those cute dances where he goes left when I go left, and he goes right when I go right. That was the extent of our interaction until I was shown a note sent a day later from Steve to my bosses thanking them for the afternoon visit. In the note, he wrote, “P.S., who’s the girl?”. If this were a real Hollywood story, someone would have introduced us properly, we would have dated, and I would have become Mrs. Steve Martin. That did not happen. One of my bosses decided she had to put me in my “assistant” place and announced that “the note must have been him just making a joke about meeting Julia Roberts, a.k.a “the girl”. It was a rather unkind, power-play thing to do, but it’s a fine example of the necessity of having a thick skin in that business. Aside from that, and so many other comical examples of the nonsense that assistants had to put up with, I have so many other memories that are wonderful. Including memories of a little something called the Craft Service table. When I was working 18 hour days, being lauded for doing such a great job but still getting screamed at when someone else is having a bad day, the Craft Service table was my happy oasis. It’s really just a table, off in some dark corner adjacent to wherever the filming is taking place, and it’s stocked with every kind of delicious junk food and carbohydrate. On a rough day, nothing takes the edge off like a huge canister of really fresh Twizzlers.

More than anything else though, it was the great friends and co-workers I met during this time that made the whole experience unforgettable. One might think that it would be hard to make true, lifelong friends in such a cut-throat business where everyone is trying to “make it”, but that was not my experience. Nearly 30 years have passed since my short stint in film production (and television production, but that’s a whole other story) but I can still count at least a handful of meaningful friendships that have endured. Even though one of those friendships still isn’t Steve Martin.

Don’t Tell Me What I Can’t Do: The Playboy episode

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I haven’t written a blog post in a very long time. When my daughter was little, she used to ask me to tell her a story from my life, and I recall having difficulty remembering anything specific from my childhood & teen years. It’s all just a blur of Brady Bunch, bad haircuts and cheerleading.

If I’m going to start writing anything now, I may as well begin with whatever unusual stories I can somewhat recall… which brings me to the Playboy episode.

In late 1990, Playboy magazine booked a suite at the Westin Copley Hotel in Boston to scout for the April 1991 issue titled, “Women of the Women’s Colleges”. At the time, I was working at Boston Magazine nearby and we’d all heard that protesters had gathered in front of the hotel. The protesters were angry that women who had attended a women’s college would consider posing in Playboy. They felt that any one woman’s individual choice to pose would be seen as representative of the collective of all women who had ever attended a women’s college. I attended a women’s college and I disagreed. So instead of spending my lunch hour eating, I found myself sitting in a suite at the Westin surrounded by prospective Playboy models, the Playboy staff and a handful of producers from ABC-TV’s Boston affiliate.

I never had aspirations to pose in Playboy nor did I think Playboy would extend the invitation. I just felt like exercising my right to cross through the protest line. When I sat down with the Playboy team, they asked all of the expected questions as they tried to get to know me. When I mentioned that I had a different perspective than the women protesting, one of the tv producers zeroed in and asked me to appear the following morning on the Good Day show which aired in Boston every weekday. She explained that I’d be on-air in a split screen with a crowd at a women’s college campus and they’d be yelling at me via remote feed. That’s not exactly how she sold it, but I knew that’s how it would go.

Early the next morning, I showed up at the t.v. studio and was seated next to a young woman who had already posed for the magazine. Sitting across from us was Eileen Prose, the doyenne of Boston morning television. Our host was not very good at putting on an impartial face which became obvious when she gave me a bewildered look and asked “Are you posing because of the money?”. I clarified that Playboy had not even asked me to be in the issue, and then I spent the rest of the hour fighting for air time to respond to some of the mass generalizations coming from the crowd. I didn’t successfully deliver every point I wanted to make, but for being in the hot seat on live t.v., I did ok.

In the end, it was a memorable experience. A nice bonus occurred about a week after the appearance when I was approached while waiting for my lunch order at Copley Place. It was a young woman who had been part of the group that was debating with me on t.v. Surprisingly, she told me that whatever I had said changed her opinion. Even more surprisingly, Playboy called and asked me to be in the issue and to fly to Chicago to be a guest on the syndicated Phil Donahue the following week. I declined both. I was pretty sure that the Donahue segment would be a nationally-televised badgering. I watched the episode when it aired and that’s pretty much what it was. I didn’t care about being in the magazine either. Being featured in a future back issue of Playboy is as permanent as posting photos on social media today. It would have been a unique souvenir to have when I’m 80 years old though. I did hold onto a few other minor keepsakes: a VHS tape recording of the Good Day show (transferred to the Cloud before it disintegrated) and the Playboy photographer’s business card. I think I also still have a blank copy of that Playboy questionnaire form which gets printed in the magazine where the featured models answer questions about their favorite things .

Recently, my 19 year old daughter asked to see the Good Day interview. It was very weird rewatching and listening to my 26-year-old self, with my huge head of hair and massive shoulder pads, while sitting next to my grown daughter. She saw past the salacious Playboy part of it and was proud of me for defending myself against a surprising number of fairly judgmental voices . Pretty ironic, considering that the place where I learned how to articulate my point of view and present it respectfully was at Mount Holyoke, the women’s college from which I graduated.