September 2007 Pulpwood Queen Book Club Selection

C H A P T E R 3

New York City 2006

The next morning Katie woke up without her usual day-after-the-Emmys
hangover. She’d been so determined to prove to Teddy—and herself—how
happy she was that she’d stayed sober. When hammered at industry parties,
she had been known to trash the life’s work, and Teddy always remembered
every word of her rants. She didn’t want to give him any ammo until she was
absolutely sure that he’d gotten over his I’m-firing-you-for-your-own-good
thing. So she’d been on a mission to adore everyone—the writers she
worked with, the network suits, even the idiot repairman/actor from the
reality show. Instead of going for her usual early exit, she’d insisted on partying
until the bitter end, and had fallen into bed at four in the morning.
When she finally emerged from her bedroom the next day, it was ten
o’clock. She never stayed in bed that late. As the child of an actress who’d
had to be at the studio at six am, awake and functioning, Katie had learned
young not to sleep in. Now, as she wandered into her kitchen for her first cup
of coffee of the day, she looked at her co-op as if she were seeing it for the
first time. The apartment, which she’d inherited from her mother—score
one for Teddy—was in a prewar building on Riverside Drive on the Upper
West Side. When Rosalind had purchased it in the seventies, it had cost a
pricey-for-the-time thirty-seven thousand dollars. Today it was probably
worth upwards of two million. Katie had never bothered to find out exactly
how much, because she’d always assumed she’d live there until she died.
It was a big space for Manhattan, with an eat-in kitchen, a living room,
a dining room, two bedrooms, and a bath and a half. The half bath had a
partial view of the Hudson River. Rosalind had redecorated it every few
years, but the basic color scheme had always remained the same: white, silver,
and liberal splashes of the same shade of turquoise as her fabulous
eyes. After her mother had died, Katie had purchased a comfy brown sofa
with plans of redoing the place to suit her own taste. Somehow she’d never
gotten around to it, so the drab little sofa crouched unhappily in the midst
of Rosalind’s glitz. However, the apartment was still Katie’s home, and leaving
it was out of the question. Or was it? Would she be better off in some
trendy neighborhood in a building where the doormen hadn’t known her all
of her life? Where were the trendy neighborhoods, anyway?
“Damn Teddy,” she said out loud as she turned on her coffeemaker—her
purchase, not one of Rosalind’s, thank you very much—but there was no
point in blaming Teddy. The truth was, she was living with Rosalind’s handme-
downs. But why not? Rosalind’s hand-me-downs were terrific. Her late
mother had been one of those force-of-nature people.
In 1975, when Rosalind Harder waltzed into New York to become a star,
she came armed with her well-documented beauty, a will of iron, and not
much more. Her acting experience consisted of playing the lead in every
show presented at her Alabama high school and working for one season as
an apprentice in a professional summer stock company. She’d never told
Katie the name of the theater. “It was a terrible old place,” she said when
asked. “It’s been closed forever.”
In addition to looks and determination, Rosalind brought a toddler to
the city with her. The official, if somewhat hazy, story about little Katharina’s
father was that he’d been married to Rosalind for just a few months
before he was killed in Vietnam. It had happened before his child was born,
and his brave young widow was too pained to talk about it—or him. This
gooey version of the facts had kept the press at bay—in the seventies, the
soap opera magazines weren’t exactly hotbeds of investigative reporting—
but Katie had always had her doubts. For one thing, there were no pictures.
While Katie could imagine that her mother might find it a downer to keep
photos of her dead husband lying around, there was no way that Rosalind
wouldn’t have hung on to at least one shot of herself on her wedding day.
On top of that, she had always refused to tell Katie the man’s name. The
one time when Katie had pressed her about him, she had screamed, “Just
be glad I never let myself get stuck with that pussy-whipped mama’s boy!”
All of this secrecy made Katie think that perhaps her mother was being
less than honest with her loving fans in TV land. It was Katie’s take, never
publicly aired, of course, that her father probably had been a soldier, and
might even have bought it in the jungles of Vietnam, but that he and her
mother had never actually done the for-richer-or-poorer ceremony. That
would explain why Rosalind’s grandmother—the woman who had raised
Rosalind—had never met Katie. “Gran’s the kind of good Christian who just
makes you want to go out and start sinning, ” Rosalind said once of the only
relative she and Katie had.
After giving birth, Rosalind had scraped together enough money to
come to New York. Katie was never sure exactly how she’d done it; that was
another part of the story Rosalind left murky. The part that happened after
Rosalind got to New York, though, had been well reported in the fan mags.
One week after arriving in the Big Apple, the intrepid Rosalind landed a
job as a showroom model in the garment district, and found an apartment
in a marginally safe neighborhood. She made an arrangement with the
woman who lived across the hall to watch young Katharina while she was
working—those were more innocent days when you could still trust your
neighbors—and went to auditions on her lunch hour. That was how Teddy
found her. He was working in a third-rate talent agency that held cattle calls
to drum up the client list, when she marched in to do Ophelia’s mad scene
from Hamlet. Her matter-of-fact delivery and dazzling looks couldn’t have
been more wrong for Shakespeare’s fragile ingénue, but Teddy thought she
might be right for the lead on a new soap opera that was casting.
There was a tiny hitch: the low-end agency Teddy worked for handled
actors who worked as extras, and day players who had less than five lines
per show, while the part of Tess Jones on All Our Lives was a starring role.
Teddy never should have been able to land an audition for Rosalind, but he
was young and cute, and after making a couple of promises he had no intention
of keeping, he got her in the door. Rosalind took care of the rest.
Some fashion magazine had dubbed the winter of 1975 the Season of
the Thoroughbred Girl, and they might have been talking about Rosalind
Harder. She “borrowed” an outfit from the showroom where she was modeling
and strolled into her audition wearing a white suede shirtdress with
pale hose that showcased her world-class legs, and a white silk scarf that
set off her hair and eyes. The casting director dragged the producer out of
a crucial meeting to watch her reading. When it was over, the Queen of
Daytime—as they called Rosalind four years later when she posed for the
first TV Guide cover ever given to a soap actress—was born.
Katie grew up on the set of All Our Lives. When she was small, the dressing
room next to her mother’s was made into a playroom for her. When she
was old enough to attend high school, that same dressing room was where
she did her homework. Each day, after she’d finished her math and social
studies, she was allowed to go sit in the makeup room and watch the monitor
above the mirrors as the show was being taped.
The makeup room was the heart of the studio; all of the actors congregated
there to hang out, gossip, and to beg someone, anyone, to cue them
on their lines. Soap actors were always desperate to run their lines. They were
under-rehearsed, they were working way too fast, and every day they had to
absorb wads of dialogue that sounded exactly like the dialogue they had
memorized the day before. The cast of All Our Lives quickly discovered that
the shy kid sitting in the corner of the makeup room was happy to help
them, and they exploited her shamelessly. They also discovered that when a
clunky phrase wouldn’t stick in the brain, the kid could come up with a way
to paraphrase it so that it did stick—and it sounded more like human
speech. Members of the cast began asking Katie to smooth out their
speeches. Naturally the show’s writers started screaming. Some of these
writers were clients of Teddy’s—by that point he had his own agency and
was handling writers, directors, and producers as well as actors—but his actors
told him the girl was amazing.
Like any good agent, Teddy watched the show every day, and he began
paying special attention to the scripts he knew Katie had altered. He realized
immediately that the actors were right, Rosalind’s little girl had real talent.
So thanks to Teddy, Katie worked on the All Our Lives staff as an intern
during all of her school vacations. Two days after she graduated from college,
she had her first gig as a scriptwriter for the show.
All of this was done with Rosalind’s blessing. Eventually. At first, the
idea of her child working on her turf, and possibly grabbing some of her
spotlight, had brought on a meltdown—it had happened in Teddy’s office
where no one else had seen it—but Katie had quickly disappeared into the
ranks of the faceless writers who toiled in the background, and Rosalind
had relaxed. In time, she came to see the advantages of having her own personal
in-house writer to bitch at when the scripts weren’t to her liking. Fortunately
for everyone, the All Our Lives writing staff was never nominated
for an Emmy on a year when Rosalind wasn’t.
Katie poured herself a cup of black coffee—after years of drinking the dayold
coffee on soap sets, she liked hers dark and mean—and walked quickly
into the bedroom. Enough with all the second-guessing and doubting, she
told herself. She was going to get dressed, go down to the lobby, get her
mail, and do something useful with her day. Full of purpose, she started
dressing. But the talk with Teddy just wouldn’t go away.
“Okay, exactly what is your plan for the future?” she asked herself out
loud as she pulled on her sweats. Talking to herself was a habit she’d picked
up as a kid. Back then it had been a great way to clear space on a crowded
New York street, but these days people just thought she had an invisible
earpiece for her cell phone. “I’ll re-sign with Teddy and re-up my contract
with All Our Lives,” she answered herself.
For as long as it’s around, added an unpleasant little voice in the back of
her head.
“And when it’s not around, Teddy will find me a gig on another show.”
Katie pulled socks and sneakers over feet that were swollen from the killer
sandals.
And then what? the voice in her mind persisted.
“Then . . . that’s it. I’ll hang on until the pensions kick in and I can retire.”
For another thirty-five years? Really?
“So I’ll try to get a job on the staff of a nighttime show.”
Lots of luck, with a résumé that has nothing but daytime credits. Nighttime
producers think daytime writers are something you scrape off the bottom of
your shoe. Plus, you’d have to move to L.A.
“I’ll do what I have to do—when the time comes. Not now.” She finished
dressing, dragged a brush through her hair, and looked at herself in
the mirror. “I could always just slash my wrists,” she said to her image. It
was the kind of over-the-top line she’d have cut from any of her scripts, if
she’d ever been demented enough to write it. “Hack,” she said to the Katie
in the mirror. And on that happy note, she walked out of her apartment, got
into the elevator, and went down to the lobby.
The mail had arrived and it had already been sorted. There was an envelope
in her mailbox for her. She reached for it, and then read the return
address twice when she saw the unfamiliar writing and postmark. It was
from somewhere in Georgia, from a lawyer she’d never heard of.

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