The Curse of the Emmy

You could argue that I should have known. Or, at least, I should have been wary. There were signs… well, maybe there were. Someone more cosmically attuned than I might have sensed them. But I have never been one to pick up on messages from the universe. I don’t have premonitions of disaster (which explains a lot about my career) and the only dream I have that I can remember is a nightmare in which I am an understudy and all of a sudden, I have to go on for the leading lady, but I’ve never learned the lines. To add to the fun, my costume is made of see through plastic so I am not only unprepared but naked. But that’s for another Substack. This is about my Emmy.

In 1983 I was nominated for the Emmy for Best Supporting Actress in a Daytime Drama. That year was notable because for the first time since 1974 (which was when the industry finally got around to giving Emmys to the folks who created entertainment for the little ladies at home) the Daytime Emmy Awards Show wasn’t televised. The reasons for this were a bit murky. Back in that simpler time when we only had three networks ( ABC, CBS and NBC ) they took turns airing the show. NBC was up but the network declined the honor. It claimed there were issues of voter integrity which it, in good conscience, could not enable. The more cynical view was, not enough NBC shows had been nominated and the network put its corporate thumb into its corporate mouth and threw what my southern husband, Roger, described as a hissy. Either way, the end result was the show wasn’t going to be on the air. That was why I decided to save some money. I’d already been nominated twice before, and both times my agent and I had shopped for my Emmy night ensembles at Saks Fifth Avenue, where she picked out a couple of little numbers that Roger and I were still paying off six months later. But in 1983 no one was going to see the show. Also, I’d lost twice before and I was sure I would again. As I saw it, I was on the always-a-bridesmaid-never-a-bride track when it came to trophies.

Roger was the one who came up with a solution. Back in the sixties, his mother, who had showgirl legs, had purchased a white chiffon mini dress with silver stripes to wear to a fancy New Year’s Eve party. It had been quite expensive for the time, as well as being a great showcase for those legs and she’d never been able to make herself give it up--even though, by the eighties, it was way out of style. I didn’t have mini skirt legs, but Rog and I figured I could use the dress as a tunic. He asked his mom to send it to me, and I bought some white polyester palazzo pants at a discount store, to wear under it. For the grand total of $21.96 I had my outfit. We didn’t even have to rent a tux for Roger because his son had a band concert that night and I was so sure I was going to lose that I told him to go to it. I would attend the award ceremony with my agent, clap for the winner, and be home before he was.

On the big night I bundled my bargain basement finery into a black garbage bag, and took a subway to the hotel, where the un-televised ceremony was taking place. I dressed in the room assigned to the actresses, did my makeup (back then, lowly daytime performers didn’t rate a makeup artist or a hairdresser) and I wasn’t upset when I spilled half of my bottle of Cover Girl liquid foundation down my front. Lori Laughlin’s mom sponged me off with club soda as much as she could. After all, it wasn’t like anyone was going to be looking at me. So that was the year I won. I stood in front of an audience of my peers, clutching my Emmy to my stained, slightly frayed mini-dress and, while I don’t remember doing it, I’m told I leaned into the mic and asked the room “Are you guys sure you want to do this?” It wasn’t my finest moment. And if you were so inclined, you might say that on that evening, there were signs.

The year 1983 didn’t improve as it progressed. Before my Emmy came back from the engraver – in those days they took them away from us after the photo ops and sent them overseas somewhere to put our names on them – I was fired. I was devastated. And I was blindsided. That was the Emmy’s fault. When ninety-seven percent of your union is unemployed at any time, you are always waiting to lose your job, no matter how secure it seems. But, having won an Emmy, I relaxed. I let myself believe I was safe. After I was dumped, I didn’t want to look at that damn trophy. My agent said she’d keep it until I stopped being a drama queen. She put it on the top of a bookcase facing the one window in her office. It was the only object up there. Remember that detail because it will be important.

I am not clear on the exact details of what happened next. When I asked my agent about it, a haunted look came into her eyes, and she got very quiet. But as I understood it, there was a construction company doing some work on the upper floor of a building across the street from her office. It was late in the afternoon when a cable, carrying something large and heavy, broke loose, and, whatever it was on the other end, swung over the street, and into my agent’s office via the window. It missed my agent, who was sitting behind her desk, a client who was sitting in front of it, and everything on the bookcase, except the top shelf where it hit and creamed my Emmy. After she cleaned up the broken glass, my agent called me and asked me to take back the twisted remains of my prize. As she handed it to me, she muttered something about forces we can’t understand and items and people that attract bad things. I told her she was being a drama queen.

Cut to 2011. I’d changed careers from actress to writer, published my first serious novel, and was about to embark on a book tour. And I wanted to bring the Emmy along. Why, you ask? Did an Emmy figure somehow in the plot of the book? It did not. The book was about three old ladies living in rural Georgia who rarely watched television. No, I wanted to bring my Emmy on this jaunt, because I was going to be in book stores across the country doing signings and giving speeches, and the Emmy was a great attention grabber. Unless you are Stephen King you need a gimmick to attract customers to your signings and speeches in book stores. I took my still mangled Emmy (I’d never had it fixed) to the American Academy of Television Arts for repairs. They said it was a goner, but for $250 I could buy a new one. A few days later Emmy the Second and I took off on tour.

I was at the airport in San Francisco when Delta Airlines decided I was probably a terrorist and they would have to dismember Emmy the Second. After they failed to find any bomb components in it, they handed it back to me in two pieces. The bigger one was the shiny Emmy figure we all know: a woman with daggerlike wings sprouting out of her back, holding a bunch of shiny rings that form a globe over her head, while wearing what looks like a windblown nightie. The smaller piece was the base on which Nightie Girl stood. If I wanted to use Emmy the Second I was going to have to put the two pieces back together again. I did want to use it. It was a prop that always got a round of applause when I gave a speech, and I had to give one when the book tour ended in West Virginia.

Fortunately, my next stop was Alabama, where my stepsons lived. Using a long bolt, plus a little spit and scotch tape, they managed to reassemble Emmy the Second. Not perfectly. The base didn’t fit the top anymore and, if I wasn’t careful, it could slip out from under Nightie Girl making her tilt precariously to the side. Emmy the Second was too fragile to use for every stop on the rest of my tour so I packed it away. But I took it out for the final event in West Virginia. This was a charity dinner, thrown by five hundred doctors and their wives, to support some cause I can’t remember. The hostess of the local morning TV show emceed the evening, and four authors, including me, had been invited to talk about writing for a living. Someone, somewhere, had decided that would be fun. After we’d gnawed on our overcooked chicken, the four of us were led onto a raised platform that faced the crowd. We sat behind tables covered with snowy white linen tablecloths, and tried to look like we were happy to be there. That went on until the hostess/emcee escorted the first speaker to the center of the platform to perform his part of the dog and pony show.

I was second up. I delivered my speech, managed to hang on to Emmy the Second so there was no tilting, and was about to make my way back to my table when the emcee/hostess intervened. At this point, I should mention that I later learned this woman had once been the winner of a state beauty pageant honoring some vegetable, and she’d started her television career as the station’s weather girl. In other words, for her, being perky was a vocation, and now she was going to treat all of us to a demonstration of perky girl schtick. “Ooh,” she gurgled at me, “A real Emmy! Let me hold it.” To my horror she grabbed Emmy the Second. With visions of it falling apart in front of five hundred people I faked a smile and pulled it away from her. “Maybe later,” was the best I could come up with. “Oh now, pleeeease,” she perked and pulled it back. I hung on to my end of it and we had a girly tug of war for what felt like a very long time until, finally, she gave up and let me slink back to my table.

That was when, with five hundred people staring at me, I looked down at my hand which had started hurting and realized the wings on Nightie Girl weren’t merely dagger-like, they were the real thing. At some point, in my tussle with the hostess, I’d been stabbed. And the table in front of me was covered by a snowy white cloth which would be a spectacular background for the blood that was now dripping from my palm. The good news was, being a good New Yorker, I was wearing basic black. Working on the theory that blood wouldn’t show up on black, I pressed my hand against my thigh until the bleeding stopped. And I was right; the blood did blend in. I kept my rapidly swelling hand in my pants pocket and no one knew I’d been wounded. Also, there had been an open bar and everyone was pretty well looped. It says something about me that I counted that whole experience as a win. At the very least, I am a slow learner.

I am so slow, in fact, that two years later when I was embarking on another book tour, I chose to take the Emmy with me again. I made the by now routine trip to the Academy for repairs on Emmy the Second, was told it was beyond help. I purchased Emmy the Third and flew off to sell my latest novel. This time, nothing bad happened. Well, okay, there was the incident at the signing in Arkansas where we had to call the security guards on the man who knew that the real killers of Robert Kennedy were a little-known tribe from the Rain Forest. He wanted me to collaborate with him on a book about it, and he got agitated when I said I couldn’t start working with him that evening. There was the guy in Memphis who knew that laptop computers were the invention of evil feminists, determined to make all men impotent. He got agitated when I said I couldn’t bring the matter to the attention of the FBI. And there was the book club in Texas that had read someone else’s novel by mistake. But none of that was Emmy the Third related. I felt that it and I were fully exonerated. Then Delta (again) lost my suitcase on the way home from Atlanta. They finally found it several weeks later and sent it to my apartment. I opened it to see if anything was missing.

Now I need to digress for a second, and explain about my technique for packing a suitcase. I was running around a lot in those years and I’d discovered the best way to keep from leaving stuff behind was to be rigid about placing everything in the same order, in the same spot in the suitcase every time. In the upper righthand corner, my makeup case nestled inside my shower cap under the stack of my bras. Next to it were my dressy shoes, tied together with my phone charger cord. On top of them was the pouch containing Tums, Advil, Pepto Bismol and… you get the picture. There was no way anyone could ever mess with my suitcase without me spotting it immediately. Emmy the Third traveled in the upper lefthand corner of the suitcase. It was wrapped in a towel and stowed under the heating pad I used when my neck wouldn’t turn. When I started digging around to check on it, all I had to do was lift the heating pad. And sure enough, there was Emmy the Third. Unwrapped. No sign of the towel anywhere. And Nightie Girl was clutching one shiny ring. The rest were scattered over the bottom of the suitcase that no one but I, myself, could have packed.

There were possibilities. Maybe for the first time, I’d forgotten to wrap Emmy the Third. Then, maybe when the suitcase was bouncing around some Delta baggage claims area, someone tossed it against a wall and Emmy the Third was hit and it broke and the rings scattered by themselves. And it was probably my imagination that the way those rings were gleaming up at me was sinister. I gathered up the rings and tied them to Nightie Girl’s hands with a big pink bow. Don’t ask me why it had to be pink. Or a bow. And while I’m still not ready to accept the concept of forces we can’t understand, Emmy the Third now lives far back in the darkest part of my deepest closet. I just think it’s better for everyone that way.

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