And so they left, and yet again Susan saw and participated in the country's landscape — hostile, cold and magnificent, dull and glowing. They pulled into Los Angeles around sunset, arriving in Rancho Palos Verdes on the coast just as a full moon pulled up over the Pacific. They were just in time for a dinner of sloppy joes at Barb's friend's house, and they watched the lights of Avalon over on Catalina sparkling in the distance. Dinner was almost ready and adults and teenagers scurried about. Susan found a quiet den and dialed Larry Mortimer's number. She connected to a personal assistant and then a few breaths later, Larry was on the line. «Susan Colgate? You're one brave woman to go and quit that pageant the way you did.»
Susan was flattered to be called a woman. «It wasn't quitting, Larry. It was — well — there was no way around it. You go and do a hundred pageants and then write me a postcard. We'll compare notes.»
«Such spark. You could really harness that — make it work for you.»
«I'm happy enough just having my mother off my back.»
«Have you ever acted before?»
«Have you ever been in a pageant with cramps before? Or the flu?»
«Touché. How old are you?»
«I'm out of high school, if that's what you mean.»
«No — I meant — »
«With a beret and a kilt I look fourteen. With makeup, cruel lighting and two beers in me, I can pull off thirty. Easy.»
«What's the most ridiculous pageant you ever did?»
«I was Miss Nuclear Energy three years ago. I had this little atom-shaped electric crown over my head. It was pretty, actually. But the pageant was dumb. It was organized by men, not women, and the only other thing they'd ever organized was a Thanksgiving turkey raffle. The whole thing was so — corny. Instead of sashes we had name tags.»
«We should meet. We should get together.»
Susan's stomach made a dip, like cresting a roller coaster's first and biggest hill. She was excited. She hadn't expected this. «Why's that?»
Barb passed by the door to tell Susan the sloppy joes were ready.
«You could really go places,» Larry said.
«Like where?»
«Movies. TV.»
«Be still my heart.»
«Come into town. Tomorrow.»
«We're going to Disneyland tomorrow.»
«The day after then.»
Susan had the sensation that this was just another emcee calling her up onto some stage where she would be judged again. After a few weeks of freedom from pageantry, she felt old strings being tugged and that spooked her. Trish, now answering only to «Dreama,» called Susan to the table. «Dinner time, Larry. I ought to go.»
«What's for dinner?»
«Sloppy joes.»
«I love sloppy joes.»
«It gives me cellulite.»
«Cellulite? You're a child!»
«I'm seventeen.»
«Ooh. I'll back off now.»
They were quiet.
Larry asked her, «Meet me?»
«What do you look like?» Susan asked.
«If I were in a movie, I'd be a sailor like back in the old days, with a sunburn and a duffel bag, and I'd be on shore leave wearing a cable knit sweater.»
Two days later Susan, Dreama and Barb met Larry for lunch at an outdoor café where the linen, china and flowers were white and the service was so good they didn't even realize they were being served. Larry was late, and when Susan saw him rush toward the table, her heart did a cartwheel. Larry was older, curly-haired, gruff and in a glorious twist of fate, a clone of Eugene Lindsay, the winking judge.
Susan fell into a reverie. She hoped that Larry's breath would smell like scotch. She realized that Larry was to be her devirginizer, and a wash of sexual energy and nervousness bordering on static cling came over her. She caught his eye as he approached, and sealing his fate with Susan, he winked.
«I'm late,» he said.
«You're just in time,» she said. Their eyes locked and they held each others' hand a pulse too long. «Larry, this is my friend Dreama and her aunt Barb.» They shook hands, and Barb sized Larry up in a manner that was blatantly financial, embarrassing and amusing.
Lunch was a blur. Afterward, Susan left with Larry, ostensibly to test for a new TV show. Once inside his Jaguar, Aunt Barb and Dreama out of sight, Larry told Susan that the test was actually for the next day. He then looked up at the sky innocently. Susan wasn't fazed. She told Larry this was pretty much what she'd figured.Oh God, she thought to herself,I'm a jaded harpy and I'm only seventeen. Mom did this to me. She's gone and turned me into … her.
Larry asked, «So where do you think we might go now?»
Years later, with hindsight, Susan would find it appalling that Barb had left her so readily in the hands of an L.A. predator.
Later that night, after Susan and Larry had exhausted themselves in Larry's bed, they would briefly chuckle over the clunky roving eye Aunt Barb had focused on Larry, then phone Barb and say, «Barb? Larry Mortimer here. We're late like crazy. We didn't even get a chance to audition. The tests were slowed down by a union walkout. It'll have to be tomorrow. We'll be back at your hotel in an hour. Here. Susan wants to speak with you.» He passed the phone over the sheets to Susan.
«Barb? Wasn't lunch today a dream ?»
The next day at the actual audition, Susan clarified in her own mind one of the larger lessons of her life so far, the one which states that the less you want something, the more likely you are to get it. As she uttered her very first line, «Dad, I think there's something not quite right with Mom,» the character of Katie Bloom, two years younger than her, melted onto Susan Colgate's soul, and as of 1987, the public and Susan herself would spend decades trying to separate the two. Katie Bloom was the youngest of four children, a distant fourth at that. Her three on-screen siblings were played by a trio of better-known TV actors who couldn't seem to make the bridge into film, and they chafed madly at any suggestion that their Bloom work was «only TV.» Off-screen, the three were patronizing and aloof to Susan. On-screen they looked to their younger free-spirit sister Susan to give them a naive clarity into their problems, and as the years went on, their problems became almost endless.
When Susan emerged as the keystone star of the series, it was in the face of outright mutiny by her costars. At the beginning she thought their coldness was the angst of tormented actors. Then she realized it was essentially fucked-up bitterness, which was much easier to handle. Far more difficult to handle was the issue of Marilyn's continued involvement in her life. The procedure, for insurance reasons, demanded that Susan live with a family member near the studio. The glimmer of TV fame quickly outshone the gloom of pageants lost. Marilyn and Don rented the upper floor of a terrifyingly blank faux-hacienda heap in deepest Encino. Susan did the easier thing and lived in Larry's pied-à-terre in Westwood. Thus, Marilyn's presence was minimized to that of a bookkeeping technicality.
Larry was like all of the pageant judges in the world rolled into one burly, considerate, suntanned package. He knew how the stoplights along Sunset Boulevard were synched and shifted his Porsche's gears accordingly. He had a writer fired who called Susan an empty Pez dispenser to her face. He made sure she ate only excellent food and kept her Kelton Street apartment fully stocked with fresh pasta, ripe papayas and bottled water, all of which was overseen by a thrice-weekly maid. He lulled Susan to sleep singing «Goodnight, Irene,» and then, after he nipped home to sleep with his wife, Jenna, he arrived at work the next day and saw to it that Susan received plenty of prime TV and film offers.
When she thought about her new situation at all, it was with the blameless ingratitude of the very young. Her life's trajectory was fated, inevitable. Why be a wind-up doll for a dozen years if not to become a TV star? Why not alter one's body? Bodies were meant to photograph well. Mothers? They were meant to be Tasmanian devils — all the better reason to keep them penned up in Encino.