Hummina, hummina…“I am so terribly sorry!” he said, his voice saccharine, sounding less regretful than like someone who’d been caught. “I was just being funny. I’m so sorry I offended you.”
I liked the feeling of having his nuts in a vise. “Well, Ed,” I said finally, “it was really offensive. And really inappropriate.”
He promised it would never happen again.
“Thanks for calling. I appreciate it.” What else could I say? The guy controlled my fate.
“What a creep,” Chris said when I replayed the conversation.
“Good,” Don said. Then, somewhat triumphantly, “Good!”
For every young woman starting out, I wish you a Don and a Chris. And no Ed Turner.
THE JOB GAVE me a chance to focus on politics, something I had come to love growing up in the DC area. I did some stories on the Reagan-Mondale campaign and even covered the conventions in Dallas and San Francisco. Apparently, Al Buch, the news director of WTVJ in Miami, was watching; he called and offered me a job on the spot.
The timing couldn’t have been better. The new president of CNN, Burt Reinhardt, made it known he didn’t think I had the right stuff to be on-air. So I applied for a job in the writers’ pool and got rejected from that too. By Ed Turner. While Wendy found her professional home at CNN—she’d stay 32 years, producing Larry King Live for 18 of them—it was time for me to move on.
By now my relationship with Guy Pepper had petered out, so before flying south, I had one last adventure in Atlanta—and my first brush （well, more than a brush） with fame.
I was covering a press conference featuring the cast and crew of the movie The Slugger’s Wife as well as the screenwriter, Neil Simon, the genius auteur behind such American classics as The Odd Couple, Brighton Beach Memoirs, and The Goodbye Girl, which I loved. The idea that I’d be in the presence of such an icon was thrilling. I was determined to get him to notice me.
I sat in the front row, wearing a white cotton dress with black stripes under a black knit jacket. I’d swiped on my go-to Max Factor Frosty Cola lipstick （I’d read that Connie Francis liked it too）。 I thought I looked pretty cute. Simon, sitting in a director’s chair, glanced my way several times. I knew he knew that I knew that he noticed me.
The next day at CNN, the show’s hilarious secretary, Mary, gave me a look as she handed me a pink While You Were Out slip. In her thick cursive, she had written Neil Simon and put a little check in the box next to CALLED.
I was completely, utterly, and crazily starstruck, laughing with my co-workers, wondering how I’d be able to go grocery shopping without being mobbed by fans when I became the next Mrs. Neil Simon.
He took me out to dinner. I remember him gazing at me and sighing audibly, his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand, looking like a smitten schoolboy. A bit over the top, but I was flattered to be the object of his momentary infatuation.
We had dinner again, after which he invited me back to his hotel. It was strange, being with someone 30 years older, but I was all for new experiences. He started kissing me and—well, that’s as far as it got.
Neil Simon’s three-word explanation: “Blood pressure medication.”
9
Rainy Days and Mondays
THERE WAS AT least one thing I left behind in Atlanta.
Bulimia had plagued me throughout college. I remember gorging on chocolate chip cookies in my dorm room, then throwing up in a paper bag and stealthily discarding it in a dumpster outside. Sometimes I’d do it three times a week, then months would go by when I wouldn’t succumb to the urge. But the cycle always started up again.
I shared an apartment in Atlanta with a cardiac rehab nurse. We weren’t especially close, but our quarters were. One night, after hearing me retch in the bathroom, she confronted me. “I’m worried about you,” she said. “I think you’ve got a problem.”
I felt exposed and ashamed. So I moved out. But the confrontation forced me to face what I was doing to my body. I learned that my eating disorder could wreak havoc on my teeth, my esophagus, my overall health. Then Karen Carpenter died.
She was a huge star when I was in middle school—I can still remember her distinctive low vibrato in hit after hit, like “Top of the World” and “Rainy Days and Mondays.” I’d say to my friends, “Listen, I sound just like Karen Carpenter,” and perform a few bars of “Close to You,” provoking eye-rolls. Thirteen years later, in 1983, her heart gave out, the result of anorexia. She was just 32 years old.