Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame by Robin Robertson Read Free Book Online Page B

whole of America indeed was turgid that day with love and recognition for the author of
The Missing
– a non-fictional meditation on the subject of missing persons. At that early stage I was not familiar with the concept of the ‘quiet news day’, therefore, when a producer from
Good Morning Chicago
rang to invite me on, I could only imagine they too were gasping for a bit of the O’Hagan goodness.
    The make-up room was quiet at eight a.m. Around the wall they had framed photographs of American comics – Phyllis Diller, I remember, and Sid Caesar, caught laughing in that particular limelight-drunk way I’d been rehearsing since New Jersey – and so I sat in the chair with a perfect sense of belonging as the girl got to work with her orange sponge. A blonde woman was sitting in the next chair along and we caught one another’s eye. She was smiling at me, and something in her experienced face seemed to draw all the light from the lightbulbs surrounding the large mirror. ‘Do you mind if I say something to you?’ she asked.
    ‘No bother,’ I said.
    ‘Well. You look like you’ve got a whole lot of God in you,’ she said, her elastic smile seeming quickly to lunge across her cheek to land in a snarl.
    ‘God?’ I said. ‘Well, it’s been a good week, but …’
    ‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘Definitely God. Like Godliness.’
    She put out her hand between the chairs. ‘My name’s Dana Plato,’ she said. ‘You probably know me?’ (Her voice had that semi-plaintive, questing upward swing at the end of sentences, the one Americans deploy so effectively, seeming hurt and demanding at the same time.) ‘I used to be in a big TV show called
Diff’rent Strokes
. It was really huge.’
    She was speaking to me now in the mirror.
    ‘There was a lot of bad luck on the show,’ she said. ‘Everybody on the show, well … all of us, we had bad luck.’
    ‘Really?’ I said. But I knew fine well who she was.
Diff’rent Strokes
was a feature of my Scottish youth, famous for Gary Coleman, the bizarrely small black guy with the grin and the catchphrase – ‘What you talk’n’ about?’ – and Dana Plato played the wise-cracking girl in his adoptive family. I even knew about the ‘bad luck’: it had been a tabloid story for years, ‘The Curse of
Diff’rent Strokes
’, but I stared at her in the mirror as my face became more orange and her eyes got glittery with memory.
    ‘I got busted for armed robbery. It was a video store in Vegas,’ she said. ‘It was money, you know? And the other guys on the show … oh, there was guns and more drugs, the whole deal.’
    ‘God,’ I said.
    ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘I got out of all that when I became a Christian, and I went to rehab, and now I’m here in Chicago to star in a wonderful show called
Hollywood’s Greatest Moments
.’
    I had to consider this for a second. Dana Plato was sitting next to me. She was wired. She was going on the show. With her blonde hair, her video store saga, her Godliness, the new production opening tonight – Jesus Christ almighty! How was any poor bugger supposed to compete?
    ‘She says you’re a
wrider,
’ said Dana.
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    ‘I love
wriders
. You’re a famous
wrider,
good heavens.’
    ‘No. Not at all,’ I said. ‘I’ve just started …’
    ‘Gee,’ she said. ‘A famous
wrider
. And we’re on the same show. You must be famous. You’re being cute. They don’t usually have
wriders
on shows like this.’
    Several sorts of panic entered my soul at once. Some of those panics are the sort that might cause you to feel pity for me, but others were only shaming, and reveal a native understanding of the machinations of showbusiness self-interest the likes of which might serve to make Diana Ross look like Miss Congeniality. I took a deep breath and asked the most selfish question of my career. ‘On the show: am I following you?’
    ‘Yes. I think so,’ said Dana.
    My heart almost erupted in the lower depths.