1.
August 2002
I got the Honeymoon Stage job offer while I was microwaving a Lean Pocket and talking to Celia about one of her customers who always claimed she’d left the foam off his cappuccino—Is he flirting, she wanted to know, or just a jerk? We often had trouble telling the difference. At the time, we were a year and a half out from our college graduations, and naive to the ways of the world.
I had moved to California three months earlier, against my mother’s advice. She thought I already had a job in television and should stick close to home, just in case. In case of what, she didn’t elaborate. I could practically hear the air quotes around television, the tutting that I hadn’t chosen a more practical career. My stepdad, Ron, agreed with her, as he always did. He basically existed to agree with my mother, which, after what my dad had put her through, she probably deserved.
I’d been working as a booking assistant for a cable news channel in Manhattan, which was close to the job I wanted in the way that JFK-airport sushi is technically the same meal as omakase in Tokyo. The pay was terrible, and I often crashed at my ex-boyfriend’s place because it was easy and right off the B train. I knew I’d have to pay my dues, but I didn’t feel like this gig was getting me anywhere other than Josh’s stained futon.
Like many others who had grown up on Tiger Beat and Baywatch, I had always had Hollywood dreams. Specifically, I wanted work in sit-coms. I wanted out of this chaotic city high-rise swarmed by tourists, to be nestled inside the relative safety of a studio lot. I wanted a tight script with a laugh track. Steady work for twenty-two episodes and change. By that August afternoon, in my Silver Lake kitchen talking soy milk with Celia, I’d come to the realization that this dream job would be difficult to find. Still, I wasn’t ready to give up just yet.
Celia might have been my best friend from college, but television was the best friend I’d had between fourth and eighth grade. My mother was a single mom who always worked a full-time job, and I’d been the quintessential latchkey kid, keeping myself company with after-school specials—some sitcom mom cooking dinner in the background while I did math homework and waited for my own mom to finish her shift. My older brother played hockey and mastered AP biology. I took daily
doses of Saved by the Bell.
There was comfort in the structure of network television—its predictable beats, the way even the most distressing B story would be mostly forgotten by the start of the next episode. I liked how the characters responded to situations in the way you would expect them to. In retrospect, I probably should have had a good talk therapist, but my mother was parenting alone—that is, until she met Ron.
TV had always been my safe space, though it didn’t escape me how unstable my career prospects were at the time of my Honeymoon Stage offer. My roommates were at least making strides in the directions they wanted to go. Celia, the conventionally hot one of our trio, had a gig at a coffee shop that sustained her between cattle call auditions, and Jen, more demure, though no less of a go-getter, worked in accounting for a sports agency. I’d been doing informational interviews while moonlighting as a dog walker, slowly blowing through my meager savings and ignoring the growing possibility that I might have to move back East.
I hadn’t considered a job in Reality television. At the time, Reality TV meant mostly talent competitions or game shows—often gross ones in exotic locales. There was a popular show about a group of random people living in a house together, talking about society’s problems, but I didn’t think that was for me.
“Your phone.” Celia gestured. I didn’t recognize the number, and I froze, awash with hope. Could this finally be my chance? I let the call go to voicemail, but I played it right away and then called back immediately.
Yes, I was available. Yes, I was interested. No, I hadn’t worked for the network before, but of course I grew up watching it. A courier would come by this afternoon with paperwork and some clips that would get me up to speed? Yes, okay, of course. I’d sign whatever they wanted. I was theirs to command—while, of course, also being my own totally interesting adult person with life experience and taste that would strengthen the show.
As it turned out, Maggie McKee was the reason I got the job. She was my Aunt Dede’s friend’s daughter and the one person I knew working in Hollywood. I had known Maggie as a child, gone to school with her in Ohio the year after my dad left, when my mom had dragged us back to her hometown to “get our bearings.” Maggie sat next to me in art class. She was a dancer. Even then, she had the shiniest hair. After my mom spent a year in night nursing school and we’d had a few sessions of family therapy, my mother took us back to Philadelphia, where I entered fifth grade. Maggie entered the national anthem–singing circuit. She became a useful trivia bit throughout my adolescence. People love a celebrity connection—the one time they sat next to an actor at an airport or when they shared a college dorm with some politician’s sister.
Maggie was my connection to something bigger, and people always asked me if she was the same in real life as she was on TV.
I didn’t know. Probably? We hadn’t exactly been friends when we were nine. Likely she didn’t even remember me. We didn’t stay in touch. When it aired, I’d barely watched the kids’ variety show she was on. The Tiger Crew cut a bit too close to the vulnerable, effusive part of myself that, even at thirteen, I was trying to avoid. So I really didn’t know her once she became Maggie McKee up on some marquee. Aunt Dede, too, lost regular access. But Maggie was my tether to the stars, proof that,
although my life seemed ordinary, I’d once played Pretty Pretty Princess with someone important.
Aunt Dede still knew Maggie’s mother, so she dropped my name when I moved out to Los Angeles. When Honeymoon Stage suddenly needed a replacement production assistant halfway through filming Season One, my inexperience was nothing against Maggie’s mother’s recommendation.
Maggie’s team sent me the tapes in a package camouflaged as “Civil War History,” a label meant to deter anyone actually interested in watching two B-list celebrities navigate their first year of marriage.
Celia went to work, and that afternoon I turned on the stringout footage. I sat there in my sweatpants, one corner of my screen smudged with what must have been my thumbprint, our spider plant dying, our windows in need of a wash. And suddenly there was the sign that read “Palisades Pines.” The looming house, the white gazebo. Then came Maggie McKee in a custom wedding dress, feeding Jason Dean a slice of cake. Her long-sleeved, low-necked lace. Her intricate updo. The tiniest trace of the girl I half remembered, if I squinted. Jason looked suave in his tux, broad and handsome as he tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. He had a thick neck, chiseled cheekbones, and a strong chin—the kind of guy who would have had his looks to coast on, even if he hadn’t been a font of athletic talent. A close-up of Maggie’s bouquet, a tight pink swirl of orchids and Juliet roses that probably cost more than my rent. A shot of Jason adjusting his jacket. Essentially, it wasn’t all
that different from the photo spread they’d sold to People magazine, a curated collection of moments I’d later realize was, like the show, going to help Maggie and Jason pay off this wedding. It was extravagant so that it could be sold, and they sold it so that they could afford the extravagance. Watching this intimate cut, I felt like a guest—or at least one of the cater-waiters. There was Maggie staring into space, fiddling with a ribbon. She checked her teeth for lipstick with a finger, turned to a bridesmaid to confirm she was all right. She rested her arm lightly atop her father’s. Jason pressed his lips together when he saw her walk through the door.
Then they were sitting on a couch, in jeans and T-shirts, surrounded by half-emptied moving boxes. Maggie looked very young and thin, and almost orange from her tan, which was something I thought they might want to fix in postproduction. She had those big brown doe eyes and a nose so pert and straight she might have been a cartoon princess. Big boobs, supposedly natural. Jason gave her a little kiss on the top of the head, and she giggled. It wasn’t exactly compelling television. I thought it unlikely that this would be my big break.
The production assistant before me had supposedly buckled under the demands of the role—she had a fiancé and hobbies and a real life she didn’t want to miss out on. This would not be a problem for me—an ambitious young woman with no significant other, few local friends, and no money for leisure. The line producer had described the job like being on location for a nature documentary, sitting silently in the Sahara, watching for movement. Occasionally running off to print out MapQuest directions. Repositioning a sofa. Refilling a bowl of chips. Getting Dan the director a ginger ale. Hours of nothing interesting, punctuated by high drama.
Ultimately, I would not get to watch two lions fighting for dominance or a gazelle taking its first steps or the sun rising over the grassland. I would watch semi-famous people in their acts of daily living. I would watch the male of the species unkink the hose, while the female flipped through catalogs. I would watch them take phone calls, nodding along, jotting something on the pad by the receiver. I would watch them walk through airports and office suites and hotels and their living room. Watching them on the couch that day, I feared there was no way the show would last beyond this season, after which I’d have to find a different gig.
And then I got to a scene on that tape with Maggie trying and failing to close a kitchen drawer. It was clearly off its track, but instead of reaching back and popping it in place, Maggie just repeatedly slammed it, little sighs of exasperation floofing her bangs as she blinked mournfully, wondering what could be wrong.
“Gosh darn it!” In that moment I saw it. I understood. Maggie McKee was not just another teenage popstar. She was Lucy Ricardo meets Marilyn Monroe. She was unknowingly watering a plastic houseplant. She walked head-on into a glass door. And then there’d come Jason, to crouch down to where she’d collapsed on the kitchen floor in clueless frustration, to kiss her on the top of the head and roll his eyes and call her ridiculous as he slid the drawer back in its slot.
“Oh,” I said aloud. This kind of TV wasn’t printing off a three-act script and having somebody read through it—this kind of TV was looking at a person’s life and deciding what it would mean. Reality producers weren’t just running the prewritten play, they got to change the rules of the game. Nothing could happen that they didn’t decide had happened, even to celebrities like Jason Dean and Maggie McKee. They had the final cut.
This was exactly what I hadn’t known I wanted: the power to tell the story, to decide how it would end. To be the puppeteer ensuring that everyone stayed who and where they were supposed to be. I was addicted from that very first drawer slam.
With Honeymoon Stage, we were going to watch Maggie McKee make a fool of herself and then smile endearingly as her husband cleaned her mess. Maggie was the stereotypical TV housewife, despite her inability to cook or clean or iron, despite the fact that she’d worked all through her childhood and opened for Take5 at Madison Square Garden. She was in need of a man to shake his head and say Oh, Maggie every time she did something dumb, while viewers sat at home
and laughed. She might not be the best singer or the best dancer, but she was pretty and blond and not very bright, and people were going to want to watch her.
That afternoon, I signed my name on the network’s papers as a guarantee I’d keep my mouth shut, but of course the first thing I did when my roommates got home was show them the tape. I was twenty-three and had no sense for consequence or self-preservation.
“Should you be sharing this?” Jen asked me. She was always the brakes. Even back then she seemed about to turn thirty.
“Technically no.” I felt a little sheepish, but the cultural currency was just too good. And I’d known Jen and Celia for years; they were as trustworthy as it got. I pressed play and watched my friends watch the screen. I wanted to gauge their reactions and glean from them some ideas for how to make myself indispensable once I got on set. I’d be the one on staff who had the pulse of the youth population.
“I don’t really understand what there could be for you to do here,” said Celia. “No offense, but it looks like someone’s just using a camcorder.”
“Yeah, but a camcorder on Maggie McKee and Jason Dean,” said Jen. “They probably need someone to remove their pink jellybeans or someone to, like, set their fan at the right angle whenever they change seats.”
“People like the pink jellybeans,” said Celia.
“Irrelevant,” I said. “I’m going in as a production assistant, not Maggie and Jason’s assistant.”
“Aren’t they the product?”
On-screen, Jason mowed the lawn. Maggie sliced through swathes of bubble wrap, wedding china emerging in a bloodless cesarean.
“Weird that they don’t have people doing this for them.” Celia said, nibbling on the edge of the same potato chip she’d been eating for the past five minutes.
“That’s the point, I think,” said Jen. “Celebrities, they’re just like us.”
“With money.” We licked salt from our fingers.
The thing was, Maggie was just very, very dumb. Mispronouncing words, malapropistic, but also apparently utterly unprepared for everyday human life. Had she been like this as a kid? Was this what happened when you performed all through your childhood? My friends and I stared at the stringout footage, a rough assembly of the moments that a story editor had flagged to make it onto the show, not yet cleaned up in editing. Maggie didn’t understand an ATM. She put the pasta in the pot before boiling the water. She bought a two-hundred-dollar air freshener. Jason would roll his eyes at her, even occasionally break the fourth wall to raise a brow at the camera, like could we believe this? They’d fall into the same toxic conversational patterns:
“Are you annoyed?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, now I am.”
“So guys will watch this and think, ‘Yeah, he gets to sleep with Maggie McKee, but also he has to put up with her.’” Jen squinted at the screen.
“And girls will think, ‘Yeah, she gets to be Maggie McKee, but also she has to manage with five working brain cells.’”
“It’s smart,” Jen said. “In a gross, calculating way.”
Celia stood up, cracking her shoulders. “I don’t know, I’d still rather be her. Dumb people don’t know how dumb they are, right? That’s kind of what makes them dumb?”
Was the show gross and calculating? I couldn’t be sure. It was certainly going to be entertaining. Society loved little more than to lift a woman up to watch her fall. Take a young woman, or better a girl, and cram her into a character and surround her with sycophants and, likely, a lot of older men, and then act all surprised when she shoplifted or developed a drug habit. This was the American way, and in 2002 we were all still feeling fairly patriotic.
Maggie McKee met Jason Dean just before the debut of her first album. Found You was a bizarre candy jar of ways her label thought she might distance herself from her child-star reputation, despite her still being a child. The executives wanted her to be sexy, but relatable: someone who’d wash her fancy car in a string bikini and then go clean her own pool. What high school senior wasn’t writhing around in pleather pants to some culturally insensitive Indian drumming? What seventeen-year-old wasn’t rubbing shoulders with movie stars and models and famous pro-athletes who, despite an eight-year age difference, took them on publicly extravagant dates?
Her record label trotted her out on shopping mall tours and to management soirees. In her low-rise jeans and bedazzled crop tops, she’d walk the red carpet for teen-movie premieres and pose for photos at nightclubs she wasn’t legally old enough to enter. She showed her face at all the major radio stations—a few days in Los Angeles, then Nashville, then New York. This was how she met Jason. It was the first season of his new megawatt contract, and the team had him making the rounds. Broadcasters loved him: because he was built more like a Greek god than an MLB pitcher; because he jokingly talked trash with club reporters; because when he was well, he could throw 98 mph. He and Maggie ended up as back-to-back interviews on a morning show in Atlanta, and as soon as they met, it was, as both would tell it, “fireworks.”
“He was older, yeah, but I’d been working since I was a kid,” she says in the daytime-TV interview that inspired the network to cast them for Honeymoon Stage. “We just understood each other right away.”
They sit next to each other on a blue velvet couch, legs not quite touching, in a way that seems more intimate than the usual famous-man’s arm over the famous-woman’s shoulder.
“The funny thing about it is she wasn’t a baseball fan at all,” Jason laughs. “The studio guys were asking all these questions, and when it was over, she stopped me and said, ‘What do you do again?’”
“Well, then I sang in the studio and you were the one who was curious.” Maggie smiles. “I was promoting my first single, and he looks all surprised and goes ‘I like that song!’”
She soon became a staple on the ballpark bleachers. He’d sometimes join her on tour. At the time, I was finishing my senior year of high school.
Excerpted from Honeymoon Stage by Margaux Eliot. Reprinted with permission from Little A, an imprint of Amazon Publishing. All rights reserved.
