Monday, November 07, 2005
Ms. KAR (Pt.3)
As our friendship developed, I realized I was feeling a lot of intense feelings about K. But it became clear to me that there were various other people in the picture, and it was going to be a case of Share And Share Alike.
I was going to have to deal with M, her theatrical agent at the time. M was a portly, gregarious black guy, with a ton of energy and a gift of gab up the wazoo. K looked up to him and wouldn't make a move without his input.
M saw Ms. KAR as a potential meal ticket. He viewed me as, well, someone he would have to deal with also. M started hearing from K tales about this P woman, me. It was P this and P that. I seemed to have made an impression on her, so M turned his attention to me. He managed to deduce that I was a somewhat crazy older blonde, highly educated and interesting to hang around. And I rode a bike. He knew before we met that I was probably falling for his protege, the way lots of people had done before.
"I think she's gay," K said to M about me. She and I had not really talked about our sex lives early on, so she was guessing here. At that time, I really did not have a sex life. I was mainly preoccupied with my two loves, long distance cycling and screenwriting.
M could see the writing on the wall. His feeling was that K needed exposure to different things in her life, especially if she were going to carry on with the acting. She would run across a lot of gay women, and M wanted her to be prepared. I was a tool in these plans. He figured he had better meet with me and see where my head was at.
Over lunch one day at the Old World Restaurant on the Sunset Strip, he and I arrived at an unspoken pact. I could say, in retrospect, it was more like a deal with the devil. But it got me K, which was what I wanted. I would have to go thru M if I wanted K. I was prepared to do that.
M spent most of the lunch praising Ms. KAR to me. "She's perfect material to be a bisexual woman," he told me. He could have added, "And you can have her if you play your cards right." He didn't, but that was certainly the unspoken subtext between us.
Did I have so little self-confidence that I saw no other way? Yes, probably, sorry to say. Maybe I could have landed K on my own, but at the time she relied heavily on M's advice, both personally and professionally. So M kept me dangling over her, and he kept her tycoon boyfriend J in the same position.
M would talk to K the way an experienced older woman would groom a younger protege. He talked a lot about powerful men, and the role women played in their lives. Take Donald Trump, he would argue. The guy spends his life climbing over people and companies to get to the top, and now he's there, but there is one final thing he needs. He has everything but the Babe. When you've taken over the business world and made your mark, what's left? You want the trophy wife on your arm.
If the woman is smart, she knows this instinctively. She'll play her cards well. She's the prize, and he's just a piker.
"He has to come in the door the correct way," M liked to say.
Norman Mailer put it this way. "God dealt women all the cards, and he dealt them right between their legs."
Women who tolerate abuse from males have somehow gotten these rules ass-backwards. They forget that they, in M's words, are "the gift."
Of course, Ms. KAR probably realized a lot of this on her own. But not all of it, or she would not have been so susceptible to M's preachings. She took his advice as holy scripture.
My feeling was that M was certainly correct in his interpretation of male/female relationships. But why did a woman need to hear it from HIM? That was the fly in the ointment. He wants to make the woman he's coaching strong in her dealings with other males, where he can manipulate and pull the strings.
If they are indeed the "gifts" to men that men think they are, then why would women need someone like M? Aren't they able to navigate on their own? Apparently not. M was always in charge.
Easy to see, in retrospect. But at the time neither K nor I probably had enough belief in ourselves.
We signed up for M's "crash course" in successful living. K was too insecure personally to function totally on her own, I was getting mired in a crush that became one of the more intense things of my life with girls.
We were easy pickings. She and I both caved in to our respective needs. We gave just about all of our personal power away.
TO BE CONTINUED
