Fame today is so arbitrary. You can have a mediocre voice and win a spot on American idol, or humiliate yourself on national TV by being lowered into a glass case filled with live rats. But at one time there were real stars, people with talent, charisma, pizzazz. This came to mind the other day when I saw a homeless woman in my neighborhood sitting on the sidewalk with a sign that read: “Believe It Or Not, At One Time I Was Really Cute.” It wasn’t until I was a few blocks away when I realized that this scary, unwashed, ungainly, creature was once the well-loved movie star Jenny Maquire. I went back and plied her with a tuna fish sandwich and two bottles of Night Train and she began to unravel the sad story that took her from the heights of fame to her cardboard domicile on the number 1 subway platform.
“Yeah, I was a big shot once,“ Jenny confirmed while readjusting her layers of filthy thrift-store clothing. “I had a beautiful apartment that looked out over Central Park and so many bags of fan mail it took three doormen to carry them up.”
Jenny’s career began as a 9-year-old contestant on Star Search where she sang “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” while juggling two flaming batons and finally diving into a tank of baked beans. Although her act only come in third, it garnered her some work in television commercials. You may remember her as the adorable chestnut-haired girl from hot dog commercials who wiped mustard off her face and said: “I can’t believe I ate all 8!” After that came print and modeling work and a stint on the now-defunct soap opera Search For Tomorrow as the treacherous Crystal Dupree, whom she played to the hilt for nearly a year before her character was killed by a tube of poisoned lip gloss. It was during this time that Jenny’s beloved parents died of complications from Irritable Bowel Syndrome. In her grief, she threw herself into work shooting the popular feature films Shriek 1 & 2 and I Know How Much You Spent Last Summer before landing the plum role “Amanda” in director Frank Garrett’s blistering Civil War melodrama: The Filthy Winds Of Ardor. She even cut some memorable records, receiving a Grammy nomination for Jenny Sings Jewish favorites.
That was when she met race car driver and bad boy around town Buzz Miller. The tabloids had a field day with their tempestuous love affair, especially when it degenerated into very public fights at low rent award ceremonies. Buzz’s philandering ways drove Jenny straight to the liquor cabinet, and before long she was showing up stoned on sets, slurring lines and turning herself into a casting liability. Her guzzling increased and she married four more times. One of her husbands was that notorious white rapper “Z-tupid” who recorded the popular anthem to spousal abuse: Smack That Ugly Bitch Up before mysteriously getting gunned down one night outside a Denny’s restaurant.
More bad luck followed. There was, for example, the ill-fated TV pilot Jenny’s Jalopy in which our heroine’s sporty red corvette became haunted by the ghost of John Denver. Aside from being in obvious bad taste, the show was agonizingly unfunny and crashed and burned with the networks almost as swiftly as the plane that killed the real Denver.
It was around that time that Jenny gave birth to a beautiful baby girl which she named Chlamydia. When she talks about her daughter today, her eyes fill with tears. “She had gorgeous black curly hair,” she mutters softly, “and the sweetest smile you ever saw.” But this was a low period in Jenny’s life. She admits to not knowing who the child’s father was. After a wild night of drinking Aqua Velva shooters, she left little Chlamydia on the A train, or so she believes. “I can’t be sure,” she confesses, “it may have been the D or the F.” Things rapidly spiraled downward after that. Her money gone, she was evicted. Friends ran when they saw her coming in their direction. Homeless, she found herself sleeping with other vagrants on the mountains of salt the city stores for snow plows in warehouses on the West Side Highway. “I learned fast how to adapt to street life…” she wearily admits. (She even gave me a helpful Martha Stewart-like hint on how to extract alcohol from Listerine by straining the liquid through pieces of white bread.) As the song says, ”You’re riding high in April, shot down in May.”
I left the poor woman, whose reminiscences had slurred into repetitive incomprehensible babble, and thought of the sweet-faced young girl in those hot dog commercials whose life was once pregnant with hope and possibility. Now for us in the neighborhood, she’ll just be Jenny from the box.
(Now before I get any angry eMails I have to admit that everything you just read is complete bullshit.)