Betty Rollin - Am I Getting Paid for This?: Memoir of A Career Girl

Also by Betty Rollin

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Here's the Bright Side: Of Failure, Fear, Cancer, Divorce, and Other Bum Raps

AM I GETTING PAID
FOR THIS?

Memoir of A Career Girl

by

Betty Rollin

Copyright Betty Rollin 2014

All rights reserved.

CAUTION: AM I GETTING PAID FOR THIS? is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America and of all countries covered by the International Copyright Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth), the Berne Convention, the Pan-American Copyright Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention as well as all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including excerpting, professional/amateur stage rights, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound recording, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as CD-ROM, CD-I, information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved.

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Attn: Kathleen Nishimoto

ebook ISBN: 978-0-7867-5590-5

Distributed by Argo Navis Author Services

FOR ED

CONTENTS

I dont want to mislead anyone. This is not a celebrity autobiography. First of all, I wrote it myself. Secondly, although people stop me in the street sometimes, it is more often than not to ask directions to Bloomingdales. And third, I have never slept with anyone famous. I did, once, sleep with the son of someone famous (page 13), but as you can see, I dont even say who.

Rather, this is a story about someone who happens to be me, but might as easily have been someone else, someone who is neither a movie star nor a Watergate burglar, but who is no nine-to-fiver, either. It is about someone for whom work, at some point along the way, became more than a matter of paychecks, vacations, and health benefits. Its about someone for whom work became like love. And by that I do not mean only the moon-in-June part of love, but the grainier side as wellthe not sleeping or eating, the waiting for the phone to ring, the caring more than you want to, the just plain caring.

Men have always cared about work. Women have not. And now thats changed. Now women care about their work as much assometimes more thanmen do, and probably for the same reason. For more and more women, work isnt just something they do. Rather, its become part of who they are.

Some people think this is bad, some think its good. But whatever anybody thinks, there, undeniably, it is. Its happened. Its happened so fast, moreover, that I think some women are caught by surprise (I was) when they find themselves feeling things like passion and excitementand griefin what seems like the wrong room, i.e., the office. These days, a broken-hearted woman is as likely to be a woman who has lost her promotion as one who has lost her man.

I found myself all worked up over work before most women I know. Thats because in my pre-liberation twenties, I missed the first boatload of husbands and was forced to occupy myself, and earn a living, until the next one came along. (Then I missed that one, too.) I made the third boatI did get marriedbut by then work had become my husband, too. So now I practice bigamy, all around a fine solution.

Romance has always been a mix of pleasure and pain, but the kinds of work I got stuck onacting, writing, and televisionhave had a particularly high dosage of both. As a result, next to cancer, work has been the most interesting thing in my life.

So thats my excuse for writing a book about my career. Plus I figure what I always figure when I write about myself: that Ill get the straight story (and, some of my news colleagues might add, the story straight).

I never had goals. I had vague notions. One was that I didnt want to be a secretary. Another was that I would do something artistic (my mothers word). Less vague than the preceding two was the notion that Id get married and have children. I guess I figured when I got married Id be artistic on the side, like coleslaw.

I went to Sarah Lawrence College, where I spent four years, from 1953 until 1957, being as artistic as possible. There were no required courses at Sarah Lawrence. No one mentioned that it might be nice to know when the SpanishAmerican War was, let alone that Keynesian economics has something to do with fiscal policy. Nor did anyone mention that if I didnt find out these things then, I probably would never find them out. So, oblivious to all, I diddled at painting and Dance (never dancing: Dance) and, predictably, Theater. That I actually got a part in an off-Broadway play the day, the very day of my graduation, did nothing to hasten my acquaintance with reality. I was excited, to be sure, but I also supposed that thats how things were out there in the worldor, at least, thats how they would be for me.

The way it happened was, in the early spring of my senior year I had a leading role in one of those plays by Garca Lorca about suffering peasant women, which were very big at Sarah Lawrence. An agent saw me, called me, sent me to an off-Broadway audition on Bleecker Street, and, incredibly, I got the part. It was to play (are you ready?) Miss Dainty Fidget in William Wycherleys The Country Wife. The starring role it was not. Mostly, I stood around in a bustle, looking perplexed while the other actors did and said all kinds of lively and interesting things. (The director had given me a large feather to hold, so that Id have something to do with my hands.) But never mind. The ink was barely dry on my diploma and I had a job! Not only a job: a profession! Actress! Not as good as Wife! But better than Secretary!

It was a wonderful summer, that summer of 57. I sublet an eccentric, high-ceilinged apartment on St. Lukes Place in Greenwich Village with two other Sarah Lawrence girls, and tried to convince my parents that the derelicts who slept in the doorway would not hurt us.

One of my roommates was black and sane. The other was white and a fruitcake. I didnt mind. In those days, being a fruitcake meant you were deep. But whenever I had a date, shed answer the door in her leotards, which were flesh-colored, and I minded that a lot. But I didnt know how to tell her to stop. That was probably because I thought it was wrong to mind. In those days, pre-psychoanalysis, pre-practically everything, I thought most feelings I had were wrong.

Anyway, the problem solved itself because the summer sped by, as summers always do, and on August thirty-first the lease on the apartment ran out, whereupon the sane black roommate went off to marry a Jewish law student and the fruitcake went back to college. Meanwhile, the play closed and suddenlyvery suddenly, it seemedit was fall.

I scrambled fast and, through someone who had been in the play, found out about an actress going on the road who wanted to sublet her apartment. I didnt know for sure if I could swing eighty-five dollars a month plus gas, electricity, and telephone but I did know my parents would bail me out if it came to that. So I went to have a look, and took it on the spot.