TO BE HONEST, I wouldn’t have remembered her at all if you hadn’t come up here asking these questions. In my job, I go to so many conferences. I’ve met so many young women like her, they all start to blend together: Reasonably pretty, reasonably bright girls who want to grow up to be Barbara Walters. Look at, what’s-her-name, Fawn Hall. One minute Barbara’s interviewing her about her involvement with Oliver North. Then Barbara’s asking her what she’s going to do next with her life? And what does old Fawn say? “I want a job like yours, Barbara.” I mean, at this point the woman’s more rich and famous than most of the people she interviews. Used to be kids growing up had dreams like cowboy and movie star, fireman, ballerina. Now it’s “television journalist.”
This one—you say her name is Suzanne?—may have been a little more driven than the average, a little more hungry. Hard to say, there were several of her kind swarming over the Marriott that weekend. Girls in man-tailored suits with their video cassettes in their briefcases that you know would give you their room key in a minute for the chance at a job—any job—at any station. But what would be the point in taking them up on it?
I’ll be honest with you: I haven’t always conducted myself like a complete Eagle Scout at these conferences. My wife and I—we’ve been going our separate ways for years now, and both of us look the other way now and then. It’s not some high-flung notion about the sanctity of marriage that would keep me from having a quick fling with a girl like your little Suzanne Maretto there. It’s total apathy. More than apathy, actually. Boredom.
They look attractive enough, understand. They even know the moves—they may put their tongue inside your ear and run their hand down the front of your pants in a way that makes your body hungry enough. They know the way to look at you—a certain blank, open-mouthed, wet-lipped look—as though they’ve been so carried away by your extraordinary magnetism and power over them that they’ve become total sexual animals. They breathe heavily, they make little noises as though they’re beyond words—beyond thoughts even. They appear to have more orgasms in a half-hour period than my news hour has commercials. They’re skillful too: they’ve read books on the subject, or magazine articles anyway. The last girl who took me up to her room at one of these conferences kept a bottle of creme de menthe next to the bed and took a big sip from it right before performing oral sex. It was a unique sensation, I have to admit.
But what they’re doing, these girls, is performing, and nothing more. They’re auditioning, same as they would in a sound studio, with two cameras pointed on them and someone holding up the cue cards. I can’t pretend I haven’t enjoyed the performance now and then, but frankly it gets old fast. There aren’t that many new tricks left, and the ones I haven’t seen by now, I don’t really need to. As for Suzanne Maretto in her cheap suit and her push-up bra—not that I remember, understand, but I can guess—she was strictly a beginner. There are girls in this business that could tell Suzanne Maretto to go audition for “Romper Room.” And I don’t hire them either.