The Girls from Ames (25 page)

On countless other pop-culture fronts, the girls have spent decades keeping each other informed—and amused. They taught each other the dance moves to accompany the soundtrack to
Saturday Night Fever
. Later in the seventies, Karen was the first one to get baggy jeans, pleated in the front, and then they all wore them. In 1981, Diana turned everyone on to the mushy soundtrack for the movie
Endless Love,
which she played again and again each night as she tried to fall asleep in her freshman dorm room.

The girls helped each other catalogue the various stunts associated with watching
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
. Many years later, at an adult reunion, they went as a group to see the new
Sex and the City
movie; the girls who were fans of the TV show helpfully explained all the idiosyncrasies of the characters to the girls who didn’t watch it much.

When Jane went to Spain for a semester in 1984, the girls mailed her letters with helpful news reports from the States. It was very selective reporting. For instance, Diana prepared what she titled “An Update on America.” Her reporting for Jane focused solely on the quirkiest news: an out-of-control Pepsi commercial, a disconcerting muffin recall, and the details of an attractive but unknown “fox.”

First, the Pepsi debacle: This was a pyrotechnic accident that occurred during the filming of a TV commercial for the soft drink. The victim? Michael Jackson, then twenty-five years old. “His hair caught on fire!” Diana wrote. “I really thought he was gone!” She then reassured Jane by saying that the singed singer went on to win eight Grammy awards. (Diana’s point: They put out the flame on his head, but Michael Jackson was still red hot.) She also decided Jane needed to know the lyrics to “Eat It,” the new “Weird Al” Yankovic parody of “Beat It,” and so she typed them out for her: “Don’t you know that other kids are starving in Japan / So eat it, just eat it . . .”

Regarding the muffin recall: “There’s this big government scam on this chemical called EDB [ethylene dibromide],” Diana wrote. “It gets rid of bugs or something, but it causes cancer. Anyway, it’s in stuff like Duncan Hines blueberry muffin mix, so it has been pulled off grocery shelves. We were all quite interested in this development considering we have consumed massive quantities of muffins this year.” ( Jane was left with the impression that if the other Ames girls didn’t die from the EDB, they’d explode from overdosing on muffins.)

As for the unknown fox: “There’s a new movie out called
Foot-loose
,” Diana wrote. “It’s like
Flashdance
, but with a guy. The guy dancer is some unknown fox who does gymnastics, too.” (For the record, the unknown fox in question was Kevin Bacon.)

The girls also loved sharing reports of their own celebrity encounters.

Marilyn worked one summer in food service at Snow Mountain Ranch in Winter Park, Colorado. One night, a guest at the hotel looked very familiar and everyone in the kitchen started buzzing. It was Ann B. Davis, who played Alice the housekeeper on
The Brady Bunch
.

In letters to the other Ames girls, Marilyn described how she approached the actress: “After dinner, I went up to her and said, ‘Miss Davis, I decided that I would regret it if I didn’t come up to see you, so I’ve decided to introduce myself.’ She said, ‘Well, what’s your name?’ And I said, ‘Marilyn,’ and she gave me a hug saying, ‘Glad to meet you, Marilyn!’ ”

Marilyn wanted proof of the encounter to show the other girls, so she got her camera and Ann B. Davis posed with her for a picture. ‘She’s a great woman,” Marilyn wrote to Jane three days later. “Unfortunately, the picture was #24 on a roll of 24.” The photo didn’t come out, which was very disappointing. Would everyone really believe her? (Of course, Marilyn was always so earnest and honest that none of the Ames girls doubted her Ann B. Davis interaction. Who’d make that up anyway?)

Karen had an “almost” celebrity encounter that was intriguing to the other girls, even though she never actually saw the celebrity in question. In her early twenties, Karen worked as a dental assistant in Ames. One Sunday afternoon, the dentist she worked for, Donald Good, got an unexpected call. Billy Joel, in town for a concert, had chipped a tooth. A crowd of 14,800 was slated to gather within hours at the Hilton Coliseum in Ames to see the show, and Dr. Good was asked to meet Joel at his office to try to repair the damaged tooth before show time.

Though the dentist thought about calling in Karen and other office staffers for help, once he looked at the tooth, he decided he could treat the singer without assistance. Karen wasn’t happy about that, of course. But she did have a story to tell the other girls, because Billy Joel ended up giving Dr. Good choice seats to the show and then thanking him from the stage. The singer told the audience about his chipped tooth and the dentist who made it possible for him to perform that night. Just before singing “Only the Good Die Young,” Joel dedicated the song to Dr. Good.

Some of the Ames girls thought the dedication was a bit ghoulish, given that Dr. Good, at age forty-three, was still young enough to actually die young. Even so, Karen found it all terrific. She enjoyed contemplating the idea that Billy Joel had been sitting in the very chair in the very office where she worked, and that the dental instruments she sterilized had actually been in his mouth. It was a pretty close brush with a major celebrity, all things considered.

For her part, Angela had cool stories to share, too. One day in 1991 she went to see the movie
Thelma and Louise
. There was an actor in the movie who looked exactly like this pleasant-but-not-especially attractive journalism major she knew from her days at the University of Missouri. She had been the social chair of her sorority, Chi Omega, and this guy had been social chair of his fraternity, Sigma Chi. They had planned joint parties together. He was nice enough, Angela always thought, though as she later told the girls, “he was kind of smallish, and not the sort of guy who stood out in any way.”

Because she thought this actor in
Thelma and Louise
looked like him, Angela stuck around to watch the credits at the end, just to see if she was right. Sure enough, the actor was Brad from Sigma Chi. “Wow,” Angela thought to herself. “Brad has gotten better looking since college.”

When she first told this story to the other girls, it didn’t make a great impression on them. OK, Angela knew some guy who got some minor role in a movie. But soon enough, as Brad Pitt’s career took off, Angela’s connections to him seemed pretty impressive. She even had an old calendar with his phone number scribbled on it; she had it so she could call him with questions about who’d buy the beer kegs or what time a party should start. (Angela also crossed paths during college with Sheryl Crow, who belonged to Kappa Alpha Theta. Sheryl was in a local Top 40 band Cashmere that played a lot of fraternity parties. Angela always thought Sheryl was very talented, but, as she later told the other Ames girls, “very plain-looking. She got better looking after college, too. Just like Brad.”)

Brad. Sheryl. Among the Ames girls, Angela probably comes in second in the ability-to-name-drop sweepstakes. But no one, of course, can top Cathy.

Working as a makeup artist, Cathy has had hundreds of celebrity interactions and helped Victoria Principal develop a cosmetics line. Some celebrities get very chatty in the makeup chair, confiding in Cathy about their affairs or their deepest secrets. Cathy knows when it’s not appropriate to reveal things, even to the Ames girls.

Over the years, she has resisted sharing too many stories with them, even though they were always eager for details. In L.A., she and her fellow makeup artists make the sound of a dish dropping to the ground every time any of them name-drop, just to keep each other in check. So Cathy didn’t want to seem like she was bragging to the Ames girls. Still, sometimes she relented and revealed the behind-the-scenes machinations.

She told the Ames girls about the time Martha Stewart’s aides—her “people”—demanded that Cathy get new makeup brushes before working on Martha’s face for a Kmart commercial. “I was thinking, ‘What? My kit is immaculately clean and I’ve used these brushes on everyone else. I’m not buying all new stuff,’ ” Cathy said. On the day of filming in Arizona—it was a scene in which Martha was hanging towels across the Grand Canyon—Cathy smiled at the handlers and never told them whether she had or hadn’t bought new brushes. Martha arrived and was very pleasant; she never questioned the brushes. “Sometimes, the people around the celebrity are the ones who are most difficult,” Cathy said. “Maybe Martha didn’t really care.”

It’s easy to get jaded in her line of work, but once in a while Cathy has encounters that make her feel like a teenaged girl again. Those are the stories she most enjoys telling her Ames friends.

She thrilled them with her description of the night in 1997 when she was called to Sting’s house to style his wife Trudie’s hair. She and Trudie were in the large master bedroom, and in walked Sting, wearing a silk bathrobe and holding a cup of tea.

“Baby, you need a haircut,” Trudie said to him, then turned and said, “Cathy, would you mind cutting my husband’s hair, too?”

So Sting sat down and Cathy began trimming. From then on, things felt kind of dreamlike. “He actually started singing ‘Roxanne’!” she later told the other girls. “It was totally surreal. He was talking about his kids, and I told him I was from a big family from Iowa, and that I liked his music, and then he just started singing . . . ‘ROX-anne!!’” (The song had come out in 1978, their sophomore year at Ames High, and most of the Ames girls had absolutely loved it. Sting almost rivaled their hero, Rod Stewart.)

Sting’s hair was already a kind of buzz cut, and Cathy worried that she’d accidentally nick him while he was hitting the high notes in “Roxanne.” He survived the haircut unscathed.

After the haircut and the impromptu performance, Sting went to the sink and brushed his teeth, still chatting away—or was he still singing?—as he brushed. Just then, his two-year-old son walked in, and Trudie asked if Cathy could give him a haircut, too. So the boy sat on Sting’s lap while Cathy cut his hair.

A few minutes later, the door to the bedroom opened and in walked Madonna. Yes, Madonna! Turned out, Sting and Trudie were hosting a fund-raiser dinner party, and Madonna was invited.

She didn’t start singing “Material Girl,” but she did say to Cathy, “What are you, a barber?”

Trudie explained that Cathy was actually a makeup artist sent by the agency to do her hair.

Cathy never mentioned to Madonna that her mother had the same name. “I had Sting in the chair, his kid on his lap, scissors in my hand, ‘Roxanne’ in my ears, and Madonna is standing there. So no, at that moment, I wasn’t thinking about my mother.”

 

 

K
arla actually credits the conception of her third child to Cathy’s glamorous career and her celebrity encounters. It happened in October 1992.

At the time, Cathy was traveling the world on Michael Jackson’s eighteen-month-long Dangerous Tour. One night, from her hotel room in Bucharest, Cathy placed a call to Karla, who was still living in Idaho. Christie was then almost three years old. And Karla and Bruce had also welcomed a son, Ben, ten months earlier.

It was late afternoon at Karla’s house, and she was sitting in a rocking chair in the nursery. Little Christie was on the floor, playing with their dog. Ben was on Karla’s lap.

Like any mother with two young kids, Karla was feeling a bit overwhelmed. It had been a long day, so Karla decided to have a glass of wine while she waited for Bruce to come home from work. She sipped the wine, rocked Ben, kept an eye on Christie and talked to Cathy.

They had a long conversation, and at first Karla was just enthralled with all of Cathy’s stories. Cathy had been hired to apply makeup only on the background singers and dancers, not on Michael Jackson himself. But as Cathy explained, one day Michael’s makeup artist had to return to the States unexpectedly.

“So there was a knock on the door of the makeup room,” Cathy told Karla, “and Michael’s assistant said to me, ‘Cathy, Michael is ready for you now.’ I was being summoned to his dressing room.

“So I go walking in with a tray of my stuff, and as usual, he already has on makeup. But for the stage, he’d always enhance it.

“Anyway, Michael looks up at me and smiles, and he signals to me to put down the makeup tray. And we both knew that he didn’t need me. He was pretty good at putting on his own makeup every day. So I just said to him, ‘You know, Mike, if you need anything, I’m right next door.’ And I walked out.’”

Karla ate it all up. Cathy told her about the private jet she and the others on tour were flying around on. “I’ve never even had a passport before, and now I’m seeing the whole world—Oslo, Dublin, Berlin, Barcelona . . . ,” she said. She also told Karla that during a rehearsal she had gotten to dance on stage with Michael, just fooling around, and he seemed to enjoy their interaction. For one show, Cathy filled in for the person whose job it was to hand Michael water and a towel on stage toward the end of the show. “He always throws the towel into the audience,” Cathy said. “Every night. And no matter what country we’re in, people go insane!”

Cathy was just explaining her life with a true sense of wonder. She wasn’t bragging. And Karla was completely proud of her. But as the conversation continued, Karla started feeling surprisingly envious. “Here I am,” Karla thought, “a stay-at-home mom sitting in a rocking chair in a nursery, and there’s Cathy. She’s living this incredible life while my life is just here in this house.”

She couldn’t exactly tell Cathy how she was feeling. So she kept listening and asking questions.

She heard the front door opening. “Bruce just got in,” Karla told Cathy. “I’ve got to go. Stay safe. I love you.”

Just then Bruce entered the room, looking awfully handsome to her. Given the combination of the wine, the conversation about Cathy’s exciting life, and the swirl of emotions, Karla was feeling passionate. She and Bruce had no intention of having another child just yet. After all, Ben was only ten months old.