Chapter 1 #2
Ultimately, I would not get to watch two lions fighting for dominance or a gazelle taking its first steps or the sun rising over the grassland.
I would watch semifamous people in their acts of daily living.
I would watch the male of the species unkink the hose, while the female flipped through catalogs.
I would watch them take phone calls, nodding along, jotting something on the pad by the receiver.
I would watch them walk through airports and office suites and hotels and their living room.
Watching them on the couch that day, I feared there was no way the show would last beyond this season, after which I’d have to find a different gig.
And then I got to a scene on that tape with Maggie trying and failing to close a kitchen drawer.
It was clearly off its track, but instead of reaching back and popping it in place, Maggie just repeatedly slammed it, little sighs of exasperation floofing her bangs as she blinked mournfully, wondering what could be wrong.
“Gosh darn it!” In that moment I saw it.
I understood. Maggie McKee was not just another teenage pop star.
She was Lucy Ricardo meets Marilyn Monroe.
She was unknowingly watering a plastic houseplant.
She walked head-on into a glass door. And then there’d come Jason, to crouch down to where she’d collapsed on the kitchen floor in clueless frustration, to kiss her on the top of the head and roll his eyes and call her ridiculous as he slid the drawer back in its slot.
“Oh,” I said aloud. This kind of TV wasn’t printing off a three-act script and having somebody read through it—this kind of TV was looking at a person’s life and deciding what it would mean.
Reality producers weren’t just running the prewritten play—they got to change the rules of the game.
Nothing could happen that they didn’t decide had happened, even to celebrities like Jason Dean and Maggie McKee. They had the final cut.
This was exactly what I hadn’t known I wanted: the power to tell the story, to decide how it would end. To be the puppeteer ensuring that everyone stayed who and where they were supposed to be. I was addicted from that very first drawer slam.
With Honeymoon Stage, we were going to watch Maggie McKee make a fool of herself and then smile endearingly as her husband cleaned up her mess.
Maggie was the stereotypical TV housewife, despite her inability to cook or clean or iron, despite the fact that she’d worked all through her childhood and opened for Take 5 at Madison Square Garden.
She was in need of a man to shake his head and say Oh, Maggie every time she did something dumb, while viewers sat at home and laughed.
She might not be the best singer or the best dancer, but she was pretty and blond and not very bright, and people were going to want to watch her.
That afternoon, I signed my name on the network’s papers as a guarantee I’d keep my mouth shut, but of course the first thing I did when my roommates got home was show them the tape. I was twenty-three and had no sense of consequence or self-preservation.
“Should you be sharing this?” Jen asked me. She was always the brakes. Even back then she seemed about to turn thirty.
“Technically no.” I felt a little sheepish, but the cultural currency was just too good.
And I’d known Jen and Celia for years; they were as trustworthy as it got.
I pressed play and watched my friends watch the screen.
I wanted to gauge their reactions and glean from them some ideas for how to make myself indispensable once I got on set.
I’d be the one on staff who had the pulse of the youth population.
“I don’t really understand what there could be for you to do here,” said Celia. “No offense, but it looks like someone’s just using a camcorder.”
“Yeah, but a camcorder on Maggie McKee and Jason Dean,” said Jen. “They probably need someone to remove their pink jelly beans or someone to, like, set their fan at the right angle whenever they change seats.”
“People like the pink jelly beans,” said Celia.
“Irrelevant,” I said. “I’m going in as a production assistant, not Maggie and Jason’s assistant.”
“Aren’t they the product?”
On-screen, Jason mowed the lawn. Maggie sliced through swaths of bubble wrap, wedding china emerging in a bloodless cesarean.
“Weird that they don’t have people doing this for them,” Celia said, nibbling on the edge of the same potato chip she’d been eating for the past five minutes.
“That’s the point, I think,” said Jen. “Celebrities—they’re just like us.”
“With money.” We licked salt from our fingers.
The thing was, Maggie was just very, very dumb.
Mispronouncing words, malapropistic, but also apparently utterly unprepared for everyday human life.
Had she been like this as a kid? Was this what happened when you performed all through your childhood?
My friends and I stared at the stringout footage, a rough assembly of the moments that a story editor had flagged to make it onto the show, not yet cleaned up in editing.
Maggie didn’t understand an ATM. She put the pasta in the pot before boiling the water.
She bought a $200 air freshener. Jason would roll his eyes at her, even occasionally break the fourth wall to raise a brow at the camera, like could we believe this?
They’d fall into the same toxic conversational patterns:
“Are you annoyed?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, now I am.”
“So guys will watch this and think, ‘Yeah, he gets to sleep with Maggie McKee, but also he has to put up with her.’” Jen squinted at the screen.
“And girls will think, ‘Yeah, she gets to be Maggie McKee, but also she has to manage with five working brain cells.’”
“It’s smart,” Jen said. “In a gross, calculating way.”
Celia stood up, cracking her shoulders. “I don’t know, I’d still rather be her. Dumb people don’t know how dumb they are, right? That’s kind of what makes them dumb?”
Was the show gross and calculating? I couldn’t be sure.
It was certainly going to be entertaining.
Society loved little more than to lift a woman up to watch her fall.
Take a young woman—or better, a girl—and cram her into a character and surround her with sycophants and, likely, a lot of older men, and then act all surprised when she shoplifted or developed a drug habit.
This was the American way, and in 2002 we were all still feeling fairly patriotic.
Maggie McKee met Jason Dean just before the debut of her first album.
Found You was a bizarre candy jar of ways her label thought she might distance herself from her child-star reputation, despite her still being a child.
The executives wanted her to be sexy, but relatable: someone who’d wash her fancy car in a string bikini and then go clean her own pool.
What high school senior wasn’t writhing around in pleather pants to some culturally insensitive Indian drumming?
What seventeen-year-old wasn’t rubbing shoulders with movie stars and models and famous pro athletes who, despite an eight-year age difference, took them on publicly extravagant dates?
Her record label trotted her out on shopping mall tours and to management soirees.
In her low-rise jeans and bedazzled crop tops, she’d walk the red carpet for teen-movie premieres and pose for photos at nightclubs she wasn’t legally old enough to enter.
She showed her face at all the major radio stations—a few days in Los Angeles, then Nashville, then New York.
This was how she met Jason. It was the first season of his new megawatt contract, and the team had him making the rounds.
Broadcasters loved him: because he was built more like a Greek god than an MLB pitcher; because he jokingly talked trash with club reporters; because when he was well, he could throw 98 mph.
He and Maggie ended up as back-to-back interviews on a morning show in Atlanta, and as soon as they met, it was, as both would tell it, “fireworks.”
“He was older, yeah, but I’d been working since I was a kid,” she says in the daytime-TV interview that inspired the network to cast them for Honeymoon Stage. “We just understood each other right away.”
They sit next to each other on a blue velvet couch, legs not quite touching, in a way that seems more intimate than the usual famous man’s arm over the famous woman’s shoulder.
“The funny thing about it is she wasn’t a baseball fan at all,” Jason laughs. “The studio guys were asking all these questions, and when it was over, she stopped me and said, ‘What do you do again?’”
“Well, then I sang in the studio, and you were the one who was curious.” Maggie smiles. “I was promoting my first single, and he looks all surprised and goes ‘I like that song!’”
She soon became a staple on the ballpark bleachers. He’d sometimes join her on tour. At the time, I was finishing my senior year of high school.