Wiggle Room
WIGGLE ROOM
When all else fails, wiggle, baby, wiggle.
—HUGH HEFNER
February 1983
“It’s all my fault,” Beanie told Barry a few weeks later when they happened to pass in the hall. She no longer saw him for playdates—or after playdates—since Marci Goldklank had moved out to Los Angeles and upgraded the studio in Westwood facing a cemetery to a one-bedroom in Marina del Rey with a view of the Pacific, and an eye toward a commitment.
“Ollie was going to make me a floater,” she said, sadly, “and now I’m working for a woman who got played by a woman who played us all.”
He wanted to hear more, to console her, to help, but now that Rose was in charge, Beanie was required to clock in and out each time she left her desk.
Suddenly there were regimens and rules and lunch hours that allowed no time for wiggle room, not even the kind the agents liked to joke about when they’d watch the girls rush back to their desks from Salami ’N’ Cheese. “Hey hon, do you want my pickle?” they’d shout, and the girls, some flattered just to be noticed, others playing along not to be judged, would giggle and wiggle and rush back to their desks. “All in good fun,” the agents would say, slapping an ass when they could, taking a rain check when they couldn’t. There was always time for wiggle room when it came to agents, secretaries, and the boys-will-be-boys club. And whether you were the secretary they had staked their pickle on, or just a friend whose wiggle was more waddle, you learned to laugh because it was all a game, and the game didn’t change. But the players did. Sometimes. And then you had to adjust to their rules.
Like when Rose wanted to hire her own “girl.”
Rose told this to Beanie without apology, without emotion, and without waiting for a response, because, honestly, there was none. How could there be? A job Beanie had created would soon be filled by someone else. All the work she had done to forge a way in, to plot her way through, to become a floater and then finagle a desk that somehow would lead to agent was now moot, meaningless, someone else’s dream to fill.
A hangnail from the archives, Beanie was swept up in Ollie Burns’s backwash while Burns became an afterthought, a footnote, a pink slip with two weeks’ severance and a handful of stories about famous people he once knew.
Sure, the agents noticed his absence. For five, maybe six minutes they stopped, made note, even protested. Mildly. But then life went on. The world reset, and Rose Liu became the girl who got the girls who got the coffee, with a wiggle.
Beanie Rosen was put on a ticking clock.
Lucky for her, she had a friend in a high place on a low floor who kept the clocks wound, serviced, and perpetually running.