Leé del libro de Fran:

Chapter One (Capítulo 1)

In the Beginning

My assistant informed me that I was being summoned by the president of the company, my boss - a king among kings and a barracuda. But how else do you get to the top at his age? I opened the door and saw him: a snake in Armani. "Come to Daddy," he said in anything but a fatherly tone, and I obeyed as he pulled off his crocodile belt and cracked it against his massive mahogany desk. How could I have let myself get into this situation, and why couldn't I bring myself to stop? But he was my addiction and I, his slave. As I stood before him, my thighs quivered and my nipples hardened as he slowly unbuttoned my blouse with one hand and began to reach under my skirt, sliding up between my legs with the other . . . NOT!!

Sorry, those things totally don't happen to me, but Jackie Collins once said on a talk show that if she didn't grab her reader in the very first paragraph, she was screwed. Meanwhile, I'm quoting Jackie Collins, so who's screwed - her or me?

Actually, I've been with the same man since I was fifteen, my best friend and soul mate, Peter Jacobson. I often say that I can recall a time when Peter had no hairs on his chest, and now the hairs on his chest are gray. He's thrilled when I tell people that.

We both remember the first moment we laid eyes on each other. I was walking up and he was walking down the stairwell in Hillcrest High, Jamaica, Queens. Me with my Farrah Fawcett wings and eight-inch Goody Two-shoes, him with his dry-cleaned blue jeans and David Cassidy layer cut. Peter later admitted he thought I was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and then I spoke . . . who knew the combo would intrigue him even more, but it did. "You gotta face out of Vogue and a voice outta Selma Diamond," he often quips. Well, whatever turns ya on!

We became instant best friends. He used to walk by my house pretending he just happened to be in the neighborhood, and he would linger in front of my apartment building, hoping I'd come out. The funny thing is, he wasn't in front of my building at all, and that's why I never came out. He was two houses down and lucky nobody called the police on him.

A lot of people ask what we attribute our seventeen-year marriage to. Screaming! We fight, we yell, and we sometimes hit rock bottom just like everyone else, but we both want our marriage to work. So we don't hesitate to seek therapy when we have problems. A good double session with the shrink clears a lot of shit. I think the one thing that Peter and I enjoy most is laughing. A good laugh till you cry. We used to get thrown out of more high school classes because we couldn't stop laughing. The teachers wouldn't let us sit together because of it, but something would strike one of us as funny and the other would just instinctively know it and glance over, and before you knew it, we were kicked out of class again. We became inseparable.

We even worked together, except for my brief stint as head chicken fryer at the Chicken Jamboree. I used to bring tons of chicken and sweet potato pies home for Pete to eat, except I never cooked the chicken long enough, so it was raw in the middle and the pie was always half-frozen. I couldn't master the techniques. So I decided to leave my career in poultry and moved on to become cashier at the Main St. Movies, where Peter was already usher. Again, we constantly got in trouble for laughing.

In fact, once fifty dollars was missing, and they thought Peter and I were in cahoots. How dare they! We marched ourselves into the main office to clear our good names. Finally, they believed us, but we never felt comfortable working there again. I don't know, maybe I should have stuck with my career at the Chicken Jamboree. Peter quit and decided to try his skills at Baskin-Robbins, but he was fired because he was too creative. He used to take the straws out of the wrappers to put them in the whipped cream of an ice cream soda to give it a little style. Some panache. Something to look at. Well, he was canned. It was actually quite traumatic for him. "What did I do? I sold more than any other salesman." But he just packed up his scooper and never looked back.

My husband will be the first to tell you that he comes from a weird family. A Jewish father, a Catholic mother who had a Jewish mother, and both of them converted to Unitarianism, then moved to a practically Hasidic neighborhood. Needless to say, he had a hard time fitting in, but I think he found solace in my family. We were loud and demonstrative.

Peter used to get a kick out of going out to eat with my family. My father took on the accent of whatever nationality of food we were having. Peter used to sit there with his mouth open. My father thought he would be better understood if he were Mr. Lee at the Chinese restaurant or a Mafia don at Stella D'Oro's Italian trattoria. It was pretty scary.

My parents, Morty and Sylvia, treated Peter as their own. Once, during a storm, my mother got an urge for an ice cream sundae with chocolate sauce, whipped cream, and wet nuts. Oh, she was hinting and hoping that someone would run out during the storm. Peter finally got the hint as my mother practically pushed him out the door. A half hour passed and half-drenched Peter came back with the sundae. Oh, my mother was all atwitter.

"Here it is, Ma. Chocolate ice cream, chocolate sauce, whipped cream, and nuts. Enjoy." My mother's face dropped. "What's wrong?"

"Oh, nothing, it's delicious," she said, as if she had just found out that Kathie Lee had left Regis.

"No, really. What's wrong?" Peter asked.

"Well, if you must know, the nuts." Huh? "I wanted wet nuts."

"Oh, I'm sorry," Peter told her. She stared at him with her best starving-mother look. "You don't want me to go back and get the wet ones, do ya?"

"Would ya? I mean, I just can't enjoy it otherwise." He braved the storm so my mother the kishkila (someone who really enjoys their food) would enjoy, and she did, and he still tells the story today.

He relishes making my mother laugh. She once had to stop traffic in the middle of Kissena Boulevard because he'd imitated her and she'd gotten so hysterical that she'd doubled over and started to pee in her pants. She couldn't move. She just loves it when Peter makes fun of her. As I'm writing this, she's telling Peter how she's too nervous to eat before she flies while she's sending my father to get her the corn muffins because she didn't like the cranberry so much. Peter loves my parents and treats them as if they're his own. There's nothing he wouldn't do for them or vice versa.

Now, I come from a very humble background. I was born in New York City, well, actually Queens, well, actually Flushing, and honey, it's a world away from Manhattan. When I was a young child my dad worked two jobs to support us, but when he got home he always made sure he kissed me and my sister, Nadine, good night, even if we were fast asleep. We felt his love. And my mother, the most loving, happy person I'll ever have the privilege of knowing, created an adoring, wonderful, and safe environment in which we kids were able to blossom. They always said, "We don't have a lot of money, but we're very rich anyway." And we were.

My bedroom and my parents' shared a common wall, and over the years I recall so much laughter coming from the other side of that wall. It was music to my ears as I'd lie in bed and stifle contagious giggles. I like to regard them as Hansel and Gretel because they've never been spoiled or jaded by life but take genuine pleasure in the simplest things. A happy family, good health, an ice cream sundae with wet nuts, and a two-dollar movie at the multiplex pretty much answers all their prayers, especially if they can sneak into another feature.

While shoving myself into my Sergio Valente jeans for school one morning I heard Harry Harrison, a local deejay, announcing that girls between the ages of thirteen and seventeen should send in a fifteen-dollar check or money order, along with an entrance application, to compete in the Miss New York Teenager pageant. Not what you'd call a terribly discriminating contest - I mean, anyone with fifteen bucks and carfare to Manhattan got in - but I saw this as my ticket to stardom and quickly sent in the money. I remember finding the perfect dress at Macy's. Even back then I realized the necessity of looking wholesome, so on the day of the contest I tried my best to look as "white bread" (the industry term for Midwestern) as possible and wore a long bone-satin dress with a soft shoulder ruffle (very Mary Ann Mobley), a tasteful pair of two-inch pumps (ya know, stewardess shoes), and three coats of royal blue mascara (whoopsie). Well, honey, you can take the girl out of Flushing . . .

The contestants were all primping backstage. You could asphyxiate yourself on the hair-spray fumes. Thank God there wasn't a talent competition, because none of us could do anything, but there was the oh-so-important question and answer portion. One contestant told the judge her hobby was sewing, to which the judge asked what it was she liked to sew. And in her authentic Brooklynese she responded, "Uh, rips and tears . . ." Hello? Meanwhile, she won, but I placed as first runner-up and left with a fifteen-dollar trophy in my hand. Well, at least I broke even. Today the trophy sits on my vanity in the bedroom set of The Nanny, but then I felt like such a loser. I couldn't believe I'd lost to the rips-and-tears chick, but my mom explained, "Fran, placing first runner-up is not bein' a loser, you're a winner . . . it's the three hundred other girls without trophies who are the losers!" Ma always had a way of making me feel better with what we on The Nanny call simple Queens logic. She's right, I thought, and proceeded to follow through with my plan to use my title as a door opener. Each day after school I would dial talent agencies and introduce myself with my new title: "Hello, my name is Fran Drescher and I'm the winner of the Miss New York Teenager pageant!" So I exaggerated a little, sue me. Meanwhile, I got myself an agent.

Copyright © 1996 by Fran Drescher