Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(24)
Short Skirts, High Heels
Tameka Jacobs considers herself lucky. Then again, luck is a relative term. It was lucky she had a healthy pair of lungs when her African American mother, a prostitute addicted to meth, left her alone in her crib for two days and nights straight while she plied her trade and then got high. It was only baby Tameka’s sustained screaming that alerted the neighbors to the fact that something was wrong. After the police were called little Tameka found herself in foster care, farmed out to a white woman named Mary Brown as a temporary foster parent. Ms. Brown wasn’t considered suitable, and there followed a tug of war between the foster mother and social services, who wanted Tameka placed with a black family. The city won, and Tameka was raised in relative prosperity in a leafy California suburb where she learned tap, ballet, and jazz. If she had stayed with her white foster mother, Tameka is certain that she would have ended up going nowhere. Once again Lady Luck took a shine to Tameka.
Like so many teenagers, she arrived in Hollywood wide-eyed and eager to make her mark as a model or an actor. Previously she had worked for a radio station in San Francisco before trying her luck in the City of Angels. At 5 foot 10 she was a head above the competition, and striking, too. She wrote the book on multiethnicity, with creole, Norwegian, African American, French, and Spanish in her genes. And that’s just what she knows about. She was a standout, literally, at auditions, and it was not long before she was able to leave her seedy basement apartment in gang-scarred Echo Park, which was not the hipster heaven it is today.
First, she did some modeling before auditioning for a new entertainment show, Deal or No Deal, hosted by Howie Mandel. The show, based on the Dutch original and replicated across the world, was predicated on the tension between greed and prudence, a sure-fire ratings winner. Contestants chose from twenty-six briefcases that contained a cash value ranging from one cent to $1 million. During the game the contestant eliminates various briefcases in the hope of being left with the million-dollar case. Periodically the contestant is offered a deal by an unseen banker. The offer to quit the game and take modest winnings is matched by the possibility of going on and winning the big prize. The audience is always eager to see them risk it all with the briefcases.
The briefcases themselves are held by twenty-six beautiful smiling girls arranged temptingly in front of the contestant. This is where Tameka came in. She was asked to be briefcase girl 21, a position she held from the day the show opened in December 2005 to the end of its run in 2010.
When she was first asked to join, Tameka was over the moon. It was almost everything she could have asked for. She was paid $800 per episode, and they regularly recorded seven episodes a day. That was $5,600, more than $23,000 a week, when the going was good. Then there were endorsements and personal appearances thrown in. Fame and riches for standing for hours on end holding a briefcase full of pretend cash. The irony was not lost on her.
Plus it was fun being a briefcase girl. The other girls were rowdy, catty, and goofy, it was just like being in a sorority house. They had only two enemies—the cold in the studio and the achingly high heels they were all asked to wear.
Meghan joined the gang in 2006 for season 2 after successfully passing the audition. Along with model Chrissy Teigen she began as a backup in case regular girls were ill or failed to show up. Eventually she got a full-time slot as briefcase girl 24—close to Tameka. When she first arrived, Tameka clocked her as another multiracial girl. “It was never discussed between us,” she recalls. “We just looked at one another and knew.” It was an unspoken code, a shared understanding of a lifetime of misunderstandings, quizzical glances, and snide comments condensed into one knowing look. They had connections in common, too—early on Tameka had been taken under the wing of model, talk show host, and all-round superstar Tyra Banks, who was, as Meghan well knew, a legend back at her old high school, Immaculate Heart. Now it was Tameka’s time to return the favor, giving Meghan the lowdown on the personalities, on who and what to look out for. She briefed her on the daily routine and what to bring to set—a pair of cozy Ugg boots after a day on high heels in near-freezing temperatures was a must. As they chatted it was clear to Tameka that Meghan saw this as a stepping stone to earn some money before trying for more serious acting jobs.
The average Deal or No Deal day began at five thirty in the morning as Meghan and the other briefcase girls gathered for hours of hair, makeup, and final fittings for their skimpy outfits. With outfit changes every episode and multiple episodes filmed each day, they often had to endure three separate fittings. A rack of beautiful matching ball gowns would arrive to be unceremoniously hacked to pieces so the girls’ legs and décolletage were on full display.
After rough fittings for length and shape there would be a final wardrobe session where the girls sucked in everything and the dresses were pinned down. Some dresses were so tight that the girls couldn’t even bend down to put on their agonizingly high heels, so an assistant would be on hand to help.
The briefcase girls all wore Spanx shapewear not only to make their stomachs flatter but to keep them warm in the near-freezing studio temperatures. As a final touch they inserted what briefcase girl 13 Leyla Milani liked to call “chicken cutlets”—or it could be pads of tissues—into their bras to enhance their cleavage.
As Meghan stood there hour after hour, trying not to shiver, her feet sore from the cheap high heels, a painted smile on her face, she thought of the paycheck at the end of the week. This was not what she had in mind when she went into acting but, at only twenty-five, she was earning more money than she had ever earned in her life, and the shooting schedule was perfect: long blocks of filming followed by weeks of down time, which gave her the opportunity to attend more auditions and go traveling with the man she playfully called Trevi Trevi Trevity.