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By Susan Littwin
"I was married to a musician named Fred
C. Dodd, and the guy has a hold on
my heart so tight that sometimes I think
I'm never going to breathe again."--Molly
Dodd to a shrink in an episode of NBC's
The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd
Molly Dodd is a woman in her mid-30S who lives alone in New York City. Unlike the perfect women who balance marriage and career up and down the prime-time schedule, Molly is a floater. She drifts from job to oh: she has trouble getting along with her mother. She writes odd poetry and has rambling conversations with her elevator man. And she is in love with a man--her ex-husband--who is even more of a floater than she is.
Blair Brown, the actress who plays Molly, steps out of the hotel elevator and crosses the lobby with a step so light her red shoes seem to skim the thick carpet. "I'm sorry to keep you waiting. I had to make one call--to my boy friend in London. There's nothing worse than a bi-continental romance, I've reached a point where I hate the phone," She says all this with an easy, matter-of-fact laugh, something like her walk.
Brown has flown in from New York to promote
Molly, and the show's publicist has set us up with a night out at Los Angeles's hottest new restaurant, a dream-like place swathed in white tenting and white umbrellas. The other diners, too, seem to have been chosen by the decorator--tan skin, pale tousled hair, billowing white dresses. Brown sits there, an island of New York chic, in her subtle. tailored neutrals with red accents, her creamy skin, her gamin-cut copper hair. But she takes it all in happily. "You never see places like this in New York, This is what California is about--light and air," She eats hungrily, sensuously, praising each dish--oyster flan, sauteed salmon, lemon-meringue tart. When we are ready to leave, she looks around from the doorway and notices that the white tenting and umbrellas disguise a bare concrete room. `Its nothing but a big garage, isn't it?" she observes. "They can practically hose it down every night."
Brown is a woman who can love a restaurant and then look up and see that it is just white sheeting over concrete. That independence, that clarity are what set her apart from Molly. Like her character, she is a bit of a free spirit, a rebel. But where Molly is lost, undefined, strewing pieces of herself over the landscape, Brown is her own person, neatly wrapped around some inner core. She is emotional, vulnerable, passionately loyal, but now--in her mid-30s--no one has a chokehold on her heart.
Almost no one. After dinner we take a walk down Melrose Avenue. L.A's strip of trendy, New Wave shops. Bemused, she passes the windows full of clothes, furniture, clocks, jewelry. What sucks her in like an industrial vacuum cleaner are the toy stores. "Robert loves white bats" she says, tenderly fingering a hideous rubber monster. Robert is her 5-year-old son, whom she left behind in New York nearly 24 hours ago and misses terribly. His father is actor Richard Jordan, -->