The Voiceover Artist

by Dave Reidy

  But the most tragic—and, therefore, the most hilarious—are the people who, God love them, have so completely suppressed their insecurity about a speech impediment that, apparently, they can’t hear themselves anymore. How else would you explain a man with the wettest of lisps, and his pick of any brand name in the world, sending me his recording of a spot for Sears? Or the Asian guy, whose L’s came out as R’s, choosing a Cadillac commercial? The real gem arrived just a few months ago. A young woman submitted her performance of a sixty-second radio commercial that, the way she did it, took almost a minute and a half. Every third or fourth word took her five or six tries to spit out. This demo I did not throw away. Sometimes, if the delivery of new unsolicited demos is light, I return to the stutterer’s demo and try to figure out what the hell I am listening to. It isn’t a joke, that’s for sure. The performance is earnest as all hell. One night, after one too many vodkas, I found myself getting a little weepy at the girl’s determination, the same way you might tear up watching an amputee finish a marathon. There’s something compelling about a person who makes a prize of doing what she’s set out to do. And that might be what this demo is—a girl who battled a stutter her whole life proving something to herself and honoring the achievement by sending out the recording. I can tell you what it’s not: any reason at all for me to sign the girl who made it.

  You might think I listen to these demos for the same reason people watch American Idol auditions: to feel superior, to enjoy the thought that, as bad as I may be on my worst day, things could be worse—I could be this deluded asshole. But the real reason I hold these auditions night after night is more practical: my other options are going home to a man I’ve never loved, or calling Larry Sellers, and I don’t want to do either thing.

  •••

  I STARTED AT Skyline as an agent’s assistant in 1974. I was right out of high school and only six months removed from telling my parents what my uncle had been doing to me every time he got me alone. The fearless part of me was born that day. Once you’ve worked up the nerve to tell your mother that her big brother has been putting his prick where it doesn’t belong and that you want it to stop—now—no tough-talking ad man can scare you.

  I was promoted to junior agent at twenty-one. Jesus, I was young. To build my client list, I went to theaters—everything from The Second City to storefront avant-garde. I would call ahead, drop the name of the agency to get on the list, and spend the show listening for a voice I could use. Most of the time, I heard no bankable voices, but if I did, I’d wait in the bar across the street after the show and, when the cast showed up, chat up the actor I’d taken an interest in. I would say I’d enjoyed the show, whether I had or not, and ask about voiceover representation. Many of the actors I asked already had agents but rarely had work. I would hand over my card no matter what, and my first clients were actors who called me back—months later, in some cases—having decided they’d be better off with me than with the agent they’d had when we met.

  When things were slow at the office, I’d ask the receptionist if any tapes had come in over the transom that day. If she hadn’t already thrown them away, I’d bring the tapes to the tiny studio in our office and play them. Unsolicited demos were no better then than they are now. In many ways, they were worse, because decent recording equipment was so expensive. I heard many demos that seemed to capture the sound of a person shouting across a large room. And many of the people with the means and good sense to buy an external microphone didn’t know how to use one. No sound is more lethal to a voiceover audition than an amplified gust of heavy breathing from the nose.

  Larry Sellers’ demo tape was different—by which I mean better—than any other I’d heard. As I found out later, Larry had made the recording after hours in a studio, with an engineer pal working the knobs and faders. But the main thing was that voice. It was incredibly rich in its timbre—especially rare in the voice of someone so young—and it seemed to possess a persuasive quality that worked independently of his spoken words. As Larry described the beauty of the landscape of Illinois’ Starved Rock, his voice persuaded me—it gently commanded me—to make a pilgrimage to a state park I’d never even considered visiting before.

  Larry’s letter, too, was different in how credibly it flattered me.

  “Ms. Vasner,” the letter said, “I asked a friend in the industry to give me the name of a talent agent who is a rising star. The name he gave me is yours.

  “My audition tape is enclosed with this letter. For now, I’ve sent it only to you. I hope to hear from you soon. Sincerely, Larry Sellers.”

  He’d been my client for six years when, over drinks—after a while, anything we did we did over drinks—Larry came clean: there was no “friend in the industry.” Larry had overheard me making my pitch to a member of the Goodman Theatre’s cast of Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre.

  “I didn’t know who you were,” Larry told me, “but I’d had my eye on you since you walked in.”

  “I bet,” I said, pretending not to believe—and not to be a little excited—that Larry had wanted to pick me up the first time he saw me. I’d liked the look of him from the start. He wore his beard closely cropped beneath a thick head of dark brown hair, and he was beefy without being fat. There just seemed to be plenty of him. I felt the urge to take him by his massive upper arms and squeeze until my hands were exhausted. I’ve always preferred big men. My uncle was a skinny shit.

  “I’d moved over to the bar,” Larry said, “and was about to buy you a drink when the thespians arrived and you sprang on that string bean of a man.”

  I laughed. “You mean Charles Garnett. A wonderful actor.”

  “He took himself too seriously.”

  “Larry, it was business. Did you want him to slip on a banana peel?”

  “What I mean is, he took himself too seriously, and didn’t take you seriously enough.”

  I hadn’t felt that way as I made my pitch to Charles Garnett, but as I recalled the exchange now, I could see him looking down his nose at me and holding my card by one corner, as if it might be contaminated with some disease.

  “And when you were done with Garnett,” Larry said, “you left. I hadn’t said a word to you. So I figured the only thing I could do was get in a studio, make a tape, and send it to you.”

  “So this whole voiceover thing was a ploy to get my attention.”

  With that, the greatest voiceover artist of his generation lifted his cocktail glass, held it in front of his lips, and said, “Here’s hoping it works.”

  And I laughed again. Larry was always a flirt, but his flirting wasn’t the funny part. What had me laughing was the idea that anything was more important to Larry than his work. So far as I knew, doing voiceover—what Larry described as the wine-like feel of the words in his mouth as he whispered or crooned or bellowed into the microphone—was all he’d ever loved.

  But the story he told about our near meeting worked. It got my attention. I decided I didn’t want that night to end with a sloppy, drunken kiss on the street after one round too many. I didn’t feel right inviting Larry to my place, and he didn’t ask me to his, so I suggested we get a room at the Hilton and Towers. As we rode the elevator up to the tenth floor, standing at the back of the car behind two fat, middle-aged conventioneers, Larry put his hand on my ass and gently goosed it. I let my hand drift over his thigh, brushing the head of his cock through his pants with the back of my painted fingernails. If not for the two conventioneers, I would’ve fucked him right then and there.

  Up in the room, I lit a cigarette and let it dangle from my lips as I undressed for him. Larry lay on the bed in his boxer shorts and purred. I came quickly and put all the energy I had left into pleasing Larry. When we’d finished, I wrapped my arms around him and put my ear to his chest, listening to the workings of his incredible voice and delighting in the feel and the sound of him.

  After that, we slept together when we were both between dates and when big residual checks came in. We e
ach had little relationships, but our own seemed to exist on another plane. I wasn’t threatened by other women, and Larry never asked me about other men. That was what excited me most about Larry: he could give me what I needed without demanding any more of me than I could give.

  For two people unsure if they could ever love anyone more than they loved their work, and because I wasn’t sure I could ever trust any man after what my bastard uncle did to me, my relationship with Larry was a perfectly blended, forget-your-cares cocktail: equal parts business and pleasure.

  •••

  IN DECEMBER OF ’95, when we’d been working together for eighteen years, Larry called and asked me to meet him at Miller’s Pub after work.

  Larry and I were regulars at Miller’s. Before or after dinner somewhere else, we’d sit at the far end of the bar, away from the hard-drinking Loop lawyers and accountants, sharing our evening only with each other and James, the bartender who’d worked evenings at Miller’s since the mid-Seventies, when Larry started drinking there. James put rounds in front of us until it was clear we’d had enough. At another place, we might’ve demanded another drink, just to prove a point. At Miller’s, we stopped, figuring James knew best.

  I assumed that our reason for meeting that night, to the extent we needed one, was the publication of a local-boy-made-good profile of Larry in the Peoria paper. The week before, I’d given the reporter a quote for the piece, saying that Larry could take a mediocre script and make a great radio commercial. The moment I’d given it, I knew the quote would read like little more than an agent promoting her client and herself, but what did I care? I wasn’t chasing any business downstate, and Larry was as good as I’d said.

  When I walked into Miller’s, Larry wasn’t at the bar. I caught James’s eye with a wave, and he pointed me to the back corner of the restaurant. I found Larry in a booth decorated with mangy golden garland and yellowing plastic mistletoe. He leaned over a nearly finished drink that obviously wasn’t his first of the night.

  I took off my coat and tossed it onto the bench opposite Larry. “Looks like the party started without me.”

  The waitress must have followed me to the booth. She stood between us, showing her crooked-toothed smile to Larry. Larry pointed at me.

  “Vodka tonic with a lime,” I said.

  “Two of those,” Larry said.

  “You got it,” said the waitress.

  “Is that the article?” I asked, taking my seat.

  Larry picked up a folded section of a newspaper from under the small booth lamp and tossed it in front of me. The editors had used a headshot of Larry smiling like a troublemaking kid. The quote I’d given, in its entirety, was the last line of the first paragraph.

  I skimmed down to Larry’s discussion of his instrument and the care he took with his voice.

  “‘My voice wasn’t my livelihood yet,’” I said, reading Larry’s quote aloud, ‘“but I always protected it. For example, I smoked, but didn’t inhale. I still don’t. Sinatra smokes the same way.’”

  I looked up and dropped the paper back in front of him. “I guess that makes you Sinatra, then.”

  Larry didn’t say anything.

  “More like Joey Bishop,” I added.

  He watched his ice melt. Except to find out what I was drinking, Larry hadn’t looked at me. I had another crack at the ready, one about this not being much of a party, but I skipped it.

  “What’s the deal, Larry?”

  He smiled then, the way people smile at a funeral, which probably explains my first guess as to what was wrong: I thought one of Larry’s parents had died.

  “We’ve had a good run, Elaine,” he said.

  Hearing those words, in that voice, chilled me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we’ve both done better than we could’ve imagined.”

  I’d had it with the slow build-up. “What the fuck are you getting at?”

  “I’m going with another agent.”

  I snorted. “What?”

  I’d heard the words—I wanted him to repeat them. But Larry just stared at his drink, and his words repeated themselves in the silence.

  I leaned toward him, over the empty space on the table where my drink should have been.

  “You’ve done national television spots for Ford, Aquafresh, and Old Spice,” I said. “You’re still the national radio voice of Hertz and Maalox. I made your voice the sound of quality in Chicago, which is why advertisers will pay twice the running rate to get it.”

  My eyes were locked on his face, but he was still looking down at his drink, as if he’d been expecting this reaction and was just waiting it out.

  “Look at me, Larry,” I said, sharply.

  He raised his eyes just a little.

  “Name another agent in Chicago who could build you a better book of local and national work and keep it growing.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t.”

  “You’re goddamn right, you can’t.”

  I sat back, and the waitress put our drinks on the table. I took a swig of mine, still staring Larry down, feeling like a lawyer who’d just nailed her closing argument. Given the case I’d made—given what I had done for him—how could Larry work with anyone else?

  “The agent works out of Los Angeles,” he said.

  My confidence began to leave me in a slow, steady leak.

  “She says that with my reel—with my voice—she can get me film work, audio books. More work. The kind of work I haven’t done before.”

  The kind of work I knew almost nothing about. The kind I couldn’t get him if I tried.

  “She wants to get me on camera, too.”

  This woman was flattering Larry with Hollywood promises. Larry was good-looking, but he wasn’t on-camera material. Taking him out from behind the microphone and putting him in front of a camera was no better an idea than sending Eric Clapton onstage without a guitar—sure, the guy can sing a little, but that’s not what anybody pays to see. How many times had she pulled this same move with Midwestern talent? Why couldn’t Larry see it for what it was? I started to picture this L.A. agent—younger than me, with long, blonde hair and perky little tits, sitting in an office above a boulevard lined with palm trees, on the phone with Larry, selling him a version of himself that doesn’t exist—and for the first time, I felt upset about another woman in Larry’s life.

  Larry and I had a signed contract. I could’ve kept him for radio and television if I wanted. But I wouldn’t do it. The freedom to come and go as we pleased, to turn down an offer to meet for drinks or leave while the other was still sleeping, had been the crux of our relationship, and our personal and professional lives seemed impossible to untangle. In that moment, I worried less about Larry leaving my agency than I did about him leaving Chicago.

  “Will you work out of L.A.?” The smallness of my voice frightened me.

  “Some of the time,” he said. “But most of my work is here, so I’ll keep a place in Chicago.”

  My work is here.

  My work is here.

  I heard the remark both ways and felt doubly snubbed, first by the idea that Larry could so easily divorce his success from all I was still doing to help him achieve it, and then that I was nowhere to be found on Larry’s short list of reasons to keep one foot in Chicago.

  With some reason to believe that Larry wasn’t moving to L.A. forever, I found the courage to leave the bar.

  “I wish you a lot of luck,” I said, grabbing my coat and swinging my legs out of the booth. “You’ll need it.”

  I stood up and threw my coat over my arm.

  “Elaine, let me take you home.”

  In his tone—even drunk, Larry is a master of tone—I heard the suggestion that I was being unreasonable. That pissed me off. I took a quick step toward him and, to this day, I would swear he leaned away from me, afraid.

  “You’ve fucked me once already tonight, Larry.”

  •••

  THE NEXT DAY, I cal
led everybody who owed me money for Larry’s work and told them to pay up. When all of Larry’s fees were in house, I had my comptroller cut his final check and put it in the mail.

  “Any note?” the bean counter asked.

  “No note.”

  Then I purged my office of everything with Larry’s name on it. I boxed up tapes of the spots he’d recorded and copies of the contracts I’d signed on his behalf and put them into storage. I would’ve chucked it all in the trash, but I knew that business break-ups like the one Larry had put in motion could be messy, and that these records were my proof that I’d made Larry money and paid him fairly. I wasn’t about to find myself in a lawsuit, trying to explain why I’d thrown away every shred of evidence of my and Larry’s work together. I’m a businesswoman. Not a schoolgirl.

  The purge extended to mementos of time spent with Larry—room-service receipts, matchbooks from 4 a.m. bars, a menu I’d stuffed into my purse after a dinner celebrating Larry’s Aquafresh booking, and a brochure for a Virgin Islands vacation we’d talked about a hundred times but never booked. I even threw out a placemat autographed, in 1986 at Larry’s drunken request, by Tony Bennett, who had descended upon Miller’s Pub with his entourage when we were having a nightcap.

  “Elaine,” it read. “You’re dynamite! And Larry ain’t bad. Tony Bennett.”

  It’s not that I was through with Larry. I wasn’t. It’s just that I was sure that things between us would never be as good as they’d been when we were working together. I didn’t want to be reminded of that fact every time I opened a drawer.

  I thought I’d tossed out everything until a few weeks later, when I was looking for an invoice and found a framed photograph of Larry and me. We were at a table for two against a backdrop of knotty-pine paneling. It took me a moment to recognize the back room of the Twin Anchors restaurant in Old Town. The photo had survived my disposal of all things Larry, hidden behind the yellow-green fronds of a potted plant I kept on the file cabinet next to my office door and never remembered to water.