by Jane Heller
People often ask me why I became an actress, why I subjected myself to the rejection, the rudeness, the assault on my self-esteem, and the answer is: I couldn’t picture myself doing anything else. The rush you get when you stand up there in front of an audience and manage to elicit a response—whether it’s laughter or dead silence—is so intoxicating that you can’t wait to feel it again. It’s like the effect of a drug, that rush of approval. Actors are basically pleasers—if we can’t please our parents, we might as well please somebody— so we’re addicted to being applauded. Sally Field was lambasted for her “you like me” unraveling, but every actor who made fun of her knew exactly what she was talking about. So I became an actress to win approval, to cause a reaction, to make an impression. But I also went into the business to become someone else. Imagine being a good girl in real life and playing a total bitch in a movie. Imagine playing any role to which you have to bring emotions and actions and words that are foreign to you in the everyday. Imagine getting to experiment with personalities that are the polar opposite of your own. Imagine leaving your insecurities and conflicts and inhibitions in the dressing room and emerging as someone else. It’s like a thrill ride, that’s what it is. And it’s that thrill ride that keeps actors in the game, not the fame or the money or the chance to hang out with Jim Carrey. I played his receptionist in Pet Peeve, not his leading lady, but I played her with everything I had and I loved the experience. It could only get better from here, right? That’s what I thought That’s what I really, truly believed.
On the night of the premiere, my mother and I did the red carpet number. The cameras were out in force, the reporters clamoring for a whiff of anyone famous. It was such a glittering event that I didn’t even take it personally when a jerk from Extra! stuck a microphone in my face, then pulled it away, muttering, “Damn. I thought you were someone.”
Undaunted, I smiled and waved at the crowd, was determined to enjoy myself. Who cared that my mother kept reminding me to stand up straight and get the hair out of my eyes? Who cared that she complained bitterly about the flashbulbs that were blinding her or the TV cables that were tripping her or the smog that was inflaming her sinuses. What mattered was that, once inside the theater, everyone seemed to love Pet Peeve, my mother included. She hugged me when the movie was over and the credits rolled, told me she was proud of me, called me her little Meryl Streep. Even Jim Carrey gave me a reassuring thumbs-up.
I was off and running.
And then came the movie’s opening day, three days later. At eight o’clock that Friday morning, my mother showed up at my door carrying every newspaper she could find and proceeded to spread them out on the floor of my living room and read the Pet Peeve reviews aloud.
The Los Angeles Times mentioned me briefly but glowingly: “As Lola, the receptionist, the energetic Stacey Reiser is a scene stealer.” The New York Times mentioned me briefly but less glowingly: “In a small role as Carrey’s eager-beaver receptionist, Stacey Reiser is grating.” USA Today didn’t mention me, and part of me was grateful.
“I’d like to give that New York Times guy a kick in the pants,” said my mother, my fiercest defender as well as my toughest critic. “How dare he call my daughter ‘grating.’ I’ll give him ‘grating.’ I'll write him one of my complaint letters.”
I smiled. My mother was renowned for the letters she regularly fired off to people, corporations, any unlucky soul who needed to be reprimanded, in her opinion. For instance, when she bought a box of All-Bran that turned out to be only three-quarters full, she wrote to Kellogg’s, declaring that she would never buy their products again unless they apologized. They not only apologized but sent her coupons for twelve boxes of All-Bran.
“Thanks, Mom, but I’d rather you didn’t write to him,” I said. “He might hold it against me the next time I’m in a movie. Besides, he only gave me an adjective’s worth of ink. Hardly a real review.”
“All right, dear,” my mother agreed grudgingly. “If you’re sure. Now, it’s almost nine o’clock. I’ll turn on Good Morning, Hollywood and we’ll see what that rascal Jack Rawlins has to say about you.”
I cringed at the mere thought. Good Morning, Hollywood was a weekly half-hour television show devoted to show business goings-on, sort of a highbrow Entertainment Tonight. Its host, Jack Rawlins, was a total gasbag—a know-it-all whose reviews always created a buzz within the industry, I suspect, because he was a Harvard grad and spoke in multisyllables and looked, not like those blow-dried studly types you see on the other entertainment shows, but like some tweedy young college professor who has all his female students in heat. He was handsome, in other words, with blue eyes framed by tortoiseshell glasses and reddish-blond hair that curled around his ears and a long, straight nose that tilted up at the end and a very generous mouth, out of which spewed some very ungenerous words on occasion. Personally, I thought he was an effete snob whose sole purpose in life was to impress people with his wicked wit. What particularly galled me was how tough he could be on up-and-coming actors and how his comments could literally torpedo a budding career. Don’t get me wrong, he could be hard on the big stars, too, but they weren’t as vulnerable to his criticism, given their established fan bases, and they managed to stay on top whether he damned them or praised them. No, it was the strugglers like me who were really defenseless against him. For instance, he once said about my former roommate, after she’d given only her second performance in a film, “Watching Belinda Hanson is like swallowing an Ambien. In fact, she induces sleep better than any pill I’ve ever taken.” Poor Belinda didn’t work again for a year. At least, not as an actress. Everywhere she went, people made snoring sounds.
“Here he is, dear,” said my mother, turning up the volume on the television set.
I leaned in, prepared myself for Rawlins’s review of Pet Peeve. I was sure he would loathe the movie, given his preference for serious art-house films as opposed to broad comedy intended for the multiplex crowd. The question was, would he loathe me or even mention me?
“Opening today in wide release is the new Jim Carrey vehicle Pet Peeve,” he began. Then he chuckled, which was not a good sign. Not the way that guy chuckled. “Of course, I use the term ‘vehicle’ loosely. Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘vehicle’ as a conveyance—something that transports. Well, Pet Peeve doesn't do much transporting, unless you enjoy being carried off into a world where a toilet overflows, a hamster receives CPR, and a plate full of spaghetti lands in the lap of the Queen of England.”
“I found the movie very amusing,” sniffed my mother.
“Pay no attention to him,” I said. “He has zero sense of humor.”
We listened as Rawlins proceeded to rip the movie, its director, and its stars, especially Carrey, whom he referred to as “a mediocre clown masquerading as an even more mediocre actor.” And then, as I was turning away from the TV, figuring he was about to move on to another review, he said, “As Carrey’s receptionist, Stacey Reiser uses her precious few moments of screen time to pound us over the head with her lines. She has the subtlety of a sledgehammer and should consider applying for a job in construction.”
I couldn’t speak at first, couldn’t process what Jack Rawlins had just said about me. If my mother hadn’t been there, I might have remained on the sofa for hours in a state of shock, hoping the floor would open up and swallow me whole. I mean, the guy didn’t just dis me; he annihilated me in front of a live television audience-— an audience that included every important producer and director and casting agent in town. He absolutely drove a stake through my heart with that review, and I didn’t want to deal with it, didn’t want to deal with the fact that I could be the next Belinda Hanson, but my mother was there and she was as mortified as I was. Before I knew it, I was the one consoling her.
“Don’t take it so hard, Mom. He didn’t trash me. He trashed my performance,” I managed, trying to pull myself together and cleave to the mantra I’d learned in acting class: in order to deal with a negative re
view, you must distance yourself from it, tell yourself that reviews are subjective and not necessarily the Truth and that one person’s harsh opinion of your work doesn’t make you a talentless fool.
“Well, he should be ashamed of himself,” she said hotly. “It’s one thing to be a movie critic. It’s another to be a horse’s ass.”
This was strong stuff from my mother. She was a pistol, as Maura called her, but she rarely cursed.
“If you ask me, I think he should be fired for incompetence as well as impudence,” she went on. “In the meantime, I will never watch his show again. I bet no one will. I bet Pet Peeve will be a big success and your career will reach new heights, dear.”
By the following week, it was clear that my mother was no prognosticator. The movie was a box office disaster, despite Jim Carrey’s popularity, and my career, unlike his, didn’t rebound. Jack Rawlins’s review—“Stacey Reiser has the subtlety of a sledgehammer”—clung to me like a poisonous snake, just wrapped itself around me wherever I went. Thanks to Rawlins, I was now officially tainted in the business. Sledgehammer Stacey. That was my adorable new nickname. My agent tried to do damage control, mailing the positive reviews I’d received to all the major players in town, but he couldn’t convince people—any movie or television people, that is—to take another look at me.
“We’re gonna have to wait this out a while, let the dust settle,” advised Mickey Offerman, who’d been my agent through thick and thin. (Well, through thin and less thin.) Despite an inauspicious first meeting during which Mickey had said, “If you get your hair bleached, your teeth capped, and your tits inflated, I’ll sign you” and I had said, “I’m an actress, not a beauty pageant contestant, and if you’re not interested in representing me I’ll find someone who is,” our partnership had gone very well up to that point. But Jack Rawlins had handcuffed Mickey. “We could go back to sending you out for commercials,” he offered. “So you can keep the money flowing in.”
Back to commercials. Swell.
When I discussed this with Maura, she came through yet again with a glass that was half-full instead of half-empty.
“Look on the bright side,” she said in her customarily upbeat tone. “Before Jack Rawlins, you were hating your mother. She probably looks good to you now, compared to him, right?”
four
I was determined to claw my way back into the movies. I was determined to show everyone I was not Sledgehammer Stacey. I was determined to prove that Jack Rawlins’s negative assessment of me was merely an example of his snotty, mean-spirited personality, with no basis in reality whatsoever, and that I was, in fact, an actress with range and nuance and, damn it, subtlety.
But just in case he was a teensy-weensy bit accurate in that I did have a slight tendency to go for too much in front of the camera (The New York Times had called me “grating”), I decided to take a few brush-up acting classes. Why not, I figured, given that I had time on my hands while I waited for Mickey to send me out on auditions. It wouldn’t hurt to perfect my craft, would it?
I enrolled in a class given by a rather well-known teacher named Gerald Clarke. I’d heard about him for years, heard how actors swore by his supposedly radical approach to teaching.
Well, I found out just how radical on my very first night in his Santa Monica studio.
“Let me begin by stating right at the top that this class is not going to be about nurturing you or making you feel safe or reassuring you that you have talent,” Gerald said to the twenty of us who had gathered precisely to be nurtured and made to feel safe and reassured that we had talent. He was standing up on a small stage and he was wearing a pair of jeans and a black turtleneck. He was in his early fifties, I guessed, with a receding hairline, a protruding gut, and a complexion that bespoke teenage acne. “This is a class for actors who want to be better actors, actors who understand that in order to be better actors they must be stripped down, forced to confront their vulnerabilities, forced to confront the personal conflicts in their lives that prevent them from losing themselves in a character. In this class you’ll learn that you don’t play a character, you become the character, which necessitates—no, demands—that you be stripped down to nothing. Nothing! Does everyone hear me?”
“Is this guy a drill sergeant or an acting teacher?” I whispered to the woman next to me, who, I realized with some dismay, was the vixen I’d been running into at auditions, the one who annoyed everyone with her bullshit gamesmanship and gigantic hooters. We had to stop meeting like this.
“He just wants us to get in touch with our issues,” she whispered back. “If you don’t think you can handle it, honey, maybe you should sneak out the side door.”
“I can handle it fine,” I said. “If anyone should sneak out—”
“You. The one who refuses to keep her mouth shut while I’m talking.” It was Gerald Clarke and he was pointing at me, shooting daggers at me, making me the focus of every eye in the room. “Step on up here and let’s see what you’ve got.”
“Me?” Nothing came out but a croak. “You want me?” I tried again.
“Why not?” he said. “Since you seem to be the chatty type, let’s have you chat us all up. What’s your name?” Sledgehammer Stacey. “Stacey Reiser,” I said with false bravado.
“All right, Stacey Reiser,” he said, “let’s have you come up here and blow us away. I’d like you to do an improv of approximately three minutes. Here’s the premise: You’re a customer in a department store, browsing at the perfume counter, and an attractive man sidles up to you, asking for your help. He claims he’s there to buy some perfume for his wife, but the more he talks the more it’s clear that he’s there to score with you. Go.” Go. Yeah. Well, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t done improvs before. They were a staple of acting classes. I just hadn’t done one after being decimated by Jack Rawlins, so my confidence level wasn’t particularly high.
I inhaled, exhaled, took a moment to collect myself, then arranged my body as if I were standing beside a department store perfume counter.
“Oh,” I said, spinning around to indicate that I’d just been tapped on the shoulder by the phantom man. “So it’s your wife’s birthday? Well, I’m not sure I’m the one to ask about the right fragrance. I’ve just been standing here trying different ones, spraying on a little of this, a little of that, to see what smells good on me. No, I guess I don’t mind.” I held up my wrist so he could sniff it. “You think your wife will like—”
“Stop stop stop,” barked Gerald, waving his arms in the air. “I can’t listen to another word of that crap.”
I froze, my arms at my sides.
“You’re much too frightened to connect with the primitive sexuality needed here,” he went on. ‘Too inhibited. Have you ever actually had a man come on to you, Susan?”
“It’s Stacey,” I said, trying not to dissolve into tears and/or vomit “And the answer’s yes.” Just not in a long time, unless you counted Ethan, the hairdresser, and we had come on to each other.
“I don’t believe you. You move as if you’ve been in a nunnery all your life.”
“But that’s not true. I studied movement when I was—”
“Excuse me. Are you the acting coach or am I?”
“You are, but I don’t understand why you’re—”
“Why I’m what? Trying to put you in touch with your issues? Trying to strip you down to your basic shell? Trying to undo all the bad habits you’ve picked up during your stab at acting?”
My stab at acting. I’d done more than stab at it. I’d thrown myself at it. And my efforts had paid off. I’d gotten a part in a feature film, and if it weren’t for Jack Rawlins I’d be getting parts in other feature films.
“Here’s my guess, Sally,” said Gerald.
“It’s Stacey,” I said.
“Someone down the line told you not to overact, so you’ve pulled inward, crawled inside yourself. Am I right?”
Yikes. Had he seen Rawlins’s review, too? “I suppose that
could have happened,” I acknowledged. “Down the line, I mean.”
“Okay. So here’s your way out of the problem. You’re going to put yourself in contact with your body.”
“Oh, you mean I should stand differently when I talk to the man at the perfume counter?”
“No. I mean you should start moving your hips in a circle.”
“Move my hips?”
“Yeah, and lead with your pelvis. Now! Do it!”
I took a huge gulp of air and, in front of a roomful of strangers, I began rotating my hips in a circle. I felt like a kid playing with a Hula-Hoop.
“Now touch your breasts and your ass,” he commanded. “Really connect with your sexuality.”
Touch my breasts and my ass? How about connecting with this, I wanted to tell the twisted jerk. I decided then and there that I was not interested in starring in Gerald Clarke’s peep show. Maybe I was uptight. Maybe I was self-conscious. Maybe I was out of touch with my sexuality, but I had my standards of conduct and they didn’t include prostituting myself for my art.
While I stood there not touching myself, Gerald looked at the group and said with an exasperated sigh, “Obviously, Samantha doesn’t want to work on her issues. Anyone else want to try the exercise? Volunteers, please?”
Naturally, the vixen raised her hand.
“Ah, good,” said Gerald. “Your name?”
“Brittany Madison,” she said as she sashayed onto the stage, planting herself next to me. She was a very big girl. It was like standing next to Mt. Rushmore.
“Okay, Brittany. Now why don’t you show us how it looks to connect with your sexuality. Rotate your hips in a circle, leading with the pelvis.”
Brittany complied willingly.
“Now touch your breasts and your buttocks and let all your inhibitions go. Do what feels good to you, what feels fun to you.”
