Famous

by Stan Charnofsky

  As he started his car, alone and feeling powerful, he shouted, “What do you think of that, Mother? How do you like that, Father? I’m a man now, not your little boy. I know about life. I know who I am.”

  The last sentence he said with considerably less force, aware, with annoyance, that he was not entirely convinced.

  TEN

  A t the end of the fall semester, Galen Thurston dropped out of school. It was no great loss to the theater department, while Garth Benjamin, who was fast becoming the students’ favorite professor, hardly knew he was gone. Juliet mentioned it to him as the new term began, and he scrunched up his nose and said, “Ah, yes, the classic face, the posturing, annoying emphasis on the wrong word when reciting a line, sparse feel for the character he portrays. Alas, let us hope he finds his true calling.”

  Galen stayed in touch with Juliet, though she was reluctant to keep Harry informed of this. Some recalcitrant spark in her told her that he, Galen, putting aside all his acting shortcomings, might be on a rocket path to a kind of industry power. He knew people. He had contacts. Despite having considerably more talent, she had no entrée to those people, to make those contacts.

  Curiously, Galen also communicated with Harry off and on. Though there was a massive chasm between the way the two saw the world, Galen had absorbed, in some eerie way, a sense of Harry as a helpful sort of oracle. He hated Juliet’s seeming attraction to him, but experienced him as a fount of natural aptitude for the performing arts, talent he knew he did not possess.

  With him gone, Juliet and Harry felt as if a spy-in-the-sky observer had been eliminated, that their affinity for each other could be less inhibited, and affection, if they felt it, openly displayed.

  While Harry would have liked that display to be spontaneous and regular, he found Juliet more whimsical about it, guarded in an odd sense, coolly selective in when she would allow his arm to go around her, their hands to touch, even their eyes to meet in class, exchanging the warm, knowing glances of intimacy. For him she was, and continued to become more of, an enigma, tolerable because of their celebrations once a week at her apartment, in her tasteful bedroom, in her cozy bed; it was an un-pronounced bribe, delicious compensation for any and all public slights.

  One evening, the assignment from Mr. Benjamin was to pair off and, after ten minutes of muted rehearsing, read a dialogue from one of a half dozen scripts he had suggested. Harry sought out Juliet and she agreed to read with him. By most accounts, the two were acknowledged by classmates to be among the top students in the class.

  They glommed on to a new Broadway play, Doubt, which won a Tony award and the Pulitzer for playwright John Patrick Shanley, the tale of a tenacious and authoritative nun who was convinced that a priest at her school was molesting a young student. There were several compelling encounters between the two.

  Juliet read first, an excerpt from the Catholic Encyclopedia on the word “doubt:” “It should be observed that doubt is a purely subjective condition, i.e. it belongs only to the mind which has to judge of facts, and has no application to the facts themselves.”

  She read this imposingly, punctuating each word to communicate that what would follow would require this prologue to be digested accurately.

  (As the dialogue begins, Harry is in her face:)

  Father Flynn: You have not the slightest proof of anything.

  Sister Aloysius: But I have my certainty, and armed with that I’ll go to your last parish and the one before that if necessary. I will find a parent. Trust me, I will—a parent who probably doesn’t know that you are still working with children. And once I do that you will be exposed. You may even be attacked, metaphorically or otherwise. Father Flynn: You have no right to act on your own. You are a member of a religious order. You have taken vows, obedience being one. You answer to us. You have no right to step outside the church. Sister Aloysius: I will step outside the church if that’s what needs to be done, though the door should shut behind me.

  The audience, the classmates and professor, were mesmerized. These performers were shouting, head to head, savage. When at last they stopped, there was a silence in the room, and Harry, looking away from the manuscript, stared at Juliet and said, “So, you see, I am riddled with doubt.”

  Laughter, an uncertainty whether Harry was referring to the script or to his relationship with Juliet—not a total secret to the other students. From the look on her face, one might presume that Juliet, too, was unsure.

  “Bravo!” Mr. Benjamin said. “This play is probably Mr. Shanley’s prime achievement, though you might be interested to know that he won an Academy Award for the screenplay of the movie Moonstruck. The two of you did superbly. Anger is not an easy emotion to produce believably; it often comes across as trying too hard, even phony. Well done.”

  When class was over, Harry and Juliet strolled together slowly, silently to the parking area, a pleasant glow the reward for work they knew was good. When they stopped at her car, Juliet smiled sweetly, the little cleft in her chin deepening, and said, “Tell me about your doubts.”

  On shaky ground, his emotions more available than his logic, Harry said in a halting voice, “Well, I don’t know where we’re going. I mean you and me. I don’t know what we mean to each other. Our lovemaking. Is it prelude or finale? I’m kind of an amateur here. I have doubt about what’s supposed to happen next.”

  “Doubt is good. Doubt keeps us guessing and alert.”

  “And frustrated.”

  “And attentive. Remember the psych class? Intermittent reinforcement is more powerful than constant. All those rats hope to hell that the pellet of food will come down, so they keep pushing the lever.”

  “You mean I’m not supposed to know what our weekly get-togethers really mean? No doubt the payoff for keeping us going is seductive, but there isn’t any reinforcement, intermittent or otherwise, about the meaning of it all.”

  “Hey, Harry, what do you want? We’re not married. I’m not, as the mommies and daddies all phrase it, ready to settle down. We’re in school, we’re on a path, we have lofty ambitions, and we have a lovely celebration every week. What more do you need?”

  “I’m not sure.” The night air seemed suddenly cold, chilling him to the bone. He stopped, took in a huge gulp of air, and said, “Look, Juliet, does the word ‘love’ have anything to do with us?”

  Without a moment’s pause she replied, “I love it when we are in my bed doing our sex thing. I love your aptitude—for theater and lovemaking—and your wholesome, innocent way of looking at life. I absolutely adore your devotion to your goals. Now, do all those things add up to your definition of ‘love’? You decide.”

  Damn, she could be irritating! He didn’t know any definition of love at all, let alone one that fit her description. Her smarmy words served only to confuse him more, substantiate his uncertainty about her genuineness. Desperate not to lose the delicious moments spent with her each week, he decided, without hesitation, to acknowledge her arguments.

  “Okay. I’m flattered by all those loving perceptions you have of me. I’ll take ‘em. End of story.”

  “Super! I love happy endings.”

  “Love and doubt—those seem to be the themes of the day.”

  She leaned toward him and pushed hard on his lips with hers. “See you soon.”

  That was it. That kind of provocative gesture was what kept him hooked in. He knew it too. Just didn’t know what to do about it.

  ELEVEN

  J uliet’s father was convicted of second-degree murder. With some skillful attorney bargaining, he managed to be sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary, with the possibility of two years off for good behavior. No one knew exactly why he wasn’t given life, or at least a twenty-year sentence, except that it was a first-time situation with no prior arrests and no seeming predilection to threaten anyone else. Juliet saw it as a quirk of our justice system; when she told Harry, who had a tenacious attorney for a parent, he said it was the abject shame of our system.
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br />   The news did not alter Juliet’s life one whit. She had not had her father around for some time, and, in fact, the prospect of him contacting her with a desperate need for money or information was now erased. In some eerie way, she felt relieved. The generalization—which some students tended to make—about how terrible that she lost her mother and her father through the same event, never occurred to her.

  On a late Saturday morning in February, a cool winter day, in Los Angeles meaning about sixty degrees Fahrenheit, with offshore winds that swept the sky clear of coastal fog and clouds, Juliet met Galen for lunch in an up-scale, Beverly Hills café, his treat.

  “It’s a snap. The director tells me what to say and how to say it. If he doesn’t like what I do, they shoot it over. So much easier than theater acting.”

  “When does the movie come out?”

  “Hard to know. I’ve been told they sometimes finish filming and no one picks up the option for years.”

  “You mean a sponsor, like a producer, with funds to promote it?”

  “Yes, that’s it. It costs a hell of a lot to shoot it, location and set and all that, along with the salaries of the actors, but then the big expense is the selling of it to the public. Somebody has to agree to underwrite all that.”

  “But, the actors and the filming costs must be manageable, since you don’t have any really big names.”

  “That’s true. I think this particular flick has like a seven million dollar price tag so far. Low budget, they call it. If it never gets picked up, the backers, which includes my father, are out their investment.”

  “So you like the work?”

  “Hell, Juliet, who am I kidding? I’m no actor. That guy in our class, that Harry fellow, he’s an actor. What I do is pose. They tell me I have a look. It’s like a lot of babes you see on TV who don’t seem to have talent for anything but get propped up and sold because of their bods. I remember one guy and girl got married, both were good-looking, neither had much in the way of skill, and they put them on a TV show, every week for six months. They ended up divorced, but the babe is now a full-blown star—still can’t act, but poses wonderfully and is considered a sex symbol. I lost track of the guy.”

  They were both silent for a time, Juliet’s mind racing. This friend and former classmate had always been full of himself, yet now he seemed to catch the subtleties of the business he was in, aware of his personal limits, tuned into the ways people get to be famous. She was wondering, in her own case, having at least a modicum of acting skill, believing herself to be sensitive to emotions and character and the underlying complexity of motive and plot, what her chances would be to break into the industry.

  She looked up at Galen and said, “Hey, Galen, next time you need a leading lady, let me know.”

  “You’ve got a look, too. Not that one-sided, hot-chick appearance, but a genuine, interesting, deep-eyed look that audiences identify with.”

  “Thanks. I guess there’s more than one way to claw your way to the top. You and I need to stay in touch. I predict you’re going to have some power in this business.”

  He seemed troubled by her pronouncement. Galen Thornton had always been a posture person, though he hardly realized it, able to get by on manufactured charm and calculated bluster; he had never thought of himself as having legitimate power.

  “Nice of you to say that.” He stopped, dabbed at his lips with his mauve-colored, linen napkin, and tossed out rather casually, “I know that things have sort of changed, but do you want to come up to my place? We can fool around.”

  Timing. Juliet had a deep, resonating awareness that if she wanted industry favors from Galen, at some time she would have to barter for them: perhaps an audition for a roll in the sack. This was the wrong timing. Keep him waiting until his desire escalates and the trade-off builds to obligatory proportions. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t gone to bed with him in the past—their carnal connection had exploded the first month they were in school together—but, since Harry appeared in her life and Galen moved on to pursue a film career, his sexual adventures with her were shimmering, but fading, memories. He could wait a little longer. She wanted a lever.

  As was her pattern, when she needed a moment to gather her thoughts, she took in the ambience of her surroundings; the servers were all women, young, possibly aspiring actors, dressed in white blouses and black, short skirts, each of them wearing a black bow tie, emblematic of the establishment’s name: The Bow Tie Café & Grille. She thought she recognized a couple of the patrons as movie stars, but was never good at remembering names of famous people, yet fervently wishing—and admonishing herself for the failing—that others would remember hers when and if she reached that status.

  “You’re an eager beaver, Galen. I’ll bet you’ve already been fooling around with some of your fellow cast members. You don’t need me.” She stopped, then threw out the carrot, “At least for now.”

  His invitation had been whimsy, hardly an expectation, certainly not a logical consequence of this lunch meeting. Yet, why not give it a try? He had never abandoned his passion for Juliet, even after she eased away from him in favor of Harry Schiff.

  After all, he understood the pull of a fellow thespian with high skills with whom she could theatrically commune; the fact that she tacked on the appendage about timing was an uncalculated bonus. Yes, he recited silently; be patient, good things come to those who wait.

  When they stepped out into the midday sunshine of Rexford Drive, a neighboring shopping Mecca to trendy Rodeo Drive, Galen leaned in to kiss Juliet. She turned her face and caught his lips on her cheek, smiled like a sly cat, and said, “Thanks for lunch. Call me if anything comes up—you know, in the world of celluloid and big screens.”

  As she strolled away, she glanced back, a calculated glance designed to offer hope, and saw that Galen had turned away, was facing the café, seemingly scratching his head, and she was startled by the perception that his image looked distorted, as if she were seeing it through a lens smeared with Vaseline.

  TWELVE

  T he metaphor escaped her. She would not readily come to the understanding that her view of Galen Thurston was skewed, that it was, in fact, severely flawed. She could not know that he would never be a power person; that he was the product of a stern and commanding father, which caused him, as he grew up, to become expert at the protective art of deflecting rather than initiating.

  Just as her view of him was flawed, so was his own about his life and goals. His appeal to Harry for direction was a tacit admission that he felt helpless to organize his future. He was an Adonis, a potential Hollywood icon, arrogant on the outside, an insecure child within. It would be an epiphany if he understood that his persistent effort in the conquest of women was a poorly disguised cry for nurturance, for someone to offer him tenderness and affection.

  There was no way for Juliet to know any of this. Someday, she might very well hitch her wagon, inappropriately and with dire consequences, to a defective star.

  Harry also grew up under a parental cloud, so different from Galen’s, absent the punishing rigidity, but with un-challengeable expectations that created in him a similar kind of insecurity. Was his intrepid pursuit of the gold ring of fame and fortune his own ambition or theirs?

  In the language of psychology, low self-esteem is an outcome of obeisance to other people’s agendas. Yet, in Harry’s situation, it was selective, his sense of his theatrical skill strong and unabashed, while his confidence in relationships or in career choices, fragile as a skiff in a storm. He would embrace his class assignments with élan, leave the campus and slide ignominiously into his other humor. Thank goodness for Katy Bloom, who knew how to detour his apprehensions and to elevate with her good sense the negative segments of his character.

  “So what’s wrong now? Miss Congeniality not being so congenial?”

  “I don’t want to talk about her.”

  “Disappointment.”

  “She’s an anomaly. I don’t know what she wants.”


  “I don’t imagine anyone really knows what another person wants.”

  “Yeah, but she’s a come-on artist. I mean there are two distinct messages: sure, let’s get together, and nah, I’m not interested.”

  “She has her priorities. Scratching her way up the ladder is first on her list.”

  “I know, but she acts as if I’m important, then brushes me off like sand on the beach.”

  “Expectations.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you expect her to put you at the top of her agenda, you’ll be disappointed. I don’t want to be mean, but Juliet is a user. Your talent is useful to her. When someone else’s status emerges as her most pressing need, she’ll dump you.”

  “Well, that is mean, Katy. I don’t see her as sinister as that.”

  “Okay, just my perception. I could be wrong. She could be a wholesome little farm girl, brushed with the acrylics of ambition like the rest of us.”

  “If I knew where my career was headed, I might understand her moods a little better. I’m damned confused. The successes I’ve had are like whipped cream, insubstantial, elusive. What do they say, ‘You’re only as good as your last gig.’ It could all come crashing down with one uninspired monologue.”

  “Not likely. I’ve never seen you grapple with a role in an uninspired way. You tend to see theater as a gourmet meal, to be savored, tasted scrupulously, not to be gulped down, never taken routinely.”

  He looked at her curiously. “Damn, Katy, you sure do prop me up. Promise me you’ll never leave. I need you around to keep my focus.”

  “You’re pretty well focused when it comes to acting. It’s with the personal stuff that you agonize and beat yourself up.”

  “Lack of experience, poor training for asserting myself. Shaky with women issues, sexual issues, goals, that stuff.”