Famous

by Stan Charnofsky

  When he first saw the pictures, disappointment washed through him like a diuretic. He blurted out his pain to Juliet, but she was at a loss to help him with the information. He began to stifle his emotions, bottle them up, act as if things were as usual—but they were not. His sleep suffered. When he looked at his mother, he was in agony. It was not fair to her. He wished there were something he could do about that. When he looked at his father, his stomach tightened, a clawing ache doubled him over. His world, as he had known it for over twenty years, was topsy-turvy. Fear of his father, awe of the man, a semblance of respect: gone, all of them. In their place was disdain, revulsion.

  He hardly would have owned up to the label of homophobic, may not even have known what it meant. It was his father, after all, but even if he was a homosexual, the way he went about it was indecent.

  Most pertinent, and a dangerous assimilation, was Galen’s flirtation with hopelessness. How useful could he be? What was the meaning in his own life?

  Earlier, he had been guiltless, reckless as a baby, focused on good times, appetizing food, beautiful women, a routine that might have been the envy of gods and despots. Now he was obsessed with absurdity, incongruity. His daily activities, from morning ablutions to midday meals, from dressing appealingly to trying hard at anything, made no sense at all. In a word, he felt defeated, a numbing humor for a young Adonis of a man.

  The seriousness of life, concepts of cultural fairness and ethical correctness, thoughts of inequities, children starving, global warming, the scarcity of potable water, torture and terror—none of these issues had ever disturbed the tranquility of his real-life performance. He had been a struggling actor-wanna-be, in perpetual rehearsal. Now, all of it, the sordid under-belly of living, came crushing in on him, rattling his routine, eradicating his carefree style.

  As he had done once before, he decided to consult with Harry, a contemporary who, as he saw it, was more grounded than he, capable of keen insight, talented but without the baggage of conceit. Harry, despite his favor from Juliet, was Galen’s never-stated and reluctantly acknowledged mentor.

  They agreed to meet where Harry was performing, at the Odyssey Theater, a couple of hours prior to an evening production. It felt homey for Harry to invite Galen to have a seat in that same comfortable room where he had first been interviewed by Brian De Genera and his pals.

  “So what’s up?” Harry asked, aware of more than Galen realized.

  “I’m a fucking failure.”

  “Hey, Galen, you’re only twenty-three or so. How could you be a failure?”

  “Everything’s turned to shit.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  It took a moment for Galen to work up the energy to get into his tale. How does one tell a friend about his own father’s corruption?

  “My old man. I saw some pics of him. He’s queer. I mean, you know, a fag.”

  “Your father is gay.”

  “I guess you can put it that way.”

  “So, is he out? Is he openly gay? Does your mother know? Do his business associates know?”

  “Nobody knows. Some guy was blackmailing him. Wanted money. I’m not sure if they did the exchange or not. I don’t even want to know.”

  “But, you started out by saying you felt like a failure.”

  “Yeah. I do. How can a son be okay if his father’s life is a goddamned hoax?”

  Harry thought of his own father, of the cutthroat deals he had to make as a power-broker attorney. Was he proud of his father? Would his father’s sordid side cause him to think of himself as a failure?

  “I can see where it would be a blow, where you’d be disappointed as hell, but I can also see how you aren’t your father. You have to make your own way, figure out your own direction.”

  “That’s just it, Harry, I don’t have a direction. I’m shit as an actor, my old man pushed me into this movie part, which I think is going to peter out, and I don’t have any other prospects. Women come on to me, but nothing lasts. It’s superficial. I…I’m shallow.”

  Harry tried to remember in his psychology classes, the concept of self-talk, how what we tell ourselves is the key to our actions. It was clear that Galen was catastrophising, trashing himself in his thoughts.

  “What if I told you, you’re not? What if I said you’re starting to mature? You’re beginning to look at yourself with grown-up values, and it’s painful. It involves escape. You have to escape from your parents. In your case, especially from your father.”

  “I don’t know.” He stopped, looking miserable. “I had thoughts that it’s the ultimate insult to my mother. She deserves better.” He stopped again, and said softly, “I even had thoughts of killing my fucking old man.”

  “That will get you a jail sentence.”

  “I know, but I can’t stand to look at him.”

  “There’s got to be another way. Maybe you could write to him, tell him what you know.”

  “Then what? He’ll want to talk, to explain it all. He’ll want to squirm out of it, tell me I’m full of crap.”

  “You know you’re not.”

  “But it sickens me to be in the same room with him.”

  To Harry, the impasse seemed suddenly enormous, a wall that Galen had erected which he did not care to scale. If he looked at it through Galen’s lenses, he could feel the hopelessness his friend was describing. What does one do when an upsurge of problems overwhelm, when troubles appear to have no solution?

  “Stay for our show tonight. Get lost for a couple of hours in Clarence Darrow battling it out with William Jennings Bryant. It’s a classic play, and it makes you think about cosmic issues. Maybe get you out of your own stuff for a while.”

  “I can do that, but it won’t chase away the image I have of my putrid father.”

  “For a time it might get it out of your head.”

  “The bastard needs to pay for his ugly behavior.”

  Harry stared hard at Galen, aware of the time, of the theater beginning to stir, the box office opening outside the lounge, cognizant of his own pre-curtain responsibilities.

  “Look, Galen, your father’s trespasses will be addressed. Life has a way of catching up with frauds. It’s not something you have to do directly.”

  Galen stared back at Harry, his look eerie, contemptuous. In a voice oozing with venom, he replied, “Maybe, maybe not.”

  It was four in the morning in windy pre-dawn darkness. The night custodian in the Bing Theater at the university, an amiable black man known to the students as Keyshawn, after his favorite football player, had just finished sweeping the auditorium and gone into his closet for a smoke. The way he described it later was that he heard a sharp sound, like a pop, but it was muffled, and he dismissed it as weather-related, or perhaps a car backfiring, certainly nothing to worry about.

  After a time, he returned to the auditorium for his standard inspection tour, languidly climbed the side stairs to the proscenium, looked about and saw, center stage, in reflected light from the naked platform-bulb, an amorphous lump of something lying on the parquet, a dark liquid spreading around it like a slow tide.

  Next day, in the mail, Harry received a hand-scrawled note: “I can’t do it. I’m not a murderer.”

  EIGHT

  J ennifer Knight Thurston, Galen’s mother, collapsed at the news, on the plush, alpaca-wool carpet of her living room floor, the phone casing splitting apart as it careened off a stone tabletop. At first they feared she had a mild heart attack, but it proved not so; she did, however, suffer an ugly, plum-colored hematoma on her arm, which had glanced off the same table.

  Bruce Thurston, Galen’s father, was bewildered by the revelation, some part of him, at a subterranean level, sensing his personal culpability, though he had no understanding as to how or why.

  Most students and Galen’s former professors clucked with astonishment, mouthing words such as, “a shame,” and “what a waste.”

  Juliet and Harry, on the inside, knew the trigger, and Katy was b
rought into the circle, more for Harry’s therapeutic need than as gossip or calumny.

  Harry decided not to reveal the existence of the letter. It would be his—and Galen’s—morbid compact.

  Three weeks after Galen’s death, in an off-hand comment over the phone, Harry’s father said to him, “You know about Thurston’s strong-arm tactic to get your mother and me. Well, an eerie thing happened. The grunt I hired to get something back on Thurston, to level the playing field, name of Whitey Carter, has turned up dead. I read about it in the Times. Not a big news story, a small-time character who must have crossed somebody.”

  Trying to be casual, Harry responded, “You think Galen’s father was involved?”

  “I have no idea. He was, as they say, vulnerable. The dead man, my spy-guy, was stabbed in the back with a butcher knife. He could have been pulling a double-deal. No one told me.”

  Yes, Harry thought, a double deal; blackmail that turned deadly. The sick, greedy bastard didn’t even know the real grief his photos had caused.

  “I know life doesn’t even up, but I hope Mr. Thurston, some day, gets his.”

  “Don’t you think he already has? Louis paused, then finished with, “Promise me, son, that you’ll never kill yourself.”

  “I promise,” Harry said at once, wondering if the request was for his peace of mind or his father’s.

  Freud was famous for fixating on mothers as the source of their offsprings’ angst. In the scenarios that filled the lives of our theatrical friends, fathers seemed to be the culprits.

  Juliet’s convict father was hardly an exception. His escape was the ultimate embarrassment for the prison system, morale destroyed, his recapture a constant and urgent priority. Whether his time in prison had finely-honed his cleverness, or whether he was simply lucky, in a bold move, Cody Marsh had dressed himself as a guard with a mocked-up name tag—he had worked in the laundry—and walked cavalierly through the gates of the maximum security lockup. As fate would have it, the on-duty gate-monitor was new, perhaps Marsh knew that, and was not familiar with the names and faces of the staff.

  That he tricked them so completely was shame enough; that he seemed to have vanished without a trace was intolerable.

  Two weeks, then three, then a month were torn off the calendar. The stakeout of Juliet’s apartment proved fruitless. The tap on her phone produced no leads. As her father’s daughter, she absolutely knew he would try to contact her, though his pursuit of her supposed affluence was misguided. There were indeed prospects following her grand review for Buried Child, but she was far from wallowing in wealth.

  On the final weekend of the play’s six-week run, an enthusiastic Saturday night audience gave the performers a standing ovation. When the applause faded, when the actors had finished their post-play clean-up, a jolly crowd hovered at the stage entrance, asking for autographs, congratulatory, their heroes and heroines close at hand, touchable, true-to-life.

  As if disguises had become his métier, Cody Marsh, looking like a stolid, middle-aged woman, hair a glitzy red under a fashionable green beret, shoulder bag hung low so that his left hand—he was a lefty—came to rest at the snap-opening, half-spectacles perched jauntily on his nose, eyes beyond them bulbous and magnified, smiled wryly at Juliet with a downward twist at each corner—his un-disguisable feature—and whispered so that only she could hear, “Hello there, daughter.”

  Off balance, she stared for an instant, looked around as if searching for help, then said, with clear irritation, “What the hell do you want?”

  By then, most of the crowd had dispersed, Juliet and the middle-aged woman alone, except for one other actor with two or three hangers-on—nothing out of the ordinary, no reason for suspicion.

  “Now, don’t be nasty, daughter. I’m your old man, remember.”

  “My old man who killed his own wife.”

  “Not a sure thing. They accused me; I never admitted it.”

  “You were convicted. You’re a murderer.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I need a boost. Five grand would do it.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “Look, you stake me and I’ll get out of your hair for good.”

  “I’ve got news for you. You’re not in my hair. You’re not even in my thoughts.”

  “All those years being your father don’t count?”

  “In all those years, you were never a father, and you killed the only person who ever loved you.”

  “You loved me. When you were a child, I gave you presents.”

  “Twice a year, when you came home.”

  “I was an artist.”

  “You were a bullshitter.”

  “Where in hell are we going with all this?”

  “If you don’t get your rotten, padded ass on the road, I call the cops and you’re going back to jail.”

  “I only asked for some monetary help.”

  “And I said no. You don’t get it, do you? I don’t want you around me, I don’t want to hear from you, I don’t want to see you.”

  A voice from a few yards away called out, “Juliet, we’re going to the Moustache Café for a late supper. You coming?”

  “Be right there,” she answered.

  “Moustache Café, huh? Pretty ritzy stuff.”

  “Cody, if you’re not out of my sight in one minute, I swear to you, I’ll call the cops.”

  For an instant, the plastic smile faded. There was a narrowing of the overblown eyes, clenching of fists, a menacing pose, fingers on the left hand unsnapping the purse—a civil war raging. Would he, to his own daughter? Then poof, like a balloon with its air bursting loose, he shrank inward, deflated, defeated.

  He said nothing. In a moment he had melted into the night shadows.

  Juliet reached her colleague, who asked, “Who was that weird babe?”

  “A fanatic,” Juliet said. “Let’s go.”

  She neither saw nor heard from Cody Marsh again.

  On the evening news, two years later, there was a report that escaped convict, Cody Marsh, was captured in Michoacan, Mexico by a bounty hunter, and had been returned to his American prison.

  To Harry, Juliet said, “The bastard managed two years of freedom in the tropic sunshine. Where’s the fairness in that?”

  Harry’s response: “Who said life was fair?”

  It is presumed in the industry, by aspiring starlets (and cynical fans) that they must sleep their way to the top. There are exceptions, principally when the young woman is a genuine talent, and/or if she is not the sort of raving beauty that causes producers, instantly and lasciviously, to salivate.

  Harry’s two female pals represented one of each. Katy was a brilliant actor, attractive but not stunning, her stage work precursors to what could become an elegant screen career. One reviewer actually made a comparison to Meryl Streep. Juliet was skilled, inventive, and a clever performer, and was possessed of looks that would magnetize the most indifferent of men. She was once described as a young Jacqueline Bisset.

  Neither envisioned her path to success via an excess of erections and orgasms, but, while Katy would indignantly refuse, Juliet would entertain possibilities, the allure of fame uneven in their psyches.

  That, sadly enough, was a key to their differences, though Harry, in his infatuation with one and friendship with the other, knew nothing about it.

  Hardly a wonder that the beautiful one’s career soared, while the gifted one’s plodded along.

  Five weeks after her encounter with her disguised father and the end of the run of Buried Child, Juliet could count four different agents wanting to represent her. The Tyrone character was scratched when Evelyn Kay convinced Juliet that he was shady, and could not be counted on to deliver, his fancy stable of stars notwithstanding.

  One other call was from Nan Bartell, the same person who had solicited Harry after his audition at the Odyssey. To Juliet, it became apparent that she was an intrepid entrepreneur,
but wore two hats, actor and agent, and was lacking in contacts; anyway, it would not do to have the same agent as Harry; priorities might have to be compromised, her career sometimes placed on hold while Nan poured her energy into Harry’s. Besides, she was a woman.

  Another prospective representative, Ashton Carlisle, seemed perfect: a forty-year-old, former actor on stage and screen, who had seven clients, including old-time character-actor William DeVane, and sports-announcer Dick Enberg.

  Juliet signed with Carlisle, who told her slyly, “If I hook you up with a producer, be friendly.”

  He said no more. The meaning was implicit.

  Movie-goers are familiar with screen credits that read: Casting by, but what they don’t know is that as soon as the casting company is engaged, thirty agents pounce on them, broadcasting their clients’ appropriateness for this or that role, cashing in on favors owed, cajoling, persuading. It is, after all, their livelihood, the way they pay their bills.

  Carlisle not only suggested, but insisted that Juliet, who had a pleasant voice, take singing lessons, with emphasis on the several forms of pop music, Latin rhythms, Black beats, country-western sounds. She had, as a teen, spent six months with a voice coach, felt that her singing skills were adequate, but gave her agent no argument.

  “If you think it’s needed, I’ll do it.”

  “I do. You want as wide a range of eligibility as possible. This could give you a part you might otherwise miss.”

  Indeed, an irrefutable theme is that timing is everything. Four months later, she was signed for a role in, of all pieces, a film musical of Diary of Anne Frank. It had been a studio-play for several years, once performed in Solvang, a community theater in Central California. Far from dark, it tried to look hopefully at the Frank family’s seemingly hopeless imprisonment in a Dutch friend’s hidden apartment. Juliet was given the role of Anne’s sister, a secondary part, but with one ballad and one intense dramatic scene that could showcase her skills. It was not a glamorous role, but, as she and her agent were to learn, it was hard to hide her intrinsic and effervescent glamour.