The tropical muggy evenings after dinner were spent in the large bar off the lobby, overlooking the sea, where the grating sound of the blender mixing the margaritas was a counterpoint to the three-piece combo. One night there was a band in the lounge after dinner, and while everyone from the film sat being cooled by the breeze from the
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sea, Cee Cee went up on the little bandstand and sang, “Here’s That Rainy Day,” and “My Funny Valentine” and some other really old songs. And afterward while the crew was cheering and stomping for her singing and Scott handed her a bottle of beer, Nina heard her say to him, “Bet you never even heard of those songs, kid,” and he laughed and put his arm around her waist, and when the band played some other moony love song, he tugged Cee Cee by the arm and pulled her out on the dance floor.
“I think if we dance any closer than this we get thrown in a Mexican prison,” Nina heard Scott say, and Cee Cee laughed.
“Looks like Cee Cee’s mushing out,” Nina heard a voice say, and it was Chelsea Bain, whose mom was drinking a margarita at the bar and smoking a cigarette and talking to one of the cameramen. And it was true, Cee Cee was definitely looking with goo-goo eyes at Scott, who Nina had to admit was really cool, but still she felt weird about it. As if she should maybe run over there and stand in front of them so nobody else could see.
“My mom’s single too, so I understand,” Chelsea told her. “They get horny.” Nina felt her own face and body fill with an uncomfortable heat at that thought. “Afterward they always hate themselves, but at the moment if you try and warn them, they make you go to your room and play with your Barbies.” Nina knew Cee Cee hadn’t had any real boyfriend in a long while, maybe since John Perry left her for the second time. There were dates, guys who came over, took her to a screening at the studio, even some who sent her flowers, but the ones she liked, the men she got all dolled up to be with, talked to in her “other voice” on the phone, were always the ones who didn’t seem to stay around too long, and the ones who were crazy about her, like sweet and wonderful Hal Lieberman, she didn’t even consider as boy friends.
“Wanna come over to my room?” Chelsea asked. Nina looked into Chelsea’s eyes. There was something she had learned to look for in the eyes of kids who made overtures of friendship to her over the last few years, a subtle, indescribable, too-eager look which meant they had no real interest in her but were longing somehow to be connected to Cee Cee. At home in Los Angeles it came in the form of invitations to birthday parties of kids she hardly knew, kids who, probably encouraged by their parents, would invite Nina in the hope that Cee
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Cee would drive her to the party or pick her up at the party so the parents could meet Cee Cee and tell their friends that they had.
More than once on the playground at school Nina would suddenly spot two or three kids looking her over, saying, “No she’s not. Her last name is Barron, not Bloom. Let’s ask her. You ask her. Are you Cec Cee Bloom’s daughter?” When her answer was affirmative, sometimes they would just giggle and walk away, sometimes they would ask lots of none-of-their-business questions, and sometimes they would be mean and say things about Cee Cee like, “I think she’s dopey looking.”
In Chelsea Bain’s invitation to leave the bar there was none of that stuff going on, so Nina said yes. Leaving unnoticed, they walked silently through the tropical night, up the stone path to the suite Chelsea shared with her mother.
“I’m shooting tomorrow afternoon,” Chelsea said, taking a Coke out of the refrigerator in the bar area and pouring it over a glassful of
ice. “Want some?”
“No thanks.”
“I’m doing my real big scene where I beg my father not to get a divorce. It’s the one I did in the test. My acting coach got me ready and we worked real hard on my emotional memory. Know what that means?” Nina didn’t. “It’s like, when you’re acting a scene, you just work off of things that have happened to you in your own real life that are like the ones you’re acting. So I’m gonna just use the way I felt when my real mom and dad split up. Only in real life my dad left my morn for this slut named Karly at his office, and in the movie it’s different. You get it? I just say the lines and think about the day my dad left us and I get so sad about that, that I cry and it looks like I’m crying over the characters Cee Cee aad Michael Nouri play who are splitting up in the movie.”
Nina thought emotional memory sounded really interesting, and also that she had such a storehouse of emotional memories herself, she
could probably be a really good actress too. “Want to run lines?” Chelsea asked her. “Huh?”
“You know. Hold book for me. I’ll give you the script and you can follow along with the words while I say them and make sure I have ‘em right.”
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“Okay.” Nina was excited. She was being included. Not just watching the way she did at the taping of Cee Cee’s show, but now she had a job, running lines with one of the actresses in the movie. Chelsea handed her a dog-eared script and opened it to a page on which the dialogue and action for the character of Stacy had been highlighted in yellow.
“Ready?” she asked Nina.
“Yes,” Nina said, feeling very important.
“You give me my cues, read the lines before Stacy’s, and I’ll give you back my lines. Go.”
First came a speech from the character of Mitch, the father. “I guess you know what’s going on, don’t you, baby?” Nina read, and when she looked up at Chelsea she could see that the girl was throwing herself into the character, right there in the hotel room dressed in her white OP shorts and a peach La Coste shirt — her little eyes filled with tears and her funny Cee Cee-like face seemed to crumble and she said, “Yes, Dad, and I want you to love Mommy, and I want you to come home.”
“I do love her, but I can’t live with her anymore. There are problems. Insurmountable problems that someday you’ll understand…”
“Understand. No. I won’t ever understand how you can love Linda more than my mom. We were a family, we were like on television, me and you and Mom and Sammy,” Chelsea said, and real tears were coming down her face. By the end of the scene she was sobbing so hard with her head in her hands that Nina set the script on the floor and reached out to comfort her, but before she could touch her, Chelsea’s head bobbed up and she was wiping away the tears and laughing. “So? Are we talkin’ Oscar time here, my friend, or what?” she asked. Nina was dazzled, amazed that someone her own age could be so in control that she could pull those tears out when she needed them and then just make them go away.
The knock on the door was Cee Cee coming to find Nina and take her back to their suite. Her hair was messy and her makeup was smeared and she had a glassy look in her eyes that made Nina think she and Scott had probably been “making out,” or maybe even more. Before the two of them left to go to their suite, Chelsea’s mom came in and said, “Into bed, girl. Big day tomorrow.” Then Cee Cee hugged Chelsea and they talked about how exciting it was that tomorrow was
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Chelsea’s big shooting day, and about how tough it was to shoot scenes out of sequence, since her emotional scene was being shot long before the introductory scenes, and while they talked their actressy talk, Nina felt out of it again.
That night she couldn’t get the scene she and Chelsea had read out of her mind, and the way Chelsea had been able just to call those tears up out of nowhere. “I want you to love Mommy. And I want you to come home.” She fell asleep with the scene replaying itself over and over in her head. It was so early in the morning that it was still dark when she heard the phone ring in Cee Cee’s room, but it wasn’t just a wake-up call. It was a conversation of which Nina could hear bits and pieces, starting with “What? Oh no: What do they think it is? I thought we warned her about that.”
Nina fell back to sleep, and
a few hours later when she woke and dressed and strolled over to the dining room where the film was supposed to be shooting that day, none of the cast and crew were there. “They’re in the lobby,” one of the waiters told her, so she walked downstairs to the lobby where the company was all spread out, their big thick cables, lights, and cameras everywhere as they shot a scene where Cee Cee and the little boy who played the son have a fight while they’re checking into the hotel.
“Quiet down, people, we’re rolling.”
After the shot Cee Cee noticed Nina sitting just behind the cameras and hurried over with a concerned look on her face. “Do you feel
okay?” she asked Nina.
“Fine,” Nina said.
Cee Cee looked relieved. “Chelsea was rushed to the hospital early this morning,” Cee Cee told her. “Montezuma’s revenge. Already. And on top of that she was up all night puking her guts out.”
“Thanks for sharing that, Cee,” Nina said, feeling a little queasy herself at the image of poor Chelsea about whose poor health she wouldn’t have felt nearly as bad before last night as she did now that the girl had become her friend.
“So we’re shooting around her for now,” Cee Cee told her, while her makeup lady powdered her face with a powder brush. “That’s why we’re doing these scenes down here so we can put her stuff off for a day or two.”
But a long hot day or two of shooting passed and Chelsea, confined
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to her hotel room, was still so sick she didn’t even want to talk to anyone but Nina who came by and taught her some card games and card tricks, and just to make sure Chelsea would stay fresh for the day when she was well enough to go back to work, they ran lines over and over again. Finally, by the fourth day she said she was feeling better and they were scheduling her first shooting day for Thursday, but that morning when she stood up to walk to the bathroom she collapsed to the floor.
She was so depleted and weak there was no chance she was going to be able to get on a set within the next few days and play the demanding emotional part. Everyone on the crew was saying that maybe the worse the child looked, the better it was for the story, but nobody believed that, and Martin, the director, spent a lot of time frantically talking on the only telephone the hotel had, which was at a makeshift desk in a little glass cubicle right near the registration desk. Nina pretended to be playing with the big squawking parrot in the cage nearby just to overhear his conversation.
“The child can barely stand up,” she heard him say angrily, as if it was Chelsea’s own fault she was sick. “What about the girl who came in second? The pudgy one who dyed her hair red for the audition? Well, see if we can get her 0ffthe sitcom. Just for ten days of shooting in a major motion picture. Tell the agent her success will be good for the sitcom. I don’t give a shit what you tell him. Just get me somebody fast.”
That night an ambulance came to the hotel to pick up Chelsea and take her to the studio airplane, which was rushing her back to Los Angeles to see a specialist. Everyone from the film crew was there and they all watched as Cee Cee walked over to the stretcher while they carried Chelsea out, and hugged her frail little body, and then hugged her worried-looking mother who followed behind. Nina walked over too and squeezed Chelsea’s hand and got a weak smile in return.
It was just as the ambulance pulled out of sight that Cee Cee stood next to Nina and said softly, so no one else in the crowd could hear, and so softly Nina was certain she had to be hearing wrong, “How
would you like to play the part of Stacy?”
“Huh?”
“I mean, I know you don’t look like my daughter, but you do look
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as if you could be Michael Nouri’s daughter, and if I coached you I’ll bet you could play those scenes. Don’t you think? I mean if I hadn’t seen you steal the show at the dancing school recital, I wouldn’t even mention it, but you did.”
Plav the part of Stacy in a movie, with Cee Cee? For an instant Nina’s heart sank with fear, then the idea started to excite her. The idea was so heady it didn’t seem possible. Especially because Cee Cee seemed to really want her to do it. Seemed to think she could handle it. “I mean, what do you think?” Cee Cee asked her, and Nina was embarrassed because she knew her face was flushed with too much need.
“Urn … I could try,” was all she could say, and Cee Cee slapped her a congratulatory slap on the back and said, “Good for you, kiddo. I’ll tell Martin.”
Late in the day when the sun was starting to set, Cee Cee brought Martin, who smelled of too much cologne, over to the suite where they sat with Nina in the living room going over the part of Stacy scene by scene. Nina felt afraid, but she relaxed a little when she realized how many of the scenes she already knew by heart just from going over them with Chelsea. It felt funny now being the one who was saying the lines while Cee Cee and Martin gave her the cues, encouraging her, praising her, never taking their eyes from her. And all of the line readings were the ones she had heard Chelsea give over and over while Nina was next to her sickbed.
Cee Cee played the scenes with her, treating her the way Nina had always seen her treat the other people she worked with, gently and with a professional respect. And Martin, who had only nodded at Nina perfunctorily at meals and looked at her every time she had been around where they were shooting as if she was a necessary annoyance, was now calling her “darling” and asking her opinion about whether or not she thought a girl her age would say the words as written in the script, or if there was some other way she wanted to say those words that would feel more comfortable to her.
That night Michael Nouri came over to the suite and he and Nina worked on the big crying scene, the one Chelsea was supposed to shoot the morning she got sick. Martin stayed in the room and worked with them, but Cee Cee said she had some things to do and discreetly slipped out. Nina felt a little afraid, but she remembered Chelsea
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rehearsing the scene and just copied what she had seen her do, and when she finished she actually had a few tears on her face, and both Martin and Michael Nouri said, “Nice work.”
“Tomorrow we’ll shoot the big scene. After that, it’ll be a breeze for you,” Martin told her, and he left. For hours Nina laid on the bed in her room, her head spinning wildly. She knew the truth about all this was that they were desperate. That’s why they were giving her the chance to play the part. She had seen them running videos of various kids that casting directors back in Los Angeles had rushed to them, and none of the girls they looked at seemed to interest them. From bits and pieces of things she overheard Martin say to other people, it was clear that Cee Cee had somehow convinced him to take a chance on using Nina in the part. “Cee Cee says she’ll be able to get her through it,” she overheard Martin say to the producer. “I think her genuine closeness with Cee Cee will play through and work for them both in the mother-daughter stuff.”
Up until the dance recital and all the fuss that went with it, like the flowers Cee Cee gave her and the raves for her hard work from’ Miss Olivia and the other parents, Nina had never wanted to be in show business. Thought just the way her mother always did, that it was dumb and brassy and full of showoffs, and the only reason she began taking dancing classes was because it was good for her posture and great exercise. In Sarasota, when she was little, she went to dancing school and the recitals were simply a necessary evil insisted on by the teachers, who wanted to prove to the parents that the money they’d invested in all of those lessons wasn’t being wasted, although in most cases it was.
But now Nina was getting the chance that other people only dreamed about and she knew it. “Are we talkin’ Oscar time here, my friend, or what?” she remembered Chelsea saying to her that night. Oscar time. What if she was nominated for an Oscar? The Oscars were a subject that could send Cee Cee up a wall. They had snubbed her repeatedly in the early part of her career, and sh
e never failed to look like a wounded puppy anytime anyone talked about them. In fact Nina was sure that the biggest attraction to the part of Jeannie, the wife in this film, was that she was such a sympathetic character, Cee Cee had to get a nomination for playing the part.
But what if she didn’t and Nina got one for playing Stacy? Or what
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if they both did? Didn’t that happen one year? Two actresses had to share the Oscar? Cee Cee and Nina would share it. Take turns keeping the statue in their rooms at home. “I’d like to thank the cast and crew, and most of all Cee Cee, who always believed in me,” she would say. And Cee Cee would say, “And I’d like to thank Nina.” By the time Cee Cee got back to the room, it was late and Nina was sound asleep on top of the bed with the script lying open on her chest.
In the early morning the wardrobe lady went through Nina’s own clothes and picked a few that would be right for her to wear in the film, and Frank the makeup man gently dabbed some makeup base on her face and a lot of powder and then some blusher and used an eyelash curler which he held very close to her eye while she tried not to blink, and then he closed it lightly and asked her, “Do I have any skin?” and when she told him no he squeezed the eyelash curler hard and curled the lashes of her right eye, then did the same to the lashes of her left. While the hairdresser was brushing her hair, Nina looked in the mirror and saw her very pretty self looking back at her.
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