Seeing Stars

by Diane Hammond

  Ruth made a final right turn onto Las Palmas. They found a parking spot directly across from the studio lot’s guard shack—who said there wasn’t a God?—where they were checked in on the strength of a handwritten list and Bethany’s headshot. It was four thirty-five. They raced past several soundstages, past reserved parking spaces for Disney directors and writers, past an open-hatched SUV with five identical bearded collies inside, animal actors for some movie or other, and then, at last, they were at Soundstage 33, home of That’s So Raven—a show that, three weeks ago, Ruth had not even heard of.

  Just inside the door, a second door led into the soundstage itself. A red light over the door was turned on, which Ruth had learned meant cameras were rolling. Even so, a gorgeous girl and a snotty-looking boy came out, laughing extravagantly. They brushed by Ruth and Bethany without so much as a flicker of acknowledgment or apology. Once they were past, Bethany clutched Ruth’s upper arm and hissed, “Mom, they’re on the show! I recognize them!”

  “That could be you,” Ruth whispered back, because it could; someone’s career could be fast-tracked right now, at this callback. It made Ruth queasy with excitement to think about it. “You have to be patient,” Mimi kept telling them, and Ruth knew that she really did, but in a secret part of her mind she was already smiling for the camera at the Oscars.

  They climbed a flight of stairs and emerged in a hallway with the same messy, hand-printed paper sign as yesterday, which said simply, Casting.

  “Hair,” Ruth said.

  Bethany smoothed her newly straight bangs, tightened the scrunchy around her ridiculous but beautifully straight side ponytail, and put on the lensless glasses. “Okay?” she said.

  “Okay,” said Ruth. “Breathe.”

  The waiting room was ringed with twenty or so folding plastic chairs, the kind that Ruth had seen for sale just last week at Costco. A clipboard was set out on an unmanned reception counter, which Bethany approached to sign in like an old hand. All but one of the seats was taken by either a girl or her mother, and every one of those girls and mothers seemed to regard Bethany and Ruth with something between mild indifference and withering contempt. None of the girls wore glasses or side ponytails. No one was wearing strange knit pants. Nothing about them said anything but Hip Southern California Tween Babe. Ruth had never seen so many beautiful heads of naturally straight hair in a single room.

  She gave Bethany a little push toward the last empty chair, and Bethy sat on exactly one inch of the seat. Ruth, having learned her place in the first week, leaned against the wall behind her daughter, ready to serve. She could feel her stomach pooch out. None of the other mothers in the room looked like they had stomachs that pooched out. They looked like they ran for an hour every morning and then took Pilates until their late afternoon nail appointment. No doubt these were women who dared to wear bathing suits. Ruth should have had a grapefruit half for breakfast instead of Denny’s Fabulous French Toast Platter. Menus always made things look delicious, and then they turned out to be just one more serving of lard on a bun, which you ate every bit of anyway because you’d paid for it and you didn’t want to be a bad role model for your daughter, who could eat eight thousand calories a day without a single serving of fresh fruit or vegetables and wake up the next morning looking like a goddess.

  A girl came down the hall from the casting room looking at the floor. Her mother rose, put an arm around her, and gently led her away. A minute later an elegant woman in an expensive leather ensemble clicked into the waiting room on perfectly coordinated heels: the casting director from yesterday. Ruth nudged Bethany with her elbow, but the casting director passed right by without acknowledgment or even recognition, picked up the sign-in clipboard, and scanned the room. Suddenly she was all smiles. “Hey!” she cried to a girl on the far side of the room with a twelve-year-old body and twenty-five-year-old makeup and hair. The girl jumped up as the woman click-click-clicked across the floor and pulled her in with a lavish one-armed hug. “How are you, sweetie? I didn’t know you were reading for this.” Which was specious, of course. Even as green as she was, Ruth knew that the casting director hand-picked the callbacks.

  The girl ran her long fingers through her long hair and shot one skinny hip out. Ruth could identify her mother on the far side of the room because she was the only mother who was smiling.

  “Where are you on the list?” the woman asked. The two of them consulted the clipboard, flipping back a few pages before the casting director gave up and said, “Oh, just c’mon back.” She linked her arm through the girl’s, and Ruth and Bethany and nearly everyone else in the waiting room watched them walk every step of the way down the long hall to the audition room.

  “They do that to freak you out,” said an amused, dry martini of a voice with underlying notes of old smoker. “It’s one of the ways they see if your kid is tough enough—or if you are. Shake the trees a little.”

  The woman who’d spoken was sitting on Bethany’s far side, watching them both with amusement. To Ruth’s relief, she didn’t look like she worked out at a gym or jogged. She looked more like someone with a pack-a-day habit and a weight problem. She wore clothes that were on a par with Ruth’s—shapeless jeans, faded T-shirt, Costco sneakers.

  “Well, it worked,” Ruth said.

  “Is this her first time auditioning for Evelyn?”

  “Evelyn?”

  “Flynn. The casting director.”

  “Oh! Yes. Plus it’s her first callback ever. We’re so nervous.”

  “I’m not,” Bethany said. “I just have to pee.”

  A cheerful, blocky, red-haired girl came down the hallway toward them from the direction of the casting room and said, “Well, that was a joke.”

  “Clara, meet”—the woman picked up Bethany’s head shot—“Bethany Ann Roosevelt.”

  Clara grinned. “No shit—is that your real name?”

  “No,” said Bethy. “My manager named me that. My real name is Bethany Rabinowitz.”

  “Jeez,” the girl said sympathetically.

  “Vee Velman,” said the woman, and held out a hand to Ruth. The hand was warm and dry. Ruth’s was cold and sticky with nerve-sweat.

  “Vee?” she said.

  “Technically, Virginia.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m Ruth. You were just joking when you said they do things to try and rattle the kids, right?”

  “Are you kidding? They do it all the time. Evelyn Flynn’s famous for it.”

  “But she couldn’t have been nicer to Bethany yesterday,” Ruth said doubtfully. Maybe this Clara was an awful actor, in which case you could understand the casting director’s lack of interest. Bethy was a very good actor.

  Clara and her mother exchanged a look. Clara grinned and said, “One time I went in and read and left and the whole time she never even got off the phone.”

  “Didn’t it bother you?”

  “Nah.”

  “But why would they do something like that? Especially to children.”

  Vee said, “There’s your first mistake. They’re not children. They’re job applicants. You’re new here, aren’t you?”

  “It shows that much?”

  Vee reached over and patted Ruth’s hand. “Yeah. But enjoy that naïveté, honey, because when it wears off you’re going to want to start drinking.”

  “How long have you been here?” Ruth asked.

  “Born and raised. My kids—Clara and her brother, Buster—have been in the industry since they were three. All the kids have. It’s what LA kids do instead of 4-H.”

  “Uh oh. Mom.” Clara tapped her watch urgently.

  “Shit!” Vee snatched up a purse big enough to comfortably accommodate a six-pack of beer. “It’s three fifty-one and we’re parked on Santa Monica. If you’re not driving away by four on the dot they’ll tow you, and let me tell you, that is a nightmare.” She pulled out a piece of paper and a pen and scribbled her name and phone number. “If the girls want to get together sometime.”

 
Ruth accepted the slip of paper gratefully. “Thank you. You’re pretty much the first people we’ve met since we got here who’ve been friendly.”

  “Doesn’t mean we’re nice, though,” Vee said, grinning. “Always watch your back. This is Hollywood.”

  Ruth looked after them as the door closed behind them. The room suddenly felt bigger and colder. She felt a pang of homesickness for Hugh. He didn’t agree with their being here but he was a good, solid, sensible man, as well as a gifted dentist. They’d been married for twenty-two years, known each other for twenty-three. They’d met as graduate school students, she of ceramic arts, he of dentistry. She’d always been grimy with clay or glaze residue and he’d smelled of pulverized tooth enamel and amalgam.

  Back then she’d told herself that Hugh, who was a model of measured words and earnestness, would be more passionate once he could take his attention away from dental school. He’d never become passionate, but by the time she realized that, she’d come to appreciate him all the more for his durability and even keel. And though he was frank with her, he didn’t dwell on her shortcomings. In addition to being a ditherer, she was hopelessly transparent and gullible. She would ask Bethy about a friend at school who weighed no more than a bird, and Bethy would say, “It’s fine, Mom, she just has a really high metabolism,” and Ruth would believe that; and next thing she knew, some parent she’d run into in the aisles of Safeway was telling her that the child had just been checked into an eating disorder clinic. It came down to the fact that Ruth always thought people were better and nicer than they really were. Hugh had been gently telling her so for years—he was telling her that now about Mimi Roberts.

  “You want the world to be a nice place, Ruthie, but sometimes it just isn’t,” he’d told her once. “Wanting something to be true doesn’t make it true.”

  Maybe so, but you had to have conviction about some things, and Ruth believed utterly that Bethy would end up standing head and shoulders above other people—perfectly nice other people, Ruth would readily concede—who were simply less talented, less gifted, than Bethy. Fate had bestowed upon her daughter a great talent and the drive to put it to its highest use. Therefore, Bethy would be seen, would be discovered, here in LA. Her life would be one long string of successes and the occasional mention—tasteful mention—in People and on Access Hollywood, until it was time for her to attend Yale or Harvard like Jodie Foster and Natalie Portman had; and after that she would come back to a string of challenging, thoughtful projects as long as her arm—meaningful movies that would be discovered at Sundance or would premier at Cannes to critical acclaim and would go on to perform outstandingly at the box office.

  Was it wrong to have dreams, to think big, to picture the best and head straight for it? Sure, the odds were long—Ruth wasn’t an idiot—but consider the case of George Clooney, who’d been to network twenty times, twenty times, before he booked ER. And look at him now.

  Another half hour crawled by. Girls and mothers departed in pairs, draining all the energy and breathable air from the room. Ruth finally let Bethy go to the bathroom but told her to hurry. She shouldn’t have worried: it was another ten minutes before the casting director came for her at last, talking loudly on a cell phone. “Look,” she was saying, “she’s not booking because she’s unstable, and she has that mother, you know exactly which one I’m talking about. Christ. So hear me when I tell you that we will never”—Ruth watched with appalled fascination as she grabbed Bethy’s headshot, the only one left, and waved it in the air—“ever book that girl. On anything. All right, c’mon back.” That last was to Bethany. The casting director clapped her phone shut and marched off down the hall with Bethy hurrying along behind her.

  Ruth’s heart leaped. Maybe she did remember Bethany but had just been keeping it a secret while all those other people had been in the waiting room, so it would seem like they had an equal chance of booking the part. If Bethany had last-minute nerves she certainly didn’t show it. Ruth was so proud. This—exactly this—was why they were here.

  WHAT BETHANY LOVED MOST ABOUT ACTING WAS THAT you could take yourself off like a coat and put on somebody else—usually someone you liked a lot better. No one else knew, not even her best friend, Rianne, but for years she had walked around as Courage Girl. Courage Girl hadn’t been afraid of the coat closet when she was in first grade; Courage Girl answered any question boldly, her head held high. It had been Courage Girl who’d fended off her crazy uncle Billy when he kept plying her with Passover wine at last year’s Seder; who’d told stupid Randy Maxwell to just go screw himself when he told her she looked like his mother’s dog (though actually, the dog was a cocker spaniel and, in Bethy’s opinion, very pretty). Courage Girl had taken swimming lessons when Bethy was afraid of drowning. Courage Girl was not afraid of Dumpsters or those kinds of cats with no hair. Not that she was always Courage Girl. A couple of years ago, in sixth grade, she had liked Billy Williams, but he’d never even noticed she was there until the day she came to school as the school’s supremely confident seventh-grade bitch Cynthia Morgenstern—the clothes, the jewelry, the walk, the laugh—and all day kids told her she just seemed so much more fun than usual, so out there.

  Now, here in LA, Bethany had lots of new alter egos: the geeky girl, the sidekick, the best friend, the brain. They, not Bethy, were the people who inhabited her skin in the casting studio waiting rooms. They were the ones who walked into every audition like she was, in Rianne’s words, the Biggest Frickin’ Deal on the Planet. That was her secret; that was why she just knew she’d be famous one day. It was what she dreamed about every night before she fell asleep; it was what she thought about when she first woke up in the morning. When she flipped through People magazine, she saw herself in the Scoop section; she’d already identified the place on Hollywood Boulevard where her star would be placed. She was going to live a wonderful, charmed life and when she won her first Oscar she would weep a little bit and thank her mother for standing by her all these years. She’d thank her father only at the very end, because he didn’t share her dream.

  Surprisingly, she wasn’t bitter about Hugh’s disapproval. She knew the reason he lacked enthusiasm was that her dreams took her away from him, plain and simple, and that was fair enough. When she made her second or third movie, or had become a regular on a television series, she’d pay for him to move down here and set up a new practice where all his patients would be starlets and stuntmen with teeth like jewels.

  She donned her glasses frames and followed Evelyn Flynn into the same audition room as yesterday, where a video camera was set up on a tripod at the back. She waited for the casting director to step behind the camera and then she moved into its line of sight, the way Mimi had taught her. The casting director showed no sign of remembering her from yesterday, which was confusing. Worse, she looked irritated. She squinted at the camera, clicked it on, and said, “Go ahead and slate.”

  Bethy smiled at the lens and said very slowly and distinctly, as she’d been taught, “My name is Bethany Ann Roosevelt and my agent is Holly Jensen at Big Talent.”

  The casting director didn’t even look up from the camera, just picked up a creased and dog-eared copy of the sides. “Okay. Go.”

  Bethy was confused. “But you have the first—”

  “Go,” the casting director said.

  Bethy raised her sides and said, “Mom said she’d love me no matter what.”

  Evelyn Flynn read, in the flattest voice imaginable, “But you’re a loser, Sandy. You know that. Everyone knows that.”

  “I’m not a loser,” Bethy said without even having to consult the paper. She was off-book, like Mimi had told her to be for every audition.

  “I have lizards that are prettier than you.”

  “I’m pretty. I know I am,” Bethy said, giving her voice the slightest tremor.

  “Okay,” the casting director said, switching off the camera. “Thank you.”

  “But I—” They couldn’t be done. Bethy had two more li
nes, and they were both laden with emotion. She’d worked with a coach on those two lines, just those two lines, for twenty minutes.

  Evelyn Flynn crossed to the door and held it open for Bethy. “Thank you,” she said again, and her eyes were flat. Bethy felt tears as she meekly passed in front of the casting director. Just as she was out the door, the woman said, “Oh, and honey?”

  Bethy perked up.

  “Don’t bring props to an audition. Ever.”

  BETHANY CRIED MOST OF THE WAY HOME. “SHE TOLD ME to bring them. She told me to! And then she didn’t recognize me. I didn’t even get to read all my lines. If I could have read them, she’d have chosen me.”

  “Oh, honey,” Ruth said, feeling the prick of tears behind her own eyelids.

  Eventually Bethy subsided, looking out the window dully and gnawing a fingernail. Ruth was appalled, but what could she do? These people were in a position to change the future. They didn’t play fair, but there it was: you could stay and take it, or you could go home. Thank God Hugh wasn’t here to witness this. He’d have transported them both back to Seattle before they even knew what had happened. He was very protective, even sometimes when it wasn’t necessary.

  Ruth got off the 101 at the Barham Boulevard exit. They’d driven this way for almost every audition Bethy had had, and it took them past the Oakwood every single time. The Oakwood was a tony apartment complex in Burbank that catered to actors, directors, and writers from out of town.

  “I wish we were staying here,” Bethy said wistfully as they drove by. “There are tons of kids. They have a pool and a hot tub and a game room and stuff.”