Seeing Stars

by Diane Hammond

  “We have a pool.”

  Bethy just looked at her. This morning they’d heard that the pool man found a rat in the skimmer. “It’s green.”

  “It is a little green,” Ruth conceded. “But that’s just paint, Bethy.”

  “No, it’s not,” Bethy said. “It’s algae.”

  Ruth sighed. It might be algae.

  “Plus the pool at the Oakwood has a diving board and a slide.”

  “Honey, last time we talked about this I told you it was too expensive for us, and unless they’ve lowered their rates in the last two days, it still is.”

  Their own crappy rental was a couple of miles away, at the Alameda Extended Stay Apartments. It cost four hundred dollars a month less than the Oakwood’s cheapest studio because it was extremely basic: kitchenette corner; floor covered with shiny maroon industrial paint instead of carpeting; marshy beds that were more like cots; funky bedspreads that looked like, and quite conceivably were, cotton throw rugs; a bathroom that could, at the very least, benefit from a new surround and an application of Drano. Ruth insisted they wear flip-flops in the shower. And it still cost $1,198 a month. Their mortgage back home was only $852, and that included property taxes.

  Instead of the triumphant dinner Ruth had planned for them to have at Bob’s Big Boy—they’d seen Drew Carey there two Tuesdays in a row, and God knew who else might stop in for a burger—Ruth decided they’d go to Paty’s, instead. Paty’s was a less popular coffee shop three blocks past Bob’s on Riverside Drive, with a nearly identical menu, fewer people, and a manager who looked exactly, but exactly, like Neil Diamond. But when they were within a block of the restaurant Ruth could see there was a line of people waiting. She drove on. “Honey, maybe we should eat in tonight,” she said. “I could make us spaghetti. Or we could go to Poquito Mas.”

  Normally, that cheered Bethy up. Poquito Mas was a Mexican patio restaurant just down the street. The first time they went there, they were thrilled to see a sign over the order window that said, NO PHOTOGRAPHS. WE RESPECT THE PRIVACY OF OUR PATRONS, which implied that at any minute you might see a star or two. So far, though, all they’d seen was a flamboyant blonde who was, Ruth was sure, a porn star. She’d heard that the San Fernando Valley was the place for porn production, and it was true that all up and down Magnolia Boulevard she’d noticed unmarked, windowless production buildings. Not that she’d ever mention this to Bethy, of course.

  “Honey? Poquito Mas?”

  “Whatever,” Bethany said listlessly, so Ruth just drove to the apartment.

  “Do you want to call Daddy?” Ruth asked as she led the way through the courtyard. Sometimes Hugh’s sheer clueless-ness could calm Bethy down, even cheer her up.

  “I don’t know,” Bethany said. “No.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ruth let them in and Bethany dropped her Mimi Roberts Talent Management audition bag on the foam-block sofa. The sofa was extra-compressed on one end, like someone huge had sat there for much too long—in the dark, Ruth imagined, eating high-calorie, high-cholesterol takeout food with a spork.

  “You could call Rianne.”

  “Mom. Rianne wouldn’t understand.”

  “How about Clara?” Ruth suggested.

  “Who’s Clara?”

  “The girl we just met at the callback.”

  “Oh. Nah.”

  Ruth waited until Bethany went to the bathroom before she called Mimi to report on the audition. Mimi listened silently until Ruth was done, and then she said, “Did Evelyn give her any redirects?”

  “Redirects?” Ruth said.

  Mimi sighed. “Did she have Bethany do the scene a couple of different ways?”

  “I don’t think so. She didn’t even let Bethy get through the whole thing. Are redirects good?”

  “If they’re serious about you at all, they’re going to see if you can take direction.”

  “Maybe she just thought Bethy did it right the first time.”

  She could hear—or at least she imagined she could hear—Mimi’s jaws clenching. “It has nothing to do with right or wrong. If a kid’s as green as Bethany, they’re not going to book her without making sure she can take direction. Is she coming to class tonight?”

  Ruth had forgotten all about the class. It was called Believability, and Mimi required that all her clients—and there had been dozens and dozens of them—take it in their first month of representation, at two hundred dollars apiece. “I don’t know,” Ruth said. “It’s been a pretty emotional day.”

  “If you’re going to get upset every time she blows an audition—”

  “I don’t think she blew the—”

  “—then you might as well go home.”

  “We’re not going home.”

  “Then I’ll see her in class,” Mimi said, and hung up.

  AN HOUR LATER, RUTH PULLED INTO THE STUDIO PARKING lot. Mimi Roberts Talent Management occupied four shabby rooms in a strip mall in Van Nuys. The studio was the beating heart of Mimi’s empire: office, classroom, parental gathering place, and venue for talent showcases in which actors performed scenes for invited talent agents and casting directors at $125 per actor per show. The largest room had a raised platform stage at one end and a seating capacity of thirty. Mimi’s office—the inner sanctum—was furnished with a lumpy couch, sprung visitor’s armchair, overflowing desk, grimy dog bed for Mimi’s imperious rat terrier Tina Marie, an aged computer, and a door that closed and locked—the only one within the entire suite. The third room served as a greenroom when there was a showcase and as a waiting room for studio parents when there was not. The fourth room—actually a walk-in closet—was the private waiting room for visiting agents—whom, Ruth had noticed, Mimi liked to keep as far from the parents as possible.

  Tonight the room was empty. The other parents must have dropped their children and run. Ruth heaved a sigh and sank into the stove-in cushions of the greenroom sofa. It was the first chance she’d had all day to just sit. Without the usual chaos of kids and parents, though, it was strangely barren. From the office she could hear the chatter of Mimi’s keyboard, the clink of dog tags as Tina Marie scratched, sighed mightily, and turned over in her basket. Whatever was going on in the classroom was silent—yoga? Tantric meditation?—until there was a guffaw from someone, a sharp though indecipherable order, and then a low and steady noise that started up as the class shifted gears.

  Across the room, one wall was covered with a corkboard, to which dozens of headshots had been pinned, most sporting Post-its announcing the client’s latest bookings: Pizza Hut, Zoey 101, McDonald’s, The Closer, House, CSI: Miami, a Red Cross industrial film. Bethany’s headshot was stickerless. Ruth ached for her. Which brought her back to a troubling truth: Bethy wasn’t auditioning as often as the other girls. She’d been sent on only four auditions since they’d arrived, and two of them had been for student films, which, though they offered good experience and introduced you to a student director who might conceivably be the next Steven Spielberg, didn’t pay anything and were therefore less prestigious both in the studio and on the child’s résumé.

  With her heart hammering in her chest, Ruth had approached Mimi about this last week, and the conversation hadn’t been at all reassuring. Mimi had sighed, taken off her glasses, and rubbed her eyes for several minutes—she made it clear that she was often exhausted from her ceaseless work on her clients’ behalf—and said, “Look.”

  Ruth hated when people said Look, both because whatever was coming next was inevitably something you didn’t want to hear, and because it implied that you were mentally incapable of grasping even the obvious on your own.

  “First of all, there are three boys’ parts in Hollywood for every one part for girls. It’s always been that way and it always will be and no one knows exactly why, so stop comparing. Second, Bethany’s never going to be going out as much as the other girls.”

  Ruth had been stunned. “Why?”

  Mimi had sighed heavily
and said, enunciating each word, “Bethany’s a niche actor. Her agent says so. I’m saying so. A showcase panel has said so. She’s going to be the sidekick, the kooky friend, the kid that’s slightly, hmmm, off. That’s what she’s going to be auditioning for, because that’s what she looks like.”

  Mimi had gone on to make it very clear that this was final, and that if Ruth continued to harry her, she would drop Bethany as a client. Just as Ruth reached the doorway Mimi had said over her shoulder, as an afterthought, “I assume you understand that if she loses me as her manager, she’ll lose her agent, too.”

  Ruth had given an involuntary gasp. Bethany’s agent was the linchpin of their hopes. Without a good agent, Mimi had made clear, your child might just as well be in Sheboygan. The conversation had been very distressing, but what could they do? They didn’t know anyone else. For now, right or wrong, they needed to stick with Mimi.

  From the classroom, Ruth heard one of the students shrieking, “You’re just like my mother!” Privately Ruth thought an inordinate amount of class time was devoted to scenes that were violent or ugly or inflammatory in some way. When she’d mentioned this to one of the other mothers, the woman had just shrugged, so it was possible that Ruth was overreacting. The class was taught by Donovan Meyer, a once-successful character actor whose career had reached its zenith in 1983 with a two-year stint as a recurring character on Guiding Light. He was spectrally tall and thin (the camera adds ten pounds, a factoid that everyone at the studio murmured like a mantra), with chiseled features and penetrating blue eyes that Ruth suspected were enhanced by tinted contact lenses she’d been able to make out very clearly the one time she’d seen him in daylight. The confident studio mothers, as well as all the kids, called him Dee. Ruth called him Donovan.

  The classroom door opened and a tall, slender reed of a girl came out. This was Allison Addison, one of the children who lived with Mimi and who were known collectively around the studio as the Orphans, though they all had families someplace far, far away: Akron, Pittsburgh, and so on. Allison’s family, as Ruth recalled, lived in Houston, but if she missed them or minded, Ruth had never seen or heard any sign of it. Allison had an astonishing, even an alarming, beauty, and though she was technically only a year older than Bethy—fourteen and a month to Bethy’s thirteen and three weeks—she was light-years older in every other way; older, possibly, than Ruth herself. Ruth, frankly, was wary of the girl. Bethy had said on more than one occasion that she wasn’t always nice.

  Now she came right over and flung herself onto the sofa only a foot or so from Ruth, huffing and crossing her arms over her chest.

  “What?” Ruth said.

  Allison shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just not into it tonight. I told Dee I needed a time out.”

  “Oh.”

  Allison glanced over and then picked up the handle of Ruth’s purse, which lay between them on the ratty sofa cushion. “This is nice leather,” she said, rubbing it between her thumb and finger. “I’m guessing kid.”

  The purse was, in fact, Ruth’s only quality accessory, bought at Nordstrom Rack for 50 percent off. She hardly ever used it at home, for fear of scuffing it. She’d brought it to LA only as an afterthought, but she was glad, now. When it came to her purse, at least, she had nothing to be ashamed of.

  “Michael Kors,” the girl said. “Am I right?”

  Ruth was impressed in spite of herself.

  “Mine’s Coach,” the girl said, gesturing to her bag and school things neatly stacked just inside Mimi’s office door. “My mom’s husband bought it for me. I won’t even let anyone touch it.” She sighed, crossed one long leg over the other, and bobbed her foot up and down.

  “Do you like this class?” Ruth asked.

  Allison shrugged. “Dee’s cool.”

  “Bethy says he’s a little intense.”

  “Well, of course he’s intense. I mean, that’s why his kids are series regulars.”

  “We’d kill for that,” Ruth acknowledged.

  “Everyone would kill for that,” Allison said in a duh tone of voice.

  Ruth could feel her face getting warm. “Why do you like acting?” she asked. She was always surprised at how much easier it was to have an intimate conversation when you were sitting beside someone and not facing them. She and her mother had had their frankest talks driving between Seattle and Tacoma to visit Ruth’s aunt Vera.

  Allison thought for a minute. “I don’t know.” She frowned. “I really don’t know.”

  “Is it work for you? Is it hard?”

  “Oh, sometimes, if I’m playing like an unpopular girl or someone who doesn’t really get it. I don’t go out for those much, though. Mimi gets mad when Holly sends me out on character roles.”

  Holly—Holly Jensen—was Bethy’s agent, too. And those, Allison’s reject roles, were the ones Bethy was sent on.

  The girl had gotten up and was rummaging around in her bag, pulling out a can of Red Bull. Ruth didn’t approve of energy drinks, especially for children. “We don’t let Bethany drink those,” she said, watching Allison bring the drink back to the sofa.

  “Really?” The girl looked at her cheerfully. “God, we live on them.” She thought for a minute. “Last summer there was this kid at the Oakwood who had a nervous breakdown sort of thing. He was only sleeping like two hours a night for weeks, and then he started hallucinating, so his parents took him to this psychiatric clinic or something where they treat mentally ill people, and it turned out he’d been drinking like five Snapples a day. I mean, do you have any idea how much caffeine is in those things? Quinn Reilly—he’s another client—used to drink them, too, until Mimi made him stop because they sort of canceled out his Ritalin.” She fell back into the sofa cushions and sipped her Red Bull reflectively. “Anyway, we didn’t see the Oakwood kid after that. I think his parents made him go back to San Francisco or someplace. Which is pretty stupid, if you think about it, because it was Snapple. I mean, it’s not like it’s illegal.”

  “Well,” said Ruth.

  Chairs started scraping in the classroom. Allison hopped up. “Time for improv. I love improv.”

  And just as suddenly as she’d arrived she skipped off again, leaving Ruth feeling strangely enervated. Mimi’s current clients’ headshots and résumés were stacked in labeled cubbies across the room and Ruth had originally thought about using her time alone to look through them, but the thought was suddenly repugnant. She put her head back and closed her eyes and thought about how talking with Allison had been like talking to another grown-up.

  Ruth was exhausted by the time the Believability class ended. She got Bethany home and to bed, but of course once they got to bed, they were too tired and keyed up to fall asleep. It was eleven forty-five before Ruth heard Bethy’s breathing settle. Only then did she mouth in the general direction of the heavens the same prayer she’d been saying every night since they arrived: Please God, shine on my Bethany and make her a star.

  Chapter Two

  ON ANY GIVEN DAY, MIMI ROBERTS TALENT MANAGEMENT represented anywhere from thirty-five to fifty child, teenage, and young adult actors, depending on Mimi’s mood and willingness to be pinned down. Her clients’ abilities ranged from execrable to extraordinary. The ones who were darling but couldn’t act auditioned for commercials and print; the ones who could act but weren’t cute went out for student films, infomercials, character roles, and lesser dramatic parts; the ones who were cute and could act were sent out for everything: commercials, infomercials, industrials, public service announcements, student films, TV episodics (both dramatic and comedic), indie shorts, and feature-length movies.

  At the epicenter of Mimi Roberts Talent Management was Mimi herself. Sixty-one, childless, and unmarried, she was as tough and canny as an old cat in the night. A skilled campaigner, she drew her clients, helpmates, and resources out of thin air, making it all up as she went along. Because she was chronically cash-strapped (though there were some who believed she had hundreds of thousands of dollar
s salted away), she lived in a never-ending state of barter, shilling for her poorer clients by digging a little more deeply into the pockets of her wealthy ones, though of course she’d flatly deny that, if pressed.

  Mimi doubted there was a soul left in Hollywood who’d remember now, but she’d come to LA as a young actor herself way back when, full of the certainty that the world was waiting just for her. She’d come to LA from upstate New York on a Greyhound bus with nothing but eighty-five dollars and four changes of clothes. What they didn’t understand—what no one outside Hollywood ever understood—was that she’d had to come, to meet what she was sure was her future. She was plain now, and she’d been plain then, too, though quite a few pounds thinner. She’d also been realistic; she knew she would never become a leading lady, especially not in those days, when leading ladies had tidy hair and elegant hats and Daughters of the American Revolution credentials and just the right balance of self-confidence and sass. Her plan had been to become a character actor, a sidekick like Vivian Vance, who’d made a career out of being Ethel Mertz.

  But of course it hadn’t worked out that way. At any given moment there wasn’t really much difference between a drifter and an actor looking for work. She’d gotten a few small roles, uttered the occasional line, delivered the odd voice-over, but her voice tended to be unmodulated and her acting, while serviceable, didn’t have a thing to separate her from thousands of others. She couldn’t pinpoint the precise day and moment when she realized she was screwed, but once she did, her next move had presented itself like pure kismet.

  She’d been living in a West Hollywood apartment building as shabby as an old shoe, sharing a dank apartment with an unwed young mother out of Kansas named Susan, who modeled lingerie and turned the occasional trick while she waited for her big acting break. Her daughter was a three-year-old named Lucy, who had a high, clear voice, silky blond curls, and a darling space between her two front teeth. Mimi often took care of her while Susan was working, in return for which Susan cooked. One day, Mimi brought Lucy along with her to an audition. The audition itself—what had it been for? A digestive aid of some kind, she thought—had gone badly, but there had been another audition in the same casting suite for children Lucy’s age. On a whim Mimi signed Lucy in, gave the name of her own agent as Lucy’s, and said they’d forgotten her headshot but wouldn’t the casting assistant’s Polaroid shot do for now? With young children, then as now, rules were more bendable, and that time had been no exception. Mimi accompanied Lucy into the audition room and saw exactly what she’d expected: on camera, the child had the presence of an angel.