“What do you mean, you’re not buying it?”
Just outside the door, Bethy knew, Allison was sitting there listening.
“All right, stop,” Joel said before they’d even gotten to the second page of the sides, turning off the camera. “Stop, stop. You just dropped two lines.”
“What?”
“Have you even read the sides?”
“Yes.”
“Then show me.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Sherman.”
The casting director just shook his head. “C’mon, kid. Start over.”
“Oh, thank you.”
He fussed with the camera. “I don’t usually allow do-overs,” he said, “so get it right.”
But she was too rattled.
He switched off the camera, walked around her, and opened the door. “Next time you audition for a lead, honey, at least be off-book.”
Bethy flushed a deep crimson. She could feel the tips of her ears getting hot, and there was a telltale roaring in her ears that meant she was this close to crying.
“Go on,” he said, making a shooing motion toward the door with his hands. “Go. Go!”
She went. Allison was on her feet, fluffing her hair. Her lip gloss was fresh, her hair shiny, her clothes in perfect order. She sailed right past Bethany and into the audition room as though she didn’t even see her.
Stunned, Bethy just sat there listening to Allison’s audition. From what she could hear, which was everything, Allison did a beautiful job. The casting director gave her several redirects and then thanked her. When she came out she hitched her Coach bag over her shoulder, gave her hips a little twitch, and danced out the trailer door pushing Bethany ahead of her and singing, “I’m-get-ting-a-call-back.”
“How do you know?”
“I always know.”
And then she slammed the door.
MIMI HAD KEPT THE CAR IDLING AND THE AIR-CONDITIONING turned on. To hell with global warming: she was old, fat, and hot, and as far as she was concerned, that trumped every polar bear on the planet.
Allison skipped out to the car and hopped into the front seat beside Mimi. Bethany Rabinowitz trudged after her, looking like she was about to cry. As the girls described it once they’d buckled in and Mimi had driven into the blessed, blessed shade of Riverside, she’d choked during the audition, which was a shame, because Joel E. Sherman was a rainmaker. Allison had had her shot three years ago and had gotten a couple of costar roles out of it. Not that Bethany Rabinowitz had a snowball’s chance in hell of landing a lead role, but still, she’d be lucky now to land even a two-line part.
Allison put her earbuds in and began rapping along to some song on her iPod. Mimi pondered for about the millionth time enrolling the girl in a hip-hop class at Millennium. Look what High School Musical had done for Ashley Tisdale. Allison’s voice was just as good, possibly better. But getting the mother to pay was the trick. The woman had gotten stingy in the last six months, which was ironic given that she was now a rich oilman’s wife. She’d shelled out money left and right when she’d been poorer, so the new husband must have put on the brakes. Allison had said he was a cheapskate. Maybe Mimi would have to just bite the bullet and pay for the lessons herself. She’d be paid back and more when—when, not if—Allison hit. Of that Mimi was sure.
“Can we stop and get something to eat?” Allison said, plucking out her earbuds. “I’m starving. Hey, Carlyle. Aren’t you starving?”
In the rearview mirror Mimi saw Bethany shrug miserably.
“I’ll do the McDonald’s drive-through, but that’s all,” Mimi pronounced. “We’ve already been gone for two hours.” Mimi hated to be away from the studio, especially to cart kids back and forth to auditions, but all the pliable parents were out of town. She’d have e-mails up the wazoo by now.
“Not Mickey D’s, we’ve done that tons of times this week,” Allison moaned. “Come on, Mimi, take us someplace decent. Please?”
Mimi checked on Bethany again in the backseat and thought it looked like the girl was rallying at the prospect of food. “All right. We’ll do Thai.” Thai food was quick and cheap, and there was a little place in a strip mall just four or five blocks from the studio.
“Yay,” Allison crowed. “Hey, Carlyle, aren’t you glad?”
Bethany shrugged.
“Come on, cheer up!” Allison said. “Stop being a whiny baby or we’re going to have to slap you around.”
“I’m not a whiny baby,” Bethany said, trying to hang on to her petulance but starting to smile in spite of herself. The girl had an excellent nature, Mimi had to give her that.
THE MINUTE THEY GOT BACK TO THE STUDIO BETHY CALLED Ruth and told her about the disastrous audition. Then she directed her to an Internet link so she could read the sides.
“Now?” Ruth said.
“Yes, please.”
Ruth was quiet for a few minutes and then she said, “What is this for again?”
“A feature film. It’s called After.”
“I take it it’s not a comedy,” Ruth said dryly.
“Mom.”
Ruth sighed. “Honey, Carlyle is one of the leads.”
“I know,” Bethy wailed, and started crying.
“Why are you crying?”
“Because I screwed up and now Allison’s going to get a call-back and I’m not.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, that’s going to happen sometimes.”
“But I don’t want her to get it! If I can’t get it, I don’t want her to get it, either. But shouldn’t I want her to? She’s my best friend.”
“Honey, Allison is not your best friend,” Ruth said.
Bethy bristled. “She is, Mom. She’s the only one who understands about acting and stuff. I mean besides you. So shouldn’t I want her to get it?”
Ruth hesitated for a minute and then said, “Honey, is it possible that she might have made you screw up the audition? Deliberately, I mean? Did she try to make you nervous or distracted or anything?”
Bethy frowned. “I don’t know. No. She’s my friend. She wouldn’t do that.”
“No?”
“No,” Bethy said firmly, but it made her think, and she didn’t want to think. What she wanted was to take it all back—making the girl in the waiting room cry, the flubbed lines, and the cold look on the casting director’s face—and start again, except that she’d have Ruth drive her instead of Mimi, and Allison wouldn’t be in the car and then sitting right beside her in the waiting room, criticizing the other girls. It would be just her and Ruth and she’d be in character, in that special place in her head where she didn’t pretend to be the character, she was the character. She’d be Carlyle talking to her brother and trying to make him feel better about something awful that she didn’t even really understand except that she loved him and he was in pain. That’s what she wanted to show Joel Sherman; that’s what she had to offer him, if only he’d give her one more chance.
She stopped crying, and Ruth told her she loved her, and Bethany told her she loved her back, and then they got off the phone and Bethany found a piece of notebook paper and her best ballpoint pen, and she wrote a letter to Joel E. Sherman:
Dear Mr. Sherman,
I know I did a bad job at the audition for Carlyle today, and that you may never ever let me audition for you again, but I want you to know that I can be Carlyle. I don’t mean I can act like her. I mean I can be her. I know her really well. I just want you to know how I feel, and how I feel is that I can do this part better than anyone else, period. If you’d just give me another chance to audition, I promise I won’t let you down again.
Sincerely yours,
Bethany Rabinowitz
When she was done she found a Mimi Roberts Talent Management envelope, put her headshot and the letter into the envelope, wrote Joel E. Sherman on the front, and pretended to go to the restroom so she could drop the envelope into the courier box outside the studio unsee
n. When she got back inside she asked Allison if she needed any help with her vocabulary assignment, because Allison wasn’t very good at vocabulary, and, surprisingly, Allison said yes. They cuddled up on the greenroom sofa and did homework until nine o’clock, when Mimi was finally ready to drive them home.
IN HOLLYWOOD THAT EVENING, AFTER THE LAST KID HAD read, Joel E. Sherman sorted through his stack of headshots. What a fucking day. Kids who were unprepared, kids who were too prepared, kids who were too old or too young or too thick or too green or just too wrong. He was only pinch-hitting today for another casting director, Sharon Shue, an old fossil like him who was out on her ass with the flu, but this was going to be a good project. He wished he’d gotten in on it. He knew Van Sant—hell, everyone knew Gus Van Sant, he was that great: a good man who genuinely loved working with kids, and who had both excellent artistic judgment and an uncanny sense for what made a movie sell in Altoona. Joel would have to read the script again, but if he still liked it he might play a little game of poker, see if he could get himself attached. He’d done it before; he was a good player, though he prided himself on being a straight shooter when he could afford to be, which unfortunately wasn’t all that much of the time. You tasted the water, you chose the Kool-Aid.
He flipped through the headshots in his Yes pile. He liked to make a gut decision as the kids left the room, then go back and cull later. Carlyle was one of the movie’s two lead roles, so there’d be multiple callbacks, though probably no recruiting beyond LA. From what he’d heard, the timeline was too short for that. He’d heard that the executive producer—who, despite a reputation as a real hard-ass, had always been a pussycat to Joel—wanted to be in production within two months. Despite that, Sharon had told Joel that Gus Van Sant was willing to consider unknown actors for the leads, if the fit was just right. An unknown was usually someone who wasn’t from here, or was a recent immigrant. Look at Ellen Page. She was from goddamn Halifax. And she was brilliant. And how about the poor kid in Bad Santa? He was a Canuck, too, and he was gold at the box office. You never knew. Sometimes the LA kids were too Hollywood, too polished.
He kept about half of the headshots that had started out in his Yes pile, maybe six, and dumped the rest on top of the Nos. One of the keepers was the kid Mimi Roberts pushed at him every time he talked to her, which was as seldom as possible. Allison Somebody; cocky kid, but there’d been something compelling about her today, something dangerous. You saw that in some of the great actors—Russell Crowe, Ralph Fiennes. He rooted through until he’d found her headshot: Allison Addison. Jesus. Mimi Roberts must be the master of stupid names. Of course, if you had a name like Mimi yourself, you were entitled to a certain amount of payback, especially if you were ugly, which Mimi Roberts most definitely was. That reminded him: Bethany Rabinowitz, her other client, had been a fucking mess today. He pawed through the Nos until he found her headshot. He’d looked forward to seeing her again, but Jesus, what a disappointment. It happened all the time, though. Half these kids were held together with Ritalin and Red Bull. But he’d gotten good feedback about her from Peter Tillinghast, and if she could hold her own on a set with that dick, she had to have something going for her. He moved her headshot to the Yes pile. What the hell—he’d let Sharon take a look at her. The kid was way too green to hold down a movie, but there might be some bit part for her.
He yawned as he tapped both piles into order. In the old days he could have put in another twelve or fifteen hours, and often had—hell, he’d gone without sleep for days on end when a movie or TV show came down to crunch time. A little blow, a little coffee, and he was good for another twenty-four hours. But at sixty-two, he was weary. The Business did that to you. It was like playing an endless game of chess. Sooner or later, you were going to make a stupid move—cast the wrong person, take on the wrong project, piss off the wrong producer. He sensed that he was approaching his use-by date, but he wasn’t ready yet. It wasn’t the money; he had plenty of money. What he wanted was to leave behind a legacy in the form of the next Dakota Fanning or Freddie Highmore. He wanted to find an actor who would have a long and brilliant career, during which he or she would tell James Lipton and Billy Bush and every other interviewer from every little burg and hamlet that Joel E. Sherman had given him or her that first break. If Joel could have that, he would retire a happy man.
He rubber-banded the two piles of headshots together. He’d have a courier deliver them to Sharon’s office in Century City overnight. Then he checked his cell for voice-and e-mail messages. There were the usual million from agents and managers, wanting feedback, pitching kids, generally busting his chops. He didn’t plan on returning a single one of them. Fuck ’em. Instead, en route to his car, he speed-dialed Sharon to fill her in on the day.
What happened next was nothing short of a gift from God.
Sharon Shue had not had the flu at all. She had had appendicitis. She had undergone emergency surgery at Cedars-Sinai at two o’clock that afternoon, but not before the appendix had burst. At her age, the recovery could take weeks. It was an incredible piece of luck.
One quick phone call, and After was his.
Chapter Fourteen
IF QUINN COULD HAVE ANYTHING OTHER THAN A CAR for his upcoming seventeenth birthday, he might just choose a washer/dryer. At least he felt that way on laundry days, when he’d worn everything he owned—and there wasn’t that much—at least twice, and even he could detect a faint odor. He hated the Laundromat. Launderland on Santa Monica Boulevard was a long march with a duffle bag full of clothes and his el cheapo but machine-washable sleeping bag. He always swore he’d get up early the next time just to go and get it over with in relative solitude, but every time he slept in anyway.
As he approached the Laundromat he could see that the place was hopping. Men and women, but mostly men, were wheeling steel laundry carts back and forth between washers, dryers, and the folding tables. A lot of them seemed to know one another. It was probably a laundry club. He’d run into them before—groups of gay men who did their laundry at the same time and turned the whole thing into a social event. On one of the big folding tables someone had laid out a tablecloth and a spread of bagels and Danishes and cut fruit and croissants and condiments and coffee. Quinn heard his stomach rumble. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday, and then all he’d had was cereal, because it and a quart of about-to-turn milk were the only things in the apartment that belonged to him and Baby-Sue had been on a bitching jag about Jasper and Quinn eating all her food.
Quinn humped his duffle over to the single available washer, dumped in as much as he could, tamped it down, then dumped in the rest. He’d probably wind up with packed nuggets of laundry soap again when it was over, but he had only so many quarters, and the change-making machine was still broken. ESTA MÁQUINA ESTÁ ROTA. The sign surprised him, not because it was there, but because he didn’t think there were that many Latinos in West Hollywood. There was the girl at Los Burritos, though. Maybe it was just that the Anglo population was so out there—41 percent were gay, bi, or lesbian—that you didn’t notice the Hispanics.
He turned his box of laundry detergent upside down and saw there wasn’t even enough left in the box to clump up. He’d just turn the water up to the hottest setting and hope that if the soap didn’t get the stuff clean—and with that little, it couldn’t possibly—the hot water would sterilize the dirt that was left.
“That machine walks when it’s on the spin cycle.”
Quinn turned around and saw the hair stylist from Hazlitt & Company watching him with a smile. “It gets out of balance, so keep an eye on it.”
“Yeah,” Quinn said. “Okay.”
The stylist was wearing jeans and an incandescently white T-shirt, and his hair was perfectly mussed. “You look like a lost soul,” he told Quinn. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Do you live near here?”
“On Norton.” Quinn pointed over his shoulder. “Near Havenhurst.”
“Fa
mily?”
“No.”
“Really? You seem a little young to be on your own.”
“I’m not that young,” Quinn said.
The stylist smiled. “I meant that in a good way.”
“Oh.” Quinn didn’t know what else to say. It was one thing to see the stylist in the salon. Out here, in the world, it felt weird, part good and part bad. Good because he seemed like a nice guy and Quinn was more or less on the outs with Baby-Sue and Jasper—he seemed to be getting on their nerves, though he had no idea why—and it was Saturday, so there’d be no auditions or classes until Monday and he was lonely. Bad because he kept thinking of how the stylist’s hands had felt, moving through his hair, rubbing his head, and he didn’t think he should be remembering those things in front of the washers and dryers at Launderland.
A black man in a canary yellow button-down shirt with the sleeves turned back called to the stylist, “Hey, Quatro! Paulie wants to know what you did last night. He says you never showed up.”
The stylist smiled a little apologetic smile at Quinn and shook his head. “Yeah, yeah,” he called back, but he was still looking at Quinn.
“Quatro?” Quinn said. “That’s your name?”
“Yeah,” said the stylist. “Technically it’s John Robertson the Fourth. So, Quatro.” He shrugged.
“Awesome.”
The men in the laundry club were elbowing one another. “Leave that child alone and come get a mimosa!” someone said, and the others laughed.
Seeing Stars Page 23
