Seeing Stars

by Diane Hammond

  “You mean like Joseph and Mary?” Vee said. “I didn’t think you people bought into that.”

  “That was immaculate sex. I mean immaculate love—perfect love. The kind where the man is handsome and sensitive and loves you without wavering from when you’re young and beautiful and nothing sags, right up until he can see your scalp through your hair and you’re squashy.”

  “Isn’t that why people get dogs?”

  “What?”

  “I’m serious,” Vee said. “Are you okay?”

  “It’s hard being back. I talked to Hugh while Bethy was at an audition, and he was really struggling. He makes it sound like we’ve abandoned him.”

  “That’s because he’s a Hollywood widow.”

  “What’s a Hollywood widow?”

  “It’s like a soccer dad. You know, the guy who comes home from work and Mom and the kids are always someplace else, like at soccer practice or an away game, and he has to fend for himself.”

  “I’m only doing what’s good for Bethy. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do? Isn’t that part of being a parent?”

  “It is what it is,” Vee said philosophically. “For every acting kid there’s a mom, and for every acting kid’s mom there’s a Hollywood widow waiting for dinner. And the saddest ones are the ones waiting in another state.”

  “Widower,” Ruth said.

  “What?”

  “A Hollywood widower.”

  “Widow, widower—you know what I mean.”

  Ruth knew what she meant. “So does that mean we’re wrong to bring our children here?”

  “Depends on why you’re doing it. Most people do it because they want their kid on the cover of People. If they tell you they don’t, they’re lying.”

  “Do you think that’s what’s going to happen to Clara or Buster?”

  “No, because ultimately neither of them gives a shit.”

  “Hugh thinks I’m delusional.”

  “Could be,” Vee allowed. “But that doesn’t make it wrong. If they’re going to stand a chance, we have to have absolute faith that these kids can be stars. And they have to believe it, too.”

  “But they’re not going to be stars—at least they’re probably not. Hugh keeps telling me that over and over, and of course he’s right.”

  “Honey, the day you start thinking that way, you might as well go home.”

  Ruth’s cell phone rang, and it was Mimi. Ruth dug out a pen and started writing. By the time she finished the call, her hands were shaking. She breathed in deeply, closed her eyes, and took a fortifying gulp of her strawberry shake. “Well.”

  Vee raised her eyebrows.

  “I have no idea what this might mean,” Ruth said, trying to be calm, “but Evelyn Flynn has asked to see Bethy tomorrow afternoon. It’s for a pilot. She’ll be going straight to producers.”

  “Which pilot?”

  Ruth consulted her napkin. “It’s called Bradford Place. Something about babysitters. We’ve never even seen a breakdown for it. Does that sound at all familiar to you?”

  “Nope,” said Vee, frowning. She called over her shoulder, “Clara! Have you heard about a pilot that has to do with babysitters?”

  “Nope,” said Clara.

  “Me neither,” said Bethany.

  “Well, you’re going straight to producers for it,” Ruth said. “That was Mimi. I guess they changed the breakdown from a boy to a girl at the last minute, so they’re scrambling. They want to see you.” Ruth’s heart was pounding so hard that her ears were roaring. This could be how Bethy’s career would begin. “She said you have to get coached for it now. Greta’s booked, so she’s already set you up to work with Donovan.”

  “Donovan Meyer?” Vee said.

  Ruth nodded. “She’s taking a class with him. The kids seem to like him.”

  “You know he’s a terrible actor, right?” Vee said.

  Ruth turned her palms up: What are you going to do?

  “Dee’s cool,” Bethy called across the booths.

  “I heard he was a jerk,” Clara said through a mouthful of cheeseburger, “but the kid who told me was pretty much of a jerk, too, so, you know.” She sucked up the last of her shake.

  “Whoa,” said Ruth to Vee, eyes wide. “Whoa!”

  “Don’t get ahead of it,” Vee said, pinching up a half dozen fries. “This happens all the time and it doesn’t usually mean a thing.” She frowned thoughtfully. “Evelyn Flynn, though. She doesn’t waste time, so she must have her reasons.”

  “Could it be something big?”

  “Sure.”

  “Bethy,” Ruth called to the other booth. “Finish up, honey, because we’ve got to get going. Donovan’s going to meet you at the studio in an hour, and we have to go by the apartment first and download the sides.”

  “But I just got my burger!”

  “I know,” Ruth said. “So eat fast. We have Pepto-Bismol in the car.”

  “IT ONLY HAS, LIKE, SIX LINES,” BETHANY SAID ON THE way to the studio, flipping quickly through pages that were still warm from their new printer at the apartment. “Do you think there might be more and they didn’t give it to us?”

  “I don’t know, honey.” Ruth tried to concentrate on driving. She’d nearly hit a man crossing the street just outside their parking lot. She really had to pull herself together. “Read the breakdown again.”

  Bethany flipped through the pages, extracted one, and read, “‘ASHLEIGH, 13: A sweet, motherly girl who lives next door to the Abernethys. Although her parents are rich and well-connected, she babysits for pocket money and wants to be a preschool teacher one day.’ That’s it.”

  “Is that enough to go on?”

  “Sure, Mom. You don’t need them to spell everything out. You make up the character yourself.”

  “Well, I’d be lost,” Ruth said admiringly, “but that’s why you’re the actor and I’m not.”

  Ruth turned into the studio parking lot. Bethany jumped out with her Mimi Roberts Talent Management tote full of sides and headshots and God knew what other detritus. Ruth had been trying to get her to clean it out for days. She reminded herself that the chaos of a busy life was better than the tidiness of an empty one. For that matter, if housekeeping wasn’t taking care of their crappy apartment once a week, God only knew what kind of wildlife it would support.

  “Are you coming in?” Bethany called back to her through the open door.

  “Probably, but I’m going to stay out here for a few minutes, maybe take a little walk. You go on ahead.”

  “Okay. Wish me luck!”

  Ruth smiled. “Luck.”

  And Bethy was gone, a girl at one with her dream. Ruth rolled down all the windows and dug her cell phone out of her purse.

  “You’ll never guess,” she said when Hugh got on the line.

  “You’re coming home?”

  Ruth tightened her jaw, felt the slightest twinge in a cracked back molar Hugh had been saying would give way one day. She unclenched her teeth. “Bethy’s going to producers for a pilot. And honey, she didn’t even have to read for it! I mean, she will now, but she didn’t have to go through the first read at all. And the woman who called her in is the number-one casting director in Hollywood.” Ruth was pretty sure that Mimi had said this; if she hadn’t specifically said number one, she’d certainly implied it. “Isn’t that amazing?”

  “I don’t know. Is it amazing?”

  “It’s amazing,” Ruth said. “Trust me.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful, then. What’s the part?”

  “She’s a neighbor kid who babysits. They say this never happens to kids who’ve never even really worked before. Well, I mean, she’s worked, of course, but she hasn’t really worked worked. Extensively. I wish you could see her, honey. She’s over the moon.”

  “You’re not letting her hopes get too high, are you?”

  “No, I think she’s realistic,” Ruth said, but she felt a little seizure in her gut. Was she letting Bethy’s hopes get too h
igh, not to mention her own? She changed the subject. “Anyway, how are you?”

  “Good. Busy. Lonely. You know.”

  “I know,” Ruth said. “I do know.”

  “Well,” said Hugh. The line went silent for a minute. “You don’t sound like yourself, Ruthie.”

  “No?”

  “No. You’re breathing a lot.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. You’re just, you know, breathing. Breathless.”

  “So I shouldn’t breathe now?”

  Hugh sighed heavily. “Never mind. I know you’re excited.”

  “Because this could launch her career, Hugh. Of course I’m excited.”

  “Here’s something I’ve been thinking about: if a kid gets famous, she had the most wonderful, most supportive, most self-sacrificing parents in the world, but if the kid dies on the vine, you’re looking at a schmuck who thought his kid was better than everyone else’s, and the kid grows up having been a failure. And you have no idea which outcome will be the right one.”

  “She is better than anyone else,” Ruth whispered. “Well, than almost anyone. I know it, Hugh. And it’s not just wishful thinking. Why can’t you see that?”

  Ruth heard him turn away from the receiver and say, “Okay, I’ll be right there.” Then he came back to her and said, “Margaret says they’re ready. So, okay, tell Bethy to break a leg or whatever—break a bank. Tell her to call me tonight.”

  “All right, honey, I will.”

  “Okay.”

  “I love you,” she said, but he’d already hung up. If she sat in the car alone she’d start thinking, and absolutely nothing good could come of that, so she locked the car and went inside.

  IN THE STUDIO CLASSROOM DONOVAN WAS SITTING IN A chair collating the pages that Bethy had just photocopied for him. “So go ahead, talk to me,” he said to her. He was always telling his students to talk to him.

  “Well, her name is Ashleigh and she’s my age and she’s a nice person who likes little kids and stuff. She probably has a couple of dogs, not those little purse-dogs, but a couple of schnauzers, maybe. A male and a female. Willy and Maude. And she’s the one who walks them when the staff is gone for the day.” She paused, looking at Donovan, who looked back at her with his fingertips together in a steeple. “Do I like having staff? It seems like that would be so weird.”

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  Bethy frowned thoughtfully. “Well, having them around makes me feel sorry for them in some ways, because I don’t think they’re paid very much and their own children are alone every day in a crummy part of LA where no one can afford a nice house like mine and good clothes and stuff. But, hey, I know! I give them my clothes when I outgrow them or get tired of them. And maybe I even make my mom buy me stuff I don’t need, just so I can give it away. Is that okay?”

  “You own this character,” Donovan said. “You say what’s okay. So keep going. Why do you like your neighbors? They have an awful lot of kids.”

  “Yes, because they’ve adopted poor children who had nothing to eat.”

  “Is that why?”

  “What do you mean?” Bethany said.

  “Well, did the, ah”—he searched his script for a minute—“Abernethys adopt them because the children needed them to, or did they adopt them because they have great big egos and more money than God and they know it’ll make people think they’re wonderful?”

  Bethany frowned, considering this. “No, they adopted them because they needed it. And people think they’re wonderful. Aren’t I supposed to like them?”

  “You tell me. You like their kids.”

  “I think I like them, too, because I’m a good person.”

  “So, okay,” Donovan said. “Let’s run it. Are you off-book?”

  Bethy had a photographic memory, so memorizing her lines was never any problem for her. “Well, I have only like six lines. I mean, I’ll be off-book once we run it a couple of times, but we just downloaded it right before we came over.”

  “Go,” said Donovan.

  ASHLEIGH

  Hi, Mr. Abernethy!

  JUSTIN ABERNETHY

  Hey, wow, are we ever glad you could come over! Listen, Cecilia’s sciatica’s bothering her again. I mean, when will these kids be born, right? So I’m going to take her out to lunch. Can you watch the kids?

  ASHLEIGH

  Sure, no problem. You know I love to play with them. Maybe we can do finger paints.

  JUSTIN

  Just ask Consuelo to help you set things up. She put the paints somewhere, probably in the nursery. And don’t let the baby eat anything.

  ASHLEIGH

  That Bruce. Isn’t he just the cutest thing? I bet his real mom was a beautiful woman, like Pocahontas.

  JUSTIN

  Now, we don’t talk about real moms here, because that would make Cecilia a fake mom, right?

  ASHLEIGH

  Oh! I’m so sorry. I just meant—

  JUSTIN

  That’s okay. We just need you to be sensitive to that, because the kids love you and they trust you. And so do we.

  Donovan lowered his script. “Jesus Christ.”

  Bethy looked up, crestfallen.

  Donovan said, “Look, it’s okay—it’s not your fault that the writer’s an incompetent moron. Let’s take it again, and this time I want you to be really in the moment, because that time your acting was showing.”

  “But if the writing’s bad—”

  “Oh, it’s bad,” Donovan said, “believe me. But that’s no excuse for you to be. You should be able to move people by reading a Tide commercial, right?”

  He said that at every single class. “Right.” Bethy shook the tension out of her head and shoulders the way he’d taught them to, tapped her pages back into order, and took it again from the top. “Hi, Mr. Abernethy!”

  “Hey,” Donovan intoned. “Wow.”

  WHILE SHE WAITED IN THE STUDIO GREENROOM, RUTH stared sightlessly at the unread pages of Seabiscuit. She figured she was averaging a reading speed of about a sentence every ten minutes. Could she be developing late-life attention deficit disorder? Was there even such a thing?

  Mimi came into the greenroom and put a sticky note on Laurel Buehl’s headshot. The note said, McDonald’s!

  “That’s wonderful,” Ruth said; and, because it was a commercial, she meant it. She had more trouble feigning delight when another child booked a theatrical part. That, as far as Ruth was concerned, was Bethany’s province. Ugly but true.

  “It’s the second national commercial she’s booked this week,” Mimi said. “Yesterday was Target. And she’s got callbacks on one more. The girl’s amazing.” She listened for a minute to Bethany and Donovan. “You realize this is a long shot,” she said to Ruth.

  “I know,” Ruth said, and then, miffed, “You know, you’re very negative.”

  Mimi sighed. “Because new parents have false hopes, and then when things don’t work out, they blame me for it.”

  “I don’t think our hopes are false,” Ruth said. “I think we’re very realistic about how talented Bethy—”

  Angie and Laurel Buehl walked into the suite. Mimi used them for cover and slipped away. Ruth sighed and then said brightly, “Hey, you two! Congratulations! I just heard the good news.”

  “About McDonald’s?” Angie said. “I know, isn’t it wonderful? We haven’t even had a chance to tell Dillard yet. And it’s national.”

  Laurel sat down in the chair farthest away from Ruth, pulled a copy of Vogue out of her Mimi Roberts tote bag, tucked her feet up beneath her, and opened her magazine. For all her successes, she seemed subdued. Ruth thought there was an air of premature aging about her, which was odd, because Ruth thought of pageanteers—was there such a word?—as bubbly and extroverted. Was that too simplistic? Though Laurel and Angie were unfailingly friendly, they’d stopped short of forming friendships. And for the most part, the studio community left them alone. Even Bethy and Allison respected the ba
rriers the Buehls seemed to have built around themselves. Bethy had explained it to Ruth this way: “They seem like they don’t want to be disturbed or something. Like friends would just be getting in the way.”

  But if Laurel hit the big time all that would change in a heartbeat, Ruth knew. If Laurel became a star, they’d have so many friends they’d have to fight them off with a stick.

  February 2007

  On any given afternoon if you were dropped onto Sunset Boulevard from far away—outer space, say, or North Dakota—you might expect to find a floral essence in the air, because it’s warm enough and sunny enough and there’s a breeze and palm trees and the occasional bougainvillea; but you’d be wrong. All you can smell is car exhaust and dirt and fast food.

  There’s a famous diner in North Hollywood that’s been there forever, but it doesn’t look authentic, just ordinary and tired, like an old waitress counting her tips out back by the Dumpster. The walls are scaly with tier after tier of framed headshots, mainly of women who look like gun molls or Bette Davis. “To Bugsy from BooBoo, XOXO.” “To my one and only—I love ya, doll.” Cornball stuff that looks fake, even though it isn’t.

  They say that America has movie stars because it doesn’t have royalty. But there are no stars anymore, not like the old days when it didn’t matter how many highballs you drank as long as you were beautiful. Now we pick them up and discard them as casually as garbage; we clamor to know every little thing and then, once we do, we blame them for it. We wouldn’t miss them on Oscar night, but as we watch them—and it’s like shooting fish in a barrel out there on the red carpet—what we’re thinking is, they’re older or uglier or fatter or shorter than we’d thought they’d be, not godlike at all; and we abandon them, because there’s always, always, someone better.