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Seeing Stars

Page 37

by Diane Hammond


  When the last girl went out—after Quinn had been sitting there for about twenty minutes, which had at least given him enough time to stop sweating—Evelyn followed, turning off the lights, locking the glass front door, and pulling a full-length blind to cover it. She didn’t say a word to him, just did her stuff and then indicated with her head that he should follow her back into her office. She pulled a set of sides from her desk drawer and handed them to him. They were from some stage play Quinn didn’t recognize. She gave him the first line, and he was supposed to do his in Buddy’s character. He tried, but he wasn’t feeling it. He was feeling like Quinn, and that was no good.

  CHET: Why would you ask me to help you rob someone? I mean, why the fuck would I say yes to something like that? Come on—would you, if you were me?

  MARTIN: Yeah, man. I would. I’d do it to help you.

  CHET: You’re crazy.

  “Start over,” Evelyn said.

  Quinn shook out his hands and flapped the script around for a minute to try to loosen up.

  CHET: Why would you ask me to help you rob someone? I mean, why the fuck would I say yes to something like that? Come on—would you, if you were me?

  MARTIN: Yeah, man. I would. I’d do it to help you.

  CHET: You’re crazy.

  “Stop, stop. God,” Evelyn said, dropping her copy of the scene onto her desk blotter.

  Quinn hung his head.

  She leaned back against her desk, crossed her arms, crossed one foot over the other, and waggled it. “So what’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  He looked at her, looked away. “I have to find a new place to live.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The people I’ve been staying with gave notice. So I have to find someplace else to live.” His voice actually caught in his throat. He hated the way he sounded, like some whiny little kid. He cleared his throat and shrugged.

  To his surprise Evelyn softened, looked at him longer than you were really supposed to look at people, like she had x-ray eyes. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, shrugged, looked at the floor, and she said, “I’m sorry,” as though she really meant it

  “Yeah,” he said.

  She went around and dug in a desk drawer, pulled out a leather book, licked a fingertip, and flipped the pages. When she’d found what she was looking for, she wrote a name and phone number on a Post-it and handed it to him stuck on the end of her finger. “When we’re done here, call him.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A friend. He has a studio behind his house. It’s a long shot, but he might be willing to let you stay there.”

  “Okay,” Quinn said, sticking the piece of paper in his pocket. He cleared his throat, blinked hard a couple of times. He’d never lived alone before.

  “If it doesn’t work out, let me know.”

  He nodded. She pursed her lips, nodded back firmly, and said, “Can we work now? Because I talked to Joel Sherman this morning. He’ll be holding a final callback round tomorrow with six kids, three Buddys, three Carlyles, and then the top four will audition with Gus Van Sant a week from Friday.”

  He could hear his heartbeat in his ears. “Am I—?”

  “Yup.” And she cracked the tiniest smile.

  “Oh,” he said, but it sounded more like a sigh. “Thank you.”

  She smiled for real this time. “Congratulations.”

  “Don’t say that yet. It’ll only mean something if he casts me.”

  “Honey, it means something just to get this far.”

  It was the first thing she’d ever said to him that wasn’t true. They both knew that getting this far meant absolutely nothing unless you booked it.

  WHEN QUINN LEFT EVELYN’S OFFICE HE WENT TO THE Paramount commissary, which looked just like a food court in a mall except that people were all dressed up as doctors, soldiers, beach babes, motocross racers, and old-time ladies in hoop skirts and bonnets, and pulled out the phone number of the guy Evelyn had told him about. Ben—his name was Ben. With his heart pounding he called the number and a guy picked up on the third ring.

  “Oh, yeah,” the guy said. “Evelyn just told me you’d be calling. You’re the kid who needs a place to live, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, here’s the problem, though. I’m going to be moving someone in back there in about a month and a half, soon as he gets back from shooting in Bucharest. They’re supposed to wrap in four weeks, but you know that’s probably not going to happen, so call it five or six. Even so.”

  “Yeah,” said Quinn. “The thing is, I’ll be okay where I am now for another three or four weeks. It’s for after that.”

  “Oh. So that won’t work,” Ben said, and he sounded like he was sorry.

  “No,” Quinn said. “But anyway, you know. Thanks.”

  To distract himself—hell, to keep from crying—he bought himself a Coke and an ice cream sandwich. Once he’d finished them and felt like he had pulled himself together, he called Evelyn and told her what the guy had said.

  “Okay,” she said and got off the phone. It was almost worse than if she hadn’t offered to help in the first place. He guessed he was on his own again. He threw away his trash and headed for home. Only then did he really think about the fact that he was still in the running for Buddy. A one out of three shot. What had he been thinking of, moping around about stupid Jasper and Baby-Sue? He had a whole month to find a place to live. Something would come through. He’d walk by Los Burritos and see if the Hispanic girl was still working, even though it was pretty late, eight o’clock. At least it would give him something to look forward to during the long walk back.

  EVELYN SHUT DOWN HER OFFICE RIGHT AFTER QUINN LEFT and put her things in good order. She was fastidious in her professional as well as her personal habits, feeling that clutter was a wasteful time-sink—in a lifetime, how many hours would you throw away, searching for things you could have located very handily if only you’d had a system? She knew she had a reputation for making lightning-fast casting decisions, but it was only because she had done her homework. She knew the kids she’d be seeing, she didn’t waste her time seeing people she knew were never going to work out, and she could spot the standout, the rare gem, at a thousand paces.

  Thus Quinn Reilly.

  Evelyn was working him like a thoroughbred racehorse, leaning and firming up his acting chops, honing Buddy with the precision of a master craftsman. And what was happening before her eyes—not that she’d tell Quinn this—was an extraordinary transformation. He’d arrived on her doorstep with all the drive and all the talent she needed in an actor in whom she planned to invest time—and she rarely invested her time—but with blunt edges and sloppy habits, going for the cheap emotions, the guaranteed attention-getters, instead of digging for subtlety and nuance. Now, seven weeks after they’d started working together, Quinn had honed his acting skills into a thing of beauty. She had never known an actor who slipped into character with such ease, which was ironic given the hair-trigger personality of Quinn himself.

  If Gus Van Sant, with whom Evelyn had never worked (though of course she knew him; she knew everyone), was truly willing to gamble on an unknown actor, Quinn would bring everything he needed to the table. Everything. And she’d already told this to Joel Sherman, who’d given her his promise that he’d get Quinn in front of Van Sant no matter what. She’d believed Quinn was ready, but now there was this damned housing thing, which had obviously brought him down. Evelyn, at that age, had been a coddled day student at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, learning to be a young woman of accomplishment and grace.

  Very few people in LA knew, because she made a religion of keeping her private life private, that Evelyn had a son. He’d been born thirty-three years ago with severe cerebral palsy that included mental retardation, and she’d committed him to an institution outside of Fresno when he was five. Never married—the father was a man of no consequence—Eve
lyn had had to put in ridiculously long and unpredictable hours even then, though she’d been a talent agent in those days, not a casting director. It had been a wrenching decision, though an absolutely necessary one (though of course her mother had disagreed). Evelyn saw him only occasionally. Though the caregivers at the facility assured her he knew who she was, she doubted it. He would look at her dully, drooling onto a diaper fastened around his neck like a bib, when she laid out the visit’s gifts—chocolates, a new picture book, a bouquet of exquisitely expensive flowers—on the tray fitted to his wheelchair. She had no idea whatsoever what to talk about, or whether to talk to him at all. Sometimes she wheeled him onto the facility’s lawn and let the Canada geese settle all around him, lured by a small bag of breadcrumbs she always brought along. The birds, unlike Evelyn, clearly made him happy. He’d kick and moan in guttural enthusiasm as she put a small handful of breadcrumbs into his spastic fist and helped him turn the hand over and sprinkle them as far from his chair as was possible, which was to say within inches of the wheels. The birds would gather around him in a honking crescendo, and Evelyn and Bruce—that was his name, Bruce—would watch them eat. It was always a tremendous relief when the visit ended and she could climb into the sanctuary of her beloved Mercedes and return to her life. Over the years she had visited less and less often. The nurses had finally admitted that Bruce was often agitated after her visits, and it was hard for her to find the time.

  Now she had this Quinn, a boy who had everything her own son lacked, even if he was clearly grappling with a difficult temperament. Evelyn had learned a long time ago to cloak her heart, but she could and would champion him professionally. The problem was, if he was worried about his housing situation—and who could blame him, at his age—he could blow the greatest opportunity he might ever have, an opportunity that could radically change his destiny.

  Evelyn also believed that Quinn was her last best hope for playing a formative role in the early career of a talented actor, never mind the most talented young actor she’d ever met. She knew Joel Sherman wanted a legacy, too; they’d talked about this, agreeing, based on Evelyn’s assurances, that they would not only call Quinn back, but put him with two other actors of very different styles and profiles, leaving Quinn to shine. If he wasn’t chosen, it would be because Van Sant had had something radically different in mind, in which case Quinn could be godlike and still not book the part. But she couldn’t imagine the director turning the boy down, if Quinn was on his game. His Buddy was high-strung, angry, grief-stricken, and raw. He took Evelyn’s breath away, and Joel had seen exactly the same thing.

  But when halfway home her cell phone had gone off and Quinn told her Ben was a no-go, he’d sounded on the verge of tears. She told him she was about to lose her phone reception going through Coldwater Canyon, but what she really wanted was a little time to think.

  Because there was, of course, another possibility.

  She lived in Studio City, in a tranquil little neighborhood of single-family homes with established jacarandas and oaks and dense rosebushes along white picket fences, attended to during the day by highly regarded gardeners. When she’d been looking for a house—how long ago, now, twenty-four years, twenty-five?—she’d thought her mother would come to live with her and so, with that in mind, she’d chosen a spacious single-story house with a tiny cottage behind it. Her mother, as fate would have it, had died of a brain aneurysm in her own living room in Connecticut, right in the middle of a rubber of bridge, but Evelyn had gotten attached to the place by then and had kept it. She had no more than to walk in the front door to feel her blood pressure drop, soothed by the soft mauves, grays, and buttery yellows she’d used everywhere. Her walls were hung with fine art—she was partial to abstract paintings and sculpture, and owned a modest collection of lesser Rothkos—and all her windows were treated with sheers for privacy and light. It was her sanctuary, her haven and refuge, and she had never shared it with another living soul.

  But now she decided that, if necessary, the boy could stay in her cottage, a spare five hundred square feet including a neat Pullman kitchen, a single bedroom, and a bath. If he booked Buddy, he’d be on location in Portland, Oregon, right away, and staying for a good three months, during which time she could find him a more suitable place to live. In the meantime, she would make it clear that under no circumstances could he be in her house without her express invitation or permission. Even so, the thought of actually inviting a young person onto her property frightened her. She’d developed an entire lifestyle around safeguarding her isolation. She had no close circle of neighbors and acquaintances; she didn’t spend long, pleasant weekend afternoons in her garden sipping drinks with old friends or family members. Did she really want a boy in her backyard? She gathered that he was relatively independent, and that he had adequate spending money for food and incidentals. The San Fernando Valley had a usable bus system, as she understood it, and of course he could ride over the hill with her, which would give him a jump-off point to Hollywood, West Hollywood, Century City, and Beverly Hills. And it would all be temporary.

  If she had to, she would take him in.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  AT THE END OF THE MIX-AND-MATCH SESSION FOR BUDDY and Carlyle, Joel E. Sherman shook a couple of Tums from the bottle in his top desk drawer, chewed them ruminatively, and reviewed his options. The problem, as he saw it—and the producers knew it, too—was that the chemistry between his top picks for Carlyle and Buddy sucked. No matter how he’d put them together earlier in the afternoon, the same crappy, flat energy sat over the room like a toad.

  So he went back over his choices yet again, even resorting to the kids he’d eliminated in the last round of auditions, to see if there was something he was missing. The Rabinowitz girl was a good kid, and cute, but of course she was no more capable of holding down a feature film than somebody right off the street. He’d keep her in mind for something else, maybe some small part, but that was it.

  And then there was Mimi Roberts’s other girl, Allison Addison. She might have been in contention before her callback, but even if that day had been an aberration and she turned to gold the next time, he’d never feel comfortable about hanging a movie from her shoulders. And he couldn’t recommend someone he wasn’t comfortable with. No, whatever she was working through, he didn’t want to be part of it.

  And then there were the Buddys. His first pick was, still and absolutely, Quinn Reilly. But was the kid a solo act? Joel had certainly seen it before: you got an actor who had all the chops in the world in monologues, actors so strong they took your breath away, and then you put them in a scene with other actors and, presto, they turned to shit. He’d learned the hard way that when that happened, there wasn’t a thing you could do about it. If that was the case here, he’d have to cut the kid loose. And if he cut the kid loose he was fucked, because he didn’t have any other Buddy he felt certain could do the work. No, he’d have to start all over again for both roles, and that would probably mean releasing breakdowns in New York and San Francisco and Atlanta, and that would cost a fortune, both in terms of time and money. Plus Van Sant’s production window was tight and getting tighter by the hour: he wanted to start shooting in five weeks.

  Then suddenly—and this was what he loved about himself—he came up with an idea from something Evelyn Flynn had mentioned to him on the fly. It would require Van Sant’s buy-in because she didn’t fit the breakdown, but if the chemistry worked the way Evelyn had described it, it was at least worth showing the director what he had.

  “Hey, Lisa!” he yelled out his office door.

  His latest skinny casting twit hollered back, “Yeah? What?”

  She was probably too weak from anorexia to get up and take the ten steps to his office. He let it go. “Get Esther Stein at William Morris on the phone!”

  Three minutes later he was explaining to the agent what he was thinking. Esther agreed: the girl was a doll, an absolute doll, and she had the chops to carry off the part
. Did he want to see her reel? Nah—he could watch her demo online, but he’d seen her work before and anyway a reel wasn’t going to tell him if she could work with Quinn Reilly. So he set up a meeting with the kid for later the next day, never mind that it was Saturday and he didn’t work on Saturday, and then he yelled again and this time the skinny twit scared up Evelyn Flynn. Not only was she managing Quinn Reilly, but she was a damned good casting director, and if she thought he was crazy, he knew she’d say so.

  She didn’t say so. What she said was, “What time do you want him?”

  THE NEXT MORNING THERE WAS A POLITE KNOCK ON HIS door and a small girl appeared. She was exactly the way Joel had remembered her: heart-shaped face, big, serious green eyes, freckles, hair the color of a copper penny, strong widow’s peak. He’d never been able to resist a widow’s peak.

  “Hey, come on in. It’s good to see you, kiddo.” He came around his desk and gave her a hug. “Is your mom with you?”

  “She’s in the car.”

  Another sign that the gods were smiling: a good mom knew her place, and in Hollywood a good mom was rarer than hen’s teeth. “Yeah, good. Did Esther tell you what we’re doing?”

  The girl nodded. “I only got the sides an hour ago, though, so I’m not off-book yet. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Yeah, no problem.” God, but you had to love this kid. Eleven years old and she was already more professional than 98 percent of the adult actors in LA. He found his copy of the sides. “I’m not even going to put you on tape right now. Let’s just run through it.”

  So they did. And when they’d finished, he had goose bumps, actual goose bumps. She was a couple of years younger than the breakdown called for, but in his opinion—and his opinions were rarely off the mark—she could handle the part, if Van Sant was willing to go younger. And if there was chemistry.

 

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