Naked in the Promised Land (20 page)

I'd inherited that trait. "It takes a lot of money. Maybe two-fifty, three hundred dollars, but the girls at school told me about a very good doctor. It would make such a big difference in the way I look," I said. "Maybe with a different nose I'd find a nice boy."

I could hear Mr. Bergman rummaging through drawers in the kitchen. My aunt got up—to help him I thought—but she stood at the window with folded arms instead. "I didn't do good by you from the time you were small," she sighed. "I meant to do everything right, and nothing worked out."

I went to put my guilty arms around her. We stood together, not talking, just looking out the window at nothing, the stucco of the ugly apartment building next door. In my high heels I was practically a head taller than My Rae now. I kissed her hair. She smelled like matzoh ball soup and all the good things she used to cook for me.

"I should have taken you away to live with me when I married Mr. Bergman. Maybe if you'd had a good home when you were small you wouldn't look so sad now, but that Mary—she was always a selfish cat. She wouldn't let me do nothing. A no-good selfish cat!" Rae hissed with all the old fury.

Their unhappiness with each other, their tirades—through all the years nothing had changed. Yet, despite the vitriol, they were sisters, two limbs on a bare tree. They never talked about the shared root that had been all but blasted, but they couldn't forget it, and it bound them together, despite curses and thrown shoes and bitter recriminations. Though they were both married now, the men had come too late to matter; even if Albert and Mr. Bergman had been different, they couldn't have counted for much. The important people in their lives were each other and me.

"That selfish cat Mary wouldn't let me do what I wanted for you, but to me it was always first God, then you. What else am I still working for if not to help? I'll go tomorrow to the bank. I bet you Mrs. Pinsky's daughter with her small little nose had it fixed too."

That was what American girls did these days to get a boyfriend, my aunt must have figured.

The nose the plastic surgeon gave me wasn't the Marlene Dietrich nose I'd hoped for, but neither was it the big convex burden I'd been carrying around with me for so long. I called E. J. Smith's old agency to make an appointment for an interview as soon as the swelling went down and I could get a new publicity picture.

I'd expected secretaries and a suite of offices, but Mel Kaufman was alone behind a big metal desk. He was portly and pockmarked and gap-toothed, an ugly man surrounded by a wall of framed black-and-white beauties. When I told him on the phone that E. J. had given me his number, he was very friendly and invited me to "drop by when you're in the neighborhood," but when I walked through the door, he seemed brusque. "What can I do for you?" he asked. I'd brought several monologues to read for him and the photo that I'd just paid a Hollywood portrait studio thirty dollars to take.

I handed him the photo, and while he glanced at it I eyed the pictures on his wall. Mine still looked nothing like them, I realized with despair. How had I deceived myself so badly? The women all had blond hair and light skin and looked carefree, with big, open smiles. All-American girls, the girls next door, the sweethearts of Sigma Chi. I, Semitic-looking, dark, sad-looking, with plenty to hide—I was their diametrical opposite. Of course, plenty of male actors in Hollywood looked Semitic like me, and from what I could figure out, the producers and directors
and agents were mostly Jewish. A lot of them even came from immigrant families as I did. But the pictures on Mel Kaufman's wall showed me what I should have known already. If you were a woman and hoped to act, you had to look like a lighthearted
shiksa
unless you were old enough to play Molly Goldberg.

"A
lantsman,
huh?" Mel Kaufman said, glancing again at my photo and then at me. He knew instantly—of course he did. I'd told him my name was Lil Foster. I'd gone through my aunt's hard-earned money and all my own, and still I couldn't pass.

I ignored his question as though I didn't understand it. Maybe if I could just get him to watch me act he'd see the talent I had, even though I didn't look like the women on his wall. "E. J. Smith thought you might let me read for you," I began in my low, confident-woman's voice. "I was the lead in
Night Must Fall
at Geller Theatre, and the play broke all records for audience attendance over the last five years."

"E. J., that old
pisher,
I hear he runs a stable now. Is that so?"

A stable? "I didn't even know he rode," I declared off-handedly.

Kaufman threw his head back and laughed as though I'd said something hilarious. "You're a funny girl, you know that? Look, I was just going out to lunch. Come and have something to eat." He didn't stop for an answer before he steered me out the door by my elbow.

"So are you a pony, or what?" he asked, zooming his red MG out of the crowded parking lot, turning sharply right on two wheels, careening down a small street as though we were escaping from a crime scene.

"A pony?" I laughed. What the hell was he talking about? "Not unless I've just grown two more legs."

"Let's see," he said, squeezing my kneecap. "Nope, feels like a
maydeleh's
leg to me." He didn't remove his fingers. What was I supposed to do? If he was really a powerful agent, as E. J. had said, I wanted him to like me. How else would I get an agent? But I couldn't let him keep his hand on my knee. I lifted it, a damp, heavy paw, and fixed a smile on my face. "Now, now," I said in what I hoped was a charming
shiksa
lilt, "we've only just met."

At Googie's, a Sunset Strip diner, Mel Kaufman asked the hostess for a table right in the middle of the room. He kept swiveling his head
around and waving to people who waved or nodded back—men who wore big diamond rings on their pinkies, women who were slim and tall with flawless complexions and long, mascaraed lashes. "You see that girl. Sexy, huh? It's Mara Corday. I got her signed to
The Quiet Gun.
" "Recognize that guy from
Mister Roberts?
William Henry, one of my boys." My head swiveled along with Mel Kaufman's. "How'd you like to read at Paramount Studio, next week?" he asked me between giant bites of tuna sandwich.

I put my own ham and cheese down on my plate and tried to swallow the wad that was in my mouth. So I had impressed him somehow. Though he hadn't even heard my monologues yet, he'd seen something in me that made him think I could audition at Paramount Studio. Was it really, finally, after a lifetime of hoping and dreaming, going to happen? "I'd like that very much," I told him, surprising myself by how suave my voice sounded although I was ready to soft-shoe on the ceiling.

I learned on the drive back to Mel's office (as wild as the drive to Googie's) that it was for Tom Saulus he'd arranged the audition. "I got you another reader," he said, introducing me to a powerfully built young man with an even profile and big white teeth who was lounging in Mel's chair now, black-sneakered feet folded on the metal desk, reading the green sports section of the
Herald.

"How ya doin'?" Tom looked over the top of his paper and acknowledged me with a slight wave of a hammy hand.

"If the studio people like the scene, Tom'll get a screen test," Mel explained, handing me some pages from Odets's
Waiting for Lefty,
a play I already knew because I'd read it in the back row of my algebra class.

"By when do I have to have it memorized?" I asked them, ready to stay up all night if necessary.

Tom let his agent do the talking. He'd gone back to perusing the baseball scores.

"You just read it. You don't have to
memorize,
" Mel answered, as though I'd asked a stupid question.

I was Florence in the three-minute scene we rehearsed the next day. I had five lines: "I know you're not, I know." "I know." "I got a lump in my throat, honey." "The park was nice." "Sid, I'll go with you." The rest
of the speeches belonged to Tom, who kept his gaze in the middle distance as I fed him the lines. His acting was wooden and he used his hands like a robot, yet he was getting an audition at Paramount. Why? I was a Bernhardt compared to him, but Mel intended this to be Tom's audition, not mine. The dumb injustice of it!

Waiting at the bus stop in front of Mel's office, I decided that as soon as I got home I'd call and say he'd have to get someone else to feed Tom lines. But before I reached Stanley Avenue I changed my mind—after all, what did I have to lose? I'd have an opportunity to step on the same gravel where Gloria Swanson and Barbara Stanwyck and Shirley Booth had placed their glorious feet ... and who knows what might happen?

"Who knows," Mel said as he drove me to the studio the next week, "you might catch their eye. Doesn't matter if you only have a few lines, they might like what they see. Stranger things have happened." I remembered the Lana Turner legend of my childhood. I would give it my all.

"Did they say anything?" I dared to ask Mel as we whizzed away from the Paramount lot. I held on to the seat with my fingernails. He was going to kill somebody one of these days.

"They'll call. Tom did a great job," he said. "So, what did you think of the inside of Paramount Studio?" This time his hand landed in my lap and his fingers darted between my legs. The paw stuck like a boulder when I grabbed it. "Hey, hey, you want me to have an accident?" he laughed, speeding up the car and pulling abruptly onto a side street. He stopped the MG in front of a house with closed shutters and turned the motor off.

"What are you doing?" I asked. Before I could make sense of what was happening, he'd unzipped his pants and pulled out his member. I snapped my head away, but I'd already seen it—a gargantuan dark rod. "Please take me back," I said, struggling to hold my voice steady. There was no movement in the unfamiliar street—no cars, no one in sight anywhere on the tree-shaded sidewalks or in the front yards bordered by picket fences.

"Don't worry, just give me your hand," he rasped. I fought to keep my hand away, balling it into a fist, yanking it from his grip while he fought to force me to touch the thing, to hold it. A serpentine monster. A deadly gun. In all my struggles—with Chuck, with Jake Mann, with Falix Lieber—I'd never seen one.

I rescued my fist, kept it balled like a street fighter's. "Dammit, take me back!"

"Hey, hey, how far you think you'll get in Hollywood?" He looked at me with a sincere expression, as if he was offering a bit of reasonable advice, but his round cheeks were splotched red. "Okay, just sit there," he said when I glared.

I edged my body close to the door. I could open it and get out and run. I wasn't trapped in the car. But then I'd have to admit it was all over, all my Hollywood dreams. And I didn't even know where to run. I had twenty cents in my pocket, and that wouldn't even get me a bus ride home from this distant neighborhood whose name I didn't even know. I turned my head away. I could hear his hand moving quickly up and down the ugly pole. I forced my eyes to keep staring straight ahead, but I still saw the movement peripherally. I turned back to him, ready to beg him to stop, careful to look only at his face, but I could still see all of him, see him grab a starched white handkerchief from his breast pocket, cover the hand that moved, close his eyes. I was glued there, my own eyes lidless. He shuddered and let out a big breath.

"Okay, let's go," he said seconds later with good cheer, tossing the wadded handkerchief over his seat, fumbling with the fly of his pants; the tires screeched as he tore out onto the street. When he pulled up in front of his office building he glanced over at me, and his lips spread in a friendly, gap-toothed grin. "I guess you don't know the game, huh?" he said.

"Go to hell, you bastard!" I snarled after I jumped free of the car. "I hope it falls off!"

I almost bumped into an elderly, blue-haired lady carrying an I. Magnin hatbox. She'd heard what I said and gave me a sidelong, horrified look as she scurried on.

***

I'm twenty-six maybe. Not sixteen. (Is it me or is it the pitiful, dark-haired creature that I've seen twice wandering around Hollywood Boulevard, looking as though she'd been hit in the head?) I'm wearing red circles of rouge on my cheeks and black circles of mascara around my eyes. My nylon stockings have huge tears that go from my shoes all the way up to my knees and beyond; the garters rolled on them three days earlier don't keep them from sagging. My stained skirt is practically as high as my
pupik,
as my aunt used to say, my bellybutton. I cross the street and a truck swerves and honks, but I'm oblivious. I've walked up and down and around for hours, for days. I'm for sale, and nobody will buy. The furious driver circles the truck back and zooms toward me, but my mother appears and without a second's pause throws herself under its wheels.

T
HE GOLDEN APPLE
would never be mine. I'd never get by the fearsome guardians at the gate because I'd never be a girl who could charm them like Doris Day, or make them silly with desire like Marilyn Monroe. How could I have believed that Lilly from Fanny's furnished room could win the golden apple? Girls like me were used for something else in Hollywood. And now I had no idea what to do with the rest of my life.