Seeing Stars (3 page)

She donned her glasses frames and followed Evelyn Flynn into the same audition room as yesterday, where a video camera was set up on a tripod at the back. She waited for the casting director to step behind the camera and then she moved into its line of sight, the way Mimi had taught her. The casting director showed no sign of remembering her from yesterday, which was confusing. Worse, she looked irritated. She squinted at the camera, clicked it on, and said, “Go ahead and slate.”

Bethy smiled at the lens and said very slowly and distinctly, as she’d been taught, “My name is Bethany Ann Roosevelt and my agent is Holly Jensen at Big Talent.”

The casting director didn’t even look up from the camera, just picked up a creased and dog-eared copy of the sides. “Okay. Go.”

Bethy was confused. “But you have the first—”

“
Go,
” the casting director said.

Bethy raised her sides and said, “
Mom said she’d love me no matter what.
”

Evelyn Flynn read, in the flattest voice imaginable, “
But you’re a loser, Sandy. You know that. Everyone knows that.
”

“
I’m not a loser,
” Bethy said without even having to consult the paper. She was off-book, like Mimi had told her to be for every audition.

“
I have lizards that are prettier than you.
”

“
I’m pretty. I know I am,
” Bethy said, giving her voice the slightest tremor.

“Okay,” the casting director said, switching off the camera. “Thank you.”

“But I—” They couldn’t be done. Bethy had two more lines, and they were both laden with emotion. She’d worked with a coach on those two lines,
just
those two lines, for twenty minutes.

Evelyn Flynn crossed to the door and held it open for Bethy. “Thank you,” she said again, and her eyes were flat. Bethy felt tears as she meekly passed in front of the casting director. Just as she was out the door, the woman said, “Oh, and honey?”

Bethy perked up.

“Don’t bring props to an audition. Ever.”

B
ETHANY CRIED MOST OF THE WAY HOME
. “S
HE TOLD ME
to bring them. She
told
me to! And then she didn’t recognize me. I didn’t even get to read all my lines. If I could have read them, she’d have chosen me.”

“Oh, honey,” Ruth said, feeling the prick of tears behind her own eyelids.

Eventually Bethy subsided, looking out the window dully and gnawing a fingernail. Ruth was appalled, but what could she do? These people were in a position to change the future. They didn’t play fair, but there it was: you could stay and take it, or you could go home. Thank God Hugh wasn’t here to witness this. He’d have transported them both back to Seattle before they even knew what had happened. He was very protective, even sometimes when it wasn’t necessary.

Ruth got off the 101 at the Barham Boulevard exit. They’d driven this way for almost every audition Bethy had had, and it took them past the Oakwood every single time. The Oakwood was a tony apartment complex in Burbank that catered to actors, directors, and writers from out of town.

“I wish we were staying here,” Bethy said wistfully as they drove by. “There are tons of kids. They have a pool and a hot tub and a game room and stuff.”

“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.

A
N HOUR LATER
, R
UTH 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.