Seeing Stars (5 page)

From down the block Mimi’s two other current boarders, Hillary Constable and Reba Melvin, waved to her before disappearing into the 7-Eleven. She could probably buy herself a new car for the amount of money those two spent on snacks. Hillary was from Columbus, Ohio, and Reba was from San Francisco; both were twelve and a half, and they didn’t have enough talent between them to fill a thimble. Hillary was wearing one of Allison’s hand-me-down outfits that was about a year away from fitting properly and five years away from being appropriate, and Reba was wearing a sundress that she shouldn’t—the smocked elastic top had migrated up her Tweedledee belly, leaving the hem about four inches shorter in front than in back. God knew when she’d last washed her hair. Mimi sighed. She really should insist that the girls go back to their homes, but the mothers were adamant that their daughters would be stars, and anyway Mimi would miss the combined six thousand dollars a month.

She pushed through the studio door, which was covered with little handprints and had a tendency to stick, and trudged past the vacant reception desk that one of her young-adult students should have been manning. Waiting for her in the greenroom were Laurel Buehl, one of her newest clients, and her mother, Angie. As usual, both were immaculately dressed and made up. They came from outside Atlanta and favored floral print purses and intricately coordinated outfits. Mimi had found them at an International Modeling and Talent Association meeting in LA nine months ago. At sixteen, Laurel was one of her oldest girls. Normally Mimi didn’t take on child clients older than fourteen because finding them work was so hard, especially when they lacked screen and TV credits. The midteen years, in Mimi’s vast experience, were the Hollywood landscape’s valley of the shadow of death. They were too old to play preteen and too young to play late teen, and no one wrote parts for midteens anyway, so the best they could do was hunker down, do their schoolwork, keep up with as many acting classes as they could afford, and wait it out. She’d explained all this to the Buehls, but they’d been unusually focused and utterly determined to come to Hollywood, with or without Mimi’s help, so what was there for Mimi to do but hop onboard?

And the girl did have some talent, which, coupled with her obvious drive and focus, might be enough to carry her. She also had flawless skin, so fair it was almost translucent. After Mimi had mentioned almost offhandedly to Angie that Laurel’s hair, though platinum, was relatively limp, the two of them had compensated with hundreds of dollars’ worth of extensions at a Rodeo Drive salon. The girl’s eyes were a striking, true cornflower blue and her figure was trim, though big-boned. She’d have to work very hard to keep her weight down when she entered her thirties, but for now she simply looked athletic and healthy—so much so that whenever Mimi saw the mother, she was struck anew by how
off
she looked in comparison. Even through her immaculate makeup Mimi could see dark, almost bruised-looking circles under her eyes, and though she was slender, it was in a bony, slack way, as though she’d lost a lot of weight recently and her skin hadn’t sprung back. Mimi had never seen Angie eat, not even at the studio potlucks one or another of the parents convened from time to time—though the Buehls didn’t attend studio social functions very often. Angie did carry energy drinks with her everywhere, which Mimi supposed could account for her pallor and the waxy quality of her skin.

“We were hoping you’d have a minute,” said Angie now, jumping up from the greenroom sofa when she saw Mimi.

“I haven’t worked out the order of the showcase yet, but I still want her to do the
Marbles
monologue,” Mimi said, because everyone always wanted to know the order of the scenes to be performed in her showcases, despite the fact that Mimi said over and
over
that she didn’t make up the schedule until that morning, when she had a final tally of who was participating and what scenes they would present.
Clear Glass Marbles
, the monologue she’d chosen for Laurel, was about a young woman recalling her mother’s very recent death from cancer. When it was performed well it gave the actor a chance to cry, which could bring down the house. Mimi had seen parents and even an agent or two weep by the end, and there was almost always a snuffle or two in the house even if actual tears weren’t produced.

“That’s what we wanted to talk to you about,” Angie said. “We don’t want her to do that one.”

“Why?”

Angie and Laurel exchanged quick glances. “We just think another monologue might be better,” Angie said.

“Can she cry on cue?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s the one I want her to do. It’s the toughest piece I have, and if she can pull it off, Evelyn Flynn, the casting director who’s coming, will remember her. I’ve been trying to get that woman to come to one of my showcases for years, so don’t blow it.”

The two sighed as one, but acquiesced. “All right,” Angie said. Probably thinking Mimi couldn’t see, she took Laurel’s wrist in her hand and pressed. Laurel nodded:
All right.

“And I want to see her do it before the showcase.” To Laurel, Mimi said, “Are you off-book?”

“Yes,” Laurel said faintly.

“Well, I want you to work on it with Dee before class. I mean that.”

Angie and Laurel both nodded and turned to go.

“E
YES ON THE PRIZE, DARLING,” SAID
A
NGIE UNDER HER BREATH.

Laurel nodded. “I know, but—”

Angie just shook her head and said firmly, “Eyes on the prize.”

“T
INA
M
ARIE
!”

As Mimi came into her office she caught the little dog squatting in the corner. Bullet-proof Tina Marie simply looked at Mimi over her narrow shoulders and shrugged, as though to say,
So? I’m undisciplined. It’s my nature. What can you do?
Knowing a lost cause when she saw one, Mimi just sighed, pulled a gallon jug of Nature’s Miracle from the top drawer of her file cabinet, and dumped some on the spot, where it mingled with urine of yore. It was true that the dog, like the rest of Mimi’s operation, was undisciplined. Go to the house at two o’clock in the morning on any given day and you might find Mimi popping Orville Redenbacher’s in the kitchen, or Allison cleaning out a closet. And what was wrong with that? Mimi had gone to San Francisco during the Summer of Love, had seen Janis Joplin in concert. She was an old rebel, messy as much by philosophy as by her nature. Allison was the tidy one, an island of order amid the chaos. She did her own laundry and often Mimi’s laundry, too; kept her cosmetics in a musical jewelry box with a dancing ballerina that her mother had bought for her, evidently, when Allison was young, and in which she also kept a surprisingly extensive inventory of earrings, inexpensive bracelets, pendants, and charms.

Allison imposed some of that order on Mimi, as well. Mimi remembered to color her thinning hair only because Allison reminded her. Sometimes she’d tease the girl by telling her she’d decided to just say to hell with it and let it grow out, as lusterless and gray as a cardboard egg carton. As it was, whenever she let it go too long Allison would take it upon herself to buy Mimi’s L’Oréal hair color and dye Mimi’s hair in the kitchen sink. Mimi loved the feel of the girl’s long fingers working around her scalp, making sure the chemicals were evenly distributed so they’d take the way they were supposed to. They’d had a disaster or two before Allison coaxed Mimi into buying a timer. When Mimi argued that they could just as easily use the timer on the stove, Allison said it had been broken for as long as Allison had lived there—didn’t Mimi know? But, of course, Mimi didn’t know, because she didn’t cook very often and when she did, as a point of pride, she followed no recipe or instructions, which made their rare at-home dinners unpredictable and, as often as not, featuring a dessert course of takeout Chinese.

In the three and a half years that Allison had been living with her, Mimi had seen the girl grow a foot and test her wings on some of the younger girls to see what power she could exert over them, getting them to tell her each other’s secrets. On the whole, Mimi was not averse to this. Good girls—and she’d seen this time after time—rarely had staying power. Bethany Rabinowitz was one of those, a mama’s girl, a pleaser. Allison, on the other hand, had a talent for forming strategic friendships and playing her looks like a high poker hand—which was not to say that all the girl’s qualities were good, merely that they were useful. Mimi wasn’t blind to the flip side. She knew, for example, that Allison was a notorious classroom cheat. She’d been outed by any number of tutors and proctors whom Mimi had hired to monitor her boarders’ homeschool work. Allison looked up answers in the backs of her textbooks and brazenly copied the other girls’ homework assignments, and when she was caught—and she never made much effort to disguise what she was doing—she and Mimi had terrible arguments, brawls, really. Mimi knew better than anyone that Allison might need to find an alternate career one day; and if so, she’d need at least a basic education. Allison did not agree. “I don’t care about algebra!” she’d scream. “I don’t give a shit where in Europe you can find Mongolia! That’s what librarians are for, to answer stupid questions like that. You just call the Los Angeles Public Library and you ask for the reference desk and you say where is Mongolia and they tell you Spain or whatever!”

But the fact was, Mimi was tired. Now, when it was all but too late, what she dreamed of—the only thing she still dreamed of—was a client who loved her. In Allison Addison—beautiful, beautiful child—she knew she’d found what she was looking for: the one who would have her. Mimi wasn’t a fool; she’d seen the furtive cuts running up Allison’s arms like needle marks. But in her line of work you accepted as normal a certain degree of damage, and cutting wouldn’t kill the girl. Chances were, she’d outgrow it. In the meantime they fought about school, and their arguments generally ended with one of them storming out of the house or the studio. The farthest Mimi had ever gone was San Francisco; Allison, who had more limited resources, had gotten as far as Tarzana. But their reciprocal abandonment was pure show. By now she and Allison were bound together as tightly as if there’d been chains.

Chapter Three

A
S
R
UTH UNDERSTOOD IT, THERE EXISTED A DICHOTOMY
of opinions about the relative merits of working as a television or movie extra if you were an unemployed actor. There were the
Once an extra, always an extra
ideologues on the one hand, and the
Anything to become a SAG member
pragmatists on the other. Mimi belonged to the latter camp, explaining to Ruth that sending Bethany to work as an extra on a Screen Actors Guild feature film was the first in a two-step strategy by which Bethany would become eligible for SAG membership as soon as possible. A SAG membership, as she described it, would open up worlds.

So three days after the disastrous
Raven
callback, Ruth was back on Barham Boulevard, fighting the morning rush-hour traffic on the way to Hollywood’s old Rialto Theatre. Bethany sat beside her and packed into the backseat of the car were the Orphans. The four girls would be working as extras on a union feature film called
High Fivin’ the House
. Ruth strongly suspected that Mimi had signed the Orphans up not so much to keep Bethany company or for the work experience, but to keep the girls busy and out of her hair for the day.

The Rialto was being used as a location for the tween/teen Disney film about a close-knit, interracial, interethnic, socio-economically diverse group of kids in an experimental high school who form an alternative cheering squad. It starred Zac Efron and Ashley Tisdale—of course—and Mimi had said if they were lucky the extras might catch a glimpse of them on set. Now, from the front seat, Bethany was telling the girls in the back, “My mom brought her camera, so if we see anyone we can get our pictures taken. Rianne, my BFF back home, would just
die
. She thinks Zac Efron is so cute.”

“You’re not going to get within eighty feet of them, you know,” said Allison. “Mimi just told you that so you’d sign up. One time she made us work on a movie with Ashley Tisdale in it for a
week
and we never saw her once, just her stand-in.”

“Wow,” said Bethany.

“Her what?” said Ruth.

“Her stand-in—her double. Boy, you guys really
are
new. Big stars aren’t going to just stand there for half the day while the tech guys work on lighting and camera angles and stuff, so they hire someone who’s about the same age and size to stand there for them. I knew a girl who was Keke Palmer’s stand-in for
Akeelah and the Bee
, and she said it was the worst job
ever
. She had rickets or shingles or something by the time the movie wrapped.”

“You could probably be Ellen Page’s stand-in. You’re as good an actor as her,” said Hillary loyally. She was Allison’s self-appointed sidekick, an elfin, precocious child who made it known that she’d gladly put her entire future in jeopardy for just one Victoria’s Secret push-up bra and something to put in it. “We saw
Juno
, and she was awesome,” she explained to Ruth.

Allison elbowed her in the ribs. “Ellen Page is like four foot ten and she has really bad hair. She should get extensions. I’m serious.”

“Well, you have nice hair,” Hillary reassured her.

“Well, yeah, compared to Ellen Page.” Allison sank back in her seat, crossed her arms, and looked out the window. Ruth suddenly recalled a comment Angie Buehl had made about Allison: “She’ll either be famous or pregnant by the time she’s seventeen.”

“I hated that set,” Reba was saying from the backseat. The third Orphan was the most unfortunate of them; she was sallow, sullen, overweight, and numbingly untalented. “It was
so boring
. You couldn’t go to craft services unless they told you to, plus even once you could, the food sucked. The union extras got like a Hawaiian luau and
we
got a couple of hot dogs and some Jell-O.”

“Yeah,” echoed Bethy in a chorus of aggrievement.

“Craft services?” said Ruth.

“The
food
caterers,” said Allison. “Man, you guys.”

“Then why aren’t they just called caterers?” Ruth asked.

Allison shrugged. “Anyways, we told Mimi we didn’t want to do this stupid movie but she’s making us, anyway.”

And so there they were, sitting in Ruth’s car and benefiting from Ruth’s services free of charge. Ruth still couldn’t figure out how, exactly, Mimi had talked her into driving these girls and chaperoning them once they were on-site—but then, it was widely acknowledged that Mimi had a special genius for pawning the Orphans onto new, hapless studio moms. “Bethany’s audition is at two o’clock,” Mimi would warble, “and please take Hillary with you, too, because I know you’ll have room in your car and she’s going in for the same part.” You could always tell who’d been conned because of the trapped, glassy-eyed look the women developed at finding themselves saddled with girls as unruly as magpies.

They were making no progress in the stalled traffic. Ruth was sweating lightly. Out of habit she glanced in the rearview mirror and was appalled to see fat Reba drinking a Slurpee and eating a Hostess Ho Ho. It was eight fifteen in the morning.

“Honey,” she said, “why don’t you save that until lunch? You could have it for dessert.”

“That’s okay,” Reba said, chewing complacently. “I can eat it now. They always feed us on set.”

“I know, but what I meant—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Allison said. “She has them every morning. That, or those cupcakes with the white squiggle.”

“They’re really not good for you,” Ruth said. Reba shrugged. The other girls just looked out the windows, bored.

“What do you eat for lunch?” Ruth pressed.

“Funyuns,” Allison answered for her. “She lives on Funyuns.”

“I do not,” Reba protested.

“Yeah, you do.”

“I eat other stuff, too.”

“Oh, right, I forgot. Nachos,” Allison said. “And pizza. She eats a
lot
of pizza. Papa John’s is right down the street from the studio.”

“We all eat pizza,” Hillary pointed out. Ruth could corroborate that. Every time she’d been in the studio there were pizza boxes scattered around like C-rations.

“Plus she never has fruit or vegetables,” said Allison.

“Oh, and like you do?” said Reba, wiping her mouth on her Mimi Roberts Talent Management tote bag.

“I have an apple or a fruit beverage every day,” Allison said primly. “Especially when I can get someone to drive me to Jamba Juice.”

Ruth’s blood was pounding in her ears. “Do you girls have
any idea
how many calories are in some of those drinks? Not to mention how expensive they are.”

Allison shrugged. “It’s no big deal. I get two hundred and twenty-five dollars a week from Chet. Plus I weigh like eighty pounds and I’m already five foot six.”

“Well, not everyone is as lucky as you,” Ruth said, and then subsided. “Anyway, Mimi must cook for you at night.”

Allison just shrugged and looked out the window, clearly bored.

“Mom,” Bethany said. “
Nobody
cooks in LA.”

R
UTH BELIEVED THAT HER STRENGTHS AS A PERSON AND
as a woman did not necessarily include parenting. Unable to conceive almost nine years into their marriage, she and Hugh had made their peace with being childless. As middle age approached, Ruth assumed that she and Hugh would gradually,
gently
, fill the void by developing an unhealthy attachment to some neighborhood child or pet. Then one morning she’d woken up and vomited. When it happened twice more, she’d picked up a home pregnancy test and stared at the pink strip as though it were stamped with hieroglyphics. She’d made herself read the box several times just to make sure she wasn’t taking a no as a yes, because sometimes she got flustered, but there it was: she was pregnant.

Her first trimester had passed in a state of sleepy astonishment, which was gradually replaced in the second and third trimesters by an unsubstantiated but nagging certainty that she would give birth to a child with terrible birth defects. In the delivery room her first question, once Bethany had been born, was “Is she normal?” She thought the delivery nurse had given her a disapproving look, though it might have been her imagination—yes, she’d opted for narcotics during labor, even though it wasn’t the best thing for the baby;
that
was the kind of mother she was. When the news came that Bethy was perfect, Ruth believed with all her heart that she’d gotten away with it only because God had been momentarily distracted.

Sometimes even now, when she looked at Bethany, her ears began to ring, actually
ring
, with amazement that this exuberant, smart, talented child was hers. She stood in awe: Bethany was a doer, not a watcher like Ruth. To
do
meant to risk acts of poor judgment, faulty thinking, weak-mindedness, and lack of conviction, all qualities in which Ruth believed she herself abounded. Not so Bethany; which was why, when Mimi Roberts had come to Seattle to give her Acting for the Camera weekend seminar and it had coincided exactly with Bethy’s decision that she wouldn’t pursue musical theater after all—and what stage productions
weren’t
musical, these days?—Ruth had signed her up immediately. The child had no neuroses, abundant dreams, and significant talent. What could Ruth do but trot along a half-step ahead of her, scattering rose petals in her path?

And so here they were, tracking a series of yellow plastic signs with
High Fivin’
printed both right side up and upside down, with an arrow telling them where and in which direction to turn. Ruth and Bethany had been seeing signs like these nailed to power poles all over LA:
CSI: Miami, Ghost Whisperer, Numb3rs, The Closer
. Ruth had assumed that the signs, with their upside-down names, were someone’s colossal mistake but that the shows used them anyway rather than waste them. It was Bethany who’d figured them out: with the name of the show printed both right side up and upside down, the sign could be used to point either left or right, as needed. It wasn’t the first time Ruth had thought Bethy
got
this place in a way that Ruth clearly didn’t. Every time they turned a corner and found a street barricaded by a chaos of white semi trucks and light arrays,
every single time
, Ruth assumed they’d stumbled onto a catastrophe—a car accident, a fatal stabbing, a drug bust. And every time, Bethy said, “Mom, they’re filming something! It’s so cool. Those trailers are dressing rooms, some of them. There’s probably someone famous in there right now.”

Ruth turned into a parking lot that was already nearly full and set the parking brake—she was a cautious driver, even when they were on a flat surface—and turned around in her seat. The three girls looked back.

“Do you all have your work permits?” Ruth asked. Entertainment industry permits were required for all children under sixteen, with no exceptions. Producers took this very seriously; their sets could be shut down if a child was allowed in without a current Department of Labor–issued original. No permit, no work, no exceptions. Ruth had heard that Mimi routinely made color photocopies of all the Orphans’ work permits—the official stamp was done in red ink and photocopied beautifully—and sent the girls with those whenever they lost their originals.

Now nods: yes, they had their permits.

“Schoolwork?”

Two nods, and a shifty little smile from Allison. Like all Mimi’s clients, the Orphans were homeschooled. As Mimi had explained it to Hugh, you couldn’t be available for auditions, coaching, work (God willing), and acting classes any other way; you just couldn’t. But the good news was, so many kids were in the same boat that the Burbank school system had what Ruth thought of as their “school in a bag” program. You were assigned a coordinator, received your curriculum, and were issued all the necessary textbooks, worksheets, lab materials, and handouts that normal kids got in “real” school. You worked on the material on your own schedule and met with your coordinator every three weeks, when your progress and work were reviewed. There were no teachers, no classrooms, and no group activities.

“Don’t you need to show the set teacher you have something to do?” Ruth asked Allison now.

“Nah. I usually just tell them I have to write an essay on my family tree or the Civil War or Chrysler or something. They leave you alone as long as you sound like you mean it.”

“But you have to spend three hours in the classroom,” Ruth said. “What are you going to do that whole time?”

Allison dipped into her Coach tote and produced a leather-bound manicure set. “Your nails?” Ruth said. “You’re going to do your nails for
three hours
?”

The girl looked at Ruth like she was an idiot. “Well, I’m not going to fake-write an essay that whole time.”

“But that can’t possibly work,” Ruth said.

“No, it does,” Hillary piped up. “She just tells them she’s studying cosmetology.”

“And they actually buy that?”

“Usually,” Allison said. “Think about it. Mimi said there were going to be about seventy-five kids on set today. They have to put us in school for three hours and give us a set teacher because that’s the law, but they don’t have to actually
do
anything with us except make sure we stay quiet and stuff and sign us in and out. I mean, it’s not like they teach you or anything. They’re more like lunch ladies.”

“Mom, we need to go,” Bethany broke in urgently. “They told us to be there by nine, and it’s nine ten already.”

Ruth looked down the street at a crowd of kids milling around outside what must be the theater.

“All right. You do all have your work permits, right, and your Coogan account information?”

“
Yes!
” the girls huffed at her in a chorus. Every child was required to have a special bank account—named after Jackie Coogan, whose childhood earnings had been squandered by his parents or manager, Ruth could never remember which—into which fifteen percent of the child’s gross earnings were deposited directly and couldn’t be touched by anyone except the child himself upon turning eighteen. Like work permits, the lack of Coogan account information meant you couldn’t work, though some kind production assistants—PAs—had been known to allow you a day to produce it.