The Next Best Thing (17 page)

I had listened, and the pilot for
The Next Best Thing
was as stripped down and clean lined as I could make it. Act One: Nana’s and Daphne’s lives in Boston fall apart, with Nana losing
her boyfriend and Daphne losing her job. Act Two: They move to Miami. Act Three: Nana goes on a date and realizes, at the age of seventy-two, that she needs to rely on herself before she can be in another relationship, with another man to support her. Daphne gets turned down for her dream job but then goes back and fights for it and gets the chef to take her on as an unpaid assistant for a week, with the promise to hire her if she can show him she’s got the right stuff. Back at home, in the tag, the mini-scene that would run before the next show began, the ladies sit on the couch and review their progress.
We’re all right for now,
Daphne says, the words that, in my mind, would end every show. And:
fin.

Onstage Daphne was pleading with the Boston restaurant manager. “I know I don’t have a ton of experience, but if you give me a chance . . .”

“I’m sorry,” said her would-be boss, played on this night by Lanny Drew, the head of casting, the one who would give, or withhold, the studio’s approval of our choices.

“I’m a good cook.” She paused, and in that pause, I could hear her gathering strength to say what she was ashamed to say but knew to be true. She wiped her cheek and blundered on. “Maybe I’m not the prettiest girl in the world, but you’ve got to have someone who can manage the inventory and deal with the vendors and tell the homeless guys to get lost when they start scaring the customers.”

“I’m sorry, Daphne,” Lanny said. “I think you’re a nice kid. But this isn’t the place for you.”

The girl on the stage lifted her chin. For a moment, she stood perfectly silent, poised in the light. “Then where is?” she asked . . . and you knew she wasn’t asking just about that restaurant, just about that job. This was my question, the one I’d asked every day in the hospital, and in school, after Sarah had abandoned me, and then in college, when I’d thought my looks
wouldn’t matter and learned, to my sorrow, how much they did and always would. “Where is my place?”

Lanny-as-manager didn’t respond. The actress paused and then turned and walked off stage left, putting an extra roll in her hips, letting him know that the war wasn’t over and that she intended to win.

There was a moment of silence. I looked sideways at Dave. I’d never been to a network casting session before, and I wasn’t clear on the etiquette. Then I decided,
To hell with the etiquette,
and started to clap. Dave joined me, and eventually, so did Lisa and Tariq from the studio, and Maya, the casting director for
Bunk Eight,
who was helping me find the actors for my pilot, and Joan and Lloyd from the network (Lanny, I noticed, had gotten very busy with his BlackBerry). I sank back into my upholstered theater seat, breathless and enthralled. As good as the actress had been in person and on tape, she’d been even better in front of real, live people. “She was amazing!” I whispered to Dave.

He nodded back, his face unreadable, his hands resting on his thighs. “We’ll see” was all he said.

The girl’s name was Allison Pierce. The previous June, she’d graduated from NYU . . . and, if I got my wish, she’d pack up her apartment, fly back to Los Angeles, and start preparing for a starring role in the pilot. Unless Polly, our next contestant, did a better job . . . but never mind that now.

“Can you give us a few minutes?” Joan called to Dave and me, from her spot a few rows behind us. The network held its auditions in an actual theater, with a stage and lights and auditorium seating and fringed velvet curtains—all of it designed, I suspected, to produce maximum anxiety in the would-be stars. I hurried up the tilted aisle, through the doors, and into the lobby, where our second girl was pacing, talking silently to herself. I found Allison in the ladies’ room, standing in front of the sinks, crying.

“Oh my God,” I said, hurrying to her side. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t believe it’s over!” She sniffled and wiped her eyes. Allison was African American, tall and busty, with warm brown eyes and dimpled cheeks. I hadn’t imagined Daphne as a black girl. In my head, she’d been white, like me . . . but when I’d seen Allison’s audition, I’d decided that I’d be willing to make whatever adjustments were necessary if the network picked her. She was the total package, pretty but relatable, a girl who could handle jokes and drama with equal skill. Best of all, she was a fresh face, a complete unknown, and that, I knew, would help. “Casting people love their shiny new things,” Big Dave said. “They’re like raccoons. Also, they really like to be the ones to find the hidden treasure and take credit for it.”

In the bathroom, I put my hand on Allison’s shoulder. “You were amazing.”

She wiped the skin underneath her eyes delicately, with her index fingertip. “I still can’t believe it,” she said. “I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe I’m here!”

“You and me both, sister,” I said, and instantly wondered about the propriety of a white woman saying that to a black one. But Allison laughed and gave me a hug.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much!”

“No, thank you,” I said, and walked her to the lobby, and told her to enjoy the rest of her time in Los Angeles. Maya had been so impressed with Allison that she’d arranged for her to meet with people at a few other networks and production companies for the remaining twelve hours she’d be in town. “I don’t know if this is the show for her,” she said, “but that girl’s going to make it somewhere.”

Dave opened the theater door. “Ruth?” he called. I tried to ignore the thrill that went through me when he said my name. “They’re ready for us.”

I hurried back down the aisle, waving at Joan as I walked
past. Joan, the head of comedy for the network, defied every stereotype I’d ever heard about women in Hollywood. Instead of being an ageless, aerobicized hardbody who wore designer suits and high heels and could be anywhere between thirty-five and sixty but would never, under penalty of death, look a day older than forty, Joan was unapologetically fifty-seven years old, with wrinkles bracketing her mouth, fleshy upper arms, and a body as slack and soft as a stack of pillows. She wore her white hair in a bun, had mild blue eyes behind glasses on a beaded chain, and never wore makeup other than tinted lip gloss. Joan dressed like a small-town librarian, in sweater vests and elastic-waisted skirts and clogs. I’d never seen her upset, never heard her curse or even raise her voice. But there must have been steel in there somewhere, because she had been on top of the network’s comedy department for the unimaginable span of sixteen years, outlasting a half-dozen different bosses and regimes and more shows than I cared to consider.

Finding this handful of potential Daphnes had been an ordeal, a two-week-long slog through hundreds of hopefuls, who had read for us in the windowless room in the back of Maya’s Larchmont studio. There were girls who could do jokes but not the poignant stuff, girls who could do drama but not comedy, girls who could do both but didn’t have the right look—too old, too young, too skinny, or just, for some inexplicable reason, not what I’d had in mind. It hadn’t helped that I was what Maya called, with a mixture of exasperation and affection, “tenderhearted.” I wanted to cast every girl who came through the door. I wanted to give them all hot tea and butter cookies and bracing speeches about self-esteem; I wanted to offer them tips and advice and coaching, and bring every girl who evinced even a hint of a possibility that she could be “it” back for another try.

That attitude had lasted for the first two days, and the first forty auditions. After that, I’d gotten increasingly ruthless, inking
black lines through girls’ names before they’d finished their first speech, tossing their head shots into the recycling bin without a second thought. There were just so many of them, lined up in Maya’s waiting room, hanging over the railings on her porch, standing on the sidewalk, chatting, smoking, texting, an inexhaustible supply of young women of all races or ethnicities who were, as we’d requested, at least a size twelve (even though I was pretty sure I’d seen some tens and eights with strategic padding) and who could play twenty-five or younger.

Every day Maya and I would watch a few dozen auditions, with Maya’s assistant, Deborah, standing quietly in the corner behind a camera, putting each girl on tape. While we were sorting through possibilities in Los Angeles, Maya’s New York City–based associate, Val, was doing the same thing with actresses on the East Coast, and girls from Toronto and Denver and Minnesota were also putting themselves on tape for our consideration. At five or six every night, Maya and I would pick our favorites, and Val would email hers. We’d review the tapes and narrow our choices, arguing and rewatching and bringing in the Daves and sometimes my grandma for a consultation before we’d settled on our four finalists.

We’d brought those four girls in to read for the studio. The executives there, led by Lisa and Tariq, had approved three of them to continue on to the network, cutting the girl we guessed they’d cut, an actress named Susannah Reynolds, who could manage the comedy and the drama but wasn’t a standout in either realm. Then Maya and I had spent hours debating the order in which we’d present the girls to the network. Allison, our New York City find, had gone first. Next up was Polly Calcott, who’d been working steadily for the past five years, landing a bit part here, a three-episode arc there, spending each summer touring with
Hairspray,
where she’d played the starring role of Tracy Turnblad. Her experience, especially with multi-camera sitcoms
and onstage, would serve her well, I thought, but her body would work against her. When Daphne became a bigger girl in my imagination, I’d thought that she would have an hourglass figure, with plenty of sand on top and on the bottom. Polly was short and square-shaped, cute . . . but if she was good enough, we’d find a way to make it work.

I leaned forward as Polly glided into the spotlight. Her hair was purple—she was playing a corpse on the episode of
NCIS
they were filming that week—and one ear glittered with half a dozen studs. I rolled my eyes at Maya, who gave me a
What can you do?
shrug. We’d asked Polly to look as conservative as possible, as close to the girl she’d be playing, but maybe she’d forgotten.

“Honey, I’m home!” she called, slipping across the stage on stockinged feet (in the script, at the start of the second act, after she and her Nana had moved to Miami, she was wearing Rollerblades). Joan smiled. Lisa actually laughed out loud. That was good, I thought: that even the people who’d read the script a dozen times still thought the funny parts were funny.

“Look out,” drawled deadpan Lanny, who, in this scene, was reading the part of Nana. “I’ve got a cake in the oven.”

“And I,” said Polly, with a nifty little twirl, “have got a job interview at Emeril’s!” She skated up to the edge of the stage and dropped her voice. “Did you see the guy in 11E? Hair,” she said temptingly. “Teeth.”

“I didn’t notice,” Lanny droned.

“You like him,” said Polly, and hugged herself. “Oh, this is perfect! It’s all going to work out! I’ll get a great job, you’ll fall in love . . .”

Lisa cleared her throat and picked at her thumbnail. Joan, with her eyes still fixed intently on the stage, shifted in her seat. Lanny pulled out his BlackBerry. I snuck a look at Dave, whose face was maddeningly unreadable. Was this going well? Horribly?
I watched as Polly finished her scene and took her bow. Again, the executives gathered, whispering and gesturing. I walked up the aisle again to say my good-byes to Polly, who was pulling on a leather jacket and a knitted newsboy’s cap. “Gotta run,” she said.

“Date?” I asked. It was, after all, Friday night.

She gave me a weary smile and pulled something out of her handbag. An apron. “I’m already late for my shift,” she said. “Hey, you should come in sometime. We’ve got five-dollar small plates during happy hour.” With that, she was gone, off to Dan Tana’s on Santa Monica Boulevard, where she’d been working as a waitress when she wasn’t singing “Good Morning, Baltimore,” or pretending to be dead in a Dumpster. It was heartbreaking . . . but, I thought, it also meant she’d bring a certain verisimilitude to the part of a restaurant kitchen rat.

Joan stuck her head back into the hallway. “We’re ready, Ruth.”

My breath caught in my throat. Where was Carter? I looked around at the empty cubicles, the vacant couches, the quiet corridors. By the time I’d turned back to the doors, Carter DeVries was charging through them, red-faced and breathless, her hair pulled into a ragged ponytail, with her script in one hand and her cell phone in the other. “Oh my God, did I miss it? Are they still here? There was this huge accident on Barham, and I was going to ditch my car and, like, run here. Please tell me I didn’t miss it.” She wiped her forehead, then tugged at her hair. “I think I parked in a handicapped spot.”

“They’re waiting for you. But don’t worry. Take a minute. Give me your keys,” I said. Carter handed me her keys and then collapsed on her back on the couch, hot-pink Keds waving disconsolately in the air as she groaned out loud. Carter was twenty-two, the veteran of an improv troupe who’d won awards for a one-woman show she’d written and performed called
Time
of the Month.
She was, in my opinion, the funniest of the would-be Daphnes. Every time she read Daphne’s lines about the Walk of Shame, Senior Version, where Nana Trudy’s peers made their way back to their condo in last night’s clothes, with their orthopedic shoes in their hands, their teeth in their pocket, and last night’s Depends in their purse, she found different inflections, different places to pause, a way to make each take fresh and funny. She struggled with the more serious parts—her natural inclination was to make a joke of everything—but Dave, in his quiet, persistent way, made the case that drama was easier to learn than comedy. “Let’s give her a chance,” he’d said.
Give me a chance,
I’d thought before I’d been able to stop myself, and I’d smiled and said, “How can I refuse you?”