Seeing Stars (32 page)

Hugh sighed heavily. “Never mind. I know you’re excited.”

“Because this could launch her career, Hugh. Of course I’m excited.”

“Here’s something I’ve been thinking about: if a kid gets famous, she had the most wonderful, most supportive, most self-sacrificing parents in the world, but if the kid dies on the vine, you’re looking at a schmuck who thought his kid was better than everyone else’s, and the kid grows up having been a failure. And you have no idea which outcome will be the right one.”

“She
is
better than anyone else,” Ruth whispered. “Well, than almost anyone. I know it, Hugh. And it’s not just wishful thinking. Why can’t you see that?”

Ruth heard him turn away from the receiver and say, “Okay, I’ll be right there.” Then he came back to her and said, “Margaret says they’re ready. So, okay, tell Bethy to break a leg or whatever—break a bank. Tell her to call me tonight.”

“All right, honey, I will.”

“Okay.”

“I love you,” she said, but he’d already hung up. If she sat in the car alone she’d start thinking, and absolutely nothing good could come of that, so she locked the car and went inside.

I
N THE STUDIO CLASSROOM
D
ONOVAN WAS SITTING IN A
chair collating the pages that Bethy had just photocopied for him. “So go ahead, talk to me,” he said to her. He was always telling his students to talk to him.

“Well, her name is Ashleigh and she’s my age and she’s a nice person who likes little kids and stuff. She probably has a couple of dogs, not those little purse-dogs, but a couple of schnauzers, maybe. A male and a female. Willy and Maude. And she’s the one who walks them when the staff is gone for the day.” She paused, looking at Donovan, who looked back at her with his fingertips together in a steeple. “Do I like having staff? It seems like that would be so weird.”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

Bethy frowned thoughtfully. “Well, having them around makes me feel sorry for them in some ways, because I don’t think they’re paid very much and their own children are alone every day in a crummy part of LA where no one can afford a nice house like mine and good clothes and stuff. But, hey, I know! I give them
my
clothes when I outgrow them or get tired of them. And maybe I even make my mom buy me stuff I don’t need, just so I can give it away. Is that okay?”

“You own this character,” Donovan said. “You say what’s okay. So keep going. Why do you like your neighbors? They have an awful lot of kids.”

“Yes, because they’ve adopted poor children who had nothing to eat.”

“Is that why?”

“What do you mean?” Bethany said.

“Well, did the, ah”—he searched his script for a minute—“Abernethys adopt them because the children needed them to, or did they adopt them because they have great big egos and more money than God and they know it’ll make people think they’re wonderful?”

Bethany frowned, considering this. “No, they adopted them because they needed it.
And
people think they’re wonderful. Aren’t I supposed to like them?”

“You tell me. You like their kids.”

“I think I like them, too, because I’m a good person.”

“So, okay,” Donovan said. “Let’s run it. Are you off-book?”

Bethy had a photographic memory, so memorizing her lines was never any problem for her. “Well, I have only like six lines. I mean, I’ll be off-book once we run it a couple of times, but we just downloaded it right before we came over.”

“Go,” said Donovan.

ASHLEIGH

Hi, Mr. Abernethy!

JUSTIN ABERNETHY

Hey, wow, are we ever glad you could come over! Listen, Cecilia’s sciatica’s bothering her again. I mean, when will these kids be born, right? So I’m going to take her out to lunch. Can you watch the kids?

ASHLEIGH

Sure, no problem. You know I love to play with them. Maybe we can do finger paints.

JUSTIN

Just ask Consuelo to help you set things up. She put the paints somewhere, probably in the nursery. And don’t let the baby eat anything.

ASHLEIGH

That Bruce. Isn’t he just the cutest thing? I bet his real mom was a beautiful woman, like Pocahontas.

JUSTIN

Now, we don’t talk about real moms here, because that would make Cecilia a fake mom, right?

ASHLEIGH

Oh! I’m so sorry. I just meant—

JUSTIN

That’s okay. We just need you to be sensitive to that, because the kids love you and they trust you. And so do we.

Donovan lowered his script. “Jesus Christ.”

Bethy looked up, crestfallen.

Donovan said, “Look, it’s okay—it’s not your fault that the writer’s an incompetent moron. Let’s take it again, and this time I want you to be really in the moment, because that time your acting was showing.”

“But if the writing’s bad—”

“Oh, it’s bad,” Donovan said, “believe me. But that’s no excuse for
you
to be. You should be able to move people by reading a Tide commercial, right?”

He said that at every single class. “Right.” Bethy shook the tension out of her head and shoulders the way he’d taught them to, tapped her pages back into order, and took it again from the top. “
Hi, Mr. Abernethy!
”

“Hey,” Donovan intoned. “Wow.”

W
HILE SHE WAITED IN THE STUDIO GREENROOM
, R
UTH
stared sightlessly at the unread pages of
Seabiscuit
. She figured she was averaging a reading speed of about a sentence every ten minutes. Could she be developing late-life attention deficit disorder?
Was
there even such a thing?

Mimi came into the greenroom and put a sticky note on Laurel Buehl’s headshot. The note said,
McDonald’s!

“That’s wonderful,” Ruth said; and, because it was a commercial, she meant it. She had more trouble feigning delight when another child booked a theatrical part. That, as far as Ruth was concerned, was Bethany’s province. Ugly but true.

“It’s the second national commercial she’s booked this week,” Mimi said. “Yesterday was Target. And she’s got callbacks on one more. The girl’s amazing.” She listened for a minute to Bethany and Donovan. “You realize this is a long shot,” she said to Ruth.

“I know,” Ruth said, and then, miffed, “You know, you’re very negative.”

Mimi sighed. “Because new parents have false hopes, and then when things don’t work out, they blame me for it.”

“I don’t think our hopes are false,” Ruth said. “I think we’re very realistic about how talented Bethy—”

Angie and Laurel Buehl walked into the suite. Mimi used them for cover and slipped away. Ruth sighed and then said brightly, “Hey, you two! Congratulations! I just heard the good news.”

“About McDonald’s?” Angie said. “I know, isn’t it wonderful? We haven’t even had a chance to tell Dillard yet. And it’s national.”

Laurel sat down in the chair farthest away from Ruth, pulled a copy of
Vogue
out of her Mimi Roberts tote bag, tucked her feet up beneath her, and opened her magazine. For all her successes, she seemed subdued. Ruth thought there was an air of premature aging about her, which was odd, because Ruth thought of pageanteers—was there such a word?—as bubbly and extroverted. Was that too simplistic? Though Laurel and Angie were unfailingly friendly, they’d stopped short of forming friendships. And for the most part, the studio community left them alone. Even Bethy and Allison respected the barriers the Buehls seemed to have built around themselves. Bethy had explained it to Ruth this way: “They seem like they don’t want to be disturbed or something. Like friends would just be getting in the way.”

But if Laurel hit the big time all that would change in a heartbeat, Ruth knew. If Laurel became a star, they’d have so many friends they’d have to fight them off with a stick.

February 2007

O
n any given afternoon if you were dropped onto Sunset Boulevard from far away—outer space, say, or North Dakota—you might expect to find a floral essence in the air, because it’s warm enough and sunny enough and there’s a breeze and palm trees and the occasional bougainvillea; but you’d be wrong. All you can smell is car exhaust and dirt and fast food.

There’s a famous diner in North Hollywood that’s been there forever, but it doesn’t look authentic, just ordinary and tired, like an old waitress counting her tips out back by the Dumpster. The walls are scaly with tier after tier of framed headshots, mainly of women who look like gun molls or Bette Davis. “To Bugsy from BooBoo, XOXO.” “To my one and only—I love ya, doll.” Cornball stuff that looks fake, even though it isn’t.

They say that America has movie stars because it doesn’t have royalty. But there are no stars anymore, not like the old days when it didn’t matter how many highballs you drank as long as you were beautiful. Now we pick them up and discard them as casually as garbage; we clamor to know every little thing and then, once we do, we blame them for it. We wouldn’t miss them on Oscar night, but as we watch them—and it’s like shooting fish in a barrel out there on the red carpet—what we’re thinking is, they’re older or uglier or fatter or shorter than we’d thought they’d be, not godlike at all; and we abandon them, because there’s always, always, someone better.

—
VEE VELMAN

Chapter Nineteen

I
N THE SPACE OF ONE WEEK, THE PACE OF THEATRICAL
auditions accelerated wildly. Some of the Mimi Roberts studio kids—though not Bethany—were going out every day. Pilot season had arrived.

“I don’t see why everyone comes from all over the country for this,” Ruth said petulantly to Vee on her cell phone one afternoon. She was walking briskly around and around Greta Groban’s shabby block while Bethy was being coached. She’d resolved to lose fifteen pounds by Easter, like
that
was going to happen. But still. “Yesterday I saw two cars from Rhode Island. Two. In the same hour. There are only, what, fifteen hundred cars in the whole state, and two of them were here.” She could feel little beads of sweat crawling through her hair. Once more around and she was done, or she’d have to find deodorant and a shower. And she and Bethy had an audition and an acting class to get through after this. “I know some of the kids are going nuts, but Bethy’s had only two auditions since we got back, and one was the one for
Bradford Place
. Straight to producers and then nothing—we haven’t heard a single word, so she obviously didn’t book it. I keep asking Mimi to get feedback from the casting director, but of course she hasn’t done it, and I don’t know how many more times I can nag her about it.”

“We heard they canceled it.”

“Canceled what?”

“
Bradford Place.
Clara heard it was scrapped. Whoever played the female lead got a better offer so she backed out, and then one of the producers backed out, and the network just said screw it.”

“You’re kidding,” said Ruth.

“Happens all the time, babe,” Vee said cheerfully.

“So do you think the whole pilot season thing is just a collective delusion?”

Vee snorted into the phone. “For kids without credits, of course it is. No one is going to cast a kid with no experience as a potential series regular in a pilot for huge bucks. But the kids with credits have a chance. It’s not like they’re likely to
book
anything, but they have that glimmer of hope—at least the parents do—so they show up just like lemmings running to the cliffs or the sea or whatever that expression is.”

“Yeah,” Ruth sighed. “Has Clara been going out much?”

“Are you kidding? I keep telling you, honey—Clara’s a redhead. She’s even more of a niche actor than Bethany is. The last thing she went out for wasn’t even a pilot, it was a feature film. She was the weird kid in a middle school class. She booked it, worked for three days, and then
hasta luego
.”

“But doesn’t she mind that? Don’t you?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Isn’t it like getting a sip of water when you’re dying of thirst?”

“Well, sure. That’s what makes Hollywood go round. You always want more. More, more, more.”

“Well, it seems cruel.”

Even over the phone, Ruth could hear Vee shrug. “It is what it is.”

“I hate that saying,” said Ruth peevishly. “You know what other one I hate? ‘Just sit down and shut up.’”

“It does seem apt, though,” Vee agreed. “You know what your problem is? You want to be in control. No one’s in control down here—
no one
. You’d be much better off if you’d give up and stop fighting it.”

“I know,” Ruth moaned. “But I
can’t
.”

“Why don’t you go see a psychic? Maybe it would help if you knew the future.”

“A psychic.”

“You can scoff, but I have a great one.”

“You’ve been to see a psychic?” Ruth said.

“Babe, this is LA. Everybody has. There are more psychics in LA than any other city in the world.”

“There are?”

“I don’t know—I made that up. It’s possible, though. Do you have a pen?”

“I will when I get to the car. Talk to me about something else, and I’ll tell you when I get there.”

“How’s Hugh?”

“He says he feels like a pincushion, pricking his fingers all the time. I think he’s resigning himself to the whole thing, though. My mother-in-law has read every diabetes pamphlet and magazine article there is. She sends me these diabetes-friendly recipes—like I’m there to cook, which of course is her point. She keeps hinting that if we get divorced it’s okay with her. I don’t know how people do this. I mean, I’m not there, but I’m not really
here
, either. No matter where I am, I feel like I’m supposed to be in the other place. Am I whining?”

“Sure. But people who live in two places live in neither. I got that in a fortune cookie one time.”

“You did not.”

“I could have.”

“God, finally!” Ruth had arrived at the car. She unlocked and opened the two curbside doors for some ventilation, then fished a pen and an old MapQuest printout out of the glove compartment. When she’d parked she’d been in the shade, but the sun had moved. She thought about sitting down on the grass strip between the curb and the sidewalk because it looked cooler, and then she remembered all the dogs that lived in the neighborhood and peed there, and changed her mind, sitting on the burning passenger seat with her legs out. “Okay, I’ve got a pen.”

“Her name is Elva.” Vee rattled off a phone number.

“Elva? You’re sure this isn’t a joke?”

“No, I’m dead serious. Now tell me you’re going to call her.”

“I’m going to call her,” Ruth said; and it was possible that she would, that’s how conflicted she felt about everything—Hugh, Hollywood, the wisdom of being here in the first place, of doing any of the crazy things they’d been doing. And that wasn’t even including the whole school charade. Ruth had found Bethy a math tutor for seventy-five dollars an hour and sent her to him twice a week with limited success, which was to say the child would graduate from high school mathematically illiterate if she continued the way she was going. Ruth unstuck one leg from the car seat ruminatively, and then the other one. “Do you really think this is good for our kids?”

“Psychics?”

“Acting,” said Ruth, and then, “No, not acting. Rejection.”

“Sure. If they have the right expectations, it toughens ’em. You could hit Clara with a baseball bat and she wouldn’t even flinch. Figuratively speaking.”

“And that’s good?”

“Sure. She’s going to make her own way in the world, fuck what everyone else thinks.”

“But did she ever really want the fame, the recognition, the whole star thing?”

“Maybe not as much as you and Bethy, but remember, she was raised on this stuff. She didn’t just drop into it after years of actor worship. We always knew it was a crock of shit. It’s more lethal when you don’t find out until you’re older.”

“You make it sound like chicken pox.”

“Don’t you get shingles if you’re older when you get it? I remember a neighbor of ours once had shingles. It’s supposed to be very painful. I don’t even know what that means, though. I always picture these scaly patches, but isn’t that actually psoriasis?”

“I have no idea,” said Ruth.

“Yeah, well,” Vee said. “It took your mind off rejection for a minute, though, didn’t it?”

Then Ruth’s call-waiting went off and it was time to go.

“Remember,” Vee called down the line in closing. “They’re stronger than we are by a mile!”

M
IMI HAD AGREED TO
A
NGIE
B
UEHL’S ULTIMATUM TO
push harder theatrically because otherwise she’d lose Laurel as a client and Laurel was worth a ton of money. And she had tried, she really had, she just hadn’t had much luck. Nevertheless, Angie was standing in Mimi’s cluttered office with her hands on her hips, saying, “You need to get Laurel in on
After
.” Laurel hovered anxiously just behind Angie’s right shoulder. “Everyone else is auditioning, so why isn’t she?”

Mimi sighed. She had already, and at almost the last possible second, gotten the girl an audition for the re-released babysitter part in
Bradford Place
. Not that there’d been any chance of her booking it, even if it hadn’t been canceled. A reliable, precancellation rumor had had it that the part had belonged to another girl, a Hollywood insider, all along; the casting director had just been window-shopping so that the producer would feel he was earning his exorbitantly high fee. It happened all the time.

Mimi turned from her computer with a lecture on her tongue about the wisdom of choosing your battles. Then she took a closer look at Angie. The woman, normally so bright and well turned out, looked like hell. It had been several weeks since Mimi had seen her. Had something happened? It had to have, for her to look like that. So Mimi toned down what she’d been about to say, but the bottom line was still the same: there was no way that Laurel would be considered for the part of Carlyle.

“For one thing, the breakdown’s for thirteen, and there is no way that Laurel can play thirteen. Right now I doubt she can even play fifteen.” You could almost watch the child’s breasts grow. Dillard’s family must have a large helping of boobs in his genetic pie, because Angie was as flat as a board. And, Mimi couldn’t help noticing, incredibly, even alarmingly, thin. Something was going on there. It wasn’t unheard of here for a woman in her late thirties or early forties to develop an eating disorder.

“The character could be older,” Angie was saying. “There’s nothing about her that’s specifically thirteen. I think it has a wider age range. She could just as easily be older than Buddy instead of younger, and it wouldn’t make any difference.”

“Except to the director,” Mimi said drily.

“Try,” said Angie.

“Please?” said Laurel.

Mimi sighed. She could either make the phone call and piss off Joel E. Sherman—who, let’s face it, wasn’t one of Mimi’s fans to begin with—or she could lie, not make the call, and risk having Angie call Joel herself, which would not only call Mimi’s bluff but also be certain death for Laurel forever. Angie Buehl was exactly the kind of mother who crashed auditions in the honest but fatal belief that if the casting director caught even one glimpse of her child, he would book her on the spot.

“Look,” Mimi said. “There’s another part, for a sixteen-year-old neighbor who has a crush on Buddy. I can get her in on that. They haven’t even started casting it yet.”

“It’s not the lead, though,” Angie pointed out.

“Which is why she’s got at least a shot at it. I know you don’t want to believe me, but no director anywhere ever is going to cast a kid who has never done anything but commercials as the lead in a feature film.”

“But she has years of pageant experience,” Angie cried. “I don’t know why you never count that.”

“And if they were looking for someone to wear a swimsuit, she’d be in like Flynn,” Mimi said. “
After
is set in Portland, Oregon, in the dead of winter.”

Laurel pulled on Angie’s arm. Angie gently shook her off. “Just wait a minute!” Then, to Mimi, “Get her in. If they won’t see her for Carlyle, then get her in for the other girl. I know there’s a place for her in this movie. I think you should be able to see that, too.”

O
UTSIDE, IN THE STUDIO PARKING LOT
, A
NGIE SAID TO
Laurel, “Because you’re good enough, that’s why.”

“But if Mimi doesn’t think I can—”

“Mimi isn’t God, honey. And we don’t have time for negativity. I’m not saying you’ll book the part, I’m just saying let’s get you in there so they can at least
see
you. If you don’t audition for this man, he’ll never be able to consider you for other roles. I’m right about this, honey.”

“Maybe,” said Laurel. “All right.”

A
LLISON THOUGHT THE EARLY EVENING WAS THE MOST
depressing time of day. Mimi wasn’t home yet and Hillary and Reba were cranky and hopped up on junk food and energy drinks. When Quinn still lived with them, they’d played Game Boy together or fooled around with Tina Marie. Now Allison devoted the time to personal grooming. Her dark leg hair was fast-growing and inclined to be stubbly—she’d been shaving her legs since she was twelve—so she’d picked up a bottle of Nair hair depilatory the last time Mimi had taken her to a drugstore, and now seemed like a good time to try it. When her phone rang she was in the bathroom, standing on one leg with the other propped up on the vanity, her left leg and most of her right one slathered in stinky cream. She answered without looking to see who was calling.

On the other end of the line she heard a long, thin wail and knew immediately it was her mother, Denise. “Honey, Chet’s dumping me.”

Allison narrowed her eyes warily. “What do you mean?”

Denise snuffled. “He’s kicking me out of the house. He said this weekend he’s bringing Eddie and Virgil and Julio over and they’re going to load up my stuff and take it to some apartment the bastard’s rented for me.”

“Good,” said Allison, lowering her finished right leg and holding the phone with her chin and shoulder so she could put the cap on the bottle. “He’s a douche. Make sure he’s paid like a year’s rent in advance.” Allison could hear ice cubes clinking in a glass. From the slightly off-kilter sound of her, Denise had probably been drinking since noon. “Manhattan?”

“Just a little one, honey. You can understand that.”

And Allison could, because whenever Denise’s men dumped her—and a lot of them had dumped her—Denise mixed up a pitcher of Manhattans along with the morning coffee. “Well, I say good riddance. He’s a fucking
douche
.” Allison wiped her hands on a length of toilet paper and sat down on about one inch of the closed toilet so she wouldn’t mess up the Nair.

“How can you say that to me? He’s my husband!”

“Yeah, for like fifteen months or something. I mean, I was surprised he even married you. You lived with him for, what, a couple of years? It wasn’t like you weren’t going to have sex with him or something unless he married you.”

“I don’t know how you can be so hateful,” Denise said. “He’s everything to me.”

Allison squinted, looked into the middle distance. “Who sings that?”

“What?”

“Isn’t that a song? ‘You’re Everything to Me’? Do you think somebody sang it on
Idol
?”