Seeing Stars (4 page)

“What?” Ruth said.

Allison shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just not into it tonight. I told Dee I needed a time out.”

“Oh.”

Allison glanced over and then picked up the handle of Ruth’s purse, which lay between them on the ratty sofa cushion. “This is nice leather,” she said, rubbing it between her thumb and finger. “I’m guessing kid.”

The purse was, in fact, Ruth’s only quality accessory, bought at Nordstrom Rack for 50 percent off. She hardly ever used it at home, for fear of scuffing it. She’d brought it to LA only as an afterthought, but she was glad, now. When it came to her purse, at least, she had nothing to be ashamed of.

“Michael Kors,” the girl said. “Am I right?”

Ruth was impressed in spite of herself.

“Mine’s Coach,” the girl said, gesturing to her bag and school things neatly stacked just inside Mimi’s office door. “My mom’s husband bought it for me. I won’t even let anyone
touch
it.” She sighed, crossed one long leg over the other, and bobbed her foot up and down.

“Do you like this class?” Ruth asked.

Allison shrugged. “Dee’s cool.”

“Bethy says he’s a little intense.”

“Well, of
course
he’s intense. I mean, that’s why his kids are series regulars.”

“We’d kill for that,” Ruth acknowledged.

“Everyone would kill for that,” Allison said in a
duh
tone of voice.

Ruth could feel her face getting warm. “Why do you like acting?” she asked. She was always surprised at how much easier it was to have an intimate conversation when you were sitting beside someone and not facing them. She and her mother had had their frankest talks driving between Seattle and Tacoma to visit Ruth’s aunt Vera.

Allison thought for a minute. “I don’t know.” She frowned. “I really don’t know.”

“Is it work for you? Is it hard?”

“Oh, sometimes, if I’m playing like an unpopular girl or someone who doesn’t really get it. I don’t go out for those much, though. Mimi gets mad when Holly sends me out on character roles.”

Holly—Holly Jensen—was Bethy’s agent, too. And those, Allison’s reject roles, were the ones Bethy was sent on.

The girl had gotten up and was rummaging around in her bag, pulling out a can of Red Bull. Ruth didn’t approve of energy drinks, especially for children. “We don’t let Bethany drink those,” she said, watching Allison bring the drink back to the sofa.

“Really?” The girl looked at her cheerfully. “God, we live on them.” She thought for a minute. “Last summer there was this kid at the Oakwood who had a nervous breakdown sort of thing. He was only sleeping like two hours a night for weeks, and then he started hallucinating, so his parents took him to this psychiatric clinic or something where they treat mentally ill people, and it turned out he’d been drinking like five Snapples
a day
. I mean, do you have any idea how much caffeine is in those things? Quinn Reilly—he’s another client—used to drink them, too, until Mimi made him stop because they sort of canceled out his Ritalin.” She fell back into the sofa cushions and sipped her Red Bull reflectively. “Anyway, we didn’t see the Oakwood kid after that. I think his parents made him go back to San Francisco or someplace. Which is pretty stupid, if you think about it, because it was
Snapple
. I mean, it’s not like it’s illegal.”

“Well,” said Ruth.

Chairs started scraping in the classroom. Allison hopped up. “Time for improv. I love improv.”

And just as suddenly as she’d arrived she skipped off again, leaving Ruth feeling strangely enervated. Mimi’s current clients’ headshots and résumés were stacked in labeled cubbies across the room and Ruth had originally thought about using her time alone to look through them, but the thought was suddenly repugnant. She put her head back and closed her eyes and thought about how talking with Allison had been like talking to another grown-up.

Ruth was exhausted by the time the Believability class ended. She got Bethany home and to bed, but of course once they
got
to bed, they were too tired and keyed up to fall asleep. It was eleven forty-five before Ruth heard Bethy’s breathing settle. Only then did she mouth in the general direction of the heavens the same prayer she’d been saying every night since they arrived:
Please God, shine on my Bethany and make her a star.

Chapter Two

O
N ANY GIVEN DAY
, M
IMI
R
OBERTS
T
ALENT
M
ANAGEMENT
represented anywhere from thirty-five to fifty child, teenage, and young adult actors, depending on Mimi’s mood and willingness to be pinned down. Her clients’ abilities ranged from execrable to extraordinary. The ones who were darling but couldn’t act auditioned for commercials and print; the ones who could act but weren’t cute went out for student films, infomercials, character roles, and lesser dramatic parts; the ones who were cute
and
could act were sent out for everything: commercials, infomercials, industrials, public service announcements, student films, TV episodics (both dramatic and comedic), indie shorts, and feature-length movies.

At the epicenter of Mimi Roberts Talent Management was Mimi herself. Sixty-one, childless, and unmarried, she was as tough and canny as an old cat in the night. A skilled campaigner, she drew her clients, helpmates, and resources out of thin air, making it all up as she went along. Because she was chronically cash-strapped (though there were some who believed she had hundreds of thousands of dollars salted away), she lived in a never-ending state of barter, shilling for her poorer clients by digging a little more deeply into the pockets of her wealthy ones, though of course she’d flatly deny that, if pressed.

Mimi doubted there was a soul left in Hollywood who’d remember now, but she’d come to LA as a young actor herself way back when, full of the certainty that the world was waiting just for her. She’d come to LA from upstate New York on a Greyhound bus with nothing but eighty-five dollars and four changes of clothes. What they didn’t understand—what no one outside Hollywood ever understood—was that she’d
had
to come, to meet what she was sure was her future. She was plain now, and she’d been plain then, too, though quite a few pounds thinner. She’d also been realistic; she knew she would never become a leading lady, especially not in those days, when leading ladies had tidy hair and elegant hats and Daughters of the American Revolution credentials and just the right balance of self-confidence and sass. Her plan had been to become a character actor, a sidekick like Vivian Vance, who’d made a career out of being Ethel Mertz.

But of course it hadn’t worked out that way. At any given moment there wasn’t really much difference between a drifter and an actor looking for work. She’d gotten a few small roles, uttered the occasional line, delivered the odd voice-over, but her voice tended to be unmodulated and her acting, while serviceable, didn’t have a thing to separate her from thousands of others. She couldn’t pinpoint the precise day and moment when she realized she was screwed, but once she did, her next move had presented itself like pure kismet.

She’d been living in a West Hollywood apartment building as shabby as an old shoe, sharing a dank apartment with an unwed young mother out of Kansas named Susan, who modeled lingerie and turned the occasional trick while she waited for her big acting break. Her daughter was a three-year-old named Lucy, who had a high, clear voice, silky blond curls, and a darling space between her two front teeth. Mimi often took care of her while Susan was working, in return for which Susan cooked. One day, Mimi brought Lucy along with her to an audition. The audition itself—what had it been for? A digestive aid of some kind, she thought—had gone badly, but there had been another audition in the same casting suite for children Lucy’s age. On a whim Mimi signed Lucy in, gave the name of her own agent as Lucy’s, and said they’d forgotten her headshot but wouldn’t the casting assistant’s Polaroid shot do for now? With young children, then as now, rules were more bendable, and that time had been no exception. Mimi accompanied Lucy into the audition room and saw exactly what she’d expected: on camera, the child had the presence of an angel.

“Honey, is she yours?” the casting director had asked her.

“I manage her,” Mimi had lied, and why not? Managers needed no credentials, no certification. All you had to do was say you
were
a manager to
be
a manager. Lucy had booked the commercial on the spot.

“Well, you’ve got a keeper there, but you probably know that already,” the casting director had said, and he was right.

Susan had been thrilled, and Mimi had kept fifteen percent of everything Lucy earned—the standard manager’s commission—which had turned out to be substantial. It turned out that Mimi had a talent for picking a child with star potential out of any crowd. In her experience, it was a rare parent who turned her away when she approached him or her at a mall or farmers’ market with her card extended—

MIMI ROBERTS, OWNER

MIMI ROBERTS TALENT MANAGEMENT

MANAGING THE CAREERS OF
SUCCESSFUL YOUNG HOLLYWOOD ACTORS

—and said, “I couldn’t help noticing your son. Has he ever acted or been in a commercial before?” By the end of the conversation Mimi had an appointment to see the parent and child in her studio. The parent was generally goofy with pride and Mimi had a new client with the looks for commercials, at least, and with a little luck and training, some went on to theatrical roles as well. Her own acting ambitions blew away before the winds of solvency and now, when she read the second character in scripts for her showcasing clients, she made no attempt to act at all, but used as flat a voice as possible, so that even a minimally talented child would shine by comparison.

But the children got older, whereupon they tended to outgrow their looks or their talent, or Mimi and the parents had a falling out, or the parents got cocky and believed they could manage the child’s career, sending Mimi a terse handwritten note or e-mail informing her that the child would be moving on. A few of the kids went on to hit the big time and most did not; but either way, there were a hundred more waiting for Mimi in the provinces, especially once she started her now-famous boot camps for young actors, housing ten or twelve kids for a ten-day intensive course in auditioning and acting for the camera. And since her specialty was bringing in actors from out of town, the boot camps had inevitably led to longer-term housing for kids whose parents wanted them to stay on, until at any given time she had three or four living under her roof. She used to house boys and girls, but six months ago there had been an incident with Quinn Reilly, her boy resident, so now she housed only girls, and except during boot camps, she had a hard-and-fast cutoff age of thirteen.

Except, of course, for Allison Addison. Allison was a once-in-a-lifetime find, a child who had the looks, the strength, the talent, and the drive to go all the way to the top. Mimi had discovered her three and a half years ago at a seminar she’d given in Houston as a favor when the talent manager who’d put the event together had come down with the flu. Allison had been sitting in the back of the room, small for her age and delicately, even crushingly, beautiful. Mimi had held her breath all that morning while she taught the kids about slating and believability and cold reads and camera angles, until it was time for each one to receive a script from an actual commercial and be put in front of a video camera. One awful child after another got up to read and Mimi pretended to pay attention, but all she was doing was waiting, teasing herself by keeping Allison for the very end.

And the girl had stood up and smiled and given her name and read through her script fluently, comfortably, utterly believably, like she’d been born to it. Only then did Mimi exhale, feverishly plotting how she could get this child broken loose to come to LA. The mother had turned out to be a back-combed, skinny-hipped, big-busted, leathery-tanned woman with the eyes of a drinker, whom Mimi felt sure had put the girl in the seminar just to keep her out of the way for the weekend. And she hadn’t been far off the mark in her assessment. When Mimi had taken her aside the woman had drifted all over the place, her attention on the quality of her manicure, the size of her diamond, the smoothness of her recently waxed legs. Which had all been fine with Mimi. In the old days, women like this had given their kids up to the circus for a song. By the end of the weekend she had gotten the mother to agree to fly Allison out to LA the following week for a meeting with a couple of talent agents. Three weeks later, Allison was ensconced in Mimi’s back bedroom, and for the most part she’d been there ever since.

It was possible—and Mimi hated to admit this, even in the privacy of her own head—that when it came to Allison, her judgment was cloudy. Mimi had never had a child of her own. Many years ago she’d thought about it, but she hadn’t wanted to bring up a child alone, and there hadn’t been a man in her life—or a woman, for that matter—in years and years. Her own mother had raised Mimi on her own, and although Mimi was grateful to her, of course, she’d always thought her mother would have been much better off without her. It was bad enough to be poor alone, but how much worse to drag a child along with you. That was a whole different shade of awful: the yearly struggle to put something under the Christmas tree and make it look like the gift came from you and not a charity; birthdays that were undercelebrated; pretty clothes and music lessons you couldn’t afford, not to mention regular dental care and meals that were more protein than starch. Those were the colors of the poverty rainbow, at the end of which there was nothing but an empty pot because somebody had gotten to the gold long before you showed up.

A
LLISON KNEW SHE WAS BEAUTIFUL; SHE’D LEARNED IT
early from her mother, Denise, who was, like God’s final rough draft, nearly beautiful but still flawed—her eyes were a little too close together; her cheekbones were flatter, even crushed-looking in a certain light. “You’ve got looks, baby,” she’d told Allison when Allison was nine years old. “Work it, because it’s your ticket out.” That had been before her mother had met Chet-the-Oilman. After Chet, whom she’d met when Allison was not quite eleven, her mother had treated Allison like the competition. She’d been apologetic about it, too: “Honey, I know you can’t understand this but I’ve got to keep him because he’s my last chance.” Allison did understand, at least in a way, because she could feel Chet’s eyes on her all the time. Maybe her mother could feel it, too. In any event, her mother drank a lot more once he was in the picture, and she had this new laugh that sounded like it could turn any minute into a long, thin scream.
You’ve got looks, baby. Work it.
Allison guessed her mother was working it, too, only she was playing for higher stakes.
It’s your ticket out.

Allison hadn’t been sure what her looks were her ticket
to
until she came to LA to live with Mimi. Now she knew. She was going to be a star, someone even parking lot attendants would recognize and get nervous around. She was going to be not just famous but
ultra
famous—she’d be the face of Revlon or Chanel or whoever it was that Nicole Kidman or Drew Barrymore worked for. She would wear pearls as big as marbles and pose in front of a fan that would blow her hair back in glamorous slow motion, and the whole world would admire her because she’d be exquisite and privileged and could rent a yacht in Cannes or the Caribbean any time she felt like it. She’d go to the best spas and fashion shows and premieres, and doormen would fall over themselves to help her and she’d laugh all the time because she wouldn’t have a single worry in the world,
that’s
how famous she’d be.
Vanity Fair
would want her on its cover, and Annie Leibovitz would take her picture.

Allison knew that Mimi knew she was going to be famous, because Mimi was the one who was going to make that happen. She told Allison all the time that Allison had what it took, and that that was rare. Allison knew Mimi was serious because when Allison’s mom was late with the monthly check, which she was almost all the time, and Mimi had to threaten to send Allison home, she made a point of telling Allison she wouldn’t really do it, it was just her way of shaking loose what she had coming to her—though Allison knew there was no reason for her mom being late with a check, now that she’d landed Chet. Mimi celebrated Allison’s birthdays with cake and a party, which Allison’s mother had hardly ever done because she could never get organized, and she took Allison shopping if she needed something for an audition and let her try on things even if they weren’t on the sale rack. She got her to the dentist every six months like clockwork, because when Allison first got to LA she’d had fifteen cavities and hadn’t seen a dentist since she was eight. Allison and Mimi fought all the time about homework and chores and having to share her room with other kids, but when it came down to it, Allison was pretty sure that Mimi loved her, and she was pretty sure she loved her back.

A
T NINE FORTY-FIVE ON
M
ONDAY MORNING
, M
IMI PULLED
out of her driveway in her Honda Civic. The car was the latest in a line of junkers Mimi traded as freely as baseball cards. A lifelong asthmatic, she turned up the car’s feeble air-conditioning and pulled an inhaler out of her bag. There was a smog inversion—again—throughout the San Fernando Valley. Mimi puffed the inhaler into her lungs, breathed deeply, and felt no relief whatsoever. She looked at the prescription on the side of the canister. Its use-by date was eight months ago. She threw it on the passenger seat, where it hit a small can of Cheez Whiz, rolled onto the floor, and disappeared under the seat.

In the studio parking lot Mimi pulled into her usual spot by the Dumpster and extricated herself with some difficulty from behind the wheel. She was fat and she was tired. She’d been carving a living out of the granite face of Hollywood for nearly forty years, and they’d taken their toll. A long time ago she’d been mentored by a talent manager who’d told Mimi if she wanted to succeed, she needed to develop, above all else, the sensibilities of a killer. “You’re at war, honey, and don’t ever forget it. A talent manager is in a constant battle between goods and services, where you’re the services and your client’s the goods, and neither one can stand without the other, which is why they are going to hate you so much and you’re going to hate them. Regrettable but true. And if you’re smart, you won’t get attached to anyone and you won’t let them get attached to you. Otherwise when they go down in flames—and believe me, they will go down in flames—it’s only a question of when and whether they’ll take you with them.”