Hell Is Other Parents

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  Alice exited first, and when she saw me standing behind the school fence, peering in at the sea of faces, she nearly smiled and waved. But then she spotted Inez, and her hand slunk down, and she walked over, slope-shouldered, to greet her mother.

  Sundance Stage Mother

  On the morning of his film’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, my son Jacob was escorted from a Park City, Utah, TV station, where he’d just been interviewed, into a white SUV waiting to drive him to a photo shoot for People magazine. “This is Jacob Kogan,” one of the film’s publicists said to the driver. “He’s the star of Joshua.” Gesturing toward me, she added, “Oh, and this is his mother? Manager?”

  “I’m his mother,” I said. “He doesn’t have a manager.” My son, at the time, was eleven; the film, his first. The only managing he normally requires, I have covered: pediatrician appointments, the occasional hot meal, a new pair of sneakers every six to nine months.

  The publicist rolled her eyes and slammed her door shut. “Whatever.”

  Our car made its way down Main Street, through the crowds of filmmakers, deal makers, and cinéastes, everyone dressed identically in denim and goose down. Jacob squeezed my hand for support, as if he were the parent protecting the child. He’d noticed how people reacted when I introduced myself as his mother, the way that they seemed, sometimes, to look through me. “My mom writes books,” he told the publicist.

  “Mm-hmm,” she replied.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I whispered to him. “It doesn’t bother me.”

  A few months before Joshua started shooting, a film director friend of mine tried to warn me: “You do understand that every single person on that set will hate you?” What could I say? I’ve read the tabloid tales of Macaulay Culkin’s estrangement from his parents, of Lindsay Lohan’s skirmishes with her jailed father and spotlight-seeking mother; I’ve seen the movie Gypsy. In the opening scene, a gaggle of stage mothers pounce on the theatrical agent, played by Karl Malden, demanding pink spotlights and special treatment for their cherubs. “Mothers, would you please get out! Get off the stage!” the theater owner bellows. Then the mother of all stage mothers, Rosalind Russell, blasts through the house doors, a bulldozer in leopard print, shouting, “Sing out, Louise! Sing out!”

  When people ask how my son got into acting, I take great pains to keep myself on the fringes of the narrative, which goes something like this: at the age of four, Jacob was asked by a casting agent, the mother of a child in his playgroup, to audition for a film by Lasse Hallström. Jacob made it to the final round of callbacks, one of only two boys still in the running, but then the other kid got the part, the film lost its financing, and it was never made. I was mostly relieved; my son was hooked. For the next three years, he begged to be allowed to audition for another film. I consulted my friend Fran, a child psychologist, who pointed out that if Jacob were demanding soccer lessons with such unrelenting fervor I would probably let him play. “It’s not about you anymore,” she said. “Seven is the age of reason. He knows what he wants.”

  I signed him up for musical theater lessons at the Y. I clapped loudly when he performed in his school play. But I drew the line at professional acting. He was too young, I told him. Then one day my husband, Paul, received a videotape in the mail. It was a copy of the 1971 film Telegramma, directed by Rolan Bykov, and starring Paul and his twin brother, George. Bykov has been called the Russian Truffaut, and the film was shown on Soviet television every winter, a sort of Communist-era It’s a Wonderful Life without the verboten religious undertones.

  Bykov was a friend of Paul’s mother, Raya, who was raising the twins in Moscow on her own. When Raya lost her job and became a refusenik after applying for asylum under Brezhnev, Bykov cast the boys in his film. (They shared a role.) I had never seen it. Neither had Jacob.

  “Look!” Paul said, pointing to the five-year-old boy peering out from the screen, the spitting image of his son. “That’s me! Or maybe it’s George, I’m not sure.”

  Jacob stood in front of the television, transfixed. He couldn’t understand a word of the dialogue, but he followed that little boy and his story all the way through the Cyrillic credits, where his father’s name, once expunged for the sin of emigration, had been reinstated. Then he turned around and stared at me, hard.

  “That was different,” I said. “Daddy had to act if he wanted to eat.”

  “Let him audition,” my husband said. “What’s the big deal?”

  So I relented. I sent off three snapshots of Jacob—which he’d picked out himself—to an agent, along with a passive-aggressive letter explaining that while my son wanted to be an actor, I thought it was a really bad idea, but if she wanted to try to convince me otherwise, we would be happy to meet with her.

  Six months later, Jacob and I flew to Los Angeles for his first callback, for a sitcom pilot. We sat in a crammed waiting room on the Paramount lot with three other boys, all of whom looked remarkably like Jacob: same neatly cut, light brown hair, same pale skin and soft features. All of the boys were accompanied by their mothers, and one had a manager in tow. When the manager found out we lived in New York, he tried to impress us. “My good friend Ally Sheedy lives in New York,” he said. “You know her?”

  The four boys eyed one another warily, then made their way into the center of the room to swap Game Boys. Three hours later, we were all still there, awaiting a decision, when the boys’ stomachs began to grumble. The manager stepped out for provisions and returned with two bags of groceries, which he proceeded to offer only to his client.

  “Those chips look good,” Jacob said.

  “They are,” the manager replied, ignoring the hint. I figured this was his way of showing us less-experienced stage mothers how much better off we’d be with him in our corner, like that sign near the Holland Tunnel that reads IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW.

  Finally, two of the boys, including Jacob, were told they’d be moving on to the Fox lot later that day for yet another round of callbacks. The other two would not. One of the boys who was eliminated was staying at the same hotel as Jacob and me, so I offered to drive him and his mother back there in the interim. He bawled in the backseat the entire ride. His mother sat in the passenger seat, lobbing tiny grenades of comfort and wisdom over her headrest. “It’s because you don’t have blue eyes,” she said, curtly.

  “But I wanted to get my handprints at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre!” the boy wailed.

  His mother remained silent.

  “Oh, sweetie,” I said, making contact with his unfortunate hazel eyes in the rearview mirror, “you have plenty of time to get your handprints in the cement in front of Grauman’s Chinese. You’re only eight! You have your whole career ahead of you.”

  “No!” he shouted. “Not in the cement. I wanted to get the handprints they sell at the gift shop!” He stared angrily at the back of his mother’s head and began to cry harder. “But my mother said I could only get them if I booked the part.”

  His mother turned to me. “Like I’d spend forty dollars on a set of handprints if he didn’t book the part.”

  I came home from that trip to LA resolved that Jacob could pursue his passion for acting only with four essential caveats: (1) no sitcoms, (2) no commercials, (3) no dumb films, and (4) no anything else that would ever have him relocating to Los Angeles. This left only independent features and New York–based shows like MTV2’s Wonder Showzen, a darkly funny sketch-comedy on which Jacob happily landed various recurring roles in the fall of 2004.

  In early 2006, when Jacob was ten, the director George Ratliff began casting for Joshua, a psychological thriller that he wrote with his friend David Gilbert. The film is about a wealthy Manhattan couple, the Cairns, whose lives take a dark turn when they bring home a new sibling for their odd—and oddly cold—piano prodigy of a son, Joshua. Ratliff had already cast Vera Farmiga and Sam Rockwell as Joshua’s parents, but he didn’t have anyone for the title role. So he asked his friend John Lee, one of t
he creators of Wonder Showzen, for a short list of names.

  When I got the call telling me Jacob had booked the part, I was walking home from my writing studio, standing by the trash can on the corner of Chambers Street and West Broadway. I remember the trash can because I was newly pregnant and suffering from morning sickness, and I was glad to have it nearby. But it was the news of Jacob’s new role that had my stomach churning. As excited as I was for him, I was mortified by what it would mean for me.

  Every mother has to grapple with dueling identities—I am Me; I am Someone’s Mother—but being a stage mother makes this conflict so explicit. After I left college, I spent a decade covering hard news, first as a war photographer, then as a television producer. After that, I turned to writing, publishing a book about those early experiences. Then I hit a five-year dry patch, during which I abandoned some six hundred pages of three partially written novels. I finished attempt number four just before my fortieth birthday. When it finally sold, after thirty-nine rejections—“Marketing wants to know if the mother could just kill herself and not her children”—it was for the exact amount that Jacob would be paid for twenty-five days of shooting Joshua.

  For the majority of stage mothers, the daily shuttling into the city from New Jersey or Long Island or Connecticut, or even as far away as southern Pennsylvania, becomes the full-time career they left behind. And as with any coworkers who’ve spent enough time together, clawing for scraps, strong bonds begin to form.

  While their progeny are busy checking out the sign-up sheets at the entrance (“Ooh, she’s the one who booked that Chuck E. Cheese’s commercial last week!”, the mothers gather on stiff chairs and badly upholstered couches to trade information: Did you sign him up for tap lessons yet? He’ll get nowhere without them. Oh, look who’s here! Mr. C.S.I. himself. I heard he booked that film with what’s-her-name, from Nickelodeon. No, we’re not driving back until six. I know the Lincoln Tunnel will be a nightmare at that hour, but Chloe’s got an audition for Law & Order at five. Don’t use that guy—a thousand dollars he charges, and our head shots all came out blurry.

  Sometimes I’d hide behind the screen of my laptop and tune it out. But most of the time I sat on those plastic chairs, my ears naked to the air, fielding questions from the other mothers—Who’s his agent? Does he have a manager? Where would I have seen him?—and counting the days until Jacob was old enough to travel on the subway by himself. And yet I knew when that day came, as it inevitably did, I’d miss certain aspects of the adventure—traveling back and forth to auditions, sneaking in a hot chocolate when time allowed, rehearsing lines at the kitchen table in our pajamas, trying to puzzle out a character’s motivations and, therefore, unwittingly our own.

  The production company faxed us a copy of the five-week shooting schedule for Joshua, and of course my baby was due in the middle of it. I called my father, who’d just retired, and asked him to be on standby as Jacob’s on-set guardian. I figured that I could handle the other responsibilities: taking Jacob to his daily rehearsals and to the intensive piano lessons required by the director, making appointments for his haircut, costume fittings, and the mandatory doctor’s exam.

  But my body had other ideas. My contractions began at thirty-one weeks, at which point I was hospitalized for several days, pumped full of terbutaline and various steroids for the baby’s lungs, and told, in no uncertain terms, that I was to stay in bed, where the painful contractions continued, unabated for many weeks, until baby Leo was born.

  A few hours after Leo took his first breaths, I was applying pressure to the geyser of blood that had sprung from my forehead during delivery—which a resident assured me was not a stigmata but something called a pyogenic granuloma, unless it was melanoma, but not to worry—when one of the producers of Joshua called my cell phone. “We need an infant to play the role of Lily,” he said. Lily is the new baby who wreaks havoc on the Cairn family, and the producer and I had joked—joked!—when he hired Jacob that if my baby were born early, he’d get a twofer.

  “But I’m still in the hospital.”

  “I know,” he said. But the youngest infants he could find were all three months old.

  Of course they were, I thought. What kind of a crazy mother would hand over a newborn to a film crew? “I’m sorry,” I told him, “I just can’t do it.” At three days postpartum, I reminded him, my milk would just be coming in, an unpleasant day under the best of circumstances. When my husband visited the set the next day and called to try to persuade me, I was more adamant. “You don’t seem to understand,” I said. “I’ve been contracting every five minutes for nearly six weeks straight, I can’t sit because of my stitches, and my forehead thinks we’re the Messiah.”

  He handed the phone to Jacob, who was taking a break from shooting a scene where he tries to push his new baby sister down the stairs of the Brooklyn Museum. “Please?” said my son. “It would mean a lot to me.”

  Please? It would mean a lot to me? I felt like I was on the soundstage of one of those sitcoms from which I’d barred Jacob from auditioning for. The only thing missing was the laugh track. And so, the next day, I left the real hospital with my swaddled son and took him straight down to the fake hospital where he would play a girl in a fake scene that my older son had just lived in real life—meeting his new baby sibling. (Insert laugh track here.) When we walked onto the set, the prop master asked if I would mind putting a clip on my premature baby’s umbilical stump, to make him look more authentically newborn. Since his real clip had just been removed at the real hospital that morning, I couldn’t see why he shouldn’t wear a fake clip at the fake hospital.

  When the scene was over, I tried to remove the clip from the end of my baby’s stump, but I couldn’t. By then the whole cast and crew had moved on to a different set, so there I sat, all alone, in increasingly severe postpartum pain, bleeding from the forehead, lactating all over my blouse, and pulling and tugging at a plastic clip that wouldn’t budge off my newborn’s now-oozing umbilicus. Luckily, the fake hospital set was on an abandoned floor of a real hospital, so I found my way to the real neonatal intensive care unit and banged on the door. “Can you please get this off?” I asked the nurse who answered the door, pointing to my son’s clamped stump.

  She looked completely confused. “Are you a patient here?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “I’m…” I couldn’t even say it: I’m a stage mother, and we’re on the set of a film, and I just got out of a different hospital this morning, and this is my newborn son, who’s playing the role of my eldest child’s baby sister in the fake hospital that’s part of your real one.

  “It’ll take too long to explain,” I said. “Can you do it?”

  “Of course,” she said. Umbilical cord clips are just like security tags in clothing stores, she told me; removing them requires special equipment. She would just have to locate a pair of clippers, and then we could be on our way.

  But we couldn’t leave, not yet, because Leo was needed for one more scene, this one with Vera and Sam cooing over him as Jacob looks on unhappily from afar. Several hours later, when the scene still hadn’t been shot, I handed my three-day-old son to a PA, told her to make sure everyone who came into contact with him used Purell, and found an empty hospital bed, onto which I collapsed. The next time I opened my eyes, Sam Rockwell was standing in my room, staring down at baby Leo asleep in his stroller, and whispering to Jacob.

  “Your mom’s a real trouper for coming out here today,” he said.

  “I know,” Jacob said. And I could tell that he meant it.

  Rockwell showed up at the end of the People shoot in Park City and swooped my son in his arms. “Hey, buddy!” he said, mussing up Jacob’s hair. “How do you like Sundance?” Sam doesn’t have children of his own, and he says he has no plans to do so, but his paternal moxie is palpable.

  He spent hours teaching Jacob how to do Meisner exercises, how to get inside the skin of a character through the repetition of meaningless phras
es (“You got a blue shirt?” “I got a blue shirt” “You got a blue shirt?” “I got a blue shirt.”) He bought him a copy of his favorite book on acting, The Intent to Live by Larry Moss, and taught him to dance to James Brown. He fretted over the scene where he had to beat my son in public, stopping every so often to make sure Jacob was okay. And the night the director came over to our apartment to show us a rough cut of the film, Sam insisted on sitting next to Jacob, holding his hand.

  “I haven’t really seen anything yet,” Jacob said. “Well, except the ski slopes from the car.” We’d arrived by taxi from the airport at midnight the night before and had been picked up at our condo at 7:00 A.M. for the morning’s publicity blitz.

  Finally, at 11:30 A.M., we were finished. And then we were dumped, unceremoniously, in the middle of Main Street. “You can find your way back to Deer Valley by yourselves, can’t you?” the publicist said. She needed the car to take Sam and Vera to another interview.

  “But I don’t know where our condo is,” I said. We’d left both Jacob’s homework and our hats in the car, and it was starting to snow.

  “Just take the shuttle,” the publicist yelled over her shoulder. Then she was gone.

  “I’m cold,” Jacob said. “And she has my Ender’s Game.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get us back. I’ll get your book back too.” I’d once commandeered a donkey to get myself out of the Hindu Kush: how hard could it be to get from Park City to Deer Valley? Just then, a taxi full of people passed by, with a telephone number painted across it: 1–800-649-TAXI. Feeling very smart and capable, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed. “Sorry, we’re out of taxis,” the dispatcher said and hung up.