Even after all these years, it still hurt that her grandmother had packed all her belongings into boxes the week she went away to nursing school. Mary Jane could never bring herself to go through the boxes of old clothes, clippings, yearbooks, and memories, but she still resented her grandmother for erasing all signs of her presence. The resentment lingered now, even after the old woman was dead.
Mary Jane wrapped a robe around herself for warmth, closed the bedroom door behind her, and walked down the worn wooden stairs, her stockinged feet making shushing sounds as she moved. For a moment, in the silence between steps, she could almost hear Snowball, her old black cat, walking at her side, thumping down the steps to join her at her lonely breakfast, his tail swishing back and forth in excitement. That cat—long dead—had been her only comfort growing up. Now Midnight was her only friend back in New York. Well, she told herself, not much has changed.
She walked into the kitchen and looked around at the chaos, resenting her grandmother even more for her slovenly ways than for the poverty of spirit that engendered them.
She picked up the coffeepot from the stove, filled it with cold water and coffee, and placed it on the flame. She waited for it to percolate while she recovered from the effort, seated at the stained white-enamel table, her chin in her hands. Her eyes swept the mean room, coming to rest on the stack of empty soup cans off in one corner. The shelf over the cracked porcelain sink held a few chipped plates and mugs from the five-and-ten; the wallpaper was faded and bulging in spots, probably from the many leaks the house regularly sprung each spring. The green-and-brown-enameled stove stood on six metal legs, the surface dark from layers of grease untouched for years. The linoleum was worn through before the sink and the stove, exposing older, tattered linoleum and the gray splintering wood underneath.
She looked out the grimy window at the steel-gray day, and the other pieces of the day before began to slip into her consciousness. The funeral, the burial. The few people in the church were there out of neighborliness, even though Mary Jane’s grandmother had been anything but neighborly. Only one other person made it to the grave, Mrs. Willis, Grandma’s closest neighbor, who lived a mile away.
After hearing the first thud of dirt from the shovel hit the cheap, unfinished pine box, Mary Jane had settled the bill with Mr. Robinson and gotten back in the rental car she couldn’t afford. She drove Mrs. Willis back home. Then she returned to the desolate farmhouse. Yes, and had a drink.
And another. And another. And cried. At least I cried, she thought, as she poured out the coffee. But I didn’t cry for my grandmother. I cried for me. And then, she admitted, she’d walked into her grandmother’s room and taken every pill on the nightstand, washing the whole collection down with the Chivas she’d brought with her from New York. She planned never to wake up, never to face another bleak morning. Because at thirty-four she knew she had had her shot—an important part, a special man—and it was over. If a fat, plain actress couldn’t make it by thirty-four, should she expect it would be better at forty-six? At fifty? I’ve ended my great expectations, she thought.
But her suicide obviously hadn’t worked. The irony of it—a nurse who couldn’t find the right prescription for suicide! There had been a lot of pills, then the rest of the Chivas. Then, at last, blessed unconsciousness, unconsciousness that she hoped was permanent.
But she’d awoken to this: the ugliness and filth of herself and her surroundings. This is what I came from, and, despite all my work, this is all I am. Trash from trash.
There wouldn’t be another Sam, or another part like Jill, or another friend like Neil, or another theater group like the troupe. She sat at the table, too sick, too tired even to cry. She remembered the Dorothy Parker suicide poem and added a stanza of her own:
Pills taste awful;
Vomit stinks;
But I’ve had a crawful—
The suicide thinks.
The coffeepot began to bubble as she walked into the pantry to look for something she could eat to calm her sick stomach. Saltines, maybe. She surveyed the contents of the shelves, mostly squat mason jars containing the dried peas and beans and preserved vegetables her grandmother had religiously put up every year but never used. Rows and rows of aged tomatoes and carrots and string beans. The short wall of the room held perishables, each tightly enclosed in a baggie with a red wire twist at its neck. Her eyes fell on some crackers; she knew that this was the only solid food she could manage. She took the plastic-bagged box from the shelf, untwisting the tie as she walked back to the littered kitchen table.
She poured a cup of the coffee, reached into the box of crackers, and removed the opened portion. She bit into one tentatively, tasted its mustiness, spat it out, and pulled out one of the other waxed-paper sleeves. She was about to open it when she noticed it was already unsealed at the wrong end. Through the opaque wrapper, she saw something. Something grayish-green.
A mouse? She almost dropped the packet, but it didn’t move, and she looked more closely. No. Not a mouse. Mary Jane tore open the wrapping and sucked in her breath. A rubber-band-wrapped bundle rolled onto the table. Mary Jane stared down at it for a moment before she croaked the word out loud.
“Money!”
The bills had been so tightly rolled, it took her some time to get them unfurled and laid out in denominations on the table: all $637. The shock of the discovery forced her to sit back in the creaking chair. Where had this come from? For an instant, she wished her grandmother had known about the money, then realized the truth…her grandmother had put it there!
Oh, no, Grandma, she thought. Why? What did you hope to do with this money? Then, at last, Mary Jane cried for the crazy old woman, mourning her grandmother’s missed opportunity of spending this money, which Mary Jane guessed must have taken a lifetime to save.
As her tears abated, she sipped her now lukewarm coffee, trying to think. How long had it taken the old woman to save over six hundred dollars on her egg money, her vegetable sales, her Social Security? Mary Jane wondered.
She realized she had never thought about her grandmother’s finances before. She’d always accepted the fact that they were dirt-poor. Grandma had told her over and over how she, Mary Jane, lived out of Grandma’s charity—“when I haven’t even enough for myself.” But was that the truth? Surely her grandmother had received Aid to Families with Dependent Children after Mary Jane’s mother had been killed and her father incapacitated. And hadn’t her grandfather, long dead, been with the railroad? Had there been a pension? What about the V.A.? Was there a pension from the army for her dad? It also had never occurred to her that her grandmother had made extra money from leasing out her grazing land to farmers. The belief was always that that rent was barely enough to pay the mortgage, but could there be more? And had the mortgage been paid off? Like a dreamer, waking up, she shook her head. It was probably a crazy idea, but Mary Jane stood, dropping the opened crackers to the floor. She walked to the pantry.
Mary Jane ripped open the other package of crackers. Nothing. Of course not; silly idea. Look at this place. Worse than Miss Havisham’s. Dust and cobwebs everywhere. Grandma was dirt-poor. But what if there is more? she thought. What else is in the pantry? In the house?
Trembling, she began to pick up each mason jar of vegetables, to study their contents through the dusty glass. Halfway down the row, the heft of one of the jars in the back was different. She returned to the kitchen, washed off the dirt, and looked. Hurriedly, she released the vacuum seal with effort, reached in, and removed a plastic-wrapped bundle: another roll of bills. Her heart thumping in her chest, her hands shaking, she counted out the money. Almost two thousand dollars.
She poured a fresh cup of coffee and slumped into the chair, her heart still pounding. More than two thousand dollars! And if there was this much, there was more.
Looking down at the growing stack of bills, Mary Jane knew with certainty: My grandmother never loved me. She took me in when my mother died and my father went into the V.A
. She was the only family I knew, but she never loved me. No wonder I always felt like a burden. She remembered, as a child, when she asked for something, as children do—money for the movies, candy, a toy—the words of her grandmother’s refusal. “No, can’t afford it, not now that there’s two mouths to feed. Now that I’m saddled with you.”
So she had soon stopped asking, and even stopped expecting. She expected nothing, and felt everyone was “saddled” with her, as if she were some unspeakable burden. And when she lost her scholarship because she’d had to take a night job while going to nursing school full-time during the day and her grades had dropped to B’s, she accepted without questioning what her grandmother had said: “Can’t help you out. I can barely feed myself.”
Mary Jane crashed her fist down on the table. The old woman had lied. Where had this money come from? What if there’s more? She stood up and looked around the room, at the ridiculous stack of empty soup cans that had been washed out and saved for no discernible purpose. She kicked at the pile, sending them clanking across the floor, kicking at each one, bouncing them off the walls, stomping on some as they rolled along the floor.
Goddamn you, Grandma. How could you? I was a good girl. How could you have withheld this money? How could you not have loved me, not even a little?
Mary Jane’s eyes fell to a bubble in the faded wallpaper over the sink. She reached out and felt a bulge and, now with purpose, took a knife and cut out the square. She peeled back the paper and exposed sheets of the kind of plastic found in photo albums. Through the shiny surface, Mary Jane saw the certificates. Bearer bonds. Old ones. She counted them. Eleven thousand dollars’ worth of bearer bonds!
She tore the house apart. It took her hours. The backs of pictures, the lining of upholstery, the floorboards, the rest of the preserves. In the freezer she found almost four thousand dollars frozen in an ice block. In the bathroom there was $760 in an old—a very old—Modess box. As she tore and smashed and cried, as she searched every inch of the filthy, nasty little shack she’d been forced to grow up in, she sobbed.
That night, Mary Jane picked up the bundle of cash and bonds, over sixty-seven thousand dollars’ worth, and started upstairs to her room. Her step was slowed by exhaustion from the search, from the anger, and from the tears. As she passed the thermostat at the foot of the stairs, she looked at the setting: sixty-five degrees, the highest her grandmother ever allowed it to be set. With a snap she pushed up the setting to seventy-five, and continued upstairs with her bundle, knowing that now, at least, she would be warm.
16
In twenty-five years of covering the Hollywood waterfront, I—Laura Richie—have learned one thing for sure: There are faces that the camera loves, personalities that come alive, project, expand under attention. It isn’t simply a question of looks, although being photogenic helps. But it’s much more than that, much rarer than that: Sophia Loren had it, Gina Lollobrigida did not. Gary Cooper had it, Gregory Peck did not. Burt Reynolds had it, Tom Selleck does not.
You can’t learn it, or practice it. It’s just there, like your breath. People want to watch you. You have an intrinsically riveting persona that plays on screen. How? Why? Nobody knows.
And it isn’t acting. There are some great actors who didn’t have it. Back in the thirties, the Schencks and Goldwyns and Warners called it “star quality. “It’s as good a term as any. And believe me, dear Reader, it’s as rare as, and more valuable than, a black diamond.
Lila pulled her old Mustang convertible into the parking space behind the low gray building in West Hollywood. She jumped out and, throwing her bag over her shoulder, walked quickly to the side entrance and up the flight of stairs, her red hair flowing in the breeze behind her. She could tell from the chattering voices that the door to the classroom was still open. I’m on time, she thought. Lila hated to be late for acting class. George Getz took perverse pleasure in singling out late arrivals and haranguing them about their responsibility to the “company,” as he called his pretty little collection of wannabes. Not that he could ever succeed in making Lila feel uncomfortable. On the contrary. George was usually so busy fawning over the daughter of Theresa O’Donnell that Lila felt like she might lose her lunch.
She looked around the cavernous, windowless room, at the gray-tweed carpeting that went halfway up three walls. Several stacks of putty-gray folding chairs were piled to one side. Next to them were mounds of soft cushions. One wall was entirely mirrored. Lila walked past a knot of young women who greeted her by name as she sailed by. Just like Westlake. She was still the popular girl, and it was still because she didn’t give a shit. She didn’t look in their direction, but gave a general hello as she opened the door to the ladies’ room. Inside, she pulled a brush through her silky red hair to get out the tangles caused by the wind lashing around her as she drove her convertible with the top down. Well, Ken’s convertible, actually. Aunt Robbie had talked Ken into lending it to her. She actually hated the Ford, and the maroon color clashed with her hair, but beggars couldn’t be choosy, so they said.
The door opened behind her and, in the mirror, she could see one of the young blonde women rush in. Bandie something, Lila thought, and turned her attention back to her own hair. She was friendly; they were all friendly, because once they had watched her mother and Candy and Skinny. Now they felt they knew her, and that maybe the famous Theresa O’Donnell would help them. Yeah, like she could help herself! Or her own flesh and blood!
“Oh, hi, Lila,” Bandie cooed as she dropped her bag on the table in front of the mirror and began to rifle through it. “Guess what,” she said. Not waiting for Lila’s reply, she continued, “I got a commercial. A national commercial!” Bandie applied the melon-colored lipstick she’d finally found. “I can’t believe it,” Bandie said. “There were sixteen callbacks, and I got it.”
“Congratulations,” Lila said. Even though money was a problem for her, she’d never do a commercial. Yet she knew that for one of her classmates to get a commercial was a big coup. The income from a national ad could go a long way toward easing the financial strain brought on by acting classes, elocution lessons, singing lessons, and dance classes. Not to mention clothes, cars, personal grooming, personal trainers, orthodontists, hair coloring, colonics, and a touch of the surgeon’s knife from time to time. But Bandie, like so many of the others, actually considered commercials real acting jobs. For most, Lila knew, it would be the closest thing to performing before the public that they would ever get. Lila shuddered. She’d never sell floor wax or douches on TV.
Lila remembered when her mother was asked to endorse some crap—a detergent or something—on television, with Candy and Skinny. Theresa had gone apeshit. “Stars don’t do laundry or TV commercials,” she had screamed at Ara Sagarian, her agent. Lila had heard many of Mother’s definitions of stars through the years, and filed all of them away. The Puppet Mistress was a manipulating bitch, a drunk, a pain in the ass, and a total nutcake, but she had been a star. And that is what Lila wanted to be, a star, someone who never carries cash; always arrives by limousine; never opens a door; doesn’t smoke in public; never refuses a request for an autograph; remembers everyone’s name; never wears a gown publicly more than once; addresses her directors as “Mister,” encourages others to address her as “Miss”; does not socialize with the technical crew; never makes her own reservations; shakes hands in greeting instead of kissing; calls her producers by their first names; has a secretary; never drives her own car unless it’s a fun one; has favorite charities; attends other stars’ performances; knows how to turn a man down without rejecting him; arrives late and leaves early; sits in the best seat at a party and waits for them to come to her; does not serve herself from a buffet table; knows how to read a contract; and is never offstage.
And that is what she aimed to be: a bigger star than her mother. So no fucking commercials.
She turned to Bandie. “What’s the product?” Lila asked pleasantly, like she cared.
“A premi
um bathroom tissue,” Bandie said with a look of triumph.
Deliver me, Lila thought. “Congratulations,” she said politely, and put her brush back in her bag.
“I called Mr. Getz immediately. He’s so proud of me.”
Great. Their acting coach was proud his student was selling ass-wipe. Lila sighed. Robbie had sworn that Getz had connections, and Lila had to start someplace. She went back out into the open room and dropped down onto one of the cushions. She looked around at the other participants and was struck once again by the number of beautiful men and women in the room. It was an L.A. cliché. They were a plague, these perfect-looking mannequins. Here assembled in one room was the handsomest boy from Debbins, South Dakota; Lake Winesha, Wisconsin; Portland Bay, Oregon; Charleston, West Virginia; Cudahy, Iowa; Woodbridge, Massachusetts; and Shreveport, Louisiana; as well as the most beautiful girl from Shadley, Mississippi; Goochland, Virginia; Barre, Vermont; Standish, Rhode Island; Black Springs, Ohio; and Enid, Oklahoma. Their looks had made them special, had been a passport out of the backwaters they’d crawled away from, but here in Hollywood even the best looks only guaranteed a waitressing job, a parking-valet job, a blow job. Lila shook her head.
A door opened at the end of the room and a paunchy man in his fifties entered, his long, gray hair pulled back into a pony tail. There was some hesitant clapping from a few of the recent enrollees, then silence as George Getz plopped heavily down on a cushion one of the students had brought for him. The semicircle re-formed around him. Only Lila didn’t move. Lila studied George as he sat cross-legged, poring over some notes. His paunch rested on his legs; his white, scrawny legs were like matchsticks extending out of his khaki safari shorts; black leather sandals shod his feet. He was wearing a faded, white “Save the Whales” T-shirt, which stretched across a distended stomach. His rimless glasses were thick, so his small eyes appeared open in amazement all the time.
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