Lately I’ve been painfully aware of the fact that I had to find something that was just for me. The way my mother keeps telling my retired father, “Get a hobby or you’ll die, Thomas.” And that’s why I campaigned to get elected to the board of the twins’ school, and became co-chair of the school’s country fair, and a few months ago I accepted the presidency of my neighborhood committee.
Recently the big issue we dealt with in the neighborhood committee was how to stop the damned production companies from filming on our streets all the time. The location scouts love our area because it’s always so picture-perfect, but they block our driveways with their big trucks and the mobile dressing rooms. The noise pollution is awful, and the kids can’t play outside their own homes. Everyone, including me, was really eager to see them stopped. So I initiated a petition for everyone in a radius of a few blocks to sign, and we worked out a whole system of how to prevent the film crews from coming here so often.
What I’m saying is, I am occupied with things other than just the occasional interview. And when I do get one, I try very hard to put it in perspective, but I always walk in with a colossal chip on my shoulder, thinking, Why are they making me audition for this? I have miles and miles of film they can look at. They can screen every episode of every show I’ve ever done and spare me the humiliation of humbling myself by sitting in front of a group of yawning people and reading lines I could say even in my sleep. But they never do.
A few months ago, I went in to read for an advertising agency casting a series of national spots for a new car. I was hoping it would turn into the kind of thing Lindsay Wagner does for the southern California Ford dealers. A spokeswoman, with an ongoing relationship to the product, in a very classy kind of showing.
Well, in spite of my bad attitude, I got to the casting office, and everyone there couldn’t have been nicer and more respectful. The director was someone I’d worked for years ago, and he came over and gave me a big hug, and the man from the agency was there, and he said, “This meeting today is just a formality, you’re the one we wanted for this, and all we really wanted to do today was say hi.”
I walked out of there feeling absolutely great. They sent me straight to wardrobe and the clothes were wonderful and I was all psyched up to shoot on Friday. When I got home, there was a message on my machine from Harry, my agent, saying they were paying me top dollar, and the shooting schedule would arrive that night. It was going to be an A plus experience all around.
When the messenger arrived with my shooting schedule, I told the twins I got a job, and they were thrilled for me. They gave me high fives and said they wanted to come on the set and watch me the way they always did with their dad. Once I overheard Sarah talking to a little friend of hers who came over to our house to play. The other girl said to her, “I know your dad is Billy Mann, who has that TV show. But what does your mom do?” And Sarah answered, “She goes on interviews.”
At last one paid off.
I didn’t even open the envelope with the shooting schedule in it until after dinner, and when I did, I laughed out loud. The commercial was shooting on Friday morning at eight A.M. and the location was Albermarle Street. The street that runs perpendicular to mine. I could walk to work. I live two houses from Albermarle Street.
Then I remembered. My God! The neighborhood committee! After all we worked on about putting a stop to the filming around here. There would be hell to pay if this production company got a permit to shoot on Albermarle Street. There was no doubt they’d have to have the shoot moved somewhere else or get into a big brouhaha with the committee. My committee! But what if the production company won the battle, and the angry neighbors looked out their windows to see that the star of the commercial they were fighting was me? Their own president?
It was insane that of all the streets in this city they picked Albermarle. It had to be some kind of cosmic lesson to me. A moment in time meant to teach me something. Maybe how to deal gingerly with things instead of always pulling on my army boots and marching in with guns blazing.
I decided I was going to be very diplomatic. I’d call the producers and tell them that because of my ironic position as both president of the neighbors committee and star of the commercial, I was in a position to warn him that the neighbors would be hostile to them, and they ought to try and find a different location, or end up in an unnecessary battle. The solution seemed pretty simple. They could just change the location of the shoot, and the neighbors would never be the wiser.
In the morning I called the production office. And the same receptionist who I’d met on the interview treated me as if she were an immigrant arriving at Ellis Island, and I was the Statue of Liberty. “Oh yes, Miss Bennet, so nice to talk to you.” She told me her boss was out, but I gave her the lowdown to give him on the neighborhood committee and why he should change the shoot to somewhere besides Albermarle Street. And at about eleven, while I was in the garden, I heard my phone ring, so I ran in.
It was the producer of the car commercial. He was ever so sweet, and frankly I felt a little guilty being in cahoots with him and warning him about the neighbors, but my mother always taught me that the best choice is the one that blesses the most people, and I knew I was doing what was good for everyone concerned. He seemed very grateful for the tip, and he said he’d get back to me with the new location. That was Wednesday. I never heard a word all day. All day Thursday went by, too.
Finally, at about five on Thursday, I called the producer’s office, and the machine picked up because they were gone for the day, so I called my agent Harry’s office to see if maybe my new shooting schedule and revised script had gone to his office by mistake, instead of coming to me. Harry’s secretary sounded kind of tense when she heard it was me, and after a minute she put Harry on the line.
“Marly,” he said in a very solemn voice, “I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but you’ve been released.”
“I’ve been what?”
“Released. From the car commercial. They’re not using you.”
I felt sick. I’d been one thousand percent sure this time. There was no doubt that I was the only one they wanted for the commercial. “Why not?” I asked him. “What happened?”
“They said they decided not to go ahead with you, because you were being difficult.”
Difficult? The word stuck in my chest. Difficult? I couldn’t believe it. Now you all know that I have had reasons in my life for being called difficult. Sit-ins where I’ve been removed by police officers, marches where I’ve carried the banner right up the lawn of the White House. Which one of you was it that peeled me off President Reagan at that luncheon when I wanted to kill him for his silence about AIDS? That was when I was difficult. This was not.
I had worked at handling this conflict with a ladylike suggestion to make the producers’ lives easier on the shooting day. Well, now I was so enraged I threw the phone across the room and did what I always do when I’m frustrated and crazed. I cleaned out closets. In one downstairs cupboard in the family room, I found a bunch of old photo albums of Billy and me with the twins when they were toddlers, and I think I probably sat there for two hours crying over every picture.
On Friday morning when I got into the car to drive the twins to school, we couldn’t make a left turn onto Albermarle Street because the trucks from the commercial shoot were blocking our way. I was about to make the right turn, but naturally I couldn’t help it, and I looked left to see what was happening. I won’t even discuss the fact that my impotent little committee, including me, hadn’t done a thing to put a stop to it. What really hurt like hell was to see that standing next to a shiny red car was an actress having her face powdered by a makeup man, and from the back she looked actually like me.
I guess I must have been sitting there staring for a long time, because all of a sudden I was looking into the face of one of those rent-a-cops who work on those sets. And he leaned into my car window and said, “Sorry, lady. You can’t make a left turn here. We�
�re shooting a commercial for a car, so you can’t drive down this street.”
“Mom,” Jenny asked me. “weren’t you supposed to be in a commercial for a car today?” I knew I would have to tell the twins what happened, but I couldn’t figure out how I could possibly explain it. How could I teach two adolescents that honesty doesn’t pay? I wasn’t moving yet, and the officer was getting miffed.
“I told you, no left turn, lady,” he said to me nastily.
Difficult, difficult, difficult. No, I would prove to myself that I had control. Not me. I would release the angst into the white light the way my yoga teacher tells me to when we’re doing our deep relaxation work. I would breathe into my spine and breathe out with love.
“Thank you, Officer,” I said, and miraculously I didn’t run him over. I simply made a right turn and headed for school. “There was a misunderstanding between me and the producers of the commercial,” I heard myself saying to the twins, “so I didn’t get the job after all.” But they’d already lost interest in my plight and were chatting about someone in their class.
After I dropped them off, I called my manicurist from the car phone and she’d just had a cancellation, so I went in and got my nails done. And then I did several errands, hardware store, nursery for some new plants, and then I stopped and did a little grocery shopping. When I got home and put everything away, I noticed there was a message on my machine, so I played it back and it was Harry saying, “Get over to Goldstar Casting right away and see Delia Katz. It’s for a big national spot and they asked for you, and look gorgeous because they want an elegant mature woman, and that’s you.”
I tried not to react to the word mature, and called Harry’s office to get more information, but a machine answered and I realized they were probably all at lunch. Delia Katz has used me several times before. You remember her? She’s a tough little New York type with that street accent, who doesn’t mince words. I once heard her tell some darling character actress, “Yer lookin’ like a fat cow. Take off the weight or yer dead.”
Look gorgeous, I thought. Dear God. I was in my white sweats, and at that moment I didn’t know if I had any gorgeous left to look. I tried calling Goldstar Casting and asked for Delia Katz, but she was at lunch. I asked for her secretary, but she was out, too. The receptionist said they’d be back at two.
It was one o’clock, so I decided to hurry up and shower, wash my hair, put on my makeup, and just be at the casting office at two when they got back from lunch. While I was putting on eye liner, I realized my hand was shaking. I was nervous. I’ve been acting for thirty years and I still get nervous before I go up for one of those things.
I’d only driven three blocks when it started raining. I couldn’t believe it. It hadn’t rained in months. All anyone talked about was how Los Angeles was in a drought, but on this day when I had to look gorgeous, it was pouring. So by the time I got out of the parking lot and into Delia Katz’s office on Melrose, all the pouf was out of my hair. I didn’t have a mirror, but I could feel that my makeup was already that kind of muddy it gets when the weather’s very damp.
It was one of those tiny reception areas, some shabby little chairs around the room and some old trade papers on an end table. There was a receptionist’s desk, but nobody was sitting there. In fact there wasn’t a sign of anyone. I was glad. That meant this wasn’t a cattle call. It always feels so eerie when I open the door to one of those places and look into the faces of ten other actresses who look just like me.
Well, as I said, on this day no other actresses were there, and I was glancing around to see if there was a mirror so I could check the condition of my hair, when the door from one of the offices opened, and Delia Katz herself emerged.
I was wearing very high heels and she was wearing completely flat shoes. And you remember what she looks like? With that frizzy yellow hair? And too much makeup, as if she was wishing she was one of the actresses. Very chunky and so short she was looking right into my belt buckle. I said, “Hi, Delia,” expecting she’d give me a big hello, but she looked up at my face and there was no recognition in her eyes at all.
It was very strange. For a minute I felt like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. Remember that scene when he finds out what the world would be like if he’d never been in it, and he sees his friends and nobody recognizes him, and even his own mother slams the door in his face?
“It’s Marly Bennet,” I reminded her, figuring she’d had a memory lapse about my name, which happens to the best of us, particularly at this age. And she is about our age, I mean she’s been around for years. I remember when she first started out, forever ago, at Screen Gems. Besides, she had to recognize me, since according to Harry’s messages, she was requesting me for the commercial. But still her expression showed nothing. “Harry Berman said you were looking for me,” I tried.
Her response was to look at her watch, then back at me. “Yeah, I was, Marly Bennet,” she said, kind of sing-songing my name. And her face, which isn’t too pleasant to begin with, had the nastiest little expression on it I’d ever seen. “Do you know what time it is?” She asked me, out of pursed lips that made her look like the Wicked Witch of the West.
Well, all of a sudden it was as if I’d never lived the forty-nine years I’ve lived. As if I wasn’t a well-respected actress for years, a pillar of the community. I felt as if I was a bad child being scolded for something, and I didn’t know what. And I was so shocked that a little funny voice came out of my face, and I said to this Mammy Yokum of a woman, “Oh. Uh. Time it is? Well, let’s see. Is it… two uh? I mean, I…”
“It’s two o’fuckin’ clock,” she bellowed up at me. “I called your agent at nine o’clock this morning. Where were you this morning? At ten o’clock? At eleven o’fuckin’ clock?”
“Me? Oh, I was… well, at eight I was dropping my girls off at school and…”
“Yeah, well if you want to have a life and work in this business,” her nasty, mean, contorted mouth informed me, “you better go out and get yourself a beepah.”
“A what?” I asked, leaning forward because I thought I’d misheard her. But it was the New York accent. A beepah.
“A beepah,” she sneered. “Holy Christ! Even my teenage daughter has a beepah.”
A beeper. She was telling me that if I wanted to have a life of my own and still be in commercials, I had to go out and get set up with the thing that Andy wears to tell him that his patients are in a life-and-death situation, so he can rush to their aid. A device which, when it goes off in Rose’s house, means that a human life is in danger. Not that there’s a part available in some goddamned meaningless television commercial.
“I cast that part at twelve-fifteen, and I closed the deal before I went to lunch,” she said, twisting the knife. And then without a “good-bye,” or a “sorry,” she walked past me into one of the other offices in the suite, while I stood there in my now flat hair and my sticky, overpainted face and my best white silk suit, which was spotted from the rain. And after a minute or two of digesting what had happened, I turned and walked out the door into the rainy day.
I just walked slowly and miserably to my car, even though the raindrops were pelting down on me. I guess I was hoping it would look as if the raindrops were causing what were now big mascara tracks down my cheeks. I was furious at myself. What in God’s name was wrong with me? I couldn’t let another incident like that go by. I couldn’t let that woman get away with that behavior. My entire body was throbbing when I turned and walked back into the casting office and called her name.
“Delia,” I called out in my biggest Carnegie Tech voice.
“Yeah?”
“I want to talk to you, right now.”
“Well, you’ll have to wait, I’m on the Ameche,” she hollered back out, meaning she was on the telephone, because Don Ameche once played the part of Alexander Graham Bell and that’s a cute thing some people like to call the phone. Well, the cuteness made me even surer I was doing the right thing by comin
g back and confronting her.
“Then get off it,” I said. My heart was banging, and I walked into that little office right to where she was sitting, ripped the phone out of her hand, slammed in into the cradle, and said, “And listen to what I’m going to say.”
Her face was fuchsia when she looked up at me. “Hey, who the fuck do you think you are?” she said, but I was sure there was a little flash of fear in her eyes.
“No, Delia,” I said. “The better question would be who the fuck do you think you are? Because all of the evidence up to now has it that you’ve been behaving like a nasty, odious little drunk-with-power troll. Not just to me but to every actor in this business. And I need to know why you think it’s okay to turn your condescending sneer on actors who need the work, want the work, count on you to understand them, and have to prostrate themselves in front of you while you strut around here acting as if you have some talent superior to ours.”
“Get a grip, Marla,” she said, getting my name wrong on purpose. “I can ruin you.”
“No you goddamn well can’t. You can’t ruin me because I have mental health and a wonderful life and children who love me and friends who are there for me and confidence in my talent. My wellness is what has enabled me all these years to be able to tolerate walking into a room of people like you who want to demean and criticize people like me. A bunch of idiotic flea brains like yourself who think they have to say something in a meeting to prove their high-paying, no- talent-required jobs, so they say something negative. People like you destroy all the good in this business.”
“Hey, you were late. It’s not my problem,” she tried, but I was on a roll.
“Terrified sycophants who are feeding off the talented people. Little leeches who are so panicked that someone will realize one day that they have zero to contribute and fire them, so their fears come out in lousy behavior to everyone around them. And you know what I’ll bet, Delia? I’ll bet all of that pent-up hate you have has collected at the top of your head and it’s what’s keeping you so short and twirpy.”
Show Business Kills Page 17