“We should stay together,” Marly said. Rose was feeling cold in the blazing-hot day.
“Yes, stay together,” she said, relieved. She wouldn’t have known what to do if she was alone and suddenly looked into the eyes of Betty Norell.
Ellen didn’t have an idea or a plan, so after a minute she agreed. “Okay, we’ll stay together. First let’s walk, and look over the crowd and see if we spot her. The trams all look alike, but after a while they empty out down below at the centers where there are shops or rides or shows. Let’s try to figure out what she’d want to do here. I mean besides kill me? Not spend money, not go on rides, maybe see the makeup show? Or the stunt show?”
She was brainstorming. Rose recognized the style. Just the way she did sometimes with other writers. Nonstop talking on the subject, in the hope that somehow from the unconscious tumble of words a valuable idea would surface. “What attraction on the Hemisphere lot would interest a frustrated actress?” Ellen asked herself out loud. She stopped a passing red-jacketed tour guide. “Can you tell me what displays here are interactive? Which ones actually use people from the audience as part of the show?”
“Uh… well, let’s see…,” the young man said, thinking. “There’s makeup, they make you up as a monster, you ladies might enjoy that. Or, there’s the shooting match. They dress some of the folks in Western gear and they have a fake shoot-out with some of our stunt guys. And… oh yeah. There’s a real good one over at the looping and dubbing stage. Some of the people in that audience get to put on a headset and then put their voice to a star’s face, and then those guys play it back on the screen and it’s totally cool. You ladies might like that one. The only thing is, there’s a long line, so you might have to wait about fifteen minutes or so. But it’s worth it.”
“Thanks,” Ellen said, and hurried ahead with the others following close behind her.
They wove in and out of baby strollers and laughing teenagers and large groups of tourists with guides translating what they saw into their native languages. Actors dressed in costumes of Dracula and Frankenstein and King Kong romped past them, entertaining the noisy, boisterous throng.
On the Western street there was a large group of spectators, and all of them were looking up at a cowboy standing on the roof of an old western saloon. Then, from around the back of the saloon came a nervous-looking man, obviously a tourist volunteer, dressed in studio cowboy attire, designed to get a laugh, with the too-big hat and the chaps and a big silver star that said SHERIFF pinned to his barrel chest.
“Git your hands up, sheriff,” the cowboy on the roof called out, holding his gun on the little dressed-up man below. But the tourist, doing what he’d rehearsed, pulled the blank gun out of his holster and pulled the trigger. The man was so short and the stunt man so high up that when the shot rang out, the gun wasn’t even aimed at the stunt man.
Nevertheless the stunt man contorted his face, clutched his chest, fell to the roof, and then as the audience moved back gasping with horror, they watched him tumble off the roof to the ground in a brilliant fall. The tourist blew at the end of his own gun in a gesture of triumph, and the crowd cheered as the stunt man jumped to his feet and took a bow.
Ellen scanned the crowd nervously, but there was no one there who looked like Betty Norell. “Let’s go,” she said, and Marly and Rose followed. At the entertainment center they wandered into shops filled with thousands of images of the characters in their films, on their television shows. Every possible merchandising gimmick was there.
“Don’t move or I’ll kill you,” said a deep voice and Rose spun around to see a man holding a Hemisphere 50 soaker water gun at his wife, who frowned.
“Oh, Harold, put that down,” she said, “and come and look at these sweatshirts.”
The clothing, the videos, the viewers, the dolls, the jewelry and key chains and mugs and posters. All of them caught the bright sunlight of the warm day as the tourists pulled the items greedily from the shelves, then waited in long lines to pay their money for the overpriced junk.
“Special effects,” Ellen said, tugging at Rose’s sleeve. “Let’s go there.”
The guide had been right. There was a big line at the special effects studio. There was a show going on at that moment, and the number of people in the line probably meant they would have to wait through at least one more seating before it was their turn to go in.
“She could be in there already,” Ellen said. “I guess I’ll have to make like a suit,” and she fished in her purse, pulling out her wallet, and from it a photo ID the studio policy insisted all employees carry. “Wish me luck,” she said, and moved aggressively up to the front of the line, where a red-coated male employee who looked like a bodyguard stood at the door.
Rose and Marly watched her talking to him, showing him her ID, and then saw the way his eyes lit up. Most of the young people in these tour jobs were in their early twenties and had aspirations to stardom, so meeting an important studio executive was a big deal to them. Ellen seemed to be smoothly informing him why she and her friends had to go in to the stage right now on a business matter. There would have been no reason for Bibberman and company to tell the tour people that Ellen was persona non grata, so the young man, dazzled by her ID, nodded in approval. Ellen gestured for Rose and Marly to join her, and they moved ahead to enter the sound stage, where the demonstration was already in progress.
They edged along quietly until they were standing at the top of the bleachers full of people, just near the steps to the control booth. Ken Moss, a sound man Ellen recognized because he’d worked on a few of her pictures, explained to the audience what they were about to see. Ken was a good-looking mustached blond of about forty-five.
“In film,” he said to the group of a few hundred, “audio and video are always recorded separately. The sound tracks are recorded by the audio person, who you can’t see right now because he’s back in that booth, and the video obviously by the camera people. When dailies, which means the film shot each day, and any of the rough cuts of the film are shown, they’re projected double system, which means the audio and the video are playing separately but cued up, or in sync.
“Once the film is cut to everyone’s satisfaction, it’s prepared for completion. To do that, the picture is color-corrected and the various sound tracks are worked on. There are three separate sound tracks at this point. Dialogue, sound effects, and music.”
A piercing scream made Ellen jump and the other two hold on to one another, until they saw it was a restless baby a mother couldn’t quiet. The embarrassed woman stood and walked out with the now screaming baby as Ken went on. “Dialogue tracks are corrected and enhanced by looping. That means the sound plays on a continuous loop, sent to an actor through a headset, and he or she speaks the dialogue to match the picture projected on a screen in front of him or her.”
Rose and Marly and Ellen scanned the group. It was dimly lit in the studio, but not one of the people there remotely resembled Betty Norell. Rose sighed with relief. Let the police find her, she thought. Let Rita Connelly with her gun do this. “She’s not in here,” she whispered to Ellen. “I don’t see her.”
Ellen nodded, and the three of them started for the door. “Sometimes,” Ken said, “the actor will turn out to have the wrong voice for a part, and the film will have to be revoiced. A voice-over actor will be brought in and work with the director to put his or her voice to the part already acted by someone else. So let’s say Joanne Woodward has played the part,” he said, and the stage got dark as Joanne Woodward’s face came up on the screen.
It was Joanne Woodward years ago, in some old film like Rachel, Rachel, and the print was in black and white. “But we’re going to pretend that Joanne, brilliant actress that she is, simply wasn’t able to get the emotion the director wanted, so the director had to call in another person. And that person was our volunteer from the audience, who is backstage, and will she please come out now, and her name is… What’s your name, dear?”
“Betty,” they heard a deep, rich voice reply.
And all three of them froze. They had been an instant away from walking out of that sound stage, and now they turned to see Betty Norell in a spotlight next to Ken, who was guiding her to a stool next to a microphone on a podium. “Betty, you have a lovely voice,” Ken said.
Betty smiled and clutched her big striped purse close to her body. “Thank you,” she said.
“Betty has so kindly volunteered to improvise a little scene so that we can loop, if you will, Joanne Woodward with Betty. Inserting Betty’s voice into the film. To show you what the process is like we call revoicing. And if she’s really good at being Joanne Woodward, we’ll see if we can get Betty a date with Paul Newman.” The audience laughed, but Betty looked very uncomfortable.
“When we’ve finished, we’ll play it back, run the new sound against the film so you and Betty can see how it works.” The friends were close together now, behind the audience, afraid and mesmerized at the same time. “So, Betty, you put this headset on, and face the screen, and when you hear the beeps, you start doing a speech. Anything. Your grocery list will be okay, or you can recite a poem you learned in elementary school, a little speech that’s about two minutes long, because that’s the length of Joanne’s monologue. Are you okay about this?”
Betty nodded. “Good. Well, I’m going to run up into the booth now, and Betty’s going to revoice Joanne,” Ken said, and he hurried off the stage. The three friends watched him lope toward the booth, spotting Ellen as he did, and smiling in surprise, then blowing her a kiss before he disappeared.
Betty sat on the stool with the headset over her frowzy hair, with an odd faraway look in her eyes as if she were getting into a role and thinking about the character’s given circumstances. Her posture changed, her carriage was suddenly commanding and interesting, fascinating to watch. And when Ken’s voice came from the booth and said, “Okay, Betty, I’m about to roll the sound,” she took a deep breath. The picture rolled, and after a moment Joanne Woodward’s lips moved and Betty began.
“Sometimes having great wealth makes people lonely!” she said, as her deep, rich voice filled the studio. Rose put her hand on Ellen’s arm and squeezed. This was the beginning of a speech she’d heard before, but she had to remember when. From some play, but she couldn’t remember which one it was.
Betty was getting into it now. “A cultivated woman, a woman of intelligence, can enrich a man’s life, immeasurably,” she said, as Joanne Woodward’s lips moved on the screen. “I have those things to offer,” Betty said, with just a trace of the southern dialect that any actress would want to use for Blanche DuBois. And of course, that was it, Rose remembered, Blanche’s speech to Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire.
“… and this doesn’t take them away.”
People in the audience were stirring uncomfortably. They had expected this to be funny. They had figured this would be some person who would be doing what they would do if they had been chosen, which was to blunder through the scene. After all, they had just spent the morning in a fake tornado, having bogus Indians shoot at their tram, having the Loch Ness monster rise from the waterway as they crossed, and all the other hilarious things that had happened on the tour so far. They couldn’t understand why this woman was so serious, and so dramatic, saying these things that sounded as if they really were lines from a movie.
“Physical beauty is passing. A transitory possession. But beauty of the mind and richness of the spirit and tenderness of the heart, and I have all those things, aren’t taken away, but grow! Increase with the years!”
“Hey, she’s good,” Marly heard someone in the row in front of them whisper. “She must be a shill.”
“I’m going to the booth,” Ellen whispered and quietly hurried out of the back row, up the four steps into the control booth, and closed the door behind her.
“How strange that I should be called a destitute woman, when I have all those treasures locked in my heart,” Betty Norell said with her head held high the way Blanche would, but the broken voice gave away the character’s terror.
She was getting to the guts of the role perfectly, just the way she had so many years ago at Tech. In fact, now, in the spot where Rose thought she remembered Tennessee Williams’s stage directions asked for a choked sob from Blanche, Betty Norell emitted a choked sob, then managed to pull herself together as the rapt audience looked on.
“I think of myself as a very, very rich woman!” Betty said. “But I have been foolish, casting my pearls before swine. You and your friend Mr. Mitchell. He came to see me tonight. He dared to come here in his work clothes! And to repeat slander to me he got from you! I gave him his walking papers. But then he came back! He returned with a box of roses to beg my forgiveness.”
The film stopped, and Joanne Woodward’s face was frozen in stillness on the screen. “Betty!” The voice over the PA was Ken’s. “You’re wonderful,” he said, “but I have to stop you here and ask you to…”
“Don’t interrupt me,” Betty snapped, angrily reeling around and looking in the direction of the booth, and she put her hand up in a salute to shade her eyes from the light, as if that would help her see into the booth. “I wasn’t finished,” she said, enraged by the rude interruption. “The important part is coming up. I don’t want to stop yet.”
“Well, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve discovered a star,” Ken’s voice said with what sounded like amusement, “with a star complex to match. I know, Betty, I know that you want to go on, very much, but now it’s time for me to do my job and play the scene back so everyone can see what a good job you did.” Betty was flushed with embarrassment and anger and with a melodramatic move, she pulled a gun from her big striped purse.
“I want to finish the scene,” she said, and the audience exploded with laughter. They were right. She was a shill, and this was another funny stunt, like the one with the Indians. “I’m not kidding,” Betty said, her eyes wild with anger at their laughter. “I’ll kill anyone, everyone,” she said, but the audience thought that was funny, too.
Rose and Marly held on to one another, and then they heard Ellen’s voice over the PA.
“Betty, it’s okay. Everything is okay. This is Ellen Bass.”
Betty looked around nervously; then up at the booth.
“Who?” she asked, squinting in the direction of the voice.
“Ellen Feinberg. Remember me?”
Betty’s eyes were wide. “Is it really?” she asked. She was trembling.
“I work here, Betty, at this studio. I think you went past my office a little while ago.”
“I know you work here. I’ve been following your career from day one! My plan was to get off the tram and try to find your office in that big glass building, but when I stood up the guy said we couldn’t get off the tram there. They wouldn’t even put my calls through to you. Who do you think you are, Ellen, treating people so badly? I sent you a tape and you never even watched it.”
“I did watch your tape. I’ve been very busy but I managed to watch your tape just recently, and you were sensational in it,” Ellen said in a voice Rose knew was phony, and that Ellen probably used fifty times a day with actors and directors and writers she had to brush off nicely. Betty pouted grudgingly, holding the gun on the audience in general.
Rose heard someone in the audience whisper, “What in the hell’s going on here?”
“I even called your house to make you an offer,” Ellen said.
“What kind of offer?”
“A part in a movie I’m going to make.”
“Like shit,” Betty said, her doubting eyes angry with a look that said they’d been disappointed too often to fall for this.
“I did. I talked to your daughter.”
“You’re lying. My daughter doesn’t even live at my house.”
“I know, but she was there, looking for you. She was worried because you’d been gone for a few days and nobody knew where to find you,” Ellen said.
> “Yeah? What’s my daughter’s name?”
“Her name is Polly,” Ellen said. “Betty, I know she must be proud of your talent. So am I, Betty. I still want to offer you a role in a film I’m making.”
“You’re a fucking liar. Everyone in show business is a liar. Phony, lying assholes. No-talents who think their money makes them hot shit.”
Rose squeezed Marly’s arm, and then she whispered, “You’ve got to admit, she is right about that.”
“It’s a great part, Betty, and you won’t even have to test for it, because I already have your tape. So put the gun down now, and come up to the booth.”
Betty looked confused, and very afraid. “Ellen,” she asked in a voice filled with worry, “do you think I look old?” Marly emitted an audible pained sound. It was the question the close friends often asked one another, and the loving answer was always, “You look sensational.”
“Betty,” came the reply from the booth, and Rose heard the emotion in Ellen’s voice, “I think you look sensational.”
Betty harumphed as if she didn’t believe that lie, either. “Jan said I looked good, too,” she said. “And I thought she looked wonderful. I didn’t want to hurt her. I didn’t want to.”
“Betty,” Ellen said, “wait till you see me. My belly’s so round these days, I have to buy my control-top panty hose in industrial strength.”
A big laugh swept through the audience. Rose was terrified that the laughter would make Betty shoot the gun, but instead Betty laughed, too. “So do I,” she said, but she didn’t drop the gun. “Tell me about the part in the movie,” she said, very serious now, and turning suddenly to hold the gun on a woman who had dropped something noisily in the front row. The audience gasped. They were getting to the point where they weren’t sure what to make of this whole scene.
“It’s called… Good-bye, My Baby. And the woman is a mature, womanly adult who… has a dying husband,” Ellen improvised.
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