by Susan Isaacs
All around were miles of tract houses. They looked cramped and uninviting, the sort of houses shoe salesmen would live in. Actually, when he thought about it, they reminded him of the Heissenhubers’ house in Cincinnati, inhabited but unembellished, as though their owners hated them. They were ranch houses with a Spanish flavor: white with wavy red roofs that approximated tile. Some had a small rectangle of grass on either side of the front walk, but many had covered the space over with flat rocks the size of fifty-cent pieces. In the middle of one there was a statue of a liveried servant holding a lantern. Its head had been knocked off its body; the motive could be seen in the jagged remains of a black neck. Nicholas smiled whenever he passed. It was a satisfying piece of vandalism, more so because the owner was too stubborn or too stupid to remove the smashed statue; it pleased Nicholas that such a man lived in such a mean little house.
But he didn’t hate Los Angeles, even though he knew it was the fashionable thing to do. He loved the climate, waking up in October and having coffee outside on the terrace. He was impressed with the aggressive informality of the city, where everyone said “hi” and no one said “hello.” People exposed as much of themselves as they could. Men, if they wore jackets at all, took them off and rolled up their sleeves, opened their shirts to let you know exactly what they were: crosses, crucifixes, and stars of David dangled from chains on tanned or hairy chests. Women wore dresses of eyelet or with cutouts, to offer little peeks of what was available. Not a single person had called him “Mister” since his arrival. He couldn’t imagine joining them, but he liked to watch their promiscuous kissing of acquaintances, their openly expressed glee over anything new. “Love the shirt!” “Where did you get that pen? Where in New York? God, I love it!” Many of them, he knew, were phony. But some were simply more natural than Easterners; they had an uncomplicated delight in good weather and bright objects.
Still, he couldn’t be part of it. Maybe it was being dislocated, just being there for a month, knowing he was missing his first autumn in Connecticut, missing his family, missing Murray. It wasn’t like an out-of-town tryout, where he knew people, where he had colleagues to have breakfast or go for a drink with. Here, he was a New York actor with a small part. Other than two not wildly enthusiastic propositions, one from an assistant director—male—and another from a publicist—female—no one showed any interest in where he went at the end of the day. He acted, read a biography of Theodore Roosevelt and several John Dickson Carr mysteries, and called Jane.
The only physical pleasure he got was from running, and that was not really fun. There was no game to it, no real skill; it was just work. But at least it knocked him out, although he had to force himself farther and farther to achieve the same effect.
Rhodes’s prodding of Philip Gray—and Philip Gray’s call to the producer he was backing—had obviously been effective. Within days of Rhodes’s visit, Nicholas was invited to California for a screen test. Before the film from the test was even developed, it seemed, he was offered a small but interesting role in the producer’s upcoming film. The producer himself had even taken him to the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel and told him over drinks how he’d seen Nicholas on Broadway and was just on the verge of calling him himself when Philip Gray had telephoned. “He’s your brother-in-law?” the producer asked.
“No.” Many of the women milling about were so flawlessly beautiful they seemed supernatural. A brunette passed a redhead and they quickly examined each other, then turned away. The brunette wore a sarong that exposed her navel. On top she wore what looked like a brassiere made of gold chains attached to a wide gold ring in her cleavage. The redhead wore silver sandals that laced up her legs and a white minidress that bared one shoulder. They might be goddesses at a convention, but no one seemed stunned by them except Nicholas, who wondered if they were starlets or prostitutes. They didn’t look real. They looked as if they never spoke. A few of them wore small, anticipatory smiles, as if momentarily expecting good news. “My brother-in-law works for Philip Gray,” Nicholas added, wondering if the producer had noticed he hadn’t been paying attention. The producer, glugging down his fourth gin and orange juice, apparently had not.
“Oh. I wasn’t sure what the connection was.” The producer looked past him and signaled for the check.
“Well, it’s sort of a double connection. Philip’s married to my cousin.”
“Let me order you a refill.”
Most theater people Nicholas had spoken with had one comment about making movies: take the money and run. The work was so fragmented as to be almost meaningless. You rarely had more than three or four lines at a time. Then you’d wait. And wait. People took up hobbies to kill the time. Jeff Barault, who’d played Mercutio to his Romeo Off Broadway, had spent two months on location in the Philippines building furniture. It had cost him five hundred dollars to ship home three ornately carved wood armchairs, and one of them arrived looking more like a pile of kindling than something to sit on. An actress he knew, a sweet-tempered woman typecast as a sour old maid—she could contract her lips into a particularly hateful line—knit mufflers whenever she made a film. Nearly everyone she’d ever worked with had six feet of intricately worked wool. In winter, an actor might pass a stage manager spitting out the purple and white fringes the sharp wind on Forty-fifth Street had blown into his mouth and say, “Is that a Come Summer muffler?” The stage manager, lifting a hair-thin purple squiggle from his tongue, would respond, “No. The Twelve Months of Judith Lane. Come Summer is beige and brown.”
Of course, the two biggest time killers were hustling for the next job—reading scripts, phoning agents, making friends with people at the studio who might prove valuable—and having love affairs.
Still, Nicholas mused, it really wasn’t all that boring. He had spent his first day repeating the same few gestures and two lines, but it was far less wearing than acting in commercials. Once he’d spent two days filming a commercial for the California Artichoke Cooperative, walking through a door, dropping an attaché case, and having the actress who played his wife leap into his arms and demand, “Guess what I have that’s green and new and absolutely yummy?” as he carried her across the suburban living room set. He’d sprained his back and spent a week lying flat on the floor with pillows under his neck and knees, with Jane having to help him up whenever he had to go to the bathroom. In the end, the cooperative had fired the agency and the commercial was never aired.
But here he had a character. True, it was another cold-blooded-bastard character, but it didn’t bother him. If someone was willing to give him ten thousand dollars for a month’s work, he’d play the biggest bastard in the world.
The last quarter mile back to the hotel was uphill, and by the time he got to the entrance he was gasping, his throat sore as it tried to open wider and accommodate more air. In the elevator, a man in a red and pink checked sport jacket eyed him with disgust, staring at the shirt that clung to him like a membrane.
After he showered—he loved showers and they only had tubs at the house—he called Jane. She said he sounded bored.
“I’m not bored,” he said, trying to chew silently the ham and cheese sandwich room service had brought a moment earlier. “A little tired. I got to the studio before six and we spent the whole day on one scene, the one where I meet them. Remember?”
“Of course I remember. I was right. You have to be bored. You know how you need to be challenged. I mean, honestly, what is this: three or four lines and then you look meaningfully at them. Isn’t that the scene?”
“Yes. But it’s not that bad.”
“Oh, Nick, come on.”
He realized, after they’d said goodbye, how annoyed he was getting with her. Every single damned night she made some remark about how terrible acting in movies was. If she wasn’t telling him it must be boring or depressing that he wasn’t utilizing his talents, she was giving him a negative review of the latest rerun she’d seen on TV. He hoped he never came up against such a harsh c
ritic; every actor was prostituting himself, every screenplay was either insipid or inept.
This screenplay wasn’t brilliant, but he’d appeared in much worse both on and off Broadway. The leads weren’t bad. The actress, Julie Spahr, looked too glossy for the antipoverty worker she was playing, but her performance rang true enough; her character was emotional, dedicated, and naive as hell. And the star, David Whitman, was first rate.
But two weeks later, he realized Jane hadn’t been entirely unjust about the screenplay. His own character had less depth than the paper it was written on; he was a stereotype, a corrupt public official, a perfect villain for the antiestablishment theme of the movie: a slick bad guy helping to destroy a couple of pure, high-minded lives. He played the mayor of a medium-sized New England city, the man the two main characters, an architect and his social-worker wife, approach to get help for an abandoned neighborhood of beautiful but shabby Victorian row houses they are trying to save from the wrecker’s ball and renovate as an artists’ community.
The director wanted Nicholas to be charming and sincere, a shirt-sleeved, rumpled-haired Kennedy type who engages the architect’s trust and the social worker’s interest. The main characters have no idea that the character Nicholas is playing has been bought, bribed by businessmen who want the neighborhood destroyed so they can build an industrial park. The final scene had no dialogue. It was a series of intercuts: the wreckers, like military tanks, inching along the shady streets of the deserted old neighborhood; the architect driving off to the state capital, his face bright with the false hope the mayor has instilled in him; the social worker, at the mayor’s office for a working lunch, being seduced by him; all the dilapidated but still graceful houses—one after another—being reduced to rubble by wrecker’s balls and dynamite.
“I think I should show a little suspicion,” Julie Spahr said to the director. “Just a little. To give a little more texture.”
“Julie, you don’t have any idea of what’s on Nick’s mind. All you know is that you’re very—let’s see, uptight. You’re hot for him, but you haven’t admitted that to yourself yet because your husband is such a terrific, perfect guy. But you’re also almost giddy with relief because you think the neighborhood’s been saved. So you’re a mass or a mess of a lot of emotions. Okay?” She nodded portentously, as if she’d just learned the location of the Holy Grail.
Hank Giordano, the director, held Nicholas’s arm and paced his walk along the curved blue line—Nicholas’s color; Julie’s was red—taped on the floor, around the desk to the chair Julie was seated in. “Easy,” he said, as if Nicholas were a toddler who might run too fast, fall, and hurt himself. “Good. Now stand right up against the back of her chair. That’s it. Press up hard against it like it was her. You’re supposed to be a sexy guy. Good. Okay. Nick, get back to your desk and we’ll try the whole thing. You ready, Julie?”
“Hank, I just think my hair’s too messy.”
Nicholas returned to the big chrome and leather chair behind what was the mayor’s desk and swallowed his sigh. It was twelve thirty, and they hadn’t shot an inch of film. Julie Spahr had spent half the morning trying to sort out her character’s emotions, even though she, Nicholas, and Giordano had had a long conference on the scene the day before. She’d spent the other half of the morning debating whether she would wear blue eyeshadow, another subject that had been discussed nearly ad nauseam at the conference. She thought she shouldn’t wear eyeshadow. The director disagreed, saying it was her unconscious way of primping for the mayor.
“Julie, you’re a social worker. You wear jeans and flannel shirts and your hair shouldn’t look like you just stepped out of Madame Fifi’s.”
“Then why the eyeshadow?”
“Because you’re not a fashion plate. You want to doll yourself up a little for this guy.”
“But you just said I don’t know yet that I’m hot for him.”
She said this without looking in Nicholas’s direction, but then she hadn’t looked in his direction for the three weeks since he’d come to California. She responded to his hellos grudgingly, as if the energy expended on them was being deducted from her life force; he was, after all, merely a New York actor in a supporting role in his first film.
“You’re hot for him subconsciously, Julie.”
“I think it will cheapen the scene.”
“Julie—”
“Hank, I wouldn’t be making a stand if I didn’t think it involved the integrity of the film.”
Hank Giordano clasped his hands in front of his chest. He looked like a barrel with arms and legs. “I’ll tell you what. We’ll shoot with eyeshadow and without eyeshadow. If it doesn’t work I swear to God I’ll use without.”
“And my hair this way and then combed out.”
“No.”
“Hank—”
“Let’s just do eyeshadow, then we’ll talk hair.”
Spahr thrust out her lip in a little-girl pout. “I hate to say it, Hank, but I can’t keep it in. I’m afraid you’ll very conveniently forget about my hair.” She was in her mid-thirties and looked it, yet she had a repertoire of childish gestures: staring directly at people with wide, awed eyes; sucking the tip of her thumb when she was, presumably, deep in thought.
“Julie, you know, you really hurt me.”
Nicholas glanced away. The cinematographer caught his eye and mouthed Bullshit.
“I didn’t mean—all right, we’ll do it your way, Hank. But I’m putting my faith in you.”
“You won’t be sorry, Julie.” She put the tips of her fingers to her lips and threw the director a kiss. “All right. Let’s get started. Nick, you ready? When you walk, slow yourself down. You’ve got nothing but time. You’ve got to keep her busy all afternoon so she can’t get back until the place is leveled. Okay.”
“Quiet on the set,” a voice called. “This is a take.”
After three walks to the back of Julie Spahr’s chair, the director was satisfied. Nicholas repeated the walk another five times while they shot Julie’s reaction—which might be cut in when the film was edited.
A half hour later he did what he was supposed to. He stood behind her, pressed against the chair. As she was supposed to, Julie stiffened. Nicholas looked down at the top of her head. Her scalp was bright pink, sore looking, he supposed from hair dye. He let the corners of his mouth move upward. He needn’t smile with contempt. This was film. The camera picked up the smallest gesture. Accustomed to the broader gestures of the stage, he felt constricted, ineffective. Every day on the set, his whole body ached with unexpressed motion.
He took the Styrofoam cup of coffee from her hand, leaned forward, and placed it on the desk. He allowed two seconds for her to register panic with an opened mouth and darting eyes. Then he cupped her under the chin with his right hand and pulled her head back so she was forced to look into his eyes. He peered into her eyes for four seconds, counting one-banana, two-banana…He brought his left hand around and massaged her throat, letting his fingers drift under the neckline of her peasant blouse. Her skin was greasy with makeup and sweat. The lights were exceptionally hot. His ears must be bright red. They were using “in limbo” lighting; only the actors and the chair were lit; the background was nearly blacked out.
He stared into her eyes. She tried to turn away but he drew her head even farther back, letting his lips part into a more open expression of amusement and contempt. He could tell her neck hurt, but he didn’t ease up. He really didn’t give a damn. Julie’s chin quivered, as rehearsed, in his hand; he tightened his grip on it. With what little maneuverability she had, she shook her head no. Her eyes were frightened. His were cool and intent, as if observing a butterfly that he’d trapped beating its wings against a glass jar. Then he lowered his left hand deeper under her blouse, holding her chin at such an angle that she couldn’t pull away. Still looking into her eyes, he gave her a cold smile of triumph.
“Cut! Print it!”
“Jesus Christ!” the cinematograp
her exploded a moment later. “You were incredible!”
“Thank you,” Julie Spahr said.
The cinematographer nodded, then looked over her head and, almost imperceptibly, doffed an invisible hat to Nicholas.
“What time is it in California, Vicky?” Elizabeth demanded. Jane looked across the kitchen table to Victoria. “It’s a little after six now. Come on. Six minus three.”
“Three, Liz,” Victoria said. “Three in the afternoon.”
“What’s Daddy doing?”
“Same thing he’s always doing, stupid. Making a movie.”
“Don’t call your sister stupid,” Jane said. Victoria looked down at her plate, but not before Jane saw her sullen mouth, its upper lip curled like a hostile teenager’s. “Come on, Vicky. We agreed to have a nice pleasant supper together.”
“A real movie,” Elizabeth said. “Not a cartoon movie. Not like Heckle and Jeckle.”
“That’s right,” Jane said. They’d had this discussion every night for the three and a half weeks Nicholas had been in California. “Daddy’s a real person, not a drawing. So he’ll look real in the movie.”
“But flat,” Elizabeth said.
“Yes. Flat, because it’s…” She tried to think of a way to explain dimensionality to a child not quite four.
“Because it’s a picture of Daddy,” Victoria said. “A picture. Did you ever see a fat picture? Pictures are flat, not fat. Don’t you remember when we saw Daddy’s soap commercial on TV where he said, ‘You really work up a sweat playing basketball’? Remember? He had a number fifteen on his shirt.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “Was that a movie?”
“Oh, God!” Victoria breathed.
Jane put her hand up. “If there’s one piece of chicken left on anybody’s plate there won’t be dessert tonight.”
“What’s for dessert?” Victoria demanded.