I didn’t really know if I was or not. Since my Aunt Rose Maria’s death, I was at a stage where I didn’t know what I wanted at all. But I said, “Yes. I don’t think she’s all that pretty.”
“She’s not. Her nose is too big and her teeth are crooked. But she’s got personality.”
“I guess so.” I had a feeling what he was calling personality was really just large breasts in a small brassiere.
“You have an agent?” he asked.
“Oh, no. I just got here two weeks ago.”
“Give me a call some time.” He handed me a business card. Someone yelled for him and he walked away. His card was from the Coast Talent Agency and it had a couple of stars in the shape of a comet on it. It read, “When you need talent, call the Coast.” His name was Sid Goldman, and he had an address in Century City, which is a neighborhood of very large office buildings that I had discovered one day when I was lost on my way to Beverly Hills to look at the stars’ homes.
I called him the next day, and his secretary set up an appointment for me. I spent a lot of time deciding what to wear and making myself up. Of course I knew that one of the reasons I had come to California was to be discovered and put into the movies, but I hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly. After all, I had only been in Los Angeles two weeks. I barely knew where any of the freeways went. My Aunt Rose Maria used to say, “When you go to a new place, learn where all the highways go so you can always get out.”
On the way to my appointment, I got very nervous. Suppose Sid Goldman wasn’t really legitimate? I didn’t expect him to be a white slaver, though I am sure that such people do exist somewhere in the world, but maybe his office would be tacky and run-down. Maybe he just took money from naive girls like me. Or maybe, worst of all, he’d expect me to take my clothes off or dance or something. I hoped if he did that I’d have the courage to get up and walk out quickly.
His office was on the twentieth floor of a very nice building, with a lovely view of the hills. So everything was fine, except there were a lot of girls in the waiting room, and all of them were pretty. There were some pretty men, too. I wanted to turn around and walk out but I was too embarrassed. So I sat down and filled out a questionnaire. I didn’t right off know what my hips measured-- I’ve always thought there were certain things a lady just shouldn’t know. And I couldn’t ask the secretary if she had a tape measure. So I left that one blank.
“You’re the girl from the beach,” Mr. Goldman said when I finally went into his office. “I remember you.”
“Thank you.” I smiled and tried to look eager and pretty at the same time.
He asked me about experience. “Professional theater? Amateur? College? High school?”
I shook my head at everything, though I did mention that I had been tulip queen. “It’s kind of an honor. We have a tulip festival in the spring and the queen rides on a float.”
“I think you ought to start out slow,” he said. “I’m going to send you into the studio and have them take some Polaroids, and we’ll put you on cigarette detail.”
“Excuse me?”
“Handing out free cigarettes. Here’s the address and the day and time. If you do well, you can keep moving up.”
“You would be amazed at how rude people can be to you when you are trying to give them something for nothing,” I wrote on my weekly postcard to Louise Ann. I made a practice of sending her a postcard every week, just so that she would know what she was missing.
I wrote her how I had to stand on Wilshire Boulevard trying to hand out little packages of free cigarettes to people, and how they just walked on by me like I had not washed that morning or I had my dress on inside out.
It is not like I was standing there asking people for spare change or even for directions on how to get to the Santa Monica Freeway. One nasty old lady came up and started to tell me all about how smoking causes cancer in laboratory animals and human beings like her late husband.
I told her that I, too, had suffered a loss, so I understood how she felt. But she didn’t commiserate with me in turn. She just stalked away muttering to herself. I had read in a movie magazine that if you were interested in being a model or an actress you had to get your face out on the street. I thought it was convenient that I could do that by handing out those cigarettes, and get paid for it, too.
I did not mind the heat in Los Angeles. When I first flew in at the airport I found the heat nearly intolerable, coming as I did from the cold of Albany. I found that I sweated a great deal and I was always thirsty. Fortunately I seemed to have brought the sweat problem under control or I would have been too embarrassed to work on the street like that in the heat and the sun.
When my two hours on the street were up, a girl named Denise, who was working on the corner opposite me, came to get me. “How many did you give away?” she asked.
I had not been too successful. I had given away a lot of the regular but the menthol had not been what you would call a hot seller. “You can’t go back with this many boxes,” Denise said. “Do you want to keep any?”
“Perhaps I’ll keep a pack or two. If you think it’s all right.”
“Honey, you can keep as many as you want as long as you don’t go back to the agency with more than a couple of dozen packs. Come on and follow me.”
She walked over to a large trash can and unloaded most of her cigarettes into it. She did the same thing with mine.
“Are you sure this is all right?” I asked. “I want to make a good impression.”
“Trust me, honey,” Denise said. She was a very pretty woman, with skin that was a color somewhere between being black and just having a very good tan. “This job ain’t nothing to write home about, but I know what I’m doing.”
Writing home about the job didn’t so much both me, because I didn’t really have a home any more, except where I chose to make it. It hurt me sometimes that I didn’t know where my Momma was. I wanted to be able to send her a postcard, too, just like I did with Louise Ann, and of course I wanted to see her, even if it was only at Mother’s Day and Christmas, the way Louise Ann’s husband Jay Tucker sees his Momma.
A few days after my cigarette assignment was up, Mr. Goldman’s office called and asked if I was available to go and be an extra in a movie that was shooting at the airport. I thought that was a stupid question. After all, I hadn’t done much in the last couple of days except sit around and wait for such a call. But I was polite, just as Aunt Rose Maria taught me to be, and I got my instructions on where to go and who to ask for.
“And the salary?” I asked.
I was surprised at how low it was. Only forty dollars a day, and you had to be there sometimes as many as ten hours a day. I had made more than that at a taco stand in Albany once, that is, until I was relieved of my position after a small fire that was basically my fault.
I went out the next morning to the airport, to the very end of one of the concourses, where there was a lounge that had been converted into a movie set. I had to be there at six-thirty, which I thought was awfully early if you led a jet-set kind of life as movie stars were supposed to.
After I had signed in and had a man with an earring look at my dress and tell me I was just fine (which of course I already knew) I sat down on one of those horrible plastic seats that are supposed to be molded to fit your body but of course they never do more than bunch up your panty hose. Denise was across the room, and I waved at her, but I was surprised by the other extras. I expected them to be all those pretty girls and pretty men who were in the waiting room at Mr. Goldman’s office. But instead it just looked like someone had gone around the airport and picked out people who were waiting for planes.
A tall, gray-haired man came over to me and started to talk. He waved his arms a lot and his voice went up and down to emphasize what he was saying. At first I thought he was like those pretty men at the talent agency or like the wardrobe man with the earring, but then I realized he was being just plain theatrical. After all, these people
were all actors. You could expect them to go overboard now and then.
It was about then that I realized I was an actress, too. I hadn’t every thought of myself that way, though of course I had my fantasies. You can’t spend an adolescence as a pretty girl in Albany, New York, going to see movies every weekend with your girlfriend, and not think about being an actress sometimes. There isn’t much else to aspire to there unless you take a particular interest in politics or state government, and civics was not one of my strong subjects in high school.
I didn’t think I was given to those kind of excessive gestures, though. Did that mean I was not going to make it as an actress? I wanted to think about that, but a man came to pick extras for a scene and I walked up front so he could see me. He smiled at me, and picked me with a number of other people.
It was a long, boring day. I stood on my feet for hours, and I walked back and forth in front of the same silly gift shop a dozen times, while one of the stars kept fumbling his lines.
During a break, Denise and I sat together in a corner, took off our shoes and rubbed the soles of our feet. “Honestly, I can not understand why they gave him this picture to star in if he can’t ever get his lines straight,” I said in a low whisper.
She laughed. “Honey, don’t you know who he is?” I shook my head. “He was a Super Bowl quarterback three times. People who go to movies like this just want to look at him. And he is fine looking, isn’t he?”
I was forced to agree with Denise on that. “So what you been up to lately, honey?” she asked.
I confessed that I hadn’t done much but sit around the hotel, and I was worried about how long my money would hold out.
“Well, for a start you can move out of that hotel.” Denise’s roommate had just left to join a community theater in Minnesota, and so the next day I moved in with her. She lived in a sweet little two-bedroom house in Venice, which is not like you would think in Italy but actually right next door to Los Angeles. And very close to the bus line, too.
Denise and I went out sometimes in the evenings to local bars, just to have a quiet drink and see if any major producers were out scouting for talent. “I’ll tell you, I don’t even care if he’s a producer sometimes,” Denise said. “Just a nice guy. Somebody to love me and give me a home, and I’ll just say goodbye to Hollywood.”
“Oh, I don’t think I could say that,” I said. “At least not yet. I mean, I think a woman needs a career. Something of her own, that doesn’t belong to her family or her friends or the man she loves.”
I continued to write Louise Ann a postcard regularly, though I slacked off a little when there was nothing much to write about. One day I called her up just to say hello and make sure she was receiving my cards, and she told me she and Jay Tucker were finding them very amusing.
“Amusing?” I asked. After all, I was writing about my career conflicts and the difficulty of adapting to a new environment. It wasn’t like I was writing jokes for David Letterman.
“You always could make me laugh, Ima Jean,” Louise Ann said. “I think you have a natural talent for it.”
It was very nice to be told I had a natural talent for something, although it was doubtful whether I could convince Louise Ann to pay me to entertain her. Mr. Goldman said things were slow at the moment in the extra business and he would get back to me. So I signed up with a temp agency as a secretary.
Louise Ann would find that very amusing, I am sure, due to my unfortunate experiences in secretarial school. But with all computer software they have now, you can be a terrible typist and still get by, and I passed the agency test.
The next day they called with an assignment, and directions how to get there on the bus. To my surprise it was at a major motion picture studio, as they say on the TV. Of course it made sense, that those places needed secretaries just as much as anybody else. “Congratulations, honey!” Denise said. She was very excited. “This could be your big break! You just remember who your friends are when you’re a big star.”
“It’s not like they have just asked me to star in a major motion picture,” I said. “Unless you think the typist I am replacing was plucked out of obscurity to be a new star and her seat is still warm.”
My boss was a man named Brent Simon. Mr. Simon, of course. He was a very handsome man, much younger than I expected. I imagine he was not much more than thirty years old, with hair the color of sand and eyes the color of the ocean off the beach at Venice. He did not seem to pay much attention to me. I answered his phone and took messages, since he spent most of his time eating at restaurants I had been told were popular places for film people to make deals. When he was not eating he was working out at his gym, I guess to counteract all that eating.
On Thursday afternoon, a writer who was working on a picture for Mr. Simon came by and asked if I could type a scene for him. He was working on the next one, he said, and they had a knife poised over his neck.
I didn’t see a knife, but perhaps it was hanging over his desk. “I don’t mind,” I said.
“Thanks, Ima. You’re a sweetheart, babe. Don’t ever change.”
“Ima Jean,” I said to his back, but he was already gone.
It was a terrible scene. The movie was supposed to be a comedy, but I didn’t see what was so funny about it. So I changed things here and there, and when I was finished I thought it was much better.
Mr. Simon came by just as I finished and took the pages away with him to the set. The next morning when I came in, he was in his office. “Could you come in here, please, Ima,” he called.
“Ima Jean,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“My name is Ima Jean. Not just Ima.”
“Well, then. Ima Jean. You typed this scene yesterday, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And did you change it at all?”
I looked down at my feet. “Yes,” I said in a small voice.
Mr. Simon was quiet for a minute. Then he started to laugh. At first it was a little like a chuckle, but then it got the better of him and he was laughing and laughing. I just felt terrible. Finally I looked up and said, “I just didn’t think it was funny, that’s all. I don’t think it’s any cause to laugh at me. I’ll just leave now and you can get someone else from the agency.”
I turned to walk out but Mr. Simon said, “No, Ima Jean, please.” He was still laughing so hard he choked on the words. “Please, come back. Sit down. I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at myself. I’m paying thousands of dollars for this rewrite, and a temp we pay a couple of bucks an hour is doing a better job.”
“If you let me stay, I promise I won’t do it again,” I said.
“Out of the question,” he said.
I looked at my feet again.
“From now on, Ima Jean, this is your job. Here’s the original script. I want you to go into that office across the hall and read it through. Anything you want to change, you change. Any way you can think of to make it funnier, you do it. There’s a computer in there if you’d rather work that way, or some yellow legal pads, pens, pencils, whatever you need.”
I must have looked confused, because he said, in a much gentler voice, “You did a good job, Ima Jean. I like the way you changed the script.”
Well, it was certainly nice to hear a kind word. And from Mr. Simon, too. So I smiled. “That’s much better,” he said. “You’re very pretty when you smile, Ima Jean.”
I went into the office across the hall and started to read the script. It was just as bad as the one scene I had read, and so I had my work cut out for me. It was very interesting, and I didn’t even look at the clock until Mr. Simon came to my door.
“It’s six o’clock, Ima Jean. Friday night. We’re not slave drivers around here. I’m sure you have something planned for tonight.”
“Well, as a matter of fact my calendar is open. But I don’t like to take the bus too late. I’ll keep up with this on Monday.”
I got my coat, and we walked out together. “Ima Jean,�
� Mr. Simon said when we got to the front door.
I turned to him and said, “Yes?”
“Well, if you aren’t busy tonight, then maybe I could convince you to have some dinner with me. I could drive you home so you wouldn’t have to take the bus.”
Well, that was certainly a nice development on top of everything else that had happened. I was sure Denise would be pleasantly surprised. And as for Louise Ann, well, I would just have to wait and see what she would have to say.
I must honestly say I thought I was happiest about going to dinner with Mr. Simon, Brent, that is. I knew I should not let it be enough for me, that I was on the brink of a career, and that was really the most exciting news. But I decided to just be happy, and so I said, “Dinner would be very nice,” and smiled.
“I said it before,” Brent said, “but it’s worth saying again. You’re very pretty when you smile, Ima Jean.”
The Cat Who Got Lost
I called my mother just before I left work. The late summer sun was slanting in my office window, reflecting off the glassy towers of Manhattan, but I could already smell the salt air of the Jersey shore. “I’m going to catch the 12:30 bus,” I said. “I should be in Sea Isle City by 4:30.”
“That’s fine, Susan.”
Something in her tone told me she wasn’t all there.
I looked at my watch. I still had a few minutes to chat before I had to leave for the Port Authority bus terminal. I worked for a fashion magazine as a clothing stylist, and the latest issue had been put to bed the day before, so I was at loose ends until we started the next month’s. “What’s the matter?”
“What? Oh, it’s probably nothing. I can’t find Rajah anywhere.”
A year before, my mother had adopted Rajah, a sleek black Burmese she found through a friend who did cat rescue. In no time at all, Rajah had come to rule my parents’ house with a regal disdain fitting any Eastern potentate.
In the background I heard a slight jingle as my mother twisted her gold bangle bracelets back and forth, as she always does when she’s nervous. “They were pouring a new sidewalk next door, and I’m just worried he got into the concrete truck. I’m going to keep looking for him, but I’ll pick you up when you get in. What time did you say?”
The Cat Who Got Married Page 7