by Owen Thomas
“Sorry,” I said, “I’m not the movie star type and everyone in my family knows it. They would all tell you that I aspire to be difficult and unlikable.”
“I find that very hard to believe.”
“Trust me, my father sleeps just fine at night with me in California.”
Orin laughed openly. “I’m sure he sleeps like a baby. See, he thinks he’s got you safely ensconced in a literary calling. He thinks all of his years of fathering have paid off. You’re a woman of letters. Refined intellect. High moral character. He’s sure you’ve got a book or two in you. You’re safe. Of course he sleeps well. But that’s not going to last. Not while you’re here anyway. You’re going to wake him up alright. Poor bastard.”
We laughed. I could see that he was prepared to let it go. Inexplicably, I was not.
“The L.A.Q. is a pretty good review,” I said. “I could do worse.”
“Oh, it’s a fine review. A fine review. You could do much, much worse. I’m sure your folks are quite proud.” He held up his hands to show he meant no offense.
“So… what are you saying?”
“I’m just saying that when I look at you sitting there in all of your raw glory and I imagine myself ten, fifteen years from now with Rosalie out in the world, I can’t help but feel a certain … kinship with your father – a man I know absolutely nothing about.”
“A kinship.”
“Yes. A kinship born of a failure to protect our daughters.”
“From?”
“Well, from the beast, of course.”
“The beast.”
“It’s that low, guttural sound,” he said, squinting. “That velvet growl, you hear out in the tall grasses along the edge of jungle, calling your name every night when it’s dark and quiet and all of your other names are asleep. You’ll investigate sooner or later. And then it will have you like all of the others. Like it will have Rosalie.”
“Maybe you should try writing fiction, Orin. Or maybe lion taming.”
“There is no taming it, I’m afraid. I write about it. I track its path. I understand it. But it won’t be tamed and cannot be resisted. Not when it calls your name.”
“Hollywood doesn’t know my name, Orin.”
“It knows the name you call yourself. It knows what you need.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know. Vanity. Approval. Rejection. Self-loathing. I don’t know you well enough to know that name. But it knows, Tilly. It knows.”
“Do I look like a Norma Jean to you?”
“No. But you all, in some way or another, look like Norma Jean to it.”
“Well, then you really don’t know me because I have absolutely no interest in show business. Seriously, Orin. None.” I made a zero with my fingers. “None.”
“If you say so, Tilly. But I’m never wrong about this sort of thing. Have you ever had an agent?”
“No. Never”
“Have you ever auditioned for a part in any production?”
“College. One Ibsen, one Tennessee Williams, one Shakespeare.”
“Stage doesn’t count.”
“Then no.”
“Which Ibsen? A Doll’s House?”
I shook my head.
“The Wild Duck. I played Hedvig.”
Orin grimaced. “That’s fun.”
“That’s Ibsen.”
“Well, your literary beginnings notwithstanding, I’ll bet you that within two years time, if you continue to live in California, you will be auditioning for the big screen. You’ll be Faye Rae to Hollywood’s King Kong. The beast will love you.”
“No way.”
“In two years time I’ll be listening … what’s your father’s name?”
“Hollis Johns.”
“I’ll be listening to the Hollis Johns lament. All the way from Ohio; that sad song that we Californian fathers know so well. Hollis’ baby girl will have traded everything he gave her – all of that intelligence and judgment and self respect – for a splash in the moral decay at the shallow end of the pool where all of the popular kids hang out.”
“You think that’s the path of all actresses?”
“Of course not. I think that’s the fear of all fathers of all actresses.”
“But I’m not a shallow person. Nor immoral.”
“Obviously not and I’m sure you weren’t raised to be. That’s the betrayal.”
I might easily have been insulted, had his tone not been so humorously and genuinely paternal, and had the thirty or so years that separated us been less clear. I told myself that he was speaking more about Rosalie than about me; that he was having the father-daughter chat that Rosalie was too young to understand; that he was venting his concerns about his own inevitable heartbreak, concerned not at all with Hollis Johns of Ohio. So I took no offense at Orin’s words. I insisted again that he was wrong about me and finally had the good sense to let the point go at that.
“Time will tell,” he said with the assistance of his long, bony shoulders. “But if I’m right, Tilly, you must promise me something.”
“Depends on the promise,” I said primly, raising my chin.
“Ha! Good girl. If I’m right, you must concede that I discovered you; that I saw the star quality in you before anyone else saw it. Before even you saw it.”
“Agreed.”
“And, if I’m right, you must consent to an interview for my next book.”
I laughed and shook his large hand. He began to say something about putting the deal in writing when there was suddenly a high, winsome sigh rising like a stream of helium under intense pressure from the corner of the study. Rosalie rolled over on her back, kicking her bare feet in the air and holding aloft the picture of a scarlet-colored mermaid wearing a blue tiara sitting on a brown rock that jutted from a sea of green.
“Isn’t she lovely daddy?”
“She’s a beauty, sweetheart,” said Orin.
“Daddy?”
“Yes, Rosalie?”
“Ummm. Ummummummummmm, Daddy?”
“Yes, Rosalie.
“Daddy, will you take my picture… in my hat and we can put it on my wall next to the other picture of me in my other hat?”
Orin looked at me with a comic graveness. “I’m doomed,” he said, and we all laughed; Orin, me, Rosalie, and the beast lying in tall grasses, swishing its tail.
* * *
I paced the perimeter of the white-stone walls that framed Griffith observatory, panting and clutching my heaving sides. The day had grown warmer with the afternoon and the climb had more than taken the edge off my restless energy. I half-staggered off the trail and out into the parking lot, gleaming hot in the sun.
A couple loading children and teenagers out of an SUV paused their commotion and looked at me with open concern. It took a moment for them to recognize plucky Katie Finn, or perhaps it was it the tabloid queen that held their attention, but it came as it always does with a finger point and whispered exclamation. Cameras were extracted. Lens caps pocketed. Zoom lenses silently magnified the pixels on the surface of the beads of sweat streaking my face. I turned back and headed around a bush to the far side of the walkway, slipping out of sight like the wildlife that I had become.
When my breath had finally returned, I sat hugging my knees upon the farthest edge of the brown and green mottled escarpment that fanned out like an earthen dress from beneath the observatory, staring out over Los Angeles. From the safety of that plateau, the city looked so harmless; gleaming in its smoggy blue mist, its steel corners and cliffs of glass fracturing the sun into brilliant shards of burnt-orange light.
I thought of the two meetings – the conversations – that had, to that point, bracketed my career. The first, years earlier with Orin, in his modest study, surrounded by his books, regarded from below by little dewy-eyed Rosalie Twill; and the last, only hours ago, in the slick, over-stuffed office of Milton Chenowith, surrounded by glossy black and white photographs, regarded from
above by hard-bitten Marion “the Duke” Morrison. The first, a conversation that warned of an impending, traitorous mediocrity. The second, a conversation that seemed to revel in ripening that warning into a promise, nudging mediocrity into its full, inglorious bloom. In the middle of those two conversations, lay the city at my feet, a world unto itself.
I would like to say that Orin Twill had been wrong about me. In the months that followed our meeting, I thought often of his prediction and just as often dismissed it as ludicrous. But in less than eighteen months time, I found myself chewing gum and swishing mouthwash on television. It was a fast and steep descent that started with the sudden loss of my position with The L.A.Q., the budget for which was, apparently, not able to accommodate assistants with their own ego-challenging, editorial opinions.
I set out to look for similar work, but had no success, and as my already paltry financial reserves dropped lower, so did my standards. My mother repeatedly offered me a stipend, which I repeatedly refused. I knew that several years earlier my father had arranged the loan for my brother’s home, paying the bulk of the down payment. I remember, too, having an ugly mixture of contempt and envy for David, who was able to accept the help without any apparent reservation. For better or worse, it was not a debt I could bear to incur.
Months of poverty and depression and self-pity followed. Mine is not a rags-to-riches story of drugs and prostitution and the violence of urban circumstance. I never lived shoeless on the street nor took up with junkies and thieves. But I was lost just the same and those alternative lifestyles of desperation no longer felt like the possibilities of another world, but the possibilities of my world. As though all of that was but a few misfortunes away. It was a self-indulgently piteous season of my life, and as silly and unnecessary as I now know that it was, I also know how real those feelings were then. Every sense of who I was and what I was worth began to waste and decay.
I kept up appearances for my mother, receiving her calls and enduring her unbroken stream of complaints about my father – his drinking, his aloofness, his cold and exclusive superiority – as though I had energy to burn. To the end of her days, she had no idea the state of my life during those years.
As for the relationship with my father, it all but completely stopped for lack of attention; the geographic separation like a wooden stake through the heart of whatever was left of the father-daughter bond. At least he made the pretense of being busy when I called; as though he was in the middle of something so urgent or compelling that he needed to hand the phone to my mother before he had uttered ten words of greeting.
At least he bothered with the pretense. Pathetic as it is, I still love him for that. It was something. A pulse. Something.
I was certainly no better. Determined to be both financially independent and cruelly forsaken of all support, I could not talk to my father without sounding either indifferent or angry at his existence. To make matters worse, all of my mother’s marital complaints roiled beneath the surface of my being. Quite inexplicably at the time, her grievances filled me with an irrational contempt for my father that was wholly at odds with my equally strong irritation at my mother for choosing to be such a willing and devoted victim. In truth, my father could not win with me, even if he had bothered to try. There was far too much unspoken and far too little forgiven.
After a series of disastrous jobs, I finally went to work waiting tables at a restaurant in West Hollywood called Gomp’s. It was one of those places where the signature plating effort lay in the elaborate, precariously vertical arrangements of a very little bit of food beneath drizzles of improbable color set upon large, white platters. Gomp’s towers of culinary pretension were a very long ways away from the finger-licking, flesh-staining simplicity of the nyma chama and the ugali awaiting me, years later, on a private island in the Indian Ocean off the Kenyan coast of Africa. If there is a comparison more emblematic of the differences between Los Angeles and Mombasa, I cannot think of one.
It was at Gomp’s that I fell in with a group of people that set me on the path. They no longer have names, these people. It has been far too long for names. I remember them like the little ghosts of memory that inhabit the playgrounds of my childhood.
But I do remember that their primary ambition in the world was to act. Not to star in movies – no one ever used the word movie – but to act … in film. They spoke of their calling to the craft. They all spoke lovingly of the screenplays – the treatments – on which they were working. They spoke incessantly of the industry that surrounded us as if they were discussing their own families. Martin Scorcese was simply Uncle Marty, just as Robert DeNiro was Bobby D, and Anthony Hopkins was Sir Tony. And, of course, there was always Mother Meryl. They all loved Mother Meryl. The list went on forever.
The enthusiasm of these people, their certainty of purpose, seemed to come to me by a kind of osmosis. I think I envied them until I gradually became them. They spoke so constantly of their auditions and of their agents and their opportunities, it was lost on me that they were all spending most of their waking hours working in the restaurant business, and that none of them had anything even remotely approaching a career in film. Their vision of themselves was infectious and, without a compelling vision of my own, I simply succumbed. What ultimately lowered my inhibitions against this seduction was their seemingly unanimous certainty that their path was also my path; that I was one of them; and that if I felt lost to the world, it was only because I had never given in to what they knew was my, and everyone’s, true calling: Acting. The craft. The industry. The beast.
Still, I mightily resisted Hollywood’s gravitational pull, overplaying a shyness I did not have and feigning rapturous devotion to a literary-minded career that did not exist. After many months of less than subtle pressure, I finally allowed myself to be coerced into auditioning for a national-brand toothpaste commercial. I was assured that while they required mostly modeling, not acting, commercials were good gateway opportunities. Screen presence, demographic appeal, self-confidence; dramatic versatility; humor; sexuality; delivery – I was assured that all of these things came through in what I was encouraged to think of as a kind of nationally distributed audition tape that only incidentally helped to sell somebody’s product. Great way to get noticed, they told me. Problem is, most people don’t have the looks. But you, Tilly . . .
So, at the recommendation of my friends, I signed up an agent – Magdeline Sumner of The Bartholomew Group, a ridiculous orange-haired woman in very high heels and a severe, theatrically made up face, recommended by one of the bussers. Maggie, as she liked to be called, drank too much coffee and tried much too hard to seem relaxed. She told me not to worry so many times, and with such urgency, that shortly into our first and only meeting, I was terrified about the very idea of auditioning for anything. I changed my mind about the whole idea half a dozen times and would have told her so had I been able to penetrate her rapid, over-caffeinated monologue, about the need for guidance and protection against exploitation. I filled out the paperwork giving The Bartholomew Group a percentage of what she assured me would be a lucrative career in commercial acting.
Two days later I found myself standing in a Santa Monica parking lot, baking in a two hour line with an assortment of bronze-skinned, white-toothed Amazons that made me feel like a fish among mermaids. My forward line-mate, Kimmi Fontaine – a name manufactured so as to never be forgotten – had long since earned her stripes in a couple of Tic-Tac adds, had just wrapped a shoot for Band-Aid, and was working hard on breaking into the cosmetic cabal. L’Oreal and Maybelline were looking promising, she said, gleaming in the sun. Lancôme needed to get over itself.
I told Kimmi that I was looking for a product with an ironic, self-deprecating sense of humor. She smiled at me quizzically, as though I had burped at her, and then stopped talking.
The audition, consisting mostly of a series of grotesque facial contortions in a room full of over-lit mirrors, cameras and well-dressed, overly serious men, lasted on
ly fifteen minutes. I was ejected unceremoniously back out into the sunlight, feeling numb and disoriented, awash in the anti-climactic residue of an experience that had simultaneously taken too much and too little of my time and effort.
But excited phone calls from Maggie Sumner sent me back to Santa Monica twice that week. The parking lot lines for the call-backs were progressively shorter and, once I was back in the room of mirrors and lights, the well-dressed men allowed me to speak words and walk and move my arms in addition to making faces. Just the same, I found it all an alien and thoroughly demeaning exercise, which I endured like one endures a bad film only because the price of admission has already been paid and there is really nothing better to do with the evening. If success must give perseverance its due, then perseverance must tip its hat to the momentum of sacrifice and the power of optimistic delusion. It is natural for us to believe that the movie cannot possibly get any worse.
I am still amazed that somehow, over scores of other women far better suited to the task, Kimmi Fontaine among them, I was selected to brush my teeth for America.
I was stupefied, both with the process and the result. I felt I was awful in every respect. For the first few weeks after the commercial was released, I tried my best to avoid television entirely. But the advertisement always seemed to find me when I could least defend myself: sitting in a sports bar or in the waiting room of my mechanic. It started like a bad pick-up line, with the slow moan of that baritone sax and the insinuating voice-over – Going to bed? Be a good girl. Don’t forget to brush. But remember, once it’s in your mouth, there’s no turning back. Each time I heard those words, I wanted to close my eyes and leave the room, the lobby, the pharmacy.
But I was helpless to keep from looking, and suddenly, inevitably, there I was, bent over a sink in a skimpy open kimono making auto-erotic expressions in the mirror and rapidly developing a sexual relationship with my toothbrush, unable to contain the flow of frothy white paste. Convincingly unable. That was the acting part. It was ghastly.