I Don't Have a Happy Place

by Kim Korson

  The day I got laid off from the casting agency, I packed up my cardboard box, as I’d seen so many television characters do before me. The company was in financial straits and one of us needed to go. They claimed that since I was the last to be hired, it was only fair I be the first fired. Sounded like a lot of hooey to me. Instead of taking my usual bus home, I thought it more effective to stomp the entire way to my apartment. It was on this route that I was stopped by a homeless fellow in a Davy Crockett hat.

  “You got any change in that box?” he said, fiddling with the tail on his head.

  “No,” I said, using the rude tone I’d mastered in my brief tenure in show business. I held on to my office box, the one filled with the pens and Post-its and rage of my fellow shit-canned employees around the world. The man just stood still, giving me the once-over. Then he leaned in and said, “You should smile more.”

  “Pffft.” Off I marched.

  “Bitch,” he said, rather loudly.

  I channeled all the scrap I could muster, spun around, and marched right back to his judgy face and dumb hat. “Hey!” I waggled a finger near his eyes. “You’d be a bitch, too, if you just got laid off!”

  I could still hear him laughing as I fought the wind over the Mass Ave Bridge.

  I spent a month holed up in my apartment, watching television, eating toast, when Casting & Co. called to offer me my job back. (I know, settle down, I, too, was surprised.) This time, I vowed to do things differently. Oh, sure, I’d still have a terrible attitude, but this time I’d dust off my old acting skills to make it appear as if I were participating. Which I did until I couldn’t fake it anymore. It was time to take this show on the road.

  Entry Level Redux, Manhattan

  New York City: birthplace of the discovered. Here, it would all be different. Here, I would be different.

  The first thing I did was enlist a telephone-answering service called Bells Are Ringing. This is what all the soon-to-be’s did back in the early ‘90s. Being part of a phone service triggered something in me. It made me finally want to apply myself. All the energy my high school teachers and various educators spent begging me not to be lame finally paid off. A fresh city meant a new life’s ambition: becoming the top client Bells Are Ringing ever had. I wanted to be more than Caller 580—I wanted to be highly esteemed, the most fun, the gold star. I didn’t even want a job anymore, just my position as number-one caller-inner.

  Jeffy was instantly my favorite, and I his. We hit it off right away. He, the upbeat wannabe Broadway dancer answering phones until Tommy Tune came a-callin’, and I, the sassy work for hire who clocked in at least three calls a day even though my resume hadn’t garnered one bite. By the end of my second week, we had inside jokes and he was calling me “hon.” I adored nothing more than being called “hon,” especially by a gay phone operator. My mother subscribed to Ms. magazine so that I could avoid being called “hon,” but nothing made me feel mightier.

  I loved Jeffy. We’d stay on the phone for five- to seven-minute clips. I didn’t even need a job or friends or a place to go because I had Jeffy, and he had me. A job would only get in the way of our relationship. However, with only seventy-eight dollars left in my bank account, Jeffy suggested perhaps it was time to get working.

  I spent many unemployed days walking the streets. When moving to NYC, one wants to look like a real New Yorker. You don’t want your clothes to give away your place of origin. You adopt a New York face, which is a combination of purpose and unflappability and superiority and Don’t bother me, I’m going somewhere important, but if you get hit by a bus, I will definitely help you. Nothing fazes you. If someone yells in your face or is masturbating in Central Park, what do you care? You’re a native. You know to complain about the incompetence of the cashier at your local Duane Reade. When out-of-towners tell you your city is great but they wouldn’t want to live here, you wave off their nonsense by telling them you can eat pad Thai at three a.m. if you so choose (but you rarely do). You say the crowds give you energy, even if they give you panic attacks. And you walk wherever you need to go. Well, that part I just told myself. Real New Yorkers take the subway, but I was terrified of it. I grew up watching The Warriors and Fame and Welcome Back, Kotter—I knew what roguery took place underground. I spent my dwindling dollars on cab rides.

  When Jeffy called to announce that I’d finally gotten a real appointment at a talent agency, I put on my interview pants and took a cab to 250 West Fifty-seventh Street. The lobby had a small newspaper stand with an impressive candy display, and a company directory on the marbled walls that I consulted three times upon arrival even though I’d memorized the floor, checked, and rechecked at home and twice in the cab. I’d never heard of the Agency, but after some due diligence I learned that the founder, who lived in Los Angeles, had a Hollywood actor pedigree and had started a West Coast agency that represented the likes of James Earl Jones and Bette Midler and Jean Stapleton. I was to meet the agent in charge of the New York office.

  “Have a seat, honey,” said an ascotted fellow with thick plastic glasses low on his nose. Head down and eyes peeking over the top of the tortoiseshell rims, he said, “You might want to sit for a moment. She’ll be back soon.”

  Back at the electric typewriter, he hummed as he clacked and clicked, and I wondered who she was—Jeffy had told me I was to be meeting someone named Paul. There were no framed headshots on the wall the way I’d imagined, just stacks of half-opened envelopes on a messy desk, and a few sad chairs, on even sadder carpet, lined up near the door. Half the office was windowed, yet still it managed to feel dark inside. The only difference between the Agency’s office and my prior agency job in Boston was the address.

  Twenty minutes later, a man entered the office with a stack of Variety magazines in hand. He had black hair and wore black jeans, black Reeboks, black glasses, and a light-blue button-down shirt that was mostly tucked in. One of the bottom buttons was undone, revealing some hirsute-stomach business I tried to ignore as he lumbered to the back of the office. A few seconds later, the telephone rang and I was told Paul would see me now.

  Paul slid a client list across the desk, one typed into three columns on letterhead, on which I recognized one or two of the 150 names. He talked for many minutes about Broadway and Law & Order and something to do with LORT contracts, to which I nodded like I knew what he was talking about. There was a washed-up, tired feeling to every corner of the office, every rug and chair and envelope. I expected New York show business to be shinier than the Broadway Danny Rose feel I was channeling. Regardless, it was a foot in the door of real New York living, so I did all my best nodding and promising to be a very good employee.

  Jeffy called two mornings later to tell me Ascot called, and so I called Ascot, who put me on the phone with Paul, who let me know I could start next week, which actually thrilled Ascot, as he was dying to get out of there to pursue his lifelong dream of experimental theater writing. The Agency would be my place of work for the next three years.

  JOB DESCRIPTION (AS PAUL EXPLAINED IT)

  Answer phones: Self-explanatory. Please be polite.

  Upkeep of headshots & resumes, plus handle incoming: Make sure there are at least thirty headshots on file at all times. Open all headshots that come in mail. If anyone looks interesting, pass to me.

  Prepare daily submissions: Each morning, an envelope will arrive via messenger, which will contain what we call a breakdown. This is a write-up of each project looking to hire and a description of roles they are setting up auditions for. I will write on the breakdown who I feel is appropriate. You type out list, collect the headshots, and mail or messenger in.

  General office and client paperwork maintenance: If the copy machine breaks—well, you get the idea. Oh! This is the most important. You see that black filing cabinet over there? That has all our clients’ union papers, their SAG and AFTRA contracts. These are very important and need to be check
ed monthly to see whose are up for renewal. Once they need to be renewed, you type up the new forms and send them in. Okay? You got it? It’s very important. (Reader alert: Chekov’s gun.) (Stay tuned.)

  JOB DESCRIPTION (AS I EXECUTED IT. FOR THREE MONTHS. AND THEN . . .)

  Answer phones: Oh, God, stop ringing, already.

  Upkeep of headshots & resumes, plus handle incoming: I’m sure there are enough in the files.

  Prepare daily submissions: Really? Submit these thirty actors for Stomp (a percussion show), when only one of these actors has percussion experience listed on his resume? Is anyone from here really going to star opposite Tom Hanks? I’ll send it tomorrow.

  General office and client paperwork maintenance: Oh, is the copier jammed? Does anyone really need staples? I’m sure those pesky contracts are fine where they are.

  When I first moved to the city and started at the Agency, I imagined life would be like The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I’d move into a darling apartment with a sunken living room and a new best friend right upstairs. During the day, I’d pal around with my coworkers and be the apple of my boss’s gruff eye, although really he had a heart of gold. At night, my Rhoda would come downstairs and together we’d lament our hilarious work shenanigans and share head scarves.

  In reality, my neighbor was a shut-in and the studio I was subletting was littered with take-out containers. There was no camaraderie at the office like at the WJM newsroom. The day-to-day work was tedious. Sure, there were perks. Paul loved going to the theater, which he did almost every night. If there were extra tickets, he’d give them to me. Many a time that meant sitting in a church basement suffering through an all-woman production of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but sometimes it meant Lincoln Center, where I went to the opening night of Arcadia and found myself sitting in front of its author, Tom Stoppard, and right across the aisle from Regis. I saw Carol Channing return in Hello, Dolly! when she was 107 years old and they had to put a net over the pit lest she fell off the stage. I even attended opening night of Damn Yankees, starring Jerry Lewis, then off to a party at Tavern on the Green. On those evenings, I really felt like I was a part of things.

  But the next morning I was back to sweeping the cinders. And although I had little experience or talent for the job, I wanted to be in the thick of it all the time. I wanted to turn down offers for our too-busy clients and wear sunglasses indoors. Instead of taking a long look at myself, I decided instead to find things wrong with my boss. His eyebrows were too thick, he whined when he spoke, what did he do all day besides read the trades? How could I be expected to work under such unprofessional conditions? Our clients weren’t landing big roles. Some made money as long-standing soap-opera characters and we had a few up-and-coming Broadway performers, but this was C-level stuff.

  I decided it was time to move on. I alerted Jeffy that I had sent out one resume and asked him, even though I wasn’t that kind of lucky, to please keep an ear out for the potential call, which, lo and behold, came in. I interviewed on my lunch hour and actually landed the job. It was the most Hollywood thing to ever happen to me, and I took that as a sign.

  Unfortunately, I was too scared to quit, so to remedy that, I started phoning it in. The submissions got lazier. Sometimes if we were low on resumes I’d just omit them from the packet. If the copy machine jammed, I pretended I didn’t see. I talked to my friends on the phone instead of ordering the office supplies or keeping tabs on those very important contracts sitting innocently in file folders, expiring. It did occur to me that Paul might do occasional spot inspections of the contract files, so instead of dealing with them as instructed, I hid them in the top drawer of my desk. At least I had the decency to give my notice two days before Paul found said contracts in the desk drawer. But Paul still got mad. Really mad. I took my lumps, though, let him scream at me as he stomped around my desk a few times and then, like a maniac, yanked the phone cord out of the wall.

  “You may not use this any longer. You may not talk on the phone. Or answer the phone. Or touch the phone. Just. Do. The. Contracts. And then, you are fired!”

  “I’m not fired because I quit!” I said. Okay, I didn’t say that. I did, however, want to remind him that I’d already quit, but even I knew enough to stop talking. Paul didn’t speak to me for the remainder of my time there, which, if you ask me, was rather unprofessional. On my last day at the Agency, I walked into his office to say goodbye.

  “Good luck to you,” he said under his breath, but I think he actually said “Good luck to them.”

  Last Stop: Show Business

  It is said that the entertainment industry is the only place where one can fail up. When I walked into the SuperAgency—a boutique agency, which was a smaller operation than the big guns like William Morris or CAA, but which represented actors you definitely knew by name or face—I knew I had finally stepped in real show business. Here was the big-fish/small-pond situation I’d hoped to find for myself. Finally, after all that nonwork, I’d arrived. Should you find yourself working in the talent agency world as an assistant, here are some signs to confirm that you, too, have officially entered real show business.

  1. The letterhead is very nice. Also, each agent has a stack of special note cards, which usually are in a bookmark shape, with their names emblazoned on them. They are of thick card stock and get placed in scripts or submission packets with small notes inscribed. Assistants dream of having these cards.

  2. You will use a headset to talk on the phone. Not only does this look official, it leaves your hands free to organize note cards.

  3. You will be forced to learn a new language—a slanguage—which you’ll absorb by studying the copy of Variety you will be told to read only after your boss has finished consulting it and throws it in the trash. To get you started, a few of the more important words:

  ankled = fired

  a shingle = a small business

  a ten percenter = an agent

  Gotham-based = New York City–based

  Not to worry, you will catch on quickly but, if you’re lost, ask a fellow assistant because . . .

  4. No agent will talk to you.

  5. It’s no longer Robert De Niro, it’s Bobby. And Marty Scorsese and Sandy Bullock and everyone’s best pal, Jimmy Caan.

  When I first started at the SuperAgency, an awful agent/creature was running the show, a Hydra of sorts. And, just as the Greek myth suggested, when one head got cut off, two more grew in its place. Word came from HQ in Los Angeles that our boss had been set free and, until further notice, two senior agents would temporarily take over—one Hydra gets ankled, sprouting two new heads of talent. This new thing was a creature so powerful that it caused assistants to hide in their cubicles or scurry to the bathroom to weep.

  Had I been in a movie, audiences would have seen a greenish sky looming over Forty-second Street, cockroaches and rodents running to get the hell out of the area. Something wicked—well, two things wicked—this way came. The audience would shout warnings at the screen: “Get out of there!” “Run!” But who listens to moviegoers who yell at the screen? Instead, I stayed at my desk, reminded on a daily basis of my stupidity, incompetence, and general dislikability.

  My direct boss was a comedy agent. Mind you, she represented young stand-ups way before stand-ups made any real money on television, so she wasn’t taken seriously and also suffered at the hands of the new boss ladies, whom I’d come to regard as Roald Dahl’s infamous duo from James and the Giant Peach, Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker. If you are not familiar with these aunts, one was rail thin and the other a roundish ball, and they were the relatives forced to take young James in after his parents get eaten by a rhinoceros. They watched over him, sure, but they were mean, abusive, and never let the young boy out of their sight to play with other children. Agent Sponge and Agent Spiker were, to put it plain, hideous to us. They were the agents you see in movies but don’t believe really exist. Calling us
names, pitting us against one another, throwing the contents of our desks across the office. Sponge and Spiker seemed to take great pleasure in the insults they hurled our way, the mind games they played on us. It was degrading.

  In fairness, I was still a lackluster employee, complete with bad attitude and lazy work habits and a real talent for stirring the pot, but they treated every assistant this way, even the ones who made an effort. We knew better than to tattle on Sponge and Spiker, especially to their clients, who loved their agents loyally and somehow found their unctuous personalities delightful. The upside was that it bonded we lower-level employees. We were tight, a band of not-so-merry assistants, and I, the most miserable and aggravated of the bunch, led this group daily to our two-dollar beans-and-rice plates at the dive across the street, where we’d spend our entire lunch hour dissecting each mean thing said to us that day, picking apart Sponge and Spiker limb by limb like a group of four-year-old boys with a handful of daddy longlegs. It just made us feel better.

  In the spring of 1986, we’d learned that two high-powered agents had been poached from William Morris to breathe new life into the SuperAgency. The assistants whispered about it in the bathroom, wondering whether these new agents chose these positions or left William Morris to spend more time with their families (slanguage synonym for ankled). No matter, in our eyes their arrival ruffled Sponge and Spiker, and that was good enough for us.

  The office was not nearly big enough—literally or figuratively—to hold our new SuperAgents. Reshuffling ensued. Sponge and Spiker let everyone know they were staying put. SuperAgent One looked around the place, to see which room was grand enough to hold him and his deal making. As he paced the office we were already mushrooming out of, his assistant walked behind him, surveying the scene. You could tell she meant business in a way none of us did, due to her smart slacks and serious glasses. You knew by just looking at her focused eyebrows that she’d never slum by the Xerox machine to waste time or complain. SuperAssistant walked with purpose, her headset (with dangly cord) always on her head, ready to plug into any phone at a moment’s notice should one of their top-shelf clients call in or, more importantly, if her SuperAgent felt thirsty or needed the air conditioner turned up a degree.