Seeing Stars Read online

  Seeing Stars

  A Novel

  Diane Hammond

  FOR KERRY

  Contents

  September 2006

  Chapter One

  RUTH RABINOWITZ HAD A WAKING NIGHTMARE THAT SHE had hit…

  Chapter Two

  ON ANY GIVEN DAY, MIMI ROBERTS TALENT MANAGEMENT represented anywhere…

  Chapter Three

  AS RUTH UNDERSTOOD IT, THERE EXISTED A DICHOTOMY of opinions…

  Chapter Four

  IN FACT, WHAT CAME NEXT WAS A CHECK FOR $995,…

  Chapter Five

  DILLARD BUEHL HAD MADE HIS FORTUNE SELLING BOILED peanuts at…

  Chapter Six

  AFTER THE SHOWCASE ENDED AND MIMI HAD ESCORTED the agents…

  Chapter Seven

  HUGH ALAN RABINOWITZ LOVED THE PRACTICE OF DENTISTRY. The human…

  October 2006

  Chapter Eight

  ON A BEAUTIFUL SUNNY TUESDAY IN OCTOBER, LAUREL Buehl reported…

  Chapter Nine

  HUGH’S ALASKA AIRLINES FLIGHT A WEEK LATER WAS HALF an…

  November–December 2006

  Chapter Ten

  ANGIE AND LAUREL BUEHL SAT SIDE BY SIDE ON UNYIELDING…

  Chapter Eleven

  THE CW’S CALIFORNIA DREAMERS, STILL IN ITS FIRST SEASON, was…

  Chapter Twelve

  WINTER IN SEATTLE WAS AS DANK AS A SEWER, BUT…

  Chapter Thirteen

  AS SOON AS HUGH AND RUTH HAD GONE TO BED,…

  Chapter Fourteen

  IF QUINN COULD HAVE ANYTHING OTHER THAN A CAR for…

  Chapter Fifteen

  MOST OF MIMI’S OUT-OF-TOWN CLIENTS WENT HOME FOR Thanksgiving, but…

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE WEEKS BETWEEN THANKSGIVING AND CHRISTMAS were, in Ruth’s opinion,…

  January 2007

  Chapter Seventeen

  TWO OR THREE TIMES NOW, QUINN HAD DREAMED ABOUT hands.

  Chapter Eighteen

  MIMI DELETED QUINN’S PHONE MESSAGE: HE WAS JUST ONE more…

  February 2007

  Chapter Nineteen

  IN THE SPACE OF ONE WEEK, THE PACE OF THEATRICAL…

  March–April 2007

  Chapter Twenty

  EVERYONE AGREED THAT SOMETHING WAS GOING ON WITH Allison. For…

  Chapter Twenty-One

  RUTH AND BETHY SAT IN SILENCE IN THE CAR OUTSIDE…

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  THE LITTLE CHILI PEPPER CHARM HAD BEEN IN QUINN’S pocket…

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  AT THE END OF THE MIX-AND-MATCH SESSION FOR BUDDY and…

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  THE DAY AFTER HER CONVERSATION WITH DENISE ADDISON, Mimi left…

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  CASSIE WAS THE ONE WHO DELIVERED THE NEWS. SHE TOLD…

  After

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Diane Hammond

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  September 2006

  The thing about Hollywood is it makes you doubt yourself—your identity, your judgment, your motivation, your parenting—because you are trafficking in children. Harsh but true: if you want to cast a Geisha-child in kimono, wig, whiteface, and tabi, fifty mothers will rush forward and offer you their daughters; if your taste is for a redheaded tomboy who looks like she could build the atom bomb with a pen, two rubber bands, and some baling wire, you can find her on any street corner. Baby dimples, Eurasian glamour, Chinese dolls with moving parts, black girls and Barbie dolls and boys as beautiful as angels—they can all be delivered right to your door, where you can make them up and feed them lines and they will do whatever you ask them to do, because their mommies and daddies and agents and managers and producers and directors have told them it’s perfectly all right because they are going to be famous one day. Try your luck! Pull the lever, swing the hammer, throw the dart, shoot the gun, play any game you like, because you never know who’s going to be a winner. And you’ll not only allow your children to play, you’ll hold the door open for them on their way through. You’ll feed them and water them and dress them and coach them, and the fact is, you’d slap their latest headshots onto the backs of the benches where derelicts sleep, if you actually thought it might help.

  —VEE VELMAN

  Chapter One

  RUTH RABINOWITZ HAD A WAKING NIGHTMARE THAT SHE had hit a transvestite crossing Highland at Hollywood Boulevard. In her mind the transvestite would be lying in the crosswalk surrounded by Shreks and Dorothys and Princess Fionas; Batman would call 911 while Japanese tourists took pictures of the fallen one with their cell phones. The transvestite would be fine, of course—it was a waking nightmare—and when s/he was set upright on his/her extremely tall platform shoes, s/he would look down on Ruth from six feet up and say kindly, Go ahead, honey—you cry if you want to. Ruth would break down right there, and the transvestite would take her gently in his/her arms—and his/her skin would be wonderfully silky and toned from hours at the gym—and smooth her hair from her face while she wept.

  That’s how much pressure she was under.

  Driving into Hollywood was always harrowing, and though she and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Bethany, had been in Los Angeles for only three weeks, she had already learned that the smoothness of the trip to a casting studio was inversely proportionate to the importance of the audition. Right now it was three o’clock, Bethany’s callback time had been two forty-five, and they were stuck in choking traffic on Highland near Santa Monica.

  Admittedly, some of their tardiness—all right, most of it—was Ruth’s fault. She had a tendency, even under routine circumstances, to dither. She’d changed clothes twice before they’d left, even though no one would care or even notice what she was wearing. She’d checked and rechecked an e-mail in which Mimi Roberts, Bethany’s manager, had forwarded the callback’s time and location. She’d printed out, misplaced, reprinted, and then found the original copy of the MapQuest directions she’d pulled up—even though they’d driven to the same casting studio just yesterday. Now she heard the same maddening refrain looping endlessly inside her head: You should have left sooner, you should have left sooner, you should have left sooner. Her blood pressure was so high she could feel her pulse in her feet. “I just can’t believe there’s this much traffic,” she said.

  “Mom,” Bethany said with newfound world-weariness. “This is LA.”

  “Well, you can certainly see why it’s the birthplace of road rage.” They moved up a couple of car lengths and then stopped, still at least eight cars short of the intersection. Beside them a young man in a BMW cursed energetically into his Bluetooth. Ruth couldn’t tell what he was saying, but she thought he looked very attractive in his nice suit and tie and tiny gold hoop earrings. She couldn’t imagine her husband, Hugh, in earrings. He was only forty-six, but he could have belonged to their parents’ generation. He was, conceivably, the last man in America to own Hush Puppies. “What?” he’d said when she’d pointed this out once. “They’re very well-made and they’re comfortable.”

  “You should try clogs,” she’d offered. “Dansko ones, like your hygienists wear.”

  But he’d just made a dismissive sound and applied himself to tying his shoelaces so that the loops of the bows were the same size and the leftover lace lengths matched. Sometimes it took him three or four times to get it just right. Ruth would have just pulled the hem of her pants down lower so no one would see. Not that she wore oxfords. She’d been wearing the same style of Bass Weejuns loafers since 1973.

  “Hold up the MapQuest directions again,” she said. Bethany held the sheet of paper far enough aw
ay for Ruth to read without her glasses. She scanned the page and sighed deeply. “At least we’re within five blocks. Do you have your script? Maybe you should run your lines.”

  “Sides. They’re called sides. If you call it a script, people will think we’re right off the boat.”

  “We are right off the boat.”

  Bethany crossed her arms tightly over her chest.

  “No?”

  The girl gave her a look.

  “Don’t sulk. I know we should have—”

  “Mom.”

  “What? Oh!” Ruth finally got it. “Right. You’re in character.”

  “Duh.”

  Ruth sighed. She wished Bethy wasn’t in character, because right now her daughter was the rapidly fraying line that connected Ruth to everything she loved and gained strength from. Still, everyone talked about how important it was for even the youngest actor to walk into every audition in character, even if she had just one line. Casting, as Mimi had told her and Bethy in their first week in LA and repeatedly ever since, began in the waiting room. Actors were sometimes cast on the spot, before they’d even read a line, they were that right. “Do you have the glasses?”

  Bethany held up eyeglass frames without lenses. She was auditioning for a costar role—a part with fewer than five spoken lines—to play a nerdy sidekick on the Disney Channel sitcom That’s So Raven. Ruth felt a little shiver of possibility. The casting director at yesterday’s audition had called Bethy “adorable, just adorable,” and specifically instructed her to bring a pair of glasses to the callback. According to Mimi, they weren’t even supposed to tell you they were giving you a callback; they were supposed to call your agent, who called your manager, who called you. The point was that protocol had been violated, the casting director had been that enthusiastic. They’d gone to Target and found a pair of weird sunglasses and popped out the lenses. They’d also done her hair in a side ponytail and bought her a pair of strange knit pants.

  This was her first callback. Mimi had told them that you had to get callbacks regularly because if you didn’t, your agent (in Bethy’s case, Holly Jensen at Big Talent) would lose interest in you, in which case you might as well pack up and go home. Mimi had amplified on this by telling a chilling story about one of her clients who hadn’t been out on a single audition in six months, whereas when he was still in his agent’s good graces he’d gone out two or three times a week. She’d then stated bluntly that the family was to blame. Not only had the boy not been enrolled in the acting classes Mimi had recommended, but his mother had insisted on using a terrible headshot that had been taken by a relative, for God’s sake, and if you weren’t willing to pay for professional materials, well then Mimi couldn’t be responsible for the consequences. She had told the boy’s parents to take him to Honey Schweitzer, a photographer who was red-hot right now. Four of the clients who’d had her take their headshots were series regulars now, three on sitcoms and one on a prime-time, hour-long drama. Honey charged five hundred dollars for a one-hour photo shoot and still clung to film instead of a digital format, but the point—at least as far as Ruth could follow it—was that people still used her, she was that good. If you did things on the cheap—and how many times now had Mimi already emphasized this—you might just as well take that money and shove it up a rat’s ass. Some of her clients’ mothers—the good mothers, Mimi implied; the ones who knew how to take direction—had commissioned as many as four different sets of headshots before they’d gotten the one in which the eyes reached out and spoke to you. If your headshot didn’t do that, you could just forget about everything else.

  Mimi made a lot of pronouncements.

  Don’t mumble. Own the room. Don’t let your mother speak to anyone.

  Never be late for an audition.

  It was four fifteen. They were two cars from the intersection of Santa Monica and Highland. Ruth rested her forehead momentarily on the steering wheel and then took a strengthening breath. “You know you’re going to have to walk into this callback like you own it. Do you need to use the bathroom?” Ruth asked because she did, and she and Bethy had always been in sync that way.

  “I didn’t, until you said that,” Bethany said.

  Ruth sighed and watched a transvestite—not a nice one like in her nightmare, but a haughty, faux-breasted person with an alarming blond wig—cross the street. S/he had a better figure than Ruth had ever had, never mind now. She’d never minded before; in Seattle, middle-aged women just spread and thickened and got on with it, but here you were supposed to look like you had when you were twenty, except for your hair, she gathered; you were supposed to be more sophisticated with your hair. But of course it was Bethy’s appearance that mattered.

  “If you’re going to come all the way down here, you’re going to have to do some things,” Mimi had warned Ruth that first day in her office in Van Nuys. “For starters, there are her eyebrows. They’re a little, hmmm, Anne Frank, aren’t they? Plus we need to do something with the hair. If she’s going to keep it long, you’re going to have to get it straightened because, let’s face it, it’s nappy. The price has come way down—you can probably find a place that’ll do it for less than five hundred dollars.” When Ruth had gasped, Mimi just shrugged and said, “Given what we’re starting with, we need the best. She’ll still have an ethnic look, but she’ll be able to play Arab, Jew, gypsy, whatever. You send her in the way she is now and the casting director’s going to look for a prayer shawl.” Ruth had feebly pointed out that only men wore prayer shawls—not that the Rabinowitzes were Orthodox or even practicing Jews—but of course that wasn’t the point.

  Last week they’d consulted with an orthodontist Mimi had recommended whose office in Beverly Hills required you to valet-park at forty dollars an hour and had a water feature in the parking garage lobby. He’d yanked Bethy’s braces off on the spot, even though Dr. Probst, Bethy’s Seattle orthodontist, had been very clear that she should wear them for at least another year before they could even talk about when to remove them. Next week they’d be getting Bethany’s first set of clear plastic Invisalign braces for twice what they’d paid for her old braces and admittedly a poor therapeutic second. But on this, as on every other point, Mimi had been adamant. “Nothing says nerd like steel braces. Do you want her playing the kid in the closeup who represents the losers’ group?”

  So the braces were off, the hair and eyebrows had been done, and four days ago they’d finally had their emergency appointment with Honey Schweitzer, which had cost them almost six hundred dollars by the time they’d ordered fifty sets of one theatrical headshot (no smile) and one commercial headshot (smile).

  If Mimi had told her that Bethy needed an eye transplant, Ruth would probably be out there right now trying to find a donor. She was that committed.

  As it was, Bethany Rabinowitz was now Bethany Ann Roosevelt, Mimi’s creation. “Hmm…Rabinowitz. Let’s go with something more mainstream. Does she have a middle name? Bethany Ann Roosevelt. That’ll make it a little different.” She’d punched the name into the Internet Movie Database to make sure there wasn’t a Bethany Ann Roosevelt already, since two Screen Actors Guild members couldn’t have the same one. Not that Bethany was a SAG member yet. But Mimi had made it plain that they would have to take some steps to get her union card as soon as possible. As she’d explained it to Ruth, SAG membership would not only give Bethy a much more competitive edge and establish her worth as an actor sanctioned by other producers and directors, but it would also give her access to auditions that, until she became SAG, were closed to her as a nonunion actor. It simply had to be done, and the sooner, the better; by implication, once she was a SAG actor, nothing would impede her from rocketing straight to the top. Ruth hadn’t had the strength to ask exactly what that might entail, or how much it might cost. Hugh was very conservative when it came to money, and she had only so much courage.

  “Roosevelt?” he’d said on the phone when Ruth told him. “Roosevelt is ridiculous.”

  “Mim
i thought it would be a good idea,” Ruth had said weakly. “Not so ethnic.”

  “Honey, she’s clearly anti-Semitic. If Bethy has a manager who doesn’t like Jews, she should get another manager.”

  “No one likes Jews,” Ruth had pointed out. “Name one female star whose last name is Greenberg. You can’t. No one can. Or Schwartz or Steinberg or—”

  “Jeff Goldblum. Steve Guttenberg.”

  “They’re men.”

  “They’re Jews!”

  At last Ruth surged through the intersection. It was now four thirty. “Headshot?” she asked Bethany for the sixth time. Bethany held up the eight-by-ten photograph with her résumé stapled to the back and waggled it. The résumé was a work of near-genius. Mimi had assembled it from a string of school plays and summer theater camps at home in Seattle, going all the way back to when Bethy was six years old and had played the part of snow. Ruth and Bethy were both paranoid about the headshot and résumé. During their first week here they’d shown up at an audition without them—Ruth had thought Bethany had them and Bethy had thought Ruth did—and the casting director had snapped at Bethany in front of the entire waiting room, “Oh, for God’s sake,” and then she’d seized the sign-in clipboard, scratched through Bethany’s name, and yelled, “Cecilia Planchard,” which was how they knew Bethany wouldn’t even get to audition, and after they’d spent seventy-five dollars on a half-hour coaching session. Ruth had treated them to a hamburger at Bob’s Big Boy, but even so it had been a glum evening in their stunningly expensive, crappily furnished extended-stay studio apartment. After Bethany had fallen asleep, Ruth had closed herself in the bathroom and cried. “She’s already old to be starting,” Mimi had told them in the lobby of a La Quinta Inn in Seattle six weeks ago, when Bethany had taken Mimi’s two-day intensive seminar on Acting for the Camera. “You know I don’t make any promises.” Yet here they were in Los Angeles, far from home and far from Hugh, who couldn’t leave his dental practice and, anyway, believed that they’d been sold a bill of goods by a shyster talent manager who came to Seattle every three months to pick a little more fruit from the naïveté tree.