Seeing Stars Read online

  In the three and a half years that Allison had been living with her, Mimi had seen the girl grow a foot and test her wings on some of the younger girls to see what power she could exert over them, getting them to tell her each other’s secrets. On the whole, Mimi was not averse to this. Good girls—and she’d seen this time after time—rarely had staying power. Bethany Rabinowitz was one of those, a mama’s girl, a pleaser. Allison, on the other hand, had a talent for forming strategic friendships and playing her looks like a high poker hand—which was not to say that all the girl’s qualities were good, merely that they were useful. Mimi wasn’t blind to the flip side. She knew, for example, that Allison was a notorious classroom cheat. She’d been outed by any number of tutors and proctors whom Mimi had hired to monitor her boarders’ homeschool work. Allison looked up answers in the backs of her textbooks and brazenly copied the other girls’ homework assignments, and when she was caught—and she never made much effort to disguise what she was doing—she and Mimi had terrible arguments, brawls, really. Mimi knew better than anyone that Allison might need to find an alternate career one day; and if so, she’d need at least a basic education. Allison did not agree. “I don’t care about algebra!” she’d scream. “I don’t give a shit where in Europe you can find Mongolia! That’s what librarians are for, to answer stupid questions like that. You just call the Los Angeles Public Library and you ask for the reference desk and you say where is Mongolia and they tell you Spain or whatever!”

  But the fact was, Mimi was tired. Now, when it was all but too late, what she dreamed of—the only thing she still dreamed of—was a client who loved her. In Allison Addison—beautiful, beautiful child—she knew she’d found what she was looking for: the one who would have her. Mimi wasn’t a fool; she’d seen the furtive cuts running up Allison’s arms like needle marks. But in her line of work you accepted as normal a certain degree of damage, and cutting wouldn’t kill the girl. Chances were, she’d outgrow it. In the meantime they fought about school, and their arguments generally ended with one of them storming out of the house or the studio. The farthest Mimi had ever gone was San Francisco; Allison, who had more limited resources, had gotten as far as Tarzana. But their reciprocal abandonment was pure show. By now she and Allison were bound together as tightly as if there’d been chains.

  Chapter Three

  AS RUTH UNDERSTOOD IT, THERE EXISTED A DICHOTOMY of opinions about the relative merits of working as a television or movie extra if you were an unemployed actor. There were the Once an extra, always an extra ideologues on the one hand, and the Anything to become a SAG member pragmatists on the other. Mimi belonged to the latter camp, explaining to Ruth that sending Bethany to work as an extra on a Screen Actors Guild feature film was the first in a two-step strategy by which Bethany would become eligible for SAG membership as soon as possible. A SAG membership, as she described it, would open up worlds.

  So three days after the disastrous Raven callback, Ruth was back on Barham Boulevard, fighting the morning rush-hour traffic on the way to Hollywood’s old Rialto Theatre. Bethany sat beside her and packed into the backseat of the car were the Orphans. The four girls would be working as extras on a union feature film called High Fivin’ the House. Ruth strongly suspected that Mimi had signed the Orphans up not so much to keep Bethany company or for the work experience, but to keep the girls busy and out of her hair for the day.

  The Rialto was being used as a location for the tween/teen Disney film about a close-knit, interracial, interethnic, socio-economically diverse group of kids in an experimental high school who form an alternative cheering squad. It starred Zac Efron and Ashley Tisdale—of course—and Mimi had said if they were lucky the extras might catch a glimpse of them on set. Now, from the front seat, Bethany was telling the girls in the back, “My mom brought her camera, so if we see anyone we can get our pictures taken. Rianne, my BFF back home, would just die. She thinks Zac Efron is so cute.”

  “You’re not going to get within eighty feet of them, you know,” said Allison. “Mimi just told you that so you’d sign up. One time she made us work on a movie with Ashley Tisdale in it for a week and we never saw her once, just her stand-in.”

  “Wow,” said Bethany.

  “Her what?” said Ruth.

  “Her stand-in—her double. Boy, you guys really are new. Big stars aren’t going to just stand there for half the day while the tech guys work on lighting and camera angles and stuff, so they hire someone who’s about the same age and size to stand there for them. I knew a girl who was Keke Palmer’s stand-in for Akeelah and the Bee, and she said it was the worst job ever. She had rickets or shingles or something by the time the movie wrapped.”

  “You could probably be Ellen Page’s stand-in. You’re as good an actor as her,” said Hillary loyally. She was Allison’s self-appointed sidekick, an elfin, precocious child who made it known that she’d gladly put her entire future in jeopardy for just one Victoria’s Secret push-up bra and something to put in it. “We saw Juno, and she was awesome,” she explained to Ruth.

  Allison elbowed her in the ribs. “Ellen Page is like four foot ten and she has really bad hair. She should get extensions. I’m serious.”

  “Well, you have nice hair,” Hillary reassured her.

  “Well, yeah, compared to Ellen Page.” Allison sank back in her seat, crossed her arms, and looked out the window. Ruth suddenly recalled a comment Angie Buehl had made about Allison: “She’ll either be famous or pregnant by the time she’s seventeen.”

  “I hated that set,” Reba was saying from the backseat. The third Orphan was the most unfortunate of them; she was sallow, sullen, overweight, and numbingly untalented. “It was so boring. You couldn’t go to craft services unless they told you to, plus even once you could, the food sucked. The union extras got like a Hawaiian luau and we got a couple of hot dogs and some Jell-O.”

  “Yeah,” echoed Bethy in a chorus of aggrievement.

  “Craft services?” said Ruth.

  “The food caterers,” said Allison. “Man, you guys.”

  “Then why aren’t they just called caterers?” Ruth asked.

  Allison shrugged. “Anyways, we told Mimi we didn’t want to do this stupid movie but she’s making us, anyway.”

  And so there they were, sitting in Ruth’s car and benefiting from Ruth’s services free of charge. Ruth still couldn’t figure out how, exactly, Mimi had talked her into driving these girls and chaperoning them once they were on-site—but then, it was widely acknowledged that Mimi had a special genius for pawning the Orphans onto new, hapless studio moms. “Bethany’s audition is at two o’clock,” Mimi would warble, “and please take Hillary with you, too, because I know you’ll have room in your car and she’s going in for the same part.” You could always tell who’d been conned because of the trapped, glassy-eyed look the women developed at finding themselves saddled with girls as unruly as magpies.

  They were making no progress in the stalled traffic. Ruth was sweating lightly. Out of habit she glanced in the rearview mirror and was appalled to see fat Reba drinking a Slurpee and eating a Hostess Ho Ho. It was eight fifteen in the morning.

  “Honey,” she said, “why don’t you save that until lunch? You could have it for dessert.”

  “That’s okay,” Reba said, chewing complacently. “I can eat it now. They always feed us on set.”

  “I know, but what I meant—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Allison said. “She has them every morning. That, or those cupcakes with the white squiggle.”

  “They’re really not good for you,” Ruth said. Reba shrugged. The other girls just looked out the windows, bored.

  “What do you eat for lunch?” Ruth pressed.

  “Funyuns,” Allison answered for her. “She lives on Funyuns.”

  “I do not,” Reba protested.

  “Yeah, you do.”

  “I eat other stuff, too.”

  “Oh, right, I forgot. Nachos,” Allison said. “And pizza. She eat
s a lot of pizza. Papa John’s is right down the street from the studio.”

  “We all eat pizza,” Hillary pointed out. Ruth could corroborate that. Every time she’d been in the studio there were pizza boxes scattered around like C-rations.

  “Plus she never has fruit or vegetables,” said Allison.

  “Oh, and like you do?” said Reba, wiping her mouth on her Mimi Roberts Talent Management tote bag.

  “I have an apple or a fruit beverage every day,” Allison said primly. “Especially when I can get someone to drive me to Jamba Juice.”

  Ruth’s blood was pounding in her ears. “Do you girls have any idea how many calories are in some of those drinks? Not to mention how expensive they are.”

  Allison shrugged. “It’s no big deal. I get two hundred and twenty-five dollars a week from Chet. Plus I weigh like eighty pounds and I’m already five foot six.”

  “Well, not everyone is as lucky as you,” Ruth said, and then subsided. “Anyway, Mimi must cook for you at night.”

  Allison just shrugged and looked out the window, clearly bored.

  “Mom,” Bethany said. “Nobody cooks in LA.”

  RUTH BELIEVED THAT HER STRENGTHS AS A PERSON AND as a woman did not necessarily include parenting. Unable to conceive almost nine years into their marriage, she and Hugh had made their peace with being childless. As middle age approached, Ruth assumed that she and Hugh would gradually, gently, fill the void by developing an unhealthy attachment to some neighborhood child or pet. Then one morning she’d woken up and vomited. When it happened twice more, she’d picked up a home pregnancy test and stared at the pink strip as though it were stamped with hieroglyphics. She’d made herself read the box several times just to make sure she wasn’t taking a no as a yes, because sometimes she got flustered, but there it was: she was pregnant.

  Her first trimester had passed in a state of sleepy astonishment, which was gradually replaced in the second and third trimesters by an unsubstantiated but nagging certainty that she would give birth to a child with terrible birth defects. In the delivery room her first question, once Bethany had been born, was “Is she normal?” She thought the delivery nurse had given her a disapproving look, though it might have been her imagination—yes, she’d opted for narcotics during labor, even though it wasn’t the best thing for the baby; that was the kind of mother she was. When the news came that Bethy was perfect, Ruth believed with all her heart that she’d gotten away with it only because God had been momentarily distracted.

  Sometimes even now, when she looked at Bethany, her ears began to ring, actually ring, with amazement that this exuberant, smart, talented child was hers. She stood in awe: Bethany was a doer, not a watcher like Ruth. To do meant to risk acts of poor judgment, faulty thinking, weak-mindedness, and lack of conviction, all qualities in which Ruth believed she herself abounded. Not so Bethany; which was why, when Mimi Roberts had come to Seattle to give her Acting for the Camera weekend seminar and it had coincided exactly with Bethy’s decision that she wouldn’t pursue musical theater after all—and what stage productions weren’t musical, these days?—Ruth had signed her up immediately. The child had no neuroses, abundant dreams, and significant talent. What could Ruth do but trot along a half-step ahead of her, scattering rose petals in her path?

  And so here they were, tracking a series of yellow plastic signs with High Fivin’ printed both right side up and upside down, with an arrow telling them where and in which direction to turn. Ruth and Bethany had been seeing signs like these nailed to power poles all over LA: CSI: Miami, Ghost Whisperer, Numb3rs, The Closer. Ruth had assumed that the signs, with their upside-down names, were someone’s colossal mistake but that the shows used them anyway rather than waste them. It was Bethany who’d figured them out: with the name of the show printed both right side up and upside down, the sign could be used to point either left or right, as needed. It wasn’t the first time Ruth had thought Bethy got this place in a way that Ruth clearly didn’t. Every time they turned a corner and found a street barricaded by a chaos of white semi trucks and light arrays, every single time, Ruth assumed they’d stumbled onto a catastrophe—a car accident, a fatal stabbing, a drug bust. And every time, Bethy said, “Mom, they’re filming something! It’s so cool. Those trailers are dressing rooms, some of them. There’s probably someone famous in there right now.”

  Ruth turned into a parking lot that was already nearly full and set the parking brake—she was a cautious driver, even when they were on a flat surface—and turned around in her seat. The three girls looked back.

  “Do you all have your work permits?” Ruth asked. Entertainment industry permits were required for all children under sixteen, with no exceptions. Producers took this very seriously; their sets could be shut down if a child was allowed in without a current Department of Labor–issued original. No permit, no work, no exceptions. Ruth had heard that Mimi routinely made color photocopies of all the Orphans’ work permits—the official stamp was done in red ink and photocopied beautifully—and sent the girls with those whenever they lost their originals.

  Now nods: yes, they had their permits.

  “Schoolwork?”

  Two nods, and a shifty little smile from Allison. Like all Mimi’s clients, the Orphans were homeschooled. As Mimi had explained it to Hugh, you couldn’t be available for auditions, coaching, work (God willing), and acting classes any other way; you just couldn’t. But the good news was, so many kids were in the same boat that the Burbank school system had what Ruth thought of as their “school in a bag” program. You were assigned a coordinator, received your curriculum, and were issued all the necessary textbooks, worksheets, lab materials, and handouts that normal kids got in “real” school. You worked on the material on your own schedule and met with your coordinator every three weeks, when your progress and work were reviewed. There were no teachers, no classrooms, and no group activities.

  “Don’t you need to show the set teacher you have something to do?” Ruth asked Allison now.

  “Nah. I usually just tell them I have to write an essay on my family tree or the Civil War or Chrysler or something. They leave you alone as long as you sound like you mean it.”

  “But you have to spend three hours in the classroom,” Ruth said. “What are you going to do that whole time?”

  Allison dipped into her Coach tote and produced a leather-bound manicure set. “Your nails?” Ruth said. “You’re going to do your nails for three hours?”

  The girl looked at Ruth like she was an idiot. “Well, I’m not going to fake-write an essay that whole time.”

  “But that can’t possibly work,” Ruth said.

  “No, it does,” Hillary piped up. “She just tells them she’s studying cosmetology.”

  “And they actually buy that?”

  “Usually,” Allison said. “Think about it. Mimi said there were going to be about seventy-five kids on set today. They have to put us in school for three hours and give us a set teacher because that’s the law, but they don’t have to actually do anything with us except make sure we stay quiet and stuff and sign us in and out. I mean, it’s not like they teach you or anything. They’re more like lunch ladies.”

  “Mom, we need to go,” Bethany broke in urgently. “They told us to be there by nine, and it’s nine ten already.”

  Ruth looked down the street at a crowd of kids milling around outside what must be the theater.

  “All right. You do all have your work permits, right, and your Coogan account information?”

  “Yes!” the girls huffed at her in a chorus. Every child was required to have a special bank account—named after Jackie Coogan, whose childhood earnings had been squandered by his parents or manager, Ruth could never remember which—into which fifteen percent of the child’s gross earnings were deposited directly and couldn’t be touched by anyone except the child himself upon turning eighteen. Like work permits, the lack of Coogan account information meant you couldn’t work, though some kind production assis
tants—PAs—had been known to allow you a day to produce it.

  “All right, go,” Ruth said, releasing them. “I’ll catch up.”

  Bethany looked at her doubtfully. “You, too,” Ruth said, giving her permission to be part of that most delectable thing, a girl group. Bethany raised her eyebrows: Are you sure? I can stay with you. “Go,” said Ruth. “Go!”

  THE RIALTO WAS AN UNPROMISING OLD PILE, WITH NONE of the showstopping, gilded art deco splendor of the nearby Pantages. It reminded Ruth more of a cross between an old movie theater and a civic auditorium. Once they were checked in and had run the gauntlet of Bagel Alley, a cheap buffet that craft services had set up to cater to the doughnut-eating, carb-addicted, caffeine-dependent extras, the parents and chaperones were directed to one location, the actors to another. Ruth could see that Bethany was vibrating, actually vibrating, with excitement. Her first movie set! Her first step toward becoming a professional actor! Even Ruth fell under the spell as they moved inside, intimidated by the sheer mass of cables, light arrays, cameras, mikes, flats, PAs, makeup artists, wardrobe fitters, and grown-up extras dressed as teachers, parents, and school administrators.

  The actual parents and other set-sitters were relegated to their own area and a production assistant barked through a portable sound system that they had to stay put; those found wandering would be invited to leave the set permanently, along with their wards and children. Thus chastened, the grown-ups—easily twelve women to every man—busied themselves establishing camps in the gulag of the mezzanine, which Ruth felt could have been worse because at least you could see all the action from up there, even if you couldn’t hear much. Like a flurry of birds, children kept appearing, alighting, and flying away with retrieved notebooks, pens, iPods, water bottles, and light snacks. They had been divided into three groups and assigned to makeshift classrooms in the costume shop and two rehearsal rooms. To Ruth’s relief, Bethany had been separated from the Orphans. Reba and Hillary had been assigned to one room, Allison to another, and Bethy to the third.