Lucky Star: A Hollywood Love Story (4 page)

“Knock, knock,” I called out as I opened the door and stepped into the foyer of my parents’ farmhouse in rural Ohio. I hadn’t given them notice that I was coming so I expected
some
level of surprise once they realized I was here, but I hadn’t quite anticipated my niece throwing a frying pan and then running into the kitchen screaming “Call 911! There’s an intruder in the house!” at the top of her lungs.

Nor had I expected to come face to face with my dad and his trusty .22 caliber rifle aimed squarely at my chest. Once he saw his son was the intruder in question, Dad took his finger off the trigger, dropped the gun to his side, and ran a hand through his air on a loud sigh.

“Good lord, you scared the crap out of us.” He looked down at the floor, taking in the pan and its scattered contents – scrambled eggs, from the looks of it – and shook his head ruefully. Craning his neck, he called back toward the kitchen, “It’s okay Gloria; it’s just your Uncle Cameron. Now get back out here and welcome him properly.”

A small, pinched face peeked out from around the door jamb. “Uncle Cameron? Is that really you?” she stammered.

“Hey Gloria.” I lifted a hand in greeting as I held back my laughter. Her attack-by-frying-pan had caught me unaware but now that her screaming had stopped and I no longer had a gun pointed at me, I saw the humor of the situation. “Sorry to have frightened you.”

Gloria stepped out from behind the door and came up along side my dad. Clasping his much larger hand with her own tiny one, she peered up at me through dubious eyes and commanded me not to do it again. “I wouldn’t want to have to hit you with it next time.” She pointed at a small skillet that wouldn’t have done any damage had her aim been true.

Even before my sister Daphne and my brother-in-law John had died in a freak car accident two years ago, leaving my parents to raise their only child, I’d thought Gloria was a strange kid. She
looked
like an eight-year-old little girl, and her voice sounded like one too, but since she’d learned to talk she’d reminded me of my great grandmother, god rest her soul. When my sister and her husband died, Gloria had been too young to understand what happened to them but her therapists had warned once she was old enough to grasp the difference between mommies and daddies and grandmas and grandpas she might have a hard time adjusting. Thankfully their fear had been unfounded.

In terms of being an orphan, Gloria remained completely unfazed and no one thought the quirks of her behavior had anything to do with being raised by her grandparents. I did sometimes worry though if the amount of time she spent with my mom volunteering down at the nursing center had rubbed off on her more than anyone bargained for. My mom had worked tirelessly to instill compassion and a sense of community into all of her children from a very early age, alternating weekly visits to the old folks’ homes, soup kitchens, and animal rescue organizations as a way of strengthening those teachings. She’d done the same with Gloria. When I’d been a little kid trips to the nursing facility had been a major buzzkill but now I recognized them as part of what made me the man I was today. It was why I still tried to visit the one by my old apartment as often as possible. Even so, as I peered at little Gloria and saw she wore a strand of cultured pearls draped around her neck and a pillbox hat that had been my great grandmothers atop her head, I wondered if Mom shouldn’t focus more on animals with her instead of the octogenarians.

Dad raised his eyebrows in silent question and I dragged my eyes down to the strange little girl at his side, an unspoken indication we should talk without her listening in. Based on what my mom had told me recently, it wasn’t only her dress and mannerisms that skewed old lady. Gloria had also turned into something of an adept eavesdropper and first class gossip.

“Gloria, you clean this mess and then go collect the eggs from the chicken coop. When you’re done with that, you can make a sandwich and watch Matlock.”

Now it was my turn to raise my eyebrow. “Matlock?” I mouthed silently, but he rolled just his eyes and mouthed back, “Don’t ask.”

What kind of eight-year-old watched
Matlock
instead of cartoons?

Once Gloria retreated outside, humming the theme to
Golden Girls
as she left, my dad turned to me. “Is something wrong, Cameron? It’s not like you to show up unannounced. Not that we aren’t happy to see you, mind.”

We ambled into the formal living room at the front of the house and I took a seat in my favorite chair. My dad settled into his own and I glanced around for signs of my mom’s presence in the house. When I didn’t hear her puttering around upstairs or the radio going in the kitchen, I asked, “Is mom home?”

“No,” he answered, looking down at his watch. “But she should be back any minute. She ran down to the garden center to pick up some Sluggo. You know we prefer the garden to be one hundred percent organic, but those bastards are doing a number on her tomato and zucchini plants this year. She’s reached the end of her rope.”

I appreciated his unspoken understanding that I wasn’t going to reveal the reason behind my surprise visit until mom was there to hear the story as well. There was nothing more Patrick Scott hated than being asked to tell the same story twice so he wouldn’t try to needle the reason for my visit out of me before she joined us. Needling was her specialty, after all.

“She wanted to put some of the chickens in amongst the plants to see if they’d eat the slugs, but I had to stop her before she hurt one of them.” On a chuckle, he added, “You can take the girl out of the city …” He shrugged and his eyes twinkled with mirth. “How your mom doesn’t know a chicken can die if it eats a slug is beyond me.” He rested his arms atop his belly and the position drew my eyes to the slight paunch he’d developed since I’d seen him seven months ago.

The Scott-Mayfield genetics were an odd thing. The boys had been gifted with my father’s build (extremely tall and lean) and my mothers’ looks (blonde hair, blue eyes) while the Scott girls had gotten my mother’s build (tiny, petite) and my father’s looks (dark hair, green eyes). Standing next to one another, you’d never know we were related to one another unless you saw the whole family together, our parents included.

At sixty-eight, Patrick Scott was in excellent shape for his age, his body stronger than many men half his age, but that slightly rounded gut indicated he was starting to slow down, maybe not get as much exercise as he had before. Not that I begrudged him taking it easy. From the time I was a baby until I’d moved out at eighteen, my dad had been one of the hardest working men I knew. He’d continued working that hard even after I’d left home. From my earliest memory, my dad left the house before dawn only to return home just minutes before my mom set the table for dinner.

From sun up to sun down he worked with his hands, toiled the earth and raised our animals, while he rebuilt the Scott family business. There’d been a time – before I was born and he’d taken over from his own father – that the farm had been in danger of going under, but by sheer force of will and determination, he and my mom had managed to hold things together even during the worst financial climate. Today, markets all over Ohio and Northern Kentucky clamored for our free range meat and organic produce, a testament to how hard he’d worked his entire life. I would have said the man was invincible but the signs of aging I saw in him now made me reconsider that notion.

Broaching the subject as diplomatically as I could, I asked, “How much help do you have around the farm these days?”

He laughed at my obvious fishing for information. “Why, you thinking of giving up Hollywood to come home and be a farmer?”

If you weren’t familiar with my dad’s sense of humor, you might think his words malicious, a knock on my pretty cushy lifestyle but he was only teasing me. He’d never wanted to force any of his children to follow in his footsteps, and in fact, had been adamant we all try something else before committing to the family business. (That it had been Daphne who’d moved home with a husband and baby only to die two years later was a sad fact none of my siblings discussed in front of our parents; the wound was still too fresh, even now.)

When I’d been discovered by a modeling scout at an outdoor music festival, I’d never worried how he would respond. When I told my parents I was deferring college and moving to New York for a year instead, I’d done so confidently because I knew they would support my decision. And when I returned at 20 with a hefty bank account but worn out from the constant go, go, go being a runway model entailed, they’d welcomed me home with open arms. I’d given community college a try and probably would have transferred to Ohio State if I hadn’t been re-discovered, so to speak, by a Hollywood agent when my friends and I served as extras in a comic book movie that was filming in Cleveland.

His question raised a good point though. If things didn’t start looking up soon, moving home to help out on the farm might be
exactly
what I’d have to do. Instead of telling him that however, I laughed and said it’d happen when our pigs learned to fly.

“It’s not a bad life, you know?” he asked, his voice going serious.

“I know Dad, it’s just not for me. Not right now at least.”

He was silent for a few beats and then answered my earlier question.

“We’ve got seasonal help for the animals which helps out a lot, but your mother and I, we’re not as young as we used to be”— he patted his slight paunch with a wry twist of his lips — “and we could really use more help with the produce. I’m working on a deal with the community college to hire out some of their ag students at reduced pay for credit toward their courses.”

I was about to ask him how that would work when my mom sailed into the room and asked breezily, “Who’s not as young as they used to be?” Leaning down to place a kiss on my dad’s cheek, she turned to me and beamed. “I’m still considered a spring chicken, aren’t I Cameron?” She laughed and I met her in the middle of the room. Grasping her in a tight hug, I swung her around in a circle and put her down with a kiss to her forehead.

“It’s good to see you mom.”

With all of my recent soul searching, I’d thought a lot about what I wanted for my future. I didn’t know if it lay in California or back home in Ohio, but I recognized I wanted to spend more time with my family. I wanted a marriage like my parents had. And if I was able to fix what I’d broken, I wanted them to welcome Sarah into the family as one of their own. I didn’t know if I stood a snowball’s chance in hell of making that happen but decided the only thing I could do was give it my best shot. If Sarah never wanted to see me again I’d try to convince her otherwise, but no matter what, I couldn’t stay away from her any longer.

The past three weeks had been filled with auditions, including the one for Broderick’s movie, but I didn’t have anyone to share my excitement and nerves with. Mike was good for a celebratory beer, but our conversations quickly strayed to whatever new woman he was seeing, and there were many. For the past couple of years whenever I’d had even a small iota of success, Sarah was the first phone call I’d make. She was the only person outside of my agent who truly understood my world and the insight and support I received from her was a large part of what kept me going.

A few days after The Worst Night of My Life, I’d called up my agent, Julie Wasserman and shared what Sarah had told me about Broderick’s secret auditions for
The Ties That Bind
. Julie had been surprised I had information she didn’t and pushed for me to give up my source. I told her I’d overheard a group of actors talking about it at one of the workshops I attended since there was absolutely no way in hell the leak could ever be traced back to Sarah. She’d stuck her neck out for me and I didn’t want her getting in trouble for having done so.