Selling Out (11 page)

“Oh, I think I'd prefer to be right here now,” Perry said.

Prefer, hell; you couldn't have kept him away from the place with armed guards.

This was where it was happening, the center of the action.

He selected an office on the second floor, right above Ned's; it was only a dingy cubicle, really, with some Salvation Army—vintage furniture, and a small window looking out on another identical building, but it seemed to Perry quite splendid. It was near a watercooler in the hall, and he could quickly run down to Ned's office and show him the latest pages that had just come out of his typewriter. Likewise, with an interoffice buzz on his phone, Ned could summon Perry down for important consultations, as he did later that very first afternoon.

“If you have a moment, Perry, there's someone here I'm anxious for you to meet.”

He was a round, cherubic-looking young fellow. Perry realized at once he must be Ned's choice to play the part of Jack. He was even dressed for the part, sloppy collegiate, with baggy old jeans and a faded sweatshirt, tousled blond hair that he had to brush up from his eyes. He wasn't precisely the person Perry had imagined for the role, but the important thing was he didn't look like some slick Hollywood star. If anything, he looked a bit young for the part.

“Perry Moss, I'd like you to meet Kenton Spires, our director.”

The pleasant, pudgy fellow blushed and shook hands, and Perry tried to hide his shock and disappointment.

How could he be a director? He was only a kid.

“Your script is the first really brilliant piece I've been shown for television,” Spires said quietly.

Well, at least he was a
smart
kid.

Kenton had won an Obie and directed several prize-winning dramas for PBS, yet he'd been languishing out here for almost a year without getting a break because he didn't have what Ned called “schlock time,” or commercial TV experience. But Ned made it a condition of his own involvement in “First Year” that Kenton direct the pilot, so Archer had gone out on a limb and raised hell to get the network's reluctant approval for him. Perry was soon delighted.

As the three new colleagues continued their discussion of the project over sandwiches and beer, the young director seemed not only as civilized as Ned, but also a fellow artist, a kindred spirit; hell, a buddy. It was as if time in L.A. moved faster in professional friendships, too, like an old-fashioned film run fast forward, so that what in the ordinary pace of life and relationships would require whole years was accelerated and experienced in a matter of hours.

By the time Ned and Kenton dropped Perry off at the Marmont late that evening it seemed as if the three of them had been best friends in high school and had just got together again to produce this show.

There was a couch in the room where Perry sat in on his first casting session, an old lump of Salvation Army furniture covered with faded brown slipcovers of some tired, nubby material. He figured this must be the infamous casting couch of Hollywood legend, but the actresses reading for the part of Laurie didn't even sit on it. Ned and Kenton sat there, while the young women stationed themselves in chairs by the window.

The faculty wives back at Haviland would have no doubt been relieved—or perhaps secretly disappointed—to find the symbolic casting couch was nonerotic and businesslike, as were the sessions themselves. After three or four readings, and the quick exchange of glances and comments afterward between Ned and Kenton, it was obvious that any other consideration than the actress's talent and suitability as Laurie was not only irrelevant, but annoying. Had some aspiring bombshell swiveled in and performed the most erotic disrobing since Salome, the reaction would have been that it was not the sort of thing Laurie would do.

At the end of two hours and eleven readings, Ned suggested they all get on with their other work for the rest of the day and “look at more Lauries” tomorrow.

“My God,” Perry said, with a sudden sense of the neophyte's panic, “what if we don't find her—the right Laurie?”

“We'll find her,” Ned told him.

Alton Saxby, the casting director, whose job was to send in a steady stream of potential Lauries until the right one was chosen, placed a reassuring hand on Perry's shoulder.

“We'll find her even if we have to make a search of graduate schools all over America.”

Driving back from the studio that evening, Perry imagined a nationwide search to find the right Laurie, the 1980s version of the legendary quest to discover Scarlett O'Hara. Perry, of course, as creator of the character, was asked to lead the talent hunt, conducting interviews in grad schools all over America, where bevies of eager, gorgeous young women finagled their way into his hotel suite in imaginative attempts to seduce him into selecting them for the role.

At a stoplight on Cahuenga Boulevard, Perry was mentally in Madison, Wisconsin, where a voluptuous anthropology major who had just been elected Miss Dairyland tricked her way into his suite by identifying herself as Room Service. After pushing him onto the bed and ravishing him mercilessly, the aspiring star whispered in Perry's ear: “I'm Laurie,” to which he replied, “I'm sorry, Laurie would never have done it that way.”

Perry laughed at himself, and decided to stop off for something to eat at the Hamburger Hamlet, a mile or so down from the Marmont on Sunset. Usually he hated to dine alone in public, especially after dark, when being by yourself meant you were not only alone but lonely. Out here he didn't feel that way. Out here he felt that although he might be by himself he was not really alone, for he was part of the mystical fraternity of show business, to which everyone else either belonged or aspired to.

The dream was not impossible. Though the Schwab's drugstore on Sunset with the counter where Lana Turner was discovered no longer existed, there were real and hopeful actors, actresses, directors and producers, camera people and set designers, in every luncheonette and coffee shop and drugstore in Hollywood, and for the price of that day's
Variety
or
Hollywood Reporter
, you could talk the language of the trades. You could speak of the latest deal and in the next breath talk of your own deal that might be tomorrow's box office boffo smash and you the producer or writer or star. And like the Megabucks Lottery back in Massachusetts, somebody's number eventually did come up, and everyone had hopes of hitting the next jackpot.

Perry sat at the counter and ordered the bacon and avocado sandwich on toast (anything with avocado reminded him with a pleasant rush he was out here in exotic Southern California). Though he was by himself, Perry was elated by the knowledge that he was one of the blessed at this or any other counter in Hollywood for he had his own show, not only “in development,” but soon to be “in production.”

Those magical terms, along with other stock phrases of show business, spoken like ritual incantations, were floating now as always in the very atmosphere of the room. A couple of places down from Perry a bald man was telling a tall young woman with an orange streak in her hair that he had just optioned a surefire property he was going to develop for a feature.

An option!

It was one of the magic words, one of the magic deeds. Everyone had options. Anyone could have options. For a dollar, you could take an option on your neighbor's laundry list, if he didn't already have it in development for a feature or perhaps for a pilot for a series!

Perry noticed a young woman alone, reading a paperback novel instead of the trades over her custard pie and coffee. Could be she was some kind of misplaced intellectual? She was hardly beautiful, with close-set eyes behind thick glasses, a long, aquiline nose, and stringy hair. Yet there was something appealing about her, a kind of wistful quality, an innocence.… She might be—Laurie!

Perhaps Perry himself was destined to be the one to discover her, the one who happened by chance onto just the right woman when all the pros had failed to produce her. All he had to do was go up and explain who he was, why he was interested in talking with her. It sounded like the oldest cliche in the books—“Excuse me, young lady, but I can get you into show biz!” He felt himself flush red at the awful corniness of it, and yet it was true. It
could
happen. It wasn't likely, but it was damn well possible.

Perry began to feel dizzy, almost disoriented. He found it hard to discern what was real and what fantasy. It was a little like being on the edge of the “twilight zone” and not knowing what thought or deed would make you cross over from daily life into some other dimension of experience. He concentrated on his sandwich.
That
was real. In rising anxiety he gobbled it down, slurped the rest of his coffee, and paid the check.

He hurried to his room and called Jane in Vermont, holding his breath as the rings came, hoping and muttering a prayer she was home. It was not just that he missed her, as he always did the few times they had been apart in the past five years, it was not just his desire for her companionship and lovemaking and talk and intuitive understanding. What he longed for now was her
reality
, her tangible, solid, commonsensical flesh and blood presence to remind him who and where he was, to keep him from slipping off into the “twilight zone” of show biz fantasy.

The sound of Jane's voice restored his balance.

“I love you, I miss you
too
,” she said.

Perry relaxed, lay down on the bed, stretching and feeling the tension flow from his body.

He dreamed Jane had been lost in a blizzard, and, with the help of Ned Gurney, Kenton Spires, and Alton Saxby, Perry conducted a nationwide search to find someone to play her part in his life. The leading role. But no one was right. They might even nearly look the part, but they kept doing things that Jane wouldn't do—laughing at the wrong time, speaking ostentatiously, moving awkwardly across a room.

“We still haven't found her,” Ned Gurney said the next day.

“Don't worry, we
will
,” Kenton said with quiet assurance.

“We've just begun to look,” Alton Saxby added.

For a moment, Perry thought they were speaking of Jane, that his dream of the night before was continuing into the day.

But of course they were speaking of Laurie.

Perry took a deep breath and, with a sense of relief and responsibility, exiled himself to his office cubicle to work on the second hour of the script. There were hurrying footsteps in the hall outside his door, and through the thin walls he could hear phones ringing—phones being answered by secretaries saying, “The First Year's the Hardest!”

Concentrate
. He had to remind himself that if he didn't finish this script for the second hour, the whole thing would come tumbling down around him, the walls collapse, the phones stop ringing. In several hours, he managed to squeeze out a couple of pages of sizzling dialogue and decided to take it down to Ned, rewarding himself with a break.

“Still looking at Lauries,” Kenton reported, and Ned sighed and handed Perry the glossy 8 x 10 photo with credits on the back that announced the next candidate. Perry sat down, deciding he'd indulge in watching just one reading before pressing back to work.

Bad luck. He could tell just by looking at the photo this one was wasting their time. Melinda Margulies may have done Shakespeare in the Park and had a lot of fancy New York stage credits, as well as a good secondary role in a TV miniseries, but she simply wasn't Laurie.

Laurie was pert, perky, and preppy. The Margulies girl was big at 5 feet 10 inches, 135, not fat but certainly hefty and decidedly broad-shouldered. A female linebacker, at least from her photo.

In person, even more so. She chewed gum with loud smacks, shook hands with a crusner grip, and spoke in a Hat, anonymous tone.

“Ya want me to do it now?” she asked, slumping in her chair before Ned even had time to ask the few polite questions whose purpose primarily was to put the actress at ease.

“Please,” Ned said, nodding.

Melinda first reached in her mouth and pulled a wad of gum from the back recesses, examined it critically, then stuck it under the chair. She closed her eyes a moment, took a deep breath, and pulled herself up so straight her spine was like a rifle placed against the chair's back. When she opened her eyes they were suddenly alert, excited. She smiled, and looked delighted by life, as if she found every aspect of it fascinating. When she spoke, her voice was warm, winning, energetic, not quite breathless but spirited, the voice of someone who was not only interesting but interested, and it was edged with that unmistakable, slightly nasal, r-softened sound that signals “preppy.”

Perry recognized this voice at once, though he had never heard it before, except in his imagination.

It was the voice of Laurie.

By the end of the reading, this magical person had somehow so transformed herself that she even
looked
like Laurie—not the way the character was described in the words of the story, but the way it now seemed she ought to look, in living flesh and gesture.

When the reading was finished and Ned and Kenton thanked the actress, she slumped back down in her seat, reached to pull the wad of gum from beneath it, popped it back in her mouth, and shambled out of the room.

“How about that?” Kenton asked with a grin.

“Well, author,” Ned said to Perry, “you should know—was that Laurie?”

“How did she do that?” Perry asked in a stunned voice. “What happened?”

“You just saw an actress,” Ned explained.

Melinda Margulies was Laurie.

The next day Ned invited Perry to come down to hear a second reading for the part of Jack by an actor named Ronnie Banks.

A bit offbeat and quirky, Banks possessed great quantities of natural boyish charm as well as a wicked, spontaneous wit. He was obviously perfect for Jack, except for one hitch. He was short.