Lucky Stars by Jane Heller Read Free Book Online Page B

meant.
    “Look, kid. Let’s get real about this, okay? I’ll keep doing my best to send you out for stuff whenever I can, but you gotta face facts. It’s possible that you won’t make a comeback tomorrow. You might have to wait until you’re old to get parts again.”
    “Old?”
    “Yeah. Once you’re in your forties, you can play mothers, aunts, teachers, judges. The meaty character roles.”
    I just sat there, feeling like a tire that had blown out. Mickey must have felt sorry for me, because he patted my hand a second time. “This is a tough, tough business,” he said. “At some point you may decide it’s not for you, not anymore.”
    “Acting is all I’ve ever wanted to do,” I protested, fighting off tears. “It’s all I’ve ever imagined myself doing. And I’m good at it, Mickey. I know I am. Okay, maybe I’m not Oscar caliber, but I’m not Sledgehammer Stacey, either. I mean, am I really supposed to quit a profession I love because Jack Rawlins didn’t like my performance in a movie that sank at the box office? Jim Carrey’s doing okay. Pet Peeve didn’t hurt his career one bit. That doesn’t seem fair.”
    “Nobody said this business was fair. Take Jack Rawlins, since you brought him up. Is he a major talent? No. He’s a good-looking guy with a better-than-average vocabulary. And now he’s getting rewarded for trashing movies. It’s not fair, but it’s the business.”
    “He’s getting rewarded? How?”
    “You haven’t heard? They’re expanding his show to an hour and going wider with it. He’s not just gonna review movies now; he’s gonna interview guests. Sort of a Charlie Rose meets Roger Ebert.”
    “But that’s—”
    “Not fair, right. Jack Rawlins is gonna be a big star and that’s how the cookie crumbles and you gotta concentrate on you, on what you’re gonna do.”
    “I’ll tell you what I’m not gonna do,” I said resolutely. “I’m not giving up. I’m an actress—even if I have to get a part-time job to pay the bills. If a lightweight like Jack Rawlins can make it in this business, so can I.”
    Talk about a stirring performance. Mickey was so moved he let out a long belch.
    “It’s the cholesterol medicine they’ve got me on,” he explained. “Gives me gas.”
    I trudged out of his office, more determined than ever to hang in, hang on, hope that my b ig break was just around the corn er.

 
     
     
     
    s ix
     
     
    M ickey sent me out on yet another commercial audition, this one for a local fast-food chain. I was supposed to play a woman in her twenties (I’d told Mickey I could play twenties, remember, and he’d agreed it was worth a shot) who stands behind the counter in her cute little uniform and says cheerfully to the next customer, “How may I serve you today?” After three callbacks, I lost the job, not because I was too old but because I was too chaste. The actress who won the part spun the line into a sexy double entendre-, as in: “How may I service you today?”
    Dejected but not suicidal , I decided to look for a part- time job, just as a precautionary measure while I waited for my luck to change. Maura suggested that, since I had no interest in waiting tables again, I should consider retailing. So I scanned the L.A. Times’ classified section and found an ad for a part-time salesperson at a fancy-shmancy shop in Brentwood called Cornucopia! (the exclamation point is theirs, not mine). I assumed it was a fancy-shmancy shop, not only because they were paying more than the other stores with ads in the paper, but because they were in Brentwood, the poshest of th e posh in West L.A., or, let me rephrase, the self-annointed poshest of the posh. While the old money lives more quietly in Pasadena, the newly minted—many of them movie and television producers and their trophy families—hunker down in their faux chateaux in Brentwood, where a two-bedroom fixer-upper on a decent piece of property goes for a cool three million dollars. This