Valerie Martin Read online

  “Any spare change?” he said. His voice was lifeless, but his eyes were black and keen. I dug into my pants pocket; I actually had a lot of change, and extracted a couple of quarters and a dime. “You need to work on your patter,” I advised him.

  “Fuck you,” he said. I dropped the coins into his palm and pressed past him. Actors are superstitious about beggars, perhaps because we’re largely in the same line. They know this and make a point of hanging around stage doors, particularly on Broadway. Long-running shows have regulars, who call the stars by their first names. “Dick, the reviewers are in tonight.” “Shirley, look at you, you’re drop-dead gorgeous as always.” So I didn’t relish being cursed by a panhandler. He stepped back into the darkness from whence he came and I pushed on to Phebe’s, feeling tentative and anxious. The bar was packed, with some overflow to the tables, and the two bartenders were constantly moving with the speed and agility of jugglers. I spotted Teddy at the far end, looking glum, his chin resting in his hand, his eyes fixed on the glass in front of him as if he saw something alive inside it. I squeezed in beside him and said, “What’s wrong with that drink?”

  He looked up, smiling wistfully. “I fear it is empty.”

  “We’ll take care of that,” I said. “Let’s go sit at a table.” I signaled the bartender, pointing at Teddy’s glass, raised two fingers, and received a terse nod; he was on the case.

  “Are you drunk, Teddy?” I asked.

  “I have no way of knowing.”

  “Well, how many drinks have you had?”

  He glanced at the wall clock. “About two hours’ worth.”

  Two full glasses appeared and I lifted them carefully. Teddy got down from the stool and followed me to the table. “Well done,” he said. “I’m glad to see you. Where have you been all week?”

  “Working,” I said. “I’ve been killing myself working.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I need the money.”

  “Oh yes, they pay you.” Teddy sipped his drink, opening his eyes wide. He had an actor’s face, full of expression, long, pale, freckled, a weary drooping mouth, an aristocratic nose, pinched at the nostrils, hazel eyes rather round and flat, and a nimbus of curly red hair. He was slender, lithe, and quick on his feet, not handsome but appealing and wry. I knew a bit about his family—his banker father who wasn’t pleased about the acting ambition; his dramatic alcoholic mother (at the beach house there was a painting of her, an English beauty with skin like a blushing rose); his ne’er-do-well older brother, Robert, who befriended thugs and gambled on anything that moved; and his talented younger sister, Moira, who was studying painting in London. He’d been to prep schools and then Yale Drama, his path strewn with privilege at every turning, but he was no dilettante. Money got him to the stage door, but only talent and dedication could get him onstage and he knew it. I sipped my whiskey, which was both smooth and potent, some brand known to the Ivy League and doubtless twice the price of the bar brand, but I didn’t care. I was in a funk about the whole business with Guy and I weighed the option of consulting with Teddy. As if he read my mind he announced, “Guy Margate got a job.”

  This news hit me like a blow and I dropped back in my chair, struggling to accommodate it and to take account of my emotions. There was a strong element of surprise—I hadn’t thought he would get the part—and a fair component of jealousy, mixed with deep resentment. Teddy watched me attentively, his chin resting in his hand, his eyebrows lifted. “How do you know this?” I said.

  “Mindy had it from Madeleine. Big celebration last night.”

  “Mindy was there?”

  “No, Madeleine called her and she called me. The celebration was just Madeleine and Guy; they had a date.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “It’s Playwrights Horizons.”

  “Right,” I said again. “Equity. What’s the play?”

  “Sunburn I think it’s called. Or maybe Sunstroke. Sunburst. It takes place on a beach. It’s written by an Italian I never heard of.”

  “Guy plays an Italian.”

  “Presumably.”

  I reached for the whiskey and swallowed a big gulp.

  “It will keep him busy,” Teddy observed.

  “That’s true. And I won’t have to give him more money.”

  “You gave him money?”

  “Fifty bucks. He pretty much demanded it. That’s why I had to work so much this week, but I’ve made it up and first thing tomorrow I’m calling Madeleine.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Teddy said. We drank in silence for a few moments. The bar was emptying out. “It’ll probably flop,” Teddy added.

  “That’s true. And it will keep him off the streets for a couple of weeks at least.”

  “Also true.” We snickered companionably, but the likelihood that the play would fail was cold comfort against the dismal fact that stood before us: Guy Margate had a part and we did not.

  When an actor has a part, he has a life, and a full one. When he doesn’t have a part, his life is looking for one. Parts are few, the competition is stiff, and even if one succeeds in being hired there are still a variety of avenues that lead directly to failure. The backers can go broke before a play goes into rehearsal; the play can close after a tryout; the director may be incompetent, lack nerve, or just lose control (as evidently happened in the profitable but unnerving production of Hamlet in which Richard Burton, directed by John Gielgud, delivered a mind-numbing impersonation of Burton saying Shakespeare’s lines very fast); the play can be difficult, unwieldy, or just banal; the actors may be miscast; illness, divorce, or lawsuits may hamstring the production; critics may hate the play and say so; audiences may fail to show up.

  Or the leading lady may go mad onstage.

  But without a part, an actor can’t even fail, so when a play is cast the thespian community recoils and regroups, simultaneously discouraged and reinvigorated, for if that miserable actor Joe Blow can land a juicy part, anything is possible.

  I’d been in the city a year and had appeared in two productions, one an Equity-waiver workshop at the Wooster Open Space and one a two-week run of one acts at a tiny theater in the West Village. The plays were new and forgettable and my parts were negligible, though I did have a nice bit of comic business in the one act, in which I got tangled up in my trousers while trying to seduce my female employer. I went to my classes, gossiped at the right bars, circled the roles I thought might be suitable in the casting-call pages of Back Stage and Show Business, and lined up at the doors with the rest of the cattle, but I wasn’t getting anywhere and I knew it. The news that Guy, an obscure bookstore clerk, new to the scene and not connected to any school that I knew of, had a part in an Equity production was like an injection of iron into my resolve.

  On Monday, I went to class with an edge of self-loathing that felt new and dangerous to me. Madeleine was eager to tell me about Guy’s success, but I shut her down with a grimace. “Teddy told me,” I said. She studied me a moment, her head cocked to one side, thoughtful, interested, the way adults look at a child who has revealed in some completely transparent and inappropriate fashion that he is in pain.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m wondering if I’m just lazy, if I’m not hungry enough, if I’m just kidding myself.”

  “This amazes me,” she said.

  “I don’t lack confidence; I know I’m good, but maybe I’m too comfortable hanging out at Phebe’s pretending to be an actor.”

  She nodded. “I’ve been having the same thoughts all day. It’s eerie.” Our eyes met and held. I think some elemental bond was struck in that look, a passion to further each other’s interests.

  “What should we do?” I asked.

  “After class, we’ll talk,” she said, for the inimitable Sandy Meisner had arrived, his ogling eyes behind the thick spectacles that allowed him to see, to which was attached the microphone that allowed him to speak, sweeping the room for the girl with the most revealing top.

  W
e went to the Cedar because it was quiet, and over beers and fries worked out our plan. We would take time off work as much as possible for three weeks and concentrate on nothing but the pursuit of parts. We would try out for everything, suitable or not, wild stretches and stuff we thought beneath us, even musical revues. We would drop our head shots off at agencies, take our meals at diners, prepare our pieces at night in my apartment. We would be relentless, we would urge each other to the limit, we would succeed.

  And we did. In two weeks I had two callbacks and Madeleine had three. We stayed up late refining our readings, drinking coffee until we were revved past endurance. Then we got into my bed and blasted ourselves into oblivion with athletic sex. It was great. I felt sleek, powerful, cagey; in the mirror I detected yon Cassius’s lean and hungry look. Madeleine was glowing from all the sex and edgy from lack of sleep. She was living on fruit and coffee. One of her callbacks, an enormous long shot we’d chosen because she was so definitely right for it, was for the role of Maggie in a revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She wanted it almost beyond endurance. The call had sent her dancing around the apartment, over the couch, knocking down chairs. “I’m Maggie,” she crooned. “They know it, they know it, I’m Maggie.” But they didn’t know it and she didn’t get the part. When the call came, she broke down and wept. She was hysterical actually; I couldn’t get near her. She lay on the bathroom floor kicking her feet and pounding her fists against the tiles. Then she got up and vomited into the toilet. It was pure nerves and rage. I got her cleaned up and tucked into bed where she cried herself to sleep. In the morning she was pale and haggard, but she took a shower, disguised the dark circles under her eyes with makeup, drank two cups of black coffee, and set out for another day of rejection. She came back with a callback for a new play at the Bijou and a week later she got the part.

  I’d been striking out all over town and my last shot was a new play about criminal activity in a bakery. I had a scene for the callback and Madeleine and I worked it over so scrupulously that I didn’t need the book. When the audition was over the stage manager reading with me looked like he’d run into a train. The director stood up and shouted, “That does it.” I had the part.

  Naturally Madeleine and I wanted to celebrate. I called Teddy, got his machine, and we shouted “WE HAVE JOBS!” into the receiver. Within the hour Teddy called back, as excited as we were. “No burgers tonight,” he said. “Meet me at Broome Street. Dinner’s on the pater.”

  Teddy had an evolving theory about the importance of actors in the survival of the human species. At Yale he’d been in a play about Charles Darwin, with the result that he had actually read Origin of the Species, which inspired in him an informed but idiosyncratic respect for the theory of evolution. Actors, he maintained, are imposters and imposture is an evolutionary strategy for survival. He described the butterfly whose wings so resemble a leaf that even water spots and fungal dots are mimicked, a perfect imitation of random imperfection. All manner of camouflage delighted him, the lizard who turns from bright green to dull brown as he wanders his varied terrain, the deer on his father’s land in Connecticut, coppery red in the coppery fall and drab gray in the winter, when the world is monotone and dull. The actor, Teddy concluded, is selected for survival, like the white moths in a British mining town which, as the coal dust blackened the local birches, mutated to black. Predatory birds couldn’t see the black mutants so only blackened moths survived to reproduce themselves.

  Because humans have only other humans as natural predators, and are, by nature, tribal and territorial, what could be more essential to the flourishing of one’s genetic material than the ability to pass for the prevailing type, to play before the fascist, another fascist; to offer the drug-crazed, gun-wielding holdup artist a fellow in addiction. In their predilection for imposture, their insistence upon the necessity of a counterworld in which they play all parts, banker and pauper, murderer and victim, man and beast, actors are equipped for survival. They are human chameleons, born with a natural ability to take on the coloration of the psychological and physical environment. And, according to Teddy, it is this evolutionary edge that accounts for the paradox of the actor’s social condition. He is both lavishly admired and eternally suspect. Actors make ordinary people uncomfortable, yet they inspire reverence and awe.

  It was nonsense, but entertaining, and Madeleine hadn’t heard it before, so we encouraged Teddy, over glasses of white wine and plates of grilled fish, to expand upon the struggle for existence and our part in it.

  “So according to your theory,” Madeleine observed, “actors are born not made.”

  “Exactly,” Teddy agreed. “There’s got to be something genetic going on. I mean, what is the attraction of a life in the theater? It’s certainly not the money. Yet look how many there are in every generation who are drawn to it.”

  “I thought it was something to do with exhibitionism,” I put in.

  “The common error,” Teddy said.

  “But I don’t want to blend in,” Madeleine protested. “I want to stand out.”

  “Of course,” Teddy said. “You want to be recognized as Madeleine Delavergne, the actress who can play all parts, from ten to ninety, male or female, aristocrat, cutthroat or tramp.”

  As Teddy ticked off this list, Madeleine made small adjustments in her expression and posture, her spine straightening at “aristocrat,” her eyes and lips narrow at “cutthroat,” her mouth ajar and eyes sultry at “tramp.”

  “She’s good,” I said and we laughed.

  “Now if you want to see an actor who only wants to be seen,” Teddy said, “check out Guy Margate in that Italian thing. I saw it last night.”

  I hadn’t thought of Guy in weeks and I found I didn’t want to think about him. “Has that opened already?” I said. “I’ve lost track of time.”

  “Is it any good?” Madeleine asked.

  “It opened last night and no, the play’s not good, though I’ve seen worse. Guy has a lot of lines and he’s in the altogether for the whole last scene, so it feels like there’s more of him than anyone else.”

  “He’s naked?” Madeleine’s eyes were wide.

  “Starkers,” Teddy said. “He has a towel around his neck and I kept thinking he was going to wrap it around, you know, but he never did.”

  “This I’ve got to see,” Madeleine was giggling like a teenager.

  “Haven’t you already seen it?” I snapped.

  “Darling, you don’t have to answer that question,” Teddy said, and Madeleine, frowning, replied, “Believe me, I’m not going to touch it.”

  “See that you don’t,” I said.

  “Children, children,” Teddy chuckled. “Play nicely.”

  I had no intention of going to see Guy’s play, but the next day he called Madeleine’s machine to tell us he had left two comp tickets in her name at the box office and Madeleine insisted it would be rude not to go. “Why us,” I complained. “Are we the closest thing he has to friends?” To which she replied, “I don’t understand this antipathy you have for Guy. After all—”

  “He saved my life,” I finished for her.

  “Well, yes, Edward,” she said. “He did.”

  I can hardly remember what the play was about. An Italian family, all staying at a beach house. Two brothers, one girl. Something like that. Or maybe it was a brother and sister, and the brother’s friend. The older generation included a doddering grandfather. Generational conflict, the changing world, expectations too high or not high enough.

  As Teddy promised, Guy had a lot of lines and in the last scene he appeared naked, save a thin towel across his shoulders which he used to pop someone, his brother or his friend, or maybe it was his father, someone who was shocked to find his friend/brother/son naked in the kitchen at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning. Guy had a nice monologue near the end, to the effect that his family was smothering him and he didn’t know what to do with his life, which he delivered while holding a glass of milk.

 
I watched halfheartedly, one eye on the stage, the other on Madeleine, who appeared to be enjoying it much more than I was. She laughed at all the lame jokes and she followed the actors closely as they moved about. Her eyes never left the stage. When the lights came up on Guy’s bare back at the open refrigerator pouring out milk, I gave her a close look, noting something, amusement, admiration, maybe just intense interest, that irritated me. Guy turned around and the audience gave the requisite inhale attendant upon full frontal nudity. There was a lot of it on the stage in the ’70s, more than there is now. Let My People Come was just around the corner, a cast of fifteen without a stitch on for two hours, they even had an orgy onstage, so people were getting jaded about all that, still, a naked man or woman in a social setting where everyone else is clothed always creates a frisson. I looked at Guy, who was drinking his milk, staring out over the footlights, a self-satisfied smirk on his face. He was loving it; he was in heaven. His sister or girlfriend, or his brother’s girlfriend, whoever she was, sitting at the kitchen table, spoke to him. He turned to her, jutting his hips forward, and praised the virtues of milk. The audience, save one, laughed. Madeleine’s mouth was open, the corners lifted, her expression engaged and titillated. I studied my knees. Disgruntlement and disgust were churning into something solid in my gut. I wanted to get up and walk out, but I knew Madeleine wouldn’t forgive me and I didn’t want to risk that. Also, if I left, I was in effect leaving her alone with Guy, who was strutting about the stage, spewing his lines like a sick baby, while his fellow actors stood by attending their cues. What else could they do? He was a hog of an actor, over the top and out of control; he even managed to upstage the girlfriend/sister’s weepy confession of her long-repressed, undying love. I recall one line—“You were a fling for me”—at the conclusion of a longish tirade about his inability to love. He tossed it at her like a brick, blindsiding her, so that she appeared to be struck dumb. It was one of those perfectly dead moments when everything comes together, the banality of the script, the ineptitude of the direction, the stereotyped superficial performances of the actors, the moment when the complete falsity of the enterprise is manifest and you know a play really stinks. If, instead of yelling the idiotic line, Guy had whispered it, there might have been hope; the actress would have had something to do, she wasn’t bad, she might have made something out of it. But Guy made the scene all about his character, a big, stupid, naked, self-absorbed, unfeeling ape.